Guild Wars 2

Tranassa.4968:

Isaiah Cartwright.8569:

Art Progression
Art progression! It’s horizontal why not do it more!!! Well we do this a lot all ready and a lot of it’s constraints comes down to costs. Every single piece of art we make is not liked by everyone and so the amount of art you have to make to give everyone a smooth art progression curve is very high. The cost of making some pieces of art is also very high (Armor especially) sense very pair of gloves = 10 pairs of gloves due to race/sex. We think art is a great horizontal progression system but not something that can stand 100% alone due to constraints of creation.

I’m pretty sure if you would do a design contest, maybe even with ingame reward for the winners, you would receive tons of nice stuff! You did this once in gw1 and, no offense, but the weapons that were coming out there, where the best looking weapons in the game! Bone Dragon staff, Emerald Blade,… All the high end dungeon rewards!
I think such a contest would give you excelent feedback AND would also lower your costs for designing a weapon/armor.
I also like the concept of cultural armors, a huge amount of players the t3 is the best looking armor. I love the Norn, and the curltural armors are just way better, than all the other armors, because they fit into the norn “feeling”.
And i think the most players want a armor that fits to their character and to the gw2 world, rather than a good looking high tech armor from a science fiction film, which does not fit at all into the gw2 world.

Just try a design contest

Just giving my support for this idea, I really like it.

I would love to draw armor design for this game, because unlike some older MMOs, the armors in this game are not just texture reskins so I feel that you can really be creative. I remember a thread on the Sylvari forums there the players were exchanging Sylvari hair ideas with Kristen Perry and there was some high-quality art in there, so I’m pretty sure that there would be some some really cool stuff if there was a design contest… or just a forum post asking for suggestions.

I’d like to talk a bit about skins as a mean of horizontal progression in the game. Currently, when I see someone with a rare skin I think “okay he dropped 10$ in the gem store and I would look like that in 2 minutes if I did the same.” This isn’t exciting and it doesn’t feel epic. I’d like rare skins to reward players who have achieved long-term accomplishments or challenging feats. Right now, the only ones that do are the Hall of Monuments sets and the dungeon sets.

I’d like to be able to fix myself some long-term goals that will take some time and effort to accomplish and would give me a reason to log into the game more often, and a rare skin that looks awesome is something I would definitely see myself going after. And if there ever is a skin collection then I’ll probably try to collect others after I get my favorite, just to fill my collection. Power creep (as in vertical progression) gets boring after a while but new art never gets old, at least if the styles are varied.

I understand that armor is the most expensive kind of gear to make, but it’s also the most powerful mean of changing a character’s appearance so it’s important.

I’d like to see Guild Wars 1 gear philosophy go make a comeback: quick to get the maximum stats, hard to get the skin you want! Altholics also win with that since they only need the stats. I agree that exotics were a tad too easy to get, but currently, getting ascended gear is way too time consuming.

P.S.: Nice to see that the game director likes the same classics as I do. (Final Fantasy Tactics) :P

Well with the devs’ love for cheap telegraphed one-shotters as the only mechanic in dungeons encounters, I can foresee myself having a lot of fun with this.

Counterblow → Defiant Stance → Counterblow → Shield Stance → Counterblow → Endure Pain → Dodge → Dodge.

Rinse and repeat. =D

Well, here’s the thing.

If they make an expansion, we’ll pay 50$ upfront and then we’d have access to ~50 new armor skins, ~150 new weapon skins, a continued personal story with an interesting villain, at least 10 new zones with all new events (more if it’s GW1-style expansions), tons of new dungeons, many new skills, perhaps one or two new professions, etc, etc, etc.

With the living story model, it’s all about the gem store to fund the development, and the gem store offers a lot less per dollar than a full expansion would. Not to mention that there’s no prestige stuff like hard-to-get armors because you just pay 10$ for the gem store armors. It’s not interesting.

I have a strong feeling that those flame armors aren’t exactly the will of Arenanet’s developers. They sound way too passionate about their game to do something like that. I bet they’re just as upset as us right now, not that we would ever know…

This travesty towards human scholars sounds more like NCSoft’s work than Arenanet’s. I mean, it’s pretty obvious that whoever did that crap just picked whatever set he/she thought would sell without a care for what those sets represent, because the choices of set are way too random. I mean, you have the human T3 for light, the WvWvW unique set for medium, and… a cheap Kessex Hills set for heavy? It doesn’t sound like the picks that someone who actually knew the game would make. At all.

Next time if this keeps going, I bet it will be just as random. Why not an Arah set, an Heritage set and the light starter set?

There are rumors that NCSoft isn’t doing too well… And 2014 has another layout of MMOs coming, including a WoW expansion that basically hand picks everything GW2 does well and leaves the bad out. What if NCSoft is giving up on GW2 and wants to milk it as much as they can until those games come out? I really hate the idea of giving up on this game, but when I see in the same day cheap armor reskins for 10$ in the cash shop, and then a tasteless advertisement campaigns like the GW2 oath, it scares me…

TL;DR version: I’d like the living story to feel a little more personal. Have little linear scenarios that can happen in parallel with what is happening in the open world, and create a few story missions that tell the story to the character, a little like how the personal story did it. Not everyone likes to do dungeons, and the open world is not immersive enough to tell the story with the chat and the zergs.
*

Hopefully I’m not too late for the party.

In the Living Story content, could we have more solo story missions? I’d like the living story to feel a little more like the personal story. I’d like to feel more personally involved in what happens.

For the Toxic Alliance, here’s how I would see that done.

