Guild Wars 2

Corky.9743:

Okay, so the people that are lvl 80 who are out there grinding karma in large zergs are just going it to get gear for looks?

Well, not necessarily. While stats’ sum is the same, there’re at least 5 non-craftable stat combinations – if you want one of those, you’re for a nasty ride

To thekittender craft gear only, NO, that kills all real end game PvE (meta events and explo dungeons).

It realy doesn’t. Part of the stuff for crafting should just come from them, and only them. Then you have different parts of the game needed without favoring one of them. Add decay instead of overpresent binding and you have normal thriving economy w/o artificial item reuse inhibitors (which will not work here either way, gw2 is not geargrinder – at least on functional level) or desperate content gating.

Who knows … Pre-80 the crafting has one set of problems, at 80 another (though partially shares some). A lot of functionally desirable things are not even craftable in the first place (not even mentioning possible upgrades).

Slowing down ? Not sure. Don’t really recall that happening to me, but people have to get rid of the concept of “craft useful stuff for yourself” – plastered all over the web everywhere, starting with ANet’s marketing department. I have 400 in tailorer/artificier, a friend in weapon/armor. We both deliberately found things that could be sold (broker or npc) for rough value of materials bought from TB. Sometimes for small gain, sometimes for small loss (think: upgrades, potions, crystals, rares+). There were occasional choke points, but nothing really bad.

They could have made proper drops and ratios, properly implemented decay (seriously, who makes non-geargrind game without one …), made pve an economical backbone of wvwvw. All part of the game complementing each other, without forcing to cross-participate. Instead we got gems, omnipresent tokens, dungeon grind, undestructible equipment. All the junk from typical geargrinder rammed down into not really fitting design.

Unless you actually want to craft “useful”-in-practice worthless (with flood of other crafters’ same useful trash on TB far cheaper) equipment for yourself, just craft runes. With current prices of some materials, you can fast forward it to max with relative ease and marginal costs – though there will be some choke points.

It costs precisely one insignia more (which might or might not be a bug), so hardly 33% more. Looking at my spreadsheet and current prices, it’s 11090c vs 12779c for a certain lvl65 set (based on heavy bones). And obviously I’m not crafting this for my own use either.

Recipe otoh is quite a pain in thekitten to get – mostly due to skill cost, that I can agree with.

Either way, the question still stands. Or should I just post some “insufficient tooltip descriptions for tailor’s bulks” bug report ?

As in subject – as some satchels/boxes of rare armors repeat the same name at lvl65 and lvl80 – and there’s no craft/item level indication at all, as far as I can see (on bulks).

Also, their tooltip doesn’t specify the armor’s level at all – for example all tailor’s bulks are like that.

Any trick I might be missing or so ? Exotics are not a problem, as they have different name and color, the rest – if the name is repeated differs on rarity side. But these ones are the exception.

I wonder why so little (if any) people bind modifier keys on mouse. Not that this is necessary here – I have a set of few other things on my mouse (attunements, targeting, dodge, up/down and few lesser things).

As for keyboard, I don’t use wasd either, though a mutation of it of sorts, with forward/backward under thumb/pinkie respectively (have been using it since Descent times). Besides being far more beneficial for movement, it frees 2 keys in excellent positions for skills and such.

FWIW – aside all the other issues with crafting – I just hope it’s an oversight. Also made small suggestion in the barrel of suggestions forum here

Looking at current state of whole crafting/itemization before cap leaves kind of sour taste in the mouth. Main problem at 80/400 will be different, but that’s for a different thread (though partially it touches this a bit as well – namely decay – still the leveling pace makes it de-facto irrelevant before cap). GW2 is a game where in essence a gear is just a tool for the job (which is great, it’s been a while since we had mmo approaching gameplay this way) – thus some decisions are even more surprising.

