Guild Wars 2

I can’t say that I’m unhappy because I got more than my money’s worth. (Even with a CE!)

I think the disappointment is that everyone expected the game to follow its predecessor’s lead and grow rapidly, with an expansion every 6 months. The idea that a MMO that did so many things well would grow so fast was very exciting. Sure the game had problems, the personal story and the dungeons were let-downs, but it’s all forgiven because hey first expansion soon.

If the developers decided to use a fast expansion release rate, the game might have twice the zones, and 3 times the skins, new classes, etc. Instead, the developers sat on the gem store and now instead of being the fastest growing MMO, it is among the slowest, and the problems that the game had at launch are not getting fixed fast enough.

So yeah, it’s just that this game could have been so much more. There was a huge buzz around this game at launch. Finally, a MMO that delivers on all the hype it created and was praised everywhere! (Just watch Angry Joe’s review of the game if you don’t have memories of September 2012.) Everything was possible. I always laugh at the “WoW killers” calling, but with GW2 it looked like it might be the beginning of a new era in MMOs because the game did so many things right. I even think that Blizzard was afraid for their MMO since they rushed a bunch of content for 8/22/12 and their MoP expansion 1 month later.

I would like to see Lion’s Arch rebuilt, because that city was absolutely beautiful.

However, it would be a bit immersion-breaking if it was rebuilt exactly the way it was though. If it is rebuilt it should be a little different. (And while remaking it, might as well make it a little bit more functionnal and put the trade post closer to the crafting stations.)

Let’s see…

• Since it’s always been a mystery to Guild Wars players, let’s make the expansion in whatever setting was planned for Guild Wars: Utopia.

• At least 8 new level 80 zones, with story missions that tells that new world’s story, similar to how GW1 missions and GW2 LS instances work.

• A new race. (Tengu maybe?) Starts in the new low-level zone. In addition, a 4th origin story for each vanilla race, starting in that same new low-level zone.

• New weapon style: Bare-hands (fist combat for warriors, shoot stuff out of your hands for casters, etc.) You can equip knuckles so you have an item to put runes and stats on.

• At least 60 new armor sets, (20 for each type of profession) all ascended, and those should all be prestige armor sets that rewards various accomplishments in the game: PvP, solo PvE, group PvE, and even more exotic stuff such as an armor set for jumping puzzle masters.

• Slotable weapon skills. Say a warrior has a set of 8 greatsword skills, from which he chooses 5 to put on his skill bar.

• A lot more utility and elite skills.

• Heroes. Similar to the first Guild Wars, but only in instanced content. (Because it would be annoying in the open world.)

• New dungeons, same design with the story and explore modes, but with completely revamped party mechanics that makes support and defense roles something more than training wheels for noobs so that 5x berserker is not always the optimal party setup.

Leaving out PvP because I don’t do any PvP or WvW so I don’t know what those would need. Also, since the topic says “expansion” I assume an actual expansion (like EotN) and not a campaign (like Factions).

It’s nothing like a full expansion. Because the LS is paid through the gem store, it keeps a lot of stuff behind pay-walls. On the other hand, an expansion pays itself, so an expansion would not only contain new story like the LS, but it would also contain stuff like commodities and skins that can be obtained OUTSIDE the gem store.

This is also why I think an expansion would be A LOT more desirable than the Living Story.

Also, the way I see it, Living Story updates are like the new raids and PvP seasons of traditionnal MMOs. Those MMOs add extra PvE challenges for their top players, while GW2, being more focused on casuals, offers more story. But, eventually, you need an expansion to keep the game fresh.

I firmly believe that an expansion would be good for the game, for a variety of reasons.

1) Personally, I strongly dislike the micro-transaction model all together. This is becoming a plague in gaming, and it does not make games better, and in fact it makes games worse than they were 10 years ago because the practice consists of taking things that should be earned in-game out of the game and instead give it for a tip. I find it very unpleasant to have to interrupt my gaming experience to get my credit card because I just want to change my character’s haircut or armor’s look. It kills the fun for me. (Not to mention in a game that is supposed to reward with cosmetics I have to pay to change my look??? The game does not make sense with itself.) I’m more understanding for a game without monthly fees like this one because they obviously have to pay the bills, but I’d much rather pay 50$ upfront for an entire expansion worth of content which includes time savers and fluff, and the devs leave me alone with those petty 200 gems here 150 gems there. And in general micro-transactions are completely against games that reward with cosmetics because it puts said cosmetics are almost always behind pay-walls, while their real place should be behind challenge-walls.

2) This kind of goes with 1). Things like armor sets are understandably very costly to produce with 5 races/2 genders/3 armor classes, so we’re pretty much doomed to get 99% of the new ones from the gem store. For a game that rewards with cosmetics and whose predecessor had tons and tons and tons of armor sets for all kinds of bragging rights, this is a huge, huge disappointment. In 2 years we only got 2 sets of armors that were not from the cash shop (the ascended gear which are IMHO very ugly and the PvP exclusive gear) Looking at the amount of armor sets we got at launch for the price of the box, an expansion might put at least 20 new sets of armors IN-GAME that rewards for actual accomplishments in the game, instead of being boring gem store purchases that are everything but bragging rights and does not speak of anything. And, in that way, expansions make a better game than micro-transactions.

