Guild Wars 2

Mike O Brien.4613:

Be angry about legendary weapons, sure, but how about the recent drought of content? That kind of thing happens when we spread ourselves too thin, and when we let the content development pipeline empty out so we can fight fires.

It’s not just recent – there has been no new content (besides HoT, which doesn’t count as it was paid for) since January 2015. The only new content since then is Heart of Thorns.

WoW: Warlords of Draenor: Shipped with 17 raid bosses (with 4 difficulty levels), 8 new dungeons (with 3 difficulty levels), 40+ full armor set skins (versus 3 in HoT), over 100 new weapon skins, 6 new full zones, and quite a lot of other stuff (mounts, pets, etc.). + a major patch 8 months later with 13 new raid bosses (again, with 4 difficulties each), a new dungeon difficulty level, a new zone…

HoT: 4 new zones, a short story campaign, elite specs, Revenant, guild halls, and that’s about it.

5 months later, there have been 5 out of 10 raid bosses released, no new dungeons, no new fractals, legendary skins planned but now cancelled at 4 out of 16, no living story, no legendary armor, 1 of 3 legendary backs actually available…

I’m not trying to be toxic, merely stating facts objectively. This really isn’t fair on people who purchased HoT.

And as for spreading yourselves too thin, it really leaves a sour taste in my mouth that new sets of weapon skins/armor sets/gliders/pets appear in the gem store like clockwork every couple of weeks. The development is always there when it comes to cash shop items. But people who paid for HoT are basically told to wait longer and longer to get the content that was advertised.

Yargesh.4965:

I would really and truly love for the people threatening to sue to actually do so. Pay 4-500 dollars or equivalent currencies per hour to get back if very very lucky the price you paid for the game. You would need to find an incompetent judge and somehow have the company not delay matters with contesting the verdict but heh, stranger things happen.
They could legally according to the contract you agreed to turn every character into pink fuzzy slippers and the goal of the game would be to find the perfect feet to fit on and you could get squat back.

Well, in the UK at least, it doesn’t work like that. We have free government services that investigate individual cases of traders breaching the legal rights consumers have over here, and force the traders to rectify the situation with the consumer. Since ArenaNet advertised certain content, let people buy access to it, and then cancelled that content, technically the consumers should be entitled to a refund.

I’m aware of how backwards things can be, however, and it wouldn’t surprise me at all if on Tuesday when I call Trading Standards I’m told I can’t do anything about it. If that’s the case then no big deal. I won’t lose sleep over it. I simply won’t ever buy anything from ArenaNet again.

Berelious.3290:

Aidan Savage.2078:

Hardly. You paid for access to it. Do you get it if you didnt pay? No. In pretty much ANY mmo in existence, you’ll find that there’s language in the EULA/ToC that amounts to “you paid only for access to the service/product,” not “you paid for something you THINK you should get.”

edit: In fact, from Section 2.a from the gw2 EULA:

You further acknowledge that Your full or partial access to Content, including one or more Message Boards, Teams or Items is conditioned upon Your compliance with the provisions of this agreement and the Rules of Conduct. ArenaNet may modify, remove, or add Content in its reasonable discretion.

Bolding my own to highlight the point soooooooooooooooo many of you people miss.

edit2: https://www.guildwars2.com/en/legal/guild-wars-2-user-agreement/ for any of you who think I’m lying.

Thank you Aiden, I was looking for this myself to post.

One thing that’s amusing is when private companies think they can rewrite the law by putting stuff in their terms and conditions. Ultimately, consumer laws are above ArenaNet’s terms and conditions, and ArenaNet will still be liable to abide by them regardless of what they put in their T&C documents.

In the past it’s been a bit of a grey area due to it being a digital purchase, but that changed a few weeks before HoT launched. Digital goods are now covered too. Anyway, I’ll see on Tuesday when I contact Citizen’s Advice/Trading Standards about it. They are the actual authority on the matter (in the UK at least), not ArenaNet.

Aidan Savage.2078:

ozma.3498:

Is there not a legal obligation to provide paying customers with the things that were advertised as being part of the expansion but to be released at a later date?

No, not really. You paid for /access/ to the full game.

That’s not true. There is actually a legal obligation – I’ve looked into it.

From the Consumer Rights Act 2015:

*"Every contract to supply digital content is to be treated as including a term that the digital content will match any description of it given by the trader to the consumer."

“A change to any of that information, made before entering into the contract or later, is not effective unless expressly agreed between the consumer and the trader.”*

Since HoT was described as having various features that have not been implemented (and in the case of legendaries, it has now been publicly announced that it won’t be implemented), ArenaNet has breached the “contract” between themselves and people who purchased Heart of Thorns and as such we should be entitled to a refund.

By the way mods, I know you infracted one of my other posts, but if you read what I’m saying, I’m talking objectively about the legalities of what’s going on here. I’m not being offensive about ArenaNet or anyone who works for ArenaNet.

