Guild Wars 2

The game is not balanced so lets add a bunch of stuff that may or may not be ridiculously op and that was only tested internally. Seriously big changes like these need to be tested by many people. They need to be given to the player base way ahead of time like 2 months and comments taken. I don’t understand why people get excited by change for change sake. I like new additions but the way stuff is tested in this game dampens any enthusiasm I have for it.

Oh, so the game needed more reasons to make leveling alts less attractive.

Whatever.

Lishtenbird.2814:

As for older players with alts… Well, leveling is boring anyway, but knowing game mechanics will probably compensate the amount of time added by traitless levels.

And thats why leveling should be made even more boring ?

I just wonder if that will also have impact on mobs. Do they have also traits ? I just always had the feeling that somewhere around lvl 12-15 the mobs started to get much harder than the lower mobs. Now if players get even weaker will those mobs also get weaker because of missing skills / traits or proportionally harder ?

Lance Darkrage.1398:

For discussions sake, does anyone have any alternative solutions to acquiring trait points, or would you prefer they simply revert the new leveling system for traits?

1. Keep it as it is
2. Make the traiting faster, not slower. If 5 traits will now be one, instead of awarding 5 do award 1. Start awarding them as early as it was currently (level 11) and finish faster. I don’t see any reason to limit the players.

Someone mentioned that a lot of players are running untraited and that’s why they made the change. The thing is when you started the game you were told how to do traiting and you were alarmed every time you had an unspent trait point. It’s not more complicated than in other MMOs. If people can’t learn to trait now, they won’t be any better at it with the new system either.

A open all option would be great. I’ve already destroyed left click on one mouse.

/agree

I’m really happy that i don’t plan to level any new character at the moment, since that all doesn’t really sounds funny but more like boredom.

TLDR

• Gold seems to be the most important thing to spend time on, is this what other pve gamers like? I certainly enjoy boss battles/dungeons
• Ways of getting gold are best spent on quick, easy, low difficulty content.
• Lack of unique rewards/lack of gold for doing difficult bosses
• Mass mobs of players in open world content make you feel unnecessary
• I enjoy fractals but i find the “skip all the trash” methods of old dungeons stale relative to other MMOs (dont get me wrong i played GW1 and did droks runs, i enjoy running stuff, its just not the PVE content i was hoping for)
• As someone who has learned the paths like most of you, I dislike the challenge new/rusty players will/do face when coming into the game, new players/ keeping players are how the game survives and becomes more fun.
• I enjoy fractals but the lack of rewards seems rather dissapointing considering ascended armor/ legendary wepons require mainly gold
• I have enjoyed GW2 a lot and hope they can keep improving PvE content
• I realise my post is massive, i didn’t intend this but ill try and respond less wordy <3
  Thoughts?
  Comments?

3)The Progresssion/noob concept

For new players or returning players (my friends and I at least, forgot about it due to lack of endgame content after hitting 80 and doing all the dungeons). The noob to endgame PVE road is a rough and frustrating process. I spent 2-3 hours working with a group in arah part 4 yesterday trying to get it done, yet the people I was paired with through dungeon finder were having troubles with mechanics, after 2-3 hours of wiping on lupi (after 1 shotting parts 1/2/3 on my 1st ever time in there right beforehand) I gave up because i could go farm Tier6 mats, sell them, and pay someone to solo it for me and save time/effort/headaches. The fact that a dungeon is do-able with 1 person in itself is a quite large flaw in endgame PvE content as I see it. The bosses seem to do no damage if you can dodge, and 1 shot with massive death hits.

For people wanting to dip back into these dungeons the community is split at the moment between those who want that fast quick farm, and those who dont know the path yet. Here is what i see as the issue with this, The process at wich dungeons are completed has been worked down to a science. In most MMO’s dungeons have a 30-45 minute playtime. as too in GW2, but to get this time we have to skip 95% of trash mobs, and only if you are farmiliar with where to run/where to jump/where to de-aggro, can you complete this.( I found myself having to watch a youtube video of every dungeon every part to refresh on these paths in order not to kitten off people “AC P3 EXPERIENCE ONLY MUST HAVE LEGENDARY AND 10 000 ACHIVE POINTS”. I understand these people 100% because it feels like a massive time sink to explain every part every run when the rewards are so low. Furthermore without this methods the 2-3 hours of trash clearing becomes horribly ineffecient next to world T6 mat farming/worldbosses/pretty much anything. IMO the best way to make trash worthwhile is somehow preserving the >1hour dungeon run. (putting players into things for more than an hour can be a negative thing, unless it is an endgame progression like fractals), Having said all that I actually think fractals and fractal-type encounters, are where the should focus of PvE content should shift.