3) There are things that I consider fundamentally flawed in the game and need to be redesigned from the ground up. Almost everything about dungeons and instanced group play is completely broken in my opinion. In my experience with MMOs, that kind of “from the ground up” redesign only happens during the development of expansion when you have the full production workforce. I don’t have any hope for things like dungeons to be fixed without an expansion.

4) This is completely artificial but news of a GW2 expansion would bring the spotlight back on the game. The gaming press would talk about Guild Wars 2 again. The people that quit might be interested to come back seeing that huge expansion full of fresh new content, and might even come back before to get ready for the expansion, discover that there’s the Living World with fresh new content, and get back to playing. Also, if the expansion does not raise the level cap it’s basically an entire expansion of endgame (like EotN) so the people that were hesitant to enbark on the GW2 bandwagon (and I know quite a few) due to lacking PvE end-game might be tempted to buy the game and join the community.

Now, NCsoft obviously disagree so I have absolutely no expectations for GW2 to move from a more micro-transaction model to an expansion model like its predecessor. Depending on the rate of expansion releases, micro-transactions probably make more bucks anyway. But I highly doubt that this game will ever realize its full potential and what it was hyped to be, simply because the micro-transaction model cannibalizes a lot of things that should belong to the game and sell it for quick cash instead of allowing players to deserve it.

Thanks for the answers. I think I’ll give another shot to good ol’ GW2. If some events are dungeon only at least I’ll have unlocked them so there won’t be a rush to do them during that two weeks.

Danikat.8537:

(By the way this might be a bad time to mention it but the Scarlet fight was soloable too. You needed a lot of people on the map to beat the holograms but not as much coordination as some other boss fights, each person could act independently. But actually fighting Scarlet could be done solo, it was pretty much run up, dodge some attacks and plant a finisher on her.)

Ah. Well I thought I had to beat the 3 knights that spawned hourly in the town before getting on that sort of ship to kill her and it seemed to take A LOT of people to kill all 3 of them while they were out. I logged really late into that episode to do it and there was not enough people to beat even a single of them so I said eff that.

Thanks for taking the time to introduce the new characters by the way. I wish the game had some sort of codex like in Bioware games where you can look to learn more about lore and the characters you met, but I suppose a wiki can do the job as well.

I haven’t played this game since about February or March, whenever the season 1 finished. I had already missed most of the first season episodes due to being busy, and I logged in for the final episode only to realize that it took a group to kill Scarlet and I was too late. I thought that was the last nail in this game’s coffin for me. I uninstalled the game and didn’t even care to watch the ending or the epilogue on Youtube.

But I read about the story journal and it looks like this feature could single-handedly solve every problem I had with the Living Story so I’m kind of interested in coming back, and I have a few questions before I start digging into that 25 GB wall.

1) In season 2, am I going to be able to solo ALL the stuff that’s important to the story (cinematics, dialogs, etc.) or is it going to require dungeons, very large groups in the open world, or any other “catches” like that which would prevent me from playing through the story at my pace?

2) Did they hint anything about that season 1 recap? If they put in all the important story points and revamp them to be soloable and instanced, I would be ready to pay a lot of gems because I missed about 3/4 of the season 1. I don’t care about the open world achievements grinds; they can leave those out, as long as ALL the story is there they can consider me a customer.

3) Would it be necessary to watch season 1 on Youtube before starting with season 2, or I can just start season 2 without being lost in the story? I know that Lion’s Arch is in ashes and that Scarlet is dead so I’m not THAT out of touch. I also know who Rox and the norn boy (forgot his name) are, but on the other hand, I have no idea where Taimi, Canach and the two human women (forgot their name) come from and why they joined me. (Although it didn’t stop me from thinking that this new group looks more interesting than the iconics, which is kind of funny.) I also don’t know who are the Zephiryte I have never played a single episode with them.

4) Did the story of the Living World tie a lot with the original story of the game? I’m not particularily eager to see Trehearne again, but I’d like to see more Rytlock and Zoija screen time. Not a huge deal but it would be cool.

5) Since this is supposed to be the continuation of our personal story at level 80, do we get to make some decisions or is it a Final Fantasy-style follow-the-story-don’t-ask-questions kind of deal now? I think that with the player voice acting being out, it would be a good excuse to give us more dialog choices and flesh out our character’s personality when talking with NPCs, even if it doesn’t actually branch the story.

I say no. Armor aesthetics is integral to a class’ identity and theme.

And besides there would be horrible clipping issues with most combination. The devs disabled combining gear of different weights in the dressing room for that exact reason.

What we should be asking for is more diversity in gear aesthetics, or at least the option to customize the look of existing ones beyond just the color. We’re probably not getting more armors before an expansion though.

I think it’s about time a developer comes in and shares the company’s thoughts on dungeons and end-game PvE, 1.5 years after release. Why DPS/control/support never happened? Are they happy with the all-DPS/stack/dodge 1-shotter dungeon designs? Do they think they succeeded in providing interesting gameplay for monk players in GW1, or players that played tanks in other MMOs? Can we expect more dungeons or are fractals and world bosses the future of GW2 PvE?

