Guild Wars 2

it’s like the arsonist standing in front of the 20th building that he’s burnt down, turning to the firemen and going “guys, can we have a serious, mature discussion about fire safety?”

My disagreement with subclasses is hereby written as well, for the following reasons:

As been previously mentioned by a great many of people, literally all so called subclasses can already be implemented with the current systems available WITHOUT actually putting a sub-class choice in it. The thing you actually want by trying to promote subclasses is already possible with next to little change.

I really don’t want to talk down on those who promote subclasses, I really do not, please take what I say for face value and not for “he just wants to flame me.”
BUT.

Some people have the tendency to grab the most enjoyable aspects of games they liked and try to push it into their new current favourite title. In this case it looks like suggested subclasses smell like GW1 players trying to get back their secondary classes, among other games.
Please bear in mind, that in GW1 your character consisted almost entirely of skills to create your build, and next to little else. Weapon choice was negligible on classes who didn’t utilize weapon-based skills, and more often than not the gear specialization was negligible as well. 95% of the time you just went with extra energy and a varying set of attribute runes and that was it. Attribute choice usually was tied to the skills you were using, 12/12/3 was common to work well across the board, but basically attributes have been pretty straightforward. Push the skills you want to improve, nothing more.

Here, in GW2, the pie-chart for the character build is a lot more balanced. Weapon choice matters an awful lot, attributes are of higher value because they can be tailored better to suit your needs, traits & support skills are the meat’n’potatoes of your build and last but not least, Runes sometimes provide exactly that extra special feature you searched for. Creating a build in GW2 requires a lot more than just overlooking hundreds and hundreds of skills. Don’t get me wrong, I had a really great time in tinkering with builds in GW1, and I wasted hours to come up with the craziest things. But I don’t miss that. I love it in GW2 as well, it is simply different and I don’t want to be a scrub, so I sink my teeth into new mechanics and wrap my gumption around them.

Back to the point of subclasses:
Everything anyone talked in this topic about subclasses is fully possible with:

1. Larger selection of traits
2. Perhaps even one or two new trait-lines (horizontal progression – see what I did there? instead of increasing level cap, we get more traits to spend points to. Keeping gear on the same level but improving power through combination and diversification of traits.)
3. Larger selection of support skills (( some builds are either completely based around support skills or heavily complemented by them. Spirit-ranger or Trapper, here you go )).
4. More weapons unlocked for professions (( which causes more skill variety ))
5. New weapons in general (( Crossbow, Two-handed Axe, Polearms, etc ))
6. A second row of alternate weapon skills which can be toggled out of combat like support skills. (( so you basically doubling it, many skills offering either an inversion of what the original skill did, or changing the utility of it. Making a 2hand sword having 10 skills but you choose which individual 5 you run to battle with. Nothing more fancy to keep weapons simple and meaningful. Inverting the skill theme is almost always possible, easy to balance and keeps the association with the weapon intact)).
7. More Elite skills (( this was edited in, sorry, how could I possibly forget that? ))

The bonuses suggested by people do nothing but promote the type of profession they want to play or showcase a deficit of said profession. Yes, granted, some professions are not good at certain things. Yes, granted, some buffs and tweaks could be made to increase their utility in said fields.
But does this warrant an entirely new subclass system?
Look at the list I posted. The answer is; no. Absolutely not. We have the systems in place to build upon for increased variety. It just needs to be a bit more populated. There is zero incentive to create another unnecessary layer of character-building.

Just real quick here…

Subclasses are a horrible idea. Absolutely horrible. The moment you begin to add too much specialization is the moment people start demanding that specialization for things that never required it in the first place. Someone will sit down somewhere with a calculator and convince themselves that the numbers indicate that with these certain professions and these certain subclasses you can clear a dungeon eighteen seconds faster, therefore no one else is acceptable.

Horrible, horrible idea for the long term health of the game.

Making with the Sharp Knives

And now a word about sub-classes. They’ve been trotted out a few times with people often saying “Wow, that would add so much diversity!”

No, it won’t.

It annihilates diversity.

