Guild Wars 2

Gern.2978:

Second, and more importantly, thief has plenty of melee options,

Thief has melee Dagger and Sword. Sword has three melee skills, dagger has 4.

Ranged skills a thief has are Shortbow & Pistol skills. Shortbow has 5, Pistol has 5, plus 1 dagger throwing skill. There’s already more ranged skills than melee skills for thief.

(Underwater it’s 50/50)

Edit: Other than point and shoot, what other moves can a rifle thief offer over the fine martial arts style of a melee staff? A staff can offer both good ranged, melee and magical skills for thief that we would have never in the past have even conceived.

I’m sorry, but I’m thinking this nerf was a good one. You could essentially run builds where conditions were irrelevant against you because you could cleanse them so easily. Stealth has largely been a get out of jail free card for wayyyyy too many thieves. Stealth is an important mechanic for thieves, but it shouldn’t be the only thing you rely on to survive. Burst, stealth, cleanse…rinse and repeat was all too many people did on thief. That is still a decently viable strat and the trait is still good for people trying to utilize stealth a lot, but the nerf balances it a little, opens up other build options, and also increases counterplay to stealth. I’m completely okay with that.

Right now, I’m absolutely loving the condition removal with tricks along with the heal boost to withdrawal. I’m running a build a lot now with Withdraw(chill/immob/crip 1), Shadowstep(33), Haste(1), X, Dagger Storm(1) and S/x(1). I could easily add Roll for Initiative for more condi removal.

So those of you thinking that thieves are unplayable are being ridiculous. Adapt. Ok, so maybe going into stealth every 4 seconds and cleansing conditions for 4 seconds and going back into combat isn’t as viable as it was before. Deal. Add some toughness, learn to dodge roll effectively and use positioning, tweak your builds and play style and move on. You can still use stealth and deal with conditions just fine. You just have to have a plan for dealing with CC condis as well. It’s just not ezmode to remove condis with stealth anymore. That’s a good thing and if it’s too hard for people their difficulty ceiling is set pretty low.

You already get the game mode for free, its not unreasonable to require the expansion for extra options

Kadsik.9281:

don’t make me regret it.

I’ve seen a similar sentiment before. People who say “if my profession gains an elite specialization that does x and y I will stop playing”. I do not understand that position at all. The elite specialization that a profession gets has zero influence on how the core profession plays so you can just keep playing without the elite specialization as you have for the past years. Furthermore, in the future there will be more elite specializations. As a final note, them getting staffs is far far from confirmed.

Elite specs are supposed to bring NEW playstyles on the table. Anyone who thinks the elite should do the same old stuff without bringing any changes, is going to be almost guaranteed to get disappointed. Like Diovid pointed out – if you want to keep doing the same old stuff, nothing’s keeping you from it. The elite specs are aimed for people who want to explore some new aspects of the class. There’s a reason why they basically give a new class name. Think of them like advanced class from other games. I’m pretty sure druid isn’t going to feel the same as ranger.. but I’m looking forward to seeing how it’s done and what it offers.

Anonymouse.4760:

Maugetarr.6823:

This is interesting, but it runs against how i always thought thief fights should go. I liked the old FG because it allowed you to front load an extra dodge and had good return in protracted fights even without vigor (1 dodge every 7 seconds without it). This let it be useful for both bursty and brawler style combat (as much as thief can be a brawler at least). Your change still eliminates the initial extra dodge and with how short fights seem to be going with all the damage flying around, we need that front end back. I would leave ES where it is and replace FG entirely with something that gave you back 5 endurance on a crit with 1 second icd. This would mean you could push your endurance regen up to 13.75, but only if you stay aggressive. This allows for blocks, blinds, range, and evades to successfully counter play the thief. It also limits dodge spamming without really attacking. While this doesn’t quite give back the upfront dodges we had either, I think it’s a decent balance.

I really like this concept, but after the vigor nerf we’d need a better endurance return to bring Acrobatics closer to where it was post patch. I also think having a higher endurance return on a higher ICD would be more reliable then 5 on a 1 second icd.

edit: higher, not lower ICD (lol)

Yeah, more on a higher CD would be reliable, but I feel an aggressive thief should be rewarded more. As far as (5) more endurance per second (theoretical max), when you combine that with ES+FG, you could get a high enough regen for a dodge every 3.63 seconds, so the value seemed fair in my mind. In practice, it would probably be an average of the max and the min (a little over 4.5 seconds) and fluctuate depending on player dodging skill and aggressiveness. SA has always promoted a bit more of a sit back and watch defense while acro has been a forward moving defense. I’d like to keep that going.

