Guild Wars 2

Ethics.4519:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

This is some of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard. If you are honestly think that the only reason why leashing exists is to encourage people to skip mobs, then you need to think a whole lot harder about what would happen if all the mobs chased you everywhere no matter what. If you don’t honestly think that, then spare us your nonsense and quit trolling.

Then please enlighten us what the reason is.

Don’t say server lag or resources because a dungeon is a very small instanced map. It would be easy to have open world leash and dungeons not leash.

There’s multiple reasons, actually. I’ll list some:

*To limit the potential of exploits. You’ve already seen enemies that can’t attack past a certain rock or a certain wall, and just stand around being melee cleaved to death. Imagine if you could pull the whole map into that spot.

*To facilitate retreating. The leash lets you run away when things go south, instead of forcing party wipes every time a player has a lag spike or something like that.

*To limit the potential of bugs. We’ve all seen strange aggro bugs that prevent rezzing. With no leash, enemies can easily mess up and do something like chase you to a waypoint, then unintentionally camp the thing and ambush you each time one person tries to rez. Let alone having mobs get caught on scenery due to pathing errors.

*To make an “arena” where you have to fight something. Imagine old TA F/U path if all you needed to do was pull all the spiders outside while the rest of the group facerolled the boss, or if they did this with the veteran oakhearts in TA F path. Or imagine the ooze challenge from the Aetherblade path if you could literally just aggro all of the fire elementals out of the room, completely ruining the challenge.

*To limit trolling. You know how much you hate it when some narb gets aggro and you have to chase around the boss? Imagine if they got aggro on something like the Ghost Eater, and just pulled them out of the room and through the whole map, ruining everything.

EDIT: Can’t believe I forgot this one

*Leashes can actually make skipping harder. Without leashes, mobs could just follow one player around mindlessly, so all that skipping would require is one player to run up, get stuff’s attention, and then get the mobs stuck on a rock while everyone else has a clean run. Or, that guy will die in a spot where no mobs stand, so when they all rest the players can just rez him and move on. Though to be fair, this is more complicated than the “just dodge as you go past stuff” method.

Originally I was going to come in here and say stuff, but then someone linked to basically all the stuff I’d say.

It really depends on circumstances. I, myself, run the 30/10/0/0/30 build, mostly because it is rare that I find myself in a situation where I am not using lifeblast against two or more enemies, and when not lifeblasting that the enemies survive long enough after Axe #2 (which, when boosted, matches dagger DPS but has greater LF generation) to make highly emphasizing the dagger particularly useful. Against champions that are by themselves, 30/25/0/0/15 build can definitely make its mark, unquestionably better in that circumstance.

Of course, at the end it is all debating a very small change to scales overall. I don’t think I ever factored in food, either…

I used to use Throw Mine a bit with turret builds back when I first started playing the game. Originally I had 4 turrets set up, but when I realized that the last turret was basically just there for me to detonate with Accelerent Packed Turrets, I decided to opt for the landmine instead. It was, indeed, a better alternative. But now I just use a kit.

I have also used the mine in PVE on rare occasion. Particularly when I’m fighting against karka. Their retaliation can kill me in moments, but a well placed minefield puts an end to that nonsense.

This has probably been suggested before, but I figure I’ll throw my line out, too:

How about making it so, whenever the ranger dodges (not a weapon dodge, but a dodge dodge), their pet dodges, too?

It was definitely hard the first time through. Mostly because, when I did it, there wasn’t anyone to teach me. You found out not to kill the oil eating ooze through experience, trust me.

But I’ve always had two philosophies that has gotten me through many tough spots, both in real life and in games. In games, specifically MMOs, it shows up a lot. The two philosophies are as follows:

#1: There’s no point in ragequitting because you’ll suck just as bad in another team.
#2: I have figure out what is going on and teach people because no one else will.

Story of my life right there. I can’t count how many times that I’ve been in a group, and we were given an assignment, or a task, or a job, or a challenge, and upon hearing that challenge everyone just stopped and stared at me. Mouth ajar, silently begging for me to provide the almighty solution, and if I did not they would get frustrated and want to go elsewhere. I am sincerely perplexed that people think that, if they are in a group situation and can’t figure out a problem or can’t contribute meaningfully, that the fault lies with others and they should go somewhere else. To me, it is as if the notion of gravity itself is foreign to these people.

Every subsequent run I’ve had of this dungeon has been a teaching one, even when I am not the one who hosted the group. The intensity of these teaching runs varies, though. Sometimes I can just give a quick synopses and everyone gets it. Other times I have to constantly follow around a troublesome player, yelling out instructions for failure after failure until either they leave, or they eventually learn. I still do see a lot of ragequitters, though. As much as I’d like to just dismiss them as “leeching” that isn’t the case; they sincerely believe that failure is the fault of the rest of the group when they themselves mess up.

In general, I prefer vitality for most things. One of the reasons being that increasing vitality is, point for point, more upfront survivability than toughness on every class except necromancer. The larger health pool does more for conditions as well.

The biggest flaw with vitality, though, is that it is ablative: it wears off and once the extra HP is gone, the advantage is gone. In longer fights where you’ll be healing multiple times against direct damage, toughness wins out because the damage reduction never goes away. Though I’ve found most PVP content to be rather short term, and in PVE you don’t actually need tough/vit.

goldenwing.8473:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

There’s a relevant joke to all this, too:

Q: How many forumer’s does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: 100. 51 to vote to get it changed, and 49 to complain about it.

Complaining about it needing to be changed, and then complaining about how?

-Dimwit

Seriously though, it’s not what is said, it’s how. That holds true for everything related to communication in life. It’s possible to disagree on everything from values to details and still be respectful. We’ve seen a lot of good examples on this forum as well.

-Mrs. Obvious

It’s more about how, seemingly no matter what is done, there’s always an angry mob on the forums over something.

