Guild Wars 2

Torolan.5816:

…I think Anet knew what they were trying with this approach, it´s really not their fault people did not like it..

No, it is ENTIRELY ANets fault. It is their job to figure out what the majority of this game wants to generate enough sales to keep the company running.

Coulter.2315:

I want the content maintained as was seen in the beta, I haven’t enjoyed PvE this much in such a long time. I would be bitterly disappointed if complaints from people, who haven’t put much effort in, derail the trend to engaging content.

You can say you’re casual and want it to cater for you but you have so much already please just give us this – if you try a bit harder and learn what your class can do I’m sure you can enjoy it with me (its not even that hard really).

I hope anet stick to their guns and keep the game fresh.

You’re missing the point, I don’t want to try harder, i want to come home after a hard day of real life, sit on my pc for 2 hours and relax and unwind with some friends doing stuff that don’t stress, or strain me. I try hard already in life, in a game i don’t want to try at all.

I don’t get to make the decision if it’s gonna be casual friendly or not, I ‘m not collin (I promise), all i’m saying is that as a casual I expect the experience in this game to remain consistent. Trust me i’m not about to barge in on your challenging group content, i just want to roam the jungle, enjoy the story, grind my masteries while relaxing and go about my business. This game was marketed as an all inclusive casual friendly game, you’re not just asking for this little bit to change, you pretty much want the game to change target groups. And if it does, i’m sure people like me will leave the second we’re through with the story. Nothing more, nothing less.

Coulter.2315:

Ok you guys just seem to be having a competition over who uses the word ‘elitist’ more.. I’ll leave you to it.

Mobs are fine, people freaking out after very little time thinking about them should just look at the tools available to them.

as stated elsewhere, mob difficulty and mob density and respawn timers are all separate issues at work here contributing to the difficulty of the experience.

many people here didn’t complain about the difficulty of individual mobs (except maybe the snipers) but mostly about their density (making dodging and kiting difficult) and respawn timer (by the time they’ve killed one mob, another one just spawned right next to them) and that made it difficult for them.

it’s not one issue, but 3, and people with romantic ideas about the difficulty of the mobs aren’t really helping. whether you approve of it or not, this game was casual friendly, and as a casual i need it to remain that way if i am to enjoy it. if it doesn’t i’ll just stop playing. simple as that. but, since they’re asking for our opinion, we might as well share it.

Druj Rosenkloitz.3729:

What I want to see is the later maps on HoT being actually difficult, say you have the night cycle on the last explorable map of HoT and you have to stay put until sunrise because if you leave the outpost (even in numbers) it will be near impossible to reach another outpost before getting killed. Say you make all waypoints contested during the night, so if you die you need your fellow players to res you or you will stay dead and miss the rewards. Add a few mobs that require serious coordination/maxed masteries to beat and you will have meaningful and engaging open world content.

this right here must be one of the worst ideas i’ve heard in a long long time for this game. night in guild wars 2 lasts for approximately 40 minutes. you want people to stay in a camp for 40 minutes because the mob difficulty and density is such that even with a group of players you won’t make it. you want them to stop whatever it is they’re doing and just hang in there for 40 minutes fighting off mobs that require coordinated effort and max masteries just to stay alive. oh my god, the fun. and if they don’t make it in time for that amazing content they’ll die, and stay dead unless they res in another map (points in this one would be contested) or some other person comes to res them and then die right next to them so they can socialise in a meaningful manner those 40 minutes. brilliant, just brilliant.

you sir, should apply for a developer position. you’ve got this.

i suggest they also develop a system where they can send small charges of electricity through your mouse and keyboard. and when you die or get hit, you take a small electric shock, you know to help you improve.

also, reverse leaderboards. scrap the best, record the worst and then publish their names in the website each month so as the rest of the community can mock and ridicule the worst players.

