Guild Wars 2

This is disheartening. I’ve been here since the BWEs, and put up with a lot of crud because the core game is so solid. But I honestly don’t understand why you think people are going to buy your next expansion after HoT was already content light and now we’ve been shown that shipping the new xpack is a higher priority than shipping one of the few things that were pretty heavily implied to be coming with HoT (and before that, were promised to us in 2013 without any hint of being put behind an xpack paywall).

I want to be happy, play your game, and shut up and give you my money when you ask for it.

You’re making that extremely difficult.

There are about 4 outfits I would buy right this minute if we could hide the shoulders. I imagine a lot of other players who buy outfits are in the same boat. C’mon ANet, it can’t take that much dev time and you’ll get a lot of sales and goodwill out of adding this functionality.

Overall, I like most of the changes I saw this patch. Someone really needs to comment on this, though: https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/42yt29/coalescience_of_ruin_how_does_the_nerf_actually/

Preliminary testing is showing that the “can’t trigger more than every .5 seconds” limit to Coalescence of Ruin and Scorched Earth is being shared between players.

I think most people will agree that those skills needed to be toned down and tweaked so that we were playing the game and not manipulating the hitbox mechanics, but this change is anti-cooperation and counter intuitive if it was intentional. It’s crippling for people who use these skills in exactly the same way that the old 25 stack condition cap was crippling for condition damage players.

So please, if it’s a bugged implementation, we could use a comment about that and notes about a fix. If it was intended, please pass on that this goes way beyond the scope of toning down the skills’ strength for individual players.

At this point I feel like they should either put it on a static cooldown or completely change how it works. Heal to unlock better healing is… weird in a game that’s about taking an active role in combat, especially on a base class that doesn’t have amazing healing options. So why not make it function like Shroud and mirror the functionality of the Glyphs?

• AF doesn’t degenerate out of combat.
• In normal form, AF only generates from attacking, at a good rate, not from healing. If AF must degenerate out of combat, this needs to be at a very good rate.
• Healing allies in CA form generates AF based on the amount healed, dealing damage does not. Healing allies at full health generates a portion (half?) of the normal AF.

There. DPS druids who drop into CA for the cleanse/daze/grace of the land will be able to get back in there easily but won’t be able to support long. Healing druids need to participate in the fight to get up AF instead of throwing out a bit of regen or running Troll Unguent/SoR, and can stay in there longer to keep allies alive when they need the healing. Healing allies who need it most rewards you with the ability to stay in CA longer so you can spot heal people who are slightly injured later, rewarding good triage tactics. CA/normal druid mirrors the functionality of glyphs, where you’re encouraged to be ‘selfish’ out of CA and ‘selfless’ in CA.

Like Stompy said. It’d be like trying to predict the most useful Fractal classes based solely around a few groups running Uncategorized for one weekend at this point.

Bezagron.7352:

A question for thoses wanting a paasive 25% MS trait.

Why are Rune of the Traveller & Rune of Speed not build options for fulfilling this requirement?

The expense. I don’t like or feel like it’s fair to have to maintain one set of world exploration armor with runes dedicated to a passive speed boost, plus another set of armor (6 bag slots and x amount of gold) for running dungeons or serious content, when everyone else can swap out one trait or utility skill to transition between the two (or one trait line, at worst). It’s the least convenient possible way to get a convenience bonus.

Bacon.1835:

The argument for this has always been: “chronomancer got it so I want it too”

“Chronomancer got it, giving every class besides guardian the ability to passively and permanently increase move speed with a single trait or utility skill, so guardians should get that too because it’s basically a QoL feature at this point.”

Heck, I would have taken it if they’d tweaked the values on Retreat! so it could be perma’d with Pure of Voice, that would still be a trait and a skill, a worse tax than anyone else. But we couldn’t get that. And our mobile kiting Elite Spec couldn’t get a 25% passive or utility either.

I have 100% world complete on my guardian, he’s been my main since release, and I’m tired of lagging behind everyone who feels like slotting a single signet/trait for open world stuff. I’m swapping to Herald when HoT launches.

Shade Madrigal.1729:

I like the idea of letting people choose between ranked/unranked and then conquest/stronghold/both, with a small (actually, maybe not so small- what’s the harm?) bonus for those who are willing to roll the dice for the sake of all of our queue’s.

There’s a thought. Give a bonus to reward track completion if you join the combined queue, and let the combined queue mingle with the conquest/stronghold only queues to supplement both. You get faster match times and rewarded for supporting the players who only want to do one or the other, and I’m sure there will be enough players interested in both to keep the one-mode only players afloat.

So you’re putting out a new game mode (that sounds really cool!) that will require totally unique strategies and encourage completely novel builds suited for the overarching strat (very interesting!)… and you aren’t planning on featuring it in a separate queue?

We also haven’t heard any serious news about build templates that might make this slightly less of an awful idea.

Why did it seem like a good thought to put two completely dissonant game-modes – that are bound to attract people who like one and not the other – into the same queue? Do you just not want people to take PvP seriously? Making people churn through stuff they hate to get to stuff they want to do is really not how GW2 was supposed to operate, and I fail to see the value-add in mashing them up together. Making a guild-group that specializes in Stronghold get sent through the ringer on a bunch of conquest maps and having no real sense of their rating is just not good if you want players to take the mode seriously.

