Guild Wars 2

Imbune.5497:

So you want the warrior to be a heavy armor profession with tons of hp, ridiculously hard hitter with a multitude of ways to block/evade/parry/counter attacks along with high vigor uptime and be very mobile with basically invincible mobility skills on every weapon.

Tell me how it’s fair that I trait my warrior in full defense/tactics with giver’s/shaman/cleric exotics and I’m not remotely as tanky as a guardian specialized in damage, nor do I have his level support, and of course my damage is crap due to no power on my gear. People say “OMG warrior damage too high make them squishy” but don’t realize there’s no other way to play a warrior. Look at the “warrior tank” posts, they almost all have someone saying “go zerk or roll a guardian.”

This is wrong. Since when are warriors not tanky? There’s a reason you keep seeing questions about how to make a tanky warrior here. People expect to be able to tank well with a warrior. I mean, come on it’s a heavy class that can carry a shield and has a ton of health, with a long tradition of being tanks in video games. I expected to be able to get good survivability when I picked a warrior, if I wanted to play a melee glass cannon with crazy DPS I would have picked a thief. Warriors should be able to bunker if they have the right stats, weapons and traits. Of course, zerker glass cannons should not, nobody ever said you should be able to have good survivability with the damage of a zerker. That would be dumb.

I agree with the OP that a warrior’s defenses should lie in block, evade and dodge rather than protection. As someone who liked playing tanks in other MMOs, I find that being good with skills like Counterblow is very rewarding because the timing is not always obvious. (If this game had traditional tanks in PvE it would be my favorite game to tank in because of that.) Personally I’d change Shield Bash so that it blocks or evades during the charge animation so that could be another skill that you can time. It’s a little difficult to use as a stun due to the animation lag anyway, so why not also give it a defensive purpose?

However, with more and more things being unblockable, I think tanky warriors need an straight up invulnerability move, but since chaining Shield Stance with an invul and Defy Pain would be a little crazy, I think it should be baked into one of these skills. I would just change Shield Mastery so that it also makes Shield Stance give invulnerability during its animation. It won’t change anything 95% of the time, but when you know that something unblockable is coming (happens often in dungeons) and you need a breather, you could pop Shield Stance and know that you won’t take damage in the next 3 seconds whether the attacks are blockable or not.

Tanky warriors should have good regens (a buff to Healing Signet was hinted), but not so good that they don’t need to block or dodge; because that wouldn’t fit with their suggested fighting style. I think Healing Signet’s passive heal should scale much better with healing power.

Then there’s this thread that has great ideas about how to improve the defense line without making it too overpowered for glass cannon zerkers:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/warrior/Defense-Grandmaster-Trait-Indomitable

This is not WoW, where one class can only do damage while another one can do just as much damage and be able to tank and heal. I’m pretty sure that warriors (or any profession) are not intended to be good at only one thing. I could be wrong, but as far as I know, every profession is intended to be able to specialize in whatever the player wants: defense, melee damage, ranged damage, conditions, support, etc. And even more when it’s natural. (Warrior tanks.) The difference is in the playstyle. I don’t really care about the removal of the trinity, in my opinion that’s a big mistake in the absence of anything better; to me the genius of the class design of GW2 is rather in the fact that every class can specialize into everything. (No unidimentional classes like mages that can only deal damage, priests that can only heal, etc.) In the future, I’d personally like this aspect of the game to be pushed.

This is a good idea but I have a problem with it: it has terrible synergy with the mace and the shield because those are the slowest weapons for building adrenaline, yet the defense trait line wants to favor those weapons if you look at some of the traits. So it sounds a little counter-intuitive in the defense line.

Personally, I’d keep that Indomitable idea because it’s a good idea, but I’d also change adrenaline so that we get a generous amount of it when we block or reflect. So you have a bunch of conditions, Shield Stance, block block block block block, now you have a bunch of boons thanks to Indomitable. Then the mace would clear one condition every 8~10 seconds and we would have good synergy with Aegis. Newbies would spam everything on the shield and get overwhelmed by a warrior full of boons, then people would adapt and learn to stop attacking a shielded warrior and it would be balanced.