Bandit.8279:

Beldin.5498:

meeflak.9714:

(Didn’t play beta) but if mob difficulty is hard enough to make people QQ. GOOD! Keep it hard, make it harder! This game needs challenging, rewarding content. I love this game to death.

The thing is .. its not rewarding .. its just trash mobs that drop the same trash
than other mobs, they are only harder to kill.

We don’t know what the rewards are yet.

Not to mention I was having heaps of fun taking on hordes of Veteran Spiders on my Reaper. Ripping through stalkers and Veteran Stoneheads on my Assassin Revenant. And that first solo kill from my Reaper on the deadly Veteran Smokescale was absolutely sublime.

No greater reward in a video game then having fun!

I killed the veteran Smokescale +2 normal one and some other crap with my
necro .. after that some of those rolling Dinos .. then the Veteran Mushroom
with some normal ones by his side .. and then i wanted to go down on a
small cliffside, and there was a normal mob, no veteran, that simply didn’t
took any noticable damage, and after it killed my golem suddenly there were
5-6 red circles around him and my necro in deathshroud was dead.

Didn’t make me feel good for the mobs i killed .. it just annoyed me because
i don’t want to “work” in a game all the time. I wanted to explore the area
and not fight for mal life every 3 steps i took. And also i don’t want to play
2 steps forward 3 steps back, because after each dead you can restart at the
only waypoint i had, and had to wade again through all those mobs because
of respawn.

And i don’t even complain about those veteran beetles that are just there to
be annyoing sacks of hitpoints.

In the end the zone will only be zerk, train, glide .. or ignore after a while if the
density of mobs will not be reduced.

+1 to the creator of the thread.
He said exactly what i think and what i want. i dont want this game that i love transform into a frustrating game that only can be played with 150 trained people at the same time or staying on X ip for 2 hours, etc etc. I want a casual game, where i can enjoy and play at its full with just 1-2 hours per day, like GW2 has always been.

binidj.5734:

Because apparently more challenging content is more fun for a number of people (or so we are told, quite forcefully, on other threads) so wouldn’t you do content because it’s fun? Why on earth would somebody deliberately give themselves a less fun experience if there were no difference in reward between the more and less fun options?

Either the “more challenging content” crowd actually mean that they want more/better loot; or they find challenging game play a reward in itself. It’d be nice if people were a bit more honest about which of those options is true.

The truth is this.. they wan’t both challenging content and better loot options, because the truth is that they want to have something to separate themselves from the others.

They want the content to be hard, so only dedicated groups of people with lots of time and effort can do it, and they want the loot to be better so they can show it off in LA or whenever the next people hub will be.

They want to feel superior to others in some way. And the only way to achieve that is via making the rewards better and the content harder. And that’s the truth of it, no matter how much they deny it.

Nobody does hard content for the joy of doing something hard for long, unless you bribe them with rewards that will make them feel unique and better than their fellow man. Simple as that.

Vayne.8563:

People are fond of comparing this game to Guild Wars 1. There was very little in Guild Wars 1 that couldn’t be purchased with gold. Arguably, the hardest weapons to attain were the weapons from DOA, or maybe rare stuff like the celestial compass, the bonecage scythe, the frog scepter or the voltaic spear.

All these high end items were available to sell. You didn’t have to be great to get them. You could farm feathers in a low end zone over and over till you could afford to purchase them.

No one in Guild Wars 1 seemed that riled that their rewards weren’t exclusive. It allowed players who wanted challenge to do challenging content and profit. It allowed less intense players to have the rewards.

I think this is the best solution all the way around.

To those who support those hard core rewards, I guarantee you if there are enough rewards casual players can’t get, you won’t have enough players left to continue running the game. Casuals, in my opinion, make a vast percentage of the playerbase. The more you put out of their reach, the more of them you lose.

Make the items attainable only through hard content but allow sale of them. Problem solved.

People who enjoy hard content can do the hard content and gain exclusives that they can keep or sell.

People who don’t enjoy the hard content can now buy said stuff from grinding.