If you want to cross-promote it for folks who like one but haven’t tried the other, why not add some mode-specific dailies? Or one-time achievements? Mashing them into the same queue is a terrible long-term idea for both modes.

This isn’t a lack of quality control. It is terrible, lazy design.

Any claims of bugs and QR issues are damage control, and short of player outcry that earns them some serious bad press in the wider gaming news, there won’t be any more than token tweaks that don’t alter the core functionality of this “feature patch”.

Vayne.8563:

Zyrhan.3180:

Great. This is even worse.

So an experienced player trying to clear maps on a new alt has to blindly run around looking for POIs and Vistas until they unlock the ability to make them visible on the map?

And a new player can run into vistas and PoIs and activate them without any indication of what they are, what they mean, why they aren’t on the map, and whether that’s something they’re supposed to be doing until they unlock the ability to make them visible on the map?

Perfect. So it inconveniences veterans and confuses newbies. A+.

A new player wouldn’t necessarily expect them to be on the map. They’d see something, interact with it, it would pop up, they’d say cool.

For experienced players by the time you’re high enough level to finish the zone, they’re unlocked anyway. I played a new character for half an hour and they were unlocked. It took me an hour to unlock skill points though.

This new tutorial scheme assumes that new players need to have their hand held and gently shown every single feature of the game, preferably at a pace of about one or two features per level. Having game features that you can interact with and actually get LESS explanation and information now than they did when they at least appeared on the zone map is absolutely a failure of this (bad) design paradigm.

Regardless of when you can unlock them in practice, it’s a completely ridiculous burden to put on experienced players trying to level an alt. It’s a pointless inconvenience that serves no purpose and actively hampers players trying to play the game, no matter how little it does so. Even if they absolutely must keep this new gated unlock system, there is absolutely no good reason for vistas and PoIs to not be account-wide unlocks once you get to them once.

Great. This is even worse.

So an experienced player trying to clear maps on a new alt has to blindly run around looking for POIs and Vistas until they unlock the ability to make them visible on the map?

And a new player can run into vistas and PoIs and activate them without any indication of what they are, what they mean, why they aren’t on the map, and whether that’s something they’re supposed to be doing until they unlock the ability to make them visible on the map?

Perfect. So it inconveniences veterans and confuses newbies. A+.

This is a major disappointment for an otherwise welcome change.

Why did this need to be done? If the problem is townclothes meshes clipping with regular armor, I think the same argument applies when it was cited in City of Heroes; regular armor clips with itself already. Limiting freedom of appearance and removing functionality seem like a really unnecessary thing to do for aesthetic edge-cases that might look bad.

And even if it is a more serious issue than that, why can’t we just have a “Style” tab in the Wardrobe that’s full of all of our purchased Town Clothes, that can only be used with each other, and a “Universal” tab for stuff like headpieces and such that can be used with either combat or non-combat armor? Is turning them into tonics that don’t function at all like the original items really the only way this could be implemented?

deSade.9437:

Go Evon!!!!!!! GO ABADDON!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Because why vote for the lesser of two evils?

darkace.8925:

Regarding “external balance”. In open-world PvE everything dies quickly enough for this not to be an issue. In dungeons and PvP, you have control over your party composition. If you wouldn’t run a dungeon with two cc-spec’d engineers or two banner-spec’d warriors, why would you run one with two condition-spec’d thieves?

If you take too many of any one aspect of combat you’re going to hit a point of diminishing returns. The exception to this is direct damage. And while it’s true that direct damage isn’t capped, it is mitigated by measures conditional damage bypasses altogether.

And if parties consisting of nothing but characters spec’d for maximum direct damage, the glass cannons, are blasting their way through PvE content, then that’s a “difficulty-adjustment” issue and not a “mechanics of conditions” issue, in my opinion.

The second banner warrior swaps his Grandmaster trait out and can either go healing shouts (a highly compatible, complimentary support spec) or pick up some spare damage, while still having doubled-up banners which aren’t useless on their own. I’ve never really run into a situation where we’ve had too much CC besides straight up brawl boss fights that are immune to CC, in which case they should probably swap to some higher damage kits/weapons. In either case, they don’t really need to swap out their gear entirely, and they don’t completely lose their effectiveness, and they’re competing with two similarly specialized builds.

Compare that to a conditionmancer. He’s put a bunch of trait points into maximizing his bleed stacks, along with a bunch of condition damage to maximize the damage that each of his conditions does. He can hit 25 bleeds without much trouble. Then my dual-dagger elementalist PuGs with him. While he’s stacking up his bleeds and getting ready to do epidemic, I run through my damage rotation, which includes a trip through Earth for Ring of Earth and Churning Earth. They do okay damage, and the extra 9(!!) bleeds are nice when I’m solo, but I’m not condition damage specced. My mostly DD character’s totally incidental bleeds have swiped half the damage potential that the conditionmancer built all of his gear around, and that’s just one prof out of 4 in the pug that can toss around bleeds or a burn here and there without even trying to. And the only thing the conditionmancer can do is respec (which is hard since we can’t save/load specs in this game, and requires swapping out all that condition damage gear) or just sit back and accept it. That’s ridiculous.

