Guild Wars 2

The quickness on pet swap is the only one that fits in. It works great in combination with F2 skills. But giving the player quickness and both parties might as well? That starts turning pet swap into a method of burst damage.

This is the issue I’m trying to get across, which I probably explained poorly in my OP; pet swap is being turned into a means of boon and condition application when it should be a way to manage pets. Traits should be granting effects that support this management, such as applying quickness which speeds up the next pets F2. Other effects, like applying posion, vigor, and granting quickness to the player, belong in other places.

Heimskarl, I have to disagree with you. Ask any experienced ranger that cares about efficiency and they will tell you to hold off swapping pets to maximize efficiency and save your next pets skills for a good moment.

Take the popular PvP strategy; you start with a spider or canine and don’t swap your pet until you have a use out of the wolves F2, which can be used right next to you immediately upon a swap, which it will then follow with a knockdown. If you swap pets constantly you will not be able to use this as both their knockdown and pet swap will be on cooldown when you best need it.

Take PvE, where a top strategy is using a feline and drake. You swap to the best one out of combat (feline for single target, drake for AoE) and remain with it for as long as you can, stacking as many boons as possible. If you use a jungle stalker for group might stacking, you use it right before the fight, then swap to your other pet before the fight starts. Pet swapping in these cases does not benefit from the traits, which only activate in combat.

In PvE, while in combat, you only swap pets is in a few situations like when your pet is at risk of death/down, to instantly reposition it, and in prolonged fights such as those that started with a group of enemies but is down to 1 where you switch from the drake to your feline.

These traits are in conflict with proper pet management, making players feel like they have to switch pets as often as they can for effects, not hold out for more boons, better sustainability, and better use of pet skills.

With the new traits there is more emphasis on pet swap effects, but they don’t fit well into the nature of pet swapping.

We have (Note that these only work on pet swaps in combat):
• Poison master: When you swap pets, your pet’s next attack will cause 2 stacks of poison for 8 seconds.
• Clarion Bond: Cast call of the wild when you swap pets.
• Vigorous Training: Your pet grants 6 seconds of vigor to allies around them when swapped.
• Zephyr’s Speed: When you swap pets, you and your pet gain 3 stacks of might for 15 seconds and 3 seconds of quickness.

What is the common theme among all of these? They encourage frequent switching. These are designed like weapon swap traits where you constantly swap to optimize cool-downs and gain bonus effects. Pet swap however is designed for keeping your pets alive, utilizing specific skills like the Wolfs CC, and using the best pet for the situation. It is best used sparingly and tactically, not frequently like these traits encourage.

Furthermore, swapping an alive pet in combat has its share of disadvantages. All its boons and effects like Rampage as One are removed, it takes time to reengage, and it goes on a long cool-down even if it was at full health.

ArenaNet, please come up with a better mechanic for these traits. Pet swaps and F2 skills are largely tactical features and should be treated as such. Traits that encourage their frequent use only conflict with their tactical nature.

fireflyry.7023:

Fyrebrand.4859:

Lately, I’ve been participating in the Tequatl event a lot more, and it’s caused me to think about why I’m bringing Berserker gear to this boss, and most other world bosses. A lot of world bosses can’t be critically hit at all, which means two thirds of my stats are literally dead weight. Precision means nothing, as the crit chance is a flat 0%. Ferocity means nothing, as without crits there is no damage boost. And in the case of Tequatl, unless I’m dodging everything perfectly I’ll probably wind up on the ground a lot more than I should be.

So I’ve been taking Power, Toughness, and Vitality on the bulk of my gear for such events. Power still works as intended. The Toughness and Vitality just keep me alive more often, while others flounder around on the dirt. And instead of “on crit” sigils on my weapons, I switch over to an alternate piece that has Sigil of Force (flat 5% damage increase), or an on-hit mechanic of some kind. MUCH better results.

Then I thought: “wait a minute, what if I took some modified version of this into a dungeon?” Well, I played around a bit with it, keeping the PVT armor but switching my traits and weapons to adjust for the fact that critical hits are still functional. I queued for CoF1, the typical lazy player’s “fast” dungeon — and there was no real change in efficiency or completion time compared to my old zerker build. Its was basically the same as with a lot of PUGs: a few people screw up and die, but we get through it in 10-15 minutes or so. It’s CoF. It’s no big deal. The stakes are low, and we muscle through it. Except, rather than be the glass cannon guy who winds up on the floor when things get hairy, now I’m the one who survives and completes the room while others are fallen.

I can’t stress this enough: “speed runs” are what organized pre-made groups perform as a cooperative team, with voice communication and coordinated efforts. They all know the workings of the dungeon — and each other’s classes/builds — perfectly. That means they can afford to go “glass cannon” and put out a perfect performance, completing the content in record time, as a kind of sport. LFG is not an appropriate environment for that. I’ve been through the typical “CoF Path 1” run countless times, and I know darn well that a successful, speedy run is more about people surviving and adapting to problems than maximizing their own personal DPS. Even if the failure is not your fault, it’s far better to be able to bear the brunt of the blows as a result and try to power though a tough situation, than to wipe and start screaming at the “noobs” for not dodging at the right moment. You have to make your choices: do you want to yell at strangers on the internet, or do you want to complete the dungeon and get on with your life?

Berserker gear is fine, for situations that are completely optimal and organized, or for low-level no-brainer situations where you’re compeltely comfortable and there is zero risk. Anything beyond that, and you are taking a serious risk. Always keep in mind that many world bosses cannot be critically hit at all, so more often than not Berserkers are more of a liability than a benefit. Plus, doing PvP or WvW as zerk will lead to serious problems unless you really know what you’re doing and are incredibly lucky.

