Guild Wars 2

I hope for better sustain and a taunt for my Warrior specialization. I wish the best way to bunker as a Warrior wasn’t to reroll Guardian, and while I reckon that this game will never really have tanking, I’d love to be able to throw an AoE taunt to save a bud. With short immunities like Shield Stance and Endure Pain I think it would work very well for Warriors. As someone who plays tanks in other MMOs, that kind of moment where you feel you’ve saved someone by taking hits in his/her stead has been sorely missing for me. A trait on our elite spec to make shouts AoE taunt on top of their normal effect would be very nice.

Personally, I’d like staff more than pistol or dagger as the new weapon. Smashing faces with a 2-handed staff would be a lot more warrior-like than stabbing or shooting from far away, and I could see staff have blocks and some support as well. As for the new skill type I think elixirs would be best. Maybe mantras or meditations if the specialization is more magic-themed, but it probably won’t be.

Yeah I hope our specialization gives us better defense. Something themed around a Knight or a Champion would be very cool. A lot of players have rolled a warrior to be tanky, but everytime one asks how to bunker the correct answer was almost always “might as well reroll guardian.” I would be very happy to get a specialization that changes this.

Since guardians got ways to use Bleeding, I hope we get ways to use Protection. I also hope we get a Taunt.

But looking at the weapons we miss, we’ll probably get some lame Thief weapons such as pistol or dagger and get called something completely un-warrior like Swashbucklers or Buccaneers. So I’m not too hopeful about our specialization.

Shield #4 is lackluster. Give it a much longer charge, an evade or block during the charge animation, or just a shorter cooldown. That would make it feel more worthwhile imho.

Currently, shield #5 is like the best block skill in the game though, and when you trait it it reflects to boot. I’m very happy with my shield #5. Although if Arenanet keeps throwing annoying unblockable skills to everyone maybe it won’t cut it in the future.

Orpheal.8263:

but sorry, in which world do you live, in where Priests are heavy armor wielding bow using soldiers again???

Minor nitpick but I’m pretty sure Clerics can wear mail armor in Dungeons and Dragons as well as in old-school computer RPGs such as Might & Magic. So the Guardian specialization being called Priest or Cleric isn’t that out of place to me. Although it would be weird if that specialization did not have a stronger focus on support because I can’t picture a Priest being on the front line.

I would love “Knight” for my warrior although that’s not very jungle-themed. I’m expecting “Barbarian” or something like that.

Even as a straight male I would absolutely love to wear a Conan-the-Barbarian style armor on my big norn, but he’s a ranger so I don’t really have that kind of option for him. I think a strong male character looks a lot more intimidating if he shows his muscles and doesn’t even care to wear armor. I suppose you can see that as the power fantasy of playing a huge male character.

In general I think this game just needs more variety in its armor sets, period. Medium is the worst but all armor classes in general are lackluster in variety. It’s kind of a shame looking at GW1’s armory.

GummiBear.2756:

But that would require everyone to carry different sets of ascended gears to be able to do all the content optimally, and well we all knows how much a pain it can be to just get one set of ascended gear

The players who are so obsessed with getting the absolute best clear time and performance in every single situation should be carrying multiple sets.

The fact that people almost never have to change gear in min-maxed runs, not even between multiple damage-oriented sets, is very telling of how much Arenanet has failed to make their PvE be a “play whatever you want”. In a well-balanced games that doesn’t have tanks and healers, people would still be swapping sets between multiple DPS sets to get that extra ounce of power.

In GW2, even if there was a need for a tank and a healer, the DPSers would universally be in berserker. It shouldn’t be. There should be multiple viable DPS sets, with long forum threads with players arguing that X gear is better than Y gear with their build.

DeceiverX.8361:

But that’s border-line impossible. As long as the healer isn’t required, the fight will ALWAYS be optimized around DPS and clearing faster as long as the encounters are designed the way they are.