1- Tower appears in Kessex Hills and you get your first story missions. The game is currently like that.
2- After the mission, you’re sent to collect some spores in the open world for analysis.
3- Once you have your spores, you’re eligible to another story mission that progresses your story with the tower event.
4- After the mission, you could get a choice to either collect some crystals or kill a few champions to allow the researchers to get the crystals themselves.
5- Once that’s done: final story mission of the patch. Scarlet abducts someone and you have to choose whether to send a call to your racial hero (Eir, Logan, etc.) for assistance or ask the Durand Priori to start researching for a way to defeat the tower’s magical defenses. In both cases it will take some time and we have to wait until November 12th.

So basically it ends with you wondering what will happen next, if you made the right decision, etc. It makes the player more involved in the story. The events between the story missions look like your typical quests in old MMOs but it’s just to keep players from doing all 3 missions in a row and then running out of stuff to do after 2 hours. It also forces them to explore the open world where other things are happening.

And then on November 12th, the next patch comes and you get to see the outcome of your choice and do the last 2-3 missions. If you missed any previous story missions, the game assumes that you made either one of the two choices in your final story mission and you get a letter telling you what happened and summoning you into the action.

Whatever choice you make doesn’t affect the greater outcome of the story, but it does have a few effects in how your character deals with the event, and makes it a little more personal.

The personal story is a feature of the game I was really excited about, but turned out to be a little disappointing to me. (Not just because of Trehearne, mind you.) With the living story, I think you could really rectify that and bring a little bit of role-playing. And with the factor of time playing, you could do like TV series and end on a suspense, leaving the player to wonder what will happen next. Like in my example, the player makes a choice but has to wait to see the consequence. You could also bring back old choices that we made several patches ago or in the personal story. Say you upset someone 4 months ago, then new patch hits and “Holy crap! This guy still hates me? Alright, I’m going to a) Add another scar on his face (+ Ferocity) b) Calm him.”

Also, I don’t really care if my character can’t talk in living story cutscenes due to budget limitations. You could turn that into an advantage by giving us more choices of answer in the written dialogs, like a charm answer, a dignity answer and a ferocity answer without having to go through the costly process of voicing them. (Think of Bioware games…) Of course, you’d have to find a point to the RP stats. (What about armor skins? Brutes get barbarian-like armor, nobles get knightly armor (if heavy) and charmers get skimpy armor. Hint, hint…)

You could bring back Trehearne in a Living Story event and give us a few noble/charm/ferocity lines to throw at him. With all the people saying that he takes over our personal story, wouldn’t it be awesome to return at him and throw him two or three “Ferocity” lines? No need for consequences as long as the dialog changes.

Lastly, could the game react a little more to who my character is? For example, my character is a human and charrs hate humans, so when meeting a charr character, I think it would be nice if once in a while the introduction lines were a bit different. Or you introduce a charming guy who starts hitting on female characters. Or a player character meetting a NPC from his order he has already met getting a “nice to see you again!” kind of introduction. Just little things that make the story more personal.

I agree with Shriketalon’s suggestions as well.

I also think that since town clothes are more or less RP items, the personal story should reward with more town clothes as you progress. At least there would be a point to putting up with Trehearne’s nonsense. :P

Also, if you start as a street rat humans, your original town clothes are rags. (Charrs get town clothes for their legion, sylvaris get town clothes for their waking time, etc.) If you don’t like that, you can buy the other origins’ town clothes with gold so you’re not stuck with your origin. It just gives flavor to your story.

McSlappy.1372:

Killthehealersffs.8940:

You got the base gear AND then you have to grind for the conquest time gated point gear in WoW !

Lets not talk about the older post : <<about 10-11 Mil people not only have the time but the cash for it…… Anyways 13%+ stat increase? In wow 2200 gear is only 5% stat increase and it is a very very significant difference.>>
Where atm, here they only have released 4 gear pieces after a year , rather than 4 full sets of stats gear :P

But that is the point. Each season’s gear is easily obtainable. If you are new to the game you can easily catch right up where people are currently. Very easy entry. With GW2 if you come in to the game six months from now it’s going to take you a very long time to get caught up to people with their ascended gear. In WoW your caught up to everyone nearly immediately. In here your pretty much going to be behind for 6-18 months.

Actually, Blizzard has capped the gear level to 496 in all PvP areas since patch 5.2, so as long as your gear was 496 or better (which is very easy), you actually have 0 catch up to do in World of Warcraft if you’re in PvP. There’s only one stat that is allowed to keep growing on PvP gear (so that PvP gear is slightly better at PvP) but it doesn’t make a huge difference.

That said, I don’t think that ascended gear makes such a big difference either in Guild Wars 2. Don’t get me wrong, I can’t even understand why they created ascended gear instead of just making rarer weapon armor skins. (New skins makes me excited while ascended accessories and laurel farming pushed me out of a game for about 6 months.) I just don’t feel that it deprecates exotics as badly as some people make it.

I play this game on and off.

I was most hyped by this game for the personal story and the dungeons. Turned out to be the two most disappointing features of the game and the ones I have completely ignored after the third month of the game. I’m also not a fan of the way the company monetizes skins. (GW1 got a lot of free armor skins like the prestige sets, why are all the new skins in the cash shop this time around?)

I still think this is a good game and is totally worth the $150 I spent on it (collector’s edition, hehe) because it has no monthly fee and the leveling experience was awesome, but it’s not going to be a game I will spend countless hours on unless a lot of things change.

Which is fine because I play WoW and have a fantastic guild to play with in there, but I really wished the game was better for me because what it does well, it does it really, really well.

The problem is not really berserker gear because it works just fine elsewhere. In PvP or WvW you can put emphasis on defense and you’re not going to be useless. Berserker’s superiority is strictly a dungeon problem.

