Guild Wars 2

I would actually preffer a fully geared lvl 80 doing less damage on a level 10 map then lvl 10 player.

Reason being the lvl 80 already has full aceess to all his traits and potentially runesets giving him that much more power and options already.

You done ….. it up.
I like 30$ pricetag (albeit being european i’ll have to shell out 30 euros, ouch). But that’s cool. Not overpriced like HoT was at launch.

What’s not cool is going back on your policy “New xpac makes previous ones free”.
Now don’t get me wrong – just the fact you’re reading this means i’m not a free player. I personally purchased both core and HoT.
But the place you goofed bigtime is in gliding.

Many players love gliding. Many love mounts (not me though).
But guess what? If you kept your old promise you could’ve made maps with gliding and mounts in’em. HoT crowd would be happy, mount lovers would be happy.

But now cause of “Player can have PoF without HoT” policy you couldn’t do that and made your desert that much more..arid (pun intended).
Now you’re gonna end up with one crowd happy (yay! mounts!), but another displeased (where are my glider sections?!).

Inconsistency can bite you in the ass for sure..

Regarding fighting stealth with AoE: That tactic only partially may work as thief is not frozen solid when insisible. they still can see your AoE coming and dodge it. Shadow Refuge is one exception as is forces thief to stay inside visible aoe circle and then placing long lasting aoe on top of it, such as meteor storm or ranger barrage may work miracles. Outside of that case thief can fullly see and dodge the aoe. Well at least it’s a dodge bait..

Dragonhunter trap is a step in the right direction. I would also very much like to see ranger traps ignore stealth and trigger regardless of target visibility. Real life traps sure don’t care for camouflage as long as they’re stepped on.

@Nutshel – totally agreed. Especially about shadowsteps having a windup, unless it’s a utility.

well older players got hours upon hours of entertainment till now that new guys didn’t get yet from it;) I say gw2 returned it’s purchase price to with hefty extra already:)

We shall see. RIght now all players had is a stress test of small demo that was available at PAX. I hardly call that beta testing. Still waiting for those to happen.

And I’m not saying if it’ll launch this year, but am wondering if it’ll make it before 3rd anniversary. Technically it can take 4 months longer after august and still launch this year. But the stigma “It’s that game without any serious content updates for 3 years” will be on many tongues.

1. NPE

2. Traits starting at lvl 30, getting one point each 6 levels and those 100% map completions as unlocks (doing one event you may not love is one thing, being stuck on a map you don’t want to for a longer spell is another).

3. Precursors being pure RNG. I’m glad to see that in recent living story chapters gear is aquired through gameplay and taking on challenges rather then pure luck.

4. Character personality being removed. I still remember my brute necromancer persona. That thing should’ve been expended rather then scrapped. I wanted to punch some npcs, or sweettalk them into revealing something they normally wouldn’t.

5. The updates. Unless they got something BIG coming then wth am i looking at here? They created a huge world in what? 4 years? Now it’s been 2 and asides content that was there and gone (like marionette, molten facility, tower of nightmares) we’re getting one map that’s size of a single zone from the base game. Yes it’s way more complex and fun, but for pete’s sake…one permanent zone after two years!!

Exactly!! Ours always blue, their always red. As it is blue has clear and simple color scheme, while for red the mini-map is a trap!

+1 to fixed color scheme for teams.

Till yesturday i was convinced we’ll be getting HoT at late spring to middle summer, but seeing how revenenant is still in the works (3 trait lines missing, no balancing applied yet) it’s clear to me that they’re far earlier in the works then I expected.

Given there’s at least finishing up the revenant, beta testing of the whole xpac, game balancing and some seeerious debugging, I’m no longer so optymistic about release date. So just gonna sit down, chill out and focus on here and today.

Thraellic.5147:

This is an excellent post and describes very well my own frustrations with HoT. I’m back playing GW2 after rage quitting taking a break for six months. I still hate that navigation is the main endgame boss in HoT, but Anet did fix a few things with patch updates, most notably dungeons and fractals.

Really hoping they did learn the lessons expressed in the post I quoted. Another expac like this… I’m not sure I’d want to come back again after that. I kinda suspect the same goes for a lot of people.

