Guild Wars 2

Yes, what would raids be without more tools to discriminate against our fellow players?

Remember guys, this is the culture that ANet wanted to bring to the game. Until now we were doing perfectly fine without them.

Can we get confirmation that Renegades with The Dreamer will be opening portals that unleash armies of flaming death ponies upon our foes?

The problem is that the barriers should not be based on gold, and they should not be based on RNG. Everything on there should be things that YOU have to do, no one else, but things that you only have to do ONCE, or a fixed number of times, not “maybe once, maybe a thousand times, depends.” Everything should either be somethign that drops every single time you complete a certain activity (or at least always drops the first time and only rarely after that), or something where you always get at least one “token” and you have to trade in maybe ten or fewer of them to get the item you need.

You should be able to work diligently towards your goal, not keep pulling the slot machine and hoping for 7’s.

The zerg, in GW2, is what I described. The “core” content of the game is spamming 1 semi-AFK, that is zerging in GW2.

No, that’s something else entirely. I don’t know what that is. I play zerg content CONSTANTLY and I NEVER just spam auto-attack (except when all my other moves are on cooldown, of course). If I just spam 1 then one of two things happen. Either there will be enough other players around that I’m not at risk, which means that spamming 1 will not generate enough damage for me to get loot from the enemy when it dies (ala the current Hydra Queen meta and a few other world bosses and champs), or there are not enough players around to reduce the risk, and if I just stand around spamming 1 then I’ll die from enemy attacks (ala most other content).

ArenaNet can take active steps to improve the bosses that are being zerged, and I sincerely hope we see more mechanically challenging (I use it very loosely) fights like we see in the QP. Zerging would still be boring though, since it’s lenient content designed for groups of casual, uncoordinated, and frankly bad players.

I don’t have any problems with the core mechanics of the QP bosses. They are actually pretty interesting, at first. What absolutely KILLS the fun of them though is the scaling and the anti-zerg mechanics of it. The mechanisms they use in an attempt to discourage zergs are horrendous for the game and only encourage people to not bother with it at all. They lead to fights where the enemies have basically infinite HP and the fights take ten times longer than they were intended to.

If they don’t want players to zerg then they need to do more than discourage it, they need to PREVENT it. Take the QP boss chains, for example. How could you do it right?

Step 1, REMOVE the Gauntlet. Players waiting around to fight Liandri should not be taking up space from people who could be running the Blitz event.

Step 2, hard lockout individual slices. Make it so that if they intend for 150 players to divide up in groups of 30, then make it that way. Lock all entrance to the slices except for one teleport in. Make it so that you can only use the teleport if you’re attuned to that slice. Make it so that when you die, you lose attunement. Make it so that when the event starts, only 5 people can gain attunement for each slice (30 total). Once each slice has 4 or more attunements then it opens up to 10 each. One 8 or more are attuned for each it opens up to 15 each, and so on until they are all full. A display of the number of players attuned to each would be shown in the event tracker, along with life bars for all bosses.

This is similar to how the watchknights worked, and similar to how the Marionette worked, only slightly more flexible, since attunement slots would free up if a player died or was disconnected or something, which would reduce problems like with the Marionette when one platform had nobody on it. If one boss was failing because they had lost players, other players could always pick up the slack.
This would mean that at any given time each slice would have roughly equal numbers of players, and it would be impossible to zerg one and ignore others. I’d be fine with that, I’m just not fine with mechanics that allow players to zerg, which is the natural way to play with multiple characters, but then punishes them for doing it. You can argue “well don’t do it then” until you’re blue in the face, but I only have control over my own avatar, I don’t have control of anyone else’s, and I’m tired of failing events because the other players aren’t willing to buy into ANet’s philosophies.

Right cause bouncing mushrooms need platforming skills to use. °3°

I don’t think they really do, most put you right where you’re meant to be, but it is fair to say that a lot of the new content, especially the Adventures, do require significant platforming skills. I don’t much mind myself, I like platforming, but those who don’t are perfectly justified in their negative reaction to it.

As long as raids do not hinder the rate at which they introduce other new content (guild missions, fractals, new maps, living story, pvp maps, etc), it shouldnt be a problem.

So far the only “new” content they’ve announced that isn’t the raids is Wintersday fluff. They haven’t even hinted at continuing the content for non-raiders yet, which means we won’t see anything new until at least early next year.

Just hit MR23 been solo the whole time.

That is truly excellent. For you. It has kitten-all to do with anyone else, and is not helpful to the discussion.

Seriously, if you’re gonna just buy your way to completion instead of putting in the slightest amount of personal effort… suffer the consequences.

The point is, “things you can spend money on” should not be a significant portion of the process at all. Any actual “crafting” elements should be more token gestures. The “base” staff should not have a higher material cost than, say, an Ascended staff, 6 Spiritwood planks instead of 35+1-0 Leather. Ideally it wouldn’t even take that, it would just be an exotic weapon using exotic mats.

