Guild Wars 2

Oldirtbeard.9834:

Apparently you’re living in the past, please provide an ANet link for me that talks about any exciting new developments regarding instanced content?

I’m sorry, but I don’t see how a lack of stated updates means that dungeons and fractals are vanishing, or will stop being run.

Oldirtbeard.9834:

Why is every one so bugged out by being useful in obsolete content; perhaps you’re not aware that ANet hasn’t developed and new Fractals/Paths for over a year, and none are on the table for HoT because they gutted the team months ago. This specialization is being designed for new open world group encounters.

Dungeons and fractals are obsolete? That’s news to me.

chemiclord.3978:

azizul.8469:

as long as the mobs in GW2 are not as intelligent as in GW1 (they heal their allies), zerker meta will always be on top….

And even if they bring the AI up (let’s be perfectly blunt, GW1 AI wasn’t exactly brilliant either), it’ll just change the meta to something else.

If the “meta” is killing GW2, then it kills every MMO on the market, because the “meta” is something that will ALWAYS exist.

I hear this a lot, but this is really deflecting from the issue.

The problem isn’t the existence of a meta. The problem is that all berserkers are the meta. To be more elaborate, the problem is that the game is designed in such a way that the best way to deal with pretty much every and any encounter is to maximize
damage to the point that gear limits, and simply pound the enemy into oblivion. While the antiquated tank/heal/DPS system still had a meta, the difference was that all playstyles still felt necessary and validated.

If you are talking about PVE, the dagger’s main-hand’s main role will be to enable the various off-hand weapons that necros have.

No one can disagree that dagger main-hand’s only purpose is to deal damage. But, necro off-hand weapons are actually pretty good. Dagger off-hand has a chaining blind + condition transfer, and a long lasting AoE weakness and bleed. The warhorn has a potent AoE stun plus nigh permanent swiftness when traited. The focus has good damage and vulnerability application, as well as chill + boon removal.

It is likely that the new loadout will be Greatsword / Dagger + Focus. Unless the axe gets some hereto unmentioned buff.

The perpetuation of the zerker meta in dungeons has more to do with Anet not bothering with dungeon revisions than anything else. The devs are already making enemies have more varied encounters that encourage different styles of play.

As much as I’d like to change the current zerg meta in WvW, this suggestion is the wrong way to do it.

It is way too inconistent. If damage scales per hit, then classes such as the mesmer, ranger, and minion master necro will be hit with much higher damage, while classes that can only AoE will become useless in 1v1 situations (staff ele). The total cumulative effect of this suggestion is the same as raising the cap from 5 to 10, but instead of hitting more people in a stack, this just punishes the unlucky few who always get hit for some reason.

This would also be an ineffective solution. While this has the equivalent effect of hitting 10 players, WvW zergs regularly run 40 to 50 people. Instead, this more harshly punishes smaller teams of players, while the mindless mega mob still runs mostly unopposed.

Better enemy behavior and AI is always something good to have in the game, as more diverse and randomized enemy encounters leads to a more engaging and entertaining experience. If you’ve got a good way to do that with this game’s engine, please let people know. Likewise, the zerg issue is another big one, since increasing the cap would cause retaliation to run amok, among other things.

Ah, the melee meta post? I read through that thing.

Yeah, the forums are like this. There’s a general crowd that vehemently defends keeping everything exactly the same. Problem is, they aren’t necessarily concerned with proving themselves right, so they’ll result to troll logic and petty insults first.

Your story isn’t unique. In fact, it is quite a common occurrence on the forums: someone has an issue with how something is done in the game, they go to the forums to talk about it, then they get yelled at by “vets” and “leets” insisting that nothing is wrong until they leave. Of course, the vets and leets bounce between near identical threads on the issue and keep insisting nothing is wrong in spite of so many complaints.

Both fulfill different roles in group, so there is no “best” out of the bunch. Warrior is easier to play, though, so if you are having trouble with zerker guard you might have to stick with warrior for now.

There is an issue with just giving priority to conditions caused by condi users: You’re still overlapping and leeching DPS away from the rest of the team. The fact is that pure direct damage builds still stack of lot of condis, and these condis still do damage (quite a bit with 25 stacks of might). For example, lets take the guardian’s burning (non-condi build) alongside of engineer burning (full condi). With 25 might, the guardian’s automatic burn hits for 546 DPS, and a condi engineer hits for about 900 DPS. If you have both members on the team, the condi engineer would be stealing 546 DPS from the guard to do their own burning.

That is why the removal of the cap and personalized conditions are such an attractive solution: There is no more overlap. Granted, prioritized malice is better than the FILO system we have now, but it is still a bandaid and not a true solution.

Currently I am but a reader. I do little more than log on and make sure I get the living story every few weeks.

The thing with all the defensive stats is that they scale well, but only when you increase two of them. Let me give an example.

Lets say you’re a necromancer. You have 1846 armor, and 18472 health. You have 1000 points to spend. If you put all 1000 into vitality, you’ll end up with 28472 health, which is a 54.1% increase in how much damage you can take. Put that into toughness, and you gt 2846 armor which is a 54.2% increase. But, if you 500 into both vitality and toughness, you’d get 2346 armor and 23472 health. That is 27% reduction from toughness, but that also applies to all of the extra health, so you would, to scale, have 29830 HP (a 61.4% increase overall).

It’s a concept called effective health. Because the two stats multiply each other, the best way to invest stats is so that health is roughly 10x higher than armor, then increase them at the same rate. This is where toughness kind of gets the shaft. For you see, the necro is already at the golden ratio of 1:10. Every other class… not so much. They all need a certain amount of vitality to reach the golden ratio.

Warrior: 290 Vit
Guardian: 1046 Vit
Ranger: 472 Vit
Engineer: 472 Vit
Thief: 899 Vit
Elementalist: 756 Vit
Mesmer: 328 Vit

Overall, players will end up getting more from Vitality from sheer statistical efficiency alone.

I considered going for sinister over my current carrion secondary set (mostly for WvW and Lulz), but I’m hesitant to do so.

I ran some numbers, and over my current mix of mostly carrion + some rampagers, going full sinister would only give a 13% increase to physical damage at a loss of 30% effective HP. In PVE sure this is fine, but in WvW that extra HP is quite meaningful. Also, it was only a 13% increase to direct damage, whereas the bulk of my damage is from Condis.

So… maybe after conditions in PVE are fixed. But until then, I’m staying carrion.

“The cannons have been adjusted. This time we’ll bring it down, for good. Fire away!” — first time I saw that was pretty epic.

The other awe moment was the first time I ran the molten facility. I was grouped up with a bunch of pugs who probably weren’t even in full exotic gear, and I swear that fight was harder than the fractal version we have now. The whole facility was fun to run through the first time, but the moment that final boss dropped I was legitimately scared.

Then, once the fight began it was Armageddon. People are flying and dying left and right, I’m having to dodge, dip, duck, dive, and dodge through shockwaves and fire fields, and the worst part is I’m the only one who was figuring out what was going on, what with the whole enraged status thing. Eventually, my underdog team of low deeps and low durability managed to kill that darn mole, only to discover that the charr fully heals and becomes much more powerful.

Nowdays that fight is down to a science, but back then it was utter chaotic fun.

Something to take into consideration is how close the scales between damage outputs actually are. For this comparison, I’ll use a 6/6/2/0/0 thief build in exotic gear, and compare the effective power of both.