Anonymouse.4760:

1. Feline Grace and Endless Stamina are buffed and combined into one trait, it would now grant vigor on dodge and improve vigor potency to 150% but no more endurance restored on dodge.. If these changes are made I would also recommend increasing the amount of vigor received on successful dodge to 5 seconds but also increase the internal cooldown to 6 seconds. This would allow for two things: The first being that the way the trait functions right now with such a small amount of vigor and low internal cooldown it promotes using your dodges up rapidly in order to maintain vigor uptime ( which if the current potency stays the same ) an acrobatics thief cannot afford to do. Secondly it would allow for more rewarding boonstrip counter play, since you are stripping a bigger amount and the thief would theoretically have to go longer without vigor. Mesmers, I’m thinking of you here.

This is interesting, but it runs against how i always thought thief fights should go. I liked the old FG because it allowed you to front load an extra dodge and had good return in protracted fights even without vigor (1 dodge every 7 seconds without it). This let it be useful for both bursty and brawler style combat (as much as thief can be a brawler at least). Your change still eliminates the initial extra dodge and with how short fights seem to be going with all the damage flying around, we need that front end back. I would leave ES where it is and replace FG entirely with something that gave you back 5 endurance on a crit with 1 second icd. This would mean you could push your endurance regen up to 13.75, but only if you stay aggressive. This allows for blocks, blinds, range, and evades to successfully counter play the thief. It also limits dodge spamming without really attacking. While this doesn’t quite give back the upfront dodges we had either, I think it’s a decent balance.

2. This combination of minor traits would allow fluid strikes to be restored or another new minor trait ⁵ that was on par with shadows resilience to be introduced. My suggestion would be Pain Response as the new minor ⁵ and replace its spot in the adept tree with Power Of Inertia ( which would also keep might stacking builds around. ) since the new acrobatics survivability is so dependent on vigor this would allow thieves to take vigorous recovery and still have adequate condition cleanse.

Interesting, but I dislike skills that operate on getting hit (pain response and HtC), and i wanted to leave the others split anyway. I’ll address more condi removal later.

3. Swindler’s Equilibrium is made a Grandmaster in place of “Don’t Stop” or “Assassin’s Reward” so that a thief could take for example, Swindler’s Equilibrium and Hard to Catch.

I like this. I can’t remember what tier other professions’ movement impairing traits were put in, but changing SE for DS seems fine to me.

4. Guarded Initiation: This trait needs to be completely reworked. It should function by granting resistance when struck while your health is below 75% Guarded Initiation would be synergistic with a different trait called Pain Response so that when you were hit at or below 75% you’d be cleansed of damaging conditions and receive 5 seconds of resistance. If these changes were made Guarded Initiation could be used over Hard To Catch. The only issue with this is that it would only be effective if you had pain response. Therefore I don’t recommend this change unless also following suggestions #2 and #3 of making Pain Response the ⁵ minor trait AND making Swindler’s Equilibrium grandmaster because as I said before Guarded Initiation and Hard To Catch should never be picked over Swindler’s as a sword thief.

This is an alright change. As I said, I don’t like traits that trigger on getting hit because it takes control away from the player. If i were going to put condi removal in the acro line, I would make upper hand remove a condi on successful dodge while still having the initiative regen and the same icd. This would actually make it a hard decision between where SE should be moved and a solid condi removal in the line.

If all these changes were made we would have an adequate amount of dodges, decent condition cleanse, and still be able to play with swindler’s equilibrium — It adds up to be a trait line that can compete with shadow arts or critical strikes for viability, and brings back that old s/d play style we’ve grown to love with skill based dodges and more counterplay.

I like the discussion about how we could get somewhere between where we were and where we are now.

Edit: Thought about it for a little after and wanted to change one small thing: endless stamina should be rolled into the current feline grace, and fluid strikes can return as the trait I suggested with endurance on crit.

I’m getting really tired of the " you must be ‘x’ size to be a ‘guild’ " mentality. It’s bullkitten. A guild consisting of a husband and wife is no less a guild than a guild of 500 people that don’t know jack kitten about 90% of their guildmates.

