Guild Wars 2

Tolmos.8395:

Total damage for the entire team? Sure. Total damage for yourself ONLY? Yes. Total damage for other individuals in your group? Oh hell no. It just invites a type of in game bullying that is neither welcome here nor needed here.

I play trinity games regularly, and consistently play a tank or healer. I refuse to play DPS. With that said, if ANYONE in my group wastes my and the group’s time by kittening and whining about someone’s DPS, I boot them. Simple as that. I have the patience of Buddha when it comes to running with other people, but I will judge you by your own standards. If a player thinks that someone’s DPS being 5% lower than their own is slowing down the run so much that it needs to be addressed, then I will address the fact that their kittenty personality is slowing down the run.

tl;dr- my vote is- for yourself, sure. For others? No.

As a former tank in trinity MMOs, I salute you.

Please please please please don’t add this to the game. My own personal experience with mmo’s have been fantastic until you get to the top level and download that DPS meter, start running dungeons only to be told you’re useless because you’re 5% lower than the highest DPS. People have to start from somewhere but they never get the chance if people get down to hard numbers and see that the DPS is lower. You all complain that zerk being the only way is terrible so why enhance that to a point that makes the game unplayable for casual players.

I agree with the personal meter, but making that information available to the party will completely kill what makes GW2 unique, in the fact that the competition to be the best and to get the best will increase drastically. Ultimately it will lead to a lot more farming and the need to add a trinity, making it another WoW wannabe/failure.

You’d have to pair them with damage taken, prevented, and healed meters for this not to devolve into a bunch of idiocy.

Believe it or not, someone on the team is going to get the aggro from a champ mob and take more damage than everyone else. That person is going to have to spend more time evading and not dealing damage.

My observation is that without clear aggro mechanics, people have a tendency to glorify not being the guy getting aggro above all else – and this would just reinforce it.

Thief isn’t that weak in melee as you claim. The dps and burst are huge. In fact a lot of Citadel of Flame path 1 (CoF p1) speed farming groups now use thieves. That dungeon path is all about killing fast. Previously it was 4 warriors + 1 mesmer. Now it can be 2-3 thieves 1-2 warriors + 1 mesmer.

I also have a thief and I haven’t had the survivability issues you noted. Thief can solo most of the game bosses alone. Surely thief cannot facetank like a warrior does, but let’s face it: ONLY the heavy armor professions (guardians, warriors), bunker D/D elementalists and necromancers can do that so easily. With a thief you gotta use the dodge button. But dodge button is even more important for engineer, because it is also medium armor and lacks the easy tools of escape thief has (no easy access to stealth, no shadowstepping).

The shortbow spam + caltrops is actually pretty effective against the monster mobs despite the clusterbomb travels so slow (you just need to learn to place those AoE circles where the monsters will be). Pistol #5, Black Powder can be used to blind the mobs almost non-stop. Most monsters attack so slowly. You just gotta time your blinds correct. It won’t work against monsters who are immune to blind e.g. dredges, but those dredges are a painful thing to solo for most professions.

Staff elementalist is okay, not as bad as you claim, but the problem is: dual dagger elementalist is still (after all these nerfs) one of the most overpowered combinations in the game. Everytime I play D/D elementalist is feels such a face roll. Soloing all the Orr maps was easier than with my warrior or engineer. And my d/d ele was then underleveled and undergeared.

However I fully agree that the professions are not balanced at all when it comes to WvWvW and pve. Sadly Arenanet balances the professions based on one game mode only: tournament level pvp, which is mostly about holding points. You cannot contest a point while being in stealth, thus thief is not that strong in pvp and thieves have been in fact buffed too much when it comes to WvWvW. The recent 3 s revealed revert was badly thought out mistake. Thieves are extremely common in WvWvW, at least in euro tier #1. They are almost as common as guardians and warriors, which are the most common professions. The combination of stealth on demand, lots of shadowsteps and high mobility + burst damage, allows thieves to do stealth stomping, spam dagger storm at enemy zergs and pick of victims from the rear and sides without much any risk. Thieves are the perfect trolling profession, contesting enemy controlled areas while enemy has trouble finding them. Low risk, high reward. One could also argue that thief is the best profession for solo roaming in WvWvW.

