Both sides of the casual/speed stuff just need to stick to those who want to play in that same way.
http://tinyurl.com/km38sk3
^This applies to both sides who are trying to force their way of playing on others.
/forum
It is subjective.
For some people their characters are more than a bunch of stats and a dps score. They play the class/spec because they like it. Those people usually do not care how long a dungeon crawl takes, they just enjoy playing their toon.
It is perfectly fine if you do not want to play with those people, they probably do not want to play with you too. Just don’t tell them that they should play something else that is not fun for them. Everybody should be able to play the class/spec he likes. If you do not want to play with them and are looking for a pug, make your own group and a description how you want to play.
Well said. Unfortunately, however, it’s going to fall on deaf ears in this forum.
No it won’t. The casuals will eat it up and continue doing what they want.
Good. Let them do just that, and proceed on your way without them.
I’d have much more fun clearing dungeons as opposed to skipping honestly
the only reason why I choose to skip them instead is the lack of reward or incentive for clearing making it nothing more than a time sink.
wat?
If you actually found it fun, you would be inclined to do it with or without the rewards. Sorry, not buying it.
Because not being rewarded for extra work outweighs the desire to do it. It’s not just that the reward is minimal, it’s that it’s pretty much negligible entirely. I don’t particularly care for speed clearing, but taking anywhere from 10-30 minutes extra for no reason at all is just too much baggage for me to actually want to do it, despite it being somewhat entertaining.
(edited by Black Box.9312)
I still dont understand how running past monster is hard. Some people in TA/Arah make it seem like the hardest thing in the game from how much that fail at it.
It’s not necessarily that it’s difficult (well, not for EVERYONE at least) so much as it just takes away from the fun of the game. I’d have much more fun clearing dungeons as opposed to skipping honestly, and the only reason why I choose to skip them instead is the lack of reward or incentive for clearing making it nothing more than a time sink.
It is subjective.
For some people their characters are more than a bunch of stats and a dps score. They play the class/spec because they like it. Those people usually do not care how long a dungeon crawl takes, they just enjoy playing their toon.
It is perfectly fine if you do not want to play with those people, they probably do not want to play with you too. Just don’t tell them that they should play something else that is not fun for them. Everybody should be able to play the class/spec he likes. If you do not want to play with them and are looking for a pug, make your own group and a description how you want to play.
Well said. Unfortunately, however, it’s going to fall on deaf ears in this forum.
OP, trying to get help from ‘elitists’ is a lost cause. You’d have been better off making a title such as “Incentives for experienced players to help inexperienced players in dungeons”, or something along those lines. While there are many experienced players that could be classified as elitist, the two are wholly separate categories based on two entirely different definitions.
But that aside, even, there are still problems that arise from such a request. It’s quite hypocritical to ask someone for assistance, and then, when provided with it, turn around and tell them that that’s not what you want. There are far too many people that play this game that expect the teacher to cater to the whims of the student, when in reality the student must work according to the guidelines established by the teacher in order to learn and understand. If someone tells you that full zerker is the only way to go and that you have only one proper way to build a class, and you don’t feel like that’s true, then that’s fine. But if that’s the case, then stop asking for that crowd to help you become a better player, because it’s far more ignorant to deny assistance from someone you request it from simply because it isn’t exactly what you wanted or expected.
FrankGrimeyAlso, in response to the support comment, that’s BS. 1) support helps keep group alive and hitting harder/faster.
MeI’m sick of people playing badly, and I’m sick of them not wanting to improve
This is exactly why I hate teaching PUGs. You support just as well in zerker, and AH builds are trash.
CoE Path 2 and 3. Aplha. It varies but sometimes, its too much too often with the AE he does Support helps there. Just one example.
Unless I’m a noob, AH don’t actually heal you ally. Nothing in that tree even support your ally. All it does is make you survive better, but nothing about your ally.
The guardian’s valor tree also provides extra toughness, precision based on toughness, and crit damage. I can have over 3k attack and over 100% crit dmg while still having 40% base crit chance and 3k armor on an AH build. It’s hardly worthless just because it’s no longer the flavor of the month build. You just have to know how to make it work.