That’s far from impossible because the big MMO does exactly that with its “Scenarios.” (Story-driven dungeons.) And it got its first one on the exact same day that GW2 released so it’s not like it’s a new thing in MMOs. Anyway in some those instance you will find that carrying a tank or a healer gives you faster runs because the healing or defense allows the group to ignore some otherwise dangerous mechanics that would otherwise distract the DPS players from the boss. And of course some other instances are faster to clear with just DPS. But any group composition can clear one.

So anyway the proof of concept for group content that support various group compositions is already there (or at least it’s there for small-scale groups) and it would be perfect for GW2’s “play whatever you want” approach to PvE because it does not always glorify the same role/builds.

DeceiverX.8361:

Hard trinities, soft trinities… it doesn’t matter. The dominant style of play will always be the one enforced this way, diverse or not. If content requires a healer or support, they will become mandatory, and others will be kicked. In GW2, it’s just the opposite is occurring because some theory-crafters and speed-runners are using gear sets based around DPS since it’s the optimal way to play in terms of time spent per unit of reward.

This is not a binary deal. There is a difference between requiring a healer, and merely allowing people to play healers if they want and still be useful and desired in min/maxed groups. It doesn’t have to be optimal every fight but for some bosses it should be optimal to bring a group that is not 5x zerk.

That’s how GW2’s PvE should have been since release. Play whatever role you want and you will find something useful to do. Say if you play a defense or support kind of character, well maybe you don’t be optimal for boss 1, but for bosses 2 and 4 it’s actually a good idea and will make things easier.

I don’t think they will upgrade to a superior DirectX version before Guild Wars 3.

Arenanet gave it a good try and I gave a chance to their approach, but at this point I think it’s clear that the PvE gameplay of other MMOs that use some form of trinity is better. They removed the “LFtank/healer” spamming but they did it at the expense of their players who prefer to play defense/support. It was not a good move.

Instead of banning roles they should allow you to play what you want (defense, offense, support, whatever suit you.) and do their best to make all playstyles reasonably useful and desirable.

Bryzy.2719:

An attribute of a good MMO is that it should keep you entertained for the entire time you are playing it and offer regular updates to substantiate this. It is not good when some of the playerbase are stuck in a ‘bored limbo’ waiting for an expansion, because this is a sign that the original game is lacking in certain areas.

The reason people say that about MMOs is because they keep paying a monthly fee to play. If you pay 15$ a month and they release nothing except for an expansion that you still have to pay then that MMO is not a very good deal.

In the case of GW2 I don’t feel they have to keep me entertained because I don’t give them anything. Although if there’s a Living World season 3 or some more free content after this expansion I’ll happily take it.

Unfortunately, one can’t just “upgrade” his game to a superior DirectX version and expect their game to run automagically better. Upgrades to Direct3D (and OpenGL, Mantle, etc.) give developpers additional tools to do more optimization and tricks for rendering, but there’s no point to upgrade if the engine can’t make use of it. In the case of D3D12 the big improvement is concurrency, so they would need to upgrade their engine so that the rendering module uses better parallelism. Programming for concurrency can be a huge, huge pain in the butt if the code base is a huge cluster of hacks.

Now, I don’t work at Arenanet and I have not seen their code, but there are various things that have led me to believe that it’s not pretty. They can’t even port the game to the DX9-equivalent version of OpenGL so Mac OSX users get a native port (I think they use some sort of emulation layer called Cider) so I find the odds of us getting a Direct3D 12 version not very likely. It’s probably for Guild Wars 3.

But I think they can still do some improvements within DirectX 9. Last time I ran a benchmark, the game was still CPU-bound. That said, I don’t think they absolutely need top of the line tech. Their art is gorgeous and that easily make up for poorer tech.

An “area” is just a logical level design unit, they can be very big or very small. I haven’t played it that far but IIRC SW:tOR’s first expansion was just one planet (Makeb) but it was a very very big one.

And Arenanet said that the new areas were very vertical. If the maps are taller than they are wide it could make for much bigger zones than any other map in the game.

Since they’re not raising the level cap they don’t need 10 zones for different level brackets. They can put just 3 but make them very big.

Don’t get me wrong I’d still prefer 10 smaller zones because that allows more varied themes (art assets, soundtrack, etc.) but I don’t see that as a deal breaker if the 3 new zones are as vertical as they said.

