Guild Wars 2

maddoctor.2738:

Carnius Magius.8091:

If the game is that easy then strip all your gear down to nothing and play starting in Queensdale and play with only equipable drops. Then move on the next level area upgrading only from equipable drops. Heck they should make an achievement for that.

That’s an argument I see a lot but it doesn’t make any sense at all. Stripping the gear won’t make anything more “challenging” that’s a quick and excuse to dismiss the actual problem. Contrary to popular belief, challenge doesn’t mean things take longer to kill and you take more damage, that’s annoying, not challenging, that’s frustrating, not fun. That’s what the old fractals were like, mobs that took forever to kill and could 1-shot anyone. That wasn’t fun nor challenging.

The old final boss of Snowblind fractal had loads of hit points and did very high damage. Mechanic wise he was trash, a giant sack of hit points that hits hard with slow, predictable, auto attacks. No fun, no challenge, no excitement. The new Snowblind last boss has actual mechanics, has interesting adds to deal with, all while his own damage was lowered massively as well as his hit point total.

Despite how many times this argument is posted, the answer is the same. Replacing your gear with lower tier gear won’t make things interesting nor challenging.

This and more this. It’s not just about kill times, but what the enemy does that matters.

The enemies don’t have to be punishing, but they should be interesting. They should teach mechanics passively through experience. There should be opportunities to use abilities other than damage rotations. Penalties for failing to mitigate an attack should be reasonable but with stacking complications so the player has time to react, not ANet’s usual 5-second stun with cheap shots or the one-hit-KO fetish.

Would be nice if players can use the weapons unlocked from elite specs without having to use the traits for it.

It’s a bit more than just that.

Highly-mobile professions with stealth access like thief and mesmer are top-dogs in the small-scale because:

- As covered, resetting a fight is a big advantage given the space to do so and a lack of precedent for staying in combat.

- Most meta roaming builds don’t feel imbalanced or un-fun to play against. They just are. The intent for these builds is to be able to enter any given encounter and either win through sheer overpowered stats (condi thief/reaper/mesmer/pre-nerf condi beserker, bunker druid) or leave (mobility, stealth) if a win can’t be done.

- Mobility and stealth are taken for small-scale because these mechanics negate pressure zergs can apply to solo players. Sending 50 people to squirrel after a thief or mesmer is pointless, and these can OOC unkilled somewhat easily, whereas doing such for less-mobile professions basically grants a free bag.

- The most potent and most-common small-scale classes aside from cases where things end up totally overpowered tend to be ones which are absolutely useless in zerg fights. When was the last time you saw a commander ask for rangers, thieves, or mesmers (outside of a veil/portal/blur bot)? They’re basically useless in big-scale encounters, unfortunately by design.

- Building on the previous point, these players are going to be very adept at roaming because it’s basically all they have the option to do. Practice makes perfect. This restriction is also what enforces cheese metas; they optimize around the best thing that can be done for the small-scale fight because it’s all they can really partake in without being called out or being a liability to their blobs.

I share the sentiment that there are too many sources of stealth and spammable resets in the game. That said, it’s been a necessary evil for the design approach of these professions. Until blocks/dodges/cc spam/immunities/boons/AoE bursts/etc. all get toned down I don’t think we can ask for blanket statement nerfs to mobility and the likes.

At the end of the day the existence of this kind of gameplay is on ANet’s shoulders for designing the professions in a way which allows people to be so exploitative of low-vulnerability builds, just as much as it’s their responsibility to clean them up in a reasonable time frame and keep the general game-state healthy. We’re simply not seeing that; these builds come and stay for longer than they’re welcome.

metabattle is actually a decent place to get initial builds then as you learn to play/fight etc you adjust your build from there. As a beginner you are probably going to want a build that helps you survive and maybe support those around you.

Lots of good suggestions here. To add on to them… A real good way to learn WvW is to have a friend who already plays it. Get him/her to buddy with you and help you understand what’s going on as you go.

Most commanders won’t have the time to explain a lot unless it’s a small group commander. If I’m commanding (Borlis Pass – linked with CD atm)… I typically run small havoc groups and will always say what we’re doing and often offer comments of why we’re doing it, why we’re putting siege “here”, why we’re running like hell.. or fighting to the death.. and so on.

