Guild Wars 2

Here’s a simple analogy for people who don’t get it?

Imagine that you have played a character for three years, then you log in one day, and the character is level 1, and all of his bags are gone, and all of his items are gone. He has no gold with which to buy any replacements, and when he works hard to earn gold to go buy replacements he’s told that he needs five people to craft and equip fine quality gear, and a few dozen more people to craft his exotics.

So he makes entirely new friends since his old ones don’t have the expo, gets them to help him level, gather gold and make all of his gear, and then once he is finally geared up he can go back to enjoying the content that he always had access to.

That is what has happened to guilds.

From my time on these forums I’ve determined that casual means the following:
- Completely flat map with uninteresting terrain that is easy to cross
- Speed across entire map in an instant, preferably by teleporting (somehow, having this ability is necessary alongside also having a flat map)
- Spend a few seconds only killing a mob by only pressing one button
- Overcome all challenges even in extremely inefficient gear and builds, without having to think about complexity
- Do not require other players for any event, not even group events
- No aggro from mobs, no skills from mobs, no danger from mobs
- No CC, no conditions, nothing that requires any kind of counter-play or quick thinking
- Everything as quick as possible, everyone is busy busy these days, can’t stop to actually play a game
- Always rewards, even for doing nothing at all
- Define fun as the embodiment of getting things for nothing, instead of immersion, challenge or time investment

More that I forget, but we all know what they are by now.

Carpboy.7145:

Most dungeons in the game are solo able. Its just people need to l2p

I think you are exadurating a bit here. Yes some dungeons are soloable but many dungeons and fractals have 3-5-person roadblock mechanics.

Which I find to be quite irritating…

I would like dungeons to become accessible to any party (2-5 players) for standard gameplay so that we don’t always have to build a full party.

I would also like to see the addition of a fourth path to each dungeon that is truly explorable, like the old “grind” dungeons in RPGs. so that you can take your time and enjoy the scenery and kill some mobs. But it won’t happen because there will be no one around to witness and report bots.

This is something that has been bothering me and my friends for a long time now.

Most of us who do the Hungry Cats quests tend to do so because we are animal lovers. However, at one point hungry cats were introduced that, when fed, would add a mess cats to your home instance that do nothing but fight each other.

Many people who fed these cats did so immediately after the patch release, before they could be properly documented and assuming that they would just add new (docile) cats to the home instance as it had been in the past.

So I’m asking, can we please get an option to remove the fighting cats?

Out of my entire friend group, no one has found it amusing. We all love animals and do not like to see them fighting for any reason; and would not have fed them if we had known they would be appear in the instance like this.

I know it seems overkill but imagine if you are a veterinarian or something …

I haven’t asked about this before because it seemed like home instance had been abandoned, however with Draconis Mons some changes were made.

You’re probably bored because the game is boring. It tailors entirely to people with OCD now and most of the posters that you will see praising it are because they have just fulfilled their 10k achviement points or whatever and are happy as a clam.

Its gone from something extremely promising to just another skinner’s box. And if you’re not affected by that kind of thing, you will be bored.

By the way, before replying to contest this point, make a list of all the things you did today in-game and take a close look at it. I bet most of it will be things like “making gold” or “completing achievements”, not genuinely having fun.

But like I said , many people get some kind of strange enjoyment out of checklists.

Nope. Definitely not.

Contested waypoints are the only salvation the waypoint system has. Waypoints are used excessively in this game, to the point where many of the community requested that as much as half of them be removed during the Dragon’s Reach update, because they cheapen pretty much everything in the game.

If not for contested waypoints, it would be even cheaper. Bosses like Tequatl would become extremely easy because you could just waypoint zerg it over and over again. This is why most of the contested waypoints exist to begin with.

Hostile zones are meant to be hostile. You are in the dragon’s domain. There’s no point in taking away challenge, immersion and sense of danger for all other players so you can save a minute or so on a glider flight. Approaching these maps knowing that you can die and have to start all over again makes you think twice about everything you do, helping you play better, and increases surrealism.

I’m saddened by how easy everyone wants games to be these days. :/

I agree, this spawn location should either get a WP or be removed. It is not fair that many of the players miss the boss because they helped with events.