Hi Joe! For a guy who hasn’t played the game in 2 years, those were pretty good questions. Very informative. Thanks, man.

It’s probably much easier to create outfits than armor sets because the chest and the legs are the worst offenders with the clipping.

They should just make some armors pieces that cover both the legs and the chest slots and have 2x the stats, rune slots, etc like in Skyrim, and you could still mix-and-match helm, shoulders, gloves and boots.

Guardian’s probably the highest survival class at the moment, although I don’t like them because their shield skills suck and when you want to play tanky you want a shield.

Revenants look like they won’t be too bad either with the option to switch between a damage and a tanky legend at any time. Looks like they’ll get to have their cake and eat it too, just like the feral druids of Warcraft before patch 5.0.

I rolled a warrior with the expectation to be tanky and it turns out we’re one of the few classes that can’t bunker very well so not sure I can recommend, BUT unlike those silly guardians we actually get to use our shield to block. I’m hoping that the Warrior specialization in HoT will be more focused on defense since I’m not the only one who made a warrior with that expectation… but not holding my breath.

I don’t think a lot of people actually expect Taunt to allow people to “tank” like other MMOs allows tanks to do, because it’s lacking the most important aspect of Taunt.

The most important point of a classic “taunt” skill is to put the tank on top of the threat list so that the boss can stay on the tank forever. However, Guild Wars 2’s Taunt does not seem to do that at all. (It was described as just a reversed fear.) Instead it just forces the boss to attack you with only auto-attacks for a short duration and then once the Taunt wears off the boss will go back to normal. Also, knowing Arenanet their Taunt will probably last 3 seconds on a 80 seconds cooldown. Nothing to make you “tank” in a classical sense.

But Taunt has potential to be really cool for players who like to have very high defenses. Say you’re a warrior and a friend is out of dodges and a big attack is coming, so you Taunt/Shield Stance, block (or reflect!) the big attacks, then when Taunt wears off the boss returns to the previous target that you probably saved. (Assuming it doesn’t actually block all skills for a boss creature.)

But if a boss is immune and you can only use it on elites and below then suddenly it’s not very useful. I don’t really care about the realism of attacking the most armored guy; when players gear themselves in full tough/vit and equip weapons with a lot of blocks just to get utterly ignored, it’s not fun. Taunt looks like it could allow such players to still be meaningful in PvE and save people or move the boss around without forcing the “trinity” into the game. But it needs to be useful on bosses…

How will that new defiance work with Taunt?

Taunt is a CC effect so it looks like it will just take a portion off of the defiance bar and not do anything on a boss like forcing it to attach you. If that’s the case then it doesn’t look like Taunt will be very useful in PvE when fighting boss.

ODB.6891:

~ snip ~

This is not the trinity crawling in, not even close. If this were the trinity you would be required to have a tank and a healer to do anything group-based. This is not what is getting in the game at all. I’m sure you’ll be able to do all content without anyone having to use Taunt.

This here is just Arenanet throwing a bone to the portion of their players with more defense/support playstyles so they can appreciate the game too and not feel like a complete waste of a party spot because they’re geared with Cleric/Shaman gear or whatnot in a dungeon.

I don’t understand why people fret so much about Taunt. As long as it doesn’t force others to play that way and isn’t necessarily required to do most things, what does it do to other people if my warrior gets to Taunt to save another player who’s getting pummeled.

And besides, since Taunt is supposed to be a CC effect it might just work to deplete the “Breakbar” and have no effect at all otherwise, effectively being mostly unusable on bosses. I hope they change Taunt to a condition so it can work through Defiance because as one of those “defense” players I would like to be able to Taunt bosses.

How I think it’s going to work is that the boss is perma-immune to CC, but when you use a CC on it, it will take away a chunk of its defiance power, and if it hits 0 the boss staggers and go in a weakened state. What it does depends on the boss.

In short it looks like they took a few pages (if not the entire encyclopaedia!) from Final Fantasy 13’s stagger mechanics.