I used to be caught up in the romance of the “zerker meta,” and how expediently it seemed to get things done. Well, that’s fine for farming open-world, non-boss events and killing random easy mobs — but when things get serious, a zerker build will drop you like a ton of bricks, and may not even increase your damage for all the trouble.

Quite possibly the best post I’ve read on this forum.

I don’t know, as long as your group follows dungeon etiquette you shouldn’t be having this problem. Heck, dungeons like CoF are so easy you can duo it without much issue, even on a berserker build.

And this is coming from someone who primarily uses the LFG tool for groups, plays a ranger main, and runs a full on offense sword build which is one of the more difficult “good” builds to survive on.

fireflyry’s post appears heavily biased to me and I wouldn’t be taking any truth out of it.

Speaking mostly for PvE, the issue with build variety is that many gear options, traits, weapons, and skills are not competitive and do not change the encounter or add anything meaningful to the fight in comparison to your “better” options.

And while there will always be a “meta” with one setup being deemed superior in a particular area, this is not the issue. The problem is with the large gap in effectiveness between the meta and alternatives and the lack of meta variety, with one build setup being the top option across too much of the game.

There are two issues which I would attribute this to above all else, and those would be:

The objective is predominantly to kill something.

When most of PvE is just killing enemies, and even objectives that tell you to defend something really mean “kill X waves of enemies as fast as possible”, it’s no wonder we have the DPS meta. What the limited objectives in this game create is a meta where the best way to approach almost all content is to just wipe out the enemies as quickly as possible.

What we need is more variety in how we handle objectives, where the focus isn’t killing the enemy but rather on survival and control. Think of sPvP control points, molten facility test room, the cannon phase on Mai Trin, and things of that nature.

Additionally, more than just active defenses need to be required to complete these objectives effectively. After all, what’s the point in using anything but pure offense when you can easily survive the content with just dodges and a projectile reflects? There needs to be a reason to bring more healing, condition removal, damage reduction, and things of that nature.

The ineffectiveness of conditions.

Between their limited stacks and lack of damage boosts on conditions compared to physical damage, conditions are inferior. Since so many weapons, traits, and skills are based around conditions, this dramatically cuts build variety.

Addressing this would require a major revamp to conditions, which I’m not sure if we will ever see. They would have to not only fundamentally rework how conditions stack up or deal damage, but also the boosts on their damage, and possibly rework enemy design to give more reason to use conditions, in order to make conditions competitive.

Equipment progression is widely rejected in this game, with both developers and players speaking out against it. So why then is infusion progression accepted? It shares many of the same problems as equipment progression, yet is seemingly something the developers are going to continue with.

With the release of infusions they made clear that they intended for infusions to be a continuing form of progression. There are game codes showing +7 stat infusions, indicating that they have been considering it. With the upcoming expansion they mentioned adding stronger infusions to the game.

Furthermore, they have shown interest in creating infusions tailored to different areas of the game, not just fractals, as seen with WvW infusions. Given the price of ascended gear and cost of changing out infusions (250 gems per item via upgrade extractor) players must choose a single area of the game they want their equipment to be built for and stick with it.

This is something that needs to be addressed. Why should I spend ~1,000 gold for a set of the best infusions when they will become obsolete as soon as better ones are released? Why is it so expensive to change infusions (250 gems for an upgrade extractor per item)?

Andred.1087:

Lol… so much wrong with this post. “Play how I want” doesn’t even mean picking whatever build you want and still being viable, even though that is the case in GW2. PHIW is about doing whatever content you want to do and still making progress toward your goals (namely, getting money you can spend on most anything in the game).

Also, I wasn’t aware that higher DPS is equivalent to being better at the game. I must be astonishingly good! Never mind knowing when to dodge, or any of that ilk.

“play how I want” is most commonly used when talking about gear and builds. Just do a search about the phrase in these forums and most of the results will be about that.

Part of being good at the game is also using effective builds and gear. Without the right setup, you can be half as effective as someone with a good setup.

Bernie.8674:

Bri.8354:

So please people, stop supporting this excuse for bad play and encourage players to get better instead.

Please quit defining “good play” as minimizing the time it takes to kill stuff. If ArenaNet had intended for that style of play to prevail they would have put enrage timers on all their bosses like WoW does.

Unfortunately this is the path they are taking. Most content is being designed as a DPS race with timers that automatically fail the event if you don’t reach it. I personally don’t like it, but this is the reality of the game, and to not build your character around it would be foolish.

Can we get a larger variety of combat music? The same music gets repeated throughout most of the game and only a few boss fights get anything special.

It just seems silly since this game has so much great music, yet while in combat you just hear the same thing over and over.

…and make everybody lose in the process.

I remember back during marionette ANet mentioned how they were trying to push the players to get better at the game, but this “play how I want” mentality has been the largest obstacle when it comes to getting players to improve.

This is especially annoying in open world content, where you’re stuck with a bunch of these players and end up failing what should be trivial content because of it. I can’t count the number of Silverwastes breaches I’ve seen fail because of a simple lack of damage.

With even more challenging open world content coming with HoT we are going to see the same problems unless players drop this mentality and get better at the game.

So please people, stop supporting this excuse for bad play and encourage players to get better instead.

AnniMira.2506:

It is a challenge. With small teams in WvW, you just don’t run in to full zerg. It is wise to quit fighting, unless you agree to stay together to the last paw up.

It is annoying to die in WvW/EotM but I have figured out my way to fight there and stay alive longer.

Edit: Think how much fun it is to opponent. Give them nice day.

And don’t you think that’s the wrong thing to expect out of WvW?

I could understand strategically avoiding the enemy to gain an advantage over them, but that’s not what’s going on here. Players are avoiding each-other because they are unable to fight them, which strikes me as the game mode being flawed or poorly designed if that was the intent.