Bottom line… prepare to die a lot, prepare to have fun if you can handle dying a lot

Watch and learn. Good luck, Have fun!

from my personal experience

Offair.2563:

If you don’t plan to play wvw it does not really matter what server you choose as its all megaserver instanced. Ofc na/eu makes a difference.

This is a good point.

If your friends aren’t wanting to play WvW with you they can pick any European server, as all the other maps are shared.

Holy c….
That is one really good looking rifle!
Yes please, give us this!!!

Yes please, this skin is too nice to only be used for just this one environmental weapon.

I don’t understand why they didn’t make it an actual rifle either. It’s a really nice skin.

My youngest daughter had a similar problem with HoT. She only plays around casually and didn’t have any character even close to max level, but was dying to be able to glide. We decided on a class she could best play at level 80 without going to much into it, which turned out to be the necromancer (your choice may vary depending on how deep into the combat mechanics of this game you’d like to dive). She boosted her newly created necromancer to level 80, played the introductory story steps, and unlocked the mastery system and the gliding mastery before going back to her lower level characters. Occasionally she pulls out her level 80 to play another story step, but mostly just enjoys gliding on her lower level toons. She’s already planning to unlock the raptor once PoF hits (she’s played the demo where she unlocked the raptor in the first story instance), so her low levels will be able to ride, too .

Shane.4023:

I should have stated that all of my Characters are low level. With that said, should I use the level 80 boost now, and then use the other boost that comes with PoF later? Thoughts and help greatly appreciated

Honestly its up to you. If you dont have a single level 80, maybe level a character or two normally first that way you learn the class. I dont know if you PVP or not, so you may already know them fairly well.

I would for sure if you care about story at all, play through it in order though.

ArchonWing.9480:

HoT/LS maps I generally focus more on killing the boss as opposed to tagging things.

This problem is much bigger than simple tagging. The game doesn’t reward you for your effort at all. I can hit that boss once and get the same rewards as you. I can hardcore solo one of the lanes in the meta, but will ultimately fail because it’s a dead map and get nothing, vs I can taxi into a full one, AFK and get the max rewards.

This will never change because requiring actual contribution is too complex, can be unfair and discourages helping. As is however, it heavily rewards leeching, which increases the burden on others.

Amaimon.7823:

Disable the effect means it becomes an ascended trinket. The aura makes it legendary.
The aura should change per class that wears it, as now its clearly a mesmer only trinket

Ur choice really if you want to see that. I would personally like 2-4 check boxes. Hide infusions, hide legendary effects. 1 for pc and 1 for everyone else

Pretty simple request. Please can we have an option to toggle the aurora glow/orb effect. Or better yet, an option to toggle cosmetic aura effects on both our character and other players, similar to the unique sound effect toggle that Anet added last patch.

Never really understood why that backpack was so valuable in the first place. It’s butt ugly.

1.) You can’t be “kicked” in WvW. You can be kicked out a squad, but that doesn’t stop you from following them. You lose out on communication, supply count, and party placement but the later 2 do not matter because boon share is generally irrelevant for rangers anyways unless they are frontline heal or something. Proectile weapons such as ranger longbow are liabilities due to the large amount of projectile hate, and while you may not, there’s no way for the commander to know you personally.

Speaking as someone that does use “rallybots” at fodder, I’d like to say that people that blame pugs for their failures especially in large fights are generally projecting and just want to blob the map, especially now that rallies are only 1 per kill so this generally is more of a problem when numbers are less than 10 In general zergs though, the so called “bads” often get 1 pushed and die before they have the chance to rally anyone. Unless you are heavily outnumbered, nobody in your group should even be close to going down before all these non-squad folks are dead. If you are, then you’re probably as bad as the pugs you’re kicking if not worse.

The ones that do the rallying are actually the bad heavies that are selfish and don’t push with the melee so they burn all their cooldowns for selfish survival and end up dying at the worst moments. But don’t let facts get in the way of rage I guess.

2.) Epidemic on pets is a problem…. assuming pets actually live long enough for that to happen. Which is never. 99% of the time just target the ranger and epi load .