They mentioned the wyvern being unable to fly when staggered. They also gave the example of another boss popping a defensive shell and when you stagger the shell shatters and the boss is vulnerable.

I see Taunt more like a life saver type of skill to give more uses to player that decided to not go full glass cannon, without forcing you to bring a tank.

If someone’s going to die you can Taunt the boss and spam Shield Stance, Endure Pain, Counterblow or just tank it like a man, then after the duration the boss gains control of itself again and the fight resumes normally.

Of course, this is assuming that Defiance will not get in the way, and given how this has the potential to use used to shut down or delay a boss’ skills, this is far from guaranteed.

Perhaps not at launch but I’ll absolutely be picking it up. Guild Wars 2 at launch was second to none. The first 2 months were an absolute blast, and everyone was praising the game. (Just look at August 2012 YouTube gaming videos (like Angry Joe’s for example) if you missed that.) Of course once people hit level 80 and began looking at the end-game the flaws of the game became very apparent, but the journey… oh my, that was fun! That was well worth my money. And I picked a collector’s!

Heart of Thorns looks like it’s going to bring us a plethora of level 80 zones with tons of things to explore, more story, more jumping puzzles, more weapon and armor skins, some kind of soft progression, etc… Well it looks like the party will start over again.

As they say, ALL ABOARD THE HYPE TRAIN!

6 to 10 new level 80 zones, including an “elite” zone where every event is a group event and you have to go with a group. Upscale to level 80 like how EotN made you level 20 all the time on the expansion’s territory.

Massive overhaul of PvE party mechanics which promotes diversity of builds instead of just stacking berserker.

Ability to bring heroes in instanced content exactly like in GW1. Heroes could be DE 2.0 characters, plus new ones. Of course the missions that require specific hero(es) for the story can pre-select and lock them in the party, and let you fill the other spots. And in dungeons, heroes could fill spots if you don’t have 5 players.

Unharmed “weapon” skill for all profession. (ie: martial arts if a warrior, “touch” skills if caster, etc.)

New weapons. (Polearm and wand perhaps?)

New weapon skills for all existing weapons, and instead of the same fixed 2/3/5 skills you get to choose 2/3/5 skills from a pool.

New elite skills for all professions.

Minimum 10 new armor skins for all profession types. (soldier, scholar, adventurer) All ascended and non-trivial to get, but should be obtained from various areas of the game. (PvE, PvP, story, WvW, jumping puzzles, etc.).

Minimum 40 new weapon skins. All ascended and non-trivial to get. Again, should be obtained from various areas of the game.

CrashTestAuto.9108:

Basically, it was a very, very good base game, the population is still good, and the game is still fun. However, a lot of the decisions that have been made since launch have been, in the opinion of many, poor. Many players have left, or are highly frustrated, and no one really knows where the game is going. If the quality of the game is going to be enough to carry it long term, especially if we see more of the same controversial decisions, I don’t know.

Pretty much what I’ve been thinking, although I think that the Living World season 2 is the best thing that has happened since launch and it’s getting in a great shape.

I still wish they followed Guild Wars 1’s model of making many huge expansions while putting less weight behind the gem store. I feel that a lot of the cool things on the gem store would be deserved in-game if it were so, especially the pets and the armor sets.

I’m French Canadian but I prefer playing on an English US client because it’s the original version and original versions are nearly always better than translations, and besides I’m bilingual anyway. Also, I love the French people but time zones difference between France and Eastern Canada are too big. So I play on US servers.

I try to stick to English in /say unless I RP or something, but if I play with a friend I might let some French slip in /say and I don’t care if some stupid bigot gets excited or ignores me. In fact if ALL the jerks in Guild Wars 2 would put me on their ignore list I might log in more often. :P

I might be biased because I have raided for years in World of Warcraft so obviously that’s the model I’m most familiar with, but I don’t really see how raids would work in GW2 without a strong redesign of party mechanics. Are we seriously going to get a 40-man raid with 40 all-berserker DPS focused players?

As someone who likes strong defensive play and almost always plays tanky characters like knights and paladins in games that allow me to, I’m not going to have any interest in GW2 raids if they are like GW2 dungeons and force me to go full damage to pull my weight.