There is no reason why a guild of 2 cannot have a hall. They have to earn it the same way the bigger guilds earn theirs by fighting off the mordrem, fine. I’m perfectly ok with that. They’ll upgrade it distinctly slower because they are smaller. That’s perfectly fine too. As long as they are willing to work just as hard as a larger guild, there is no reason their size should be the barring factor.

Frankly, I don’t see why people always try to defend a company from player feedback. If players think there is something wrong with new content, or the price of new content, they have every right to make themselves heard.

It is, in fact, to ANet’s benefit to read and consider this feedback. Whether they act on it is another story altogether, but they certainly shouldn’t ignore it, nor should other players try to suppress it.

I also think the title of this thread is misleading, because it implies that all veteran players, or at least a lot of them, feel entitled to extras simply because they are veterans. In reality, the situation is quite the opposite. I think a lot of veteran players are unhappy simply because its the new players who are getting extras simply for being new players, while veterans get nothing to offset that obvious discrepancy.

All we want is balance. We want the price point and incentives of the HoT upgrade to be fair to both new and veteran players. Right now, it is glaringly in favor of new players, who get the base game for free in addition to the expansion, while veteran players only get the expansion on its own for the same price. If some people can’t see an issue with that, I’m afraid they are simply choosing to be ignorant rather than fair.

Just like it can be argued that veterans shouldn’t feel entitled to extras just because they are veterans, the same argument can be made that new players shouldn’t be entitled to extras just because they are new. If the scales are not balanced on both sides, then one side or the other is always going to end up feeling burned or neglected.

Across all characters, I have played for 1374 hours and 50 minutes over the past 1021 days. I paid $60 for the base game.

4 cents an hour. That how much of my money Anet has taken while I played their game.

You might think that is excessive, I some of you reading this have played more. Much, much more. After you have judged me, for a moment, lets say I only played for 1 hour on friday and saturday. Thats 21 cents per hour.

There is NOTHING I can do with 4 cents. I would need 50 times that just to enjoy a Soda. For the price of a soda, I: “Veteran Player” – could have enjoyed 20 hours of Guild Wars 2.

How my 4 cents an hour pays for this opportunity to escape each day to a persistant living online world is beyond the scope of my imagination, its just one of those things I am going to have to take for granted because trying to wrap my head around it hurts worse then trying to wrap my head around the idea that I, “Veteran Player” am somehow entitled to more then a new player, because 3 years ago I shelled out $50. I lose that much money a year in my couch. I find that much money a year on the ground. Last week I found a quarter stuck to the bottom of my shoe. Thats like 6 and a half hours of GW2 paid for.

Anet owes me NOTHING. in fact, laid out like this… yea, I pretty much owe Anet. if I have to pay $50 today to uninstall GW2 that would bring the cost of my entertainment up to 11 cents an hour. We can go back and do more Soda math, or you can get the point. In case you didnt:

If HoT adds absolutely nothing to the game, I will have gotten my money’s worth. So have you, “Veteran Player”.

Many.8419:

You can’t take seriously any anet promoted youtuber/streamer like bogotter or wooden potatoes. They can’t be trusted because they benefit from advertising this game.

Why judge people based on whether or not they are promoted by Anet instead of based on the points they are making? If you disagree with the points then by all means, disagree with them but focus on what is said instead of on who is saying it.

Ah, I will hold my judgement until we receive more info about the map reward system. The system has the potential of making mats easier to obtain which should alleviate the grind.

The HoT expansion costs $50, available only bundled with a “free” copy of the core game.

When the core game goes on sale, it costs $10. We can thus pretty fairly feel that the “freebie” in the bundle is a $10 bonus value.

But the practical upshot for those of us who own the game already is this: by including the core game for “free” ANet has tipped their hand that they’ve effectively padded out the price of the expansion by 10$ (the cost of the core game at its lowest price) over what it might otherwise need to be.

You know what else costs $10? Extra character slots. Which is exactly what current players of the game do want and need with the expansion.

If ANet can afford to “give away” one “free” $10 value item with the $50 purchase of HoT, why can’t they do it with another? The value, monetarily, is the same.

This, I think, is why so many of us feel so slighted. Getting the $10 value of the core game is nice for new players, but it’s a thumbing of the nose at existing players who ANet must know would not want to spend $10 in that way. It leaves current (and often very loyal and long-term) players feeling like they pretty much have to subsidize the bonus value being offered to new players, while they themselves are left out in the cold, not given the one thing they really want which, mathematically, is a simple even swap out: an additional character slot.