The problem is that Arenanet has (in my opinion) massively failed to design proper, balanced dungeons. Obviously, when it is possible to dodge, block, kite or evade to avoid everything that matters and you don’t need to invest anything into defense to do that, berserker is always going to trump every other type of gear for seasoned players. And this isn’t an opinion, this is logic. If you’re good enough to stop everything from hitting you, why do you need that large buffer of extra health? So it’s the very design of the dungeons that make berserker gear so good in there.

The problem is that full-on offense and the general “the-best-defense-is-a-good-offense” mentality is not the favorite playstyle of everyone. A lot of players are more defense-oriented, and Arenanet’s dungeon design utterly fails to provide content for those players. Personally, I have no interest in maximizing my damage. What I want to do in a group is protecting people, taking hits for them, and healing and supporting them. Of course, I could do that, but I would be a waste of a party slot in an experienced team because it’s just sub-optimal to go defense in dungeons.

And I don’t even think the dungeons were supposed to be so offense-oriented at first. Their “Damage/Support/Control” paradigm sounded really fun. Like the trinity, it would have included all kinds of playstyles, both offensive and defensive, except that it was a lot more flexible and open-ended. For example, tanking is control, but don’t want to tank? Fine, you can also kite, interrupt, blind, stealth, stun, etc… As long as the boss is in control. But instead they came with their Defiant/Unshakable mechanic and turned their dungeons into this mindless and boring max-DPS mess. Why? Seriously, why was Damage/Support/Control never implemented in the game? This game’s dungeons could have been so much better. I’m still waiting for a developper to comment on dumping the Damage/Support/Control paradigm. We know that the personal story team was rushed, was the dungeon team rushed as well and had to take a shortcut with defiant/unshakable? I wonder.

The two versions don’t even look like they’re the same set. I would wear the male version on my female warrior long before I’d wear the female version. Except the boots, which are really nice, I must say.

The problem with the female version is that it doesn’t look like heavy armor at all. I like armors that reveal a reasonable amount of skin but it must still look like armor and that one doesn’t.

There’s about 6 heavy armor sets that show skin in the entire game, and of them only 2 are skimpy. Oh! And of the skimpy ones, one makes you look like a cave girl and the other is beyond weird and bizzarre and forces you to farm a dungeon, so no thanks I’m going to dress my girl adequately.

Why can’t we get armors like those instead?
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/File:Warrior_Elite_Templar_armor_f.jpg
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/File:Warrior_Luxon_armor_f.jpg
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/File:Warrior_Silver_Eagle_armor_f.jpg

Those Guild Wars 1 armors exposed some skins but weren’t exaggeratedly revealing and still looked like metal armor. Those are the kind of armors I would have wanted for my warrior, and I would totally spend some gems on a set that look like that if one was available.

Revealing or not, I want heavy armor to look like heavy metal armor. Yeah, the game could use a few more revealing heavy armors, however the female version of the Phalanx set doesn’t even look like armor. (And neither do the Arah or pit fighter sets…) So yeah for the Phalanx set I also prefer the male version, just because it actually looks like armor.

I’m a defense warrior through and through, in full Cleric’s/Giver’s armor. (And I’ve been focused on defense even when we had no sustain and everyone was telling me to reroll guardian so I’m not FotM either.) And seriously my Earthshaker is hitting for 850. I think that’s really weak right now. If it drops to 650 it might just kill the hammer for me.

Is there a reason that there’s no base damage component to the attack skills in this game? I mean, isn’t that how heals work? If the damage modifiers looked like [Base] + [Power] * [Coefficient] instead of just [Power], it would be really easy to keep the damage of power stackers in check while ensuring reasonable base damage to players that are focusing on other stats.

If Healing Signet’s drops to 360 base healing, the coefficient should be 0.1, not 0.07.

The idea is that to get today’s Healing Signet, you need to put some thoughts into healing power, but not necessarily sacrifice all your stats into it.

Don’t forget that the devs are cool with us being tanky, so you don’t want to break even with today’s Healing Signet only at maximum healing power. A tanky warrior would probably have closer to 750 healing power, and 0.1 breaks even around there. (435 vs 429 today) At 1,500 healing power, that’s 510 but then you made healing power your primary stat so it should be fine.

I think it’s much more likely that they’re going to be moving Unsuspecting Foe to master and swapping the Adrenal Health and the Armored Attack minor traits.

Seriously?

Engineers have good shield skills but Shield Stance is like the best block skill in the game. 3 seconds, unlimited blocks, not limited in amount of blocks, can be traited to reflect, 30 (24 traited) second cooldown. There isn’t a lot of things I would trade my Shield Stance for in this game…

Shield Bash… meh, at 25 second cooldown for a stun, it could probably use an evade or a block during the charge animation, or have a longer charge to justify the cooldown… but Warriors are in a very very good position right now so I’m not going to complain too loud.

Also I’m really glad that Warriors get to block with their shield. I hate how Guardians cannot block with their shield. (But can with their focus!?) It doesn’t make sense.

Healing Signet is quite possibly the highest passive regen in the game, but warriors have very high health and no reliable access to protection so this is needed for long-term sustain.

What needs a change is the signet’s active. I don’t want the heal buffed because it would be overpowered to have high passive healing on top of a good active heal skill, however I’d like to have a reason to use it. Since the devs would like to improve sustain, I would suggest changing the signet’s active effect so that it also heals other players for 50% of what the signet healed the warrior. (Passive effect is unchanged.) So it’s not more powerful for the warrior and it actually hurts him to use it since he loses the heal, but it gives him a little tool to support his party. Let’s say that you are a full support warrior with maxed healing power. Healing Signet heals for what, 4,000? Then using it also gets a 2,000 heal to nearly party members. With regen banners or healing shouts, I think this could make support warriors pretty sweet to have in a party, especially if they’re also tanky.