Even since the game was released, players have been posting tons of opinions and suggestions about group mechanics, “trinity” and dungeons in general but they’re always rebutted by idiots who think they’re helping the game by answering “go back 2 wow gw2 isnt for u ololol”, and this thread is no exception.

I think that getting the developers’ thoughts about the current content, what they like, what needs to be improved, and a couple of “We want this” and “We don’t want that” would make discussions about PvE a bit more constructive than that. There is an upcoming blog post called “A Solid Foundation”. With a title like that, one can expect it to be about something core to the game, such as group mechanics and synergies between different classes and playstyles. I’m crossing my fingers…

The sad thing is Arenanet has everything in the game to do something better than the holy trinity, yet they have probably the worst and most one-dimensional system one could possibly design. I would be very disappointed if they brought the trinity in because they could go for something far more dynamic than that for PvE.

If this game had the trinity, it would be like, okay I always have 1 tank 1 healer and 3 DPS in my 5-man group because that’s what it takes, and all I have to figure is what each of these roles has to do for a boss. This would be unquestionably better than what we have, but it feels static because it’s always the same group roles. (As it does in MMOs with the trinity.)

Now, in Guild Wars 2, consider that everyone is an hybrid, that we can change role with just a weapon swap, and that we’ll soon be able to reset our traits for free. It means that if Arenanet wanted, they could create dungeons encounters that are a lot more dynamic. Instead of always having the same roles, they could create bosses where the players are constantly changing roles and strategy. Say you could have a first boss where support is important, so a few people would get their support skills out while the others keep damaging. Then the second boss could be an endurance fight where you need to get your defense skills up. Then the third boss hits like a truck but is easy to kite so range is nice, but he also uses frost so someone has to have condition cleanses as well. Fourth boss is a DPS race so everyone goes damage. And so on.

Dynamic role-switching is something that classic MMOs like WoW could never do because of how some classes are 1-dimentional, and of how hybrids are forced into one role because in a 40-man raid you have many one of every role anyway. But Guild Wars 2 could do that right now.

I’m not a huge fan of 75% of the warrior survivability coming from one single skill that you can swap to without having to gear or trait for it. I don’t think it’s good game design.

If they tone down survivability from Healing Signet, then turn around and buff survivability from the defense and tactics trait, I think we’d be in a very balanced spot because we would have to pick between offense and defense.

I really like the idea of having another in-game community vote on rebuilding Lion’s Arch, or <insert something else>.

The thing is that when ArenaNet makes world events hard, people complain that their efforts get ruined by “noobs who barge in and don’t know how to dodge”, and when ArenaNet makes their world easier, the same people go “OMG when will the zerg stop!?!!”

There is no easy solution to “break the zerg.” What it would take is content where people would naturally split and do different things based on their preference, but this isn’t going to happen as long as the only viable role is DPS. As a tank player in other MMOs I would LOOOOVE to pick a more defense- and support-oriented role on my warrior in GW2 when I PvE, but I’m just not helping when I do.

I asked it before and I’ll ask it again: can we at least get an explanation on why the DPS/control/support thing never happened and if we can expect to ever get that? Tell me if I’m wrong but I don’t remember reading anything about that, and I honestly believe that this game could totally be the king of MMO if it did its hardcore group PvE right.

For a one-time $60 I don’t find this game disappointing at all. It entertained me for much longer than Skyrim and cost the same price.

I mean, sure I’m not playing the game much either, like once every 2 weeks to see the story, and even then I find it hard to bother sometimes. (I still haven’t seen the “new” Lion’s Arch for example.) But I’m also not paying monthly fees for it so my expectations are lower.

I really wish the game could keep me as entertained as WoW does, and before launch, during the BWE, I thought that if one game could become the new king of MMOs, it was GW2. But it didn’t happen. But I blame their terrible dungeon design (the game basically has no high-end PvE because the dungeons are so bad), not the difference with the first Guild Wars.

I didn’t like the first Guild Wars much, I get that the millions of skills was enticing to some player, and I agree that the multi-class system was awesome, and cosmetic-only (non-cash shop) skins farming was really nice, but that’s about where my love for the first Guild Wars ended. I’m glad that the second game took a few steps away from that game to make it more like an actual MMO. I just wish it kept more of the good stuff.

The truth is that the lines are blurred between classes.

Warriors can be pretty kitten strong in defense too if they wish to go with a tanky build, and as many have pointed out, guardians can be good damage dealers if that’s what the player wants.

The problem is that if they nerf Healing Signet too much, yes the damage warriors will be more balanced but the tanky and bunker warrior builds will be completely destroyed, and we will go back to pre-HS where anyone asking how to make their warrior tanky would get laughed at and told to reroll guard…

I don’t understand why they can’t just lower the base heal by about 1/3 but hugely increase the healing power scaling. That would stink for PVT but full-defense/support warriors such as cleric and shaman would keep their heal, while those damage warriors who put a large amount of pressure on their foes would see their survivability toned down a bit, as it should.

Actually they should increase the healing power scaling of nearly all healing skills in the game…

This is something I never thought I’d say after the Trahearne flop, but the new characters kind of grew on me. I hope they don’t kill any, at least not so soon.

I don’t think they’d kill Jory, that style of character is popular and I don’t think she gave the story everything she could yet.