The “costs” of producing it should be entirely in the unique challenges you undertake for the collection, and items that you earn specifically from those adventures. To craft a sword Precursor, you should not need to use enough base metal to craft an Iron Throne’s worth of swords. To make a Precursor staff, you should not need enough wood planks to build an entire pirate ship. The base mats should be about the same as any other weapon in the game, all that would be different is the need for various unique items, which could not be purchased or collected in bulk, you would just get ONE of these by completing ONE activity, and this is what elevates the item to Precursor status.

Now, you can argue that a player should collect his own Shards of Glory and Memories of Battle, but these items should not even have a market value. Even if you are making your own and not buying them, you are passing up that amount of gold by not selling the ones you have.

Gold cost should not be a factor in this process at all. Your options should be either:

A. Spend money to buy the thing off the TOP, already completed.

OR

B. Do the Mastery collection chains and receive the item for completing tasks, with practically zero coin or fungible assets spent in doing so.

The current method is neither of these things.

Minigames are only annoying when you HAVE to do them to gain access to specific rewards, or when they offer an unbalanced quantity of rewards.

So long as you’re free to say “I am not enjoying this, I will do something else instead,” and NOT be penalized for that choice, the mini-game is fine.

Unfortunately, HoT’s mini-games have failed this very simple test.

Cheaper is irrelevant. It doesn’t matter if it’s cheaper.

To you, perhaps, but it matters a great deal to a great many people, I would be confident in saying this matters to the majority of players that were asking for Precursor crafting in the first place. The entire point was to NOT have to grind for gold.

It costs less than 10g gold to make them. And whether it would have cost 450g on the market had you bought the mats is irrelevant.

Not true. If you can make those mats for 10g, and sell them for 450g, then you’re still out 440g in potential earnings, that is not nothing. Materials you harvest/craft yourself are not “free” if it’s possible to resell them. Aside from some token materials, like just enough metal and wood to justify the crafting of a sword, ALL materials involved in the Precursor should be account-bound rewards for specific single tasks. There should be no way to buy them, and no way to sell them if you acquire them yourself.

Precursor crafting wasn’t invented so people could get them easier or cheaper. It’s just an alternative to gambling or being very lucky.

Then they failed at the design stage, because it should have at least been cheaper than the existing market prices.

Price doesn’t matter if your crafting it vs. buying it because if it did, you would just buy it in the first place.

The point of crafting it should be in doing more work so that you pay less.

I do not believe gold should be out of reach for most people, ONLY because they tied it into the rewards system, and most importantly the Masteries system. Everyone should be able to max out their masteries, and considering that this is impossible without getting gold on at least most of the Adventures AND accomplishing many of the very difficult story mode challenges, this means that Adventures need to award gold to almost everyone.

This doesn’t mean Gold has to be faceroll simple, just that it should be achievable to all, and none of that “well anyone can do anything if they just try hard enough” nonsense, anyone over the age of six knows that’s not true.

So the targets should be, anyone should be able to get bronze within a few tries (and most skilled players should get it first or at least second try), and anyone should be able to get silver within a few more as they shave the edges off, and gold should come soon enough after. For those that say “but there should be real challenge,” that’s what the leaderboards are for, post something ABOVE gold. Gold is not the ultimate finish line, nor should it be. Gold is just the tier at which you get the peak rewards, and therefore the level that everyone should be capable of reaching.

This is stupid.

I’ve been listing myself in LFG for a week and a half or so, I’ve been asking around in chat, and so on. But, there’s just no one pugging a raid, or filling a spot, or any of that. And no guilds are recruiting that actually go into the raid.

So, what exactly is the issue? Is the raid in GW2 just one of the hardest in the genre or something, or are people just being silly?

I’m not “afraid” of raiding, it’s just, I’ve spent about six hours in total raiding without a single boss clear, and while to WoW raiders that’s “just the warm up,” I’m a GW2 player and have better tastes than that. If I’m going to play a game for three+ hours, I’d better have accomplished a hell of a lot more than staring at a single boss and never getting more than half his life down.

I don’t think the majority of GW2 players are afraid of raids, they’re just too good for raids.

They aren’t really dismissing them….. just telling them to get better. Other people can do it, why can’t they?

but it’s basically dismissing their experiences, saying that the inconvenience they are having is not something that should exist, or not something that should bother them. If someone is saying that they’re bothered, then they’re bothered. Accept that as a fact and move on from there, don’t try to explain to them why they’re wrong for being bothered.

They aren’t pointless. Pointless would be if they just didn’t make anything better. These changes actually make things worse, overall, so they do have a point, to make the game worse. Apparently it’s been too good so far and they needed to balance that out.

As has been detailed many times we will not be disclosing work in progress. I don’t know how to make this any clearer. As uncomfortable as this may be this is the reality.