There’s a relevant joke to all this, too:

Q: How many forumer’s does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: 100. 51 to vote to get it changed, and 49 to complain about it.

Vayne.8563:

Asuka Shikinami.5462:

Nage.1520:

Asuka Shikinami.5462:

People are angry for a reason.
People hate temporary content for a reason.
People hate ascended gear for a reason.
People hate class imbalance for a reason.
People hate server imbalance for a reason.
People hate constant buggy content for a reason.
People hate watching you making the same mistakes over and over for a reason.

Why don’t you understand that?

You make it sound like no one at all likes the changes. People don’t hate these things, some people do, at least in regards to temporary content and ascended gear. Some things you call mistakes, other people quite like. The balance stuff, well yeah, that needs a whole lot of work…but if you keep using the world people as if everyone things the same, you completely lose any kind of credibility.

Agreed, some people do like them. Also some people like exploiting and some people like hacking. When we refer to large groups of people their is always going to be variation about opinions on a subject, particularly if it involves change. My post did not state that every player or forum reader shared a collective opinion or my own. I did use plural terms, however given the nature of these terms and the amount of evidence that these points are shared by a considerable number of people on the forums, I believe said usage is justified.

The points I am referring to are the ones which are constantly brought up in the forums and attract a lot of negative feedback – again for a reason. If people like said content, I am also sure they have a reason for liking it. If people are angry, and are angry for a reason, maybe that reason should be considered instead of just making condescending threads about how you want people to agree with your approach.

If there were polls on these subjects, on the forums, I think we would find an overwhelming majority of people don’t like many of these points. We could say that this is only representative of the people posting in the forums not the game altogether, however this thread is only targeted towards the people in this forum.

tldr; Semantics aside, people are angry for a reason. Said changes have affected a lot of people in negative ways and they respond with negativity. If Anet doesn’t expect that or think it’s warranted giving the nature of some of these changes, they need to spend more time trying to understand their forum community and less time enforcing group think. This tldr is far too long.

I think you’re wrong about the usage being justified. Because you don’t really know how many people like something.

Assuming that people come to the forums to complain, you’re naturally going to see more complaints on the forum. It’s not an accurate indication of the entire player base…only a very vocal percentage of the playerbase.

Saying people are mad and that gives them the right to act badly is wrong anyway.

The whole thing rings from a flaw in reasoning known as the argument from ignorance. The argument from ignorance is essentially the practice of saying something is true or false because there isn’t evidence to the contrary. This shows up in debates about approval and content a lot, and in forums it always follows the same pattern:

Person 1: A is true because you see it here.
Person 2: A is not true because you see opposite here.
Person 1: Exceptions that are dwarfed by the rest
Person 2: Forums aren’t representative so it isn’t an exception.
Person 1: I have a poll that says it is.
Person 2: That poll is posted on the forum…
Person 1: There’s no proof that forums aren’t representative.
Person 2: But there’s no proof that they are.
Person 1: But there was a rise/fall of players when this happened.
Person 2: Correlation isn’t causation. A hundred things could’ve caused that.

So on and so fourth. The issue being that we don’t know jack about the population distribution and popular opinion. It is possible that the forum is either an accurate representation, or an inaccurate representation, but we have no way to prove either.

Originally I would suggest that, instead of going off of popular opinion, you would go off of the logic inherent within each argument, but this poses another problem: ultimately what the community desires isn’t always logical. From a marketing standpoint, there’s always a strong force in decision making that is “what the customer wants”. I’ll be darned if I can figure out a method of getting popular opinion from the game other than a mandatory survey of every active player, since asking for volunteers results in skewed… results.

The whole thing is just a bad situation. To end it, I would just like to mirror the paranoia that Anet might choose to listen only to positive feedback, since it is very easy to invoke the argument from ignorance to dismiss the negative.

Bright.9160:

Except that if Anet wanted, they’d remove leashing from the game, and skipping would be an instant goner. I wonder why they haven’t done so, if they designed things to be killed 100% of the time. Oh right, but now I’m using logic, and you’re having a hard time grasping that.

Anet stated on not one, but multiple occasions that skipping is a legit tactic and totally okay. In fact, some parts of some dungeons were specifically designed for skipping. Most of Arah comes to mind for example. Some parts of CM come to mind too. The run in F/F TA as well after the valiants. I mean, why would it be that a mob that isn’t really so far away would leash right at the end of a bridge, so conveniently out of aggro range of the next mob and with only very few blossoms around?

There are plenty of examples where skipping was most likely intended as a legit tactic.

Stop trying to get your stupid ways enforced on other players. It’s annoying, and quite frankly, borders with fascism on some occasions. We’re not forcing you to skip everything, are we? We’re telling you to keep your flawed arguments to yourself, and play how you want and be happy with it. You on the other hand are telling all of us we’re wrong, not playing the game, cheating, exploiting, and should all play like you do, yet still claim to have the moral high ground.

Good luck with that, Mussolini.

This is some of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard. If you are honestly think that the only reason why leashing exists is to encourage people to skip mobs, then you need to think a whole lot harder about what would happen if all the mobs chased you everywhere no matter what. If you don’t honestly think that, then spare us your nonsense and quit trolling.

I’ve heard that excuse of “well, if Anet didn’t want us to skip, then they’d do so and so” and it is getting tiring. Last time I heard, if Anet really didn’t want us to skip, then they would’ve put arbitrary gates that forced clearing before being opened. Well, look what happens with all the recent dungeons: arbitrary gates forcing clearing. If you actually paid attention to what Hrouda said about skipping, you’d see he doesn’t condone it, and didn’t force players to fight every mob because he thinks its a sloppy and bad solution to the problem. Now that he’s gone, look what happened. Instead, the rare circumstance where Anet has designed mobs to be skipped is being used shamelessly as a sweeping justification for all skipping everywhere.

