Guild Wars 2

ISP: Bell Aliant
Location: Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, Canada
Server: Ehmry Bay

Does anyone have a link to where they say they’re adding new weapons?

There’s just nothing to do, and no reason to log in most of the time. The closest we get is fractals or world bosses, but in most games one dungeon is not even close to being enough; I remember playing Rift and, at launch, it had 10 dungeons, about a new one every 5 or so levels from level 15, and at level cap, you could replay all those dungeons in a remixed format. Plus the 20 man raids. Plus the 10 man raids. Etc.

GW2 doesn’t come close to the sort of group content that other MMOs have, and it’s one of the few MMOs that actively seems to discourage people from grouping, by not giving them any reason to do so— not to mention more than a few dungeons (like CoF) get locked doors all the time too.

knives.6345:

• The loot isn’t fun.
-It’s subjective. I don’t find them “fun” too – but I find them adequate. I never-ever got a precursor since release, so yeah, it sucks for me. Also, the game is designed to have a horizontal progression (which honestly gets boring), meaning it’s all about the looks, not the stats.

That’s how it’s claimed to be designed, in theory but in practice, this ‘horizontal progress’ in this game is rather terrible.

Most of the skins in game seem to come out of the mystic forge, rather than actual gameplay— or else they drop so rarely they’re very rarely seen. Nevermind the fact that most bosses don’t even have unique skins that they drop to begin with.

I mean, games like Rift manage to do vertical and horizontal item progression (not to mention ‘living world stuff’ and adding new content) just fine. Why can’t Anet?

Samuel Loretan.8601:

Hello!

Here’s some clarification, as I understand that this whole thing is quite complicated to grasp.

• The roll-out plan ultimately include all maps in the open world, including the cities. The speed at which we’ll roll out the system will depends on how the system performs versus our expectations, but the goal is to ultimately cover the whole open world.

• The roll-out is done on a per-map basis. Once a map uses the MegaServer system, it uses it for all Worlds (that is the point of the MegaServer system). The “map population” I am referring to is the average population on the map across all Worlds.

Thanks for your comments!
— Samuel

With do respect, what’s the point of this ‘update’? I don’t think anyone’s complaints, concerns or issues with the megaserver system has to do with the speed by at which it’s being rolled out. Whether you do it fast or slow, it’s not going to resolve issues like those people have brought up about schedules or problems with communities.

I mean, it’s not even approaching addressing those issues. At all.

This strikes me as a bad idea, like… ‘time to uninstall the game’ bad idea. It appears they’re making theses changes because, during no-peak hours, events like ‘battle for lion’s arch’ were basically unplayable. This isn’t an inaccurate description, but it seems to me it’s more of an issue with the sort of content (and the abuse of timers and DPS meters) they’ve been adding.

There shouldn’t be content in the open world that requires a large group of people to complete, because, as noted, if you’re playing during off hours, you’re screwed. Taking all the world bosses—which are frankly one of the few reasons to keep logging in and playing this game—and putting them on limited schedule is a step in the wrong direction.

Other than the wardrobe and dye fixes, I can’t see anything worthwhile coming out of this ‘feature pack’ patch, and now I’m not even certain that I’m going to be all that interested in logging in on april 15th at all.

Dalanor.5387:

Just changed the other two roles.

Changed them to what, exactly?

Use anything else beside #1 or play PvE.

I do. And it’s still painfully limited compared to other games.

False again. Read this.
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Control_effect

And yet, the very second paragraph of that article:

Crowd control is essentially the same group of effects, notably used in-game in effect descriptions of Unshakable and Defiant tooltips. Some enemies possess the Unstoppable ability which makes them totally immune to control effects as well as movement-restricting conditions like crippled or immobilized.

Defiance, at it’s most basic and minimum level means you have to hit the target with some form of crowd control three times before you get any sort of effect to stick. Everytime a new player jumps into the fray, that’s another three stacks. A group of three players, for example, has to remove nine stacks of it. And so on.

And that ignores the fact that giant bosses, in general, are completely immune to crowd control all together.

So you want perma CC to afk dps down bosses? How engaging that would be. Not even WoW has this.

WoW has tanks, a literal form of ‘perma CC’. Except for when the bosses break free of that or you have to engage offtanks for whatever reason.