Seren.6850:

we cant have a guardians survivability and double/triple their dps

Can’t have triple their DPS when actually traited and geared for defense/healing. But we also can’t get close to their defensive prowess no matter how hard we try.

THAT’s the problem. We have a defense and support trait line but they’re basically useless because the only thing that works with the warrior is the damage specs.

Epic.3950:

I guess warrior tanking is dead since nobody seems to care about it its a real shame

I care and I think the balance is broken if a warrior that has put all her trait points in defense and support doesn’t even get close to a bunker guardian in survivability.

I play a mace/shield+longbow warrior with healing+toughness, and it’s pretty fun but to be honest I don’t think it’s very viable. Unless Arenanet fixes us we’re pretty much pigeonholed into DPS styles. We’re one-trick poneys right now.

But at least we get to tank with an actual shield. (LOL @ guardian shield skills.)

I’d like to see a skill where the warrior jumps and smashes his greatsword into the ground. Sort of a finisher.

Protection. There’s no reason that defense warriors shouldn’t be as tanky as guardians, we spend the same amount of points in our defense-oriented line. But it needs to come from a deep defense trait (minor or major) to keep it out of reach of full-offense builds.

Agreed. Warriors need better survivability, not better damage. We really should be able to bunker like guardians and elementalists if we want to trait that way.

To be honest though, Dotted March could be a step in the right direction if the healing is good enough. Also, if the increased passive effect of signets mean that Healing Signet heals more now, that could also be good news for survival.

It only works on “block” skills. “Invulnerable” and “Evade” are still safe. And Endure Pain will continue to void the direct damage.

I’m not a huge fan of “block” being the weakest avoidance mechanic and I hate when they add new ways to bypass it. I understand that a Guardian has tons of skills that apply Aegis and that people need to be able to land a hit on them sometimes, but warriors don’t have overly powerful defenses and now one of our only good defense (Shield Stance) is going to get bypassed very easily.

As a defense-oriented player, I hate playing glass cannons. My warrior is almost entirely focused on defense and support (mace/shield+longbow+shout heals+full cleric/giver’s armor), but I’m about to give up on trying to be a (bad) bunker and go glass-cannon damage dealer because it just doesn’t seem good enough. And seeing “block” mechanics getting more ways to get bypassed certainly doesn’t help with the impression that the only viable way to play the warrior is pure damage.

If the problem was Aegis being too powerful, they should give warriors (or at least defense-traited ones) the power to block everything with their block skills so that warriors don’t become completely defenseless as they keep adding more unblockable stuff. That would also be helpful in dungeons with all the stuff that’s unblockable.

I don’t really like the new Signet of Might. Warrior survivability is not so hot, and they’re going to add even more stuff that bypass Shield Stance. Great…

The other buffs sound kind of cool though.

Mace-shield warrior here. And yeah, I was sorely disappointed at my warrior’s ability to tank. I picked a warrior over a guardian because I want to carry a shield and guardians’ shield skills are garbage, but it wasn’t really a good choice for someone who prefers defensive gameplay, and it seems to get worse and worse. It’s like every patch adds new stuff that ignores block, and there’s simply no way for a warrior to get both the defense to tank and the DPS to keep hate.

Now, I’m not a huge fan of this game’s trinity-less dungeons, and I don’t PvP either so in the end I don’t care that my character is not as tankish as I wish she was, but as a tank you should really be able to spec into survivability and tank as well as a guardian. I mean, come on, since when are warriors squishy? I don’t really have high hopes though. Since warriors are such DPS brutes in PvE, I doubt that Arenanet will buff warrior defenses anytime soon.

Skins could be a good incentive to run dungeons, but rewarding with skins would take a “wardrobe” bank tab and transmutes that don’t cost gems. I also don’t like the dungeon skins, personally. (At least not the heavy ones.)

I prefer playing a tank than a damage dealer, and this game slaps tanks and healers in the face with its no-trinity design. I really tried to like it but in the end it’s not fun for me.