As much as I’d like to sit back and say “play how you want”, the fact is that elitists don’t. They go into every forum and insult players who do anything but run the builds and equipment they do. As if the only metric to gauge a player’s worth is how quickly they can do content and how risky they can be while doing it. Personal preference, comfort, or skill level be darned. You march on this crusade that anyone who doesn’t go for pure damage is bad for the game, and why is this done? All because the elitist despises any player who does anything but increase how fast they get coin from a dungeon.

Of course your constant push for elitism and discrimination is ruining the game for others, because now you keep pulling the better players into a hyper-refined niche that makes them incapable of handling with anything but other hyper-refined builds. So instead of having players who are good enough to run pure DPS working with regular groups and capable of playing off of regular groups, they isolate themselves and then go to the forums to post horror stories about how those backwoods pugs didn’t stack exactly when expected with no word on strategy every time they bother to venture into the rest of the community. But hey, at least we have a bunch of players who have no business running GC gear kissing dirt every 10 seconds because elitists are deeply disturbed by mentalities different from their own.

The whole “play how you want” thing would’ve gone fine until you decided you weren’t happy with how others played, so you go around demonizing them. Now we have this cultural civil war going on in this game, with the other extreme being players who now adamantly refuse any constructive criticism because they’re fed up with impossible advice given out with the purpose to be bragging rights and to increase the adviser’s income. If elitists hadn’t made a big deal about it in the first place, this never would’ve happened. The worst part is that you actually believe that players who like to fight mobs are jealous of you.

The hardest part about being civil is that I don’t want to be civil toward a monster. As much as it pains any company to hear this, the fact is that there are customers for every company that make things worse. For the community, and for the company themselves. I’ve seen it happen in many customer bases and videogame communities, and this one is no different.

Consider this: there exists players in the game who’s desires and activities are destructive to the game itself. There are players who are insufferable socially, who take every opportunity to be inflammatory, discriminatory, and hostile. The player who is not happy unless someone else isn’t. There are players who scam, attempting to rob everyone else of their work, their fun, and their peace of mind. There are gold farmers who exist solely to make a profit by selling in-game currency, using stolen credit cards to do so. There are players who do nothing but attempt to hack the game, create bots to let players easy mode their way to wealth, then sells these bots for real world money. There are players who seek only to find every profitable exploit possible, and never intended to play the game the way it is designed to be played.

Those are easy to spot, but what of the ones who aren’t? There are players in this game who, merely through suggestion and propaganda, want to destroy the identity of this game. They want endless grinding, and superiority in performance from that grinding. Players that want to abandon the combat system, replacing it with a generic trinity system with inflexible class makeup. Then there are players who discriminate as a form of personal duty, seeing other players only as tools to their own gain, and are hostile to anyone who doesn’t cave and conform to their demands. Players so entitled and selfish that they are proud of their own intolerance, and refuse to do anything but troll and insult others who don’t agree with them. There are players who seek to manipulate the competitive environment only to make their favorite class or tactic reign supreme, with no motivation for a balanced PVP game.

So take any good community, and ask them what they are supposed to do with their poisonous elements when they have no direct tools to stop it themselves? When any good community is ultimately helpless and at the mercy of those who wish to destroy that community? When the only other inevitable outcome is that the poison eventually takes full effect? Simple: you aren’t civil with them. They don’t want to reason, and they don’t want what is good for everyone. The only way to deal with those elements is to make sure they are uncomfortable, unwelcome, and not tolerated. Then, eventually when it becomes clear to them that they will not get what they want and they will not have fun doing what they do, then their only course of action is to change or leave.

Amurond.4590:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

OP: I bought chocolate ice cream, and for some reason it didn’t taste like chocolate. Why is that?
Brasil: Don’t buy chocolate ice cream. Problem solved. RESPECT ME!!!

I like how you think direct dmg vs conditions is a subjective argument.

I like how you think that is what I am criticizing. If the OP was asking about direct dmg vs condition dmg, then it would be relevant.

But he didn’t.

haviz.1340:

If you didn’t notice about 50% reduction of silvers hp you must have had really bad dps. Husks don’t die in 2-3s in old TA.

And why multiple smaller hp bags are preferable to one bag? It increases the importance of AoEs, makes los-ing even more important and reduces the viability of single target cc-s. In other words, everything that BHBs stand against.

I never bothered to time it. Then again, that was pre-LFG days, so it could be that the new HP drop coincided with an equal DPS drop from players in general.

Anyway, I’m used to an MMO where the standard mode of play was to be outnumbered 3 to 1, where enemy difficulty came more from numbers rather than being gigantic HP bags. While the two situations can pose equal threat, throwing around multiple enemies invokes a sense of relative power, whereas lightly plinking away against a single big enemy invokes a sense of weakness by comparison. Should things turn sour, the gains made against a group with smaller members are absolute; dead enemies stay dead, whereas failure against a big enemy means the loss of all progress.

Spreading skills and different forms of threat also allows for targeted progress: If one enemy in the group has skills (say, large AoE stuns) that a group of players can’t handle, then they have the option to target, disable and burn that particular enemy, eliminating that kind of threat. Throwing all of the abilities onto few or one mob results in players just having to shrug and grit through a troublesome attack. This also means a diminished effectiveness in enemy attacks, since few or a single enemy has to deal with cooldowns and attack at a certain pace, whereas multiple enemies can attack simultaneously, posing more threat. The end result being that having more enemies results in both greater possible challenge, as well as more tactics in which to deal with that situation.

I suppose the biggest drawback to such a system is that, to compensate for low health, each enemy need proportionately higher damage. Even the mooks need to pose a threat to stay engaged, and if they die quicker then they need to kill quicker.

