Guild Wars 2

I used to love gw2. It took me 3 months to realize that the classes and skills systems are weak and way behind gw1.
the core activity of an mmo is fighting. I judge it based on 3 factors:
- the variety and flexibility of classes/roles system.
- the skill management complexity and variety.
- the combat UI and how customizable it is.
Despite some nice stuff added in gw2, In all those 3 points gw1 wins hands down.
I regret dearly the devs didn’t keep gw1 designs on those matters, as for me it makes or breaks a game.

it seems to me with better technological means at their hands they didn’t want to redo what gw1 was. the reason? maybe in order to compete against other mainstream mmo, such as wow, and get more people in.
dumbing down good design for masses is the first step of failure.

1) very well written story, well integrated in pve and reflecting your progress
It is really a shame of what story and its integration had became in gw2.
2) vast number of skills, orginal and fun way to acquire them
too standard approach of acquiring skills, and too few to offer complexity.
3) more flexible UI, especially regarding skills
too strict UI regarding skills in gw2.
4) original classes and more complex skill management (=good!)
poor number of viable builds in gw2, with weak skill management possibilities.
5) no gear grinding for stats at level cap, and no stupid stats
ascended, magic find etc.
6) fun, open, and truly competitive pvp
zerg stomping www, pay 2 play tournaments.

to me, gw2 missed the mark. it tries too many things without a global coherence nor relations between each of its elements. some of its elements are poor and lacking depth, while others offer just a grinding experience.
while technologically inferior, gw1 is way more coherent and immerse you more in its lore. it is simply fun.

grind and RNG are the fabulous solutions they found to stop ppl from leaving. well sorry bud, that achieved the contrary.

for me, none. I want major design changes in www and pve. they aint coming with yet another event aimed at rack money from gem sales.

dimgl and the blunder that is story. i loved so much gw1 story: the maps and environments, the mobs and quests all was a background to a fantastic overarching story, your story. in gw2 it is merely treated as an instanced side quest, completely disjointed from each map. how horrendous.
Instead of integrating fully in the pve, taking advantage of dynamic event system, it a simple background side quest that has 0 influence in pve, 0 influence into progressing.
WWW feels exactly the same, instead of integrating it with pve elements, like ressources, mobs etc, it just feels an instance in another world totally independant of pve.
their design choices sum up to butchery. they butchered story, pve, www into steaks and served that in distinct indigest meals.
instead of trying to correct this major design fault, they’re trying to bring interest back in pve with events. no, no that won’t get me back to your game, you failed to understand your mistakes.

alas i’ll have to agree. I made up my mind that this game was not a dignified successor to gw1. dubious design choices and bordeline stupid balancing, and a focus on pumping out stupid events instead of fixing the metagame, pushed me out of the door.

there’s an atmosphere to gw1 that gw2 havnt caught up with by miles.
I enjoyed thoroughly the story in gw1 prophecies. from a falling ascalon, to uncovering the white mantle schemes, to finally ascending, it was astounishing story telling and progression that blended story and pve.
gw2 story is cut from pve, its little instances per map, feels like side quests.
the consequence when you reach 80, there’s absolutely no point to those end zones as they feel so disjointed from story.
why they didn’t put the story as persistent in pve, and subject to dynamic events states, is beyond my understanding.
in parallel a stupid focus on vertical progression on a single location damaged the game in enormous proportions.
the result is now dead population on many servers, both on pve and www side.
this game is dead whatever events or contents they produce.
they failed to understand that players makes or break mmos.
I mourn the idea of what was guidwars.

Like every mmo, the main reasons of slow game death is a mix of bad classes balancing, not quick reaction to some annoying bugs, and lack of involvement of community in their patches. It’s a bit strange that the communication between the devs and community is almost nearing zero, since this game depends on the community interest to get money.
my proposed solutions:
- setup a test server to gather feedback and catch breaking bugs before going live (jumping bug anyone).
-start weekly QA that respond to all questions without taboo, so the community can feel implicated in the future of this game.
-have constant implication of class designers in their forums. that infuriates alot of people when their class is nerfed, bugs not fixed, issues not acknowledged etc.
-question their long term design decisions and involve community on that process. this is the most important part: they must be able to adapt a core feature (www, pve, etc) to bring players together.

Last remark: it seems that they’re going the monthly event route to keep players in the game. I don’t think that’s a valid long term strategy and a response to increasingly empty zones, servers, and disheartened community.
This short term low vision strategy of pumping out events and ignoring the valid pleas of the community solely made me leave the game.

To be honest I’m a bit disappointed by the state of WWW.
This portion of game is what I envisioned my end game, and it is simply not providing fun.
This comes to several factors, one of which is population imbalance: playing in a dead server, means absolutely no chance to have any impact.