Again, ask yourself how much people would consider it balanced if one DD-focused player, or just 3-4 players who didn’t bother building for Power/Pre/Malice at all could make a mob constantly immune to further direct damage. That’s what condition players are up against.

darkace.8925:

Sigdur.4025:

Well jeez, we can’t have all of these nifty Quaggan backpacks AND a battle-system that allows for balanced condition-build groups. Clearly it’s us spoiled try-hards that are overworking these poor developers.

A condition-build group is, by it’s very nature, NOT balanced. Ergo, a balanced condition-build group is an impossibility. If you want a balanced group, you should probably stay away from overloading any one particular aspect of combat: be it conditions, support, crowd control, or anything else.

It appears you don’t at all understand the concept of a balanced party. So you’re making it very difficult to respond to your post with anything other than the rolling of my eyes. And you should probably tone down the snarkiness, at least until you have something of an understanding of the subject on which you’re speaking.

Internal balance =/= external balance, which is what the poster is complaining about and what you’re conflating here.

Condition damage is supposed to be a viable damage style for a player to specialize into. Therefore, it should be internally balanced with direct damage builds. That is to say, for every point of “character power” (be that traits, gear, or skills) you invest, you get roughly the same amount of killing power by investing it into either condition damage or power. For most classes, in most cases, this is more or less true to my knowledge (barring unique circumstances like objects which are immune to conditions).

It’s external balance where this falls apart, and that’s what people are complaining about. Most of the really viable condition builds rely on stacking bleeds as an example, and some are capable of hitting the condition cap on their own, or getting the majority of the way to the cap. That’s okay if you’re solo (to an extent), but this isn’t a solo game. You will regularly be fighting mobs with multiple people, and many of them will be throwing out incidental conditions, let alone the occasional person who is specced for condition damage. It’s an unfair burden to put on condition damage players, because the extra damage over time isn’t “free”; they intentionally devoted part of their character’s overall strength to doing damage over time rather than damage up front. The only condition that makes sense with a global cap is Vulnerability, since that functions as a force multiplier for all incoming damage, and thus gets better the more people you have attacking a monster.

I think most people would consider it ridiculous if mobs became immune to direct damage if they took a certain amount of direct damage from attacks in a given window of time, and if this window of immunity was so low that a direct-damage focused player could nearly hit that threshold solo and constantly bumped into it with 1 or more players around, including condition damage builds that do some direct damage on their attacks. That is precisely the situation that condition damage specs are faced with, however.

Until they address the cap, they won’t be able to make condition damage externally balanced against direct damage, which consigns it to being a generally inferior spec outside of fairly niche circumstances (that is, solo/small group, dungeons with no other dedicated condition builds, and similar PvP groups).

So, for some reason this mod-created feedback thread didn’t include some important context, so I’m responding to the dev quote from this thread:

“Each guild mission type becomes available through an upgrade that is researched in the guild tech tree. The first one is Guild Bounties, which does require Art of War level 5.”

This is ridiculous. My guild is lucky enough to have a lot of influence stockpiled, which is great, since we’re a small, active RP guild, and don’t accumulate influence all that quickly. But.

Why does the entry level mission require Art of War 5?
Why does this new PvE content require Art of War at all?

My guild has a number of people who would like to WvW, but don’t because culling is still awful to the point where the majority of us consider it an unplayable amount of not-fun. As such, we haven’t bothered buying up Art of War, which up until today was useless for anything beyond WvW. From the sound of it, a lot of guilds are in our situation.

So, ANet, not only did you not let us know that these missions would require this extremely niche, expensive unlock nearly a month ago when we first learned about it, you guys didn’t bother to mention it until the update was less than a week away; thereby ensuring that even a PvE-focused guild with thousands of influence or gold to spare wouldn’t even be able to buy their way up to Art of War 5 in time for launch (rank 5 alone takes 1 week, and the patch goes live in 5 days). Even then, you announced it through a random forum post. So the only people who can start doing PvE Bounties when it goes live are heavy WvW guilds, and “spend everything everywhere” megaguilds.

That… really does not make sense.

The implementation feels like another “here’s a cool thing… you can farm up to get some day!” bait-and-switch in your game that was supposed to be about optional, cosmetic grinds that don’t gate content, and the lack of clear communication has a lot to do with that. I don’t like the implementation, but if you would have at least been open and clear about it and your reasons for doing it back when you announced Guild Missions, then at least everyone could have been on the same page and smaller guilds could have spent the past month saving and preparing for this big new feature (and really, it’s the biggest new feature in the update, from the notes we’ve gotten), instead of having to go through another imbroglio where people scouring the forums and reddit have to play telephone and guessing games to figure out what the kitten is going on, and why the kitten you’re doing it.

This is ridiculous. My guild has a ton of influence stockpiled, luckily enough, but just… seriously?

Why does the ENTRY LEVEL Guild Mission need Art of War 5?

Why does PvE content need Art of War at all?

I really wish you guys would stop taking good ideas and implementing them in completely nonsensical ways.

I’d suggest grabbing a devourer or a spider. They tend to be more like little mobile turrets than typical MMO pets.

That said, if you want a medium armor bow user, thief is also an option. Shortbow is a powerful weapon set for them, and you still have the aesthetic of the dodgy, highly-mobile medium armor class to play with.

Please revert this change. The massive amount of utility that being able to preview out-of-armor-class gear provided far outweighs a few minor graphical glitches. There are a lot of things more in need of polish than this feature.