4) Fractals
I quite like fractals, they provide a repeatable dungeon that can be fresh and scales with difficulty. The perfect PvE formula and is why I recently got back into GW2. However I saw the level 50 rewards and got discouraged because it seems the main reward is doing the content, players need a sort of working towards new gear/items/rewards type of feel to stay active. Ascended crafted gear seems great in terms of its use for prestige and player advancement. but it falls into the trap of again being too gold depended, i already find myself floating 2000+ bloodstone and emphyral and it has been less than a month of getting them (another thing too add here is that I had destroyed 500 blade shards, having more than enough to make all the backpacks ill ever need, before i found a DEV post saying don’t, this info needs to be more readily available). The main components I now need for endgame gear, are gold based. Another flaw I see is with content being always acsessable. It is difficult to catch up in fractals because if players do them, they move on to 50+, or they run daily 1-9 runs, 10-40 has a void of players atm and having a steady flow from early-endgame to end-endgame is key in the PvE formula. Thinking back to how WoW pulled it off, you want the dungeons to have unique rare asthetic drops so theres always a reason to do them, and allows the older gear to easily filter to new players and let them catch up. Im not saying gear is an issue like this in GW2 because my old exotics from release are still a mere 5% stats behind ascended fractal loot. But that in itself seems odd that there is no gear progression endgame.

I feel like fractals and things like them should be the focus for GW2 in terms of building up an endgame content. There has been a lot of living story i missed, a lot of new minigames, yet i still see a gaping void in the PVE content of GW2. In fractals they got it 90% right, the boss fights are engaging, the trash mobs are at a minimum and the lack of open world-ness makes high level fractal actually prestigious to those who play PVE. the one thing that falls short is gear. it still seems Gold dependent. Even with high level fractals being challenging, the difficulty/rewards quite honestly doesn’t make doing them worth the time/effort. Get enough dragonite ore and you basically are best farming gold/shards for the gear, not doing the associated content.

There are several things I feel like are holding Guild wars back in terms of PVE content. I am just coming back from a long break and feel the PvE still lacks endgame.

1)LS bosses/Worldboss trains
The mob mentality of living story and world boss fights has its place, however they are the highest gold/time ratio and seem to have the lowest player input/reward ratio (auto attack with a staff or be highest dps, same rewards). For me it comes down too “is the reward enough gold/time? if so farm, else do it once and move on”. Hardcore raiders enjoy a challenging boss which they feel rewarded in killing, and are rewarded for killing. I could use a lvl 80 with max gear or level up an alt and still feel like i am contributing the same to the group.

Since picking the game back up I have been trying to catch back up on what is happening in the game. I found a lot of the community of Ex wow raiders like myself had stopped at the launch of Living story. However I found the recent (2014) bosses and content a lot better in terms of PvE mechanics. Unlike before where the most challenging boss (lupi) was recycled for all 4 parts of arah. Aside from the clockwork dungeon boss, most of the bosses are available to anyone rules it out as endgame content.

Perhaps If these were (5/10/more) party instances like a dungeon, It would feel much more rewarding to those who do it. For example have the knights/scarlett fight be a 15 man dungeon where it lets you split 5/knight, and then 15 on scarlett. It would allow players to feel more involved in the fight rather than just a mess of players on a boss. There is little to no reward for the players who really skilled at PvE that a little gold cant match. For example the fractals lvl 50 rewards (seeing as the effort/time required to get there, the player would be better off if he spent it farming gold). The players get to the end and feel like their time has been wasted. If difficulty causes an issue with content being able to be completed by all players, there can be a difficulty scale such as “hard modes” or fractal difficultys.

2)Rewards for Difficulty
It seems like boss achievements are the main reward for being skilled at PvE mechanics. however being someone who put the game down for 6-8 months, I find myself a solid amount of achievement point behind those who didnt. Not that those players shouldn’t be rewarded for it, i just feel daily and monthly achievements weigh very heavily against the difficult ones that really are prestigeous. Sadly i don’t have much to offer in terms of fixes for this apart from a change in the scaling. it seemed quite reasonable at launch, however now coming back to GW2 i see achievement point values way higher than i thought possible. Any thoughts on how you feel the fixed/daily/monthly achievement ratios are?