Yeah, but as I’ve said, that policy needs to change. It’s like saying “I’m sorry, but we’re just going to be deleting all of your characters when they hit level 53, and there’s nothing to be done about that, I don’t know how to make this any clearer.”

It’s just a toxic policy, and you can never have a fully healthy relationship with the community until it is disposed of. I give you a great deal of credit for trying anyway, but it’s like boxing with both hands behind your back.

P.S: If you want to discuss potential future features and systems then you are welcome to partake in the CDI.

Where is the CDI page for the NGE?

And for the record, the earlier we get news, the better, but even days or weeks in advance is better than nothing.

But when it was up, you could only spend them to run the gauntlet, which was both annoying and way too time consuming. It would have taken be hundreds of hours to get through all those tickets. They need a way to just convert them into something useful, even at an exchange rage of less than a copper per ticket.

There have been a lot of vague mentions of “things that are bugs” but nothing specific s to what is a bug and what is a “feature.” Could we please get an official list of what the leveling experience is meant to be like for a brand new player, verses what it’s meant to be like for a fresh alt after making a level 80?

so in the upcoming balance update we will be converting all equipment and consumables that provide a bonus to Boon Duration or Condition Duration to use Concentration or Expertise instead.

So you have a stat in the game called “boon duration,” which controls the duration of boons, and you have a stat in the game called “Concentration,” which controls the duration of boons, and you decide to remove the one call “boon duration?”

WHY?

Why remove the stats that do exactly what they say they do, and leave in the stat which nobody will have any idea what they mean unless they look it up in a wiki?

How does that make any sense?

Why not just leave Boon Duration and Condition Duration as the stats, and remove Concentration and Expertise?

I like the second type of games. Only overcoming difficulties with my skills make me enjoy my reward, because then they have value for me. Apparently, that’s not you definition of enjoyment; that’s your right and your choice. However, ANet designed GW2 this way and keeps designing it that way – so you either accept it or leave the reward (or the whole game).

And there’s a reason why ANet did it: games which require zero effort can only have a very short lifetime because of lack of commitment and long-term goals. For a Buy To Play game like GW2, no loyal veterans means death.

You’re still making strawman arguments. Nobody is asking for a method that requires zero effort, or even a method that requires less effort. All we’re asking for is a method that allows for the same or even more effort to be applied in a different area of the game, one that we enjoy more. Nobody’s talking about getting a free lunch or an easy ride, just a challenge that is more enjoyable to us.

I can see why people who liked open world are upset. I don’t think this content was aimed at the hard core crowd. I also don’t think the enemy difficulty is the ultimate problem (I don’t see huge complaints about the same enemies in story) but it may be a contributing factor. I think the problem is that every single map is event driven, on a timer, and has champion protected hero points.

I have heard from people who could barely get through the first story chapter to get their glider and never touched it again. The mob difficulty is a significant problem for some people. Don’t you remember the HoT betas when people were complaining very loudly about Modrem Snipers, to the point that they tweaked them (at least in that first mission) several times before launch?

I agree that timer changes and soloability changes will be nice, it will improve things considerably, but it won’t entirely solve the problems people are having. And keep in mind, this is coming from someone with full HoT map completion, maxed elite specs on 11 characters, and HoT story completion, so I’m not saying this was too hard for me, but I totally get why it’s too hard for others, and honestly it was more hassle than fun in places.

But yeah, right now HOT causal content is in a dire state. I don’t think this is the fault of raids (which are generally well received by that community) but the ongoing content drought and poor open world maps.

I also don’t think it was the fault of raids, just that raids are a symptom of the problem, which is that ANet overestimated how much the players would want raid like content, more difficulty enemies, more meta map objectives that required overall map coordination to complete, stuff like that. The HoT open world maps are basically like “raid content-lite,” so for people who enjoy raid style content, there’s a lot to do, while for people that don’t enjoy raid style content, there’s really not much aside from trying to cross maps while avoiding as much as possible.

Were you not around when the masses were calling for more difficult content prior to HoT?

That isn’t a thing that happened. “The masses” were never asking for more difficult content. A very vocal minority was asking for more difficult content, a group of similar size to the “anti-raid whiners” you’re trying to hush up now. There have always been people that wanted raids, that wanted “more challenging content,” but most of them left early in the game and never came back, because that’s not what GW2 was about. The community that they fostered for three years were the people who liked that GW2 was not overly challenging.

I think it’s fine to have challenging content, but it needs to be COMPLETELY optional. Not “optional” in the sense of “you don’t have to do it, but if you don’t then you’ll never get certain rewards or be able to play through certain content,” but TRULY optional, in the sense of “there is a hard version and there is an easy version. You can play the easy version if you like and get all the same stuff, it’d just take a bit longer than in hard mode. Have fun!”

