Guild Wars 2

To me, grind is a question of perspective. I don’t consider running events over and over for the next few weeks and months to be a grind because I like to play them. I like the mechanics of combat and playing with groups of other people to do difficult content. The fact that this will eventually result in the acquisition of a legendary doesn’t mean I’ve grinded out said legendary, only that I’ve achieved it through normal gameplay. The people that claim that the game is all grind are the ones that aren’t willing to wait very long for their bling, or don’t enjoy those aspects necessary to acquire it. And that’s not grind. That’s people finding key aspects of the game unsatisfying.

I can commiserate though because I too find key aspects of the game unsatisfying and resent being “forced” to participate them, in order to achieve any kind of long-term goals (hello WvW, you filthy kitten). To me, the WvW aspects are nothing but grind without an ounce of enjoyment to be had. But that’s just my perception. It doesn’t mean that WvW is really that way — it just is to me.

Either way, the no grind philosophy is in place, as far as I’m concerned. Which doesn’t mean that people are going to universally enjoy those aspects of the game they need to take part in, in order to reach their personal long-term goals. That’s a lot different from a game forcing you to repeat the exact same content for weeks and months, just so you can access new content. To me, gating off content behind a gear acquisition treadmill, IS grind. In GW2, nothing is gated off and everything is accessible to everyone with a minimal need to repeat anything. So, promise fulfilled.

I’ve found the Elementalist damage to be fairly low across the board, but in water, it’s almost ineffectual. My other characters seem to be able to operate underwater fairly effectively, and if I’m in Orr with my Ranger, I actually prefer to travel underwater because it’s safer. My Elementalist though — I avoid the water at all costs.

I’m almost positive that node spawn is not intended. They don’t hang off terrain the way that the one in the image is doing. Even rich nodes, which are often protected by veteran mobs or tricky landscape features, are spawned flush against the terrain.

It’s not always clear when you’re standing somewhere that the mob is going to consider unreachable, thus causing it to slip into the invulnerable state. It’s a real pain with ranged characters because it’s so easy to trigger. If you want to make sure they stay vulnerable, usually standing right beside them when they reset will do it. It usually just takes a few seconds. Easy-peasey for melee characters, but kind of dicey for ranged specialists.

The veteran spider cave is the entrance to that puzzle. It will put you at the top of the complex. The way you first got in is the failure exit if you miss your jump and end up in the pool. There’s no way back up (that I’ve found) after you hit the water, other than exiting and coming back through the spiders.

I wish I understood the mechanics of conditions better than I do, but as a rule of thumb, I only look at extending my condition duration to enable me to achieve higher stack counts. The longer they last, the more stacks I can get in before they start to get dropped. Overall, that equates to more DPS output. I can’t really say what the optimal balance between condition duration and condition damage is though, since it varies according to build.

EDIT: But as Wiser with Age just showed, adding stack counts don’t help that much with Poison or Burning since maintaining them constantly isn’t much of an issue for most condition builds, without the benefit of +duration. I generally use it only for dumping massive bleed stacks. Should have been clearer about that.

I don’t take chances and just use them for copper. Trying to keep track of the different tools needed for each tier is a pain in the backside already. The ambiguous descriptions for these things don’t help.

Don’t listen to every negative post in the forums…

…but please, for heaven’s sake, listen to the ones about the bots!

Pretty accurate. My only contention is about player decisions kicking off event chains.

It is a choice that every player has, whether or not to kick off an event, and those events do affect the world at large. So it may not be a choose-your-own-adventure style choice dialog that begins it, but it still constitutes a choice that a single player makes. So to me, that’s a promise fulfilled.

mulch.2586:

We’ll see if they ever get religion on banning gold buyers/sellers and botters. For now it seems like they’re scrambling to catch up.

