Guild Wars 2

I was extremely optimistic about this living world nonsense when I first heard about it back in may. I stopped playing guild wars 3 months after launch mostly due to not having any friends of mine playing it any more. However a couple buddies of mine decided it would be a good time to give the game another go due to the thought they were going to “churn out a lot of new content” due to the expansion of there living world teams. My first thought was wow that could be really awesome think of the things they brought to us when the game first came out south sun and 2 rather fun festivals loaded with cool stuff.

Here where the problem is. Nothing they have come out with is permanent. We haven’t seen a new zone, a zone getting reworked, anything at all. In fact we were told around june time that the content was going to be more permanent due to a larger living story team. But we still haven’t (excluding the cometic rework of the great collapse).

Looking back it makes me wonder, I bet anything south sun, winters day, and the mad king event were all completed pre launch. Just look at the evidence, have we seen anything near that large since december? Not even close! SAB is the only exception but its not hard to churn out an 8bit world.

Another thing the living world was suppose to do was evolve the world. Things were suppose to change the world “forever”. A good example would be the karka attack on lions arch destroying the tower or the mad king blowing up the lions arch statue in order to get into lions arch. Well once again haven’t seen any of that since december. And whats the kicker to that? The lions statue is back!??! out of thin air? why? so we can recycle the mad king event for this year. Its a complete joke! I remember the interview with colin johanson talking about players being able to say thing like “I remember the lion statue that used to be in lions arch”. Guess they were to lazy to stick to that.

The point is, the living world system NEEDS to get scraped and just do expansion they can’t keep up and all there doing is hyping the kitten out of content to keep people interested. Our next “big” update is a “rework” of tequatl that just makes him a bit harder and adds a couple steps, and aLFG tool that should have been in the game pre launch. This is such a joke, anyone with a brain should realize this. Guild wars 1 expansion every 6 months was way better due to people getting all these features and more (new zones, story, skills, professions).

I can’t be the only one who thinks this living world system is all a gimic.

Content that will dissapear from the game should not attempt to achieve grandeur. They will only fail, and that focus should have been put into something more permanent.

Adding more locations with living world is not a good idea, as the problem is that many of the current areas aren’t populated enough.

My suggestion is to periodically come with small overhauls, adding something new to an area, and that the living world is the story of how this change came to be.

The starter areas are great, but most of the other areas are not very well made. They have less beautiful stuff, and they have a lack of locations that aren’t filled with homogeneously spaced red mobs.

Areas that have few locations with friendlies or yellows are depressing. They are claustrophobic. They need green pockets of air (friendly npc’s).

Higher level areas tends to get more difficult because mobs have more skills. This is a good way to increase difficulty.

Higher levels areas also have fewer green and yellow npc’s, there are few locations without red mobs, and they respawn faster. This is a horrible way to increase difficulty, and they simply make the areas depressing.

Example: Firebreak Fort

Firebreak Fort in Mount Maelstrom is anything but well defended. The 2 normal risen mobs that spawn near the siouth gatee will kill the guards protecting the entrance , and they’d kill anyone inside if they’d ventured there. This fortification is a good candiate to make some alterations to.

Act1:
Firebreak fort and the surrounding areas have been overwhelmed by risen. The survivors have set out camp to to the north of the fort. Merchants, repair, trading post and bank npc’s are dead along with most of the guards. A powerful necromancer servant of zhaitan, is responsible for this uprise in risen. By killing Risen, he will eventually show up and you must fight him. By succeding you will only weaken him, but it will reduce the number of risen for a certain period (and give some nice rewards).

Act2:
The necromancer were unsuccesful and decided to retreat (you’ll may meet him again later). Firebreak fort has been reclaimed, but it lacks proper defense and there are a large number of risen lurking outside the walls. The fort is to be improved and there’s a series of smaller events related to this.
Caravans are coming in with supply to repair damage dealt to the base, and new recruits are arriving and they are in need of safe passage to the base. Also soldiers needs more training, and there are events related to soldiers going on patrols to gain combat experience, and players need to help them stay alive.

Prologue:
After Act2 there will be some changes

- All damages to the fort have been repaired (possibly improved and better looking).
- Risen will be gone from the vicinity.
- The two entrance guards at each entrance will be veterans, and there will also be a few veterans inside the base.
- There will be a safe passage from Fort Firebreak to the base right to the south, with a patrol containing one veteran and two normal npc’s.
- A new event will be available, where some soldiers at Fort Firebreak will launch a raid into the risen infested murkvale bog, south of the fort. The npc group consists of 2 veterans and 4 normal soldiers. They can handle most encountered fights on their own, but to continue between fights, all npc’s must be rezzed, and atleast one of the normal npc’s will tend to die, which imposes the need for a player.

