Don’t forget the Sanctuary→Basalt/Kodash run.
“It’s been confirmed that the precursor scavenger hunt won’t be out this month” – confirmed WHEN, WHERE and by WHO?
When
About a week ago.
Where
On these forums.
By Who
By Colin.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Where-s-the-Scavenger-Hunt-post/first#post1190541
(edited by ASB.4295)
I honestly wasn’t aware anyone ran condition builds in pve anymore, they’re horrible. It’s all about raw damage. Your ‘fix’ would make them even more obsolete.
Wow, I’m getting major Deja Vu right now. Fascinating.
Nothing is wrong with them. They tend to cause population segregation because an uncoordinated, averagely skilled group of players(PuGs) is usually unable to complete them. However, with difficulty progression like fractals, this becomes a non issue. The main problem with raids in GW2 wouldn’t be so much elitism and discrimination, but the issue of creating raid content for the majority of the player base which isn’t overly experienced and skilled, without turning the raid into a 10 or 20 man spamfest on easier levels. You can’t make the presence of every player count with easy or medium level difficulty without making it too difficult for the majority of the population to handle.
ANet has shown with GW:Factions that they aren’t averse to the idea of raids, and if this feature is requested often enough by players, I’m sure they will listen.
Plus, I’m not sure this “hot spot” idea is going to be good in practice. Unless I’m misunderstanding the concept, how is this not going to lead to overcrowded areas and dozens upon dozens of people mashed together trying to complete whatever the daily task is? That doesn’t sound like fun, that sounds like lag and frustration.
It’s what they added to GW1 to breath life into the open world(towns and outposts), and while indeed felt like daily zerging with how crowded the closest town to a daily mission of quest always became, it was better than the alternative: 98% of the population crammed into end game outposts and trading hubs to the point of them having constant overflow servers.
Why should he be allowed? Because it’s up to the rest of the group to decide whether they think they have a chance with him. Technically, everything but the best possible gear decreases your chance at completing certain content. Yes, your power increases faster at lower levels, which means the rate at which the chance of completing any given content increases is inversely proportional to the invested leveling a character. You want to find out if an averagely skilled player will be a liability at any given level and equipped gear? Get the best player you can find, tell him to level a character to the point you want to find out about, and do the content with him a few times. If he has any sort of problem with it, it’s probably safe to say that his equipment wasn’t good enough.
If you don’t want to go through all of the trouble, you can talk to the other members of your party and come to a consensus.
But as more and more of the population reaches max level, the bias towards demanding level 80s will for any given content will gradually increase. That’s just the way it is.
the problem with that is that, me and my guild can run this stuff no problem smash it out no one die’s its awesome
I join a PUG and BAM im the one with the most servivabuilty and there going down like flys
no more puging for me it seems
And people complain that guilds are useless. They won’t be so useless if you have to join one to successfully complete dungeons.
I have an extremely hard time believing that Subject Alpha wasn’t balanced with respawning in mind.
I can tell you that when the only dungeon we had seen was a preview of AC, waypoint zerging was an issue that came up and was inquired about as well, with a dev(I think it even was Colin) answering that while it wasn’t a tactic they expected, they would monitor how much it would affect the difficulty of boss encounters and taking action if needed. I specifically remember a dev quote about them keeping an eye on this, which strongly implies that they had not anticipated players resorting to this kind of play to complete the content.
Nooope. Working as intended.
I’m just suprised that there has not even been a minute squeak about what they plan to do with these maps.
There have been bits and pieces of information coming out, but nothing concrete, if that’s what you mean. We can obviously see from closed off portals that they plan on making the Crystal Desert and the Maguuma Wastes accessible.
Maybe they are saving the best till last Idk..but so far, I remain apathetic about what I’ve read.
The kind of new content you want is the most expensive and difficult to create. Compared to how much of a resource hog new maps and voiced stories are, changes to the engine or the addition of new items to acquire for completing content already in the game are a bargain. I understand what you expect, and I’m not saying you shouldn’t want these things, but this kind of content is just not very economic when you can give players the same amount of replayability at only a fraction of the costs.
It will be even worse than that..LFG only warrior guardian and mesmer any one else f off
Again, sounds pretty much like what the meta dictated in GW1. If you didn’t have a profession with the right build and equipment for the mission’s established speed clear build, you could gtfo. Okay, leveling and gearing up was a lot faster, so you had the option of rerolling to fill another role to increase your chances of getting into groups, but still.