For UK buyers who want their money back, here are some things directly from the Consumer Rights Act 2015:

“Every contract to supply digital content is to be treated as including a term that the digital content will match any description of it given by the trader to the consumer.”

“A change to any of that information, made before entering into the contract or later, is not effective unless expressly agreed between the consumer and the trader.”

Legally, you should be entitled to get a refund for the expansion.

Minx.7521:

If you or someone else that was looking into the legalities can post follow-ups it would be greatly appreciated. If they abandon what was promised, they’re straight-up lying and expecting to get away with it.

I’ll be calling Citizen’s Advice on Tuesday (they are closed until then since it’s bank holiday weekend), who deal with consumer rights alongside Trading Standards in the UK. I suggest people in their respective countries do the same, as it will vary from country to country.

Fortunately, as of October 1st (i.e. shortly before HoT was released) the Consumer Rights Act 2015 was expanded to give legal rights to consumers related to their digital purchases. Since ArenaNet has essentially sold advertised certain digital content and have now decided not to deliver it, it is likely that they will be legally obliged to provide either a full or partial refund based on the documents I’ve read.

I’ll post full details once I’ve been through the process/have a case opened.

Another sad thing is that since Heart of Thorns was released, there have been 112 gem store skins added to the game (Dominator, Soaring, Timekeeper, Merciless, Plasma, Immortal, Improvised). No problem allocating resources to that, was there?

Neural.1824:

Ever notice that Anet’s attention to things is a lot like a 10yr old with ADD on speed?
How many times have they introduced amazing new ideas, only to never implement them again? How many times have they added content, with promises of “new direction”, only to drop it for the next new shiny?

They are a never ending stream of one hit wonders, which has resulted in a chaotic, half broken world full of players suspended half way between dedication and rage quitting.

Yep. I firmly believe that there will be one and only one raid ever added to the game.

Mike O Brien.4613:

Then we shipped precursor journeys for existing legendaries, and said, “We’ve been working hard on new legendary weapons, the first handful of which will be introduced in Heart of Thorns, with more to come in subsequent updates.” While I fully get that you’re disappointed today, this is not about us shipping half an expansion pack.

Actually Mike, the specific wording was:

“Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns heralds the beginning of the *first new set of legendary weapons to be added to the game since its original set of twenty included in the launch of Guild Wars 2. The first three we’ll release are a celestially themed axe called Astralaria, an experimental energy themed pistol called H.O.P.E., and a raven spirit themed staff called Nevermore. It takes a lot of work to craft these legendary journeys for release, so rather than take the time to develop the full set before releasing any of them, we will be releasing new legendary weapons in small groups at regular intervals until the full set of sixteen has been added to the game.”

Source

Is there not a legal obligation to provide paying customers with the things that were advertised as being part of the expansion but to be released at a later date?

These are welcome changes, but until solo queue and team queue are separated, PvP will remain unenjoyable for a significant portion of the playerbase.

I assume this change was made as a result of the PvP population not being large enough to support both separate modes without queue times getting out of control. I understand this, but for myself personally (and I’m sure many others), I would actually rather have long queues than constantly face premades.

I’d love to see a tickbox in the UI where players can opt in/out of the merged queue. For example:

[ ] Free-for-all (solo queue and team queue) – Average queue time, 2 minutes.
[ ] Solo-queue – Average queue time, 10 minutes.

No perks or anything. Just the benefit of knowing you are going to face a pure solo queue team.

Can we at least get some kind of comment from the devs on this issue? No disrespect intended, but it seems like you guys actively avoid addressing this aspect of PvP that so many people hate. There have been probably thousands of posts about it, and yet you guys won’t even acknowledge it. Why?

Ohoni.6057:

It is healthy in an online game to have things that only the top players can acquire. I believe this actually motivates ALL players, including those who aren’t “top” players, to play the game more, because there is something symbolic of your status that you can strive towards, even if you never get there.

Nope. Common misconception, but total trickledown nonsense.

As you appear to know everything definitively, please explain to me what kind of reward structure motivates people to play in an MMO, using the undisputed most popular MMO of all time World of Warcraft as your supporting case. Thanks.

Astralporing.1957:

ozma.3498:

It is healthy in an online game to have things that only the top players can acquire. I believe this actually motivates ALL players, including those who aren’t “top” players, to play the game more, because there is something symbolic of your status that you can strive towards, even if you never get there.

Oh yes, it’s symbolic all right. It symbolizes the division between “elite pros” and the unworthy masses. It symbolizes the toxicity this division causes. And it is a symbol that actively striving to create that toxicity is not only fine, but actually something to strive for.
I wouldn’t call that healthy, however.

Well, not really. There are plenty of raiding guilds in other games who aren’t “elite” or toxic at all – they have just organised themselves and beat some content, and thus they are rewarded for it. It’s nice to be rewarded for doing difficult content that required a lot of effort and organisation. It doesn’t automatically mean all raiders have a toxic attitude and look down on those who don’t have the best rewards.

