Guild Wars 2

I guess they’re focusing on pve because WvW is inherently about imbalance. Bigger, more coordinated groups trump small and/or uncoordinated larger groups. That one group has 10 guardians and the other has 9 and a necro doesn’t really matter when we’re talking about 50+ zergs.

That said, they do need to make sure that every class has a role to play in zerg gameplay. There is a distinct preference for warrior/guardian/elementalist/veilbot and the others aren’t turned away, but they’re substantially less effective in zerg battles.

maddoctor.2738:

Xzygy.1452:

Each of these would be quite easy to fix, but for reasons unknown, you allow players to continue to break the game.

I think that they haven’t fixed them yet because it’s not as easy as it might look like. But more importantly they don’t want to allocate resources in fixing their broken dungeons. If they cared about their dungeons at all they would’ve fixed them already.

I hope they put more effort in their raids

Some solutions would be easy to execute without too many development cycles. For example:

• In Molten Furnace, move the fence in just a little bit to eliminate the corner. Increase the smasher’s aoe to prevent players from standing under it.
• In thaumanova and swamp, close the door and lock the players in.
• In aetherblade, remove the terrain players wedge themselves into.
• In Mai Trin, remove Ellen’s ability to revive.
• For linecasting, change it from missiles to a pulsing aoe to accomplish the desired amount of damage in the aoe per target This would also fix similar exploits using missile based aoe against walls.

Generally, have a minimum time in mind that the boss is supposed to be alive. When the boss dies before that minimum, dump that session’s data so that a developer can replay it. We’ve been told that GW2 has one of the best metrics subsystems in the industry, I’d like to see them use it.

I don’t think these suggestions would take much time to implement, and I’m not suggesting that they should focus on this, but it speaks to the history of allowing exploitation, which needs to change, otherwise raids will just be bigger dungeons where we all stand in the corner mashing stability and cleaving blindly until the boss dies.

With the announcement of raiding in Guild Wars 2, I wanted to take a few moments to write about some of the concerns I have based on specific examples from both pugging and organized PVE in this game, as well as the perspective of a former top 50 US raider in World of Warcraft.

The first area that I’m concerned with is exploitation or creatively using the game environment or abilities such that allows the players to circumvent the content. What worries me here is that you make no effort to stop this behavior, and because this is something that you have a history of not doing, I can’t expect you to start doing it simply because we’ll have more people in the group. Examples of what I mean:

• The Molten Furnace fractal, where you have an exceptionally well designed encounter with multiple mechanics that players are supposed to play through. What actually happens, though is that players just stand in a corner and completely negate the vast majority of the damage simply by standing in one spot.
• The Mossman encounter, where dragging him into the water breaks all of his mechanics and lets players just burn him down
• Mai Trin, where players can intentionally bug Ellen Kiel such that she will resurrect players if she dies during the initial trash and is revived, at which point she’ll rez anyone coming into the instance, allowing players to continue running back in during the encounter.

Each of these would be quite easy to fix, but for reasons unknown, you allow players to continue to break the game. In examples like the Aetherblade Fractal, the glitching has been around so long that nobody knows how to do it “legit” anymore. This is an area that you absolutely must address if you’re going to be serious about adding raid content to your game.

The next area that I’d like to talk about is the Meta. The term “Meta” is a greek prefix meaning “beyond,” and is used to describe not simply beating content, but finding the most efficient way of completing it. In most cases this means to find examples as I listed above and exploiting them to get the content down more quickly. I believe that in a few ways, this is hurting the pve endgame in Guild Wars 2:

• Firstly, the current meta is built around supporting a broken mechanic which you have made no effort to fix: Linecasting. This is done to force all missiles in Frost Bow’s 4th ability to land in a very small area. This artificially inflates the damage that an Elementalist brings to the table and devalues the damage other classes bring. Frost Bow 4, and all abilities like it were never meant to spike damage on a single target, they were meant to spread their damage over an area. The way it works is being exploited in order to kill bosses and trash faster than ever expected.
• As a result of killing bosses faster than anticipated by the content developers, the mechanics you build into the fight are often circumvented, such as with the slime in the Thaumanova Reactor Fractal, which can be kited to the hallway and burned down before its blocking phase and before any of the small slimes can get to it to heal it. This is clearly not what you intended the encounter to be, but this is the way that many players do it.