Taohaza.4205:

Hannelore.8153:

Meanwhile I’m still one-hitting mobs in everything up to lv50 maps while they take about .000001% of my HP with their devestating autoattack skills.

I went afk on my Guardian and a Bear was on me the whole time and it couldn’t even kill me because my passive Virtue regeneration was out-healing it, and I don’t even have that much Toughness equipped (about 2500 defense).

This game is just too difficult.

/Gasp. Your Guardian has good survival. How shocking.

I leveled Guardian after Mesmer. Try doing reverse. You’d be surprised.

I have all classes at 80 and my main is an Elementalist, which has the lowest defensive stats?

There’s a post of some level <50 guy on another thread one-shotting mobs with only single-stat +Power gear because they are so weak now.

PvE is really easy now, so easy that it completely takes the challenge out of it and makes playing with friends a bore because you have to avoid hitting the mobs. I can have a character completely in Dire gear or some other set with zero Power-based offensive capability and still autohit <lv30 mobs to death in seconds.

Its somewhat harder for a levelling player with up-to-date gear, but not by much.

If you’re having trouble with it, you should play another game, because its just the beginning and its about ten times worse in lv80 zones and a hundred times worse in dungeons unless you have a good party…

I’m a bit confused with the Druid class. I have two of them that play in completely different builds, with one obvious being a staff healer. What I don’t understand is the decision to make the druid’s staff only have physical damage, when nearly all healing power based sets in the game are centered around condition damage. Also, non-dedicated sets like celestial seem to do more damage with conditions than with physical damage on weaker damage classes like the Ranger/Druid.

I know this class is supposed to be a dedicated healer, but I seem to do almost zero damage aside from my pet when wielding the staff. I know various forum threads have pointed out that the Druid can give massive damage boosts to party members, however these boosts only work with certain traits and with glyphs. Those running other support builds such as spirits do not get most of them.

Honestly at this point I’d be satisfied even for single stack on burning on Solar Beam so I don’t have to watch my pet kill everything with its 1-2k crits which seems something around five times the damage I do with the staff.

Please don’t abandon this expansion just yet !

You only did a single touch-up run of HoT and to be honest that just isn’t enough. yes it got it into playable shape but it did not fix most of the core problems.

Some things that still need addressed:
- The story is still a buggy mess, the final instance especially. Almost no bug fixes have been made to the story despite it being very unstable overall.

- The difficulty from some of the map components is still a bit high. Mobs are mostly okay but some HPs and adventures need to be toned down to account for the fact that these maps won’t be as popular as they were at release. Its time to start being more realistic about how many players will be there.

- There is still no lore offered to why things are the way that they are. We aren’t asking for much, just a few NPCs here and there to handle things like the elite specialistaion, and some lore adjustments to the tooltips.

- Some masteries from HoT and LS3 are useless and just a waste of points. They serve their purpose for a few days and then disappear—now that the big HoT grind is over these should be collapsed into other masteries or “minor masteries”.

- And most IMPORTANTLY, timed map metas need to be removed and become player-driven like the Silverwastes. This system only worked in Dry Top because the whole map doesn’t explode like it does in HoT. The HoT metas are far too important to be on a timer because you spend two hours to risk a failure and this will not work with the populations that will be inhabiting these maps in the future. All the people currently farming this content giving the illusion that it is still well-frequented will move on to PoF and LS4 eventually.

Yes, I know there are workarounds for most of these problems, mostly involving LFG. But it won’t last, its just a temporary stopgap measure. If the HoT maps were changed to be player-driven, then Dragon’s Stand (one of the most frustrating maps in the game in regards to participation) would become the next Silverwastes and be played by high-level players for many years to come. The HoT maps themselves are amazing and they just need to have a better longevity.

Please don’t let HoT become another gameplay & lore black hole like LS1.

Thank you kind sir. You have informed me that I should stop running around with my speed and loot weapon in open world, on a slow (mostly) melee class, to farm a small, chaotic map where events come and go in the blink of an eye.

-

Just for reference, many Guardians use burning for damage, not direct damage, so the Staff will have the highest chances of proccing upgraded Virtue of Justice. There is absolutely no requirement in open world to rely on direct damage, to run around in Berserker, Assassin or Rampager builds, and to use optimal weapons.