Content is just just story, maps and events. They have a lot of gear to release before the year is over, and they probably want to spread it out evenly, so everyone has enough time to gear up. I suggest keeping an eye out for any new gear additions, which will probably come as a reward for what you perceive to be valid new content.
“LF2M, Full exotic only, link all gear, EXPERIENCED ONLY OR KICK, Magic Find GTFO”
That looks like most lfgs in GW1 elite mission hubs.
We’ll see if it’ll turn to this soon.
Once guesting is in, populations will congregate on certain worlds and make those zones easier to traverse again, solving both of your problems.
I think it will be very difficult to improve the endgame without huge changes to the game mechanics. WvW is the only place where GW2’s endgame rises above the competition. I think they should work on improving that first.
Not necessarily. Remember the first room of The Deep in GW1?
With a 12 man party and each of the 4 transporters only letting 3 players, the group had to make sure to organize in a way that (almost) every 3 man team ended up with at least one healer to defeat the first few aspects of Kanaxai. After that, the group reunited.
What people crave as endgame is forced specialization, but what GW2 was built around is to prevent the need for this kind of playstyle. Since the every player in a party can essentially do everything, it might as well be considered a single player. How do you break this holistic trinity? By physically separating players from each other and giving them unique challenges that require every team member to succeed on their own in order to progress.
In GW1, the meta for most endgame group builds evolved to a point where the team separated into highly specialized sub groups that simultaneously worked on completing quests in order to get to the reward as fast as possible. Teams didn’t have to split up to finish the content, but the risk/reward ratio was higher when taking on quests as a 3 or 2 man team compared to a full party. GW2 could design content(I think they already did that with a fractal) around separating players and forcing them to depend on each other at certain points without being able to help them out of they slack. It’s far less accessible and encourages elitism a bit more than the current system, but it’s what a certain group of players want from their end game.
Another example at player separation is the final mission of GW Factions, where the boss could teleport a player into an “out” and replace him with one of his minions. The player could make his way through the “out” past some hard hitting enemies, or wait for his team to kill the enemy replacement, which would transport him back into the arena.
You can use the basic mechanic in GW2 as well to single out one or two party members, but instead of an easy “kill the replacement or run to the portal”, you could turn one or two party members into minions of the boss, that suffer heavy health degen and are forced to attack their teammates to stay alive long enough until they can, let’s say knock down the boss to force him to release his spell on the “evil” party members.
If you want a kind of endgame that allows and requires specialization, you have to separate party members from each other. If you allow players to choose who is separated into which solo challenge, you can turn up the difficulty/specialization even more. Create a room for a dungeon that requires a player to survive as long as possible in order to allow the others access to an area that – once completed – will free you and allow you to return to your team. Naturally, players would start demanding certain professions with certain survival heavy builds to maximize their chances at completing this challenge.
A return to GW1’s system to prevent one party member stopping bosses from regenerating while the rest of the party rushes back.
The piece of code that allowed you to do that in GW1 was most likely part of the spectator feature, so I would think as soon as PvP get’s something like this, it will be added to PvE as well.
I’m interested to see if they can force a play style change with the reduction in AoE. Are skills with a conical effect considered AoE?
Not to be a Negative Nancy, but I think that’s just part of their marketing. ANet always get’s really talkative if a new event or update is ready to be released, and disappears into their coding lairs as soon as the news have settled. I’m not complaining, I’m just saying that you shouldn’t expect them to stay this communicative all the time.
I could imagine summoning a group of lesser races as followers/henchmen if you want to do dungeons or Orr and are alone, but making lesser races playable? They are called “lesser” for a reason. You can always develop lore for lesser races and make mature them, but that takes effort.
The Dirty Dozen:
1) Would you prefer ascended gear to be the last tier implemented for the remainder of GW2?
2) Would you prefer ascended gear to be equal to exotic gear in all statistics except agony resistance?
3) Would you prefer the level cap to remain at 80 for the remainder of GW2?
4) Would you prefer if WvW was set up on an equal playing field similar to PvP?
5) Would you prefer if WvW / PvP / PvE had separate skill functionalities?
6) Would you prefer if Magic Find was removed from the game completely?
7) Would you prefer if Magic Find was divided equally amongst all party members?
8) Is GW2 too ‘Grindy?’
9) Does GW2 need less RNG?
10) Has the Trading Post [and all its users/farmers] positively impacted the economy?
11) Do you have as much faith [and/or enthusiasm] about the game [and/or company] as you did before launch?
