Guild Wars 2

If the level cap goes up I will not buy the expansion. Maybe I will continue playing the lvl 80 content, but probably not for long.

GW2 doesn’t need a level cap increase at all, it already takes long enough to get a twink to lvl 80 and exotic gear, no need to make this situation even worse.

For Gods sake, no increase on the level cap. But after ascended gear were added, nothing could really surprise me anymore. If the devs think that adding treadmill will get GW2 more WoW (and WoW clones) players, they will do it.

We don’t need vertical progression. We need horizontal progression. the company that made gw1 understood this. Sadly, I don’t think many of them are left.

Using the principles of Guild Wars 1, the sooner the cap, the better.

@ “Okay now almost all of the whole rest of the map is all 80.”

If that is your reason, then I would assume that after they increase to 100, someone else like you would come in and suggest 120. Then after more expansion, 140, and another 160, then Unlimited Edition!

The whole point of max leveling is so you dont have to feel “Oh, I am too under level to run in that big area with my guildies because I go to work 9-5 every day and my guildies play like 24/7.” Me being level 80 now, I don’t really have to feel behind incomparison to all my guildmates, I hope you understand what I am saying. In other words, just let me enjoy the new “expanded” contents and area without having to spend 2 weeks to reach level 100 before doing so. In GW1, get to level 20, and about 80 or 90% of the other areas are level 20 areas. No need to worry about leveling now, just find stronger weapons and capping skills (oh how I miss you Signet of Cap)

Level cap increase is a TERRIBLE idea. I really hope anet is intelligent enough not to do it.

I believe a vast group would just up and leave if this ever happens, so i guess its up to Anet, but i think a level cap raise would be really bad for the game, especially with its limited end game and very little build variations..

I truly do not like the idea of raising the level cap. As others have said, it would be in blatant disregard for a large majority of the GW1 fanbase.

A level cap will be the final sign I need that they have fully abandoned the GW1 playerbase. Three campaigns, and an expansion, and the level cap never went above 20. Leveling in this game already feels like needless padding, which I’ve expressed before, but this is the sort of nonsense for why I picked GW1 over games like WoW.

If the cap gets increased to 100, I’m 99% sure that I’ll quit the game… I’m just not gonna put that much effort to be competitive again on all my characters… I’ve put in too much time into gearing to start all over… no way… I think ANet would make a massive mistake if they increased the level cap…

I was just thinking about this, and you know, I hardly ever run a dungeon WITH a warrior. Almost never. Oh, ocassionally here and there, but they’re the real exception to the rule. And then I thought about it….

Why not make dungeon groups and exclude warriors from them. Just post something on gw2lfg.com that looks like this.

Want to run SE Path 1…warriors need not apply!

First it would be funny to see how they like it, particularly if lots of people start doing it, but more, it would give everyone else a chance to get in their dungeon runs, without kowtowing to the efficiency slaves.

I think it’s a good move.

Stealth is a relatively new addition to gaming. It seems like every MMO from Shooters, Space games, RPGs, MMOs, and MOBAs all have to have stealth these days. In this post I’m going to analyze why stealth is an inherently unbalanced mechanic and why should generally be avoided in games in the future unless there is a specific purpose for it instead of being bolted onto any genre and trying to balance it afterwards.

First off, let’s visit stealth as a mechanic. We’ve all seen it. You enter stealth becoming invisible for a time and then reappear under set conditions be it time, action, or something else. However, stealth gives a TON of benefits, both tangible and intangible that need to be considered during balance. The longer the stealth is, the larger most of these benefits become and often the more uncounterable the benefits become. This uncounterability of players while in stealths lends itself to use of mechanics instead of skilled decision based gameplay. So let’s analyze these pieces one by one:

• Time to analyze your enemy
• Cooldown reduction
• Movement closing
• First strike advantage
• Untargetability
• Scouting undetected

When a PVP battle starts several things happen in a very short span of time. What a player does the first few seconds of combat can determine how good they are as a player. Let’s say you see your enemy off in the distance. You now have a few seconds to determine their class, look at their armor and weapons, analyze their buffs, and from there try to determine how their character is built and if you could handle their build in your current build. This can make or break a good player. Engaging an opponent when they are built to counter your build is suicide, but if you guess wrong at their build they can send you a haymaker in combat that you weren’t expecting and force you to adapt.