Bank slots IMO are a great buy. Bag slots, character slots. I don’t see other things as being all that attractive. I hate my town clothes, but there’s not many choices, and they’re all dumb. Boxing gloves?! How’s that fit in Tyria? Aviator sunglasses? Kttens! we can’t even ride a mount, let alone fly.

The $$ to gold rate is set by ANet. They can pass off some BS about it being based on the market, but THEY set the parameters, and they made the choice. They could have chosen a rate that would have discouraged outside gold sales/buys. But they decided not to. Why?

It doesn’t matter what rate they set, it’s not going to discourage gold farming bots, which is the primary reason why the market is in such a kitten state. Until ANet deals with the bots, they will continue ruin the gold/gems market by undercutting it — no matter how low a bar ANet sets for it.

After all, it’s not like players are actually investing their time bot farming. And they don’t even have to worry about maintaining a monthly subscription to the game. They make a profit no matter what the exchange rate is. The only question is how much are they making. My guess is, with the grinding necessary to reach certain achievement plateaus in the game, business is brisk.

The longer ANet waits to address the botting problem, the more damage they do to the economy and their own bottom line.

I’m not too sure about dropping the attunement swapping cooldown, but it would go some ways towards the profession being fairly underpowered. I much prefer the idea of sigils that trigger on attunement swap, just like those that trigger on weapon swap. In fact, those weapon swap sigils should just be amended to recognize when an Elementalist swaps their attunements and trigger as if it were a weapon.

It came as a bit of a surprise when I realized that I couldn’t use many of the weapon swap sigils that I’ve been holding on to, with my newly hatched Elementalist, because there is no weapon swapping. Oops.

It’s pretty naive to assume the plague of bots we’re seeing, is as a result of the instability of the BLTP. You only need half a clue to realize that we have bots because botters are able to get away with it. There is no other reason because no other reason is necessary. We’d be seeing exactly the same problems now, had the Trading Post been running smooth as silk since head start.

All of which doesn’t absolve ANet of it’s frustrating lack of response.

You can’t get sylvari T1 cultural armor from the TP. At least I’ve never seen it listed there. I’d assumed it was the same for all races, but I stopped checking when I realized that I wasn’t ever going to spend any more gold on them.

Heh, that’s awesome. I’d like to thank them as well. At least somebody is doing something about these accursed bots.

@Leper

It sounds like you’re playing the game as intended and in normal doses. The people sporting gear like you mentioned typically aren’t playing at a leisurely pace. They’re farming and slogging. Don’t get the impression that just because some folks are already decked out in the coolest in Tyrian finery, that you’re doing something wrong. Just make sure what you’re doing stays fun and the rest will fall into place on its own.

They’re worth keeping around if you’re slumming in lowbie zones. I do that a lot while playing with friends who aren’t nearly as far along as I am. I hate seeing a node on the minimap and leaving it untouched, so it saves me from having to buy low tier tools for the area. Wasting mithril or ori tools on copper just irks me.

Thanks for the information about how to report them. I couldn’t for the life of me find it yesterday when I wanted to do that during the centaur/bridge defense in Kessex Hills. Those guys have been there for ages.

The disheartening thing though, is that you just know that there have been hundreds of reports already filed, and yours is just getting tucked into a huge pile — that’s just been sitting there for ages. Maybe they are planning on coming down on these guys with a vengeance. Maybe they are still working out the kinks in summoning Dhuum to reap them into perma-ban oblivion. They just need to do it soon because GW2 is becoming a botting laughing stock for it’s seeming inability to address the issue.

It’s a lot easier to just craft your own exotics or buy them outright on the TP. Seriously, they aren’t difficult to make. You could probably farm the mats you need in a couple/few hours in Orr for a single piece.

The stuff you’re referring to (karma sets) require a lot of karma, which players dedicate themselves to farming. Unless you are doing the same (and you’re not), there’s no reason to expect to have a similar amount of karma available to you.

Craft it or buy it. You can have your own full set of exotics in short order. Worry about karma-bought skins later.