If you don’t want to play for more than an hour at a time, don’t raid. It is impossible to cater for all players, and at this point I feel the more serious PvE players need some content aimed specifically at them.

Not to be disrespectful to you OP, but it sounds like you want all content to be aimed specifically at casual players like yourself, without anything for other kinds of players.

It is healthy in an online game to have things that only the top players can acquire. I believe this actually motivates ALL players, including those who aren’t “top” players, to play the game more, because there is something symbolic of your status that you can strive towards, even if you never get there.

My personal theory is that it’s largely based on who is online actively queuing for PvP. The more people, the better the matchmaking. The fewer people, the more losing streaks you get, because the game will put you against premades, often with a suboptimal team who have no real chance of winning, simply because otherwise you’d be in the queue all night waiting for a balanced team to fight with and against.

Unfortunately the PvP population is too small to avoid this outside of peak hours.

I agree, an MMR-based leaderboard would be much better than the current system, where leaderboard position is a reflection of time spent PvPing and “teammate RNG” rather than skill. But in order for it to work, the matchmaking really needs to be fixed first.

“Rank means nothing” – the OP is referring to matchmaking, and according to the official wiki’s PvP matchmaking page (written by an ArenaNet PvP dev) rank is actually factored in when setting up matches:

Scoring/Rank/@distance Score added or removed based on the distance between the potential roster’s average rank and the average rank of all selected rosters, including both teams.

However, rank is just one part of matchmaking. The real question shouldn’t be “why do I fight high rank players even though I’m a much lower rank?” but rather, “why am I fighting alongside rabbit and deer rank PUGs against full premades of rank 70-80 players?”

Halvorn.9831:

How do I even know who is a premade? They do not necessarily need to share the same guild tag. Is there any other means of finding out?

You open the team roster screen and right click the enemy names. It will say either “Invite to party” if they’re a PUG, “Join party” if they’re in a group that isn’t 5/5 and neither if they’re a full 5/5 premade.

Evan Lesh.3295:

This is the consequence of allowing any party size to queue, but in my opinion is far less of a problem than splitting up the community.

Well, no disrespect intended but have you paid much attention to the general outlook most people have on the current state of PvP/matchmaking/the queue system?

I think the real issue is that nobody feels like they are having much of a meaningful impact on their group. It used to feel good as tank saving the group when a DPS carelessly pulled an extra group of mobs. Now all I do is stand in a corner and press ‘2’.

hannah mee.7925:

Realistically the difference between achievements like this and 500 shotgun kills is that this achievement relies on a large number of coordinated people who, let’s face it, aren’t that coordinated. Shotgun kills only rely on you and your ability to shoot 500 enemies with a shotgun.

It’s limited time only, and was bugged for most of the update.

It requires about 150 people who are outside of your control to do something.

Literally 99% of people won’t be able to get onto a map that has enough people to actually complete the achievement due to the overflow system.

It’s just generally a very poorly designed achievement that honestly shouldn’t be in the game. It personally ticks me off a bit that I’ll miss it due to how its nearly impossible it is to get onto my main server (Desolation) if you log at any remotely normal time, but I’m not enough of an achievement addict to get mad about it.

However, just because you personally aren’t into achievements or you were lucky enough to get it doesn’t mean your “just don’t do it” argument has any merit whatsoever. A lot of people place more value on achievements than you do, and it bothers them that they’re unable to complete this one not due to a lack of commitment or skill, but due to factors that are entirely outside of their control.

You wouldn’t say “don’t watch the match” to a football fan. You wouldn’t say “don’t listen to the new album” to a music fan. You wouldn’t say “don’t read that book” to an avid reader. So don’t tell achievement fanatics to simply not do an achievement just because you personally don’t care about them.

I agree, this was a stupid achievement. Simply put, achievements like this shouldn’t exist. I’m all for a challenge, but not when the hardest part is just getting onto the main server. The fact that it was bugged for such a long time also didn’t help matters, but it’s still a very poorly designed achievement that is simply unobtainable for most people regardless of how many hours they spend in an overflow or how good they are.

I am currently looking for two players to complete a dedicated dungeon tour group. We’ll be running all the commonly farmed paths 3 to 5 nights per week (possibly more, depending on availability/interest) at 20:00 GMT.

The purpose of the group is to save the time that would normally be spent looking for geared and experienced players in LFG and to minimize time spent wiping/explaining tactics as can often be the case in pugs.

Paths:
AC (all)
TA (forward and up)
SE (path 1 and 3)
CoF (path 1 and 2)
CoE (all)
HotW (path 1)

Classes we’re looking for:
1x Warrior
1x Guardian

Requirements:
6k achievements
Meta builds + Zerk gear (minimum exotic)
General knowledge of the aforementioned paths
Ability to attend a minimum of 3 nights per week for the full tour

This will not require guild representation as it will all be organized through whispers. All we require is that you are available 3 to 5 nights per week and can pull your weight when farming these fast and easy paths.