The idea, certainly, is to generate more income by getting players to spend out on character slots separately. However from the consumer side of things, we can all see that if ANet can afford to give one $10 value freebie that they could just as well give another. It doesn’t make us feel like we are getting a fair value for our money. It makes us feel snubbed, taken advantage of, and resistant to buying anything.

since a new player gets 5 toon slots, is it too much to ask for 1 for someone who already owns the game? id like to make a revenant without paying extra cash/gold or deleting my 80s.

Rising Dusk.2408:

Going to re-post some thoughts I had in another thread since this is the centralized thread for feedback.

Stronghold was a pretty painful experience for me because there were so many people playing and the game apparently thinks I’m so good that I should be able to carry teams who lose 4v3 teamfights. I got in about a dozen games, of those I won about 5.

That said, I would like to clarify my thoughts on the game mode.

• The game lasts long enough, it should not last longer. The game mode already lasts long enough and no ‘victory or death’ mechanic needs be implemented. What should happen, however, is that points gain should be balanced so that once you have a higher score you can’t just turtle until timeout. Winning really should be about progress to killing the lord, so offense.
• There should be increased incentives to kill players. This is a big issue right now. If you wipe the enemy team in your lord room, there is literally nothing gained except a delay to the inevitable. By the time you collect your team or anything after such a win, the enemy has respawned and can charge again. This results in too hard of a snowball effect. There should be increased penalties to death as the game goes on such as longer respawn times or even having a hero spawn for your team after every few kills your team gets.
• Archers are terrible. This whole mechanic is essentially ignored because archers are worthless. They need to do substantially more damage to guards, and guards in general need to be substantially harder to kill by single players.
• Channeling absolutely needs to be interrupted by damage, not just CC. This is important for the health of the game mode. Certain stability-stacking builds can just cap a hero and ignore players and then run off afterwards. The entire purpose of these capture mechanics is to make them a place where a fight takes place because both teams want control of the mechanic.

These, I feel, are the biggest issues in Stronghold right now.

Your points:

1) You don’t want VoD then go on to describe a problem VoD would solve.

2) I agree with you, but a stacking debuff might discourage people from getting into fights – maybe just up the base respawn timer.

3) Archers need to be more relevant – I would prefer they gave players a damage aura (+5% damage per Archer maybe) than became OP themselves.

4) Channeling only being rupted by CC is ESSENTIAL. This game mode isn’t like Temple where the game can be won with zero channels – the resources and heroes are REQUIRED to end the game (imagine a game where you needed to cap the Temple bottom buff to get any points – we’ve all seen groups of players sit down there for 3-5mins with no team capping it). It also encourages taking boon removal.

I’m really surprised to see so many people saying they didn’t fight other players. I was constantly fighting in every match.

Roe.3679:

I’m really surprised to see so many people saying they didn’t fight other players. I was constantly fighting in every match.

Yea, same here. Sounds like a lot of people either avoided PvP because they didn’t understand how the game worked that well or (judging by the tone of many comments here) because they convinced themselves that this game mode was PvE carebear mode and played it that way to reinforce their own cynical narrative.

I’m looking forward to seeing this game mode being available for more than 48 hours so that we can get past all these radical conclusions people are making about a game mode no one is really comfortable playing yet.

cocowoushi.7150:

LanfearShadowflame.3189:

Additionally, I will point out that all of the rest of game is essentially completely solo-able, so there is no reason why very select content should be gated behind grouping.

But why is it a bad thing for some content to require a group? I mean, you can already get dungeon rewards without ever setting foot in the dungeon with PvP tracks. Fractal skins (and tonic) are exclusive to the gameplay mode. Why is that a bad thing to have pure group content?

Because it bars some people from ever experiencing that content. Some people just don’t like grouping, or just prefer to play with 1 or 2 real life people, etc.

It doesn’t affect those that desire to group, so why is it an issue? Why is a bad thing to have options for all player types?

I am not saying to make it easier. Not by any means. In fact, make it harder. Then actually being able to do it solo, duo, or full 5 man is a badge of honor. Then the only barrier to entry is skill, and that’s as it should be.

I would actually like to see them make dungeons and fractals scale-able, or have them reintroduce npc hench. This way people have the option to play how they are comfortable playing. They can choose to pug if they desire, but if they feel uncomfortable because they haven’t done it or done it much, they have the option to just go alone or with a friend or two. Options are not bad things, and it can still remain ‘challenging.’

