Guild Wars 2

Yes, GW2 is definitely different. It’s possibly the only well designed and polished game released since WOW which wasn’t to some degree a WOW clone.

Personally I don’t love all the changes – eg. getting rid of roles (mostly) – but I think most are big, albeit simple, improvements which noticeably increase the fun factor.

Donari.5237:

Agreed on all counts but one! The events are the “quests” of this game. Don’t think of them as a break, think of them as advancing the story of the zone you’re in (plus they may be the main source of xp for you).

I see your point and you’re right. But I don’t think the OP is wrong either.

“Questing” has essentially become defined as being given some task by a stationary NPC who is always there. Because that’s how 99.99% of games implement it. I’m pretty sure that’s how the OP used it and in that sense they’re right to make the distinction they did.

rapthorne.7345:

With respect, no information was actually shared other than something may in some way change with HoT. Ambiguous information is often more frustrating than none at all.

Agreed.

I can’t say anything other than I preferred the original trait system to this current one. But who knows what this future direction is, other than ArenaNet who aren’t saying yet.

I read that Nexon proposal after seeing it come up in a reddit thread and am entirely unconcerned.

To me it read as Nexon throwing a hissy fit because NCSoft won’t do what they want. I’m pretty sure the average shareholder will see the same and simply vote no to it.

I think making ascended gear account bound was a great idea. But it left cultural armour in a weird place.

I totally get that the cultural armour is meant to be race specific ankitten ot suggesting changing it. But in its present state it makes cultural armour much less appealing for ascended gear because you can only share it with other characters of that race.

I see two simple and fair ways this could be fixed.

1) Make cultural armours ‘transferable’. Eg. if you apply a T2 Asura skin to a piece of armour and you also own the T2 Norn equivalent, then your Norn characters could wear it and it would display the Norn skin. It would be unwearable for races you don’t own their equivalents for.

2) Assuming the player has any outfits, allow account bound armour to be worn under them by any race. Mechanically, it could work like this. If you’re not wearing an outfit (outfit selected and its checkbox ticked) then you can’t wear other-race cultural armour (i.e. as it is now). If you are wearing an outfit then you can equip other-race cultural armour AND the option to untick outfits is disabled. You can still change outfits but the option to untick outfit display remains disabled while you’re wearing any other-race cultural armour.

EDIT – Thanks to Electro for pointing out that cultural weapons aren’t race bound. I hope I didn’t cause any confusion.

Knighthonor.4061:

Druids wearing the skin and bones of animals is symbolized in Video Games as animal transformations because real life Druids wear those to take the spiritual form of the animal spirits.

You’ve either missed or are blithely ignoring the point they were making which is it is highly debatable what “druidism” is, because as with so many things it has changed drastically over time.

Fair enough you define druidism a specific way but that doesn’t make it an absolute truth.

Zenith.6403:

When will you realize that x times 300%, 400%, 500% or whatever is meaningless without knowing what the x is?

Do you not understand how the magic find bonus works?

Every time you kill a mob one or more random rolls are performed to see if you get loot from specific tables. If your roll is higher than the threshold for that table then you get something from it.

The magic find bonus multiplies your roll. So with a 100% magic find bonus you have double the chance to get loot from every roll. On average that means double the loot, across the board.

cyst.3108:

Yeah babe Druid is what is for you.. you know, cause we alreaddy got a full detailed mechanic of the druid alreaddy… Specialization is something that goes beyond to the main class. you you have to fully master what you got until you especialice in something not better.. but deeper and diferent.

I can’t believe this needs to be explained…. further.

Like I said, quite clearly, I like the NATURE THEME of Rangers but not most of the rest of the profession. Not to my tastes. While we don’t have excruciating details on Druids, we know they have more plant based attacks. That’s freaking awesome in my books. Much better than boring Ranger skills.

Specific mechanics… well it’s highly unlikely they could make them so bad that I wouldn’t want to play the profession and ANYONE else would. So I blow raspberries in your general direction, babe.

cyst.3108:

All this is getting old… wait release… buy, play and if you dont like: Unistall. Player base is as big as XXXXXXX, Anet wont matter about 2-3 Cry-baby that doesnt have an lv 80 yet even if they have the time till the release to just lv them, and change their mind.