Iris Ng.9845:

Small groups can still own the roaming scene providing a tight coordination and sound battle plan.

If you feel hopeless in battles, it’s time to question how to become a better player.

Thanks, although that’s not necessarily the type of situation I’m trying to bring up here, neither is player skill or knowledge.

The design of the game doesn’t allow for enough counter-play; you are not given the capability to adapt or use the surroundings to large enough effect as to reliably defeat an opponent you are innately disadvantaged against.

Had the players in the first video fought an opponent with similar communication, builds, and skill, but larger numbers, the tactics that could be used to overcome that opponent are what I’m talking about.

I’ve always struggled to find a PvP game I could enjoy. Maybe I’m just overly competitive, analytical, and critical, but the vast majority of games have at least a few issues that ruin them for me.

In the case of GW2, the most irritating thing is the way counter-play is set up.

In structured PvP and small scale fights It’s mostly build based with a lack of counter-strategies outside of your characters skills, which are also limited in the variety of strategies you have available to you in a given build, leading to “hopeless fights”. When one side has an advantage, the other side just isn’t given the tools necessary to counter and defeat them.

In WvW it’s even worse. The majority of fights have a consistent victor, often determined by the size of the group and their coordination, while the disadvantaged side can do little to nothing to fight back. The strength of an individual is too low (AoE cap of 5) and group sustainability is too high for smaller numbers to be effective, especially with the downed state. Siege rarely tips the scale due to the large numbers needed for it to be effective and loses that effectiveness once the enemy gets close, which is easy enough with a Mesmer portal or more often, just running through.

To me, this type of combat is tedious and un-enjoyable. It’s disheartening running into an opponent you are “hopeless” against, and dull when your team just gives up on fighting completely, knowing they can’t do anything to defeat the opponent.

Surely I can’t be alone in this viewpoint.

I don’t see much of a problem with these given how easy travel is. Mesmer portals already allow people to bypass content and its not like these are unlimited use or anything.

A few tips on how to be effective on your ranger in PvE.

Equipment Stats:

Berserker (power, precision, ferosity) on all your equipment. I’ve been playing over 2 years on my ranger, have done most content, and haven’t needed anything else. Rely on your active defenses (evades, blocks, ect) and your allies abilities (wall of reflection and such) for defense, not equipment stats. Having that extra offense is overall more helpful than the extra health or armor would have been.

Weapons:

• Longbow is your best ranged weapon.
• Greatsword is your best cleave weapon with defensive aspects that really help at more difficult content.
• Sword/axe is your highest DPS weapon. It also has a projectile reflect.
• Sword/warhorn is a high DPS weapon with group support.

What I like to do is use sword/axe sword/warhorn in easy content. In harder content longbow and greatsword are better options because the sword with its “leap of death” as I like to call it, puts you in the enemies face and makes it harder to maneuver.

• Mainhand axe should only be used when doing mindless zerg farming.
• Forget about torch, conditions are too weak.
• Forget about the dagger, if you need defense use the greatsword, otherwise stick with offhand warhorn or axe.
• Shortbow isn’t as good as the longbow.

In Group Settings:

Bring Frost Spirit with the Vigorous Spirits trait and the Spotter trait. Together, while active, these two will give a total of 35% damage and 750 precision to the group, far surpassing any alternatives.

Pets:

Please don’t use bears! What you should be using are:

• One feline. Jaguar has a nice stealth ability and the Jungle Stalker grants 5 stacks of might. Which one is better depends on the situation.
• One drake. It’s tough and has cleave attacks making it the best pet against groups of enemies. I personally like Reef Drake the most because of its confusion which never seems to hit the condition cap so it’s always useful.

Together these two should allow you to get through most situations. The drake works best against groups of enemies, places where the feline can’t survive well, and is good at surviving while you wait for pet swap to come back. The feline is best for its single target damage.

In the rare situation where these two can’t survive well, such as the final boss in SE path 1, switching out one of both of these for a ranged pet (spider or devourer) is a better choice.

Most of the time spent on my necromancer was in the mad kings labrynth, and I always found it annoying how I used death shroud at low health expecting my allies heals to put my HP back up, only to come out of it with the same health. I can see how it could be overpowered in PvP, but in PvE healing while in death shroud wouldn’t be a problem at all.

Perhaps they should convert heals while in death shroud into some other effect? I’m not sure what, but heals not affecting you at all just seems silly.

What did you expect, them to give you a god mode skill set? The skills work fine for the instances they gave us. It also allows for some strategies that are fairly strong.

The best use I’ve found is with a hit-and-run strategy. All the cooldowns are low and it has a ton of evades and movement, allowing you to LoS enemies, use invisibility, drop caltrops, against single targets use 2 against the wall for 6+ hits and 30+ seconds of poison or 5 for group damage, follow up with 3 once invisibility ends, then evade away once your health gets low.

The evades and caltrops are also great against the centaur boss. Dropping a caltops on the centaur boss deals with the elementals pretty well and lasts long enough to take down a boss phase too if you’re also attacking. With all the evades you never have to worry about running out of dodges, and that’s a good thing because those wind walls hurt.

No Walking.6349:

Bri.8354:

Dervish seem unlikely given their lore, and would likely be limited to humans if they ever were added into the game.

If they were to add a new class, my vote would be an Aspect Master (Zephyrites who use wind, sun, and lightning power from those crystals).

Did you read my post?

If they were to add it to the game, it would need to have a design that fits in with all races. Eternal alchemy works fine for asura but doesn’t make much sense with other races.

