Guild Wars 2

Swift.1930:

Funny, because first you say that unless the thing I said was implemented, what I said would not be viable. If you’re arguing that a single-mushroom daily limit is a gate, then clearly you’ve not seen the current mission gates based on masteries… single-mushroom limitation is not a gate when you can still wander around and find more mushrooms. Think map completion – we can’t sit around and complete a single heart eighteen times over to complete all the hearts on a map. Do we consider that gated?

The real gating is when you lock masteries behind each other. For instance, if you could pick and choose any of the masteries to level at any given time, and then the next one costs more xp, etc, etc, it would be less gated. But currently each one is tiered, even though (apart from the gliding mastery) nothing is related to its preceding mastery point.

A bit like the new skill circle setup (which replaced the old pick-and-choose skill tree), where we have to level our skill trees with 80% of skills our characters wouldn’t even pretend to practice or care about before unlocking the skills we care about.

And thus the burnout. We’re forced to level and go through entire trees of things we will never ever use just to unlock something minor. This is a huge change compared to the vanilla release of Guild Wars 2, which (minus bugs, but certainly not closed to additions) is what we paid for.

Also, keep in mind that at least 60% of the GW2 playerbase came directly from GW1, and there were very, very few gates in that game. Nearly pure customization.

But then the whole issue isn’t that the system is poorly made, the issue you have is that you don’t get what you want when you want it. I understand that you would rather be able to pick which masteries you want to level in a non-tier order but the result is the same as the current system, you end up with some masteries taking much longer to get. So it isn’t so much that the system is bad/poorly designed, it’s just that you don’t want to level up the other tiers of stuff to get to the one thing you want, you don’t want to take a long time to get them, and you don’t want to do things unrelated to them is what i’m getting from your posts. Also that heart example was terrible example because once you do a heart, it’s finished. Hearts in a map are not one giant cumulative, they are separate things.

Yes, you can’t choose and pick from your skills anymore. Okay, but is that really such a game-breaking thing? Like, are you that flustered that you have to spend 12 skill points before getting the specific shout you want on your warrior? Or having to do 5 HoT HP’s to unlock something you are looking forward to?

I hate to break it to everyone who agrees, but the mastery system was designed for long-term goals upon hitting level 80. It is a well designed system that allows you to do multiple things to earn experience for each mastery and provides incentive for playing all of the content. Maybe you don’t like that and that’s fine but it’s what Anet wanted to do with masteries and they aren’t going to change.

I can’t really debate about the whole system with you if you simply write it off as things that you don’t enjoy because then that’s your opinion. I’ve still yet to see what is so bad about the current mastery system from your posts and more just like “I don’t like this”.

I’ll also ask the question again, because everyone seems to side-step it despite wholeheartedly agreeing that the system should be like this: What is a viable way of obtaining a mastery through physical interaction with the specific task it is related to, while making sure it isn’t easily cleared and without being too repetitive or limiting?

Swift.1930:

Zelkovan.2630:

Swift.1930:

EsarioOne.9840:

I’m seeing alot of discussion about how mastery relates to burn out, that’s not the case.
Mastery = Millions of experience
Millions of experience = time buffer so people don’t realize the mastery system is non-beneficial and shallow character progression.
At its core, mastery is just something to keep consumers occupied. You aren’t doing anything original or unique. It’d be a different story if the player actually learned the itzel language (etc.) by doing related activities.

Ah, I just made a comment to this effect on another post – you’re exactly right; if mastery was related to trying to do the things you are mastering, it would make sense and wouldn’t be a 9999999999999999XP grind (which is a lot of veteran spiders, by the way). Like trying out jumping mushrooms ~40 times before it actually takes you in the right direction and doesn’t get you nearly killed, or something like that.

The issue with that is it’s easily bypassed. I could literally just stand next to one mushroom in one corner of a map and jump on it over and over again until I unlock that mastery. Same thing with Itzel lore, just talk to the same npcs over and over again. So how do you slow people down so they don’t unlock all the masteries instantly and devalue the point of masteries meaning to be the long-term horizontal progression?

I mean, that’s a viable way of leveling a skill… it’s not a bypass. As the game currently stands, you can stand in one corner and bash a single dinosaur over the head until you unlock every single mastery.

If you want to slow down masteries presented in that fashion, you just need to make sure the people can only gain, for instance, a certain number points in a mastery level from a single NPC or mushroom per day. They can always come back and do it again tomorrow, but if they want it quicker they will need to seek out other NPCs/mushrooms. Gliding would be slightly trickier, but I see nothing wrong with a “total flight time” being the requirement. Makes a lot of sense for glider players, and also encourages using gliders more.

So here’s the real question: why don’t the Guild Wars 2 devs seem to care that the leveling system is completely detached from the actual masteries? I could be leveling mushroom jumping without ever even SEEING a mushroom. By hitting a dinosaur with a pointy stick. In that abandoned little corner you mentioned.

But it is a bypass. The whole point of Masteries was to provide a long-term horizontal progression once you hit 80. If all it took was 40 mushrooms to master mushroom jumping mastery, someone would literally just keep using the same mushroom over and over until they unlocked it. That wouldn’t take very long. Okay, so you say you limit a mushroom to once per day. Okay, fine. But then you get people complaining on the forums that Anet is “gating” content again by forcing you to wait a whole day per mushroom. You end up in the same scenario where people don’t like the situation, much like yourself. Another issue is, it would be very easy to reach the 40 mushroom requirement, even if it was once per day per mushroom. So once again, you hit the issue of masteries being cleared in a few hours/days after launch.

Okay, so let’s say hypothetically you raise the cap to 200 mushrooms. Now that’s a grind, because every day I have to make sure I jump on every mushroom I see, whereas before I could just do whatever I wanted in the new maps and reach the same goal. Same principle with NPCs. You would once again end up with people complaining about the system on the forum. Sure, getting xp to jump on mushrooms has nothing to do with physically jumping on mushrooms, but it’s a smart way of making sure masteries take a while, while at the same time not restricting you to what you can do to level it.

Sure, I could just sit in one corner of the map and bash a pocket raptor over the head over and over again for masteries. However the difference between the current system and yours is that you would literally have to be insane to do that in the current system because you would receive so little xp. Thus, you don’t have incentive to sit in one corner bashing a dino’s head because it would literally take months/years. However, with your system (assuming no daily cap) you have incentive to sit in one corner, constantly jumping on one mushroom.

So once again, I’ll ask the question. What is a viable way of attaining mushroom jumping through physically interacting with the mushrooms, while making sure it isn’t easily cleared, and without being too repetitive or limiting? Or any other mastery similar to it? Unless of course, you forsake the whole idea of masteries being long-term progression, in which case you just go with what you proposed. However, that’s not Anet’s goal with masteries, so the point is moot.

If someone can come up with a reasonable way to accomplish all those goals and implement it well, then Anet messed up on their part. I have yet to see such a reasonable way.

Swift.1930:

EsarioOne.9840:

I’m seeing alot of discussion about how mastery relates to burn out, that’s not the case.
Mastery = Millions of experience
Millions of experience = time buffer so people don’t realize the mastery system is non-beneficial and shallow character progression.
At its core, mastery is just something to keep consumers occupied. You aren’t doing anything original or unique. It’d be a different story if the player actually learned the itzel language (etc.) by doing related activities.

Ah, I just made a comment to this effect on another post – you’re exactly right; if mastery was related to trying to do the things you are mastering, it would make sense and wouldn’t be a 9999999999999999XP grind (which is a lot of veteran spiders, by the way). Like trying out jumping mushrooms ~40 times before it actually takes you in the right direction and doesn’t get you nearly killed, or something like that.

The issue with that is it’s easily bypassed. I could literally just stand next to one mushroom in one corner of a map and jump on it over and over again until I unlock that mastery. Same thing with Itzel lore, just talk to the same npcs over and over again. So how do you slow people down so they don’t unlock all the masteries instantly and devalue the point of masteries meaning to be the long-term horizontal progression?

