Guild Wars 2

200+ pages and still dead silence? Again? I give up. I was so excited for this game prior to release entirely because of the design manifesto. This is a slap in the face, as is the revelation that a skeleton staff has been working on the class fixes this entire time.

I’ve waited patiently for patch after patch to fix something, anything about my class issues. Instead its just been an assortment of random nerfs, fixes no one asked for and icon fixes ( woo ). While ANET routinely either just goes silent and lets the resentment simmer, or puts their foot in their mouth promising something that never materializes.

Quality of Life. NOT QUANTITY OF CONTENT. Slapping in new content does absolutely nothing if you aren’t improving the gameplay experience itself which has a laundry list of issues you should have been working on since release.

Luckily, I’m within the refund window. If I wanted a gear grind there are vastly superior games than this for it. What I wanted was Guild Wars 2. You failed to deliver that.

They’ll always be guys that play mangina for the eye candy. But with GW2 specifically, male human face selection is awful. As I don’t want to be an androgynous Asian, a meat faced dipkitten or Clint Eastwood, I go with Sylvari. But for guys that absolutely want a human character, you’re pretty SOL with your options in GW2 for men.

I was frankly surprised at how awful and limiting the male human face selection was. Every other race has more/better options. But because ANET made the secondary detail layer of male human to be porn star mustaches instead of scars, tattoos or complexions its subpar to every other race. With very little variety because oddly enough not everyone wants to look like their dad’s prom photo.

Maulor.9847

Please take your cries to the cry threads, and let us revel in the fact that this game takes EFFORT and TIME and DEDICATION like any good hobby should.

If you can’t grasp why upsetting your most valuable customers is a bad thing, I can’t help you and you should probably excuse yourself from this discussion. As you clearly don’t understand the problem here.

Also, what effort, time or dedication are involved with what is basically a slot machine?

dahkot.3579

Still waiting for someone to show me
1.) How ArenaNet forced anyone to buy anything ?
2.) Where they didn’t specifically say a “chance” of getting something.

Neither of your points matter in any way shape or form to the actual situation. ANET angered its best customers. End of story. ANET is a business, they made a bad business decision, their business will suffer for it. That’s literally everything that matters here.

Your whiteknighting around the forums is completely irrelevant. Nothing you or anyone else says will convince the people that feel like they were duped out of money to be happy about it.

And no, I didn’t spend any money on anything for Halloween. But I sure as hell won’t now or at any point in the future if this is the standard ANET is going to work by. Did I spend money on the gem store before? Sure, back at release for some cosmetic stuff. Will I ever again after watching this fiasco? No.

Is that good for ANET? Obviously not, and that’s all that ultimately matters here.

The problem is, historically speaking, any bad impression an MMO gives in its first month sticks. It is extremely hard to get back players that left with an unfavourable impression from the first month. Thats why every MMO you’ve ever played emails you constantly with free weekends, etc.

It’s also why half of MMOs go down in flames in the first few months. Because they launched an unfinished product and then couldn’t get their launch numbers back even after they finally fixed all the problems. Then its just a slow, bleeding death.

This thread, and every whiteknight on this forum, is totally missing the point here.

ANET just kitten off the people most likely to give them money. That is bad in every conceivable way from both a business and reputation stand point. This was neither good PR nor good business practices. Its an all around lose lose situation for ANET.

You can whiteknight till you’re blue in the face. It doesn’t change the fact that the people who were most willing to spend money are now highly unlikely to do so ever again. Damaging both ANET’s rep and the prospects for any further events of this nature that they do.

Are you going to care about the Christmas event after losing $50 on the Halloween one? Fark no.

deathTouch.9706

It’s your own fault for making assumptions and impulsively acting on it, especially if doing so was outside of what you could reasonably afford.

God forbid people playing a game, ie an activity for having “fun”, expect something fun instead of being exploited for a cynical cash grab.

This whole event is becoming kind of a clusterfark. Poor communication and now poor deployment. Oh well, hasn’t been a patch yet that didn’t disappoint me. Why start now? >.>

The Story so far….

Bad Players: Where?! When?!

Good Players: No seriously, when?

;p

Pretty much. Ele is built in the image of a traditional ranged DPS caster. Yet ironically is ill suited for the job of high damage ranged combat. Due too low base damage on abilities and many abilities having too big of a wind up allowing targets to easily avoid them.