BUT… I have to say that I’m very afraid for Kasmeer… they made her way too cute and lovable, and then with her sad backstory they obviously wanted her to grab our sympathy too.

Again, I really hope nobody dies because I like all the new characters and the synergy between them and I’d like to see more episodes with them. But if someone has to die… yeah, my money’s on Kasmeer.

Well if everything is going to be relocated to the Vigil keep and it becomes the next Lion’s Arch, I’d rather keep Lion’s Arch or have a living story to rebuild it after the event.

@AcidicVisions

Going to go with spoiler tags in case it’s true, but…

I dunno, I have a lot of trouble believing they’d kill a cool and lovable character like Taimi, you’d think they learned something after killing our beloved mentors in the personal story…

Also, if Anise is dead and so is Scarlet (because they promised Scarlet would die), it breaks the human personal story.

I agree that Kasmeer does have the potential to pull an Aerith, so while I hope they don’t kill a member of DE2.0 so soon, I wouldn’t be surprised to see it happen. But the rest of the story sounds fake. Not saying it is, maybe it’s true, but it does sound fake.

I admit I’d like that plot twist if Canach redeemed himself by saving Kasmeer’s life. Of all the important Sylvari characters in the story, Canach is the only one I actually care about.

I hope they don’t kill anyone from the living story though, at least not so soon. The new cast of characters kind of grew on me, and I’d like to do more story stuff with them. Besides, my personal story is full of interesting characters that die, I’d like those new ones to stay on their feet for a little while.

I went human partly because I liked the fact that they were considered underdogs by all other races except Sylvari. Unfortunately, the human personal story didn’t touch that aspect of humanity even once.

As for voice acting, my main is a human female and the only thing that annoys me are the boon gain lines, like “I COULD OUTRUN A CENTAUR” or “YOU’LL HAVE TO HIT MUCH HARDER”. The lines were cool at first but you hear them 10 times per minute in a zerg so it’s really tiresome. To be appreciated, lines like those should be few and far between.

Thanks.

I’ll watch the youtube tomorrow to get up to date with the story then I’ll do that.

Oh are you serious? I thought the last patch was a WvW patch so I thought I could wait later this week to do it. Now you tell me I can’t do it?

I guess I could watch it on youtube but I kinda wanted to play it myself because I hear there are a lot of story involving the characters involved to far in the LS and that you could trade dialog with them. I’m a bit disappointed to read that.

I’m really not into PvP. Is there enough story in that WvW patch to make it worth the trouble? It’s was kind of frustrating for me to do my explorer achievements in WvW and get killed 3 times for each point of interest, so if this episode is going to be that kind of experience I’ll just pass, this time willfully.

I like when developers put romance in games. It make their characters feel less one-dimensional. A character might be a powerful warrior, but when he’s not waging war, what is he doing? Why is he a warrior? It doesn’t HAVE to be romance, but I think an important character should be defined by more than his fighting prowesses.

Now, I don’t actually know how good or bad the Kasmeer/Marjory romance is because having to do an open world event on a 2-hours timer, with a 75% chance to hit overflow, with the complexity of a WoW raid encounter, and with random people that can ruin it at any time, just so I can unlock a story mission feels more like carrot-on-a-stick baiting than entertainment to me, and ditto with being forced into WvW for PvE-related stuff, so I’m kind of passing on those updates. To be honest, when I first heard those two were “romancing” I thought it was a combination of clumsy writing and the playerbase’s imagination making them look like lovers, (like Fang and Vanille in Final Fantasy XIII…) but apparently it’s intended, heh.

But as long as it’s well written and the characters are interesting I couldn’t care less if they were added “to attract juvenile males” (as some put it) or for whatever other reason.

But when it’s not well written AND it was added “to attract juvenile males” AND it touches subjects that are unfortunately still taboo like homosexuality, then it really leaves a bad taste in my mouth. It reeks like marketing department meddling with the story just to monetize it and ruin the story, and I hate that with passion. Again, I’m not saying that’s what this game’s developers tried to do with this update. It’s just my thoughts about those that do.

I’d also add that I find it kind of insulting as a male when developers attempt to fanservice me with stuff like that because if I wanted to see cute women loving each other I know a lot of places on the Internet for that, heh. Just give me a story you can deliver and I’ll be happy.

I’d much rather have a good story with cool characters that I’ll care for and that the writers can pull off well, than a story that tries to pull taboos right and left but that is in the end over the head of the writers. And if they can have both an excellent story and play with taboos at the same time, it’s mastery. (Games with really memorable stories always shake taboos a little.)

There can never be enough hair styles in a game like this.

Although for the males I’d rather have more facial hair styles than haircuts. I’m disappointed by the choices available. The only male hair style I feel is really missing are the tied long hairs. (Not a pony tail, guys with long hair usually tie their hair at the level of the neck, not on the skull.)

Apparently, creating a new armor is extremely expensive so the only new armor skins are going to be on the gem store.

This is one of the many reasons why I think an expansion would be good for the game.

I don’t take orders from anyone.

That said, I’ll almost always listen to commanders because I’m a casual in this game and commanders know the game better than I would ever do.

But if I disagree I won’t do what they want and I don’t care what people say.