The challenge and fun of PVP begins at first contact. The less information that is outright given to you but clearly displayed on the enemy the better, but that’s a topic for another time. Stealth breaks the initial period of analyzing, theorizing, and preparing for the coming battle. One party gets to analyze the other often for large amounts of time while the other can have no idea of the existence of the other. The stealth character gets the ability to almost perfectly select targets they know they can kill. It skews the initial planning phase of the battle drastically in the stealth characters favor with no more than the push of a button. This removes a huge skill aspect of PVP and greatly favors mechanics over skill-based gameplay.

Along the same lines, during combat you often have to adapt to enemy tactics and strategies. Giving yourself a big time out during combat is a gigantic advantage. However, with stealth, this also applies to your enemy. This can be a wash in instances where there’s not a mechanical advantage to having a slight breather. However, in games where a stealth class has lots of front loaded damage this is a dramatic advantage. Not only do you get to take a breather and plan your next move but you also get to sit out all your cool downs and apply more front loaded damage again. It essentially removes the detriment of burst damage which is generally high cool downs.

The longer stealth is the more it lessens the number of decisions opponent can make for how to deal with it as well. So if the enemy has no important decisions to make while the character who is stealthing does, this creates an even greater informational advantage. I’ll say this multiple times, but again this points to a mechanical advantage instead of skilled gameplay.

Something just occurred to me that I hadn’t really thought about before. This whole “invested in my character” thing; what’s that about? I mean, I get wanting them to look cool or have a cool title or something, but I wonder if that phrase might be mis-applied? Maybe it would be more accurate to say “I want to be invested in the game”?

My first major MMO was Star Wars Galaxies, and I was there for about 5 years. My next one was WoW, and I was there for maybe 2. Now GW2.

In SWG, I was majorly invested in the game. You only got one character per account (which made sense considering the depth and breadth of the game), but I never felt ‘attached’ to my character. I was attached to the game. I interfaced with the game via a particular avatar (I got a second account shortly after getting going because there was so much to do that I needed a second), but it was the GAME I was invested in.

In WoW, I got all kinds of characters, but the game was kinda shallow. The multiple characters allowed me to experience more of the game, one shallow slice at a time for each character. But after the first few characters, it got monotonous. But more importantly, there wasn’t much reason to become invested in the game. The only thing holding me there that long was reaching level cap’s (and the attached gear grind), trying the different healing roles (mostly PvP), improving my skill as a healer, and seeing the different zones.

In GW2 there are several different story lines, but they become more and more homogenized the higher level you get. Then there are the overpriced and punitive RNG quest for shiny skins. There is WvW, which has become more and more stale with each passing week (thanks to zergs allowed by AOE caps and no challenging NPC’s). sPVP is about to get a cool boost, but that’s not something a majority of players enjoy doing. So all we have left is the exploration, which is pretty great. But it is a finite thing. Once you’ve seen a zone, it’s not really exciting to see it again. Or again. Or again. Holiday and special events are great and a lot of fun, but they are temporary, and in between we’re back to the same old thing.

There isn’t really any need to ‘invest’ in GW2. So, what would make me invest in the game? Player housing. A real crafting system (see SWG, DaoC, Eve… but especially SWG). A more dynamic resource system. A better market interface and limits on economic activity based on character profession investment (no expiration of item listings? Really? No limits of the number of transactions per day/week/month per account?). The ability to set up and run a personal 24/7 vendor as a way to sell goods. A serious limit on how many recipe’s you can learn at each tier per character. Lose the ability to retain profession skill’s for any that you drop.

Basically, a game where being a merchant is possible. A game where I want to spend time away from swinging a sword. Bah. Rant over I guess. I want SWG back. I guess I will have to settle for dreaming that ANet will stop punishing players with horrible RNG, the mystic toilet, and stupidly monotonous and incredibly expensive process to get the cool skins.