But ultimately I feel there is dire lack of PVE /WWW interaction.
Take darkfall game, despite its many shortcomings, I feel it reflected more guild wars spirit than WWW could ever bring. The loss of gear on death provided spice, but most importantly, player activities contributed actively to the objectives.
Let me take an example: in guild wars 2, all castles, towers, and assets are pre-built. There is no full destruction, or any building from scratch.
Why gathering and crafting disciplines are not used fully in WWW to build castles/towers at predetermined spots, build siege engines, repair walls etc with actual resources?
The fact that gw2 decided to isolate WWW from the rest of PVE is the main mistake.
No incentive to go on pve world, and at the end WWW feels stale, not dynamic enough, and limits the kind of gameplay to only combat, where it could have been much more.
I don’t know if ArenaNet wished this, but it is clearly not satisfying.

dont hijack the thread please, it was made for joking about the nerfs. theres plenty of other thread where you can argue.

Halloween special patch:

- added a chance to get guardian costume in the black lion chest
- the guardian costume comes with the original skills

Brutaly that wasn’t directed to anyone in particular but those that feel ok whenever nerfs don’t affect their build.
If i remember well you were not a proponent of the GS.
A little question: how do you make greatsword work with the last SoW nerf?
Oh and one last thing: abstain from call others ignorants, that just puts you in the elitistic/egoistical group you pretend to not belong to.

wait they touch the hammer. the same people telling you everything is fine in their world (the crithammer world) will feel the same as many people feel currently for their build.

RoseRIP may I bring to your attention that there are other classes that have a way easier manner of getting perma- swiftness than swapping to a weapon + using 2 skills of 60 seconds CD?
To me this is not a valid reason to nerf this core shout.

my 2 cents:
-SoW cd increase equalled to a huge drop of damage. adding +10% damage doesn’t bring it back to original value. you can call that buff, I call it a useless attempt at compensation.
-renewed focus: being able to move is nice, but how does it make better than endure pain? shorter cd, no activation time,ability to not only move but also attack, how is that comparable?
- Save yourselves: this shout was giving buffs to many builds: might based builds, retaliation builds, protection builds etc, or simply 10 second of swiftness. Was it overpowered? hardly because of its long CD.
I ask you a honest question, if they did touch the hammer, for example by putting longer cd on mighty blow, you would still applaud?
Finally, I want to add something: Everyone here has a right to state their reaction to the continuous nerfs this class has suffered, wether to defend the nerfs or protest, as long as it doesn’t involve flaming of others. Because both people care about this class.

for some reason it started playing for me.
I don’t know if it is due to a computer restart, but it looks like it.

xmas patch:
- blocked access to the Mists, guardians were not supposed to pvp
- +1% damage to SoW to compensate (we listen to community!)

3s vs 5s duration, cd difference, ability to attack vs not. any day anyone would prefer endure pain to this so called “elite” skill.

Edelweiss.9815:

SY! was way too strong for bunker builds with super boon duration. It’s still an ok ability, just not something EVERY bunker is going to pick.

The +10% to SoW damage is kind of… lame, though. It does feel like a “throw them something so they don’t cry as hard” type of buff.

so according to you, it is ok to nerf by 50% a core ability in order to nerf a very specific niche, good for nothing else, build among dozens other?
It is totally unreasonable. But it seems the devs in charge of guardian balancing think like that, seeing that the previous nerf affected all symbol builds, just to squash a retaliation build (and failed).
With this reasoning the class is already dead, no need to wait more incoming nerfs.

bone thrown +10% damage for SOW. rejoice you got your symbold damage nerfed by -100% and now it’s back at -90%.
Maybe in 10 months we’ll see a +10% increase?

indeed it’s a bit funny. whats the point of running around while getting beaten on your back like a kittenroach?

I expect mighty blow hammer nerf. that will teach them for having a viable offensive weapon!

that 10% increase in damage was so condescending, not only it doesn’t compensate for the DPS loss incurred by longer CD, but it is a blatant bone thrown at us to accept even more nerfs.

nerf nerf nerf. every other classes get fixes and buffs, and we get nerfs. This is getting highly irritating.
Oh but it’s pvp only! it’s like saying: you’re guardian? go back to dungeons.

Battle music is supposed to be 3+ mobs, according to some people post.
I really wish I’d know what’s wrong with my playlist as it doesn’t get played at all in game…

a gold/skillpoint estimation is what I’d like to know, if you were to buy everything.

truly I wouldn’t see a sane person with money buying keys to get most of time crap from the chest. but then the world is full of insane people, rich or not..

could it be that the rates are adjusted along the average price? mind boggling conspiracy

(continued) or if you want to do things faster: create norn alts, there is very close easy skillpoint to get at the worm location. get lvl 2 + skillpoint, rince repeat 70 times for 350 lodestones.