Before launch the dungeon blog said that they were dumping the traditional tank/damage/healer role structure for something much more flexible they called control/damage/support. Not sure what happened that blog post and launch because it obviously turned out to be damage/damage/damage, but I hope the developers will work on fixing the problems with PvE party mechanics before thinking about implementing raids, otherwise I’m afraid it will just be terrible.

I think that expansions with living world updates to keep the game fresh between two expansions is the way to go for Guild Wars 2. The expansions would bring a lot of nice stuff to the game that would otherwise be gem store only, and while it is not related to content it would also bring back a lot of the buzz the game has lost and hopefully make the game exciting again.

How I see the Living World mesh with the expansion’s story content is that the expansion would unleash a whole new continent and in the expansion story you work with the b/iconics and other important people towards establishing a strong presence on that continent, with bases, towns, etc. Then the living world kicks in a little bit later while you go after the main villain with the biconics.

Effort vs rewards is a different topic. I agree that the game’s rewards are off and should be revised, but the current reality of the game as of September 28th 2014 is that they already have places where you can stand in one spot and rake in gold and ascended mats.

If we’re going to have to live with that, I’d rather sequestrate that play style in a specific map than allowing it to pollute the leveling areas of the game and possibly ruin the experience of other players with the toxicity that goes with it.

fellyn.5083:

They have. It’s called Cursed Shore.

But no, it requires the tiniest amount of brain power to move around so it’s not good enough for the fail farmers. Farmers would rather stand in one spot and spam 1 to victory.

Yeah that’s why I specified that it should be easy stuff. The idea is not to challenge the farmers, it’s to give them the exact same braindead difficulty they have now, and then conceal that gameplay into one zone specifically designed for it so they don’t disrupt the experience of new players and other players who just want to do dynamic events for fun. Then make it so it’s more profitable to farm in the new zone.

Then you could add bonuses to doing the farm there to make it even more advantageous to farm there instead of in the other maps, such as randomly spawning (easy) bosses with really good drops or spawning better chests.

Honestly, I don’t want to get rid of farm runs. I don’t have a lot of gold, and I utterly hate dungeons in this game so if I want to make gold those farm runs are probably my best option. I just want the game to be rid of the toxicity that those runs create, and sometimes separating players with conflicting goals is the best way to deal with it.

I wonder why Arenanet can’t just create a zone whose sole purpose would be to be farmed by trains?

For example, create a level 80 zone filled only with group events with a scaling of 10 to 100 people (to make sure that nobody accidentally goes there without a big group), with chances to spawn boss-type mobs with great loot if the scaling gets high enough. Then tune it so that it’s more profitable to farm that zone instead of the newbie zones. Make it easy so that farmers never consider farming the low level zones instead.

That way, farmers get to farm, and newbies and casuals don’t get their play experience disrupted by those ridiculous and often toxic farm trains. Sounds like a win-win.

As someone who did a lot of social anxiety in my early 20s (though mostly ok now) I’d seriously recommend joining a friendly social guild if you want to play a MMO. Might sound stupid but for me 6 years of being in a really friendly guild (in another MMO) was almost therapeutic. I don’t know if it’s related but I almost never get anxiety attacks now.

Anyway, on topic, competitive games tend to have a high ratio of toxicity in their communities. Look at League of Legends, they tried everything and it still doesn’t work.

I would not exactly consider Guild Wars 2 to be a competitive game despite the developers’ efforts to make it an “eSport”, but the little competitive it has is mostly structured PvP so yeah expect a little more toxicity there than in other game modes. I still think you got unlucky, but if you can’t deal well with jerks in your own team and want to avoid it, you should probably make your own team with people you know.

Of course there are other game modes that can exhibit toxic behavior, such as quick clear dungeon runs, although in that case if you join those runs without being prepared for it you’d be kind of running after trouble.

I’m going to be positive (hopefully not too naive) and assume they had heavy discussions today on what to do with this debacle and where to go from there and haven’t come to a decision, so they have nothing to tell us.

