Guild Wars 2

Don’t fanboy over him, or else his ego will grow to much and he’ll start making bad decisions.

There’s a saying I have in life: “Luck is for other people”.

The thing is, when someone gets lucky they shout it to the skies. When the 1000 other people don’t get lucky, they say nothing.

The thing I find funny is that people theorize that others act this way because it is online and misses the social cues. I act like this in real life, too. But online, its like everyone also has aspergers.

Anyway, something I’m noticing is the lack of perspective from the players, so allow me to give the other side of the debate: videogames are a lot like drugs that operate on operant conditioning methods to provide a sense of satisfaction far beyond basic biological needs. Reckless use of videogames leads to compulsion and to addiction, which can ruin education, ruin relationships, and ruin lives. When people make videogames, they make more than just entertainment. They are making a device which operates on psychologically subconscious principles that compels people to play the game, sometimes even when they really don’t want to play the game.

“Even when they don’t want to play the game” is the big one here. Often times, people will find themselves trapped in the more skinner-box like games, returning only for fear of losing out on the new better-than-ever limited time and necessary for PVP weapon, or for fear that their town will become overrun with weeds and the next time they play will be a boring grind to remove them all, or that their guild will disband because there is a mandatory attendance requirement for all those who joined. You hear complaints about it from guild wars 2, as well. The whole “time gating is annoying”, “dailies feel like work”, “No more temporary content”, those are complaints about factors that are in the game that compel players to do things that they don’t want to, otherwise they end up missing out. GW2 is a bit more lenient with this, because they don’t actively punish players for not participating as much as they just deny rewards (laurels, specific skins, mystic coins), and it just happens that everyone else will end up getting these rewards, so you are only indirectly punished for not playing the game.

Put all of that together, and you’ll find there is quite a lot of animosity toward the developers. This is one side of the coin. There is another which makes people hate developers:

Sometimes it is about a passion that is strong in the game. When there are things that players love to do, when they get an unholy amount of enjoyment from the way they play the games. The hard part is, then the way they play the games gets changed. Classes become “balanced” in a way that their favorite methods are ruined completely, bugs get introduced that linger around for months that ruin certain playstyles (coughfixturretsnowcough), sometimes things get outright removed from the game that people loved to do. Think about the current champion farms, then think about all of the people who lose out. The people who liked to do dungeons, the people who liked to do chest events, the people who liked to do fractals, the people who liked to do dynamic events, all these are diminished because the champion farm has taken away people who would otherwise be doing all of those things.

So when people find out that the one true joy of their lives is being ruined by the devs, they respond with unnatural hostility.

This isn’t just true for videogame developers. Any place where there is some kind of power struggle that compels people toward a behavior, whether it be illegal like drugs or “legal” like oppressive economies and governments, you will see this hated. Any place where the passion is killed, you will see that hatred crop it. I wouldn’t call anyone “responsible” over the issue as much as I’d say it is an unfortunate fact of reality.

I’m a bit nervous for the class myself. I largely PVE, so the three main concerns are damage, damage, and more damage. The Scourge looks like it’ll be fun to play, but I have no grasp on how much deeps it can spew forth.

IndigoSundown.5419:

What stops you from playing as you want now?

Actually, the issue is far more complicated than that. Whether we should have hard roles or not isn’t just a matter of player preference, but a business decision. People like having hard roles, and they like having their playstyle reinforced by the game’s design. So, the question is if the game can be more interesting, entertaining, and appealing to the public at large if there were hard roles.

It isn’t a stupid thought. Since beta, one of the biggest legitimate complaints about GW2 is that the PVE combat is samey. From an outside perspective, watching everyone in the team do the exact same stack and smack routine with every encounter ever is both unpleasant to look at and unappealing in general. Hard roles appear to be dynamic and unique, with each player’s singular contribution being noticeable.

From the diversity standpoint no one “loses out” if tanking and healing become requirements. DPS preference players still get to DPS, but now the other two legs get to do their thing, too. The problem is that players who build bulky or healy, or heck even conditiony face not gratitude, but ire from their teammates. Telling these minority preference players to just go and hang out with each other is like telling racial minorities to do the same thing to avoid racism. It isn’t a fix, at all. The hate is still there, you’re just trying to hide yourself away from it.

While it is a community problem, it is also a design problem. So, facing the unreasonable wrath of selfish teenagers on the internet, the only reasonable solution would be to modify the game in such a way that the stat combinations that Anet put into the game are useful in that game.

Personally I think the solution to this problem is just to make the game harder, but in specific ways to encourage more than just corner pulling and bursting. You’ll still get full zerk groups, but hopefully the skill of the average player would mean that running a bunch of unaffiliated full zerkers is no longer completely superior to 4 zerks + 1 zealot.

Ashen.2907:

1) I commented on elitism. Giving preference to one person because they are superior, or perceived to be so, in some way to an alternative is a form of elitism.

2) Intruding on a group in contradiction of its clearly stated goals and desires is rude and selfish. The community theater across the street from my home advertises ballroom dancing on the first wednesday of each month. It would be very rude and selfish of me to walk in and start square dancing.

5) If there is a word that you do not know being used then you should know to ask. If you are not willing to ask a question in a situation where you know that you are not in the know the consequences are your own.

Of course the expectation is in the mind. It is in the mind of the person who formed the group and labeled the LFG according to that expectation. It is in the minds of those who join a group so labeled. It should be in the mind of anyone seeking to join that group. This is not significantly different than a group labeled as needing one more for HotW and having someone join with the intention of doing AC. If the player doesn’t know what HOTW means he knows that he doesnt know, and has the option to ask. The same is true with a team advertising for a zerker. If a player doesnt know what the word zerker means he knows that he doesnt know and can ask. If I say to you, “Yggdrasil stands tall,” and you do not know what Yggdrasil means you will immediately know so and could ask.

I think that you are over psychoanalyzing the individuals looking for a faster path to game rewards. “Sometimes a cigar,” I mean an advertisement for a speed run, “is just a cigar,” I mean an attempt to complete an objective a bit faster.

#1: Guess again. Elitism is not based on preferences of performance, but exclusion of perceived deficiencies. The word itself is based on the notions of privilege being separated into the sole ruling class, and thus always manifests as an exclusion by standards. There is no “pick A or pick B” option in elitism, only a “don’t pick A”.

#2: As far as these people know and experience, the title is meaningless and thus garners no further expectations, because no one respects them anyway.

