Guild Wars 2

That guild you’re talking about sounds like a bunch of kittens so it’s probably best you got kicked out. Imo outside of speed runs and high level fractals ranger is easy mode in pve and is pretty much awesome in spvp so don’t give up on the class if you’re enjoying it so far. While you wont be dealing as much dmg as the burst classes healing spring/ traps offers plenty of synergy opportunities and it looks like spirit builds are finally becoming handy.

Also if you like bows their damage increases significantly if you use piercing arrows since you can be hitting more than 3 targets more than 50% of the time if you pay attention to your position.

That was a fun watch.

5*same class can produce some amusing effects. I once fought against a 5 man team of identical mesmers (asuras, same skin, same armor) spamming clones/phantasms. I almost had an epileptic crisis.

Einlanzer.1627:

nagymbear.5280:

Warriors can use longbow and rifle. And don’t tell me rifle is not a bow, because I know it is not. Warriors have IMHO better utility on their ranged weapons than a ranger, and from what I’ve heard they deal more damage with it too.

Warrior longbow is specialized AOE with poor single target damage and less range than Ranger Longbow, and their Rifle is high specialized for single-target DPS and split between power and condition damage. It also doesn’t have amazing utility.

At best, warrior options rival Ranger options, but rangers are unquestionably better archers. Notice that’s specifically what the description states, not that they are better at all forms of ranged combat.

Warrior longbow has 1200 range traited (same as range longbow untraited), a 240 radious fire field that can be combined with a potent blast finisher (3 stacks of area might for 20 sec)that also deals tons of physical damage and can be further combined with leap skills for fire armor on top of that, a 180 radious area blind and a 3 sec immoblize that applies 6 stacks of bleeding for plenty of single target condition damage. So it has plenty of utility and deals plenty of single player condition and AOE damage plus considerable physical damage.

Riffle deals formidable single player physical damage while having, cripple, vulnerability and knockback. Also only the autoattack deals condition damage so it’s not by any regard “split between power and condition damage” it’s clearly a single player power based weapon that can achieve AOE potential when traited with piercing bullets same as ranger bows.

Einlanzer.1627:

One thing that’s driving me crazy about this topic is that this patch keeps getting talked about as if it hamstrung the notion of “rangers as archers” when, if anything it enhanced it.

Now, instead of having one good, fairly versatile bow and one mostly worthkitten w, you have two pretty good bows with different strengths and tactical applications. You can now play a true archer more than you could before by slotting both bow types and switching between them based on tactical need, unlike before, both are pretty well-functioning.

Rangers can now function better as true archers than they could before.

This issue has been heavily debated in other threads. For a lot of players running condition builds and using piercing arrows like myself for example, such a drastic decrease in the shortbow range heavily decreased it’s damage potential for skills 1+2 (you need to run closer to the target and can hit way fewer targets) and also decreased the tactical appeal for skills 3-5 since you now need to be standing a lot closer to the opponent to use them.

Longbow mainly became more appealing to me in relation to the post-nerf shortbow but I don’t see myself farming enough to get berserker gear. Plus vanilla pets have been nerfed and you now need to trait around em to make em as effective as they were pre-nerf (or apparently even more effective if you got trait points to spare but I don’t)

So I can safely say I function worse as an archer than I did before. It’s not the end of the class for me or anything like that but my favourite build and weapon was heavily nerfed and I kinda enjoyed playing it so that sucks.

Overall I feel my warrior is at a better place when it comes to ranged combat than my ranger.

slingblade.1437:

I agree that the word Ranger in-and-of itself does not mean archer. However, Anet’s own description of the class opens with these words: “Rangers rely on a keen eye, a steady hand, and the power of nature itself. Unparalleled archers, rangers are capable of bringing down foes from a distance with their bows.” This has already been posted a million times. One hand doesn’t seem to know what the other is doing after reading those words, and seeing the reality of GW2 Rangers and their bows.

Plus there’s a bow (not a sword/greatsword) prominently displayed in the RANGER CHARACTER CREATION SCREEN where the description opens with “rangers are proficient with a bow” while there is NO MENTION OF ANOTHER WEAPON OR MELEE COMBAT AT ALL. Plus rangers can be seen wielding a bow in pretty much all the ranger illustrations.

Plus historically rangers relied on stealth (not an option for a GW2 character btw), traps and ranged combat for hunting in the wilderness. Unless you think a ranger’s first option would be sneaking up to a boar and attacking it with a greatsword.

Surely it doesn’t come as a surprise that a lot of players looking to create a bowman character chose ranger over thief and warrior.

Swords/Dagger/Torches make perfect sense for the ranger but the class description clearly implies that there is a focus on the bow while there is no mention of bows in the description of any other class whatsoever.

A shortbow and pet nerf. Exactly what the class needed.

Honestly the thing that cracked me up the most was this though:
White Raven, Rainbow Jellyfish, Black Moa, and Black Widow Spider have had their health updated to match the other pets of their type

The fact that this had not been patched until just now truly boggles the mind.

It makes a huge difference especially if you use piercing arrows and like to aim for a distant foe while strafing around to pierce as many nearby foes as possible.

Manekk.6981:

Nugget.8031:

Manekk.6981:

Xsorus.2507:

Yea Tailswipe is a pain to land, won’t deny that.

i also think you’re underestimating the power of all the time Crits on a Jaguar Stealth vs 25%.

Go use the Bird for example.. and you’ll see its not guaranteed critting every time.

It’s if I understand it correctly 25% increased chance from it’s already high base not a flat 25% critchance this would mean a 20-30point bm jag having like 70-80%critchance in stealth, unless I’m totally off on their base critchance but I seem to remember someone calculating it to be close to or slightly above 50% with so many bm points.

Critical Chance at lvl 80 = round down((precision – 822) / 21)

Using that, Cats have 59% crit at lvl 80 by default and 73% with 30 points in Beast mastery, even more if you stack masters bond. So yeah, it’ll still have pretty much guaranteed crits while in stealth.