The fact of the matter is that the current design of dungeons in this game encourages players to get to the end as quickly as possible by whatever means necessary. Champion loot boxes was a step in the right direction, but even that isn’t nearly enough to make it worth the time and effort it takes to kill every single enemy when you could just skip it all and get the dungeon reward at the end and have 2-3 other paths done in the time it would have taken you to fully clear one.
Daaaaaaaaaaaaat timer.
- “Split PvE and PvP mechanics. […] why can’t it be implemented for other skills, items, stats, boons/conditions, etc.?”
- Because the more you split the two environments, the more you require players to learn the same thing twice, or to put it in other words, to confuse the memory training one puts into learning the optimal moment of a fight when to use a certain skill or combination thereof.
The effects of the skills themselves aren’t what need to be changed, rather just the numbers between PvE and PvP should be separated. Take confusion, for example. In PvP, confusion is an incredibly powerful condition that can kill unwary players very quickly. In PvE, however, enemies have too much health and too slow action time for it to be of any effectiveness, at least when compared to simple direct damage. If they would adjust the values so that it did more damage in PvE to make it worth using while keeping it as is in PvP, there could be a better sense of balance between both without changing how it actually works.
O.o 0 comments on engineer? the most gimpt class in the PVE game right now? seriously.
I didn’t avoid talking about engineers because I don’t think they need a rebalance, but rather because I have absolutely no experience playing one and therefore didn’t know specifically what is wrong or how to fix it. I’ve heard from a few others as well that they are also in dire need of some fixing up though.
6. BALANCE CLASSES.
This is probably the biggest problem with PvE as of right now. Warriors, guardians, and mesmers dominate the current PvE meta because it’s specifically geared toward their specialties. Now, I won’t go TOO in-depth into class balancing because that would require another thread entirely, but one thing that I DO want to emphasize is the need for every class to be equally viable, but simply in different ways. One thing that I think could make this work could be setting a baseline damage/armor/healing standards for all classes, but give each one the opportunity to expand upon these standard through their own unique skills and traits.
Ranger: Right now, the ranger is a really underwhelming PvE class due to the fact that a good portion of its DPS lies within an AI pet that the player has very little control over. How about instead of the player having reduced damage, it gets flipped around so that the pet gives EXTRA damage on top of the ranger’s adequate solo damage? This way, people will actually want to work with their pets and pay attention and make sure they’re alive so that the ranger is at maximum potential WITHOUT penalizing them when they simply can’t do that. Maybe throwing in some sort of more advanced pet mechanics (like I dunno, pet dodging maybe?) would help with that as well.
Necromancer: Necros are masters of conditions and outlasting the enemy. What’s the point of that when neither of those things are of any importance in PvE? Let’s give people a reason to take necros into dungeons. Make portions of dungeons more beneficial to players that spec more defensively than offensively. Make conditions more worthwhile, maybe by using some of the suggestions I listed above.
Warrior: Okay, I already know that anger will rise from some when I say this, but it really needs to be said: Warriors need a damage nerf. The fact of the matter is that their standalone damage is already competing with the best of the other classes. Their ability to quickly and efficiently stack might on themselves and vulnerability on the enemy simultaneously makes them way too powerful to allow for balance without them getting a nerf. Give them reduced base damage, but still let them build up might, fury, and vuln like they already do and have them use that to bring their damage back up to its full potential.
Thief: Give thieves the advantage of higher base damage at the cost of being less tanky and not being able to stack might and vuln as efficiently as warriors. Yes, thieves are still pretty strong as is, but that’s how they are supposed to be. The thief is the class that is MEANT to be the glass cannon, moreso than any other class in the game. Let them be the best at dealing direct damage, and in exchange make them dependent on allies for utility in order to maximize their potential.
Obviously there are more ways to work with this idea than I’ve typed out, but hopefully you get the idea by now.
