Guild Wars 2

I used to be a hero like you, then I took a Trahearne to my story.

No rant about Trahearne would be complete of course without mentioning his voice acting. Despite what many people say, I honestly feel that a lot of the voice acting in GW2 is good. There’s clearly some talented individuals out there that were hired by Arenanet. So why they decided that their most important, central character in their grand overarching story would have hands down the worse voice acting in the entire game is completely beyond me. Trahearne’s dialogue redefines “wooden”. He shows absolutely no emotion at any time, meaning that his “inspiring” speeches sound about as inspiring as an airport announcement that Flight 714 has been delayed. Of course the NPCs cheer and shout about how great it was, whilst the player is staring dumbfounded at how anyone could cheer at that. The final straw for me was in one of the last missions, where Trahearne and his faithful lapdog opps, I mean, loyal Commander, venture into the Orrian royal tombs to attempt to cleanse Orr. It’s a tense moment, the possible completion of Trahearne’s Wyld Hunt, and the culmination of years of research and countless lives. The ritual is completed, but alas, it fails. Oh the woe, oh the hubris! Not that you could recognise this from what Trahearne comes out with. “No, to come so close. How can we fail now”. He sounds exactly as wooden and emotionless as he does at any other time. He’s just had his hopes and dreams shattered completely, and he still shows no emotion. Was the voice actor on Valium 24/7 or something?

There’s just too much to fix. You can’t make players like this character with a few band-aid fixes. Arenanet would have to sit down and redo the entire personal story from Claw Island onwards to have any hope of redeeming their story. They won’t do this (it’s a tremendous investment of time and energy for what is for them bound to be a low priority), so my only hope is that the next expansion doesn’t feature Trahearne. Because he took what was, up to level 50, a very enjoyable story experience, and made it into total dross.

because the upcoming holiday content is eating up our precious testing time.

Maybe it might be a good idea to, I don’t know, not do a holiday event when still working out large launch issues?

Lets start the movement! Feed Trehearne to Zhaitan!!!!! Its the best way to kill it (Zhaitan). I bet he would not be able to proper digest his plot.

The ending was just a major letdown. Please fix this!

And remove that Veggy-Marshal.

@ Green

1. I do not want to come across as confrontational, but I am going to have to disagree with you. The GS Guardian was only on par with other DPS assuming you built all out glass cannon. With our base HP being as intrinsically low as it is, you are hindering your group with the amount of times you will be downed, if not killed, running a glass cannon GS Guardian. Assuming you do run that way and it works for you, your damage is now on par with other damage dealing classes that are either able to withstand more of a beating due to mechanics or hard coded statistics such as higher base HP. Even if it is the case that the damage was too high, which I doubt, it is a trade-off: damage for survivability.

2. I just came up with that on the fly and honestly I don’t think that would be the right choice upon reflection. Perhaps Symbol of Wrath isn’t the right ability to gain retaliation from…I really don’t know. All I know is that I made the Symbol work for me independent of the perk of on demand retaliation. I would like to see ANet come up with a way to give that back without infringing upon their views of the tactical decision to pop retaliation.

3. I don’t mean that you should literally be able to play however you want and still be as effective as other people who are min/maxing, but when you find something that works and it isn’t game breaking, you should be able to play that way if you want to. This build was a lot of fun and I was playing the way I wanted; now I have to switch to a style that I don’t really enjoy as much to get the same benefit out of my character.

4. Prior to the patch I would completely disagree with you. Take the Writ traits and you have larger symbols, symbols that heal, and symbols that last longer. Take 5 points in Zeal and you have another Symbol that will definitely be proccing a fair amount if you run a GS build in dungeons. So that is 3 Symbols, two of which can be put up every 8-10 seconds and last for roughly 5-6 seconds. The Mace and Hammer (particularly) Symbols don’t last nearly as long, although the defensive qualities of those weapons are nothing to scoff at.

Post patch, I’m very inclined to agree with #4. The Greatsword no longer makes sense to use in a Symbol build and you are much better off with a Mace/Focus or what have you. That is really the cornerstone of my argument. I simply disagree with the change based upon the impact it has had on build diversity.