I don’t have a problem with AoEs. Single target CC isn’t a problem if encounters are designed well enough: a mixture of low HP + high HP enemies, as well as enemies with distinguishable immediate threat makes single target CC worthwhile even when being swarmed. I’m not even sure what LOS is supposed to refer it. As far as I know, that means Line of Sight, AKA “be capable enough to point your toon in the right direction when shooting”. I don’t have a problem with that. Maybe it is in reference to enemies body blocking. I’d actually prefer to see more of that, since it makes sense: have mooks out front while the dangerous guy in the back lays waste. Its like putting snipers at the end of a long hallway: it’s annoying to deal with but a realistic expectation of combat.

So far, this path is permanent.

Of course, if and when Scarlet is finally defeated, the path will become outdated and quit making sense, so it’ll have to be changed again. But I don’t see that happening for awhile.

I haven’t noticed an overall HP decrease as much as I have noticed that more vets are running about instead of silvers. I have also noticed there are a lot more enemies in general… I’m for this change, though, since a whole lot of smaller HP bags is preferable to one gigantic bag.

Something I’ve always found interesting is that everyone always has a different response to the whole skipping thing. Some say it is to make money. Some say it is because they are bored with the dungeon. Some say it is because they enjoy skipping. Some say it is to be “leet”.

Well, the good news is that Anet is already starting to do the stuff you mentioned. For example, the newest dungeon revamp they have made it so the entrance to each area is closed off until you kill all of the enemies, or the objectives are surrounded by adds and the objectives themselves are slow to complete.

Anet themselves have stated that they are looking in to increasing how profitable the mobs are throughout the dungeon, but are having difficulty balancing this. The problem is that if you make the random mobs too profitable, then players will just do the beginning of a dungeon instead of skipping to the end of the dungeon.

It is annoying that players actually avoiding playing the game, but this if Anet’s current trend continues, then this problem is only a temporary one.

That video was awesome. It does make me think why some people would even bother with anything but HS spam.

It really depends on the circumstances. As far as necromancers go, they have their highest potential damage from conditions, due to how well they can spread them. Overall, I’d say play how you want and don’t worry too much about it, since there isn’t anything in the game that needs to you to run power. To get into specifics:

Dungeons: you won’t be well liked by elitists, but running a conditionmancer is fine for pugs and casuals. The only time you’ll really run into issues is when you have two or more condi builds in the same group, because then damage can start to drop off. If you have a dedicated group where you’re the only condi user, go nuts. Lately, I’m seeing few and fewer condi builds, so the chances of meeting up with another one in a pug are pretty low.

Overworld: the only time you’ll have a problem against champions and world bosses are the ones that are heavily zerged. Temple bosses, champ trains, dragon champions, the ones where there are 20 or so guys on one mob you’ll see an issue. But, in champions that aren’t fought in large groups, or areas with zergs of mobs themselves, condition builds are fine.

You’ll still do damage, since nearly all condition attacks have direct damage components, so getting credit isn’t an issue.

WvW: Conditions are pretty good here. In small scale fights (anything from 1 vs. 1 to 10 vs. 10), the AoE power from conditions and their pressure can do plenty of damage to other players. It is actually pretty good at doing damage. In zerg vs. zerg, sometimes a well formed enemy zerg will pack a cleansing, but a necro can easily maintain AoE condi pressure despite this.

Personally I just have multiple builds.

The only ones that don’t make too much sense are norn and sylvari. Then again, this is a game, so you can make any class of any race and throw whatever storyline you want behind it.

TheMaskedParadigm.3629:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

OP: I bought chocolate ice cream, and for some reason it didn’t taste like chocolate. Why is that?
Brasil: Don’t buy chocolate ice cream. Problem solved. RESPECT ME!!!

No, the answer would be to buy a different brand of chocolate ice cream. If you want to apply your nonsense to this situation, the answer would be to do damage in a different way. Condition damage is capped on how much it can do, and the entire group of people you are playing with all share this cap. 5 Rangers get to share 25 bleed stacks and fight over Burning and Poison. It’s a stupid design and it doesn’t work in PvE. If every single mob or boss was a Dredge from Fractal 80, then condition damage would serve more of a purpose. Everything is susceptible to direct damage.

No, the answer is what durend said. The OP was asking a very specific question, and you didn’t answer it. Instead, you broke off into an unrelated tangent where you massage your own ego about how much you like strawberry icecream, just like you are doing now.

I"d like to help, but there isn’t any build listing or description in the video or in the description for the video. This is all I can tell:

Scepter/Focus, Sword/Torch, possibly perplexity runes. Ether Feast, Decoy, Blink, Arcane Thievery, Mass Invisibility.

It has been mentioned before, but if someone who doesn’t discriminate explains it, this might make more sense.

The thing with GW2 is that nearly all of the defense in this game is “active”. What this means is, defending yourself isn’t really about an armor rating, or a HP bar. It is about recognizing enemy tells, blocking and blinding those attacks, maintaining distance, strafing, and dodging. Other MMOs invoke passive defense, where everything is determined by your stats beforehand.

Because of this, the roles played by any character isn’t too limited on their stat distribution. A guardian can reflect and block just as well in full zerker as well as they can in full PVT gear. But rather, the “role” they play is based on the utilities and traits they have at their disposal. This is a bit jarring, since this is different from both other MMOs, and from sPVP/WvW mode in this same game.

As for the reasons why it is different, there are several reasons:

1)In PVP, your opponent will always have relatively high sustained damage, so things such as effective HP and the overall damage to durability ratio come into play. In PVE, enemies have strong but slow and telegraphed moves. This means that in PVP active defense only avoids some damage, whereas in PVE it neutralizes nearly all of it.

A)This is also why healing is more important in PVP. Whereas you can dodge nearly everything in PVE, if you can’t dodge then you’ll never heal the massive amount of damage done. But in PVP, since you can’t dodge everything and damage is sustained, the healing contributes meaningfully to your overall health.

