Guild Wars 2

The main problem with Guardian virtues is not the traits; it’s the base virtues themselves. I can’t speak for SPvP since I don’t play it, but every other class has unique mechanics that bring something unique to the table.

Guardian mechanics, on the other hand, provide vanilla buffs which can frankly be covered by any other calling. Especially VoJ’s burning damage. IF VoJ’s and VoR’s buffs were not your garden variety burning damage or regen, perhaps Guardian virtues wouldn’t feel like an afterthought.

Prince Rogers Nelson.7652:

Call me crazy, but I suspect the reason they’re not using green is a simple matter of color contrast and visibility.

At least 2/3 of the land on the WvW map surface (i.e. world map/mini map, which is typically how people find commander tags) is green in color. It might be a bit dodgy having to spot the green tag on the green background.

You beat me to the punch.

The red/blue/yellow/pink combination is the best 4 colour combination they could use while still making sure that colourblind people aren’t confused by some of the colours.

Adding my name to the list of people annoyed by this.

How can ANet consider it reasonable to put mobs in a mission which you have to kill, are not summons, yet they don’t even count towards the daily quest?

If Anet cannot figure out a way to balance drops in the new content they release (and honestly, putting mobs into the game which the player has absolutely zero incentive to kill in an MMO is kittened), then they can at least change the mechanics to make for a new class of mob which does not grant XP or loot, but yet still doesn’t break the game by not triggering on-kill traits, items, food or daily quests.

Brother Grimm.5176:

So you think GW2 servers system works just like GW1s did……I think I see the problem in explaining this to you, now. Gonna let you figure out the problem for yourself since it’s obvious you already have all the answers.

Good luck.

Hardly. Explaining how things worked for the gw1 servers was to refute the argument that the suggestion cannot possibly be implemented without increasing lag for the majority of the population. This argument is clearly false, and it is therefore technically possible to change the gw2 servers to facilitate people from all over playing together. Try to follow the argument more closely please.

Zanshin.5379:

I play on Fort Ranik, a EU server. If you trace the IP of the server you will see that it actually is in Texas.

In-game /ip to see your server’s IP. Then google it.

My copy of Gw2 is connected to 3 IPs atm :
64.25.40.119
206.127.146.74
206.127.146.71

You’re welcome to traceroute all 3; you might be surprised at the results.

Edit : seems you’re confusing the business address of the owner of the IP with the physical server location.

Dusty Moon.4382:

Xarog.3172:

Dusty Moon.4382:

Actually – you don’t know what is involved with the character data. When you bought the game, there was an EU version and a US version. In GW1, all your data for your characters was stored locally (on your PC) but that was an Instanced – lobby game not a true MMO. The data is different for a true MMO and GW2 is one. All the other games I have played (Rift, TERA, WoW, ESO, etc.) all have the same problem as GW2 – they have EU and NA server farms. You are assuming a lot that you know nothing about.

You’re right, I don’t know the exact architecture of GW2’s server structure, but what I do know is that you’re patently wrong about the character data for gw1 being stored locally. If that were true, anyone with half a mind to crack the file encryption would be able to edit their characters and add whatever items/skills to their character they wanted and clearly this is not the case.

I am a NA player and played on an EU server for a while because of the guild I was in was mostly EU. It was a lag fest. The reason there are THREE server farms, for this game, is the lag would be horrendous. Again, you assume a lot and no nothing about how the game is structured.

Et tu, Brutus.

You could hack the data in the beginning that is why initially duping was such a big problem with GW1. There were speed hacks and other things that were done in the beginning also – hence why A.Net when hard nose with the rules about cheating, etc. What they went to was to have an exact copy on their server so if anything was wrong with the data for your character it would be changed when you logged in. They also went to encryption on the data. If you played from the beginning of GW1, you would know the story.

Your argument still falls apart because even if everything you say is true, there was still a central server holding all the account data and people were still able to select which region they wanted to connect to on the fly.

In addition, the process of switching your characters between data servers is gated behind a gem cost, but the process is still automated which means that the two data servers are in communication with one another. Setting up a temporary transfer in order to facilitate people from both sides of the Atlantic being able to play with each other ought not to be beyond the realm of possibility.

And as someone who had re-installed gw1 more than once without losing any characters whatsoever, I find your claims highly suspicious.

Dusty Moon.4382:

Actually – you don’t know what is involved with the character data. When you bought the game, there was an EU version and a US version. In GW1, all your data for your characters was stored locally (on your PC) but that was an Instanced – lobby game not a true MMO. The data is different for a true MMO and GW2 is one. All the other games I have played (Rift, TERA, WoW, ESO, etc.) all have the same problem as GW2 – they have EU and NA server farms. You are assuming a lot that you know nothing about.

You’re right, I don’t know the exact architecture of GW2’s server structure, but what I do know is that you’re patently wrong about the character data for gw1 being stored locally. If that were true, anyone with half a mind to crack the file encryption would be able to edit their characters and add whatever items/skills to their character they wanted and clearly this is not the case.

I am a NA player and played on an EU server for a while because of the guild I was in was mostly EU. It was a lag fest. The reason there are THREE server farms, for this game, is the lag would be horrendous. Again, you assume a lot and no nothing about how the game is structured.

Et tu, Brutus.