Just curious Sola, how many hours have you been putting in each day for the past three weeks? I’ve finished the story and gone through all the maps, although I still very much enjoy them. I still have to work on masteries though and still have to unlock all the elite specs.

I legitimately think the worst thing for MMO’s are players who play the game every day for hours on end after a release. If you play 4+ hours a day for weeks of an expansion, you’re going to very quickly get bored/hit the wall. I haven’t had the opportunity to play every day for long periods of time, so to me the expansion is still very much enjoyable.

towerston.2790:

Cogbyrn.7283:

Fighting games support smashing buttons as well, and often when it’s a new player vs. a new player, the person smashing buttons will beat the person who is trying to play. That doesn’t mean fighting games aren’t skill-based, it just means you have to practice.

You make a whole lot of “undeniable” assertions, without actually supporting them. I don’t believe you know what you’re talking about, almost exclusively because you included Heartseeker Thief spam in your original post. You have switched to typical Revenant/DH complaining, and the age old “particles and effect clutter”. Now it’s just another generic post that has already been created.

Yes. Thank you.

You entirely missed his point.

Test.8734:

Divine Flavor.2016:

I don’t know if five and a half million subscriptions was enough to make buy to play work for them, but it’s hard to argue that those kind of numbers weren’t successful on at least some level. As far as I know, WoW is the only other MMO to ever get numbers that high.

Half a million subscriptions would be more than enough to make GW2 a big success… But GW2 does not have subscriptions

We know the GW2 earnings. Notice how, no matter how many players bought the game, its earnings in the graphic I linked earlier were less than those of Blade & Soul (which has not even been released in the West yet) and very close to those of Aion (which has had a very poor reception around here).

Celtic Lady.3729:

Is WoW the only MMO out there that hasn’t gone F2P? I don’t mean free to play to 20 or whatever. I mean, free to play the whole game.

GW2’s F2P seems more restrictive than any I’ve experienced so far.

Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn still has a monthly fee.

And try playing The Old Republic for something even more restrictive than GW2.

Vayne.8563:

Asking for a zone to be nerfed is far more lazy than saying people need to be reasonable about their expectations.

Not really. Victim-blaming is, after all, the laziest possible approach to a given problem. Which pretty much describes the attitude of some people, who claim that nothing in the game is wrong and that it’s always the players’ fault that anything, from the smallest thing to the biggest outcry, appears to be wrong.

It’s rather obvious that, in an expansion for GW2, players would have expected content similar to that of GW2. To make HoT something so different that many players – for example, the one you were quoting (and not imaginary people like “everyone in my guild”) – do not enjoy it is completely on ArenaNet. They should have clarified it before the expansion was avaliable for sale, and the fact that some players weren’t aware of it is prood that ArenaNet wasn’t clear enough.

I tip my tin foil hat to you, sir. It’s clearly obvious the game is failing miserably since launch. /sarcasm

I’m 99% positive since launch GW2 has been doing fine. Megaservers were yes, to fix some low population realms, but also to deal with the fact that the leveling experienced was heavily kitten by no players being around and the fact that guesting was a thing. The reception for HoT has also been overwhelmingly positive.

The game going free to play probably wasn’t because the game was struggling financially either but to encourage new players to come in and play right as the expansion was launching. That way they could just buy HoT and get the base game for free. You also do realize that most of GW2’s income is from the gem store post launch of expansions/release, right? Meaning box sales are less than you would think. Also why is NCsoft not publishing GW2 a bad thing? If anything more of the money goes to the devs I would assume.

Also, three people left the company. Okay. That happens. Just because people leave to pursue other jobs doesn’t mean that the company was dying. I don’t get why people equate: “Oh this guy went to work for Amazon OH EM GEE THE GAME IS A BIG FAILURE. SEE ANET IS DOING IT WRONG” You want to see people leaving the company which was a direct correlation of the its game dying? Look at Wildstar. They had to lay off devs from the team.

You’re just spouting doom and gloom.

The Mordremoth you fought in the story was how you, the commander, associated him to look like or what he manifests himself as in the dream. The whole thing they were playing throughout this expansion was that Mordremoth has no physical form. He is all the vines/roots you see throughout the maps. Meaning, even if you were to kill all of the vines, they would just grow back.

Thus, he has no physical form. However, it is implied that the Mouth of Mordremoth in the Dragon’s Stand meta is how Mordremoth represents himself. Meaning it’s how he would physically represent himself if he were to associate with a “form”. This is implied by the fact that in the story instance, if you noticed the constant black shadowy face that is always behind Mordremoth is exactly the same face as the Mouth of Mordremoth.

Now as for mechanics? The fight was waaaay better than Zhaitan but lacking in build up mainly because it happens so quickly and drastically. The bugs in the instance sucked though.

From what I’ve played and seen/read, the story of HoT goes hand-in-hand with the map events.

In Verdant Brink the pact is scattered and as you search for the remaining Destiny’s edge in your story you help the remaining pact survivors regroup with each other so they can survive. When you then push into Auric Basin, you meet the exalted and give them the egg. However at the same time you are helping them reclaim their city from the Mordrem, as well as ensuring the pact has a safe rally point (Tarir). There are still some pact soldiers who crashed in Auric Basin and are confused but for the most part a basic camp has been established. Once Tarir is taken, the Pact uses it as a resting point.

Then when you push into Tangled Depths to continue to look for Logan/Zojja/Trahearne the Pact has now taken the offensive after managing to regroup at Tarir, replenish their supplies and restore the chain of command and so they push into Tangled Depths. That is why the whole meta event for that map is fighting that giant boss, it’s the pact now on the offensive.

Finally when you leave to go to Dragon Stand the Pact is on its final offensive and it’s the Dragon’s final stand (hence the reason why the map is called Dragon’s Stand I would assume). There, the pact launches an assault on the epicenter of Mordremoth and you fight the Mouth of Mordremoth. The mouth is most likely Mordremoth’s physical representation meaning you are fighting Mordremoth himself in Dragon’s stand.

The fact that in the final boss mission in the story you constantly see that shadowy black mask was basically a sign to me saying that while you were fighting this chubby little mordrem, the real physical representation of Mordremoth was what you fought in Dragon’s Stand. The black face and the Mouth look exactly alike. Of course since he can’t be physically killed (as they explained) you go into his mind to kill him.

That’s why it probably felt a little…disappointing. IMO if they had forced you to complete (whether success or failure) the Dragon Stand event before fighting Mordremoth in his mind that would have been more leading.

But yes I also agree that the ending was kind of like “Is that it?”. No conlusions, only more cliffhangers.

Why is it that people who protest this expansion associate hardcore with anything that takes a few seconds or more to think about? Hardcore open world would be if every mob in the game had the potential to kill you as quickly as another player would in pvp (dodges, invulnerability, healing, all included).

The open world in HoT is barely difficult. It makes you have to think and readjust yes, but once you figure it out it’s very simple and easy.

Tbh, I think Anet hit it right on the head in terms of balance. There have been many areas in HoT where I just casually avoid mobs or I could maneuver around them. There are some areas where I have to stop and fight. It’s really not a big deal. I think the people who cry “hardcore” on the forums are the ones overreacting imo.

I find it very funny that a few names in this thread were, before the launch of HoT, promoting the increase in difficulty of the open world and encouraging Anet to do it. Now that they got what they wanted they cry wolf and run back home.

I’ll be frank here. I have been playing the game solo for a few months after I left my main guild. From playing HoT, it is definitely difficult playing solo. But why is it so difficult? The simple answer is that mobs are actually a threat. I could walk through 5 normal mobs in Orr and easy kill all of them. Not so in HoT. If there are pocket raptors I sure as hell better pop defensive abilities when they swarm me. Snipers? Kill them first.