Create badges (the thingy next to your name like the world completion) and titles that are only from completing said content for unique stuff that you can use to show off so that people who want that “unique”-ness can be satisfied through that.

People are fond of comparing this game to Guild Wars 1. There was very little in Guild Wars 1 that couldn’t be purchased with gold. Arguably, the hardest weapons to attain were the weapons from DOA, or maybe rare stuff like the celestial compass, the bonecage scythe, the frog scepter or the voltaic spear.

All these high end items were available to sell. You didn’t have to be great to get them. You could farm feathers in a low end zone over and over till you could afford to purchase them.

No one in Guild Wars 1 seemed that riled that their rewards weren’t exclusive. It allowed players who wanted challenge to do challenging content and profit. It allowed less intense players to have the rewards.

I think this is the best solution all the way around.

To those who support those hard core rewards, I guarantee you if there are enough rewards casual players can’t get, you won’t have enough players left to continue running the game. Casuals, in my opinion, make a vast percentage of the playerbase. The more you put out of their reach, the more of them you lose.

I think it’s fair to say that there are some people who like hard mode. There are plenty who come out and say “make X more challenging.” Fair enough that, they know what they like and are entitled to express that. But there are also people who do not enjoy hard mode, and they are not your lessers, they are no less deserving of getting what they enjoy out of the game, and we all need to keep that in mind.

With that in mind, we have the constant discussions over adding difficult content to the game, and the best ways of doing that. I think that it’s important when difficult content is added, that effort is taken to make it as optional as possible. It should definitely be there for those that want it, but those who do not enjoy that sort of play should be able to avoid it completely, and not feel punished by the game for not enjoying that sort of thing. They should not be blocked out from fun experiences and cool rewards, they should not have a slower advancement path, just because they do not want to participate in difficult content, or are incapable of doing so.

In its ideal form, every type of content should have both “easier” modes, and “hard modes” available. I’m not talking “turn on auto-run and auto attack and you’ll be fine” easy, I just mean that it doesn’t require absolute coordination and precision to survive the encounters, content similar to the basic content the game launched with. The more challenging modes can go crazy with one-hit kills that must be avoided, elaborate death traps, that sort of thing, but these should be avoidable by those who choose to avoid them.

The most important factor is that there should not be a reward gap between the two varieties of play. Just because a player is not interested or capable of hard mode does not mean that he is less deserving of a cool looking skin or useful piece of gear. Hard mode content can have a leaderboard, or titles, so people can show off that they have completed it, but should not have anything that is inherently cool that cannot be earned elsewhere, nothing that would be cool whether it denoted the achievement or not. The basic test is, “if anyone got this item for free in the mail, might you still want it?” If so, then it should not be locked behind hard mode content.

If hard mode content always takes more time to complete than the normal mode, even once you have it on farm, then it can provide a quantity of loot sufficient to make it no less rewarding than the easier mode per minute, but anything you can earn from that mode should be earnable in both. for example if a hard mode dungeon takes 500% longer than a normal mode one, even once people have mastered it, then it could offer 50% more loot drops, so that it balances out, but there should never be a super special armor type that you can only earn from that mode, or that technically drops in both but has a decent chance of dropping in hard mode while only a Precursor-level chance fo dropping in normal.

You should be running the hard mode because you enjoy the challenge, not because the game bribes you into it, and if for a second you begin to think “well if it only offered the same rewards as normal then I wouldn’t do it,” then you should be playing normal mode, and maybe they shouldn’t even bother with a hard mode if enough people think that way.

If you want more challenging content because you enjoy a challenge, then I hope ANet lives up to your expectations. If you want harder content because you want access to rewards that most players can’t have, then that’s just being a selfish jerk, and I very much hope that ANet does not indulge you in that.

PorceleinEve.2973:

LanfearShadowflame.3189:

nekretaal.6485:

GummiBear.2756:

and then everyone will hord up on tomes and instaunlock every single masteries a few minutes after HoT is released… That is beyond stupid

Tomes are from dailies and from Pvp. Players who put in time ought to get an advantage, & players who Pvp shouldn’t be left far behind.