I have found a lot of discussion online about the availablity of the endgame items. For example other games have had the difficult and challenging bosses, and those bosses exclusivity reward players with the best items. However the “big ticket items” (I.E. Prerequisite exotics, ascended gear, even legendary themselves) mainly rely on gold. As for making gold, drops off mobs through out the world regardless of difficulty, seem to provide similar if not seemingly unbalanced rewards (meaning spending X hours in difficult content usually rewards a lot less than X hours in easy content). Thus a lot of players complain about RNG in the game. I dont feel the use of RNG has anything wrong. you may never see the precursor drop, that’s a reality of having it rare and changing it throws off the mechanics. However something should be done about the high difficulty encounters rewards. I don’t know how i feel about the daily 1-2g rewards for dungeons, you could do 7-10 quick easy dungeons and get more gold than doing 1-2 difficult ones and they would take the same time. This creates an endgame content based around farming/repeating easy content to get quick and easy rewards of money to buy the things you need. When you are max level and log on to play PvE, you want that to revolve around farming gold/using that gold to kill harder bosses to receive (X) where (X) is either prestigious loot, Greater gold than you could have farmed but is only available one week/month/day. Or maybe aesthetics, although aesthetics can only go so far especially sine the Value/Time+Effort Ratio should be considered. and farming aesthetics can cause a “what now” feeling upon completion due to the fact that they really haven’t gotten any stronger as a character.

https://soundcloud.com/arenanet/guild-wars-2-battle-on-the

I really love the new track for this boss fight! Thank you, Leif Chappelle!
The piano sections is wonderful, it reminds me Kingdom Hearts (like someone say on soundcloud). Good Job!

So after watching Braham break his leg thousands of times I really started not to care. Same goes for your Lesbian subplot. You let us skip the first cinematic but we have to watch that stuff over and over again when we are trying to go for the achievement? Really I could not start caring less about more now. Braham and Marjory deserve it for how many times I had to sit through that.

I think the final instance could have been improved greatly by using illusion of choice.

Let me explain:

In the final instance Scarlet asks if we want to know why she did everything she did but Braham cuts her off.

The players have no word in this matter, and are just dragged along for the ride, rather than deciding (even if it is just an illusion) the outcome themselves.

I think it would have been way more interesting if the players had to make a decision, something like:

• Hear her out: Which leads to Scarlet saying something along the lines of “(cough) (cough) come closer, and i’ll tell you” so the players approach her together with Marjory and Braham. But just as we get close she yells “Fools!” and blows you all up (leading to the cutscene with Braham and Marjory getting injured).

• Finish her off: Which leads to the version we have now (Marjory and Braham closing in on her, ready to kill but she blows them up)

Too late for this chapter but please keep in mind how powerfull an impact a choice (and even the illusion of having one) can make.

I’m all for romance in video games. We’ve had this Kas & Mar discussion many, many times before on various topics so I’ll try to concise. K&M feels too forced, too .. non-subtle. Shoehorned. Especially the last few updates where their romance has surely not been a mystery to anyone who watches their dialogue. I don’t need my romancing Guild Wars NPC’s to rub my face in it. Koss & Meloni was a good example. So was Mhenlo & Cynn. (Now THERE’S a romance that was funny to watch and wasn’t too cheesy!)

And I’m sorry if I’m a bit of a Grinch here, since the OP seems pretty sincere. But I’m just not feeling it.

Vol.7601:

Traveller.7496:

iStoked.4018:

Seriously! I’m still picking my jaw up off the floor.

C) Selling Tormented weapons on the store just makes me angry that there’s no way to get them besides random. It’s a slap on the face for any GW1 veterans who had them and loved them.

Buy them from the TP?

yayaya farm gold till you fall flat on your face!!! awesome rewarding gameplay!!

/sarcasm off

get real. Stop with this nonsense “buy from TP”… ya farm gold ok, i dont really feel like doing endless and mindless zerg trains to earn something.