I have no interest in ‘perma cc’ of bosses, it would, as you say, be dull. But you’re making the fallacious assumption that there are only two options; the pointless, weak, ineffectual CC we have now, or perma-CC. There isn’t. Most mmos have found some sort of balance between the two extremes.

It’s possible, even likely, that if every class had some sort of ‘control’ weapon that allowed them to strip defiance off relatively quickly to get a crowd control effect in (in much the same way that multiple controllers in CoH could CC anything; it just wasn’t always easy or for long) then perhaps it would be less of an issue, but right now it’s very chaotic and zergish.

Use your traits, that affects a lot of your abilities, such as when Mesmers can trait for CD reduction and longer duration for their Feedback for example or when Elementalists apply aoe fury to team mates when blasting in fire fields as support.

I do use traits. But traits often feel like a DPS who’s specialized their spec in such a way that they can provide minor support or minor whatever else.

Palador.2170:

Neumonics.4603:

Perhaps if they created 3 more classes who are just devoted to those rolls, but as it stands , no. I disagree.

This would be a Bad Idea.

Back in CoH, there were four ATs with access to “Buff” power sets. Two of them, Defenders and Controllers, could get the actual “Healing” power set. For Defenders it would be a primary set, for Controllers it was secondary.

Now, you didn’t NEED a “healer” in a team. Lots of the buff sets could prevent the damage rather than healing it away, or crowd control could keep the fights at a level where the damage being taken was minimal.

And yet, you would sometimes encounter a group made by people from trinity style games that knew there were “healers” out there, and would refuse to get a group going until they had one. I even heard stories of them kicking out more useful people to make room for one.

Even worse was when they would make a “pure healer”, skipping over useful non-healing powers to pick up optional secondary healing skills that were redundant to their character, because they wanted to be “the best healer they could be” and show us how it was done. Or they’d make a Scrapper (melee fighter) and skip a lot of their own defensive powers because they were DPS and expected someone else to keep them on their feet if they got hit.

TL;DR: If you make a “Tank” or “Healer” class, people will think they NEED them, even if they don’t.

There’s bad players in every game, including CoH; but I don’t think that’s good enough of a reason to avoid the trinity like this game has done (or, for that matter, Champions Online) CoH had a good system, it’s a shame it’s no longer with us.

Yeah, I think it’s rather…. foolhardy, on Anet’s part, to pump this stuff. Most Developers put these sorts of quality of life stuff in their patches along side stuff like adding content and stuff.

Dusty Moon.4382:

Xae Isareth.1364:

Dusty Moon.4382:

Kit.3986:

Dusty Moon.4382:

No game can really FORCE true Team play. Forced grouping, using the Trinity, is NOT TEAM BASED-PLAYING. It is up to the INDIVIDUAL PLAYER to be TEAM based or not. I CHOOSE to be a team player, others do not. It is your choice in this game. At least you have a choice.

Games can, namely by having a complicated enough encounter where players need to communicate and decide upon actions together that will lead to survival and killing the boss in a timely fashion. WvW is a good example of forced teamplay, since if no one plays as a part of the team in that gamemode, they will all die.

I also didn’t point to using the trinity, but at least providing a reason to be any other role than zerker DPS. There are support abilities in the game, there are support builds, there are tankier builds and condition builds, but most groups don’t want to see them or deal with them because it’s simply faster if everyone goes full zerk and stacks on every encounter…. which requires no teamwork besides the occasional rezzing and just pushing out damage: no communication needed, you can even go afk during the fight and still have the boss killed in a timely manner. Putting in a little bit more challenge and getting people to wok together in the dungeon environment would… make it more fun and less like farming events.

And when you go into group content, like a dungeon, shouldn’t a player want to be a team player? What’s the point in doing group content, with a team, if you would rather do solo content?

That IS NOT TEAM PLAY. Team playing is an attitude. When I played Rift, I was forced many times into a group and the other players were not team players. Also saying, I need DPS in X build, healers in Y build and Tanks in Z build or you can’t join is not TEAM PLAY – that is a group of individuals playing together. What is the difference with what GW2 and forcing? At least in GW2, you have a choice.

GW1 GvG and HoM was TEAM play. Dungeons under a Trinity game – sorry no.

Addressing the post above yours.

If you think about it this way. To you as a player in a trinity game, even if GW2 was just all about the DPS, how is it different?

If you’re a DPS, you’ll go full DPS. If you’re a healer you’ll go full heal. If you’re a tank, you’ll mostly think about survivability and aggro management, and might be a bit sneaky and add in a bit of DPS.