The problem is that ArenaNet needs to keep players active enough to spend money in their cash shop. That’s what puts bread on their tables. For PvP and WvW players there’s plenty of things to do, but for PvE players there’s nothing to do.

I think it’s safe now to say that their dungeons have utterly failed to provide anything interesting to chew on for serious PvE players. People that do them just want the gear and use exploits, 5x berserker teams and cheats to skip as many bosses and be done with the dungeon ASAP, and when Arenanet tried to fix one dungeon (AC) the players found the dungeon annoying and just stopped running it. And I don’t have the impression that fractals have been immensely popular either.

A lot of focused PvE players got to level 80 and then quit because there was nothing else to do. Events are too easy to pose a challenge, dungeons have huge design issues, world champions and other really hard mobs to solo had no rewards (back then), there was just nothing to do it you don’t want to PvP.

Adding ascended weapons (and later armors) introduces a new goal that is going to take a very long time to fulfill. This will keep players active and busy for a long time, and that gives the game a larger pool of players that could potentially spend money in the cash shop. Personally I think it’s a little silly and even hazardous for the game that ascended gear has to have better stats than exotics, and on top of that the devs look a little funny to go 180 on their word, but I sure am glad that there is something to do as a PvE player. I haven’t played the game from April to last August because I just had nothing to do. Now, at least, I have a reason to log in and play. I just wished my gear wasn’t deprecated…

Daecollo.9578:

That would make it a Niche, no other healing skill in the game requires a dedication to a stat to be effective, just a bonus to the heal. As soon as you make it a Niche it becomes worse way worse at lower levels because they don’t get as many stats as higher levels do. No other healing skill not a trait or passive class effect, an actual healing #6 skill in the game is made good with gear, its good as is, gear just supplies a bonus. It is perfectly fine.

I never said I wanted it nerfed that way. I said it’s the only kind of nerf I could live with for Healing Signet. I’m pretty happy with how warrior sustain is right now. The developers have acknowledged in the state of the game on twitch.tv that a lot of warrior players wanted to be tanky (because since when are warriors not tanky in MMOs?), and they seem pretty happy about us being tankier now. After several patches without a nerf to our sustain, and now that interview, I’m not really worried about losing that sustain, even with all the people shouting for a nerf.

Making heals based on a %age of damage dealt would push us even harder towards berserker gear, not to mention the more we do damage the more we have sustain so we would be unstoppable juggernauts. That’s really not a good idea.

Really, Healing Signet is fine, and it hasn’t been nerfed in like 3 patches, so the devs are probably happy with where warriors stand right now. Warriors had really crappy sustain before it, and while I’m not too fond of having one ability alone be 50% of our sustain, at least we have sustain now.

The only nerf I could agree with would be maybe reduce the base healing of the signet BUT increase the healing power scaling to something more decent. Let’s say the base healing is ~300 but with maxed up healing power gear it goes up to ~500. That’s something I could live with. But a flat nerf to the passive healing? No.

Lafiel.9372:

Trinity doesn’t solve anything though. Adding a trinity will just dumb down the game even more. The solo lupi warrior video didn’t prove anything but that the player was skilled enough to understand and dodge all the mechanics the boss threw out. Something trinity implemented games probably couldn’t do but in a group of 5, it would be a billion times easy than a group of 5 currently. So what’s your point? add trinity so the game gets dumb downed even more but at least people are forced to group up and worship tanks and healers? or instead, people still have to group up to finish a dungeon but some elites c an choose to solo a dungeon and taking 10x longer.

I disagree with many things anet has done but this is NOT one of them.

Oh btw, the real problem is crappy mob ai and cheap boss mechanics like high HP which is causing people to go the DPS route.

It’s funny to read people say that the holy trinity would dumb down the game when the PvE strategy in Guild Wars 2 is to stack 5 people in berserker gear and dodge red circles on the ground. On the other hand, MMOs with the trinity use it to design extremely varied and interesting boss encounters. For example, in WoW’s Throne of Thunder raid, there isn’t a single boss that will let you zerg it, and while you have tanks holding the boss’ aggro, there’s still tons of things to watch out for everyone. I’m sorry to say it but so far it’s a solid 1-0 for the holy trinity in PvE, it’s just a lot more compelling and fun than whatever design we have in the game right now. (And no it’s NOT damage/support/control). Although to be fair with GW2 I just came back from a 4 months break and I heard that the bosses of the temporary dungeons during my absence were a lot more fun than the ones in the original dungeons.

Now, I’m not really asking for a holy trinity. I would actually prefer if they brought the support and control role in the game instead and work from there since that’s what they promised in the first place. The video does a pretty good job at describing what breaks dungeons and what could be done to bring support and control back in the foreground. There’s also the fact that a lot of people prefer playing support and group-oriented roles, and the control and support roles would be very interesting for those people. I have someone in my guild in another MMO who plays 4 priest healers, and I have another friend who has one tank of every class that can tank in that same MMO (I kind of like tanking as well). How can the PvE be fun to people like them if it’s “go zerk of gtfo”. Support (healing is some form of support) and control (tanking is some form of control) needs to be relevant and helpful.

Dungeons were intended to be the high-end PvE activity, so something is obviously wrong with them when jumping puzzles and achievement grinding are more popular than dungeons in almost every “what activity do you prefer” polls.

There’s no “best” race for this. It depends on what kind of warrior you want to make. Do you want a brute or a knight?

