Guild Wars 2

Same bugs as others:

• a lot of achievements appear reset/locked, though the AP are still there
• daily achievements are not registred as completed in the UI, but can stil be earned
• skills/traits appear locked in hero panel but can be used

Edit: HoM stuff resolved

First phase of Claw of Jormage, the “Mist Wave” attack (he slams the ground with his left hand, and multiple ice shards appear from the ground, going downhill and knocking back the players) is bugged: the ice shards appears pointing uphill when they use to point downhill (which makes much more sense)

Xdmatt.3958:

PvE is broken. Horribly, utterly broken. It has been broken on the day of release and it will always be broken.

It is broken in GW2, it is broken in WoW, it is broken in RIFT and it is broken in every MMO that has been made and will ever be made.

This sentiment is expressed by the “top 0.01%”, “creme de la creme de la creme”, “elitist jerks” or whatever you want to call the segment of the players that have mastered the game’s most efficient strategies and tactics, have conquered every challenge and are now bored and bitter. These same players take to the forums to grouse and nerf-herd endlessly, whether it be about the lack of challenge or about the fact that “noobz w/no skillz” can clear the same content as the elites, albeit with more effort. They demand fundamental alteration to the game’s mechanics, they constantly bag on the game’s meta because the meta is inadequate or downright awful and encourages “bad players”. They post lengthy and detailed explanations as to why the game’s dev team would be served better to abandon their vision and bow to the collective wisdom of those blessed with the top DPS.

On such occasions when nerfs happen (and they may or may not be related to the demands of the elites), they are immediately met with a storm of cheers, followed inevitably by a second storm of compassionate “lol git gud cashul” advice to the remaining 99.99% of the player base whose experience just got turned on its head.

Time marches on though, and at about three months mark bitterness and boredom begin to stir once again, and the cycle begins anew.

Because PvE is broken. Horribly, utterly broken. It has been broken on the day of release and it will always be broken.

There’s so many things wrong with this post that I have yet to find anything that is even remotely accurate…

Since you want GWAMM, the better move is to go directly for it as you’ll get most of the monument you need in the process. The best way to get GWAMM is to get the following titles:

• Legendary Guardian (which includes Protector of Tyria, Protector of Cantha, Protector of Elona, Guardian of Tyria, Guardian of Cantha and Guardian of Elona, for a total of 7 titles)
• Legendary Vanquisher (which includes the Vanquisher title of each continent, 4 titles total)
• Lengendary Cartographer (same, 4 total titles), use texmod to make it easy
• Legendary Skill Hunter (same, 4 total titles)
• Master of the north
• GW:EN reputation titles (Not Too Shabby, Legendary Delver, Secret Agent and Slayer of All)
• Nightfall reputation titles (Holy Lightbringer and Legendary Spearmarshal)
• Survivor

this is a total of 27 titles. You’ll then have to pick 3 from

• Kurzick
• Luxon
• Drunkard
• Party Animal
• Sweet Tooth

Unless the economy really went nuts, I’d go for the 3 consumable ones, since maxing Kurzick/Luxon is rather time-consuming. I wouldn’t consider going for Lucky, Treasure Hunter, Unlucky or Wisdom as they require a huge investment to be completed, and it seems your current progress towards those is rather small.

Now for the process itself:

• Start with normal mode EotN, without forgeting your storybooks. Remember that the NPCs will not accept these books if you’re above rank 8 in the respective title track (asura, norn, etc..). I’d advice you to have a look at the 4 repuation titles beforehand to decide to which faction you should give the books, without forgetting that you’ll also have the hard mode versions and vanquishing to do. Ebon vanguard and, to a lesser extend, Asura, are harder to farm so I’d go for those.
• Continue with the 3 regular campaigns, doing missions, elite skill hunting and vanquishing/maping (both at the same time). Again, don’t forget your storybooks but do not turn them in yet. Also, when vanquishing in Elona, don’t forget to take the bouties at the res shrines: if you do it right you should complete both lightbringer and sunspear titles before you’re done vanquishing.
• Ultimately, go for hard mode EotN. Dungeons should be enough to max out the Deldrimor title (don’t forget your book!), both norn and asura being also close to max after having vanquished the whole map and finished all the missions. Keep an eye on the Zaishen quests to get additional rewards, especially reputation points. Again, don’t forget to bring your storybooks but do not turn them in. Also remember that you can skip one hard mode dungeon (I’m looking at you Duncan) and still get Master of the North (source)
• At this point, start farming for your survivor. There’s various methods to do so, as explained here, my personnal choice being Kilroy Stonekin’s Punch-Out Extravaganza!! . This is where you’ll want to use your carefully saved storybooks: once you have farmed enough xp, turn in all your books at once to receive a huge chunk of xp completely risk-free. Same goes for the various quests you may have done while playing

Now that you’ve got GWAMM, your HoM should be at 49/50, with monument of honor being at 39/40 (I’d send you a simulation but it seems I can’t save it…). For that last monument you have 2 options:

• Reach 100,000 points towards the Lucky title
• Reach 550,000 points towards either kurzick or luxon title