Warriors are super strong in pve and buffing them for pve was… unnecessary. Guardians have always been strong and while I rarely play my guardian I feel that guardian is one of the best designed professions and should not be altered much.

Arenanet should really look at the least played professions, engineer being probably the least played profession in pve and WvWvW. Why nobody is looking for engineer in a party? You see constantly people looking for a dungeon or high level fractal group saying stuff like “LF1M, warrior or thief only”, “LF2m, guardian only”, “mesmer only…”. Engineer are by far the most difficult profession to play effectively, requiring so many key presses and mouse clicks that D/D elementalist looks like a walk in a park after that. Engineers need something unique, something else with other professions don’t have. Turrets are not the thing as turrets are currently weak and turret health pool is ridiculously low e.g. compare healing turret having 5.9k health, vs ranger ursine pet having 2.6k armor and over 29k health. The former is immobile and self-destructs in 5 minutes (but lasts <2 seconds in WvWvW). The latter is mobile, can swapped into another pet, can inflict a lot of different conditions or do utility and doesn’t even require a skill slot. To add more salt to the wounds, turret-related traits are way too weak and at the moment they don’t even do anything. Yes, they are totally broken.

I am sure Arenanet has all the tools to make a better balanced game. They have access to real servers-wide usage statistics. They can analyze the map chat logs and so on. They should boost the least used professions and underused skills and weapons. They should not nerf too many things, like they have been constantly been doing with the engineer profession (yes, nerf bat swings with every patch, thieves at least got something useful in recent patch e.g. larcenous strike, buffed signets), because that only makes the player base more angry.

Tagus Eleuthera.7305:

Originally I thought stealth was OP… so I rolled a thief recently. According to the thief forums, it’s a job that has a high learning curve…. I’m starting to actually believe that.

I’m leveling a thief right now and I don’t even have all the stealth skills unlocked. I got all of 8 trait points to work with and can’t even equip a third utility skill or an elite skill yet. Already I can pop in and out to a limited degree. There is nothing skillful about it.

tinymurder.5791:

Deamhan.9538:

Uruz Six.6594:

Amun Ra.6435:

Sooooo… you suggesting you NEED more than one person to take down a thief? If this doesn’t sound broken to you I don’t know what will.

I’m saying what’s broken is complaining about 1 vs 1 and neglecting that WvW and PvP is about team play.

1 =/= 2. Thus it should never require a minimum of two people to counter the class mechanic of just one. Balancing it based on 1 vs 1 is EXACTLY how it should be done.

Once A = B, B = C, and C=D, then A+B=C+D, A+C=B+D, and A+D=B+C.

Then everything will be equal.

By equal I mean balanced. So it is irrelevant what you mean by equal.

Look at it this way:

If you take 2 people of equal skill, equal gear, equal damage dealing capability, equal survivability, and equal mobility, then the person who loses will be the one who either makes the first mistake or, more likely, get’s unlucky.

Yeah, what’s the world coming to when the deciding factor on who wins is who is the better player and not some crutch mechanic.

If you have 2 classes that differ in their dps v/s survivability, mobility v/s dps, survivability v/s mobility, etc, then you have a challenge of skill v/s skill. Luck, and the RNG become influences to deal with, rather than the deciding factor. It becomes possible to recover from a mistake, rather than be doomed by the inevitable mathmatics of “equality”.

I’m talking about balance between the professions, not the game consisting of just one profession. It also doesn’t matter either way. If the professions are balanced or two people are fighting each other with the same profession, it will come down to who the better player is. Sure there will always be a “luck” factor, that is something that exists in everything but the stealth mechanic and how it is implemented in this game stacks the odds. Thus, it detracts from the need of skill.

Stealth may be annoying at times(trust me, I’ve been smoked by thieves often enough in WvW to understand the frustration), but it does come with a cost to the player who chooses to make a thief. It needs to be tweaked, but if the choice is having stealth & inequality, or equality and no stealth, I choose stealth.