It’s 2012, I’m kind of tired of having to window out and scour the internet just to figure out what something in my inventory or that I’m about to purchase actually looks like. Forcing me to do so more often is not moving in the right direction.

It was interesting. I liked how there were several clear, distinct phases, most of which presented a pretty serious challenge, and didn’t amount to just beating up on a giant wall of hit points for three hours.

That said, it was too long, and got tedious. Especially since people playing from the start already had to clear out the giant cave full of invisible karka before the Ancient even spawned, and then had to go through TWO more long, painful slogs of killing dozens of karka in the middle of the event. One stage of defeating reinforcements with half the duration would have been more than enough in the context of the event.

That said, I would definitely like to see some world event bosses that range all over the map and have multiple distinct phases. If they’re spread out and not one-time events too, the issues of lag and culling should partly solve themselves, as well.

(continued)

Fractals are interesting. Frankly, I kind of wish that the difficulty ramped up and we were allowed to go back to the hub in between every Fractal, and that progress wasn’t saved between runs, so that there would be less player stratification – everyone starts from square one every time and can either jump off the ride and start over or push up into the higher tiers as they like.

Which brings us finally to… Ascended gear. It’s terrible, and every day seems to bring information about how it’s actually worse than I feared it would be. As said, there’s a 200+ page thread mostly consisting of how it’s terrible from a conceptual and PR standpoint. I’m exceedingly disappointed that they exist, that they depend on random drops, and that they require a massive amount of grind for what is going to ultimately amount to a fairly significant stat boost. I’m upset and seriously reconsidering my committment to this game both because it seems like a clear reversal of the past 7 years of dev comments about the nature of the game, and because endless vertical progression – which you have now opened the door for in players’ minds, no matter what you say – is lazy design and introduces the looming spectre of power creep.

You guys are so close to hitting the mark, and it has pained me all weekend to watch what feels so much like missing that mark on your end, and setting such a perilous precedent for the future.

Really? So the 200+ page Ascended Item Thread became a “discussion” thread that wasn’t considered an official feedback thread, then the 15+ page Feedback thread got eaten, and now this sticky got put up on the evening at the tail end of the event on a forum that will probably be going away with said event? Wow. Just… wow.

Well, on to the feedback.

I felt there was a lot of potential in these events, but not a lot of payoff, and that this fun gap was almost entirely due to how they were implemented. The scavenger hunts and karka attacks not only didn’t play to your strengths this weekend, they seemed to intentionally highlight the weaknesses of the game’s engine and design.

A giant zerg event in the game’s busiest hub city, and a huge multi-hour boss fight were frankly terrible ideas given the state of the engine and its dev-admitted issues with player culling. I know I fought a skrittload of karka this weekend, but I’ll be kittened if I actually SAW more than 20% of them. Not being able to see what you’re fighting is annoying. Having to deal with a slideshow on a decent computer for 3 hours when the things that you are fighting are easily able to take out 25-40% of your HP with one attack, and ALSO have several knockdowns that can only be avoided if you dodge while they wind it up – and not being able to see it when they do? It was frustrating. And ultimately… boring.

Which is a shame, because I thought there were a lot of interesting, engaging things done with how we fought the Ancient Karka, and would like to see more things like it in the future. But on that note, in addition to the engine issues, let’s also try to hammer home something that seems to be a design issue: ANet, long =/= challenging. This fight fell into the same hole that a lot of your boss fights seem to, wherein bosses just have too much HP for what they actually do. If the stages were 30% shorter – ESPECIALLY the TWO “defeat reinforcements” stages – this fight, and several others, would have been a lot more engaging. As it was, once you understood the rules of engagement, it just became a slog.

That’s enough on the karka invasions. My other big problem was the bugginess of the investigation missions. This bothered me for 2 reasons: First, you guys know full well that events wherein you talk to an NPC, then they become hostile, then you have to kill them bug out all the time. It’s been a major problem since launch. So why did you go ahead and build the investigation around it? Technically it was unsound.

Second, and in my opinion, worse – stylistically it fell flat. The idea of uncovering a conspiracy by the Consortium was a cool one, but the medium chosen for it screamed… NOT that. I know you guys like to encourage open world co-op as a major driving principle of gameplay, but instances are not inherently bad things that must be relegated to dungeons and personal story. When you’re trying to tell a more intimate story about intrigue and mystery, a semi-hidden instance portal is a much better tool for the job. It both encourages the sort of one-on-one (or one-on-five in a group) encounters that makes more sense from a narrative perspective of tracking down and interrogating suspicious persons, and vanishing away the people who find the entrance makes the challenge of discovering the NPC an actual, y’know, challenge. It really loses something to go to the Hanto Trading Post and then just stand there until you see the pile of 20 people spamming AoEs load in, and then just go “Oh, yeah. Guess he’s there. Mystery solved.”

(continued)

Bluebird.1890:

Everyone can be mad at the companies all they want, but the fact of the matter is that the market shifts to where the money is if the company is competent.

So, if the money is in appeasing the demographic that WoW players inhabit, then the games will continue to be more like WoW.

The only 100% sure fire way to ensure that this stops is simple: Stop giving companies your money.

Seriously. It is quite literally the only way it will happen.

Here’s a blast from the past. 2007, to be exact.

