Guild Wars 2

I have noticed that enemies in story missions seem harder than in the open world. Maybe it has to do with scaling, aren’t stories scaled to exact levels (ie if you’re level 60 and go into a level 54 mission, you’ll be scaled to level 54), while the open world is a bit softer (like if the area you’re in is intended for level 54s, you’d still be level 55 or 56?).

There’s also an issue that some enemy types are just harder than others, like Destroyer Harpies are harder than regular ones, and story missions often introduce enemy types that you might not have faced in the open world yet, or they come at you in numbers and patterns that you wouldn’t see in the open world, or that you’d at least have back-up for.

The DPS race is real, and it does limit build diversity and promote a soft gear-gate, but I don’t know that it’s the main problem with accessibility. Being able to gear more into defense might be helpful, but many of the mechanics are designed to auto-kill, which is more of an issue for general accessibility than constant chip damage.

Nope, they still need to change Acrobatics back, no matter what The new elite spec does.

I think getting tokens for doing anything in the game would be absolutely terrible. In a year from now every longterm player would have it without having actually earned it by active play towards it, but rather getting random tokens every few hours.

And a ton of people got Precursors within the first few months due to RNG. Don’t try to make the existing system out to be one that rewards hard work and skill, it rewards only one thing, luck. You can have the most skilled player in the game playing a hundred hours a week and never get a Precursor, and the most casual, idiotic player every kills a moa in his first week and a Pre drops.

Putting exclusives behind content will bring a lot new players in, and this thread is proof that a lot of players WANT them, you can’t ignore that.

This thread is “proof” of nothing. There have mostly been less than a dozen people responding to the topic, myself being one of them, and while more of them have stood in opposition to me than have supported me, even in total it’s a VERY tiny number of people, and not at all a representative body of people. If ANet could get everybody in this thread 100% on board with what they were doing, it might pay for their coffee budget for a month.

It’s a fact that “some” players want what you want. At least enough to count off on the fingers of one hand, possibly even two. Are there more than that? Likely, sure, but how many more? Impossible to day. I know that there are people out there who prefer exclusives behind content, but how many of those people actually care enough about the rest of GW2 that it would draw them in, rather than they seek it out in some other game product? I think it’s a bad idea to speculate about “drawing players in” because there’s almost never any evidence to support these groups existing in reliable numbers, while the players actually playing the game are actually playing the game.

That’s not true. If everything is a grind you can’t get anything if you hate the grind, like most of the game is now and will be with your “proposal”.

That’s a facetious argument though, you’re just trying to demand a false equivalency that you cannot earn. Not being able to do something because you don’t want to do something is not the same thing as not being able to do something because you can’t do something. You’re abusing a play on words, at best. Now ideally you wouldn’t be expected to do anything that you don’t want to do either, and my proposal is the best possible compromise for that, because if you prefer to grind, you can grind, but if you don’t want to grind, you never have to grind, and you can just do the specific content and get the specific rewards as you like.

That’s not what rewards exist in a game. Let’s entice people by giving them free legendary items? Then IF they like it, they can get blues and greens? Does that make any sense to you?

You don’t typically need a Legendary item to act as enticement. No. If we’re using generic terms here, the idea would be that you would use, say, a unique exotic as an enticement. Run Shadow Behemoth a few times, get a Final Rest. It would be something interesting enough that you would go out of your way to get it, but not so fancy that it blows all other rewards out of the water.

Then after that, you would just earn progress towards other rewards. If you enjoyed that encounter, you could do it again, if you don’t, then you don’t have to do it again. It wouldn’t be blues and greens alone, it would be progress towards things like Legendaries, which would take many months if all you were doing was farming Shadow Behemoth, but it would be possible.

Do you understand?

For the record, I am NOT saying that Legendary Armor should just be a freebie casual reward for Raids, I’m just saying that either Legendary Armor should not be exclusive to raids at all, in that you’d never even have to set foot in one to earn it through hard work in an other area (although you could raid for them if that’s your choice), OR they make it so that you do have to dabble in raiding, just for a little bit, to unlock “something,” and that something would then allow you to either keep raiding for the armor, or go elsewhere to finish it up. The “something” would just be a seed, but you’d have to work to grow it into the final version, you wouldn’t just be handed the final version after minimal effort.

Again, any time you think to yourself “He’s trying to get the rewards with less effort, I’m going to straighten him out!” Stop, go back, you’ve made a mistake somewhere, figure out where and then post.

Let me ask you, even if you get that shinny raid legendary armor, how long will you keep it? Looks in this game are mostly in flux and you will change them often, if you “miss” one skin it won’t be the end of the world.

If that’s true, then why do you care so much about maintaining exclusive access? If you can demand a right to care, then obviously I can demand an equal right to care. And for the record, while I update my characters from time to time, some of them are still wearing pieces that they’ve had since their first day, and most are still wearing at least mostly stuff that they’ve had for a couple years now.

That’s why I think exclusive Outfits would be much more palatable than exclusive armor, because while I agree with you that if I got the Exclusive Armor handed to me tomorrow, likely none of my characters would be wearing the entire thing within six months, and honestly I doubt that any of them would ever wear the entire thing at once, but depending on how they look, I fully expect that several of them would be wearing at least 1-2 pieces of it for years to come. It’s like the Lumi set, where between ten characters, I’m wearing like ten pieces of it in total, spread between three of them. That doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t be upset at not having it at all.

Individual player wants are irrelevant when designing rewards, once you get this you won’t sound like a selfish spoiled brat who wants everything handed to them.

True, and the same applies to you, but what does matter is individual player wants in aggregate, what large groups of people agree they want, and while neither of us has direct evidence to support a mandate, I still fully believe that my side has more, and would pressure ANet to determine that using the tools only they have.

I call a reward what it is, a reward. A reward is something given or received in return for a service or deed rendered, it can be both exclusive and non-exclusive.

Right, and yet every time I refer to a non-exclusive reward system, you insist on “that’s not a reward.” I’m not saying that the definition of “rewards” can’t include exclusive ones, obviously they can. I’m saying that specific to this game of GW2, the best rewards shouldn’t be exclusive, and I personally don’t support them being so. I’m saying “exclusive rewards are a thing, but GW2 should avoid them.”

I have this thread and MANY others about the failed reward system of this game, where it doesn’t feel at all rewarding.

Which at most represent dozens, perhaps hundred of people in a game population in the hundreds of thousands. It doesn’t matter what the consensus of thread are, the numbers involved are still tiny and not representative. I don’t doubt your anecdotal evidence, I just doubt it’s relevance.

I have the DEVS themselves saying the game is hard to keep players playing long term because there is a limited amount of things to go for.

Actually, I’ll need you to cite that one, because the only time I heard devs talking about player retention, it was in regards to the mechanics being too confusing for new players at low levels so they had to dumb them down a bit.

Just because YOU say it won’t make a difference, doesn’t mean it won’t, because the evidence show the exact opposite.

“The evidence,” at the moment, shows absolutely nothing. There is no actual evidence, and won’t be until well after HoT comes out, and even then only if ANet releases any of the relevant numbers.

That’s irrelevant, it was, it is, and will always be. This argument of yours is the most illogical and flawed of them all. When you stop using it, you might become a better person.

And until you understand and accept as fact the point I am making there, you have no hope of understanding the conversation at hand.

Yeah, I will NEVER pay money for an outfit, no matter how nice it looks, but I would have bought numerous outfits if I could just mix and match the pieces I wanted from it. They really need to take the time to re-rig their armor systems so that they all use the same skeleton.