I have to disagree. While the majority of said post is golden, I very much enjoy the maze-like maps. This is a jungle, the feel that you’re slowly biting your way in with mastery system and you own knowledge of the uncharted as the player is a growing factor for me. It’s one of the things i like most about HoT. It’s the pacing of it (due to insufficient amount of PvE maps for everyone (4) and small amount of masteries in total that made it a chore. The experience of having advantage due to…real experience with given maze-like map, and not just some stats or skills feels epic for me.

Rangers, Revenants are pretty happy if you ask me.
Necromancers are also happy. To burn some tiers under a-net’s hq that is

Seems like i dodged a bullet when i chose queen’s terrace over airship pass.

Bottom line of my thread is that programmers were lazy at our expense. And mind you they’re charging extra money for it. Regular ingame features are better programmed then a payed one.

Even if one has to be ousted for one reason or another, it could be done with teleporting like in case when you don’t have a pass and try to enter with stability on. You’re just ported back. Having the guard kick my character with line that should never be there, given i have the pass, is nothing more then someone not doing their job right, while charging extra $ from players for it.

As a player who got convinced to buy this awesome game after last free trial, right now i’m pretty furious with this one. Reason is simple – last time the players could invite their friends to join, that’s how i was hooked. This time it’s some websites, that force ppl to register and personally i have no idea what one has to do on each to get the key.

I want to invite my friend over to try the game out, but i guess i cannot. Me and him gotta count on one of those websites. Not to mention not everyone is jumping in their pants to try it out. I got convinced to gw2 because i played it. But if you’re gonna pile obstacles, then the undecided ppl, like my buddy aren’t gonna climb that mountain you needlessly put in front of their face. They should be able to simply get a code and try, be it from their buddies ingame or gw2 website, but without all those other websites, registration there and other needless complications.

I was playing my human commoner storyline to get my black lion key when something itched me to talk to blaize during the bandit hideout covert operation.

What i got is this gem of a reference to Blazing Saddles and it’s villain casting scene:

Oh thank goodness, for a second there i was afraid that was a ranger trait, phew. Dodged a bullet there.

^ can’t wrap my head around just what exactly costed so much, given HoT is not exactly the biggest xpac to hit the market in gaming industry…

Game Mode: PvX

Pet mobile combat improvements.

Many call pet a lost cause because of it’s inability to hunt down moving targets. With this in mind few changes can be made to improve it or at least make the situation less tragic.

Firstly as someone pointed already, pets being able to jump up and down after their targets would be great help in pursuit of human targets. Not every pet has to have it, but felines, canines, spiders & moas should have it, while birds should be able to chase their prey no matter the vertical distance, as long as there’s a clear air route to it and it’s not underwater.

The less fortunate families of pets, such as drakes, bears, boars and so on, should have a passive ability reducing their and master’s damage taken from projectile attacks, so anyone wanting to shoot down the ranger from afar, will face reduced damage output, bringing him closer to petless ranger dps.

As for horizontal mobility there have been proposals of increasing pet attack reach, which i fully support. Be it build into every pet henceforth, or achievable by easy to get trait, make it happen.

So in the end I gave out and got HoT. Went into spvp tried elite specs a bit and morale of the story is short – they’re not named elite for nothing. Normal trait lin…erm…“specializations” can’t compare.

And with that comes the realization that something is seriously missing here.
That something is the base elite specialization.

The ones who did not buy x-pac have nothing that can be deemed comparable to elite specs, it’s the cold hard truth. What should’ve been is much like masteries that are divided between old Tyria and Heart of Maguuma, there also should be base elite specs for old Tyrians and new, alternative ones with HoT, that will give you alternative option to put into that elite specialization slot.

Yeah i realize that money, development time, business etc etc. But it’s still unbalanced and i will take a jab at that even if it’s never addressed.

Deathly chill in it’s original form was the only thing making staff viable as actual condi weapon. poison, chill (with damage), bit of bleeding and fear (with terror + chill damages) were a reason no not attach a suction cap to your staff and sell it off as toilet plunger. Now….anyone having pipe issues?

Not a bug, just a complaint. Map is ugly af. As mentioned in my general patch feedback thread. Why the whole wooden box Playstation One graphics style?

You could’ve made sandstone styled colloseum. Or more oasis themed with some palms, waterways etc. If it had to be dark and medieval, then something with some spikes, chains, deathpits…nooope. You went the cheapest and then some knight tournament props way.