If this is right their critchance is even higher than I thought wich would only make this nerf all the smaller and more insignificant.

That sounds like a huge nerf if you don’t invest in beastmastery. 40% less crit chance while in stealth and 28% less crit chance even with 30 in BM. Plus the maul nerf. Why do ppl discard this change as insignificant?

Besides master’s bonds and 30pts in BM is a pretty big investment to get jaguar damage to almost the same place it was before the nerf.

haha poor pets got the middle finger.

I’ve only been kicked out of a pug twice and the reason was something like “sorry but having a second ranger might be too tough at fotm lvl XX” or something like that. Both times I was kicked before actually starting the instance.

I guess ppl feel that our regular dps is inferior to that of other classes and our condition damage is kinda pointless if there’s a second ranger or a necro in the group (makes sense since burning/poison is always up even with a single ranger and there are plenty of classes that apply good bleeding that also caps anyway). Plus utility-wise we can’t really compare to guardian/mesmer and the number of party spots is after all limited.

Also I have to say, while I like having the option of using melee weaps and I get the linguistic origin of the term ranger, upon choosing the class I did not expect to end up using sword/greatsword 70% of the time and 30% shortbow. I guess I’m just stuck on what the ranger in GW1 was all about (full ranged) or the impression I got from all the GW2 illustrations of the class that always clearly show him as an archetypical fantasy ranger carrying a bow with a pet on the side.

Boas (constrictor snakes category) would be nice- give em an immobilizing F2 called constrict where the snake and foe both get immobilized for a moderate period of time.

Bats might also be nice with a little life-stealing F2 or wells similar to necro’s.

Also “swarm type” pets like rats or frogs could be fun. The graphic could look like 5-6 pests moving together but count as a single pet as far as gameplay is concerned. Could give em a “steal or confuse” F2.

Squid and octopuses for aquatic (spray ink F2 causes area blindness)

Sorry if someone has come up with these a long time ago feel free to delete this thread if that is the case.

suggestion 1 (ok that’s a really obvious one): add an F5 ability to the pet that functions like a dodge or perhaps simply grants evasion (.75 sec similar to that of a player dodge) without an actual animation. The command could be called “watch out!”.

The pet should stop attacking for that short time but should not otherwise disengage or run away from the target. Obviously the command would have a reasonable cooldown rather than giving pets an endurance bar. Perhaps a beastmastery trait would reduce said cooldown. One could optionally keybind F5 and player dodge to the same key and have the “pet dodges same time as ranger” effect if they want to but I personally hate the idea of my pet dodging when I do since I am ranged and typically way far away from my pet. I guess pressing F3 could also give that .75 sec evasion and then you could press F1 to get your pet to attack again but I’d rather it was a separate command.

Suggestion 2: Master/Grandmaster beastmastery trait Feline Reflexes: pet cannot loose over 15% of max hp in a single blow at a cooldown of 8 seconds.

That would ensure that pets kinda dodge most of a massive attack once every 8 sec without the ranger micromanaging them. Obviously it would benefit med-low hp pets more than tanky ones and work better against single dungeon bosses than in WvWvW where ppl are nuking left and right.

Suggestion 3: Stay close! shout that forces the pet to stay near the player (120 radius) granting it protection similar to guard. The pet can attack nearby targets normally and should move out of red circles if the ranger does. Probably works best with ranged pets. Kinda like F3 except the pet doesn’t just stand there scratching itself.

Yup! Ranger is tons of fun in pve even in lvl80 areas. I’ve also had very few issues in dungeons or fractals although you do need to learn to control your pet otherwise your dps will suffer greatly.

I gotta admit however that I find that I get way more badges with my ranged warrior rather than with my ranger and I kinda like warrior riffle/longbow (single player/aoe) way better than the ranger longbow and main hand axe that constitute 2/3 of the ranger’s ranged weapons. I guess I kinda like playing the sniper and, dps wise, I cant do that with my ranger. Shortbow rocks though.

I dont do spvp so I dunno about that.

meh better than nothing but to be honest I feel like my warrior got more loving than my ranger…

yeah my main was a necromancer in GW1 so I tried leveling a minion master in GW2 and gave up at lvl 30. The minion AI is simply atrocious. While I would expect them to be brainless lumps of undead flesh and dumber than living animals, their AI is just garbage at times. I cant count how many times I noticed them sitting around doing nothing.

I really feel bad for necromancers but then again minions are an optional mechanic for them since they are essentially utility skills and not equipping them frees up utility slots that you can use in other ways. Minion master is just a build for necromancers and you can ignore minions entirely by simply not equipping them. This is not the case for rangers and their pets.

I honestly dont care and for the record I got all the hom items/pets and use jellyfish all the time.

I’d rather you didn’t loose focus of what’s important and waste time tweaking things like that.

Robert Hrouda.1327:

Ranger toolbox isn’t just utilities, folks, it’s your 1-5. And between LR and QZ, there’s a TON of utility power in just those two alone, leaving a third open for whatever you feel you may need in the fight and to better define your play style. Shortbow is full of utility and also does really good sustained DPS, so I stand by my statement of rangers having an expansive tool box.

the “LR and QZ + 1 extra skill” statement sadly illustrates just how rubbish many ranger skills are compared to a select few at the moment. Sadly, I just realised most of the time I use both LR and QZ as well… Granted I often go traps too though. I mean if 2 out of 3 utility skills are pretty much no brainers how much diversity do rangers really have at the moment?

I’m glad for the engineer buffs. They were long overdue.

As for the ranger:

I don’t enjoy melee combat (that’s why I picked the ranger class) so the Gs buffs (albeit welcome) did nothing for me.

Some of the bug fixes, the white raven and black widow in particular, only reminded me of how long even the simplest ranger bugs linger in the game until they receive proper attention.