Both should be really easy. Given you already have the Misfortune monument, you should be close to the Fortune one (for what I know about those titles you could even have it already but forgot to display it…). Use lockpicks or farm 9 rings to get the luck you need. Kurzick/luxon shouldn’t be much more difficult since you’re gonna farm a lot of points while vanquishing,doing the HM missions, and turning back the Factions sorybook (maxed HM version gives 120k alone…)

TL,DR: condensed version on the wiki

The problem is the UI to interact with the downed (be it a stomp or a res) will appear only if you are close to their apparent position, but will trigger only if your are close to ther real position.
When interacting, your character will automatically turn towards the real body. What I usually do is moving in that direction a bit while spamming the interaction button: most of the times, the apparent and real positions are close enough that I’ll find a point where my stomp/res will trigger

I want the troll balance update notes back x)

Did you reach the 10k daily cap before the update?
I am experiencing the same problem (no AP from wintersday dailies / regular daily system), and I think it is linked to the monthly being still active.
My guess is, since players are still able to earn AP from december monthly, Anet haven’t merged the daily and monthly cap yet, leading to your (or at least my) current dailies to be discarded since I’ve reached the 10k cap. The fact the permanent/daily/monthly breakdown is still apparent strengthens this hypothesis.

People are now complaining about too much loot?
… ok

Bubi.7942:

Vikkela.7261:

Fine, here you go, it’s actually pretty easy when you know what to do

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOLzRkittenBio

It seems like this guy in his video somehow manages to keep his clones and phantasms alive for 3-4 attacks. From the kill time I’m guessing he’s on zerkerish build.

So what was the problem again OP?

You do realize the video has been recorded by OP, right?

fictitiousacct.1782:

Currently the highest AP anyone has right now is 25,457 and I’m sure they capped the AP for both monthlies and dailies. I don’t know how many achievements are left after that, but it’d pretty much be WvW, PvP and LS achieves.

Capped for dailies, yes, but for monthlies not even close (more like 2k5/5k).

Assuming they follow the current pattern for AP rewards, the first pinnacle skin is to be awarded at 29k AP. (pattern being: you get a weapon skin in every 1k chest, except for the 3k chests where you get an armor skin instead)

I can also confirm the first 2 tiers of grawl, hyler, krait and ogre collections awards 0 AP. 3rd tier awards 1 AP.

draconx.3102:

Yamiga.7863:

Correct me if I’m wrong, but wouldn’t it possible to simply change the balance between his skills damage and stats?
As far as I know, reflect damage is calculated with the skill’s base damage and the power/prec/ferocity (amen) of the player reflecting. If Anet brings down the base damage on all of Lupi’s skills and gives him more power (the stat) to compensate, it would only reduce the damage from reflects?

Reflecting an enemy projectile uses that enemy’s power stat for damage calculation.

My bad then :/
But it uses the player’s precision/ferocity, right? I’m sure I’ve read that somewhere…

Correct me if I’m wrong, but wouldn’t it possible to simply change the balance between his skills damage and stats?
As far as I know, reflect damage is calculated with the skill’s base damage and the power/prec/ferocity (amen) of the player reflecting. If Anet brings down the base damage on all of Lupi’s skills and gives him more power (the stat) to compensate, it would only reduce the damage from reflects?

PookieDaWombat.6209:

The fact that if you have the achievement already unlocked for say owning cultural armor pieces. i know a few people that bought and owned all of the tiers of human cultural armor, but don’t have it anymore, and when the wardrobe came out they weren’t given the skins for it even though their account clearly shows they bought and wore all three sets. That’s a lot of gold for Anet to ignore.

That’s because the cultural armor achievement does not track which skin was bought: it does not differenciate between light,medium and heavy. Which means that when the wardrobe came out the software had no way to know which skin should be unlocked, thus unlocking none.

Bloomhunger’s spirits in swamp fractal also count towards plant slayer. Giant slayer is indeed very long considering the only reliable way to get it is to farm a single group in a single event (broken golem in Brisbane)… but if you think its stupid I suggest you to have a look at the WvW achievement tab
And btw the next LS seems to have giants in it, which could make giant slayer easier

Hydroclasm.8572:

- I think that Liadri gets a single stack of vulnerability when you throw an orb at her in phase 2. This may help if you’re not sure you hit her.

She does but the stacks only last for 1 minute, which means the first will more likely have vanished when you throw the 8th orb (unless you’re able to throw 5 orbs in less than a minute, in which case I don’t think any tips are needed )

I used 2(III)/4(II/IV)/0/5(IV/VIII)/3(III). GS/Sw+F, mirror, mantra of recovery, blink and signet of inspiration (didn’t find anything really worthwhile…)

Traited focus pretty much trivialize the first phase and allows you not to take feedback. Mantra of recovery and Mender’s recovery combined with Mirror gives you enough cleanse to survive in phase 2 where mesmer’s lack of swiftness caused me a lot of trouble, especially since you’ll want to save your temporal curtain to pull the shadows into the vortexes that appear near the edge of the arena.