Some would be an objective fact, many is a subjective term.

Some enjoy obsessing over semantic terminology when they’ve already internally ceded the cogent points of discussion but don’t want to admit to it.

I love the Asura’s flip animation way more than any other race’s dodge.

You seem to be suggesting in your post that Arenanet should just make the perfect balanced system. And that is the illusion. Even if they could balance it for one player, perfect balance is different for everyone.

As I said, perfect balance is unlikely, but should be the goal, and it could be a lot closer than it’s turned out to be. All of you complaining about “having” to do SW farming to make gold are a symptom of that, and no better than people complaining about having to farm raids for Legendary Armor. If the system were better in balance, you would never feel compelled to do anything you didn’t want to be doing. You would never have to say “well, I need gold for that [something] I want to buy, guess I’ll have to farm Silverwastes.” You would instead be able to say "well, I need gold for that [something] I want to buy, guess I could run dungeons, or run event chains in any of a dozen zones, or do the World Boss circuit, or run raids, or PvP a bit, or WvW, or do map completions, and it’ll all work out to about the same rewards.

Someone even mentioned leveling alts, and honestly, that would interest me as a valid option (I’m mostly done with alts, Rev aside, but I was doing a lot of that at one point). It might be interesting if they had a method by which a player who already has a level 80 character, could gain level 80-esc gold rewards while leveling an alt. It would need to figure out how to avoid things like using crafting or scrolls to power-level the characters, but it doesn’t seem like an impossible goal that they could balance it out so that leveling a character from 1-80 in the “traditional” manner would result in equivalent rewards to doing whatever else you could be doing with that time.

For a hardcore raider the raids may be optimal, and for a casual the event trains may be optimal. Without unique rewards both aren’t encouraged to do the other things, wich means both are far more likely to burn out on the game without trying other things. It’s just that simple.

If a player is burning out on the content he’s doing, then he can do other content. Burn out happens when players feel that the ONLY way to reasonably progress is to keep doing the thing they’re doing, whether that’s champ trains or raids, and they do not enjoy that activity anymore. I’m switched my own primary activities around numerous times, and it usually had nothing to do with any rewards specific to that activity. So long as people do not feel that their time would be wasted in doing something else, they are more likely to change roles than quit, what makes them likely to quit is if they believe that no other role would be worth doing.

And as I said, if that alone isn’t enough, they can offer rotating minor incentives to the balance, so that maybe this week champ farming is slightly more efficient than other activities, next week it could be dungeons, the next week it could be raids, and so long as you’re perfectly happy doing what you’re doing, it wouldn’t be enough to be worth chasing, especially if you really dislike that particular activity, but if you are burnt out and vaguely interested in something different, or if you enjoy all elements equally, then you would follow the largest bonuses.

They already do this to some degree, with scheduled PvP XP buffs, WvW XP buffs, and daily tasks that sometimes send you to Fractals, sometimes to harvest various areas or run events in a given area. The bonus reward is usually not worth the effort, but it could be.

Arenanet wants to encourage people to try everything, and there is not a single way a token system can provide this in a decent working way.

And again, wanting people to try everything is fair, and they can do this with unique rewards that you can earn very quickly, after you’ve tried the activity. But expecting every player to enjoy every activity is just an unreasonable goal, you have to accept that most players will dislike numerous elements of the game and not want to do them, and you have to respect their choices, so providing unique rewards that insist they stick around well after they’ve decided they are not enjoying themselves is an unreasonably overbearing decision.

So sure, unique rewards attached to content, if and ONLY if those rewards are for trying the content, and can be earned by any player within an hour or two of attempting the content. Any reward that does take long term and serious effort, and there should be such rewards, should not be unique to specific content, and should allow players to pursue the content that interests them personally.

No thank you. The Raid is designed specifically to have a place for harder content, no one forces you to play it but if you have the right attitude you’ll be fine.

Then the easy mode raid is not for you, and nobody will require you to play it. This is for other players for whom your words do not ring true. It is not for you to judge these players.

Putting dev time on nerfing current raid content is an annoying thing for you to suggest.

As I made clear, I do not believe that this would take considerable dev time at all, maybe a few manhours in total, and if any dev would like to explain where I’m wrong in that then my ears are open, but vague “the devs could better spend their time elsewhere” could much more easily be applied to the entire raiding content if it remains in its current state.

Asking for a way to grind rewards in easy mode is awful (in WoW, due to lockouts having separate rewards, people tried to do them all for loot and it caused burnout and will cause you and your easymode raiders to have to deal with people who just want the loot).

I’m pretty sure everyone involved will just be in it for the loot, that’s sort of the point.

If you don’t like raids thats fine, stop trying to kitten with them, please.

I don’t like raids in their current form, but there are elements about them that I’d like to be able to enjoy, so I’m suggesting a way that I, and many other players, could do so. If that mode is not for you, then you don’t have to use it, but having it available as an option would in no way hurt you.

They are rather easy, and it’s only players who put restrictions on other players, mainly because they want to play elitist in an already casual game.

If you’d tried them, you would know that they are not nearly as easy as you make them out to be. They’re far from impossible, but they are by no means easy. An easier version of them would provide a useful function. Don’t think of it as “infantile mode,” think of it instead as if the default raid is the “Tribulation Mode” of SAB, which it pretty much is, and what is being requested is a “Normal Mode.” “Infantile mode” would be several steps below what I propose here.

You mean like how an easy mode takes any fun out of actually playing the current state of raids ?

No, nothing like that.

Nothing whatsoever like that.

At all.

That’s the problem. You guys are so wrapped up in how you feel, in the content you enjoy and in how you enjoy it, that you cannot for a second comprehend that there exist people who feel any differently than you do.

So no, there DO exist people who would enjoy the easy mode content I described. You would not have to be one of these people for these people to exist. You do not need to understand these people for these people to exist. But they do exist whether you believe they do or not. And these people would enjoy playing through easy mode content, and would not enjoy buying their way through hard mode content.

Reality does not care whether you believe that or not, it remains reality regardless. You have absolutely no choice in that matter. The only choice you do have, is whether you care whether those players are happy, and attempt to help them be happy on their terms, or you don’t care whether they’re happy, and you attempt to stop them being happy by enforcing your terms.

Legendaries take more than a few hundred gold. They take thousands of gold. And karma. And dungeons. And wvw. It’s a lot of effort.

I covered all that. Legendaries take a minimum of a few hundred gold, if you luck into and/or farm most of it, you’d still need to buy Icy Runestones and a few other things. Now they do take thousands to buy outright, and even if you do luck into or farm the rest of the components it would mean passing up the opportunity to cash those things out for thousands of gold, but the minimum gold cost is somewhere under 250.

And again, as I said, most players already have plenty of karma and WvW badges to buy the necessary components, even if they never farmed karma before or even entered the WvW maps. and as for dungeons, you only need 500 tokens, that is something like ten or less dungeon paths, which for most dungeons is fairly trivial. It would be the equivalent of like 40 Magnetite or less. World completion is the only portion that takes any serious specific commitment, and even still, it’s VERY casual content that any player of the game is capable of, especially if they have even minimal help. Considering that it takes a minimum of nine other players to clear a single raid boss, if you were to take nine other players on a world tour you could sail past even the stickiest Hero Challenges.

And a wager if you put forth the hundreds of hours it took you to get a legendary weapon, you could get legendary armor.