The content isn’t unplayable solo. It is possible solo but more challenging and a bit slower. To be completely honest, I love this change. Because you know what it’s promoted me to do? Actually talk with people in the map and group up and form parties. It reminds me so much of Maplestory (prior Big-Bang). THAT was a game where you had to pretty much party with others late game and just grind mobs over and over. The upside to that game was that it forced you to get social with people and make connections. These maps are promoting that and anyone who is crying how “hardcore” it is has never even touched something hardcore. Difficult content is not hardcore. Hardcore in MMO’s are when you invest a large chunck of play time towards a specific goal or set of goals.

The one thing they could help is make it so that the HP are more solo-friendly but otherwise leave the rest of the open world alone please.
Anet, please for the love of god don’t nerf the open world.

What I don’t understand is why they didn’t let us just figure this out in the game? Why did they have to write an article about it?

Yeah and Arah was centered around 5 man groups in full exotics, yet people have solo’d it naked.

Look, with all due respect I understand Anet’s statement about Ascended. But “should” does not mean “required”. Just because the devs say that you “should use ascended” does not mean it is required. The only way it will be required is if there is a system in place that FORCES you to have ascended before attempting the raid. Currently there is none.

There’s also the fact that ascended is literally a total of 12.5% dmg increase in total. Meaning, if you were going to hit 1k with an auto attack normally in full exotic, you’d be hitting 1125 dmg instead. Just means that in the long run you may need to autoattack a boss one more time.

Even disregarding that 12.5% damage increase if you equip trinkets, which are easy to get from laurels, and just get an ascended weapon (easier to get than full armor) then your damage difference comes out to a measly 7.5%. That’s nothing. That will literally not make or break the raid.

Crystal Reid.2481:

This is really well constructed feedback, thanks for posting. I can tell you I’ll be changing their portraits to be Champions instead of Legendary to clear up some of the confusion over these guys being the boss, and looking into some of their numbers to make sure they feel sufficiently threatening without becoming a horrible slog.

As much as I understand the idea of the Guardians teaching you the mechanics for the actual boss, I still think they should be somewhat threatening or challenging. So my feedback is that I definitely agree that they shouldn’t be a slog fest because let’s be honest, no one really loves trash mobs all that much lol, but they should feel somewhat threatening. I mean, someone has already solo’d one of the guardians (although it took much longer).

Perhaps making them attack more frequently, hit harder, or maybe have more mechanics? I’m not quite sure what you guys have the resources to do, but I believe it would be better for everybody if the mobs who weren’t the final boss weren’t giant HP sponges but at the same time were not a cakewalk.

TL;DR- No one likes non-boss mobs with high HP but no one also likes non-boss mobs with no real threat.

I think there’s a pretty big divide here on what people want from the non bosses.

There are some who believe that trash mobs such as the RGB guardians shouldn’t pose a threat and are there just to get you used to the final boss (that and they are the first wing’s 1st mobs so they are “expected” to be easy). Then there are others, such as myself, who believe that even they should be thought provoking and challenging, meaning not just huge HP sponges with 1 mechanic.

I think a majority of people will agree here that when Anet said “challenging group content” with their description of such being content that, when you finally clear it, gives you a huge sense of satisfaction, they meant that all of the content would be difficult. Not just the major bosses.

The RGB guardians need to be much more of a threat and challenging. They are, as per their description, legendary enemies and should be more challenging. I think people need to move away from this idea of “trash mobs”. Enemies that are not the main boss of a section does not equate them to being trash mobs that you can just kill with no effort. This whole raid is supposed to be a challenging group content that has you on your toes all the time. If someone who has 1/10th the man power needed to beat this “challenging” group of enemies can easily solo one of the guardians on their first try with no threat of danger or challenge even with 1/10th the man power then they need to be made stronger and less simple. I felt no rush or threat at all when fighting all three with a full group of 10 for the brief time I played it.

That said I don’t think the guardians should be a horrible slog fest. No one likes mobs whose sole purpose is to slow down your time and that take ages to kill. They should feel threatening and challenging without sucking all of your time away.

Kailee.8790:

…If this was easy, then we need a massive overhaul on dps for the druid…

I went full cleric with staff… it took ~2-3+ minutes for 1 veteran beetle… I just press 1 and alt tab

Why did you expect to be able to kill a tanky monster quickly while wearing full clerics gear and using a weapon whose purpose is to heal and support allies?

Lakanna.2073:

Dashingsteel.3410:

I think raids are Anet’s new shiny toy, and it will be the targeted content. I hope I am wrong but considering legendary armor, exclusive skins, exclusive minis, and a whole lot of lore gated behind these raids it seems to be their target content. I hope I am wrong about this. If raids are truly “challenging content” and they are harder than high level fractals this means that a small percentage of the community will be doing them. It would be sad if most of the targeted content was for the small minority.

And the very worst part: the people who really wanted raiding in the game left years ago. There are tons of MMO’s out there with an established raid system, raid community, and raid content. Adding a single 3-wing raid to GW2, locking all those exclusive rewards behind it, and hoping that the raiders come in droves will work… for a few months. And then, the cries of “there’s nothing for me to DO!” will resume, and the raiders will go back to the games that were built from the ground up to accommodate them.
I won’t be raiding, but if others enjoy it, then that’s all good. But I have left games before because raiders were treated like they deserved everything, and anyone who did not raid just didn’t count. It looks like this game is heading that way: If you want the really cool stuff, you have to raid. There is no alternative, there is no choice: raid or GTFO.
I’ve already gone from telling friends how great the game is, to telling them that the devs aren’t trustworthy and that I hate the new direction of the game. I log in less and less, and I’m pretty vocal about REALLY not liking the raid-exclusive stuff. Too bad, I loved this game for years, but going forward, it looks like the game I loved is gone, replaced with yet another second-rate WOW clone.

I don’t think just by adding a raid you become a “WoW clone”. Raiding is an established concept in MMO’s and there are people who enjoy it. The reason why Anet decided to include raids was because many players (myself included) basically gave the feedback along the lines of: “This game is really good and casual to get into but there is nothing challenging”. So Anet said “Okay, we’ll add some more pretty fun non-hardcore stuff and give you guys some stuff you’ve been asking for”. And now we have raids. Honestly, they could have done it another way but then you get issues like Teq and Wurm where at their releases there were huge overflows and it was a big mess.

Exclusive rewards is also a thing many people agree with. You want that shiny skin? Then play the content for it. If you mean legendary armor, then the dev’s have stated that you will need to play all aspects for the armor, including raids.

We don’t even know how the raid will play out. I doubt it will be anything like WoW raids. I feel like anyone crying that the game “I loved is gone” is doom-sayers who have yet to even see what the raids will look like. The mere phrase “raid” just makes them cry “GG WoW clone”. We will see tomorrow I guess.

My concern is that Anet will make raiding the focus of new content. Meaning 85% of it is raids, 15% is the stuff that GW2 is sort-of build upon.

Avster.1935:

The bolded part applicable to any part of the game. Even the “Open World PvE”, in fact OWPVE loses it’s surprise far more easily than instanced content, because you can just “roll through with the zerg”. Wherease Raids still require a certain level of challenge and will require greater coordination.

What are player thoughts on this? Would you like it if all future content focused mainly on raids, open world/story instances, or both?

Both.

Raids and dungeons get boring to me in the sense that they are very linear. You play it once and it will be the same every other time. You know exactly what the bosses/trash will be, what they will do, how the NPCS will talk, etc. The same could be said with open world content, but the difference is that you can at least communicate with others and depending on how many people are in a certain spot you may need to adapt. Just a personal preference. I also enjoy leading large groups, so that is another flavor for me.

Blaeys.3102:

Raids need to be treated as one small piece of the picture moving forward.

I put them in the same category as fractals, story instances and sPvP – stuff for smaller groups to do together.