Brother Grimm.5176:

Xarog.3172:

Astral Projections.7320:

It’s because there are two data centers which separately hold the account’s information. One is in Europe and one is in the USA. Because there are two account data holding sites, this means the two types of accounts can’t share the same map.

Thanks, Captain Obvious.

The point is that this division is artificial and ANet should make it go away.

Yeah, there is this thing on the internet called latency that IS effected by actual geographic location (the data path length from your PC to the server). Games that need near-real time data to work smoothly do NOT do well with high latency. The game was designed with 2 (now 3) data centers for a reason.

Players whine about lag and very often the reason is something Anet CANNOT do anything about (sans putting in MORE DATA CENTERS….the exact opposite of the OP request). Ask a player in the Pacific Rim (that has to connect to either NA or EU servers to play at all) and they will tell you about living with near constant skill lag and rubber-banding. (Yes, Anet could add another Data Center, but I’m sure it’s not cost effective to do so).

One BIG data center would make the game horrific for a VERY large portion of the playerbase, so it’s not likely to happen.

Gw1 had multiple data centres and switching between them was as simple as selecting which district you wanted to join. The hop between the EU and NA servers showed your IP jumping from the 206.x range to the 216.x range just as happens in guild wars 2.

There is absolutely NO reason why character data and the server hosting the instance needs to be housed at the same physical location and the gw1 network proves this to be true. I find it quite astounding that so many people in this thread are ignorant of this point.

ANet made a choice to have two difference character data servers, but it does not need to remain this way, and making excuses about potential interruptions in service does not absolve them of the fact that the way things work is because ANet chose it to work this way.

And by extension, myself and anyone who doesn’t like the way things are set up now are quite entitled to tell ANet that we want them to change it. There ought to be a cost-effective way to ensure that people from all over the world can play with people from every other part of the world together while still primarily being based in a region that is close to their geographical location. After the megaserver debacle and the way Anet is generally lumping the playerbase into the same instances and this is the next logical step in that progression.

calyx.9086:

If you wanted to play with American friends, you should have chosen NA instead of EU. We have several Brits, Middle Eastern, and New Zealanders in our guild who we play with on a regular basis because they chose to play on NA servers.

Also, you can just buy a 2nd account as someone else previously mentioned, and have both an NA account and an EU account.

Since its such a small thing, why don’t you just buy the account for me? Make sure to fill it up with ascended gear too, cuz apparently farming all that stuff is trivial.

I did not choose the region that I was based in lightly and it’s completely ridiculous to expect people to buy 2 copies of a game just to be able to play with people they know.

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

While you wait for ArenaNet to ‘make it go away’, and you don’t mind the lag, you can always transfer to your friend’s NA server, and play with them in the same map!

That might work if I only had American friends. I don’t, and I’m not inclined to rack up a fortune in gem costs to constantly hop between worlds.

Some people do mind the lag, though, and are happier to have a data center nearer them. One of the reasons those in SEA ask for their own data center, I imagine.

Gw1 allowed players to choose whatever region they wanted to connect to on the fly, even though they had a home “district”. I don’t see why this can’t be done for GW2 as well.

Astral Projections.7320:

It’s because there are two data centers which separately hold the account’s information. One is in Europe and one is in the USA. Because there are two account data holding sites, this means the two types of accounts can’t share the same map.

The point is that this division is artificial and ANet should make it go away.

I have several friends in the U.S. and I’d like to be able to group up with them sometimes, but for some strange reason the network infrastructure won’t allow it.

So why, when the messaging system global, when we have a global trading post and I can invite Americans into my party, and they can invite me even though I’m on Seafarer’s Rest, does the game throwsup network errors any time we try to go to the same map?

Before the advent of the megaservers, there might have been a justification for keeping the worlds separate. There’s no excuse for it now.

It’s 2014, and the internet is a global village. ANet, please adjust your game infrastructure appropriately.

The jellyfish in the jade boss fractal don’t always run away when the 2 tentacles have been killed. my personal experience is that this only occurs at lvl 50; either way it occurs sporadically. (I’m listing this as a bug because I honestly can’t see what dev in their right mind would want to force players to kill a bunch of veteran mobs that give no xp and drop no loot in what is already the slowest and most tedious boss fractal in the game.)

And again with the jade fractal in particular, if your character is auto-attacking and you try to pick up a crystal, the game sometimes bugs out and ignores the interact command and simply carries on attacking. This is more noticable at higher latencies. Either way it’s incredibly annoying and needs to be fixed. Trying to pick something up should reliably interrupt auto-attacks.

And while technically it isn’t a bug, why do we need extra agony resist for lvl 50, but there isn’t a daily tier to go with it? Daily rewards should go from 0-9, 10-19, 20-29, 30-39, 40-49 and then finally level 50. Right now there’s absolutely no incentive whatsoever to take lvl 50 over, say, level 49.

Also, on the asura/harpy fractal, getting knocked off the final pedastals sometimes knocks you back all the way to the beginning of the level.

It doesn’t only affect other skills. I can’t count the number of times I was downed in the jade fractal because the kittening sceptre auto-attacks wouldn’t stop despite me furiously mashing F to pick up one of the reflecting crystals.

It is utterly ridiculous.

Seems to be restricted to having a the interface set to “small”. Either way, it’s terribly distracting to constantly see letters jump around just because you happened to highlight over a link.

Well, I didn’t think I’d have to add anything since I thought the devs would realise that they failed to update the celestial stats on all infused gear, but apparently I was wrong. So…

Infused celestial back pieces have less stats than their non-infused counterparts. Please fix.