#3:You misunderstand how potent a lack of knowledge can be. Because they don’t know what the word means, they don’t know if it is important enough to ask about. The title might as well be the collection of random gibberish that spews out of map chat, and no one cares about that stuff. People go through life encountering unimportant words that have absolutely no impact on their life, and thus aren’t worth learning. Yggdrasil is one of those words.

The whole point of the list is the fact that, no, the speed expectation is not in the mind of people who join up on these groups, nor in the mind of people seeking to join these groups. Hell, sometimes it isn’t even in the mind of the people who form the groups, because they’ll just copy/paste what they see, or they’ll inherit the group from someone else who used those tags and don’t care to change them. While you have done a good job of saying that you hate people who do this, this doesn’t suddenly make it not true.

Goldrock.9076:

way too early to be making loong winded posts on raid content because well its a new thing and chances are it will change over time.Like everything else though i agree but patience.

Um, no. It is never to soon to make a comment on how something is done. Complacency just leads to more problems. If you see an issue, there’s no proof that there’s a solution in the mix or that things won’t get worse, so speak up and say stuff immediately.

This community isn’t too bad. I’ve seen ones that are much, MUCH worse. For example, I haven’t acquired a single stalker or hatescriber, and there aren’t players with 30 different account names that are used to troll people. The forums actually look down (for the most part) against hacking and exploits. Barring some exception, you’ll get more serious answers to any question than non-serious ones. People don’t use the forums as a medium to break international law. The moderating staff are only categorically liberal instead of capital L zealots, or conservative fascist, or worse yet the trolls or criminals themselves. The moderators aren’t too lazy, either, since whenever I report someone actions are swift.

I’ve been to places where none of that is true.

fadeaway.2807:

Why did this need another new thread when as you said, we already have many?
I get that everyone wants their opinion heard and thinks it is the best, but if everyone created a thread (looks like they are doing this) then we end up making a mess of this new balance subforum.

A few reasons:

#1: So many of the threads have devolved into nitpicking and insults that, even if I were to post a big explanation as to why things are going down, the likelyhood that it’ll be read or taken into consideration by anyone, Anet included, is remote at best.

#2: The zerk threads talk about solutions, just have open discussions, or were negative responses to the idea, but none of them really bothered to delve into what exactly the problem is, why it should be fixed, how it came about, why it is unique to GW2, etc. Hell, originally I didn’t even plan to include a solution in this thread, since Guang’s thread was enough.

So much of the other threads has delved into madness that I felt an escalated voice was necessary. It is unfortunate, though, since I would like this thread to serve more as an explanation for the zerker issue, rather than to discuss particular solutions to it.

In theory you balance the summons by making them stronger than the average well. In practice, they didn’t do this. Instead, we get two skills that act like offensive wells, and the other three act as very odd buffs that require teammates to be any good, and each one is generally unfulfilling.

The energy costs definitely hold them back. If you could drop both Icerazor and Darkrazor in an area, you would get solid combination of disables and damage that would make for good point control. Problem is, both skills cost a total of 70 energy to use. You simply can’t layer them up. Of course, Necromancers and Chronomancers don’t have a problem layering their wells. Hell, I’ve been hit by double gravity several times in WvW.

Individually they’re weaker than wells, they have a destructible component on top of their effects, and because of energy costs they’re also mutually exclusive with each other. You can only use the best PVP combo after 4 seconds of combat while using no energy for other skills.

Those five are the top tier. Now we get on to the others…

#6: Mesmer: The mesmer has a lot of niche uses, such as boon stripping, excellent reflect uptime, and cleric skills. The mesmer also has excellent damage in the right circumstances, and portal is always a good backup. But, outside of these niches and circumstances, the mesmer loses out and starts to feel dull, with both little to contribute ofensively, defensively, and also with fairly low damage. Mesmers will still find their place in dungeons, though, and they can have an excellent ranged game with their phantasms.

#7: Ranger. The ranger isn’t too bad of a class on its own. It does many things correctly, such as having unique team buffs, fire fields, decent dodges and fury. However, the ranger has two big problems with it: It lacks real potency and identity in its abilities, and it has an AI with it constantly. It is always hard to evaluate the rangers, since I rarely see them do anything inside a stack or out of it, and most of the time rangers will have to fight with their pets to get anything done. The pet itself is often a liability, since many enemies gain advantages from merely hitting something, an they pets don’t dodge.

#8: Necromancer. Necros are in the same bulk class as warriors in that they are extremely tanky. However, the necro has so many flaws it is painful to list them all:
1) Sustained damage instead of burst damage. High burst is useful since travel time eases cooldowns, giving good bursts higher overall DPS.
2)Lack of offensive team buffs. The necro is a selfish buffer, with their only contribution to team offense being vulnerability (which most people can do).
3)Their useful utilities (blind spam, boon corruption), come with dark fields, which are arguably the most useless field in the game.
4)They lack useful combo fields and combo finishers.
5)Their ranged combat is pretty bad, being almost wholly reliant on condis.
6)They lack vigor and dodges, making them vulnerable to on-hit effects from bosses.
7)Lack of unique buffs.
8)Lack of potency. Most of the good things necros do (blinds, vulnerability, weakness, boon removal), other classes do better.
9)Lack of cleave, with the recently buffed dagger auto being the best necros have.
10)Fear ruins stacks and coordination.
The necro does have some good things about it. It has decent sustained damage, decent chill, decent self buffing, and IMO the best AoE stun in the game via Wail of Doom. But there simply isn’t enough to warrant a necro’s place on the team over anything else.

Ur not doin it rite.

You enter WvW. You look at the map. You ascertain what is happening by looking at the map (big orange swords on stonemist’s inner layer. Gee, what is going on there?). If you cannot ascertain what is going on in the map, you ask what is going on in the map. After you find out what is going on the map, you decide to

A): Join or form a Havoc team of 5 players that goes around getting tanks and undefended towers.
B): Set up siege defenses and run supply at critical towers and keeps, as well as maintenance siege and upgrades at those locations.
C): Go to the commander shield and do whatever it is they are doing.
D): Go near the commander shield and scout specifics, reporting back to the commander group what you see (enemy groups, how well defended a tower is, how much time is left on guild claiming, etc).
E): Go solo and try to intercept yaks and pwn n00bs.
F): Put on your own commander tag and form another group that takes on larger missions.
F) a) If you don’t have a commander tag but have enough pull in a guild or on the map, do F but without the tag.
G)Sit on defense at a tower or keep and keep tabs/have a sandwich with a relaxing view of zerglings running by.
H)Group up as many as you can in one spot and LIVE FOR THE SWARM!!!
I)Enter Guild vs. Guild battles.
J)Decide the map is fine and your services are needed elsewhere.