No.

Period.

This is one step away from “People who pay more should have an advantage”

If tomes of experience don’t do what it says in the box, shouldn’t the people who get them get compensated for their loss?

I mean by making tomes not working as before, doesn’t that reduce their value in the pvp tracks and dailies? If you don’t want them to work on masteries, then those who have them should be compensated.

Tomes continue to do exactly as they did before. They give 100% of a level. Before 80, that levels you up, after 80 is a skill point. Skill points have become spirit shards and tomes used on a level 80 do grant a shard. As such, their functionality has not changed. There is no need for compensation.

The mastery system is a new system. There is no precedent of tomes working with this system, because this system did not exist. Thus again, tome functionality has not changed in this regard either. So, no need for compensation.

Edit: Fixing my terrible, terrible typing.

PorceleinEve.2973:

LanfearShadowflame.3189:

nekretaal.6485:

GummiBear.2756:

and then everyone will hord up on tomes and instaunlock every single masteries a few minutes after HoT is released… That is beyond stupid

Tomes are from dailies and from Pvp. Players who put in time ought to get an advantage, & players who Pvp shouldn’t be left far behind.

No.

Period.

This is one step away from “People who pay more should have an advantage”

If tomes of experience don’t do what it says in the box, shouldn’t the people who get them get compensated for their loss?

I mean by making tomes not working as before, doesn’t that reduce their value in the pvp tracks and dailies? If you don’t want them to work on masteries, then those who have them should be compensated.

They maintained the same value because they give a spirit shard to an 80 which is what they would have done before HoT. They are not being given ADDED value by contributing to Masteries.

Also why on earth do you want to burn through HoT’s Masteries in one evening? Its self defeating…

Also “compensation”… What has become of us -.-

Ayrilana.1396:

Mastery points are there to get you to experience various aspects of the game rather than sit in one location and farm XP.

whatever happened to the play as you like idea… now we “have” to experience the various aspects of the game? if that’s the case, i want sPvPers to join me in the maguma jungle, and them pve only types to have to sPvP in order to get into the maguma. That will “help” them experience the various aspects of the game. Especially the frustration one :P

But really now, if one wants to sit in one location and farm xp, why is that bad? and how is it any different from when ppl farm SW hours on end?

Don’t really need to see the second part of this dissertation to give my answer: Nope.

Silicato.4603:

I agree with ardenwolfe.
One of the early issues of this expansion is that the content offered is almost equal to a free LS season + some free feature updates.
And you know, that kind of content i like, but there is a main difference. You have to pay for it this time.

I blame all those people who asked for an expansion, a payed expansion. At the end we’ll have the same as if it was free but paying it.
And with a whole year of wait and lack of content in the meantime…

Learn from our errors and next time, please, ask for more free and frequent content and less semiexpansions with money like this one.

how is it the fault of the player that anet decided to charge an arm and a leg for another living story update? We asked for an expansion, hopefully its what we get. Just because they stuck the word “expansion” to it, doesnt make it what we asked for.

If i ask for an apple and someone asks for money up front then gives me an apple tree seed, its a bit kittenish to say i got what i asked for when i clearly didnt.

Here’s a reality check: If they release an expansion with three maps, please know everyone could have had those same three maps by now, via Living Story, given the amount of time we’ve waited for this expansion.

Think about that for a second and then realize why people are less than thrilled with this. That is not what the community expects when they ask for an expansion.

It means we’ve sat around with nothing to do, with no seasonal or special events, and watched our peers leave for livelier pastures, for the same amount of content that could have and has been delivered in the same amount of time.

For free.

ANet just withheld it during that time and then released it all at once instead with a huge price tag to boot.