I mean, this is very very serious. Leveling is the one thing about the game that is unanimously praised about this game. The immense enthusiasm and hype that surrounded this game at launch then its 10/10s and GotY awards were largely based on the leveling experience. So if this patch destroys the leveling experience, it is effectively Arenanet doing harakiri if left like that.

I can’t +1 this enough.

If anything this feature pack definitely proves that Arenanet would benefit a lot from having a PTR for future feature packs. Players would have reported right away that the leveling changes are not right, and we might have been lucky enough to get the worst offenders pulled out.

It would be pretty cool for tuning up balance fixes in real-world PvP and PvE situations with real players.

Also, since the Living World is separated from the feature packs they would be able to make those test realms spoiler-free.

Unlike the ridiculous locking of skills, the changes on the personal story is one I can understand.

I remember finding it very annoying back during the beta week-ends and at launch to have leveling break the flow of the story, and this was made even worse by the fact that unlike the living story missions, personal story missions are usually very short.

With that new design, players can do the whole story arch in one go, uninterrupted. I feel that doing an entire chapter in one go is the best way to enjoy the personal story, and that is what I was doing anyway.

I have to agree that level 10 is kind of high though. I understand that you have to be high level enough to be able to travel through the maps where the personal story takes place, but that sounds excessive, especially since you get a very large amount of XP for completing personal story. I’d strongly suggest changing the story to unlock at level 5, 15, 25, … then the XP from completing the earlier missions should be enough to level the player for 2 or 3 levels and being able to travel through the map.

Anet, how hard would it be to make the tutorial go faster for alts?

An implementation I’m thinking of is if you have a character on your account with no tutorial locks left, you get a perk on your account that makes the tutorial unlock things at an accelerated rate.

That sounds like a win to me. New players are carefully hand-held, while those who are already accustomed with the game are not restricted by tutorial mode.

The thing with block…

Aegis blocks should not reveal stealth and should not deplete a warrior’s adrenaline. Aegis can last long, and can in fact outlast stealth 2x or 3x (or infinite for the virtue passive) can be gotten from external sources, and the character can still attack, heal, AoE, etc. while protected by Aegis. So a thief or a warrior is not really counterplayed by Aegis, and because of that, I think that Aegis should not reveal the thief or drain the warrior’s adrenaline. Just imagine a thief entering stealth and the guardian getting auto-Aegis from virtue. You were not actively counterplayed and you still can’t land a stealth attack. I can see that being frustrating for thief players.

Now, active blocks such as Shield Stance, Parry, Counterblow, Protector’s Strike, etc. are completely different. Those last for a very short period, have to be actively used by the player him/herself and prevents the character from doing anything else while blocking. Now this looks more like counterplay, and I agree that such blocks should both drain a warrior’s adrenaline AND reveal a thief in stealth.

The problem is that unless you are an elementalist, there’s not enough variety of weapon skills, and on top of that there are a lot of skills that cannot be used underwater, so underwater gameplay gets repetitive.

I think that all other classes should have access to all 3 underwater weapons, and then add some additional land weapons that make sense being used underwater, such as daggers and focus. This would make the game more interesting underwater.

What boggles my mind is that Guild Wars 2 still doesn’t have a free demo. Those F2P MMOs have a huge advantage in entry price over Guild Wars 2. In SW:TOR for example, yes the cash shop is intrusive, but once you spend $5 in the cash shop, your account gets upgraded to a premium account and get a very decent game experience until the level cap.

Just like SW:TOR (but for different reasons) leveling is the best part of Guild Wars 2. Allow demo players to play until level 15 and I bet it would help sell the game.

I don’t understand the purpose of this thread. I don’t think a lot of people want GW2 to stop being B2P and embrace P2P or F2P+P2W. I would uninstall this game in utter disappointment and never look back if it changed to follow any of those models.

The recurrent complain about the payment model is that it’s entirely financed by the gemstore instead of expansions, which has a very negative effect on the game because a lot of things that should be in-game rewards are instead purchased on the gem store. So we basically get some content but not a lot of rewards.