It’s not a die hard requirement for spvp map to be ugly like sin. Believe me it’s really not..

On a more combat oriented note this is another map that has too many open spaces. Melee combatants get some serious hate as result as it’s easy and profitable to snipe anything that stands on point without the need to get closer or ability for defender to use line of sight tactics to force attacker to get closer. After Capricorn this is another “too much open space” map, albeit Capricorn is aguably worse as you have to travel 20000 miles from one node to another.

What we could use spvp wise would be a map that’s closer to being next “Forest of Nilfhel” map. One with more tunnels, line of sight opportunities, not so distant captures points. Where a sniper who chooses the right spot (and not any spot!) can get some opportunistic shots in, but the melee fighter is not turned into a sitting duck by being in a clear line of fire around 90% of his map presence.

200k $ for tourney rewards, apparently insufficient $ for properly staffed pvp balance team – anet logic, go figure..

Regarding opening strike i belive it should be a crit debuff on a monster.

Opening strike – affected foe has 10% extra chance to receive critical damage.

Now as for minor traits:
5 pts trait – when entering combat your first attack is an opening strike (8 seconds)
15 pts trait – opening strike raises damage from critical hits by 10%.
25 pts trait – opening strike grants attack of opportunity.

Grandmaster trait – your critical attacks have 15% chance to grant opening strike (3 sec).

New beastmastey trait (you decide the placement in line)- Smell of blood – your pet goes berserk and deals 20% more damage on foes affected with opening strike.

Well this is pretty rough, but more or less how i would do it.

And that’s why a-net’s marketing is a bust.

The proper way to do this is to start off big (that they did), but also leying out the concrete foundations for hype, such as size of the expansion. If you know it’s gonna be big and how big, then hype is on with slowly revealing just what’s inside that big black box of unknown we’re awaiting.

But here it was not clearly stated, in fact it’s actively avoided, leading many people to think that the x-pac won’t be half as big as expected, and devs straying away from the topic sure doesn’t help to put out the doubt.

Also i hate these “filler” bits we get recently.

No one is forcing you to drop information weekly, a-net.

I don’t want, nor care for recaps of any kind. You’d save both your and my time if instead of throwing these fillers at me, you just left a note under actual new HoT blog post saying “Next reveal – [date here]”.

Well i’m gonna think bit outta the box, or bird’s eye view like.

1 Gem store horizontal progression.

Gem store is no exception to player’s ingame experience of being treated either fairly (horizontal growth), or a part of society with “master money class” and “99% rest” (vertical). To avoid the latter the gemstore must adamantly adhere to certain rules:

• low prices
• wide selection of items
• absolute lack of any ingame advantages on said items.
• no RNG
• exchangeability of gold for gems.

So far you got 2/5 right. The pricing, limited item selection and RGN are still
blocking a lot player’s bucks from flowing into your accounts.

Low prices and wide selection of non RGN items is the good and clean way of making big profit without relying on underhanded gambling and wallets of few elitist at cost of your reputation and large part of playerbase.

If it’s cheap, average joe doesn’t feel gated out of the cool stuff and has no reason to complain, nor to tell his friends that if you wanna be cool in this game you better shell out or look for another one. And there’s a loooot more average Joes then rich Steves so to say.

Wide selection of items means bigger chances a player will find an item (or many items) he likes and decide to “support the game” according to his own financial possibilities. And for those who wanna support it all the way, the collectionists can buy all that stuff and blow their money. Or sell it on Trading post for gold, that works too and no one’s complaning.

2. Professions’ horizontal progression.

For a class/job/professions horizontal growth means “more equaly tempting choices”.
More builds, more skills, more viable gear stat combinations, defense builds, support builds, crazy oddball builds, as well as cosmetic choices…as long as they are all fun and have their place in the world.

This all goes down the toilet though if there’s no balance. Then suddenly you lose professions, builds and skills because there’s a top dog, and rest are niche, useless and for masochists. Just take a look at LFG tool to see which scenario is currently shining down on us at this very moment.

First rule of medicine is “Firstly, don’t make it worse”. So listen to your community and either convince them that it is them, who are not seeing full potential of certain professions, or take decisive action where necessary (pve op warriors).