So, yes, if it’s only three or four maps of fluff content for fifty dollars or more, expect the reviews and reactions to be as bad as that Fantastic Four movie, but a lot less civil.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

If you could get mastery points, just by leveling then do you even need to try the harder stuff until you have all your Masteries? In theory, someone could stay at the first waypoint and do the first events over and over again, leveling up and getting mastery points while never venturing deeper into the jungle. You could have zergs of people farming mastery points in this manner, following a series of frequent, easy events It’s exactly this sort of scenario that means they had to separate mastery points from leveling.

If that’s how they want to play that’s their choice. You can play as you want. And they can too.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

It doesn’t affect me directly but it affects longevity of play. Just like the first players who at launch leveled the char to 80 quickly by crafting, bought the first Legendary with gold as soon as they could, then said there was nothing to do in the game and left, having the ability to progress Masteries by building up points beforehand means there will be a lot of people who do this then complain about how the expansion has nothing to do. Explain to ANet how this is an advantage for them having people quickly whip through their character progression model they’ve set up, and then have nothing to do till the next expansion.

or alternatevely they could come up with an advancement system that didn’t feel so empty and pointless as the one they came up with. There’s a reason expansions in other mmos add lvls, and anet isn’t the gaming guru who came up with the golden alternative. Surely this isn’t the best they could come up with…

Coulter.2315:

Do you think they are hoping to introduce a progression system which can be preprogressed in?

So as someone said, just disable tomes at 80. Then you can’t preprogress but still get the streamlined system, which is the main purpose of this suggestion. Your fixation on tomes and preprogression is a red herring and completely missing the point.

Coulter.2315:

My source is just some inductive reasoning given the system they designed and common sense answer to my above question.

ArenaNet has been steadily streamlining all aspects of character progression! By inductive reasoning and common sense, they should prefer that their new systems be polished and streamlined as well.

Hybarf Tics.2048:

You should look at the wiki where they show the whole 100% of ground level layer.
You have to consider that BWE 1 did not include root and canopy layers we played only say one third of the ground level map which Anet stated was 25% of the whole Verdant Brink map.

Some of that area certainly wasn’t what I’d consider floor biome, but if it was purely floor it does nothing to inspire confidence. There wasn’t much to be seen overhead for a canopy biome to exist in. And if the 25% number is accurate, then it seems likely that the canopy biome doesn’t exist in that part Verdant Brink, or is very limited. The other 25% of that half of Verdant Brink will probably be the roots biome. If canopy does exist there, then it’s sharing a percentage with roots, meaning that neither of those will be a full-map biome.

If the canopy is only the absolute highest areas (even above the highest we’ve seen in beta), then I really doubt that biome will amount to much anywhere. With the high cliffs and a hylek village in the tree tops still being floor, it doesn’t leave much left for the canopy.

The content outposts are likely concentrated in the floor biome, so that’s where the majority of everything can be expected to be. I expect the other biomes to be used, but my guess is that will be something like how the roots biome in Silverwastes is now.

This “1 is 3” hype is probably going to turn out to be just that. Hype. It’s only 3x the content if the biomes are equally utilized and cover equal portions of the map.

Morfedel.4165:

Hybarf Tics.2048:

If it does have 3 maps or even 4, since I bought it a few weeks back, I’ll play it do the storyline kill the dragon, then uninstall and pretend I never heard the name Guild Wars 1 and 2.

Geez, if you hate it so much just get a refund and forget about it now.

Considering the original game had 30 maps including cities. Verdant Brink based on the wiki version of it is simply the ground level map. For the sake of argument you take that map and add the other 2 layers, even with the 3 layers a HOT map such as this is no more than one and a half GW 2 map. If you take 4 maps like another poster claimed it would give us the equivalent of no more than 6 GW 2 maps, which is barely 20% of the original map. For a normal expansion which means 10 to 15 maps of the original we would need 7 to 10 Hot maps. About what you said I don’t hate the game I love it but I simply dislike being taken for a ride and 4 maps would make me feel like I was taken on one.