First off, i wish they just remove the world stealth and call it invisibility. Sorry, but if i see someone running towards me and then ‘stealths’, i should still see them running towards me.
And you’re right, they have the highest burst and are the slippiest class, which is a horrible combination. Invisiblity is the next best thing to invulnerability. Your oppenent can’t see you, can’t target you. All he can do is swing wildly hoping for that glimmer of hope to hit, only for a thief to shadow step, bow 5, or their blinfing powder activates.

They made theives have too much control in fights. The ability to do spike damage, disappear, and spike again has always been stupid. At least in WoW, if a rogue got close, you had a chance to react with their stealth sound, or even seeing them.

You can have your spike damage, you can keep being slippery, but when you have the second best defensive ability in the game, its op.

Step 1) Go to a guild wars 2 item database site and get the chat codes for the items
Step 2) “Ping” a full set of gear you don’t own
Step 3) Tell the little kiddy who demanded said ping to “Go back to WoW”.
Step 4) …
Step 5) All of GW2’s playerbase profits

Kajin.5301:

Go ahead and waste time pinging your zerk from bags, you’ll be detected for having lacking dps (@4acolytes or 4 braziers) and will get kicked eventually (deservedly so too). Don’t join if you don’t conform. Go make your own MF party lol, enjoy waiting staring at your gw2lfg post.

The more dps the party outputs, the faster bosses melt, the less chance players have to go down and drag the run. What’s so hard for you to understand that? If you don’t want to join a 5min p1 run party or w/e, then don’t complain and join a normal p1 party.

All I’m seeing is OP asking for kitten and paying with fake bills and complaining he needs real bills to get his fun…

Soon ANet will revamp CoF speedruns… That will be the funniest day of my GW2 life.

Putting these in order (1 being the worst, 10 being the least bad).

1. Ascended and Agony
In a game that took pride in having skill based combat and minimum amounts of grind this absolutely doesn’t fit in the game at all.

2. Putting RNG in the gemstore
You can’t sink much lower than this when it comes to making money.

3. Magic Find in dungeons
In a team based setting Magic Find does not belong there.

4. Dungeons
I could write a book on things I don’t like about dungeons in their current state, but to keep it short: Bosses that are boring, easy HP sponges. Bosses that only target 1 player the whole fight. Trash mobs that aren’t worth the time and risk killing, and are easily skippable. Same rewards across all dungeons and paths regardless of difficulty and length.

5. World bosses
They are nothing more than a 1 minute (or 10 second in the low level areas) loot, zerg and lag fest.

6. Legendary items
From bad design for most of them to the fact that they’re buyable off the TP, there clearly wasn’t put in a lot of thought and effort into the whole Legendary items thing, which is a shame.

7 Skill
This kind of ties in with a few of my other problems, but I feel that grind is hugely favoured over skill in this game, and that’s what bothers me. Skill doesn’t get you awesome gear, only grind does. Skill doesn’t get you a legendary weapon, only grind does. Skill doesn’t get you titles (Dungeon Master being the sole exception), only grind does. Skill isn’t even required in a lot of cases, it’s often more about grinding down enemy HP bars than it is about skilful gameplay.

8. Story
I had hoped for the personal story to be closer to Guild Wars 1 missions, by offering unique challenges and mission objectives. Instead of threw me bunches of regular enemies and the most easy and boring bosses possible. The story itself went quickly downhill after level 50 when my Order’s mentor leaves…

9. Crafting
Crafting is completely useless besides it being an easy way to level up an alt, since everything is buyable on the trade post for roughly the same price as it costs to make something yourself. Needs untradable skins that can only be obtained through crafting.

10. Cities and home districts
This one was going to be obvious, but there’s just about 0% reason to ever go back to any of the racial cities, except for exploration purposes and the occasional story objective. There’s even less reason to ever go to your home instance…
1 thing that would surely help would be to make travel to my racial city free, but for now Lion’s Arch is the only true place to go to.

11 Underwater
Yes, an 11th. Deal with it! Underwater combat in its current state is a bore, and offers way less variety and fun gameplay than combat on land.

WvW is open world PvP. You can go about your business there doing quests/yak hunting solo with the threat of running into enemy players.