People play in the way that is easiest for them. It is not hurting you. Any pain that you feel as a result of their playing style is a placebo effect.

Between this and bell choir elitism, I have now seen it all …

Don’t forget to include things like Health received per second so you can see how much all the leechers are keeping you from going down inbetween those big hits.

Pulling your own weight is relative. There are many ways to pull weight, and yes while it is true that in dungeons it is generally Berserker gear and a damage build, that is not always the case (for example, at Tequatl its PVT and damage build).

That’s why something like this would be completely useless and unwelcome.

I play with all classes with varied gear, including zerk on half of them, in a great variety of situations in the game and I can say that it is impossible to generalize.

If this is true then for each new outfit released, they should move one armor skin off of the gemstore and into the game to be obtainable by some means.

Well, if you are using a Rifle then you are at range and you are not receiving buffs as almost all buffs to party members are only 600 range. This is why people get upset about ranging because it lowers overall group performance for no reason.

You are basically making it harder for everyone with no concern for their experience. Imagine being a melee getting pummeled by a boss while everyone ranges. The play how you want playstyle has to go both ways and everyone has to make sacrifices in order to work together as a group, that is just how groups work.

Also, if you don’t want to be griped out, don’t join someone else’s party. Either make your own or call your guild to help. I am not a hardcore elitist myself, and I do not agree with the way that people behave in this game, but at the same time its simply a fact that when you join a party in this game you are on their terrain.

And its important to understand that other people are in a bad mood all the time because the game is going downhill. They keep trying to cling to what little they have left in the game like some kind of crazed zealot because not only has ANet added nothing else for them to do, but they keep adding more bugs and nonsensical limitations in the few things that they do have left to do in a game that is increasingly being tailored for low-intelligence players with fat wallets.

Some classes such as Elemenetalist benefit greatly from Wupwup/Celestial.

First and foremost we need an underflow system. No amount of tweaking or hammering in any mechanics of the game will change the fact that all players are spread out on 24 different servers per region for a given map, of which there are 20+ in the world.

With an underflow system, all servers would share the same map until it maxes out. You may only see 6 people in Timberline Falls on your server, but imagine if you saw 6 people on it from every server at once…

The game has an absolutely massive population that is being sliced to ribbons.

Labjax.2465:

Summary of thread so far:

OP makes a sarcastic post about the number of stuns and knockbacks that mobs do and how annoying it is.

Posters come to the rescue pointing out that it’s a L2P issue and OP needs to get good.

Today I learned: Being annoyed is a skill issue. I have heard of anger management classes. Is there such a thing as annoyance classes? I guess I better go take some, so that I can get more skilled at not being annoyed.

I will say this quite clearly in a way that is easy to understand…
They are trying to kill you.

If you don’t want to be annoyed, don’t play games. Because the goal of enemies in every game is to make sure that you die and cannot continue, at least not without some amount of rage and frustration if you can’t stay level-headed.

OP reminds me of those kids who throw Nintendo controllers at the TV.

For over three years we had to put up with mobs that don’t move and could barely cast a single skill if they had any at all, and would generally die easily to a single, undergeared player with almost no build pressing their #1 button.

That is what is unacceptible.

What we have now is just the very beginning of what we should have, challenge. Though the mob AI still has a long way to go, it is better.

If you don’t like it ,don’t play video games.. its what they’re for.

The only real gripe I have is that in Bloodstone Fen it seems like mobs overswarm you and have too much health compared to the other newer maps. But every map seems to have gimmicks like this, such as Auric Basin having too many chargey things, and Tangled Depths being too excessive on the Chak goop.

I think this is kind of how ArenaNet intends it ?

The core game was absolutely pathetic in terms of difficulty, and still is. However HoT meta events and raids take this a bit too far, not because they are super difficult, but because ArenaNet returned to cheese mechanics like 2 hour map metas and timers on absolutely everything even though they should’ve learned by now.

Its like everything that was bad about the game in the last three years was presented to the head content designer and s/he said “Exceeeeeelent”.

Challenge is not cheap. Challenge is also not cheese.