As I said, it only took me a couple of weeks once I decided to do it. Even factoring in the time I spent running world completion, it probably didn’t take me even 50 hours overall, I mean I got it done over several months while also leveling several alts. I haven’t really bothered on any of my other characters, but could probably knock it out in under 20 hours if I really attempted it. Hell, I might just give it a shot on my new Mesmer, it would be handy knowing I have all the WPs unlocked on her.

It’s ok not to like everything in the game. What seems insane to me is that you are demanding an easy mode so you can get a reward.

Keep in mind, I’m not just demanding an easy mode because I want the reward, although that is certainly one factor of it, and I think a perfectly reasonable factor. It is also because I enjoy what I’ve seen of the content, and want to be able to experience that in a way that aligns with my challenge level. I truly believe that I would enjoy a lower risk version of the existing raids, just as you might look at some easy content in the game and consider how you might appreciate it more if they did X or Y to up the challenge factor.

No one demanded alternative ways to get the Christmas shoulder. Pvp legendary. Wvw skins. Guild armor.

Ahem. . .

Why would you play content you don’t like just to get a skin?

Why should I have to?

I mean, let’s assume that I like the skin. I want to have it to put on my character, so that my character will look like she would look wearing that skin. That is the endgoal. No, I would very much prefer to NOT have to do content that I do not enjoy to get that skin, but if the game gives me no alternate method of earning it, then I have only two options, either do the content I do not enjoy, or never have that skin. Neither of those is a positive outcome from my perspective. So you’re right, the better option is to not have to run that content I do not enjoy and still get the skin through some other method, but you guys seem to insist that I shouldn’t have this option available to me. Why not?

I am not opposed to eventually alternative ways to get legendary armor. I see it as a prestige item. I don’t want the current method watered down. Because, in my opinion, the effort required is on par with legendary weapons.

For you, maybe it is, but you do understand that for the vast majority of players, the effort required is WAY more than the effort it would take them to earn a Legendary weapon, especially when you consider that the current elements are only in the Precursor tier of the armor, and that we don’t even know how much gold and mats will go into the eventual creation of the Legendary Armor itself. For all you know, the final steps could include having to do a ton of whatever it is you hate most in the game.

And as for “eventually,” how long is “eventually?” The actual raid versions are still on the distant horizons, I assume you mean some time after that. How long, months? Years? with the current pace of releases, I think “eventually” would likely come far too late to be of any use to anyone. It’s basically saying “never.”

It’s not a zero sum game. You can have skins that are easy to get. Other that are hard to get. Cool skins that are easy to get. Cool skins that are hard to get. That pleases both groups.

No, it doesn’t. Skins are not fungible. You can’t say “well I get exclusive access to this skin, and you can have this other skin instead, everyone’s happy!” Well no, if the skin you have exclusive access to is the one that looks cool to me, which the skin I can access does not, then you haven’t offered me anything I would value. It’d be like if I said to you “I will keep this rock to myself, which is made of gold, but you can have that rock if you like, which is made of quartz, and now we both have rocks and everything is fair!”

“Cool” is entirely subjective.

And if all you care about is the “coolness” of a skin, then it’s dishonest to demand legendary armor, at least at this point. We don’t even know what it will look like. So clearly you want it for the prestige. So complete the prestige content.

I am not certain that I will want the skins themselves, that’s fair enough. I might not. I can pretty much guarantee that I won’t be wearing all Legendary pieces even given the option, but I think it’s likely that I would find at least a few pieces that look very cool to me. I mean, the Lumi set came up earlier, I picked up the entire set, but not one of my characters is wearing full Lumi. Some only have 1-2 pieces, some have all but 1-2 pieces in Lumi, but they are all a mix of the pieces I thought worked best with the rest of their look.

So yes. It might come down to it that they release the Legendary set and I’ll think they look ugly as sin, and want no part of the skins. But I think that given the care they’d want to put into it, this would be a fairly unlikely outcome, so I think it’s better to be laying the groundwork for a solution. I like to plan ahead, and prefer to discuss things that the devs may be working on, rather than to wait until they are 100% finished, months or years down the road, which then means that any solutions to those problems would take additional months or years after that.

And even assuming that it goes that way, I’d still value having the armor itself as a way to shift my stats more easily, so people would stop complaining about my 1600 Toughness Tempest. And even if we do take the armor out of the picture entirely, I still want the easy mode raids just to be able to play in them.

And again, I do not care about the “prestige,” I reject the entire concept involved. Think about it, I’m suggesting that they add an easier mode, one in which not only I would be able to participate, but everyone would. If I were able to earn Legendary armor that way, and everyone else could as well, then how could I possibly claim to have “prestige” from wearing the resultant armor?

Have you tried mixing Acrobactics + Daredevil + Trickery?

Yes.

It’s not remotely as good as what we had.

Not even close.

Yeah, I spent about forty minutes on the boss blitz before it stalled out, and only got six tokens for my time spent there. Whee. I have no intention of going back.

Ppl need to understand that not every single specc is made for every game mode. They want to create a diversity of speccs so you can decide what you want to play (will be better if there are 4-5 speccs for every class)

I disagree with this mindset. I do believe that every spec should be for every game mode, because some players only enjoy one mode, and they should not have to wait 3-4 years with no new version for their class because this expansion’s spec was for “some other mode.”

Now, different traits can support specific modes, there can be certain builds within the spec that are only useful in a specific mode, but there should always be at least ONE trait loadout that is designed to be great for each game mode in the game.

Oh, it shall be flipped if necessary. Every kitten for itself.

Businesses don’t survive on good will and happiness. There’s a balance that needs to be maintained.

Of course, and nobody is suggesting that that balance should not be maintained. We’re just quibbling over where that balance point would best be. In a game with GW2’s business model, in which they 1. have no monthly fee, so you can play as much or as little, as often or as rarely as you like and not have to justify a mandatory “keep playing” fee, 2. have no “energy” system that limits the amount you can play without spending money, and 3. Do not have cash-only buffs that are absolutely vital to competitive play, their entire income process is based on people wanting to give them money.

Even the most hardcore, 18h356d player can do so without spending a dime, if he doesn’t feel like rewarding their behavior. Instead, ANet has to convince players that the experience is worth not only playing, but also worth giving them money. That requires that you at least like the company and their practices to some degree, and the more that you like them, the less you care about nickle and diming them, and the more likely you’ll be generous in your spending, picking up random junk that you can’t logically justify, but you like it, and they’ve earned it, so why not?

Their pricing model depends on the kindness of strangers.

If the world existed how you wanted it to exist, every person who goes to Vegas would walk away with a lot of money. Vegas would then go bankrupt, and there’s be no more Vegas. Take my analogy, replace “Vegas” with “GW2”, and you have the outcome of what your suggestions would do.

Nope.

Although honestly Vegas is pretty hard to justify.

Comrade, a Free Market can not be described as an exploit. The laws of Supply and Demand work. Some players understand how this works, and that’s how they choose to play the game. Why should Anet say “Ok Wanze, you’ve hit your daily limit on how many players you can satisfy today. Please try again tomorrow.”

Because it keeps the rewards received by each player more in balance and results in a healthier game population with less inequality?

Your suggestion is akin to asking for the removal of the Trading Post entirely, and replacing it with a glorified merchant.

Honestly I’d prefer that to the alternative of leaving it as is, but that’s not what I’m asking for. Supply would still be determined by how many of the items the players bring into existence, demand would still be determined by how many people want that thing, all I’d be doing is reducing the role of the middleman taking his cut in the middle for providing no actual value to the scenario.