There might also be lore preventing the use of eternal alchemy. Firstly, how would you? The asura had a hard enough time building a device just to look into it, and a way to utilize it would be far more complex than that. Secondly, the bloodstones limit how many types of magic an individual can use, so the character cannot use the eternal alchemy naturally.

Dervish seem unlikely given their lore, and would likely be limited to humans if they ever were added into the game.

If they were to add a new class, my vote would be an Aspect Master (Zephyrites who use wind, sun, and lightning power from those crystals).

The core of the reward system since launch has been weapon and armor skins. While it is nice to have a wide variety of these, after 2 years of collecting a wardrobe of skins it has grown stale for many of us.

This late into the game we already have multiple outfits we enjoy so more skins just doesn’t have the appeal it used to. What I feel the game needs at this point is to focus on expanding customization and progression.

And no, I don’t mean stat progression, I mean more ways to decorate and customize our characters and other aspects of the game. Things like:

• Horizontal character progression and customization.
• Home instance development.
• Decorative effects on amulets.
• More badges (the gold star you get for world completion).
• Tiers of titles (think “kind of a big deal” from GW1).
• Prestigious mail carriers and finishers earned through game-play.
• Legendary ranger pets
• Utility skill reskins

elinos.7493:

+1

I think the new zones are moving in the right direction regarding this. Drytop has the ambrite weapons and Silverwastes have the carapace armor. While perhaps not the most sought out items by everyone, they are still unique to the zones and give reasons for players to spend time there. I hope this trend of ingame armor and weapon skins that don’t come from the gem shop, but from new zones continues.

I don’t know if it’s feasible to add similar rewards to all the old zones at this point, although if it could be done slowly over time, it would definitely give more reasons to revisit them. I would have said add a skin here and there as reward for map completion, but I don’t know how they’d handle all the people who have already finished those maps. Free skins just doesn’t seem that interesting.

Agreed; the exclusive rewards in dry top and silverwastes are nice even if they aren’t the most desired. I also like what they did with foxfire clusters which gave gathering a unique reward.

Foxfire clusters are a good example of what they should do more of. Imagine if they added something similar to other harvesting types, various dynamic events, jumping puzzles, WvW, and so on. Now picture these materials all playing a large role in the creation of legendary armor/accessories or something of that caliber.

Something as simple to implement as that could go a long way at improving rewards.

Geeze guys, I thought I made it pretty clear what I was talking about in the OP.

The boss is far from perfect as many have pointed out, but don’t you feel that its behavior is a step forward from what we have seen in the past? If they continue working on it we could get some really nice boss fights, don’t you think?

For the most part bosses in this game have been a let down. Their behavior has boiled down to blindly chasing you or being a stationary target, but the behavior of the Mordrem Teragriff was very different. It had scripted behaviors, ran around the map, and wasn’t just something you attacked like a pinata.

Bosses like this are a huge improvement, and if you keep working on it, we could see some amazing boss fights and dungeons, far above that which is currently in game!

A persistent issue since launch has been a “lack of rewards”. There have been countless revamps since launch to make the game more rewarding, but in the end many areas feel unrewarding. Why? Because everything is in competition with each-other, the rewards are largely generic, and no matter how much they increase rewards, this won’t change.

Players keep saying that the game is unrewarding but this simply isn’t the case, especially in comparison with other games. The rate at which you get items through normal play is healthy, you can get whatever you need within a reasonable time frame, and even the most expensive luxury items are within reach.

The issue with rewards in most cases isn’t with how much is handed out, but with the lack of variety and exclusivity. The bulk of value in desired items, such as legendary and ascended, are based around materials given out in every area of the game like rare equipment (salvaged for ectos and precursors), T6, and silk.

What this does is create a situation where every part of the game is in competition, and it’s just not realistic to meet the design goal of making every part of the game “rewarding” when the bulk of value comes from generic items.

What rewards need are more exclusivity. Each area of the same needs to have specific rewards that no other have access to, and those rewards need to play a large part in the creation of highly sought after items. This way, from a rewards perspective, every aspect of the game has value and is worth taking part in, not just a limited portion like we see currently.

Because ANets refuses to do separate balancing, some of these changes just aren’t realistic. If we were to go ahead with the realistic ones, condition damage would still have issues primarily because of the stacking rules which agree with it or not, is a larger issue than the other points you brought up, even if they are valid.

For instance, if condition damage is changed so the highest damage application always takes priority, we still run into the following problems:

• You can only have 1 effective condition damage member in your party, while any more than that deal no damage with some of their condition such as burning and poison.
• Many power based groups can maintain poison, burning, and a good amount of bleeding. Because of this, the effective DPS of the condition damage player is reduced by the strength of whatever condition they are overriding.

If condition damage is to be truly addressed, the condition stacking rules must also be changed.

Gaile Gray.6029:

Gulesave.5073:

Gaile was not asking whether the promise of more LW is sufficient to sate our desires for intel, just whether it counts.

Yes, this is correct. When I see comments like “there’s nothing new to do” or “we need fresh content” it just occurred to me to ask if you’re taking LW into account, if you see that as new content and pretty significant chunks of it, at that. (Admittedly, it may not be what you personally have requested, but if the statement is “there’s nothing new” that doesn’t seem quite right.)

Thanks everyone for not barking at me when I asked the question. Again, the question was not “is it enough?” I really was pointing to it to ask for your impressions of the concept and the execution as continuing, new content in an ever-changing world.

My issue with the living world, in both season 1 and season 2, is that it doesn’t add much substance for the amount of effort that goes into it. It has been a poor allocation of resources development time.

Season 1 being temporary is arguably the worst decision you guys have ever made. All that effort and passion by the developers only to be removed after it was over. What a waste.

Robert Hrouda puts it best: "I had always hoped my last hurrah would be an epic dungeon that would stand the test of time, and provide entertainment for players to the very end… but instead it’s an instance that will only persist for two weeks, and then go away.”