For 35 years I’ve been playing consoles and PC games, now it’s only PC and to me an expansion based on everything I’ve seen and played, has always been one third to one half of an original map, any less than one third and it’s not considered an expansion. Some people won’t even consider less than 50% of an original game, depending on price and HOT is a good 85% of the original price, so spare me the fanboy acceptance of everything done by Anet, if it really turns out to be 4 maps than this expansion is worth no more than 20$ US dollars.

mrstealth.6701:

However, good first impression aside, this was still just a very brief preview of 25% of a single map. The one discouraging thing I did notice was a definite lack in biome overlap. Various parts of the map seemed to transition between canopy and floor, more than having the two overlap each other. Hopefully other areas will have more, but I have the feeling that we’ll see a lot more map covered by 1-2 biomes than 3.

The whole thing also didn’t do anything to help the overall lack of information. The area beyond that 25% of 1 map is still a mystery. These betas just give a taste of the new style of events.

You should look at the wiki where they show the whole 100% of ground level layer.
You have to consider that BWE 1 did not include root and canopy layers we played only say one third of the ground level map which Anet stated was 25% of the whole Verdant Brink map.

I really like this suggestion. I mean, think about it…the core systems of this game have been through a number of revisions since release, and the ones that have been successful (yes, I’m avoiding look at you, Mr. Complete-World-Exploration-to-Unlock-Traits!) are the ones that have simplified and slimmed down the game experience, leaving us free to just enjoy playing in this lovely world.

Boosters? First there were a bunch. Then a few more. Then there was dust that made many into two, and now all of that is by the wayside, and there are a total of, what, three different boosters I think?

Skill points? First you only got them from skill challenges in the world. Then from challenges and level-up. Now we get so many from level-ups that there’s no need to do the hero challenges in the world unless you’re a completionist (which I am).

Weapon skill unlocks, PvP skins, PvP titles/progression/rewards, WvW skills….all of these things have gone through multiple iterations and eventually come out LESS complicated than they started.

TL;DR – I agree with the original poster 100%, and think that his suggestion is very much in line with how the design philosophy of GW2 appears to have evolved over time.

GummiBear.2756:

and then everyone will hord up on tomes and instaunlock every single masteries a few minutes after HoT is released… That is beyond stupid

Anet could just make tomes continue to give you spirit shards at 80 instead of giving you levels. That way, there would be no abuse of tomes to unlock the reward tracks instantly.

1. Essential
Required to access core content of the game, these are the cheapest tier of mastery, and the most important. Gliding, bouncing mushrooms, masteries that unlock adventures or let you access areas of the game, all go into this category. These masteries would require a minimal number of points to unlock, because they let you play the content you paid for. And if you want to play with your friends, the barrier to entry is going to be low. There’s not a lot in this category, but if you need it to access significant parts of the game, it goes in here.

2. Useful
Things that are nice to have, quality of life, convenience. Includes the masteries that let you do tricks with your glider or fly with it forever, or eat the stoner frog mushrooms and fight the resulting hallucinations for a daily prize (which is actually the frogs paying you to leave), or combat stuff like tearing the bark off that one Mordrem guy that the developers talk about, or automatic looting, or any number of nice things that don’t actually bar access to important parts of the game.

3. Luxury
When you’ve got too many points and need something to spend them on, like this uh, brand new Lamborghini here. Since this is Guild Wars 2, that Lamborghini is actually a legendary precursor collection. But precursor crafting only goes in this tier as an example; what I actually propose goes into this tier are masteries that essentially act as dumps for your excess mastery points. I’m talking 25 points per tier for a mastery that increases your chance to get rare gathering materials, or 100 points to unlock waypoints for all your characters, or 200 points per tier to increase how many items you get from map reward bonuses. Purely luxury things for people who already have everything else.