Make it rewarding by actual skill. my 3 year old can farm champ zerg trains and eventually buy something off TP. Stop acting like this makes it OK. It doesn’t change the fact that anet only plans to add skins and what not through gem store

The story good, the gameplay…. WTF

I am sorry, but i actually dozed off in the massive holographic zerg fight.
While i was expecting that, it was actually worse then i thought. No challenge, no rhyme or reason. No introduction. Just here have some gamemechanics and have them zerg away for an hour…

Okay, to be fair, there are some really nice mechanics there, but not for mass players…
Seriously, These were great dungeon bosses. But here they were just damage sponges.

Awesome Cinematics I liked the camera work in engine and for the cinematic… nothing to add here. Thumbs up, etc…

Story was… unexplained… seriously.. thats it? We as players know what is coming… new ED, but the people of Tyria again get now answers… they even tell her to shut up…
Good grief.
The couples kiss, someone is injured and yeah… i hoped for more…
It was well done. Some light hearted but predictable bad implemented extra “drama”, which was okay, given the mediums limitations (okay, here the camera was bad. Her shockwave was kinda odd… suddenly all were injured.. okay?), but otherwise…
In the end the only thing we as players got was just the big reveal in the cinematic.

Sidestorywise Not much actually. We got Ellen staying out of the way… okay… sure.. Heal-O-Tron saving our butts in battle which was awesome and Magnus staying around. Oh and Taimi, showing some kind of emotions as we talk to her after the fight…
Otherwise not much has changed as far as i know off… kinda disapointed.

The loot.. great, i think. Got nothing awesome, but i can work on my ascended armor now a bit with the lesser vison chrystals. Otherwise most went to the venodor ot getting escavated… in the end two gold and a nice mask…
I see potential here for people who stay with the event..

Replayability? I honestly am not in the mood to go brain afk for another hour. Seriously the payoff isnt nearly enough for me, to do so… It is easier and more stimulating to do everything else.

In the end i can say it was a nice one time experience for me.
Putting Scarlet down was satisfying, even though they could have seriously revealed that “twist” a lot earlier… so yeah, new ED. whoopdidu… next…

iStoked.4018:

Seriously! I’m still picking my jaw up off the floor.

You are pretty easily impressed.

A) Kasmeer & Marjory was pretty cheesy as before. If that’s what they were going for, great. Success.

B) Loot was alright, lesser vision crystal saves me a few jumping puzzles and skillpoints, I guess.

C) Selling Tormented weapons on the store just makes me angry that there’s no way to get them besides random. It’s a slap on the face for any GW1 veterans who had them and loved them.

D) Event itself has potential but I’m already stupefied how dumbly people are playing. Red knight has 100+ people on it while green has 10. No chance to make it into the next phase. Hopefully will improve with time.

E) Who was E?

F) Also, one positive thing – I liked how they put a portal there to access the ending in case people didn’t feel like zerging or just can’t finish the events and just want to see what happens.

By the way, is there supposed to be something else after you escape the ship and see the cinematic? It seems like the whole thing just ends abruptly.

I posted this elsewhere, but thought it may generate more discussion here:

With the EOTM patch pending, I wanted to post my thoughts on Scarlet.

First, the questions.

1. What is Scarlet doing?
2. Why is she doing it?

First question: What is Scarlet doing?

According to Taimi, she is looking for something. That’s a safe bet to make. So, what is she looking for?

We are not sure. However, she has built:

• thumping devices
• machine minions
• airships
• mega lasers
• poisons
• drilling machines (presumably, based upon schematics in her office)

From this, I conclude she is looking for something underground.

OK, so what is she looking for? Really I only have 1 conclusion based upon what has been discussed (or not discussed) in GW2: a dragon. Using some meta-gaming, we know Primordius will be the last, biggest baddie, so ANet will save him until later.

That leaves us with: Mordremoth, the jungle dragon.

Mordremoth exists and is awake – we know this. However, we have not seen evidence of its corruption similar to what we have seen with the other dragons.

I hypothesize this is the case because Mordremoth corrupts nature from under the earth. It controls plant life and various earth-dwelling invertibrae (i.e. worms).

The 3 headed giant worm, I suspect, is a champion of Mordremoth. I also suspect the giant jungle worm is a minion of Mordremoth. If this is true, this means the jungle dragon has infected large, geographically separate regions across Tyria. (If the 3 headed worm is that big, imagine how big the dragon is!)