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To summarize:
I’ve written a wall of text on how I think PvE could be improved. Would I like to see these things happen? Most definitely. Do I think Anet will actually take advantage of my advice? Not really, but I didn’t really have anything else to do today except type, and there’s at least a chance of things happening now, even if it’s slim. Hopefully I didn’t bore you to death, and if I did, sorry, but I felt like a lot of this needed to be said. I love the game, but I just think it could be SO much better if Anet strived to work on what’s already in it instead of continuing with gimmicky Living Story arcs.
So anyway, that’s it! Feel free to post any sort of agreements and/or disagreements (within reason, of course) and also any suggestions you might have, whether they’d expand on the ones I’ve given or they’d be completely new!
Oh, and TL;DR?
Quite simply, if you didn’t bother to read the wall of text, then don’t comment on it. Because I care as much about what you have to say to me as you cared about what I had to say to you. And if you didn’t read it, then I’m going to take that as not caring at all.
(edited by Black Box.9312)
4. Make conditions more viable in PvE.
As of today, condition-based builds are quite kitten in many portions of PvE. Because of the current meta of the game’s PvE content (which is pretty much just outputting the most damage in the least amount of time), DoT-based conditions are simply not desirable in most instances within the game. The very premise behind conditions is that they deal damage over time, and with the current meta the idea is to use up as little time as possible. As for non-damage dealing conditions (other than vulnerability), what’s the point? Chilling an enemy isn’t going to do much good when it’s stationary and simply spams one attack that doesn’t have a cooldown. Blind is next to useless when it only works TEN percent of the time it’s put on a boss. Weakness… Weakness is just completely pointless period. Both the enemies and the conditions themselves need to be reworked, so here are some ideas that I thought up:
-Have enemies that have physical damage resistance and/or condition vulnerability.
-Increase the condition stacking cap if possible.
-Add mechanics that encourage the use of conditions (such as bosses that have healing abilities that can be hindered by poison, or highly mobile enemies that are much less difficult to dispatch with the use of cripple).
-Completely revamp weakness. One idea that I was thinking of that might be more viable would be that weakness would increase condition damage on targets affected by it. It would work similarly to vulnerability, but apply to conditions instead. This would in turn make other conditions as a whole more viable as well. I’m sure there are plenty of other ideas that could work as well, but the point is that the AI is not going to be affected by a decrease in endurance regen, and glancing blows aren’t going to matter when they can still kill you in one hit anyway.
If conditions were made more powerful, this would hopefully result in an increase in condition-based class builds in PvE, which I’ll cover below.
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5. Rework dungeons.
This is a big one. I’ve been hearing rumors that this is a planned thing, and if it is, it’s really important that it’s done right. It should be rather obvious by now that at least 90% of this game’s dungeon content is a simple DPS hackfest. So many good mechanics that this game has are currently going to waste because there’s no need for them when all you need to clear dungeons are the biggest guns you can find. Some examples of dungeon mechanics done right in my view would be the Lupicus fight in Arah and the now defunct Molten Facility.
Lupi in Arah is definitely one of the more entertaining fights in this game. Between things such as the grubs and empower stacks as well as the timed dodging required for many of his abilities, and even simply the idea that it’s a boss fight that is actually not done best by just stacking on him in a corner. If there were more boss fights in this game that actually required precise use of the dodge mechanic as well as mobility, and maybe even environmental factors that could be put into play, or really ANYTHING that would involve more strategy than stacking and hacking away would make dungeons a lot more enjoyable.
The Molten Facility as a whole is a good example of a dungeon that was quite well done. Things such as the shield dredge that required CC, the frozen generators that had to be destroyed before clearing out the hallways, and especially the boss fight at the end that required players to react to their surroundings and pay attention to detail really made this dungeon FUN to run through. It’s really a shame that it got taken away, because from what I’ve heard from others it was very highly praised.
The point of this is, dungeons need more widely varied mechanics that promote clearing for entertainment, rather than speed and the reward at the end. Adding in platforming segments, puzzles, etc. would make it even better. And let’s not forget the fact that many mobs are skipped due to the wasted effort required to kill them when they can simply be avoided. Give us some incentive to work through every piece of the dungeons, reward us somehow for taking more than the minimum effort required; it would definitely make the full dungeon experience more worthwhile.