I used to enjoy quickness since it complemented both condition damage and regular damage builds pretty well and most importantly was pretty fun to use but I guess it wasn’t meant to be.

I was looking for an excuse to log back into the game and I actually ended up losing one.

Asthalon.6875:

People need to stop jumping all over ArenaNet for stuff like this.

You said it yourself, ANet admitted Ranger is the most in need of improvement. When you make a game as complex as GW2 is, and you come out with a statement like that, there are usually one of two possible outcomes, tied to the nature of the company:

1) The company doesn’t care about community feedback at all. They slap some stuff together and call it fixed. Don’t like it? Wait til the next expansion when they change everything again anyway.

2) The company cares quite a lot about the game and the community. They spend time developing, testing, trashing, developing, testing, and maybe implementing ideas. The last thing they want to do, after admitting (effectively) a kitten-up is to follow up with another kitten-up.

Topics like this are getting tiresome. People ask, nay demand answers from the Devs, and when they get those answers, if they don’t like them (no matter how practical or sensible they are), they whinge and moan and then go start a new thread to ask again. If I were in ANet’s shoes, I wouldn’t bother to say anything. Robert Hrouda is a brave (and well-spoken) man, in light of that.

Maybe you (general you) should stop before posting threads like this and ask yourselves this question:

Do you actually know how to develop, program, draw, test, and implement these fixes yourself?

Most of us cannot answer Yes to that question (I can’t). Kwitcherkittenin. Let the nice people who know how to do it take the time to do it properly.

Just out of curiosity. By your standards how long would it take until it was justified to complain about the state of the ranger class? A year? Maybe more?

It’s already been six months so clearly that’s not long enough.

Also what does not knowing how to develop a game have to do with anything?

I don’t know how to make ice-cream but if I buy one and there’s a hair in it I do believe it’s perfectly fine to complain about it.

I’m currently working as a web designer and I would never dare imagine using that argument on a displeased client. “Hey if you think you can make a better website go make it yourself mate! But oh wait, no you can’t cause you don’t know how to make a website, do you? Plus I didn’t ask for all that much money so I guess you should have seen it coming! I’ll probably fix it eventually so how about you quit your complaining!”.

Btw I worked as a 3D modeller for a couple of years so I do have a general idea of what goes into making a game (granted I had nothing to do with anything outside the visual aspect).

Well if you want pets to be such a huge part of the ranger gameplay you should probably find a way to balance their usefulness gap between open pve, dungeons, spvp and Wv3.

At the moment said gap throws the entire ranger gameplay out of balance. That’s what happens when you build a class around a mechanic like that. Plus open pve is hardly a problem for any class. What good is a mechanic that gives a class an advantage in open pve only?

Additionally, staggering pathfinding issues, constant misses on moving targets, the fact that they seem to stop moving in order to attack/use F2 skills, the fact that you really have very little control over their behaviour by default (attack and call back only? really?) and need to waste a skill slot on something as simple as “guard this spot” imho makes pets way too problematic and limited a feature to build the ranger class around.

CETheLucid.3964:

Arekai.5698:

This thread shows how much they care about Ranger.
0 kittens given about this thread, 0 kittens given about the class.

It certainly has nothing to do with the asinine way people try to communicate their issues. That can’t be it. If I were a dev I wouldn’t touch this thread either.

What can they say honestly?

Working on it? You’re still mad. You want an exact date like they’re on your time, balance and polish be kittened. You want details they can’t honestly give you.

It’s coming? They’re lying, obviously! It’s never coming, maybe in like 2022 amiriteguise?

They are very likely following this thread, but any hope of expecting a response is dashed when you people carry yourselves like they boiled your pet rabbit.

So instead, you get to sit here and fester wondering why no dev wants to respond to you and cry some more about how awful rangers are while they quietly work on it.

Get a cup to catch your tears. They’re probably thirsty, and this thread could hold the team over for quite a while! Might even get that update out sooner!

But don’t expect a response.

It’s been six months since the game’s release.

If they’ve been “quietly working on it” they should have more to show for it by now. I’ve been keeping an eye on the patch notes looking for an excuse to log back into the game for over three months now and I have yet to see anything significant regarding the ranger.

Also never pointing out issues or expressing one’s frustration always helps the developers make a better game because no wait it doesn’t.

Nibiru.1423:

matenzo.9518:

Anet is the one who should be “punished” for the Fractals DC issue.

They should have never released fractals if there was no way for players who dc to log back in. And on top of that they made completing fractals a requirement for the monthly achievement and the only real way to get ascended gear. No wonder people risk it.

Haven’t they fixed this issue yet? After all this time? Seriously?

next patch so they say, can only hope.

Too late.

Anet is the one who should be “punished” for the Fractals DC issue.

They should have never released fractals if there was no way for players who dc to log back in. And on top of that they made completing fractals a requirement for the monthly achievement and the only real way to get ascended gear. No wonder people risk it.

Haven’t they fixed this issue yet? After all this time? Seriously?

Brown bear F2 ability is shifty as well. It’s a bit hard to time it well cause the bear often rushes away from you and towards the enemy before wasting the skill like a moron. Even calling it to you and then using the skill doesn’t work, you basically have to switch the bear to defensive mode, make sure it disengages from combat and then press f2 when it’s standing idly right next to you.

CrazyAce.3842:

If you’re doing a signet build without Marksmanship {IV} Signet Mastery and {XI} Signet of the Beastmaster, you’re doing it wrong.

Not to be a troll, but you guys clearly don’t understand how signet builds work. Signet Mastery lowers CDs by 20%, Signet of the Beastmaster makes signets’ active effects also affect you. The passive effects already affect both us and our pets. They are fine as is.

And if we’re talking about signet builds that suck, Rangers have it off WAY better than Necromancers. Necromancers’ signet builds barely synergize, have weak passive effects, and have long cooldowns to boot. At least Ranger signets all work in tandem quite well.