B)This is also why durability is important. With active defense stopping so much less, you’ll rely on your stats a lot more. The sacrifice for greater damage is meaningful, since an opponent can do comparably greater damage to your HP bar than you do to him if built right.

2)PVP objectives aren’t about killing your opponent. In sPVP, it is about point control and secondary scoring mechanics. Sure, killing helps, but it isn’t necessary to progress. In WvW, it is about group movement, siege, and holding towers/keeps (which don’t go by normal combat rules), so again it isn’t necessary to kill your opponents as much as it is to drive them off. But in PVE, it is all about death, killing enemies, and more death. So, offense became the name of the game.

3)You fully heal after fights. In games where you don’t, defensive stats and healing are important for long term sustainability, but in this game you get a clean slate for merely ending the fight. With active defense being important and limited, the faster an enemy goes down, the less damage they do and the quicker you can heal up. Because of this, DPS gear is both offensive and defensive in one.

4)The game is designed with close ratios between offense and durability. In some games, one player can have 10 to 20 times the effective HP of another character, and some characters can have 5 or 10 times the damage. In this game, the scales kitten much smaller (for example, only looking at gear + 300 Power/Prec/Crit damage and ignoring sigils/runes/trait abilities, berserker only does 50% more damage than soldiers), and this allows for players to have diverse builds while still being relatively effective. This diversity doesn’t punish players for any glaring flaws in group composition, so players are free to go full DPS without fear of being completely one shot by everything.

When you add all of these things together, you get a perfect storm that focuses on damage above all else. Ultimately, I would like to see this storm remedied, and this is most easily done by making PVE more like PVP. Put in enemies that have high sustained damage and attack frequently with quick AoEs and cleaves, have objectives that are explicitly not about killing enemies, and you’ll see build diversity become much more useful.

Yenn.9185:

At this point, it’s better to segregate the community between casual and speed runners. The problem is (PuG) casuals also like to speedrun, evidence to that is they still join speedrun groups despite not having zerkers. And yes, zerkers wanna be partied with other zerkers because they want fast runs.

PS. Don’t get kitten when someone says cleric gears are trash in dungeons.

Another big problem with segregation is that those who don’t fit in either camp get lumped into communities where they don’t fit, consistently polarizing the problem and making it worse. When segregating you end up shoving people into extremes while ignoring the middle ground, so you end up a bunch of people not capable of playing how they want because they neither want to be super-efficient discriminatory elitists, nor do they want to be ignore all self-improvement casuals.

When you get people who only run in the segregated groups, then it pulls those players from the game itself. Every player good at the game who decides only to run with only one group(even if they don’t want to) is taken from the possible pool of pugs. This means that, eventually, all you’ll get are new and inexperienced players, so partying with random people just gets worse and worse. The good players and the veterans aren’t there to teach them, or to even off the scales.

The population that does grenth changes regularly, so you’ll get groups of people who don’t know how to do it. Although the fight is quite simple by normal standards (kill the adds, damage the boss, kill the adds that spawn, damage boss, repeat until death), it does have bad descriptions for things. But, once you get a certain group trained to do it, you’ll have easy grenth runs for a few weeks until they change over.

I wouldn’t blame the grenth event as much as I would blame… everything else. Pretty much every temple boss and every champion in orr is extremely straightforward, requiring you to just attack them until death. There’s no real indication that grenth is an exception until you faceplant and fail at him. Expecting people wandering around the game to know that grenth is an exception is just unreasonable. I wouldn’t blame the champ trains on failure, either, since Grenth failure has been going on a lot longer than that.

For those wanting a mini guide to the Risen Priest of Grenth, here it is:

There are several things you need to take note of during this event.

#1: The adds are priority number one. The event fails of Jonez Deadrun takes too much damage, and attacking only the boss will result in adds rushing Jonez as the spawn throughout the event. So, kill all the adds in front of the priest at the start of the event, then engage the priest while killing adds behind him.

#2: Priority number two is keeping the priest away from Jonez. The priest attacks with large AoEs that drop on every target in range, so if the priest gets near Jonez, who sits atop the stairs at the entrance of the room, the priest will quickly kill Jonez with his AoEs. The priest has a habit of aggroing on one particular player, an you can tell who this player is because the priest will gaze every so lovingly at them all the time. This player who has the aggro should engage the priest at all times regardless of circumstances, even their own death. Because if you can’t take the heat and have to run away, you’ll pull the priest and ruin everything. But if you die, you can run back and still get credit for the event. If you have the priest’s aggro, you can run to the corners in the back of the chamber to pull him further away.

#3: The shades are a complicated and powerful enemy that kill and need to be killed in a special way. First, they’re immune to all damage unless you get one of the buffs from the left and right side of the entrance of the room (big swirling cloud on the ground). Then, you can fight the shades. The shades put a debuff on you with every attack and at 25 stacks of this debuff you die instantly. The shades can be easily kited or blinded. The shades will spawn when the priest is at 75%, 50%, and 25% health, so if you do not have the priests aggro, run back to kill shades when he reaches 75% and 50% health.

When the priest reaches 25% health, such an incredibly large group of shades will spawn that it is impossible to fight them off, so try to burn down the priest as quickly as possible at that time.

#4: the priest himself has several attacks. They have no immediate range limit, so you can safely melee the priest.
A)He will throw a projectiles in an arc in front of him that become miniature ice elementals that explode. This attack isn’t too dangerous or damaging, but it can be reflected and blocked as it is a projectile. You can rez off of the ice elementals sometimes.
B)He will drop a bunch of icicles from above. This attack creates bright red circles on the ground and takes forever to take full effect, so it is easy to run out of the rings or just dodge on command.
C)His most deadly attack: He will twirl his staff above his head, causing several portals with very short delay to form on the ground sequentially. These portals do damage, then drop you from the roof to do fall damage, then do damage when you land, and this can hit for massive amounts. They can sometimes be dodged, but require quick timing to avoid. This is deadly because the fall damage bypasses armor and the downed state.