Edit : Nvm, looks like it was fixed but not mentioned in the patch notes.

TP broken for me as of 30 minutes ago… And I’m using Windows.

The most satisfying thing you can do is to start outbidding by large amounts and find out where the bot’s price ceiling is… and then bid for 1c below that amount.

You have to be quick to spot when the bot goes away, though. :p

Risingashes.8694:

Xarog.3172:

Risingashes.8694:

The forums are filled with inflation rants, and how inflation helps the despicable 1%.

The forums are then filled with deflation rants, and how deflation help the disgusting 1%.

You guys really need to crack a book and pick a story.

Inflation -> hoard items and reduce total wealth held in coin and wait for wave to peak.
Deflation -> reduce item storage where possible and increase gold reserves where possible.

That isn’t a rational explanation. What that’s really saying is “rich people are smarter than others so they can shift things around to make every market condition work for them”- it has nothing to do with what is happening in the present.

If you want to deal with deflation you need to increase gold drops, which will make the rich richer. If you want to deal with inflation you need to reduce gold drops, which will lock in the rich who can invest in items.

What exactly is the solution here? Give every whiner 500g? What does any of this amount to other than base jealousy?

Look, I’m not trying to defend any PoV here. I’m just saying that talking about deflation or inflation in the context of trying to solve market manipulation is an excercise in pointlessness.

Risingashes.8694:

The forums are filled with inflation rants, and how inflation helps the despicable 1%.

The forums are then filled with deflation rants, and how deflation help the disgusting 1%.

You guys really need to crack a book and pick a story.

Inflation → hoard items and reduce total wealth held in coin and wait for wave to peak.
Deflation → reduce item storage where possible and increase gold reserves where possible.

Seeing as the gold income was nerfed because “no longer needing to pay for repair costs”, what’s ANet going to do about the fact that I now have to teleport twice to get to most places I want to go since the waypoints all show as contested, and until you teleport to some random location you don’t want to go on the map, you have no way of knowing if you can actually reach your destination or not?

Bumping for great justice. I discovered this on Thursday, much to my detriment.

marnick.4305:

IRL there’s a big economic crisis, and in GW2 people complain about people playing the market. In fact, I have the idea that people are copying something they only heard recently about but which existed for ages. In Vanilla WoW the pristine hide of the Beast was the most expensive thing for over 1000g. Usually only 1 or 2 on the AH. People played the AH and it was considered legitimate, no one complained.

In GW1 there were a lot of powertraders, I was one of them for a while. The profit margins were huge because no one had a clue, there was no central price point such as the TP. I could easily buy stuff and sell it for triple the price some time later. On the other hand, most stuff was dirt cheap, most regular players would never notice the powertrading.

The GW2 TP is even more healthy than the WoW AH because of the bigger pool of players, and because of that, playing the market is far less profitable. Most buy and sell orders are within a few copper and due to the vast volumes, controlling a market is nigh impossible for any item a regular player would be interested in. Actually, a lot of prices see deflation instead of inflation, especially crafting materials are prone to this.

So I wonder. GW2 economy is clearly more healthy than WoW. The inflation rates are under control, most important stuff is dirt cheap. Furthermore, the value of gold is pegged to real currency which further curbs inflation as it is in the best interest of a.net. Complaining about the economy is like complaining a Kanaxai costs stacks of armbraces in GW1. That’s not relevant of 99.9% of the playerbase.

The only reason I can imagine why people complain about the economy, is because stupid bankers made the RL economy go awry. People read words they don’t understand in popular magazines and take that misinformation into the games they play. Suddenly, every powertrader is a bad person.

tl;dr: GW2 economy is very healthy. Don’t let the RL scaremongering get to you ingame.

In GW1 it was impossible for a single person to completely monopolise a single item. There was just no way to be in every district all the time making sure you bought up every last attempt to sell an item below a certain price. This also meant that if you were patient as a casual player you would get the item you wanted at the price you thought was reasonable, as long as you were willing to be patient.

In GW2, the fact that the trading post allows you to set orders for items makes it a trivial task to completely manipulate commodity prices to the point where it’s realistically possible to single-handedly set a price for a commodity, with the only limit being the amount of gold that you have in your bank. Price manipulation can and does happen on a frequent basis, which only hurts players who trade according to need rather than those who trade in order to flip commodities for profit.

Secondly, it was far easier for a person to get completely optimal gear in gw1. The only things that relatively expensive were the elite armours and rare weapon skins. In terms of item potency, there was literally no difference between a purple (rare) or gold (exotic) weapon.

As someone who personally farmed several hundred ectos in gw1, along with purchasing a tormented weapon or two and other items that cost in excess of 100g, I find myself having absolutely no motivation to put up with the crummy way the gw2 economy is set up. The 120-150 gold required to purchase something as simple as a triforge pendant, or the mats required to upgrade ascended gear (nevermind the ludicrous prices for precursor weapons…) compared to the slow rate of wealth accumulation through farming makes the grind prohibitive and un-fun.

Nike.2631:

Colbear.6425:

Wealth growth is logarithmic. Wealth distribution is skewed.

The change in wealth over time, between rich players and poor players, is logarithmic. If it takes a month for a rich player to double their gold, in that same month, a poor player might increase their gold by a factor of 10 or 20 instead.

