Guild Wars 2

Potentially useless info:

During Dragon Bash you can get the Slice of Candied Dragon Roll food which seems to be the same thing as the Omnomberry Ghost (albeit shorter duration) but costs darn near nothing at all.

However, I still wonder at their value versus the Squash. Your logic about Hidden Killer vs. Executioner and large bursts being extremely effective at causing panic (not to mention making HP pools drop) makes a lot of sense, and it would seem that adding a significant amount to that burst would be a good idea.

The Ghosts might be the highest theoretical DPS if you go with the HP-Swing method (which isn’t entirely valid, it looks like you’re counting a ghost proc as 700 damage which really isn’t fair at all), but in what situation is that actually useful for a class that isn’t going for a bunker strategy? Not to mention the RNG baked into the mechanic.

In a short fight I’d certainly think that you’d want more burst to get rid of the opponent altogether as quickly as possible versus sacrificing a pretty decent amount of damage for a small heal and giving them the chance to just live longer and do more damage to you. Even in a long drawn out fight against something like a bunker Guardian, is trying to essentially “out-bunker” the Guardian with the Ghosts going to be desirable versus simply lining up more damage?

Give me 25 stacks of might and 25 stacks of bloodlust on my Necromancer, and I’ll down zergs by myself.

Seriously. I love how people are acting as if no other classes in the game can stack Bloodlust/Might/Zerker/etc and do a lot of damage.

Yay, ANOTHER thread that boils down to, “I don’t like stealth, so nerf something about Thieves.”

Thread after thread on these boards whining about thieves, and all it ever boils down to is, “I don’t like stealth….just because! Nerf it!”

Yes, thieves are annoying and very hard to pin down sometimes, but there’s not a whole lot else to them. Other classes are far more beneficial for most WvW purposes.

Why are there like 2000 threads on this? And why do they all boil down to, “I saw this thief, he didn’t do anything at all to me or my group, but he turned invisible and I couldn’t see him!”

One thing I really like about this build and your videos is that it seems like your opponents are actually capable and you’re coming out on top.

You see way too many PvP videos – especially Mesmer, just due to the mechanics – where they seem to be fighting complete idiots. =/

I bet this has been asked 9000 times (but I haven’t seen it in this thread, punch me if I missed it) but I’m surprised that in a build so focused on shatters and burst that you don’t seem to entertain using Mental Torment. (20% more damage on Mind Wrack)

Is it just that you don’t feel the extra damage is necessary or that putting the 10 points up there causes you to give up too much survivability?

Wow.

A control scheme that’s standard to pretty much all MMO’s (and other games as well) is considered a “game-breaking” bug by Mr. $4000 and a few others, and so they’re declaring GW2 a failure?

Take your ball, go home, and leave us alone.

I spend an inordinate amount of time in Cursed Shore farming for a legendary, as it’s by far the most efficient method.. should I be afraid to return? Do I need to alter my playing habits?

That’s just it. They designed the much-touted “endgame weapons” to require a grind that basically forces you to ACT like a bot every time you log in. Go to the popular farming places, farm with the farming zerg, moving from one point to another ad nauseum. It’s pretty impressive just how huge a grind they threw into the game.

Then a ton of people get banned for “bot-like behavior”. Brilliant.

“Bot zones”

That’s a good one. The only way to not be in one would be to purposefully avoid events altogether.

The best part about this thread is the fact that the way the game encourages you to play at level 80 sure as heck makes you look like a bot anyway. No shock that some people got caught up in the ban wave.

It seems like such a no-brainer: crafting items that can then be used while you level to the next tier, rinse repeat.

Nope. The best way to be successful at crafting is to pick up Cooking and Jewelcrafting, rake in a bunch of easy Experience with them, then come to forums and tell everyone how easy the crafting system is.

It’s really annoying how the standard reply to every thread is:

“Stop having goals. Just log in and…you know…be there. But don’t have any goals. Don’t try to get a particular item that you like, or level a certain craft or anything at all. Just stop having goals period.”

To an outsider, this game would seem insanely boring if all they saw were your constant posts on how you shouldn’t have any goals at all.

Hah, this actually is pretty funny. It’s true, though, these great heroes just fall over dead every time something looks at them.

Last night I was working on soloing Caudecus’ Manor story mode, and the first golem pops and boom, down goes Logan instantly. Kill the golem, rez Logan…next room the friggin’ Door Guard slaps Logan down! It’s just one nameless guy, c’mon!

I agree that it could be a very niche part of the content, but then I’ll wager that paid tournaments and such will be extremely niche as well.

However, I feel like one of the stumbling blocks to people enjoying this sort of content in other MMO’s is all the barriers to entry involved. The sPvP concept in Guild Wars 2 has shown me that even players that thought they disliked PvP in other games can actually come to enjoy it when the grinding elements and “getting one-shot by people in uber gear” are removed.

Perhaps a system that removes the barriers to entry and encourages people to simply jump in and attempt some difficult content together would have a similar result on people that thought they hated “raiding” in other MMO’s.

The concept of “bringing the content to the players” seems to have been a core part of Arena Net’s philosophy when it came to the development of Guild Wars 2, and I feel that for the most part they’ve done a good job of bringing that philosophy to life.

Particularly the Structured PvP environments and to a lesser extent WvW both do a great job of letting the player just jump into the real meat of the content without needing to worry about grinding a ton of gear or prerequisites.

Where I feel the game is somewhat lacking is in the offerings of challenging, tuned and competitive PvE content. As it stands, the Group PvE content in Guild Wars 2 really doesn’t offer anything that other MMO’s haven’t in the past. A handful of 5-man instances that are – quite frankly – easily farmed right from the start.

Furthermore, these instances all abide by the standard MMO rules. You have to be of a particular level to attempt them, and having decent gear certainly doesn’t hurt.

Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t want that kind of content to be removed. The entire outdoor world of GW2 is very well done in most every aspect and I don’t see any reason that any part of that “Adventure Mode” should be altered or removed.

What I propose – and what could really truly embody the philosophy of “bringing the content to the players” in a way that I don’t think any AAA MMO has done in the past – is a Structured PvE system that mirrors the sPvP system already in the game. Most of the mechanics regarding player elements would be the same. Everyone bumped to maximum level, with access to all their traits and slot skills and vendors happily providing a variety of gear to them.

As players tackle the challenges set before them, new tiers of cosmetic gear, titles, achievements, etc. would become available to them, just like in sPvP. Gamers tend to be extremely competitive about just about anything, so even simple things like leaderboards showing who has defeated each encounter the most times, or in the fastest time, or with the least amount of deaths, could be added.

The content? Well, to start with, you already have a lot extremely impressive opponents out there. The Shatterer, Claw of Jormag, Tequatl the Sunless, and many other large models that already exist in the world today.

Before anyone brings up the topic of “raiding”…this need NOT be traditional raiding as people understand it. In fact, it could even be 5-man content just like existing dungeons. The important part is that it is a system that offers finely tuned, challenging PvE content to the players with the same all-inclusive, “jump right in” philosophy that the current PvP systems embody.