It really is the same thing. Its just very one-dimensional. Plus, just looking at the proportion of DPS to tanks/healers in MMOs, I really question if most people actually likes to think about healing or tanking anyways.

Sorry the Trinity is one dimensional as you have set roles – done. In GW2, depending on the mob, a Mesmer can tank, as can any other profession. It is the mix of skills and synergy in the build that is important.

The trinity gives the game a basis for building teamwork and cooperative play. Does it guarantee it? No, of course not.

The truth of these threads, that talk about the trinity or suggest the game needs it, isn’t so much that we need ‘tanks’ or ‘healers’ so much as they’re trying to get at the underlying issue that all we really have in this game is dps.

What I mean is that this isn’t a game that’s ‘free’ from the holy trinity, it’s a game that’s struck in the holy trinity and lopped off two of the three roles that make it up. Guild Wars 2’s problem is that it’s limited the gameplay dramatically, not increased it or allowed people greater freedom.

You say your mesmer can tank, but I highly doubt that (unless you’re referring to some sort of ‘face tanking’ or surviving a battle with npcs focused on you… which again, isn’t really tanking) because this is a game where there are no taunts—and more importantly, there’s also no control. Keeping in mind that tanking is, and has always been, a form of control, this game has next to no control abilities what so ever. What controls we have are incredibly weak—appropriate for the sort of controls you’d expect on a dps in a game with a holy trinity, but in no way comparable to true controlling that you’d find in any other game. In fact, most champions are semi-immune (and get more immune as more players join in) and some critters are completely immune.

This dramatically reduces the number of gameplay options that are open to players.

And that’s ultimately the problem, not the fact that Guild wars 2 doesn’t have a trinity, it’s the fact that we don’t have a trinity and gameplay options are incredibly narrow. I don’t see why, for example, we couldn’t have stats that increased our ability to control, or powers that allowed healing or other forms of support.

Hybrid.7059:

Going to pass on any new personal story unless the design is vastly different. If it remains similar even slightly to the current style of the personal story I won’t bother doing it. I’ve already done Trahearne’s personal story for him, so I suppose I’ll just let him do it himself in any continuation.

Yeah, I’d like to see the personal story return, but the truth of things is that the personal story is god awful. I mean, it’s not bad for the first two parts, but as soon as you start moving towards the ‘orders’ it gets crippling boring.

It’s really only the two parts of the personal story that are actually personal, as far as I can tell… after that the paths keep merging into one thing.

OptimistPrime.9283:

Absolutely not.

A.) We have swiftness. Not only that, but we have incredibly readily accessible swiftness.

Not every profession has easy access to swiftness, actually— Mesmers, for example, only really have focus 4 to apply swiftness, and Temporal curtain is bugged so it doesn’t apply swiftness to characters who already have it.

Furthermore, the fact that people invest so much time making sure they have some means to generate swiftness only strikes me as an argument for mounts, not against them. Players clearly want to move faster than the normal walk rate, and it makes little sense that we should be forced to carry around a weapon or utility skill simply to make that happen.

B.) Going along with swiftness, we have maps that are “small”, meaning we can get from point A to point B without waypoints in less than 5 minutes. A second if you use a waypoint. Mounts are necessary for games like WoW where there are no waypoints, so you HAVE to walk.

While this is true for many of the pre-80 maps, this really isn’t true for Orr, where a great number of waypoints are almost permanently contested due to temple events or whatever. In theory it ought to make doing the temples more desirable, but in practice is’t just annoying.

And this says nothing about the waypoints that get contested during events and that event bugs out. I remember for several weeks, for example, the waypoint closest to the Grenth temple, that’s not contested, was locked due to a broken event.

C.) Towns being cluttered with MORE things just sounds terrible, both aesthetically as well as technologically.

Then don’t allow people to mount up in towns.

Adding mounts, for example, would give Anet something they can create skins for, and sell in the gemstore, which means they won’t have to sell things like armor skins— they might be able to justify adding those skins to the game as part of the game, rather than something we have to pay for.

I’m just a bit dismayed that they’re expecting so many people to participate. I mean, the mari requires something like 75-125 people to do, and that’s a /lot/ of people. In my experience playing mmos, it’s difficult to even get enough people to make two full raid groups of 20 people, for example. What are they going to do if interest drops?