Full Zerker: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fZAQNAV4Yl8Mp6pFOxxJ0PNRLRtdIEdfAXzg2PQAEiA-ThRDwAP3fIhSweK/ep+DIdPAM/BA-e

Full Soldier:http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fZAQNAV4Yl8Mp6pFOxxJ0PNRLRtdIEdfAXzg2PQAEiA-ThxDwAN3f4juHeK/cp+DClgAM/BA-e

Zerker has 2584 power, 60% crit chance and 2.23 crit damage, comes to 4491 effective power.
Soldier has 2524 Power, 34% crit chance and 1.77 crit damage, comes to 3185 effective power.

In raw stats alone, zerker only does 41% more damage than soldiers. Now, factoring Keen Eye (5% crit rate), 1/3rd fury uptime (6.7% crit chance), revealed training (+200 power). we’ll get 5250 effective power for zerkers, 3689 effective power for soldiers, and a total difference of… 42%.

Go for broke (full might, banners, food, perma fury, swap trait to flanking strikes, Empower Allies, Spotter), you’ll get 11090 EP for zerkers, 8265 effective power for Soldiers, which comes to a 34% difference in effective power.

This is one of the design decision Anet made early on: to prevent hard tank/heal/other classes from forming, gear and stats were designed in such a way that the relative scale between two extremes wasn’t that far. I’ve come from previous games where the scales in effective health and effective power can be an order of magnitude different between classes. I imagine other people are coming from those games, too, which is why some players consider anything but zerk to be leeching. If everything else is equal, if a dungeon run has a full minute of combat in full zerker gear, then full soldier gear will only add 25 seconds to the run time.

Build and tactics are far more important than gear. Enforcing gear diversity is an issue, but it isn’t an extremely big one, which is why Anet hasn’t devoted too much time to fixing old content for it.

PVE overall is pretty easy, so you won’t be totally kitten by playing a neco. PVE necros show their weakness in two circumstances:

#1: In dungeons. Necros are mediocre all around and have nothing special to their name, so other classes get preferential treatment. You can still find a team for most dungeons, though.

#2: In zergy overworld stuff. Necros are designed heavily to be a condi class, and the condition cap completely nullifies your damage the moment a second condi user comes around. Outside of condis, necros don’t have good range options, so you’ll be stuck spamming staff 1.

Carighan.6758:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

#8: Necromancer.
(snip)
1) Sustained damage instead of burst damage. High burst is useful since travel time eases cooldowns, giving good bursts higher overall DPS.
(snip)
9)Lack of cleave, with the recently buffed dagger auto being the best necros have.

Now, I’m not disagreeing with most of what you say, but really? Do you take Condi-Necros into dungeons?
Because all dungeons I’ve ran on my Necro were as a pure DS 6/2/0/0/6 build in full zerker, and they have ample direct damage, even on-demand with Lich Form, and a very solid AE due to the very wide projectile path Life Blast / Plague Blast / Deadly Claws have.

They’re still meh for dungeons due to, as you say, their utility never being needed and hence all they can bring (like dark fields) falling flat. But their raw attacks are very potent and quite useful.

… Apparently there is a miscommunication here.

Sustained vs. burst damage is not about condi vs. direct damage. It is about how the Necromancer’s damage rotation focuses mostly on its auto attack and thus outputs a steady stream of damage. Other classes have options to unload a lot of damage all at once. For example, a thief can backstab + heartseeker an enemy into oblivion fairly quickly, or a scepter ele can… go through its rotation to kill an enemy much faster than the necro’s sustained attacks could.

On paper, these would be balanced out: after the thief blows all their initiative or an ele swaps through all their attunements, they are stuck with an inferior auto to the necro who will eventually catch up in damage. However, in practice what happens is the thief/ele kills the enemy really quickly, then recharge their skills during the travel between groups of enemies. Thus, from encounter to encounter, other classes are continually obliterating enemies, whereas the necromancer is stuck planning for the long haul on short term engagements.

Those five are the top tier. Now we get on to the others…

#6: Mesmer: The mesmer has a lot of niche uses, such as boon stripping, excellent reflect uptime, and cleric skills. The mesmer also has excellent damage in the right circumstances, and portal is always a good backup. But, outside of these niches and circumstances, the mesmer loses out and starts to feel dull, with both little to contribute ofensively, defensively, and also with fairly low damage. Mesmers will still find their place in dungeons, though, and they can have an excellent ranged game with their phantasms.

#7: Ranger. The ranger isn’t too bad of a class on its own. It does many things correctly, such as having unique team buffs, fire fields, decent dodges and fury. However, the ranger has two big problems with it: It lacks real potency and identity in its abilities, and it has an AI with it constantly. It is always hard to evaluate the rangers, since I rarely see them do anything inside a stack or out of it, and most of the time rangers will have to fight with their pets to get anything done. The pet itself is often a liability, since many enemies gain advantages from merely hitting something, an they pets don’t dodge.

#8: Necromancer. Necros are in the same bulk class as warriors in that they are extremely tanky. However, the necro has so many flaws it is painful to list them all:
1) Sustained damage instead of burst damage. High burst is useful since travel time eases cooldowns, giving good bursts higher overall DPS.
2)Lack of offensive team buffs. The necro is a selfish buffer, with their only contribution to team offense being vulnerability (which most people can do).
3)Their useful utilities (blind spam, boon corruption), come with dark fields, which are arguably the most useless field in the game.
4)They lack useful combo fields and combo finishers.
5)Their ranged combat is pretty bad, being almost wholly reliant on condis.
6)They lack vigor and dodges, making them vulnerable to on-hit effects from bosses.
7)Lack of unique buffs.
8)Lack of potency. Most of the good things necros do (blinds, vulnerability, weakness, boon removal), other classes do better.
9)Lack of cleave, with the recently buffed dagger auto being the best necros have.
10)Fear ruins stacks and coordination.
The necro does have some good things about it. It has decent sustained damage, decent chill, decent self buffing, and IMO the best AoE stun in the game via Wail of Doom. But there simply isn’t enough to warrant a necro’s place on the team over anything else.

My personal rankings for classes in dungeons (might be a bit outdated).

#1: Elementalist: The ele brings a lot of damage, both single target and AoE, while also providing fire/water/lightning fields and plenty of blast finishers. They can be built for full DPS and stack might/fury, or built for support to provide protection and various utilities. Their sheer amount of weapon skills provides a lot of utilities, and they can adapt to any crazy situation that gets thrown at them. Only weakness being their frailty, having to rely on dodges and vigor to stay alive in the pack, and they will die very quickly sometimes.

#2: Guardian: Guards provide a lot of the more unique utiliites that eles are lacking (AoE Pull, AoE reflect, Aegis, blinds), while also providing useful services like Cleanses and swiftness. More defensive overall, but still something that will be useful on nearly every team. Weaknesses being a weaker ranged game, lower DPS (I guess, don’t quote me on that), and still frail.

#3: Warrior: This original bastion of high health + high armor + regen is still quite useful in the game. Their high durability lets them facetank many enemies even in zerker gear, and they provide a series of unique buffs as well as might stacking. They have solid burst damage, and a sweet AoE rez to boot. Weakesses being that, other than the occasional stun, they have little defensive utility. I’m also not to sure about their ranged capabilities either (but by sheer bulk and defense they rarely need to range).