Mind blown? Am I the only one who likes GW2 a lot more than GW1?

GW1 frustrated the hell out of me with its missions where you have to restart everything over on the first wipe. Then you get tons missions especially in Factions where you have to keep Leeroy Jenkins alive. Just frustrating. I didn’t even finish War in Kryta. The only reason I kept playing was because I’m an armor set addict and I wanted the Heritage armor set for my GW2 character.

This isn’t to say that there’s nothing in GW1 I wouldn’t like to see the devs bring over to GW2. Far from it. Elite skill hunts were very cool, subclassing was very interesting, the number of viable builds was impressive, heroes would be super cool in GW2 instanced content, the variety of skins was such that whatever look you had in mind, GW1 had something for you. I could keep going, GW1 had a lot of very good ideas that should be brought over to GW2, but so far I had more fun with the second game by a long shot.

I’m going to give a vote for Platemail and Elite Templar as well. Heavy needs more shining, “knightly” armors. My warrior wore Elite Templar in GW1 and she looked really cool in it.

I think heritage is inspired by those full metal armors but not completely. I think I recognize the top of Elite Templar, but the bottom and other pieces seem to come from another sets.

Leo G.4501:

Lilith Ajit.6173:

Esplen.3940:

Lilith Ajit.6173:

My female asura looks like a girl.

I’m glad you’re using one of the three armorsets outfits that actually display the female version.

Still, I want to be a man if I can’t be a girl.

Oh okay I’m sorry.

My Asura looks like a girl.

If anything, I’d call that another problem with armors in general: SKIRTS!

Because that armor really isn’t supposed to be feminine…except it’s a skirt-type light armor. Are you saying males wearing that same armorset are girlish?

But this I find is a problem with GW2 armors in general…and with a lot of MMOs now-a-days, they put in so many butt-capes and skirts, it leaves little option for variety…it’s like people think those skirt dealies look good when your avatar is running around, jumping and kicking stuff…it’s not.

To be honest warriors in the time used to wear long hauberks that goes down to their knees or lower thighs which might look like a skirt with a belt. Not to mention roman centurions. Skirts and kilts for heavy armor never struck me as odd or feminine, personally, even on dudes. I’m actually surprised that other MMOs don’t use that style of armor much.

But yeah, I think it’s more the sheer number of them that’s problematic. Like I said in a previous post, in the case of skirts/kilts, I think it would have been better if they at least had more bare legged ones to break the monotony. There’s only Pitfighter. More armors like Pitfighter would be nice for heavy.

That also goes with what I said about missing variety. We talk about skirts for heavies but medium are stuck with lots and lots of trenchcoats so it isn’t much better their way. I know this is mostly to avoid potential clipping between the legs and the chest when mix-matching, but it hurts variety.

Lilith Ajit.6173:

Lol first thing, any character can use any order armor. Lemme read the rest of your rant. Hold on.

After reading it: I think you’re giving all these reasons why the exceptions and examples that prove you wrong are invalid and refusing to accept them. Rather than saying “Oh right there is that but I would like there to be more x because I am unsatisfied with current choices. I would like y and z from irrelevant game 1 and possibly a and b.” You decide to go with “NONE OF THAT COUNTS.”

So silly.

You’re thinking too much into it.

The first armor is 1) a Vigil-exclusive and so far not even the gem store does allows you to bypass that restriction so that’s not an option for 67% of the warriors/guardians, and 2) it only looks skimpy because of the point of view, you barely see the girl’s legs normally. In fact if you count THAT as revealing, I could make a male norn, give him Pitfighter, look under the kilt and say “there, males have revealing armor.”

The female Phalanx armor is an atrocity that doesn’t even look like the original art that was presented (on the male character), and on top of that it cost gems. I’ll give you that it’s revealing, but it looks silly to me. I don’t even know what she’s supposed to be wearing around the waist.

Pit Fighter is just as revealing on the males if not more so I don’t see why that one was mentionned. I’m pretty sure barbaric shows a lot of torso and muscle on a man too so we’re far from full plate.