3.) Make your own squad. You can’t be kicked from it. Hell, you can even make a squad and kick everyone using meta builds if that’s your thing. Once there was no tag and we came under attack and there wasn’t any time to switch toons, so I tagged on Druid. People cooperated because there was nothing better to do anyways.

That’s always something I’ve wondered on this topic. Why don’t people make groups like “Casual Bring anything NO META OR KICK groups” I doubt anyone is going to complain about being excluded from that, so what’s the downside?

ArchonWing.9480:

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Well this thread has been informative.

From reading it, so far I’ve found that if I play female chars then it’s because of feminine aspects of my personality and if I play male chars is because of masculine aspects of my personality.

What this all means that a female playing female chars I’m expressing female personality traits. But I’m spending my time staring at female butts, so… I’m expressing male sexuality? I’m exhibiting latent lesbian traits? But if I play male chars, while I’m now being sexual normative by staring at male butts I’m expressing masculine personality traits.

Hmmmm.

Nowhere in all this contradictory mess am I allowed to play which gender I want based on nothing more than aesthetics.

To all the deep psycho analysis some have made I say, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar (that is, you’re looking too deep into a shallow choice).

I like to set things on fire indoors and swing my weapon at ambient creatures. . Isn’t that what people do in real life too?

Pfft… I do that all the time. I’m also partial to teleporting straight to the kitchen when I don’t feel like walking there. :P

Toons in an MMO mean different things to different people. I’m the type that prefers playing same-sex characters, because I think of my toons as being extensions that represent me in the game world. But to other people it’s different. It may be like reading about a character in a book, or there may be no thought whatsoever besides whatever they find most aesthetically pleasing. For others it may be an anima/animus thing, whether conscious or not. Then there are probably some who are consciously or subconsciously acting out bizarre “puppeteer” fetishes in playing opposite-sex toons, which is incredibly creepy to think about.

It sometimes surprises me how many people play opposite sex toons (in particular guys playing girls) in MMOs, but that’s just because of my own bias. It’s not something you can make sweeping generalizations about.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Well this thread has been informative.

From reading it, so far I’ve found that if I play female chars then it’s because of feminine aspects of my personality and if I play male chars is because of masculine aspects of my personality.

What this all means that a female playing female chars I’m expressing female personality traits. But I’m spending my time staring at female butts, so… I’m expressing male sexuality? I’m exhibiting latent lesbian traits? But if I play male chars, while I’m now being sexual normative by staring at male butts I’m expressing masculine personality traits.

Hmmmm.

Nowhere in all this contradictory mess am I allowed to play which gender I want based on nothing more than aesthetics.

To all the deep psycho analysis some have made I say, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar (that is, you’re looking too deep into a shallow choice).

I like to set things on fire indoors and swing my weapon at ambient creatures. . Isn’t that what people do in real life too?

Well this thread has been informative.

From reading it, so far I’ve found that if I play female chars then it’s because of feminine aspects of my personality and if I play male chars is because of masculine aspects of my personality.

What this all means that a female playing female chars I’m expressing female personality traits. But I’m spending my time staring at female butts, so… I’m expressing male sexuality? I’m exhibiting latent lesbian traits? But if I play male chars, while I’m now being sexual normative by staring at male butts I’m expressing masculine personality traits.

Hmmmm.

Nowhere in all this contradictory mess am I allowed to play which gender I want based on nothing more than aesthetics.

To all the deep psycho analysis some have made I say, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar (that is, you’re looking too deep into a shallow choice).

What do people think MMORPG means? Everybody knows that MMORPG = Mostly Men Online Role Playing Girls. =P

But seriously, I have 8 characters, using all the races and have a mixture of male and female characters. I get immersed into these games, but I do not require that my character represents me in any way. If I am going to RP, then I would choose male cause it is easier to RP when it you are RPing something somewhat close to yourself. But I do not RP in this game, therefore my characters do not need to represent myself in anyway.

Across three accounts I play 23 female Charr and 1 male Charr.

~ Kovu

Fallesafe.5932:

You can’t enjoy the game or become immersed in it unless you identify on a fairly deep level with your character.