Professions are not really balanced. Guardians, warriors and mesmers tend to be favored over anything else.

How much do you play? What motivates you to play?
I’m very casual. I log about 2-3 nights a week for about 1 hour.

What attracted you to this game over other MMOs?
I actually also play World of Warcraft, and I don’t play this game “over” it. (More the opposite.)

How often do you play with and interact with other players? Are most of your friends people you know from in game, or from real life?
I don’t play the game enough to have a guild or a large amount of in-game friends, although when I meet someone nice to play with it’s always more fun.

What do you do with your time in game?
Daily achievements, jumping puzzles, role-playing and a bit of WvW.

For a 150$ purchase (CE owner here) this game was one hell of a good deal. I got the best MMO for everything except dungeons and I didn’t even have to pay one dime in monthly fees. And I got a cool statue to express my nerdiness. thumbsup

Now, I find this game’s instanced PvE lacking, and as the defense-oriented kind of player I actually like the trinity since it allows me to play a tank, so this cannot be my main MMO. I wish I would have more things to do at endgame, but the game is the way it is, and since I don’t have to pay monthly fees my bar is not high when it comes to content updates.

MMOs tend to attract a much larger portion of female players than most other genres. I don’t think it’s as high as 30%, but it is probably not too exaggerated either. In WoW my guild is very close to the parity, for example.

We all know that the trinity is not perfect. For example, one obvious flaw of the old trinity is that hybrids cannot be “masters of none” as they should, otherwise they will be just plain inferior to specialized classes. Just for that, Arenanet was right to look at the system.

The problem is that whatever they have designed is NOT better than the old-school trinity, and it raised more issues. I’m not even sure it’s fair to say that it solved the “LFM healer” issue because people are still selecting classes for speed runs. (Warriors, guardians and mesmers are in high demand.) And that’s the big problem with this game’s highend PvE.

For me, the core of the issue with Guild Wars 2’s dungeon design is that a relatively large number of players are more defense-oriented and would rather play a supportive role. In another MMO, I know someone who only ever plays healers and she hates doing anything else. Those are the “true” tanks and healers, those that don’t spec into healing just for the fast queue. The game should not bring back the trinity due to the issues I have mentioned above, but it should at the very least try to give something to keep those players entertained. It does not, and that’s a problem.

For example, as someone who likes playing tanks, I’m all for removing the static aggro because I believe that a little chaos keeps the game exciting. However, when a boss picks me as his current target, I should be able to pop Shield Stance, Counterblow and my interrupts to give my party members a short little break while I keep the boss busy. But nope, can’t even do that. Whatever would be worth blocking is unblockable 90% of the time in dungeons, and the Defiant buffs are impossible to control because they are party-wide. (And the game is very misleading about the block part because outside of dungeons nearly everything is blockable, so you’d expect this to work in dungeons.) So even though I spent all my traits in defense and support, I have to dodge roll and run away like everyone else instead of played the way I built my character to play. This is disappointing, to say the least. Probably wouldn’t be that bad if I had picked a guardian because they have protection, but as a defense warrior I rely almost entirely on blocking, interrupts and high health for defense and 2/3 are rendered useless.

The irony is that if the game worked that way, it would actually be more fun to play that kind of character in Guild Wars 2 than it is in games with real trinity such as WoW, because timing a block and taking zero damage and no conditions from a potentially deadly attack is infinitely more rewarding than stacking 30% damage reduction here and another 20% there and hoping that the healer can do the rest.

As an aside, it wouldn’t be that bad if the DPS-control-support soft trinity actually happened. Healing is just one way of support, and tanking is just one way to control. I believe this game’s instanced PvE would be a lot better if it really allowed you to play the way you want instead of filtering in or out certain playstyles. Nobody has to play a healer, but if someone really wants to, s/he can. Ditto for tanking. I know that it must be very difficult to allow healing without making it mandatory, but I see no reason to ban tanking by making everything that matters unblockable.