Main pre-cap issues sumamrized:

• the game throws literally barrels of white/blue/green/ junk at every player – not mentioning story rewards and not too pricy heart vendors; it’s physically impossible to have problems with access to reasonable gear; use what you need, vendor or broker what you don’t – everyone is set for free
• at the same time, some common and practically all fine materials are – in comparison to full items – nonexistent; for some reason it’s logical (?) that you have to kill 10 harpies to get 1 claw (if you’re lucky), even that each of those poor beings have at least 4 per one leg. Not mentioning other things such as like 20-30% dead mobs not even being lootable; or champions having 1 white item, or veterans being worthless to bother with). Sorry that’s korean mmo “logic”. Not common sense or “GW2 is different”.
• pre-cap stuff is for the most part obsoleted in a matter of minutes / hours
• some level stages leave pve drops superior to crafting (e.g. 45, green drops vs. blue only crafts); add the above two points and you have far more and far cheaper equipment from standard mobs than crafted stuff

To emphasise: the discrepancy between material availabilty and full non-crafted items’ availabilty is insane. The damage coming from it is even far worse, because:

• levels 1 – 79 serve single purpose: map content gating – which comes down to essentially skill/trait points; the level range flows rather fast; any pvp is completely exempted from it and everything else is downscaled
• levels 1 – 399 of crafting are somewhat analogous – save few specific things that just happen to be learnt a little bit before 400 with no 400 counterparts, no one gives akittenabout this stuff

Now where do the above points put “discover recipes ! have fun ! craft useful things !” ?

Literally nowhere.

From practical point of view, almost everything pre-80 is pointless – a placeholder in essence, for example – does anyone ever crafted a “minor potion of <whatever> slaying” for anything else than skillup ? Drop rate is upside-down, there’s is zero demand for significant majority of pre-80 crafted stuff. It goes straight into salvage, use + salvage a few hours later, or vendor.

Besides diehard crafting for the sake of crafting (and discovering how ugly say, male’s light rare lvl35 armor looks like on a sorcerer), discovery and experimentation (with random fan db or not) is actively avoided, choosing the most efficient/cheapest route to 400 to get to proper exotics and just avoid the whole material farming chores and/or broker costs.

Was that the aim of the system ?

As mentioned above, almost everything during leveling phase is a quickly obsoleted content filler. It could at least be enjoyable filler, but because of some crazy decision regarding silly drop rates – it’s hardly anything enjoyable or even appreciated.

As in subject – this is beyond irritating for people that move/kite a lot during fights. Camera control is enabled only with RMB or LMB – and both of those buttons also select whatever target is under the cursor.

Unless I missed some existing option that allows that already.

PopeUrban.2578:

I think the reason stats are arrayed in very specific combinations and quantities is a designed balance rather than some sort of oversight.

Yea, that’s one possible reason – though looking at what is available currently, I don’t really see that many issues.

Though FWIW, I’d love (and quite a few other people judging from comments) to see all permitted (if that’s the actual case) combinations to be normally craftable. We have 7, and there are at least 6 other combinations completely uncraftable now – with some of those quite desirable – e.g. pow/vit/tough or pow/cond/mfind.

This has been mentioned a good few times already, but from current set of 168 possible combinations, only a mere handful are available (7 from crafting and a few from dungeon geargrind).

Now, the solution to the thing is rather simple. We have enough types of fine materials that would correspond to attributes (e.g. blood – power, sacs – condition damage, claws – precision, etc.) Instead of making preset inscriptions in form of e.g. (looking at random lvl80 exotic recipe):

5 globs
5 dowels
5 fine materials of the same type

Ramp the requirements a bit up with following template:

7 globs
7 dowels
3 fine materials X (major)
2 fine materials Y (minor #1)
2 fine materials Z (minor #2)

3/2/2 group can be filled with player’s chosen stacks, giving particular bonuses. The resulting inscription would simply have “custom” prefix (or maybe <player name>‘s – if your DB scheme allowed this kind of flexibility), and subsequent final item as well. This doesn’t cause any prefix bloat and shouldn’t require any big modifications (and on top of that – no modifications to existing items).