Your idea hurts way more players than it helps, because a vast majority of the players who purchase goods from the TP want instant gratification. Remove the players who provide that instant gratification, and you have angry players who will complain that they have to farm 5,000 Mithril ores themselves. Oh wait…

Nobody’s talking about removing the people who farm those 5,000 mithril ores. Those 5,000 mithril ores would still get farmed, and still get put on the market, and the people doing it would make out just as well, likely better than under the current market, as would their customers (one or the other might end up doing slightly worse, but between the two of them they would make out better than they would currently).

What would be removed is the people who buy those 5,000 mithril ores at one price, and relist it at a higher price (either immediately or at a later date), forcing the people who actually want to use those mithril ores to spend more for them or do without, while the people who did mine those ores would not be seeing any of that profit. If someone gets a better deal in a transaction, it should at the very least either be the end-user of that item, OR the original creator of that item, not someone who’s only contribution was in making the deal worse for both of them.

You’ve heard it guys, if something in GW2 looks cool then Ohoni is entitled to it. Doesn’t matter that he already dismissed raids before we even know anything about them, the armor you can earn with raiding might look cool, so Ohoni deserves it.

Yup. not that I shouldn’t have to work for it, but the method by which I work for it should be versatile enough to allow for multiple possibilities, at least one of which I would be likely to enjoy doing as much as you enjoy raiding.

What, has that been unclear up to this point?

Everything you keep saying reeks of entitlement. News flash, if you dont do particular content you arent going to get particular rewards. Thats how almost all mmorpgs are.

But the raider’s position is no less entitled. They are demanding not just access to the things they want, but also the right to restrict access from other players who don’t want to engage in the same content. You might argue that raiders are just trying to retain the system already proposed by ANet, but arguing for the status quo is still taking a position. The raider’s position is “we want to have fancy loot for our raid, and we don’t want anyone else to have it,” and that’s just as entitled, if not moreso, as anything I’ve said.

You are not entitled to that cool armor skin if you dont want to work the path anet has set for you. This is not ohoni wars 2. You dont get to make the call on how rewards should be distributed.

No, of course not, but I do get to make the call on how I would prefer to see them distributed, which I have, and I can make the case to ANet and my fellow players as to why I believe this would be in the game’s overall best interests, which I have, and then the ball is in ANet’s court as to whether or not they make any changes based on that customer feedback, which they could do. I don’t see what seems so wrong about that to you. Don’t you believe that players should be able to request things that they believe would improve the game?

What are you doing in terms of compensation for this change? I mean, will dailies that were cleared during this period be automatically cleared, or will we just miss out on that daily progression entirely? Will we get our loot compensated somehow? I mean, usually when a game takes things away from players that they have earned, they give something back as fair compensation.

GW1 hall of monuments rewards should be kept exclusive. They are rewards for veterans of the game’s predecessor who spent hours playing that game to achieve various things, some of them difficult. The moment they make those rewards available to those who have never even played the game is the moment I stop playing and supporting the game. And I don’t even own GW1.

Perhaps. I never raised Hall of Monuments as an issue, but there is an argument to be made for keeping those rewards exclusive. Still, those rewards were in place at launch, people knew what they were getting into. These new rewards are being added thre years after launch. “Oh, you’ve been playing for three years because you don’t like raids and this used to be a safe space from raids and raiding culture? Well too bad, because there are raids now and you can’t get the Legendary Armor without doing them. Raids!”

No, it would be Sparkfly armor because it’s no longer earned by doing teq.

So CoF armor is no longer CoF armor because you can earn it via PvP? It’d still be Teq skins, because it’s Tequatl themed, regardless of where you get it, just as Beaded weapons are Hylek themed, even though you can buy those on the TP.

You’re assuming the raids will be the dungeon equivalent. What if raids are the precursor equivalent? Then they could take ages to earn, even if they use a token system and they should.

Again, if they do take ages to earn via raiding then that would be the absolute worst case scenario, because it means that even players who have zero interest in raiding would have to spend dozens upon dozens of agonizing hours engaged in content that they do not enjoy, rather than spending that time actually having fun. For most players in that situation, they would burn out well before they actually got the reward, and either quit raiding and go back to other aspects of the game, just a little more sad, which would benefit no one, or they get so fed up that they quit entirely. The latter is less likely, but the reason most people do quit a game comes from too many straws being piled up on their backs, and this has the potential to be a doosey.

And it can’t be easier or cheaper than getting ascended either without angering players and rightfully so, legendary isn’t supposed to an advantage.

They can add in fixed costs as necessary. I mean, Legendary weapons only have a fixed cost of around 100.5g, but they have a practical cost in the thousands because they take fixed effort in some places, and market costs in others.

It apparently costs around 125g per suit of Ascended armor. Even if the raid component of these armors was made relatively effortless, they could at minimum require you to buy say 200g worth of materials to upgrade that to Legendary, and the costs would balance out. Or 300g, whatever. And it certainly can require a lot of time and effort to fully assemble, just as little of that time as possible, if any, should be spent inside a raid.

Exclusive things in games are not things that ruin games. If we can’t agree on that then we need to agree to disagree on this issue because neither of us is going to change the other’s mind.

Agreed. On the disagreeing part. Exclusive things definitely can ruin games, if they’re mishandled.

I think a lot of players do want to PvP given the fact that players do post quite often on the PvP board and were quite outraged at the beginning of the latest season due to how the matchmaking system works currently.

As you go on to say, some do, certainly, but some don’t, and nobody benefits from funneling those who don’t into the PvP aspects regardless of their interests. Let PvPers PvP, let non-PvPers ignore that the PvP aspect even exists without missing out on anything they might want.

When I see it’s stuff I don’t want to do, I just shrug and get on with what I want to do. It’s just 10 AP, some spirit shards, and 2 gold and some random small stuff for doing specific dailies (and most of the time it’s karma and experience stuff).

When it comes to dailies, it’s not a huge problem, I don’t think many players will quit over it, but it is something they could be doing better, that they could allow PvEers to complete their dailies without so much hassle. It’s not even the reward that really matters, it’s the psychology of “this is the daily, it should be completed.”

You seem to take a very laid back approach to game design, “que sera sera, whatever the devs decide will be,” and that’s fine, but I look not at how things are, but how much better they could be, and I ask for them to be better so that they can be the best they can be. The bright side of this is, if they do change things, it would work out just as well for you as the current system, so, que sera sera.

Dailies aren’t really a system designed to reward what you already felt like doing at that moment. They’re designed to give you something specific to do when you don’t have anything in mind.

Right, and offering a couple more dailies per day would still do that just fine, it would just give you a few more options in which tasks you wanted to do.

I don’t understand why you are against stoy in difficult instances. It’s already been said that it will be a different story than the main story of HoT and it might well be a self-contained instance.

Basically, it can’t “matter.” It can’t be anything that would change your character in any way or effect his life moving forward, because it’s an experience that the players can’t be expected to share. It needs to be purely optional, and therefor the amount of story depth it can have is more limited than the LW stuff.

I suppose it could effect the world in some way, but in a way where if your character isn’t a part of it, then it’s just something other characters did, and it all worked out ok. Similar to the Destiny’s Edge novel.

Funny how this works. At release players were complaining that their characters weren’t important enough, now they are complaining that they are too important. I guess the devs will never succeed at pleasing everyone.