Leiloni

Could be cool, but I wonder – if we’re already shooting fire arrows, what benefit do we get from peforming a projectile finisher through a fire field? Same question for Ice and Water fields lol? I’m not sure the Dev’s had Elemental arrows in mind when they designed that system. :\

We already have a proof of concept in Frost Bow. The auto attack of which is not a projectile finisher far as I recall. But even if it was, the attack has a splash heal at the point of impact. It could still pick up regen when being shot through a water field. Half of our current auto attacks don’t actually have a secondary effect if you look. They’re just damage with different colour spell effects. So the bow auto attacks don’t actually need a secondary effect.

Provided each is using either a different effect or a different method of damage delivery. Such as:

Water Shots = AoE splash heal
Earth Shots = Bleeding
Air Shots = Ricochets to multiple targets as the bolt arcs.
Fire Shots = AoE splash perhaps with a persistent burning ground component.

Heck, Fire Bow #2 could use the “trail of fire” effect from Burning Retreat so the arrow leaves a burning trail to the target. Frost Bow #2 could keep its channeled vulnerability. Air Bow #2 could blind. Earth Bow #2 could have weakness or cripple. So on and so forth.

One of the big problems with Conjures is losing access to all your regular skills, thus plummeting your survivability. So, what if Conjures were all 1H and granted skills like a 1H weapon. Giving 3 main hand or 2 off hand. So you would retain the weapon skills of your regular main hand or off hand weapon. Allowing you to mix and match, keep half your skills and still swap attunements to access other skills.

So if you had something like off hand Earth Shield, main hand Lightning Mace, main hand Water Scepter or off hand Water Focus / Horn, off hand Fire Axe, main hand Flame Sword.

We’d lose a couple of abilities, but regain some of our regular skills while gaining much more situational customization over our weapon skill bar. In lieu of having weapon swap. A good portion of the conjure weapon skills are a somewhat redundant anyhow. They could be condensed in a smaller group of more meaningful skills.

I’d like to see Longbow myself for the arcane archer look. Mesmer’s already have GS. Elementalist is the only scholar without a unique weapon. Mesmer’s have GS, sword and pistol. Necromancer’s have Axe. Ele should have something unique as well to set it apart from the other two. Longbow, Hammer, etc. Something different from Mes and Necro.

Man, I got 5 yesterday. All from the same company from different chars. What’s your guys’s secret? ><

Xsorus.2507

It lost over 30k Subscriptions the month of WoW launch. That is a massive Deathblow to game. TOA increased the number of subscribers flat out.

Might want to actually read the charts you’re linking. Seeing as they show exactly what I said. DaoC suffered a gradual decline. Also the supposed “deathblow” you’re referring too actually corresponds with the launch of with a couple of major titles ( WoW, EQII, CoV ). Which is perfectly understandable.

Xsorus.2507

Gear Also mattered before TOA as well. Bout the only time it didn’t was pre SI. However SI introduced the Raid Dungeon Weapons, Which were far better then the player crafted weapons back then.

All that mattered pre-ToA was being able to afford a spellcrafted, overcharged suit of player crafted armour. Before SI, all that mattered was masterpiece player crafted. SI dungeon loot didn’t really matter at all unless you wanted some trophies.

Xsorus.2507

TOA didn’t require massive coordination, It required massive amounts of people, Unless you were Albion/Hibernia, then it required 1 group or less.

You quite obviously did not play ToA at release. Otherwise you would recall the 6-8 hour raids required to move through the master level steps. Often times with encounters that would punish the raid as a whole for the stupidity of a single person. Or which routinely kittened players out of encounter credit due to bugs or straight up by design ( Motherkittening harpies >.> ).

On top of that you had scroll farming for hours just to activate artifacts and then pointless mob grinding to level them up.

I’m impressed you remember pre-diminishing returns Infiltrators, but not ToA’s launch. ;p

Balidore.2790

Ok… so here it is. DAoC started to die upon EA buying out DAoC, and releasing that absolutely terrible ToA expansion

EA didn’t buy out Mythic until 2006. ToA was released 2003.

Balidore.2790

Warhammer was bad, so everyone came back to DAoC, then WoW came out, it was pve, so most didn’t like that either, and came back.

Warhammer came out in 2008. WoW was launched 2004.

Let’s hear it. What do you want to see added to each class next? Not new weapons to the game, but new weapons specifically to each class from weapons that are already in game. AKA ones Anet doesn’t have to add tons of new animation for and thus are actually feasible without a major expansion.