Dear Arena.net. Im enjoing with every GW2 update and find it interesting to expect something new every 2 weeks.
But. Last patches showed a lack of testing in developement. By the way the most of content obliges to finish it in 2 weeks and causes some stress to people with work and education.
I dont wanna say that your “content making” speed is a bad thing. Dont you think it will be better if you increase the gap to 4 weeks (for example) so people can enjoy the update with more time to complete the achievements and so you have more time on testing and developement in general?

There’s nothing quite like waking early, smelling the fresh morning dew, grabbing a piping hot cup of coffee and logging in to Guild Wars 2 to watch the Sunless rise…

Pretty much everyone. It’s pathetic that Tequatl is more dangerous than his old boss.

Actually, he was more dangerous before the upgraded fight, too.

The zone lvl is irrelevant as you scaled down and end game content is rightfully not contained to max lvl zones. That would not be right for GW2 at all.

Should it be Teq? Yes.
- his revamp is being bundled ito the current living story and will be explained later
- this is a test case for other bosses. The current ones needed a reva,p and at least 1-2 needed to be challenging
- no reason to suggest new dragons wont be like this or balanced somewhere between teq and old bosses. The longevity of this encounter will dictate that no doubt

Remember, this should have existed at the beginning. Face rolling bosses are fine to have in the game…but not every boss should be that way

seems to be balanced for full-exotic geared lvl80s

While I agree that the cooperation demanded by this event is a pipe dream for most PUGs, I think this is at least equally to blame. I saw someone yesterday comment that Tequatl now makes Zhaitan look like a lowly common Son of Svanir.

IT HAS TO BE INSTANCED. It is impossible to coordinate massive amounts of players that have only been taught to spam “1”. Since launch everything open world has been spamming “1” in a zerg. Now all of a sudden you expect them to know how to actually play the game?

Please Anet. Make instanced content this hard. The place where players actually want this kind of challenge. Even if you make it like a raid (25-30 man groups) please make it instanced.

You can already see all the threads asking for a nerf. Open world players dont want this kind of challenge.

Lastly, rewards need to be addressed. They need to be TRADEABLE. Even if the new tequatl was way easier people would stop doing him once they got the skin they wanted. For all the people who dont use those stats or dont like the skin, he is already pointless. The only way to make money off him is to get an impossible precursor or the extremely low chance at the mini. Tradable rewards are key to longevity.

Guys, Tequatl came out YESTERDAY!
And it has ALREADY BEEN BEATEN (see here: http://www.twitch.tv/flickky/c/2951634)

Seriously stop complaining about it being too hard. 90% of people still have no idea what to do.
Give it time.
If you watch the video, sure they had some good coordination but there was lots of room for improvement (several people could not dodge/jump the waves).

And it DOES NOT REQUIRE VOICE COMM! Just people who are skilled and know how to react. Warriors: bring your warbanners. Eles: bring your icebow/fiery greatsword. 90% of the time the commander was just calling for cleanses and more ice bows lol. This is something players should be able to figure out themselves.
Ever try a dungeon for the first time? Ever try a dungeon for the first time with voice comm? It’s much easier of course especially when everyone is learning, but it is NOT necessary.

Stop calling for nerf and instead learn, adapt (l2play).

Let matters take their course , people will learn and the experience will be much better. You don’t need to beat any content after 1 day after release did you ? This will be permanent, relax.

Ohai, I think I just need to get all this frustration off my chest. Otherwise my head might explode, and that wouldn’t be pretty.

Generally, day to day, I play GW2 with my boyfriend – this is great. We’re both skilled players and can rely on each other in any combat situation. Woopdedoo for us! So. Tequatl’s update was released as the 17th, and I celebrated because no longer would I be a GTA V widow, wandering the expanse of GW2 alone – I would have all the time in the world to defeat Tequatl. Yay!

I love tough content. Liadri, SAB etc, these things that have people up in arms about difficulty, it really doesn’t bother me. The reason why is that previously these things have been Solo, the only person I needed to rely upon in these situations was myself.

Now I know there will be some saying ‘Well hold up a sec Aisina, this is an MMO you’re playing woman, if you wanna play solo, go find yourself a single player RPG!’ – Which is fair enough, however, multiplayer hard content in this game (such as it is) allows you to choose your team mates. Nobodys just going to wander into my dungeon or fractal and start aggroing mobs left right and centre while the rest of us stand there going ‘what the?!’ – Neither am I going to 4 man this content because player 5 wants to leech the reward easy. “You go ahead guys, Im just going to sit here and let you do the hard work.”

