Guild Wars 2

Smooth Penguin.5294:

You don’t need Ascended armor. The stat increase over Exotics is minor. So if you’ve given up on getting these, you can still play the game as normal.

Hey, you don’t need exotic armor. And you do not need to play the game at all.
You can run around naked and kill stuff. Ascended armor is trivializing the content, so if you want a challenge, don’t use it.

This whole “you don’t need ascended items” bullkitten is as bad as the talk back in the days of WoW. If you don’t raid, you do not need this stuff.
Thank good this game was build on horizontal progression where everyone is on the same power level.

BiS for everyone. Sure as hell. Loot in this game is mess. Ascended items are the extra bit of poop on top of it.

Vesuvius.9874:

Make it 10 times as hard to get legendary armor than it is to get ascended.

The only thing that is hard in getting ascended items is to motivate yourself to do ridiculously easy tasks over and over and over again.

How would you make farming ressources ten times harder? If it means ten times more ressources, it would be just ten time grindier. Impressive! That sounds like a real achievement. You should also get titles like:

Legendary Lumberjack, Nemesis of the Ancient Wood Log
Legendary Miner, Destroyer of Ores
etc.

I still think, your titel is too long, how about:

Remove Ascended from WvWvW

Open world bosses with raid boss quality that actually require an insane raidsize and coordination in a non-endgame zone with limited player spots in the zone itself or you go into an overflow and is totally not appropriate for the level players have when they quest in the area?

I said it when Tequatl was redone, I say it again, this is bad game design. It is the worst open world game design I have seen in 15 years of MMO gaming.

ANets approach to break the “Holy Trinity” mantra in MMOs:

- Remove tanks
- Remove healers
- Remove mob AI
- Remove mob control
- ???
- Profit

I am deeply surprised this didn’t work out.

I will make it short. People are confused about where the game is going. Many of them have been citing the Manifesto, but as we were told, the Manifesto is mostly gone (well, play the game and you will see it, if you want to).

I do not say the new way is for the better or worse, in fact, I have no idea what the vision for Guild Wars 2 right now is supposed to be. Others feel like this too, so I guess a fair amount of your playerbase wants an answer why things are happening they way they do. Are some things just collateral damage or part or a bigger plan?

Sure we are asked to give constructive feedback, but how? Refering to the old manifesto, we are outdated and wrong and it will sound like a rant. If we just give feedback on single topics, we might miss the context and even though the ideas might be good, they will fail in the grand scheme.

Most of the things that have been setup as a roadmap have been implemented, but what is the aim for the future, what is down the road in a year or two. You must have a plan, some roadmap that you can at least share the direction we are heading to.

Share some information, knowledge will at least end the wild speculations and if you can, setup a new Manifesto, so the players can refer to that.

Thank you.

I am suprised that it is not the best choice to roll your face on the keyboard when you are downed.

People seriously log into the forum and write a post, instead of reading the skill describtions? People make it to 80 and do not understand how the four skills work. Unless you have never died before because you are such an awesome player, this is sort of a shame.

It was an update (sort of a feature patch) for Star Wars Galaxies called “New Game Enhancement”.

The NGE is mostly seen as the reason why SWG failed. So putting it in the title makes the whole discussion sort of biased.

Ghostextechnica.3270:

Remember that GW2 is designed so that skill > gear and they don’t want people in unobtainable gear.

Sometimes I think GW2 is simply designed to suck.

The problem with the trait system is:

You have to unlock it, step by step and you have to also unlock the traits too.

So a new players feels like:

“Wow, I have unlocked a trait slot. Let’s see what I can do!”

He checks the UI and he get’s told:

“Well you have unlocked the trait slot, but you can’t use the stuff because you have to unlock it first!”

Whoever thought that was a good system? Gating the gated stuff?
In the end, instead of the player feeling more flexible with traits, he feels more limited.

So in the end, I only see two options to make the trait system work and both options involve getting rid of one gating:

A: Step-by-step unlocking trait-slots, offer all traits available for the slots for free.