I feel like the signet would be better if A) the passive was per outgoing hit, not when I take damage, and the active part applied the signet to myself and players around me, rather than whatever we’re attacking. The latter would prevent it from being wasted by accident.

Flesh golem should turn into a zombie voodoo shark when it hits the water.

I think the answers to the question about conditions and the difficulty with Scarlett to be the most troubling. With Scarlett, I don’t think the complaint’s really been about the length of the plot— at least not at first.

Indeed, I don’t think there’s ever been a problem with the ‘length’ of the living story storylines, so much as there’s been a serious problem with the amount of material vs the length. The very first living story, for example, was one I enjoyed much more than any other part so far, since it seemed to focus on character who weren’t overpowered demigods. The problem was though that we had essentially a two or three page story, but it was stretched over four months. I have no problem with it being realized over that length of time, but there needed to be more meat to the story than what was presented.

With the question on conditions; it’s interesting to see that we’re going to get NPC that require condition builds to take down, but that’s not really (in my opinion) the spirit of the question being asked. Guild Wars 2’s condition builds suffer from the fact that there’s such a small cap on them, and the fact that most conditions can be applied multiple times by a single player. It only takes two or three players attacking a single target to max out bleeds, for example, and that’s only assuming that none of those players are purposely built for condition application. I mean, a main hand sword, on a warrior, can probably reach the cap on his or her own. And that’s the problem.

Making certain npcs that require condition damage applications is only going to further reinforce the specialist and narrow scope of condition damage builds— and that’s what needs to be addressed.

1. Do other, non-human races have holidays? Is there any chance that in the future we’ll see them represented with living story events in game?

2. Is there any backstory or lore related to the legendary weapons?

They should just bump engineers back up to heavy armor. and come up with another medium armor profession.

Engineers were originally conceived as heavy armor, not medium.

Kind of a late reply, and I’m sure everyone has said everything that needs to be said about post-80 progress.

But what about progress 30-80? Of all the games I’ve played, GW2’s leveling progress has to be one of the most boring I’ve ever played. mostly it boils down to the fact that, once you’ve reached 30, you’ve basically unlocked every skill for your profession; there’s nothing new for you. I mean, yeah, there’s traits and all but I’ve never really found traits to be particularly organic… or as fun as a ‘new power’.

Secondly, any sort of weapon crafting is really boring as well, mostly because every since weapon you craft, except for the rare and exotic 80 tiers look exactly the same. There’s only so many times I can craft a gnarled stick stave and not loose my mind. surely it’s not that hard to give us more skins per level tier?

I just wish the finishers were class related, rather than generic. I mean, if you’re going to force us to finish them, it should at least be stylish by default.

Ugh, armour in this game is getting as bad as it is in SWTOR.

I find the whole excuse of ‘server limitations’ rather idiotic, since pretty much every mmo out there seems to be able to handle a bucketload of dots on a target just fine.

More importantly, if it was a hard limitation, they shouldn’t have designed the game in such a way that hands out conditions like they’re candy. Take main hand warrior sword; here’s a weapon that, with it’s burst skill, can stack over ten bleeds BY ITSELF. I’ve personally been able to get up to 22 bleeds by myself— and that’s part of the problem.

Most games don’t give everyone dots, and when they do, they’re not spammable dots.

I wish they’d either increase the over all store of our collectables, or, alteratively, reduce and refine the amounts needed.

I mean, think of it this way; if it takes 100 bloodstone dusts to make a brick, and we get 5-15 every time we open a bag or chest or whatever, why not just reduce it so we only need 10 bloodstone dusts to make a brick, and only get one dust per chest and bag? It’d take, more or less, the same amount of time and effort to get enough to refine, but it would only take up a tenth of our bag space.

The same goes for all crafting materials; if I need three logs to make one plank of wood for crafting, why not just set it so each tree only produces one log and one log is all that’s needed to make a plank?

It’s just common sense.

maddoctor.2738:

While not addressing the problem with Berserker it could potentially open up new builds/options.

I don’t think anyone’s claiming that zerker is a problem so much as it’s currently the only stat set that anyone uses.

The problem is that, for the most part most stats are pretty useless. Only a handful, like healing power, for example, contributes to your ability to support others, and it only does so in a very weak sense.

Many of the boons don’t receive any contribution from the character’s stats. To put this another way, a character fighting naked will contribute the following boons at their full strength: Might, Protection, Aegis, fury, stability, swiftness and vigor. It makes no difference, and that’s the problem with the gear set up.

