Holiday cheer…. my only weakness again forum bitterness…
NOOOOOOOO
<ack>I’m free….
I’m interested to see what they dish out for this event…. really hoping with boyish glee that there’s a candy cane rifle skin that shoots a tinsel as the particle effect.
I like WoW’s instance tagging feature much better and could really apply quite well in GW2 considering there’s no raids. Never really understood why GW2 went with the tagging feature it has when it results in a bunch of issues.
^^ Yeah seriously on underwater fighting… Love how almost all my necro utility skills are blocked when underwater
Let’s see I can use summons or basically nothing…. hmmmm
No wonder it is not currently in first place. That stupid 20hour single player game about the plague is in the lead… It looks like an old Call of Duty: WII game, but with teleporting…
I wonder if this is something similar to what the Skryim fanbois said before Zelda: Skyward Sword trounced it in the voting.
I think we’re forgetting best game of the year means best game this year…. As in how the game is right now in this year. Given the current state of the game, and even if you wanna consider the directions it’s going… I don’t think it’s GOTY material based on the other candidates.
I would also say the WoW era isn’t over yet since it still has a larger player base and that the whole no-subscription MMO philosophy has it’s fair share of problems as the subscription-based philosophy.
I mean the folks who are claiming time as a factor for why they think GW2 is awesome, just consider that last year G4tv placed Skyward Sword as game of the year…. which is probably around 16-30 hours of gameplay depending on your pace (and really no different ways to play it). Skryim on the other hand had hundreds if not thousands of hours of gameplay…. scale of content does not necessary equal great game. In fact, I’d encourage folks who’ve never played it to try the first Dead Space game. It can literally take about 6-7 hours to beat and was actually a pretty kitten good game.
(edited by Bruno Sardine.2907)
How can you pit absolute different games against each other? Doesn’t make sense to me.
This is only about exposure and internet traffic.
Really? Sigh…
There are somethings shared between games that can be judged regardless of their genre; like art direction, story telling, (voice) acting, gameplay, innovation, “fun factor”, etc… People put various weights/emphasis on different categories, there’s no “unified system of judging a game”.
By these metrics, a individual judges which is overall better.
Like seriously…. are you saying that if I handed you Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Duke Nuke Em’ Forever (assuming you had the ability to play both of them), you couldn’t come back to me and say which one was better?
Notice how the top 4 games all came out during basically the “oscar season” for video games (granted, this is usually a good time for video games as titles get put on Xmas lists)…. The award is best game of the year, not this year’s game with the best potential. Maybe next year, I’d consider GW2, but certainly not for this year. Though I’m not a huge fan of any of the four titles vying for the top spot, I’d personally go with Dishonored.
Gear does give you more wiggle room, but nothing jawdropping like the difference between top tier raid gear and normal gear in WoW. That being said, it is nice when items that are hard to obtain and take awhile are such because they require legit challenges to overcome rather than just taking a while to get because the RNG and DR only allow you to achieve the item at a certain rate.
i’m sure any youtube vid will be sufficient…. it’s really not that hard of an instance. The first pack of dogs is probably the hardest part of the instance tbh (any possibly Vevina the mesmer chick)
Would be cool if there was an optional quest chain where the reward it an order-specific elite skill.
Maybe every week you get a set of order delivered in the mail where a unique quest or two are setup in different parts of the world that offer varied stuff.
Bots banned, and now you can enjoy your Lodestones 5 gold per each.
Seriously… though I think the OP is talking about the botters that log in, hit a node, log out, and then wait for a certain duration before essentially rinse & repeating. The suggestion of nerfing drop rates across the board makes no sense though if the complaint is merely about the nodes.
Agreed…. for some floor colors/textures it can be tough to see the thin red line designating the circle’s boundary
For precision, toughness, condition damage stats the dungeons you wanna run are either TA, AC, or CM. You might have to check the stats, but I think AC might give you more precision than condition dmg comapred to the TA/CM armors (which give more condition dmg over precision).
TA/AC are easy and fast…. AC is more likely to be run given it typically has a lot of opportunities for mobs to drop a few silver which people go for; this also means a greater chance to find seasoned groups.
If you really want to run the other dungeons just to see what they’re all about, that’s fine. The least you can do with tokens you obtain from those dungeons is buy the rare dungeon gear (assuming it’s higher than lvl 68) and salvage it for ectos (apparently folks are doing this, though I’ve yet to try this out and confirm whether you can actually do this)
(edited by Bruno Sardine.2907)
So if they’re tapping the nodes, the solution is to nerf drop rates of materials from mobs rather than more lessening the number of active node spawns and making them spawn more randomly?…
I bet if you added a consumable item as the reward at the end for people who already completed story mode where it increases the MF and token yield of doing the dungeon in explore mode path by say 50% (for up to 5 hours), people would probably jump in.
unless the buffed it, CM story mode was one of the easiest dungeon runs ever. ever. for all story modes.