Of course you do, so long as the stealth tips the scale in your favor.

Each profession can have its own style. Its own way about doing what the other classes do.

As for the Thief. How about instead of the thief being about damage avoidance with stealth, it is about damage avoidance through more evades and dodge rolls. Hell, from a full meter, each class can dodge twice in a row. What if the thief can do it a third time. A lot of their skills already have evades.

Honestly there should only be two stealth skills for them. One is a skill that only grants stealth while out of combat. In combat it becomes an evade with the visual of going stealth for the duration of the evade. This could even be a signet. The passive effect grants stealth but as soon as you are in combat you lose the passive effect. The +50% movement speed while in stealth trait would have to be changed to 25%.

Then there is the skill that can be used in combat. This would be a stun breaker and would remove conditions that effect movement. It would also grant a 25% movement speed which would stack with the 25% given by the trait. The length on the stealth would be sufficient enough that you can get far enough to break combat and the passive effect of the signet would take over. The CD on this skill would be pretty long. Long enough that if you tried to only pop out of stealth to hit then use it and vanish every time it is off CD, the person you are trying to get would also be out of combat (since you broke combat with them) long enough for their hp to refill.

This basically gives them the capability to move around unseen and pick their targets. It also gives them a means to escape if it looks like they are about to die. However, it also means that in order for them to actually fight someone, they have to stay visible and fight them. Their means to avoid damage is now through the use of evades.

One problem i see with this. You are calling it stealth. Its invisibilty. If i see someone running towards me and ‘stealths’ and suddenly he disappears from view, he didnt sudden jump into shadows or moved quietly, he went invisible.
Thieves can have stealth. They cant have invisibilty.

I want to add something concerning “help” for lower lvl players. I experienced this kind of situations in several other games as the low-lvl who gets helped as well as helper and I have to say that it never was much fun.

Beeing lower mostly ment that someone was onehitting everything in front of me while I was following him/her as a useless lootpet. I have enjoyed the comany of a friend ofc but I mostly felt stupid because I couldn’t contribute anything to the fight.

Beeing higherlvl ment that I helped someone but the fun I gained was only from the feeling to help someone or that I enjoyed the company of that person, but it was not really fun to hang out in an area where the gameplay was boring.

In fact it was not really playing together. In GW2 I really enjoy that I can play in another area and don’t have to think about the lvl of someone I play with.

+1 @ furryangel

Here is the thing with scaling though:

Again as I mention earlier, if my friend is asking me for help in a scenario … let say … getting an SP. He/she cannot get it due to the difficulty, hence asking for help but when you brought your level 80 character fully geared with no benefits whatsoever and can’t lend a hand, then what is the point asking for help?
My personal experience had been during my low level, when I can’t get a SP or POI due to heavy guarded mob, I literally have to camp around the area until few other explorer to come challenge the same SP so I can get it the same time.

Challenging is a good thing but when you spend tremendous amount of time and golds to setup your character, the least I want is dropped to the same identical strength as a person that just started.

The nodes don’t shuffle by accident, they are set up to work that way. This is intentional, and the fact that you don’t like it doesn’t invalidate the reasons why they do it.

So botters only have to deal with one reset per week? No. They should randomly shuffle nodes every night at 0:00 GMT.

Mr Crossbones.8793:

Can someone link a stealth thief versus stealth thief pvp 1 on 1 fight? Cant seem to find any lol. Humor. Battle must be epic…

Timelapse Photo 2 Thieves fighting

They wont’ change the price, because if they did, more people would leave WvW than people who object to the price..it’s that simple. WvWers are begging for high price service transfers.

And to put it in perspective when I played WoW, it was $25 for a server transfer AND the game charged a monthly fee.

Anet is the only game that allows guesting that I know of, or one of the only ones, so you can play everything except WvW with your friends, even if you are on a different server.

If Anet was greedy, guesting wouldn’t exist.