This is also why eSports will fail, because it makes the classic PvP game mistake of being full of cheese. Most PvP matches are reduced either to dying in a few seconds, or living forever, and because of the boring game modes neither of them actually accomplish anything! When I think of game modes like WvW and PvP, I think massive sieges, complex battle tactics, epic adrenaline-pumping one-on-one battles where every single skill cast has a chance to determine the outcome of the fight.

Not… whatever this is. Playing PvP in this game is like playing Quake 3: Team Arena with simplistic, strange and half-broken combat mechanics. If they’re serious about eSports, hire some people who made PvP games before.

Your opinion is your opinion, don’t feel like its shared by the rest to the player base. Everyone has different lives and relates to the characters differently.

For example, alot of people hate Marjory and Kasmeer, but like it or not there’s lesbian players in this game who appreciate such things. But the solution to that problem is to give us more straight and male/male relationships, not less lesbian maintext.

The issue is simple, this is an MMO, and it is ArenaNet’s job to make money off of it, and that means attracting as many markets as possible. So its always better to add and extend than to remove anything.

Failure to realize this is what lead to season one being so unproductive.

Alot of people relate to Braham because they’ve lived a life similar to his. If ArenaNet kills him off, they could lose that portion of the market, its bad for the game. Braham’s attitude in general is reflective of Norn culture, and as you can see of the thousands upon thousands of “annoying” Norn players in the game, people like it.

Would you like soaring gem prices and delayed expansions because of “annoyance” ?

I recommend taking a step back and trying to understand that the world, and especially social communities, just don’t work like you want them to.

If you want a DPS meter, “this game is not for you.”

I hate to use that phrase, because it is so often thrown around by “elite” players against those who are more casual or less knowledgeable, but there you go, because it applies to both sides of the fence not just the “casuals” and ’bads".

I for one hope they take this game further and further away from this elitism – there are hundreds of games out there to play if you want that kind of atmosphere. This was not designed to be one of them and it needs to go away.

Stop confusing bad mechanics such as a poor AI with a game meant for DPS. There is a world of difference between lack of foresight and intentional design.

A simple observation: I would rather join a Tequatl attempt than do an explorable dungeon run these days, because the Tequatl attempt is likely to be less toxic. And I run half of my characters in full Berserker DPS builds. You would not believe how often I get accused of doing no damage just because the party leader kept getting downed and needed some people to flame and blame.

Situations like this are alot more common than the elitists think – because they have a blindless to their own behavior and the behavior of similar players.

Lazarus.3970:

Ardid.7203:

Forced gender diversity has NEVER been a good practice in the gaming industry.
Female characters that can’t wear “male clothes”(aka, more covering clothes) and always have to be almost naked ARE sexist, and wrong.

What we have here is the complete oposite: the imposibility to use cute or delicate, or even skimpy clothes on some chars. This is wrong TOO.

But, the solution isn’t to make the female versions of armor more “femenine”. That is going back to the first problem. What Arena Net have to do is to add are new wearable items more “cute”, “delicate” or “skimpy”, wich people could use, no matter the gender of their char.

But HOW do you make armor more “feminine”? No one has said anything about what these desired changes should look like. How do you make a pair of pants more feminine?

1. Helmets – Cant do much there. They are what they are.
2. Shoulders – Ditto.
3. Gloves – Ditto.
4. Coat – The only thing I could seem them doing with these are make them more dress-like. But that brings up a few issues.
— Heavy armor leaves little room to work with. Asrua don’t have boobs, so they don’t need any definition on the chest, and making it too elaborate is just impractical.
— Medium armor is mostly depicted as being trench coats. T2 and T3 cultural armor are some of the few exceptions, and IMO look the best among the medium armor lines for Asura. They could medium torso armors look more dress-like, but then you need to ask, do they redo existing armors, or keep the changed style for new armors only? I personally would be really kittened if they changed my favorite armors to be more dress-like.
— Light armor already has a sizable range of coats that look more like fancy cloths. If dyed right, as I’ve seen many times, its possible to get a more “girly” look with color alone. This applies to all armors actually. The Nightmare Court armors IMO are best for “feminine” styles.
5. Pants are pants. They have slim and slack versions abound. I use the T2 cultural medium pants because they flay out and cover up the upper part of the T3 medium boots. And once again, heavy armor is subject to that practicality look. It would be silly if they made heavy armor pants any different because they are the pinnacle of armor protection, and should look the part, fitted for protection. Either you make heavy armor actually be armor, or the other alternative is they look skimpy.