Tweek.3190:

bantapoo.1093:

ouch! lightning hammer cost even more than volcanus..
The biggest issue after gold, is skill points as I drained around 300 skillpoints from all of my characters to craft volcanus.
Im thinking of a strategy to get skillpoints: create new character, get it to lvl 3, buy crystal, delete character, rince repeat..70 times lol…

Uhm, the mystic forge vendor items are all soulbound not account bound.

they are but, but the recipe result isn’t.
just give a lvl 3 alt enough money to buy 5 elonian wine, and the other ingredients. and you get 5 lodestone that you can bank
recipe: 2 xxx core + 1 crystal + 1 wine + 1 dust.
so for a level 3 alt that means 10 xxx cores + 5 crystals + 5 wine + 5 dust = 5 xxx lodestones.

so this is a version of crithammer using a GS. basically what I use, except I go 10 on Virtues to get 20% cd reduction on Consecrations, which covers 2 of our best utilities: the fire aoe, and the projectile wall

I can’t make any playlist play in game.
Followed tutorial exactly yet, it still plays the normal music on main menu…
Please help!

ouch! lightning hammer cost even more than volcanus..
The biggest issue after gold, is skill points as I drained around 300 skillpoints from all of my characters to craft volcanus.
Im thinking of a strategy to get skillpoints: create new character, get it to lvl 3, buy crystal, delete character, rince repeat..70 times lol…

any luck with the conjured hammer (lightning hammer) recipe?

those cores and lodestones are too rare drop to even bother farming them. in one hour of DE farming in cursed shore anyone can make a minimum of 2 gold with mf>100 gear.

Harbinger.8637:

Volcanus is expensive.

Liquid Flame= 10g
100 Mytic Coins= ~4g
250 Molten Lodestones= 155g…

and you forget the 100 destroyer lodestones..
I estimate its around 200G, less if you buy cores instead of lodestones. but then you need around 300 skill points..
It’s truly a legendary effort for me as I play only 4 hours a day.
The good news is I checked that the recipe of vial and the vial itself are account bound, so you can use your alt if they have cooking
the bad news is its hard to farm molten and destroyer cores. I tried going to mount maelstrom to farm those destroyers but after 2 hours getting nothing I decided to stop.
Embers rarely spawn at cursed shore, and it seems the fire mobs in fireheart rise are not high level enough to drop those..
so basically I do a couple of CoF quick runs, and the rest of my time I farm DE at cursed shore for money.
life is tough!

It would be amazing if the frost bow shoots frost arrows…

if its so minor why is it I can see them camping penitent on cursed shore every kitten day?

the reason why it’s not advisable to give event completion to low levels is basically saying to all botters: camp cursed shore more, you can level to 80 easy.
currently there’s 2 ways to gain levels fast, legit way.
Pre-40:
- identify bottleneck events in some maps (kessex hill/harathi hinterland etc) and farm them
- explore each map to get the skill challenge and waypoints only
post 40:
maxout crafting disciplines to gain good chunks of exp.

question: are gift of baelfire / vial of liquid flame / volcanus soulbound or bound on acquire?

Also i took a look at current prices, I need a minimum of 160 gold and 330 skill points to craft it..OUCH

stupid question: can destroyer and molten cores/lodestones drop off regular mobs? and where?

Maisen be kind just tell the recipe man
edit: looking at the sword rune, could it be that the 4th element is a simple superior sigil of fire?

Fender have you tried: scroll + coin + quicksilver vial + ori blades?

a personal take on gift of the incenerator: I highly doubt it can be used for another weapon but the legendary. it’s like saying gift of sunrise can be used for other weapons, which I doubt.
It is highly possible that it is using yellow mats like destroyer/molten lodestones, through a higher component such as vial of liquid flame, or vial of quicksilver (it uses molten lodestones).
Did you try those vials Fender?
Oh and thank you and everyone who take the time to discover those recipes, you’re a helper to the community.

Maisen and all of those who are brainstorming, big thanks to you.
There is one sword that i’d love you guys discover the recipe : Volcanus
please make my dream true, many thanks!

sadly it doesn’t help versus stuff coming from the sky such as those pesky meteors tossed by elementalists.

i still dont get why the rate of getting an exotic out of combining rares is so low.

not only it is viable, but if you want to play an offensive guardian, you’re cornered into using melee weapons.

yesterday, after the patch, i put 4 random lvl 70-80 rares and I got a named exotic sword, the resonator.
So maybe I got very lucky.

Bugs in code happen, and some can be hardly detectable, but have an immense impact.
Maybe the game designer intended it to be no diminishing returns, but somewhat it happens due to a bug in diminishing return code.
Suffice to say that statistics is a valid clue that says there is obviously a problem, provided the samples are large enough to be conclusive.