Most sub-class lust is really just the hope that a theme you’re familiar with will be awarded with extra power. Kneel before the temples of conformity and receive their blessings. Bleh. But lets assume the reins of blatant power creep are being held firmly and we’re really looking at a nice little set of new & balanced right tray goodies and maybe a fresh left tray weapon bundled together. Staff-wielding Rangers with a spread of new nature magic-themed utilities has come up a few times all under the catchy moniker “druid”.

Lets pause and look at how good we actually have it right now.

The trait system allows for around 220 combinations if you are spending your points in ten-point blocks. More than double that for the classes that have desirable combinations of 5, 15, and 25 point minor traits. Factor in actually filling your 7ish major trait slots and the combinations jump to over 100,000… but lets realistically weed out the ones that aren’t internally self consistent like collecting 20% cooldown traits for more types of utility skills than you can actually have. My rough eyeball says you’re left with something in the vicinity of 2,000 plausible trait/skill set-ups.

That’s per class.

And out of over 2000 workable combinations of traits, we’re going to exalt THREE over all others? Ditch all of that genetic potential to lavish these new skills upon just over one one-thousandth the viable builds because someone came up with a catchy name?

It’s not actually hard to make the case that dropping an asteroid on the Earth and triggering mass extinction does less damage to the species diversity than introducing a handful of named sub-classes with closed benefit sets. It’s THAT BAD.

The three Warrior subclasses suggested sound cool at all, but where’s “the archer”? How can you have a list of thief subclasses and not have a “swashbuckler”? Hey, I’d really like to advance my dual-pistol engineer as more of a “gunslinger”… Wouldn’t a necromancer “master of bones” be cool? It never stops. Even if you’re really excited about the ideas they inspire, you’ll never keep up with the actual richness and range of literary, fictional, and historical archetypes that resonate within your playerbase. Right now I can make an “archer” that’s on even footing with anybody’s warrior AND I can mix and match utilities without locking myself out of the weapon I want to use because I’m moving outside of a pre-determined theme. I can pick traits to emphasize gunplay on my Engineer. New skills fitting those themes would be even better, but exclusive new skills? Why? Why do that? What’s more, as things stand I can easily come to the boards and share my vision – to work from equal footing with anyone because at the moment the Devs don’t play favorites that way. They don’t claim namespace and fixed concepts for their own. The don’t highlight any sort of ‘one true way’. Why throw that away?

These sorts of Archetypes are fantastic inspiration, but use them to inspire individual components and then allow the players to combine those freely within the frameworks already in place. If a new “druid” build is going to arise, let it arise because a player took the new tools and did something compelling with them – often with a small, unpredictable twist that’s a better solution than would have been hard-wired into the system by artificial constrains. Allow for evolution. It would be tragedy to release some sort of tightly inter-laced staff-&-Nature Magic build when you could have with the exact same work introduced a new weapon: staff and a new cluster of utilities: Druid Magic. Instead of rendering a few thousand other themes second class citizens unworthy of using a staff, you actually increase build diversity by around 150 new combinations as players tinker with mixing the staff with every existing utility-set they like or they stick with their beloved greatsword/sword + torch and rotate in some of this new Druid Magic to see how it feels.

New options build diversity. New options bound together in arbitrary clusters murder it.

One of the best thing this game did was firmly de-couple race from class. Don’t undo the gains of that philosophy by binding weapons to utilities. Even in the service of an awesome theme.

A new way to troll ?

Create a thread, spout some useless nonsense, wait for someone to reply, delete post so first reply looks like OP, watch as everyone is confused by the new OP reply, profit.

Well played, well played.

This is a strange viewpoint. I don’t know if I’ve ever created a build based on Elemental Attunement, and I do quite fine. Sure, it’s handy, and it’s fairly strong. But if you consider it “forced,” then that’s probably because you’re unwilling to learn to live without it. You may be offended by that idea, but consider that there are obviously many other players that think otherwise. You are either the only person with a clear understanding of the trait’s value or you are perhaps too narrowly interpreting other options.

We’re already struggling to be viable in general, so how can anything be considered “forced”? It’s more like we have fifty shades of mediocre. Or perhaps we haven’t yet stumbled upon the wonderful confluence of mechanics that will allow the elementalist to shine.