12) Do you reasonably expect [many of] your primary concerns to be addressed in early 2013?
y,y,y,n,y,n,y,y,n,y,n,n
Promise, schmomise.
It’s not a design choice but a technical limitation, which looks like could be solvable in the future. Adapt to the situation for the time being and be sure to make your voice heard in the future!
Yes they absolutely can say, no more new gear WITH STATS. When they were frantically spinning PR statements during their announcement of Ascended gear they said Oh we meant for this tier to be here from the start and it needs to be there for the game to work as intended.
They still lost some customers despite the epic spin they put out. If they then further announce that they’ve re-evaluated again and decided that their original philosophy of no gear treadmills means doesn’t mean they are prevented from adding new tiers of gear with better stats, it just means they’ll do it on a slow time frame they are going to deal with a second backlash and subsequent user exodus.
I’m not trying to live in a rosy world where I don’t think this will happen, they’ve already mentioned raising the level cap through an expansion. I’m having fun playing the game with friends, but they’ve opened the door. This makes it less likely for me to buy gems, and I’m not as committed to the game when I know the devs are making design choices I don’t agree with and that they previously stated they didn’t agree with either.
You may be right, but I am pretty much convinced that they have changed their course and are tying to make the transition(adapt or leave) for players of the old guard as smooth as they can, for the players’ sake and for the sake of not generating too much bad PR of course.
This is just them making the decision that it’s better business to cater to the the fans of vertical progression. Sad news for someone who thinks this game is awesome.
FULLACK. ANet is a 300 man company, and changes like this must have been discussed ad infinitum before they decided to implement them. It most likely is a well thought trough business decision based on the observation and/or prediction that the player group of ye olde guard isn’t big enough and doesn’t have enough purchasing power to keep a fully fledged MMORPG like GW2 alive. It’s sad for players that a part of this group, very sad, but if the livelyhoods of 300 employees are (potentially) at risk, I don’t know anyone who’d be that reckless.
Of course, that’s all speculation, like most things surrounding this subject have been. Just trying to look at if from different angles.
Appearance wise, Charr are lot closer to the average player’s ideal conception of a leader compared to most of the other races.
We get ascended gear pieces for the remaining 9 gear slots AND at least one set of ascended weapons. That’s plenty of goals for everybody, assuming they don’t make them even easier to acquire then they are right now. Increasing the number of ways to gear up: yes please; decreasing the amount of play required to get them – hell, no.
Oh, don’t forget about infusions! They are also releasing all of those tiers, so if you are dedicated enough, you could work your way up to a full ascended infusion set(12).
I think that’s more than enough to do until 2014 hits.
I would also love to see ascended gear be purchasable on AH/sellable on AH.
Making it tradeable would singlehandedly destroy the prestige of the gear. You don’t want supply and demand control the value of these prestigious items, but the actual invested player time and to a degree skill to attain them. It may be a harsh truth, but not everybody who wants ascended gear deserves it.
I agree though, that superfluous items should be able to be converted into something that doesn’t affect the economy or prestige of it, while still being of use to the player. Guaranteed Mystic Forge recipes to turn spare ascended gear items into soulbound ascended gear or weapons you actually can use. If they can pull it off, they could also make those new items account bound and soulbound on equip. There’s many ways to make use of excess loot without cheapening it’s value by selling it.
Welcome to GW2: Gear Gating.
Gear gating can be counteracted by making older tiers progressively easier to attain with each new tier release. So no matter how far you are behind, if the devs balance it right you could gear up fast enough to start working towards the current top gear.
That to me reads ‘We will not add new tiers in 2013, but may add more from 2014 onwards.’.
What’s the problem with that? They are releasing the whole ascended set + weapons and up to ascended infusions this year. That gives people a metric crap ton to do, even if they only have one character. Do you think they can pull a sudden “nope, no new gear” in 2014 when everybody has gotten used to the pace at which ascended gear pieces have been released? I read the “not releasing new gear in 2013” as “you’ve got the whole year to get geared up in ascended, if you want we’ll add more later”. They’re open for more gear, but will keep listening to the community, like they have done before with the LS patch(whose execution was bad, but this is about intention).
(edited by ASB.4295)
Colin JohansonYou won’t see another tier between ascended and legendary in 2013 for example. … Later in 2013, we’ll begin to introduce more of these systems once we’ve finished rolling out the remaining ascended gear and infusions.