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MASSIVE WALL OF TEXT INCOMING. READ IF YOU DARE.
Alright, so I realize before typing this whole thing out that it probably won’t garner the attention it’d need to actually have some of these ideas implemented, but I’m going to say it all anyway just because I can.
So. PvE. It should be needs to be reworked. It should really be plain to see that when dungeon parties are dominated by warriors, guardians, and mesmers that there need to be methods put into place in order to make other classes more viable. I’m gonna try and be somewhat brief, but I have a lot to say so I’ll probably end up writing quite a wall. I’ll try and break it down into sections so people can just read the parts that they’re interested in. And please, DON’T comment on something if you haven’t read everything I’ve written about it.
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1. Split PvE and PvP mechanics.
This is really a no-brainer, and it needs to be the top priority. There’s absolutely no reason to keep things static between PvE and PvP when the meta-game for each is the complete opposite of the other. You simply cannot have balance in both unless you treat them as separate entities. It’s already been done with Save Yourselves and boon duration runes, so why can’t it be implemented for other skills, items, stats, boons/conditions, etc.?
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2. Put the Living Story on hold.
I’m gonna be brutally honest here: The vast majority of the Living Story content so far has been very boring and contrived. Lost Shores was a disaster; Flame and Frost was mostly bland (with the exception of the Molten Facilty, but I’ll get to that later), and dragging us back to Southsun Cove ended up not being worth the effort. This is compounded by the fact that the parts that did work (IMO namely SAB and the Molten Facility) are now gone forever due to some strange thinking that removing fun content is a good idea. The fact of the matter is that there are far too many people that are doing the missions on a one-and-done basis, and then going back to the rest of the content that’s been there since release. Meanwhile there are some rather large problems with the core game that have been seemingly overlooked by some bad prioritizing within Anet’s crew. To put it short and simple: Balancing and bug fixes need to come first, and added content should only come once the existing content is properly optimized.
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3. Add some incentive for end-game open world play.
As it stands right now, the only times I see high level players consistently doing open world content are at world bosses. There’s the occasional dungeon event chain or orrian temple chain that gets done, but even those for the most part are overlooked on many servers due to the simple ability to guest to a server that has already completed it in order to access the dungeon or merchant. Now, I understand that this sort of thing might be a little difficult to pull off, but surely there’s some way to motivate players to do them, right? Perhaps some sort of unique items acquired by actually doing the events, instead of just a merchant that sells them?
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Holding some classes and builds in higher regard than others is still elitist, no matter the reason. The problem with this game in particular though is that it’s not really the fault of the players that such elitism exists; the game’s PvE meta is completely DPS-centric and creates large gaps in efficiency between certain classes and builds. Warriors simply fill the role of DPS better than other classes, and since that’s 90% of what you need in this game there’s no reason to take classes that sacrifice DPS to excel in other categories other than maybe a guardian for boons and reflects and a mesmer for time warp. I’m not a fan of elitism myself, but until Anet balances PvE to make it require more strategy and skill than just straight DPS speed runs, there’s really no way to say that it’s not justified.
So just because we dont want to contribte to charity means we’re elitists?
Because giving our time purely for other people’s gain is charity.
Oh we are such scumbags just because we dont want to waste our own very limited time.Action-like games almost always revolve around taking mobs down as fast as possible if you want to be efficient. (Dark souls, monster hunter). Card games might be right up your alley; it seems to be the case
Yes…? That’s exactly what I’m saying. The very definition of elitism is holding specific groups in higher regard than others, which is exactly what you’re doing when you’re picking and choosing in order to spare ‘contributing to charity’.
Very good points OP, I agree with pretty much everything you’ve written down here, particularly with the rewards and the dredge fractal. What really bothers me the most about fractals though is just how much Anet’s fractals team doesn’t seem to care about the actual problems. Every patch that comes along brings a new bug alongside the existing ones that aren’t fixed because they’re too busy fixing the exploits used to work around the poor design of some of these fractals (the dredge one particularly). For example, they recently decided to make projectile blocks and reflects completely useless against Old Tom, yet the fan can still bug out and cause your party to wipe due to perma-poison.