Caeledh.5437:

For the record, I already have all but a few professions at or nearing level 80 – all the ones I care about – so none of the above was said for my own benefit. I have a lot of time to kill at the moment so when I read about HoT’s specialisations I decided to finish levelling a few professions I could never be bothered with before.

Has to be said – LEARN TO READ. I specifically said I have mostly level 80 characters. FYI that includes a ranger. It was pretty boring getting him there but I gritted my teeth and got it done. But if I hadn’t had so much time to kill right now, I honestly don’t know if I’d have bothered and there goes much of my motivation to buy HoT.

I agree 1000% with the OP. It’s the reason I logged into the forums today but the OP beat me to it.

My theory is they’ve settled on this level 80 number on the basis of feedback from existing players – who all would mostly have their characters at level 80 – and not on the basis of feedback from potential new customers or former players who might buy HoT. And I think it’s a big mistake.

I’ve only ever been an on-and-off player of GW2. Part of the problem for me is I’ve never been able to settle on a profession. I like the theme of some and the mechanics of others but can’t get everything in one package.

For example, I like the nature of theme of Rangers and pets are generally nice to have and spirits are cool but don’t care at all for their weapon skills. It’s just not my cup of tea. Druids are much more to my liking.

So say I’m a new player or someone who bought GW2 and no longer plays and didn’t level every profession to 80 but like the look of one of the specializations. What I’m faced is with is a barrier – having to level a profession to 80 that I don’t love and that’s a reason NOT to buy the game / expansion.

I think it’s along a similar vein to the mistake Anet made with changing the way players unlock traits. The original system, which from memory let you get your first GM trait at level 40, allowed players to get more of a proper feel for a profession by that point. Level 40 is obviously much easier to reach than 80.

For the record, I already have all but a few professions at or nearing level 80 – all the ones I care about – so none of the above was said for my own benefit. I have a lot of time to kill at the moment so when I read about HoT’s specialisations I decided to finish levelling a few professions I could never be bothered with before. But if they haven’t already I think Anet should invest a little money in focus group testing of former and potential GW2 players to get a better feel for this.

No, definitely not.

Honestly, I’d love to see some kind of shapeshifting and be perfectly happy for Druids to get it.

But I also think all the “it’d be too much like WOW druids” comments are perfectly valid. GW2 has made a big name for itself by not copying other games. It has a unique world, races, story, combat system and now alternate form of end-game progression. It seems unlikely they’d choose to buck that trend with this.

That said, it’s not like shapeshifting is unique to WOW and it already exists in various forms in GW2. So if animal shapeshifting were introduced, rather than being as a part of the Druid spec I think they’d do it as a separate Ranger spec.

I’m an on and off player. I really like a lot of things about the game but after a month or two on I inevitably end up feeling burned out and not having any fun at all.

I came back about half way through the Christmas event. So I did the achievement grind for that. Exhausting. A lot of it not my idea of fun at all but if you want those shinies you gotta do it. I gritted my teeth and got through it. It ended, thankfully. Then another event rolls right in not long after.

I feel dread at the thought of more of the same and I notice looking at its dailies that PvP is mandatory. There’s no way to get the minimum 3 points without doing at least 2 of its arena games. That’s just piling worse news on bad.

It’s bad enough having to do a bit of PvP for some event meta achievements but having to do it daily is just too much. In fact since one of them is awarded just for participation I wouldn’t be surprised if you see a lot of players just going into the arena and then idling until it’s over.

That would be dreadful for the people who really want to play it but that’s the kind of behaviour you’re encouraging by forcing players to participate in activities they don’t really enjoy.

Seriously, there’s a lot to love about this game. You know how to make fun content. But this particular very thick and time consuming layer of tedious repetition could do with some pruning.

All my characters are Sylvari and Asura so I get where this question is coming from. They’re very cool.

Sylvari can look incredible with all their colour and glow options, if you’re good with colours or at least have the patience to try lots of variations until you hit something nice.

Asura can be total cutesy-pie (mine are) or vicious little rat people. And their animations are adorably comical.

