I’m sure some of anet developers are sad as we all are. They wanted to make an epic mmo with esport but instead they are forced to create facebook games because metrics say so. Sadly.

My two cents.

Temporary content

• Living Story should have a permanent impact on the world. If it is a simple new threat every 2 weeks that is being taken care of, players will eventually get bored.
• New players joining Guildwars 2 community permanently lose an opportunity to experience all the work you have done.

Pace too fast

• Two weeks to complete a content is way too fast for casual players.
• Completionists feel the need to participate in said content in that time frame to complete all achievements, especially when it will be either removed or be available next year. This makes living story more like a work instead of enjoyment. Players should participate in that because they like it, not because it will be unavailable or because they will miss their achievement points.
• Go back to monthly or even bimonthly living story releases with more meaningful content than smashing pinata.

Focusing players in one area

• While it may looks appealing, especially to show how the game is flourishing it comes with few, very serious design drawbacks.
• It makes server lagging very noticeable. Everyone hates when they cannot fully control their own characters because of connection bottleneck.
• A work of designers that create new champions and bosses gets fully wasted. The reason is called a zerg. Because of 5 person aoe limit any champion fighting more than 5 people will have limited mechanics. If said zerg includes more than 30 people a vast portion of them treat those champions as dummies, literally. They spent their time in the game on attacking enemies you spent time on designing without even considering what those enemies can even do. Very good examples are temple bosses.
• Recently, I started to guest on empty servers like Vabbi with 2-3 friends and we tried to do temple events in Orr with our little group. I have never thought I would say that but you can actually design great and enjoyable fight. Bosses like Statue of Dwayna or Risen Priest of Melandru became one of my favourite, on the level of Giganticus Lupicus or Legendary Imbued Shaman. That clearly shows your more than capable of creating engaging fights but this work goes to waste because zerg completely negates every single mechanic of almost all the bosses. Players that do them on daily basis with zergs most likely would have no idea how to fight world bosses in limited group.
• I would say that if you would have moved almost all the temples bosses to Seer path in Ruined City of Arah (path 4) and replaced dungeon version of those priests that path would be the single best designed content you have ever created.
• To put it more simply, focusing players creates zergs, zergs are rewarded equally because of the design of not sharing loot, that in turns leads to very lazy gameplay (you can literally go make a cup of tea while killing world bosses) that completely negates all the hard work you put in creating combat mechanics.

Old content forgotten

• Living Story premise sounds great, a breathing living world. But it comes with the price, a steep one. Old content like dungeons or fractals is completely forgotten, left to rot with its bugs and faulty reward system.
• Replacing old paths with new ones like you did with Twilight Arbor is not exactly an answer, especially when the new path is being designed as a story mode path. This new path has also few issues like relying on AI, length and not enough rewards for its length.
• Last instanced, group based and permanent content update was at the start of 2013 when Ascalonian Catacombs revamp went live. You have enough content, there is no need to forget about it and create new one, there is a need to update it with meaningful additions or revamps.

Also:

Ele is a very high skill celling class, pro’s do extremely well, and new players get destroyed.

Pros rerolled.

It means they have no clue what to do next.

Oxe.6142:

I take issue with the 90% figure, but other than that, what did you think the forums were for?

Praising anet, what else?

Fractal Rewards Issues

• Got 37 empyreal fragments at scale 45. Before this long awaited patch it would have been 45 fragments.

Mai Trin

• You might get 9s long agony by moving near the entrance.

Molted Duo

• Effigy often starts to reset during the fight even when attacked.
• You might get 9s long agony by moving on the edges of the arena.
• Sometimes when you wipe you restart at arena instead at the beginning of the fractal.

Nike Porphyrogenita.8137:

Cliffside Fractal
• I applaud the devs for trying to fix the Archdiviner exploit which trivialized the encounter. However, their fix is pretty lame. Essentially, the Archdiviner gets 2-3 seconds of free attacks on the party. On several occasions a party member has been given 3 stacks of agony because he spawned the red circles under him during the stun phase. This isn’t a huge deal with max AR, but for people with imperfect gear it becomes a simple RNG gear check which is not how the encounter was intended to be.

That was the case since they remade stun you get while hitting the seal.

The Mexican Cookie.3690:

This thread is the worst thing since atse

It still might get worse!