The best you can do is soak up their delicious tears delivered to you on the silver platter!

Oh and go ahead and 1v1 and beat them – cherry on top of the cake!

Ps. Don’t go saying you play a lot of pvp when you’re a mere deer rank. I’m dragon rank (via ranked and unranked only) but i would not say i play a lot since i play for 2-3 months, while some play since the beginning.

First off ranger has absolutely no manners and doesn’t know when to die. He just doesn’t want to take his leave like a man. He trows down healing fields, that heal, give regen, clense conditions and are waterfields for the blasty party members like it was free candy. You think downing him would shut him up? he has a trait to drop even longer one when he’s downed, and his own drooling, unvaccinated beast..erm i mean “pet” can revive him far better then he himself.

As if running around with a rabid, slobering, smelly fleabag wasn’t enough, he’s obviously taken into some occultism and started summoning spirits for buffs! One of them, stone spirit lets people get protection while their attacking. kittene to get that buff, but the damage one (frost spirit) is also not every day occurance. Probs that’s why he sold his soul (and gets visits from exortists)!

And some of them might even reach him if it wasn’t for his horde of abominations from hell better known as pets. Mother nature must be full of love, cause half of those “pets” got looks not even a mother could love. For those adversaries that looks and smell alone didn’t do the trick, the “pets” bring a variety of nasty surprises, that are independent from ranger himself!
While that sissy with bow polishes his nails, wondering if berserker’s gear is better then assasin’s or other way around, his pets can still have defence of a german sherman tank with a forcefield, taking heat off him, or cast boons, inflict nasty long conditions, or just scratch the innards from enemies faster then your ex scrached your face off when you answered the question “Do i look fat in that dress?”. And probs just like you with your ex, he always has an alternative around, just swapping from one pet to the other once he feels it’s time to maul you in a new, uglier way.

Of course as if abusing poor horrors found in nearby cav..erm i mean using pets wasn’t enough, he himself also comes decked with lots of utilities. They say that there’s two way to tell a ranger apart from a snake in melee combat. If it’s uglier of the two, or wiggles more, then it’s the ranger.
Thieves have officialy filed a lawsuit vs ranger for abusive use of evades as well as sic’ing their pets on them. Sadly due to their own charges no thief came to present his case in court personally.

Ranger’s stability is also stuff of hate. 20 secs stability from rampage as one that does not get shut off with elite itself, means that with boon duration, he’s not gonna be out of the game any time soon. There’s a reason it’s called “Rampage” – the hp bars of poor vic..adversaries of ranger rage tell the whole story. It’s not uncommon to see genius norn rangers such as Panther Slash use that to advantage while leading parties through dangerous mobs – mobs go for ranger who cannot be stunned, knocked down etc, while rest follows not far behind avoiding needless attention. Circus level bear abuses are also not unheard off, where bear gets sent to draw aggro while party just sneaks past the animal attack scene.

Every certifiable psychopath must be a proficient axe user. Does it come as a shock to you that ranger can use it both main and offhand? Offhand one is especially the loving side of ranger, that says, come here, or i’ll just pull you myself, then get sliced to bits with my whirling axe, that will add free 12 stacks of vulnerability asides 5 sec missle reflection and self retalliation. Best things in life come in melee;)

But nothing wrong with going about it in an old fahion way, and run around with a pitchfork and torch. Sadly they didn’t give ranger a pitchfork..kitten EU agriculture regulations! But we do have the torch! And a fire combo field on it (8 sec one, nice cd). Speaking of fields rangers seem to get the best deals – ice one from ice trap, looooong water one from healing spring, and said fire one from torch’s bonfire. More should be on their way via traps. Regardless, while not many, they definitely hit the spot for any combo aware party!

To sum it up i remember an old metal plate on the fence with picture showing a dog and a gun, and saying “If he won’t bite you, then i’ll shoot you”. Kinda like the ranger and his pet:)

Justine.6351:

?

You mean free condi dmg as is /= fair?

Even condi builds have basic attack dmg, 4% crit chance and +50% crit damage.

Which is 2% direct damage boost overall thanks to low crit chance.

Meanwhile bleeds, our main condi damage source start at 42.5 damage per tick right out of the box. That’s an amount equal to having 850 condi damage if bleeds started with 0 base damage and relied only on condi damage stat.