Encounters that need to be coordinated don’t belong to the open world in the first place. When Arenanet puts them there they hurt their game and the community. Although I think the new bosses are more meant as a “How far can you get” type of encounter. Maybe it would be clearer if a defeat didn’t one-shot the whole map…

I’d say around 130,000 concurrent users at prime time.

No.

That suggestion often comes up, but in the end Armor is an integral part of a profession’s visual identity. It would denature them if they didn’t have to wear their own armor.

If you’re suggesting that because you want total freedom in how you want your character to look like, that’s what town clothes are supposed to be there for, but Arenanet never did anything with them. I would start there. There should be some limited ways to wear those in combat in some situations, in town there should be an option to auto-turn your town clothes, in cutscenes when your character is with civilians she/he should wear town clothes (no need to be in battle suit), etc. Town clothes should also be one-piece IMHO, or at least have the chest and the legs be one slot, so there’s no mix and match clipping issues between legs and chest pieces.

Also, the armors of this game wouldn’t look as good if you could match different armor classes because the artists would have a lot more restrictions. Things like pieces that cover more than their “area” (like the trenchcoats covering part of the legs even though they’re chest armors) wouldn’t exist, or they would impose heavy restrictions on other pieces. For example, the skirts and kilts of the light and heavy sets wouldn’t exist or would be a lot more stretched on the character’s body because they would clip with the mediums’ trenchcoats. By separating them and forbidding mixing and matching, the restrictions on designing light armors are not the same as those on medium armors, which are not the same as those on heavy armors. So this allows diversity of gear looks without dumbing down the complexity of the skins.

On block definitely makes sense and sounds fair.

Evade, not sure.

VOLKON.1290:

I tanked for years in WoW, both main and off tank. You’re forced to build encounters such that you account for one or two tanks based on the size of the party, a certain number of expected healers and then you calculate the rest based on a certain level of dps from everyone else. That is ridiculously limiting.

Except that Guild Wars 2 wouldn’t need to have that problem if it had roles. There is a difference between how Guild Wars 2 handles classes and how World of Warcraft handle them. Unlike World of Warcraft, Guild Wars 2’s classes are all hybrid and can do a bit of everything, and changing roles just takes a weapon swap. So Arenanet would have a lot more freedom in changing what a fight requires in terms of groups than Blizzard does. It would be a lot of fun to have groups juggling with their group roles on a boss by boss basis. Roles also don’t have to be limited to tank, healer and DPS: support, CC, kiting, what have you. Say the first boss of a dungeon favors a DPS race, the next one is easier if you have someone tank it but no healer needed, the third one is better if you have a lot of range and kite him, etc. And then there could be multiple strategies to bosses instead of just one that the devs force and players would debate what party is better. There would be no optimal group because while all classes can do a bit of everything, not all classes are as good at all roles. There would be no trinity, just different roles, and depending on the encounter players would shift their strategy.

It’s sad because Guild Wars 2 has the potential to be so much better in PvE than anything else, even World of Warcraft. And it wouldn’t take that much for it to go from terrible and mindnumbling to awesome and new. But instead we have that terrible “DPS zerk wars only or boot” meta and whenever someone makes suggestions to change things they get yelled to go back to WoW.

VOLKON.1290:

The Marionette fight as it stands now simply wouldn’t be anywhere near as fun or engaging if there was a trinity system in place. Look at the opening phases… stop the mobs from reaching the portal. Without a trinity everyone has to do their share to slow down and take down the mobs as well as look to help keep your people in your lane up and active. With a trinity you’d need two tanks per lane, one front and one back, with a healer for each tank and enough dps spread out to burn the mobs down. The mobs would get caught in a taunt and forget about hitting the portal, which poops on that mechanic. Then you have the portal/platform phase itself. You’re spread out randomly onto the five platforms each with a champion of it’s own… good luck with a trinity system there. Even if you forced it to work that’s five tanks and five healers plus three dps per platform or you fail.

You either haven’t really raided in World of Warcraft or you are dishonest. There are plenty of encounters in World of Warcraft that have those mechanics. For example, those mobs running to portals wouldn’t be disrupted by tanks because Blizzard would make them immune to taunts and ignore aggro.

The thing is, Blizzard can disable the trinity with tricks like that whenever it would ruin the challenge, whereas Arenanet can’t insert the trinity where it would make an encounter better because the game has no tanks and healers. There are also plenty of other things Arenanet can’t do that Blizzard does, like encounters that require controlling the boss, simply because you have no control over the boss without a stable aggro table. This is why I said that Arenanet’s current party mechanics are more limited without a trinity.

^^

I have a warrior and I actually like the idea of nerfing the healing signet’s passive heal by ~25% and buffing the scaling a great deal. I gear and trait my warrior all the way for support and defense, but my healing power feels like a waste because warriors scale horribly with healing power. If I had used PVT instead my warrior wouldn’t be much more fragile, and she would also hit for more than 600 with a Earthshaker. I feel like an idiot to be a warrior that can’t DPS and isn’t much more defensive than the others.

If one healing skill scaled well with healing power, it would make gearing for it feel more rewarding. And Healing Signet makes more sense to receive that kind of deal because if you take less damage you’re less likely to need burst healing than a glass cannon. I also don’t think you should get that kind of healing power if you don’t trait for it. And if they give a group support side-effect to the active like I suggested it would make it perfect for support warriors.