And probably some other things I haven’t mentioned. There’s a limit to my creativity and experiences, after all.

DGraves.3720:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

It doesn’t matter if it gives a significant improvement. All that matters is if the potency of that skill competes with the others. When power builds needed ascended gear to compete with condition build’s exotic gear, then that’s a problem.

… But it doesn’t. At all. I’ve no idea how you guys do your math and crazy numbers but condition damage isn’t ever going to do better than raw consistent burst simply because one stack never hits that kind of damage. Ever.

Aside from Burnzerkers briefly demonstrating this false, the fact is that condition damage is inflicted by all the stacks, not just one. Also, condition damage is usually safer to use than power damage, which means that while in a vacuum a power build does better, in practice a condition build does better. Conditions aren’t affected by protection or weakness, either, which chip away at power builds and can be a severe pain (especially in higher fractals). Also consider that condition builds still do direct damage, which after maximum might/fury and team buffs, still stand for a substantial contribution to damage outside of just the conditions that are inflicted.

Then again, last I checked you have no clue how condition damage works. It appears that fact has not changed.

I’ve mentioned defiance before. The best solution I’ve heard to the problem is to have defiance automatically remove itself over time. Like, if you get 5 stacks of defiance, then every 2 seconds a stack is removed. Stacks can also be removed by CC.

I couldn’t bring it higher than a 5 out of 10. There were many good/fun parts, but truth be told from sheer repetition and boredom I checked out of the LS for many months.

Animism.6849:

Basically – we aren’t.
Anyone who recommends farming champion trains is concerning.
All the current methods in game of making gold are entirely sub-par to what we had before.

Bring back dungeon rewards please…

Actually, by doing a rudimentary flax farm (on my alts), quartz crystal gathering for ley-line tools, treasure mushroms, and also by crafting jeweled damask/deldrimoor, I’m making quite a lot of bank. I’ve bought 6 full Viper Sets, 800 gems, and am currently sitting at 250 gold. The income is so high that I’m actually going to buy a commander tag.

If you want a braindead easy way to gather money, there’s a elder wood log farm at Rayham Bayt in Malchiors Leap. Go there with your alts, chop the wood, and then do whatever you want for a few hours, then come back and chop the wood again. It is about 30 silver per toon, so if you have a lot of alts it is several gold of windfall every few hours. It is fast and easy.

Gather your quartz. That stuff is valuable, and it takes 10 minutes out of your day to do. If you have the home node you’ll get enough to make a ley-line infused tool, which sells for 5 gold or so. 5 gold in 10 minutes is a steal, but if you can’t craft it then you can sell the quarts for 2g to 2.5g. Drytop itself is a decent way to make money, since it mass-produces coarse sand and the geodes you gather can buy keys to open up the locked chests.

Heck, every HoT map meta is good for cash. You just have to commit and be there early enough to get the 200% contribution. The easiest map for this is Auric Basin, which by happenstance is also loaded with ancient wood logs and orichalcum ore. You can see at a glance which events need doing, and the only “organizing” you need to do is the taxi for the big event, or maybe a small group to do some of the harder events. After AB is Dragon Stand, which needs bodies but tends to organize itself.. Around map close a lot of people will stand around and join a squad, so when the group fragments into different maps everybody can taxi in on the commander instantly. It is recommended to do each map, though, as getting enough of the map specific ascended material lets you craft jeweled deldrimoor and damask, which when bought on the TP nets you around 100% profit.

Lord Kuru.3685:

You’re looking at it the wrong way. To understand their decisions you have to put yourself in their place. If you’re Anet, you’re not analyzing which system is better for the player. You’re analyzing which system is better for you.

And in this case, they realize they haven’t created enough new content. So they need to artificially stretch it out as much as possible in order to give the illusion of more content than there actually is.

This sounds correct at first glance, but the more I think about it the more it doesn’t make sense.

#1: What is good for me is a happy customer with a happy reception. Higher praises means more sales and more retention. The give-then-take-away that happened with elite specs does more than just generate rants on the forums.

#2: The gating of elite specializations only adds more “grind” in one way. In order to get the masteries you have to scour over the new HoT maps and do the stories, which also will put you next to all of the hero points that you would need for those elite specializations. Once you’ve obtained the sufficient mastery ranks, then you pretty much have your elite specialization already.

The extra grind comes from having to take alts through the map. Since masteries are account bound, this only adds a relatively small amount of time for each alt. So depending on how alt heavy you are, putting the elite specs behind masteries adds anywhere from “no extra time at all” to “insurmountable amounts of time” (given that some players have upwards of 18+ characters). The alt grind might be moot, though, because you already have access to at least one elite specialization of your choosing, so the absolute gate of when you receive an elite spec adds little to no time.

This is what is so infuriating about this change. It doesn’t make sense. Someone has shown me an awesome new toy, then taken it away just because they felt like it, and have refused to give a sufficient reason as to why. Everybody gets hurt for seemingly no benefit.

Ashen.2907:

Completely agreed, except for the part of the current state of technology in GW2. The game includeshigh cyclical ROF machine pistols, automatic rifles with rates of fire not too dissimilar from modern assault weapons, flame throwers, grenades, and so on, not as exceptions but rather as defining aspects of the setting’s tech level.

I’m not too keen on the GW2 lore regarding firearms, but from a gameplay perspective it wouldn’t make for good design to have pistols and rifles reflect their equivalent speed. If you want to take the abilities of the classes literally, then we also have bows with homing and high explosive projectiles, and poisonous gasses.

This all exists in a universe where a stick can throw fire, the primary mode of transport between cities is wormholes, and autonomous robots are the norm. Arguing over the exact technological era of GW2 is kind of a moot point. Think of it this way: the rapid speed at which new technologies are being introduced hasn’t caused the bowman to die off yet. Rather, since bows are still prominent in the world, technology is being developed with bows, instead of against bows.

Other interesting trivia, the grenade was first invented at around 750 AD in Eastern Rome, and the flamethrower was invented (formally) in 672 AD. Yes, a lot of the techniques we have for modern warfare are the same stuff we’ve been using for over a thousand years. Other ancient weapons include biological warfare and chemical warfare.

I know I said it years ago, but I still want swimsuits.

While staying alive, that is. This is an action game, not pen and paper. You’re meant to dodge, duck, dip, dive, and DPS, not just sit there and take it.