I’d actually love to make GW2 my main MMO because everything else about it is superior to the other games on the market, but as a PvE-oriented person how am I supposed to play GW2 as much as I play other MMOs if the one part that is lacking is the part that keeps me logging back?

My warrior.

Heritage shoulders, chest, boots and gloves.
Draconic legs.
No helm.

I’d like to know as well. I thought the artbook in my CE was that one so I didn’t bother to buy it when I saw it. When I came back to buy it it was sold out.

Fun is the root of everything. The OP talks about things like immersion but if a MMO is not fun I’m not gonna get immersed in the world, I’m not gonna bond to my characters, I’m not going to care about the story, and so on. Tons of games had good stories but were ignored because as a game they weren’t really fun. The Xenogears and Xenosaga games in the late 90s-early 2000 are very good examples.

I play both games.

Guild Wars 2 is generally the better game. It has way better PvP, to the point that Blizzard is taking notes from GW2 in their patch 5.3 and capping gear power. Events vs quests… do I need to say anything? Character customization is immensely better in GW2 with creation options, dyes, and very diversified armor art. You can really make your character unique if you start mixing armor sets that look like they would match.

There is one area where GW2 falls flat though, and it’s dungeons and raids. If you remove something like the trinity, you have to replace it with something better, and dodge-or-die+zerg+kite is far worse than the trinity. And no I don’t mind waiting 30 minutes in queue for a tank if it means I get a better dungeon.

Unfortunately it’s the most important area for me, and it makes GW2 my “off-MMO” rather than my main. In fact GW2 failing on this era is the reason I still feel like playing WoW, because for everything else GW2 tends to do better.

I play a warrior and I tend to call it the “shotgun” in chat. I’m not a gun specialist but to me it looks like a shotgun, and I like to use it on Orr’s zombies just for style.

My warrior is my main and I don’t think it’s going to change. Not only the warrior is my favorite profession, but I really like the way I designed my warrior, I got a cool little RP backstory for her, and for some reason I identify to her a lot more than my other characters. I’ve spent a lot of time just collecting great dyes and cool armor skins that suit her well. I’d never spend a lot of thoughts (or gold) for that kind of things with my alts.

I started with a guardian during the beta. I thought I’d like it because I’m a defense-oriented player, but didn’t really like it. I got bored and tried the warrior in the last ~4 hours of the beta, I liked it much more. It’s able to be very tanky too, but they have a more “in your face” style which I find satisfying. That’s exactly what I needed!

So I made a warrior in live and she was pretty much a main from day 1. I like how I can be super tanky with mace/shield in a high level zone, and then swap to greatsword or hammer for the Wayfarer dailies and go on a rampage. Or grab my bow or my shotgun and stay in the back while shouting heals or planting banners. I know all classes support varying playstyles, but the warrior feels like she has the best variety of playstyles.

I’m playing a uber defense/support-oriented warrior and mobs just don’t leave me alone. If damage counts in determining who has aggro, there has to be something I’m doing that generates more aggro because I always end up with aggro even though I’m playing with a glass cannon warrior who must do at least 3x my damage. It must be either that AoE healing generates a huge amount of hate, or that the aggro bonus from carrying a shield is massive.

Titles would be a good start for acknowledging the character’s personality, but what they really need to do is to make the personality system go hand in hand with the personal story. It doesn’t really make sense that a feature that is designed to let us shape our character’s personality has utterly no impact in the RPG mode.

I agree that shield should be bigger. Where are the large kite/tower shields?

I just wish there was a town cloth seller in town for selling basic clothes like what NPCs wear. I’m not too fond of my human commoner warrior looking like a princess in town clothes, it makes me avoid the feature altogether. Why can’t I get her more “normal” clothes? In fact, I think characters should change their town clothes depending on their biography. (Social rank for humans, legion for charr, etc.)

I also agree with having an auto-town cloth switch for when you enter a capital city.

Warriors don’t really have a defensive elite, (unless you count the Battle Standard one because of the res, but it’s mostly offense-oriented buffs) so I’d give them one:

I am Unstoppable!
Shout. Gain swiftness and become invulnerable for 8 seconds. 90s cooldown.