I think I’m supposed to do closing words but I already wrote a lot of them, please let me know what you think. I wrote this because the developers seem to actually be reading and responding to feedback and are willing to change things based on it (e.g. adding weapon swap to revenant), so I am hoping to get some discussion going.

How many times have you leveled up since skill points were replaced with spirit shards? I’m sure nobody keeps track, since right now the reward for leveling up is nothing. Unless you count the AoE knockback and full health refill – hardly any sort of reward for filling up an entire experience bar – there’s no tangible reward. But when Heart of Thorns eventually comes out, that will be fixed, right?

Only temporarily.

See, right now a mastery track requires two things – sufficient mastery points to unlock the track, followed by a certain amount of experience to make its benefits yours. Don’t have enough mastery points to unlock a track? Your experience will go to waste. 3 months in and you’ve completed all the tracks? Same again. Spend all your mastery points on Exalted Lore and stoner frog shroom bouncing, but don’t have any mastery points left to level gliding so that you can reach all the mastery nodes that require gliding to access? Hope you enjoy never, ever getting to fly around the Maguuma Jungle. Also, your experience points will go to waste. (But also you don’t get to glide. This is an actual thing that needs to be fixed independent of my following suggestions.)

Why are these two separate systems? Why is the only way to get mastery points by finding them in the world, instead of allowing us to unlock them directly with experience? This was how skill points used to work, and nobody complained about that. It was a great system – level up to unlock your skills, or find nodes scattered about the world to unlock them a bit faster. And once you hit level 80, you could keep leveling up to get more skill points, which could be used in the Mystic Forge if you had an excess (we all did). I opened up my mastery page on the beta and was bombarded with eight help bubbles trying to tell me how the system works. I already know how experience works; why not just use that? You don’t ‘train’ gliding by gliding, or exalted lore by reading books, or stoner frog jumping mushrooms by seeing how high they can get you, you gain it by murdering things, gathering resources and completing events. Mastery experience is identical to regular experience and does not need to be gated by exploring specific developer-sanctioned areas of the world. And what if maxing out your masteries requires completion of an adventure or event that’s just too hard for you? Let’s not be elitist – some content is hard. What if Liadry awarded the last mastery point you need to unlock real-life superpowers and 10% off your insurance, but you can’t beat her? You’re stuck.

Masteries should work like the old skill point system. Once you hit level 80, leveling up stops giving… well, levels, and starts giving mastery points. Masteries should cost a certain number of points to unlock, and once you decide to pay those points, there’s no nonsense about ‘training’ them – it’s yours. You’ve already earned the experience, you gained however many mastery points you needed, and you bought the mastery. Transaction completed.

Now thinking long-term: Progression-wise, as time goes on past Heart of Thorns’ release, under this revised system players are going to be earning a lot of mastery points. My main character (guardian) had over 800 skill points when they got changed to spirit shards, without using any scrolls (post-patch I ended up with over 4500 shards, 3000 from scrolls). It’s not unreasonable to assume that dedicated players will be earning several hundred mastery points, and any new masteries introduced in following patches would be immediately gobbled up by people like myself with an overabundance of mastery points. That’s fine – we already earned the experience, but there should still be sinks for mastery points. Ergo, I propose three ‘tiers’ (if you like) of masteries.

5k char limit, cont.

binidj.5734:

I really wanted to like the greatsword but as has been said here it was simply not as good as dagger/warhorn in terms of anything! Still we have to bear in mind that this is a beta so hopefully ANet will jiggle about with the greatsword skills a bit to make it a comparable weapon in terms of control, damage and lifeforce generation as dagger/warhorn.

yeah agreed really i would be ok with it being slow but it needs to hurt bad when it hits to make up for it. sence its a burst weapon as many has said, but the thing is i say it needs to hurt more then a full meta ele ( asuming that the necros is full meta zerkers) then i could see why it would be slow but as it is, if they decide to make it better then they need to ether make it hurt or faster or even have a high life drain so we can get in to reaper faster. but i think they will see that dagger dagger deals more DPS and i hope they fix it. ANET FIX NECROS GREATSWORDS PLEASE !!!!!