Jeff Strain, Co-Founder of ANet: How to Create a Successful MMO

Even more than the Manifesto, this is the document that cemented my enthusiasm for ArenaNet. This was from the perspective of an MMO dev talking to other devs and hopefuls, and it outlines precisely why I always used to like ANet so much from a philosophical perspective; I’d read their dev statements, and constantly think, these guys get it. Here’s a few particularly relevant quotes.

“It can be a daunting proposition to willfully walk away from what seems to be a “sure thing” in game design, but lack of differentiation is probably the number one reason that MMOs fail, so we all need to leave the comfort zone and start innovating, or risk creating yet another “me too” MMO."

“According to James Phinney, lead designer of StarCraft and Guild Wars, every great game starts with one question: “What do I want to play next?”. This may seem an obvious statement, but his point is that designers are often asked to make a game that is specifically designed to be “better” than a successful game from a competitor, rather than making a game that is exciting and new. How many designers have been asked to make a “GTA killer”, or a “Guitar Hero killer”, or a “WoW killer”? I personally have heard numerous designers and producers working on unreleased MMO projects describe their game in these terms: “It’s like WoW, but…” I just shake my head when I hear this, because the team that is best poised to deliver a successful game that is an evolution of WoW is… well, the WoW team. They’ve got their thing, and they’re good at it. Let’s all carve out our own thing, and be the best at it. Truly great games are made by passionate teams who are on fire with the notion of changing the industry. If you are aiming at a competitor rather than aiming to make something fresh and innovative, you’ve lost."

“As a general rule, be nice to your players! With each generation of MMOs, players become less tolerant of being forced to spend time resting after battles to restore health, onerous consequences for dying, the length of time required to level up and reach the mid-game, and high failure rates for activities such as crafting. Early MMOs could be “meaner” because there were fewer choices, but today players have options, so be nice to them."

“Don’t design an MMO around the assumption that players are a “type” of gamer. I often hear developers discussing whether an individual is a roleplayer, or a PvP player, or a solo player. Our belief is that while you can certainly find players who exclusively fall into one category, most players dabble in everything. It is tempting to believe that because a player is playing an MMO, and because good MMOs are social games, every player must therefore like to play with other players in a group. Our experience with Guild Wars is that this is an erroneous and dangerous assumption. On any given day, a player may want to play with his guild, or he may want to play with his best friend, or he may want to play alone. The fact that he is playing in a large communal environment is not a predictor of how he wants to play. We should be striving to make games that let you play how you want to play right now, and offer you the flexibility to progress with any combination of players you like."

I could go on, but really, just read the article.

Overfrosty.1675:

Also http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bxszx60ZwGw

Everyone arguing in favor of a gear treadmill as a matter of course should really watch this.

http://extra-credits.net/episodes/power-creep/ Just… watch.

Power creep is not good, nor is it inherently necessary, and causes additional problems that must themselves be patched up. Just because WoW did it and WoW is successful doesn’t mean that every game needs it to be successful. It doesn’t even mean that every MMO needs it to be successful. GW1 didn’t need it.

Endless vertical progression is almost always a result of lazy design, appealing to our base desire to see bigger numbers instead of focusing resources on making the gameplay itself more engaging. A game where I can do 10,000 damage every time I hit a mob – who itself has hundreds of thousands of HP, and takes as long to kill as any other mob in GW2 – is not inherently better than GW2 because the numbers are bigger. Making the numbers bigger does absolutely nothing for the experience besides coddling the WoW players who don’t know how to function without bigger numbers to grind, and you know what? They’re going to grind the bigger numbers and go back to WoW. Because no game does that style of gameplay as well as WoW.

Trying to compete with WoW on WoW’s terms is the one-sentence summation of the generation of MMO wreckage that started strong and then quickly petered out over this past decade, as most spectacularly demonstrated by SWTOR. It’s a lost cause to pursue this type of player, and has earned them a ton of well-deserved bad press and distrust from the long-term fans of the game.

Ganzo.5079:

Well guys i dont think tha lag is a major problem, remeber that currently with this event they are running the invitational event… So even if this patch is unpopular, for now we have much population then before in game, and keep in mind that some grinder is returned to grind in the new shiny dungeon. So we cant attack Anet for the event lag, is a series of unfortunate events…

But for the ascendent gear project, is another story.

You can’t really say “well it was a bunch of circumstances that were totally beyond anyone’s ability to fathom or predict!” and shrug it off.

ANet chose to make the initial invasion event only happen in one city, which is already the most crowded city for a variety of reasons.

ANet chose to introduce their new gear grind dungeon on the heels of the initial invasion, and to stick it in LA, which was already crowded.

ANet chose to have their invitational weekend on top of their new patch and big invitational event.

ANet chose to do all of these things while apparently making no additional considerations for how much extra strain this would put on their server resources.

It was a perfect storm of lag, but it was one they chose to create.

Venn.8931:

Now that the betrayal and rage is mostly out of my system, I’m beginning to shift my focus on pity towards the developers that have been there since the start of Anet’s design philosophy. This massive change in vision has made many of them look like hypocrites and traitors. You can’t blame them for not addressing us, because they knew their actions were going to be met with boos and egg tosses before the first word of the blogpost was even written.