#4: Thief: Thieves are a nice mix of incredibly powerful defensive capabilities and aggro management with the highest damage in the game. Their stealth alone usually guarantees them a spot on the team, let alone spammable boon stripping, high evasion, perpetual AoE blindness, spammable blast finisher, and plenty of defiance stripping abilities. Their weakness is that they lack any offensive team buffs and their ranged combat isn’t that good, giving them a redundancy problem. While it is useful to have more than one ele/guard/warrior on the team, a second thief offers little to no advantage over just the one.

#5: Engineer. Now, the engineer is a jack of all trades, having far more utility than the elementalist. The engineer is capable of nearly everything, having a combination of fields and blast finishers, blinds and reflects, stability and stealth, heals and rezzes, cleanses and pulls, etc. and so on. In fact, the Engi is best at stacking vulnerability and second in long range damage. The weakness being that, whatever an engi does, another class is probably already doing better, and a large amount of DPS from an engi comes from their condis. But, with their versatility, engis are great for pugs.

If anything I would call Barlte’s ideal to be unrealistic and short sighted.

There is talk about being free from social stigmas and their constraints, but those stigmas aren’t always the bad thing. For example, in the real world, it is a punishable offense to follow some around yelling obscenities at them for 4 hours straight. And yet, this is something I’ve seen frequently in MMOs. Hell, I’ve even seen it encouraged in MMOs, since these players will gather together like roving packs of animals and collectively feed off of the victims of their collected harassment.

To be true to oneself is to be at one’s most evil. While I was quite a bit late to the emergence of MMOs, history as I have seen it has shown the games becoming more restrictive after the realization that people won’t govern themselves given a universe with no laws. Likewise, with the way games are structured, the person with the most “merit” is often obsessive, controlling overachievers who pride themselves on their virtual numbers, creating a world in which the most prominent players are also the most hostile and disagreeable.

The idea of a utopia is all well and good, but it is ill informed when confronted with two facts of life: There’s no such thing as a free lunch, and human nature is to be flawed.

Personally I rank City of Heroes higher than GW2. Mostly because CoH fulfills several niches that I like in gaming, but also because many of the things GW2 does is loaded with design mistakes. Prime example: GW2 is built being an action and skill based game, but the special effects flying everywhere make it impossible to see enemy tells. I’m playing the game at the moment mostly because I came to the realization that, if something I want is added to the game, it’ll be added to the gem store, and I don’t have the capital to fund a big gem store purchase.

GW2 has the potential to be so much greater than it is now. But right now the classes are lacking diversity and sheer volume of skills, enemies tells and actions are drowned out by flashy effects and clipping character models, enemies in the game are designed so that gear diversity isn’t a thing, an entire form of damage (conditions) is extremely underpowered in PVE content, players are constantly at combo field war, game balances and changes are coming out so slowly that players find the game stale, there is a lack of variable PVP modes and maps, and I personally have checked out of the living story’s…. story.

The good news is, Anet is working to improve these things. It isn’t all doom and gloom.

I personally find the idea that people couldn’t understand the gem store conversion system to be horrifying. I don’t know about anyone else, but by the 4th grade I knew about fractions and rounding and rates. I was 10 years old when I learned everything I’d need to know about the gem and gold conversion system, and I was a poor kid who went to a public school in a poor neighborhood.

I can’t remember where I read this (probably before the the full release from the game), but the cash shop is operated by an independent company. One that is probably commission by NCsoft themselves. Thus, the actual development team for pretty much everything else in the game doesn’t have that much control over how gems are handled. It makes sense when you think of this change as one that is done by the management of an out-of-touch company.

Seriously, the complete removal of a customized conversion system was a bad move. It’s like removing all the cents from the U.S. dollar. My simple suggestion: put it back. You can keep the whole pre-made deal thing, but you must have an option for customized purchases. Put it behind a second screen if it is such a problem.

Another note: a person’s inability to interface with the system isn’t necessarily the system’s fault. Something my award-winning (not an exaggeration) website design instructor told me is that no matter how simple and brain dead you make something, someone will always be deader in the head area.

Illuminerdi.9153:

I’m curious if you read about my idea for making rewards increase the longer a run takes; the idea being that if you kill the first boss or a few trash mobs you get chump change. This prevent people from running in, farming up early content, then leaving before later content.

But, by making the multiplier dependent on how many bosses/trash mobs the team killed, it also means that you can’t bypass that stuff either and just kill the bosses, or else your reward will still be chump change.

For example:

Let’s say you have a boon that you get when you kill a dungeon enemy. Trash mobs give you 1 stack of the boon and bosses give you 5 stacks. For the sake of the example imagine that there is no upper limit to number of stacks you can have on this boon. The boon is wiped when the dungeon is reset, but persists between death.

If you speedrun the dungeon killing only bosses and necessary enemies, you wind up with, say, 50 stacks at the end. Meanwhile, if you finish the dungeon killing most of the trash and the bosses, you wind up with 500 stacks.

Now you weight the rewards so that someone with 50 boon stacks killing a trash mob has a 20% chance for 1 token drop, but someone with 500 stacks has a 70% chance of a 2 token drop. Killing a boss when you have 50 stacks gets you 5 guaranteed tokens and a 20% chance of 3-5 extra tokens to drop. Killing a boss with 500 stacks gets you 20 guaranteed tokens and a 70% chance of 5-10 extra tokens.

Make sure nobody finds a way to quickly stack this boon up to 500 and you have a weighted system: all rewards are proportional to the time spent in the dungeon, without actually being based on “time” (otherwise people would just idle) – you have to kill enemies to get the boon, so you have to actively play to stack it, and being stacked per player means that people can’t just jump into existing teams and reap the rewards.

I’m curious what your take on this is and whether or not you can see ways this would be (heavily) exploited or otherwise still discouraging people from playing sections of content?

EDIT: also don’t focus on the exact numbers I put in there – I wasn’t being specific and I’d need to get out a calculator to determine what “good” numbers would be for a system like this, the idea is just to show how your reward curves upwards the more content you do so rewards stop being a race between time and content, freeing people up to choose whether they want to do a little content and get a little reward, or a lot of content and a lot of reward. The overall rate of reward would be equal between different play styles – everyone would earn tokens at (approximately) the same rate.

Scaling up rewards as the run goes on is an interesting idea. The biggest flaw would be the difficult balancing and implementation.

Balancing around a simple merits based system is easy in theory. Just take the average time it takes to complete a dungeon run while skipping and speed running, work out how much time it takes to kill all the skipped enemies and complete all the bonus objectives assuming the same party and tactics, and then multiply that time by the current reward/time of the speed run to get how much that should reward players. Thus, the time spent on objectives would be equally rewarding to the time spent on the dungeon avoiding those objectives.

But a scaling dynamic system adds a whole other level of complexity to accomplish the same thing. Now, you not only have to balance the time it takes to complete an objective, but also the rate at which the buffs are acquired, and the average amount of buffs at any moment in the dungeon, then acquire new metrics about speedrunning the dungeon while skipping (particularly the distribution of buffs per every moment of award) and apply that measurement to balancing out the rate at which items are dropped and buffs are applied while not skipping.

Simplicity is a positive factor. A scaling buff system can work, but the potential for exploitation and failure is high, and holy hell do I not want to sit down and work out all those numbers.