These examples are breaking your game. Most of the time, they’re not more fun to do than the original encounter, but players do them because they’re faster or more consistently effective than playing through the actual mechanics. These are loopholes that must be closed if raiding is going to be a serious thing and is going to be challenging.

Part of the Meta is group composition, armor choices, and rune/sigil choices. There is a generally accepted notion that Berserker’s stats and either strength runes or scholar’s runes are hands down the best. Power builds beat out condition builds, and there is often no reason to bring certain classes to a dungeon. I’ve been in groups where a necromancer joins and immediately there is a vote to kick. Or I’ve seen a warrior camping longbow auto-attacking and berating an elementalist for using dagger/focus when staff is just better.

Most of these conclusions are done with very crude napkin math and without the ability to collect empirical evidence to support one build or stat or rune over another simply because this data is so time consuming to collect. The only way to do this currently is to record the fight, and record the numbers as they scroll in the combat log. As a result, nobody really does it, and if they do it, they’re trying to prove something. When they see it, they’re done. This is confirmation bias.

As a result, damage is modeled mostly using exclusively +power or more recently either power or condition damage, but the math gets much harder when trying to take both into account. As players do both forms of damage, stat combinations like sinister and celestial become very difficult to properly model, so the facts are glossed over and build x is simply the one promoted. Please just dump the combat log to a text file so that we can parse it and make our own decisions. I’m not asking for a damage meter, only a personal log of my actions so that when a player makes a claim, they can back it up with actual data. Let the players help the developers identify problems or areas that can be improved.

Finally, I’d like to briefly discuss overlapping mechanics. Stuns/roots are an interesting mechanic. AoE fields that can kill in 2 seconds are an interesting mechanic. Rooting a player in a field that will kill them in 2 seconds, however is not an interesting mechanic. Feel what you like about World of Warcraft, this is an element that they’ve improved dramatically on for the genre, and this is one of the critical areas that they’ve focused on. I’m all for randomness in a fight, but you’ve also got to look at how these different things will interact and make rules to avoid it. Every action a boss takes should have a purpose. If it’s rooting a player, why is it rooting them? Is it about to drop a field on them that needs to be interrupted? In a case like that, it makes sense, but you have to properly telegraph it so that players know they’re supposed to interrupt. It can’t simply be that the boss floating off camera raises his bow a little.

Hopefully something in that mess is useful to you in your development process. I like this game a lot and want it to do well, but I’m pretty worried for raiding, especially with the claims you guys have made when compared to the existing content in the game.

I’d like to see something better done with the shouts, but the reaper form and greatsword is a ton of fun. Played a few builds and just loved all of it.

I’ve spent several hours now with the Daredevil.

General Feel
The Daredevil gives my thief a feeling that I have dodges for days. I can dodge any attack that I can see coming. This is a pretty cool feeling and despite the low HP, I feel much stronger than previously. The abilities are confusing, though. I’m not certain what my place in a group is with these things. Staff doesn’t seem to do anything that can’t be done better by either dagger or sword.

Animations
I’m not sure where you were going here, but they’re lazy, uninspired, and dont even make sense. I’m playing a male asura.
Auto Attack. Staff should be about arcing sweeping motions, spins, and acrobatics. Instead, this is a blunt 90 degree smack followed by a slightly better animated swipe, followed by… a magical spinning staff. The last especially is so lazy it makes me angry. Animating hands was hard, so you avoided the problem by spinning the staff with magic. This is the animator’s equivalent to drawing all of your characters with their hands in their pockets because you cant draw hands.
Staff 2, 3, and 4 don’t look bad, but the animations could be better especially on Asura. To achieve the same reach of a Norn, we’d have to throw our whole body into it like the greatsword abilities.
Staff 5 is what all of these animations should look like. However, you copied the same animation to use on bound.
The dodge replacements. Stop. Being. Lazy. Bound is clearly Staff 5, Impaling Lotus is clearly death blossom, and you didn’t even bother to animate Dash differently than the run. Spend the time. Do it right. Your players are going to be staring at these animations for potentially years. The least you can do is dedicate a few days to giving us slick looking abilities.