And even with gearing for the ones that do function based on stats, like Regeneration, you’re basically shooting yourself in the foot because Regeneration is a rather weak HoT in a game full of volley attacks. I very rarely die because my HP has been slowly eaten away, I die because things hit really hard and wipe out large parts of my HP bar before I can heal.

The truth is, in a lot of ways the gear stats in this game are apparently designed as if we were supposed to have a trinity within the game. But we don’t. We’re all playing, essentially, DPS roles and yet all over the game we have gear that appears to be for tanks, even though we don’t have tanks, or healers, even though we don’t have healers.

What I think we need is A) Boons redesigned so that they’re based heavily on stats, and not stats like power. more powers that offer direct heals and direct support. Most of the healing in this game tends to be personal, and there’s only a handful of abilities that actually offer healing to the group. Rather than ‘Mark of Blood’ (for example) offering regeneration, it should just pulse and heal players directly (and do so strongly), and boons like Aegis and stability should be more widely spread throughout the professions.

Vayne.8563:

Aeonblade.8709:

So why does no other game have the same redonky town cap on their dots. And if they do have a cap it’s much higher. You can’t tell me after 3mil box sales and destroying peoples credit with the RNG boxes that you don’t have money to upgrade the servers to handle more than 25 dots ticking at once?? REALLY?!?!

Very few games have dozens of people in the open world all fighting the same thing. Remember in most games, when you tag a mob, only the guy who tagged it gets credit. So you don’t have this open world issue.

In raids you have 20 people stacking conditions in most games.

In Guild Wars 2, meta events can scale up to 100 people. It’s not quite the same, is it?

This isn’t really much of an argument, and here’s why: the games that do feature huge amounts of open world content, like Rift, handle this sort of thing far better than Guild Wars 2 does. Even though there can be dozens of players dropping dots on something in Rift, only rarely to different abilities from different players interfere with one another— and it’s usually the debuffs/buffs, and it’s usually handled with overwriting and prioritization.

You bring up 20 man raids, as if this helps your argument, but frankly this only underscores the seriousness of the issue. As it stands, GW2 could not possibly handle 20 man content, simply because 20 separate players would more than likely hit the cap limit several times over.

The problem with the condition stack would be far less if conditions were relatively hard to apply to something, or relatively unique from profession to profession. For example, it’s rare, in my experience, to see a stack of 25 confusion on a mob, because confusion is almost completely unique to mesmers. A quick look at the wiki, however, lists 27 separate weapon skills (and weapon skills only) that apply bleeding, over seven out of eight professions. So, yeah. That’s probably part of the problem.

I’m not sure if anyone else has brought it up, and I realize this thread is probably more focused on the PVP side of things, rather than the PVE, but Marks don’t trigger against things like dragons or other world bosses.

To be honest, I’m not a big fan of Marks at all, they don’t really seem to have that much utility compared to other aoe attacks, and 90% of the time I’m using them like ground targeted AoE in PVE anyway.

HotHit.6783:

A thing I’ve seen in this thread is that people are scared to implement these tools out of fear that they will be misused. Well, I’m sorry to say, but there are plenty of tools in the game that can be used to grief other players.

Chat, gear, professions, fractal level and even titles. That’s just a handful. If a person is creative enough, they can turn even the most benevolent thing into an instrument of torture. But also, humans have a very big history of taking any kind of research and using it to kill each other. Nuclear weapons being one of the most obvious.

As a nuclear physics student, I’ve had people ask me this kind of dilemma before. My response is always the same. Nightmare isn’t created by tools, it’s created by the ones that use those tools, removing the tools doesn’t remove the nightmare, it merely forces it to find other tools.

What exactly is the purpose of a DPS meter or other sort of meter, though? I simply do not see the purpose of such a ‘tool’, despite the insistence of many players that they should be in game or available.

About about a condition that, if the target is killed while active, causes a minion to spawn from their body? The minion could last as long as you have Life force, or until it’s dismissed (probably f2 or something)

I assume they’re going to be shipping Rox and Rytlock.

Two years from now one of our missions will involve kitten-sitting their cub.

ReginaBuenaobra.6953:

Hi, everyone. The team has been following the spirited discussion about Rox (and Braham). I just wanted to pop in with a note from our Lead Character Artist so he can provide some background information and clarity about the art direction for Rox.