I really think the lack of swiftness is the hardest part for mesmers because it forces us to waste dodges wen we could just run out of the shadowfalls, which is why I used a BLTC speed booster I had in my bank.
If I was to try it again I’ll probably drop the points in Illusions to get 6 in Inspiration and Compounding Celerity which would give me that missing movement speed. The 2 remaining points I’ll put either in Domination for traited GS (which is, for this setup, flat out better than the illusions 3 minor trait anyways) or in Duelling to get Deceptive Illusions to feed Compounding Celerity.

Another solution could be to use runes of the traveler so the movement speed is no longer a problem…

Here’s the build i used to kill her on my mesmer (and get the 8 orbs achievement):

Stick with sword+focus (both traited) for phase 1. Use your focus skills to reflect her attacks when you can’t strife them. You can also use sword #2 to dodge the shadowfalls without having to move/waste a dodge. Learning the different patterns (clones spawning, “light pits”, aoes) is a must.

When entering phase 2 switch to GS. Dodge when she jumps towards you to avoid the cripple/weakness then run in (relatively) small circles so you don’t have to dodge the shadowfalls and spam GS #1 #2 and #4. Cripple from the izerker + GS#5 + Blink should be enough to kite her until she dies. If she manages to cripple/weakness you, use the mantra or heal to cleanse it asap. I’d also recommend to save your blink for when you really need it (usually to escape the aoes when she managed to cripple you and you have no dodge left)

Jorvych.3064:

I can’t seem to get past phase 1 on my mesmer. I’ve tried a zerker build, a PU build, and some build this person told me their used.
It’s really bumming me out. It seems like I’m waaaay too squishy to survive all of the stuff she throws at me. I’ve never fought her or anything, but I’ve read guides and seen videos and it just doesn’t add up for me.

zerk mesmer (phantasms oriented) worked really fine for me, did the 8 orbs achiev too
sword+focus (both traited) works wonder for 1st phase: use the focus to reflect her attacks and sword #2 to dodge the aoes. Once you get used to the patterns of the aoes, white pits and illusions spawning it gets quite easy. After that switch to GS and kite her to death. I strongly suggest bringing Mantra of Recovery to get rid of the cripple (i also used the Mender’s Purity trait with Mirror for heal), and Blink in case of emergency

Donari.5237:

It was supposed to reset. They announced that they’d be resetting with the patch, and then it was only 2 achieves needed to complete it. I believe the bug is with those who did 2/2 and don’t now have the option to do 4/4 in the remainder of the month.

Its not, I did the whole monthly before (all categories at 100%, both PvE and PvP) and it did not reset.

Same here monthly was finished but didn’t reset. I asked people in my guild that also had the whole monthly finished (every category) and theirs was reset, so I guess its a bug?
I really want to be able to earn the rewards/AP once again :/

Nike.2631:

I actually got the impression that the energy release was not part of the plan. I think she meant to capture it for herself, but being dead and all, she couldn’t make the fine adjustments required.

When interacting with the control panels after defeating scarlet, you can read (iirc) that the drill wasn’t designed to store/channel the energy from the ley lines and is unable to do so.

Wanze.8410:

Promoting Bronze Ingots to Iron has always been profitable butthis night i got an average of 30g profit per skillpoint spent, which is redicilous.

How many iron ingots does this reciepe creates per try? According to the wiki its 250 bronze + 5 dust + 1 iron + 2 philo => 40 iron (average) which is not profitable at all.

I think they will become salvageable when lvl 500 jeweler is introduced (maybe in march?), so that people can craft the various stats combinations. I assume crafting ascended rings/trinkets will follow the pattern for weapons and armor: 2 “core” components (setting + band/hook/chain) requiring electrum, a (lesser?) vision crystal and an ascended jewel. Those jewels would be craftable for the classic stats combinations and obtained through salvaging for other stats.

Zaxares.5419:

Maybe. I can see where you’re coming from, but I’m always reminded of this one time where we had one skilled player who planted himself near the enemy goalkeeper, was stealing kegs from the enemy and then immediately throwing them out of the Arena. Considering we were already winning at the time, it seemed less like a valid defensive tactic and more like somebody just rubbing it in by refusing to let the enemy team score at all.

I’ve only ever seen the number of kegs on the field go up to 5 before, and that was when the game bugged and the match kept on going even after the timer expired. New kegs are not added to the field unless an existing keg is turned in or thrown out of the field.

Denying kegs is a really lame trick which is imho only a side-effect of a mechanism designed to get rid of unreachable kegs. I’d love to get rid of it but it’s probably not possible
Kegs are not limited on the field, I’ve already seen 4 kegs being added at the same time. However, kegs 2 and 3 will not appear before a very long time unless the previous are either scored or destroyed.

Rick.5781:

2. I hate to say it, but the fact that you feel the need to complete all the dailys just to stay atop a leaderboard in a video game that has no impact on your quality of life, and do it even though you don’t consider it a fun use of your time, is a symptom of the obsessive compulsive spectrum of mental disorders.