The example above can be extended naturally to lower level items of course (which allow dual combinations, and so on).

Item DECAY

From what I’ve seen, GW2 approached whole equipment side of things quite more reasonably than most other games out there. Not without some issues, but overall it’s well made.

Furthermore – and most importantly – the gear is practically a tool for the job, not a penultimate reason to play the game (with sadistic content gating well known from other games, korean ones in particular).

But at the same time – it falls into the same trap of pseudo-decay bandaids known from typical “carrot-on-a-stick geargrinders in instances” – to name a few typical techniques – BoP, BoE, merciless RNG. Even in GW2, some of the equipment is unobtainable through crafting (tough to say if it’s deliberate or accidental – e.g. stuff with “soldier” stats’ combination) forcing typical (and quite repetitive) dungeon grind. And then, everything remains endless but account bound …. in a game like GW2 ? A “sword” that never breaks really doesn’t make sense. The only reasons such thing thing exists in [other] games are: content gating, money/time sinks, artificial means to inhibit item reuse.

Why not just use decay that would fit this game really well ?

It assures that nothing is endless, allowing to get rid of most/all aforementioned bandaids at the same time. It allows full tradability of everything. It allows toning down on requirements – especially on RNG / timesink front. It leads to all elements of the game naturally complementing each other – be it common stuff needed for crafting, special parts from dungeons, less special parts from regular pve world, karma-related stuff, and properly skilled crafters themselves. And situation like “ok I have my exotic gear, I don’t care anymore about the gear” never arises – the end effect is better than in any game with undestructible equipment (which generally ends with geargrind expansions once too many people grab the carrot, or get bored with chasing the old one).

To give a simple example (similar to Neocron – if anyone remembers that small, fine mmo):

• a crafter makes some item – it gets durability rating, say 100%+tiny rng. The combat use causes the durability to drop over time – which should be tuned to allow semi-hardcore player to use the item at its full strength for a few days (week?); also during crafting there could be optional components (for a solid price) to extend crafted item’s normal durability; also durability drain could be related to damage done/taken – there are tons of possibilities here

• once the period is gone (corresponding to say 50% of durability) the item starts to lose it’s performance (red light for the player: get ready to replace it)

• 40% and it cannot be transmuted anymore, 30% and it cannot be salvaged (btw: scale doesn’t have to be linear either)

The core point is – replacing is not stupidly painful people are “used to” – but a natural part of the game. Make sure everything is craftable and tradable, make sure “the best” /does/ require participation of all /parts/ of the game (and tradability assures you are not forced to participate in some – or even all – of them).

Vaerah.4907:

Very simple concept: add the same button for weapon set swapping all the other classes have, just disable it in combat. Pronto, a fix that does not require any additional developers effort except an “if in combat” check in the code.

Going easy way, that would work. But we have quite a few more (and other classes as well) combinations. I’d rather see them spend a tiny bit more effort and allow weapon+ h/u/e skills presets, which then can be bound to some keys (by default unbound).

This would be beneficial for everyone, not only elementalist.

LoneWolfie.1852:

8) Better filter list for recipes, something like the TP.

Unless you mean something else, there are checkboxes where you can select what kind of stuff should be listed (including: tiers, gives exp, have enough materials, etc.). It might be eventually improved as well, giving even more fine grained control. Though FWIW I found it reasonably sufficient so far.

And overall – regarding all weapon combinations (that would be 5 in case of elementalist). For the greater good of players’ sanity (at lest those that do use different weapons depending on situation they see around) – please add shortcuts for weapon presets outside combat. With ability to pin down the weapon to particular slot in inventory (so whenever unequipped, it goes back to that one [invisible] bag and its slot).

Sure it’s a detail, but it’s mighty frustrating detail when you are forced to do that many dozens time a day. And it’s beneficial for all classes of course.