EDIT:

Personally, I hate the trinity system, and if the game went that direction I’d stop playing completely.

The reason is that the trinity system is a system of negatives. Each player is built specifically to be ineffectual own their own, and this was done so to deal with the extremely basic aggro mechanics that older MMOs had. It is about having a series of classes that are inept and incapable on their own, forcing a grouping up.

In reality, the trinity system is actual a duality system. It is about tank and healer, and is built around maximizing effective HP and effective health regeneration per encounter. Enrage timers had to be added to harder content to give DPS a role, because otherwise everything would be completed just by having tanks and healers. The DPS role is basically occupied by extra people you use to fill the party slots once you have the requisite tanks and healers.

The system isn’t necessarily boring, as much as it just plain sucks. You don’t have independence, and the moment something goes wrong everyone blames the tank/healer. Because nobody wants to be the tank/healer, everyone stands around waiting for one to show up in a group. And throughout all this, I keep wondering where the red mage is. Maybe it is because I hail from the days of Phantasy Star Universe and Monster Hunter, but having the classes be ineffectual specifically to force grouping is a horrible idea. I’d rather have each class be effective, AND have a set of strengths to go with it. Then, I’m not forced to wait around for people to play the game, and if something goes wrong then it isn’t automatically the healer’s fault. I’d rather be empowered then specially incompetent.

I’m a bit conflicted about the update myself.

On the one hand, I enjoyed the thrill of the difficulty. A successful run truly felt like an achievement. It wasn’t impossible by any stretch. you just needed everybody on the same page. The “high DPS, pay attention” page. but once you got that organization together, it was beautiful.

On the other hand, my complaint is in essence that more people get to do the event successfully and more frequently. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. I’ve been on enough pug runs to know that getting a successful kill out of randoms was incredibly tough, and now more people get to do it.

The real question I have is this: It that O.K.? My general experience with randoms is that they are hard because they are undergeared, poorly built, and don’t listen. I’ve been lobbying for a general increase in difficulty because faceroll easy is boring and doesn’t hold interest. King of the Jungle was one of those events. You had to try to beat it.

Personally, I don’t want my off-days to be the overall determiner of how valuable I am as a player.

Arche.7326:

Try Necro, we still cant solo Lupi.

Necro is easy. Their massive health lets them face tank nearly anything in the game.

If you want hard, try engi. Gotta play Mozart on your keyboard to be effective with that class.

And the hardest part about all this is coordination. You see, there is no one there to teach you the proper timing on when to push, when to veil, when to lay down the stun fields, where the melee train should go, where the ranged group should sit, where to focus the choke points, when to bunch up and use blast finishers, when to use what field, when to lay down siege, what siege to use, what targets to single out, what to pull, where the best treb points are, how to blindly treb, where to put traps, and for all of the things I have forgotten to mention. You have to learn the timing for things, and get the feel for the combat. Then you can start to build up counter strategies, like laying down AoEs against stealthed melee trains, stacking stability patches into choke points to run right through them, and using decoy groups so you can counter-pincer an enemy zerg.

As far as low HP classes go, thieves are the difficult one in the Marauder debate. It really comes down to three things. This is from a PVE perspective.

#1: Thresholds of survival and healing capacitance. Health is restored after any fight, so any additional health after the minimum is excess. Thus, there is a certain threshold of health you need to hit. This threshold isn’t a hard number, as it is dependent on the fight, and can be thought of as a series of attacks, let alone one single attack. For example, while wandering around in HoT maps it takes 3 “volleys” from frog archers to take me down. Changing my gearset from zerker to marauder would increase this to 4 volleys, buying me that extra attack.

In long fights, this survivability threshold is governed by healing capacitance. This is the capability for your character to receive heals. Thieves have high personal healing, but low healing capacitance, which is why glass thieves are either at full health, or kissing pavement. A larger amount of health, while increasing the threshold, also increases the amount of healing received, which thieves to survive more attacks in the long run.

#2: Damage uptime. The advantage of a higher threshold + healing capacitance is longer engagement time. At low thresholds, once a thief reaches the one-hit-until-death range, they have to back off, or they risk dying. The cost of disengaging is dependent on how good the ranged damage is, and for thieves this isn’t good. So, by having a longer melee time thieves have a higher damage overall.

#3: Failure rate and skill level. The fact is that exchanging 9% damage for 50% more health makes an overall more efficient and powerful character. The only reason why this debate exists is because, in theory, it is possible to complete content without needing any additional health at all. But, if you shouldn’t happen to have that peak leet skill like most players, then the time for failure needs to be factored in. A death is the biggest DPS penalty you can suffer, since it involves all of the damage done being reversed and the additional travel time. A failure is essentially the same as doing negative DPS. While most trials are geared per fight, the fact is that time wasted on a failed fight is never reset. That time still eats away at the overall DPS of a gear prefix.

So, if you should find yourself dying, then Marauder will be better than berserker.

Previously, the question was this: “Do all 3 of the above advantages compensate for doing 9% less damage?”. But… things are complicated now. It is all due to two little words: Enrage Timers.

In a raid setting, individual survivability per fight doesn’t mean a darn thing. Either you have the DPS or you don’t. You die in 8 minutes anyway, so repetition and perfecting play with maximum damage are a necessity. Previously, these weren’t necessary. Because of this, the biggest advantage of a reduced failure rate is tossed out. Now, whether Marauder does more damage than Zerker is on an individual fight-by-fight basis.

So the question now is “Does the increased melee engagement time and higher healing capacitance make up for the 9% decrease in direct damage”. To that end, I’m not so sure. I haven’t set foot in raids, so I have no idea what the damage thresholds are like there.

spoj.9672:

Tooltip damage varies depending on your power. So using damage numbers like the ones on the wiki doesnt make much sense. Its best to use the coefficients. As they are always constant.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1aI9lEpPZLiNVf7ibEeVzV1h_-aWWt-JEGW0suFgaewM/edit#gid=0

These are current coefficients. Id suggest tweaking your feedback to reflect coefficients. Or at least list the power you have with these tooltips.

The feedback is exactly the same. I’m comparing, under identical conditions, the tooltip damage between dagger and all other skills. Thus, the ratios between coefficients and tooltip damage are the same.

Actually, scratch that. It’s better. Coefficients don’t take into consideration weapon attack strength.

TexZero.7910:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

TexZero.7910:

You could start by working on the baseline economic problems that cause people to auto farm. That’d be nice. So it likely wont happen.

That’s just absurd. The “baseline economic problem” is that people want money. Period. You can’t fix that.