But other warriors will disagree.

To be honest I think the active should be crappy with such a good passive.

I don’t get why the devs want to buff the active and nerf the passive when the whole point of the skill is the passive and you only use the active when you’re outplayed, and 3/4 of the time it doesn’t save you, even in PvE with the stupid mob AI.

I like my idea of having it do an AoE heal because it doesn’t increase warrior sustain, it only increase warrior support. So if you see a teammate dying you could sacrifice your signet passive to give him a little buff in health. And then increase the cooldown to like 30 or 40 seconds because using the signet should be a big deal and have consequences.

Yeah I meant the buff.

Warriors have no access to protection. They make up for it with higher health and better regens. That’s how it works.

OP wants to make Healing Signet’s active gives them protection, which doesn’t work with that design.

Warriors have no protection by design.

They make up for it by having high health and higher regens/heals.

Giving them protection would probably open a huge can of worm and require nerfs elsewhere.

And I’d personally like its use effect to be a support one. ie: It heals others for 50% of what it heals the warrior.

Rangersix.1754:

runeblade.7514:

Then it doesn’t count. It is a passive not a active.

Care to explain how that negates the fact of uninterruptable healing?

Because if I’m going to be bursted down within 3 seconds at least I don’t want my 3×425 heal tick to be interrupted?

Active and passive healing. Apples and oranges.

Role-playing (personal story) was announced as a big thing for PvE, with big features like a biography, a personality system à la Mass Effect, a home instance that evolves with your character’s story, and a lot of decision making. After launch however there has been almost no developer talk about it. (No blog posts, no interviews, nothing. I remember one or two developer comments about Trehearne’s character but that’s about it.) Also, the Personal Story forum has recently been archived, and in the first CDI, the devs mentioned that it was limiting the Living World because it prevents important areas to be changed, important characters to be killed, etc.

So my question is more of an open one. What are the developers’ thoughts about the personal story, 1.5 years after launch? Can we expect to see more of it in the future?

ArmageddonAsh.6430:

It is fine them having High health, High Armor or High Regen, Having them ALL on a class that has so many skills that can make them immune to damage as well as STILL being able to deal damage is what is wrong.

Then you get into the insane broken mobility they have, the insane CC ability that the Hammer has. there is a reason why there are Warrior only dungeon speed runs and everything They are best in PvE, Best in WvW both Solo and in Zergs they are just to strong at every aspect.

No it’s not.

First, unless Arenanet does a 180 and gives Warriors protection, high health and high regen need to go together, otherwise you’re denying the class of any sustain. Before the Warrior heals were buffed warriors had a lot of burst resistance thanks to their high health but had a lot of trouble regenerating any health lost, and as a consequence they had no regen and had no way to tank or to bunker. For a warrior class design, having no sustain was pathetic.

Second, the “high armor” of soldier classes is something like +400 more armor at level 80 which is nothing. Warriors with high armor have invested into toughness gear and the Defense trait line, which means that their power and/or crit are kitten.

Third, the Warriors’ damage immunes come in an amazing number of three, of which one uses the healing slot and is thus uncompatible with the supposedly overpowered warrior heals. Shield Stance is admittedly the best block in the game but you can’t do anything else while blocking and it forces you to keep a shield on one of your sets so it has its drawbacks. Endure Pain (and its traited version) is vulnerable to conditions and everyone knows that, so I wouldn’t exactly call that a damage immune, especially not in a game stuck on a permanent condi meta… Don’t get me wrong Endure Pain is amazing, but comparing that to invuls, blocks or evades to make a point would be dishonest.

Sounds like you have a problem with Warriors being naturally tanky but seriously since when are fighters/warriors/knights squishy in RPGs? The trinity may be gone but that doesn’t mean that all classes should have the same strengths and weaknesses before traits, and if there’s any strength you’d expect a design for a Warrior class to have, it’s natural survivability. Besides, before Healing Signet was buffed, one post out of 10 in the Warrior forums was something like “How do I make a tanky warrior?”, (and you’d invariably get a “Reroll guard” answer within the first 3 posts) so don’t think I’m the only one who think warriors should be naturally a bit tanky. A lot of players want their Warriors to be that way.

Now, whether Warriors do too much damage while having so much health, or whether they have too much survival when they are in Berserker gear is a completely different matter. Personally, I think that Healing Signet’s base healing should be reduced by 15% or 20% instead of 8%, but the scaling on Healing Power should be doubled. So the regen of glass-cannon Warriors would be less outrageous, and full defense/support warriors with Cleric or Shaman gear would get to keep a very good Healing Signet. My only problem with that is that PVT would get screwed on that deal…

As for CC… the thing is that a damage-focused Warrior can CC a squishy and one-shot it without you being able to do anything about it, but on the other hand a defense Warrior has pathetic damage, and CC and conditions are the only thing you can do to avoid the opponents and force them to care about you. Seriously, my Warrior did 800 with her Earthshaker when she was full-defense, and that was before the nerf… (I don’t even want to think how laughably weak this thing would be now.) If it didn’t have CC I would be literally ignored by other player… And as a defense Warrior I was already getting ignored by PvE players because I wasn’t full-zerk…

Atherakhia.4086:

What is the 3rd tanking stat you plan to get? Vitality, Toughness, and ???