If you’re interested or have any questions please contact Ozma in-game via whisper or in-game mail.

Proposal overview
I feel the best way to improve Fractals is to improve the reward structure and fix Dredge.

Goal of proposal
To make Fractals more appealing by improving the reward structure, while fixing some of the issues that put many players off.

Proposal functionality

1. The gold reward vs. time/skill requirement is out of alignment. I think you should get a gold reward for each map the first time you complete it per day, on a scale from 50s (Swamp) to 3g (Dredge).

2. The Fractal weapon system is very frustrating. I have friends who have literally over 20,000 Fractal relics, who have done the Fractal daily literally every single day for close to a year, yet still don’t have the Fractal weapon they want. While RNG is an integral part of MMOs, I feel this crosses over into unreasonable territory.

To fix this, I’d suggest having the following system in place:
- Fractal weapons are now crafted using recipes purchased with Pristine Fractal Relics.
- They require some crafting materials that have a (reasonable) chance to drop from end bosses in high level (40+) Fractals once per day, so you can’t just abuse your wealth to get all the Fractal weapons by buying mats on the TP, and getting the weapons you want will still require a certain level of commitment.

3. As I’m sure ArenaNet are aware, virtually everyone hates the Dredge map.
- The beginning of the map is simply too much. There need to be fewer mobs, or the mobs need to be made manageable by non-premade groups by making them not respawn after being killed, or by making them easier to kill (non Veteran?).
- The clown car bit is far too long. Reduce the number of Dredge that spawn here, and make it doable to pull the boss along with the Dredge (instead of separating them) by making them hit less hard, or by having 3 at a time spawn or something.

4. Incentivize high level play. There’s not much reason besides the faint hope of getting a Fractal weapon skin to do high level Fractals. I’d like to see a special armor set (skins only) introduced in the same manner as the Hellfire/Radiant skins – for example, have boots/gloves/helm introduced now for 30, 40 and 50 personal levels. At 60, add legs. At 70, add chest. At 80, add shoulders. Titles would also be nice.

Associated risks

I don’t think rewarding more gold will be a risk if it is handled appropriately – a one-time reward per day, per map (like regular dungeon paths) would prevent people from abusing the system.

As for Fractal weapons being made craftable, I think the only risk is that they’d become more common. However, I don’t think they’d become extremely common, since many people simply don’t run Fractals.

Fixing Dredge? I see no downside to it. Virtually everybody hates the map. (Sorry to say it, but it’s true.)

Fractal Armor – it could be perceived as “too exclusive” by some of the playerbase if certain parts required high personal levels (i.e. 80 for shoulders, as I recommended). However, I feel this kind of exclusivity is what the game needs. Things like Legendaries only show who grinded the most gold. We need something cosmetic that shows skill.

Another risk for Fractal Armor would be that it might be several years before the cap is raised to 80, so people could be walking around with incomplete armor sets for too long.

I’m personally very happy with this content update, although maybe I’m biased because I’m on Desolation. It’s just nice to see content in the game that is pushing players to have structured, organized groups in large numbers. While there are still some very clear issues that continue to exist (such as overflows and the very nature of “boss timers” rather than being able to see content when you please), for me this is by far the best content we’ve seen since Fractals were added to the game.

The only reason that the lack of a trinity works currently is because the ingenuity of players has allowed them to completely bypass 80% of every dungeon in the game by skipping mobs, cheesing bosses in corners with Fiery Rush and running min/maxed builds that burn bosses down faster than they can even pose a threat. Ironically, it’s often the people who ask for more challenging content who are purposefully avoiding any slight bit of difficulty the dungeons may have by using the aforementioned techniques.

If mobs didn’t reset and bosses couldn’t be pulled into corners, we’d see a tremendous drop in the success rate of people running dungeons, as a lot of the trash mobs/bosses are somewhat difficult – people just don’t realize it because they kill them in a couple of seconds against a wall, or more commonly, just skip them entirely.