Doesn’t matter though, I can give you that females are probably better off, my point is that the variety is limited for everyone, and on a much larger scale than just which gender is skimpier. Look at the first game in comparison: it didn’t matter what gender your character were, you had something for pretty any class stereotype you wanted. Let’s take the warrior for example. Want to look like a total psychopath in dark armor? Core prestige armor, Kurzick armor, Primeval Armor. Want to look like a samurai? Luxon armor. Want to look like a knight? Elite platemail, Elite templar, Elite sunspear. Want to be skimpy? Elite gladiator, skimpy for both genders. And since paragon would be considered an heavy armor class here, you also get looks for roman centurion stuff. This game has nowhere near that variety. Yeah sure I’m picking armors from 3 campaigns and 1 expansion for GW1, but if GW2 is playing the “no expansion, small updates instead” then I think it’s fair to compare it to the first game.

And there are some really easy things they could have done in GW2 to break the monotony. Look at the first soldier armors you get, they’re so similar. Why didn’t they make at least one of them bare-legged. In Guild Wars 1 the starter armors for warriors were all bare leg. (And yes, that included males.) This is a really small fix that would make the starter armors look completely different.

The armors in this game lack variety in general. You speak about armors for females as an exemple of variety but those lack variety just as much. I play a female warrior and if I wanted to look scantily clad my only option would be to look like a cave girl. And on the complete opposite, if you play a female caster and you DON’T want to be half-naked, well… that’s not happening.

If Anet’s artists are out of ideas they should hire some of the Skyrim modders on nexusmods. There are some really really cool and varied lore-friendly armors for both genders.

EDIT: Also, what happened to the armor artists of Guild Wars 1? That game had some of the best variety of armors of any game I played, for both genders, from caster armor to soldier armor.

I’m actually pretty happy with this. I suggested something like that for the weapon and armor sets a while ago, but if they want to apply it to even more stuff, even better.

This is not “an expansion worth of content” but that’s the kind of little things that can keep someone like me busy between LS episode updates. As a casual PvE player who really doesn’t like Anet’s approach to dungeons, I’m really looking for reasons to log in outside of LS updates.

Might want to mark this thread for mild spoilers. I’m not done with the Summit Event, now I know there’s a fight…

But yeah cutscenes should be skippable the second time. Or better, just fast-forward it directly to the meaty part.

Arenanet’s engine just doesn’t seem to be very well engineered to me. Being a game programmer myself I can “smell” a lot of things about it, like for example why is it so hard to port it to Mac natively? (If you don’t know, the Mac version is using an emulator called Cider.) Please don’t tell me that gameplay code links directly to the Win32 API… Of course it’s not a little feat to port a game to another OS, but if a game engine is reasonably well engineered, it’s not impossible either.

I’m also very curious why they have to cap condition stacks to 25 for “programming reasons” whereas other MMOs don’t have that problem, and that limitation has serious consequences on gameplay. I understand that in GW2 each individual condition in a stack has its own timer so there are a lot more timers to keep track of for the server. (Whereas most other MMOs have a global condition timer for the entire stack of a debuff so it’s easier on the server.) But GW2 doesn’t have a very large number of stacking conditions compared to those other MMOs so I’m not sure why it is so bad it can’t be done.

Now, I don’t blame the programmers for the state of the engine. I know how it is: when you are buried under a mountain of jira tickets for bug fixes and incoming new features that other people are waiting after, a full engine rewrite which will occupy programmers for months if not years only for fixing something that “already works” and “doesn’t add anything new” is a very very hard sell… You’ll have an easier time selling a fridge to an Eskimo.

Esplen.3940:

I’m going to say what I’ve told myself since the luster of launch left me: GW2 has a ton of potential. I’m just waiting for Arenanet to bring out the diamond that it can be.

That’s what I’ve been telling myself since the beginning but I’m getting sick of waiting. Arenanet are sit on a gold mine and they let dust cover it.

The LS season 2 is the best thing that has happened to this game’s PvE since launch, but if that’s how the company wanted to expand its PvE, that should have came sortly after launch, not 1.5 years later. 2 years later the game should have at least one expansion.