In general, if a game does not increase in difficulty over time, then the game has no longitivtiy. You can make the difficulty constant, but then the game becomes mindless. In order for a game to be interactively entertaining and promote longitivtiy, there needs to be slight increases in difficulty (a sort of ladder) as the game goes on, especially when adding in player-boosting mechanics such as elite specs.

That’s not how GW2 works. GW2 was designed to have relatively flat difficulty, at least once you reach endgame. That’s why a level 80 can still do content in starter zones, and while it’s a bit easier, it’s not like one-shottting boss mobs easier like in other games.

It’s normal that everything can’t be played equally in a game that’s mostly balanced around PvP. That being said, there’s a lot of leniency and pretty much every class has something decent to bring to a raid. Would you rather they don’t make any challenging content then?

I think that it’s fine when the game gives the option of playing challenging content, but there should always be less challenging alternatives to the same content, with the same rewards. The easier version can obviously offer a lesser amount of those rewards, so that the hard mode is the most efficient way of acquiring them, but the hard content should never be the only way of experiencing that content, nor the only way to acquire any rewards that might be of value to a player with no interest in the hard mode content itself.

Per company policy (see Mike O’Brien’s post for his summary of ArenaNet’s dev communcation policy) we wouldn’t be able to discuss what is currently in development, or what progress we’re making on it. It would purely be a list of core high level topics we are aware of and think are important in Gw2.

Whatever else you do, that company policy needs to change as soon as possible. It is toxic to the health of the community and needs to be cut out like the gangrenous limb that it is.

That said, until you resolve that crippling bloodclot, whatever information you can squeeze past it would be appreciated.

The wouldn’t even need to do a poll, they could just run their internal numbers.

A. How many people play the game fairly regularly.

B. How many people have tried the new Teq fight at least once.

C. How many of those people never tried it again?

D. How many people kept trying until they got their achievements?

E. How many of those players never played it again?

Just compare those numbers and that should give a solid result.

If the number of players who tried Teq is well less than the total number of consistent players, then that is a bad sign.

If the number of people who gave up before completing Teq is relatively high then that is a bad sign.

If the number of people who quit Teq as soon as they’d “cleared” him is relatively high, then that is a bad sign.

The only thing that could be seen to justify the “Tequatlization” of the game is if a sizable portion of the player base is STILL routinely doing the Teq fight, because they enjoy doing it, at levels comparable to other open world events like Claw of Jormag or even the Karka Queen.

No.

What they should do, is remove the Watchwork pick’s bonus, then convert all existing “fancy picks” into skins, ones which you can apply to any pick you want, account bound, so that any pick can look like the fancy ones.

Then they introduce an “infinite pick/axe/scythe” that has no effect to it, it’s just infinite. Anyone who buys or owns an existing infinite tool gets one of these for free, so basically there is zero function loss there except for the Watchwork one.

Then they should have a “Harvesting aspect” slot, which you can slot in a special aspect that gives bonus resources, like the “Bounty Aspect” would cause you to harvest food items in addition to normal stuff (like bonus mushrooms from rocks and trees), or the “Scarlet Aspect” that gives you watchwork from rock, spores from plants and trees.

You would not need a special tool to use these aspects, and they would be earned through completing gameplay objectives, not off the gemstore.

Raids have like 5 developers working on them. They said so as much in an AMA. The lack of casual content is not because of raids.

I’m not sure this is accurate. It may be that raids have a permanent staff of five people, five who’s job it is to work on raids all day, every day, but I have to believe that they borrow people from the “staff pool” to create content as well, environment modelers, artists designing gear that only drops in raids, creature creators, effect programmers, etc. If so, they would be taking those staffers’ time away from other potential activities.

If they truly are the work of only five people, start to finish, then these are clearly the best five people to work at ANet, and their talents could be spend accomplishing similarly incredible feats elsewhere in the game.

Copy, Paste, /thread:

Sort of like the small vocal minority calling for raid nerfs/different raid modes? I can back this up from the fact that Anet created raids and stated that raid participation hit higher numbers than in most games. If you don’t think that is a success then there is no point in continuing this conversation.

You’re trying to apply a same/same argument here, which is faulty for several reasons:

1. Forums and other out of game communities always skew towards “serious” players, hardcores. If you have ten people loving raids on a forum that might represent hundreds in the game, while if you have ten people talking against them that is more likely to represent thousands. Previous MMO developers have expressed this fact, that while the majority of the conversation on their boards revolved around raiding and endgame content, those players only made up 10-15% of the actual players. Because of this, “the same number of people are on your side as on mine”, in this case, would put you well behind, not even.

2. They did say that raid participation in GW2 was higher than the industry standard, but this is not a major factor, both because of the generally low raid participation in other games (so “more than 10%” is really nothing to right home about), and because the raids are brand new, and most people can at least enter them as is, so chances are that a huge number of players have at least tried the raids out over the past few months. I’m certainly one of those. That doesn’t mean that they enjoyed their experience, or would continue to do so over the next few months. We have heard no data out of ANet as to how many people are raiding on a weekly basis.