Do you see where I am going with this? Maybe.

My point is. No matter how much I gear my character towards defeating Tequatl, no matter how many Powerful Potions of Undead Slaying I purchase, or spicy mushrooms I force down myself. Its not going to make one jot of difference.
Even if I bring lets say… 15 of my closests friends and guild mates and we magically all make it into the same instance, we all bring our potions and mushrooms and BiS gear. We all sit on the same voice server, and coordinate. We still don’t make a difference – because Sir Herpalot is busy firing his hylek turret at Risen 20 feet behind him.

Even if you coordinate players on the turrets to be on the same voice communication, you can guarantee that Sir Herpalot and friends (he has many) still manage to steal them mid fight.

Ok wall of text, you can see why I needed to get this off my chest.

Just… argh. Do I have any magic suggestions other than putting Captain Teqqy in an instance where me and Sir Herpalot + company never shall meet? No.

Stress. So much stress.

./end

I’d just like to be one of the few people to say thank you ANET for giving us a lofty challenge. I think this is great for the game, and I’ll explain why:

1. We are too used to ‘akitteng’ content and boss mobs.

I think people are upset that this is so hard at least in part because they’re so used to setting up at a safe spot for the boss mob fight, heading to the kitchen for a drink, and coming back to grab their dragon chest and loot. Making these fights something worthy of a server working together and coordinating is a GOOD thing

2. It’s a freaking DRAGON.

I remember the first time I killed Teq, being completely underwhelmed. I was totally impressed with the three dragons, their animations, and their graphics, but was blown away at how stupidly facepalmingly easy the fights were. Jormag was annoying, but it wasn’t hard. Anyone remember The Sleeper from EQ? That was an epic battle and people still talk about the first time it was killed.

3. This is a great guild challenge.

Since there isn’t raid content in this game, I think there should be at LEAST a few dragons in the game that take mass coordination to defeat, and that often means guild “raid”. Not in a guild? then join one! is your guild not strong enough yet? then work towards it! I don’t have time for people who say “well it should be pugged, it’s not fair that a guild who coordinated on TS3 was the only team who defeated something”. Why the hell shouldn’t it be like that? Why does everything have to be so stupidly easy that any group of level 60-80 half-geared, half-afk people can beat it?

4. The content has only been out for a day people.

Lets hold off on all the QQ’ing and the “ANET, this is too hard” threads until we give it at least a week. One server has already beat him, so why can’t the rest?

5. If you’re not willing to work towards something and coordinate, don’t play the content, or find a group of people who will work with you.

Don’t want to download teamspeak? sorry, no sympathy. Don’t want to join or work with a large guild? again, too bad. If you don’t want to work towards it, go back to farming FGS.

The ONLY thing I would say about the Teq rising patch that I think should be changed is the reward, ie. loot. From what I’ve heard you get a number of chests and mats, but that’s not really all that impressive when those items can pretty easily be attained from doing a couple of the easier events. I think that there should be something concrete as a reward. For example:
- Unique precursor crafting component (remember having to get the red scales from Naggy?)
- New Teq weapon skin (not RNG) or a token towards one (with 10 tokens traded in for a skin)
- Mystic Clovers

Give us a reward on par with the level of effort! Bring back the olden days of epic dragon slaying raids!

Sorrow’s Furnace was just a smidge above 75%

Boo hoo hoo ;-(

I fought Tequatl and we didn’t win and I wasn’t rewarded with lots and lots of cool loot. Therefore my time was completely and utterly WASTED.

Oh wait..
no it wasn’t…
I HAD A LOAD OF FUN!!!

:-D

Not to be a total jerk here, but maybe just don’t do this event? If you don’t like it?

I have no interest in high-level Fractals, so I skip them. I don’t want to spend hours and hours in dungeons, so I avoid Arah Explorable.

I’m not a big MMO guy, I’ve only played the GW games, but I’m consistently surprised by people who seem to complain because they feel the need to do EVERYTHING. If you aren’t enjoying being a completionist, stop being a completionist!

You just gotta change the mentality. This is what we asked for. A World boss you can’t just “Zerg”. Rather, he’s a boss that requires thinking. Every person fighting him needs a role. Using the cannon. Guarding a cannon. Clearing adds and tendrels, and fighting the dragon itself. Also, you can’t just sit in place and fight. The fight actually utilizes GW2 combat mechanics. You have to jump, dodge, and use blast finishers to stay alive. Teamspeak is probably also a must.