The value of having dedicated roles like tank and healer would go a long way to making the game’s PvE more enjoyable, as these roles can provide a huge amount of satisfaction. For me personally, I always play tanks in MMOs, so not having the opportunity to do this in GW2 has been an interesting experience, but ultimately one that has left me looking elsewhere for my MMO gameplay fix, as I don’t really care for damage (pressing ‘2’ and doing 50k+ damage isn’t exactly riveting for me), and unfortunately running a Cleric Guardian is simply holding a group back once you’re playing with experienced players.

naphack.9346:

The Problem with this is group stacking, especially in world vs world.
There was a time, when there were turtle zergs, stacking at one point and shooting down anything in front of them with concentrated ranged damage.
Granted, back then, arrow carts did a whole lot less damage, but the main thing is, it would not have mattered at all.
What they did back then was exploiting an oversight by the devs, where the heal on shout trait of warriors(and many other shout skills, but the most broken thing was in fact the heal trait) did not have a target limit, so 50 men standing at one and the same spot, while spamming “FOR GREAT- ON MY- SHAKE IT OFF!!” would be constantly healed by far more than any ballista or treb could deal damage.
With this change, we’d essentially get that meta back. 50 guys stacking atop 5 water fields, 5 light fields, 10 fire fields and a couple ice and eternal fields for good measure, so every blast heals for 5k, grants frost and chaos armor, retal, 25 might stacks, while every projectile heals for 5 conditions, inflicts 10 seconds of burning, 5 stacks of confusion and a very long chill.
It wouldn’t be good for dungeons either. You’d see even more stacking, this time packing as many combo fields as possible and as many finishers as possible.

That’s true. I guess one way to get around it would be to only allow one combo to happen per field type, per finisher. By that I mean, say you have ten fire fields, a blast finisher wouldn’t give everyone an instant 25 stacks of might but just the usual 3 stacks.

Another way to do it would be to limit the potency of fields that are underneath the “top” one, but still allow them to go off. For example, if a water field is underneath a light field, have the combo heal be less potent than it would be if it was on top. Although this is still suboptimal, since it doesn’t allow people to be fully in control of their finishers.

I would recommend simply having ALL possible combos go off when somebody uses a finisher. For example, you have a fire field and a light field on top of each other and somebody does a whirl finisher. As a result, you get both burning bolts and cleansing bolts.

There are so many drawbacks to the whole overlapping fields thing. I don’t feel that allowing all combos to go off would be too overpowered, and it would promote things like stacking might in the middle of a boss fight with a fire field, without the Guardian’s hammer auto attack light field getting in the way (for example).

NoTrigger.8396:

if you want to address the dominance of berserker/dps players, then give us more difficult content so only REALLY GOOD players and REALLY GOOD groups will be able to survive in berserker gear.

we are asking for difficult pve content for a very long time now.
dont nerf what i feel is fun to play, because you are not capable of delivering challenging and difficult content.

If you want challenging PvE, you’re really in the wrong game. The entire PvE system in GW2 is set up in a way that encourages an inverse skill progression, where to be really “good” you actually have to run with a group setup that melts everything so fast you don’t even have to dodge anything.

Furthermore, any shortcut in encounter mechanics (like reflecting projectiles on Lupicus) is used to bypass as much of the fight as possible, and of course any mobs that can be skipped (particularly ones that actually may pose some kind of threat) are indeed skipped. Glitches and bugs are used liberally to avoid having to do anything, with the ultimate goal being to get everything as close to the point of “press one button and the boss instantly dies” as humanly possible. (I’m not talking about your guild, but rather the general philosophy of conquering PvE in GW2.)

No, this isn’t a game for those who are interested in an end-game that demands skill from its players. Unless ArenaNet makes some serious changes to the game, this will always be the case and players will always find a way to make it faceroll again.

VOLKON.1290:

Let’s put it this way… games with actual treadmills (like WoW for example) don’t need to have threads like the CDI currently open now. Why? They have an inherent treadmill to keep players hooked on a false sense of progression.

Well, I wouldn’t call it a false sense of progression. You actually have to beat progressively more difficult boss encounters to increase your stats. I’d say getting Ascended armor is more of a false sense of progression – you’re increasing your stats while standing at the crafting station in Lion’s Arch.

I’ve learned to ignore all hype about upcoming content and features and simply focus on what I see in game on release day. The two are usually worlds apart.

And also, I agree that just scrapping leaderboards for fractals would be the best idea. Having leaderboards for fractals makes no sense. PvE leaderboards for things like Challenge Missions made sense (in GW1), but not fractals.

ColinJohanson.2394:

We’re holding the leaderboard for now to see if we can’t decide on a better way to help differentiate people on it who are all at the same tier, other than just the first who got there specifically. Once we have decided that, we’ll need to code, test, and vet it and then update the leaderboards to reflect the new tracking.

That’s good to hear. Any word on whether or not people who hit 50 (or higher) before Fractured will get some kind of special title or achievement for doing so?

Samhayn.2385:

I like this idea of higher drop rates for harder content but it still neglects wvw so I would like to add. Higher drop rates in wvw from Player kills modified by the players rank. Higher rank = better chance to get something good from them. In theory higher rank players should have more experience and thus be more difficult to fight.

In practice this would be really bad. For one thing, it would be too exploitable (i.e. a friend transfers to enemy server, and kills the high-ranked player repeatedly with someone else there to resurrect). It would also unfairly turn high-ranked players into walking target practice. And finally, WvW isn’t really the best place to reward people for being good at PvP – PvP is.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

What if certain pieces of ascended gear could be crafted and sold on the TP such as gloves and boots?