Math aside what i wanna say is that putting into a stat should have meanginful effects. And with condies having such high base damage there isn’t that much of reward for builds that go full condi vs builds that go hybrid, or low condi in exchange for other benefits.

You’re suffering from thief syndrome. It’s really easy to die as a thief if you don’t focus on evading damage.

I can add on top of what my forespeaker said:
My thief is dual gun, and a off hand gun has great ability – black powder shot.
It blinds your opponent, and creates a field around you that will make your regular shots blind her each time you fire, and regenerates very quickly. You will have access to that blind most of the time.

Also you can go into stealth and fire regular pistol shot for awesome 5 hit 5 stacks of bleeding combo

If going gets rough, be creative:)

Game mode: PvE

Zef’s weapon revamp suggestions – the torch

Goal of this change
Increasing torch utility as damage and crowd combat weapon.

Proposed functionality
Explosive torch - throw torch with gunpowder sack attached that explodes on impact dealing aoe damage and burning.

Damage: 900 (2.0 coefficient).
Explosion radius: 180.
Burning duration 4s.
Blast finisher.
Cooldown: 15 seconds.

Bonfire - base radius increased to 180. Pulses blind(1s) & burning (1s) each second. With offhand training, radius increases to 240. Physical damage per pulse increased to 2x current value.

The torch is about damage and that’s what’s happening right here. Rather luckluster Throw torch now becomes an aoe with serious damage and blast finisher, retaining it’s cooldown.
Bonfire receives more utility for crowd melee situations, by adding blinds and larger radius.

yeah, recently it’s one bad decision after another, though you didn’t have to bring out the NPE boogie man, some of us still have nightmares…

But yeah, random boon conversion (0 skill, 100% luck), leaps independent from movement speed value (there goes movement condi and boon game) etc and so on.
I wonder of the last one is tied in some way to HoT maps being smaller, since nobody can tell me that our curret huge pve maps “are too small for leapers”.

Anyway i can swear they’re reading “101 ways to sink a game” in recent times. Someone must’ve told them “sreamlining is hip” and they bought it….

I want mine always blue, enemy always red. There have been cases i mistook scoreboard points thinking red is my team when i was blue and vice-versa. I know it’s moronic and my mistake, but in spvp player should not be forced to spent an iota of brainpower more then necessary on UI intricacies. Everything save the actual combat should be extremely simple, reliable and unchangeable, so full attention is put into the match and not wrestling with HuD.

I think we should have a large pool fo dailies for a month to choose from. You make your own daily from that. But to make it far each would have a limited number of uses (so you don’t do laurel vendor daily everyday). Then on a short day you pick easy ones, on one with more time you “pay the debt” and do the hard ones left in the pool.

They need to curb this stone age old meta.
“Play your way” is what makes GW2 epic, but in raids it’s “play chronobunker, druid and ps warr, plus some other guys in dps spots” since the dawn of time.

This is disgusting. I want GW2 where I pick a profession and i can reliably do at least 2 outta 3 roles (support, tank, dps) as long as I’m using a proper build and know what i’m doing with it.

The 3 “gods” are long overdue for nerf bringing down to everyone else’s level.

Why is PS warr getting 600 range on his mights, when almost everyone else has 240?

Why is chrono having strongest upkeep of party quickness AND alacrity AND distortion? Others struggle to be even semi-decent with one of these!

Why is druid given completely unique powerful damage buffs, while everyone else has only might is replaced by ps warr again?

And if it’s cause “he’s got no damage himself!”, then fine! But make it so, that those who do have damage can be a viable replacement if only by grace of their damage.

I do look forward to PoF in this regard. I smell that this time around there will be great potential hidden in synergetic play between PoF specs. More deep and complex then simple “give me might”. We’ll see how it goes, i await it eagerly.

Hi all since many are talking about shortbow rework i think that i may share my few cents on the subject from perspective of ranked play.

Firstly off i love the shortbow and i find it a very good weapon if used right (and given your enemies aren’t all mesmers, eles, scrappers and guards).

Now the shortbow shines as a team damage support weapon (easy flanks if you snipe inside mid-chaos), pursuit weapon (that sweet cripple, enemies contantly exposing their back to you which sb loves) and overall annoyance with constant condi/direct damage pressure.