Frankly, I wonder how much of this is executive meddling by NCSoft/Nexon. In that vein, I had the sudden realization yesterday that it seems very poignant that the Ascended gear is dropping from the FotM dungeon that’s being obnoxiously hawked to everyone passing through LA by a guy named Blingg. Subtle Take That to whoever decided on this new direction, perhaps?

Right, so apparently the 200 page Ascended Item thread full of negative feedback is now just a discussion thread. That’s handy.

Here’s my feedback:

Ascended gear as a new tier and agony/infusion set two different, horrible precedents. We already don’t have enough resources being devoted to the horizontal progression at 80 (where are the new armor sets for the new dungeon? Why couldn’t the new looking exotic weapons be purchased with fractal tokens? Where are the cosmetic armor/weapons in the empty, empty store for us to throw money at?), splitting further developer resources up with vertical progression is ridiculous and a reversal of the promises we’ve gotten over the past 5 years about the nature of this game. And all it accomplishes is to introduce the specter of power creep (this is an important video and explains exactly why bigger numbers =/= good design for the WoW players who take gear progression as a necessity beyond debate).

Agony/infusion is mechanically almost identical to dread/radiance from lotro, and raises the immediate specter of infusion-gated content and gear checks; we can see all the bosses in the new dungeon without Ascended items with luck and patience, but the jury is still out on whether we can acquire all of the new weapon skins, which would just be the first step down a dark road. LotRO already made that mistake. It was costly for their bottom line and a huge blow to the goodwill of their fanbase, and eventually, they realized that, and tried to take it back, well after the damage was done.

Specific to the Lost Shores weekend event:

- The initial invasion was cool, but an awful lagfest. You guys should really have made LA spawn more overflows with lower caps or something, because as it was it was nearly unplayable.

- The investigation missions bugging out was unfortunate. Was it really necessary to have NPCs that you need to talk to and then beat up in circumstances that were going to be bum-rushed by dozens of players, considering how frequently and completely this has bugged out skill points of a similar nature for the past three months? Moreover, why couldn’t they be instanced like personal story quests or mini dungeons? I know you guys like to foster group play, but it really kills the feeling of an “investigation” when you just need to go to the general area and look for the 20 players standing around spamming turrets and AoEs.

- The consortium chests having a guaranteed skin drop is a step in the right direction. But seriously, just put those types of skins into the gem store as direct buy options. Or just put BoP only versions available for direct purchase alongside the chests that have a chance of dropping trade-able skins. Many of us would love to purchase functional skins for our characters, but think gambling is stupid. I have no interest in touching the things and will be looking up the skins online and buying any skins I actually want through the trading post.

- The karka are cool, and Levvi giving them the scientific name “leviathanis carcinus” was a nice touch. The first thing I thought when I saw them was that they were a cousin of the leviathan mobs from Factions. The loot bags in dungeons are also a nice touch.

If these only drop over the difficulty scale where agony resistance is necessary, or they’re BoP, I give up. I wanted some of this stuff for my elementalist, but he isn’t my main. I’m not going to have him in ascended gear any time soon, if ever. And several of my friends refuse to chase ascended gear on principle, and I can’t blame them. I’ll be joining in on that if you’re now gating stuff behind an agony check.

Because really, at that point, there’s nothing stopping you from gating better/newer ascended drops in a similar way, and there’s the gear treadmill you promised us we wouldn’t be getting.

I’m inclined to agree. It’s a weird setup to have such a selfish stat that contributes nothing to the group completing content in such a cooperation-centric game. And I say this as someone who dungeons in defensive greens with Pirate Runes and feel I contribute a lot to a dungeon. It’s still sort of a hard idea to defend from a philosophical perspective.

Uh, no. Horizontal progression at 80 and new content TO DO is what people want. Vertical progression is what ANet specifically and loudly proclaimed their game wasn’t about. You don’t need bigger numbers on your gear (while the enemy numbers get bigger to compensate) to make content fun and engaging. That’s just power creep: http://extra-credits.net/episodes/power-creep/

You know what I was hoping for when they announced unique rewards that can only be obtained in the new area and a new dungeon? I wanted a new armor set. I wanted them to finally put in the Tribal armor set and a new set of exotic heavy/medium armor and weapons so I could get a cool new appearance option for some of my characters that still don’t have just the “right” look. I wanted a new legendary weapon to consider grinding. That is the content I want at 80.

I do not want the “endgame” of GW2 to become an arrow comparison engine like most other MMOs. Especially when they specifically said it wouldn’t be.

So… Yeah. I remain highly displeased, now that the patch is out. I bought a copy of the game for myself, 2 character slots, and another copy for a friend, who herself bought at least two slots. That’s the last actual money I’m spending in the game, and I would be very unsurprised if it was the last money she spent as well, since she’s considerably more upset about this than I am.

I bought it, so I’m going to enjoy what I paid for, but if ANet’s continued support for the original game they envisioned is going to end, then so is my continued support for them. I already didn’t bother sending out an invite-a-friend to another friend of mine who was a huge GW1 fan and probably would have gotten the game if he’d gotten the chance to try it for free this weekend.

Will there be tiers of gear after Ascended if this one doesn’t “bridge the gap” the way you like? Will the level cap rise beyond 80 at any point in the game’s forseeable future? Do you intend to have dungeons that require a certain amount of infusion to complete the basic content?

These are the questions that need answer. Because answering yes to any of those means we are, in fact, getting a gear treadmill. Just quibbling over the details of its implementation.