Good news, everyone! We’ll have our complete ascended gear(12+2/12+4) and ascended infusion(another 12) by the end of the year, which means pretty much one new ascended gear piece per month, plus infusions. That’s definitely going to tide players over until 2013, when they will once again “consider” getting more gear into the game.
they will never even consider
Things change as time passes. If the outcry for world pvp is big enough, I’m sure they’ll listen to their fans and try to make it work. It’s in the hands of the players to rally for certain features to be implemented, and with how passionate PvPers generally are with their likes and dislikes, I can see open world dueling being something we(the majority of players) have to convince the devs of is going to be good for developing the community.
We’ll probably not get it this year, but as the list of core game issues shrinks with each passing month, development time is being freed up for introducing actual game enhancements. Be positive, but realistic.
I’d phrase it a bit differently: “Let the ascended gear be easily available”.
“Easily” suggests that it should take less work, which would defeat the purpose of being something exclusively for the dedicated players. But yes, all PvE/WvW areas of the game need to be saturated with the new gear to increase the number of ways players can choose from to work for it. Also, the more prevalent ascended gear is(and future tiers are), the higher its prestigious value will be. Only a small percentage of players knowing of its existence is counterproductive to one of the main attractions of the gear, at least in PvE.
Oh, that’s a tricky event to solo. I died at least twice at the exact same spot. Made me rage in a good way.
You are wrong!
GW2 has a slight vertical progression!
WoW has a hard vertical progression!
The difference between medicine and poison is the dose!
GW2 hasn’t been around long enough to have “hard” VP. There’s more than one reason why some people don’t like typical vertical progression. Some issues can be alleviated by tuning numbers, e.g. not making new gear too powerful, and not taking a crap load of grind to reach the BiS gear, but the core problem some people have about there never being a definite, everlasting plateau still remains. It’s a direct conflict of interest between two different player mentalities. One mentality always wants and needs the direct, immediate satisfaction of dinging and gaining raw power, while the other mentality despises the endless journey and the uncertainty of being pushed off the top of the mountain every time new gears or levels roll out.
GW2 needs to commit to one mentality to retain a solid player base that is being able to look into the games future with confidence and hope. Currently, the sails are set for VP. If they switch course again, player retention will decrease further and even less people will have faith in the dev to provide them with what they want.
(edited by ASB.4295)
An Asura gate to the Mists makes sense actually.
The Asura Gates leading from and to PvP and WvW(which are Mist realms) haven’t built themselves, you know. IIRC, Balthazar once opened a portal to the Mists in LA, but it was never said what happened to it. Did the Asura traverse the portal to build the gates in the Heart of the Mists and WVW? Did the god portal close again? Or did the Asura combine the human god’s magic with their gates? As far as I know non of this has been answered.
All we know is that according to non-implemented guild upgrade features, the Asura have managed to create portable gates, which are able at least transport people to the device.
Description found in the game files:
Worm Hole(DISABLED) This wonderous asuran device can summon all guild members to your location once. Limit one built at a time.
Well, I guess people should be happy ANet realized they couldn’t pull off the stale GW1 model in 2012 with the large majority of players they inherited from other MMOs. Thinking about it, if they wouldn’t have announced their plans for new gear releases, lord knows how many more players would have left.
One thing GW1 had I’m looking forward to seeing introduced in GW2 are titles that are increasing your defense or power, like the EotN faction titles did. Making them as difficult to max as the Factions allegiance titles, with a nice extra boost(not gamebreaking of course) for the top rank would go a long way towards giving players the feeling that they could always get better and never run out of goals to work for.
Yeah, that’s how people speed cleared path 1 an 3 back in the day.
Why did people run UW over and over again in GW1?
For the odd ecto and the chance of rare chest loot(eternal stuff, dhuum greens)
Wo do people run Dragons?
For the odd exotic(=ecto) and the chance of rare chest loot(precursor)
You don’t need more trait points, and the level cap of 80 can stay in WvW, but the increase is sorely needed in PvE, as well as new gear. Without statistical improvements its almost impossible to keep people interested in PvE. Not increasing the level cap is just purposefully gimping yourself with the amount of options you have to create real progression(no, skins and titles are not a meaningful progression for many).
Nope. I play games first and foremost for the story. If there was a game without any progression at all, just exploration and narrative, it would become my all time favorite instantly.
Although GW2s lore is a lot shallower and less morally ambiguous than its predecessor, its still an interesting world that allowed me to dive in and enjoy myself for as long as I could find any information with substance.