So when a rich player gets a 100% return, a poor player would get a 1000% return.

The rich player may have 6000 gold now, instead of 3000. And the poor player would have 50 gold instead of 5 gold.

The distribution is still skewed towards rich players. The growth rate is not. A lot of stuff caps out at a certain gold/hour rate, with the exception of speculation, which returns equal rewards for rich and poor players (if they buy in at the same time, they both get a 200% return, for example).

And all of that is strictly for players who play the market – adventurers and harvesters generate wealth is a linear fasion. After hitting level 80, the second month brings in the same amount as the first month, the third brings in the same as the second, and the fourth brings in the same as the third. The progression actually runs retrograde – 100% growth, then 50% growth, then 33% growth, then 25% growth…

And this is exactly the problem with the guild wars economy.

The fact of the matter is that for people who don’t have the time or the interest to speculate on or flip commodities in the trading post, you’re basically getting shafted every single time you buy something from someone else instead of farming it for yourself.

Add this to the fact that the t6 crafting materials are few in number and used almost everywhere (that is, cooking aside, all of the crafting disciplines share the same crafting materials, and all of the crafts use all of the fine materials, and the legendary/top-end cosmetic items also use the same t6 materials only in much larger quantities) and it honestly becomes discouraging to try to farm up enough gold to pay for the inflated material prices to buy anything from the trading post.

I find it highly ironic that in guild wars, where one of the stated aims was to remove the grind from the game, that I find trying to farm up money (whether it be actual coin drops or crafting materials from mobs or running around trying to harvest materials) to buy anything from the trading post invariably involves more of a grind than in a gear-treadmill game such as Rift.

And unless something is done to curb the effect the speculators have on the game’s market, I don’t see this changing in the forseeable future.

@ Devs

Please consider adding a test client and a test server where players can copy their characters in order to test patches before they go live. I am sure that there are more than enough players willing to test the fixes so that silly mistakes get fixed before they get ported to the live servers.

I don’t see why all of the events have to run at the same time on all of the servers. Especially now that server moves lock you out for 7 days, it makes more sense to run the events during peak times for each different region.

Why make some people unhappy needlessly?

Drake Brimstone.3706:

dirtyklingon.2918:

i hear ya OP, especially when it comes to my exalted set. it took me a lot of tries to find somethign that would appear dark on certain dye slots(collar in particular). i mean even midnight dyes show up as very pale shades.

Solution, dont use the Midnight dyes, use an actual Black or Abyss dye if you want black. Midnight Fire for example is a very very dark Red dye, not black, so on some pieces of armor the Red will be more apparent then others.

How is that a solution? If he bought midnight fire it stands to reason that he wanted an “almost-but-not-quite-black” hue of red. If the same dye comes out on the next piece of armour looking like a tomato red, then obviously something is off, and I think any reasonable person would be a bit irked over this.

The game should let us just choose our primary and secondary stats on armour and call it a day.

Darknass.1903:

So what your saying is your idea of “endgame” is farming/grinding all day long? If so then yes, there are only a few suitable places to farm, but for those who play the game for entertainment value rather then grinding gold… (for whatever reason) THE ENTIRE GAME IS ENTERTAINING.

No, I’m not saying that mindless grinding is my idea of end game at all. I am saying that my complaints about the way cursed shore is designed relative to the rest of the game has nothing to do with your argument about me having levelled too quickly, but you simply don’t want to take the hint.

The “incentives” for going back to lower level zones are purely for entertainment, if you don’t find it entertaining to explore different areas then I guess my point is completely lost on you. Sure the best way to get your shiny pixels the fastest (as of right now) is by grinding the plinx DE chain over and over and over and over and over again, but is it entertaining for you? If not, there is a whole big wide open world to explore.

And over every hill is the same generic mobs. One troll is the same as another. The skelks will always blink in a predictable manner. What’s the point of exploring, if, when you’ve seen one kind of mob, you’ve seen them all? Is it an exciting challenge to encounter these garden variety mobs? On the contrary, it doesn’t matter what gear you have or what skills you’ve chosen, the encounter will pretty much play out like all of the previous encounters.

So no, exploration doesn’t really grab me as an advertising point. If I wanted the kind of exploration you are referring to, I would rather spend my time in a sandbox game such as minecraft.

azurrei.5691:

It’s annoying but I understand the mechanic. But you know what – MAKE THE MOBS SLOW IF THEY ARE IN COMBAT TOO! LET’S BE EQUAL!

Quoted for truth.

It’s utterly moronic that I cannot effectively kite mobs even AFTER I’ve been buffed by swiftness.

I don’t think its quite as simple as you make it out to be. For example, you have some dyes that are “metallic” others that are “natural leather” and yet more that are in the “vibrant” category.

I think the game’s rendering engine renders things differently based on the kind of material it is supposed to be rendering, and that in turn changes the way it renders a particular colour as well.

In other words, the same yellow is going to be brighter on a shiny surface compared to a dull surface.

markob.4398:

While I agree that, so far, I consider GW2 to be the inferior product to GW1, this is based upon looking at a complete first game and comparing it to a two-month old game. That’s simply unfair.

The only solution is to wait while they put the meat onto this skeleton. Fortunately, this game has no subscription, so it’s possible to simply take some time off and explore the new content once it’s out.