The thing that attracted me – and many I know -to GW2 was the ability to play together in large groups with everyone that wanted to tag along. There really isn’t another MMO out there that does that in a fun way, that Ive found. That content includes WvW, engaging open world zones (that scale dynamically), world bosses and guild missions. That is where Anet needs to focus the most effort – to set GW2 apart from all of the raiding focused games already out there. Those things make GW2 the best MASSIVELY (important word) Multiplayer Online game Ive ever played. If they suddenly shifted gears to focus endgame on raids, that would be a tragedy.

So, yes, raids should be considered important, but no more so than fractals/spvp, and considerably less so (IMO – important note), than guild missions, open world zones, WvW and world bosses.

This is what I agree with. I believe raid’s should once again be a niche part of the game, the true challenging content to partake in, but I’d rather they be second to open world zones, Spvp/WvW and the general core concept GW2 has taken over the years. If raids were to become the main focus again i’d be a bit disappointed. Once again, I think we should continue to get them, perhaps very moderately but not the main focus of content.

If raids are truly “challenging content” and they are harder than high level fractals this means that a small percentage of the community will be doing them. It would be sad if most of the targeted content was for the small minority.

I am not hardcore in the slightest, but I most definitely will be doing raids. I think one of the major things that this game has over others in terms of raids is that there is no gear requirement. Just grab some exotics and maybe a few ascended trinkets and a weapon and you should be good, making it very accessible.

I am very happy that the game is getting challenging content. It has definitely needed it for a very long time. I do have one concern however. I very much enjoy open world content. I like maps like Dry Top and Silverwastes as well as the small story instances that Living World season 2 had. Now while I didn’t enjoy every aspect of these things (Like a majority of S1, some story instances, and a few other things) I did enjoy them.

With raids coming, will all future updates focus specifically on raids? I’m not much of a dungeon/raid person. I will do it and if it’s fun I may replay it a few times but once it loses its surprise or challenge I generally drop it unless I want something from there. I like exploring maps and open world events like The Breach (though they could be a bit harder). It gives GW2 a different flavor from other MMO’s. Will future content only focus on raids as their target? Meaning will we get a content update and the majority of it is a raid and we very rarely get something else? I fear this will make GW2 follow the pattern of other MMO’s.

I know this puts you guys at Anet on the spot if you attempt to answer it but I’d certainly like to know how you guys are moving forward with content and i’d argue many others would like to know as well.

What are player thoughts on this? Would you like it if all future content focused mainly on raids, open world/story instances, or both?

A no thank you on tanking.

The whole core concept of GW2 is that you don’t need a healer/tank to run in a group. Everyone keeps themselves alive and every class has tools to make sure the bad guy gets off of them when they get aggro.

The second you add a spec who’s sole purpose is to draw aggro then you ruin the whole idea of this game. Because now you and a group of players aren’t “fighting a boss”, It’s just your tank fighting while you do pew pew and stab stab from the sidelines. It also seems silly that a giant dragon or monster focuses one target and not the guy who’s shooting giant fireballs at his face. It’s boring. Yes, some people enjoy it. A majority in GW2 don’t.

People like to argue that without trinity there are no strategies in this game and it’s just stack in corner/zerk meta. What people don’t realize is that the scenario is not because there aren’t any defined roles and thus a lack of roles, but because the game isn’t punishing enough or difficult.

IndigoSundown.5419:

The proof will be in the pudding. The player-base (particularly the ever-evolving PuG meta) will determine how necessary healers are to be. The only influence Anet will have is to provide the specs to heal —which they are apparently doing -- and determine how hard the raids are. If the raid is completed better (i.e., faster) with a healer, then a healer will be deemed necessary. Also, only the best healer will do. Tune the raids really hard, and no group will be able to do them without the best healer.

Which I agree. The necessity for a healer will be determined by the player base. If we can do it without a healer then it won’t be a demand. If its easier with a healer then they may be somewhat needed but not necessary. If its impossible without a healer then they will be required.

I have faith though that the raids will be tuned so that you can run any comp. Obviously some will be deemed better than others, but I doubt it will be forced to run with a druid or something of the sorts.

The thing is, even if you DO need a healer, healing in this game is very moment-to-moment. You can have a healer, sure, but he needs to land his heals on you (because they aren’t click ons) and you have to make sure you are in sync with the healer. It’s not like WoW where the healers just sit in the back and click on portraits to heal. In this game you need to not only be closer to the healer but also aware where he is throwing down the heals, because if you roll out of the zone there goes that 1.6k hp back. There’s also the fact that every class can still heal themselves, dodging is still a thing and many of the classes have abilities that mitigate damage.

Apologies if this has been said a thousand times or its been pointed out, but I haven’t had the time to read the whole thread and wanted to share my thoughts.

I think you guys who believe that Anet is enforcing a strict trinity are reading too much into this. This is a very loose based trinity and not a strict one. Firstly, all classes (or at least a majority of them) have been able to heal their allies since launch. The issue was that the content wasn’t difficult enough that you never needed to role a very supportive build. Now that there will be, the demand for those builds will rise.

In traditional MMO’s, trinities are rigid. They don’t change. The encounters are designed to have a tank to aggro the mobs while the healers have low cooldown clickable heals. There is also the fact that other classes can’t heal themselves, so you result in a encounter where there is only one person who can heal others (or multiple people who can heal)and they can only heal and deal no damage. They don’t have any damage.

In case all of you missed this: there are no target-able heals in this game. You have to aim everything. Better yet, there are no low cooldown spells that heal for 2/3 of your health. The lowest CD heal spells don’t heal for all of your health in that one quick cast. This means that for a healing role to be viable they must actively run around healing the team, while not getting killed. Here’s another caveat to GW2 that half of you seem to be forgetting: there is weapon swapping! You can, believe it or not, swap weapons and suddenly do damage! It’s like people forget this is in the game. Just because you spec as a druid doesn’t mean all you will be doing is healing, you can actually switch to a damage weapon and fight on the front lines when everyone is relatively high health, then switch back if need be.

Plus, the fact that all classes can already heal themselves means that this “trinity” where we will be waiting for 2 hours for a healer won’t happen. Anet has told us multiple times that they don’t want that to be a part of their game. GW2 support won’t be the babysititer of the group, considering that spells will only hit 5 targets max and even then there are no reliable, sustained heals on any class. This means that the support role of GW2 will be an a character that supports the team alongside fighting them; not just healing them!

Anet is attempting to incentivise picking other builds besides damage. This is not an attempt to establish a trinity. They are not forcing you to queue for a raid as a specific role such as in other MMO’s. You can run a raid as an all damage group and still be able to keep yourselves alive. Anet are simply pushing for the “soft trinity” that they have always wanted to have, which is a good thing.

I didn’t get to participate in the beta so I just watched a live stream of it and I must say a lot of it looked very impressive.

One thing that I noticed that I feel should be fixed as soon as possible is when NPCs talk with each other during personal story steps. In the live stream I watched there were instances where some of the npcs were talking with each other but were nowhere near each other and were in fact facing away from each other. This needs to be fixed because it can be such an immersion breaker when you are immersed in the story and then all of a sudden Rox is staring at a wall while talking to Rytlock fifteen feet away. This is definitely something that can rub someone off the wrong way when playing.

Anyone else agree with this?

I’m sorry but if you have THAT much of an issue with killing a down state necro then its a l2p issue. Out of all the classes I deal with when stomping, necro is by far the easiest because all I need is invisibility, blind, or one stack of stability and he’s an easy stomp.

The class already has issues surviving in fights and half of their skills are lackluster or not nearly as good as other classes. The fact that they were always supposed to deal this much damage in the downstate but it was only realized after they fixed all the traits after 2 1/2 years shows how love-lacking they’ve been since launch.

Cogbyrn.7283:

Whenever I distance myself from the game for a bit, then come back, I marvel at how everyone always thinks their class should be able to do the thing that represents a weakness.

If you want to be able to escape any situation and not die in a fight because for some reason you can’t stomach dying, play a Thief or Warrior. Don’t play a class designed to have lower mobility and yell “But I should have mobility too!”. No, you shouldn’t. And Necros can escape off of cliffs or pull fun Spectral Walk/Flesh Wurm jukes as well, if you utility for it. “But I want other utilities! Class X gets mobility with weapon Y, and Necros don’t have mobility on their weapons!”. Then play Class X, and stop being a nuisance.