You may be right, the GW2 community might LOVE raids as they are and not want any changes made, but there’s no evidence to support that theory, and it seems by far the least likely scenario, given past circumstances and the GW2 community in general.

I hear your opinion, and you are one in a dozen. Is this a fact because you state it needs to be that way? Is this how a solid game works that keeps the interest of the consumer? Zero progression? If I wasn’t right Ohoni, things would not be the way they are. It’s pretty simple.

So basically you’re arguing that if this wasn’t the right thing to do, they wouldn’t have done it?

Like WvW Borderlands 3.0?

Like NGE 1?

Or NGE 2?

Like the oh-so-successful Precusor Crafting that everyone loves so much?

They’re human, they make mistakes. A mistake is only really a problem if they refuse to correct it (although really they could make a lot more mistakes if they were more transparent about their long term plans rather than springing systems on us fully formed). they implemented raids they did because they thought it would be a good idea to do so. That doesn’t mean that it WAS a good idea for them to do so.

Hello GW2 community, what would you rather have?

1.) Would you rather have an easy-mode faceroll raid mode.

2.) NEW CONTENT

It’s not an either-or situation. At least not significantly so. New content takes a lot of resources, and is likely going to get them. Easy mode raiding, even by the most pessimistic analysis, would take a lot fewer resources, no new models, textures, environments, animations, etc. It would be purely content designer work, spreadsheets and databases, and that’s still work, but less of it than full blown “new content”.

So if say the original plan is to design “one hundred new ‘content things,’” and they changed their plans to also make an easy mode raid, then that might reduce it to “the easy mode raid and ninety-seven new ‘content things,’” not “well, just the easy mode raid now, no time for new content.”

People would still be getting PLENTY of new content, and they would also be getting the ability to play the entire current raids in a manner that they would enjoy more. Win-win-win.

I’m sorry, did you design GW2? Are you the lead marketer for consumer interest or something? Or… are you making things up again to push your agenda?

If you don’t recognize my statement as being obviously true, then you need to play more GW2 before attempting to discuss the game.

. . . when the Knights worked. The new version does not. It requires the zerg to split up, but the bosses have too much HP for a split zerg to deal with it, so they just don’t die. At least with the original version if you killed at least one guy you got loot form it, in the current version nobody gets anything and it was all a huge waste of time.

If you insist on splitting the party then you’ll need to third their HP.

Tempest were in a great spot last build??? you literally are the first person on the ele forums that have suggested they are in a “GREAT” spot…. There was nothing positive about tempest to say, as you can see from the feedback on the forums….

Yes, the Tempest forums were a hotbed of salt, that doesn’t mean that they were actually right. Those that cry loudest are not necessarily those most deserving of attention. A lot of you didn’t like the Tempest, and are very loud about that, but a lot of us liked the Tempest just fine, and some bonus damage is a very welcome change. I’d like to see some animation tweaks, and a complete overhaul of the Elite by the time the expansion launches, but I had zero expectations that they would fix everything by the next patch.

Remember, the Tempest is allowed to be HORRIBLE next patch, for all it matters. It’s just beta, nothing is on the line yet. All that matters is the state that it’s in by launch. The BWE2 changes they’ve announced are not final changes for any class, they are “let’s see how it handles with these simple changes we can make,” and if it turns out to be not enough, they can do something else. For the record, if I could, I would be running my BWE Tempest on live at the movement, it was a lot of fun.

For the record, here are some things you should really give up on right away:

• Warhorn as the weapon: I’m not a huge fan either, don’t intend to use it, but it is happening. There is no chance of them changing to another weapon for HoT, and even less than zero chance of them releasing a mainhand for Eles, but keep in mind that they’ve indicated more Elite specs will come over time, so you’ll get whatever weapon you wanted eventually.

• Overloads as a concept: Overloads are happening. They will do mostly what they have been doing. They might reduce the cooldowns on them a bit, or buff their effects, but this is the mechanic, like it or not. Yes, they will interfere with your standard attunement rotations, and this is by design. You are meant to rotate slower and more deliberately than usual, count on that remaining. All that is likely to change are things that make this slower rotation more worth it.

This does nothing for PvE. Nothing is going to compel a staff or dagger ele to put the only attunements that have good autoattack sustained damage on cooldown, fire and air.

If you put fire or air overload down in PvE, you murder your damage since earth and water autoattacks and skills hit like wet toilet paper.

This might be true if Overloading kicked you out of attunements, but it doesn’t. A solid Tempest rotation is to be in fire, burn your cooldowns, Overload, burn your short cooldowns, go to Air, burn your cooldowns, Overload, burn your short cooldowns, and then right back to Fire, which has come off its long CD by that point. You can throw in the other two whenever they’re helpful. Honestly I don’t see where people are having trouble with this.