Season 2 is permanent, but still doesn’t provide much substance. Months of effort creating these amazing maps and a much better story, for what, a few hours of play time?

You guys need to start looking at ways to get more value out of the content you create. It simply isn’t a good update model, or a good allocation of resources, to spend so much time and resources on something that only lasts players a few days, and to make make matters worse, this is the only content we have been receiving!

I hope you can see why players are so upset over this.

We have been waiting for a meal for such a long time now, yet all we keep getting is appetizers, and then we are told in an interview with the chef that you aren’t even cooking a meal, only more appetizers. Then the restaurant creates a policy where the workers are not allowed to speak about the meal or appetizers.

Has our meal even been started, or is it just taking a while to cook? Are you just going to keep throwing appetizers at us until we get fed up and leave? As customers at your restaurant this is something we would like to know, and the silence isn’t helping at all.

Gaile Gray.6029:

Ok, I’m back. About Harry Potter…

I think that the whole basis for the presentation in this and other threads about communication has a few pillars. And it’s one of them that I’m thinking about. J. K. Rawlings wrote a series of well-loved books, and I am sure (although I didn’t follow it) that people gave feedback to her on every release, heck, probably every nuance of every release, and that they also provided suggestions for future books. It’s a natural thing: People were highly invested in the series, loved it a bunch, and wanted to know more, or to have input.

In that small sense — and yes, that’s only part of the communication question — I don’t think I’d want our team to communicate about the game’s direction. Like, “Yes, so in the future, all frogs will become sentient, treble in size, and take over Lion’s Arch, leading to the elimination of all non-amphibian races. Yep, yep, that’s where we’re heading with the story.” NOTE: This is NOT where the story is going. This is only a wildly-improbable scenario offered for purposes of… umm… providing a wildly-improbable scenario.

My question: Do you agree that it’s good to not share that sort of information, information related to the actual direction of the game saga as a whole?

If so, then my sense is that you want to know more about the nuts and bolts.

• “Are you looking at XXX new feature?”
• “Do you intend to improve ABC functionality?”
• “Is ### working as intended, or is it bugged, or will you incorporate player feedback to change it?”

Again, this is a small part of the discussion, but I wanted to make sure I was looking at that part accurately. I wondered if generally, no one is asking about the whole “Tell us where the story is going” bit.

There is a huge difference between story narrative and game design in regards to communication.

Most of what players seek isn’t the direction of the narrative, but the direction of the game design. What type of content can we expect? Will we be getting more legendaries? Home instance customization? Guild halls? Types of progression? New weapons? And so on…

Unlike narrative which you can’t share the direction you wish to take without ruining it for everyone, you can share a wealth of information about the direction you wish to take with the game design without ruining it for anyone.

If anything, giving information on where the game is headed helps out. This is why i don’t get why you adopted a policy of no communication. Many important questions and concerns players have about the game just aren’t being answered and it gives players a dreadful outlook on the games future.

Well their response to the chest farm was typical. Call it a “bug” and apply the simplest solution they could come up with.

Now that the chest farm has been addressed hopefully the other issues with the map will get more attention:

• The event rewards are lacking, both for events that lead up to completion and the completion rewards.
• Players are encouraged to tag as many events as possible, not do them effectively.
• Since chests are so rewarding compared to events and are limited time, players are encouraged to abandon whatever they are doing when one is dug up.

Nilkemia.8507:

You can only get the shovels from the events themselves.

You either have to stock up on keys at the start, or keep a fort defended/supplied so that the merchant will sell them. And they only sell them when the fort isn’t being attacked.

While people do camp out at chest heavy areas and dig them up, it tends to be during the down periods in between defending the forts and the “break time” bit after fighting the bosses from what I’ve seen.

On no map so far have I seen everyone stop doing events altogether and only hunt down the chests the entire time.

Yet another “the chests give too much stuff, nerf it now!” thread.

The chests are just a small part of what I’m trying to bring up with this thread.

The overarching issue is that the reward structure does not encourage players to do the meta event effectively, if at all. Once players are more familiar with the map it won’t be so easy to ignore.

The current reward structure of silverwastes is broken in that it doesn’t encourage effective event play.

Currently the most effective way to get rewards is to ignore the event structure completely, with everyone camping out at the amber fort and opening buried chests.

The second problem is with the events themselves, in that they do not reward the player based on how helpful their participation was. Why defend for the 5 minutes when you can kill a few groups, move your way to the next fort while tagging other events on the way, and repeat, ending up with 3 times the reward? Why focus on dolyak supply runs when their rewards are lacking and disabled after running the same dolyak just a few times?

What I suggest be done is:

• Change how buried chests work. Uncovered buried chests should remain active until the meta event is finished, bandit crests should be removed from their drop table, and reduce the number of chest locations, possibly appearing in different locations each time.
• Open up more tiers of rewards for events, the more participation in the event the higher the reward would be. This way players are encouraged to do entire events, not run around doing the bare minimum for credit at each one.
• Dramatically slow down how often dolyak supply runs appear, make them harder, and increase the rewards to the player and benefits to the fort.

What this would do is better distribute rewards based on effective play in the event structure and since buried chests remain uncovered for the entire event period, players wouldn’t be so distracted by them.

Follow up post:

The chest farm has been addressed, but the other issues with the map are still there:

• The event rewards are lacking, both for events that lead up to completion and the completion rewards.
• Players are encouraged to tag as many events as possible, not do them effectively.
• Since chests are so rewarding compared to events and are limited time, players are encouraged to abandon whatever they are doing when one is dug up.