Necros don’t have as much mobility, but I don’t think that’s their problem. It’s just one of their weaknesses.

At the end of the day, if they homogenize all of the classes to be able to do everything, everyone will complain about how their class “doesn’t bring anything unique to the table anymore”. Take some stuff away to make a class unique, and they say “but I want to be able to do what class X does”.

I also marvel how some people say that instead of not making a class weak they argue to play a whole other class instead. Really solves the issue of a broken, backwards class, huh?

A class should not be “defined” by weaknesses. They should be defined by theme and play style. Just because we are supposed to play as an attrition class, and I say ‘supposed to’ because there are classes that do it better, doesn’t mean we can have no access to mobility, CC, scaling defensive skills, etc. Nor do those things take away from our identity. How in the hell is getting a blink or mobility skill taking away from our class identity and homogenizing it?

PowerBottom.5796:

Never said any of that, I also don’t wanna make it sound like Necro is the best build out there or sth. (I personally like it the most atm and I think it’s underplayed, but nothing more). Also, most of your points have a certain validity to them, I just think that you might paint the picture a bit too black.

I don’t want to come off as raging at you or trying to down play your opinion, for clarification. It’s just I can sometimes get a bit frustrated when people try to argue the class is in a good spot or above others. It isn’t. It isn’t at the level of unplayable but its never touched the “good” level. So yes, it isn’t as “black” as I’ve been trying to picture it. However the issue still stands that compared to everything else in this game the Necro synergizes least with the beautiful combat system in this game. As Nemesis says…“It’s like they made an amazing combat system and forgot to invite the Necromancer”!

That being said I still enjoy the class itself and can find it very enjoyable. Frustration stems from the fact that everything on the class seems to be downplayed by every other class in terms of traits and skills and how Anet hasn’t even attempted to address it in three years. That and the recent “revamp” was shoddily done for Necro’s in comparison to every other class.

So, sorry if I came off as a bit conceited there!

PowerBottom.5796:

Well, afaik, one of the teams winning the most (or nearly everything) atm is running a terror-necro…. can’t be that bad. ^^’

It’s atm also my favourite class/build to play and it feels pretty strong to me… but hey, what do I know, right? Cuz everyone not whining about the balance just doesn’t have the deep understanding you guys have. :P

The biggest mistake most ppl on the forum seem to make is that they have no clue what situations they should search out and what to avoid. Do I go roaming like crazy with my Necro and make the sub-par mobility come into play? – nope. Do I search out 1v1’s against classes that outsustain me? – nope. Do I still Pointguard home like in the good old days? – nope. Teamfights is where the Necro belongs IMHO. And yes, you’ll have to stay in the backline and LoS like crazy, but the boonstrip and AoE-CC and DPS is just amazing.

The necro can 1v1 for sure. The issue is team fighting and mobility. Like you’ve pointed out the necro can neither bunker nor be roamers. However, they can’t team fight. Literally if 2 or more people jump you then you’re dead. You can’t run away because we have no mobility skills, we can’t tank the damage because we don’t have scaling defensive skills and we have no easy access to stability. Why bother bringing a class that is dependent on other classes to keep it alive and can’t fulfill two roles and can’t defend itself when I can bring an ele, gaurdian, engi or any other class that fulfills those roles better, contributes to the team more, and can survive on its own.

Also, what CC? Do you mean the two low duration fears (unless you are condi, in which case it totals to about more or less 4 seconds) and the chill effect we have? Because we can’t lock down classes like engi can. The boon strip that is very easily avoidable through dodges, can only remove 5 boons on one target and has a 40 second cooldown? Yeah. Very strong team presence. Your not an asset to your team if you play condi necro you are a reliability because your team has to babysit you because you can’t do anything if anyone decides to attack you. Sure, you do nice damage if your ignored, but that is a moot point because the second you are focused your a dead man (no pun intended).

Also, a competitive team lost in a previous tournament because the enemy team every time went after the necro and fights would turn into disadvantages for them. Everyone who has played pvp for a while knows that necro’s aren’t that scary and are more often than not free kills for an organized team.

PowerBottom.5796:

I don’t see it as bad as described: I currently like how Necro plays: It’s the class that feels most like I’m playing GW1: I absolutely love Path of Corruption and Corrupt boon – so fun and skill-intensive to use (especially in teamfights, where you really have to look for stability and keep CD’s and procs like for example earths embrace in mind). I also think Terror-Necro is kinda underplayed.

Having looked at all the stuff they’ve talked about in the rdy up thingy, I think Necro (or rather the Terror-necro build) got a few direct and indirect buffs:

- Quickness is now a boon: depending on how things work out, it could be another high-impact boon like stability that you really want to get rid of and turn into slow (I guess that’s how it will work with corrupt boon and PoC).
- If I’m not mistaken, Poison will now stack in intensity: this could give the Necro the ability to deal dps a little bit faster.
- You will be able to get dhuumfire on the terror-necro build (with the 16 trait-points), or you’ll be able to get the stability – both in the soul reaping tree. That’s IMHO a pretty big buff.
- You get the 20% bleed-duration for free.
- You get the fear on downed for free
- instead of 15% recharge on deathshroud, you get staff-recharge and LF on the marks, which also frees you up to take sth. else in death magic…. not sure how good putrid defense is gonna be… or you know, just 1 less condi every 10s – pretty standard for an adept trait.

Not gonna lie though – other classes seem to have been buffed pretty heavily, but others on the other hand look kinda weird, like the Ele. Necro is somewhere in the middle I guess: I’m just glad that it looks like it’ll still be fun and skill-intensive to play. That’s for me the most important thing: balance can always be achieved by tweaking the numbers afterwards, but if they would’ve messed with PoC or sth. I would’ve lost my kitten. ^^’

See, that is where as a necro main, I’m going to have to completely disagree with you. Necro’s are and have been, since launch, in a terrible spot.

Read this post for the state of necromancer and hopefully you will at least get why necromancers are a bit peeved off at the changes. They are far from buffs/debuffs. Yes, some traits got buffs but the real issue is that they fixed absolutely nothing while conflicting traits in other lines (e.g. curses) as well as doing absolutely nothing about the issues mentioned in the post I linked.

Why is it that Engi gets a baseline of 50% more grenade damage now but necro’s still need to trait for fear to do a small amount of damage? Makes no sense to me.

Dear lord some of these comments about MM being strong and Siphoning builds being good just shows how out of the loop or new to necromancer some of you are. Okay look.

Necro’s do good damage. Their damage is fine, it isn’t some pathetic bottom-barrel wet noodle you slap enemies with. Power builds do very well in sPvP for damage as well in PvE and condition builds are okay in sPvP and do some nice damage in PvE if you are the only one using conditions. Damage for necros is not the problem. The real issue with Necro is these five things:

-Mobility
-Disengage
-Surviving focus fire/Stuns
-Stomping and Preventing being stomped
-Party support
Guess the one class that lacks in all five of these categories? You guessed it. The necromancer! Guess what we get instead? The wonderful “second health bar”- Death Shroud!

The class is just poorly built. It has no skills with mobility or disengage potential, the only one being wurm which you must cast twice to use, ensure it doesn’t die in the process, and must be in range if it is alive in order to teleport. It lacks any disengage skills (skills that apply swiftness do NOT count) that other classes have such as Ele’s Ride the Lightning or Warrior’s bull charge. We have no group wide buffs such as AoE might, reflects, stealth, swiftness, protection, etc. apart from our wells which are very situational in PvE and hardly work in PvP because no one stands in them for a long time. Which, as a result, makes us undesired in group content. To add to this we have no combo fields besides dark, which aren’t even that useful and we have no active blast or projectile finishers that we can trigger on our own and frequently.