Sure, Signet of the Hunt has a weak active effect, but it’s almost as good as perm swiftness. Not a huge difference between 125% speed (signet) and 133% speed (Swiftness).

Not to be a troll but the point of the op is is that our signets are comparatively ineffective compared to similar skills of other classes unless you are actually willing to spend 30 pts and two master traits along the marksmanship traitline and actually build a signet build around them.

Endure pain offers 5 secs of invulnerability with a 90s cooldown without the need to invest 30 trait pts and 2 master traits. Therefore endure pain is clearly a better skill than signet of stone (since its passive is kinda crap anyway). Obviously invulnerability is the type of boon that best fits the warrior/guardian gameplay though. I don’t think that every single class should have a 5 sec invulnerability skill at a 90 sec cooldown and I’m perfectly happy with protect me anyway.

I think the signet of renewal passive effect sufficiently compensates for its active effect being rather situational.

Signet of stone is useless unless traited and frankly I prefer protect me anyway since its cooldown is way lower.

The Signet of the hunt active is just kitten and I got plenty of swiftness from birds/horn/rampage anyway so I still can’t be bothered spending a utility slot on it.

Signet of the wild is generally poor unless traited and sick em is way better if you’re after pet burst damage. The passive regeneration is hardly impressive as well.

Alastor.1074:

http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/14saks/i_just_understood_fractal_dcs_and_fractal_levels/

This might be an interesting read for those complaining about it being easy to fix, If Fractuals do work that way

Well then they clearly shouldn’t have used the personal storyline system. It was their damn fault they chose that platform in the first place.

In the meantime they have yet to add alternative ways to get ascended gear and FotM is also currently a requirement for the monthly.

Robert Hrouda.1327:

We’re aware of the problem and are working on an active fix. Very sorry about this, hopefully it will be fixed soon.

haha almost a month later and the issue persists. By now ppl are doing fractals 10+ so even if they did patch things up it would be too late for ppl frustrated with this issue anyway. Plus you need to complete fractals to get the monthly.

Brilliant.

I faced the same issue while doing this quest a while ago. I just abandoned that buggy piece of junk and used mortars/regular attacks to get rid of the giants instead.

The camera is notoriously frustrating in this game so the particular bug came as no surprise.

Pets do perfectly fine in regular pve. Yeah they occasionally aggro the wrong mob but I find that a ranger has plenty of ways of getting out of sticky situations like that even in lvl 80 areas. For the most part melee defensive pets make for a good distraction vs regular foes while offensive pets make for a good damage source vs small mobs of enemies without much aoe damage provided that they don’t attract any serious aggro.

In any other situation however (dungeons, bosses, vs human opponents) I find that my options reduced to either using ranged pets (that I don’t particularly like) or simply using pets like the red moa and jungle stalker and basically having them stand by me while their F2 ability and protect me are on cooldown.

Sadly that means that my damage output is significantly decreased and an important mechanic of my class is severely limited during the times when I generally need my pet the most. I mean I hardly need any help dealing with trash mobs and elites in regular pve.

I crash every time I exit a dungeon (it kicks me to the desktop and I get that send Anet a report popup). It doesn’t make my life too hard atm but it only recently started happening. It’s something I instantly noticed because it does it every single time I exit a dungeon. Since I’ve been running dungeons for I while it’s something I would have noticed if it were happening before the patch.

Oh well.

It’s kinda nice that they are owning up to some of the poor design choices they made but most of them were so blatantly bad that they make me doubt their foresight or even common sense.

Good intentions aside, they better learn from all of this and avoid releasing such kitten, half-baked content in the future. Also they better rectify said issues/bugs/imbalances fast since a lot of great games are getting released for the holidays and players’ good faith and patience is running out.

I’m still not sure how obtaining ascended gear bridges the time gap between exotics and legendaries by the way. It’s not like ascended are precursors or anything. If nothing the ectos and mats you have to spend on getting the ascended could have gone towards obtaining your legendary. It actually broadens the gap. Hopefully they will reduce the mat cost and add alternative methods of obtaining them like they said and soon for that matter.

Tengu-Dervish. Although they are unlikely to be released on the same expansion, since tengu look Canthan and Dervish are traditionally elonian. I just think that there need to be 3 “heavy armour” classes in the game same as light and medium.

AndrewMcLeod.3857:

Derk.3189:

Stormleaf.1769:

Erulogos.2591:

Quoting you both as you both make the same argument, essentially, and miss the same issue.

The issue is not with -current- content. No Ascended gear is required to finish every dungeon and kill every boss currently walking Tyria.

The issue is with -future- content. It was stated, when Ascended gear was announced, that Agony (and thus Agony resist) was something that would be involved in content going forward. It was not stated, one way or the other, if it would be required to even attempt future content, and it therefore becomes a simple question: grind Ascended and Agony resist now, so you are ready for the new content no matter what, or wait and see if it will be required, and hope that, if it is, enough other people waited that you can get groups to grind it out.

It is true that as of this moment in time, the grind heavy gear is not required to see any of the content in the game. But we don’t know when or if it will be, and Anet has not said one way or the other. A lot of folks saying it is required are basically taking the cautious path, assuming it will be and preparing for the worst.

The issue with this is that ArenaNet could have easily made this content require Agony resistance from the beginning as well, by making it some Mystic Forge thing and introducing Agony at fractal level 1. They didn’t; heck, they even made it so low levels can participate. Exotics aren’t even a requirement for the early difficulty levels. If they didn’t do it now, why do you think they’re magically going to start doing it in the future? None of the content in GW2 has been restricted like that. There is zero indication of ArenaNet ever restricting content like that, and it’s simply not helpful to base your argument on an assumption that they’ll magically start doing it.

AHHAHA You really think they did that for the players? Its just there to draw out the content, an additional carrot on another stick. Oh you want to see what agony is like? Hit me up 10 levels.