Or maybe just maybe there are people farming the materials there whose rate of acquisition are substandard compared to their usage. You know like leather/linen.

But you’re right it’s absurd that we have nice things.

So they’re afk farming a valuable source to (gasp!) make money.

TexZero.7910:

penelopehannibal.8947:

TexZero.7910:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

TexZero.7910:

You could start by working on the baseline economic problems that cause people to auto farm. That’d be nice. So it likely wont happen.

That’s just absurd. The “baseline economic problem” is that people want money. Period. You can’t fix that.

Or maybe just maybe there are people farming the materials there whose rate of acquisition are substandard compared to their usage. You know like leather/linen.

But you’re right it’s absurd that we have nice things.

What you’re suggesting won’t fix it. It’ll just migrate it to a new area. For instance, if they “fixed” the linen thing so it’d end up only being 50 copper a piece, the AFK farmers will just migrate somewhere else, such as gaining cotton, then we’re back to square one.

They’ll AFK farm for the highest priced item they can possibly get. They don’t care if it’s linen, gossamer or pink inflatable moas.

And why are they farming… ?

Fix the source of the problem and it will cease to exist.

Why exactly are players forced to “Farm” for drops when we have a lovely map event reward that could be tweaked into giving more. This will get people into the game playing the events to get loot. I know that’s like some foreign concept…especially here. Heaven forbid people are rewarded for the actions they take in game.

They’re not forced to farm.

I think the OP might have a bit of a misunderstanding: all professions in this game do damage. Not only that, but all professions in this game do a lot of damage. You can outfit anyone in pure berserker gear, and when you do this you can get some freakishly high DPS. So, my suggestion is to pick a class that is flashy, and just build for DPS. But, if you want the classes laid out, then (listed by my opinion):

Elementalist: These guys are kings at AoE damage and combo fields, and are IMO the highest DPS class overall. They come with a lot of potent ranged attacks, and also great utility as well. Due to the FGS running bug(?), you can stack up insane amounts of damage against cornered foes. But… your defenses are paper thin, and to maximize damage you’ll have to utilize combo fields to get the most out of your buffs.

Thief: Highest single target damage in the game. Decent AoE damage with the shortbow and sword as well. Most utilities are defensive, but signet builds can increase damage a lot, since thief weapons already have a lot of utility. Haste makes for nice burst damage, and they are already at stacking fury.

Guardian: high base damage, a ton of combos, reflects to reflect back damage a ton of cleave, comes with a lot of additional low maintenance support, great at stacking might, comes with a lot of active blocks. They are bland, but effective.

Engineer: Best self buffer in the game, capable of sustaining 20+ stacks of might constantly, along with decent fury uptime as well. Bombs and grenades both do a lot of direct and condi damage in large AoEs. To top it off, with the nigh limitless utility an engi provides, there is no problem you won’t have a solution for. But, the engi is a high maintenance class to play, with a high skill floor and skill ceiling. Comes with haste.

Necromancer: direct damage necos are highly underrated. From the ability to plow through armies with life blast, to the relentless single target damage of dagger flashing, with decent self buffing abilities the necro arguably the ultimate of low maintenance DPS. Their high HP and constant LF gain makes the necro quite tanky even without dodging, but their flaw is their lack of serious AoE damage.

Mesmer: Mesmer phantasms are extremely potent, doling out a ton of AoE damage at range, and alongside of their reflect skills the mesmer becomes a tricky pony to play and fight with. But, mesmer phantasms take a long time to build up damage, so often opponents will be dead before you can fully get going. But nonetheless you have a lot of support prowess on the side. Also comes with time warp, which is a group AoE haste.

Ranger: don’t have much experience with this, so I can’t speak personally. I think the have high sustained single target damage, though.

I’m not happy with the spec, either. I can’t figure out how it is supposed to deal damage, the skills are clunky to use, the mirrors are an inconsistent and poorly explained mechanic, the dodge is jarring. I haven’t done a full review of it, largely because I don’t PVP, but from testing on the golems the Mirage is neither fun nor powerful.

Zerker gear will still be useful. Don’t believe the hype. If anything, PVE thieves will just have to change from No Quarter to Invigorating Precision, and heal themselves for 700 per hit.

This probably should be in the Q and A section, but I’ll answer.

Once you use a skin to paint an armor, that option is gone for good. But, the skin is unlocked in the wardrobe, so later you can use a transmutation charge to put it onto another piece of armor.

I’ve done some math on the subject. Without getting into specific builds, swapping over from full zerker to full marauder will decrease your effective power by 9.2%, but increase your effective HP by 49.7%.

While it is possible to roam around in full zerker gear as a thief, it isn’t too much of a drop to swap out some bits Marauder.

Perfect class diversity in raids will be a pipe dream. The game will have 9 different classes when raids are released. This isn’t just a question of “will necros have a place”. It is a question of “will revenants, engineers, rangers, mesmers, and thieves have a place”. For that to be true, there would be only a single redundant class in the raid.

I’m playing around with this in theory, and currently there are two ways things can go.

#1: All 10 players in one area. This has a optimum comp of 5 eles, 2 warriors, 2 mesmers, and an extra (probably a thief). The 5 eles have extremely high DPS and will also stack a whole lot of might/fury, and most importantly will give the entire party ice bows. The two warriors are there for banner buffs for each party, as well as might stacking and group rez. The two mesmers are there for utility: boon stripping, cleansing, reflects, portals, slowness, time warp, mass invisibility, etc. The thief provides high single target damage alongside of group vigor and blind spam, or should the situation require a mass amount of control or bar breaking.

#2: Two teams split toward different objectives. This will basically be the same comp: 2 Eles, warrior, mesmer, thief. Each team a duplicate of each other.

As for the other not mentioned classes:

Engineer: This will be useful where high condi damage is needed. In general, if the team isn’t a perfectionist, an Engineer can fulfill any role to some degree. Of particular note, the engineer is arguably the second best blind spammer in the game.

Ranger: This is another high-condi damage class. The ranger will be useful in circumstances where enemies need to be engaged at very far range, or the pet is necessary to tank hits off of a fast attacking boss. The ranger will only be “useful” if all other necessary roles are filled, as it provides little more than HP and damage by itself.

Guardian: The guard is basically a mesmer alternate. It doesn’t have as much utility, but it does have more power. Guards will be useful if permanent protection is needed, as well as group pulls, or if the mesmer just happens to be too redundant. Special note here, guards are not good at boon stripping, which may be a necessary role in certain circumstances. However, thieves can take care of that, should the need arise.