Illuminerdi.9153:

I’m not really tied to the idea of generic tokens – I thought the community would get behind the idea but most people seem to dislike them, feeling that it would just lead to farming or running specific dungeons. I don’t think that is the case and/or that you can really prevent that regardless, I think that generic tokens just frees people up to choose content based on what they have or haven’t done yet. Then again, I also believe that players should only have to run through a dungeon 10 times or less to get a full set from it, so in my world there isn’t really a lot of farming anyway because the need to do everything in the most optimized fashion is irrelevant. People farm and speedrun because things take forever; if things stop taking forever, they don’t really care as much whether or not one path is much faster/better than another. Generic tokens would mean that someone who wants a single set of CoF gear could buy one after doing every dungeon once. They might not have enough tokens to buy every other dungeon set, but they can at least get one complete set. Meanwhile, someone who wants all the sets is going to have to farm anyway, so you might as well let them farm where they want and how they want. I find it fascinating that people are arguing against this because it means people will farm, when isn’t that what they’re already doing?

It’s from experience. Technically, all dungeons have a universally awarded token already: gold. It is because of the gold reward that many dungeon paths are grinded frequently. Now, diminishing returns and dungeon specific tokens encourage people to run more than just the optimum paths. Take away the tokens, then there is even less left for neglected paths. The issue isn’t so much people farming as much as it is people farming only one part of the game.

Likewise, the reason why people farm is to amass wealth more than anything. With the gold rewards, people run dungeons to pay for their legendary and ascended gear, and even then the tokens themselves are inevitable gold fodder. Now, you can make a case from here: you can say that since people are just grinding for gold, you can remove all specific tokens and replace them with a global token so players can just play how they want. But, much like diminishing returns, these systems are in place to save the player from themselves: By forcing (to a degree) variable paths, players don’t become inundated with repetitious boredom at nearly the rate that unrestrained free play would, and likewise this promotes more activity in places, letting newer players adventure and learn with more experienced players.

This was actually one of the biggest problems with Phantasy Star Universe. Without some form of mandated diversity, the majority of players in the game would all sit in one lobby while doing one mission over and over again. The end result being a large, expansive and diverse game built for multiple players but with nobody around to help.

EDIT: Can’t believe I forgot this.

As for giving more tokens: that is an option. Tokens can be converted to gold through indirect measures, so something that you can do is make dungeons reward less gold, but give more tokens. Likewise, you could just throw in a direct token to gold converter at the vendors, and then adjust how many tokens each path awards to reflect this.

Though ideally, a player who wants specific armor pieces from dungeons would just run those dungeon paths once a day, then go do something else more interesting. The pacing reduces burnout rate, but also provides incentive to come back again later. If dungeons awarded too many tokens, then players would lose the carrot at the end of the stick too quickly. Still, increasing token rewards is always an option.

Anyway, while you do have some interesting ideas, I have some criticisms.

#1: The problem with having a universally applicable tokens is that it removes all need to run any but the most grind-able and easy dungeons. Dungeon specific tokens work to mandate diversity in play, meaning that nearly all dungeons are being run for their tokens. Diversity in play in these dungeons has many positives, such as allowing mixing new players with experienced players, as well as ensuring that these dungeons are run on a regular enough basis that it wouldn’t be too difficult to find/form a random group at any given time.

Parts 2 and 3 are tied together, so I’ll have to tackle both of these: There was an issue when the game first released where players would only kill the first boss, then exit the dungeon. This was because the rewards were spaced so that it was more profitable to cut out the dungeon and do something else than it was to play to completion. The current product of speed running you see now is considered the lesser of two evils: by end-stacking rewards, players are encourage to at least play to completion.

Though the idea for #2 and #3 are noble, by making rewards highly dependent on specific bosses or landmarks, we risk unleashing the beast we caged a long time ago. Any balancing of rewards will have to either be rewarded at the end, or heavily stacked toward finishing the dungeon, so that no part of a dungeon path will ever be more efficient than the dungeon as a whole.

I reiterate: no one knows how to go about doing this. That includes myself. If I were to take a note from other games, they have a proportional rewarded system where there would be various statistics taken and bonus goals that awarded points at the end of a dungeon, and the dungeon awards would be based upon this scoring system. I.E. there is 20 tokens at the end for merely completing the path, but then based on the percentage of non-respawning mobs killed, alongside of optional objectives and hidden events, there would be additional awards.

Without hard metrics (some of which aren’t even available to anet), it can’t get more specific than that.

Surbrus.6942:

Oh please. Killing boring enemies with horribly simplified mechanics and terrible AI does not, even in theory provide an obstacle that the party needs to coordinate to overcome. If it did, then dungeon solo and duos would not be a common thing for players in this game to be doing if they are looking for anything near a challenge.

As for why Anet put horribly boring trash into the dungeon, rather than interesting encounters? That is simply laziness, there is no mysterious hidden meaning behind any of this, it’s just a poorly done job, simple as that. If you want to see how to do trash mobs right, there are examples already mentioned in this thread (mostly to do with Fractals), or you could look at Guild Wars 1 (something we’ve been telling Anet to do all this time).

I remember back when this wasn’t the case. When the game was first released, the hardest parts of the dungeons weren’t the bosses, but the elites that littered the paths. Experienced players were calling targets against specific enemy types and even had specific strategies against them.

What made these so much more difficult was how hard it is to keep track of multiple things at once. Groups of enemies employ multiple strategies simultaneously, and can employ additional tactics beyond what any single boss can do. In AC alone we had to dodge the burrower, watch for teammates to get pinned by the scavenger, an stun the breeder all at the same time.

This was back when dungeons were run at their appropriate level, and the combination of LoS stack + spam blinds + pure DPS hadn’t been unlocked yet. Once players learned this, all of the elites that used to provide a challenge became routine and rather boring.

Several simple mobs can act as one complex and interesting one, and it would be easier to create a more balanced experience by multiple simpler mobs than with a big complex one. If not for the pratfalls above (vastly multiplied damage via cleave, easy grouping via LoS stacking, rendered nearly useless with blinds, etc), “trash mobs” would be the best way to create engaging experiences in the game. I say “engaging” since if you make things too hard, then you’ll just get class discrimination.

@OP: You’re not alone in this. The idea of balancing the reward systems in dungeons to be equally rewarding to both full skips and clear alls has been around for years now. It is one of those things that everyone kind of wants in theory, since it will help to resolve some issues around balancing rewards and the economy and also encourage diversity in playstyle, but in practice no one can agree on how to do it. The issue being that Anet doesn’t know how to do this, either, which has resulted in them not doing anything at all. The other issue being that the raw hostility of elitists prevents any meaningful discussion from taking place.

A lot of the things GW2 does well is remove a lot of the hassle that comes from other game design. If you think that dungeon kicking is bad now, you should’ve seen how bad it was in some of the other games I’ve played. Phantasy Star Universe had different item acquisition modes (round robin, random, first come first serve), but it also had a “leader decides everything” system along with a bunch of random drops at the end of each mission. So, if the leader ever found an item he wanted, he would just quickly kick every other player in the team so he could get it. Given that most of the game was gear based… it wasn’t a pretty sight.

But in general, the thing with a lot of conveniences is that a lot of the content of the game is in dealing with these inconveniences. For example, no roots while casting means that everything becomes spammy, with less emphasis on positioning and timing. The gameplay is certainly different, but better? I’m not so sure.