Different players, as I said, I was never one of those “make me the hero, down with Trehearn” types. I thought Trehearn played out the only way it possibly could.

This is the main issue, the game doesn’t exactly offer enough options to justify the “other ways” in a lore/story way. Sure if you use your imagination everything is possible but I prefer if the game itself tells the story and offers rewards in an appropriate way.

Sure, but as I showed, the mechanics of “multiple routes” does not discount the possibility for a lore/story-driven experience, they just didn’t happen to bother to include that. They always could, at any time and with fairly limited effort on their part. But basically your insistence that “if there are multiple ways to get an item then it ruins all story potential” is nonsense.

How about getting Deadly Blossoms from Citadel of Flame? Killing enough Flame Legion soldiers you get a plant-y sylvary themed armor piece

You wouldn’t get blossoms from Flame Legions, you’d get Charr Carvings, but there would be an NPC that is too wounded to go into dungeons himself (took an arrow to the knee), but he supports those brave enough to keep the dungeons in check by collecting tokens from them and exchanging them for other tokens they might need. You’d be able to offer him, say, 100 Charr Carvings, and receive 80 Deadly Blossoms in return (they are hard to come by, you know). You could then take these Blossoms to the Lion’s Arch forgemasters and they would be able to provide you with the botanical armaments of your dreams.

That’s the least thematic method, short of no theme, but they could certainly elaborate it if they wanted, like having specific NPCs spread around the world that are enthusiastic about a particular token and will trade you other tokens for that one type, or having multiple crafting NPCs spread across the world that trade those tokens for various loot, instead of the current, more convenient LA vendors.

You keep making the same mistakes in every post. You want Legendaries to be easier to get, mainly because you desire them. You want more Precursors out there. You want more T6 mat drops. That’s not the focus Anet had in mind for them. I don’t blame you for having tunnel vision on these things. Heck, I’m selfish too when wanting stuff that takes a long time to get. Personally, I would love to be able to get any Precursor I want, and any given point. But the smart business side of me understands that while I want everything as handouts, this is bad for the game.

Can we not dip into condescension? I don;t want it as a handout, I’m willing to work/pay for it, I just think that the current amount of work/pay is higher than it should be. I would rather they just hand them out than they they keep them as is, but ideally it’d be somewhere in the middle, where it still takes effort to achieve, but not this constantly growing amount where it is never within reach for most players because the goalposts keep moving.

Could you entertain the idea of a few seconds that maybe the people who want lower Precursor prices are not lesser human beings than yourself?

These weapons are BiS with the best looks (outside of Gem Store skins), and were intended to require a LOT of effort to get. The effort to craft or buy them takes time.

The game’s been out for two years. I think that two years of accumulated effort is plenty for a “long term goal,” especially when we’re considering that there are over a dozen of them to collect in total, each character has 4-6 slots to fill, and who knows how many characters each player has. I think we’re well past the point at which the “you see, Legendaries are meant to be a long term goal” excuse can hold up.

Honestly, I wouldn’t mind if it were a “long term goal,” if that term were applied more fairly. I mean, if crafting each legendary took at least one year of real time activity, 365 daily mined, account bound ingredients, then fair enough, it takes time, but that’s not how it works. Instead it just takes a lot of money, and a lot of money is something that might take some players a long time to accumulate, while others can afford a new Legendary every few months. Let’s not pretend that owning a legendary is some mark of achievement, it’s just a mark of having gold.

That’s pretty much what you and some others are asking for. You want that instant gratification without considering the consequences of your demands.

I think if you were even half paying attention to the discussion you would understand how ridiculous you’re sounding right there.

Matt Witter.6982:

There are a few different knobs we can turn in regards to AoE some of the bigger ones being:
Radius of the AoE
Frequency of the AoE Damage
Damage of the AoE
Max Targets of the AoE

Currently, some players causing the AoE are able to do more damage to one person while also controlling a portion of the field, compared to a player with single target damage.
In our balance discussions we always look at what these changes could do to PvE as well as PvP. Any changes we make will undergo a lot of testing, both internal and by our trusted alpha team. It is important to understand that we are not doing a blanket nerf to all AE’s or a dramatic adjustment of the damage AoE’s can do. There may be some cases where players can build for AoE damage, but are just not viable or other cases where AoE is clearly the dominate way to build, and as such the other builds get left on the side lines. Its these classes/builds that we are concerned about.

I know that when you say this, you mean it to be true, but I hope that you can understand that from our perspective, we have little reason to trust in the testing team to only turn out well balanced changes to the game. Too often overthe past few months, “overpowered” options been nerfed, leaving a barren wasteland in their place, breaking that build entirely, in some cases the entire class, without any positive changes to make up for the loss.

If there was a better track record of making nerfs only once the counterbalancing buff was ready to maintain the class’s effectiveness then we, as players, would have more reason to have faith that these AoE changes would be for the best. Given the current situation, however, you guys seem to be taking aim at something that we do not view to be a problem, and which numerous classes and builds depend upon, which gives us perfectly solid justification to fear that you would be perfectly willing to decimate certain classes in the game of “game balance,” rather than waiting until a truly balanced solution could be found, and then it could be months before positive changes go in to clean up the devastation left in the wake.

I would recommend involving the players in the decision process here. Suggest the nerfs you’re intending to make well before patching them into the live game, take in feedback, and be prepared to go back to the drawing board if the players do not agree with your proposals. Don’t just spring them on the players and force us to live with the changes until the next major patch, whether they destroy our characters or not.

I am getting kind of bummed. My main, the one with World Completion, is a Thief, and the DD, while interesting, is a long way from exciting at this point. My secondary main, the one I ran a lot of s2 on, is a Guardian, and I have ZERO interest in the Dragon Hunter spec for him. My favorite specs so far are the Reaper and the Herald, which means I’d either need to power level a Revenant right away just to catch up, or put my Necro back into action (I mostly keep her in LA these days). I also really like the Scrapper so far, so my Engi is likely getting back into things, and maybe also my Ele. I’m really sad about the Daredevil though.

For crust
1 1/4 cups graham cracker crumbs from 9 (2 1/4-inch by 4 3/4-inch) crackers
2 tablespoons sugar
5 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted
For filling
1 (14-ounce) can sweetened condensed milk
4 large egg yolks
1/2 cup plus 2 tablespoons fresh or bottled Key lime juice (if using bottled, preferably Manhattan brand)
For topping
3/4 cup chilled heavy cream

(do not try this in game)

Even with that bonus I haven’t found it worth rerunning the LS with multiple characters. It’s easier to just farm geodes. The problem with the LS in it’s current form is that 1. Most things you do there don’t count towards dailies, and 2. enemies don’t drop loot, which is vastly unsatisfying, and the loot you get at the end is not enough to make up for that. They are fun enough to do one pass through, but anything beyond that is tedious.

If nobody cares then i don’t see why you have to complain about it. Obviously you care or you wouldn’t complain right?

You’re misplacing. Say you have a suit of legendary armor on. Nobody cares about you. Nobody cares that you have it, except maybe yourself. If people are impressed, they are not impressed with you or your efforts, they are impressed with the efforts of the game designer who designed that armor.

The only time anyone is impressed with a player due to what they have on, is when they coordinate their own armor well, matching random pieces in a pleasing manner with a clean color pallet, because that expresses the player’s design skill, rather than the developer’s. If you’re just wearing a full set of Legendary Armor, the Ascension wings, and an HoT Legendary weapon, nobody else cares, at most you are a mannequin.