Humans are good if you envision your warrior as a knight of some sort. My character’s haircut is horribly unfitting for a warrior but otherwise she looks really knightly and I totally love her look. I see my character as some sort of errant knight who just didn’t care about the millitary, so human is really fitting.

If you want a warrior that looks brutish and ruthless though, you’re doing it wrong with a human. Norns and Charrs are probably what you want.

Not sure if Sylvari would be a good choice for me. To be honest I can’t think of any profession that suits them other than thief and ranger. But at least I guess you can make a really ugly/scary Sylvari which would make him the brute type.

Asuras… well, midget warriors are good for a laugh!

I totally agree, although I’d prefer they just add bare-chest cultural gear for male norns. (Otherwise, here comes the large influx of half-naked human females… <_<) It would also allow the armor designers to add some nice accessories to the chest armor like bracers and tribal necklaces.

Besides, male monks from Guild Wars 1 had tons of bare-chest sets so why not in Guild Wars 2?

1- Fix dungeons so that support and defense characters have a place. I’m not necessarily asking for tanks and healers but 5 DPS teams being the best dungeon party is unacceptable and makes much worse party mechanics than the so-called “holy trinity” that the devs were so excited to break.

2- Introduce “prestige” skins like in Guild Wars 1, and make obtaining them a journey. Say you have a very rare event chain in a map, and if you help, the NPCs will remember you for a while and let you enter hard solo instances that if you complete before they time out, you get a recipe for a prestige piece.

3- Wardrobe system for your skins. What’s the point of rewarding players with skins if there’s no way to store your collection without eating all your bank slots? It also doesn’t make sense in a game that rewards skins to have players pay real money to transmute, but since cosmetic are part of this game’s monetisation scheme, I guess there’s no way around that issue…

4- Add personal story missions to the living story, focused around what your character does during the event, with some role-playing. It could add some nice suspense to take a decision one patch and have to wait the next patch to see what happens. I feel that the game has given up on role-playing, after the lukewarm reception of the personal story.

I would probably give the game my Like if I had a Facebook account. I haven’t really played the game seriously in the last 2~3 months, but I often look back at those forums and on the main site to see if there’s anything new that I would like to do. Also, despite me having been inactive for a while, I would be completely dishonest if I said that I didn’t have loads and loads of fun with it while it lasted, and for a one-time payment that was a lot of value.

So yeah, totally satisfied with the game, and while I personally prefer a certain other MMO that has lost about 600,000 players in the last months, I usually recommend this one to casual players because it’s so much more respectful with their time than the traditional MMOs.

Yamsandjams.3267:

As for stability… I don’t really think it needs that. One of the main way to counter such a skills is to use an unblockable CC like magnet, line of warding, or reaper’s mark. Giving it stability would remove these possibilities, and would even allow the stability to extend beyond the block duration unless they specifically coded it that way. I guess it would be a somewhat reasonable way of making it stronger though, not that I think it needs to be stronger.

The thing is that it probably shouldn’t have a counter. Warriors don’t have tons of evade, protection, invulnerability, stealth or aegis to keep them alive, and Shield Stance is probably their most powerful defensive ability. And it’s not an apply and forget kind of deal like an Aegis boon or Guardian focus #5, warriors have to stop attacking while using Shield Stance and other lesser block abilities. Getting knocked out of Shield Stance by an unblockable attack is a huge deal for a warrior, whereas a guardian would probably just fire another defensive ability if a block fails.

For that reason, I think that Shield Stance should never fail to block attacks. Personally I’d go even farther and add both Stability and Endure Pain for as long as Shield Stance is active. That way, unblockable skills can still pierce the shield’s defenses, but the only thing they could do to the warrior would be applying conditions, which I suppose is intended to be our weakness. Any damage from unblockable skills would be reduced to 0 and CC would not work.

BurrTheKing.8571:

TL;DR Warriors give up a lot more than Guardians in order to be tough, and we should find our own role to fill rather than trying to fill one that’s already filled.

No offense but that kind of reasoning annoys me.

This is not World of Warcraft where some classes are designed to tank and others are not. This game’s classes are supposed to be versatile enough to support pretty much every playstyle. If I want to specialize my warrior into defense, she should be able to take defensive roles (such as bunker and dungeon tank) about as well as a guardian. (Or any other class.) Of course, balance cannot be perfect and the developers are humans, but there shouldn’t be such a large gap in the ability to play defense, and even less for a heavy armor class like the warrior.

What I think should make the difference between two classes should be how they achieve it. I don’t really mind if I don’t have protection on my warrior, but if I don’t, I need another way to sustain, like more blocks, evades, stronger heals or whatever. My preference would be more blocks and evades (an evade effect on Shield Bash would be really cool) because reactive play is a lot of fun for people with defensive playstyles and it raises the skill cap. It’s more fun than just applying protection or having a strong passive heal that you equip and forget.

I think that the warrior’s active defense was intended to be block instead of evade. The problem is that block is too easily bypassed (in dungeons it’s just ridiculous how many things ignore block) and we don’t have nearly enough block skills unless we go mace/shield.

As for why greatsword has evades, the melee DPS characters were weak in the first betas so the evade was probably put into greatsword for that reason.

Personally I’d add an evade component to Earthshaker and Shield Bash. That way the melee two-handed weapons would have an evade, and the one-handed weapons would have an opt-in for evade by using the shield, or they could forsake their evade by using another off-hand.

Making all dungeons solo-able would be the final nail in the coffin for instanced group PvE. It would be like Arenanet saying “Oh, you know, we failed the game’s high-end instanced PvE content, and we’ll give up and make them solo content.”

What they need is to make the dungeons fun and compelling, so that you WANT to group up and do them instead of coming here and ask the devs to make them soloable. Oh! I’m sure a few players are going to quote this and say “but I like dungeons” but I think it’s pretty obvious that the current incarnation for dungeon doesn’t work for most people.