There really isn’t much they can do to make the armor more “feminine” without upsetting the existing styles. However, if they decided to make some armors/skins that are meant to appeal to female players, given the new wardrobe system, then sure, I can see it. Maybe some shoulders that look like flowers, a nice hibiscus flower hairpiece, or some goggles with heart shaped lenses.

The moral of the story is, “feminine” and “armor” just don’t mix. Armor is meant to cover and protect, not accent the feminine shape.

Well, its really hard to explain to non-females (not assuming your gender here, just saying in general). There’s just a certain love for certain things that kind of runs instrinsicly, and most of the GW2 content does not meet the requirements for something that I would call “feminine”. Yes, you have many sexy outfits, but that’s it – and the Asura don’t even have access to them at that. For Asura, everything is pretty much just armor through and through, with maybe a frill or two but not much.

Please, don’t use the “it’s armor” argument. We both know that this does not apply to games in the modern era, especially since you can wear outfits now.

The problem that people have in this thread is that other races have access to much more variety while the Asura are forced into a specific look for each armor set. Removing gender lock-outs for Asura and Charr are a start, but we also need to look into allowing girls to better express themselves without it simply being “hey, look at my huge boobs and my flashing panties” like Humans and Norn.

There’s three definitions of feminity when it comes to looks, “Cute”, “Sexy” and “Pretty”. For Asura, “Cute” and “Pretty” are what we aim for, but currently most of the game content for 3/5 races is “Sexy” and for Asura none of the three.

The cute Asura that you see in game are from carefully crafted mix-and-match armor combinations that have a very, very limited amount of variations. This is a product of the players behind them being very creative and spending alot of time comparing armors, wasting money and finding combinations that work.

It does not mean the game allows it to happen by default.

By comparison on my Human I can just equip one set of cultural armor that all matches well and I am good to go. Its the same with my Sylvari.

You report them, put them on ignore and never hear from or see them again.

Its the Internet, they can’t come through your computer. And if you’re sharing real life information online for any reason at all, stop that.

The chests were really good before they removed random skins from them. You used to be able to get unique dungeon, PvP and other skins from the chests without having to have had complete the relevant content. In some cases, this was the only way to actually get the skin if you weren’t able to complete that content.

“HoT is hard enough, no need to make the rest of the game like that”

I’m tired of this outlook, players who have a hard time with content expect it to be made easy for them just so they can continue playing the game and accomplish everything you can do in it, maps, events, masteries, full rewards etc.

By that notion, you have 25 maps from Central Tyria to go auto-hit mobs in. Having 2/3rds of the game tailored to you isn’t good enough?

First of all, HoT is not hard, HoT has ~mechanics~. All of those things you have having trouble with like, avoiding AoE circles, needing to defend against and CC enemies, do jumping puzzles and overall use strategy and tactics?

That’s called ~gameplay~, and its what separates a high-budget MMO from from one of those games you pick off Steam for $1-10 or even F2P.

This game has always been very casual, let the players who want something else out of it have something else out of it for a change without having to have everything nerfed, dumbed down, simplified, face-rolling easy.

Sorry, but this is one of, if not the easiest MMOs in existence. I know its not fair to compare but its like a bunch of kids who are having huge bowls of ice cream in front of them getting upset that someone else wants some cake too.

And its not about raid builds, I play mostly non-meta characters, lots of support builds, even a few tank builds, and PvE is just “kitten , kitten , kitten ”. Slowly over the years I’ve lost the ability to find myself immersed in any combat in the game even on badly played characters because its just “hit one until the bar reaches zero”. The only content left that requires more is fractals and raids.

I find it ironic that I am one of the most casual players in GW2—lots of alts, not a single meta build, all characters in mostly exotics, heavy support focus, yet people still somehow find the time to argue with me that the game is difficult because the don’t want to crawl out of bed and drink some coffee to play it.