• Challenge through combat mechanics.
  Liadri, Lupicus, and Clockheart are good examples, where the challenge was based around the combat mechanics. Boss blitz is a good example of what I don’t want to see in raids, where the combat was very much trivial and the challenge came entirely from coordination.

• The skills available to the player need to be important tools.
  Player skills have a wide assortment of mechanics such as projectile reflects, condition clears, crowd control, blocks, and thing of that nature. Instead of bundles being the main tools, put more emphasis on player skills, such as a phase where you need condition clears to survive.

• Combat that enforces active movement, not stacking.
  Measures need to be taken, such as lingering AoE, that enforces an active movement combat, not one where the best strategy is for everyone to huddle around the boss and stay in place.

I personally liked the system GW1 had far more.

What made GW1 great was them questioning the conventions of an MMO, and is the reason why you see so many unique systems which ended up working for the better. GW2 attempted to do the same, but they also took traditional systems from other games seemingly without much question, magic find as an equipment stat being a great example which was thankfully removed.

But there are plenty of out of place and inferior systems still in place, stats on equipment and trait lines being one of them. There are far better ways to handle stat distribution and customization than what they decided to go with.

I don’t have a problem with the amount required for the achievement, its nice to have some long term goals.

My only real issue with the achievement is how players who spent tokens before it came out have to grind all that again. I’ve already ran over 1,000 dungeons but since I’ve always spent those tokens on weapons/armor to salvage/mystic forge, I don’t have much progress towards the achievement.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Dalanor.5387:

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

runeblade.7514:

• Stacking- What steps should be taken to remove stacking or should it even be removed at all?

To remove it, I suspect the entire engine would have to be re-written.

To discourage it? Enemies which can pierce through any number of players with a swing rather than hit just one. Stack at your own peril.

Ehm, stacking has nothing to do with cleave attacks. Guardian’s aegis would still negate the damage despite it hits multiple players. Dodge still negates every damage. Active defenses still negates every damage. Reflects and absorbs still negates every damage (lets take aside stealth patches ’kay?).
So please, please let this issue die silently in this thread since vast majority of users who comment on this topic spread only misinformation which hurts both the discussion and players who likes to melee stuff.

Let me be honest – I don’t see stacking as a “problem” which has to be completely rooted out. I see it as a byproduct of design and it has been present since the first time I played an MMO where you could do that.

Heck, my first “raid” as modern definitions call it was rife with stacking so Bard songs could continue to affect people fighting, so enemies could be AOEd down quickly from casters, and slightly so they didn’t ping pong all over the place chasing different targets.

(. . . the first “raid” as I’d call it was the Lupogg King and that one was hilarious for other reasons. Stacking didn’t matter as much as safe spots and management of the aggro methods. )

I don’t want stacking to go away so much as I want counterplay for it.

The problem with stacking as I see it, is that the enemies we fight aren’t given the tools to counter it.

In most cases, all enemies are given is the capability to hit a small number of targets with their normal attacks, and their stronger attacks capable of hitting the entire group all have obvious tells and AoE rings, allowing players to negate them with a single dodge, or more often, just take the hit and recover in seconds from the group healing.

What bosses need are attacks that discourage players from standing in the same spot or next to the boss for the entire duration of the fight. For instance, give their melee attacks a cleave that hits 25 targets and AoE effects that linger in an area like with the spider queen and Tequalt’s poison. This will encourage players to move around more and be a natural counter to stacking.

Crystal Reid.2481:

These are all really excellent questions! I would love to see some drilling down into these specifics with your proposals.

Design wise, one of the largest issues in the game is the way you scale content. The only way we see it being done is by increasing health and numbers, which doesn’t create a better experience.

And as a result of the inadequate scaling system, most content breaks once a certain threshold of players appear. In many cases this threshold is between 5 and 10 players, yet you easily see 3-4 times the ideal amount of players appearing. Guild bounties are a perfect example, where the boss is best suited for a small group of players, yet always is done with a large group, resulting in a completely trivial and uninteresting fight.

So please, do not scale raids. Create a set number of players the raid is designed around and do not allow any more players than that to enter. Otherwise the raid will become broken because of an inadequate scaling system, like we have seen in most large scale content.

The goal of this post is to highlight issues with the current iterations of large scale content so they aren’t replicated in raids.

Most content is not mechanically suited for large groups of players. Be it guild bounties, guild puzzles, temple bosses, world bosses, Tequalt, Marionette, boss blitz, or most other large scale content, they all have issues when it comes to dealing with large groups of players.

For typical bosses without side mechanics, such as most world boss and guild bounty bosses, they are not designed to handle more than a small group of players. The more players that join in, the more trivial the fight becomes, to the point where it’s an “auto-attack blob”.

For more complex bosses that feature side mechanics, such as Tequalt, there is a limit of players that are mechanically meaningful in the fight. You need players on the turrets, defending the turrets, and attacking the boss. However, this caps out at around 30 meaningful player roles, so what was done to account for all the other players? Increase spawns and Tequalt’s health so you need a lot of players for the sheer damage, not because of the true mechanics, and this brings me to my next point.

Large scale content uses too much artificial difficulty and mechanics and not enough of the core game mechanics.

What makes Tequalt hard? Coordination, numbers, and damage.
What made Holographic Scarlet and the Assault Knights hard? Numbers and damage.
What makes temple events hard? Numbers and damage.

Just what makes any of these bosses, or any large scale content for that matter, difficult? It’s definitely not the core combat mechanics. Instead the common theme seems to be side mechanics often revolving around coordination, number of players, and damage. The combat mechanics aren’t present enough in the mechanics or difficulty of the fight which brings me to my final point.

What happened to traditional combat values? What happened to death being the deciding factor in a fight? What happened to the skills available to your character being your main tools?