How many MMOs have zones/dungeons/quests that almost no one bothers any more because there’s stuff that’s newer and better? When Rift opened a new max-level zone everyone went there for a while. When they released and expansion with a level cap increase and new zones that were higher than the “old” max-level zone traffic there dropped off sharply because you could skip it and go from the original zones to the new zones.

Several raid dungeons were all but abandoned and new players had trouble getting enough people who wanted to do them. Until Trion introduced new weekly quests that involved killing X boss in the old raids, then people would organize a group to raid up until that boss, then leave.

No matter how awesome the new shiny is, there will be another new shiny in a few months. The current shinies will eventually become old and dull and all but forgotten. Rather than have them clutter up the landscape, with people going “LFG – Old Shiny” and people responding “no one goes into Old Shiny any more, now there’s New Shiny!” A better choice is to remove Old Shiny before it becomes boring, then make it a fractal dungeon, or build on it and bring it back later, or just come up with something even better so no one misses it.

If they change a few things permanently and remove other stuff, over the course of a year or two the world will change without large chunks of it becoming boring and ignored by most of the players.

Matryoshka.1607:

Aeonblade.8709:

LinkR.6190:

Aeonblade.8709:

LinkR.6190:

I believe they have said they are doing living stories in an attempt to give the game a more live feel. If something good sticks around too long it becomes stagnated. However, when it is taken away before this can happen, you are left with your nostalgia. There are indeed pros and cons to this tactic, but this is simply how Anet wants to do things. They are experimenting with what works and what doesn’t. If it doesn’t pan out as planned you can expect them to stop.

I think a better question is why do we have to go through 6 months of beta testing for them to have something not pan out.

It’s sort of difficult to get an idea if something will work or not before they do it at least once. This IS their living story.

In all honesty it shouldn’t be a hard decision. Add a dungeon people can do for years or add a dungeon maybe if they are lucky half the people currently playing now will see.

You tell me which one would be better for the longevity of the game.

The latter, because people would keep coming back to experience content that will only be around for a short period of time. Rather than knowing it will be around forever and they can come back at any time. And that is essentially something you must have in a B2P game. Content that entices people to keep coming back.

That right there should end this thread. That’s exactly right and gives good reason WHY people should come back.

If the dungeon was to have come in and stay, why should I log in this month when I could log-in in August and have the same thing? No reason to, right? I’m not paying monthly, so it’s no money lost. But, by having temp content A.Net gets people to log in to the game, and word of mouth about how AWESOME THE DUNGEON IS people then get friends and fence sitters to purchase the game too. Customers.

Took you 3.5 months to get the best skins in the game? Most other MMOS would have taken that time to get a full set of gear alone…

Desirable weapon skins were always suppose to be a grind / farmed. But the nice skins were not suppose to add any additional stats (and they don’t).

Ascended gear is the first addition that could be considered requiring farming.

Flissy.4093:

This is a plague that has been unleashed on Tyria. I’ve had enough of Soldier Warriors joining my groups saying “but i gud dps” but make it so we’re effectively 4 manning the thing. This makes it even worse.

There is only two uses for defensive stats, and that’s to cover a players incompetent kitten as they are too bad to dodge, alternatively your character is an anchor, where you only want Knights anyway as Vitality is objectively bad (and this role should be a Guardian only). Everybody else should be Rampager/Zerk, no ifs, no buts.

If I have the ability to play full berserker and get a dungeon done quickly, why should I have to carry someone who isn’t pulling there weight?

Oh well, back to gear checking I suppose.

I talk from a PvE standpoint only.

You’re the reason why I refuse to wear “zerk.”

Yes, more underwater areas, a dragon event, and a dungeon please !!

Rangers will become useful again ..

So everyone else decided this was actually a thread about how bad/good underwater combat is and how to fix it.

I want an underwater zone (when the underwater dragon is revealed) where the bottom is impossibly deep and incredibly black (such that if you try to swim down too far you would get a warning that the pressure is too much, similar to the current being too strong on map edges) where the meta zone dragon lieutenant will slowly come into view from below out of the unending deep.