One important thing to consider that not everyone might know is Sylvari skin colour is used in their racial armour. And it’s not always a direct translation. Eg. you can make a Sylvari with white looking skin but it’s technically a pale grey and what you get in your racial armours is a darker grey. That can look bad. I have a whitey and make that work with the tier 1 armour and blue dyes. But it’s really difficult otherwise for that character and Sylvari racial armours.

Most of my Sylvari have green or brown skin. That’s much easier to colour match. We’re accustomed to seeing lots of different coloured flowers with brown and green so just about any combination thereof looks good to us.

I have some with less natural looking skin colours that look very cool (also with racial armours) but they took longer for me to get right.

This is a joke thread, right? I note the lack of details in the original post about how exactly the staff is underpowered or anything.

Fire attunement is definitely OP compared to just about anything else in the PvE game. That’s for the sake of PvP balance where targets aren’t stupid enough to just stand in a fire field. The DPS needs to be relatively high to compensate. That’s an enormous boon for PvE.

In PvE the other attunements seem and I suppose are crappier. But I don’t think they are compared to just about any other weapon / profession in the game.

I get good use out of my fire staff but if anything I’d see Anet hitting staff’s fire with some kind of nerf before they buff the other attunements.

Vortex.3712:

Conjures blocking all your attunement rotations destroys the weapon. i think one solution would be to be able to spawn one conjure weapon at a time pick either on ally or on your self and it can be stowed and un-stowed(or used again) until its charges run out. basically giving the ele another attunement and each conjure can be summoned depending on the attunement that they are currently on( like earth shield on earth, fire axe on fire, bow on water etc.). and have like a 80-120 cd .

The whole rotating through elements thing is an optional playstyle, not a defining feature of the profession. It’s definitely not something you have to do. Nor is it necessarily optimal.

But I agree that instead of 4 active utility skills they could be dropped back to one and summon a different weapon based on your current attunement. That would be sensible. Also agree that a new trait or utility passive to only summon a weapon on the ground for an ally (and not yourself) would be good. Giving players more options is almost always a good idea.

lordbachus.6091:

How about a new set of cojure weapons…… Sword, shield and net, a gladiator set… Mellee and crowd co troll oriented, with

Love your enthusiasm and more would be good, but the problem I’m trying to address is the current mechanics which make them less appealing. A few relatively simple (programming wise) changes could achieve that. Designing and testing more elemental weapons would be much, much, much more time consuming.

And I think if anything were to be done in that department I think perhaps underwater versions might take priority. Elementalists are perversely ill equipped for underwater combat compared to other professions and its mostly because of conjures.

Conjured weapons are one of the really cool looking aspects of the ele profession but in practice they’re rarely used. I almost never use them and never see anyone else with them. The only time I have used them is when I convinced a friend to try the game and she was playing non-ele classes. She enjoyed them so I’d drop them for her.

The main problem is it’s a pain to have to recast all the time. And when solo running back for the second conjure is almost as tedious.

I’m aware some of my suggestions make them more like engineer kits and some people will get their knickers in a twist over that. To that I say too bad. Engineers still have lots of uniqueness (eg. turrets) and the sad fact is conjured weapons are so under-used because they’re not fun. That’s a lot of wasted potential.

I think they could easily be brought into more common use with either a few traits or utility passives which give players more options with them. Eg.

Bound weapons : Conjured weapons are no longer ground targeted and only create a weapon for the caster. They no longer have charges or a duration limit. [implement a cooldown comparable to non-engineer weapon swap]

Enduring weapons : Conjured weapons have a longer duration (5-10 minutes?) and unlimited charges. Reduces conjured weapon cooldown to 10 seconds. [cd reduction allows caster to conjure weapons for multiple allies]

Regenerating weapons : Conjured weapons automatically refresh their duration and charges every X seconds for both caster and allies. [would have a range limit and only work for weapons you conjured, not those conjured by other eles]

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Caeledh.5437:

Don’t we also know eles have sword?

Where was this confirmed? This is the first I’ve seen or heard of it.

Confirmed maybe not. But everyone’s been talking about it in numerous threads on this topic. I think from this.

http://youtu.be/IOUk2y0K2m8?t=1m57s

Watching it again now though I wonder. The attack does looks elemental – fire on sword and the player turning to mist…. but maybe this is the new revenant class showing their misty ways.