With above said, i would like a few tweaks to it that help it perform in above roles, rather then trip over it’s toes in situations where it’s supposed to shine by default.

So here’s my take on it’s skills and upgrades they could use, followed by explanation why such changes.

1. crossfire – fine as is.
2. poison volley – fine as is.
3. quickshot – remove swiftness, add stealth (2s), increase cd to 12s, but reduce it to 9s if succefully evaded an attack using quickshot. Breaks out of immobilize. Triggers light on your feet trait bonus.
4. crippling shot – add swiftness (which is taken from quickshot).
5. concussion shot – fine as is.

Ok now the “why” part.

Quickshot is quite flawed atm – swiftness+ backhop work great as escape tool, but are completely contradictory to eachother when chasing enemies (swiftness good, backhopping bad), which is one of primary scenarios for sb usage. Diversity suffers.

So instead of swiftness i propose stealth which works great as a defensive tool, and can be used for better positioning , something a guerilla combat weapon such as shortbow badly needs. Being an immob breaker would also add to it’s movement oriented playstyle and follow up on one of it’s best uses – as often the only escape you have when immobilized.

4. crippling shot – now this is the skill where swiftness should go to. Cripple + swiftnes is a sweet movement control package, and here are no evasion/hopping shanenigans that would prevent you from using this skill for it’s primary purpose of gaining movement speed upper hand. Ofc there is a price to such approach – both advantages being on one skill only means that if you fail to land it, then double your loss. No free lunch, kids!

Now we all hear about dungeons being unfair etc. I won’t get into that as i don’t have lvl 80 fully geared character yet, but getting whopped in yesturday catacumbs story run i can say for sure i wished i had more defensive traits activated.

Now seeing as dungeon’s goal is to make ppl think what they’re doing and act as a team not bunch of 5 skill spammers, i would like point one flaw that dungeons still have.
Lack of trait resetting npc. Most ppl in normal pve aren’t the turtles and prefer glass cannon builds if you ask me. Dungeon is another beast and just like the anvil at start for repairs it should have trait reset npc so we can prepare a more defensive or supportive builds for what’s up ahed.

Add +1 if you support this idea:)

Flop eared rats are acting up again?

I’m going to be “that guy” here and ask bluntly:

Will the RNG be dropped in gemstore (yes, black lion tickets and ticket scraps). Cringe worthy it is, but until x-pac announcement it could be justified with game upkeep costs. But since you’ll get a huge money boost with HoT can we just send that mechanic to “The hell away and never come back”-ville and leave it there?

While it’s a spvp issue only and defo one on higher skill level (one i’m not yet on myself) i find pets annoying as hell for lack of evade. In spvp this can be a serious problem, and far so for your ranger then pet itself.

Necro (reaper) uses a shout, especially elite one? Well gg for dodging that, too bad pet didn’t and he still got his bonus for hitting a target thanks to that (especially if it’s stab stacks).

Berserker just needs to headbutt your pet and he’s off to running start with full adrenaline bar, whereas on another class (save maybe minion necro) you’d be rewarded with major head start for keeping the warrior starved for adrenaline. That would be especially helpful on ranger who lacks solid counters vs a warrior, and needs to kite to keep extremely bursty warr in check.

And dont’ get me started on dragon hunters and their ridicilous heal trap. Yes, pet does ruin their day for triggering all the other traps instead of you, but then it makes it gloriously bright for triggering heal trap which you yourself may at least try to avoid by staying at range. Same goes for lord on foefire. Lost one game cause i thought lord could handle it with support fire from me…but nope. heal trap, lord steps into it, guard’s hp back to high levels, lord kill, gg.

Other then this “minor” issue pets are pretty good these days, given you remember to swap them out before they die, choose them correctly (squishy pets will get owned in a player zerg without your support and control), and support them with some cripples/immobs on enemies to keep their damage going if they’re melee.

Well it’s been a week since HoT Pax announcements and already we got super powered individuals here who already played it to 100% obviously, able to easily state it’s too small, revenant is op and breaks balance, that it’ll suck etc.

Well, thanks for the heads up guys! I almost hyped and decided to throw money at a-net but luckily you stopped me from making the biggest mistake in my life and wasting critically important 40$ or so for the expansion.
[/sarcasm]

For the less mentally gifted of us, how about we just wait till they reveal more, and some hands-on feedback from other players/known reviewers.