I think it’s fine for anything to be in the dailies, but they need more options, so that if two or more of the dailies are broken or overly complicated, there are other things you can do instead (without having to go into the Mists).

Don’t: Don’t spread events randomly across the map so that players have to scurry from one to the next and try and find one available.

• Do: Keep it organized. Have three (more or less) “starting locations” on the map, with a named, commander tagged NPC, establish these before the event starts so that players can group around them. Then when the main event starts, a sub event will appear near this guy. You finish that one, another event appears within walking distance of the first, everyone goes there, next thing. Then a third, and forth, etc. If you want to repeat events, just have ti loop around in a general circle, but the basic rule is that the next event to start should be within walking distance of the last, you should never have to TP across the map to reach it.

Don’t: I think one of the biggest problems with this event is that it’s a four hour event. A lot of players don’t play for four hours a day, even with breaks in the middle, so a lot of this event is just out of touch for them. I personally play from around 10-12 EST, most often towards the 11pm area, meaning that my “prime time” just happens to fall dead center in the “we’re taking a break” phase of the event. Whee!

• Do: The event timing needs to be more consistent and also more varied., I would say for something like this, three maps, twenty minutes on, ten minutes off, repeat. Players could skip a round if they wanted, but there would never be a ninety minute gap between events, and even if you only played for two hours you would have the opportunity to hit up to four of the events.

Don’t: Don’t reward players based on how many of the events they tag over the course of the event.

• Do: Use the sequence above, and reward them for how many phases they get through in that single chain. If they bounce over to other chains then they get no credit for those, just the first one they start on. That way, they ONLY get the most credit for sticking with a single group the entire time.

Don’t: Don’t be stingy with rewards.

• Do: If you’re planning on running this sort of event on a regular basis, announce that in advance so that players will know that they’re meant to save up for the big rewards over several months.

Otherwise though, if you announce this as a one-off event, then the amount of rewards should be enough that a fairly casual player, one who only plays the events 1-2 hours a day over the course of the event, should be able to earn enough for at least one, and likely several of the biggest rewards, a player who plays 3-4 hours a day should be able to earn all the big rewards, and a player who plays more than that should be able to earn all the big rewards, and have plenty left over to spend on “filler” rewards like material bags.

Don’t: Have enemies not drop loot. Dropped loot is FUN, way more fun than end of event loot.

• Do: have the enemies drop standard loot. Nothing crazy, nothing that makes “scaling up” the event worth doing. Make it so that “scaled up” enemies don’t drop loot, perhaps, just the “normal amount” enemies do, or the “scaled up” enemies would drop normal mob type loot rather than fancy champ bags, but have them drop loot. You can still reward the “special” loot at the end.

Don’t: Overemphasize mob tagging. When tagging mobs is the way to earn credit for the event, it overemphasizes long range builds and AoE builds designed to hit the most enemies possible as fast as possible, which in a large zerg may be the only way to hit anything before the zerg burns them down.

• Do: Have objectives that all players can do to “buy in” to the event, that do not involve tagging mobs, such as activating a device or attacking an enemy with a huge health pool. Ideally don’t even make players tag mobs to get drop loot, if they are around the mob when it dies, and “tagged in” to the event itself, then loot can drop to them too, even if the mob was killed before they could tag it.

There are probably others, but those were the main issues with this current event.

anecdotal.

Obviously, as is any account to the contrary. All we know is that some people feel one way and other people feel the opposite, and both people are entitled to feel that way. It’s up to ANet to figure out how many people fit into each group and what to do about that.

Staff 2: The projectile speed need to be at least 2~3 times fast. So far this skill is very clunky and hard to hit anyone at 600+ range
Also, I “strongly” suggest the wisp surrounding foes should not only heal allies, but do small aoe damage to the target and the target nears it. The damage doesn’t need to be high (in fact, it shouldn’t be high), but it should help druid tag on foes better, which compensate some of the druid’s reward credit issue.

People say it shouldn’t be high damage, and I sort of agree, but sort of don’t. What I would like to see is this ability to have low base damage and low base healing, but also have a high Power/Healing coefficient, so that your stats would make a huge difference. In that way, if you went Healing build, it would be very high heal, very low damage, but if you went DPS build then it would actually do solid damage, just negligible healing. I’d like to see the control.

While I laugh at the doom and gloom tone of your post, I do at least agree that it was a HUGE mistake on their part to tie so much of the content to massive group participation, especially without giving players the tools to better coordinate those activities (like being able to specifically select maps from a list rather than being randomly assigned one).

I’m hesitant about how the new achievements were described in the blog posts. I’m not freaked out without knowing the full details, but the impression I got from the blog was that the new LW-connected achievements were designed to 1. not be possible to clear on your first playthrough, forcing you to redo the content multiple times, and 2. would be “more difficult” than existing ones, which is hard to guess at since some existing ones are very easy, but others are already plenty hard. I would not want to see achievements in the game be something that only “elite” players are capable of overcoming.