The only dungeon that not only should but must have a solo version is Arah story, so that players don’t have to do a dungeon to complete their personal story. Given how unpopular dungeons are, I think it would be common sense to make the personal story agnostic to dungeons.

• The rewards are cosmetic but there’s no special bank tab to store these trophees and it costs you gems to get transmute stones so their reward system just doesn’t work for me and I have no incentive to start collecting them. I just get the skin I want and get done with it. (And in my case the skin I wanted was a mix-match of Heritage and Draconic so it took me 5 minutes to get the look I wanted.)

• End game PvE is all about DPS, zerker gear and zergs because DPS/control/support didn’t happen. I’m sorry but I’m the defensive type and I don’t like these dungeons one bit because DPS is boring for me.

• The personal story could have been a lot better. Being given a choice every 2~3 missions feels like a waste of effort when most of the choices look like “Do you want to take the right or the left path?” Role-playing is fun when your choices allow you to shape your character’s personality. Give us more moral choices, with consequences.

Karizee.8076:

And I fail to see how having a tank hold the boss in one place is interesting.

I mean you may as well dig a hole and put the boss in it and let everyone “do their rotation” for all the interest a tank brings.

Who said anything about holding a boss in a corner and zerging it? In fact this game doesn’t have tanks and of all MMOs I’ve played (I’ve played a lot) it’s easily the one that is the most guilty of having zergs encounters in its endgame PvE.

Obviously, if you put tanks to hold aggro and leave the encounters as they are it’s going to be worse. Instead of having a chaotic fight you’ll have a boring fight…

The reason why having tanks and aggro mechanics is better is because it gives the raid some form of control over the boss, and with this kind of control the developers could design far more interesting encounters mechanics than those we have right now. Having unique encounter mechanics is how you break the “zergs” in encounters, and tanks allow encounter designers to build a lot of original boss mechanics.

And that’s what we want: unique encounters where you don’t zerg and where not everyone is better as a damage-dealer in berserker gear.

This game’s group mechanic was supposed to be DPS-control-support. Except that it doesn’t have it at all, instead it’s DPS, period, and a lot of players are unhappy about this, especially those who prefer more defense-oriented roles and get asked to get decked in berserker gear to do dungeons. You may wonder why I bring this up? Well, what is tanking? It’s control, in fact it’s the ultimate form of control, where one (or more) player is entirely dedicated to controlling the creature(s). If there was tanking, there would be control, and I think that this game’s endgame PvE would be a lot more popular than it is right now. (Wouldn’t have to be healers by the way, the tank would have his blocks and dodges to stay alive, so no it wouldn’t be the trinity, it would be DPS-control.)

That said I’m not trying to get tanks into Guild Wars 2. I’m not saying that it can’t be done without tanks, and even less that Guild Wars 2’s raids are going to be a flop without them. I just don’t understand how they will do it so that their encounters are not zergs. I don’t think we need to tell them that zergs are a no-no, most likely they figured that out 10 months ago. But how are they doing it, and how successful are they going to be at breaking zergs? That’s what I want to know.

The raiding thing makes me very curious.

I don’t understand how they are going to make large raids interesting in a game that doesn’t have tanks and aggro mechanics. You can’t really make large raid encounters interesting without any kind of control or structure.

I’m not saying that raids can’t work for Guild Wars 2, I just don’t understand how they’re going to make it work without letting every boss encounter degenerate into “zergs” with a couple of red circles to dodge and where there’s no point to have anyone that isn’t in berserker gear.

I’m very interested.

What I’d like them to release is their content editor.

Extend guild housing so you can make your own guild dungeon, and invite other people in.

I can always dream…

What you listed is more specializations than roles. Direct damage builds and condition damage builds are both DPS builds, for example.

I also have the same impression about how characters are created. Unlike other MMOs where some classes can only ever do DPS, I always had the impression that in Guild Wars 2 every profession is versatile and able to take any role a player may want. You pick a profession for the hero archetype, the feel and the playstyle, and then you pick the role you want to assume. However that’s not what I’m seeing right now. I picked a warrior with the intension to go defense-heavy, and I think it’s pretty reasonable to expect a heavy armored “tough guy” character to be viable at defense, but as it is, the class has no viable bunker or tanking build and it probably has the worst sustain out of any class right now. I’m talking about warriors because I have one, but I’m sure there are a few other professions with only one viable build. I still believe that the ultimate intension of the developers is to have every profession viable in multiple roles, but it doesn’t feel very high on their list of priority.

As for roles, there will always be roles. As long as people have preferences, people will naturally pick a role. The reason that the tank/dps/healer model works so well is because it gives people who prefer defensive playstyles a chance to shine. As someone who prefers playing on defense (I have a level 90 of all 5 tank classes in World of Warcraft) I just can’t get engaged in this game’s PvE because it’s DPS, DPS, DPS, DPS. (Plus warriors are pretty crappy at defense and I don’t “feel” guardians, but that’s another issue.) On a side note, I don’t think that their DPS/control/support would work as well as tank/DPS/healer for defense people.

Being the kind that can spend hours customizing, deleting and recustomizing a character until s/he looks perfect, and then spend hours farming the exact piece of armor I want, I can totally stop to look at other people’s armors when I find a character that looks good.

But to me, a good armor is one that looks unique, and being unique means mix-matching armors and using a nice dye palette. I don’t care how hard you worked to get that CoF set or the skimpy human medium set because everyone has that so I’m not going to stop looking at your gear if your character wears that.

Daecollo.9578:

Ayestes.1273:

That’s a whole lot of buffs all at once, and extremely high healing values.