Ps. A-net. I got a nice hand grenade here chugged with money. I wanna throw it at you, but no preorders yet…

kurfu.5623:

The problem is that by the time they reach 80 and experienced a huge chunk of the game, a large number of people are no longer incentivized to purchase.

The FtP version should have taken a lesson from WoW – FtP only up to level 20.

This guy gets it. Would you pay a full new sports car price for a nice looking, spare tire and a paint job on your current one you got for free? Ofc not! It’s overprice, sentiments be kitten ed! You’ll look to get the biggest bang for the buck, probably another fully functional sports car even if it’s of totally different brand and you’re not very sentimental with them yet.

The more you get for free, the bigger, more reasonably priced and appealing the payed portion must be to logically justify the purchase. And here even the original B2P players who did pay $60 for core GW2 at launch find it lacking for the price.

Not to say it’s not epic fun (to would be buyers) – it is. But the price/content ratio..well free market already verified that one.

Well that’s still something. Beats fanart & dev profile week. Guess we’ll see more tommorow.

Ok as a guy that loves HoT (as in gameplay wise, launch policies were a subject to my heated criticism), I’m hyped bigtime for path of fire and extremely pleased to see that launch is far better and smoother then HoT. No content draught, great price, and chance to try it out.

But the announcement left me with many questiosn I wish answered by someone from a-net. Mostly on HoT vs Path of Fire.

Here we go:

1. Will we get more masteries then just mount ones?
2. Will gliders still get some love?
3. Adventures? Will we get them in PoF?
4. How is verticality doing? Will fans of HoT core maps get at least some places that are highly vertical?
5. Will HoT be required to play PoF?

Basically HoT introduced the “feature not content rich” approach which in the end worked for me.
Adventures, collections, tons of hidden places, masteries to navigate maps, verticality, raids.

So seeing as PoF is to the “content rich” one, will it still be feature-rich and have stuff to keep us busy for a long time with all sorts of scavenger hunts, mini games and collections to do?

Here are areas they should seriously do their homework on:

1. basic economy and marketing. In a-net’s case very, very basic. Like the fact that if you sell something cheaper, then you get more buyers, and it evens out or often outclasses the gains out of selling less copies for bigger price.

Also a great move PR wise as even if the offering is not 10/10 if it’s sold for reasonable price you’ll get far less voices of discontent (like you do now for xpac just being too small for it’s price).

2. Communication on the forums. No, i don’t mean forum mods. I mean devs actually speaking with players in the first and foremost place such discussion should take place. A nice roadmap is always nice. And no 6 moths silence when players are wondering what’s next? Few mmos can get away with being absolutely silent on upcoming content for longer then 3 months.

3. New sales and marketing team. A-net had a great reputation for being class AAA honest dev. Now with HoT sales policies which were to put it bluntly a straight up war with veteran players on nearly every step don’t expect neither the hype or pre-orders/pre-purchases for the next xpac to look as good as for HoT. And that’s just the stuff that happened before the launch. Post-launch is the “it’s feature not content rich” issue which doesn’t sit well with everyone for their 50$.

A-net’s now got a loong haul to get back into community’s graces (least a lot of veterans), and it’s gonna be one tough crowd after the numerous pricing/pr/content failures of HoT.

Ok, so i wanna ask those who beat it or at least done majority of it:

Is it packed with enough content to justify the “expansion” title, or am i looking at something far smaller then expected?

^ if you mean my #3 about sales and marketing team then let me remind you their “slight” flops such as:

- forcing veteran players to pay full game price with xpac, when it should’ve been much cheaper for them – “Do not Pre-Purchase Heart of Thorns” from that time is a legendary topic on reddit, probs the biggest one ever regarding GW2.

- refusal to add a free character slot for revenant in xpac that costed 50$ at it’s cheapest. Only after HUGE flames from players did they change that to “IF you pre-purchase” (so basically cough up money for a cat in a bag at that point).

- not letting a lot ppl test out the xpac before they buy. Only those who pre-purchased had a guaranteed beta slot, rest was either lucky or had to wait for official launch and reviews.