Israel.7056:

Tolmos.8395:

That is still farmable. Just over a longer period of time.

Well the time required is really the issue here. I’m saying it takes too long to acquire ascended gear given how frequently the meta gets changed due to balance patches by the devs.

Screw the META, just gear up a build you like and stick to it. METAsheep annoy me to no end. I main as a HGH Pistol/Shield Engineer, the meta is to use grenades but i have more fun without: yet i will still tiny dunk you into yesterday.

SKILL>meta builds.

The reason I argue here at the moment is because I strongly dislike people who argue debating techniques instead of coming up with actual arguments. It’s often because they have none.

clay.7849:

The point is that support in this game is inefficient and, therefore, unnecessary. I would point out that it is a shame that the PvE content in this game is such that it doesn’t provide an interesting reason to use support classes.

So basically what you’re saying is that anyon who chooses to focus on supplying the party with boons first, damage second, is a dead weight?

So the added healing that lets you stay in the fight longer to deal more damage is a waste? The high number of might stacks and fury that can add up to 70% to your damage output are a waste? 25 stack vulnerability do nothing? Snares are useless?

As a staff elementalist, I prefer to every 45 seconds or so stop mindlessly spamming fireballs to setup my skills for perma chill on the dungeon boss. But I suppose the 5 seconds of dealing less damage are wasted for you. Even if it does mean you now have to dodge those big spikes just 1/3 of the time now.

I’m completely specced for support in my Guardian. Nobody thinks it’s useful, of course. Everyone’s too busy dealing omgwtf damage to notice 15-20 seconds of protection on them, 18 stacks of might, near constant regeneration, tanking the boss while I revive some lolglassy thief or warrior, making some stupid boss deal 10k damage to itself simply from a reflect wall.

Or the fact that aggro mechanics make the bosses / enemies attack me kitten near all the time, making it so all the glassy DPS’ers don’t even NEED to dodge (Most of the time), get downed, heal, or waste time with all those frivolous pleasantries.

Maybe it’s cause I go balls to the wall full support, who knows. And no, I’m not talking “Lol I have a greatsword and AH, it’s time to be a support guardian!” I can still do decent damage with Cleric’s stuff. Symbols heal AND damage, Orb of Light heals AND damages (And then detonate heals and damages again.) Mace final attack heals and damages.

So yeah. I’ve always been a support player, primarily, in RPGs and MMORPGs, and it -can- still be effective in this game. Full PVT gear still gives the same amount of offensive capabilities as Cleric’s. So why shouldn’t I go cleric’s and help teammates out more than myself? Decent damage, great support, it -is- possible. Especially when most of your heals/buffing skills also do damage.

But that’s just a primary guardian speaking. I won’t pretend like support is great for other classes at all. I’ve never had someone convinced I was a waste of a party slot though, and I do let them know that I’m “as support as possible.”

I will agree that if you can kill the enemy faster than it can kill you, that’s absolutely fantastic. I, however, am not much of a risk taker and I don’t wanna get downed because one single misclick. I’ve seen 4 glassy dudes die almost simultaneously because an enemy’s telegraphing animation happened, and then delayed the actual effects of it. They dodged too early and went down. I dodged too early too, but my Aegis caught it and I could revive them while taking the enemy’s non-super-mega-ulti jump or whatever it is.

But that’s just me. I genuinely enjoy supporting others with heals and buffs. I wouldn’t throw the term “Support” around just because you have healing shouts, like some others do. Every fiber of my build is dedicated to supporting, and doing passing damage is just a side effect. That’s why I think it works, at least.

Support isn’t something you build for. It’s something you do. The reason the meaning seems broad is because it is broad. Anytime you do something to keep your party members from dying, or to enable them to do more damage, you are supporting your party. All that AoE Might/Vigor/Fury? That’s support. Guardian spamming AoE Protection/Regen? Support. That Necro that’s keeping Weakness/Vuln/Chill on everything? Yeah, that’s reducing damage taken and increasing damage output. It’s support too.

Oh, and sometimes people heal each other….I guess.