So yes, full DPS is the way to go.

#5: If you are defeated, rez at a waypoint and run back. The battle is way too chaotic to rez the defeated, and trying to rez them often results in death. If no one pulls the priest to Jonez, then you’ll have nigh unlimited time to beat the event.

#6: Transformation skills lose the buff that kills shades, as well as getting downed. Take note of this.

Keep these things in mind, and be mindful of the environment, and you too can kill the priest. It’s actually easier with a small team: get a group of 5 or so together and the adds + AoEs won’t go out of control. Also note, this event is one of the few that is vulnerable to trolls, since it takes just one player to fail the event.

I’ve seen in threads I haven’t posted in. Ergo, it isn’t directed at me. And yes, it is quite a bit more complicated than just partying with likeminded people.

I’m running out of time, so I’ll try to keep this short. Levels are good because:

#1: It provides a sense of accomplishment to what you attempt.
#2: Watching characters grow in strength provides a connection to them.
#3: It makes for a simple scale to segment abilities so players don’t get overloaded when starting. But overloaded from enemy abilities, and from player abilities.

I think it is hilarious that the topic is basically copying a post of a player complaining about runescape. I could’ve sworn I had seen the same stuff posted there four years ago or so.

Anyway, as always there are many flaws with the things he brings up:

1)Catering to end-game: This in itself isn’t bad, since ultimately the end of the game is what people are expecting when they pick up the game. The contrast, catering to mid game or beginning game, has the problem in that it permanently cuts off all of the players past that point. While adding stuff at the end of the game means more stuff for everyone to do eventually, adding stuff at the middle or the beginning means more stuff for only new players to do.

2)Adding too much currency: He’s actually right about this. I’ve played a few games where the most valuable items were more valuable than the currency hard cap. This only happens if you throw out cash more cash than there are sinks.

3)Making things too easy: The problem with his statement here is that it neglects player diversity. The fact is that challenge is not where the fun comes from. The fun comes from being entertained or engaged. The mistake that was made here is that there are many players who become engaged by being challenged, and the writer thinks this is everyone.

4) Focusing on one area too much: this is an idea that is purely subjective, in the sense that it can never be incorrect. No matter how wide the focus of the devs, if there is a point where there is something that a player thinks is being neglected, then the devs are putting too much focus into something else and should focus on what that player wants. Repeat this a million times and you get politics. The real concern is widespread negligence by the devs, which is different from just over-focus on one aspect.

5)Over amplifying numbers: The flaw here is that there is satisfaction in numbers. I’ll use early runescape as an example: when starting the game a long time ago, you could only hit a 0 or 1 on an enemy. This… sucked. But, eventually the game was changed so everyone did 10x the damage, and 10x the HP. Now, starting out you could hit 0-10, and the cumulative effect meant that players could see their progress in the game.

It is for this reason that high damage gear has such an appeal in MMOs. With low damage gear you just feel like you are ticking, plinking, and nitpicking away at enemies. But with DPS gear you cut huge swaths into enemies, and so it is satisfying.

Also the damage often comes from the scale of health. Sometimes players grow in a non-linear fashion, and so the numbers can seem “out of control” whereas they truly represent the scale of change that goes on in the gam.

#6)Over-emphasizing the market: the flaw the writer assumes is that there is no relationship between people wanting to spend money, and advertising. Funny thing: advertisements get people to want to buy that product. It has worked that way for forever. This is also a subjective stance, since anyone who isn’t happy with it will say there is “too much”, whereas others can disagree.

#7)Shafting veterans. Funny thing, this is the opposite of the end-game problem, since veterans are the ones… that play the endgame. But anyway I digress: a lot of this is an entitlement issue. Again, it is subjective because people can always think they deserve more. In the runescape example he provided, many people complained that they weren’t getting statistical advantages over new players. There is the flip side in which new players feel violated because gaming veterans get so much more stuff, and the new players feel like they could never compete or achieve what the old players do.

#8)Uber buffing: This is correct, so long as you don’t look too far into what he is asking for: Power creep. One of the big complaints in games is that things that aren’t added… to end game… are useless because you’ll just pass them up, hence the “is this item needed and what does it add?” thing. The response is that players always want new stuff to be stronger or better or make more money, otherwise it is useless. If you have to ask “what is the point” in super pretendy fun time, then you aren’t doing super pretendy fun time right.

Targeting the wrong demographic: this one is a no-brainer, but it also highly unpredictable. For example, no one knew My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic would be so popular with adult men.

#9)Giving experience too easily: again, not a problem if most of the game is based around gear or even competition. This is a complaint a lot of people have when they want a game where no-lifing allows you to pwn n00bs.

Tl;dr: same stuff that was always posted on the RS forums: a lot of subjective stuff, a lot of entitlement. I see in the years I haven’t been playing the game, nothing has changed.

I think one of the things that hasn’t been looked at with the loot and crafting system is the community.

I’ve played a game which has, bar none, the most hostile player community I’ve ever seen in an MMORPG. It was a bit of a mystery, with people blaming everything from the age group to the advertising campaign, but one of the things that contributed to this game’s hostility was that all other players were essentially your enemy:

#1: All gathering nodes were shared globally and could be depleted by one player. You had to fight other players for space and race against other players to get materials.

#2: Monster loot was only given to one player in most circumstances, meaning that it was a competition to get to the monster and “kill stealing” was a huge thing. Again, monster numbers were limited.

#3: All of the best items were all from extremely rare random drops. I’m talking about killing thousands and thousands of a single kind of enemy and never seeing one, so because of this items took on a stock-market like pricing system really quickly.

#4: The PVP system was a “winner gets everything the loser was wearing” system, so a lot of the PVP was factionless backstabbing in an attempt to get the extremely rare + wealthy stuff.