I think the game has a lack of character connection, too. Whether it is PSO/PSU, RS, City of Heroes, or even an old flash game (Adventurequest), I always felt an attachment to the toons I made. But for GW2 and DCUO, this wasn’t the case. I’ll focus mostly on GW2, but the flaws tend to apply to both.

#1: The combat is somewhat homogeneous. Though each class has different tricks, the entire goal and pacing of the fight feels extremely similar. Granted, the higher octane active combat of GW2 blows most other MMOs out of the water, but instead of diversity in play it is more like changing which color of racket being used in a game of tennis.

#2: The story has an inverse-tree diagram. All of the variety in the story is at the lower levels, but it all culminates into defeating Zhaitan. This is important, since diverging or expanding stories allow a character to grow in their own way. Converging stories is more like giving implied ability to your NPC while they go off doing the same thing you’ve done before.

#3: Inter-class diversity is incredibly small. When I play as any class, I am effectively interchangeable with everyone else of the same class, as well as everyone else in other classes as well. The gameplay is all about high damage and active defenses, and once anyone has those two things down, they become faceless cogs in the system. Even if I try to force class diversity (hah, I’ll use a mace instead of a sword!), it doesn’t amount to any meaningful impact on play. When I play GW2, I feel invisible.

#4: Appearances are also bland. Medium tier armor is a sea of trenchcoats, heavy armor sets are mostly plates with different patterns, and light armor, while being the most diverse, is still mostly robes. While I can change the size, color scheme, and texture of my curtains to countless different combinations, I can’t overlook that I’m still just choosing curtains. When I go to any overworld event, I know for a fact that I do not stand out, no one else stands out, and there’s nothing I could do to change this fact.

These two combine to form a deadly duo. In GW2, I am engineer #13597, who wears the millionths human female skin they’ve seen this month with no adequately distinguishing features. This is not something I want to be: I want to be notable on the field, not just famous as being that guy on the forums who hates skipping.

#5: The amount of investment that actually goes into any character is quite small. Now, normally this isn’t a problem in itself, but when you are lacking other notably identifying features, the potato-chip style character creation stokes the flames.

#6: To maximize visual perception against all of action-combat based stuff, I have to keep my camera zoomed out to see things. Because of this, I don’t get much of a good view on my own toon.

And this is why I’m not playing the game anymore. I don’t care about my toons, and I don’t care about the story, so the only thing that was tying me down was the gameplay, which I inevitably got bored of. About the only thing keeping me around is the fear that I might want to play GW2 in the future and if I don’t occasionally log in to get the story steps I’ll just come back to find a gigantic pay wall staring me in the face.

I’m all for tutorials for crucial in-game information (such as how to dodge), but I really do hate how the new leveling system gates everything..

Teaching players every aspect of the game right out the door is impractical, but you don’t have to take away features in order to teach them later. It is the whole “teach via boredom” thing all over again: by depriving players of stimuli, they are expecting to use their monotonous and boring time to brush up on their skills and personally better themselves. But people don’t better themselves to fight boredom. They turn on the TV to fight boredom.

Anet really has to learn that boredom doesn’t encourage players to learn anything.

Retaliation is definitely an engineer killer in WvW. In WvW we use the flamethrower and grenades a lot, and each of those are multi hitting weak AoEs. I can be downed in a few throws.

In sPVP not so much, since there the bomb kit is more prevalent.

I’m not that happy with the game, either.

The PVE game has been broken down to a science. So much so that I can go into any dungeon in this game with my thief, and know exactly how to handle each wave of enemies that comes up with no communication with the team prior: LoS enemies into a corner, spam blind fields while attacking in melee to melt the enemies down in a few seconds, then run past all non-essential enemies and bosses.

Rinse, repeat, and do this every single day. No meaningful contributions from gear and build diversity, no noticeable unique or pivotal clutch plays. The enemies are nondescript and die quickly, most content is skipped from time and boredom, and my individual contribution is bleached out in a sea of flash particle effects and bright lights.

Outside, we have zerged events where the lack of individual contribution and flash effects are taken all the way up to 11, where at no point does anything I do seem like it matters, or if anyone even cares that I am there. The success or failure of any event is
wholly out of my control.

The PVE game has left me uninterested, due to how homogenized and easy it is. Then, we have the PVP side.

WvW is basically the same as the overworld events. SPVP, however, just really isn’t my game. A big problem I have with competitive gaming is that I am not good at gaming. My reaction time is slow, my reading speed is slow, I’m constantly shaking so I don’t have precise movements, I can’t think for the future, and I’m nearly blind. So, sPVP in GW2 for me consists mostly of me getting ambushed, mashing buttons randomly in a panic because I can’t see or understand what is going on, and getting outright beaten by players who can precisely move, turn, and attack on a dime. Random noob fights at hotjoin are the best I’ll ever get at sPVP, and now that the game has been out for more than a month, that isn’t a satisfactory level anymore.

GW2 just isn’t fun to play anymore, and it looks like Anet will never fix these problems. Maybe when I get the urge to stack in a gigantic flashing effect I’ll play the game again, but until then I’ll do little more than lurk on the forums hoping for a change.

At this point I’m seriously considering just rerolling my necro into something else. I had a thread with a rather large list of grievances from necro traits alone, and it seems like these issues are never going to be addressed. Let alone the lack of potency with our utilities and the lack of team support.

But who knows. Maybe when I bother to start playing the game again some time down the line, the necro will be in a better place.

You have to consider relativity. The difference in effective HP between the two armor sets is 0.28%, or a little more than one quarter of one percent. 1/4th of 1% is nigh invisible, so the difference in effective health effectively doesn’t exist.

This is only for direct damage, BTW. Against other condis, rabid provides absolutely no defense. Now, you can argue that a necro handles condis quite well, but I can also argue that condis can still swamp and overload a necro if enough of them are present. You can say that extra heal efficiency can compensate for a weakness in condi damage, but I can also say that heals aren’t guaranteed, as they can be interrupted or burst past.

This might be a novel concept, but consider this: both sets have different strengths and weaknesses. And depending on context, one can be better than the other.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Yet we now have spent the last 2 “feature” patches revamping the leveling system from the ground up and not introducing a single bit of endgame. I literally just spent the last 20 minutes looking for a SINGLE thread that said they should revamp leveling and I couldn’t find one person complaining about it. The biggest complaint related to leveling I could find was to undo the changes to leveling the last “feature” patch brought.

So what exactly is the point of revamping the only part of the game people almost unanimously loved and completely ignoring the areas of the game people think need the most work? It just seems like a terrible business strategy to me.

That was probably me.

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, I made a thread titled Do What Now? or Why I suck at this game where I outlined several of the teaching problems this game has. Many of these teaching problems had to deal with leveling and how boring it was.

Though not every change to leveling reflects this, there are certain parts that I feel responsible for in the blog entry:

To help ease the learning curve for new players experience when they first load into the game, we’ve simplified the number of systems visible to players early on and layered them all into the level-up guide. When you reach a specific level, any system tied to that level will be presented in the form of a reward. The game will also offer to teach you how to use the new system and will show you what you’ll get the next time you level up.

Anyway, leveling problems in a game aren’t the kind of things people go to the forums and complain about. They are the kind of thing that turns off new players, who just leave and don’t say a word.

Before the trait rework, leveling was a bit more interactive in that you continually received trait points for leveling, which you could invest to gain new skills. Come new trait rework, then suddenly everything is spaced further, longer in leveling overall, and utterly boring. This made a _very_big problem with the game: playing it wasn’t fun at low levels anymore. It was a featureless and unremarkable slog where you received barely anything at a slow pace.