My picks would be:

Elementalist: Shortbow or Longbow ( Focused on long range single target damage )
Engineer: 2H Hammer ( Tool-ish melee weapon and underused in game right now )
Guardian: Longbow ( For reliable ranged damage )
Mesmer: Off-hand Pistol. ( Duh )
Necromancer: Off-hand Axe. ( Something with mobility or hard CC )
Ranger: Staff ( Support oriented, Nature Magic themed, Druidic )
Thief: Rifle ( For a 1200 range option. )
Warrior: Off-hand Dagger. ( Condition or defense focus. Parrying dagger. )

“Feminine Armour” is an oxymoron. ;p

Man, wish I had unlimited vigor, eyes in the back of my head and the ability to see through stealth! Then Moa would never be a problem.

(cough).

Xsorus.2507

In closing, your grasp of history concerning DAOC is pretty much wrong on every level, Do not, I repeat Do not comment on DAOC and its development in any given future, You are clearly not qualified to discuss that topic.

Neither are you apparently. ;p

DaoC’s decline was gradual, it never suffered any sort of massive sudden deathblow from WoW. ToA did in essence kill DaoC by introducing a brutal power grind and a set of top heavy I Win abilities and items as rewards. Hence when they launched ToA free classic servers they quickly became the most popular.

ToA required massive coordinated efforts and unspeakable time sinks and tipped the whole game as a result. It also tied PvE grinding directly to RvR advancement which kitten lots of people off. RvR degraded into a matter of who had what RA / Master Level / Artifact abilities up. There were several abilities and artifacts that could literally automatically win a fight ( lawl Forceful Zephyr ~ ) and others that were so powerful they became required ( Bodyguard ).

Most fundamentally required pvp functions were also RA’s ( Purge, Ignore Pain, Determination, Charge, etc ) and hitting the higher RRs wasn’t easy unless you had a dedicated guild group or just zerged all the time for a handful of rpz here and there. Mixed with ToA it made for one kitten of a barrier to entry and I imagine turned off quite a few new players in its day.

So no, GW2 doesn’t need RAs. Display ranks ala DaoC would be nice however as would any manner of earnable aesthetic modifications.

They really don’t require skill. I wish they did. They might be interesting then. There’s a glimmer of potential in them that could make for a very skillful class if it leaned more towards utility, position and deception. But as is they’re stupid easy to play and achieve success with. Anyone that says otherwise is frankly fooling themselves. Even without haste you can hit stupidly hard for little effort on your part and any trade off in squishiness is easily mitigated with stealth.

Powerful abilities on long cooldowns are the bain of any MMO. They were awful in DaoC. Often completely determining fights based on whose timers were up. GW2 should NOT be like that in any regard.

Capitalizing on an opponents mistake should be a matter of knowing what combination of abilities to use. Not which I Win button to click.

Well, that was completely disappointing given how long we had to wait for it. Not a peep on balance or even an acknowledgement? Just a brief discussion on features that probably should have been in at release.

Nice and all, but I care more about the state of the classes and the balance around them than any of this. The game likewise can’t be taken seriously as an eSport with so much bugged and out of whack among the classes. I was expecting and hoping for some news on what you plan to do about making an even playing field before you go on about adding more playing fields.

spvp has been a litany of disappointment since release.

Vanille

No way in hell are mesmers easy mode. Mesmers have an immense learning curve.

I sincerely hope that was sarcasm.

Infinitus

Trust in Arena net they do know what they’re doing and I play a mesmer and we’ve had a slight balance this patch also and i wouldn’t be suprised if there are more to come. It’s how MMO’s work.

Anet has given no reason at all to trust them so far. Seeing as my main was an Ele, I have no faith in them either. ;p

It effectively did nothing. So no, it wasn’t “too far”. If anything, it missed the entire point of people’s complaints in the first place.

Gotten it too.

Don’t know where you’re playing, haven’t had a Mesmer free match in….er. Well, since the game launched. Every game has at least 3-5. Same with Thieves. God my entire team was Thieves this morning. Because that pistol whip “nerf” ( lawl ) did absolutely nothing. Much like the Mesmer “nerf”.

It did fark and all to counter Mesmer phantasm/illusion/clones. They still enjoy 100% uptime or close to it vs most classes and the ones with heavy AoE, like Ele, just die in seconds if they’re spec’d for damage anyhow.

Spvp is a mess and Anet has given no indication thus far that they have any idea whatsoever on how to fix it.