Necromancer: The necro only brings two things to the group: epidemic, and a spongy body to absorb hits. It does do other things, like protection, AoE boon stripping, group cleanses, etc. but these are usually already handled by the guardian, mesmer, and engineer. If there are a lot of adds that spawn, the necromancer’s ability to take hits will come in handy.

Revenant: I have no expertise in this class. My entire game experience has been spent without this class, and until I get my hands on one I’m not sure what they’ll truly be able to do.

Tarn.1374:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Please no more of this “leeching traders” crap again. It has already been discussed at length that free trade isn’t evil. It goes through the same song and dance over and over again.

You’re not eliminating free trade. It is a good thing, not a bad thing.

It’s a game, not the real world. The less materialistic and economic-based an MMO is the better it is.

There is nothing wrong with an MMO having a thriving economy, and making the game less based on the economy would not be an improvement.

Nike Porphyrogenita.8137:

Still waiting to hear what the “problem” is. In a good player’s hands, pve dps builds are objectively superior.

SO WHAT? Please explain why and how this is a “problem” that requires “fixing.”

This is a fine example of the wrong line of thinking I was talking about. You can see here that the subject isn’t about the gear, but about “good players”. The zerker issue exists outside of player skill, but the inability to look past player skill has left Nike blinded.

This failure in logic follows through nearly every thread on the zerker issue, this one included. A nice shorthand for recognizing this error is to look at a few key phrases:

“What they want”
“They use this as”
“Good player”
“What you are doing”
“What they say”

and such. This is ultimately an act of hostility and not reasoning. As such it accomplishes nothing.

It is my advice to not respond to these kinds of comments. Yes, I realize the irony of this post, but I do need an example.

runeblade.7514:

Would this solution destroy stacking? I don’t care if berserker meta gets buffed or nerfed. The OP does not address stacking as an issue or if the side-effects of berserker meta does anything to stacking.

Stacking is, in itself, a different issue that isn’t dependent on berserker gear. It’s not even a subject of this thread, really.

Malevil.2104:

Another essay about how is berserker gear bad for game but still not a single valid argument how passive stats combination and defenses would make game more challeging compared to active defenses which berserker setup uses.

…skill and challenge? That isn’t really the subject here. The subject is equality in performance through calculated exchange of durability for damage.

I feel I have to restate this: my goal isn’t to make zerker obsolete. My goal is to make zerker have drawbacks to it use, and make the exchange of durability for damage have a meaningful impact.

Shalien.9018:

You’ve missed the point entirely.

We’ve broken down dozens of times why it’s not on par with the other elite spec mechanics. The sum total of everything is not what concerns people.

You’ve missed the point entirely. My point is that people are wrong to ignore everything else. Their analysis, much like your analysis, chooses to ignore how good any of these things are, and instead looks only at sheer quantity. That’s not how it works. Its like a kid with a pound of steak being jealous of another kid with 2 pounds of sawdust because “sawdust boy got more”.

It is lying by omission. Simple as that.

I suppose the only advantage I’ve seen in the thread is that the Devs can distinguish between a lot of the QQ and things that are meaningful.

One of them brought up the fact that the trolls/zealots are in polar opposites on stances, arguing over each others heads and contradicting both one another, and themselves.

I’m trying to be reasonable in that thread, but the fact is that the thread isn’t a discussion. It is a monkey kitten fight. No one wants to talk about what necros have, the strengths of what they have, and the weaknesses of what they have. They just walk in already convinced that necros need a nerf or buff, and then stick to that story no matter what happens.

Zypher.7609:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Whomever they hired for the most recent bundles does not understand price discrimination. Anet isn’t going to get more money by only selling bundles. They’re getting less.

Yes because it is not like they have the data to back up what they are doing. Oh wait, they do.

Data is of no value to the incompetent.

It only seems like many of the elite specializations are stronger because they provide some kind of new or missing utility that the class needs. I.E. Daredevil gives the thief more dodges and a block. Depending on the situation, an elite spec won’t always be better.

This topic. So much this. Now, for barely related story!

A long time ago I was playing with RPG Maker 3, and one of the ideas I came up with was a continent called “Nightless”. The gimmick with Nightless was that, while in the daytime it was a level appropriate area, at night it was filled with high level boss monsters of my own design. This made it so you would never want to head to that continent at night, and unless you were insane you had to sleep off the nights indoors. It was actually kind of hard to pull off in RPG maker 3, since I had to come up with multiple versions of the same continent, and share flags across them…

I’ve always loved the idea. Another time I saw it done was with Rogue Squadron 2 on the gamecube. It used the internal clock so one of the missions changed at night. The daytime mission was really dull, since it involved flying slowly and shooting radar dishes with an Ion cannon. The nigh version was epic, since you had to fly deep in the rivers and valleys in the middle of a thunderstorm, just avoiding the radar dishes to the best of your ability. Getting past that, flying through the empire base with the only thing to navigate by being the spotlights you are trying to avoid is awesome. You actually feel really cunning and stealthy while doing that.

I would love to see something like this in Guild Wars 2. Dynamic events that depend on the weather and the daytime, as well as non-event dynamic elements that just changed around depending on the time and weather.

Though the moon phases idea is pretty cool, I would like to see something a bit more weather based. A lighting system that followed this ranking from brightest to darkest:

Sunny day
Rainy Day
Night
Severe Thunderstorm at Day
Rainy Night
Severe Thunderstorm at Night

Where with the thunderstorm at night, it is so dark that the only time you can really see anything is from the lightning flashes in the sky.

Enemies would be under a similar effect. Wherein anything more than a rainy day should obstruct make things harder to see and decrease the perception distance, enemies would similarly lose aggro distance, to the point where in a nightly thunderstorm enemies can’t see you unless you are right in their face, or have some specially nocturnal thing going on (darn dredge!).

That way, while there would be danger in not being able to see as far or as well, and that different events can happen at night, there would also be advantages in that you can walk right past many day mobs without them being able to see you.

I imagine they’ll fix skill lag when they figure out a reasonable way how.

Technically, there’s a certain “region” where sinister is better. I’m going to divide up the time of any fight into 3 phases:

#1: Starting Phase. This is the period where you are first bursting out your conditions. If the enemy dies here, then the enemy has died before you can do any real condition damage. Viper has an advantage here, due to greater effective power.
#2: Pre-Threshold. This is the point where you’ve dumped a load of conditions all over the enemy, but they haven’t really had time to tick away too much. In this period, when condition damage overtakes direct damage, sinister will be better.
#3: Post-Threshold. Here, your stacks are fully realized and you’ve entered into something resembling a full rotation. Once the stacks have been realized, Viper begins to pull ahead very quickly.