I could understand if you’re disabled (as I am), but otherwise.. meh.

Haleydawn.3764:

The biggest problem with condition builds are the fact you only need the one stat for the damage, where as power builds require 3 stats in harmony.

The biggest improvement to how condition damage works would be to require power and precision to up it’s damage rather than just condition damage alone. You want a powerful condi build, you’ve got to have pow/prec to get that. How to go about reworking that is up for debate.

What ? This isn’t very accurate.

A condition build using just Condition Damage doesn’t do hardly any DPS, the people you see doing really high DPS with condition builds are running a three stat combination of Condition Damage, Condition Duration/Concentration, and Precision to land conditions on critical hits/sigils (Warrior, Ranger, Guardian, Engi, etc.).

Viper gear is used for those three stats, not the additional Power.

If any classes can do high DPS with a stock “Condition Damage” build (such as full Dire), then its something very class (and usually, weapon) specific (say, scepter Necro?) and not something that is global to the game itself …

The people who critisize condition builds as being “easy” have clearly never had to make one or seen it countered by an enemy player or encounter.

Game is emptier lately, although still fairly populated. Alot of people moved to the other newer games that popped up after having a heart attack over the upcoming patch that will completely ruin the game forever and ever (sarcasm).

That’s funny, I saw map completion as playing the game. If you’re joining an MMO and don’t want to explore the world of Tyria, it seems kind of silly. I could understand if you’re a hardcore WvW player, but if you call yourself a PvE player its just a contradiction since PvE is alot more than just fractals or dungeons.

Guild Wars 2 has some of the best open-world content available on the market. I recommend enjoying it instead of worrying about moar shinies.

Reminds me of those people who grind alts to level 80 in the Queensdale train.

ArenaNet has always been traditional. Everything in GW2 at launch existed in other MMOs long before it, and in tabletop games long before that.

Can you name one thing in GW2 that no game ever had before it?

What made GW2 different is that they try to take a new spin on everything, and that has not changed. This is what makes it seem “unique”, and going forward it seems they have continued to take this approach with mounts.

Yes, we have mounts. No, they won’t be exactly like other games, even just what little we saw of them shows they are very different because they are important to navigate the terrain instead of just crossing it for travel.

A friend of mine was finishing her crafting to level 500 yesterday and had to buy something like 50g of leather just to make one set of exotic armor which sells for about 10g on the trading post because of bad stats.

Our guild has been stalled on upgrades for over a year because every upgrade is now over 100g of leather thanks to the ongoing drought that did not exist at Heart of Thorns release when other people levelled their guild halls.

New players coming to the game who play mediums almost cannot afford any gear. A basic set of gear on my new Thief cost 100s of gold if I were to buy or craft it directly and that is for the exotics. I ended up having to use cheap “named” equipment to sidestep this cost so that I could play lv80 content.

I am tired of this. Exhausted.

And don’t talk to me about farming. Farming leather in this game is a huge snoozefest, its only implemented in one farm in one map.

FOX.3582:

I really really really don’t understand where this “small guilds can not have Guild Halls/Favor” talk is comming from. I see a lot of topics on it and people are saying the biggest nonsense I’ve ever seen here on the forums.

My guild has 2 people. Me and my wife.
We have our guild hall. We have almost 2000 favor. And we even have upgrades in our guild hall. The coolest thing that I am very proud of is the fact that until now we did not even spend gold on the upgrades, (and believe when I say we have more then enough gold/materials) what means that with patience and farming you can have this upgrades for almost free until a certain point.

Before HOT we could not even start a mission. We could not even obtain merits!

I don’t know about all this people saying otherwise but they just talk nonsense. The one thing HOT really did for us is making guilds very small guild friendly. Please friends do some more effort when you want to achieve something. Don’t come here on the forums asking for everything to be thrown at you.

FOX…

Oh look, another “I don’t care that you got owned” thread. Sigh

Please explain how you did this because me and my partner are veterans who had a small guild of 4-5, forged entirely by us, with full level 6 upgrades before the update, yet we cannot even complete the mission to claim our guild hall because it overwhelms a few players. If you got help from another guild, your entire post is useless because it just shows that you had to find workarounds anyway.