Way to see the glass half empty. I’ve seen a lot of people excited about a lot of the features. Perhaps you’re unhappy that something you wanted wasn’t announced? Or just have been talking down this feature patch for so long you wouldn’t back down now?

Lots of needed tweaks and updates. Doesn’t matter how long ago they should have been in the game (in your opinion), they’re here now, and you should at least try to be grateful.

Meh. You’re entitled to your opinion, I’m entitled to mine. Personally, I like some of the balance changes (particularly for Ranger), dislike some of the others. I like account-bound and color shifting Commander tags (picked up one for the first tiime when this was announced), Nothing else in week 1 will impact my game at all.

Megaserver improvements? Could be good, but as they say it’s just an iteration of changes they’ve constantly been making, and nothing about it sounded as big as what they need to do, allow players to deliberately shift megaservers to find the one that suits them, rather than leaving it to chance. I doubt this will improve my chances of randomly logging onto a T6-capable map, but we’ll see.

The crafting UI thing is probably the biggest change for me, it will make things considerably easier and ideally this would have been in at launch. Performance upgrade? Too nebulous to get that excited about, they are constantly promoting performance upgrades, and that’s good, but nothing super exciting.

New items and crafted backpacks? Could be cool. I have a LOT of backpacks though, well more than I have characters, I kind of like the ones I’ve got on my characters at the moment, so this element doesn’t psyche me up. Profession loot? This is horrible and will make playing most of my characters far less rewarding. I don’t see this featuring working out as a positive at all.

A Fresh start? The guiding element is fine, especially if you can disable it (and not have to keep disabling it constantly like Personal Story notifications), but everything else they are changing about the lower levels sounds as horrible as the universally despised Trait changes, and from the sounds of it, if the game had launched in that state I would never have played past the early levels because it would have seemed too slow-burning and generic. From the sounds of it, they’ve stolen GW2’s soul from the early levels.

Miniatures that I can slot without taking up an inventory space? Ok. Having to destroy them preventing resale, and no longer being able to collect stacks of them without taking up even more inventory space? Not good. Overall a net minus. Putting Finishers in the same tab as Equipment? Also a net minus, it’s better off where it is. Being able to previous them is all well and good, but that’s not something I’d mess with often, and I can always check Dulfy for that.

Achievement collections? Could be fun, but could also just be a huge money sink, requiring massively expensive items that only TP tycoons can afford, while many of us are still saving up for Precursors. So long as they don’t tie any collections to high priced items, it will work out ok, but I have that sinking feeling when they show that “Spirit Power” pack that it might involve some extremely pricy components.

And yeah, all the TP UI stuff sounds good, but way short of the stuff we’ve been asking for since launch, like “sales over time” tracking, and displaying the average actual sale price of items (as opposed to just having to guess based on buy and sell requests).

So overall, some nice little tweaks here and there, but nothing major, and as many actually bad things as good ones. Nothing that significantly changes play though, no new skillsets, no major trait additions or corrections to the old system, no new weapons available to anyone, nothing terribly “wow,” and no mention of any on the horizon.

I get what the OP is saying, but I think the greater good is served by letting everyone who wants a certain look to have access to it, than to have some people feel “special” for having something that other people don’t.

A simple check that everyone should make from time to time, are you happy because of what you have, or are you happy because of what other people don’t have? If the latter, you might want to reconsider a few things.

It all comes down to this: “Does a raid having a unique skin mean that you now absolutely have to do that content?”

The answer is no.

All just as true as it is irrelevant.

What it really comes down to is this: "does it benefit anyone to have players in a game doing activities that they do not want to do?

The answer is no.

Also, at the risk of upsetting some people, please kindly ignore the players saying they like the boob plates for feminine Charr. I, and I know the original designers of the Charr would agree, are strongly considerate of the lack of sexual dimorphism in Charr – males and females tend to appear the same.

But there is no lack of sexual dimorphism in charr. That is not a thing. Is their dimorphism the same as in humans? No, they do not have prominent breasts, but look at a female charr with no armor on, they wear tops while male charr do not, there is clearly a distinction made there. And obviously female charr have different horn and ear configurations than males. You might not recognize these distinctions, “all charr look alike to me,” but that doesn’t mean that the distinctions do not exist. Similarly with Asura, the females wear one-pieces, the males shorts, that would not occur if there were not physical distinctions made, even if they are not obvious to booka.

Regardless, this debate should not devolve into “breasts or no breasts.” It’s not about the breasts. The distinction is in the overall cut of the outfits, and the male versions are not always as interesting as the female one. I for one would love to see the human female variant of the Phoenix armor on my female charr, but that is not an option. It’s not about showing skin" or “cleavage,” it’s about having available the more trimmed, flamboyant armor designs that are more typical of the female armor sets in the game.

If you want a complete and total break down I’ll post it. SOME precursors may be more expensive to craft than they sell on the TP due in fact to their lack of popularity but these pres ARE CHEAPER TO CRAFT THAN TO BUY. So all this nonsensical BS about precursor crafting is too expensive needs to stop.

600-800g is still too expensive, by several hundred gold.

If their intention was to make ascended armor hard to get in general, silk was the best option because it is used in every armor class.

Yes, but you can’t salvage silk from heavy or medium armor, so their goal needs to take into account that while all armor might use silk, all material types are not equal. Silk is both the hardest to find AND the most needed, which is a bit nonsense when it comes to material balance.

I don’t know what I can say here without getting banned from the forums. You just made every person who has half an idea how raiding works literally cringe. Tempest is a berserker class. All berserker. Start there. Get yourself some runes of the scholar and some proper food/utilities. Read a couple guides. Bam. You’re raid ready. Or keep this up. It’s your life mane.

Exactly my point. I know that it’s not the build most people would want in a raid, but it’s the build that I’ve got because it’s designed primarily for other content. I want a raid in which that doesn’t matter.

You know what might help me have the right stats for the task though, if I had armor that could change stats on demand. . .

The bazaar itself, I’ve never seen the events not go gold in the first ~2 weeks until people were done with it. Not even in the empty morning hours.

The Drinks one would usually get gold but in the hours I played the Yak races often capped out at silver, just because not enough people participated. It really showed the difference between events where a few players could try extra hard to pull things through (since you could captures as many as a dozen or so crystals each), verses one in which nobody was allowed to contribute more than any other (each player could only cross the finish line once, and if not enough players did, everybody loses).

Maybe it shows that other people just need to get good.

Nope, that has nothing to do with anything.

Yeah, in principle having the megaservers in Orr is fine, but they need to figure out a plan for temples first, so that players will know from across the world which temples are up, in which phases. Until they get that figured out, Orr MUST stay serverbased so that people know what they are getting into.

All of the examples you just mentioned are affected by temporary price spikes which will correct themselves in the longrun.

Even if you adjust for the price spikes, and assume that they will come down over time, the gold requirements for Precursor crafting would be considerable even at pre-HoT levels.

And besides, as I’ve said on numerous occasions, ANet bears responsibility for price spikes as well. They can estimate that certain items will be in unusual demand over a given period of time, and should provide short term faucets to counterbalance that demand, such as those silk-dropping bags they had during the LA invasion that tanked cloth markets for a bit. when you dump a ton of new sinks into the economy, dump a bunch of short term faucets as well, so that the system is designed to balance out eventually AND to quickly counterbalance short term spikes.