I think rams are a cheap mechanic that discourage EFFORT. I mean it’s got the DPS of like a hundred people hitting the gate at the same time, and you can buy one for a few silver! It’s like, I’ve been destroying gates with my autoattacks all my life. I was proud when I finally got it down, like I accomplished something. Now you are telling me you can speed it up a hundred times by paying silver? I no longer have faith in the game.

I believe I am standing on the outside of an inside joke.

Shockwave.1230:

Diamond skin is a hard counter to pure condition builds. All you need to do is inflict 1,500-2,000 damage then you can continue melting Elementalists as normal.

Funny … many thief builds can melt an elementalist in a few seconds regardless of build , but elementalist becomes powerful vs a subset of a couple of classes and all of a sudden its a big thing. No one seemed to care when it was just Elementalists dieing without being able to be a noticeable benefit in a group situation. :p

Diamond Skin is not powerful at all vs the vast majority of the game … while the ele remains the lowest hitpoints, lowest armor class with no survival gimmicks like stealth, clones, or deathshroud … and all the while basically having the same damage output as every other class.

In short … cry me a river.

They should also introduce another skill for warriors: “Rising tide – Enemies around you drown in their own tears”

I think ascended armour will be Anets gift of xmas to us…

You won’t be able to unwrap your present until the end of January because that’s how long you will after grind your kitten off 24/7 to get a full armour set…it will also cost you a arm and a leg…which is good because that’s 2 armour pieces you won’t need!

To GvGers: Use this map, do not get mad about previous patches that ruined your gvg experiences. Anet spent resources on this because they see potential in it. If it’s popular there will probably be more content in the future for gvg.

1. make the wvw dev’s actually show up
lets be honest the wvw version of the cdi was nothing like the pvp or pve version’s
the wvw dev’s only showed up when players started getting testy and then pretended they where active participants the whole time. the thread had a very poor discusion because the wvw dev’s barely showed up to have a discusion with.

I think you misunderstand two things about the complaints.

1) The issues with Scarlet often revolve around her obscene levels of power and control over other races. So far, three of the most xenophobic and hostile factions in all of Tyria have bent over backwards to fulfill her will, without any explanation as to why. The Flame Legion are misogynistic, xenophobic, and highly pyromaniacal, and yet the Living Story expects us to believe they dropped everything and bowed down to a foreign and highly flammable girl. The Dredge would die before they allowed themselves to be enslaved again, but they were somehow bullied or coerced into serving a single sylvari. The Krait never, ever, ever negotiate with outsiders…unless it’s Scarlet, in which case they’re sitting down at the conference table.

To use the Joker analogy, imagine that one writer decided that the Joker was suddenly in command of the League of Shadows, formed an alliance between the Sinestro Core and all of Lexcorp while calling the shots for both, and then got Apokalypse to combine tech with Thanagar in order to give him more minions. That would not be “good characterization”. That would be absurd.

Until the writers justify why anyone listens to a single psychopathic sylvari, the last eleven months of kooky alliances make Scarlet appear absurdly overpowered and completely unsuited for her “ultimate mastermind of all evil factions” role.

Speaking of pacing…

2) It’s not that Scarlet has no plan. It is that the story has failed to demonstrated one.

We have fought her for eleven months. Tell me, where do you think we are in the story? Is she about to unveil her ultimate plan, or is she starting to begin her actual goal? Are we winning the fight due to our efforts to destroy her facilities, or are we losing the war as her influence expands? Are we one month away from the grand climax, or will it take six?

We don’t know. That’s because the story has not revealed anything concrete about her methods or her ultimate goal. We are fighting her because she is the only thing on television right now, and we can’t change the channel. We could be two episodes in to a full twenty-four long season, or one episode away from the finale. But we can’t tell, because absolutely nothing has been done to convey what is going on or why we should care. That is why people say she has no purpose. No purpose has been conveyed, and after eleven months of fighting Scarlet Briar, “she might totally have a master plan that we will learn one day” isn’t giving people a reason to give a cute-baby-feline about the story.

The Joker works well because he thrives on chaos using methods that oppose the Batman. His tools of the trade are cheap (gasoline and spare parts), his minions are disposable psychopaths (Harley aside), and his primary weapon is his insane unpredictability. The “crazy lunatic” villain is not a Leader of Men or supreme savant of all technology. He is chaos incarnate, and that means very few people willingly serve him except out of pure greed or their own lunacy.