B: Open up the whole trait system from the beginning, if a trait has been earned and there are enough trait-points available, let the player use the trait in the fitting tier. This might allow to use higher tier traits earlier on in theory, but in the end the traits are gated by their placement in the game anyway.

Double-gating has to go. It is just too disappointing.

Blurk.6231:

Did everybody forget about precursor crafting!?

/hype

Only ANet…

ANet balancing meeting:

DEV1: “Dear lord, look at the mesmer profession, it’s as messy as a port-a-potty at a truckers convention. What the hell should we do?”

DEV2: “Buff warriors I say!”

DEV3: “Yeah buff them warriors.”

DEV1: “Ok, so we buff warriors, problem solved. Let’s move on to the next topic.”

The Karka Queen is killed daily on my server. Tequatl is not.

Ms. Karka is a fair open world encounter where everyone can jump in and win on my own server. Tequatl for some reason is not.

“This hype train feels thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread.”

For a game that wanted to be awesome for people who do not like MMOs, it has pretty much become something that is similar to every other MMO. And I for one thought, the other MMOs might adapt to be more like GW2 at start.

But in fact, GW2 adapted to be more like every other MMO out there. Vertical progression, grind for best gear, raids with high difficulty (not managable for casuals or random groups).

So as a result:

If you do like MMOs, you might enjoy GW2. But people that do not enjoy playing MMOs seem no longer be the target group of ANet.

Colin, taken from the Manifesto:

“Most games, you go out and you have really fun tasks occasionaly that you get to do. And the rest of the game is boring grind to get to the fun stuff. I swung a sword, I swung a sword again, hey, I swung it again – that’s great. We just don’t want players to grind in Guild Wars 2 – noone enjoys it, noone finds it fun, we want to change the way people do combat.”

For a game where the director says they don’t want people to grind, there is a bloody high amount of grind in it…

- People who are looking for a good story will start with a new game.
- People who are looking for endgame content are going back to other games.
- People who like character progression will start with a new game or go back to other games.
- People who do not like character progression will play some other games.
- People who like competetive PvP have better options and will play them.
- People who like to play roles in a role playing game will play another MMO with roles.
- People who like challenging content will play other games.
- People who like to play dungeons will play games that release more dungeons frequently.
- People who get tired of The Zerg will play other games.
- People who want raids play other games.

GW2 is a jack of all trades but in the end, it just satisfies noone really. It has no niche to fit in, so people most of the time have just some better option on what they like to play.

They did this for three reasons:

1. Cliffhanger: They needed a reason to pause the story and give an outlook.
2. Artificially stretch the next LS episode: We no longer can go to the pale tree directly it seems, so we will need to “wind-up” our way there.
3. Reintroduce Trahearne: Who would you better ask for help getting an audience with the pale tree than Trahearne. It will reintroduce the pact to the story too. Brace yourselves, this won’t end well.

1.2.2 Leveling 21-44: I see myself four times. I must be drunken twice.

You did it! Yeah, you might not have realized it, but you have left your early days behind and are now to become one of us. What made the difference? Traits. If you were as greedy with your hero points as I have hinted earlier (like not spending them on skills to actually experiencing the beauty of GW2), you will have some left to dump into your traits. The obvious question is, where to put them. And if you are reading this, the obvious answer is: You have no idea. Fear not, the answer is at hand.

You will have to pick one trait line, and the one you should choose is Dueling. From now on, EVERY SINGLE HERO POINT you earn is to be spent here. You should have enough hero points to actually get some nice stuff. We are specifically aiming for Phantasmal Fury (adept), Fencer’s Finesse (master) and Deceptive Evasion (grandmaster). Getting these traits is your Nr. 1 priority. Nothing else matters. If you do anything else with your hero points, you will regret it later on, be warned.

Chances are slim that you will get all the way up to Deceptive Evasion right at the start. So as a rough guesstimate you should aim for level 31 to get Deceptive Evasion as a follower of this guide from the start. Things change quite a bit as you produce a clone whenever you dodge in combat from now on. What the happy little trees are in the “joy of painting”, the fragile little clones are in the “joy of mesmerizing”. From now on they are everywhere and you should not be greedy with them. The trick is to use dodge clones as fillers when your other illusion skills are on cooldown. Most of the time you might not even need to swap from greatsword to sword/focus to kill a single enemy.