Cato.5970:

It does make a difference: some NPCs treat you differently because of it.

While it’s a nice touch, it’s a little absurd that the story mode, the part of the game that is supposed to be a RPG, is totally agnostic to your character’s personality. If the expansion expands on the personal story, I hope it will hold your character’s personality into account, even if it means that we have less choices to make.

In light of what M. Stein has shared, I’d like to say that I’d be very interested in reading a blog post or something about the personal story. I know we’re probably not looking at more story missions until the expansion, but I think it’d be great if Arenanet shared a little of what they learned about the personal story: what worked, what didn’t, what general direction they’d like to go for next time. Also, what it could have been if the developers on the personal story were not on huge time constraints. (Given how the “work in progress” tag was there even on the last beta, the amount of bugs in the story missions, or how the home instance or personality system seemed vastly unused, I have no trouble believing that there was a time constraints.)

I’d buy “normal” town clothes if I could. By “normal” I mean no chef suit, wedding dresses, clown suit, bath suits, halloween costumes, etc… just normal clothes that are different than the default ones. They’d have to be really cool for me to spend gems on them but I would.

Brennus.1435:

deltanium.7543:

That seems like a personal problem, but I think there are some clues as to why this is happening, and it’s somewhat the result of a clever direction.

Take for example WoW in which most races….

Everything you just typed out here was extremely interesting and I am now researching gaming psychology, haha. Seriously.

How people choose the character they want to play and why it’s this character instead of that character is indeed a very interesting topic. I’d really like to read a psychology thesis on the subject, personally.

There could be many reasons for people to ignore all races except humans, but I think people simply want to look at a character they can identify themselves with. Our characters are basically “us in Tyria” and others players are already identifying ourselves to our online avatar, so if the player hates his character and can’t relate to him or her, it kind of sucks and a good part of immersion is ruined.

Different players relate to different things. For some, making an identifiable character could mean making a carbon copy of them in real life (so all human, like the OP), while for others it means making something they find super cool and can immediately connect to, making something unique, making something that doesn’t look like them but feel it represents them (most common for mains/first characters), or simply picking a gender/race that fits with the archetype of the profession in their mind. (most common for alts.)

If you’re interested, Arenanet expose their own view on the matter in this blog post:
http://www.arena.net/blog/the-emotional-connection

I also think people’s characters represent them more than they believe. For example, in nearly 10 years of playing MMOs, I think the race, gender and general look of a character is a good hint on the personality of the player in front of the monitor, especially if it’s their main or their first character. (Because for alts most people go with what “fits” best, ie: a charr or a norn for warriors and an asura of a human female for an elementalist.) And that’s especially true in a game like this where you have a lot of ways to customize your character’s look. Even if both play the same race/gender/profession, the character of an extroverted and highly social player usually won’t look the same as the character of an introverted player. Not always, it’s hard to generalize over that kind of things, but I find it to be true more often than not.

Flamenco.3894:

Overall it’s bad a game. Especially if you compare it to GW1. Still, it’s enjoyable with its scenery and sounds. The achievement system however, depletes my soul.

I wouldn’t call this a bad game. I can make a rant post 4x longer than the OP’s post about WoW and I think that’s one of the best games out there.

The big problem for me that stops me from caring about dungeons or fractals is that the trinity, with all its issues, is still better than nothing. I’m all for removing it but it wasn’t replaced by something better, it was just removed and the void wasn’t filled. I know someone who plays 4 holy priests in WoW because she loves to heal and support, and personally, I have very defense-oriented playstyles in games so playing a tank, aka protecting my teammate by keeping a boss’ attention on me while blocking/dodging everything, is my favorite thing to do. Guild Wars 2’s group PvE, as it stands, has no place for players like us who are more defense-oriented. It seems they didn’t try to keep the more defense-oriented players engaged when they denied tanks and healers players of their favorite roles.