I’m not giving up just yet. I do think that they need time to add meat to the so-called skeleton, but I also want to do what I can to make sure its the right meat. For example, if all the game development goes into making new costume pieces to be sold in the gemstore, that’s definitely flesh on the bones, but at the same time it won’t help GW2’s long-term survivability.

Aza.2105:

Apparently the OP has had bad experiences with dungeons. So he, like many others with bad experiences want anet to change dungeons solely for them.

1. In most cases you were in a poorly coordinated group and failed. I don’t recall ever having to dodge every sec of my dungeon experience. What I do recall is dodging when I see a big attack coming or using skills to negate or mitigate damage if I so happened to prematurely use up my endurance.

I’ve had good groups and bad ones. The fact that there are good groups does not change the fact that all of the participants will be building around damage avoidance and choosing utility skills which focus on boosting group survivability. Even while trying to contradict my initial post, you talk about how you’re using your utility skills cuz your endurance is low and you can’t dodge. Which only proves my point how much emphasis this game places on dodging, and how is relegates all other considerations to a secondary position.

2. GW2 doesn’t have team play like chain stunning a mob to death while your friend nukes in the back? Sounds lame and mindless. GW2 has combos, which are very helpful, use them.

I dunno, I found 2 eles comboing meteor shower for the AoE knockdowns to be tons of fun in GW1. It wasn’t lame and mindless at all and actually required quite a bit of skill and co-operation amongst the players. When it went well, it was a rewarding experience. When it went badly, well, that’s what the monks were for.

Now GW2 doesn’t have monks, and I perfectly fine with that. But at the same time the potential of a player to initiate a conflict and gain the upper hand through the entire fight just does not exist. It’s not that its insanely difficult to pull off, it’s just plain theoretically impossible.

I do not want to project, but it appears your idea of fun comes from the sensation of having monsters being not very challenging. I do agree with your other problem about items being exclusive to specific dungeons.

I like challenging mobs. I like interesting fights that test my skills and my reactions. I do not enjoy trash mobs that have to be constantly kited and which require me to constantly blow all my control skills while hoping that other people also blow their control skills at the right time while the people who don’t currently have aggro sit and use their auto-attacks until it becomes their turn to hold aggro for a bit and blow their mitigation utilities. Just because I want this improved does not mean that I’m looking for loot pinata dungeons.

I imagine if tokens for example were universal, all that would happen is everyone would pick the dungeon they found the most easiest to complete. Which would be worse than what we have now.

I am fine with the tokens working as they currently do. What I think they could do, however, is to add rare materials to some of the dungeons and have each dungeon have its own material which can be farmed. These materials could maybe go towards legendary armour sets or something, since those are entirely missing from the game at the moment.

KensaiZen.3740:

Not able to stand and tank dungeon mobs or boss? You’ve obviously never rolled an AH Guardian.

Just did TA the other night and killed the bosses by just standing together in the symbol and beating them to death. No dodging required.

Things like this can be done. Just because people have not found out how does not mean they do not exist in the game.

Actually, my main is a Guardian and I’ve traited full toughness + healing and I use AH as well as the “your crits grant your allies might” ability. I prefer to run around with a hammer and use the combo to keep up a very high uptime of protection and retaliation, as well as traiting my character so that my symbols heal anyone standing in them.

The strategy you are referring to relies upon your teammates being clever enough to stand in your symbols, and to be frank there’s a lot of credible speculation that Altuistic Healing will be the next guardian ability to get hit by the nerf bat.

Though, I dare you to try ALL the dungeons using this tactic and/or trying to go toe-to-toe with champion mobs this way. If you happen to upload any of the attempts to Youtube, lemme know, cuz I think watching the replays will be quite entertaining.

Darknass.1903:

You don’t need to be level 80 to experience the game, that isn’t the way it was designed. It was designed that you get to level 80 as you experience the game, so for the people who bum rushed to level 80 thinking that all the good content is at the “end” are now disappointed. The entire game is endgame content, It wasn’t designed to be rushed through, it was designed to be experienced. Sure there aren’t many “level specific” things to be done at level 80, but there is a down leveling system for a reason. If you bum rushed to level 80 without second thought, maybe you should run around the world, explore I’m sure you’ll find something interesting, and if not then you’ve missed the point entirely.

This is patently wrong. Once you are at level 80 there is only one place that is worth your time to farm, and that’s cursed shore (and MAYBE malchor’s leap if you have enough people at the right events.)

The problem I was alluding to was not the fact that I expected the open-world grinding part of the game to somehow magically transform at level 80, but the fact that one area is vastly superior to all other areas in terms of profitability, despite there being no real increase in the complexity or difficulty of the content. This is bad game design. I’m really hoping lost shore provides a viable alternative, but I’m also hoping that the devs provide viable incentives to revisit the older zones.

Draeka.5941:

Yoh, periods and paragraphs are your friend.

I don’t understand why you complain about not being able to go toe-to-toe with dungeon mobs, since you can do a whole lot more than just dodge. Blind, daze, knockback/down, root, cripple, freeze…you can do a heckuvalot to avoid being hit. This is why a good dungeon group doesn’t get wiped; not because they have ridiculously high healing power or toughness, but because they know their skills and how they interact with others. Team synergy isn’t evident in world PvE, but in the rest of the game that’s what separates good players/teams from those that are not.