Level 31 also unlocks your elite skill slot. What you want in that slot is Time Warp. But wait a sec – just forget about that. You might want it, but you won’t get it. Why? Ain’t nobody got hero points for that. But praise the six gods, with the new trait system, racial elite skills are unlocked by now. So unless you are a Norn, you might actually find something useful on your list.
The problem with hero points is, that at level 45, you will unlock you second trait line, and at that time, you want a kitten 52 hero points saved up to get down to business. So unless you grind all hero challenges on your way to level 45, you will probably not going to get close to having enough points for your traits and Time Warp. You will get it later, you will survive without it, you will enjoy it when you finally get it. It is always good to have something you can look forward to.

1.3 Leveling 1-80: TL;DR Version

1.3.1 Leveling 1-20:

Step 1: Level to 10 preferably with greatsword. While it is difficult to maintain a rotation because of cooldowns you can go with greatsword 1, 2, 4 shatter f1.
Step 2: At 10 equip sword/focus as second weapon set. Rotation is greatswords 1,2,4, weapon swap sword 3 shatter F1.
Step 3: At level 11, pick “Signet of the Ether” for healing and “Signet of Inspiration” as utility 1. At level 15, pick “Blink” as utility 2 and at level 19 “Signet of Illusions” as utility 3.

1.3.2 Leveling 21-44

Pick Dueling as your trait line, spend all your points there to get Phantasmal Fury (adept), Fencer’s Finesse (master) and Deceptive Evasion (grandmaster).
Safe 52 hero points for level 45.

1.3.3 Leveling 45-70

Pick Illusions as your second trait line, spend all 52 points there to get Compounding Power (adept), Shattered Strength (master) and Master of Fragmentation (grandmaster).
Safe 52 hero points for level 71.
If you can afford it, get Time Warp.

1.3.4 Leveling 71-80

Pick Domination as your third trait line and:

A) Spend 52 points there to get Empowered Illusion (adept), Blurred Inscriptions (master) and Mental Anguish (grandmaster)

- or -

B) Spend 44 points there for playing the Lazy Kai Build.

All longer fights consists of following mob AI:

1. Attack anything randomly.
2. Cast AoE

In rare cases:

3. Check distance, cast AoE

The strategy for all that is:

Bunch up in melee and beat the kitten out of the mob.

I have never seen so little variety in a RPG regarding to boss fights.

Is ASCII allowed on this forum?

Then we clearly need the facepalm one for ANet failing at balancing one small aspect of their game without kittening over the majority of players in all others.

Ah, and yay eSports! Srsly!

nexxe.7081:

spiritus.7983:

Every major villain wannabe in gw2 is a sylvari, Canach, Scarlet now another one A… something < already forgot his name as I write here. Seems like Pale Tree is losing his flock

Not to mention that I hope anet is learning something by now, Canach was a miserable fail to portrayal a villian, Scarlet was a mary sue… now lets see this one how they fail him. Apparently this new villian lost his mind too, verry original, we just get rid of the last crazy silvary two months ago. Clearly the grove needs a mental institution in the next patch

You forgot Faolain, Caithe’s lesbian lover, because you know, we need more lesbian love plots! And not exactly a villain, but Trahearne was a major character.

Anet is obsessed with Sylvari. It’s disappointing.

Guild Wars 2 is the story of the Sylvari. Of course it is all about the Sylvari. Ever played a Sylvaris personal story? Play a Sylvari, and the story makes sense from the first mission up to Zhaitan.
Play another race, and suddenly, a wild Trahearne appears…

GW: Story of humans
GW2: Story of the Sylvari, with the possibilty to play other races and miss the story…

Are you moaning about moaning?

There are no inactive accounts. Players buy the game and have an active account till the servers close down.

Simple as that.

Santa “RNG” Claus will make many people angry this christmas.

He is a very evil entity in GW2.