The Agony mechanic wasn’t introduced at the start of the dungeon so that everybody can experience the content. While one of the goals of the Fractals of the Mists dungeon was to provide some difficult content for players looking for a challenge, we also wanted the dungeon to be available for everybody to experience. While getting far into the dungeon requires agony resistance from ascended gear, the content was designed to provide challenging content, and to allow players to choose what difficulty they wanted to play at.

As for ascended gear, to reiterate what Chris has said (https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/info/news/A-message-from-our-Studio-Design-Director-Chris-Whiteside), it’s not intended as a treadmill, but rather as a tier of rewards that can help bridge the gap between Exotics (a few hours of effort to acquire a piece) and Legendaries (hundreds of hours of effort to acquire one). They’re currently only available in the Fractals of the Mist Dungeon, but we’re going to be adding new ways to acquire them, both inside of WvW as well as elsewhere in PvE.

As Whiteside’s post points out there was no real gap between exotics and legendaries except for that in grinding time required to obtain each. I still can’t figure out how adding a tier with slightly better stats addresses said gap though.

As far as I can tell ascended items really don’t contribute at all towards obtaining a legendary since they don’t function as precursors. It’s a purpose for further grinding functionally independent from obtaining a legendary. It also makes obtaining a legendary even more expensive since it apparently increases the price of shared materials like ectos.

There’s no actual reason adding multiple precursors with the same stats as exotics wouldn’t serve that purpose outside Anet appealing to the vertical progression croud.

EDIT: A person aiming to obtain a legendary item has no reason to waste money on ascended and a person who couldn’t care less about obtaining a legendary would be perfectly fine holding on to their exotics.

Denim Samurai.2379:

That’s odd. I had my first set of exotics within the first two weeks. What’re you waiting for?

haha statements like this make me feel like I’m playing the game wrong :P I’ve never had enough gold for full exotic gear. Where do you guys get all that money?

Do you play certain content specifically because it rewards you better loot/gold or did you amass your fortunes by casually progressing through the game?

I’ve completed the personal story and almost have 100% world completion with a second character and never made enough gold to give both of them full exotic :/

That may have something to do with the fact that I hate instanced content (dungeons, fractals etc) and that I don’t spend much time in the cursed shore or the new lost shores cause I find them pretty boring and it’s impossible for me to get the dailies there (especially the enemy variety).

“[] As we watch Guild Wars 2 mature in its Live environment, we have found that our most dedicated players were achieving their set of Exotic gear and hitting “the Legendary wall [].”

I just thought it was an odd choice of words cause I’ve played GW2 for roughly 200 hours and still don’t have any exotic jewellery :P I’m not implying that the total amount of hours played makes one a dedicated player or anything. 200 hours is probably not even all that much compared to other ppl but it represents a lot of my free time during the past few months. It’s just something I noticed when I tried the /age command.

I don’t take offence by that statement since I don’t consider myself particularly dedicated to any game anyway. I’m just curious as to what your interpretation of the term as used in this statement is, since it’s this dedicated player that the developers are apparently appealing to with these changes.

Why is it that people feel that 5-player instances of any kind are the appropriate place in GW2 to obtain top gear?

Is it because you find it more challenging or frustrating than open-world content? Provided that you aren’t in a particularly disorganized group and sorta know what you’re doing, grinding the instanced content in GW2 is achievable by even the casual player. That is compared to doing most cursed shores DE chains with a handful of players nowadays.

Besides, not everyone buys mmos to end up repeating 5-player instances over and over again. Why wouldn’t Ascended gear be available in WvWvW as well as regular (non-instanced) pve and through a variety of means including Karma?

Mr International.3715:

I don’t like talking to people, I have to think about what to say really hard and it just gets awkward. I never understood the way humans interact and I find myself never knowing how to respond to anything, or never getting a response to what I say. Occasionally I’ll tag along with a group of people doing DE chains or whatever but if introductions are made I just peace

hahaha that cracked me up.

Rhydian.5412:

You know what else would be new? Introducing a catheter in my pork sword. Would I like it probably not, Ball clamps would also be new as well as a butt plug coated in sand paper those things would also be new. Do I want any of those things? I want those things about as much as I want to watch Steel magnolias while playing with myself with barbed wire.

[….]

We came here to get AWAY from you mfkers not spend quality time with you.

Jeez Rhydian that was a “passionate” post.

People on both sides of the argument are getting increasingly hostile both in and off-game and that hardly does the community any good.

I didn’t intend to answer my own questioner but after reading your post what the hell. Feel free to check my post history as well if you like.

1) 3/5 My enthusiasm for the game has been draining for some time now. While that is perfectly normal there are three main factors that significantly accelerated the process:

• my ranger main has played exactly the same since the third week after the game’s release. My endeavours experimenting with builds outside the cannon (shortbow bleed, berserker longbow+traps) have been neither fruitful nor fun. I actually have no complaints about the relative efficiency of the class but I find it lacks variety. I like focusing on a single character so I guess that’s partly my bad. I do however have to point out that my necro in GW1 had over half a dozen fully distinct builds for endgame content and plenty more that were tons of fun in casual pve.
• I wasn’t really that impressed with my personal story in the first place (I come from a single-player RPG background) but I was simply appalled once I reached the Traherne part of my story. Not only did I feel like it rendered all my previous choices inconsequential but I became painfully aware that it played out pretty much the same for every other player/race/class. I was also shocked by how anticlimactic the Zaitan fight was and frankly couldn’t care less about any of the Destiny’s Edge.
• by now my buddies in real life have moved on to other games and my favourite guild has been essentially inactive since mid-october. I joined another, more active guild, but it’s not the same. I also had to dump 2 guilds cause all they seem to do nowadays is farm FotM and frankly that alienated me significantly.