You can already get Soldiers or Sentinals gear. Are you advocating for a Toughness, Power, Vit set?

Healing.

You take less damage with toughness, and you regen more with healing. This is especially good with passive healing like regens or Healing Signet.

Yeah I agree, I like building my warrior for tanking and support, and I couldn’t care less what other players think of non-zerk people. I absolutely despise this game’s dungeons anyway so it’s not like you’ll ever see me in your LFzerk groups, heh.

That said, Giver’s (armor) is pretty much a defense+support set. It gives toughness, healing and boon duration. Toughness and healing is a good combo for sustain, although the lack of vitality won’t help you survive burst so there could be better defense gear. Problem is the weapon version is totally different stats so you can’t build entirely in Giver’s and probably have to resort to Soldier, Cleric or Shaman for the other slots.

I haven’t heard about Guardian health ever being as high as Warrior, although the devs tried making it medium during BWE 2 as I recall. But then they were monsters in PvP. Admittedly, nobody knew how to play back then, so maybe the devs should review of their health tier. Or maybe they already have and figured that Guardian health was justified. I feel that a lot of Guardians would prefer having more health and less boons since the class is advertising itself as a defense-oriented class and a natural first-pick for tank players in other MMOs.

Warriors have high health, high armor and high regen because they have no access to aegis and protection outside of runes and allies. They take more damage than say a guardian but they regen more to make up for it. And it also makes sense from a lore point of view. I’m in favor of toning down their damage and making them more difficult to play, but I’d hate to see them made squishier. Warriors should be tanky by design because they are, well, warriors. I don’t think it’s right for them to also do the highest damage in the game. This should be reserved for high-risk-high-reward classes like Thief.

Thieves have low health because they should be using their evades, their blinds, their shadowsteps and their stealth to survive. They’re also the epitome of high-risk-high-reward in most RPG games with mostly offense-oriented play styles, and I think that’s what Arenanet wants the Thief class to play like. I’m not in favor of making the Thief any tankier at all.

Elementalists… well I have no idea why they have low tier health other than lore. I thought they were intended to make up for it by having good healing with their water and good defense with earth, but that seems to attract nerfs, and doesn’t work so well in keeping them alive in the first place. Also, they aren’t really glass-cannon like Thief to justify their low health. It’d probably be silly to have Elementalists that tank stuff head-on like a Warrior or a Guardian so maybe more health is not the solution, but I agree they need more defense.

Fluffball.8307:

LA can’t be destroyed because a ton of personal story steps use it. And use it intact (i.e. we need to save it from Zhaitan.)

Personal Story is a giant detractor from Living Story. Zhaitan is forever alive, Orr is forever corrupted, LA is forever untouched. If PS wasn’t there, imagine the possibilities. ANYthing could change. We could literally cleanse Orr forever, sort of like the Karka event.

I hope they don’t restrain too much from doing something crazy because of the personal story. With the Trehearne take-over fiasco, level 50+ probably need to be redone from scratch anyway, and I’d also add the human, sylvari and norn first 20 levels of personal story as well because those races’ starting stories weren’t nearly as exciting as the charr/asura starter stories.

Ideally the personal story and the living world should be merged together. That would solve the issue.

Say, for example, in a living world update, Trehearne summons players to Orr. It turns out that Zaithan is still alive and the Pact is reassembled in an emergency. This leads to a temporary solo story instance that ends with a catastrophic defeat of the Pact and Trehearne dying. After that, the task to reform the Pact falls on the player’s shoulders. This opens the new level 50-60 personal story missions. (The old level 50-80 missions would be completely removed from the game, and the Arah story mission would be changed to an instance where Destiny’s Edge talk about the old Zaithan fight.) Then on the next story update, something happens in the living world, which opens up the level 60-70 missions of the personal story. And it would keep going like that, well past level 80. Until the culmination of the story that would end up with the real Zaithan fight. After that, expansion time and it starts over with another dragon, hehe.

That way of handling the personal story would use the episodic nature of the Living World to make the player wonder that will happen to him, what was the consequence of any choices he made in the story, and so on. A player who would have missed the events would have the missions but not the living world events that came with it.

VOLKON.1290:

The simplest way to think of it is this… if GW2 had the trinity then fights like the Marionette wouldn’t exist. Trinity combat all breaks down to the same script – tank taunts, healer focuses on the tank, every now and then throw a twist at the dps so they don’t fall asleep. Without the trinity we can have fights like this where we divide into five groups which further get divided into five groups which all have to work together successfully in order to favorably progress the fight. There’s a randomness that defies a set script so you need to be on your toes and pay attention.

That couldn’t be farther from the truth.

In fact I think that the devs of GW2 are quite limited in the amount of mechanics that they can introduce to fights because of all the chaos that their PvE group combat engenders. You can’t really reproduce the unique encounter mechanics that games like WoW or FFXIV have and that makes every boss feel unique and different if the fights are random and uncontrollable.