Hey there, like many of you I love the new druid elite specialization. Even though I think the druid was intended to have more than one aspect, for now all we got is our healing form.

While this sounds promising with the more difficult content we get in HoT – including raids – it will fail to help the ranger as a profession in the long run.

Sure, when everything is new and exciting and people do not know what to do, groups will take rangers as healers into the new content. They will excel at healing, noone will come close.

But this will only be for a short time frame. Soon, players will figure out the new content, and even if there is some unavoidable damage here and there, a pure healer will sooner or later be obsolete. Off-healers will shine, like classes that fill the primary role of a damage dealer with enough heals to keep a group alive.

As long as rangers damage stays mediocre, they will lose their spot in raiding on the mid to long run. Unless ANet manages to keep dishing out progressive raid content fast enough (which I do not believe, they said 6 wings a year, which means more or less two raids annualy) we will see groups looking for everything but rangers/druids again.

A solution could be a second aspect that would boost damage. Call it Avatar of the Wild or something and give the druid an option to spend the extra bar on something different than healing. Glyphs would change too, so this should be possible.

Maybe I am too pessimistic, but I fear that we soon enough have all those discussions about the PvE meta and how rangers are not part of it again.

Every single one you try with a norn.

Step 1: Give Veil to thiefs, give Portal to eles.
Step 2: Delete mesmer profession.

Result: Noone, in not a single game mode would miss the mesmer profession in GW2.

So let’s wait another four monthes for some actual content I guess.

Yay!

Shoe.5821:

why do you think a ranger could not be an off-healer?

zealots equipment exist, as does celestial.

staff/bow or staff/sword/x are totally plausible builds

Oh they can be. But other off-healers have higher DPS and group support. Why would you take a ranger/druid?

I see it this way:

First Tequatl was undead and we had to kill him.
Now Tequatl is simply dead and noone cares anymore.

We won!

Tested the soulbeast
hit stuff with greatsword.
Golem died.

Tried to workout rotation
clunky as kitten.
Camping beastform best
but boring.

Played holosmith
LOL
New engineer main.

How about we have now ascended gear you have to grind for weeks for tiny stat boosts.

PvE is more or less the same with some more zerg.

PvP is the same old same old.

Peetee.9406:

November 15th 2012 – The day the gear treadmill began.
January 28th 2014 – The day pay-to-win began.

ANet seems desperate, why such a move? This is obviously a door opener for more items to come. What is next? A vip subscribtion?

1. Sharks with lasers

2. Mounts

3. Dead horses along the way with sticks around that you can pick up to beat them

That is all.

Bubi.7942:

Okay, let’s go into a little detail here.

I will assume that OP is using the build posted in his signiature. Full zerk.

His suggestion is to make illus/clones immune to damage.

Wow. I mean, by god wow. Sure, why not, summon your 3 illusions then go /sleep in the corner.

Did you know that the downside of going full damage is low survivability? Did you also know that phantasms/clones inherit the caster stats? Does that explain why maybe your clones die such a horrible death?

Counter method#1: Don’t go full zerk. Never go full zerk man.
Counter method#2: Use traits that increase the health of clones/illusions (yes, trait change is free, try it)
Counter method #3: Use Signet of the something that increases illusions health

Don’t want to counter casue, by gawd, changing gear/traits for once is too hard? Rather roll with the tide?

Roll tide method#1: Summon phantasm, let phantasm attack, press f1
Roll tide method#2: Think and not spam. gasp Use your phantasms when they can actually do damage, and not while, for instance huge Aoe is up at champ Terragriff
Roll tide method#3: Actually gonna cheat here cause this yet again, needs trait swap. Get Debilating Dissipation so you even benefit, when your clones die, and are not shattered.

So hard.

Secret note: Every mesmer has access to shatter, you don1t need to be a “shatter mesmer”.

I am fairly sure now that you have no idea or experience on how shatter, clones, phantasms or even the mesmer profession works in PvE.

Trying to push clones HPs? What is this – comedy?
Blowing up your phantasm if it is literaly the main source of your damage? You know how much damage the shatter of that phantasm will do without being skilled into shatter. Like less than an auto-attack.