I don’t care about the leaderboard, and I’ve said it at least 3-4 times in this thread alone. Had you read the thread you’d know it. I farm APs because I have fun doing it, what I don’t like is how dailies have grown to be the main AP source and how doing them all now takes 5-6 hours when it used to be 1-2h

Nike.2631:

The simpler solution in terms of structure is to have they dailies give 0 achievement points individually and each day has a 5 point meta-achievement for doing any 5 of the list. Then you can still see all 11ish of them, and you can even still do them if you must, but the AP incentive stops at 5.

I’m coming up on 10k (about 40 to go) and while I’ve managed to dial back to doing them faithfully rather than compulsively, I am looking forward to hitting that milestone and largely ignoring AP from that point on.

The problem with this system is it prevents any player to get more AP from dailies if he’s willing to. I personally wouldn’t mind but I understand how someone would like to be able to do a bit more dailies to reach the next achievement chest. That’s why I think my progressive cap is the better solution, as it does not affect anyone but completionists.

Rick.5781:

I think most AP hunters suffer from some sort of OCD (I know I do). When there is something that is available to do that is tracked, I feel like I HAVE to do it, not because it’s fun or because I want to, but because my mental state compels me to do so. If you don’t suffer from any sort of obsessive compulsive disorder tendencies you can’t understand this, but it IS real.

I think the problem is that if you are seriously hardcore OCD, the only way to make you happy is to put a cap on how many AP you can get from daily/monthly, as that would end the need to get more, since there is no more to get. Doing that could ruin the fun of many people that are NOT hardcore OCD.

For completionists more is not necessarily better, for casual people, more is usually better.

1. Thanks for your concerns but I do not suffer from mental illness. Maybe you do but it’s your problem and I’d love if you could avoid that kind of generalization
2. You obviously didn’t read the propositions that were made because the most discussed ones do not impact casual players at all

VOLKON.1290:

Yamiga.7863:

VOLKON.1290:

Nausicaa.9563:

I support Awe’s proposition. A total cap of 20-25k daily points would not be reached by anyone but the most dedicated completionists (who do the permanent stuff as well), it wouldn’t punish anyone’s playstyle and it would improve the achievement point system, making the leaderboard more competitive (except for the living story achievement problem) + making playing the game like completionists do more relaxed.

If anet is worried that these completionists would stop logging in daily after reaching this cap, I feel there still is enough incentive to get your chest every day, aka laurels.

Why exactly do you wish to punish the most dedicated completionists again by capping their access to APs? Why is their style of play so ‘not good enough’ that you feel the need to put a cap on it?

You don’t understand that completionists are the ones actually requesting that kind of change, because it will improve our playstyle.

Every completionist is asking for this, or only the few that see this as a means to try and cement their positions on the leader board by denying others access to APs?

At least every completionist I know. Some of the most hardcore even said so in this very thread. And I’m still under the impression you don’t understand how a hard cap or the progresive cap I proposed works: it will “deny people access to APs” starting from the top of the leaderboard, slowing down the top players. If one was trying to secure his position he wouldn’t require that kind of change.

Colin said in this blog post they’ll do the 2014 preview after the end of 1st season of living story (at least that’s what I understand):

Due to the size and scope of the final four story releases in season one, the next round of major features will be bundled together into a large “feature only” release that will come after the first season of the Living World 2014 has finished. Once the story has completed, we’ll go into much greater detail on what’s to follow, but for now we want to focus on making sure our last four episodes shine.

VOLKON.1290:

Nausicaa.9563:

I support Awe’s proposition. A total cap of 20-25k daily points would not be reached by anyone but the most dedicated completionists (who do the permanent stuff as well), it wouldn’t punish anyone’s playstyle and it would improve the achievement point system, making the leaderboard more competitive (except for the living story achievement problem) + making playing the game like completionists do more relaxed.

If anet is worried that these completionists would stop logging in daily after reaching this cap, I feel there still is enough incentive to get your chest every day, aka laurels.

Why exactly do you wish to punish the most dedicated completionists again by capping their access to APs? Why is their style of play so ‘not good enough’ that you feel the need to put a cap on it?

You don’t understand that completionists are the ones actually requesting that kind of change, because it will improve our playstyle.

Subdue.5479:

@Yamiga:

The number one reason most people don’t care about the leaderboard is because the vast majority of players have no access to it. Plain and simple. My suggestions make it accessible and allow for awards to be attached to it, two things which currently are not possible.

That’s your opinion. Mine is that the number one reason most people don’t care about the leaderboard is because they think that “competing” about who spends the most time farming dailies is silly and absolutely not fun.
I obviously can’t prove I’m right (and neither can you), but it is what can be infered from the various posts of last december’s daily-related threads.

Subdue.5479:

@Yamiga

It has points, it has a leaderboard, and while you may not care about the leaderboard, it is pretty obvious that there are those among the following who want to cap daily AP that do care about it. Furthermore, the suggestions I put forth match more with what one would expect an “AP Hunter” to want. When a hunter goes into a forest to hunt, his goal is to bring back as much as he can or as much as he needs, not to kill every animal in the forest. That’s how it should be for “AP Hunters” well. If there are far more potential points than a player can possibly achieve in any given day, it shifts the focus from “I have to do everything” to “I’ll do as much as I can.”