I think the less the TP has to do with vertical progression, the better.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

The Tokens idea is interesting and I am sure you are noting that with our Mega Boss update Tequatl players can earn Ascended Weapons with Unique skins (Sunless) and that we will be moving forward with that paradigm. The idea of more challenging zone meta events was raised in the Living World CDI and a good idea.

I think the Tequatl approach for gear distribution is highly problematic because of the following reasons:

- Mega bosses have a very low level of personal responsibility. You don’t matter to the overall success or failure of the event no matter how well (or poorly) you play.

- You are usually fighting alongside random people who, more often than not, won’t listen to instructions or tips. However, it’s difficult to even make organized groups to rectify this due to the restrictions imposed by overflow mechanics.

- It encourages things like camping Sparkfly Fen so you’re not in the overflow. This isn’t an option for somebody like me who has limited play time if I want to enjoy other aspects of the game.

It’s nice to see devs posting some of their ideas behind design philosophy. :-)

My opinions on horizontal vs. vertical progression:

Horizontal progression:
- I like it, but it no longer feels meaningful past a certain point.
- The emphasis on character appearance combined with the acquisition methods of “cosmetic upgrades” encourages people to focus on grinding gold rather than getting better at playing the game.
- A great part of RPGs is fighting progressively more hard-hitting enemies. Horizontal progression doesn’t lend itself well to this.
- There is currently no way to wear a weapon/armor skin that shows how skilled you are, so people go after scarce items instead. It would be nice to see some kind of “skill-based horizontal progression”.
- As people master their class and number-crunch the best setups, even brand new content can feel trivial in difficulty once you get a vague idea of the mechanics when all bosses, old or new, are tuned to the same player gear level.
- It can become monotonous always having the same gear, stats and build, doing the same bosses for the same reward.

Vertical progression:
- In my opinion, it works very well when there is new content to go along with it (for example, the continuous introduction of new PvE instances in other games), since it then becomes a reward for doing the new content.
- It allows the bosses to be progressively more hard-hitting and have higher stat requirements, which is a very simple way to make the game feel more epic (if antagonists aren’t scary, fighting them isn’t as fun).
- Getting more powerful and looking cooler by beating challenging bosses with your friends/guild feels more meaningful than getting new stats by doing simple and easy activities.
- Vertical progression has no place in PvP.
- Most people like becoming more powerful in games, myself included. It can be a very rewarding, exciting and epic feeling progression system if done correctly.

My favorite stat progression system (in response to Colin’s post):
- Final Fantasy games in general, as you can focus on increasing the particular stats you want through gameplay. I particularly liked Final Fantasy X, maxing my party’s stats by fighting bosses in the arena and replacing spheres on my grid before going to fight the optional mega-bosses on the international version.

GW2’s implementation of vertical progression:
- It doesn’t feel meaningful as it’s not tied to any real accomplishment.
- The stat increase seems too small for the amount of time/currency/materials required.
- There really should be some new, more difficult content to go alongside a new gear tier, otherwise it simply makes earlier content easier when most people weren’t struggling with it anyway.

Thanks again devs for posting, I’m looking forward to seeing where this discussion leads!

Would be nice to have tags that only people in your squad can see, going beyond the “guild only” tag idea, so big guilds can have more than one commander on a map doing stuff without affecting the “main” zerg. Also the ability to hide tags from commanders not in your squad. (This stuff has probably already been suggested, but I haven’t read through the full topic.)

There’s a couple of small changes I’d love to see on the map (as in – the actual map that comes up when you press ‘M’):

1. Remember last zoom level. It’s annoying having to zoom to the level you want over and over again every time you open the map.

2. Make the map show instantly when you press ‘M’. The opening/closing map animations get annoying if you have to check the map a few times in quick succession.

I haven’t played Dredge since the Fractal changes, so apologies if any of these points have been addressed in Fractured.

The panel bit at the start: this needs re-working. Having to use stealth/go round the back/have people die on switches etc. is just tedious. Just make it so that once you kill the Dredge, they don’t respawn for 60 seconds or something and you’re free to use the panel.

The bits where you bomb doors (both of them) have far too many mobs. Again, it’s not fun. It’s just tedious.

The clown car bit – again, too many mobs. It takes too long. It’s not fun. It doesn’t require skill. It’s just annoying.

The final bosses – fine by me.

To be fair, you have to expect some degree of paying for cool stuff in a free to play game. At least it’s only skins and nothing with stats on it.

Jski.6180:

Gold should be important in an mmorpg or you will get something like what happen in GW1 where gold was pointless it was ecto that where used to buy things.

As far as I know, that only happened because there was a limit to how much money you could carry in your inventory/bank, so people started using ectos as a form of currency to get pass the “wealth ceiling”.

haviz.1340:

And an arrow.