Denseness and fun are important but also important is exploring and just plain ole wandering around looking at things. There are plenty of people who like to jump on each rock and try to climb each hill just to see if they can get anywhere not obvious or see something that no other player has seen before. If the maps are small and few, then those activities are quickly finished.

Fox.3469:

If it’s 3 zones the size of verdant brink with those layers that’s already twice the size of the average wow expansion…

Did you actually play BC or WotLK?

EDIT: Average, right. Beta’d Cata, which provided less new landmass to explore but redesigned a considerable chunk of the old world. No experience beyond that.

mercury ranique.2170:

I’ll answer very simple that I judge on quality and not on quantity. It actually seems there will be “just” 1 map. This map however is bigger then normal PvE maps. It also consist of three layers above eachother, making it actually the size of three bigger then average PvE-maps.

I thought the same thing, till I actually saw Verdant Brink. The multi-layer concept looks great on marketing material, but the reality of what has already been seen is very different.

From what was seen in earlier stress tests, and from datamined maps, Verdant Brink looks to be about the size of Dry Top and Silverwastes combined. That is considerably smaller than a lot of existing maps, many of which are around double that size.

As for the three biome layers, the jungle canopy and floor areas didn’t seem to have much overlap at all in the stress test areas. We’ve yet to see the underground area at all, so there is some hope for overlap there. A lot of the area was also taken up by inaccessible canyons, although those areas could possibly be available at a later time (but I don’t see that being very likely).

The way events are displayed on the map makes frequent overlaps seem even less likely. Unless it sees a major overhaul, finding events would be very frustrating without indication of which layer they are in. I just don’t this idea of 1 map = 3 maps worth of playable area being a reality.

IIvIIozzie.9250:

Torolan.5816:

stuff

You fail to understand your opposition’s argument. Southsun wasn’t a fail because the content was too hard, it was a fail because the content was buggy, laggy, boring and unrewarding. While no longer buggy and laggy as it used to be, Anet put no QoL into the zone, they left it to rot. Raising the HP on enemy mobs to make it more “difficult” is just lazy on the part of the developers. They claim to have challenging content in the expansion, we’ll see. If their recent updates are any indication for what’s in store many players will be disappointed, myself included.

As you obviously also were there when Southsun was introduced, lets recapitulate it then, ok?
Sadly you are right with the idea that Southsun was left to rot. I don´t even want to defend Anet for this policy because I too think that this is not only sad but also a bad idea for the development of the game. I also agree that adding HP instead of a mechanic is bad and the easiest way out.
But:
1. Regular Veterans and young Karka were never that buggy. Granted, sometimes they jumped back to full HP and you had to begin from scratch, but that was rather uncommon and was rather quickly fixed.
2+3. The content was laggy because people came to the island with the idea that they could rush from settler champ to settler champ all day long. This kind of also adds in to point 3, the boring map. I gladly agree that the settler champ uprising idea was pure garbage, but that lasted for how long, 3 weeks? Besides, people regularly ask Anet for literaly circular and horribly boring events like the Queens Anniversary or the Halloween labyrinth in the forums, so isn´t this the kettle calling the pot black then?
4. A karka veteran is not unrewarding, you always get a shell from it. That is not enough to make people farm them regularly because people only accept the utter maximum instead of pretty nice, but it is a solid item in the AH.
5. Tequatl was hard to beat for randoms for the first months after it was buffed the first time, and the three headed worm is still impossible to do without TS because of its mechanic and the timing. You simply can´t cater to the more hardcore players when you advertise your game as easy accessible and for it´s equal opportunities regardless if you are new or a veteran, sad but true.
Vinewrath is still pretty high in the favor of the more hardcore players, at least I would guess that because of it being a dumbed down Marionette and more hardcore people would have really loved that if it had not been open worlded.

my reaction will be extreme disappointment.