Come on… CoF or HotW?
I will say CM story mode is certainly easier once you know it. I guess you can say the same for all the dungeons, but my first dungeon was Arah SM, then the story modes of CoF, CoE, and HotW (I wanted to unlock all the EM’s on my main toon just in case)…. I thought they were all pretty easy and involved minimal-to-no deaths. AC, CM, SE and TA by comparison were much worse (not necessary in the order I mentioned them). In all cases, no one knew what to do and it was the same group of folks so it’s not like I was PUG’ing and got good groups with the later dungeons and terrible ones in the earlier dungeons. Maybe it’s the scaling? Tactics? Idk, I just remember what dungeons were easiest and which ones were harder.
An airship battle…. everyone takes control of different types of ships (so professions really don’t matter) and fights. The ships all have various pros and cons and you have to work together to fight successfully.
If you in particular are able to endlessly replay the current content and never get bored with it, great. But I’d say you are an extreme outlier.
I guess…. idk, D2 had a good run for a couple of years before crazy runewords and the hellfire; which only made it run strong for a few more years (people still playing it as far as I know). There is a certain “magic”, or the right stuff if you wanna call it, that makes doing something over and over in game not feel like drudgery. I can’t say what the magic is cause it’s different for every game. I mean D2 has it’s thing, but I also like popping in ME2 every now and then even though I can beat it flawlessly with any class on insanity…. Something about the game makes it enjoyable to play even though I can essentially beat it in a comatose state.
GW2 had a real opportunity with it’s DE’s and content (present and future) to really take horizontal progression to the point where actions (or lack of actions) are constantly impacting your world. In a sense they delivered on this…. but almost in the same way like how you see a fast food commercial with this awesome burger only to get the thing and find two paper thin paddies squished between mammoth sized buns. Horizontal progression without any significant consequences (good or bad ones) behind actions isn’t really horizontal progression and doesn’t exactly generate the kind of desire to keep on doing the same thing.
I don’t think it’s so much the ascended gear itself that’s making me lose interest… Rather, the direction the game is going. Granted, there’s no pressure to really play (which was a nice selling point) so I’ve definitely decreased my time investment in it pretty substantially.
Random question here, I noticed that one agony inflicting attack is a projectile, can these be reflected to inflict agony on the boss? Or are they immune to this?
Can be reflect and they are not immune to it. However I have no idew how many dmg they’ll suffer from it.
Well certainly not what the agony dmg is supposed to do… otherwise you’d cleave almost all the health off a boss.
I mean TBH… I find most of the lower level story mode dungeons horrible for acclimating players to what it means to play dungeons in GW2. This game, in general, presumes a lot about the players; two of which are that players have some experience with dungeon-based MMOs and that players understand how to apply a non-trinity system into group play.
I’m not asking for a hand holding experience, I’m just understanding the player’s frustration. I mean it’s story mode…. nothing more than attunement to host explore dungeons with some lore tied in.
Man if this game is grinding to you guys, must have never played Tera or Aion or any other MMO for that matter.
In less then a week my fresh 80 almost has a full set of exotic armor, yes I do still need a Longbow and Trinkets, but in other games that armor would have taken months, if I got it at all…
Just because those games have grinding at higher orders of magnitude than GW2 doesn’t mean that grinding in GW2 is nonexistent or has no basis to be considered insufferable. That’s like saying if you think dynamite is destructive, you must have never seen/heard about an atomic bomb…. doesn’t change the fact that they’re both destructive.
Yes other games take a long time to high end gear… because their entire premise is built around achieving it. GW1 had it’s grinds for skins, and I think most players don’t think too fondly on the severity of those grinds. This game was supposed to have content in tandem with horizontal progression be the main drivers; that somehow the actions of a server had dynamic consequences that would make the experience ever changing. What we got was really nothing that plays to this strength…. only pseudo-delivered promised that translate into weak endgame.
Braxxis is correct. The Golem boss is more of a “mini-boss” and it is by design that you fight him while the waves are coming.
Ok… so why are the waves filled with all silver mobs then? I mean, you have the 4 veteran (or are they champion) dredge suits in path 2 that spit out a bunch of dredge but they’re all regular mobs.
Well especially since we have the mist -> la setup…. Unless that’s something we’re not supposed to be using (which Anet hasn’t done anything to block it) traveling to a city should be free regardless of where you are; just save us the loading screen hassle.
I don’t mind the costs so much if I’m jumping from a city to a zone or from one zone to another…. but traveling internally within the map can be steep for higher level characters. Maybe internal travel could cost half of what a player could make from completing one event/heart?