Please stop flooding forum with anticomplains.

I like ranged combat, it allows me to play and sip a c’ocktail at the same time. It also requires coordination to sync drinking and pressing dodge key every minute.

I managed to gather 4 fellow druids and 2 druid spirits and together we slain this legendary beast. Here are the results:

Druid haviz’s PoV: http://youtu.be/zjwcNbMrrT8
Druid Dub’s PoV: http://youtu.be/GJMS-zBvlB8

Before 6/3 patch – not having a buff = 50% of damage, having a buff = 100% of damage
After 6/3 patch – not having a buff = 0% of damage, having a buff = 50% of damage.

It doesn’t help that developers forget to divide one number by 2 when changing the mechanics of the fight. I’m wondering if they are aware of that fact.

You ascend by fighting with crafting panel after setting your autoattack on and pressing alt-tab, not by doing something skillful.

Hope it’s fun.

PS. We’re preparing Tequalag just for you.
Anet.

Razor.6392:

Fixes:
1. Make enemy npcs stack boons by default when they are at 150 range from each other or lower. (Might, Retaliation and Protection every 2 seconds)

So guardian GS#5 gives enemies boons now. Brilliant.

2. In the case of isolated of bosses, give them potent point-blank aoe’s to ALL of them. I’m talking about 5k dps at the very least if you choose to stand in their pbaoe.

That means you cannot melee bosses and you are forced to pew pew from range.

You have an ironic signature when you consider what you propose.

The Game Slayer.7632:

Okay buddy you are completely right. Everything you say is right. You know what is good and bad for this game. you know it all. Me, many elementalists, and the a-net balancing team are clearly wrong.

you just keep on at it, in your own, little world

Indeed, everyone knows that ele is decent as a Jack of All Trades. That’s why:

• every single serious team in pvp has an elementalist
• every decent dungeon team uses eles because they are versatile, not because they are might stacking bots spamming 1
• every wvw zerg uses eles for their versatality, not because they are water field spammers

Yes, it’s too hard.

New gear for no new content, anet’s logic is unparalleled. Not to mention the acquisition method.

Skill system is a garbage. Most of the time you use “skill” number one.

Otaur.9268:

Heimlich.3065:

kostbabis.8791:

pls bring it back

I’m pretty sure that won’t happen. Remember that they removed the blast finisher (completely) from Dragon’s Tooth too.

Now there are only 2 combo finishers (total) outside of Earth Attunement and utility slots (Comet and Phoenix are the remaining two).

If I was a betting man, I’d wager ANet will remove them (without comment, naturally) in an upcoming “fix”.

The blast finisher on Dragons Tooth is not removed, but now focuses on where the Tooth lands, not centered around the caster.

It doesn’t work at all.

I’ll stop skipping when everyone in champ trains will start to kill every single enemy on their way to the next champ.

That’s what anet gets for abolishing gear stats standardization from gw1 and introducing gear stats diversity. Neverending story.

Stx.4857:

Hmm, so in reality.. damage is reasonably balanced? I would expect thief to deal a little more damage than other melee because of how squishy he is, like a trade off.

Try to play an ele without using conjures. No damage, no survivability.

There are 3 identical vigour traits for ele, gua and mes. Guardian and mesmer have that traits as’ 5 minor traits while elementalist will have it at 20 points. What is the logic behind that, especially when an elementalist is the squishiest of those?

So the answer is they couldn’t fit all dredges in the timely manner.

Elementalist build has antitoxin spray.

Eurhetemec.9052:

Sure, but that’s being pedantic and missing the forest for the trees. In most games, there will be different ways to gear that are very effective – a different spec may require different gear, for example – indeed there are in GW2 – just not really in PvE. This is clearly an issue. Also, in other games, there are often a number of very close alternatives, which is not really the case here. If you removed Crit Damage from the game, it might be (not my chosen solution, just one approach).

Those specs are effective in other games because there’s an emphasis on strict roles and you need all of them to complete a content. Here, we don’t have strict roles and those soft roles we have (support, control and dps) mostly do not require different specs. You don’t get stronger control aspect with different gear and support is balanced such that healing power increases your heal/regen potency but offensive gear increases your reflections and certain supportive conditions like blinds and vulnerability.

No, it needs to be deleted.