I purchased a collector’s edition of the game knowing very well what they thought about the trinity so I’m not trying to act disappointed or surprised there. I think the game is great and I play it regularily, but there’s no way it’s going to be my main MMO if it’s group PvE isn’t compelling to me.

I’m going to pass on commenting the PvP because I don’t really care about competition and I don’t think I’ve ever done a single WvW or sPvP match on my main. It doesn’t sound bad though, no gear grind makes it already miles ahead of traditional MMOs.

Actually I’d like to see an expansion like Eye of the North where all the zones are max level and low-level characters get upscaled to level 80 (like in WvW) so they don’t have to grind all the way to 80 to start seeing the expansion’s content.

If will also be nice if the expansion doesn’t require you to have completed your personal story to go on with the expansion’s story, because between Trehearne stealing the show and being forced to run a dungeon to finish your story, a lot of people (including myself) have completely given up on their character’s story.

I think it’s better without profession-exclusive armor skins. Not all thief players want to look like a bank robber, not all warrior players want to look like the hulk, and not all elementalist players want to look classy. Splitting into 3 classes of armor allows players to look a little different from what their profession’s themes would imply, while still keeping things sane. (No warriors in elementalist armor…)

For example, I play a warrior and I prefer the knight look, but with the guardian class around this time, the cool knight stuff would probably be guardian gear if it was profession-specific, leaving me to equip the barbarian or skimpy gear.

Inversely, the heavy skimpy armors all look like berserker (read: warrior) stuff without a single exception, and given the amount of guardians that are female humans… yeah I can already hear the guardian outrage if those sets were locked away. =D

Except maybe for engineers, I think every profession has armors themed around it, so if you want to look like an archetypical <insert profession>, you can. And the cool thing is that you don’t even have to run dungeons: you get all the themes you want with the other armors.

For my warrior I wanted her to be a knightly heroic lady instead of the stereotypical loud and barbaric warrior, and I think my current sets fits the style pretty well. She doesn’t look mean but she looks strong and resiliant with all that metal, the huge gloves and the shoulders.

This is all heritage armor except the legs that are from the draconic set, because I wanted something that flows. Mainly silver and green dyes with some blues here and there. My only issue is those huge boot clipping issues, but that can be expected when mix and matching armor from different sets.

I disagreed 2 months ago and I still disagree now. I’d be okay if it’s just the head slot (you can hide that slot anyway) and I’d also be okay if it’s some iconic sets like a white mantle or a pirate armor from the cash shop but anyone can equip anything? No thanks. A warrior should look like a warrior and an ele should look like an ele.

Besides they would have to remodel every armor in the game to fit with any other armor in the game. Consider that even with the restrictions there’s still a lot of clipping issues they haven’t fixed. With no restrictions, it would be endless. Wonder why adventurer professions have no flowing skirts or kilts like the light and heavy professions do? Because their long trenchcoats would clip through it. (Try it for yourself with a trenchcoat and a draconic leg piece. Tell me how pretty it looks.) Breaking the armor rules would force the armor designers to re-design every piece of armor with much, much stricter rules so that each one works with anything, and as a result we’d all look bland and similar. We would probably look like in older MMOs like WoW where they just “draw” armor graphics on the character, instead of having tons of additional accessories and things that flow in the wind.

What we need is variety. Medium armors have way too many trenchcoat armors. Light armors have way too many skimpy armors. (If you’re playing a female character.) Heavy armor has the best variety but could use more sets like the barbaric one that are neither revealing nor armored from head to toes.

Someone mentionned WoW’s “transmogrify” system on the previous page but, actually, Blizzard has never lifted the limitation about armor types. (Can’t transmute plate to cloth) Also, while you can transmute weapons from one type to another, you can only do it for weapons you can actually equip. You also can’t transmute silly items like a fish as a weapon or invisible armor because they don’t want players to look silly. So Guild Wars 2’s restrictions on transmutation are just in line with those of WoW and sound pretty reasonable to me if we want to avoid absurd sets.