Bolded part. You’re not considering what actual completionists/AP hunter want but what you think they’re expected to want. Unfortunately these expectations are wrong, what completionists want is to be able to do everything and your “doing as much as I can” is the exact opposite mindest.

Just because you can’t see that, just because you don’t want that, doesn’t mean that it’s not better for the community as a whole. As it is, the system is a giant “screw you” to the 95% of the player base that didn’t start collecting achievements right from day one. What could be an excellent tool for A.Net to drive activity into lesser played zones, into lesser completed dungeons, for lesser completed events, instead stands as a flaccid ruler for the kittens of a tiny minority of the population, as evident in the number of your supporters who, prior to it being pointed out, even had their leaderboard ranks in their signatures!

And as for your suggestion, it is just a watered down version of the same deal that the others posted. It has the same pitfalls – making it easier for people at the top to stay ahead. Now, I’ve already explained it once so I’m not retyping all that. Instead I’ll just quote it for you here.

Again, you base your arguments on what you think people want. Most people don’t care about the leaderboards, whether or not they are in it, just read the various threads about achievements that were made last december if you want evidence. And the very few people that may actually care are, at least in my experience, largly outnumbered by the completionists.
What you’re proposing is completely destroying the playstyle of a minority, completionists, to potentially please an even smaller minority. What I propose is a QoL change affecting completionists only

Subdue.5479:

I find it funny that you go through all that trouble to paint this picture that I’m biased. However, I notice that you neglect to identify who I am biased towards, or against. Do you know why that is? It’s because the suggestion I put forth is neutral, fair, and more importantly, makes the game more competitive, and therefore better for all players. If you are going to bring up my views, that’s fine, but argue against them, not against me having them.

You are biased because you assume this thread to be about the leaderboard when it’s not. In each of your posts you assume that the leaderboard is what we AP-hunters are aiming for, and that our playstyle should be “balanced” like a competition which it isn’t. You are biased because you do not know the playstyle (AP-hunt) you’re proposing to rework (destroy actually).

Subdue.5479:

Yamiga.7863:

My idea was to limit the top farmers to ~80% of the “normal” maximum income to avoid a threshold effect, but as long as the system works I’m fine with any numbers
The smaller the monthly increase is the easier it is to reach the cap, which means that players that already reached it have an easy time keeping with the increase, but also that players that didn’t reach the cap yet will catch up faster.

Another advantage of this system compared to a simple hard cap (since some people really think the leaderboard does/should have a meaning…) is that everyone can actually catch up with “top” AP players, because they’re slowed down, and even pass them if they slack off because the cap keeps increasing.

Why again would we want it to be easy to stay at the top?

You don’t seem to understand how the system I proposed works. Currently to “stay at the top”, one just has to farm dailies and other players can’t even catch up. With my system, “top” players can’t prevent other people to catch up with them, making it harder to keep thier top spot.

PS: the more I talk about this leaderboard nonsense to answer your concerns the more I wonder why you (or anyone) care so much about it…

Hellmasker.1649:

Yamiga.7863:

Awe.1096:

3554091

Simple. Almost everyone in this game does dailies. Only a minority (and an extremely small minority) was salvaging 10 mil items or running 9001 CoF. One is not like the other.

I want to see how many players in GW2 will actually reach the treshold of 25,000 AP from dailies alone. Almost everyone?

Very few, even if the game stays for very long. I’d really like the daily APs to be limited in some manner, and the better solution (imho) I came up to is the following:

Progressive cap

Principle: Past X total points from dailies, dailies does not award anymore APs. Every month, the cap X is increased by 500 (numbers are purely indicative. Its meant to be a bit smaller than the maximum one can earn in a month, which is currently around 600)

Players affected: Dailies farmers only. As long as the numbers are correctly set (first cap and monthly increase), only the players that heavily farmed dailies since release will reach the threshold

• To reach the threshold, one has to have a large amount of APs from dailies AND consistently do more dailies than the monthly increase
• Even if a player reaches the cap, he will still be able to increase his AP score the following month
• The system is rather simple, yet effective and does not punish hardcore players, even on the long term
• It is also more flexible than a hard cap

Please tell me me if you see any flaw in this system. The more I think about it, the more it seems to do only what its meant to: slow down the grind for AP farmers without affecting other players.

A new take on it. Refreshing to see a new idea, I wouldn’t mind a system similar to this. The AP in question would be more comfortable ~200 or 250, but I would be on board on this.

My idea was to limit the top farmers to ~80% of the “normal” maximum income to avoid a threshold effect, but as long as the system works I’m fine with any numbers
The smaller the monthly increase is the easier it is to reach the cap, which means that players that already reached it have an easy time keeping with the increase, but also that players that didn’t reach the cap yet will catch up faster.

Another advantage of this system compared to a simple hard cap (since some people really think the leaderboard does/should have a meaning…) is that everyone can actually catch up with “top” AP players, because they’re slowed down, and even pass them if they slack off because the cap keeps increasing.

fellyn.5083:

I’d like to point out that your argument makes absolutely no sense. If dailys hinder you from doing what you want don’t do them then? Why does the game need to change because you have some sort of OCD complex?