- bait & switch with “need a core game to play xpac” which pushed core game sales, only to discover some time later that no, you don’t need core game. After solar storm level flames erupted they had to refund quite of lot of core game purchases after that, and that’s a plus for them that they did, but this “mistake” shouldn’t have happened in the first place.

- inadequate price vs content. Notice the metacritic player reviews. Recently they are bad and i don’t blame them. The xpac is great, but it is too small, forcing it to be too grindy, and many a person strongly dissatisfied with price vs content ratio. And thus negative reviews pour our like a river. Can you blame them? Having to pay nearly (or completely if with slot) full game price for something that’s clearly not even 1/3 core game size, regardless whether you own a core game or not?

All these “small things” pile up in a mass of angry players (that will probably once again get real angry when next xpac launches with 50$ tag for 4 new PvE maps + 2 or so guild halls) if you’re not a newcomer to the series (while offering said newcomers best deal on the market).

Be it honest mistakes, or a push to sell HoT copies at 50$ no matter the consequences (you decide which) sales and marketing team managed to seriously tarnish a-net’s crystal clear reputation as extremely honest dev when it comes to both amount of content and sales policies. If i were their boss ppl responsible for this damage would be flying out of their job the first chance i get to replace them with someone who knows how to appeal to customers instead of sinking the hard earned good name of my brand.

I am glad people did notice this. It’s the world old tactic of lowering product quality called “two steps forward, one step back”.

They launch forward something unacceptable by common standards, then after outrage take one step back, making the deal better and gaining player support for the change, all the while the deal after change is still worse then what was upheld as a standard till that time.

I found it:) And correction:
The jail is on the lowest inhabited floor or rata sum (the one with 3 waypoints).
Most bottom part of rata sum is where i went and found nothing (above screens).

Btw, most epic jailing reason ever:

Please correct me if i’m wrong here, please.

We basically get tons of ways to convert condies to boons and boons to condies…which in raids means jack, cause unique boss boons and condies.
We get tons of torment which is shafted vs raid bosses that are held stationary by the tank. No one’s gonna start kiting boss and change a boss run into merry go around so you can get your torment damage off.
We get burning, but i can see a-net’s doing it’s best to keep it tame – low stacks, internal cooldowns, low durations.
We get barrier which is ….yeah well..what? I don’t think it’s gonna replace a healer, guess bonus utility that actually works in raids…might be nice.
We got mights on elite…with 300 radius….PS warr ain’t losing his spot anytime soon.

And on top of that they wanna gut perfectly good reaper from condi damage, cause kitten good spec that actually let necro be played the way you wanted (tank/condi/power), let’s bucher it, can’t make scourge look bad!

I am not a happy necromancer.

theory: mmr will provide balanced team compositions.

practice:

If you play good you’ll be paired with teammates that spend 2/3 of match off point or fight ad infinitum over getting graveyard in foefire legacy while other two points are capped by enemy team..

If you play bad, dw you’ll get strong teammembers to carry you. Yay mmr!

You can do a guild bounty even with one person. Here’s how you do it. Once you unlock it (you can bribe your way to it with gold for influence) start it up at sunday or saturday evening. There’s a 90% chance someone else (and in numbers) will be seeking same bounty or even already be pouncing away on it.
Just ask in map chat and if that’s the case join in. That kill will count to your guild’s bounty. If no one is fighting it, you can still ask in map chat if someone saw it and gather ppl for it. Few refuse the allure of a champ for thrashing;)

If you’re moderately lucky you won’t get one of the 3 pain in the kitten to find bounties. Also be sure to read up on wiki on bounties and the maps they spawn in. be sure to have all of those maps properly discovered (waypoints activated).

And as i said one person is all it takes so….you can hunt one target, while your buddy at same time seek the other. With outside help you’ll be done in a jiffy and get your guild merits. Guerrilla tactics ftw (even if my guild underlings hate me for it:>).

Hi everyone, having some hard time against bunker eles i run into the “chill them!” approach. But there’s one thing i don’t know about chilled and need verified.

When a person is chilled their skill cooldown goes up by 66%. But how does that work?
If a chilled character uses a skill that has 10 seconds cooldown, then cleanses the chilling off after one second, will he still have to wait 15.66 more seconds for next cast?

Or will it only affect the first second of cooldown when chill was actually applied and after cleansing it’ll be 9.66 seconds more?