My Greatsword Guardian was SO much more fun than running a Mace/Focus setup. For 90% (made up statistic, of course) of my dungeon encounters, I was able to run the Greatsword. It was hands on and very difficult to play, but like I said earlier, it was fun and it worked. On really damage intensive fights, I still swapped in my Mace/Focus if I really needed it, but I can only think of a few encounters off the top of my head that required the swap. Since the nerf, I have not been able to run the Greatsword effectively in dungeons as a support role. People can no longer take refuge in my Symbols and my ability to withstand a beating has been nearly cut in half.

It still gets the job done to some extent, but the support role has really been taken out of the picture, even though I’m still traited for support. I am now a lackluster damage dealer with the occasional mini group heal here and there (if my group can actually afford to run into my Symbol during its uptime). If I really want to play this role effectively again, I have to switch back to the Mace/Focus and start chasing enemies down again. There isn’t too much point to a tank that can take any beating if the enemies don’t even want to dish it out on me.

So there are my frustrations, now I’ll get down to the essence of my argument. ANet told us we would be able to play the way we wanted to play. Already we have seen that this just isn’t the case, as “glass cannons” who wanted to play that way are having a nearly impossible time in dungeons. I thought I found something unique here that I wanted to focus on, and now this build doesn’t work either. Retaliation builds? Dead. I understand ANet has their own vision, and it does seem to be an evolving (to put it lightly) one. However, this new vision is crippling build diversity even further. I guess if there had to be a TL;DR, that would be it.

To me it seems like a major developmental aspect was completely overlooked in this patch. When a change is made to an ability, even a fairly vanilla seeming ability such as Symbol of Wrath, it sends reverberations throughout the rest of the game that need to be completely understood before the change is made. Now, I realize that my particular build probably wasn’t very mainstream and there probably wasn’t too much data on it, but it worked and it was fun. It is now tedious and painstaking to make it work, if it does at all.

Instead of flaming ANet for not considering the impact this would have on other builds (I wholeheartedly believe the only reason ANet made this change was to cripple PvP Retaliation Guardians), I will simply propose one more change. Return the symbol to its previous recharge rate and lower the amount of procs of retaliation it provides. Promote build diversity, don’t hamper it.

Thank you all for the read and I apologize for the lengthiness and long-winded explanations. I hope some of you out there agree with me.

Animus

I’m not sure how others feel about the recent GS nerf, but what bothers me isn’t the lack of a reliable source of retaliation, or the reordering of the skills (albeit annoying as heck). What really bothers me is the 50% damage nerf to our symbol’s uptime. I’ll break down the reasons why.

Sure, nerfs always suck when they hit your class hard, but this nerf is a game changer for some Guardians, including myself. Symbol of Wrath used to provide a serious source of damage output, ignoring retaliation entirely. That damage has now been cut in half over the course of a long fight. OK so a straight up dps nerf…that’s fine, if it is well reasoned. Was this well reasoned? Was Guardian dps in dungeons and DE’s so high that it needed to be nerfed to this extent? I don’t have large-scale metrics but something tells me we weren’t exactly on the top of the totem pole when it comes to damage output.

Alright, so I can make my peace with the damage nerf, at least eventually I will. What I don’t think I can come to terms with is that a build that I have been working on perfecting for quite some time is now essentially no longer viable. I created a support build on the Guardian that relied on symbols providing a constant source of healing to my group. I won’t go into a full discussion of which traits I selected (they should be obvious for those who have delved into this sort of build), but my setup was 0/5/30/30/5.

At first, I was running this build with a Mace/Focus as primary weapons and then a Staff for my secondary set. The “healing” and “tanking” was unbelievable for a game that “did away” with the so-called Holy Trinity. I was doing both consistent healing and tanking for my groups and having fun with it for a while. However, once I started grouping up with more…“competent” players, I found myself unable to keep enemies on me because the damage output of the Mace/Focus was too low to “hold aggro” and enemies would endlessly chase after our squishies while I helplessly ran after them holding down 3 on the mace trying to soak up a hit or two (mostly to no avail, because I wouldn’t ever be targeted).