I think your personal satisfaction level would sore through the roof when you realize that you are in fact not obligated to finish them every day.

The “all or nothing” play style you created is your problem alone and there is a solution for your problem already.

Following your argument, every pvp player unhappy with the current balance should stop doing pvp. Don’t you think thats a bit extreme? Instead, they ask for balance updates. Does that makes them mentally sick like you’re implying?

I, like other AP hunters play some sort of niche minigame within the game, which goal is to collect achievement points, like some people play the game to play the trading post or collect miniatures, etc. During the last year, the “meta” of this minigame has been drastically pushed towards dailies, december 2013 update pushing the time required to do all the dailies to the roof.
I am NOT asking to revert these changes. They were made for a reason, to make it easier/more rewarding for the majority, and our minigame suffering from it is just a unfortunate side-effect. Instead, I propose a small change that will only affect people playing the AP hunt.

VOLKON.1290:

Your claim that you’re only proposing to balance your style fails for two reasons.

1. It’s not only your style. Whomever you are, you aren’t qualified to impose restrictions on others or to negatively affect others choices of how to play.

2. Balance your own play style. If you need added restrictions put in the game to do that then odds are it’s not the system that’s at fault.

1. I’m not imposing anything, I’m proposing. People that share my playstyle (=players affected by my proposition) are completely free to disagree, but every AP famer I know actually want that kind of change to be implemented.
2. It was balanced for a while but then the system was changed. Hence the system is at fault. Isn’t it legit to change the system to fix a problem caused by a change in the system?

Subdue.5479:

@Awe.1096, Yamiga.7863

You can play the game any way you want. MMOs, especially in the case of GW2, are about enjoying the game the way you want to enjoy it. What bothers me about the specific change(s) that you guys are clamoring for is that they don’t affect gameplay at all. Nothing hinders you from playing the way you want to play now, without those changes implemented.

That means that there are two reasons why you might want to have these changes implemented. You might, rationally but maliciously, want to limit competition on the leaderboard, thus making it easier to maintain your place. Personally, I think the way the leaderboard is setup right now is already broken enough as it is, and really needs a major overhaul (https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/The-AP-Leaderboard-Sucks-Let-s-Fix-It), but the change you suggest makes it worse, not better. Or, you might irrationally be trying to deal with your own neurosis by changing the game. If that’s the case, if this really is a mental illness for you, it really might be a good idea to step back. But that’s still not a reason to change the game.

You’re missing the point. Completely. I could care less about the leaderboard, competition or anything like that. I’m playing for the personal satisfaction of completing achievements, like I do on most games I play (I even went for Civilization V ones lol). In GW2 achievement points act as a global meta-achievement, therefore I’m trying to earn them as much as I can, including dailies.
This is a all or nothing playstyle, and the current state of dailies actually does “hinders me from playing the way I want to play” because it takes a lot of time (not skill) to do them all every day, and missing one or two of them just because I don’t have time is really frustrating, to a point its almost not fun aymore.
The proposition I made would fix that without any impact on anyone but AP farmers, people that share my completionist playstyle.

Subdue.5479:

Yamiga.7863:

And for the last part: I’m not deciding how other people should gather APs, I’m proposing to balance my playstyle. If my system is implemented I’ll be one of the firsts to hit the cap.

Oh please. It isn’t your playstyle you want to “balance.” It’s the playstyle of those around you. If you just wanted to affect your playstyle, then you would just do the dailies you wanted to do. No, it’s not that you just don’t want to do all of the dailies. You don’t want anyone to be able to do them.

My playstyle is to get every achievement point I can.“just do the dailies I want to” would mean completely changing my playstyle, therefore is not a solution. Changing how many APs I get from dailies is.
Additionnaly, every AP farmer I know agree that the current daily system is broken for our playstyle, which means every player I know that my proposition would affect (“those around me”) are actually wanting it.

VOLKON.1290:

Major flaw. You’re deliberately hurting players that farm dailies daily. No one has given an explanation as to why their style of play is so superior to those that prefer farming dailies that they can punish those that choose to farm dailies. What gives you the right to decide how other people should gather their APs?

Do you really think some people choose to farm the dailies without going for permanent achievements? I have yet to heard about them. The only people I’ve heard of that are heavily farming dailies since launch are AP farmers which, like me, go for every single achievement in the game. Only those players are affected by my proposition.

With the current system you can’t get all the dailies without spending a lot of time specifically towards it every day. Actually even the most dedicated players (to AP-hunt) tends to skip some of the new sPvP dailies because they take forever. The progressing cap would be equivalent to skipping 3-4 dailies/day for hardcore farmers only . Or fully missing 4-5 days/month.

And for the last part: I’m not deciding how other people should gather APs, I’m proposing to balance my playstyle. If my system is implemented I’ll be one of the firsts to hit the cap.

Awe.1096:

3554091

Simple. Almost everyone in this game does dailies. Only a minority (and an extremely small minority) was salvaging 10 mil items or running 9001 CoF. One is not like the other.

I want to see how many players in GW2 will actually reach the treshold of 25,000 AP from dailies alone. Almost everyone?