Large scale content neglects these basic parts of the combat system. Your characters skills are not the main tools in the mechanics of the encounter, rather side mechanics are. Death is of little concern due to the low combat risk and the few players that die only serves as an inconvenience to your groups DPS due to the combined lack of risk and ease of recovery.

If you want to create a better large scale experience these things should be addressed.

In summary:

• The raid mechanics need to be suited for the number of players participating, with each player having an important role in the mechanics, not just there as damage filler.
• Combat needs to play a larger role in the difficulty of the fight. Added mechanics and coordination based around those mechanics are fine to have but should not be the core means to create difficulty.
• Death needs to play a deciding role. We need more things were defeat is caused by, and the difficulty designed around, the entire group of players getting wiped and less around things like defeat timers.
• The skills available to a player need to be more important. Things like projectile reflects, condition clears, stability, blocks, and crowd control need to play a larger role in the mechanics of the raid.

With the 5 second delay between uses and random nature of buffs, this is an extremely annoying item to use. You have to use this item for ~10 minutes just to use up a single stack of candy corn, and it takes ~15 before you get a reasonable amount of time on those buffs.

Please give us an option to use more candy corn at once so its not such a pain to use.

And here I thought it was going to be something cool like a new Halloween skin, tonic, or endless use item, why else would John draw attention to it? Turns out to be some rusted piece of junk.

You win troll post of the year John! The hunt was a lot of fun to watch though.

The core problem I see is that meta builds are too far ahead of the alternatives. There’s always going to be a meta, but when everything is so far apart it makes players feel forced to run those meta builds.

I’m sure most people wouldn’t mind if someone ran a build that was slightly less effective than the meta, but what we see is a single change in a build deeply cutting its effectiveness with the top builds being over 5 times stronger than the weaker ones.

For example, its mandatory for effective play to run spotter and frost spirit on a ranger in dungeons. No alternatives begin to complete with the 35% damage and 750 precision they give.

GW2 is a great game and my overall favorite MMO.

But as others have said, they have done a poor job at updating the game. The updates to quality of life have been amazing, among the best of any game I’ve played, but the content updates have been poor.

Over a year of updates did little to develop the game due to season 1 being mostly temporary. Season 2 is a step in the right direction, but still lacks replay value and because of this, doesn’t have any more appeal to veteran players than season 1 had.

I still play in anticipation for new content.

If they suddenly announced that they weren’t going to have any more updates however, I’d quit instantly and never look back.

I really wonder why everything has been delayed for so long. I’ve been looking forward to things like the legendary trinket, new skills, precursor crafting, and new legendaries, but they are nowhere in sight.

Have they postponed development, cut them completely, or are they complete and just being held back while they look for a good way to implement them?

Doon.2364:

That’s the impression I got when I first bought the game is that there will be continue updates of new weapon skills. More skills = more build diversity = more fun. 2013 was suppose to be the year when things start rolling out. But it came and gone with no change. This game has a lot of potential. I just hope there is still time to turn the ship around and finally give the players what was promise. I wouldn’t mind unlocking all weapons skills and give players the option to choose their own sets of 5 skills.

I don’t think skills would add any real build diversity to the game. Right now PvE is a wreck with 1-2 builds for each profession that are far beyond the alternatives and the PvP meta has the same issue, just not as severe.

But even so, it would be fun to have more options added to the game, especially once they fix the design flaws and bring builds closer together, opening up more true variety.

The instant use of point blank shot is where a lot of its strength is, so If they increase the cast time they’ll need to give it something valuable to compensate.

Hopefully all we will see if a change in its animation and trail effect.

I prefer option 2.5.

The main issues I’ve noticed with RNG comes from precursors and the fractal tonic, both of which could have been solved with a token system. The chance of getting either of these from playing normally is extremely low, and the only real way to try for a precursor is to gamble away at the mystic forge where you can spend hundreds of gold and end up with nothing.

A token system would have been a good solution for both of these. What if players could spend 250 pristine relics for the endless fractal tonic? What if players got a number of tokens each time they tried to get a precursor from the mystic forge, which they could trade in for a precursor of their choice? (The chance of getting a precursor from the forge may need to be reduced accordingly.)

I hope they make clear what their vision of “raids” are, as a foundation for player to build their feedback on. Otherwise you’ll see a copy of these raid discussions, with everyone having a completely different idea of what a raid is, which will likely result in no strong consensus and an unproductive CDI.

To give everyone an idea of what they think a “raid” is, just look at Tequalt and the three headed worm which they called their version of raids.

My guess is that they are going to make these part of guild missions, probably set in the open world, as either a simple world boss or a dungeon type setup similar to puzzles, only more combat focused. In my opinion something like this is the most likely scenario based on the content they have produced so far.

Conditions have many problem in PvE due to the way they stack on enemies. In addition to the obvious problem with the 25 stack limit on common conditions like bleeding, other, less talked about, condition stacking rules have just as much impact on the effectiveness of conditions.

Conditions with a 1 stack limit have duration stacking limitations. For instance, if 5 effects that apply 5 seconds of burning are applied, the only way to apply more burning is to use an effect which has a greater duration than one of those stacks. This means low duration conditions, such as bonfire which ticks 1 second of burning 9 times, is not able to apply burning in many situations.

Damage conditions with 1 stack are ineffective damage in group settings. A single condition ranger can permanently maintain burning and poison on at least 3 targets, reducing the DPS of fellow condition dealers who aren’t able to apply their burning or poison damage.

Furthermore, because many physical damage groups already apply burning and poison passively, the effective DPS of condition damage roles is greatly cut. 2 guardians can easily maintain burning on an enemy, meaning your effective DPS is cut by the base condition damage of other party members. This means your ~1,000 damage from burning and poison will really be ~500 effective damage.