The damage seemed alright, but I’m a little concerned from a pvp standpoint that pairing acrobatics and daredevil will give players access to near permanent dodging while still doing some damage. Between staff 3, 3 dodges, and the endurance sigil, you may find that it’s possible to maintain dodges for much longer than you’re intending to.

I had a lot of fun with playing the class, but the animations are a huge letdown. What you need is to look at some reference and to stop being lazy. Darth Maul could lend some inspiration on how to spin a staff, as could the Chinese staff or spear spins. The animations are the thing that is going to be foremost in my thoughts because they’re so bad. Literally, we had better melee staff animations in Dark Ages of Camelot over 10 years ago. If they could figure it out, you can. Don’t let a decade old game show you up.

Hello,

I’d like to know if you guys have any plans to offer a setting greater than “Larger” in the UI options for the expansion. I generally play in 4k and the text and UI size is super, super small.

I don’t think that there are a huge number of people running a setup like this, but I can’t imagine that a UI preset would involve that much development time. It would be a welcome quality of life improvement for those of us that have taken the plunge. Other games seem to either handle it fine, have the ability to modify the UI, or allow 3rd party mods which make it easier.

Especially with a second monitor (at 1080p), Fullscreen mode will lock my mouse on the main screen, while Windowed Fullscreen doesn’t give me the option to specify resolution, so it defaults to the native display.

So I’ve been maining elementalist for the last few months after taking a break, and I like how the class plays currently, especially dagger/x. What I enjoy about the class is jumping rapidly between attunements, creating one of the more interesting/diverse playstyles available in the game currently for me.

I think that where you’ve messed up here is that you’ve confused a storm based character with a sound based character. It just feels muddy and without clear direction. You’re trying to push us to front-line (a place we already are with d/x), give us shouts, and reward us for staying in the elements longer. Please pick one of these things and make that the core of your tempest. Trying to charge simultaneously in several directions does not work.

Classes

Elementalist
The Elementalist is now locked to a single attunement at random.
Fire damage has been buffed by approximately 500%. All fire skills now have no cooldown.
Air attunement has been eliminated
Earth attunement has had incoming gold from drops and vendors reduced to 10% of normal. Additionally, that 10% is now taxed at 50% to support… Things.
Water attunement now has two icons. Members of one group cannot be grouped with or within 500 meters of the other.

One Elementalist retains the ability to change attunements. This Elementalist must do battle against mostly fire Elementalists, but sometimes water and Earth, if they’re being kittens. If they fail, the world will be plunged into 10,000 years of darkness. This Elementalist is also responsible to create a really, really (REALLY) awful youtube video on their adventures and must at all times be accompanied by a complete moron and someone who has no idea what their potential is or how to realize it.

We’ve all lived with 250 stack size for this long and been fine. This isn’t exactly a core game feature, it’s a nice to have like unlimited gathering tools. I have zero issues with them charging for this. Frankly for as much as we get from this game for free, I’m a bit surprised we don’t pay a sub….

It amuses me that people like you will condescend to others when it is impossible to judge true dps fight by fight in this game. Seconds lost to dodging and moving in and out of mêlée stack up quickly. Without a definitive accounting of damage done and the various encounters which will skew the results in favor of one weapon set over another, there is no basis for determining who is right or wrong in this.

Again, not that it matters. All content in this game can be pugged. The difference in what you seem to consider viable or impractical, isn’t being able to down content, it’s being able to down content hypothetically faster without the ability to prove it.

In a group really concerned about damage and speed runs, the group would be better off replacing you with a warrior anyway.

For any and all aoe situations, your best bet is going to be mêlée. This requires coordination because you’re going to be squishy. Thieves running sword/pistol with permablind makes for some nice and easy area damage.

However. For single target, I’ve not been impressed by sword as the main option for damage dealing. The auto attack, while fantastic in aoe doesn’t so vastly outperform greatsword auto attack that it justifies the need to be in mêlée combat.