Very few, even if the game stays for very long. I’d really like the daily APs to be limited in some manner, and the better solution (imho) I came up to is the following:

Progressive cap

Principle: Past X total points from dailies, dailies does not award anymore APs. Every month, the cap X is increased by 500 (numbers are purely indicative. Its meant to be a bit smaller than the maximum one can earn in a month, which is currently around 600)

Players affected: Dailies farmers only. As long as the numbers are correctly set (first cap and monthly increase), only the players that heavily farmed dailies since release will reach the threshold

• To reach the threshold, one has to have a large amount of APs from dailies AND consistently do more dailies than the monthly increase
• Even if a player reaches the cap, he will still be able to increase his AP score the following month
• The system is rather simple, yet effective and does not punish hardcore players, even on the long term
• It is also more flexible than a hard cap

Please tell me me if you see any flaw in this system. The more I think about it, the more it seems to do only what its meant to: slow down the grind for AP farmers without affecting other players.

Subdue.5479:

Malediktus.9250:

Horrible suggestion, even worse than the current one. We need more skill involved and not more time consumption per day.

And “More skill involved” means what? Certainly not the 1000 Ooze kills that has you sitting at the top of the leaderboard.

What is allowing people to “sit a the top of the leaderboards” is a bazillion APs from dailies. Killing 1000 ooze awards way less APs than a full daily

william dj.6953:

Awe, you asked me a question and I answered. Now allow me to ask you one. Or anyone that wants these changes can answer the question.

Would the proposed changes allow those at the top of the leaderboard maintain their position much easier?

If the answer is Yes, this, in my opinion is why so many people are against it. This said group of people come on forums make suggestions claiming its for the benefit of all in the game. When this is 100% a big fat lie. It is to benefit them the most and they know it. When others call them out on their lying they start pitching a fit.

No matter how many numbers are thrown out there, no matter how many times the suggestions are reworded its still the same thing. A lie that centers on the selfishness of this group.

And btw, the question really only requires a yes or no answer. Not the typical avoidance of answering a question that so many do when trying to convince those on the board of their position. By throwing up walls of txt.

No

There’s a lot of test items/monster-only items that are not available for players but can be linked in chat with the right code.

Balance between game types

The second problem of the achievement system is it rewards PvE way more than other game types. WvW achievements are ridicoulously long and unrewarding, WvW players get most of their achievements from the PvE-related content in WvW (finishing events, gathering, etc). sPvP achievemtns are more consistent but PvP players are completely cut from other sources. On the other hand, PvE players have access to most of the achievements and can still easily gain APs from the other game types with minimal involvement.
Unfortunately, devs already said the current WvW achievements can’t be reworked, however I think a workaround can be find by adding new achievements, especially with the new EotM map. It won’t fix everything, but it’s a start.
For sPvP, new achievements could be created tracking the various ways of increasing the score (kills, points neutralized/captured, etc), and the current proffesion-specific ones expanded with a repetable capped achievement like Agent of entropy: veteran champion genius/mage/illusionist, etc. I don’t expect much dev commentaries on this though, since the spvp rewards are already being reworked.

Daily/monthly

These time-limited achievement have been in the game since launch, but have experienced extreme changes since, especially the daily. Their goal was to reward the player for regulary login in and playing the game with a some currency and a chance to a BLTC item. To make this reward easier to get, a new daily system was introduced, where numerous daily achievements are available (9 at start, 15 currently) and completing 5 of them gives the daily reward, any additional daily still awarding 1AP and some experience. This system has recently been extended to spvp.
Starting last summer, every day contains a LS-related daily for every active arc, contributing to both the daily reward and the the LS meta. The objective was to make it easier for casual players to achieve the LS meta. Monthly achievements evolved less, the pve-side only having 7 options when 4 are required for the reward.
The problem is the scale of some of the daily and monthly options are completely out of touch with each other. How is talking to a npc in LA (Daily Laurel Vendor) the same as earning 2 WvW levels? Why do I only need 50 WvW kills for the monthly option when the daily is 10, meaning around 300 kills a month? How is playing 3 sPvP matchs the same as winning 3 soloQ tournaments?
I feel like the various Anet teams are throwing their own ideas into the system without thinking about its coherency, with the last sPvP daily as the culminant point: currently, finishing all the sPvP options take 3-4 times what is needed to finish all the PvE options, for half less APs. The new spvp dailes were designed to give a better AP income to the spvp players or to drag more people into tpvp, probably both, and both objectives are good but these dailies just don’t fit with the rest of the system.