And before someone screams that MMOs are social games, I will point out that instancing in general is an anti-social model.

Additionally, I will point out that all of the rest of game is essentially completely solo-able, so there is no reason why very select content should be gated behind grouping.

I would like to see it faster, deal with it…

Why do people always overstate the difficulty of GW1?
The vast majority of the game can be more or less AFK:ed.

There is of course also the part about everything becoming easy after a while when people have learned how to do it.

TheBlackLeech.9360:

Vayne.8563:

TheBlackLeech.9360:

Vayne.8563:

TheBlackLeech.9360:

Obtena.7952:

TheBlackLeech.9360:

Obtena.7952:

Extreme.8350:

Rin.1046:

TheBlackLeech.9360:

Rin.1046:

If they keep us entertained throughout, I see no problem with it taking 12 years to defeat all the dragons.

The problem is that they are definitely not keeping me entertained… at all.

12 years of starving for content?

No thanks.

You can’t please everyone.

But Tera online can

He should go play Tera online then. The problem here isn’t the game, it’s the people who think the game should fit their exact needs.

…or maybe I should play the sequel to the original Guild Wars (if it only existed) and not this sorry excuse for a money grabbing cash cow of a MMO we call Guild Wars 2.

No, it really sounds like you should get some sense and stop purposefully expose yourself to something that you obviously can’t stand. If the game doesn’t fit you as a player, don’t throw time/money at it expecting it to change. That’s not a realistic approach.

Do you think I even have a reason to log into Gw2 any more?

I haven’t done so in months.

Its just disappointing to see something you spent so much of your time on go completely belly-up…. and then still refuse to give up.

I liked Gw2 at the start, but only because I forced myself to like it.

I refused to accept the fact that all my preparation was completely wasted on a game that I didn’t like.

It took me a long time to come to grips with it, (i kept thinking things were going to get better) but I’ve long since gotten over it.

Guild Wars 2 is not something I support any more.

But you spend time coming to the forums. Total waste of time if you ask me.

Obviously there are people here who do like it. You don’t. Shrugs. Why leave a game and then come back to complain about walking away from it? Seems to me that that that’s neither constructive, nor particularly helpful even to you.

Hope you find a game you do like. Some of us still like this one.

I feel that if I get enough people to gather up the pitchforks then Anet might actually start caring about their playerbase instead of the dollar signs.

Unless enough people like the game. Which seems to be the case. Anet changes the game to make it what you want, it’s likely to lose some of the people that currently are enjoying the game. The game is what it is and there are people, apparently more than a few of us, who do like it.

Sure it can be improved, but I can pretty much guarantee you it’s not going to do an about face and become the game you want. I think you’re wasting your time. Of course it is your time to waste.

There is an expansion taking shape right now.
What shape it takes has still yet to be determined.

I just hope when it finally does arrive that it brings all of you guys everything you want.
…because it won’t have what I want.

Stand up and voice your opinions now and don’t be pushed around or support a game developer that only decided to push an xpac after the cash well dried up.

You’re deluding yourself.

The shape the expansion takes in isn’t going to change in leaps and bounds. It’s going to change in this skill or that skill. But the PvP thing that they’re creating, that’s been created. The WvW maps, that’s been created.

If you want more dungeons and Anet hasn’t created them, those aren’t being created. If you want mounts and Anet hasn’t created them, those haven’t been created.

So again, what you’re saying changes nothing about the expansion. Maybe it’ll change some balance stuff, but nothing major. Which means either you’ll like what Anet puts out, or you won’t.

Either way, you’re still coming to a game you’ve given up on, that many people are happy with, that you want to change into something else, which might not make those people happy. We do pretty much have a good idea of what this game is and enough people are excited about it.

Details will change. That’s why those of us who like the game are here.

Maybe the Living World and the Living Story didn’t work out the way ANet wanted. They seemed to have wanted a game world where every day was different and non repeated, like the real world. It didn’t work out for them, people didn’t want this. But you should give them credit for trying to do something different than the old standby of no content for 1-2 years and then an expansion, rinse and repeat like the other games.

So, there wasn’t an expansion for a long time because they were trying something else. They deserve consideration for that at least.

Necromancers necroing a thread about Necromancers

It cannot be more meta than this

Sounds like you’re opposed to the idea of a meta in general. I can sympathise with the sentiment. As far as I’m concerned, meta is for simple people who can’t think for themselves, and a sign of imbalance in a game.
Sadly, it has become intended design over the years.