Is there a reason that Celestial lacks boon duration? Instead of boosting the stats on Celestial by a measly 6%, why not just add Boon duration?

I never really understood this decision. Celestial players rely on Might to deal damage, not the overly generous Critical damage of the set. It doesn’t crit often enough for that damage to be useful – only enough to keep Vigor up.

Wow, this game already looks ten times better than any other MMO out there except Tera and people always just want more no matter what.

Its an MMO, it can’t have the same graphics as an FPS. It lags enough already.

You think WoW looks as bad as it does after all this time because its dated? No, Blizzard could easily afford to replace its graphics engine entirely. Easily! But they don’t because it wouldn’t be able to handle the amount of players on-screen.

Its less about GPU and more about CPU overhead. People automatically think that having a powerful GPU is a fix for all issues, but it doesn’t work that way. There’s major threading issues and CPU bottlenecking under the hood. The more objects on the screen the more your CPU load no matter how much you offload to the GPU, because at some point you have to actually process those objects. And every command that you make to the GPU and all the textures, vertex lists, shader code, etc. that you upload to it are all CPU-bound, because they are handled by the driver.

If its hard to understand, just consider that your graphics driver is made from CPU code. It can tell the GPU to do something, but the very process of it doing that consumes CPU on top of the game, and due to how threads work, it isn’t as easy as just offloading it to another core due to asynchronous data access problems.

More or less MMO engines have to follow the same restrictions as RTS engines, in contrast to an FPS which only has to support maybe ten players.

The only thing GW2 could do to max your graphics card even more than it already does (given that it is already 100% vertex and pixel shader based), would be to support screen space ambient occlusion or SSAO. Although it already has its own form of albedo (solar radiance), so it wouldn’t make much of a difference.

I understand that you’re trying to be serious, however the way you state all of your points comes off as more of a joke. Its clear that you mostly play Thief and have no real understanding of the other professions.

The Thief is balanced around their ability to stealth – which players underestimate. When used properly, stealth is a catch-all get-out-of-jail free card. Even if you discount that you can often get away with it, it also gives you the advantage of ambushing your enemy, so psychological factor is very important too.

On top of that, you say that other professions aren’t nerfed by the changes, but that is completely false. Every other class relies on critical damage in exactly the same way. In fact, the Thief probably has the least reliance on this, because if they fail to land enough damage on their opponent they can just reset and try again.

The important factors to understand in other classes’ balance is: visiblity and mobility. Both of these play heavily in combat, especially mobility. Stealth (lack of of visiblity) and mobiltiy are the Thiefs strengths and what they are balanced around.

For example, you argue Warrior is far better, but they are horrible on both of these.

Nobody says you have to run full zerker (or similar glass) on Thief in PvP/WvW and just spike people down. Its not like they have less health and armor than a Ranger or Engineer, and its not like they have less weapon choices or abilities. You’re chosing to see that there’s only one way to play the Thief when there are many.

All classes have problems, some of them far worse. Maybe you should try playing Ele without Celestial or PVT gear in PvP/WvW, when you die from one rogue AoE.

Gold being useable for everything is one of the positive aspects of this game. Its what mostly keeps it from benefiting only gemstore users, because even gemstore items can be bought with gold, and the trading post keeps gold having real value, so it is not simply forgotten like the main currency in some other games. In fact, I would say that Soulbound and Account bound are more of a poison than anything.

The UI team for this game is very bad.

They seem to favor “simplicity”, the problem is that definition is their own and doesn’t come from the players. Because of this alot of information is missing from the UI which makes combat difficult (e.g, an always visible combat log so you can both chat and watch the skills you’re being hit with at the same time).

There are dozens of UI features implemented in even the most basic indie MMO that have yet to make their way to the GW2 UI and the developers have never really given a reason beyond that they don’t want to clutter it up. Yet at the same time they keep trying to push more advanced content like PvP and raids that the game just cannot handle with the current UI limitations.

You can’t make a “pro” game with a “poor” user interface.

He’s dead because he opened up the box of fun and it was full of bugs.

Gotta love having all stat gear that doesn’t have all stats. Quality.