And like Wethospu said, they are chaining reflects even more easier so what exactly does make it harder?

Plus, you will rarely find people in this subforum genuine impressed when you mostly use ranged attacks, whatever content you do.

Everybody seems to be entirely missing my point. People implied that it’s not very impressive because it’s ranged. I’m pointing out that meleeing Shaman isn’t some kind of impressive feat in itself (there are countless examples of bosses that have already been meleed in solo videos that are much more difficult to dodge at melee range) and shouldn’t be used as a reason to say they somehow cheesed it because they used ranged weapons.

Ranged weapons are much more suitable on Shaman, kind of like when soloing Lupicus meleeing is much more suitable, since you don’t get hit by projectiles etc. People don’t start criticizing players for doing that, so I don’t see why it’s appropriate here.

If there is some kind of unspoken rule that you should always use the worst choice of weapon as some kind of community-imposed gambit, then Warriors for example, should stop using GS since it provides an extra dodge, or offhand sword since it provides an extra block.

Wethospu.6437:

If meleeing was fairly easy why did they range then?

They already stated why – because it’s a more suitable option for the fight. It’s a bad fight to melee in, since there is more DPS downtime (leaving melee range, the boss invulnerable during the AoE attack), and you can’t DPS the adds while kiting if you’re melee. Longbow is (imo) the most suitable weapon, since you have two large-radius AoEs that do a hefty amount of damage, as well as being able to Blind the boss (making arrows miss) and use Bleed/Immobilize during the add phase. You already stated that you went melee purely because it’s too easy at 48 otherwise.

Also you are missing some major things which makes me believe you really haven’t meleed it. Most importantly when he “spins” you have to react immediately because the attack hits really inconsistently (before circles even appear and outside of them). There might be something I don’t know about this attack so feel free to tell me. One little thing is that you have much less time to avoid his arrow (you have to dodge based on animation instead of dodging when it flies towards you). And finally you have position properly for Firestorm and it’s much easier to take damage from lava.

I admit, meleeing Shaman isn’t my “normal” approach during 48 daily runs and whatnot. But after Define released their full melee video and then again when you released your duo video, I tried melee and it wasn’t difficult enough to make a ranged duo 80 kill seem like they cheated somehow. It’s much easier than something like Legendary Archdiviner, where you literally (I timed it) have to press dodge in 0.2 seconds on his non-leap melee hits to avoid taking ~5k damage at the old 48.

Also I don’t think the lava damage actually scales (not 100% sure but I think I tested it at some point). At least on the video I saw Mesmer getting hit for about 2.5k from an Elemental. That’s about 13% of his health, not 75%.

I can’t remember exact numbers, but me and an Elementalist were messing around on 80 Shaman a couple of days before the patch, I’m 99% sure it was over 10k damage per hit (I checked my combat log at the time). I can remember, because I then went to re-trait Missile Deflection to see if I could burst them down a bit with their own damage and was disappointed that it “only” did 1-2k damage when reflected. Unfortunately I didn’t take any screens or record it.

According to you with reflects you can just faceroll. So what made this fight so impressive then?

That was in response to you implying melee is much more difficult on this fight than ranged, even though both groups make liberal use of reflects and the boss attacks aren’t supremely difficult to dodge or anything. What makes it impressive on both videos is dealing with the general chaos of the fight, regardless of reflects.

Syn Sity.5826:

Lol, what an kitten thing to say. Both kills are very impressive and you are directly insulting wethospu and sandy’s kill for no reason, while simultaneously giving all these examples as to why the 80 kill was more difficult just to fuel a fire that had already been put out.

I’m not fueling the fire – I got to this discussion late, and since a lot of people look up to rT and probably trust their opinion without verifying things themselves when it comes to “high end” PvE, I wanted to make a few points as I feel their comments about the video weren’t fair (or even accurate).

I have respect for those guys too and enjoy their videos. That doesn’t mean I have to agree with everything they say and keep my mouth shut just in case it causes some debate. I think both kills are good accomplishments and I showed the 48 duo to some of my friends when it was first released.

My point was that if you’re chaining reflects and kiting in between, then the only extra difficulty a melee player faces is the slow AoE you can walk out of and the spinning attack, which compared with many bosses in the game isn’t too fast, and is very easy to see since it’s a big boss model hovering above the ground.

I want to clarify a few things since a lot of people may still hold the opinion that the kill is somehow not very impressive because they used ranged weapons.

First of all, meleeing Imbued Shaman himself (even at 80) is fairly easy with a small amount of practice, like most slow-hitting bosses. You have, what, two extra attacks to deal with? One of them is a slow cast AoE that you can literally walk out of, and the other is the spinning attack that also gives plenty of time to react.

If we were talking about a boss with fast melee hits, for example Legendary Archdiviner, I would definitely agree that ranging the boss trivializes the fight versus meleeing it. But on Shaman? Nah. It doesn’t even come close to trivializing it. Shaman’s attacks (including melee) are by far the easiest part of the fight.

