Guild Wars 2

Algreg.3629:

please stop relating everything to wow.

This is a completely reasonable comparison, anybody can tell (even he himself) that Samwise Didier likes to draw ridiculously exaggerated pauldrons. I personally find them distasteful as well, don’t know if I would say I want them removed, but I certainly do not want the game flooded with them either.

These achievements are arguably worth the 50 in terms of time investment to achieve them. Honestly, they could even be worth more and it’d be fine; getting 50/50 HoM points is a serious accomplishment.

And for the record, anyone can still get them, just go hop over to GW1 and work on the HoM.

Bobler.2074:

people are just going to tell you what they need to sell quickly to make them selfs profit and by the sound of how you look at things i wouldn’t blame them for trying have you ever played a Mmo your not being forced to play thats your choice and your not paying a subscription Monthly fee of currency this is a game your choice to play daily all if not most mmos have a daily aspect to them if they didn’t people would get bored fast because they could complete the ‘weekly" they need to do in one day dailies keep people hooked go play wow and then tell me you don’t like to play P2P games

Have you ever used a period?

Also, what are you even saying?

I hate to join the kitten fest on Adnul, but he does seem to still be bugged.

Bugs:
-Invisible Critique, at the start of some matches he seems to have critique up without having the icon up
-Chained Critique, while he may not re-critique on the 3rd round of having critique up, he does seem to do it on the second, and very rarely the first (ie back to back).

Not a bug but very annoying:
-Doesn’t take enough damage/heals too much, while it doesn’t seem to be a bug, he just has way too much health and doesn’t take any damage, even those he rarely bluffs. Even with counting his skill uses it doesn’t seem like he can be beaten unless you correctly predict every skill he uses.
-Great timing on Critique, he often has perfect timing on when to critique if when not chained. (~75% health or lower, immediately after he countered your water)

I’d offer strategy advice such always bluff a couple turns after he Belches and save you own Belch and Water for when he could Belch… however i still haven’t beat him, so take it for whakittens worth.

Adnul definitely isn’t fixed. he spams his special almost constantly.

Regina Buenaobra.6193:

The information that Martin provided after the last quarterly earnings call about this topic hasn’t changed.

Our primary focus as a company is making the core game experience as amazing as possible, through new features, content, and the exciting changes and additions to the world through our Living World releases.

You might want to tell your bosses that because they seem to think you have already started developing an expansion.

ColinJohanson.2394:

Some fun ideas in here, we’re also actively discussing ways on how we’d best like to alleviate having to make players choose between having better stats, or using magic find. It’s not a choice that’s great for game play and there isn’t really anything that fun about it, even more so when group composition is taken into account. Ideally we’d also like to keep the ability to slowly build your magic find over time, but doing this at the cost of using better stats isn’t the right way to do that.

No ETA on any changes here, just want to point out we agree there is an issue here that goes against what we want Gw2 to be, and is something we want to address.

Here’s an idea. Remove MF from the game and increase drop rates a bit. There, done. Everyone now has a small MF increase and nobody has to sacrifice anything to get it.

Zackie.8923:

can we have some really cool knight in shiny armor skins?

all these creepy risen blight growing stuff gives me the jitters

GW2 for you, fridge horror galore.

Getting a shellfish vibe from this.

jazzllanna.1278:

Lane.3410:

If they sell the sickle and axe at the same time the gem exchange will become outrageous.

I know the goal is to get people to spend RL $ on gems, but I feel at some point even the occasional gem store purchase for gold is going to become out of reach for the average player.

You have to remember though if people are not giving them money they have no money to pay their staff or pay for a building or anything business related.. so if everything you wanted in the game was easy to get with gold then no one would use money. Cannot have the game without them making real life money to pay people making content and things for you to enjoy in the game.

And really most things they add are under 10.00 worth of gems so unless you just go full out crazy then that is less than most subscription games.

Also before you think they get tons from box sells.. just remember ncsoft gets most of that money.. they get their money from the gems store.

Arenanet operates under NCSoft, so NCSoft gets the money no matter what. Money doesn’t get sent to Arenanet’s bank account.

If they sell the sickle and axe at the same time the gem exchange will become outrageous.

I know the goal is to get people to spend RL $ on gems, but I feel at some point even the occasional gem store purchase for gold is going to become out of reach for the average player.

DarkSpirit.7046:

I don’t think it would ever be out of reach, since you can always use real money.