This phase will be class specific, but it will occur right around the time when you’ve earned a number of extra ticks equal to the the intensity advantage multiplied by the average sustained stacks of a condition. So, for example, bleed has a 12.5% intensity advantage, so if you sustain 20 bleeds, Viper will beat Sinister once you’ve gained an additional total of 2.5 ticks of bleeds. This isn’t “2.5 seconds at maximum stacks”, btw. That is 2.5 ticks of any bleed you inflict, including the first one.

So, for a more “real class” example, a necromancer will sustain 10.125 stacks of bleeding just auto attacking with scepter, Lingering Curses trait included. Grasping Dead adds 5.4 more stacks. Enfeebling Blood, 0.96 more stacks, totaling to 16.485 stacks (rounding to 16.5). This is 2.06 ticks of additional bleed in Viper, and since the first bleed from the scepter attack would have expired 8.1 seconds into the fight, Viper will beat Sinister at around 9.5 seconds (first bleed gets 1.5 ticks, second inflicted bleed gets 0.5 ticks).

It is a bit wobbly here, since depending on rotation the time at which those “extra ticks” comes can change. For example, if you open with Grasping Dead, you won’t get any extra ticks out of that skill until 18 seconds into the fight, so the threshold becomes around 11 seconds (including the cast time for grasping dead), assuming you auto attack. The rule of thumb is the shorter the duration of the condition, the quicker Viper gains the advantage.

Also this calculation is simple, as it only looked at bleeding. When you get multiple conditions, it gets technical again, since you’ll have one condition’s ticks covering for other ones.

There is another advantage. A sinister “burst” requires a sustained output of conditions. In legacy content this is pretty easy, but many HoT enemies have stealth, evades, and very dangerous counter-attacks. Being forced to chase and disengage buys extra time for viper to tick, thus granting more advantage.

I’m going to recommend a fairly simple philosophy in videogames: prepare for the harder fight. If you are fighting an enemy that will die in 6 seconds of Sinister gear, and you would need 9 seconds to gain an advantage in Vipers., then that enemy isn’t exactly a big deal. In Viper gear that enemy would die in 6.75 seconds – initial direct damage advantage anyway, so it isn’t like you’ve lost much. Combine this with the versatility and leniency of Viper, and I have to take Viper every time.

But to really put this into perspective, the numbers I have listed in the OP are without a rune set, with no might. Add a rune set and might, and you’ll get the following numbers. Sinister’s 2214 vs. Viper’s 2021.

Bleed: 155 vs. 143
Burning: 475 vs. 445
Poison: 166 vs. 155
Confusion: 87, 188 vs. 81, 176
Torment: 116 vs. 107

Intensity Advantages:
Bleed: 8.4%
Burning: 6.7%
Poison: 7.1%
Confusion: 7.4%, 6.8%
Torment: 8.4%

The real determining factors for Sinister is going to be the initial condition duration you have. There are examples where Expertise would be almost completely superfluous. For example, on my revenant’s condi build (full sinister) I have 95% duration for Torment. I don’t exactly need much more. Well… I could always use more, but I can’t get more.

I’ve been doing some math around proc based effects, and I’m not sure there is a class where the procs are so valuable that you would take Sinister over Viper just for them.
Sinister will proc 44% more crits than Viper, 27% under fury. On many builds, that isn’t that important. I.E. on my rev, I have a 33% on crit to proc 4 seconds of torment. On Sinister this is 0.62 torment ticks per hit, but in Viperthis is 0.43 torment ticks per hit. This seems like a lot in reference to each other but when you realize that it is attached to the mace’s initial 4 seconds of torment per hit, you can see that this extra precision really amounts to the difference between 4.62 per hit and 4.43 per hit. This is… about a 4.3% advantage in condition damage coming from procs. 4.1% if under fury. You can go back and do a lot of those calculations (many of which are tricky, because procs are “hit” based, and thus you need to find the average hit rate), but the conclusion you’ll come to is that they don’t matter too much, especially when you realize that condi duration plays a factor in these crit procs, too.

There are a few minor exceptions. Engineer grenades while not under fury will do a fraction more damage (1.38 scaled bleed ticks vs. 1.33 scaled bleed ticks per grenade volley) under sinister. Sharper Images on the memser will do 2.34 scaled bleeds per illusion hit vs. 2.26. These amounts are very tiny, though, and as such they aren’t greater than the advantage gained by the non-crit-proc conditions the class will inflict.

Well… that ended up more rambly than anticipated. I’m not sure how the math is going to work out when I start writing these posts, and sometimes one tangent leads to another and so on.

The perpetuation of the zerker meta in dungeons has more to do with Anet not bothering with dungeon revisions than anything else. The devs are already making enemies have more varied encounters that encourage different styles of play.

I’m surprised no one has done the math for ascended weapons.

I suppose my biggest concern over ascended is that, even though it is only a 5% increase, it is a 5% increase of everything. When you have the full ascended armor, weapons, and trinkets, you’ll have 5% more of everything than if you didn’t. So, looking at the damage formula:

Damage = Power x Weapon Attack x Coefficient / Armor x Crit mod

Coefficient and armor are constant, so we can ignore that. Now, lets say that we go with a berserker ascended set, and we get 5% more attack, 5% more power, 5% more precision, and 5% more crit damage. Now, lets look at how those stats will work.

Power would be 5% more from what armor and trinkets give. You already have 916 power to start, and a full set of exotic berserker gives 1003 Power. 5% of that is 50, so you can add this 50 power onto whatever build you want. I’m going to assume a full 30 points into a power line, just for example sake, as well as ruby orbs on the armor. So, overall power raises from 2339 to 2389, which is a 2.1% increase in damag.

Precision would get a further 35 precision, which is about 1.5% crit rate. I’m also going to assume 300 precision from traits, so a full build will have 1082 precision, or kitten .5% crit rate. Ascended raises that up to 57%.

Attack power is just a flat 5% increase.

Crit damage is a kittene, since it increases by more than 5%. Where exotic trinkets give a total of 36% crit damage, the ascended gives a total of 44%. This is a total increase of 22%, and the rest of the stats will likely follow suit. So, while full exotic gives 62% crit damage, ascended will give 76% crit damage, or 14% extra. Assuming ruby orbs an at least 100 trait points, this will mean a total increase from 84 to 96. Since crit damage starts out at 150, this comes to a total increase of about 5%.