Due to our high HP, low lack of invulnerability and evasion skills and lack of protection our healing and values should naturally be higher for our lack of sustain.\

A whole lot of buffs when you can only use one of these at once, it should be a hard choice between all of them.

I agree that warriors take more damage so we need to heal more, but 575 baseline for a passive Healing Surge heal tick is way too high. Ideally, increase Healing Surge’s passive heal by ~50% because it’s really weak, but increase its HP scaling by a very large amount, so you get something like ~300 heal baseline, but ~700 with full healing power. So a support warrior can stack healing power and toughness and get some really nice survivability and perhaps even bunker by taking less damage and healing more, but berserker glass cannons would still be unable to withstand focused attacks. For the active effect, I like the idea of an AoE heal. Make it the weakest heal, but heal the party for 50% of what it heals you. Since such a version of Healing Signet would probably be used by defense/support warriors, adding a group support component to that heal would make it a lot more interesting to those warriors in my opinion.

Healing Surge is going to have an interesting synergy with the incoming trait buff where burst skills are going to clear conditions, so if it fills the bar it would become very interesting for warriors using that trait. I mean, you have a full bar, you get conditions, you clear them with a burst, you get more conditions, you use Healing Surge and clear them when your burst skill is up again. And of course you can add even more ways to clear conditions. Maybe that’s a little overpowered… (If it is, an alternative would be to decuplate the speed at which adrenaline fills after using Healing Surge, so the bar still fills quickly but you have to “work” for it.)

It could be a nice feature to implement.

The feature I want the most though for customization is heraldric shields. Of course, only 3 professions can use shields, but it would be pretty cool for a guild to have its warriors and guardians carry a shield with its colors on it.

They’re probably giving up on dungeons in their current incarnation. They tried to fix AC in a way they honestly thought would make things more fun, and instead they made the dungeon even worse.

I feel they’ll just leave dungeons like that and work on a much better dungeon system when it’s the time to build their first expansion.

MidnightCorutin.7084:

Guardians can tank IF they build pure hp/toughness.
Guardians can do damage IF they build Damage/Crit blah blah
Guardians can support if they sacrifice HP/Tough for Healing which provides little bonuses to vit and tough.

At least you get to be good at different things. Guardians are easily the most complete class right now.

Those other classes you mentionned may be good -even OP- at one thing but you forgot to mention that most other builds are subpar or useless.

I spec my warrior in tankiness and she’s still a worse tank than a damage guardian, and no she doesn’t do more damage when traited that way. Ditto for support. The only thing that works is pure damage but that’s not my playstyle at all so I parked her despite being my main.

I’m sorry but I don’t have a lot of sympathy for guardians given the problems of other classes. Do guardians have problems? Yes, but like I said, they’re probably the most complete class right now.

Biggest issue with warriors is that we’re one-trick poneys. It feels that if you’re not a zerker glass cannon you should give your spot to someone else.

We can specialize in support, but we’re not very good at it.

We can specialize in survivability, but a guardian will be 2x as good as us without even traiting/gearing in defense.

Warriors have damage and that’s it.

And of course one-trick poneys aren’t very good at PvP.

Having less health but taking less damage is a far better deal than 27,000 health because it’s much easier to regen the damage.

As the game stands right now, guardian in zerker with nothing but damage traits are tankier than a warrior in defense/support traits and also do more damage. I’d laugh if it wasn’t that I rolled a warrior to be tanky…

The problem is that raids wouldn’t work very well in this game. Remember how dynamic events looked at launch? That’s basically how raids would look in this game: monstrous zergs… just with more “dodge that one-hit-KO.”

The reason is that when the developers decided to drop the “trinity”, they traded rich team interactions for more character individuality and freedom. This causes the PvE encounters to focus on each individual player instead of the group as a whole, and you can’t make very interesting large scale PvE encounters like those you see in other MMOs such as WoW if it’s always everyone for himself. If they made raids with that kind of team interaction, they’d probably have to make everything a one-hit-KO to keep the encounters difficult, and it wouldn’t be fun at all. That’s why I think that raids would not work.

With 5-player teams their design works because losing one player out of 5 is a big deal so they can challenge the players’ dodging and kiting skills without having to make every missed dodge a one-hit KO.

Yeah we haven’t heard much about Eric Flannum.

Also, it seems that the game director is now Colin Johanson. (It shows that title in his forum posts.)

What is the cheapest way to get good damage? I don’t want to spend a fortune on a zerker set, but stuff with offense stats tend to be very expensive. My real set and the one I’m willing to spend gold on is defense/support, but right now non-DPS warriors are terrible, so I need a temporary DPS set until things get fixed, but I don’t want to spend all my gold on it.

I made a cheap rare (yellow) set with the zerker modifier on it, but without sigils and runes I don’t do much more damage than I used to.

What is a good “cookie-cutter” DPS trait spec?

Any good DPS sigil and runes that won’t cost me too much gold?

I’m willing to accept that my damage won’t be as good as the one with the “real” zerker set, but that’s okay I just want a set that will make me useful to my team because right now “tanky+support” just doesn’t work for warrior.

I agree with the devs that charrs and asura have the strongest personal storyline. Playing my blood legion charr sometimes felt like I was playing my renegade commander Shepard at times, which is awesome.

I also agree that the asura story is very enjoyable. I love the asura attitude and Zoija is awesome for that. Although I guess it can get on some peoples’ nerves. I’m the “why so serious” type so funny little guys are a good fit for me.

I thought the humans would have a great story because they were supposed to have that “underdog” theme, but the personal story completely ignored that part of human lore, and honestly the rest of the game doesn’t make you feel like it either. I was disappointed in my human’s story long before Trehearne mary-sue’d it.