Yes, its allowed. This was already addressed with selling dungeon paths, which is essentially selling a spot in a party for a final boss – the same thing.

I don’t remember the official response, but it was like “okay”.

Disclaimer: I don’t agree with it myself …

Kaiyanwan.8521:

I miss old Orr. It was brutal and you had to pay attention to your surroundings.

The Orr we have right now is a watered down version already, if it get’s any easier it will feel like a starter zone all over again.

The megaserver thingy will fix the zone for you. All those people on one map will make it doable even if there is no skill involved.

Why does everything that is not doable with just clicking 1, 1 and 1 again gotta be nerfed. When did this mindset, that everything has to be super easy to be enjoyable became the norm in MMOs.

Modern MMO players are spoiled. Look at all these threads over the last year that complain about this game being hard to level in… (lol)

They have no idea how games were in the past, or how they should be.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

NCSoft makes a lot of money off of GW2 as it is. Why would they purposely lose profit for a change that benefits no one but Valve?

In theory it would bring console/TV users to the gem store. In theory. Unfortunately, the issue is that Valve is trying to market it for other audiences instead of the one they should be targetting – console users.

I think the developers want to believe it is, and don’t realize that it isn’t.

Celestial is only good for classes like the Elementalist where the generous stat distribution works well with low base stats. in other words, it allows a class that has poor stats balanced around their skills to strong stats and strong skills.

But I don’t see the developers removing the time gate any time soon. People have asked them to repeatedly, and I don’t even remember seeing a reply.

You should give up on this game getting updates. I think we’ve established by now that the only thing we’re going to get most of the time is rehashed festivals.

Look at the -entire year- of content drought before HoT released.

Brb, playing Living Story content.

Oh wait.

You should read up on Skinner’s Box, a.k.a, “Progression”.

Originally GW2 was not supposed to be like this, the content was separated into the casual and hardcore (dungeons and fractals). Unfortunately with the ascended armor update it all began to spiral out of control, now almost everything you do in the game is a grind for one thing or another. I’m not neccessarily talking about ascended or legendary gear, even that one backpiece that you really want sometimes ends up as a terrible grind.

Honestly, it’s become a fashion show sweat shop. I really wish they would go back and revise all of the merchants and rewards, so you can at least spend the money that you do have on more interesting things without grinding all week just to buy that one item from another player. Of course, everyone would prefer the really good rewards to come from quests, but ANet has shown zero interest in that.

This is where all MMOs end up, and anyone who believes otherwise does not undersatnd how profit is made or how a business model is laid out.

The blueprint and Blade Shards can still be used. The rest can’t, though some people are still holding onto Belongings and Heirlooms in case the merchant returns.

I think the tricolor chest was removed from Kessex Hills, but I would double check. It should be near the Veteran Toxic Wurm Queen spawn point.

You can check Scarlet’s Lair to see if the keys still work, but I think the chests are gone.

Malice.8439:

Hello.

As someone who partook only sporadically in the first season of the Living Story, season 2 makes no sense. I’ve been able to read a few short explanations that summarized season 1 – however, I start the first part of the season 2 story and am told to “go meet my friends”, and there are five characters I’ve never seen before. What’s worse – they treat me as if we’ve joined forces and saved the world together, but since I never saw them during my personal storyline, I assume they are all from the living story.

May I suggest you introduce a video or a quest, perhaps, where we can catch up? Or perhaps just add dialogue to these five NPC’s, “Oh, hello [Player Name], remember when we did X over at Y? Ah, those were the good old days, eh?”.

Does anyone know a good place to read up on these people (and everything else that happened during season 1) without spoiling too much of season 2?

They have said that they want Living Story S1 to return in a playable form, they just cannot do it right now due to time constraints and limited resources.

If you want to know everything that happened, some players documented the entirety of the Living Story on YouTube. There you can find videos of pretty much every single update from last year, both gameplay and story.

Having 100% critical chance is possible for several classes. It just means wearing Assassin’s or Rampager’s gear, using Sigil of Accuracy/Perception, etc.

Drops are still RNG-based, so it depends on how lucky you are that day. Also, keep in mind that +300% of .000001% is still only .000004%.