So, looking at that damage formula again:

Damage = 1.021 Power x 1.05 weapon attack x constant stuff x crit mod

old crit mod:

55% x 2.34 + 45% = 1.737

New crit mod:
57% x 2.46 + 43% = 1.832

Crit mod’s total increase is 5.5%

In the end, we have 1.02 × 1.05 × 1.055 =1.1299 = 13% increase in damage.

Note, this number can change depending on what build you use, but for now I just went with a fairly generic berserker skeleton.

Add this on top of the fact that you’ll also have 5% more armor, so you’ll take anywhere from 2.5% less damage to 2.8% less damage. When fighting another player in full ascended while you have full exotics, he hits you 13% harder, and you hit him for 2.5% less, given generic builds.

Considering that attacks hit upwards to 8k or so, that 13% is an extra 1040 damage, while you’ll instead hit for 7800. That comes to a total difference of 15.9% total effectiveness between the two of you. That is a little too high of a statistical difference for me to be comfortable.

So overall, when comparing ascended to exotic, bear in mind that the cumulative effect is much higher than advertised. You can do the math with different numbers if you so choose, but remember that the less that is invested there, the more ascended makes a difference.

I mentioned this before, but the biggest issue with GW2s combat is that the devs didn’t design the PVE game around the skills they made. They designed the PVE game around the same basic enemy structures we’ve been seeing in MMOs for awhile. New vehicle, same roads…

There are three big issues I’ve seen with engineers:

#1: It is painful to play. Literally. The amount of mashing I have to do on the keyboard has actually left my laptop’s keyboard broken, and also causes me severe wrist pain. I swapped to a SD build because it is lower maintenance.

#2: The engineer has a high skill floor, and because of this it isn’t immediately rewarding. The engineer is a hybrid in every sense, and as such they lack direction that people normally have when conceptualizing a class.

#3: Where the elementalist has skills that are powerful but hard to use well in PVE, the engineer has skills that are easy to use but weak in PVE. The elementalists utility is hard-baked into their weapons sets, whereas engineers have no weapon variety, instead relying on utilities for variety. This intensifies into a perfect storm of difficulty and an inability to impress.

I think that #3 isn’t talked about a lot, but it is important. I ran HGH grenades for so long, mostly because there wasn’t anything else to run.

Elixirs: They are good for self buffing and spots of mild support for teammates, but are invisible. Often times, if an engi is running an elixir build, you’ll never be able to tell. They also require heavy trait dedication to be effective.

Gadgets: These strange tools are tailored for specific uses you’ll rarely ever see, and don’t have the traits to become really useful. Nearly everything that a gadget does, some other utility or kit does better. That, or what the gadget does is so obtuse that there’s no point.

Turrets: This is what originally drew me to the class. They were decent once, but bug after “tooltip update”/nerf after bug has left turrets as a big mess that no one can use. They die instantly and just plain don’t work, leaving most turrets as a filler for blast finishers. Dedicated traits do nothing to ease this pain.

The end result? You go with kits. You have plenty of kits, and they each do something useful and unique that you can use.

This is a grave oversight on Anets part. The entirety of the variety and power of the engineer is located in their utility slots. Competition in utility slots is fierce, and every single utility must be compared to a kit and everything that kit offers. This is where so many skills fall apart.

For example, take Elixir S. Invulnerability period, self daze, provides stealth on toss, stun break. Seems alright? Compare that to Tool Kit: invulnerability period on a 1/3rd the cooldown that is not a self daze, 1200 range pull + interrupt, high damage + confusion inflicting skill, short duration bleed/cripple patch, stun break with kit refinement, turret repair with mild vulnerability, triggers sigils.

It is obvious that Tool Kit wins out, every time, almost regardless of what traits you pick. The same can be said of… well… pretty much every utility that isn’t a kit. Why take flame turret when the bomb kit does the same stuff, and more? Why take elixir C when you can just use the elixir gun to do so much more? Why take the rocket turret for burst AoE damage when the flamethrower can do that, but so much better? Why take the personal battering ram… at all? Why go with HGH when fire fields and Juggernaut give just as much might?

There are some that stand out as a unique or useful option, and you’ll see these get used alongside of kits to fill in holes that were there before. But, not enough utilities do this. You’ll almost always end up going with x3 kits, or x2 kits + additional utility because most of the utilities aren’t worth the space they occupy.

What Anet needs to do is buff a lot of the utilities so that they can compete with kits. Anet has to remember that engineers don’t have potent weapon options, or even weapon diversity. We are a class that is all about the utilities, and most utilities suck.

Having looked at the structure and function of a compound bow in real life, I can definitely say that is an engineer’s weapon. Seriously, the thing is a mind-boggling set of gears and pulleys that doesn’t make sense until you’ve fired one a dozen times.

I support the OP.

The biggest problem I have with the dev’s explanation is that it lazy. I’ve seen games that have vastly different sized characters and still had the ability to interact with objects. Of course there were size/clipping issues, but the players didn’t really care about that. They just cared that they were there. A lot of players want to be able to make stupid poses and interact with different things, clipping be darned.

BobbyStein.2315:

DarksunG.9537:

But telling us we can’t have any opinion on what we’ve played over the past year is totally unfair. I’m not sure it even makes logical sense.

When did I ever say you can’t have an opinion? I’m just asking that people reserve judgment on the next release until they’ve played it and absorbed the story components.

There is a saying in the entertainment industry, and this includes videogames: the most important part is the first 5 minutes.

What does that mean? You have to grab and hold the attention of the audience pretty quickly, otherwise you’ll lose that audience to something else. This is one of the biggest failures of the current LS content, and this is a notion that the Devs haven’t quite grasped. I’ll spell it out quite simply:

I don’t care what happens with Scarlet, and there’s nothing that can fix that now.

I’ve lost interest. The beginning of the story was too slow, too generic, too flat, and I don’t like any of the characters. I am not invested in the characters. Because I’m not invested, any creative twist or expansion of these characters has no meaning to me. I was not given a reason to care in the first place.

Meh. I saw the show for Blade and Soul, and it was alright. But the thing with GW2 is that I currently don’t like the story or the characters very much, so watching it become an anime would basically be like sitting through living world. Again.

PopeUrban.2578:

Oh for the love of…

Not everything in the world is about flippin’ anime.

Why do anime superfans insist everything be converted/compared to/related to it?

You know, I find disproportionate responses to be the sign of underlying issues.