Mr eX.3420:

Is the Greater Nightmare Vine encounter in TA being reworked with the res rush change in mind? All the red circles make it impossible to revive someone after they’ve defeated.

Maybe the point is to not die at all? This boss isn’t even legendary.

JonPeters.5630:

We are trying to take steps to address some of the dominance of Berserker/DPS players. More info next week, I think.

Jon

What happens with “play how you want” if we hypothetically need defensive passive stats to survive?

Maybe he’s afraid.

Brainless activities rewards you with BiS while challenging content is left to rot. Maybe some players don’t like mindless spamming 1 but prefer to be rewarded for their effort equally to those who like “world” events and standing in LA by the crafting panel.

Agreed on whole suggestion. Finding people for other dungeons than fractals have become somewhat difficult. Everyone I know runs fractals to get new shinies. And since we’re on the path to become like a standard mmo, I don’t see a particular reason why not to implement that kind of system which is almost a standard feature there now.

Btw, I thought that inverse law of female armour was mostly applied for heavy armours. Might have been mistaken though.

PrivateSoftcore.6291:

Sure, and it is different – but that doesn’t mean you have to be 100% different. It throws away the core mechanic that makes MMOs successful. No vertical progression is laughably bad.

gw1 had no such stupid thing. But I guess you need a carrot to have fun.

Nikaido.3457:

It is rude but it’s also almost impossible not to when you’re in front of someone who has a 151 pages history of vehemently arguing in any thread showing any sort of criticism against anet. (what the f..? I don’t think anyone else in this whole thread has a comparable amount/omnipresence. Paid PR or you just don’t like this game as much as you pretend to and spend more time on forums than actually playing or doing other stuff in your life?)

I don’t think it’s possible to read the general discussion subsection for more than a week without developing a distaste for the One Man PR Army you represent.

+9001

It’s hilarious.

Lavadiel.6231:

Maybe I overreacted a bit with those bugs, but seriously killing final boss in 13s or this boss being soloable (indepened of how skilled the player is) is not what I expect from good designed game. This boss should be v. hard for 5 ppl, 4 pll party will need to have godlike skill players (like 3-4 yeras experience) to kill it.

The former is a speedkill, designed theoretically and executed practically while using optimized rotations, both ours and lupi’s. Even if you are stubborn enough to say it’s been achieved with fgs, we still have killed him in 21 seconds without that. Speedkills like that doesn’t happen often though.

For the latter, Wethospu spent about 50 hours on practicing just to solo him in 15 minutes. The game evolves and players get better or simply knowledge gets passed down. When first solos were achieved most of the players were still having problems with him and I’m sure they were branding themselves as experienced. Forums usually are for minority that often is much more skilled at a game. Soloing lupi was done by probably less than 60 people. To add more, lupi is considered as the best designed boss in gw2 and the only reason those solos started to appear was that one person was determined enough to accomplish that.

I’m sure that after 3 years full parties will still have problems with him.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

By contrast, regular enemies in the overworld do so little damage that there is no need to dodge at all. You just plow right through regular enemies and continue on as if nothing happened. But, silvers, champs, and enemies in dungeons do so much damage that there’s no point in passive defenses.

I couldn’t disagree more with this. You completely chose to ignore sustain which is one of the biggest contributor the extreme survivability of tanky builds. Passive defense plus sustainability achieved by regen, protection and other traits (soothing mist, adrenal health, healing symbols, etc) give you so much survivability that you don’t have to use any active defense (including dodges) at all.

Wethospu.6437:

Only saving grace is if new scale 30 is really hard but I really doubt that.

It cannot be hard because of the vast amount of people who refuse to improve their gameplay (don’t confuse that with casuals).

Konig Des Todes.2086:

I wouldn’t mind the loot table for elites being raised, especially outside of dungeons, but overall I don’t think the “difficulty” of these mobs is worth complaining about. Maybe they’d have a guarantee white champ loot bag (never having a chance at the green or exotic versions… are there fine versions? I only get white green and orange text colors; if there’s blue then that could be the “high level/rare” drop for them). Cannot be the green version as then they’d be farmed too, I wouldn’t doubt. Though either case would be a big no for the dungeon variants.