Then the Greatsword idea dawned on me. I replaced the Mace/Focus with the Greatsword and kept the Staff as my secondary weapon. My damage output was actually high enough to ensure that at least some enemies focused on me, and I was able to “tank” again, albeit without as many defensive abilities or as much healing. So I got my full Exotic Clerics set crafted and I was able to withstand just about any beating with my “Altruistic Healing” and Symbol build providing relatively constant healing to me and my group. Sure, any damage dealing oriented player would out damage me, but the point was to play support, and it worked.

The skill order change is annoying, but I agree that it actually makes sense in the context of the cooldown changes. The sad part is that, because people are so focused on having to retrain their fingers (which will probably only take a few days of play), many people are missing that the underlying changes are a huge nerf to the damage output of the weapon.

this cooldown change on SoW is killing all symbol based builds. Please revert to the previous cooldown, and change the boon granted.

GW1 had PvE and PvP completely separate. This needs to happen in GW2. They are already showing that they are incapable of balancing them both using the same skill sets.

CC Meinke.2749:

Hello everyone,

please refrain from posting names of players which you accuse of being bots and report those players instead.

Greetings

10 Pages of peoples comments and concerns and THIS is all you comment on?

Words FAIL ME…

I love the game but Anet, your ’don’t give a kitten #8217; attitude to a HUUUUGE botting problem and total lack of respect towards your customer base sickens me.

Its so so annoying as the game is great, it stinks that you CBA to fix what is a MAJOR problem or even give us a news update on it. We’re treated like mushrooms.

I know you want us to use the ingame tools to report bots, but they are botting in large groups. how do you want us to do that plz. I have seen 2 large groups of bots just today.

I’d start by looking at all human rangers with random letter names and a bear pet who run with their best buddies with random letter names and bear pets.

Mira,
I thought the same thing but did it yesterday finally after 2 weeks of thinking it was bugged.
Here’s the drill:
You have to time it so you’re there when the harpy attack event is going on— or when the Mardine npc has the gold above his head.
If it’s the harpy event, kill the harpies and close the event.
Then Mardine and his asst. yak a lot about throwing the cows and they throw 3-4—unsuccessfully (poor cows) and then finally the last cow makes it the top of the tower.
THAT is when the cannon gets a green outline around it, and you click to interact.
It then catapults you to the tower, where you’re knocked out for alittle bit, but you’re there—whoo hoo! Try that. ..it should work.

I love this game to bits but this apparent lack of action is close to driving me away from the game.

Perhaps they don’t care as they already got me £40 but I do want to continue playing but this is worse than I’ve seen in any other mmo and I’ve been playing them almost a decade.

Are there ANY GMs at all?

one person above said they feel alone, we I agree.. I report and report and nothing seems to come of it. I’m fast losing confidence in anet and unless I see this lessen, I’ll be forced to play something else.

I know you get bots in all online games but when theres 20+ going around in a line killing everything, its beyond a joke.

Nimmi.1650:

I’d rather they ‘fix’ Trahearne in the future, instead of killing him off. Letting him die is such an easy thing to do, especially for Anet. …..

I’d rather they don’t. Kill him off and start again I’d say. I’d like my story back, not for his to try to un-sour me on the character.

We as customers get banned for saying the wrong thing in chat but bots run rapid day in and out. You can send 1-2 people to each server and run through the areas on each server. Watch and see how many bots you can see and just ban them. Saying you are doing something and actually doing something are two different things. Bots are out in the open and are clear as day. We see them but cant do anything about it but report. You can do something about it but you don’t seem to see it but claim you do. :’( We just want this taken care of please. I understand you are “doing” something but come on. If 5-10 people reported someone for being a bot they should be banned on the spot. Like I said we as customers get banned for nonsense but bots just run rapid.

Is it really that hard for a company like ArenaNet to appoint some GMs as everyone has suggested to actively be on the prowl responding to bot reports and banning them on the spot?

I know you guys are working on a more “permanent” anti-botting solution but players expect something to be done NOW, and for good reason. If ArenaNet is indeed committed to fighting bots and saving their product, then they will have to have both a short term solution AND longer term solution.

LOL, this is like:

Q: Report dosent work, what we can do?
A: Use Report option.