That said, people play the characters they find cool and would like to identify with while playing the game, and in many cases that’s a human. Story and lore can influence people to play one race instead of another, but looks is probably the strongest reason. (Especially for a main character.)

Warriors need massive survivability buffs. If I put 30 trait points down the defense tree and equip my character with soldier/cleric/shaman or giver armor I think it’s pretty reasonable to be more survivable than another class that spent all its resources in offense. But no, the only way to play a warrior is berserker and it’s very frustrating and disappointing if you’re like me and like playing tanks.

I nearly stopped playing the game because of that. I hate playing glass cannons but if I don’t I’m miserable, plus I’m sick pretending to be a tank when even elementalists are tougher than me without sacrificing half the damage I do, not to mentions that guardians spend 0 points in their defense trait lines and they’re tougher than me 30 defense/tactics AND have better damage. I’d play a guardian but I found them boring during the beta so I’d rather just play another game.

This isn’t a “QQ” or “I quit” post, I’m sure this will get fixed eventually, and since warriors have at least one very, very good spec (DPS) there’s probably other professions that are more in help than us right now, but until then I don’t find my character as fun as I wish she was and I’ll be mostly leveling alts casually or playing other games.

I agree with the original poster.

I play a warrior and I am also traiting and gearing her defensively with tons of support because defense and support fits my playstyle, but I’m just not having fun playing that way in this game. I feel I could be much more useful to my groups going berserker, but I hate being fragile and it’s just not my style to go all-offense. As a very defense-oriented player I’m just not finding group play very fun because of that, so after level 80 I am only playing this game casually when the living story looks interesting.

I understand that the devs went out of their way to kill the “tank role”, but now all the fun things to do as a defense-specialist have been stripped out of the game. As a high-defense character, when I see someone getting killed I want to be able to protect him/her. But nope, no way to get a mob to attack you unless you actually go glass cannon and risk getting yourself killed too. And I’m sure that people who play glass cannons DON’T want to get attacked and have to kite non-stop. It feels so backwards! The other day I was playing with my friend who is a glass cannon and we took a champion: he spent the entire encounter kiting the boss because he had aggro, and while I (tanky) was trying to kill it with my pitiful damage. It really wasn’t fun.

It would be very nice to have a utility similar to the warrior’s Intevene in World of Warcraft, where the warrior redirects all the damage taken by a nearby party member to her/himself. You could use that on a player that is downed or about to be downed, then Shield Stance or Defy Pain while other players revive the player safely. That could be fun, and this is already programmed in the game. (The ranger’s “Protect Me!”) That’s the kind of thing that would give a huge point to having a low damage defensive character without putting the trinity back into the game.

Another thing that’s fun as a high-defense character is to be able to withstand stuff that other players have to avoid. For example I find it fun when a boss uses a huge attack and everyone is running away, but instead I just stand there, pop Shield Stance and BLOCK, BLOCK, BLOCK, BLOCK, BLOCK, BLOCK, BLOCK! Feels good. However, in dungeons it feels like the majority of the dangerous stuff is unblockable and you have to dodge and go Greatsword because, well, your shield is useless. The troll in AC story is probably the most ridiculous example of this: even his auto-attacks are unblockble, and he’s just a story mode mob. I don’t mind an unblockable attack here and there to keep things from being monotonous, but I think there are too many at the moment. If block was reliable in this game, I think it would be MORE fun to play defense in this game than in one of those MMOs with the trinity, because here when you block/dodge attacks you reduce damage by 100%, which feels much more rewarding for players that are good at it. This contrasts with trinity MMOs, where tank abilities typically reduce damage only by a percentage to make sure that healers have something to heal. A big cooldown can be 40% damage, while in GW2 just a simple skill like Counterblow is 100% and have short cooldowns.

I agree that heavy armor has the best diversity. My only complain would be the revealing pieces which could be a little better. The only one I find really cool is the barbaric set on a huge male character but if you want something in metal like actual armor (or are playing a female character) I find the revealing heavy gear lacking.

Dungeons are where the game died for me. I don’t even try to do them anymore. I ignored the living story dungeon and I’m ignoring my personal story because it ends with a forced dungeon run. That’s about how much I hate this game’s dungeons.

• Dungeons reward armor skins, but the transmute system and the bank tell me to ignore all skins except my favorite, because if I start collecting skins, I’m going to 1) fill my guild bank (and actually need 2 accounts) and 2) have to buy gems everytime I want to change my skin. This works against any incentive to do dungeons. It takes a “skin collection” tab and transmutes at no cost for this to work. (Of course NCSoft would lose revenue here.)

• Removing the trinity could have worked if 1) it was replaced it with something better and 2) the devs could find something fun to do for people who like playing tanks and healers, but as it is right now, the system just doesn’t work. I guess some enjoy the chaos that this kind of system allows, but I think there’s can’t be any kind of depth to the encounters without a bare minimum level of stability.

• The balance seems way off. One of the branches of CoF is super easy but the surprise troll mini-boss of AC easy can wipe a whole PuG/casual group with his stomp, has everything unblockable including his auto-attacks and regens his health. That has no place in story.

On a more positive note, the absence of a gear treadmill is an extremely positive aspect to this game’s PvE and just for that I’ll keep an eye for any dungeon improvements, and none of the issues I mentionned above are unfixable.

What’s so bad about a monster that can one-shot an entire party in one stomp, has every single attack unblockable and is in the first dungeon’s casual story mode? This is perfectly balanced.

If you want to use a shield pick a warrior. Guardian shield skills are not shield-like at all, and don’t even block stuff. (You will probably use a focus.)