Things like flashing lights and little chests with minor rewards mean a whole lot from a conditioning standpoint. Before you can get to theorycrafting, builds, nuanced mechanics, and meaningful difficulty, you have to level and learn first. Leveling is the first and primary experience every new player has with the MMO. So, if the leveling system is horrible, then this is a gigantic turnoff for prospective new players.

I wouldn’t call a system of caveats and costs a solution as much as a beast with a host of different problems than the one we are facing. I’ve heard this debate in many different forms, from other MMOs to Yugioh and other card games, and there are multiple sides to it.

First and foremost is that caveats aren’t an instant resolution to stale gameplay. Diversity is from creativity, and diverse gameplay can exist in a system of only positives. Adding detriments to abilities will just add another layer of imbalances and flaws to the system, unless it was done just right.

Currently, there are several factors that determine the overall usefulness of a skill:

*Cooldown Time
*Activation Time
*Aftercast
*Range
*Radius
*Target Limit
*Number of effects
*Type of effects
*Potency of effects
*Overall pool of support for that ability
*Activation Condition (equipment only)

To these ends alone, there is a lot of depth that can go into designing any one skill without tacking on negative effects or additional costs. I personally like a system of all positives, mostly because my entire experience with negatives is trying to minimize or reverse them, and resource pools resort in spamming efficiency based techniques and periods of inactivity in the heat of a battle.

Has GW2 made the best of this system? Undoubtedly no. GW2 is currently ruled over by procs, hard CC, paper/rock/scissors gameplay, overly large AoEs, and long invulnerability periods. The balance is in shambles due to widely disproportionate potency and ease of use in abilities. But, by proper usage of the above factors, as well as a wide diversity of effects, it is easily in the realm of possibility to make a game that works in positives.

Honestly, I don’t have any hope for this patch. The dagger hitting an extra target is nice, but at this point I feel it is just too little. My list of grievances with the necromancer is magnanimous on traits alone, let alone the general ineffectiveness of utilities and weapons. I imagine what we’ll get with this patch is Signet of Undeath boosting LF generation to 1.2% every 3 seconds, and then a several month wait before another change.

^Except that the only games like that are RPGs.

Anyway, yeah the RNG can be pretty cruel sometimes. I hate RNG based gameplay myself, but studies have shown that random reward systems have the strongest incentive for conditioning behavior. So, as far as MMOs and RPGs go, RNGesus is here to stay.

I’m pretty sure many mobs prioritize low HP.

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

You can’t factor in runes and traits because we’re basically looking at pugs here.

No, no, no, no no. We’re looking at a player who has personally found it necessary to swap out a few pieces from the max DPS zerk gear. Thus, the given is that this player is already running max DPS zerk gear, and is probably running near meta build, too, what with videos and guides and stuff. This poses a methodological problem: If you are going to presume stupidity and failure on the part of the experiment, then what is to stop anyone from assuming an exact opposite level of stupidity and failure that works for their own case?

As for your numbers: What is there to disprove? You’re basically just agreeing with the analysis I had in the first place: Knight has miniscule increases in offense in certain circumstances over Soldiers. I find it hilarious that you pick numbers and circumstances that favor my conclusion better than the ones I pick myself.

frifox.5283:

stuff with no linked build

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

*Asterisk: A lot of this is dependent on classes and builds within those classes. The skeletal build above existed to demonstrate sheer statistical prowess, and is not representative of a meta build.

Seriously, there’s a reason why I included this. If a build happens to be extremely proc heavy, or natively stack a lot of ferocity, then knights becomes better offensively. As for the defenses, AKA why we’re swapping out pieces of zerker for knight/soldier, that has no contest. Anyway for comparison, the ele staff DPS build 6/2/2/2/2 with both soldiers and knights.

No boons: 3084 Soldiers, 3170 Knights (2.8% difference)
Fury (reasonable given the build:) 3398 soldiers, 3445 Knights (1.4% difference)
Fury and Max might: 4477 Soldiers, 4698 Knights (4.9% difference)
Effective HP: 28,610 Soldiers, 19,739 Knight, (44.9% difference)

Knight gives nigh negligible to small increases in offense in lieu of far worse defense, as it usually does. But, the important thing to see here is that, in the staff DPS build, there are no damage procs, let alone one that would meaningfully discriminate between 41% crit rate, and 76% crit rate. I guess you could consider the Sigil of Strength, which would be only 58% as effective on the full soldier build as the knight build but given the internal cooldown and AoE nature of the ele along with group contributions of might, that difference might not even show up in many circumstances.

So, to reiterate, your mileage may vary.

A little lesson: a generic analysis is never superior to the more comprehensive and elaborate analysis. You’re not factoring in runes and traits, which contribute to the overall stats of the player. You aren’t looking at where you start: 2k power at 4% crit rate is better than 1.6k power and 35% crit rate. You also aren’t looking at the multiplicative nature of precision, which benefits greatly from having more base power to begin with. You also aren’t looking at the variability of might application. You also aren’t looking at benchmarks of survivability and personal sustain vs. variable sustained incoming damage.

Case in point looking at the two sets under your circumstances:
Pre buffs: 2040 effective power soldier vs 1880 effective power knights.
Post might and fury: 3220 effective power soldiers vs. 3155 effective power knight.
Post might no fury: 2933 soldiers vs. 2833 knight
Post Fury, no might: 2240 soldiers vs. 2040 knight

Soldiers wins. Every time. I’ve already mentioned the preservation of procs as a possible reason to go for knight over soldier, and the whole “swap to more defensive gear” discussion exists already in the pretense that swapping for more defensive gear is personally necessary, so questioning the given situation is just a distraction.

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

Soldier’s is arguably the worst overall set for DPS just because you’re still running power main stat and you have no precision. The already-high might stat means that might/EA/banners have a reduced marginal effect, the lack of precision means ferocity from banners and food has zero effect, and the lack of ferocity means precision has a greatly reduced effect. Moreover, since your defensive stats are both minors, you have to trait more heavily into defensive lines to get the same level of survivability, which is a further DPS loss.

Compare that to Knights, which gets both power and precision in minors, guaranteeing that might and ferocity have the greatest marginal effect, and also has substantial toughness which is arguably the most important defensive stat. Even Clerics or Magi is better because you have a lower power stat (so might helps) and your defense is already through the roof so you can trait offensively and do more damage overall than a Soldier traiting defensively.

Obviously if you’re a Cleric traiting defensively you will do absolute crap for damage, but it’s still a better overall balance of stats if you build right.

So… primary damage stat is inferior to two secondary damage stats, but two secondary defensive stats are inferior to primary defensive stat… Excuse me while I whip out my calculator.