2) 1/5 I’d like to get the quiver for my ranger (I’m referring to the skin not the stats) but I doubt I’ll ever be able to gather the mats required unless I actively start grinding dungeons, FotM or orichalchum and I have no intention of doing any of that. Even though I have several hundred hours invested in the game I never had that kinda resources since the stuff I enjoy doing (like helping guildies story mode dungeons, getting map completion or their personal story) are not rewarding resource or karma -wise. I also have to point out that the three ascended items currently in game already give an extra 5% critical damage that makes a significant improvement considering I run a crit build.

3) 2/5 I generally love the feeling of being able to progress my crafting disciplines but I would happily settle for crafting fancier skins rather than better gear stat-wise. I do need something to refresh my interest in crafting but the latest patch did nothing to address that and vertical progression is obviously not the only/best answer anyway.

4) 1/5 tons of new skins and weapon types instead. I wouldn’t be too bummed out if they introduced a new tier a couple of years from now but I’d rather they didn’t. Three months was way too soon and there should have been a longer notice so that people don’t waste money on exotics.

5) 0/5 It was at not even on my list. There are so many bugs and class balancing issues plus WvWvW and sPvP require immediate attention. Sadly I think that releasing a new tier of gear in the midst of all those pre-existing issues will only complicate things.

Quit jumping to conclusions and try to keep it civil.

I’m covered by the questions expressed already.

I gotta admit though I think your expectations for this thing are not very realistic. The official Anet posts regarding the Lost Shores event and Ascended gear debate have set a certain tone that will most likely be the one adopted during Monday’s little shindig. The “ascended items were introduced in order to address the gap between exotic and legendary items” statement is a fine example of what I expect to read on Monday.

If you believe that the introduction of ascended gear contradicts your original vision of the game and constitutes an omen for things to come, whatever PR response Anet may provide should not really reassure you anyway. I mean actions speak louder than PR.

Let’s face it, the vertical progression mmo formula is extremely popular for a reason. People are so used to it by now that they have come to expect it and GW2 has by now attracted a lot of players from such mmos that will never rest until they have it and will defend it to the bitter end. Pleasing both horizontal and vertical progression fans is not possible.

Lifelike.5862:

1) – 10.
2) – 8 (it’s exciting, but not super exciting. This sort of thing I feel is standard for progression)
3) – 10
4) – 0 (no payed expansions, please.)
5) – 5 (I was more interested in class balance and the addition of more misc. items to collect and things to craft with them therefore, but an extra gear tier is ok I suppose)

I’m not one of those GW1 hipsters, by the way. I like my games with meaningful content.

Just a small clarification about 4) cause judging from this post I think maybe I wasn’t clear enough or perhaps my English failed me a bit.

By paid expansions I’m referring to massive expansions like factions or nightfall for GW1 introducing extensive new content like new classes/races and a brand new continent roughly the size of the original game. Sort of the WoW equivalent of MoP for example. I think such expansions are sure to be released and they’ll unlikely be free (makes sense they wouldn’t be). I’m not referring to added content like the lost shores.

How true are the following statements for you on a scale of 0 to 5?

1) I felt like I had little to do once my main character hit level 80, I got full exotic gear and 100% world completion. By the time of the patch my enthusiasm for the game had already lost a lot of momentum and I was really looking forward to new content.

2) Obtaining ascended gear gives me something new to aim for and boosts/refreshes my enthusiasm for GW2.

3)The lack of a tier after exotic is something that always bothered me. I feel that equipping my toon with better and better gear is something I look forward to in a game and that element was missing from GW2.

4) I believe that future paid expansion packs should introduce new tiers of gear.

5) In my wishlist of things to come for GW2 three months after its release (new areas/foes/weapons/events/skills, fixing bugs, tweaking class balance, anything at all) the introduction of a tier slightly better than exotic ranked pretty high.

lordkrall.7241:

Astralporing.1957:

Do you think that people that like this new mechanics are majority of all players?

I think the people that like it or don’t care about it are the majority of all players yes.

Had a small chat about it in Lions Arch yesterday. First overflow then when server became available continued there.

No one did seem to have a problem with it.

And now you will probably shout about how those that don’t like it don’t play the game anymore, and that is fine.
But keep in mind that I was on overflow, which meant that my server had to be FULL in Lions Arch when I got there, and that does show there are rather many people still playing.

Well, seeing how Lions Arch is currently serving as a hub for people who want to play fractals I’m sure the local crowd actually liked the new content. If you are amongst the ones who resent this sorta thing but still wonna play the game you either hide map chat (aka FotM lfg channel) or avoid LA altogether.

It also makes sense that there would be an overflow in LA now that it hosts a dungeon but that does not necessarily mean that the number of active players overall has increased.

Also you are right the majority of casual players are not bothered to use the forums or fill out surveys but express their feelings towards the game indirectly (but clearly) by playing the game as frequently and enthusiastically as ever or moving on to other games. I am sure that if nothing, the majority of the people in these threads are invested enough in the game to feel strongly about the changes whether they defend or resent them.

As a sidenote people who are against all this are not saying that they were satisfied with the endgame in GW2 pre-patch or that they wanted the game to stay static. They just strongly disagree with the “I had nothing to do once my toon hit 80 and got 100% world completion” so farming for slightly better gear will fix that because it gives me something better to do. After all once you get ascended are you gonna get bored again if they don’t release yet a new tier of gear?

Personally I was bored of the game before the patch and I didn’t have full exotics. The reason I was bored is that my ranger has played the same since week 3 (condition and critical) and no other builds seem all that viable by comparison. I generally focus on one character so my bad I guess. Sadly I also find the new lost shore area pretty boring since the events don’t seem to be so frequent and I can only kill so many young Karkas before wanting to blow my own brains out. Fractals was ok for the first couple of times I did each mini instance but I can’t be bothered doing them more than 3-4 times. Plus there’s an identical dungeon in Vindictus so it doesn’t have the new-car-smell for me that it has for other people.

I will not resort to the “the vocal minority doomsayers often turn out to be right-look at what happened to SWTOR etc” argument since I am sure in other games the doomsayers have been wrong and I hope so am I.

gadenp.7586:

Hi fellow forum-ers,

Recently, after FotM came out, I have extremely scaled back my time spend in GW2.