However, you are still basing your entire strategy of how you are going to run around and dodge the mobs and keep them disabled so you can do damage. Whether or not your attack combo finishes before you have to dodge again is largely irrelevant. Getting a good crit off or finishing an attack chain is highly unlikely to stop the group from wiping. And that kind of fighting style just isn’t fun. It’s like playing dodgeball and all the NPCs have an endless supply of balls and the only way you’re gonna win is to keep dodging and using abilities to avoid all the crap they’re hurling at you. To which I say, “no thanks”.

If you find such content fun, well, congratulations, I guess you’re a masochist. :P

Curlybaby.6258:

I am one who loves GW2 and it’s game phylosophy and often times finds myself defending many of the criticisms slung at Anet on these forums. Having said that, I don’t think the OP is being malicious with his criticism and I can see his point in most of his post. The one area in which I greatly disagree is in his abilities section. I think it an exaggeration when he says that the differences between a tank and a glass cannon are nearly negligible. IMHO, there are huge differences between glass canons and tanks in GW2.

Much like many of the posters with criticisms of GW2, the OP only comes to his conclusion when comparing GW2 to other games (WOW again?). In that same light, a GW2 player could go on the WOW forums and criticize that game for being too “arcady” with their damage and damage mitigation. Again, I know that this is his opinion, and everyone is entitled to one, but that does not mean the game is “lacking,” “rushed,” or “unfinished.” It is simply an intended game design decision.

In that regard, I see GW2 as a very well thought out game. Yes, there may be bugs that need to be fixed, and there are perhaps a few other areas that need to, and perhaps in time, will be adjusted, but overall GW2 is a very good game and playing as intended.

If the combat mechanics are superficial to such a degree that your choices with regard to gear and traits become mostly irrelevant in a PvE environment, then the balance is off.

I do not expect the differentiation between DPS and Tanks that you would find in, say, Rift. But I did expect the differences to be more like what you found in GW1.

Fritz.5026:

I would disagree. I find there to be enough difference in classes that I can have a difficult time choosing which class I want to play at times. Though I suppose you could be really nitpicky and be like “all melee hits things and all ranged shoot things” but then I would simply wonder how that is different than any other game.

In GW1, your entire build was built around your elite skill. How much impact does an elite skill make in GW2? Does it make or break your build or is it basically just another utility skill in a special slot?

Also you have to understand that this game is designed with a pvp backbone. Yes it does have a large pve section that you can level up and explore, but every player should notice that this pve section does not have gear grinds where the game devolves down to most time = most powerful.

The design of the game probably seems strange to many players who are used to playing pve based games where the pvp is just something they tacked on to keep people sated. However, i dont see that as a shortcoming of this game, but just an inappropriate expectation from the player.

I said in the OP that I have played a lot of Guild Wars 1. That game also had a PvP backbone with some PvE tacked onto it. I did not go into GW2 expecting to find a gear grind.

Lalabu.2097:

The way I see it, not allowing for glass-cannons or tanks shows that Arena Net stayed true to getting rid of the holy-trinity. If you look at the lore behind the dungeons, the dangers within are feared by the inhabitants of Tyria! It would be silly for a group of adventurers to come by and have one of them simply stand in the face of the enemy laughing at his pathetic blows (tank). & the glass-cannon who just pulverizes the boss because he has been hard training for a month’s time.

You present a false dichotomy. It is not neccessary for all the classes to form a kind of homogenous lump in terms of DPS and damage mitigation in order to get rid of the “holy trinity”.

When you can give 5 people random exotic gear, have them not spend ANY trait points, but also have them choose their own weapons and utility skills, and those 5 people can clear a dungeon, you have a problem. The only place that the traits ACTUALLY matter is in SPvP. If one’s trait choices and stat distribution is essentially irrelevant to the gameplaying experience, then there is not enough of a distinction between glass cannons and people going full tank. It also means that the dungeon mechanics focus too much on the dodging mechanic.

When you say that building tanky allows for no more than taking 2 hits extra, I can only think of how that’s fine! Your stats and skills should synch as to allow you to alter your playstyle only enough to get down your combos while surviving, not regenerating to max HP. I do not want people to have the ability to change from a wrecking ball to a block of god-metal. This forces people into pro-builds & into 1 to 3 very specific ways of playing each class.
Right now, it comes down to positioning and strategy, not build. Games where builds are do-or-die fail to keep me and my friends interested for long.
Guild Wars 2 is where it is at

I did not buy GW2 to play a FPS. I do not have a problem with dodging being a mechanic for damage avoidance, but I do have a problem when the entire game’s combat system, its utility skills and its weapon choices are built around this dodging mechanic. It makes the gameplay shallow and uninteresting and repetitive, and it ultimately results in a feeling of one’s desired playstyle being irrelevant.

Haha, I am SO glad that I bought up every kind of dye in the game while prices were low. By selling the unidentified dyes that I got instead of using them, I’m definitely going to finish ahead in the long run. :P

Breneman.6380:

Well I guess it’s just me personally but I’d much rather see an opinion or ideas come from a person who has views and experience of a full product rather than just half.

That being said I do mostly PvE however I disagree with the fact that PvE and PvP are two separate games for the fact that in both you still read and react to certain situations. They’re more like different ASPECTS of the game.

I’m sorry but you’re being silly.