I’m not playing the game anymore (for actual gameplay reasons), so I would definitely not want to play a product with identical game mechanics with a different skin slapped on.
Exclusive content that requires you to be max level and have at least close to the best gear equipped. GW2 doesn’t technically have content fitting this description(except maybe fractal level 10+), but the devs want to introduce content with higher agony resistance required in future updates. The first piece of content that will require fine infusions to even survive and experience it at all will be the first true piece of pve endgame content in gw2.
Basically, more endgame content that allows the hardcore players to set themselves apart from the masses. That would include more ascended armor, rarer infusions, meaningful title ranks that affect character power, very difficult (guild friendly/pug unfriendly)10 man raid type content, a system that lets you level up to 5 levels above max level, but makes you loose an over-level every day you haven’t earned a certain amount of xp. Anything that is worthwhile playing for, i.e. anything exclusive.
Open world pvp with a player bounty system and mounts would be pretty fun too, but that’s horizontal fluff and can wait until they’ve added enough real progression.
Abaddon is also dead. DEAD dead, not just forgotten. So he ain’t coming back.
None of the human gods are(for now), although if they return and demand temples to be built in their honor, they would obviously need a new sixth one for the God of Truth, who succeeded Abaddon. Whether the human gods would force their worshipers to build monuments for them is questionable, but there’s at least some evidence to suggest they’re not completely benevolent beings. It’s suggested that at least one of them overthrew a more ancient god himself.
It’s still sunken and defaced, lying north of the Straits of Sacrilege. I think.
It’s pretty obvious that didn’t anticipate to attract a lot(the majority) of players that have needs GW2 wasn’t built to satisfy. They are slowly trying to rectify this without delegating away too much of their man power from their original plans. That’s why content has been buggy, patches have been lackluster. They had to split the live team into two, with one part following their original path, while the other one is trying to add all the features the majority of the current player base is missing(gear progression, raids, mounts, dueling, gearscore/inspect, etc.). They can’t afford to dedicate all of the live team towards their original plans, because by the time they are free to start on the things players badly want, they will have lost too many potential MT and expansion sales.
It would not be totally out of Areanet’s nature to implement instanced content which surpassed the standard party amount. I mean if you look back at GW1 essentially we had raids (12-Man) in the form Urgoz Warren and The Deep, Both were incredibly fun and incredibly long. And neither of them implemented a “Gear Treadmill”.
And now with vertical progression becoming a major focus in GW2, there’s no reason not to use raid instances(like Urgoz/Deep) to give the large majority of players what they want: a real challenge and meaningful rewards.
Feeling bad for the scrubs and bads who cannot get into those raids and therefore attain the gear? Easy: Just make the gear a timed exclusive to the raid, and allow non-dedicated players to attain it via non-raid means at the same time you introduce a new and better raid/gear tier. That way scrubs won’t cry about inaccessibility, and the dedicated player will always have the privilege of staying one step ahead than the rest.
The treadmill has to be facilitated in this game; players always need a goal worth working for. Skin and titles don’t satisfy a enough players that can keep the game alive, both financially and in a communal sense. GW1 was not a real MMO and could get away with it, GW2 can’t.
Who says we are a small minority.
ANets decision to add new gear tiers and raise the level cap say so. They have the data, and they are acting based on it. What’s endangering their success isn’t that they cater to people who like endless progression, but that they try to strike a balance between the few “plateauers” and the rest, which is preventing them from adding enough meaningful progression to satisfy the masses. Just like people won’t do events if the rewards are in adequate, they are not going to want to play if they can’t get stronger better Harder, Better, Faster and Stronger. Horizontal progression like skins and titles are nothing more than the spices enhancing the actual “meaty” progression, which is leveling, gearing and generally getting stronger, like GW1s PvE-only title rank based skills.
They have to fully commit to progression, not chicken out half way by adding one set of new gear over the course of a whole year. I mean you can release individual gear items, sure, but you have to make sure to have the next gear piece ready for release by the time the majority of people are done with the previous.
I almost certainly won’t. A few months or years down the line, when I see them giving up on incrementally releasing better gear(a.k.a treadmilling), vertical progression, and if they made acquiring BiS gear easy enough for me to not worry about it, I’ll consider it.
DR is anti-farm/anti-loot/ANets version of a raid lock not anti-bot
You’re a long time gw1 player, right? How would you compare the effect the introduction of DR in gw2 has to the addition of anti farm code and loot scaling in gw1? Is the relative amount of loot reduction comparable?