I play a tank in another MMO and I’m doing far more than just sitting in front of a boss and trading blows like an idiot, and I hate to say this but the fights have WAY more interesting mechanics than most of GW2’s PvE encounters. If a MMO has tanks sit in front of bosses and healers spam heals in the back all the time, it’s a problem with that MMO’s developers or game engine, not with the trinity. The trinity can do every fight a DPS-only design can do, and it usually does it better too because it allows people with more defensive-oriented playstyles to play their way and feel useful.

GW2 desperately needs a new PvE model. It doesn’t have to be the trinity (and it probably wouldn’t be) but things need to change. DPS/Control/Support anyone?

We seriously need a CDI on dungeons, fractals and instanced PvE…

Change dodge so that it gives 75% damage reduction to all ground-based attacks such as traps and AoE. You’re moving out of the way of a spike trap but you’re still getting hit by a spike or two. Makes sense. It should still grant full avoidance to direct attacks though.

And I don’t see how Block makes any more sense than dodge in being a % damage reduction. Especially not blocking with a shield. (ie: Shield Stance, Gear Shield, etc) Perhaps weapon and magic blocks could be % based but not shield blocks.

PvE would be far better, and the game might have an end-game PvE just as strong as WoW’s. PvP, on the other hand, would probably go back to requiring a healer for a team to be viable, so it’d probably be worse.

For PvE, it’s not that the trinity is a must-have, it’s more that the devs have failed to replace it with something better.

Muchacho.2390:

It doesnt matter how much they nerf it. It will always be a terrible skill from a game design perspective (like many other things in this game). No healing skill should be passiv.

Because you don’t like it doesn’t mean it’s not good game design. (Or that it’s not skillful play like one of the above poster thinks.)

The idea behind Healing Signet is that you’re trading burst healing for sustained healing. This is a rather interesting trade.

Normally, that kind of deal is great on tanky characters who are buffed on toughness and healing power, but not so good on glass cannons who need to be healed fast when they’re being focused.

The problem is that the way it’s balanced, it’s the best healing skill almost all the time whether you’re tanky or not. This is not right, but this a balance issue, not a game design issue. And on top of that, it makes the warrior’s healing options boring.

What I think they need to do is to reduce the passive healing by a good deal, but increase the healing power scaling a lot. That would make the skill’s worth vary based on builds, instead of being the best heal for nearly every build.

As for the active effect… well I think you can’t have your cake and eat it too. If you want such high regen, you shouldn’t have a good burst heal. Instead of buffing the active effect’s raw healing, I’d like to see it do something more support-ish, since tanky warriors are more about support. Something like healing yourself and nearby allies for a percentage of the heal you got could be nice, for example.

Nerfing Berserker gear isn’t really going to fix dungeons. What they need to do is take their current dungeon design, put them in a cannon, fire the thing, and then redesign the entire GW2 dungeon system from scratch.

Dungeons in MMOs should require teamwork. Dungeons should favor and encourage having different players with various playstyles.

The Tank-DPS-Healer paradigm works well because it achieves both of those goals incredibly well. Usually you get players who are more offense oriented and others who are more defense oriented, and only by playing well together they can win the encounters.

I’m not advocating for an introduction of the tanks/DPS/healers trinity in this game, however the game needs to have a dungeon design that is at least as good as that.

1- Skin Locker
This feature is probably the most recurring request in this topic, and I wholeheartedly agree. I know that the game is using transmutation stones as a monetization scheme, and having a skin locker where you can freely swap your skins sort of undoes what transmutation stones are for. However, if you wish to reward players with cosmetic rewards, you can’t put cosmetic customization behind the gem store. This is probably not an easy thing to balance for the developers, and I bet it’d be subject to long debates between monetization team and content creators, but I think that a deal that allow a skin locker (or a similar feature) to exist is very important for this game.

2- More Armor and Weapon Skins
And not just from the gem store! I made a very long post about this topic about that in the old topic before it was officially about the vertical progression so instead of repeating myself, I’ll just post the link here: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/CDI-Character-Progression-Vertical/page/16#post3375158

If that’s too costly, I agree with the idea to make slight variations for armors, and I especially like the idea of making “elite” version of old sets like in Guild Wars 1, which would be improved, more “epic” versions of classic sets. I can’t imagine this taking as long as a completely new set to make because you already have 10 base sets.

3- Improved Personal Story
This one would most likely have to wait for an expansion, but I’d like to have a personal story with more interesting choices. (Mostly moral ones, which are the fun choices to make in RPGs.) And also one where my character’s personality (charm/dignity/ferocity) plays a part, and is rewarded later. For example, there could be different armor sets for the 3 personality types. Like, for example, if you have a ferocity “soldier” profession, you would look like a hulking juggernaut. That would be awesome.

I almost always play alone.

My main MMO is WoW and I’m in a very social and active guild so it’s hard to be alone there. So GW2 is sort of my escape hatch when I feel like playing alone. I load up the game, do my daily achievements, do some events for the heck of it, gather some mats for ascended (as if I’ll ever get those ;_;), maybe a jumping puzzle because I love those, etc. The other day my GW2 guild asked for help on a guild bounty so I came, but yeah… I like being a lone wolf in Tyria.

1. The DPS/Control/Support model. Currently it’s go zerk or go home for dungeons.
2. New skins -especially armor- that can be earned in-game as opposed to the gem store.
3. Continued personal story.
4. Skin collection.
5. More jumping puzzles.