It can’t survive focus fire from more than one person at a time because we have absolutely no skills that allow us to do so. For example, Ele can pop mist form and it doesn’t matter if a whole WvW group is attacking him he won’t take a single point of damage. Guardian’s can pop their elite skill that grants them invulnerability, Engi’s can use their invulnerability elixir, thieves can stealth, etc.

To compound this already wonderful problem, the phrase that the Devs constantly use to justify us lacking in all of these categories is our wonderful Death Shroud mechanic. Which, in of itself, is contradictory because we are locked out of ALL of our skills when using it (the only class mechanic that does this) and it doesn’t prevent us from being pummeled to death by CC’s and multiple enemies yet the devs constantly justify our lack of everything else because we have a second health bar, when it doesn’t even function like that. It’s just a damage sponge and not even a very good one at that.

Finally, two of our trait lines have ALWAYS been bad (Blood/Death magic), one of our elites is buggy as hell (Flesh Golem), and they have now just recently screwed over the curses trait line. For almost three years the Necro community has been giving feedback on how to fix this class and instead the Devs give us something we never asked for (Duuhmfire). They sometimes give us something that helps us (e.g. the stun break in DS that you can trait for now) but it is never enough to adress the core issues.

Do you see why the necro community might be a little peeved at the moment? Especially when with an expansion which generally brings broad sweeping changes that can fix classes, this is what we got, when some classes that were already in good standing got even better? That and along with the sort-of lackluster enthusiasam they had when presenting the Necro changes only to rush through it because of their excitement about the next class to talk about just rubbed a lot of us the wrong way. I know they didn’t mean it intentionally but it didn’t help the situation.

Despite the issues with the new trait lines and how some traits don’t make sense or are a complete nerf/not worth picking, I still think either Anet isn’t aware of the class problems. Specifically, two of our trait lines suck (blood and death magic) curses got nerfed with Terror being placed in an odd spot, and Spite/Soul reaping are pretty okay.

There have already been suggestions to the fixes for the trait lines (Terror damage being baseline, adding 1 non condi related GM trait, etc).

However I really hope that Anet realizes that our real problem isn’t damage we can do or are sub-par trait lines (though that definitely needs some fixing, especially considering what ranger/mesmer/engi got) but our lack of mobility, blast finishers/combo fields, disengage, and defensive options. I recommend everyone watch Nemesis’ explanation on it, it is very in-depth and highlights the problems well. Please Anet, if you haven’t watched this video, please take a pen and paper and write down notes because he hits the nail on the head about the problem with this class.

Gibson.4036:

It would probably help if they didn’t keep finding ways to lock content we already had access to. They should have learned from the first trait rework.

It’s okay to add new things and give us a hunt to get them. But don’t lock out old things with much more difficult gating and don’t replace them and make us earn their replacement all over again.

Yes, that is annoying. Correct me if i’m wrong, but I didn’t see anything in the article that tells us that characters who are grandfathered in will have to gain all of their skills back. So…I don’t see an issue with old characters. If it is in there then feel free to quote and correct me for being wrong.

Yes, newer characters most likely will have to do this after HoT. But we don’t even know how quickly we can unlock skills or traits through this system. For all we know it could be really easy. Or it could go hand-in-hand with the NPE, for which you don’t even unlock utilities until later now but by the time you do you will have plenty to choose from. From what I understood from the article, every time you level up or do skill points (which will be renamed) you get progress towards new traits/skills. Considering how abundant they are in the game, it shouldn’t be hard at all.

Funny how people for the longest of times have been complaining that they want to progress their characters in a horizontal, meaningful way. Now Anet gives them a system to do so, by playing your character and unlocking new abilities and traits, and people call it grinding and content locking.

Anyways, this probably won’t limit diversity. If anything it will make choices more important because those three lines you pick have a drastic effect on how your build will turn out. Meaning you don’t want to just randomly dip 2-3 points in every trait line. I know for some this is a limit on diversity but to compensate we are getting more meaningful choices and to be truthful, we aren’t being gutted in terms of variety of builds because we can still pick three trait lines. It would be gutted if we were forced to only pick one. Most builds only use three trait lines anyway, so there is no major change. People are just overreacting. Just wait until it comes out or you get to play around with it, then voice your concerns.

In case anyone is confused, you MUST pick 3 trait lines when you use your class. HOWEVER you are not locked into those three trait lines. You can swap any of them whenever you want out of combat.

I’m not really seeing how specializations are going to limit build diversity.

They’ve stated that traits that effected skills (e.g. wells on necro being targeted instead of on the character) will just be automatically transferred onto the skills that the traits effect, so i’m positive this will also apply to the other classes. Meaning, you are essentially getting buffed with the option to choose more meaningful traits rather than “Oh man this makes my good skill slightly better”.

I can see the concern on how now you are forced to pick three lines and you can’t spend the odd point or so in another of those three, but how is that limiting diversity? If anything it makes it more diverse because now you have to be meaningful about which trait lines you pick. A majority of classes usually go into the same trait lines for every build but now if you are limited you won’t be able to hop between them. Yes, this limits where you are free to spend your points, but in no way does it limit diversity. If anything it promotes careful planning and creativity.

Best bet though? Wait until it comes out. Then judge.

Colin did state in an interview that they will be looking at the base professions and re balancing them for HoT.

Jump to 4:45 for his specific answer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sG5oUKqbIVM

Whether or not that means they get new traits, revamped skills, or just become more powerful in general is all up to Anet. So in all honestly all we can do is just have faith and wait.

Well, like I said it depends on how defensive you are talking about. If you go purely defenisve and bring no offensive traits/amulet to a fight, then yes your damage should take a significant drop. In which case, if you are against a pure glass cannon build your hope of winning is through attrition and keeping them pinned. I don’t expect a pure bunker build to be able to 1v1 a glass cannon thief evenly, especially if the thief plays well. I DO expect him to live a long time, so much to the point that he either gets help from his teammates or the thief can just never kill him.

I also do see your point a bit and it does happen in pvp games where defensive builds just get destroyed. Then again, skill is also a factor. I’ve been able to beat glass cannon p/d thief on my tank bunker necro because I timed my dodges/fears well and managed to kite him a bit (I also wasn’t purely defensive as well so that helped). The opposite also happened to me, where I went a glass cannon thief and because I didn’t play as well I got stomped by a bunker guardian.

There is also the issues that, like I said previously, some defensive trait lines for some classes are just awful and are no where near as good as other classes. Hopefully HoT addresses the lack-luster trait lines for each class to make them worthwhile.

Apolo.5942:

More in the lines of a paradigm shift. Many people have stated that Healing power is a worthless stats, and that is true, but mostly because all defense is next to useless in this game, save some very key very 1 shot things like aegis or blocking, but skills that should be viable like shouts and meditations dont really work for its intended porpuse, they dont heal you, nowhere near the damage you could do or increase if you just went full offensive. Vitality is another stat many consider useless and favor yet more offense over it.
There is a clear direction here, where you should forgo defense in favor of offense, and my personal distaste for it aside, it is clear this kind of meta has not resonated with the player population at large, given the sorry state(participation) of pvp in an mmo that is a direct successor to a pvp focused game.

You kind of got it right. See, healing power and vitality actually are valuable because they can very easily increase regeneration on your class and keep you up much more often. Don’t believe me? Take a look at the current d/d cele ele and shoutbow cele warrior. They both have very strong regeneration and the healing power helps. Now, the reason why this works so well is because their trait lines are very well made. When you spec into water for ele you gain vitality and healing power along with a bunch of minor and major traits that you can use to keep yourself and your team alive. The same applies to warrior.

Now, stacking healing power/vitality just by itself and not speccing with any offensive power (such as a purely defensive amulet and traits) doesn’t work on all classes because some classes defensive lines are just absolute trash and have terrible minor/major traits that grant little regeneration or defensive capability -cough necro cough-. This makes it so that yes, while they are a walking sponge, they can’t contest in fights very well and as such during a fight bring little to no damage and can simply be ignored. You can find the same thing in others games like LoL where building straight tank doesn’t work unless you also have cc/damage.