I rolled a Necro and it was a step up. I am sad. =/

I’ve seen that once or twice. I thought it was clever, not an exploit. Its not like Engineer Turrets are any sort of threat in any way shape or form, sadly.

Looking at data doesn’t help if you aren’t actually playing the game to see why you’re getting said data to begin with. Last patch proved that one.

Doesn’t matter if your data said 4 if you don’t check to see if it was because 1+3 or 2+2.

This is making the gross assumption that every Thief is kind enough to waltz into your field of view, wave and not use stealth or shadowstep. So as not to startle you, that would be bad manners.

The whole idea of a 2s faceroll is to pull it off by surprise on a target that won’t be able to or can’t react in time in the minuscule window of time they have. Toss network latency into that and perhaps you can see why everyone is kitten off.

There are two things that have kitten people off since the dawn of the internet in gaming: Dying instantly with no control over the situation and dying to mechanics that require vastly less effort than they themselves are using.

Paulus magintie

Also they have data we can’t even see to back up their choices, sadly I don’t see any PvP skills like in GW1 where you could have a PvE skill and for PvP it works differently for balance.

Data does squat if you don’t actually PLAY the game to see why you’re getting that data. Nerfing Pistol Whip by 15% shows a total lack of understanding of what the problem with Pistol Whip is ( Psst, its the haste stunlock, not the base damage itself ).

Because you want to play a caster but have too much self respect to play a Mesmer, but have no hope whatsoever that Anet even understands whats wrong with Elementalist.

Welp, that was the final bit of proof I needed that Anet doesn’t listen whatsoever. No faith left in them now. Ele deleted, rerolling something that actually functions.

ThiBash

Even your auto attack skills have secondary effects that make them useful depending on the situation. You should swap attunments all the time, because that’s what you’re supposed to do. Mono-attunement is Guild Wars 1 (ancient history).

Actually half of the auto attack skills have no secondary effect whatsoever making them little more than filler skills with different coloured particle effects.

Also, our traits are apparently designed WITH mono-attunement in mind. Which is the entire problem. We have Traits that reward you for being in one attunement on a class that’s forced to constantly rotate said attunements to be effective. Essentially devaluing your trait points.

Ele is a sad sad excuse for a class right now. The idea is sound and there’s potential for it to work. But the execution is terrible and I’m sick of waiting for Anet to do anything about it.

Short answer: Class selection

;p

I prefer the male armour overall. Female armour tends to be horribly impractical in the interests of sexing it up for the eyes of men. But that’s a problem that extends across the entire industry really.

I would totally take another utility slot over 90% of the elite skills. =/

I like the ideas and the potential but I was one of those unfortunate enough to select one of the wrong classes out of the gate ( Elementalist ) and I’ve seen no indication whatsoever that the class situation will change any time soon. Despite how glaringly obvious and easily fixed many of the problems are ( and were in beta ). So I don’t have any confidence the situation will improve any time soon.

I guess all I can really say is if it was a monthly sub game, I would have dropped it when the first free month ran out.

Bard was not fun in DaoC. MINSTREL was fun in DaoC. ;p

Changing the thread title kind of negates the joke mods >.>

Greatsword Ranger is about the only way to use a Greatsword in game without feeling cheesy. It actually works fairly well if you build it tanky. But hey, my main is an Elementalist. Anything is a step up. Well, except necro. (cough).

I honestly never use dual pistols anymore. The shield skills are just too useful in pvp.

I feel bad for:
Good necros -.-

Join server. Look at scoreboard. Give up.

Switch servers. 5 Thieves on one team instead. QQ.

Not sure what to tell you, you can roam fairly well with D/D. The inherent problem is other classes can roam even better. Which by and large is the central flaw to Ele overall. We’re not bad, everyone is just better.

It can work, but be prepared to work for it.

Its a high effort cap. Big difference, really. This is the only class where you need to devote your whole utility bar to “Oh shi-” buttons just to stay on even keel survivability wise with other classes. -.-

I’ll thank them when they actually say something about the state of class balance and spvp. Silence isn’t golden, its frustrating and rapidly becoming inexcusable.

Remove it. It is not and will not ever be balanced, frankly. 90% of the complaints about burst damage are directly related to haste. Dying in 1-2s in an MMO has kitten people off since the dawn of the Internet. Don’t try to incorporate it into yet another game. You’ll never balance it and never justify it.