From what I understand, the point of home instance was to support the RPG feel of the game by putting an area that reflects the choices that your character makes in the game, but apparently they ran out of time and had to cut on the home instance. (Actually they probably cut on the whole personal story side of the game given how it’s easily the most criticized aspect of the game.)

Sureshot.6725:

I mean you go all the way to the end capable of soloing and then BAM …you must group.

Personally I wouldn’t mind having to group. If the last mission was like the very first one you do after character creation where you fight a big boss with other players, it would have been awesome.

What made me throw the towel is that the group content is a full-fledged dungeon, and I just can’t stand the way dungeons work in this game. (If you remove the trinity, replace it by something that’s at least as good…) With that on top of the Trehearne issue, I lost the desire to complete my story.

Which is a bummer because it was one of the features I was really really looking forwards to in this game. With the sheer amount of feedback this forums get though, I think they’ll figure out what needs to be adjusted to make a more satisfying story mode in the future expansions.

I understand that we can’t get every stat combination possible because there are 1,023 possible combinations (nCr(10;1) + nCr(10;2) + nCr(10;3) + … + nCr(10;10)) but right now we have an entire stat wiped out.

Question for people running fractals: is there healing power on fractal ascended rings? Maybe Arenanet thought that people not running dungeons aren’t team players and don’t care about support roles? I noticed that the items tend to be offense-oriented.

It kind of sucks because I like gearing for survival even though I’m not a dungeon runner. I wonder if those ascended items will actually be an upgrade for me.

I go to the lake with the tar slimes in the Charr starter zone. The fishers there have a life span of 10 seconds.

I don’t see any reason to go to Southsun Cove. The veterans are barely soloable, the normal trash is hard and there’s no vistas or skill points. The zone reminds me of Silithus in World of Warcraft in that it’s a high-level zone with cool rewards to get (orichalcum, karka scales, etc.) but the amount of work required is totally not worth it. I’d like some “Living story” to happen in the zone and transform it for the future. At least some vistas, heart points and skill points would be nice to put it on equal footing with the other zones.

Same issue.

Server: Tarnished Coast
Zone: Snowden Drift
Character: Warrior
Error code: 7:11:3:189:101.

The whole zone resets when I DC so I think it’s on Arenanet’s side, not ours. What’s aggravating is that it didn’t save what I looted and my daily achievements.

Anyone tried the holidays “Giver”? When you use it on armors, it gives +++toughness, +healing, +boon duration. It’s more tanky than Cleric’s because the main stat is toughness instead of healing power, but it buffs boon duration which is kind of nice for support.

It’s really lacking any kind of offensive stat, but Giver only gives those stats on armor so you can use Cleric on weapons and accessories and get some power there.

I’ve been playing mace+shield from day one and I never really got over it. =) I’m not sure I would recommend this setup for anyone, but I’m very very defense-oriented so it fits my playstyle like a glove.

The reflect trait is very fun. It rewards you for being good at defense. Not sure what I blocked (probably Kill Shot) but I got a 14,000 reflect once in WvW. It’s also a lot of fun to have button that makes you almost invulnerable for 3 seconds if you get caught by surprise. (Yes it blocks from behind and you can move while blocking. And nearly everything can be blocked.)

It’s also very powerful in PvE. I was soloing a bunch of level 80 champions the other day. It took ages but they never stood a chance.

Also, thumbs ups to Warriors for actually having their best block skill on a shield. It’s kind of absurd how Guardians block with their focus and buff with their shields.

Endymion.6180:

My screen goes all black, or light green, or light pink and freezes that way with the sound looping.

The bolded part sounds familiar.

The DirectX9 runtime, which this game uses, pre-fills the screen with lime green or bright pink every frame when it’s running in debug mode. If you happen to be a developper running the DirectX SDK on your computer (if you’re not, ignore my post) make sure that DirectX9 is NOT set to run in debug mode. When it’s in debug mode, it sometimes fires trivial issues as error which can do nasty things like calling the debugger or triggering Guild Wars 2’s error handling features uselessly. (Depending on how it’s programmed.)

morrolan.9608:

Whether its available just in fractals or not its still vertical progression and still against their original manifesto.