The community was literally given every reason to hate each other. From taking nodes, to taking loot, to literally stealing the clothes off of your back.. It is hard to be cooperative and understanding when literally everyone else in the game is a detriment to you.

It was early in GW2s design that they talked about the philosophy of a cooperative gaming environment, and this is one of the things that sold me on the game. Individualized loot meant no incentive to kick players and no kill stealing. Individualized crafting nodes meant I could craft at my own pace instead of having to buy from some no-life or bot. Dynamic event mechanics mean that other players don’t hinder your own quests (special exceptions apply). The lower equipment ceiling means that all content in the game isn’t some gear check. Multiple ways to gain equipment allowed for individual play styles, and instances meant no “crashing” other parties.

To that end, I think they’ve done quite well with how loot is handled. There are some obvious complaints, such as DR (implemented only as an anti-botting measure) and how many events are based around RNG loot boxes, but no one is perfect.

My biggest concern is about exploitation of any “help n00bs” mechanic that gets put in place. Someone else mentioned before that it is a fine line between too little and too much, but the incentives seem like they can be easily gamed by switching to alts, making dummy accounts, players selling their newness as “incentive”, or something else that will arise. I’m not sure it would even work, since this attempts to appeal to elitism instead of discouraging elitism. We’ve already heard what they say: “I quit mowing the grass because they’re always more grass to mow, so now I only go to places where the grass doesn’t grow anymore”.

I’m afraid other than a community shift, there isn’t any way to get elitists to become tolerant again.

As to the OP, I applaud him for taking time to actually think about the issue. I like his analogy, too. I suppose one thing to consider is why it is people want to be SWAT or a superheroes. Another thing to consider is why it is people _don’t_want to be a SWAT or a superhero. It is there that things really become interesting.

OP: I bought chocolate ice cream, and for some reason it didn’t taste like chocolate. Why is that?
Brasil: Don’t buy chocolate ice cream. Problem solved. RESPECT ME!!!

Photoloss: The fact that you honestly think the blind fields were only used on the hounds is proof of how little you actually care about the issue. If nullifying the offense of every non-champion enemy in the dungeon isn’t enough “support” for you, then nothing is. Come back when you actually care to think about the issue.

First playthough I did was on a mesmer, and the whole time I kept wishing I was on my engi/thief/necro.

The reason is simple: the group I had was bad at pulling the holos, and unfortunately they were too far away to focus pull. However, thief/necro/engineer all have a 1200 range direct pull that can move the holo’s across the map very easily.

The thief is particularly notable, due to its ability to spam blind fields. Then, when you get ambushed by a bunch of nightmare hounds, instead of the group wiping the hounds flail helplessly at open air. The slick and sparki fight is pretty simple: go dagger/dagger, and then you can backstab the two all day for massive damage. Slick can’t even defend himself at close range, and plus stealing from them keeps getting you elixir of Heroes, so you have invincibility periods where you can just go meshugga. That only matters for sparki, though. The oozes weren’t a problem either: one off-hand pistol and you can blind them over and over again while using smoke screen and devourer venom to hold off the elementals. The limitless dodging came in handy while face tanking spur and the clockheart, and should the clockheart get off its’ mega attack, you can just spam disabling shot to avoid every attack.

As a mesmer, I felt like little more than a damage dealer. The biggest advantage being that I could maintain distance from holo’s while they blew up generator. I didn’t find wardens or feedback nearly as useful against sparki and slick, since they would usually get off one combination before dying, and frequently they would end up distracting the ooze from eating oil. The thief did more damage, though, hitting for upwards to 24k with the CnD + backstab combo, and 13k a pop with Heartseeker when they were nearly dead.

I have yet to play though it with my engineer or necro, though. The advantage with the engineer is that I can dole out maximum damage at any range (again), and I’ll also have access to pulls, plenty of control, a few reflects, and also the ability to spam blast finishers in my own water field to heal up everyone from the DoTs in the area. Most importantly, I’ll have access to a better rez skill in Toss Elixir R.

The necro might be more of a problem. They don’t have anything stellar, yet they’ll still have the tools for the job: blind fields and fear + stuns for the ooze section, a whole lot of HP and life force to absorb the DoTs from slick + sparki fight, and a 1200 range pull for the holos.

I think the hardest game I ever played was Capcom vs. SNK 2 EO. For giggles, I cranked the difficulty up to the maximum and went through the campaign mode, or whatever the tournament story mode thingy was called (haven’t played the game in years). By the third round of the tournament match, after an hour, I gave up. I got my butt handed to me so many times and so succinctly that I knew that, if I were to practice for a year straight, I would have never gotten past that third match up.

The hardest part was that this wasn’t a numbers check, or a pattern. There was no “weakness”, or special tell you had to see. You were given an opponent who played intelligently, and also acted and reacted three times faster than you can, and had such sweet moves that every repeated failure was in itself a spectacle.

And that is where most games fail on difficulty. Whenever they give the boss a gimmick, or a big tell, or a set pattern, then the fight is no longer hard. The only “hard” part is figuring out the trick, and then after that it’s all ice cream and gum drops. Or if it is simply a stat check, then difficulty = leveling up enough. Most bosses and challenges are puzzles, or they are gear checks.

The people who complain about things being too hard or too easy, I find this represents how well someone can problem solve. The “too easy” crowd does one of two things: either they solve the problem really quickly, or they’ve looked up how someone else did it. The “too hard” crowd usually does two things: first they don’t look up how to do something beforehand, and then they are really bad at figuring out the problem. Sometimes they’ll look it up before hand, but not have to wit to figure out why their group failed when another group didn’t.

There are exceptions to the rule, such as bad design (read: fake difficulty), but generally this is how I’ve seen most “challenges” play out.

I find that people’s definition of elitists is too narrow, which leads to some confusion when people start arguing about them.