Q: Ok we alredy use it, for weeks, but we see not effect ingame, bot still in the same spot after weeks… so?
A: Use Report then, let me show you how can u use report: blah blah blah

Q: [whatever] and because of that we conclude that report DONT WORK
A: Here is a fresh idea: use report, if you go ingame , right click…

you imagine this guys at war?
“the heli is broken, please send backup”
“just take the heli and get out of there”,

“Already told u, the heli is not working, we need…”,
“copy that, take the heli and…”

come on….

gurugeorge.9857:

Snip

I very much hold the opposite opinion to you george on most things, especially DR and the rampant bot problem (which is, you must agree, getting out of hand.)

However, I can’t knock a well articulated and well-meaning post down when I see it. You also say you agree with several negative effects of the controversial systems used by ANet to “police” the game and that made me smile.

You’re quite right, could I really be unhappy with the purchase I made for the price I paid? Not really. 1-80 was really fun. Really really fun. Each new vista I made sure I watched in full. Each new level was a heart flutterer. Each new mob an eye-opener, each new zone a challenge.

It’s these moments of brilliance and sheer joy within the game that started to make me believe that this game was the one.

That special game that would fill the void this genre so badly needs.

It seems ANet had done their homework and had laid out this solid plan.

I got sucked in. Sucked in big time. I had this silly smile on my face over a weekend from Friday to Saturday, that happy feeling you get when you find an experience you can enjoy in the privacy of your own home that’s all yours.

Then this novelty started to wear off. Not because I reached the cap. Not because I managed to put together my exotic set relatively fast.

Bots. Rampant bots.

Everywhere.

I have seen the same bot names from 3 weeks ago. I’ve mashed that report button like a hyperactive whack-a-mole fanatic. It’s not working.

I hear what you’re saying about CCP and their business practice. I’ve played EVE for 3-4 years.

EVE and GW2 are massively different. Polar opposites of the MMO scene.

EVE has a stable population of ~30,000 per day and if you’ve been in their world recently you’ll know it’s full of nasty dangerous spam messages. They have spam for contracts that, if you’re uninitiated and new, can clear you out. It’s nasty the way the scams target new players. You must know this.

EVE is no paragon of virtue, not by a long shot. There’s myriad things CCP does right, but it’s bots are definitely not one of them.

All I want is action.

As is said in the OP they’re proud of 1600 and relay these glad tidings to us as if it’s some major cleanse operation.

It’s not, it’s a drop in the ocean. You must be able to see this.

You say there’s a ban hammer coming which will affect swathes, leagues, multitudinous bots.

The fact is you don’t know this is true at all and MOST importantly you don’t know what ANet protocol is going to be for dealing with these bots.

They could just tempo-ban them as opposed to perma-ban them.

The real fact of the matter is bots are proliferating and it IS affecting the way I play right now.

They are in my way in the PvE environment and very noticable.

I challenge anyone from any server to prove me wrong and we’ll go on to your server and spend time in Cursed Shore around the trinity of waypoints and see if there’s any truth to what you say.

This isn’t even taking account the chatlog spam and PM spam.

I’ve noticed an increase in PM spam, up from 1-2 per week to 1 per day. You can’t ignore this. You must be seeing it!

I would love, nay, I would pay hard cash – 1 week’s full wages of my own money – to take someone from ANet (not fourm staff) into the the areas affected on the 3 servers I’ve played on.

Just show them. Open my arms and say “This is what I am talking about.”

There’s no way they’d be happy with what they saw.

ANet, please log into your own game, please visit these places and see what we see, we’re not trying to mislead you, we really have problems, we just want you to see how we experience the game as a player, we just can’t play

I love so much about this game. It’s so stylish, so fresh, so… je ne sais quoi.

The bots really ruin it.

I’ll even play with DR.

Just have a bot cull. PLEASE!

Fact: You’re Not Doing REMOTELY Enough, ArenaNet.

The fact that your community moderators lock EVERY thread that discusses botting = proof that you’re deaf & blind to the effect that these bots are having on your servers.

If you cared and REALLY wanted them gone – they’d be gone.

Let’s not pretend otherwise.

How about on the spot banning GM’s? An ingame ticket for botters would be enough to handle this. With the help of the society its really possible to keep botters/farmers to a minimum.