Balance between time-limited and permanent achievements

The main problem of the overall achievement system is the lack of balance between permanent and time-limited achievements. What was supposed to register a player’s achievements, like the titles and Hall of Monuments did in gw1, currently registers the time spent in game. The total amount of APs available from daily/monthly is already around the same as both permanent and LS achievements together. For many players, the fastest way of gaining APs, be it to reach the next chest or just to improve their score, is now to grind dailies and the occasional Living story that can usually be finished in a few hours. In comparison, the permanent achievements they have remaining are both too long and not very rewarding.
Of course, Anet should add new permanent achievements to increase their weight, but I think the problem won’t be solved unless a cap is put to APs gained from dailies, like it was done for Agent of Entropy. Different implementations for this kind of cap are possible (and some have already been discussed on this forum), from a simple hard cap to something smoother like a slowly increasing cap. Same goes for monthly, but the problem is less important since the AP income is smaller. The main inconvenience will be to set this cap, since it would probably have to be higher than what any player already has because of the achievement rewards.
Another possibility could be to merge PvE and PvP daily. Since the rewards are already being merged, the only reason I see not to completley merge both dailies is that in the current state it encourages people to play spvp since the rewards are exclusive.

I didn’t had much time to post during the holiday, but here’s my contribution to this awesome thread.

Since most of the others sujects have already been widely discussed, I’ll focus on the form of horizontal progression I’m the most attached to, achievements.

Overview

The original goal of the achievement system is to record the progress of the player towards a variety of predetermined objectives, which, upon completion, rewards the player with achievement points and titles. Later, Anet introduced achievement rewards, awarding currency, unique skins and titles depending on the raw number of achievement points obtained.
Players choose to work towards achievements for various reasons: specific rewards attached to the achievement (mainly living story ones), achievement rewards, or just for the personnal satisfaction of completing what can be seen as a challenge.
I will split the achievements in three categories: permanent, living story and daily/monthly. I’ll start with some thoughts about each of these categories

Permanent achievements

Those have already been largely discussed in this thread, mainly in the form challenge vs grind. Overall, people have been asking for more permanent achievements, and especially for more challenging achievements actually rewarding skillfull play rather than time invested. While agreeing with this, I want to point out that grindy achivements are not necesserally bad since they can hold a feeling of progression, the best example being the rank achievements in sPvP. Despite skyhammer farm broking the whole rank system, players have shown that they were still attached to their rank when Anet considered removing it.
I think grindy achievements are ok when they:

• Track a progression with displayable tiers and a good progression curve. Despite the last rank being extremely hard to get, sPvP ranks fit this description quite well. On the other hand, the various WvW achievements fail because they have only one displayable tier and the requirements are insane.
• Does not require to be specifically grinded. The point is even if it takes a lot of time, players can progress towards the achievement without playing specifically for it, like the weapon master or slayer achievements that will progress while doing other things. On the other hand, they can be rushed with a boring and repetitive farm.

Living Story

The main characteristic of LS achievements is they’re time-limited. Again, this subject has already been discussed, mainly last summer because of the Aetherblade retreat and Liadri achievements that were considered too hard by many. I feel like LS achievements are used by Anet as a listing to tell the player what is available in the current release, which is not too far away from the original goal of the system. The problem is since they’re time-limited, they can’t be too hard without punishing players that don’t have much time to play during a certain release and can’t train for a particular achievement, even if they’re willing to spend time on it later.
With the tower of nightmare releases appeared LS achievements that only required to spend a quite large amount of money (Aftermath Treasure Collector, Aftermath Toxic Consumer). I really think this kind of achievements shouldn’t exist at all, they’re not an achievement. Same could be said about Karma Spender, Big Spender or even Daily Feast, but at least those are rather cheap and require regular currency.

Quincy.2198:

Osi.3504:

Romek.4201:

this thread is soooooo funny^^

Whats funny is you. Most of the achievement players at the top are all GOOD sPvP players. I realize a lot of people lack the logic that some people play all game modes, not just one like you might. There have been a lot of achievements that were harder than these but much faster and easier(granted you were good) to earn, like crab toss win during the living story every single day, or throwing 8 crystals at lidari. All of these harder achievements mean you can play well, even sPvP. If they weren’t good or decent at the game they wouldn’t be among the top ranks to begin with.

Sorry for your lack of logic pal, not the first time you’ve posted something trollish and sad.

Uhm no. Being good at PvE and having alot of APS doesn’t mean you’re good at PvP. Just not.

Having a lot of APs means that you do play PvP. Of course some AP hunters just farmed hotjoin for their PvP dailies, but most of us went in tournaments instead because there are achievements to be done there (its also the best way to increase your rank for those like me that despised the skyhammer expoit farm). It makes us at least experienced PvP players, not the “PvE scrubs” you and other people seem to see us as.

cesmode.4257:

Yamiga.7863:

Lord Kuru.3685:

Achievement points should be the only form of vertical progression in this game.

I may be wrong, but aren’t achievement points horizontal progression?

If I didnt know better from reading Kuru’s posts, Id say this was trolling

But seriously, in most games achievements are for nothing but titles and vanity. The fact that GW2 is rewarding you as it currently does is pushing the envelop. I mentioned this stuff to a few of my friends who play other MMOs and they said “ew…rewards for achievements? Thats a sticky topic”.

Thanks for the precision I was a bit confused
Achievements should not be a requirement for anything and shouldn’t be part of any form of vertical progression. Unlocking titles with achievements is a good idea imo, its basically how the GWAMM title worked in gw1 and I feel it was missing in gw2. The other achievement rewards are just some nice additional rewards that pop from time to time.