Ashes.6418:

Let’s avoid Slippery Slope fallacies. They add one new tier of armour, that does not automatically mean that they are going to add even more in the future.

No, the fact that they have started the stat inflation and have committed to continuing to do so in that post is what indicates they’re going to keep doing it.

“As we release more new end game content in the future, you’ll see more Infusions and Ascended item types being added to the game. Eventually, you’ll be able to kit yourself out with a full set of Ascended gear and high end Infusions to help give you the edge in end game content.”

Catrenna.4298:

All of you are suffering from social equilibrium. If everyone were praising the change, so would you.

I wrote my post before reading the thread specifically to avoid that sort of thing from influencing my personal reaction to this news.

I’ve been accused of being a fanboy more than once these past few months when it comes to defending ANet. This is a tipping point for me. I still love the game, I still have some hope that they won’t manage to screw this up (and there are a few – a FEW – ways they can make this work), but the trust feels broken. Now I look at that screenshot of the Ascended ring compared to the Exotic and don’t think “Well, it’s only 2-3 stat points, it shouldn’t be THAT bad”. I think “Well well, I see they didn’t include a slotted infusion in their big announcement post. Wouldn’t it be just so clever to put most of the big stat boosts in the infusions they conveniently haven’t shown us, so they can divide the impact of player outrage?”

That sort of cynicism isn’t how I used to look at ANet. It’s how I looked at Bioware in SWTOR, and EA Mythic in Warhammer, and how I started looking at Turbine after what they did in MoM. I’m really, genuinely disappointed to be thinking about ANet like that.

Please, ANet.

Please don’t continue down this road.

I know, you’re thinking, “A new tier of gear with only marginally better stats, plus one new statistic that only pertains to the highest level PvE content! It’s progression for those that want it without unbalancing the rest of the game!”

It looks great on paper. And it’s a horrible mechanic. It is going to be all too easy to fall into the trap of building dungeons that deal more and more agony, and then flat agony up front as soon as you walk through the door. It makes sense. To progress, you just need more ascended gear! You don’t need better stats, you just need more infusions! If you don’t want to do it, then don’t! Everyone wins.

It’s been done before. It ruined dungeons and raiding for me when LotRO’s Mines of Moria expansion tried it with Radiance, which works almost exactly the same way the blog describes infused armor. Everyone did all of their grinding to get their one set of radiance gear with stats that poorly supported several builds, and then needed to upgrade it down the line for functionally identical gear that had the same – or worse! or at least less-intelligently-allocated – stats as what they were wearing, but more radiance, and thus it was necessary to survive in the newest dungeon tier. It was miserable, it made bringing alts to high-end dungeons an unholy pain (and outright impossible without some instance grinding that no one wanted to do once they got their radiance), and it wreaked havoc on PvE build variety.

And then they removed it: http://www.lotro.com/gameinfo/devdiaries/1043-update-2-radiance-removal-developer-diary

Please don’t go down the same path with this game. I really like it too much to watch it make the same mistakes that ruined LotRO for me.

I was really hoping we’d be seeing the Tribal/‘Masquerade’ set come out with Halloween.

ANet, please make it available in PvE, for my poor norn elementalist who doesn’t want to wear heavy cloth coats that totally obscure all of his tattoos?

Josh Foreman.8250:

Well, ideally we will continue tweaking our camera until this is not a problem. Throughout the development of GW2 I was very purposefully pushing the boundaries of spatial layout and mechanics, because I believe you can’t know what your limits are until you pass them. One of the themes I tried to explore in a couple places was claustrophobia. (Specifically in Troll End, which I consider to be my worst JP) I always play as the largest male Norn in these areas while I’m building and testing them.

I’m happy to hear this, and totally agree about Troll’s End. I haven’t gotten to do the majority of the jumping puzzles, but that one sticks out as really poor design, almost entirely because of the camera. It’s the worst one I’ve done, and the only one I dislike more is the Vizier’s Tower, and that one almost entirely because there’s finicky terrain AND a punishing jump AFTER you get the achievement for the puzzle but BEFORE you can get the skill point, vista, or lore. For people who want to 100% maps but dislike jumping puzzles as a rule, it adds insult to injury.

That said, I managed the Mad King’s Tower after two hours of mashing my head against it and syncing my movements to a song I picked out, which helped a lot in memorizing the jumps to get past the first chest and earn some breathing room. I loved it and it made me think back to old-school platformers, and even my friend who hates puzzles with a passion wasn’t especially bothered by it since it wasn’t required for the Emissary title. I really hope we do see more optional challenging stuff in these events, especially if ANet is going to keep offering such a wide variety of holiday stuff to do.

People might want to pack and use CC on a powerful ability that thieves can use every 20-40 seconds, EasymodeX? Surely ANet hates warriors!

I mean, CC only exists for landing hundred blades, and for no other useful purpose, after all. :P

Well, this is disappointing. Smells like Nexon/NCSoft meddling to me; but then, I’m getting kind of tired of trying to attribute the uninspired grind and half-finished systems from launch to publisher pressure.

Guess it’s a good thing I don’t really want any of these skins so I won’t be going insane trying to farm them, but I’m sad that I seem to keep saying that about a distressingly large portion of the game’s big dangling carrots.