Running a phantasm/reflect build, most of your damage comes from your summons anyway. Of the phantasms, I’ve found that for most mobile targets, berserker is durable, high damage compared to the other alternatives. I’ve also found GS3 to be invaluable for boon stripping. Every time I clear a protection, that’s a 33% increase in damage for the entire group. I’ve not seen another weapon with this ability not tied to also spawning a clone and thereby destroying a phantasm resulting I lost damage.

While there is something to be said for optimum throughput, there is also something to be said for consistency and safety.

Additionally, none of this actually matters. If you’re playing the mechanics, any old WVW zerg build with PVT gear will down content. Its going to be a bit slower, but you’re still going to down it. Understanding how to maximize your role in the group to make the dungeon smoother is all you need to worry about.

Learn what you can from people who have the experience, but don’t forget to get your own experience too. Short of a damage meter or other real form of evidence, all of this ‘theorycrafting’ is mostly conjecture anyway.

From what I’ve seen of mesmer pve, you’re mostly in sword/x anyway, so I don’t really see having a gs as a liability. Sure there’s better out there, but I havent really seen many use it.

I’m having a few problems here and hopefully someone has some tips and I should mention that I’m pugging 100% at this point. I get the dodge thing on bosses, and for the most part, I do fine there, but on trash, there seems to be so much aoe damage flying around that within 5 seconds of entering melee, I go down faster than Steve Irwin in a tank of stingrays.

Doing Path 3 of AC tonight, the group just stacked up and LoS pulled the spider and did the same later on the lizards. I couldn’t even see what was going on much less dodge anything. Is this just a case where everyone who pugs is in full out tank spec? I mean I never got a chance to do much of anything other than die on these two pulls.

Sadly, the only option I see is to gear and specialize in defense, which seems like a cop-out. But I don’t see anything I could have done there in the chaos and actually survived except to spend like 90% of the time running short bow, which isn’t why I rolled this class. It’s staggering how different the dungeons are from the leveling.

Is this something you guys are running into? I also have problems on small bosses where they’re just buried in particle effects. Is there a way I can limit that?

Some of the responses here are just silly. We have two main schools of thought: The evil “Godskull Exploiters” that control everything to keep the precursors out of reach except for those with huge amounts of money, and another which seems to think that the drop chance for the precursors from the forge and other drop points is so ridiculously low that they’ll never drop.

What most of the “Godskull Exploiter” bunch don’t seem to realize is that if this were the case, if there were only a few people controlling the price, it would be rising independently of the materials to create the precursor, which simply isn’t the case. When I first started throwing obscene amounts of weapons into the forge, precursors were at about 300g. But then again, I could buy the materials for about half of what they cost me today, and now dusk is going for about 600-700.

If I were to put the laptop I’m writing this on up on ebay for 400 bucks, it would sell very quickly. It would also likely be re-sold for 800 the next day. This is because there are people out there willing to pay 800 for it. when you’re working with an economy the scale of guildwars’, this kind of thing happens all the time. When they stop selling, the prices will come down. When the materials to make them go up, the prices will rise as well.

I’d like some concrete information, sure. Drop chances, etc. From my point of view, you have to play to win, and really, once you’re established in exotic gear, there isn’t much to spend money on except legendary weapons. I’m probably about 600 Rare greatswords in at this point and while I’d like the drop, I don’t feel cheated that I haven’t seen it. It’ll make getting it all the better.

The difference between the haves and the have-nots wasn’t ever just magically having the money. Its about understanding the market, focus, and time.

Oozo.7856:

krixis.9538:

every time a thief clicks in GW2 be it pve or pvp. we get nerfed

STOP CLICKING 11!!!!!!

Don’t be so harsh. Every game needs at least one class or build easy enough to play such that even clickers can do well with it.

Get off your soap box. There’s 10 abilities. Clickers can “do well” with anything.

Clicking is always the wrong choice, but lets be real about how low the skill cap for ability use is across the board…

Very interesting video! Can you link your build/gearing?