I love the mesmer pink butterflies. Best thing about the class IMO. Only thing I’ve ever wanted to reskin are the engineer packs.

Since what you’re wanting is just a way to change what happens on your own screen, on the face of it that sounds reasonable. One potential drawback though is the impact that could have on screenshots and videos which when shared online become marketing content. You’re asking them to give up a lot of control in a domain that drives revenue.

Even limited to colour it could be problematic.

Yes. The info released so far about specialisations would be enough for me to want it.

Don’t we also know eles have sword?

Seems unlikely to me, since there are a bunch of race-based achievements.

Not that I care either way.

I think the original system was fine. Certainly fine enough for the game to be incredibly popular and sell like hot cakes.

Revert to that.

My favourite so far is the druid. I’ve been wanting something like that pretty much since the game first released. The elementalist with a sword could also be interesting, though they kind of already have ‘specialisations’ and melee ones at that with conjured weapons.

Really curious to see what guardians will get. They already have melee. They already have magic. They already have ranged. The only thing they don’t have is firearms.

While I think GW2 is a marvellous game I’ve never been able to really click with it and have only ever been an on and off player. Two things stood in the way.

First, I normally play healers in online games and GW2 essentially does away with them.

Second, I could never settle on a class. I like the theme of some (guardians, rangers, elementalists) and the mechanics of others (rogues, engineers) but couldn’t get everything in one package.

One thing I had always wished for was rangers being able to wield some of the ‘magic’ type weapons and be more druid-like. And here it is! So that’s enough for me buy the expansion regardless of what else it contains.

Thank you ArenaNet!

I fail to see the point of this item. I certainly wouldn’t recommend it to anyone.

I bought it expecting to be able to use it to wp back to my capital city. Teleport to house. Exit to city.

But that doesn’t work. It lets me teleport to house but replaces my house-to-city portal with the house-to-original-location portal.

So…. what’s the point of that? I currently only visit my house once a day with one character to mine nodes and fuse crystals. I have most of my alts parked in capitals and any of them can do that.

My patience with their terrible handling of this is exhausted. I’m requesting a refund.

For anyone still hanging in there, try moving to a lower population server. The severity of the problem is linked to server pop. I’ve reported this but they prefer the it’s-your-IP line.

Moving to one of the lower pop servers, I went from being instantly lagged out and then disconnected every time I logged in to actually being able to play for a few hours of the day (at quiet times) and not being lagged out and disconnected for a good 5 or more minutes.

Good luck everyone else

The LZ.7891:

Pretty unfair to call it a bogus game just because you appear to have connectivity issues.

LOL.

It’s not just one person having connectivity problems though, is it?

1) Yes.

2) Australia.

3) All. I’ve tried around the clock and can’t find any time when this problem doesn’t occur.

Three months on and still suffering from this problem.

Tried something new this morning. Ran the game with the windows resource monitor open.

It showed no packet loss or high latency for any of the GW2 connections. But I was still instantly lagged out and eventually disconnected after selecting a character and loading into the gameworld.

Bladetrick.3849:

Anyone know if this is a realm thing or a guild wars 2 thing?

Not completely clear but it appears to be an ArenaNet thing.

The exact same problem hit GW at the same time as GW2 earlier this year.

Old, old, old problem which seems to be affecting more people now. Join the gang

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/tech/error-code-7-11-3-189-101/

Still instantly disconnected every time I login.

It’s really disheartening to see that not only am I still experiencing this problem four months after first reporting it but that it now seems to be affecting more and more players.

FYI for those new to this problem, it seems to have popped up earlier this year and started affecting both GW and GW2 at about the same time. Players who once could play both without problems suddenly started having this problem. But somehow the problem is on our end…

Also having the same problem.

All ports open. Problem unaffected by whether firewalls are on / off.

Problem was there in the beta weekends. Got worse during some of the stress tests. I ticketed it then and complained about it (like many others) in the forums. Apparently this was ignored.

• NOTE * Disconnects only occur when server load is high. When there aren’t many players on this doesn’t happen.

Looking at the traceroute from gameadvisor, the problem seems to be on the anet end. The trace makes it all the way to 64.25.32.82 where it reports the destination as unreachable. That IP belongs to you.