Also, request for a repositioning of some, if not all, wps so that fewer (or none) are contested. I don’t mind say gates of Arah being contested, but when every point near it is contested and I’m forced to run halfway across the map it’s like “why bother even discovering wps in the first place since they’re costly at best assuming Anet allows me the privilege to waste my coin”.
More often than not, I mainly have an issue seeing the circle sometimes… the thin red border can be a little hard to make out where it is on the ground given the ground colors and textures. Is there a UI option to make the circle border a little thicker?
If legendary items required a series of account bound items that didn’t require gold, you could effectively kill the “other” market… but you’d also kill a lot of the gold sink and attraction to use RM in the TP.
You also get a hefty amount of silver for completing an explore path on top of whatever coin drops and loots from mobs…. Which, esp. at the lower levels, be easily turned around on the TP buy super cheap gear to keep your toon geared to the respective level, pocketed, or used to buy lower tier mats so you can level up your crafting professions if they happen to be falling behind.
I mean in order to get any significant results requires a large sampling size… and given the nature of MF it’s natural that in a law of big numbers type situation MF wins in the long run. The question shouldn’t be whether MF is useful or not but rather over what time/kill frame does the gap between using mf and not using it become noticeable?
GW1 is 1000x better than GW2 will ever be. In every aspect. Fact.
How about jumping…. haha had to throw that out there, but yeah I think GW1 > GW2 in most respects.
Anyway did you see the list now that list is funny but then again aside from Planetside 2 and Black Op’s 2012 was a crappy year for games IMHO.
Yeah seriously…. most big titles aside from maybe COD:BO2 didn’t nearly deliver. Actually there’s a few indie games this year that were pretty good… Hotline Miami is kinda quirky and a throwback to the 80s, but good story and fun. Walking Dead wasn’t bad either and actually delivers more on the “your actions have consequences later on” more than the entire Mass Effect series.
About mounts and pets in WoW…. I was actually a fan of grabbing different mounts in BC. The economic stability of the game made it easy to pursue these things without feeling super strapped for cash. 1600g on a flying hippogryph that moves just as fast as a super fast mount for 120g is purely cosemetic…. but to getting 1600g was relatively easy to get with about 20-30 minutes of daily quests every day for a few weeks (I think it was something like you could do like 10-15 daily quests at 5 gold a quest… I remember it taking almost no time to recoup the gold spent).
The rep grind in order to be able to purchase these things could be a bore at times, especially in areas that didn’t have dailies or dungeons to build quick rep with factions… but there were benefits other than vendor access like lowered repair costs and more from vendoring. Grind rep was also farming for whatever… so you were effectively killing two birds with one stone.
WoW vanilla and really up until about a few months into BC, it did have a bit of intense farming/grinding at times… mainly for those doing raids. I know GW2 wants to do away with tradition and be different from the mold, but that shouldn’t mean not doing your homework on what certain core systems (like an economy) work and why. Maybe WoW was able to have it’s economy achieve homeostatis because it was making hand over fist with the subscription fees… I mean, the same company pushed out D3 and that game’s economy is all sorts of bungled in an attempt to get those precious micro-transactions.
I guess the golden question that earns you the big bucks is how to make a game that has a balanced economy for the players and can earn your company money. The mindset in the industry seems to be making the consumer pay upfront or attempting some form of nickle n’ dime on the consumer.
Honestly, I thought the game moving forward was going to be more like $60 bucks for the game initially and maybe some meaningful DLC installments every 3-4 months for like $5-$15 a pop with your occasional “freebies” like the holiday events.
If you took out grinding, theres no reason to play GW2 other than wvw or spvp.
True, but if they stuck to their strengths and really pushed out a dynamic environment where personal, guild, and server actions (or lack of actions) have real consequences (a true sense of horizontal progression), then you wouldn’t actually need so much grindy filler to keep people playing.
Look at all the contested waypoints on Orr. Tell me they’re not the real consequences of player inaction.
That only affects the zone…. that’s hardly dynamic. Whereas, say, by helping the Pact in other zones, it increases their presence in Orr (since that’s where the main focus of the story’s campaign is and they can now allocate more resources to it). Points now become less likely to be captured because there’s more NPCs or they’re more robust making them harder to kill and easier for them to essentially hold the point on their own. Flipside, by doing nothing in other zones it thins the Pact out (because they have to “reinforce” those areas), making it more likely for points to be steamrolled over. Not saying this example wouldn’t require some fanagling of how DEs currently work… but to me dynamic extends beyond a captured point.
It’s like saying Skyrim is dynamic because you can choose to join Imperials or Stormcloaks; which dethrones certain Jarls in order to appoint those more sympathetic to whatever cause you joined… yet taking these actions have no real impact on the world other than potentially pissing off the Blades leader and blocking the main story progression (depending on whatever point you’re at in it).