Power is the most efficiently scaling direct damage stat in the game by a very large margin. It is something that a few of us worked out in the past, so I’ll continue to use this formula:

Power – Prec + 832 > 2100 / (0.5 + Critdmg)

At no ferocity, you need 3368 Power before a single point in precision is worthy of an investment. You may recognize that 3368 is roughly equivalent to full power primary + 6 power runes + 6 in the power trait line + full might. Knight gear barely pays in precision what it loses in power. Things only start to grow when you start to factor in food, team buffs, and signets. Even then, the scales are actually really close. Here, let me show you:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fJAQFARjMdU7Z3HWeQHaAAAwMODVA-TRROwAcVCCY/BUK/QqDgs6PkBQfMA-e Knight Skeleton

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fJAQFARjMdU7Z3HWeQHaAAAwMODVA-TRROwAhV/Bw+DlU+NTJYRdAkBQfMA-e Identical soldier skeleton

Effective Power pre buffs (food included): 3088 Soldiers, 3170 Knight (2.7% difference)
Effective Power post buffs (spotter, discipline, strength, empower allies, 25 might, fury): 5439 Soldiers vs. 5832 Knight (7% difference)

So overall, the offensive difference between soldiers and knights gear is below the RNG aspect of combat (10%). The reason for this is quite simple: because soldier gear has less precision, the precision buffs mean much more than with knight gear. The difference between 25% and 50% crit rate is much more significant than 50% to 75%, after all.

Now comes durability. For this, you have to consider effective HP, which is the multiplier of HP by armor. The most efficient distribution of effective HP is essentially a square, where point per point via investment they are equal (or roughly when HP is 10 times armor, due to how vitality scales). So, calculating effective HP with 1832 armor as the baseline…

41,326 HP in Soldiers vs. 32,833 HP in Knights.

Meaning that soldiers gear can take 26% more direct damage than knights. Soldiers likewise can also take 41% more condition damage. The only advantage knights has is the increased healing efficacy from toughness, which gives about 12% more efficient heals. All of these numbers, of course, are well outside the RNG aspect of combat.

Soldiers (and likewise, Dire), is arguably the best gear in the game, and it is because of how efficiently the stats are placed. Prioritizes the most efficient damage stat, has secondary stats with a strong geometric relationship, with no true weaknesses to the build. Were it not for the fact that active defenses make passive defenses useless in PVE, we’d have a soldier meta. Because of this, if a player wants to swap out a few pieces of gear for greater defense, the best gear to do this with is soldiers, because it has the largest gains while sacrificing very little over other gear choices.

*Asterisk: A lot of this is dependent on classes and builds within those classes. The skeletal build above existed to demonstrate sheer statistical prowess, and is not representative of a meta build.

Remember to factor in Near To Death

roachsrealm.9284:

after some number crunching the nomad set just isn’t up to part for other options..

with a warrior traited 5/0/6/0/3 (vit/tough > power conversion) a full set of Knights gives more toughness and power than a full set of Nomads. In top tier everything other sets still produce more toughness. The vitality isn’t enough to boost the power beyond what you’d get.

With nomad all you are doing is sacrificing power for your health pool. Most classes won’t need this. I can see a zerk crit thief swapping out 2, maybe 3 pieces of armor for Nomads to give herself a boost during tough OHK fights. Otherwise, Nomad: Do not purchase / craft.

There’s a catch to just swapping out some gear, though. I do this on my thief all the time, and I’m usually swapping out zerker pieces with valkyrie. If I need more survivability, I just swap out more pieces to get greater survivability.

Overall, you can summarize swapping gear like this:

Soldiers: high statistical bulk, doesn’t sacrifice the best damage stat. Has wide scales, letting you swing from one extreme to the other.
Knight: Not as durable as soldiers with only the same offense, but added advantage of maintaining precision for crit based effects.
Valkyrie: Not as durable, but maintains the largest portion of offense. Good with classes that have fury and solid crit boosting options, letting you better micromanage exactly how much health is needed to survive.
Cleric: Inferior to all above, except in circumstances where your class or playstyle already has a lot of heals (guardian, engi, ele mainly). In those exceptions. the massive healing pool can increase group sustain at the greatest sacrifice to offense.

But Nomads is nigh useless when compared to other options, especially considering that someone can always swap out more gear for more bulk. Nomad has only slightly more effective HP than soldiers, but sacrifices all the power. Nomad doesn’t preserve precision or ferocity. And as far as changing playstyles and sustaining the team goes, nomad offers less healing support and less offensive damage than clerics. Nomad is also more expensive, to boot.

Whenever I run a dungeon, I form with the “all welcome” title all the time. What the Op describes isn’t the typical experience with utter randoms.

In general, whenever I form an all welcome group (and yes, I do it for CoE as well), I get the following, not including myself:
2 to 3 experienced players who run meta builds and just don’t care for the wait
1 to 2 completely new players who are just glad that there’s an LFG that’ll take them.

And from the start, the two new guys are immediately subservient to me and the other experienced members of the party, following directions and listening to what we have to say. It helps that I open the dungeon with “O.K. now, is there anyone who is new to this dungeon, or anyone who does not know what to do?”, then wait a bit for their timid “yes”.

There are a few exceptions to this rule, and that is when forming Arah, HotW P2 or P3, CoF p3, or TA Aether path. In those paths, I always get 3 to 4 new players, and maybe 1 experienced guy to help me out. Those dungeons tend to be longer and grueling, since I have to stop and lecture before every single challenge.

It is quite rare to get someone who doesn’t fully listen or cooperate. This is mostly because, for a newb to preferentially join the “all welcome” group, they have to acknowledge somehow that they are inadequate for other runs or titles. This self awareness really contributes to the creative and open minded aspects of a player. In contrast, the guys who don’t listen, don’t communicate, and don’t cooperate don’t have a particular preference for joining LFGs, so by sheer statistical probability alone, they’ll be joining the couple of “P1-3 SPEEDLCEAR zerk meta build ping gear” hanging around than my group.

Granted, newbs can be frustrating to deal with themselves, since if you gather enough of them they’ll get spectator syndrome and assume that the crucial, tactical movements necessary to complete a challenge should be handled by someone else. But after a wipe or two and some specifically directed harassment they fall in line.

Magnetic Aura and Magnetic Wave?

The best part about going 30 into tools is all the extra utilities that are picked up along the way. In general, I run static discharge, speedy kits, and adrenal implant, providing speed, damage, and greater survivability all in one. Adrenal Pump is nice, but the big minor trait is Inertial Convertor, which has saved me multiple times (usually with Elixir R or Elixir U, but also with Bandage Self, Elixir S, Thumper Turret, and Bomb Kit). Then you get Enduring Damage, which is a nice damage buff. The recharge reduction on toolbelt skills is nice to have, too.

Going 6/6/0/x/x bombnades is nice, but it is mostly straight up damage. The remaining 2 points has to constantly be switched between out-of-combat speed, additional damage on toolbelts, or additional survivability with proc dependent vigor, and my teammates are rarely ever happy to sit around while I awkwardly fumble with my traits before and after each fight.

In an experienced group or a premade, where I know that defenses and/or out of combat speed will be taken care of, I’m totally going with 6/6/0/x/x. Otherwise, I find myself having a stronger and lower maintenance performance with 2/6/0/0/6. I compared the effective power between 2/6/0/0/6 and 6/6/0/2/0, and the difference between the builds is rather small (0.86%, or less than 1%, comparing 5483 EP vs. 5436 EP), pre boons. The true comparison between builds ends up being over other subjects, such as the overall team contribution of vulnerability and bleeds vs. higher starting direct damage in bombs, overall contribution of static discharge, travel times and OoC travel speed, utility and damage contribution of toolbelt skills, versatility granted by having an extra open utility slot, etc.

I’m pretty sure necro traits being bad and ranger traits being bad are really independent of each other. Both can have bad traits.