Elitism as a word holds its history in government, being related to those who were selected or chosen, and so the words “elite” and a “election” share a relationship. It is from here that elite had “ism” attached to its end, and it became about the state or practice of being elite, particularly with ruling bodies and government. Elite came to mean “the privileged” or “the wealthy” or “the gifted”, and elitism was being rule by them; a notion which wasn’t popular when the word was invented.

This old world definition is how it came to be applied in games. “Elitism”, or governing by the elite, ultimately meant the exclusion of those who were not elite. From this, we’ve found the term “elitism” applied to places where some select group or club has status that excludes everyone else by direct action. Thus, the most appropriate definition in gaming, as well as the most encompassing definition, is

Elitism (gaming): A group of players with self perceived privilege or skill that emphasize play only with other privileged players.

The primary tool for doing this is exclusion, much as it has been for all “elite” groups in history. This can describe nearly every circumstance of elitism mentioned in this thread, and also brings to light some misconceptions:

#1: The elitist does not have to be good at the game.
#2: The elitist does not have to be right about how they gauge others.
#3: A player who is good is not necessarily an elitist.
#4: A elitist does not have to and can acknowledge that they do not fit their own criteria.
#5: An elitist does not need to want to be an elitist to be an elitist.

That is where a great many misconceptions lie. It’s like this in real life, too. We’ve all seen a great many people who are full of themselves, but can’t make sense of it an have nothing to show for it.

I wasn’t the biggest fan of F/U, and I’m still sad to see it go. I’d rather have it revamped then just… dumped.

Unfortunately, it is really hard to find a group that doesn’t skip. Anet talked about forming non-skipping guilds, but I haven’t heard hide nor hair of one.

I support the OP.

The biggest problem I have with the dev’s explanation is that it lazy. I’ve seen games that have vastly different sized characters and still had the ability to interact with objects. Of course there were size/clipping issues, but the players didn’t really care about that. They just cared that they were there. A lot of players want to be able to make stupid poses and interact with different things, clipping be darned.

The OP brings up one of the many design flaws of the condition system in this game. The caps wouldn’t be so bad if every class inflicted different DoTs. But every class inflicts the same DoTs. I was kicking around the idea of making each class emphasize different condis, so they won’t become redundant nearly as quickly. It is a bit boring that if you make a condi build, its all about bleeding and not much else.

I do think the problem with the condi limit is the server processing power. The way GW2 handles conditions is… problematic. The problem is, the server re-calculates the damage done for every tick of every condi on the enemy. This means that, while direct damage does its calculation only once, a condition attack does its calculation a dozen times. It has to constantly pull from memory the identity of the player, the level of the player, the malice of the player, and then calculate and apply that to each condition, which keeps track of its duration and stack limit.

25 stacks per enemy can get pretty stressful when you have players all over the map fighting different enemies. A simple solution to this would be to change it so the condi only calculates its damage at application, then simply subtracts that amount each tick. Doing this, you could save a whole load of processing power, and with that you can easily triple the current condi limit.

I’ve done the math a few times. Generally, berserker is better than assassin, but not by much. This is because of how well power scales up when compared to precision or crit damage.

Broadicea.8294:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

I don’t expect LFG results to stay as bad as they are now. Eventually people will learn what is up with dungeons and it won’t be so painful to pug.

LFG.com has been around for what, 8 months? And the pugs from there are still pathetic if your baseline for measurement is anything above “barely competent”. Now there’s an entire new population of pugs trying to get into dungeons without knowing fact #1 about how the game really works. I don’t expect it to be any different until 2015.

The LFG tool, however, is really new. Personally I’ve found the pugs from gw2lfg more than satisfactory for awhile: most of the random groups I join run berserker, stack for buffs, and dodge enemy attacks just fine while using area appropriate skills like reflects and blinds. Of course these new guys don’t do that, but it’ll probably be just a few months before they catch on.

I listen to… strange things. Lately I’m listening to nightcore, touhou remixes, and a few miscellaneous rock albums from bands I’ve never heard of before.

Snack.9315:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Phineas Poe.3018:

DesertRose.2031:

While Rampager properly deals slightly more damage in solo PvE Berserker scales better in groups, so I advice you to not bother with Rampager in PvE.

What do you mean by “Berserker scales better in groups”?

Condition cap.

I understand that. But I tend to play with certain people I know, not PuGs, and I know they don’t use (or focus on) condition damage most of the time. So even if they use conditions, I will probably override theirs.

The thing is, if you were using direct damage, then you wouldn’t need to overwrite their conditions, and so their conditions would do full damage on top of their direct damage.

You go do something else. Seriously, if you don’t want to play the game then don’t play the game.

I broke my regular trend with the thief. I only have one build for him, so I only have one outfit, but I alternate what is displayed at different times. First is hood on, shoulders off, and totally not stealing from that cart. Second image is shoulder’s on, hood off, and not about to deface that poster.

Outfit is anonymity hood, order of the whisper’s leggings and boots, and duelist everything else.

And now for my necro. Went for the “goth loli” look with her. First outfit is full TA except it has some green rank circlet and shoes. Second outfit is a mixture of HOTW chest + cloves, SE with everything else. No mask.

Got my norn mesmer here. First outfit is full vigil, second outfit is full HotW gear without the shoulderpads showing. NOTE: we had to bribe her with ale to get her to take the pictures, and as a result she was quite inebriated at the time.

Got my human engineer here. First suit is full divinity council w/ noble mask, second is full cultural tier 3.

Phineas Poe.3018:

DesertRose.2031:

While Rampager properly deals slightly more damage in solo PvE Berserker scales better in groups, so I advice you to not bother with Rampager in PvE.

What do you mean by “Berserker scales better in groups”?

Condition cap.

I don’t expect LFG results to stay as bad as they are now. Eventually people will learn what is up with dungeons and it won’t be so painful to pug.