An easy way to address conditions is create effects which take place after condition stacking limits are met. For instance, if condition stacking limits are met on any condition, the monster would take direct damage based on the intensity and duration of that condition. Other non-damaging conditions like frost and cripple need the duration stacks removed if they are present, the limit instead being a max total duration. Immobilize should be converted to daze when it reaches the duration stack limit.

IndigoSundown.5419:

My initial thought was that these questions need to be answered as soon after the CDI starts as possible. Then I realized that once the thread got a couple of pages long, people would just jump in and not read the rest of the thread. Maybe Chris should use the Question/Answer posting option to put these points at the top of every page.

It seems to me sometimes that hosting a CDI is like the proverbial “herding of cats.” A raid CDI is going to take that to a new level, because of the points Bri raises. I strongly suspect that nothing like consensus is going to come from this.

Since raids aren’t going to be a multi-part CDI they can’t be asking the questions many of us are trying to answer in this thread. Rather than asking “What should raids be?” they need to make clear what they have in mind for raids and gather feedback about how to improve and build upon what they have in mind.

So for instance, they would have to state something like this in the opening post:

What we view a raids to be is:

• A new guild mission in the open world that anyone can join in on.
• It will feature puzzles and combat encounters, leading up to a boss at the end.
• Rewards will be guaranteed rares or greater, guild commendations, and guild specific rewards like the other guild missions, only greater.
• Players can only gain credit from these once a week.

Players can then suggest alternative and additional systems, ways to improve encounters and mechanics, and things of that nature rather than everyone throwing out a different idea of what a “raid” should be.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Bri.8354:

I was linking precise coordination to “herding”, which is what many players don’t enjoy about that sort of content, not saying that Tequalt used precise coordination.

Bah, Tequatl doesn’t really need “herding” either – it only requires it due to the massive amount of scaling due to having so many people wanting to be in a successful instance. Probably because the rewards are rather lucrative for a little amount of work (if you’re in the zerg rather than on turrets or boats).

With less people, Tequatl would not require herding quite as strongly. Mostly because with less people, there’s less need to shout instructions – they’ll be aware of what to do by the time it starts off.

Agreed; with fewer players Tequalt wouldn’t have that problem and I’d be perfectly content with its design.

This is one of the things I hate about the open world. They have to account for extra players, even those that aren’t mechanically important, the end result being either a trivialized fight (most temple events and world bosses), or one that players are just there for the damage.

If they do add raids I hope they are instanced, otherwise they will see similar issues.

I have a feeling the raid CDI is going to be a mess based on this thread and the discussions before it. There won’t be a clear vision or summary as everyone has preconceived notions on what a raid should be and what would work well in this game.

ANet calls Tequalt and the worm their version of raids.
GW1 players think raids are what the elite dungeons were like.
WoW players think raids are what they are like in WoW, including gear progression.
And then there are the dozens of other games out there with different styles of “raids”, one of my favorite being Vindictus.

So what is a “raid” exactly?

• Is it open world or instanced?
• What is its difficulty based on, added mechanics or combat mechanics?
• Should mechanics be based around a commander herding everyone like in WvW or individual thought processes and natural teamwork reactions like in marionette, assault knights, and holographic scarlet?
• What should rewards be like? Should it offer exclusive rewards like those seen in FotM, Tequalt, guild missions, and PvP tracts?
• What level coordination should they require? Should everyone need to sync up perfectly, only allowing organized guilds to complete it effectively, or should the difficulty be based more around individual mastery and knowledge of the mechanics allowing skilled public groups to complete it effectively?

The answer will never be uniform as everyone wants something different from raids. In the end its going to be up to Arenanet to choose what they want to add to the game, not based on the CDI, but based on what they want to put out.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Bri.8354:

Would you support a mechanic that required every player to pick up and use a bundle on a boss within a 3 second window of each-other? This is type of precise coordination I’m talking about. It’s less about teamwork or smart and skillful play and more about herding, which is one of the core issues many players have with the way Tequalt and the three headed worm were designed.

There are far better ways to design content for teamwork and coordination than that.

Hey now, Tequatl isn’t so . . . bound to precise timing. In fact, it can easily be made to work if your instance is just willing to listen to instructions. “Turrets, hit the head with #2, then drop #3 on where the zerg is standing. Cleanse each other too.” “Everyone defend the batteries, western kill tendrils, north stomp grub holes, east kill things.”

There’s no precise coordination needed, only communication. Not unlike the marionette event, which required communication rather than coordination.

Triple Trouble, well, I’ve tried it a few times. It seems to really require effort to time the kills closely and to handle the mechanics. It’s a different animal than Tequatl, as much as Tequatl is a different animal than the Shatterer.

And none of them are quite as time-consuming as a run at the Temple of Balthazar, which needs an entire zone to complete three separate event chains and keep them from falling apart until a fourth begins.

I’d say if we had raids, Marionette is a good model to start from. As is Tequatl. Triple Trouble is a good high water mark for precision of mechanics and communication. Temple of Balthazar/Straits of Devastation is a good high watermark for how to get an entire zone to be a raid.

I was linking precise coordination to “herding”, which is what many players don’t enjoy about that sort of content, not saying that Tequalt used precise coordination.

I agree with marionette being a good model for raids. If you had 5 players at each of the paths, or less paths with more players in each one, joining up in the final arena at the end, everything would work fairly well, probably better than the open-world version.

GOSU.9574:

You left out Monks.

I assume you are referencing “multiple objectives and roles for players in the group”.

These roles don’t have to be profession based, but can be simply part of the encounters mechanics. Using Tequalt as an example, some players use the turrets, others defend the turrets, and others physically attack the boss.