Maybe you can’t, but this doesn’t go for everyone. And while I know this is an old, old argument, I’ve never seen anyone actually answer this to my satisfaction: How the heck are you able to more easily identify with an Asura, a Charr or a Sylvari than the opposite gender?

Guys who play female characters are just feminine men in RL (which is fine I guess).

/snort
Sure.

A number of my good friends play female characters. And they’re great people who I enjoy hanging out with.

Good lord, this is only a hair’s breadth from the old friend argument certain people make.

But they absolutely have a lot of feminine qualities.

Or maybe you’re focusing more on the feminine qualities everyone has because they’re comfortable playing female characters in games and you think they therefore have to have these qualities. Or you’re projecting qualities onto them for the same reason.

The fact of the matter is that some people identify more with their characters than others, and if those same people don’t feel comfortable identifying with the opposite gender, we get threads like these. It’s important to remember that people are different from one another and that the conclusions of any one of us about why others do what they do are worthless because none of us has made a study of this.

Personally, I’ve been playing tabletop roleplaying games since my early teens and video games since before that. When I play CRPGs, I tend not to invest that much into characters, because to me no game can ever come close to what a real P&P RPG can let me experience. Computers just aren’t very good DMs. Thus, I have absolutely no problem playing whatever looks best to me. In GW2 this means female humans and Sylvari, and male Norn, Asura and Charr.

Odokuro.5049:

It’s not that I am uncomfortable with my own gender/sexuality. It’s just since I first started playing online games where, character creation was a thing. I would always try to identify with some part of the toon itself, or model it after some facet of myself, as a way of immersing myself into the game, even if it’s only, “Pixels”.

Now I could see myself making a female toon, only, maybe see it was my feminine side coming to life. I know I am going too much into it, and this is just a game, but, it’s sometimes hard for me to get behind something such as progressing in a game like this, if I don’t feel like I can relate to my toon.

I’m an odd one, sorry, but thanks for all of the responses.

People are a lot more than their gender, imo. It doesn’t have to be your “feminine” side, OP. I have an RP main who is not only a guy, he’s an extroverted ladies man who shudders at the idea of monogamy (poor him, his family’s story has maneuvered him into having to be the heir after all). None of that is me. But he does include my enjoyment of fine food, appreciation of well tailored garments, and general desire to be liked that leads to being nice to other people rather than cruel.

I also have a shiftless ex-Seraph guardian who embodies my distaste for cleaning the house and preference to lie around having fun rather than buckling down to do what must be done Both of them also contain personae snippets that aren’t me at all, too, it’s just helpful to be able to empathize a little with them so as to flesh them out and care what happens in their stories.

Putting facets of yourself in the characters you write, be it in an MMO or in text fiction, does not mean you’re somehow identifying with something you yourself are not in RL. It just means you’re injecting some plausible depth.

(I must say that until Donari’s first incarnation as a WoW blood elf swashbuckling rogue ship’s captain, my track record at writing believable men was dismal. I started out, for instance, with a dim wit strong arm misogynistic thug who liked to drown kittens and whose only saving grace was he would never sell out his boss. He always got his comeuppance, though, once I whispered others in the RP to make it clear I knew he was a jerk and they should trick him into failure as they pleased. But in GW2, alt friendly as it is, I have a good chunk of male characters that I think hold up well in RP).

On the list of things I can’t play:
I can’t play a character with a joke name or one without a backstory. They gotta have meaning else I lose all interest in them.

Einlanzer.1627:

Ashen.2907:

The fights are great for solo players. Finally a use for our interrupts, CC, target prioritization, a reason to dodge and move.

Too bad about the actual map design.

Depends on your class. Something that gets talked about surprisingly little is how much variance there is in ability to solo easily from class to class. Personally, I think a lot of story bosses are just hellacious playing solo. Like I have almost rage quit the game on a few occasions, and I know I’m at least average in terms of play skill.

I have beaten every single story instance on every single class, solo. That includes personal story, living story season 2, HoT story and Living Story Season 3, except for the very last episode. I’ve done it on five classes so far. Four to go.

It’s not only possible on every class, but once you know the fights, it’s easy on every class, as long as you’re willing to change your build up, or your weapons, maybe take some food/utility buffs.

