Guild Wars 2

For a while (idk if they still do) WoW had the philosophy of certain classes/specs being viable by just doing damage if that’s what someone wanted to do. They openly came out and said this, which is why you saw specs like ret paladins, feral druids, etc. doing insane amounts of damage.

I think I’m alone when I say this, but I don’t think the game is terribly broken atm. I think some things are a little too good (cantrip eles, hgh engis), and some things are a little too weak (warriors), but I don’t think it’s that bad. I think balance changes when teams become better coordinated. I can only speak for NA, but I haven’t ever seen any team have outstanding coordination with each other.

I think when this starts happening balance will inherently start to shift. Don’t get me wrong, I think changes need to be made, but I don’t think it’s as drastic as people make it out to be. I think it’s laughable that so many people think they play “perfectly” most of the time, whether it’s solo or as a team.

If you want to compare this to WoW arenas, think about melee cleaves. They didn’t take much coordination to play, as most of the time it was more effective to just sit on one target for 10 minutes until it died. Compare that to other setups, one being RMP, where you had to do things like baiting out cooldowns, swapping, and bursting into CC. The game obviously went through a lot of balance changes, but this is generally how it was when I played.

You would see melee cleaves dominate the lower ratings because it was relatively easy compared to other comps, however at higher ratings it wasn’t as effective and it showed. I just feel like people in GW2 are playing more like a melee cleave instead of playing like a coordinated team, and that’s why certain things appear insanely over/underpowered.

A lot of people are going to disagree with me and flame me, but it’s really funny that the same people that berate new players for dying to high burst in hotjoins are the same people that complain about balance and don’t even try to do thinks like setup spikes in cc chains on bunkers. These are the people that complain about hundred blades being broken because they can’t finish it in a bull’s charge, but don’t even try to have a teammate follow up with a stun, knockdown, root, or do anything after the warrior uses bull’s charge. This is a team game.

The idea was to make living story one time events to give them some meaning for the ppl who did them and these ppl can tell new players about what was done before. The thing is that there should be a living story going on all the time.

Glint is my fav. Don’t like the elders.

“Each encounter within the dungeon itself is designed to teach players mechanics they haven’t encountered before, from jumping over ground attacks to using pushbacks to knock enemies out of protective auras, culminating in a final battle designed to test players’ proficiency with everything they’ve learnt.”

OK… this holds tremendous promise.

Endgame, huh?

I’m pretty new to MMOs, with GW2 being only my second one. On the other hand, I have played many RPGs and generally more games than is healthy for a 22-year-old.

However, topics about “endgame” and the various points raised within don’t resonate with me as an MMORPG player. They resonate with the me as a “gamer”, a person who plays videogames.

People talk about “endgame” and use words like “progression”. To me, that sounds strange. As someone else pointed out, you’re not progressing as person, the developers are just altering the mold you’re playing in. You can’t even argue that the “endgame gear” is tied with your mastery of the game, as your skills within the game, namely knowledge and reflexes, are not tied to the gear, they’re tied to you as a person and the time you’ve spent with the specific set of rules.

Another thing is, why are you playing to “progress”? Is it tied to some kind of measure of self-worth? That you’re worth more as a person if you spend your free time “progressing”? Or is it that you find increasing numbers fun? Sadly, actually measuring your mastery of a videogame would be a boring task that is best left to the relevant scientists.

I’m not really a stranger to grinding for progression either, I’ve spent several hours in the past few days killing a total of 69 Grand Dragons in Final Fantasy IX to get Freya’s Dragon’s Crest to hit for 9,999 damage, all while also getting a Golden Chocobo, stealing like a boss and gathering a total of 80-something frogs for Quina. Note that pretty much all of those activities were dull. I found myself cursing when the frogs kept running away or when I found a treasure as the timer on Hot and Cold hit 0:00. Still, I did it. I’ve also spent over 100 hours doing similar things in each of the following:

• Kingdom Hearts (I actually started a project to get to level 100 on Destiny’s Island)
• Kingdom Hearts II
• Final Fantasy VII
• Final Fantasy VIII
• Final Fantasy X (300+ hours played)
• Final Fantasy XII
• Final Fantasy XIII
• Final Fantasy XIII-2

However, I did not do it to progress. I did not do it because it had a meaning. I did it because I loved the worlds. The worlds that had those characters I like, the characters I hated. The worlds that had those musics I could listen to hours on end. The worlds that remind me of someone interrupting me or commenting on how boring something looks.