To say that it’s not much of an accomplishment because they’re using a ranged weapon and thus negating two slow, incredibly easy to dodge attacks is like saying your guild’s Lupicus solo videos don’t show any skill because by meleeing you’re negating several of his main attacks that only hit ranged players.

Let’s face it – the only dangerous part of Imbued Shaman is the add phase, and meleeing the elementals while chaining reflects has zero risk vs. ranging them, since you are fully protected from their attacks anyway. On the [rT] duo 48 kill video, you basically chain Feedback, Phantasmal Warden and Temporal Curtain and then run out and kite the adds until the reflects come off cooldown.

I’m not criticizing this approach, but rather pointing out that there is nothing about this that shows superiority in skill of playing melee vs. ranged. With the protection of reflection abilities, you could essentially put some random terrible player into a Feedback bubble at level 80 and they’d be able to melee with their eyes closed and come out alive.

The real skill in the 80 duo is coordinating and positioning everything for the amount of time it takes to kill the adds (since they have so much health) while removing the boss’s bubble (full groups sometimes even struggle with this), dealing with the lava that appears beneath you and takes most of your health in one tick, and still dodging Agony/surviving the fourteen level 84 adds (who hit for 75% of your health) when you occasionally have to leave the reflect zones because of lava.

When all is said and done, this is a great duo kill and big respect to you for pulling it off.

People need to stop saying 30 will be the same as the old 50. It has been stated previously that the new 1-50 will be easier than the current 1-50, let alone the current 50-80.

“We fixed a number of bugs and made lots of balance changes to existing fractals. Also the difficulty scaling has been tweaked overall to create a slightly less difficult curve up to 50.” (https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/livingworld/fractured/Fractured-Pro-Con-Suggestion-Thread)

Also, in other news, it seems there are some new PvP game modes in the works. I guess that means we’ll see everybody’s PvP ranks downgraded to 10, since they didn’t earn any glory using the new maps.

goldenwing.8473:

Bigger Picture concern:

What happens in the MMO community when word gets out that a developer decided to change dungeon mechanics (Fractals), then de-leveled their customer base to make them run it again?

Do you call that a reset? It wasn’t gear. It wasn’t a title.

How do you explain to potential new customers that this is not something they should worry about?

Should you be concerned that the game will get a reputation?

Understand, that ANet just did something in the MMO industry no one else has ever done before because it is unthinkable.

Were these questions even considered in their decision to make this change?

Indeed. It baffles me how they would actually do this. In a genre where if you lose your playerbase, you will eventually lose your game (look what happened to Warhammer Online), doing stuff like this is, as you put it, “unthinkable”.

I can already name off the top of my head at least 5 people from my “close friends” in-game who are strongly considering quitting over this. And the dangerous thing is that it’s not an “emotional” (i.e. rage) quit, it’s more of a reasoned “I seriously cannot believe they are doing this… I think it’s time to find a new game, because this really is too much” perspective on the whole thing.

I’m in the same boat. I’ve pretty laid back about a lot of the stuff I didn’t like in GW2, continuing to play even when some fairly silly decisions were made (like giving away thousands of precursors at the karka event, making the “one time only, buy them now or miss your chance forever!” weapon skins tradeable, etc.) but ultimately as a player you have to draw the line somewhere. I think for myself and many others, this is probably the line. If they’ll delete so much hard work like it’s nothing, I don’t think I’ll ever feel like working on something difficult in-game again. And if I feel like that, then there will be no point in continuing to play.

VOLKON.1290:

Funny… I didn’t hear this many complaints when they removed a leg in TA and replaced it with a new one.

You might have done if they’d removed all TA tokens from people’s accounts, all gear purchased with TA tokens, and reset people entire Dungeon Master achievement.

Moshari.8570:

I do think this sets a REALLY bad precedent.

This – and not the level change itself – is the main reason I’m currently strongly considering quitting the game permanently. It has become quite clear over the past year that ArenaNet march to their own beat in many ways. In some parts of the game, that’s a very good thing. In others, it has people like me (and many people I speak to) scratching our heads in disbelief that a company like them could make such blunders in judgement. I’ve never seen an MMO literally erase your accomplishments without any real compensation before. It’s mind-boggling.

VOLKON.1290:

You do realize that when I go into a level 30 map they already reset my level to 30, right? Yeah, thought that was worth mentioning.

Pfff, you know what I mean… :P

In WvW, the new mastery mechanics are the levels, so that makes no sense either.

No, what I mean is – they add a new Mastery in an update, therefore the playing field is changed, therefore it’s unfair to still have ranks that you earned on the previous “playing field”. For example, they added Flame Ram Mastery in the Tequatl update. The playing field changed. Time to delete everybody’s ranks because you got to rank 150 in a world where Flame Ram Mastery didn’t exist.