As such i’m kind of confused at what you were discontent with. You state that the meta favors offensive builds more than defensive and forgoes regeneration and vitality, yet there are a few very powerful builds that use those to their advantage. You also state that vitality and healing power reduce your offensive capability (which should be the case) and this is… disfavored in pvp, when that isn’t really the case? Elaborate a little more and i’ll better understand =P

Edit: I get what you are discontent with, that the meta seems to favor more offensive abilities. For some classes, this is true, but for a few this isn’t the same so much. Hopefully the changes in HoT will add more builds to be viably competitive.

Nike.2631:

The simple fact you used the verb ‘beat’ should tell you that’s not a spear-like anything. You don’t beat with spears- you ‘thrust’ or ‘stab’. That’s a piece of in-game footage of using a staff to beat/clobber/whack something.

The only actual “spear” shown in relation to HoT trailers was during the animation where the corrupted Sylvari impales an enemy and that animation is the thing Colin was talking about where the artists went a little wild and showed something not in game just like there is concept art that shows characters riding dolyaks.

Believe me, I understood it wasn’t a spear when he began to swing it the wrong way, haha. However, there definitely were people who were convinced 100% that spears were coming…

Anyway, my point was more on elaborating how we don’t really know anything yet. Specifically on the whole paraphrase that seems to be emphasized from Collin and other interviews where they say “I can switch between playing a druid or ranger”, implying that there is something that druids lose access to when switching from a ranger, otherwise you would just stay a druid all the time. However, we don’t know and should just wait IMO.

Nike.2631:

There’s a bit of difference between animation and in-game footage .

How do you know which is which? In the reveal trailer, it all looked like gameplay footage. Yes, obviously characters themselves can’t push open doors and what-not but I’m pretty sure the clip where Rytlock beats a mordrem to death with a spear-like weapon wasn’t just “animation” but an actual skill (most likely an auto attack for staffs or a bundle he picked up). I don’t see why they would make an animation for a auto-attack chain just for the sole use of a trailer when it could be an actual skill. It’s the same thing with the anniversery trailer where all of the footage of characters is actual in-game footage, just manipulated in a cinematic way.

Also I feel like the reason why they showed the druid with a pet is because maybe they felt that if there was no ranger pet then players would not be able to distinguish what class it was. Or, maybe the druid doesn’t change the class mechanic at all and instead adds new skills and removes others. We will see.

SyZ.7920:

Let’s just re-examine where I’m coming from:

There are only FIVE races in this game, and I can’t name all 5. I don’t know how many classes there are, and the ones I do know, I don’t know what they do. (What the heck does an Engineer do?)

There’s no desire to learn about them, because there’s no reason to. All grouping via a dungeon ends up with somebody tanking while I sit in the back hitting 2 and 5. People say that WoW conditioned players to just heal, dps, or tank, how is this any different?

I was a Gladiator in that game. I had to know stats, how to enchant, how to gem, how to itemize, what skills every class did, how to properly time abilities – none of that is required here.

I had actual goals laid out – you log in, you do your dailies that actually lead to gear, and that helps you in a larger raid with a large number of people, with a clear goal and progression. Dailies in this game are: log in, do 3 things, get some karma and gold.

My guild has about 100 people, and nobody is ever on. And the only reason I’m in it was I had nobody to actually talk to at 80 because there is no grouping in this game so where exactly would I find people? A guild, in my mind, is a group of players who have the same goals in mind (endgame content) and want to work together. Here, it’s just people with a tag. There’s no 10, 15, 25, 40 man content, and everything I can do with my guild I can just do in LFG or solo. What’s the point?

For an mmo, there seems to be very little structure. It’s like, instead of having 10 or 25 maximum players for content, and having lots of it, there’s just random world bosses that any number of people can do, and then 5 man dungeons. So I’m supposed to go to a timer website, then every 15 minutes go to the next world boss with 300 people and get a chest of yellow items that I sell for 20-25s on the trading post and just gather more ascended materials I don’t need and can’t sell?

And that’s it? Just do that?

Why is there no desire to learn classes? How do you not know what each class more or less does when there are descriptions right when you pick them at character select? If you don’t know what they do, why don’t you find out?

To me it seems like two things:
1. You are too lazy to actually learn about the game and anything that seems to complicated you ignore. I mean, you can do all that stuff in WoW but you can’t be bothered to remember race names or play/learn other classes?
2. You need to have something laid out for you. That is not this game. You do whatever you want. You need to figure out what you want. If you don’t know, then think for a bit. If you can’t figure it out then the game isn’t for you.

Why does everything have to have a reason to do it? If you enjoy running fractals and dungeons, then just do it for the fun of it or the enjoyment of it.

If you want goals to work towards then work towards map completion or ranking up in spvp or whatever you fancy.

I’m not quite sure what you are lost about. Do you not know what you can do at 80 or do you need something to tell you what to do at 80? You seem to just list things that sound troublesome to learn/understand and just label it off as “why bother”. If you need something to tell you what to do then I don’t think you should stick around long.

Also there are no stats for spvp. You start and finish with equal gear stats as everyone else in spvp, so I don’t know why you are saying your gear sucks. If you mean for WvW, then yeah you might want to go for ascended.

Crash.5362:

1- More diversity and new weaponsa attracts new players that otherwise would be disappointed at the lack of a kind of weapon expected to be there.
2- Opens for new builds and combos, more diversity and depth for playstyle.
3- It was advertised before that they exist (In trailers recently) Its hard not to expect that they’ll be there when the very game advertise them.
4- A lot of people were looking forward to it, it’d be new content added in a cheap way since the skins of spears are already in there, seems like a no-brainer to add them.

I still don’t think you understand the argument lordkrall was trying to make.

Let’s put it this way. To make a whole new weapon type you need a couple of things. You first, need artists to make every single model of spears/pole-arms/whatever (let’s assume they make 50 models).

You need game designers to come up with skills for that weapon for each class that gets that weapon, making sure they aren’t overpowered or a rehash of a skill the class already has (e.g. not another gap closer for a warrior). You need to come up with new traits in a trait line that aren’t broken or useless. Then you need to get someone to draw the portraits for each skill for each profession, animate/code those skills into the game, then bug test them to see if they work properly.

All of that costs time and money because the people who are making it aren’t working for free. So lordkrall’s question is this: Why should Anet spend their resources (developing time and money) into making a whole new weapon type and all the stuff that comes with it, when they can just add a new weapon to an existing class like how they are doing with specilizations.

As for your previous points….
1. You can get “more diversity” by adding new skills to existing weapon sets or giving classes new existing weapon sets, so that point is kind of invalid.
2. Repeat of your previous point, see above.
3. I don’t recall any advertising at all for any new weapons types in any recent trailers.
4. People can also be looking forward to other weapons for their classes. The argument that “it’s a common weapon in MMO’s” is pretty lame because that doesn’t justify pouring all the resources into it. The same concept can be applied to gear treadmills- they are common in every MMO, so why don’t we have one? Especially considering that if they were to add another weapon, they need to make it different from the rest of the weapons for every class.

Just playing devil’s advocate.

The map itself (Silverwastes) is balanced in terms of reward. IF you defeat all five champions you get three gauranteed rares, plus not including the champ bags you get and all of the other minor bags you got from events. Then on the down time you can quickly run around the map and open chests. It’s still very profitable.

The problem is not that the map is not balanced properly; it’s that people expect raining loot. People want loot to drop from the sky like its nothing and not actually have to work that hard for it. They want 40+ champ bags by the end of the event and want to have a few rares which is what the chest farm was doing. Now that it is actually balanced as a farming location in comparison to the rest of the game, it became “gg Anet nerfing farming again they want us to buy gems”.