While my own attempts failed, it was painfully obvious why the attempt failed. People were trying to zerg it, and 40 dead bodies piled up around the dragon and just sat their being useless rather then paying the 1 silver to Waypoint back to the fight. The cannon gunners were kitten too and were not stipping the boon. In essence, in these fights people are doing everything wrong and not approaching it as it is intended. Treat the boss as a BOSS and then maybe you can kill it.

Oxe.6142:

daimasei.4091:

Oxe.6142:

Did you just insult Jennifer Hale? Them’s fighting words……

Nope, I didn’t insulted anyone but yes, the voice she made is one of the worst in the game and no, I don’t mean she did a bad acting, just the voice she chose to do is awful IMO.

The best thing you could do for yourself and the rest of the GW2 community at this point is to delete all your toons, abandon or cancel your account and leave without saying a word. You are not wanted here.

Wow. Just, Wow.
I don’t have an opinion on this either way, but …
If you were trying to be funny, it wasn’t.
If you are serious, please take the Fanboy-ism down from 11. He’s well within his rights to voice his opinion of the voice acting. In fact, he was very civil about it.

Back to topic:

I’ve tried both Human and Sylvari Necro’s. I rather enjoyed the level of customization for the sylvari. With proper gearing and appearance you can get a very distinct character. The animations killed it for me. The movement of the race, just didn’t fit in with my concept of the character. Delete.

The Human was too generic. The armor models looked good and well proportioned, but I again it didn’t feel right. Delete.
Although I have seen other player’s Human Necromancers that look awesome.

I ended up creating a Norn male power Necro of largest size. My favorite 80, by far.
Started a Charr Minion Master for PvE only, and loving the look and personal story.

To each, his own.

This probably won’t happen but it’s what I wanted in a necromancer.
I don’t really wan’t minions but I think it would be cool if when you kill a mob (has to be a mob that rangers can have as pets) you can bring it back to life until it dies for a second time. It could be like if it dies for a second time it turns to ash because it was only brought back due to necromancy.
just a thought. I would like to hear feedback to see what others think.

So the general consensus is less about buffing Lifesteal, and more of a rework of the mechanics as a whole that allows it to work without being horribly broken? That was basically the conclusion that I’d come to, which made me wonder what players wanted; a rework at this point in time seems extremely unlikely, given the current track record of not doing sweeping changes, and I thought/think most players realize that.

Let me make this simple.

99.9% of the content in Guild Wars 2 is Easy Mode

For over a year now those of us that like a challenge have not found it in Guild Wars 2. Since this patch .1% of the content in Guild Wars 2 actually is designed for us that like a challenge.

If you don’t want challenge you have 2 options. 1: Play the rest of the content in Guild Wars 2, or 2: Play FreeRealms. That might be more your speed.

It’s about time that we have a HARD dragon to kill. The fact he died in the first day actually means he’s not only killable but he might be too easy. I spent 2 years trying to kill the Glimmerking in DAOC before we finally killed him. A hard fight is a remembered fight.

It’s only been 24 hours, folks. Many players, along with myself, were dorking around behind Tequatl trying to get the Tail accomplishment.

Things will coalesce with time. Expecting elite-level teamwork from public players after just a couple attempts is unrealistic and naive. Try to be real about this and keep it all in perspective.

The new boss, designed to be significantly harder and replace the previously waaaay-too-easy boss, should be killable in 3.5 minutes? Are you absolutely sure you want to stick with that story?

Jayce.5632:

DS will always be seen as a means to bunker things since it serves as a replacement of all the normal tools used to bunker. As for Vampirism, they could allow siphons to persist through DS and go from there. No regen, no heals, including wob or blood minion’s main siphon. Anet could solve two problems at once. It should help to increase survivability unless of course that even with the low return on vampirism proves too strong with DS.

It’s certainly fair to say that Vampirism will never be enough for us to bunker until it heals us through DS.

mobility + avoidance + invulnerability >base stats

We were suppose to be the non-escape, pure attrition class. When we get in a fight, we win, or die. Or the other get’s bored N runs off.

The way that lost/most necro’s go glass cannon, stack condi & hope they die before they focus/CC/Train us prob gives the hint that… Were not ‘the’ bunker class, by a country mile. Hell even our ‘weakness’ on DS, means you got to go hug the scary thing, and it’s what 40% duration of thief’s auto-attack on weap? With a longer ICD than DS CD…

If the idea was, we magically steal life back with vamp, and have a nice big EHP… well… 25 per hit, don’t other class’s get over 200 per hit without a trait cost? (As well as 100% regen while sitting in water).