Aaron Coberly, Lead Character Artist

Hey everyone, this is Aaron Coberly, the Lead Character Artist here on Guild Wars 2. I can see that there are a lot of strong feelings about the design decisions for Rox so I wanted to come on and set the record straight. The goal with Rox was to expand the charr’s visual options. She is a young charr so we thought it would be a good opportunity to introduce the cute kitty cat end of the spectrum. This isn’t a change of direction but an expansion of the race. Our goal is to add more variety to all of the races over time and we saw this as a good opportunity to do this with the female charr. The charr are a feline race, which gives us a lot of options—from the grizzled matronly lioness to the strong puma and even the cute house cat. We don’t want to limit our options to just one section of the feline genus. Our designs are inspired by all the feline variety that exists in nature.

Further on down the road, it does mean that if we introduce new faces into character creation, they will include a broader range. Does that mean that this particular face will be in there? No, because she is a main character, but there could be a cute kitty cat style face.

Hope that information helps you all understand the thinking behind Rox’s appearance.

I don’t think anyone isn’t necessarily disputing that idea of cute kitty faces for charr, so to speak, as they are disputing the idea that Rox is cute.

She’s really quite terrifying.

THOSE EYES, OH GOD WHY.

I doubt it. I’m not even convinced Jagged Horrors do anything at all.

The problem is, it appears to be balanced around the assumption that anyone using Staves is going to be going full into Death Magic— having 100+ toughness from PotH from five Jagged Horrors might be a problem, for example, or either of the GM traits from that line.

But people don’t, which makes jagged horrors utterly useless.

I have mixed feelings about this; it’s not that it’s bad that they’re making this change, but at the same time it’s rather frustrating that after months of pointing out the loot problems, and months of being told there wasn’t any problem, that surprise surprise there actually is a problem with the system and it’s getting fixed.

As someone said earlier, however, blue drops are essentially vendor trash in this game— as are, often, so-called master work items. The biggest problem is that 90% of drops aren’t an improvement in terms of stats, and more importantly they’re not an improvement in terms of looks, either.

With weapons especially, the number of models is incredibly limited and one note. Probably 90% of Staves, for example, are tree branches with sticks of butter stuck on one end. What’s worse is that 95% of Scepters are essentially the same model as the same named stave, but cut in half. And so on.

It’s really truly awful; and the only place we might get different looking weapons is from the mystic forge— not from doing dungeons or killing champions as every other mmo does. ArenaNet really needs to increase the number of interesting weapon models out there, as well as make them available in game, not via some obscure recipe at the RNG toilet.

IMO, the only blue or green items that should drop from champions is fine crafting materials, and several of every stack. At 80, this should mean killing a champion and winning blue loot would net you five or so t5 crafting mats. If you’re lucky enough to win green, you should get t6 crafting mats.

Nay of the Ether.8913:

Glad you fixed that, there’s lots of teenage charr lol

Is there? I’ve never seen them.

I’m going to echo that it’s not obtainable in game, or else it’s obtainable but only in an obscure fashion.

In SWTOR, for example, Magneta crystals involved a convoluted series of quests/required items involving multiple planets and things. It’s possible that obtaining the Final Rest involves something similar, like (for example) defeating all the temples in Orr in a particular order, or obtaining a rare item in one zone and interacting with a series of obscure things in another bunch of zones.

Or another possibility is that it’s an event that only spawns based on obscure requirements, like only spawning during a new or full moon.

As I said, though, I’m leaning more towards it simply not existing in game. Being in the DB isn’t the same as being properly hooked up to anything in game, and video games have all kinds of beta content that sits in their databases and never sees the light of day.

I think from what I’ve read, "war"band is something of a misleading name since all; charr consider themselves part of the war effort even if they’re not running around with guns.

In my head canon, Fahrar training is broken into two sections; the first half is typically what we think of as being a fahrar— ie young cubs. Here the cub learns the basics of almost every skill he or she might ever need, like reading, writing, sharpshooting, gun maintenance, math and so on. At this point the primus is observing the cubs and, at some point (probably when the cubs are old enough to be worth the effort to put them in a ‘war’ situation) the cubs are divided according to talents and interests into a warband, but they don’t actually spend much time together at first. Rather, the individual cubs are off being mentoring by older warbands and individuals to teach them the individual skills he or she will need to handle their chosen profession.