I don’t know why people get so wound up seeing a different language in open chat. That channel isn’t their private message service so there’s bound to be stuff in it that just doesn’t apply to them. If it’s something written in another language, then that obviously qualifies as being “not meant for them”. Deal with it and move on.

Frankly, I think it’s just the busy-body types that care about this. The types that peer through a crack in the curtains and furtively watch their neighbours’ comings and goings, notepad in hand. Just mind your own business.

I don’t find that underwater mobs hit harder. In fact, it’s usually the opposite. On my Ranger, if I’m in Orr just farming mobs, I’d prefer to be doing it underwater because it’s safer.

But I agree this is highly profession-dependent because I’ve also found my Elementalist to be particularly weak, especially while solo.

One thing I do hate is the “return to surface” downed mechanic. Even if you can make it, you’re absolutely helpless on the surface and can’t even swim away to break agro. If you surface and you haven’t already shed your agro, you’re pretty much kitten-ed. And I might just be projecting my frustration, but they also seem to have much longer tethers on average than their land-based counterparts. Once I’m in a retreat situation, I’m usually done for.

I don’t really think that 1-hand legendaries should have lower requirements than 2-handers because the are just skins. They provide no gameplay advantage, so the mere fact that you even have a legendary puts you on equal footing with anyone else who has done the same. There’s no disparity and no imbalance — and no need to have legendaries in both hands to show your achievement.

At least as a dual-wielder, you have the option doubling your bling rating by acquiring a second legendary to show off. Two-handed wielders don’t have that.

Greiger.7092:

Yer supposed to kill the giant, not just farm grubs off of him. That’s borderline exploitative. Its pretty sad that folks took advantage enough for Anet to need to respond by disabling it.

I figure it would have been better if they just drastically reduced the drop rate of those guys, but if that ended up being more complicated to do than it seems, this is probably just a stopgap. Last I checked a number of MMOs (and RPGs in general) don’t give any loot xp gold or anything for killing summoned mobs. At least ANet tries to.

It’s still hammering a finishing nail with a sledgehammer.

I don’t particularly appreciate seeing “content has been disabled” when doing the event legitimately (not farming it), when there are hundreds of bots spread across the world, farming events on autopilot, like they’ve been doing for weeks. And even if I was farming grubs, at least I’m present and playing the game, and earning my drops. The anti-farm code would cap it soon enough anyway.

For what it’s worth, I think there should be a greater separation between PvP and PvE, across the board. My opinion, however, is not a popular one.

If something is Soulbound means you can’t pass it along to alts to use if your main or current character doesn’t need them. A good example is gathering tools. When you level out of a zone and are ready for the next one, you buy new tools to let you gather the higher level mats. But you can’t pass those old tools to an alt or sell them to another player who is gathering at that tier. They need to buy their own tools, thus keeping the economy running because it is a perpetual gold sink.

Zinthros.6589:

I support compulsory PVP to get legendary weapons, which means I support the gift of battle and the inclusion of the WvW zones in 100% map completion. People too afraid to face human opponents, in my opinion, do not deserve legendary weapons. Legendaries are meant to show mastery of the game, which happens to include two very prominent kinds of PVP with a third supposedly on the way. Pure PVEers have not, and will never “master” GW2, so they should not get legendaries.

Ahh, now we start to see the rampant arrogance and kittenry that keeps me as far away from PvP as it’s possible to get. Ignore the fact that I’m willing to put in more effort than you are to acquire a legendary, what’s most important is that I won’t play the game by your worthless standards. You people are the last individuals on the planet that I’d choose to spend my leisure time with. Thank you for proving my point as to why some of us loath the PvP experience — we need to play with PvPkitten

Yeah, that’s pretty much the story of Orr. Everything seems to respawn so quickly that it’s almost impossible to get to your objective before the respawn closes in behind you. It happens in other parts of the world too though, but those are usually exceptions to the rule. In Orr, it is the rule.