Anyway, we don’t bunker the big damage, due to lack of avoiding CC + lest dodge/block/invul of any class.
Were also behind on the small constant dam. Actually I think a Guard can remove more damage from others with protection up time, than we can remove from ourself with armor/DS/Vit. (DS also is 1% blocks, so getting hit for 1 damage still takes 1% your max life, meaning it’s not really ‘double’ our life, even excluding decay per second, and the time it takes to fill up with LifeForce)

Arianna.7642:

What exactly do people want lifesteal to do? I will attest to it not being of the highest caliber currently, but is the Necro community expecting a 15 point investment into Blood to instantly make them invincible in a 1v1 scenario?

I obviously don’t speak for everyone, but after playing as a blood necro and only a blood necro for the past year, I want sustain that’s at – a minimum – on par with the sustain of what guardians and eles have in this game. IMHO a blood necro should have the greatest sustain of all; obviously at the expense of damage, of course.

I don’t want a one-hit-kill or invincibility, but neither am I satisfied with life stealing mechanics that only scale +6 points if going full healing power, a trait line that doesn’t work when using our profession-specific mechanic, is very situational, and requires a light armor class to become a front-line meleeist to achieve their sustain (though I’ll admit I’ve found that last point kind of a fun change-of-pace).

Have I made it work? Yes. Has it been fun jumping through all the hoops to make it work while watching other classes achieve better sustain with less effort? Not particularly.

Furthermore, it’s rather one-dimensional. I’m going to make comparisons to GW1. For those who would counter, “They’re different games. Get over it and move on!” my counter-counter is there’s nothing wrong with using proven mechanics from other games; even more so when the game you borrow from is the direct predecessor of the current game under discussion.

Life stealing in GW2 is – as Rennoko put it – binary:

“Hit the guy, get some HP, hit the guy again, get HP. Fails to be an interesting mechanic.”

Not unlike Colin Johanson’s famous I swung a sword… quote.

Sure, in GW1 you had your straight-forward binary life steals. Vampiric Gaze, for example; cast it and life steal a set amount of health. But there were spells which – both singly and in synergy with other skills – brought greater depth and variety to life stealing mechanics. A hex which would life steal every time an afflicted foe hit you, instead (Insidious Parasite). Other examples include spells which would steal health but also provide different effects based on specific criteria:

• gaining energy if suffering from a condition (Angorodon’s Gaze),
• inflicting weakness if the target foe is attacking (Blood of the Aggressor),
• bleeding yourself if your health is above 50% (Blood Drinker),
• stealing double if the target’s health is above 50% (Lifebane Strike),
• hexing a foe to cause their next spell to fail while stealing health when they cast (Mark of Subversion),
• life siphoning while removing boons (Strip Enchantment),
• stealing health from a minion (Taste of Death),
• DoT hexes which would heal the necro while degen-ing the target (Life Siphon and Life Transfer)

These are just a sampling of the variety of life stealing skills available to a necromancer in GW1. What’s more is this doesn’t even include a discussion of how those skills could be combined to synergize with other skills to even greater effect. A quick example; steal health while bleeding yourself with Blood Drinker, then follow up with more life siphoning using Angorodon’s Gaze while gaining energy due to suffering the self-inflicted bleeding.

And don’t even get me started on the complete lack of being able to use your health as a resource as existed in GW1 with skills like Blood Renewal, etc.

As I said, I don’t want invincibility as a blood necro. I believe, though, there exists a middle ground in that huge gulf between binary life siphoning and +6 extra health stealing when maxing the healing power stat as exists in GW2 and the richness, complexity, subtlety, variety, and flat-out superior sustain that was afforded blood necros in GW1.

That’s what I want.

I love the necromancer, and every bit of it. Although there is a long way to go to make him a good class, I just like the feel of it. I never liked boons much anyways, so necromancer was my first choice. The thing I really like, which I just couldn’t find in other classes, is the build variaty. It’s basically anything goes. I switch builds every week or so, and they all kinda work. They are not the wombocombo builds like mesmers or eles or warriors have, but they all work. Also, I love the feeling of just calling down the thunder with all the conditions we have. Bursting 20stacks bleeding, chilled cripple and poison just feels nice. And the deathshroud, where my little asura shouts “I AM DEATH INCARNATE!” is just awesome.