I would not want to see more achievements that require the level of skill/luck as some of the Gauntlet achievements, or the ones connected to the LA Aetherblade base dungeon, nor would I want to have achievements that you cannot complete on your first playthrough if you meet the other requirements. That was one thing that bugged me about some of the achievements tied to the Kessex Hills LW updates, where you might have to beat a given boss once, and no matter what you did it would not unlock a certain achievement, and then you had to beat them a second time and on that second time you could get an achievement for beating it in a certain way. If you beat ti right the first time then you should get the full achievement for it.

If you think ANet should charge a sub, then buy at least $15 in gems each month, but leave the rest of us alone.

I accept the fact that they are having a problem. The solution to that problem, though, is not to reduce the difficulty of the mob, but to increase the skill of the individual.

No. That is up to the player. You get to decide what your solution would be, you do not get to decide what their solution should be. If their solution is “:make the mob less annoying,” then that is their solution.

That inconvenience should motivate’em to improve so that they can beat it, instead of whining on the forum asking Anet to remove the inconvenience for’em.

Noooope.

There’s plenty of loot pinata’s in core tyria for you. Please go back to them until you feel safe enough to venture into a somewhat challenging area.

Last thing we need is HoT dumbed down to the level Orr is at.

The game is for everyone, for those who insist that people should “learn to play” with tougher mobs, you need to “learn to play” with less hardcore players. GW2 is not a hardcore game, it is not for you. It is a casual game for casual players, and they gain nothing by alienating those players.

This isn’t some kitten gripe about how we only start with five. That’s not the issue. I already bought three more slots for a total of eight. You’re welcome.

My problem is that the loading screen only has room for 7 slots to be displayed at once. This means that one of my characters always gets bumped off the screen and I have to scroll over to reach her. That’s silly. I can get why you wouldn’t have room for infinite slots, and 9+ would be pushing things, but in a game with 8 classes, you can safely assume that a large number of players would make one of each, so having 8 slots on the main screen instead of 7 would just make common sense.

“Why did the Tempest only get numbers, when [other class] got all this other great stuff in BWE2?”*

I’ve seen this sort of comment come up far too often in the response to the BWE2 Tempest changes, but in case it needs spelling out, the beta is not about you. It is about improving the game as a whole, and testing various features as they move towards launch. They do not owe you a fun and fully workable class, not until launch day of HoT. That is what you paid for, for the Tempest to be fun on launch day, and not a minute before. Anything else they offer you is bonus.

So if you aren’t satisfied with where the Tempest is at right now, that’s fine. Certainly let them know that, and explain why you don’t like it, and how they can change it. That’s all useful feedback.

But if you feel upset that the Tempest is not great right now, then too bad. If you are upset because some classes got more substantial changes between BWE1 and 2, then too bad. It is not their job, nor should it be, to make sure that every class is equally represented at all phases in beta. Count your blessings, people who main four of the classes haven’t even gotten to try theirs yet.

As the BWEs move forward, class balancing will move at a constantly shifting pace. Some betas, class A will see significant improvements, and class B will see relatively nonsense tweaks. Others, class A will get very little and class B will get some major stuff. Just because a class only gets minor tweaks between two beta windows, does not mean that they have given up on the class or that it won’t eventually see major changes, it just means that the sort of development time that it would take to make those major changes is not available for that beta window, or that other projects take priority.

That is a GOOD thing, to do otherwise would mean wasting a lot of time and attention trying to make sure that if child 1 gets a toy, child 2 must get an equally cool toy or he’ll throw a fit in the store. Sometimes people need to grow up and learn to be patient.

If the changes they are making to the Tempest in BWE2 do not appeal to you, that’s fine. You don’t have to play the Tempest over that weekend if you totally don’t like the class. Play a standard kit Elementalitst in the new content, see how that works out. Or maybe try out one of the other classes, BWE2 will likely have all the BWE1 stuff, plus probably 2-4 new classes, and Glint, so give those a go. Or if you absolutely can’t be bothered to test out HoT in anything less than a perfect Tempest, then just play the normal game that weekend. They’re all valid options.

But the point is, the beta weekends are not about you, they are not about making sure that your intended class is the absolute most important thing at every phase in development. The betas are there to test the game, and to make ALL the classes and content the best it can be, and that process is not always evenly paced. Get over it.

*and for the record, the reason is likely because they’d been working on a lot of that other stuff already, and just had to pull the trigger on it, but they don’t have any major Tempest changes ready at the moment, but are certainly working on it at some level.

GW2 has a ton of different content to satisfy all kinds of players,and
now it also has Raids.It didn’t become Raid focused.

And yet the only new content added to the game over the past four and a half months has been raid wings. . .

We need a lot of grinding. We need things to work towards.

They are two different things.

Would it be possible for you guys to cheat this one for us? Like gift out a “chunk of Mastery XP” consumable to players that do a certain amount of the content?