So I would like to ask:
1. Who here, still come to forums but play the game much less?
2. When did you start playing less?
3. Why / What caused the decline in time spent?

1. Me. Well kinda. I still log into the game daily but at this point over 75% of my time in GW2 is spent in Lion’s Arch chatting with friends (who also mostly log in to get the dailies) and also trying in vain to create a story group for Cathedral of Flame. So I still log in but at this point GW2 serves me mostly as a fancy msn.

2. I was a bit frustrated during the last phase of the Halloween events but the Lost Shores one-time event is what did the most damage.

3. Several things:
a) My favourite guildmates moved on to another game. I’m in 2 more guilds (they still have a few people logging in) but they seem to be doing mostly fractals and I don’t want to trouble them with my disconnect issues not being able to log in afterwards.

b) I’m the kind of player who focuses 99% of his time around one main character and have no interest in alts. I feel like my gameplay with the ranger has been the same since the third week and I find that experimenting with builds other than condition/critical has not been all that fruitful. The card game feeling of playing around with builds is what I most enjoyed in GW1.

c) I was very disappointed by the two opening phases of the Lost Shores (after the lag of the first day I didn’t see the point logging in at day 3) and that greatly shook my expectations for following events. The unacceptable technical issues and bugs demonstrated an incredible lack of foresight on behalf of Arenanet (what on earth made them confident there wouldn’t be incredible lag during the opening event I’ll never know). I also thought the opening event and treasure hunts themselves would have been very tedious and unrewarding even without the bugs and lag. Plus I was pissed off that I sat through the lagfest of the first day and bugfest of the second day and all I got out of it was some karma jugs and a several silver in repair costs and then I found out that people present during the closing event received a 20-slot bag and lvl 80 exotics.

d) I spent over 40g on my exotics and several fine transmutation stones mislead into believing that they were top tier only to find out that there will be a new tier of gear released relatively soon.

e) I find Vindictus’ Resenlian’s Labyrinth better than fractals and I never get disconnected and unable to rejoin the party while doing it. After all it is the exact same concept. Creating a low level fractal group is already an ordeal thanks to the scaling system (it’d be alot better if there were broader scales and you needed complete each 10 times rather than doing (and creating a party for) 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10. Plus the rng ascended has rendered other dungeons near obsolete at this point.

Robert Hrouda.1327:

We’re aware of the problem and are working on an active fix. Very sorry about this, hopefully it will be fixed soon.

Problem is by now a lot of people have moved up the fractal scale a lot. As many players have moved on to fractal lvls 10+ it is getting progressively harder to create parties at lower scales. The longer this bug is present the more frustrating it will be for players most hit by this issue to catch up. It already takes well over an hour to create a low level fractal party.

Besides why have that many scales in the first place? It only makes it harder for people to group up. It would have been a lot simpler if fractals had fewer but broader scales and people just needed to repeat scale 1 ten times rather than completing 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10 once.

fellyn.5083:

Columba.9730:

More dungeons. I hate dungeons. It would have nice to acknowledge the near universal disgust at the gear grind.

“Near univseral”? So you managed to ask every single player in the game how they feel about it?

Do you realize the people posting on the forums represent not even 10% of the people who are playing the game?

Since you’ re posting on the forums you probably represent less than 10% of the player base too. I find it odd that positive threads are often thought to represent most of the populous while negative threads the vocal minority.

It’s true that the majority of players express their opinion indirectly (but clearly) by playing the game as enthusiastically as ever, still logging in every now and then or hardly ever logging in any more. However that does not necessarily mean that the people in the forums do not roughly represent a significant part of the player demographic (ppl that are rather ambiguous about staying or quitting but kinda wonna stay still).

For what it’s worth my server feels like nothing but a shadow of its former self most of the time and my guilds’ attendance sheets are 90% grey even during the weekends.

Archer.6485:

Couldn’t you joke around, chat and have a good time in LA while running FotM just like you did in Cursed Shore?

I understand it’s frustrating that we’re limited to only running FotM for ascended gear but is it really worse than running Plinx for the best gold income? If nothing else FotM does seem to be quite rewarding in terms of gold and I couldn’t possibly fathom how running Plinx could be more fun.

That said, we definitely need new options in terms of endgame PvE content which I’m hoping will happen sooner rather than later. But somehow I doubt that bringing Plinx back would be a good step forward for the game…

A lot of people don’t buy mmos to end up repeating 5-player instances (that includes the pre-existing dungeons). For some of us such features don’t really feel like an mmo experience but rather like a multiplayer feature of a single player game. I guess we expect our adventures through the “actual mmo” content to be as fruitful.

Karizee.8076:

Account.9832:

at least when WoW releases a new patch, people brainlessly repeat three new dungeons, not just one

Or 2 rehashed dungeons for 8 months. Zul’Aman, Zul’Gurub anyone?

Of COURSE everyone is running the new dungeon. It’s our first new dungeon since the game launched. Do you really expect people to run the same dungeons we had at launch forever?

Plus it’s wonderfully fun, epic and a downright revolutionary concept in dungeon running. 9 mini-dungeons in one with a world boss, escalating difficulty. Good stuff

Not sure about it being all that revolutionary. All Vindictus dungeon runs are essentially a random chain of 6-7 instanced mini levels followed by a boss with a higher elite drop chance. Vindictus being a Nexon game of course. Besides aren’t fractals the same as infinite dungeons in action rpgs like torchlight 1 except the maps are smaller and the topology isn’t generated randomly?

Plus each mini dungeon has been pretty much the same every single time for me so far so it does feel pretty repetitive already.

LFP FotM lvl4.

I’d been trying to complete a lvl 4 fractal group for over an hour until I finally gave up. Grinding is the least of my worries. Not to mention how hard it’ll be to find groups for dungeons now that the reward armor doesn’t even have max stats. Story mode groups are nearly impossible to create at this point.