If you could show me how a majority of the collections besides precursor crafting can be circumvented by using the TP I’d be very thankful. Most are based on soulbound items (example: http://dulfy.net/2015/11/08/gw2-hot-weapons-armor-and-backpieces-guide/ ).

Well, aside from the Precursors, you can more easily gear up in peak equipment (full ascended with ideal runes/sigils) using gold, which makes any achievement-based progress easier. You can also buy peak food, which also helps. The Auris weapons require certain accountbound components bought with map-currencies, but they also require ori imbued inscriptions, more ori, and a good amount of linseed oil, which is currently down in price from its peak, but nowhere near vendor trash.

What more fair way is there than offering everyone the same opportunity via souldbound collections. Unfortunately this gave rise to a new problem once again, people feeling overwhelmed and thinking they have to “do everything” in order to “keep up”.

To be fair, some of the collections are pretty complicated and overly specific. I do think they could offer more paths towards earning some of the components required, or only requiring less than 100% of them and let players decide which to prioritize. But again, the biggest outrage was over the collections you seem least interested in discussing, the Precursor collections, which require hundreds of gold in fungible materials.

I’m going to make a post that’s neither “it was way too hard.” nor “learnt o play newbs,” and just point out that while the fight was quite good, it could have been tightened up a bit.

I’m not sure if the mechanics of the fight had a time limited “burn phase” or whether it was designed so that the “burn phase” lasted only to a certain HP limit and then ended, but I had to go through about 5-6 total burn phases over the course of the fight. This, I feel, is too much, as by that point you know the mechanics and it’s just repetition and tedium. The Zelda games get it right, you want exactly three burn phases to a good boss fight, no less, because you want to test the player’s ability to learn the tactics, but no more, because if they can manage three then they’ve probably got it and beyond that you’re just wasting time. So just make it so that each phase ends when they get to 34% less HP than they had the last round.

This really bugs me but the staff animations when holding the weapon and running aren’t staff-wielding like. This goes for Staff Revenant as well. It’s not like a hammer (which is the current animation). The hands should be at the base of the weapon. Others have stated about combat strikes are off in some instances so I won’t go into that.

I don’t understand what you mean by this? Do you mean they should be holding the staff as if it were a greatsword? That is a stupid way to hold a staff. A melee staff should be held at the 1/3 and 2/3 positions, for maximum control. If you’re going to hold it from one end then you might as well put a weight or a blade on the other to maximize damage. Melee staff skills should only be holding it at the base for occasional longer range strikes.

This would be the pose I’d want for running though, but the resting pose should be more in front of you. http://www.ambrakarate.com/images/boStaff.jpg

I’m in the majority agreement with Dust Strike being a circle as it’s more beneficial than a line; it can act like a larger Black Powder. In fights, I don’t consider using it as it doesn’t feel useful in my rotation.

I prefer it as a ranged attack, it lets you reduce the threat of enemies that are outside of melee range. I would not want to see it become a PBAoE, we already have that in pistol.

- Other content in this game is hard. Arah. Aether path. Liadri. Halloween jumping puzzle. Those don’t have easy modes.

The halloween JP offers only a generic exotic. Liadri offered only a mini. Aetherpath and Arah both offer nothing you can’t get elsewhere.

Raids offer easy access to Ascended gear for those who can do it (and also are likely least in need of more ascended gear), and exclusive access to Legendary Armor. That is far more significant, the content you list fails as precedent.

- All content in this game has unique rewards. Open world (map metas), WvW (wvw armor), PvP (glorious armor, pvp backpiece), Fractals (silver/gold fractal skins, backpiece), SAB (SAB skins), guilds (guild armor and weapons). Having unique rewards with raids is in line with the rest of the game.

The content you list is either fairly trivial to participate in, and requires a significantly lower investment of time and skill, or the uniqueness of the reward is very minimal, like weapon skins that are in ugly colors instead of the pretty colors that the default come in. I can guarantee you that if SAB blue skins were ONLY available for beating W2 Trib people would be flipping their kitten. The content you list fails as precedent.

- Tying legendaries to content is not new or unique to raids. Legendary weapons are mostly tied to pve. Backpiece to pvp (and eventually fractals). Armor eventually to raids.

But again, the two things you list involve relatively minimal investments of time and skill compared to the raid requirements of Legendary Armor. The content you list fails as precedent.

- Player preferences change. Just because raids weren’t in the game at release, doesn’t mean there isn’t an audience for them now. At launch, I liked open world and exploration. I was as far away from a hard core elitist as you could get. (I shamefully admit that I used to think a healing staff mesmer was good). But that was three years ago. I like GW2 combat – it’s part of what initially got me hooked. Now I like to apply it to more challenging encounters.

That’s great, for you, but there are also people who are not you.

- It’s ok not to like everything in this game. I understand if you don’t like raids. Ok. But a lot of people do. Luckily, there’s other things to do in the game if you don’t like raids.

Yes, and those things also reward Legendary armor so people who want Legendary armor but don’t like to raid can just do those instead. Oh, wait. . .

- Fractals and dungeons are far superior to easy mode raids. I’ve yet to hear any strong arguments here.

That’s an entirely subjective opinion. It’s impossible to argue against a subjective opinion. Easy mode raids are far superior to Fractals and dungeons. I’ve yet to hear any strong arguments here.

The only response I get is that easy mode raids would be easier to make. While we don’t know whether this is really true, I believe there are separate teams working on fractals and raids. So we can get new fractals without tying up raids resources.

We do know that it is true. It’s impossible for it to not be true. What is debatable is exactly how much work it would take, I err towards “very minimal,” others err towards “a few weeks or months,” but regardless of that, doing anything with raids that is not easy mode raid as I described it would take MORE time, because it would involve doing everything you’d need for easy mode raids plus more things. And easy mode raid wouldn’t have to tie up “raid resources” either, it could be handled by an entirely separate team if the work involved was more than trivial.

- Unless easy mode gives unique/additional rewards, there is no reason to run it, if you can already beat the normal mode. I don’t know anyone who runs infantile mode SAB, if they can already beat normal mode. Just not worth it.

And that’s fine if it turns out to be the case. Easy mode raid is not FOR people who can already beat hard mode, it is for those that cannot. If hard mode raiders see no point in running it, then that’s perfectly alright. At least they would have the option of running it, while those who cannot compete hard mode do not currently have the option of running an easy mode instead. More options, good.

- Legendary armor, while technically a separate tier of gear, is really just a fancy skin. Some in this thread want an easy mode partly/mostly because they want legendary armor.

Stop trying to convince people to not care about Legendary armor. You will change exactly zero minds. If you don’t care about Legendary armor, then that’s fine, obviously you would have no reason to object to everyone having it, but if other people do care about Legendary armor then that’s fine too, that can be their position and you don’t have to agree with it for it to be a valid one.

Some people hate fractals. Some people hate pvp. Some people hate map completion. So they won’t get legendaries, unless they buy them or bite the bullet. Same with raids.

But yet again, the skill and time investment in these activities is far below what the raids currently require.

Instanced dungeons were very hard at release. Instanced fractals were hard. Season 2 had hard instances.

I didn’t do any dungeons at launch because I was way underleveled and mostly uninterested, but I was running Fractals on day one, and never encountered one that I couldn’t beat. Where does this “Fractals were difficult early on” nonsense come from?

And as for the dungeons, that had more to do with players having no idea how to pilot their own characters, or being ridiculously underleveled for the content. Neither of those would apply to the raids.