Whatever, sure, give us some more of your wisdom so we can at least have a laugh now and then.

I see where the disappointment comes from. Edge of the Mists was announced monthes ago and everyone knew it would happen at one day.

But, just putting Scarlet and therefore PvE content randomly on the Wv3 map so it looks like an update to the LS? That’s bullkitten.

For 14 monthes, ANet has told us that fun is the following:

- Very little real content/story every two weeks.
- Grinding this content over and over and over again, for the chance to get some super rare item

and/or

-Grinding this content over and over and over again, to collect hundreds/thousands of items to get some nice stuff.

How anyone who has not come from an asian grinder can be happy with this is beyond me.

An expansion at least gives the hope that we get something real, that feels immersive, maybe massive and entertaining without mindless repetitive grind.

That is why people ask for an expansion.

TTS is a raiding guild. Tequatl is a raid encounter.

Join raiding guild, do raid content – get loot.

Such a simple concept, it worked in other games too.

Warriors crying about nerfs, when their solution to their overpoweredness was to buff all other classes, because you know, this way they can say, warriors are in a nice spot, just everyone else is underpowered.

“Wut does that mean, I has to heal mysulf? Ain’t nobody got time for that. Need to faceroll damage. Killing stuff is fun, healing is not!”

Seriously warrior is easy to learn and easy to master, god forbid, it would be balanced to be on par with other classes…

Vesuvius.9874:

Kaiyanwan.8521:

Vesuvius.9874:

Make it 10 times as hard to get legendary armor than it is to get ascended.

The only thing that is hard in getting ascended items is to motivate yourself to do ridiculously easy tasks over and over and over again.

How would you make farming ressources ten times harder? If it means ten times more ressources, it would be just ten time grindier. Impressive! That sounds like a real achievement. You should also get titles like:

Legendary Lumberjack, Nemesis of the Ancient Wood Log
Legendary Miner, Destroyer of Ores
etc.

What in your opinion constitutes as being legendary then? What in your opinion would make something legendary?

I don’t know, content that is challenging, entertaining and exciting. Content that is hard, and takes time to master. Content that make you feel like you make a difference. Mind blown.

Just kidding, mindlessly grinding is really the most legendary thing I can come up with.

From time to time I wish too, that there was a bit more depth than just knowing when to dodge.

I hope at one point they can break the whole DPS meta for PvE (read everyone runs zerker gear).

It is just ascended rings, just some minor stat upgrade they said. Now a year later look how much more damage a full ascended character can do.

It starts small, but if you look carfully, you see the signs, or you don’t and play sheep.

Well, I cannot say if this game is losing too many players or too few.

The only thing I can say is, that in the last 1 1/2 years, this game has degenerated from the hope for the whole MMO genre to a generic asian grinder with a cash shop and crappy updates.

Do you blame the players for not logging in for this?

Metrics:

If you are out of ideas, go with math, because you know, math is always right.
It won’t work, but at least you have an excuse for whatever bullkitten you are doing.

Face it, GW2 attracts tons of people who actually don’t like the genre. My wife bought it and she managed to play to level 10 till she quit the first time. Half a year later, together with me, she made it to 50 on the second try before she got bored to death.
She just doesn’t like GW2 that much. Do I think she would have liked it any more with the changes from the two feature patches? Kitten no. She would have never returned with even more restrictions.

This will pretty much end like in SWG:

People who do not like the core of the game will still stop playing.
People who liked the game the way it was before will stop playing.
People who are fanbois will defend all changes until the game is dead.

But why run anything else in PvE than zerker gear? It just makes you less efficient.

Still better than what we got in Season 1.

Colin Johanson (Game Director/Big Boss):

“Everyone, including casual gamers, by level 80 should have the best statistical loot in the game."

What do I not see? What is there that is beyond my reading capabilities?

“We want everyone on an equal power base.”

Which is no longer true.

Nothing leaves ANets office without Colin giving it a go. Especially not a thing like the manifesto.

I play a mesmer. This is reason enough to not like the new patch.