Yes, basically it’s a little like professional wrestling. ANet picks the winners and losers before the match, and you just play out your role.

It would be nice if they at least told you which you were meant to be so you didn’t have to figure it out for yourself.

The entitlement meme will stop when people stop whining about how they are entitled to more than they are.

As a player, you are entitled to get exactly what you paid for. If you paid for the core game, you are entitled to the core game. If you paid for gems and bought things with those gems, you are entitled to the things that you bought with those gems. If you buy the HoT base kit at $50, you are entitled to the things listed in that base kit.

Nothing more.

If you are whining about how ANet has “betrayed” you or “owes” you anything, then that is entitlement, and if you don’t like being called out on that, then stop being that.

There were also a lot of players who bought the game with the expectation that it would offer content they found challenging. While dungeons did fill that role at first, that did not last long.

Sure, but most of those players left pretty fast, and good riddance. They were corrosive tot he culture of the game.

I also happen to believe that the best thing for the game is for players in general to accept that every aspect of the game may not be for them.

And that’s fine. I can get 100% behind that, so long as two conditions are met:

1. Said “not for everyone” content cannot block progression towards earning rewards that “maybe everyone” players might want. Rewards are “for” anyone who wants them.

2. That no story is locked behind completion of any of this content, not even to the point of requiring someone else to “clear” the content for you and invite you in. This condition was clearly violated by the HoT 1 raids, no matter how much ANET and raiders might protest otherwise.

So long as those conditions are met, fine, “not all content is for everyone,” and there’s plenty of content I don’t do. But so long as that content is used as a gate between me and things that I definitely, 100% do want, then I’m sorry, but “not for everyone” no longer applies.

At all.

I just wanted to give Kiel a shout-out after the holo-battle. I voted for Evon, but during that fight, she rezzed me twice, including once from complete death death. This was the most useful an NPC has ever been in this game in my experience, so thanks Ellen.

This is non-negotiable, we absolutely need a UI button to swap Daredevil Dodges. This can either be f3-f5 each picking one, or a single button that rotates between them, and they can put a cooldown on swapping or whatever they feel is necessary, but a button IS necessary.

I love Lotus, when I’m in combat, but I absolutely HATE how if I’m just roaming around and dodge, I suddenly agro everything around me. It’s not practical. I also would love to use Dash while roaming around, but it’s not the best for me in combat, so I need the ability to switch between them on the fly, even if this is restricted to out of combat only it would be an improvement.

As they stand, the dodges are more annoying to manage than they are a positive, we need confirmation that they are at least working on this, but so far they’ve remained complete silent.

She changed the thread title so that people don’t have to feel like they’re only allowed to post here because they dislike it, and that the thread is for feedback in general, not just complaining about it.

If people want to start a positive (or neutral) thread on the topic then they can do that, but this thread was started as a negative one, and should remain as such so long as people continue to want to discuss the topic.

I will say this, I hate PvP, have always hated PvP, have never wanted to play PvP at all, but I played through the first two league seasons because they made it the only way to earn the Ascension wings. I’m now towards the beginning of the forth achievement tier, but have yet to win two matches in a row this season. If things have changed in a way that prevent me from reaching Ruby this season and next, preventing me from getting the wings I’ve been working on for several months now, then I will flip the kitten out.

Do not change the rules on people in the middle of a race. Do not let people advance at a certain pace until the halfway mark, and then halt their advancement completely.

i have a character that’s a pve beast – i pretty much do nose dives into hoards in dragon stand and do champs solo, can solo a whole heck of a lot in most parts of the game, and it’s hardly ascended – i have the build to handle a raid, i just don’t like playing with elitists, they are simply annoying, i don’t want to have to deal with their paranoia and fear of death. is that so wrong ?

The funny thing is, and keep in mind that I’m on your side here, but from the sounds of it they might want to keep you out of the raid anyway. It sounds like you have a pretty tough build, and maybe that would be useful as the tank, maybe not. If you can’t be the tank though, they will really hate you having any kind of defensive capabilities, you’re meant to be full glass. I’m not defending that, mind you, just relaying what I’ve been told by raiders on the matter.

I agree with you about this. I think it’s premature to gauge how NPE will play at the current time, because we do know changes are coming.

But this is the thing, we (players) do not know what is coming, and the only reason we don’t know what is coming is because you guys won’t tell us. So until the updates drop, we don’t know what to expect. Because we don’t know to expect, we cannot intelligently comment on it until then, which wastes weeks and sometimes months of time in which we could be hashing out the best possible systems. Anything good that’s been added to the game recently, we probably could have had in game six months ago if you guys hadn’t been wasting time on systems that we could have told you would be base ideas from the start. I mean think of the thousands of man-hours that have been wasted on NGE elements that will have to be reverted to how they were.

When you don’t involve players in the process you end up with systems like the NGE that launched on September 9th, which clearly satisfied nobody.