To some, “progression” is about “skill”. However, from what I’ve seen on these forums, majority of the people are clearly not “skilled”. They might be able to do all the dungeons, they might have a ridiculously high PvP rank, a bunch of legendaries, could do the Mad King’s jumping puzzle blindfolded with their toes. Still, they do not display qualities of mastery. And further, what meaning is there in being “skilled” in a set of rules that someone else put forth?

I will admit, some of the most fun times I’ve had with games were in settings where you could argue for “progression by skill”. I spent hundreds of hours playing Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater nearly 10 years ago. Similarly, I spent hundreds of hours playing and researching in Diablo II: Lord of Destruction on my PvP barbarian.

To me, “the endgame” doesn’t exist. I don’t believe that I can ever truly experience and know everything there is to know about a game. And that’s not even getting into the roleplaying aspect. I would love to look at certain characters and analyze their philosophies, ponder why they did what they did, trying to understand the religion set within a game.

Crap, that became a lot longer than I figured. Grats to anyone who actually reads all of that.

Karizee.8076:

Progression is a weak illusion propagandized by subscription fee games where you don’t actually progress, your gear does. You don’t get better, you get better gear.

That type of subscription model gates that gear behind horrifically teensy drop rates on ginormous loot tables which is further gated behind reputation or daily grinds.

It’s an awful way to play an MMO. Boring as sin.

I agree with this. I don’t want my character to be a coat rack for greatness. I want to be great myself. There’s a big difference between these two states of play.

I’m hoping for a mini Zhaitan personally

I’d be happy with mini’s again. Always did like minis =)

Instead what we have is “i roll in the mud, i roll in the mud some more, i roll.. oh crap i am out of endurance!”.

Ignoring how half (three quarters of) the time this skill doesn’t work, the other portion of the time the benefit of throwing it down is only 1 additional second of swiftness (see note 1). Only… that isn’t how it works, is it?

I can’t count how many times I’ve had 9 or 10 seconds left on a swiftness boon, and I’ve trod over a symbol of swiftness I’ve thrown down, only to get all that time reduced to 1 second (plus my stacked boon duration increase, for a few more seconds). It isn’t that I’ve lost track of the time, it’s that the time has been cut short.

Other skills that grant swiftness stack duration (and, in fact, the swiftness boon says “stacks duration”, see note 2) and are instantaneous, not requiring pulses or nonsense like that. I feel nothing but disappointment every time this skill fails to work, and every time it works wrong. Please fix it.

Note 1: “Each pulse applies the listed duration of swiftness to allies (including self) that do not already have swiftness. Allies that already have swiftness (whether from an earlier pulse or another source) only receive 1 additional second of swiftness per pulse.” (http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Symbol_of_Swiftness)

Note 2: “Movement speed increased by 33%; stacks duration.” (http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Swiftness)

Poplolita.2638:

Not so long, I was playing Wow, proof: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/character/kiljaeden/Poplolita/simple

And then, I got tired to do the same thing over and over and over and over and over and over and over again…. And then gw2 came out. Exactly what I was looking for for years! Because it lacks what I hate the most in wow.

Being forced to:
Pve:
1. do daily quests to get into normal dungeons,
2. do normal dungeons to get into heroic dungeons,
3. do heroic dungeons to get into the real content: raid.
4. Repeat after each patch release.
5. Burn out.
PvP
1. Random battleground during 72 hours to not get one shot in competitive pvp: Arena/rated battleground
2. Farming conquest points during 2-3 months in arena/rated battleground just to stay on the competitive fiel, if you misssed 2 weeks of farm, you were pretty much screwed
3. Repeat after each patch release.
4. Burn out.

Was just not fun.

I hear you. And the best part is, we were paying them to be put on this hamster wheel.

So glad to be out of that!

This is not a suggestion, this is a discussion. A suggestion could be drawn from here, but I would appreciated if we left this thread on here rather than on suggestions where it just dies without ever seeing any poster’s light.

We have the option to “upvote” posts, but we lack the option to downvote them. I understand that by limiting the options to only “positive” you are missing out on a very important part of expression and decision making. Remaining neutral is not the same, neutral means you neither agree nor disagree. Reporting is also not what we need. I often see the thumbs up posts but if I see a bad suggestion I would like to be able to let the dev/mods know that I do NOT agree

“Negative” feedback is important too and it does not mean negative is the bad sense of the word. When I mean negative feedback is for example;

Tittle: Armor should scale harder with levels

Text: blah blah blah, no gear progression sometimes is bad, blah blah blah, lvl 80 exotic should be 30% stronger than lvl 79, the threshold should exist, making WvW better for exotic gear . blah blah

Rating: Yes+ (20) ; No- (78) ; Neutral" (320), Views (3586)
“Neutral being all those who saw the post logged in without going for neither.
Also a numerical value might be needed, or at least a ration of bad to good (like youtube), 100% positive is not the same as 70% positive and 30% negative. Also, the current rating should be hidden until your own has been given, that way you can prevent from it influencing your own decision.

then people can put different points and the devs can analyse from which has positive and which has negative (subsequent posts) which part of the suggestion can be taken as a suggestion, rather than only those which people agree.