Which is why I specifically said “for gold”. Not everyone has the disposable RL income for gem store purchases.

One of the great things about GW2 in addition to no subscription fee was you didn’t need to have RL $ to buy things, you could use gold. Both items were draws to those who lack the excess funds to spend on a video game. However, at some point the only people who are going to have enough gold will be the TP traders and CoF runners.

Ursan.7846:

Vargs.6234:

The problem is that the world hasn’t changed.

But the world has changed.

LA’s Lion statue was destroyed and slowly rebuilt. Refugees had set up camps in LA. The Consortium has built a refugee camp in Southsun.

It definitely is changing. Slowly but surely.

Nobody is going to excitedly come back to this game because there’s a refugee camp in southsun, or because the LA lion statue was deleted for awhile but is back now.

RamataKahn.4283:

Yeah didn’t think so.

You know there is something wrong with the game when ppl are seriously defending warriors in “Ranger’s pet vs Warrior” debate.

wllalele.9427:

RamataKahn.4283:

Yeah didn’t think so.

You know there is something wrong with the game when ppl are seriously defending warriors in “Ranger’s pet vs Warrior” debate.

lmfao..

And you forgot to kick it, that’ll help

You clearly didn’t bring banners to whack them on the head.

They’re harder to kill too. One followed me half way around the map until I got tired of it. I hit it with blade trail, 100b, whirlwind and rush on a zerker warrior, and it was still at ~60% life.

#beastmode

You know what’s good incentive to run a dungeon? A kittening jetpack as a reward.

Wait 4 days and everyone is burnt out on it… It will be the same. I felt this way with AC and CoF aswell

To the people saying stealth is a thief’s only real defense and that you can’t just nerf it, well yeah they made the thief very stealth reliant and they said that it wasn’t supposed to be that way when they were marketing this game. It needs a core redesign.

One person gets to make informed decisions, the other doesn’t? How the kitten is that balanced? I’ve left people swiping thin air like lunatics, putting skills on cooldown and then came back for the kill at my leisure and they can’t do that to me.

Anybody defending kittening ridiculous tactics like “spray and pray” should really go quietly sit down and whittle something.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

Side note – Earlier in the thread, people were comparing other games’ mechanics. Well, if you want more nerfs to Stealth, then I propose bringing in a FPS/CounterStrike mechanic to balance things out: Anytime you are blinded in game, your screen goes bright white for the duration of the condition. I’d gladly give up Stealth for that.

Yeah, let’s give everyone seizures.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

Stealth was already nerfed. This was due to an unbalanced “perma-stealth” Thief troll build. Now with that said, let’s breakdown your complaints one by one:

• Time to analyze your enemy
This is done before a Thief or Mes goes into stealth. If the target is squishy, you attack. If it’s a Guardian, you run away. Simple.

• Cooldown reduction
This was the nerf. No more perma-stealth trolling.

• Movement closing
Part of the purpose of being stealthed. You can run away or move in for a hit. Nothing wrong here.

• First strike advantage
Part of the purpose of being stealthed. You can run away or move in for a hit. Nothing wrong here.

• Untargetability
Part of the purpose of being stealthed. You can run away or move in for a hit. Nothing wrong here.

• Scouting undetected
Part of the purpose of being stealthed. You can run away or move in for a hit. Nothing wrong here.

Summary – Stealth is a part of the game. If you’re unable to come up with effective strategies to counter it, it doesn’t mean it’s unbalanced or broken. It means you need to get better. There are many ways to counter a Thief or Mes, but being that I play both, I won’t discuss them (for fear of people learning how to kill me).

Trying to sound smart and failing to even understand the base perspective. Calls OP’s points “complaints” and does a “breakdown” to say the same thing over and over. Ends with a real complaint.

…. lul

It appears to me that developers respond to the lowest common denominator having the loudest voice. Stealth is not a new idea; it’s a borrowed idea.

Developers are like normal people. They fall into patterns and tend to not question how things work or why they work a certain way. Ideas are simply borrowed from the people who invented them.

I agree that stealth doesn’t provide skill based game play. However; keep in mind the audience that you’re trying to convey this discussion to. They generally don’t like to think.