US – 11 GM’s
EU – 11 GM’s
French – 2 GM’s
German – 3 GM’s
Spanish – 1 GM (with English or any european country as 2nd option to help on spare time)

In total 28 GM’s for banning them on sight. Just to keep spots open for real players. Whether if its for WvW or just to get in your own server instead of overflow etc.
One last idea. EU GM’s would also be responsible of US servers. So that the US servers wont be full of botters at night. And vice versa.

Lets say couple of EU GM’s start early in the morning around 6 AM GMT +1. At that same time US GM’s are finished working and EU is taking over.

Darnit i really would like a job like this.

Any feedback on this guys?

Basically, they don’t see gods as being ‘gods,’ they decry that as a fallacy. Instead, they see gods as powerful persons or beings which use their power to try and convince a peoples of their godhood, so that they might control them, and claim worship and offerings. This is what happened to the charr. The charr realised that the very notion of gods was inherently fake.

From the Wikipedia article on Atheism: “Atheism is, in a broad sense, the rejection of belief in the existence of deities. In a narrower sense, atheism is specifically the position that there are no deities.”

The charr reject the idea that gods, as others believe in them, can exist. They think that the very notion of an all powerful being to be worshipped is fallacious, they see trickery, and they seem just a powerful person or creature trying to control others. That is the same as atheism.

The Egyptian peoples believed that some of their Pharaohs were gods, they believed this completely. However, an atheist would tell you that the concept of a god is a fallacious thing, and that a Pharaoh was just a powerful person pretending to be a god in order to achieve power. If a person believes in a god, and another doesn’t, it doesn’t make the person who doesn’t believe in a god not an atheist.

The charr believe that the notion of a ‘god’ is a fallacious thing. That a ‘god’ is not a real thing, but a construction created by a powerful person who wishes to control a peoples.

Now let me again cite the definition of atheism: “Atheism is, in a broad sense, the rejection of belief in the existence of deities. In a narrower sense, atheism is specifically the position that there are no deities.”

By the very definition of atheism, by denying that a ‘god’ can actually exist, the charr are atheists. Don’t mix up the Flame Legion (who are god-worshipping theists) with the rest of the charr (who’re almost Universally atheist).

TL;DR: So for the last time. No. From someone who’s read every last thing about the charr, who’s played through the three legions multiple times, who’s spent more time with them than is healthy, I can say – no. The charr unequivocally do not believe in gods. There is no doubt about this. They see the word ‘god’ as an irony, an oxymoron. Hence ‘false gods.’ If the charr believed in gods, they’d say they did. But once again, they see powerful creatures trying to trick lesser minds into being controlled, they don’t see gods. They don’t believe in gods. Therefore they are atheist.

I’m not sure what good it’ll do, but since a lot of us seem to feel strongly about this, it might be enough of a poke to get ArenaNet to look into it.

This is essentially about the poor execution of charr armour: The tail clipping; the horn clipping; the scaling/rigging of armour pieces for charr women; and so on.

http://www.change.org/petitions/arenanet-address-the-poor-state-of-charr-armour-sets

Feel free to read that, and only sign it if you agree with it. I just feel that for a reasonable amount of work, it would generate a lot of good will.

Please note!: You don’t have to provide your details, like your address and so on. If you want to leave those blank and remain anonymous, you can. Those are provided as optional fields.

This may be all for nothing, but I figured it might be worth a shot.

TyrantV.4076:

Vargs.6234:

corpsekin.4601:

same problem for leather, everything is a bandana over the mouth intill pirate, which instead of being a musketeer hat, like it is for everyone else, is a tiny cowboyish hat that just looks comical.

You did not just diss the ascalonian hat
http://i.imgur.com/8aHae.jpg

Please make a “Haters gonna hate” version of that.

Here ya go

http://www.quickmeme.com/meme/3qvico/

Vargs.6234:

corpsekin.4601:

same problem for leather, everything is a bandana over the mouth intill pirate, which instead of being a musketeer hat, like it is for everyone else, is a tiny cowboyish hat that just looks comical.

You did not just diss the ascalonian hat
http://i.imgur.com/8aHae.jpg

Please make a “Haters gonna hate” version of that.

If you want evidence that engineers are crippled, its not a very hard task to find evidence for.

Kits don’t use sigils and weapon stats.

There we go.