Ron.4920:

In every video game where invisibility is involved, the invisible player will have an unfair advantage.

Lets just imagine this hypothetical situation. You are pretty low on money at the moment, and you have to gamble to make ends meet. There is a gym right near where you live that has boxing matches on the weekends. There is a guy who sits at a table in the back room, you can place bets with him. You go up to place your very first bet, it is your last few dollars. You know nothing about either fighters at the moment, so you say to the bookie. Can you tell me about the fighters? The bookie says well one of the fighters is invisible. Which do you choose the visible fighter, or the invisible one?

People do not like being jumped by invisible players who are capable of burning down their health bars in less than 5 seconds even with 2k toughness and 20k hp. What is so horrible about those 5 seconds is it is possible to be stun locked the entire time, even with stun break/condition removal utilities. Invisibility has been a broken mechanic ever since some lazy developer said “hey I don’t have to actually make the sprites, I can just say this monster is invisible”.

If your solution to making ends meet is gambling, you need to seek some help with that.

Joking aside, this is a pretty silly argument. The biggest advantage thieves have is those few seconds where someone gets jumped and panics. They don’t use their abilities correctly, and they essentially stun themselves as they do so, then get mad about it. It happens in every game even when the stealthers are in bad shape, some idiot will still get owned, come to the forums and say “rabble rabble stun lock rabble stealth” and that is about as much sense as they make.

The complaints about culling need to be done in a thread about culling, not in a thread whining about stealthers cyber bullies always taking lunch money

Fyrebrand.4859:

Second, if you need a DPS meter to TELL you if a player is skilled or not, you’ve got bigger problems than how much damage you can dish out.

…

You’re right, we should all play this game like we’re in high school.

Your post was too long to reasonably quote the whole thing, but I feel like these two statements summed up your point, and I’m generally confused because you’re saying that data on player performance, i.e. damage output, healing, etc. is meaningless.

Skill is not this magical thing that some players have and others lack, it is experience and knowledge paired, and can be obtained by anyone.

It is very difficult to accumulate knowledge on what works the best for the role we’re going for without math to back it up. Players resort to feelings when empirical data isn’t available, thus we get the backward notion that huge numbers equate to better damage output overall.

We have no basis for comparing builds or evaluating one ability or weapon against another. We have no method for discovering how boons impact our damage or healing output. We have no basis for comparing what we’re doing against that of our peers.

This leads to heated arguments that can have no basis in fact because the facts are obscured from us. People complain that this or that class is overpowered or weak, that one class is mandatory while another is worthless without any real data to back up or inform their opinion.

The same players that would childishly laugh at you and judge you for your “terrible deeps” do so with or without evidence. If a damage meter is meaningless, then don’t download it, don’t turn it on, and you’re left to blissful ignorance just as you are now, and the rest of us can enjoy a little metagaming, self improvement, and strategy.

It never ceases to amaze me how people actually want to remain ignorant to how the game works. Since when is having more information a bad thing?

I’d like to address a few arguments specifically:

“Why should I rez?” Because you’re going to screw up later and your teammate will remember how nice you were in rezzing him and return the favor, thereby increasing your damage.

“Everyone would be pure dps specs!” This game’s punishment of pure dps builds is large enough incentive that most people play hybrid simply to stay alive. I would not be surprised to find that the hybrid builds do more damage in the long run due to more time on target.

At a minimum, I’d like a way to track my individual performance and determine for myself what exactly the word performance means. The inability to min/max my character and learn by the analysis of impirical data is an itch that GW2 simply doesn’t scratch.

There is also a competitive element that this game lacks in pve content. I derive a sense of accomplishment from the knowledge that I’m doing well. I also really enjoy learning how to be a better player.

Lets say I’m a Thief and I’m in a group with another Thief. He blows me out of the water on damage. I could A) feel ashamed and hope that he isn’t running one of those evil meters he can use to call me out, or I can have a potentially fruitful conversation with him about what he’s doing to achieve those numbers.

My question to the nay-sayers, is this:

Are jerks really any less of a jerk because they can’t see your damage? Or do they simply find other ways of being childish?