Yeah, I wasted a couple of orichalcum ores when I tried this myself. I later found out they were the equivalent of steel. The description could be a bit (a lot) clearer.

Just curious, but has anyone who’s played through the sylvari storyline seen any change in their home instance? I went back to visit mine recently, after reading this thread and well after hitting 80, and I don’t think I’ve seen a single change to it, whatsoever. But it has been weeks since I was last there so I may not realize there’s a difference. If there is, it’s not apparent to me.

I thought all home instances were supposed to change in some way to reflect our actions, even if minutely.

Yes, it’s a PvP area so no, it’s not griefing. That being said, the time I waste screwing around trying to get what I need from the zone, is locking up a slot that someone who actually wants to participate in PvP could be using. The longer it takes me to do it, the longer someone else has to wait.

And really, do you want someone like me on your side? Someone who has no interest in capturing objectives, defending your keeps and killing other players? Someone who is only there under duress because a NON-PVP aspect of them game requires I be there? Is this really a win for anyone?

PvE and PvP are two very different things. That’s why the Mists exists and why open-world PvP does not. I wish that philosophy had been maintained throughout the game rather than having these stupid grey areas between them, that does nothing but create animosity within the community and absurd levels of frustration for some of us. Ball dropped, as far as I’m concerned.

@Runo

I’m pretty sure that’s incorrect about participation. Damage is what counts, not activity. When I rely on my bleeds, I usually get a silver. When I swap to melee and start hacking with my sword, I always get gold. I can be there from the beginning of the chain to the end and constantly active with heals, rezzes and boons, but unless I’m doing raw damage, my contribution isn’t very important (based on the rewards received).

For most people involved in a big event, if they are condition specced, their damage just isn’t counting. Hard to get full credit for an event when the majority of your damage is getting thrown out before it even lands.

Much ado about nothing.

pxl.2437:

pls. can anyone tell me why i should quit and go back and play wow or warhammer again?

Nope. You should quit and go back and play WoW or Warhammer. Stick to familiar surroundings because you don’t seem to operate too well outside of them.

It’s not really very important as far as the game play goes, but I would most like to see every cutscene in the game reworked into a proper, cinematic experience, a la SWTOR. That’s something I think would go a long way towards making the personal stories, much more immersive experiences. Lackluster plotlines and uninspired voice work would be a lot more forgivable if that were the case.

So long as the five man limit is maintained for dungeons and story instances, I don’t see why not.

I’d also like to see the different tiers of tools re-skinned so it’s possible to tell them apart while they are in inventory. And I’d ALSO like to see some mystic recipes for tools so that we can make some uber tools, kind of like how we can do that with Salvage Kits and end up with a 250 use ultra kits. And while they are at it, make them account bound instead of soulbound. I’d like to be able to pass them off to my other toons when I have leftovers after a tier. AND MAKE THEM STACKABLE, so I can combine partial stacks into full ones.

Yeah.

I think that’s everything.

I’ve never seen games that offered as a “feature”, the ability to fundamentally retool your character into something completely different, as being the least bit attractive. To me, when you can change something like that, you no longer have a character to play, just skeleton that you hang different modules off, whenever you feel like it. As if it were a battleframe in Firefall or a Mech in Mechwarrior.

I prefer characters remain just that — characters. Unique in their abilities, their weaknesses and their histories. And when I tire of a character, I make a new one.

By the way, I am also a long time GW1 player and my characters remained true to their classes, even if the opportunity was present to change them. I might have borrowed abilities from other classes for my builds, but fundamentally, they were unchanged.

They have ankles? I’ve never really noticed anything below chest height.

Seriously, that’s not very attractive. But really, those reed thin models are pretty ugly all around. More roundness everywhere is always better.

Daniel.2743:

I disagree, I enjoy playing the genre. It’s just the companies that make games these days add no innovation to their product. I enjoyed playing WOW 7 years ago.. It’s just the players have moved on, but the game designers haven’t. One of the main reasons why it really gets on my nerves when people constantly defend this game, they are not pushing boundaries of games, they’re settling for mediocrity and hindering it from pushing forward.