Jack of Tears.9458:

We’re not remotely the only class what has Stealth, so I’m not going there.

but thief is the only class who can consistently keep stealthing until he/she gets bored

Nor are we the slipperiest class in the game, though we’re supposed to be.

actually, thief is. Join a battle from stealth, spike your victim to death, stealth and flee unpunished. Out of initiative? roll for initiative, rinse and repeat.
I am still undecided, between warrior and thief, which one is the most roflstomping class: they are both so easy it’s painful, I remember how much I struggled to level at first when I rolled my very first character in gw2 (Elementalist).
Everything else is a piece of cake to level and to succeed with, really.

Gibson.4036:

If D/D Ele is OP, tweak how many boons can be stacked how quickly.

nope, cause Ele’s boons stacking directly depends on how well the player knows his class and is able to perform quickly the combos required to get those results.
Give to all other classes similar COMPLEX mechanics to counter it, and I am all up for it.

Why can’t they do something more meaningful like create more/better team mechanics… instead of just upping the damage against people running boons… how about introducing utilities that put down a combo field that can be finished by teammates to strip boons or something along those lines.

Stop adding damage… burst in this game is already ridiculous. Start adding and USING the mechanics we already have.

I note that a lot of people supportive of this possible change play Thieves and/or Warriors.

As a Guardian, if I use a Mace, Greatsword or Hammer, my auto-attack will essentially give you Regen, Might or Protection, or give you a damage boost. A lot of my other attacks, and most of my utilities, will do the same, some more than others. Essentially all of my buffs, which are the centrepiece of the Class, will be giving me a debuff and/or giving you a buff. And you wonder why Guardians are concerned?

What will be the point of some of those Boons anyway? Using Regen or Protection would be counter-productive.

As already stated, there are ways to remove/steal buffs already in game. If you want to steal Boons, then play a Class/build and/or use a weapon that allows you to do it. If it’s not your preferred Class/build/weapon then tough luck. No Class/build should ever go without some form of counter and bunkers already have a counter in their lower damage output and the ability of other, specific, builds to remove their Boons. When Thieves or Warriors have trouble with bunker builds it is called balance. What I am seeing here is players saying “I can annihilate every build for every class except for a handful of builds that stack Boons… I want to be able to destroy every build with impunity.” That is the epitome of bad game design.

With that said, if any Class should be a candidate for something like this it shoud be Ranger or Engi, not Thief or Warrior.

Boon hate sounds odd to me: “Bro y u giving me swiftness in combat it increases enemy dps!!”. Goodbye to support.
I honestly think the bunker problem can be solved with a simple but reasonably drastic change: improve the Vulnerability condition. Make it twice as strong. Maybe even make it four times as strong. I always found it kinda lame that MAXIMUM stacks of vulnerability has a smaller effect than the protection boon (25% vs 33% respectively). By doing this, offense may very well have the edge over defense without resorting to raw damage increase (to professions that already have a lot of that i.e. warrior/thief). In effect this should result in a more exciting game.

If boons make you vulnerable and thus giving boons make other vulnerable, doesn’t that mean that support is a bad thing?

In the last time I have seen lots of complains that the game is already focusing to much on DPS (and I agree) so why make support even worse.

alemfi.5107:

Warrior was mentioned as a candidate, and —- i suppose it may make sense for them to get increased damage against a boon heavy target as opposed to other enemy boon mitigation.

1 or 2 weeks ago there were lengthy discussion about warriors having to much dps…

You know, I wouldn’t mind the basic concept if it were aimed at making alternate builds viable (not particularly introducing new build types)…

….like, say for instance, the mechanic for ‘boon hate’ was it just procced damage on the target for every boon they have. So use a special boon hate attack on a target with 3 boons and you get 3 instant tics of damage…but the tic per boon would be static and only enhanced by condition damage. Low condition damage builds (your zerker warrior) would not do hugely as much damage with it so most boon bunkers can simply ignore most of the damage just like they’d probably ignore any bleeds-on-crits. But a condition warrior? That would…possibly just make them a threat rather than a nuisance vs foes with lots of boons or weak condition removal.

Just a thought on my part…