It’s not. Tomorrow they’re allowing people not running fractals to get ascended gear and then they’re going horizontal from there.

Colin said no power creeping in 2013 and I think 2014 is about right for an expansion, so it sounds like power is effectively plateau’ed and there’s no vertical progression.

I was also extremely suspicious when they announced the ascended tier, but it turns out that it is exactly what they said: a new tier of rarity to make the bridge between exotics and legendaries. Exotics are stupidly cheap to craft while legendaries cost 2,500 gold in the BLMK.

I’m open to playing anything but a male human. (I find it boring to play what I am IRL.) I wanted to play one of every race. I like every races in this game so I want to play as each one.

As for sylvari, why not? The artists and writers seemed very enthusiastic about them and there was tons and tons and tons of blogs, interviews and Q&A about them. And -hey!- they glow at night, how is that not awesome?

I dunno, I’m male but I really can’t relate to human males in video games. I find it so boring to play what I am that I won’t like the character enough to identify myself to him and I’ll quit. So no, personally I REALLY don’t make only human guys just because that’s what I am. My main character is a female human and my alts are a male of each other race and I bond with those character a lot easier than I would with a human dude.

Also, I personally disagree that the other races aren’t interesting. I love my asura, my norn and my charr. Sylvari, I care a little less, but I still find them more interesting than male humans.

Well, having a NPC lead the Pact instead of the player character solves the problem of naming the slayer of Zaithan in future expansions. They can say “Trahearne’s Pact has slain Zaithan.” instead of something lame like “A mysterious adventurer slew Zaithan.”

Personally I don’t really care that my character isn’t the leader of the pact. (It would be nice but I can live without it.) The issue is that Trahearne shouldn’t be leader either. Don’t get me wrong, he’s not a bad NPC at all and he would be a perfect advisor, planner or tactician, just not a leader because he reaaaaaaaaly doesn’t have the personality. I understand that Zaithan is the Sylvaris’ Elder Dragon and that it made sense to make the leader a sylvari, but there ought to be sylvari NPC better fit to be a leader, like Caithe.

Or maybe don’t play pure glass cannons when you solo? If you don’t spend a single stat point in defenseive stats you’re asking to die in solo. I traited my warrior all the way into defense and she takes ages to kill stuff, to the point where outside world mobs sometimes respawn by the time I finish a tough veteran and I get zerged, so it’s not much better this side of the fence.

The problem with nerfing PS encounters is that this is going to make the personal story an even bigger joke than it already is for tanks. On my warrior, I use mace+shield and longbow for weapons and I heal with all of my utilities on top of two passive regens. Between all the blocks, interrupts, blinds, and a free dodge when I use a burst skill, I can literally take 0 damage over the course of a fight if I play well. (Unless it’s a champion or a AoE zerg.) If the bosses are not punishing enough when a hit slips past my defenses and I regen it all back then there’s absolutely no challenge whatsoever and I might as well just stand in front of the boss and auto-attack WoW-style.

I think charrs are good if you want to play a mean character. I agree they have the best 1-20 storyline. At level 30 and up though, the storyline starts merging with your organisation and racial subtilities mean nothing anymore. So 20 levels of fun storyline aren’t really worth playing a character you can’t bond with if you find Charrs unappealing.

critickitten.1498:

Get rid of humans, if anything, they’re the most bland race of the five by far. Which is sort of crazy when you consider that they have one of the more exciting backgrounds, what with being nearly pushed to the brink of extinction. But their voices are bland, their zones are bland, their stories are bland….they arguably manage to out-bland Trehearne.

Actually I liked the political struggles between the queen and her ministers, and I grew to like Logan even though he looked like your generic human paladin at first. Can’t beat Rytlock but he’s tied with Zoija for my #2.

But yeah, the “dying race” card wasn’t nearly played enough. In fact I think it wasn’t played at all because I don’t remember being told to hold human ground past my intro mission. The human story would have been more engaging if characters felt that their race was really struggling for survival.