If you like Scarlet, you are entitled to that opinion. In turn, those who have legitimate complaints are well entitled to their opinions on the matter.

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

Shall we give Kits to all other professions so they can properly utilize Rune of the Engineer?

Frankly speaking, do you think is fun for engineers being excluded again and again from the rewards?
We still have to bear with the kit backpacks, and yet we continue getting backpacks from the living story that we can’t even properly use. Cause they’re covered everytime we use a kit.
And now we find ourselves as the only class that can’t properly use a rune set. Without any special reason – the rune could have worked with any signet or gadget, for example, and engineers would have been able to use them as any other class can do.
It makes me wonder if the engineer class was even taken into consideration when this rune was designed.

Just 1. A better kick-off of the topic

What I mean by this is start by clarifying what certain things are “off the table” as well as some of the major factors that need to be taken into consideration.

For example if the OP on population imbalance topic had stated that forcing transfers, blocking transfers, merging servers, and reducing WvW map limits are “off the table” then half or more of the discussion would have been preemptively eliminated, and the average post much more relevant and worth reading.

I would like interaction from the get go if the topic we want to discuss is even something that will truly become a priority. I feel the last discussion was not a very good use of time since I don’t beleave its something the dev team is ready to work on.

The obvious thing is that there needs to be more dev responses.
One thing that became very apparent is that the WvW section only has one dev posting while pvp & pve have multiple devs. In general the amount of dev interaction is very low (except for pvp which seems to be on a good way, especially with all the posts by Justin ODell)

In the few posts Devon made he however showed that he put alot more thought into the issue of server population than most people on the forum.
The topic in general was imho not very productive. The balance of server populations is a very hard issue to solve and most suggestions made would do more harm than good and i don’t feel that anything in the thread brought us closer to a solution (except maybe transfer prices bound to WvW rating)

Could you add more acquisition opportunities, so one can get this amazing item for both PvE AND PvP please?
Maybe add it to the achievement rewards list where one can withdraw them unlimited times.

Dasefex.4810:

JamboHammer.4397:

GrahamW.5397:

if conditions are so easy to clear with null field then why is confusion a problem exactly? As a shatter mes its incredibly easy to avoid getting stunlocked and having confusion stacked on you even if they manage to stun you once or twice you can just send it all back to them and watch them kill themselves. Your tears are tastey feel free to whisper me whenever you feel like it for some fights.

i love how u still come at my D cuz i said null field not arcane thievery and perplexity every skill u use can be rupted causeing 5 stacks of conf each time and there stuns have less of a cd then null field or arcane thievery, ill make sure i got one of my buds hunt u down while im at work and if u lose to him dont even bother to hit me up cuz im training him to become better. and ur still avoiding the fact that i asked u wat guild ur from and i bet u were one of the 5+ sf that tryed to jump me just now in gombl just to get trolled after 2 of u ran from me 1v2 funny thing is i dont even main mesmer, ill make sure when i come back from work ill kill u with my mes thief and war and i will change to my condi warrior build just for u. im not in the mood to hunt someone down that could be running the other direction if u wanna duel meet me at the eb jp around 9-10pm

When all else fails attack the grammar.

You probably should use a comma between “fails” and “attack” to indicate the pause in thought.

BlackDevil.9268:

VOLKON.1290:

BlackDevil.9268:

VOLKON.1290:

BlackDevil.9268:

VOLKON.1290:

BlackDevil.9268:

You know, you can kill everything in the tower with full zerker too. You just need to ‘’learn to dodge’‘. Would be fun when they would release a dungeon with boss timers so you actually need to run dps specced.
Until they do that, I don’t think I’ll enjoy PvE in this game a lot…

Ugh… a dps race type of boss would be horrible for this game. It would only reinforce the fallacy that dps trumps all in GW2. I like that they’re working to break that bad habit that lesser MMOs have cursed upon so many.