Also I disconnected while doing fractals 3 yesterday and couldn’t rejoin my party so I had to do it all over again… Pretty much every run I lose someone due to a disconnect. Hopefully they’ll fix this soon but the same thing happened with the Halloween event instances and they didn’t learn anything from it.

Logun.2349:

I’m less upset about the addition of a new gear tier, and actually more upset about the change to the flavor of the game.

If you’re having fun with the game, whatever that might be, doing dailies, running dungeons, collecting mats for crafting, experimenting with recipes, doing the open world events, or participating in WvW or PvP then it’s not a grind to obtain new gear.

The original designers of the game understood this. It only becomes a grind when you are forced into a single type of gameplay that you don’t particular like to begin with or becomes boring because you have to repeat the same action and content over and over again.

If everything you do in the game (crafting, adventuring, dungeons, dynamic events) ticks you a bit closer to acquiring the top end gear in the game then you’re earning the gear as a side effect of you having fun playing the game YOUR WAY. This was the promise GW2 had over other MMO’s

I’m pretty sure this was the point of Karma, by just playing the game you earn your way into Exotic gear (the old top level gear in the game) that’s what was great about this MMO. You could also just craft your way into the best gear or if you wanted to run dungeons you could get into top end gear that way too……this system is now broken.

This addition of the Ascended gear and Infusions have basically killed many of the best “Play the Game Your Way Systems” this game had to offer from crafting to karma.
The addition of this new tier of gear is just a symptom of the pandemic of things they broke with this patch.

The original designers of the game removed things like the trinity so there were no barriers for players to leap over in order for people to just play together without the need to search for a single profession type. This new content seems to work against this principle. With the introduction of mitigation armor (Agony) players will seek out others that already have a start on the mitigation sets to group with to improve their odds and be reluctant to let players with lower resistant scores join the group.

With the scaling of difficulty players will also seek out other players that have already unlocked the higher difficulty ranges so they don’t have to repeat the lower ones. This all goes against the original ideology for the game reintroducing walls for the players to leap over to play together.

Although these walls are being self-imposed by the player base the current design teams seems oblivious to how players will twist these systems to their advantage and exclude players lower down on the food chain.

The game is making a shift more towards the instanced dungeon endgame so many MMO’s go with introducing a new token (Currency) the Fractal Relics that will unlock some of the more powerful items in the game. This power creep virtually renders much of the other dungeons in the game obsolete just 3 months after launch, good luck finding a group for any of them if you haven’t already seen them.

I see this instanced endgame shift as an unfortunate step in the wrong direction that diminishes the open world massively multi-player elements. In a game that relies on players to push back against the games open world dynamic event driven environments a critical mass of players is needed to keep these areas playable. We are already seeing endgame open world areas that have multiple way points in contention because players have abandoned the dynamic events in these areas and the world has pushed back against the environment.

My prediction is this doesn’t get better any time soon, players trying to find a massively multi-player experience in the endgame open world zones are not going to find the critical mass of players needed to contend with the many group dynamic events in these areas or throughout the rest of the game.

I’m certain that with the player base already diluted between WvW, PvP and now this new endgame dungeon designed scaling in difficulty allowing players to constantly run them as long as they like the open world will become nothing more than a virtual lobby especially since this dungeon has its own unique currency connected to the best rewards in the game.

Moving forward I see the inevitable evolution for this game is to abandon the open world dynamic events in lieu of a more traditional single player quest system.
If these design changes are intentional then bravo job well done on the part of the live team, but I signed up for a true massively multi player open world experience so I’ll be taking a pass.

“Welcome to the lobby for World of GW2 please make a selection, would you like dungeon A,B or C ….sit back relax your game will start in a moment”

If you got this far and are curious about the title of this post that’s how the Bait and Switch works when you advertise one thing and deliver something unexpected.

LFG FotM lvlX

VOLKON.1290:

Mountain Man.7901:

VOLKON.1290:

there’s no indications they’ll keep pushing further and further tiers out there to keep you chasing the unobtainable.

This is, in fact, exactly what they’ll be doing.

“This is just the beginning. In November, we’re only adding the first level of Infusions and Ascended Rings and Back slots, so that leaves us a lot of room to build upon these levels of Item progression in future content.

“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.”

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/linsey-murdock-unveils-new-high-end-ascended-gear/

You’re reading this wrong. This is exactly the opposite of what you claim. This is horizontal progression, not vertical. More infusions and ascended items is expanding the tier horizontally, not pushing a vertical treadmill. I stand by my statement and use your quote as evidence… there’s no indication that they’ll keep pushing out new tiers of gear and having you perpetually chase the uncatchable.

Well that’s kinda horizontal progression as long as they don’t start gradually releasing normal infusions followed by rare followed by exotic followed by ascended infusions. It also depends on how much grinding is required to obtain said items and how much difference they make gameplay-wise. It also comes down to how much faith you have on Anet to stick to their word. I mean they heavily implied that legendaries would have the same stats as exotics (functioning essentially as fancy skins) and that those stats would be the cap but then they changed their minds.

I run a critical build. If every piece of ascended jewellery gives me +2% critical damage over the exotic berserker counterpart (as is the case with the red ring of death compared to the berserker ring with exquisite jewel) then a full set of ascended trinkets potentially gives over 12% more critical damage. Ascended armor and weapons on top of that probably give an extra 10-15%. that sums to over 20% more damage for me 80% of the time (my average critical chance).

That makes a huge difference in pve and WvWvW not even considering additional stats and potentially critical damage from infusions. … I thought I was done with this sorta thing when I got full exotics which is why I bothered spending all that gold (and game hours) on obtaining them. I was under the impression that they had max stats not that 3 months later they’d start gradually releasing items increasing my average damage by 2% each minimum. For pete’s sake the 50 ectos required to craft the back item alone currently cost 12g.