No warning, a random spawn point and just all of a sudden it comes into view.

Pants will be filled. I don’t imagine many people will like it since it can be a serious phobia for some people.

I’ve started trying out a bit of WvW. I don’t often hang with the zerg, but there are plenty of corners of the map to be involved in even when the main action is somewhere else. Unfortunately I’m not that interested in my server doing well right now, and it’s entirely because of World Completion.

I’m on the Henge of Denravi server, and just this past week we dropped from Blue to Red. This was good for me because it let me pick up the Red Borderlands easily. We also, for a brief period, held most of the Eternal Battlegrounds map. Now all I am missing for world completion is the Green Borderlands. It’s possible that my server might take the entire Green Borderlands, but as a practical fact I’ll probably have to wait until we happen to become Green. At this point we are more likely to drop a tier to get to Green rather than gain enough to top our current tier. So I’m stuck rooting against my server.

I don’t mind the Eternal Battlegrounds being a requirement for World Completion. That encourages supporting the server and makes me want to play WvW. The problem is the (duplicated, repetitive, uninteresting, arbitrary) Borderlands that you have to repeat three times. If each Borderland was different that would at least make exploring them more fun, but it doesn’t even have that going for it. There’s nothing to look forward to in WvW but my server losing horribly over the next few weeks and then running through the same areas I’ve already done two times before. It’s too bad because I’d really rather join in and help out, but then that would be working against my World Completion goal.

ColinJohanson.2394:

We’re trying something very unique and different with Gw2, and a lot of it plays back on the original ideas and concepts we had for the game all these years we’re trying to build towards and accomplish.

Our goal is to get to a point where on a regular basis, the world around you is not only changing in the short term through our normal event system, it’s changing and evolving permanently through our living world releases as well. What you’ve seen so far is primarily some tests and warmup stuff while we in the background organize the company to support this exciting future for our game, the future for living world is filled with endless possibilities.

The “fear” a lot of players have I think stems from just how good the design of this new dungeon is.

Its the kind of dungeon a lot of people want:

- Energetic and paced.
- NPCs don’t feel pointless.
- Feels plot connected to what it relates to.
- Not too hard to learn, not so easy it can be farmed.
- Gated nature of the steps works to block farming, but without being artificial.
- The boss fights are NOT health soaks, but have mechanics to them that take advantage of GW2 unique combat system

People fear losing something this good, and never seeing it again because, sadly, the existing dungeons don’t come up to the level of this one.

When GW2 launched, the first dungeons were exciting. But only because we were still learning some basics. Many of them do have a dynamic boos or two (lovers in AC Story, or the ghostly graveling from AC explorable come to mind). But most are just “tank and spank” fights minus the tank.

And the paths of explorables – have all the plotline of a cereal box. The Story modes had plot, but in a skippable manner, and the NPCs in both were usually best left ‘dead’ off to the side somewhere.

Fractals are a bit more engaging, but this new thing is just amazing.

More of this please. And maybe go back and take another look at the old dungeons.

ColinJohanson.2394:

Our goal is to get to a point where on a regular basis, the world around you is not only changing in the short term through our normal event system, it’s changing and evolving permanently through our living world releases as well. What you’ve seen so far is primarily some tests and warmup stuff while we in the background organize the company to support this exciting future for our game, the future for living world is filled with endless possibilities.

Enjoy the ride!

Colin and the GW2 ANet team -

Being a long-term GW1&2 player, I have to say I am liking your ideas for the direction of this particular game. It’s one thing to sit and play a game with a very fine story line/graphics/mechanics that continually repeats. It is completely another for the game with a very fine story line/graphics/mechanics to shift and move it’s story as the story is occurring. The game then becomes a living, breathing (albeit virtual) entity. Much like real life. We live through what will become history. round of applause As games go, you have something unique here. It’s a concept I’d been hoping for since the third year of GW1.

I have one request in this – PLEASE, allow us, the players, the ability to completely (after a short period of time completely deleteing on your part) annihilate an elder dragon or two before dumping another major something-or-other on top of our heads?