I’m not sure the education can be handled any other way. Teaching someone to swing a sword around (like a warrior) isn’t no where as complex as teaching someone the basics of engineering or magic. Engineering in particular, Charr’s specialty, probably takes years and years to learn even if we assume the profession we play in game is more of a combat engineer who doesn’t actually know how to build their own gear. And that’s not supported in game.

Plus, as others have noted, there’s the problem of farmers and merchants warbands.

and it’d explain why there’s no teenaged charr at all in the game

I’d like to see necros get Shields and/or pistols or rifles. I’d be nice if we had a long direct damage weapon, and rifles and pistols (imo) fit more with the more ‘modern’ setting of GW2.

I mean, if wizards were “for real” why wouldn’t they use an Kindle rather than lugging around 10 thousand books, for example? There’s no reason why these professions shouldn’t modernize themselves with the times.

Why shields? Because they’re under used! That’s why. Maybe make it a main-hand condition weapon :P

They’re…. still in the game?

When they trigger depends on the profession, and some have higher and better chances of saying something over all. I know my necromancer almost always says something when a summoned minion dies or gets summoned, and elementalists always say something when shifting attunements.

The only profession I’ve played that doesn’t say anything unique is mesmer, and I suspect that’s a bug.

I like Necromancers, but compared to other professions necromancers feel like they’re missing something or weren’t designed in the same coherent fashion as most of the other professions.

This isn’t to say that necromancers are bad so much as it is to say many of the other professions feel much more polished, especially in regards to their profession mechanics.

The first time I rolled a necromancer, I never really felt compelled to use Death Shroud, where as with mesmer I’m always shattering, or an elementalist I’m always switching attunements, or with a engineer I’m always whipping out my tool belt.

This is my second time playing necromancer, but despite specing fully into DS and trying to built my character around it, a lot of them it’s just easier and more effective to just stay out of DS and hit things with my daggers.

The long and short of it is; Necromancer is good, it’s fun, but I don’t think it’s necessarily Guild Wars 2 good or as fun as it could be, and it’s frustrating that the game has been out some five months now and Anet hasn’t displayed much movement in the direction of changing it.

Necromancy 4 undeath yo!

I like it for the random set of requirements, but I feel like things like veteran slayer or events need to include things like champions or higher and dungeons.

Often I don’t always have a lot of free time, and I find myself forgoing things I’d really enjoy, like dungeons, or doing champion level events, because I know they won’t count towards the daily.

Given that the game expresses the requirements in a percent for the daily, why not just provide multiple ways of filling up any given requirement? For example, for killing veterans, each counts as 20% of the bar, but maybe the silver ringed dungeon npcs count for 15% and champions count for 40%.

Inspecting for Stats bores me.

Inspecting for Skins, on the other hand, intrigues me.

All the more reason armor should be unhooked from profession!

If I want to me a Charr Engineer in a breast plate with a cowboy hat, by George it should be allowed!!

Also:
[Quote]The nice thing about going with a “canon uniform” is it accounts for tail clipping. The worst culprit is our medium armor, but it is hidden under a secondary flap so it isn’t horribly blatant.[/quote]

Nosir, I’m pretty sure the worst culprit is the t3 light cultural armor.

You know, the one that has a solid skirt on it?

Komolov.5903:

I guessed you like me expected them to release the new content in one big sitting, but unlike you , i dont bemoan when they decide to wisely release their new content in the span of a few months.

It’s one thing to release content in smaller than normal chunks, it’s quite another to do what Anet has done so far.

I love stories, half the time I play video games for the stories and/or background, and I’ve been very disappointed with this prelude. It’d be different if the content was being released on a semi-daily basis or what not, or if the longer wait produced more content, but so far we’ve not seen that.

According to Dulfy, for example, the refugee camps in HB and BC have expanded since F&F first dropped, but the amount of content is essentially nothing. Half the npcs don’t even greet you, and the one npc you can have a relatively meaningful conversation with has about 3 lines of dialogue spread over two pages (or something like.) I didn’t even bother to check on the situation in HB.

I’m very worried that this living story is going to develop a serious case of arc fatigue before the arc even begins. It’s like we’re reading a book, but the authors are only releasing one or two sentences of the prologue every couple of weeks. A couple of sentences isn’t enough to hold anyone’s attention for long.

Edit: I want to say I’m not judging it yet, I’m just a bit worried.