Especially outside of dungeons? Everyone skips in dungeons because elites drop junk. There are like 2-3 weekly threads complaining about skipping in dungeon subforum and the reason is that it is a complete waste of time not to skip elites.

What are fractals? Some abandoned anet’s little side project?

kult.3465:

There was an equal problem with many players on low population servers that could not get Dragonite ore because the events where constantly contested. Or do any of the high level content.

Joining a guild is an option but even so you got to go thru the pain of setting up massive events.

I don’t know why people are whining, there are 3 zones in Orr, if they where running events with their guilds already they can scout all 3 zones to find out which events are starting.

Equal problem? People were guesting on low pop servers like Vabbi to do temples by themselves instead of roleplaying zerglings.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

-snip-

I’m sure there are many gw1 vets (including me) that wanted pve resembling gw1 pve where most of the mobs and bosses were using players’ skills. Not only that, but some groups of mobs had certain synergy in their builds and it was almost like fighting in pvp. But there was one fundamental flaw – mobs are not players. Ultimately, player should always win because he can adapt or use “cheap” tactics.

EddardStark.4692:

What is the best Critical Chance % range for a DPS?

For DPS best critical chance is 100%.

WarpSpasm.9721:

The whole point of being an Ele is to cycle through your attunements surely? This is the class’s primary attribute and it needs to be utilised to get the maximum benefit.
On DD it’s standard to close on Air, follow up on Fire, shift to Water to negate damage received and then finish off anything left standing in Earth with bleeds. With boons, esp Fury popping like billio, the DPS is through the roof with a crit build. My Ele speed kills as fast as my Warrior easily.
Anyone who can’t/won’t consider attunements whilst attacking needs to roll a different class. Sticking to auto attack is pointless.

Whole point of an elementalist is to use your attunements based on current situation, not to spam every single skill and swap attunements and then complain about 30 arcana being necessary.

Your elementalist can’s speedkill (assuming you’re talking about pve) anything as fast as warrior if you constantly swap attunements.

Let’s change Arah into Disneyland!

morrolan.9608:

Its called a strawman argument and yes it is annoying. The vast majority who object to the ascended implementation do not want it handed to us on a platter.

Exactly. I want different, l_e_s_s boring methods of acquistion. Why is crafting a method to get last tier of weapon and not some challenging content? Too hard for try-hards?

This filter…

So that means we don’t have 20 skills but 16?

Evilek.5690:

Warrior make 42k+ Hundred Blades every 8sec, 3.5 sec cast time = 12k DPS without full might stack.

I have never seen 42k+ 100b without might stacks. Got a screenshot perhaps? Just keep in mind that almost any warrior dealing that amount of damage traits for forceful greatsword which gives might stacks.

unleashed.8679:

The problem of conditions isn’t the damage alone:

• You can’t use CC, because of defiant and unshakable:
  Introduce a “rage-mode” for every boss, if he gets too many hard CC within too short time (stunlock), the boss get buffed with stability, swiftness and fury/might.

You can use CC, you just have to coordinate it. Thoughtless spamming of CC should never work.

• There is no need to kite bosses in current design:
  Kite them to position X and they get damaged (exception: dredge fractal)
• There is no need to kite enemies, because you can dodge every single attack of bosses

I’d like to see people that claim this to fight mossman or archdiviner at high scales. Dodge every single attack of them without kiting and I’ll applaud you. You keep using hyperboles and that’s not a thing you’d want to use in a serious discussion.

• There are no bosses with high toughness:
  “Difficulty” of bosses is made due to vitality (life sponge) and not toughness. There is not a single boss with high toughness, so conditions would deal more damage then power builds (due to the effect, that they ignore armor).

How would toughness not be a life sponge? Instead of promoting direct damage, you’d promote condition damage which arguably is much easier to play. Build diversity achieved by the cost of lowering already low skill cap isn’t something I would like to see.

Heck, if everyone wants build diversity so much, anet should also buff AI specs. I’m sure pvp-ers would appreciate that.

Malediktus.9250:

I suggest deactivating stealth kits and portal cannons for dungeons and fractals.(or better even delete them from game entirely). That would solve some problems quick and easy.

What kind of problems? anet already stated that skipping isn’t a problem.

TheKillerAngel.3596:

In time, people will be downing him regularly. You don’t want to make ascended crafting invalidated.

Why not? It’s kittening horrible.