How has it accomplished this? I suggest it has done this subterraneously. I believe Mordremoth is some bizarre tree-like dragon that exists mostly under the earth. It has slowly spread its root system across much of Tyria, corrupting organisms along the way.

Now, is Scarlet working for the dragon or against it? I’d say against it. Why? If she were championing for the Dragon, then we would see her commanding an army of plant-like life and trying to acquire sources of magic for the elder dragon. Instead, we see her using the magics for her own benefit and building machines to do her bidding. That sounds pretty anti-Jugle Dragon, if you ask me.

Scarlet has been building an kitten nal of weaponry designed to kill Mordremoth:

• Flame legion weapons (fire is no friend of plant life)
• tunneling machines to dig deep
• clockwork machines (cannot be corrupted by Mordremoth)
• giant drills
• a super-poison injector
• toxic hybrids that may poison plant-life

If Mordremoth has corrupted much of Tyria and lies beneath the surface, then anywhere you stand may be on top of the enemy. So where does one fight from? Well, the skies! Here is where the Aetherblade ships come in. From here, Scarlet can attack with impunity, far from the reach of Mordremoth.

I think these thumpers aren’t looking for a single thing. I think she is mapping out Mordremoth’s root system (the ley lines of Mordremoth, if you will).

All roots lead back to the trunk. By mapping out the root system, Scarlet will pinpoint the location of Mordremoth’s core.

Now, onto question #2. Why is she doing this?

I have no idea!
What I believe, however, is that the remaining questions which I have not answered are tied into her motivation
Why did she go crazy?
What did she see in the Mists?
Why did she kill Omadd?
Why is she attacking Mordremoth now?
Why is she attacking the citizens of Tyria?
What do the steam creatures have to do with this?

I can only speculate that, while in the Mists, something got a hold of Scarlet and, when she came back, she wasn’t alone.
I’m guessing whatever came back with her is somehow tied to the Steam creatures and has a giant hair across its rear about all things organic.

The enemy of my enemy is my friend? Or is the enemy of my enemy my enemy?

[Devs still have “couple of big projects” cooking in the background]

We recently had Fractured. This mean there will be no (positive) fractal changes for one year.

You cannot be (or is very difficult to be) immersed in a game that:

- Restricts your camera to constantly 3rd person
- has instant travel + a load screen with every waypoint
- has no inherent weather effects
- has icons in every corner of your screen, and a non-adjustable UI
- has NO sunset or sunrise (only light, then dark, then light…)
- has a nearly static world of repetitious events and plethora of never-moving NPCs

All-in-all, single player games are where you will find immersion, where they can cater a game to fit around your character and present everything to you in a way that seems more natural and not segmented for someone else who happens to be doing the exact same thing you are.

MMOs just can’t have that type of immersion.

Best we can hope for is they start learning how to write better stories and polish up the game world, so instances and events will help make the player feel more integral in the world.

I actually made a video about this on my channel a long time ago, where I was going to explore zones with my UI completely turned off….and it actually made much more of a difference than I had imagined.

tl;dr

The game isn’t immersive, try playing with your UI turned off in a PvE zone, and you will at least feel a better sense of immersion.

Immersion is dead.

I blame it on the jarring transitions of instanced zones and waypoints.

WoW is more immersive than this game even.

Sharvis.9085:

Traveller.7496:

But honestly, do you guys feel that leveling LA would be a “world-changing” event they keep promising? If GW2 had Searing of Ascalon – type of event, that I would accept, but just a makeover for one town doesn’t cut it after all this hype.

In terms of a simple makeover, no. But there are ways it could be done to give more oomph to the events, such as the destruction causing the Tengu wall to collapse allowing access into the Dominion of Winds.

This. Please let it be this.

Steel Fenrir.2791:

We should do a farewell party for old Lions Arch if that would happen. Oh wait, maybe we should gather for a solemn mourn for its loss? Or maybe both!

Oh my god — you just reminded me.

Lion’s Arch will be the mirror of Ascalon of Pre-Searing, and Scarlet is probably going to decimate the landscape, turning the beautiful city into the wasteland of Old Lion’s Arch, just like Old Ascalon.

Let’s just be hopeful that Scarlet can live up to what The Searing did to scar its mark in history.

LA is going to get destroyed. Or at least severely altered, Stormwind/Orgrimmar style. Who’s with me?

Hopefully this will lead to mystic forges in all the racial cities, with a shared city chat channel between all 5 cities