Overall I think that since we lack Polls this would be a good start

.
.
.
.
.
.
Inb4 " I wish I could downvote this…." and “my lack of upvotes for you is as conclusive as downvoting you”

Mirta.5029:

Xia.3485:

PearlGore.7419:

And GL with high lvl Fractals or Arah EXP in beserker Gear lol.

When everything one shots you you’re best defense is playing smart, not toughness and vitality stats.

unless you’re a warrior dodge is not infinite and sometimes you can’t remove aggro, so vitality and toughness are good friends in a high level dungeon. Plus toughness actually enables you to hold aggro and make it easier on everyone else. Really I have seen very few very good berserker warriors in CoE or Arah. Most of them run in, smack things, go down.

Yep.

Over time I’ve learned that most explorable bosses can be ‘two-personed’. If I was a bit better, soloed.

I’ve learned this because those berserker types run in, do some massive damage, and then faceplant.

Then me and another player trade the boss and adds back and forth as we take it down, thanks to having toughness, vitality, and assorted other stats.
- Sadly these fights are often -not- that much longer than fights with a team of all five still up, leading me to think that really, in a lot of ways I spend a lot of time ‘carrying’ these folks.

Quite often as wel two-person such a fight, the faceplanted berserker types are in chat talking about how “this never happens, usually I pwn teh bozz 1337-stylz.”
- And then we get to the next boss, and it happens again.

Then I start hearing about how “man I’m lagging today” and other excuses, while I manage to stay alive and kill the boss even while getting some of those nasty ‘running man’ lag moments…

Lastly: I have yet to encounter anything in this game that can one-shot any of my 8 characters. Even the big dragon fights. I’ve seen a few things that can two shot me, but most can’t even do that.

I’d been thinking they must have nerfed damage in this game after launch – but then I just realized I wasn’t standing in the fire so often, and now knew the value of mixing my stats between offense and defense. Even at launch they couldn’t one-shot me, but I used to go down a lot after ‘shot 3’, whereas I’m now often the ‘last one standing’ while also the primary one holding aggro (and the primary one reviving others in mid fight, even while something is wacking on my back)…

This has nothing to do with me being ‘good’ or ‘epic’ or ‘1337’ or something. Far from it, I’m hardly that good at this game. Its just that I put more thought into my gear and build than [Achmed voice] “I pwnz U!”

I wonder if people would also be offended if they knew about every time an artist designs an enemy which isn’t used or a programmer figures out a cool trick with the physics engine and then can’t think of a practical use for it.

…or, more accurately, why high base HP is possibly overrated.

The topic caught your attention, didn’t it? I want to toss out an idea I’ve been thinking about, although credit where credit’s due: I’m not by any means the first person to think about it, and this is something I’ve been dwelling on after listening to other players talk about toughness, effective health and survivability.

I want to advance this idea that the Warriors’ high health pool is overrated, and that the Guardian’s low health pool is actually a good thing. But in order to convince you of this idea, consider the following:

1. HP is Ablative Mitigation

Think of a high health pool as a form of ablative defense. It’s a buffer. Having a huge health pool can help you absorb front-loaded damage, but you’re not likely to get back all your HP over the course of a fight. A warrior with 25k HP can survive frontloaded, burst damage, but will likely spend the rest of the fight bouncing between 4k and 10k HP. Being healed back to full just doesn’t happen often in this game.

2. Armor/Toughness is Proportional Mitigation; Healing is Linear Mitigation

The damage you take is inversely proportional to your armor/toughness. The higher your armor, the smaller a percentage of damage you take from any given attack. Likewise, the value of your healing received is inversely proportional to your vitality. So a warrior with 25k HP gains a much smaller proportion of her health back from a 5k heal than a Guardian with 15k HP. Keep this in mind.

3. Avoidance Is The Best Mitigation

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. In GW2’s case, an ounce of avoidance is worth a potentially infinite amount of mitigation. Dodge roll, missed attacks, block mechanics and invulnerability completely mitigate any incoming attack, to say nothing of absorption and reflective walls. Remember that the Guardian has a lot of these.