Overall, the Thief needs to be looked at in Guild Wars 2. The style of play it brings to the table reduces complex decision making for the thief and to counter stealth as their class mechanic leads it to the best burst in the game while simultaneously making them almost unkillable at the press of a button. As it stands now, Thieves don’t get kills through skill, it’s simply mechanics that allow them to pick up kills. Players play PVP because they don’t want to play simply against mechanics. PVPers want skill to be the defining characteristic of their fights. Bring depth and skill to the class and to people reacting to the class. Of course, changing the stealth durations will require more balancing with class survivability, damage, and traits. As I have outlined, the class reduces complex decisions for all players involved and that simply is not good game design. Please go back to the drawing board and take another look at the Thief class.

If you read this far, thank you! You’re a trooper. I know it was lengthy but game balance is very complex and understanding the fundamentals is important. Thanks so much for your time and I hope you learned something.

Guild Wars 2 could go to this model, but it would take massive rebalancing. I don’t think it’s viable as every class is meant to be able to do everything. As you can see, lots of emphasis is put on deciding WHY, WHEN, and HOW to implement stealth in your game. As Anet seems to have bolted on stealth to jump on the bandwagon, they missed out on a great deal of this planning phase. So what could Anet do?

Of the two things that Anet could do, normalizing and lowering stealth durations is the best option. In my opinion the Mesmer is very well balanced as far as stealth. It simply acts as a way to throw off your enemy for a second, reposition yourself a bit, and reengage while possibly dodging a spell. If you engaged something you shouldn’t have then it probably won’t save you. Their stealths sit at around 3 seconds (the best amount of time in my opinion, they should all be exactly 3) and their elite is 5 seconds and does nothing but stealth. They also get no bonuses when stealthing which keeps it from becoming even more unbalanced. Remove the ability to increase stealth duration and it would be perfect. The low time means that you can’t use stealth to endlessly to analyze potential targets and completely ignore fights that you can’t win. Low duration also reduces the amount of time you’re able to wait out your burst potential. Abusing stealthed movement is at a minimum with low duration and makes it only useful for slight repositioning not outright quitting a fight. It still gives the first strike advantage, but as I’ll discuss below allows for more tactical decisions and skill from both players. This makes short untargetability, first strike, and repositioning the benefits of stealth and still makes it very powerful.

Increasing the number of untargeted spells is a great way to mitigate stealth’s benefits to a simply deceptive role. Smite is a MOBA with only untargeted spells. Everything is a skill shot. They have one character, Loki, who has a relatively short stealth. He can really only use it for escape juking and quick engagements from the jungle because if you try to use it in full view of your enemy they will just CC where you disappeared from and hit you with everything anyways. This brings a great tactical element to stealth and AOEs as it gives you the ability to make more decisions in response to a stealth. In Guild Wars 2 there are two things preventing this from being viable at mitigating stealth. Dodge rolling in stealth and delayed AOEs. Very few AOE spells are instant cast making the ability to react to a stealth and hit them quickly impossible. On top of that dodge rolling makes it so that you can just avoid the AOE and stay stealthed. The best way to balance this is to make dodge break stealth. This plays out very nicely on the battlefield in regards to short stealths.

Let’s say a Mesmer decides to hit her torch 4 and enters a 3 second stealth. The enemy has a few options. Blow a defensive cool down and absorb the burst, try to hit the Mesmer with AOE to deal damage or CC to keep pressure on, if they have stealth they can stealth second and just get to have the first strike advantage when the Mesmer leaves stealth, or do nothing and absorb the re-engagement or let the Mesmer leave combat but have their cool downs up for the next time they need them. Let’s say the enemy decides to blow an AOE and drops it right on the Mesmer’s head. Now the Mesmer has a decision to make. Do I blow the dodge roll, leaving stealth and allowing the enemy to have the first strike advantage while I finish my roll animation or do I eat the damage? With long stealths the defensive buff duration won’t last long enough, the CC / damage will be impossible to follow up on, and the enemy can just walk away regardless. There’s no skill or branching decision making to be had. I could easily give more examples of decision making that long stealths eliminate but good skilled and complex decisions that short stealths add.

As you can see this branching decision making adds a lot of skill and complexity to PVP, something that is very good. However, this assumes that stealths have low durations and dodge rolls be adjusted to only allow the dodging of one spell (in this case the AOE) and not complete invulnerability during the entire roll. However, even if the dodge animation makes them completely invulnerable like is currently the case the enemy still baited out a dodge roll making that one less available to them later. I have several issues with dodge as currently implemented however but that’s another story. Let’s leave it at I think all buffs to endurance pool size and regeneration should be removed from everything and it should be normalized amongst all classes and dodge should only stop one attack when you hit the button choosing amongst the first to hit you.