I don’t have to know a thing about PvP in order to explain what I expect from the PvE side of the game. Changes to PvE don’t have to affect PvP and frankly I believe it is inevitable that the devs will throw in the towel and just have pve work differently on a fundamental level so they can preserve the integrity of the pvp system. Just like they eventually did in GW1 with the arrival of the “Ability (PvP)” skills.

At the same time, I have tried a few hours of SPvP as well as WvW. There’s a lack of depth to the pvp aspect of the game, too. But in my opinion the people who are speaking up about it have hit the nail on the head (which is not the case for PvE). They’re probably more invested in PvP whereas right now the PvP game doesn’t grab me and will probably fail to grab me as long as they try to promote it as an e-sport. However, I think ANet have every right to try to make it into an e-sport and if they succeed I will be very happy for them. But the cheering will come from the sidelines, not the front ones. :P

Point being, be careful what you assume about people and how familiar they are with the game just based on what they are commenting on.

Breneman.6380:

Your post is moot in my opinion (not trying to start anything here) for the simple fact that you say it’s not living to it’s ‘’full potential’’ when you’re not even playing the FULL game. Nowhere in this do you even include pvp which leads me to believe you haven’t spent time doing wvw or spvp.

How can you say ‘’not living up to it’s full potential’’ when you haven’t even played the second half of this game?

I don’t have to PvP to know what’s missing from the PvE aspect of the game. If there’s anything missing from the PvE aspect of the game, then the game is not living up to its full potential.

In GW1, different zones would drop different things. Take the Icy Dragon Sword as an example :
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Icy_Dragon_Sword
It only drops from a few mobs in a very specific area of the game. If you wanted an ICD, you either had to go there to farm it, or to buy it from someone who farmed the area.

Since there were many skins that were restricted to certain mobs/areas, it in turn kept those areas valuable to the playerbase. If you knew for a fact that Dusk could drop from, say, Sparkfly Fen mobs, that would give you a reason to farm there instead of in Cursed Shore.

Basically, some of the zones should have something unique about them which serves as a reason to farm that zone.

Part 2 since there’s a 5000 char limit on posts :

*Abilities
Whether I go full tank or build the glassiest cannon ever, my play style doesn’t really change. I’m mostly going to be trying to dodge out of the way of mobs and doing damage whenever they aren’t focused on me. Going from glass cannon to full tank mostly means a switch from being able to take 0 hits to being able to take 2. Tank builds can still do decent DPS. This basically means that tanks don’t feel tanky and glass cannons don’t feel very powerful. This leads to a feeling that it doesn’t really matter what gear you use or how you trait your character. While the abilities obviously have different effects, they aren’t very radical and this leaves combat feeling extremely repetitive and similar no matter which class you pick. If you want to specialise in something, it ought to be special, kitten it.

-
The overwhelming feeling that I get when I play GW2 is that it’s a game that was released too soon. It really has a lot going for it, but at the same time many aspects of the game’s design feels like the attention they got was downright superficial. But I’m really hoping that GW2 ends up being the rich experience it could be, and I think the issues I outlined above is the best place to start (at least from a pve perspective).

I played a lot of Guild Wars 1. It was a major time sink for me and among other things I have some really fond memories of Alliance Battles. I ended up making sure I had at least 30/50 of the HoM awards because I knew I would end up playing GW2 when it came out.

When I heard ANet say things like, “there will be no dedicated healer class”, and that you’d be able to explore the world by yourself and still be effective in combat, I was overjoyed. Not only did I think it was lame in GW1 that you had to take monks with you everywhere, but as a player I also felt hamstrung in that I needed to take 7 other people/henchies with me practically wherever I went.

So I guess its fair to say that I had a lot of expectations for GW2. And honestly I am a little disappointed. GW2 feels like a very shallow game in comparison to GW1. Once you hit lvl 80, your pve experience pretty much revolves around dungeons and event grinding in Cursed Shore. However, the dungeons are repetitive and un-fun (which I’ll get into below), and that pretty much leaves a major grind-fest so simplistic and repetitive that players have been mistakenly caught in ANet’s anti-bot web.

But I sincerely believe GW2 still has a lot of potential. There’s a dungeon revamp in the works and we’re getting a new zone next week and I guess if one has faith in the ANet devs (and let’s be honest, they HAVE been saying more or less the “right” things when it comes to responding to player criticism), then one should expect these changes to make GW2 a better game to play. And with that in mind I want to point out where things could be better :

*Dungeons
I’ve read a lot of threads on dungeons and why they suck and tbh I think every last one of them has missed the boat. The real shortcoming in dungeons is that the moment the fight starts, players lose pretty much ALL initiative. The entire fight mechanic is built around avoiding damage. Players need to avoid damage at all costs and they get 2 dodge rolls and “utility skills” to achieve this. Considerations like effective DPS and weapon choice come a poor 2nd. Frankly, this is absurd. In every fun MMO I’ve ever played, when it came to dealing with average dungeon mobs, playing well meant robbing the mob of his initiative. Where’s the build which makes you laugh cuz the mobs can barely scratch you? Or the chain-stun build which keep the mobs nicely disabled for your nuker friend so he can blow them to kingdom-come? GW1 had this element, and there were several ways of going about completely destroying trash mobs. Not so in GW2. No matter what, the dungeon mobs are always going to down you in a few shots if you ever get it in your head to attempt to trade blow with them. Until this part of the dungeon experience is changed, no matter what content you design, people are always going to feel like they’re signing up for a particularly masochistic game of dodgeball.