I’ve done pretty much all hte instances on a zerker ele. I’ve done them all on both condi and power rangers. I’ve even done them on both power and condi engies.

The real problem is that most people go in one time and they find it hard and they don’t know the fight, and so they struggle. Once you learn the fights, assuming you know your profession, it’s a lot easier.

The first try is always hardest though. If you don’t know how to beat a boss, the odds are it’s going to kill you.

I feel like toughness in general should be a multi stat giving you damage reduction from conditions and power damage this way us power players will get some benefit from adding a few items with toughness on them allowing us to live longer while in these situations. Maybe this way they can change Vitality completely to give less health overall or be a new stat completely like reducing condition duration applied to you. I do feel though power builds are at a huge disadvantage compared to condition or tankier builds that still put out nice damage with a lot less survival issues. What if they mixed other stats as well like Ferocity being the primary stat to power builds that give you a 50/50 of precision and critical damage? With a change like that precision would be more so a power stat, but that kind of change can make it so you can stack off gear with secondary stats for survival without worrying about too much power damage loss.

Rhiannon.1726:

TheOneWhoSighs.7513:

Honestly.

The simplest way to balance WvW, would be to not have WvW tied to the base servers.

Have a completely separate set of WvW servers people could join, that would fill up on their own, but only with people actually interested in WvW.

And cycle people out of the server if they become inactive for more than a month. (Or, perhaps, reset the populations of each server entirely annually)

Issue is, while this would be balanced, it would also make people pretty mad. What with the difficulties of swapping servers and all.

Since a very long time the pve population of a server doesn’t count for the wvw server status. So we already have what you propose.

It isn’t only about counting population, it’s about having the active players joining and being able to spread them out. It’s a way to try and get pug accounts spread out and not just sleeping on servers.

With the wvw only servers you get a lot of options to work with here.
1. You get the “blowup” option to basically reset servers and spread players around.

2. You get to set server population caps lower to start to spread players out, I’m sure anet has the numbers on active players and can set an appropriate bar.

3. With the activity check you will be booting the inactive or sleeper accounts and make them choose a wvw server again whenever they decide to return. 4-6 weeks seems appropriate.

4. No more links.

5. You can assign 3 or 6 servers as ocx/sea populations, which will always be fighting each other, this will be a place for them to regularly find enemies as those populations are currently small and spread out over 24 servers. Even implement the “controversial action level system” and set the off hours which would be their NA times, to very low scoring as a way to dissuade bandwagons to their off hours.

6. Every 2-12 months you can reset the wvw servers, players choose a server again, this is a way to shake up populations, a way to destack and break up bandwagons that build up, allow anet to readjust the starting population caps. This is a very low option, as it’s would further disrupt building “server community”.

7. They can design the servers to have themes like gods and elder dragons, so that the community can build around those instead of just a server name as it currently is.

8. With wvw only servers they can do stuff like population resets, lower or raise population caps, assign different rules, they could even go on to doing other stuff like assigning servers for different rules like the ocx/sea servers option, they can do 3 servers for ppk only scoring. All that and not interrupt the pve population or original servers.

9. Wvw haven’t been about “who da best” ranked server in years, t4 doesn’t care to play in t1, t1 has been broken for a year now, we don’t need straight blanket rules for 12 servers anymore, not exactly a competition and hasn’t been since like year one. With wvw servers they have a way to start applying options to expand on wvw and it’s game play.

Other games like ESO have this running already.
When you start ESO you create a character, the race you choose is assigned to one of three factions. When you enter their wvw you first choose a campaign/server to join, they have like 4 types with different rules, like under 50, fully champion points, no champion points, resource scoring only.

tldr don’t care if you didn’t read.

Indeed, so far we only have the Glorious PvP Chest, maybe the gem-bought BLTC Viper Chest, and Ascended armor that doesn’t have a long piece of leather hiding everything below the waist.

You can only make so many different trenchcoats, and yes, some are pretty cool, but I think after 5 years the Adventurer classes got maybe, perhaps, slightly tired of them.

I support this 100%.

I don’t understand why Anet continues to add armors with trenchcoats when a massive amount of the playerbase has told them numerous times to stop. It’s pretty much “screw the players, we’re going to do what we want.”