As a rule, I kind of feel like the focii aren’t the best done example of that item of weapon I’ve ever seen in an mmo.

It probably is the same helm. You can’t expect in-game models to look exactly like the concept art.

Josh Foreman.8250:

Yeah, I feel bad about the camera issues. The camera was changed just before we launched in order to accommodate a couple of systems, and as a result the way a lot of our JPs feel changed as well. When I was building Troll’s End I always tested it as a max-sized Male Norn, and it was ok. A bit claustrophobic, which was the intent, but not infuriating like it is now. Sadly there’s no good way for me to go in and make that area bigger without a HUGE rework of the area. What I can promise is that moving forward, as I make new JPs I’m keeping the new camera in mind all the time. I still can’t make it as smooth and wonderful as a dedicated platform game camera, but just try to minimize the frustrating bits.

Is there anyway to include the old camera system and just switch over to it within a certain range of a jumping puzzle? I’m not sure how deep in the game “cameras” tend to be.

I think what bothers me the most about a lot of the armors in game is that most of them were obviously never designed with the charr in mind.

I can understand clipping around, say, the horns or whatever, because we can pick and choose which horns to use and there’s a chance that the compatibility might slip through the cracks, but not the kitten tails. Consider for a moment that even one of the cultural armors— the t3 light, has this problem.

It’s really frustrating when most of the civilian/solider npcs have better looking armor than you do. ie http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/File:CulturePaletteCharrNPCs_-_Render.jpg

Tokens are currency and should be treated as such.

Unless Anet has plans to add recipes involving them to the mystic forge or something.

I think we’re most likely to see a new race, not a profession, but I could be wrong. Ultimately it depends on whether or not anet feels they can deliver unique game play mechanics for a new profession— keeping in mind that many of the professions we have today are some what mash-ups of the original professions from GW1. I’d really rather see them work on adding new weapons (in general) and giving existing professions access to weapons they don’t currently have access to now.

Florgknight.1589:

What happens when you have a profanity filter that can’t be turned off? People find loopholes so they can have what they say seen. If you block every curse word but someone wants to use one, they’ll just replace a few letters, add a space or odd letter inbetween. When you have that then people are still cursing only in this case you can’t block it because the filters aren’t able to be programmed to censor every single variance of certain words while remaining in reasonable bounds. Yes, there are people who go out of their way to bypass these filters, and by giving people the option to turn them on or off, you make it so that the ones uttering profanities do not use variances of them in a way that bypasses another person’s filter.

Which would be an obvious attempt to circumvent the game rules and mechanics, in this case the profanity filter.

I don’t think banning or suspending people on the basis of that is a particularly problematic thing. People who write kitten as K_i_t_t_i_n are obviously attempting to get around the filter and (likely) harass people, of which there should be no tolerance. But harassment or circumventing game mechanics are different kettles of fish from profanity in and of itself.

Villious.8530:

I guess the bottom line here is, it’s Anets world and Anets laws. You break them, you pay the price…..even if it should be a no-brainer manners thing. Sorry, but I’m glad you got suspended.

No one is suggesting that individuals to violate the EULA or rules of conduct shouldn’t pay the price, what people are suggesting is that it’s logically inconsistent to ban swear words at the same time allow the filter in game to be disabled.

If anything, we’re asking for the filter disabler to be disabled to prevent people from violating ToC or EULA.

The difficulty level of the dungeons isn’t really the problem here, the problem is that the game’s resurrection system is badly designed.

On paper, the idea of the downed/defeated divide when it comes to player death sounds good, but I’ve found in practice it’s really quite bad. The first problem is that for the most part it’s too difficult to revive a defeated person while in combat. I’d estimate it takes at least twice as long to revive a defeated person than it does a downed person.

So ideally, you should try to revive them while they’re still downed. But as I’m sure many of the people here are aware, it’s fairly easy for a downed character to be completely wiped out from AoE or other such things before anyone has a chance to get them back on their feet. And even more problematic, even if you get them on their feet they’re only at 25% health in a game where attacks are often significant percentages of a character’s health.

God help you if you get downed multiple times in a row— the death penalty will kill you before long!

Which makes the fact that revival powers only effects downed players and not defeated players, despite the fact that we need a means of quickly getting defeated players back up all the more confusing and stupid.

I don’t mind that they’ve removed rez rushing, but I think the way the game handles death needs to be addressed soonish.