Added to this, dungeons lack a proper loot reward. I’m not saying the armour/weapons is a bad reward. But they’re account bound. You only do the dungeon if you’re actually looking to get a piece from the vendor. This by definition ruins the replayability of the dungeon. Sure, you get a few hardcore dungeon farmers who do it for the other drops, but as far as I can tell its a small subsection of the playerbase that actually does this. The elite dungeons in GW1 dropped currency that players could use to trade for other things they want. The fact that the currencies were desirable because they bought the most prestigious armour/weapons in the game is what gave the dungeons widespread appeal. Dungeons in GW2 need to have a similar kind of payoff in order to draw players into their depths.

*Zones
Where is the zone differentiation? Don’t get me wrong, each of the zones have a different feel to them and the atmospheres can be downright awesome, but… Where’s the unique mob drops? No matter which zone I’m in, the mobs pretty much drop generic level appropriate crafting loot and/or level appropriate random quality weapons. Which, if I were to guess, I would suppose is a direct part of the “all you need at lvl 30 is in a lvl 30 zone” philosophy, but where did it say that all of the rewards had to be solely appropriate to someone who is lvl 30?

There should be rare, level independent (i.e. as desireable to find at lvl 1 as lvl 80), loot that drops from certain mobs in each zone, and no two zones should share the same loot table. By doing this, it would actually matter if someone were in Cursed Shore or Frostgorge Sound or the Hirathi Hinterlands.

Yeah, I was actually surprised to find out that GW2 didn’t come with this feature. Anything bought from a vendor and not equipped/used yet should be returnable to the vendor for a full refund at least 10 minutes after the initial purchase was made.

I’ve heard this from several sources now. I haven’t tested it myself but it sounds like there’s DR on salvaging kits. Which would be extremely lame if true. Salvage kits at an advertised effeciency rate (50% for black lion kits for example), and players should be informed of any change to that.

If players can’t trust one statistic on an item, why should we trust any of them?

Anet really needs to step up and explain wtf is going on here.

Zeus.9840:

Conncept.7638:

Ziggurat.8261:

I would really like countess anise’s armor :/

I would really like if they didn’t add Anises armor, and if they stop putting in blatant copies of NPC armor period. I hate, absolutely HATE that the T3 light cultural Asura armor just makes you look like a pixel for pixel copy of Zojja. Blatant laziness on part of the designers.

It would be laziness if those cultural sets were the only ones in the game. However, the cultural sets are only a small portion of a much larger variation of unique armour sets. You may not be satisfied with the T3 making you look like Destiny’s Edge characters but other players may not share your thoughts on it. As a matter of fact, I can imagine people complaining about not having the current T3 designs if they were never implemented.

Don’t want to make it seem like I’m being hostile, but I find it unfair that you should accuse the designers for being lazy just because they decided to add 5 sets of armour into the game that lets those who want to look like Zojja, look like Zojja.

Except that t3 cultural armour is supposed to be something to aspire to. There are very few sets in the game which aren’t worn by NPCs at one point or another.

In my opinion the real reason that guilds aren’t working right now is due to the fact that the game is lacking in structured content. When GvG comes out and when dungeons are revamped so that people actually want to run them, there will finally be an incentive to be in a guild beyond the solo-grinding buffs that guilds are currently used for.

I know that its frustrating and there’s a lot of things I think Anet needs to fix, but if you look at the replies from the devs it really looks like they’re doing their best to make sure the game heads in the right direction. So while I agree that guilds seem a bit unworkable atm, I do believe it will get better in future.

Actually, the real explanation is the fact that ecto prices have risen from 12s each to 15s each.

T5 mats are used to make rares which are then salvaged for ectos and put on the TP. As the ecto price rises, the more currency the crafters have to buy crafting materials with.

I’ve given it a bit of thought and I think a lot of people have misunderstood what I was trying to say, so I wanted to give it a 2nd attempt :

I do not think the artwork is bad. The artwork really impresses me on most of the items.

But :
Below is one of the dungeon pieces, from Caudecus’ Manor. Note how none of the pieces look under-designed. There is exquisite attention to detail on the chest piece. And at least to me, the marks on the legs and shoulder pieces make it look very much like an old piece of armour that has become tarnished with age. If that’s what they were trying to do, then I for one can’t even imagine a more realistic way one could do it.

No one can say that it’s a bad piece. But does it say “hero”? No, it says, “I got this armour from the attic; it belonged to my great great grandfather.”

This is all fine if you want to pretend your character was is a knight in the queen’s court, or a poor out of luck squire that’s trying to make his fortune with his grandfather’s armour, or a general in Zhaitan’s army. Or a cook. Or like someone whose armour was grown from a seed pod.. I’m glad you all have the choice to dress your characters this way if that’s what you want.

However, not a single piece says, “Out of the way, hero coming through!”. Not a single piece looks as if it ought to belong to the protagonist in a heroic saga. We’re playing an MMO where our characters are supposed to be hero of the day. The story does not happen without us. Yet in GW2 the main character looks just like all the NPCs because his choice of armour can be seen on several NPCs of major or minor involvement in the central plot. If you were drawing the pictures for a story, you wouldn’t make the evil sorcerer antagonist look the part by drawing him in football uniform. Similarly, it’s hard for me to think of my character as the protagonist of his personal story because he just doesn’t look the part. All I’m saying is that the option to do so should be there.