I think people misunderstand in that when you have one spot that is so much better in terms of reward (gold in this case) than others there are a couple of problems. Firstly, it inflates the economy because gold is worth nothing now so eventually prices rise. Secondly it basically forces anyone who wants to obtain anything to do that specific spot/farm because every other place sucks. Lastly, it hurts new players who will not have access or know about this farm anytime soon and thus will be gated out of the economy due to rising prices.

TheFool.4589:

Read original post of mine.
They can use FB and the in game mailing system to promote it.

The problem with your whole Idea, OP, is that you assume that:

A) Creating content is simplistic and has no real consequences on the game and
B) The whole community is a sunshine-rainbow filled place that will all agree on one thing and
C) We, as players, know what is best for the game.

And that’s the problem. We don’t know whats best for the game. It’s what Vayne and Tobias is trying to tell you. Players don’t think hard enough about changes they would make to a game. Let’s assume this happened and we made a community vote about balancing. Take the classic itteration of game balance: Player A says “Why don’t we just buff all the other classes so class X isn’t OP?” We all nod are heads and go “Yeah, lets do that!”

The results of that is that EVERYTHING in the game becomes much easier to do and now Anet would have to re-design everything because people would then complain that the game is “so easy” (probably the same people who came up with the balancing idea). Not only that, but it would require a ton of work to redesign all the classes and even more work to redesign the entire game. And with all that work they are doing, they are using revenue for it (because they don’t do their jobs for free) where that revenue could have gone into new content or something different all because players don’t think deep enough about decisions.

That’s if your idea even assumes we all agree on the same thing. I, for one, certainly don’t want the game to be more similar to WoW. Does that make me a minority, or does that make you a minority? Some people want uber-hardcore dungeons and raids. I don’t, because I find dungeons fun only one time and then every other time after it is essentially the same thing. Once again, does that make me a minority or the people who want dungeons? The community will have conflict over every issue.

TL;DR- It doesn’t work. It’s a nice idea in a fantasy but it doesn’t work. Never has, never will.

So what does this post have anything to do with the new TP?

I very much enjoyed this episode. I really liked the first instance where you dabble in Krytan politics and you get to overhear opinions and gossip and get to see Canach and his rebellious self.

I very much enjoyed the end too.

SPOILERS:

The dragon fight was well done and tense, especially since the room was kinda small. I didn’t die on it, but it wasn’t as a cake-roll like episode 3. The vision at the end made me eager to see what the next episode will tell us about it.

Overall I thought it was awesome and well done.

Cliff.8679:

No, I’m pretty sure most people were paying attention. People aren’t taking issue with the hunt to find them not matching up with Rytlock’s dialogue. We’re taking issue with just how lame the hunt itself was. Trying to assign such plot importance to something that involves hopping to a couple waypoints, possibly doing an event you’ve likely already done multiple times before, and then looting a pile of rubble is just a huge buzzkill. This crown is supposed to be the missing piece in an enormously important plot hook to the world of Tyria involving the Foefire, Ascalon, Sohothin and Magdaer. And that’s how they resolve it. With no buildup aside from Rytlock’s “oh, by the way, I found out about this broken crown,” and a 10-15 minute romp through areas we’ve already explored doing events we’ve already done time and time again.

From both a storytelling and a gameplay perspective, it was completely and utterly unsatisfying in every possible way.

Which is what i’m saying, people were expecting some dramatic and long-epic quest to find these things, which usually isn’t the case with forgotten relics (especially in the real world). Yes, you could argue that they are important for the Foefire in breaking the curse and thus deserve such special attention, but SPOILER: he didn’t break the curse meaning that he did something wrong, so how important really is the crown?

I will agree, however, the way they dropped it on us was pretty lame. It kind of came out of nowhere when Rytlock was telling us to get the other pieces with no build up what so ever and this is in part due to bad storytelling. However I think the gameplay mechanics were fine for it, Rytlock even specifically states that the fragments are meant to look nothing special and as such people disregarded them so there was no need for this journey or quest of some sorts, anti-climatic as it sounds. I do think, however, they shouldn’t have put a star on our map for us to find it. I think they should have given us a large, broad area to search and that would have been much better.

The problem was that the shards were centered around events and many people did it on launch day where everyone was zerging everything in a mad rush.

Out of the three I had to get two of them weren’t completed and I did the events and it actually felt meaningful and like I was hunting down pieces. Then on another character every event was finished so I just looted them and would WP.

I can bet a week or two from now, if you replay this story and get the pieces, it will be much slower and more enjoyable. Also, for those saying that it wasn’t some EPIC quest or something, you obviously weren’t paying attention to Rytlock. They were all fragmented and scattered when a couple of people broke it. That doesn’t immediately mean that each one is in a secret cave behind some guardian, it just means that they ended up buried or lost somewhere (like how we found them).

I mean, in all honesty, how likely would it be if someone found a shard piece and immediately said “A shard of the ancient crown of Ascalon! I must hide it behind 20 different traps and a boss”!"

They probably just saw a broken fragment of a crown and dismissed it as garbage. Hence why we find them buried or in rubble since they were considered junk.

Funny how I find it the opposite. I find that by adding the events/steps of the story into the Open World it makes it even more immersive. Rather than fighting a bunch of plant monsters by myself while every other hero and NPC in the world doesn’t seem to care much, I’m fighting off the swarms of Mordrem with other heroes who have also rallied together to fight off this sudden attack. If I had to go into an instance in every one of these i’d say that would be less immersive.

Yes, it is very clustered and hectic but that is because it is patch day and everyone doesn’t know what to do and where to go. Give it a day or two and it will be less messy.

Rhaegar.1203:

Zelkovan.2630:

(…)although no details other than the existence of a sixth Elder Dragon were ever made clear. (…)

I’d say that leaves out the possibility of the name being written in the Jotun/Dwarven texts.

I interpret that quote as more like they could or could not have had the name, but simply the name and nothing more (what the dragon looked like, where it slept, what its corruption looked like, etc). Though yes, one thing it implies is that they didn’t have a name, either. So where is the name our characters keep talking about coming from?

We, the community, knew about the name a long time ago from a skill description but the characters in the game world don’t have a source for its name. Unless Marjory makes the excuse that she decided to name the dragon Mordremoth, another scape-goat for this situation.

According to the wiki:

“Mordremoth’s existence did not become apparent to most Tyrians until early 1327 AE, when it awoke. It was, however, mentioned in ancient dwarven texts and jotun stalea, although no details other than the existence of a sixth Elder Dragon were ever made clear. Additionally, the Inquest had been conducting experiments structured around the presumption of six Elder Dragons for a while, indicating they had some prior knowledge of it.”

This doesn’t describe if the dwarves specifically knew his name, however it was never mentioned that they did know his name. So either the dwarves did know the name and the Priory has records of it but no one decided to give a kitten until now, or the dev’s just did a little nose-dive and will soon make lore up for it with the former example.

See OP the reason why the devs don’t post here is exactly because of the second reply to your thread. Even though he is implying he wants the devs to interact with the community that one sentence is laced with hostility and aggressiveness that if the devs were to post here it wouldn’t go down well.

Devs do post, you can go into the Lore section or Living World section and you will see the Devs posting on calm and well constructed threads that aren’t lashing out at their staff members. However the reason why they don’t post here often is because of the terrible negativity some groups bring on the forum. People who come into the forums with negative views on content tend to argue with the devs rather than work with them. I remember when Super Adventure Box part 2 released and Josh Foreman was constantly on the forums adressing people’s issues with the “super-difficult and frustrating” content. He was constantly telling people how to improve on it or what they could do to make it better, that he would fix some specific issues, etc. Except people were lashing out at him so bad that in literally every post he made on the huge thread you can see him start trying not to break down from anger and frustration.

Then his final post on that thread was that he was no longer told to interact with the forum. That’s why the Devs don’t comment on hot button topics. It’s not because they are selfish- it’s because the community will jump on them like rabid skritt regardless of what they say.

tl;dr: We are the reason the Devs can’t show us nice things.