Any response to this issue that involves something along the lines of “well you should have done something days/weeks/moths ago to prepared for this” indicates a total failure on Anet’s part. Players should not have to stockpile or speculate, the systems should be designed to be balanced out based on how things ARE.

They supposedly have an economist on staff who is capable of predicting these trends almost as well as any of us.

If they add a mechanics change to the economy that any of you could predict would vastly shift the value of certain resources, then the guy on staff should KNOW THAT and plan accordingly. If the change would result in supply dropping well below demand for a limited time before balancing out to a higher level than before, then they need to account for that.

In this case, they could have added linen, wool, and cotton scraps as relatively common drops from Giant Wintersday Gifts. If the math was done right, that would have flooded the market with supply in proportion to the increase in demand. If after Wintersday it doesn’t look like supply/demand will balance out to previous levels, then they can just nudge up the drop rates of those items from other activities a bit.

What is the point of paying someone to have a hand on the tiller if all he does it tie it off and take a nap?

There would be of course more people that would play raids. But there is also no basis for the fact that the playerbase for raids would atleast double. Unless thats the case you are using ressources for a even smaller group.

I don’t think that would be an unreasonable claim. I mean, it’s really hard to say, we don’t know how many people currently raid, or how many people historically Dungeon or Fractal, but my assumption is that a lot more people Dungeon and Fractal than currently Raid, and most if not all of these people would work Raiding into their schedules if the reasons they currently don’t raid would be pealed away.

Not to mention the people who currently raid, but are not particularly enjoying it, and might enjoy something different more than they are currently enjoying the raids. The would not be totally new customers to that experience, but their added happiness would be a net positive nonetheless.

You can already ignore mechanics like green circle at VG with 1 full healer and a off-healer in dmg-equipment, building more defensive would probably allow you to even ignore the damage from the radiant sections.

You tend to frame things in terms of what an expert group can pull off when they are trying something weird, but keep in mind that most changes would be aimed at imperfect players who are just trying to get by. Any changes made likely would make things much easier for people who already have the content on farm, but that’s not the point. The point is to allow people to squeak past it who are currently struggling, and will continue to struggle or give up entirely so long as things stay as they are.

There are plenty of mastery points. If you got all mastery points unlocked you have 35 HoT and 18 Tyria mastery points to spare.

Yes, but if you don’t have all mastery points unlocked then you have zero to spare, and plenty of the existing mastery points are unreasonable to obtain. There are not enough reasonable mastery points to unlock all existing masteries, much less if we consider that future new mastery points may not keep pace with new abilities.

You need 124 total points to unlock the existing HoT masteries. There are currently 160 available points, so yes, theoretically there are 36 to spare. Unfortunately,

14 of those are inside the raid, out of reach of non-raiders.
10-16 of them are locked behind Adventure silver/gold challenges that are typically considered extremely difficult

4 more are locked behind completing all story mission achievements in the HoT sets, at least a few of which are very challenging such that even if you complete the majority of them, you won’t get those masteries.

Several others involve fighting mobs who cannot be soloed, and that groups almost never challenge, making them hugely inconvenient to target.

1 of the other ones in Rising Flames involves a jumping puzzle that is universally considered cruel and unusual (even by those who like it that way).

and of course Hal.

So even just counting the currently available masteries, there really is no huge surplus for most players. If we factor in that the next episode will likely add a new mastery tier that costs even more, every last available point matters.

The OP is a bit more irate than I would put it, but I agree with the premise behind all the points he made. The original GW2 leveling system was perhaps not completely perfect, but it was better than the new one.

Yeah, I do NOT want them as a Mastery, and do NOT want them as a WvW track unlock, but I also don’t want them to lock me into an entire trait line. If they aren’t going to let us mix and match traitlines anymore then they should just roll them into the default kit.

Many people raid for gear, mats, and just for fun, yes elitism exists in raiding but it exists everywhere anyways, you just need to find a guild that does not have that kind of attitude towards raiding, in fact I recommend you join a guild that is just learning raiding and learn with them, it may be frustrating at first but it will teach you how to raid well. Atleast in my experience in other mmorpgs.

The problem is that it’s a double edged sword. If you try to join with elitists, then they might be a jerk to you, or to others in the group, and it all gets toxic and horrible. If you don’t try to join with elitists, then you’ll probably end up with some horrible players, and you’ll do your best but be unable to carry them, and the entire group fails over and over and over and over and over until you all quit for the night having accomplished nothing.

The real issue is that the raids require such precision from every player in the first place. If it were more forgiving of mistakes then you could take a casual pug in and they would succeed, rather than fail constantly, allowing you to avoid both the elitism AND the constant failure.

Most of the people saying that they don’t want to raid, their reasons boil down to “I don’t want to fail constantly, I don’t want to waste time failing constantly, and I don’t want to deal with the conditions that would be necessary to not fail constantly.” Remove the constant failure and pretty much every issue with raiding goes away.

Also, we’ve been told what A.nets stance is on giving out information, yet people keep asking for stuff that clearly isn’t on the table per their own(A.nets) stance that they will only talk about stuff that is ready for release.

Yes, which is why we keep telling them that this stance is not good enough.

Now, why do people do this? It makes no sense. You can wait a bit and make double the money. Why have you ever pressed the buy instantly button? When was the last time? Last time I did it, I needed food for WvW and didn’t have the time to wait, so I bought it at a higher price. My time wasn’t worth the wait for the order to be filled, so I paid someone else for the ability to have it now. I paid for his time waiting for someone to buy his product.

I’ve used the buy instantly when I haven’t planned ahead, or in the rare cases where there is only a tiny difference between the two values, but yeah, in most cases, for most items, it must be ignorance, they just don’t understand what a bad deal they’re making.

I just don’t see how selling my time is unfair to anyone.

But the thing is, that isn’t a transaction that ANet should reward. ANet should be doing that job for us. Players should not be asked to spend their time juggling orders, nor should they be profiting off it. It should just be players putting up items for sale on one end, players buying items on the other, and no players needed, wanted, or rewarded in between.

Regarding your issue itself, I understand it, but i don’t agree with it. Fractals are mini dungeons. Fractals don’t ask you to play a complete dungeon, but only a sequence of small dungeons.

If that’s the goal, then they’ve missed the mark someplace, because each Fractal takes about as long as most dungeons I bother with. Four of them in a row takes at least twice as long as a normal dungeon, if not four times as long.

I also understand that you want to play the fractal you want in the “tier”. If everybody would do that, no one would ever play dredge again. The current implementation is not a bad thing as it forces you to play some fractals no matter what. You don’t like it? Well, restart and hope for the better, but making sure that each fractal is played actually makes you better since you learn the new mechanics.

I listed a way that would allow them to continue to force players to run the worst fractals if they want that, it just would allow players to do them on their own time table, rather than having to set aside an hour or more in a single stretch.

Maybe read the post before commenting on it next time.

So I repeat, it’s not a real problem. A very small amount of players want less than 4 fractals. A lot more of players want the dredge fractal shortened.

Can’t they do both? Last night I ran Uncategorized, Snowblind, Cliffside, and Molten Bosses, which was a very nice mix as far as Fractals go, and we had very few setbacks (at one point the hammer vanished n Cliffside and we had to wipe to get it back), but it still takes too long.

I played some fractals when they first came out, and dabbled in them a bit after that, I know all the old ones well enough that I can get through them, I just can’t be bothered due to the long time between start and finish. I play roughly two hours a day, but I like to move around and do a lot of different things in the world. Running Fractals for even half that time is just more than I’d care to devote to it.