Why?
The whole game is already based around ’’dps’’, especially PvE.
The real ‘’pve pro’s’’ only run in full zerker to finish everything as quickly as possible. Wouldn’t blame them tbh, getting rewards the fastest way is pretty much the only thing that keeps pve interesting in this game, the combat itself is just horribly motivated to make a macro to spam 1, move with 1 hand and kitten with the other one. That’s about the skill you need to play PvE in GW2.
The only way to fix that is to put a time limit on bosses so people actually start figuring out what else there is besides #1 spam and troll defensive builds.

So yeah, I don’t really see your point.

The whole game? No, no it isn’t. As a matter of fact, berserker groups are the largest suppliers of income in WvW. Bags galore and they shatter like phantasms on a sunny winters day. Now, perhaps a lot of the simpler areas in PvE are fine with the disillusioned zerker crowd, but it’s time they took off the training wheels and learned to actually use the rest of the skill bar, gear options and trait options that are in the game for a reason.

‘’berseker groups’’, as in raids or blobs is probably as popular as the roaming section in this game is. And well, i can tell you, the majority of the roamers runs quite dps based specs.

And for the $96,000.00 question… So?

So, you’re comparing PvE with WvW and you still haven’t replied to my question:

VOLKON.1290:

Ugh… a dps race type of boss would be horrible for this game.

Why?

I already answered that. It reinforces the fallacy that the combat system in this game is purely dps based. Newer players to GW2 as a result learn to play poorly and when faced with the more complicated aspects of the game, be it WvW or dungeons and towers with more complicated mechanics, wind up liabilities. They become the inflexible yet loud few that yell on the forums about how something is too hard to complete (hits too hard, too many conditions, etc.) and scream for nerfs to content that is perfectly fine and already quite well balanced around a combat system designed to utilize a combination of damage, control and support skills.

BlackDevil.9268:

VOLKON.1290:

BlackDevil.9268:

You know, you can kill everything in the tower with full zerker too. You just need to ‘’learn to dodge’‘. Would be fun when they would release a dungeon with boss timers so you actually need to run dps specced.
Until they do that, I don’t think I’ll enjoy PvE in this game a lot…

Ugh… a dps race type of boss would be horrible for this game. It would only reinforce the fallacy that dps trumps all in GW2. I like that they’re working to break that bad habit that lesser MMOs have cursed upon so many.

Why?
The whole game is already based around ’’dps’’, especially PvE.
The real ‘’pve pro’s’’ only run in full zerker to finish everything as quickly as possible. Wouldn’t blame them tbh, getting rewards the fastest way is pretty much the only thing that keeps pve interesting in this game, the combat itself is just horribly motivated to make a macro to spam 1, move with 1 hand and kitten with the other one. That’s about the skill you need to play PvE in GW2.
The only way to fix that is to put a time limit on bosses so people actually start figuring out what else there is besides #1 spam and troll defensive builds.

So yeah, I don’t really see your point.

You talk about skill then you talk about exploiting the game mechanics with zerker to clear content ASAP… which is a zerker pressing 1 to down everything and dodging a bit. That’s not skill, that’s breaking the game in your favor so you can do a bum rush to the end without stopping to enjoy anything. That’s the mentality I just don’t get. Hurry up so you can be done with everything… and then what? Stand around LA? Show off your backpacks? “Oh look at this Legendary I never get to use much”? What is your end goal even?

Mind you, I do think full zerker does take skill to run in certain situations because you are a glass canon and you have to learn to play it… but I see zerkers laughing how they faceroll everything and then screaming for a challenge. Well, they broke the game mechanics. They’re given a challenge and they either completely speed clear it using those broken mechanics or they find out zerk gear does them no good in clearing it (Tequatl) and they QQ on the forums about it.

I hate to have to tell you this but picking the most powerful uber build encourages bad, boring play too because you can just put anything down. In other games “challenge” usually means handicapping the player in some way (sometimes the player will handicap themselves), ya know, not running the best game busting gear to whup butt ASAP.

I hate to have to say this. Brace yourself.

GW2 was not meant for people with your mindset – it was sold on the idea of avoiding it. That’s why most don’t want an “inspect”, don’t want a DPS meter, don’t want the crap that has made other MMOs toxic.

This is basically the mentality the general playerbase have adopted. Getting a full Zerker build and expecting it to work for everything.

Then Anet starts to develop content which makes you use other builds and people thing they got a curveball thrown at them.