4. In PVE, Incoming Attacks Are Predictable

Solo a Guardian long enough and you’ll catch on to an enemy’s hidden “rhythm” of attacks. Enemies attack you at relatively fixed intervals. Their biggest attacks are almost always telegraphed, and red circles tell you exactly where you don’t want to be. The conclusion is that it’s easy to avoid attacks you can see coming, provided you have the tools to do so.

CONCLUSIONS

• ….Warriors don’t necessarily have it better than us. Their health pools are much higher, true, but high health usually just serves as a buffer, absorbing the first few big attacks but never really getting back to 100%.

• ….Lower health pools means greater vulnerability to conditions. Luckily, a Guardian can hardly sneeze without removing conditions, but it bears mentioning that our low health pools do come tacked on with this basic weakness. Conditions are potentially our undoing provided we’re not smart about removal, or lack removal options (certainly possible).

• …Guardian self-heals come in steady streams of small values rather than big bursts, making it ideal for builds with decent health/vitality but very high armor and toughness. Our readily available Protection boons multiply this effect. Guardians are therefore capable of much higher sustained survivability with lower health pools.

• …You don’t have to sacrifice damage for defense. Guardians do need Vitality, but not as much as you may think, and survivable builds probably don’t have to build purely on Power/Toughness/Vitality. If you have enough vitality to survive big attacks, you’re good to go. You have more than enough raw mitigation (Protection boons) and Avoidance (Blind, Vigor, Block, Invul) to handle telegraphed attacks.

• …There is a sweet spot for Guardian health, and I don’t know what it is, but it seems to be about 15k to 16k health. This is usually enough ablative defense against frontloaded damage, but also relatively easy to heal back to 100%

Sorta TL;DR Version: High health pools are basically ablative defense. They let you survive big, frontloaded damage, but you’re almost never going to be healed to 100% in an aggressive fight. The lower your health pool, the more mileage you get out of each individual HP healed. The lower your health pool, the more vulnerable you are to condition damage. The lower your health pool, the more vulnerable you are to spike damage. The higher your proportional mitigation (armor, toughness) and the more options you have for total avoidance (dodge roll, invul, block, miss), the less vulnerable you are to predictable damage. Most spike damage in PVE is predictable. Therefore Guardians actually don’t need that much health to perform well.

Thoughts?

Rakanarshi.5892:

The other classes just can’t kill as fast as the warrior can. You can’t get some mobs and heap them all together and then easily mow them down while doging here and there. Everything is just so much slower, even on an eli. I thought, oh yeah, glass cannon, but I found that the best way was to go dagger/dagger and stick to earth…it was also a pain to get a new weapon and level 12 different skills -_-. Can’t they just look at the other classes and see how they can be more fun early on?

Strange, I played a Warrior up to level 10 and thought it was the most boring class to play. It’s just spam hundred blades and watch stuff die. I tried some of their other weapons, but they weren’t much more fun, and killed stuff slower.
Elementalist and Thief on the other hand are a lot more fun. Sure, they might not kill stuff as fast, but they have mobility, and both classes have plenty of fun skills.
Btw, if you play Elementalist, I’d strongly recommend learning to use all 4 elements in battle instead of sticking to only 1.

Raising the level cap would be an amazingly good way to destroy any potential of having any customer loyalty ever again.

It’d be an ‘offense’ against the core fanbase equivalent to adding elves, tanks, and healers.

Pretty much a direct shot across the bow against everything this game is supposed to stand for.

Hopefully theyll gauge the community reaction before any lvl increase. There was a weighty petition against it further back on this forum. I would say the game is less designed for it than gw1. That then leads to items. If you have to grind for new items, that will be a new treadmill. If they level items with you..why have the level raised?

No, a level raise would be silly imo and add nothing to a game working perfectly well doing what it is doing

If they raise the level cap they will have truly abandoned the idea of this game being a Guild Wars sequel.

I don’t belive level cap will EVER be raised.

This is the kind of thing they should offer through the gem store. It’s got a cool effect, doesn’t break the game but it’s not utterly useless fluff like town clothes. If you’re concerned about storage space and carrying around tools then it’s a good deal. If you’re concerned about cost then keep buying 100-use picks.

I’ve seen numerous posts by people saying they want to help support the game but there’s nothing worth buying from the Gem Store, and others who complain that all the cool stuff is hidden behind RNG keys. This is a good deal for everyone, the only ones who aren’t happy about it have made the choice to be unhappy.

Fortus.6175:

The game has pretty much boiled down to me camping dragons and doing continuos repetitions of CoF for tokens to buy exotic staves (which takes me about 4-5 days to buy one) and farm gold to buy all other stuff which i know I cant get, Like I said, Im starting to get burnout, and Im afraid I might have to quit this game again until the next time the cosmos aligns and the games Im playing are offline and I get another week off.