BS they are not pushing the boundaries. They obviously are, just not the way you think they need to be pushed and not in ways that appeal to you. Your statement is objectively false.

Don’t bother playing anymore MMOs, just build your own. Show us far your game can “push the boundaries” and still remain economically viable.

PhoenixFire.2790:

If you don’t like it, you don’t like it. I’m not sure what exactly you wanted out of making this thread. Unless you’re just looking to stir trouble. So… your opinion is valid, have a nice day? I can’t really tell you what to like so this conversation ends here.

Bingo.

Find the community site(s) for your world and see many of the guilds who are playing on it. You can also get to know them before you join them.

Frankly, I would never join a guild in a game, only outside of it. The reason being that gaming isn’t enough to form relationships on, which is what a good guild fit is all about. If you can find a group of people that you like hanging around with, without the benefit of the game world to bring you together, it’s almost a guarantee that you will enjoy spending time with them when you do have that.

Look outside the game, not in it.

Common dyes are cheap on the TP. Rare ones are very expensive. Unidentified ones are somewhere around 6s.

Er, wasn’t this thread supposed to be closed? ‘Cause I have some choice comments on botting I’d still like to share.

I think you’re out of luck. I don’t think ArenaNet is going to reverse that for you, regardless of how honest an error you made. And there’s no way in-game of returning something, once you’ve bought it.

But on the bright side, the further you level, the easier the money will be to come by, so the lost gold won’t be as big a deal pretty soon. Unfortunately, if you were counting on the weapon for its stats, you’re stuck.

TheSabi.2378:

“WoW’s gear treadmill….”

umm…yeah…the “gear treadmill” was around long before WoW.

True. WoW just made it a gaming staple.

I haven’t found the starting experience all that different today than it was a month ago, and I’ve been running six alts up through those events for the past three weeks.

It seems to me though that the stuff I saw bugged on my first run through, either still is bugged, or it’s been replaced by something else on the list. Basically, zero actual progress. Yet I still manage to have a blast while playing. I must be bugged too…

Campana.9216:

The option to be bad or evil was deliberately not provided by Anet. Their story is about saving the world from evil. This would be more palatable if your character could sound less brainwashed into serving good.

Sadly, engaging story writing isn’t Anet’s strong point.

They’re capable of it, they just didn’t do it in GW2. For the most part, the characters aren’t that memorable either, which makes it hard to care what happens to them. Except for Tybalt. /salute

There are number of bugs that continue to persist. Broken events. Broken skill points. Broken story quests. Some of the fundamental mechanics still require re-balancing and tweaking (condition focused characters). The trade post is still frequently in maintenance. In other words, there are tons of things to complain about. But oddly enough, I’m still enjoying just playing the game, running events, gathering and crafting, fine-tuning my ability to deal with over-agro in Orr, and just wandering in the world. Some of us just like the way the game plays and feels and try not to sweat the bumps in the road.

There’s no other place in the gameverse I’d rather spend my time in than Tyria.

JazzyJay.1367:

It it too bad that you spent your money on something you don’t care for. Maybe come back in the future and check it out again. You never know what changes will happen.

Coming back isn’t going to change anything for him. He didn’t even reach 80 and was already bored. That means he doesn’t dig the core mechanics and that’s something that isn’t ever going to change.

He was likely looking for more of a WoW-like experience and GW2 is never going to provide that. It’s also the reason many of us are here in the first place.

I’ve encountered an empty chest only once after a jumping puzzle, but I consoled myself with the knowledge that whatever came out of it was only going to trivialize the difficulty of attaining it, by being so disappointing.

I’ve seen this happen with substantially fewer people involved, during PvE. It only happens in a couple of places though and it happens consistently. Because of this, I always thought it was map related.