Yeah, personally I think sanctuary is kind of a junk skill in its current implementation. Haven’t bothered using it in ages. I swapped to Wall of Reflection and never looked back.

It takes a bit more attention on your teammates’ part, but its uptime puts Sanctuary to shame and it can let you mitigate (and deal) tons of damage – especially in dungeons. I never take WoR off my bar.

It’s a pretty ridiculous change, I have to admit. Especially given how much AoE retaliation you can still grant with a hammer and some light fields. Couldn’t they have just nerfed the symbol duration and put more damage up front, or nerf the retailiation boon duration?

Between this and nerfing Signet of Judgment AND making it an exception to the 25% retaliation duration trait (because apparently 3 second retal is okay, but 3.75 is so broken that it warranted an unlabeled complication to the trait system), I’m really a lot less confident in the live team’s balancing abilities…

+5% damage with [weapon] traits are brutally uninteresting. I hate their existence on principle. They’re exactly the sort of “filler” specialization that made Blizzard finally ditch their talent trees and that was supposedly part of the underlying decision to go with the trait lines we have today. ANet has said that warriors are basically the one class who are more or less where they want to be, and I personally believe part of that is because they have a bunch of viable builds and very few boring, minor passive upgrade traits.

If those +5% damage traits aren’t glorified placeholders that will be replaced with something actually viable and interesting in the relatively near future, then I’m going to be extremely disappointed in ANet.

It’s stupid. Tooltips are already not informative enough in this game. Don’t put in specific exceptions to trait benefits on skills that should clearly be receiving the benefit from the trait in question.

Seriously? A 3 second retaliation boon is okay, but a 4.25 second one is so overpowered that we need to specifically prevent a trait that should apply from working, thus hampering the clarity and intuitiveness of the trait system? Over a 1.25 second difference?

I really do not understand the phantasm changes.

I haven’t done a ton of structured play on my Mesmer, but I wasn’t under the impression that the phantasm build was overpoweringly strong at this point. Even if it was, I sure as heck don’t see how a phantasm focused build would be overpowered in PvE.

So why in the world is the cooldown being increased?

In PvP, I’ll still have them up for the start of every fight, and shouldn’t have a major change in maintaining 2-3 phantasm uptime with pistol and greatsword. In champion fights of sufficient length, I’ll have the same ability to keep up a pair of phantasms and a cycling clone in many fights

Increasing the cooldown, to me, only seems to serve as a nerf to our general PvE ability against multiple normal mobs, and I don’t know how anyone could view mesmers as overpowered in that situation right now. Are we just not supposed to use phantasm traits unless we’re doing dungeons or PvP? Is that the intention? Because I’m going to keep my phantasm setup for general PvE usage, but it feels a lot like ANet doesn’t actually want me to play that way.

Disclaimer: I play on an old 4:3 monitor and have no issues with the camera as far as FoV goes. (getting stuck on terrain, especially during jumping puzzles though, that’s another matter….) I have no need for an FoV slider and no desire to use one.

It’s still stupid not to include it. I have friends who get headaches and irritation from playing the game for long stretches on a widescreen monitor, and while I’m glad improvements to the camera are coming, it still doesn’t sound like enough. And as others have said, the fact that it’s possible to brute force a workaround – either by distorting the client window or paying out the nose for a more extreme monitor setup – means that refusing to implement such an improvement on principle is needlessly doing harm to a chunk of the player base.

I love the heck out of my ranger right now, who just hit 22. It’s fun and mobile and I’m dodging everywhere and flipping out like a ninja with fun melee AoEs and all sorts of combo fields and finishers to play with.

I’m running sword/dagger and axe/axe with Flame Trap and Healing Spring most notably. I haven’t found myself missing the range of a bow or really missing the speed on a warhorn (though I do use the speed boost signet). I mostly autoattack on my 33 dual dagger elementalist… both of them mostly need to use lots of buttons in tough/big fights.

Personally, I feel like my ranger needs to press half as many buttons as my elementalist in sticky situations, but each press is twice as effective. I definitely don’t feel bored on either.

Weekly? I think daily at this point is warranted.

The tendency for events and skill points to bug out has become increasingly obvious and fun-destroying the further we get out from the hotfixes and associated resets during the game’s launch. It’s seriously a problem, running through Gendarren Fields or Lornar’s Pass and running by 3 bugged events out of 4, or not being able to complete a zone because a skill point is bugged out AGAIN.

We get it’s not an elegant, permanent solution and not what ANet would like. But we really need a band-aid right now.

Ragnar Dragonfyre.1806:

The game was never designed, nor intended to be balanced in this manner. This would require a massive co-ordinated effort between all the class designers to re-balance the game.

Simply put, it’s not going to happen. At least not in this game.

However, let me tell you… in past MMO’s where this was possible, everyone just wore plate armor. Everyone. It was silly and trivialized the need for any other armor type.

I agree it would require major revamping of the game, but in fairness… other MMOs didn’t have dodging, nor was dodging given the primacy of mitigation it gets in GW2. It would depend on the bonuses, but personally, if lighter armor made it possible to dodge more often or effectively? I’d wear light or medium on every character. Maybe heavy on my ranger since I like using sword/dagger on him, and that combo suffers from having tons of baked in evasion while also rooting you during the auto attack animation.

Outside of the required time to implement it, the idea has merit because of how different GW2’s approach to damage mitigation is.