The thing that bothers me about fractals is that people aren’t constantly searching for exploits and workarounds just because they’re lazy; they’re doing it because there are some parts that are just so poorly designed that there’s no efficient way of doing them legitimately. Nobody wants to go balls-deep into a mob of 50+ dredge when they won’t even drop any worthwhile loot, so why force people to?
Holding some classes and builds in higher regard than others is still elitist, no matter the reason. The problem with this game in particular though is that it’s not really the fault of the players that such elitism exists; the game’s PvE meta is completely DPS-centric and creates large gaps in efficiency between certain classes and builds. Warriors simply fill the role of DPS better than other classes, and since that’s 90% of what you need in this game there’s no reason to take classes that sacrifice DPS to excel in other categories other than maybe a guardian for boons and reflects and a mesmer for time warp. I’m not a fan of elitism myself, but until Anet balances PvE to make it require more strategy and skill than just straight DPS speed runs, there’s really no way to say that it’s not justified.
Gotta say, this is really disappointing.
I’m the co-founder of a social, casual guild with about 40 members, most of whom are fairly active players. We formed because there were a handful of us that would sit in LA from time to time and just chat. Our original intention with the conception of the guild was simply to be able to use guild chat to talk with each other while we were off doing our own thing so that we wouldn’t have to sit around doing nothing in LA, but eventually the guild just kind of started to grow into a full-fledged guild. We’re still mainly just a group of social players, but we’ve somewhat unintentionally become an actual guild as opposed to just a text box for conversation.
When we heard about the introduction of guild missions, we were pretty excited that we could do something involving more than individual parties of 5. We’re in the range of size that’s not quite small, but certainly not a big guild; and we enjoy playing the game with each other just as much as with our own guilds. But then we found out what the requirements are just to UNLOCK these missions.
Because we don’t take our guild TOO seriously, we don’t really have the rate of influence gain required to be able to unlock these within a reasonable amount of time. Worse yet, when the guilds of Crystal Desert left, our guild split up due to some of us having other guild allegiances. Obviously that’s not a problem when it comes to just playing with each other now that we have guesting, but the way that the influence system is split between servers makes it all the more difficult to work toward this goal.
Yes, we COULD just join a large guild, but by being forced into such an option in order to access the content we’re being forced to play the game in ways that may not appeal to us. It’d be like forcing sPvP players to level their characters up to 80 in PvE before even being able to play a single match of sPvP: It just doesn’t make sense to funnel people into playing content they’re not interested in just to get to the stuff that they ARE interested in.
I get that I can probably just tag along with a large guild that does these missions, and knowing some people that are in some large guilds I probably will. But it’s the principle of the matter that bothers me: By doing this Anet is making larger guilds more beneficial than smaller guilds, which is essentially equivalent to them turning their backs on a good portion of their game’s player base.
(Sorry for the wall of text, so I guess I’ll just leave a TL;DR – This isn’t a problem that’s going to break the game, but it IS something that is a problem for smaller guilds that should be changed.)
There were some events that we could not extend past Phase 1, unfortunately. Extending all events in Phase 1 would have been a much more extensive fix, requiring much more time to thoroughly regress. Given the time sensitive nature of the event, we extended what portions we were able to effectively.
Our developers are reading all of your feedback and are taking all the critiques on board.
We apologize that this means that folks are not able to complete the Miyani chain.
I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to jump on the ‘this is not an adequate apology’ boat. Placing more emphasis on limiting the duration of the event than on making sure the event functions correctly is simply inexcusable.
Yeah, it’s a free update and I’m grateful that you guys are so willing to provide us with this kind of stuff, but I’d much rather not have it at all than have it and not be able to do it because you “don’t have time to fix it.”
On Crystal Desert the largos is gone and no one can even interact with the chest. Still pretty broken.