Though someone else will have to make the “I hate ranger traits” thread. I have very little experience playing rangers, and thus don’t know the practical applications of the traits.

I always think it is funny that the RNG is seen as an apathetic and malevolent god in games. It certainly seems that way, with things like precursor drop rates being so low that you’ll get one “blessed” player, and hundreds of cursed ones.

I don’t like having games be heavily based on the RNG myself. The wealth and economy in the game is an enabler to greater assets: more gear sets, more characters, better equipment for better performance, greater profits, and more fun overall. So, whenever there is a game that is heavily RNG based, essentially the game randomly rewards players with the capacity for greater fun. This is done in contrast to players who have inferior gear, not as many characters, and less assets to risk and spend. Thus, the malevolent nature of RNGsus.

Guild wars 2 isn’t that bad as far as the RNG goes. It has taken several moves against it:

#1: Everything is balanced around exotics, and exotic gear isn’t that difficult to obtain. Thus, effective performance isn’t dependent on so much on oodles of random wealth.
#2: The difference between gear tiers isn’t that big. Ascended only gives around 10% to 15% of an advantage over exotic gear. Thus, someone doesn’t become horribly overpowered because they wind up with an ascended weapon drop.
#3: There are multiple alternatives to acquiring desired gear which aren’t based around random drops. Crafting and unique currencies (karma, dungeon tokens) are examples of these. Because of this, you can work toward the exotic goalpost without ever spending a cent.

And that is really the most I could ask for. While I haven’t been lucky enough to get a precursor drop, I also am not doomed to perpetual inferiority because of it.

still @Bhawb:

Parastic Bond
Ah.. I could’ve sworn when I checked the wiki last night there was no listed cooldown. This will be my bad, here.

Death into life
This is utter nonsense. Necromancer healing lags far behind what elementalists, engineers, guardians, mesmers, and warriors can crunch out, and that little healing power will never amount to anything in any build, ever. Here, let me show you:

Full zerker DPS: will get about 175 healing power, but won’t be traiting for healing utilities, so other than a 3% boost to consume conditions it goes completely to waste.
Full Cleric Support: will probably not bother putting in 15 points into spite just to get 123 healing power. But, on top of the 1300 healing power, 123 additional extra isn’t even a 10% increase. Most healing skills have 0.1 to 0.4 modifiers, so this means that Death into Life will only increase healing by 1% to 4% in a full cleric build. It isn’t worth sacrificing renewing blast (well, maybe because renewing blast is horrible to use), transfusion, ritual of life, or deathly invigoration for.

This trait is the definition of useless. It can’t be useful. Period.

Chilling Darkness
I guess you can define “niche” as “runs well of darkness”. But regardless, it is actually pretty bad for a chill stacking mechanic: 1 second worth per blind. Well of darkness and plague form have an attack rate of once per second, meaning that without additional chill duration, the effect leaves as soon as the enemy leaves the blind field. Plague form essentially disables the necro for the duration, letting you do little more than tank and decap a point. It is important to note that you can accomplish this without chilling darkness, since spamming blinds is enough of a defense. I’ve run a chill necro before. Chilling darkness is the worst way to go about it.

Full of Life
Soothing mist also has the additional effect of being a large AoE effect. It also isn’t neutralized by the ele class mechanic (much like how Deathshroud is). As I said before, the biggest problem is that it completely lacks potency.

Vampiric Mastery
Agreed. It is a little known fact, but I categorize mastery as a lukewarm trait. I just lumped together the entire vampiric line in one big thing, because the flaws with the system are fairly pervasive. Mastery is the exception to this rule, however.

Gluttony
The big problem is that a lot of lifeforce isn’t gained through skills. It is gained through deaths. Likewise, life force is different from health in that it degens naturally while in use, so the total sum of contribution that gluttony provides is an additional second or two in Death Shroud. In a fight when a player is lacking DS it doesn’t provide enough for a clinch movement (since you’d have to regen up half the bar to buy a single second of time), and unless you have a build that specifically generates a lot of life force through skills the trait contributes little to nothing at all. The total impact of gluttony, can be summarized as “it only provides enough lifeforce when you don’t need it”.

Path of Corruption
I categorize this as a lukewarm trait, because it lies in the shadow of what is IMO a far superior trait: chill of death. Chill of death triggers automatically at 50% health with no need to activate DS, no additional animation or projectile to stop, and also removes up to 3 boons. Now, you can make a case for Path of Corruption, but as an avid necro player I have had a horrible history with Dark Path being dodged, being blocked by terrain, being interrupted, or otherwise failing to work at all. The second issue, other than the infrequency of Dark Path, is that the skill forces players to “belly up”. A large portion of my necromancer play has been about safety in positioning and maintaining distance, since no active defenses results in necros getting thrown around like ping pong balls while in the fray. While spectral grasp can remove someone from the safety of their teammates, Dark Path puts me right into the line of fire, where I am helpless, and will get piled and burst down very quickly.

Because of this, Path of Corruption is a mixed bag. It adds universal frequent boon corruption regardless of any build, but it does so by forcing me to use a skill that I’d rather avoid the vast majority of the time. If this corruption were on something like spectral grasp, or if Dark Path pulled enemies instead of pulling me, then Path of Corruption would get 9/10 easily. The fact that path of corruption is one of the better grandmasters necros have is more of a statement on how bad necro traits are, rather than how good Path of Corruption is.

Dhuumfire
I keep forgetting that tainted shackles exists… darn my head.

EDIT: Fixed a poorly written section.

@Bhawb: Reading is OP. I’ve already mentioned many of the things you’re bringing up.

Anyway, the problem with poison is that poison isn’t that good. It does little damage, and the only use is the -healing effect in PVP. Add on the fact that, on a condi MM build, poison is already nigh permanently afflicted via scepter auto attack and putrid mark. Similarly with weakness, caused by putrid mark + chillblains, as well as enfeebling blood. It is hard to justify this being a grandmaster trait when it accomplishes the same thing as the scepter auto attack.

Likewise, with minion master, the theory is alright but the overall effect is minimal. Other than bone minions, which do more DPS when sacrificed immediately, a group of minions can live for several minutes at a time. It is important to note that minions don’t have long cooldowns, either. After bone fiend runs around for 5 minutes, shaving off 6 seconds from the recharge is the most minimal boost to minion performance possible. If anything, what minion master should do is reduce the cooldown on minion active skills as well as the minions themselves. But regardless, minion master gets used a lot because, for a minion build, the only competition from the adept tier of Death Magic is staff mastery for condi builds. So really, minion master is a case of “there’s nothing else to take here”.

It is important to note that, while death nova and minion master work better together, they actually run contrary to a lot of the other traits for minions. In particular, Flesh of the Master is an excellent trait for prolonging the survival of both the minions, and the necro themselves. In doing this, it cuts the usage of Death Nova and Minion Master down by 50%. Other traits work better the longer minions are alive, such as fetid consumption, vampiric master, and necromantic corruption. I like to use Flesh of the Master as an example of a good trait, because instead of a paltry increase to the most minimal recharge in the game, it actually works to keep your minions alive and fighting.

Just dubbing something a “niche utility” doesn’t deal with the fact that many of these traits are unrealistic, unrewarding, too costly to use, and balanced around improbable scenarios. It is quite hard to realize from this extensive list that there are a lot of traits that I left out due to build differences and niche uses that are actually good. Remember: there’s a lukewarm list for a reason.