If you took out grinding, theres no reason to play GW2 other than wvw or spvp.
True, but if they stuck to their strengths and really pushed out a dynamic environment where personal, guild, and server actions (or lack of actions) have real consequences (a true sense of horizontal progression), then you wouldn’t actually need so much grindy filler to keep people playing.
You realize that if they gave us a nuke option it would require 10,000 of each T6 mat, a billion various lodestones, and detonator that’s RNG but can only be rolled on in the forge if you supply 1000 T6 mats split into the four forge slots.
^^^ Funny you mention that, because before my group got kicked it was like "speak with ghost “whatever name” in Lion’s Arch"… and before I could even be like “kitten?”, the loading screen for LA popped up. So maybe it wasn’t a DC for a particular player as much as a biff by Anet.
Everyone was real pissed when it happend and I was more like “who the kitten is this ghost dude?” (I was also pretty unhappy as well).
It could also be due to the fact that because drop rates beyond 20 don’t seem to improve by any real measure relative to the challenge… so the majority of people around these levels are just doing the daily lvl 20 for some loots and a shot at some infused ring drops.
I think people don’t like Traehearne because our epic story of small beginnings to grand standing is hyjacked by this firstborne (aka privileged) book-learner who apparently doesn’t know what a shirt is because he never wears one…. Our character isn’t so much a focal hero as much as a glorified sidekick that does all the heavy lifting, yet Traehearne gets all the praise. Also, he gets a legendary item for putting in little effort into the game? WTFZORS?!!!?!
We’re like the cat sidekick from Hong Kong Phoey.
Honestly at this point, I’d be all for green rings dropping 100% of the time if they offered an infusion slot (while still having a pipedream’s chance of getting an ascended ring).
Don’t tread on me… or my progression
I feel your pain…. a group I typically run with was down to the last few percentages on the last golem of the Asura boss (we were doing fractal 19 and that would’ve finished it), but then the person who made the fractal DC’ed and it actually booted us all out.
Needless to say it was incredibly demoralizing
I am noticing less rares… but more cores. Maybe that was just a lucky two runs (and my observation is slightly skewed since one chest gave me a glacial, molten, destroyer and charged core)
The grind is over…. the grind will never end…
Get the next legendary… even if you’re an engineer, you still need that pistol/shield legendary combo even if you’ll never use it
Farming or grinding for anything is the wrong way to play GW2.
They specifically made it so you cannot just farm things, things come with time – period.Until you get out of that mentality that you need everything and you need it quickly, you will never enjoy GW2.
Yeah… isn’t that what drop rates are for?… You know, so that things come with time? So it’s fair to have all sorts of ways to make gold, but still have a DR in on top of low drop rates? Because I suppose inflated prices on materials is better than an actual balanced market of those who farm for mats and those who farm for gold… with everyone else being in the middle of these two extremes.
I understand the need for the DR in dungeons and it’s original purpose as a “quick fix” to rampant issues of botting and grubb’n…. creating a super deflated market (great for players, terrible for Anet), but now that those have been dealt with relatively successfully, why is this draconian system still in full effect?
I will hand a blank check to Anet if they put in a rifle that looks like a candy cane and shoots tinsel as the particle effect….
You’ll shoot your eye out, kid!
Then I’ll get a helm with a patcheye…
Well Orr is farmed a little less due to a series of nerfs on the plinx and other lucrative karma grinds.
gw2lfg.com is a good way of finding groups for things other than fractals… though a lot of posts are general for fractals (but you can filter out to find non-fractal things). What some folks have realized is that fractals have better loot potential at higher levels, but dungeons give you more coin (at least I was noticing 10s drops from certain chests, bosses, and mobs in CoE that traditionally didn’t give that much)… So there are folks running explore mode dungeons (one dungeon path can easily give you enough gold, before sellingloot, to purchase at least 1-2 ectos).
I will hand a blank check to Anet if they put in a rifle that looks like a candy cane and shoots tinsel as the particle effect….
Then I’d make sure to bounce that check <.<
Although it saddens me to be one of “those people”… I will ragequit if the party is just terrible. However, for me to do that, it has to be pretty clear that the majority of people aren’t listening/trying to adjust or have any idea how to play their toon in a dungeon setting (not like a set build or whatever, but just not playing it well… you know when another player is not playing well). Luckily, I only do this once or twice; most people seem to “get it” by now.
Would be nice if the game gave you a ring when you first encounter lvl 10, 20, 30, etc., the RNG being what type of ring you get; with additional ring drops from dailies afterwards being RNG like now…. I think the rings need to remain somewhat RNG so players aren’t swimming in them, but at the same time they need to have some consistent drop at times so that players aren’t totally blocked from being able to progress.