They way you’ve put it reads nice. But think about it. If they were to give players a legendary in about 3 months, what would players do next? Maybe you don’t get the weight of the word “legendary”. It really is something you were supposed to do in a very long time span. Setting this as your only objective will really burn you out, if you don’t enjoy the rest of the content.

My only big problem with this whole thing is RNG and “hope”. If the precursor was a 100% certain drop (bound on pickup) of something really hard you had to do, I wouldn’t mind. You would deserve your legendary and you would have to prepare yourself for it. Now, an extremely rare drop from a 2~3 hour wait boss has no merit at all, just boredom. I’d rather very much farm the gold to buy the precursor on the TP so at least I am enjoying the content while I do it.

SolidTx.3249:

I am, admittedly, a bit surprised. I never realized that gear progression could be viewed so negatively. I see how you are looking at it – but hopefully you can respect another point of view.

We think of gear progression as a good thing. I guess the difference then comes down to a capitalistic vs communistic game design philosophy. Said differently some want a game that reward their players with better possessions and items based on their achievements, hard work, dedication and comittment.

The same game, I guess, can be seen as elitist, requiring it players to work in order to get something that people feel should be communal and given to all freely.

And I don’t see GW2 at lvl 80 as a sandbox.. Once a player has exotic gear, map completion and a legendary what is there to do? Honestly, we can’t figure it out.

The problem is that many players game from Guild Wars 1, like me, and are in fact fans of that game. You maxed out your gear very early in Guild Wars 1 and NEVER got better gear after that. In fact. if you maxed out your gear in Prophecies, the first game, you never had to upgrade your gear again in any of the other three Guild Wars 1 games.

It made for better gaming in my opinion.

In Guild Wars 2, when ascended gear was introduced, a decent portion of the population actually walked away from Guild Wars 2. I don’t think Anet is willing to open this can of worms again.

This seems somewhat counter-productive in regards to getting rid of botting.

Voodoo.1709:

Ision.3207:

Voodoo.1709:

I just don’t see how adding a class that is more oriented towards group healing would hurt. It would please those that enjoy that role but would not be required for dungeons for all the reasons you all have already mentioned.

Because those classes ALREADY exist … For example: a deeply water traited staff Ele with very specific set of utilities and a very specific skill rotation can do wonders for a coordinated group of players that are famliar with a dungeon.

Same for Guardian and Engineers … hell, even the DPS monster known as, “the Warrior” can be a banner/shout beast if he desires … so a dedicated healing/regen/aegis alternative ALREADY exists – and in spades. So anyone that likes those roles has a plethora of choices …

The only thing a TRUE 100% heal the group class might do for this game is possibly make PUGGING easier (assuming he knows what he is doing, and assuming he LIKES the role …) … but the cost of having a class like this would be ruinous to every single other aspect of this game. Not to metion the gigantic overhaul of the core game the devs would have to make, as well as an overhaul to every single professions healing and regen mechanics …

Basically, if Anet wants to destroy their own game … then feel free to make a LotRO “Minstrel” class and put it in this game. Normally I would think they would never even entertain such nonsense, but hey … ya never know …

I am simply trying to understand your point here… Why would adding a class more oriented towards healing cause a MAJOR overhaul?

The way I see it you would still be able to do groups exactly how they are now (mesmer + 4 zerker warriors lol, sorry had to) or people could choose to spec more into damage and less on support/healing if they knew they could have a healer class with them.

It just adds more options IMO and doesn’t seem ground breaking in any way. Again I am not trying to make you mad just trying to figure out your point. Why couldn’t they just add a healing class and not change other classes?

Because then you end up with the same "lfg need “the healer” stuff you have in other games. Everyone will know that “class x” is the best healing class in the game and will only want them for their healing abilities, and they will be pigeon holed into that role permanently, because everyone else just wants to dps.

Same for “the best tank class”.

In the end it ends up taking away options because everyone will want “4dps + healer” It’s just in most peoples nature to want to dps like mad and not have to worry about survival. It’s easier. Since it is easier it would become the norm very fast.

Now before someone brings it up, I realize their are already preferred group make ups, but that is a failure of PvE balance and is unintended. Adding in further imbalance will not fix it.

Also, as stated above, devs would have to rework every healing skill in the game to make up for the extra group healing provided by this “healing class”. And what if you do not have the healing class? Guess what? You do not have enough healing. So you can’t just take any group makeup like you did before.

Hope that helps make the point.