Guild Wars 2

clay.7849:

Calae.1738:

Grind:

A reward system combined with a style of gameplay that is easy and repetitive. If there is no reward there is no grind. If the reward can be aquired by repeating the same task over and over again; then that is a grind.

I like this, except for the fact that a grind is subjective. What I find a grind, you may not.

Which is why I would add that when something repetitive becomes boring or tedious, then it becomes a grind.

In fact, the first few times I farm an area, I don’t find it to be a grind. As I continue, it becomes more of a grind.

If going out in the open world killing NPC’s was fun and had no reward; even if you did it countless times it is not a grind. You’re actually enjoying yourself.

Ask yourself this…

If all rewards were removed from Guild Wars 2, which part of the game do you think would be fun enough to play without any reward?

The very idea that the designer has to bribe the player with rewards in order to get them to play thier game; calls into question if the game is any fun at all.

Sanis.1096:

next patch will make gw2 e-sport… next patch is THE patch

We could only wish.

Grind:

A reward system combined with a style of gameplay that is easy and repetitive. If there is no reward there is no grind. If the reward can be aquired by repeating the same task over and over again; then that is a grind.

Instead of nerfing chests why don’t they buff the dragons?

You could train a monkey to kill these dragons.

Oh SoS, how the mighty have fallen.

My heart weeps for thee.

Geotherma.2395:

Calae.1738:

Rebort.6295:

I would quote john quoting john but come on. He’s said if they changed it, they would tell us in the patch notes.

If the arenanet wether man tells me it’s sunny outside and I look out the window and I see rain; I’m going to take an umbrella.

I don’t really care what anyone says. I trust data from experimentation. Run the numbers yourself.

John could say anything he wants; I have no reason to believe anything he says. I fact, I have no reason to believe anything anyone says.

Then why play at all? Continuing to play only would show that you either enjoy being lied to, or simply don’t believe your own conspiracy theory. Because here in the land of facts and numbers we have answers and can take them as such. Because our $$$ is supporting this company whether or not we have our tinfoil hats on or not.

We are playing a game, not voting for the next politician. Why people take this stuff so seriously is beyond me. I imagine every lead, designer, dev has to take babysitting courses just to be allowed to post on forums. Because half the time instead of being able to post helpful information they have to be busy culling the conspiracy theories that bored people come up with in their heads.

Obviously John Smith doesn’t exist at all, I mean who really has the generic first and last names like that right? Clearly he is an undercover agent from another country, possibly planet, sent here to steal our gems through micro-transactions. He has so far evaded capture by posing as a mild mannered MMO person, but soon the jig will be up.. very soon… MISTER SMITH

Dude you’re going crazy on me. Calm down.

In the world of finance and economics it is common for people to lie and profit from other people’s ignorance. It happens everyday. You can’t trust anyone but; it doesn’t mean you can’t verify thier claims.

Take a look at how much resistance the financial industry is placing on Elizebeth Warren to create a Consumer Protection Agency against predatory financial lending institutions.

Rebort.6295:

I would quote john quoting john but come on. He’s said if they changed it, they would tell us in the patch notes.

If the arenanet wether man tells me it’s sunny outside and I look out the window and I see rain; I’m going to take an umbrella.

I don’t really care what anyone says. I trust data from experimentation. Run the numbers yourself.

John could say anything he wants; I have no reason to believe anything he says. I fact, I have no reason to believe anything anyone says.

Simple things amuse simple minds.

The majority of the population just want to be rewarded with as little effort as possible. They want to be told that thier a hero.

Which is pathetic if you ask me.

We’re the only class with at least 3 useful utilities and the rest are aweful.

We’re the only class where all our elites are terrible.

The devs spend more time nerfing and taking things away then adding and modifying. Probably because it’s quicker and cheaper. Designing a new ability and balancing it requires a lot of testing; which Arena net doesn’t like to do.

Obtena.7952:

Telling us information prevents nothing. They can still adjust it and if we ask, they would just tell us the new rate.

Your assuming they don’t change the rate. I bet they change the rate all the time depending on player activity and changes to the game.

If they tell us the rate we can verify it by accumulating data. If they dont’t tell us the rate they can change it by 1% and no one would notice. 1% may not seem like much but, in a global market with millions of transactions? Think about it.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

John Smith.4610:

Nike.2631:

Answering the crazies but not the real questions again .

Simple question mode: does the vendor coin value of a rare affect the ectoplasms-outcome of salvaging it?

Pleeeeeeeease?

Sorry, you aren’t getting salvaging secrets out of me.

Any insight on why salvage rates on ectos are such a highly guarded secret, as opposed to other information you provide? Is it just the potential market impact that prevents you from sharing or is there some higher big brother reason?

I can’t see what effect telling us the salvage rates would have on the market. The only change I see is a potential increase or decrease in certain salvage kit sales, which seems nominal to me in the long run.

Telling us the salvage rates prevents them from adjusting it manually to what ever rate they see fit.

They may not necessarily be balance with each other but, the devs weigh them the same on gear and traits.

1) Are there any plans to revisit the minor/major traits, weapons skills, utility/elite skills in order to balance the least popular ones with the most popular ones?

2) Are there any plans to remove passive effects and boons from minor/major traits, utility/elite skills and replace them with a unique ability?

3) Are there any plans to introduce combo systems on weapon skills where a chain of abilities are used in sequence to inflict bonus damage? Example: Guardian Hammer Banish + Mighty Blow (Banish causes knock down, Mighty Blow does bonus damage to knocked down targets).

When someone spends 10 points in Arcana, they shave 2 seconds off thier attunment recharge. How is that 2 seconds of attunment recharge balanced against 100 Power/Precision/Toughness/Vitality/Healing/Condition Damage?

The reason I ask is because I know that 1 point of Power weighs the same as 1 point of any other stat (except crit damage).

I’m confused how Arenanet balances 2 seconds off attunment swap to 100 of X stat.

People are expecting a huge update to PVP this month. PVP is the only thing holding me to this game. The PVE is such a chore. Nothing is even remotely challenging. Arenanets definition of a PVE challenge is laughable at best and insulting at worst.

This month will decide wether I give a kitten about this game.

People are not doing Dragons because the loot is good. People are doing the Dragons because you can auto attack AFK your way to the chest.

I wouldn’t go as far as to say that the market is corrupt but, it’s definatley manipulated. In the same way that a central bank manipulates interest rates to dictate the value of money.

It’s in Arenanets best interest to have a slow growing inflation in the the system. Why? Because it’s easier to manipulate the value of gems than it is to manipulate the value of gold. If they can manipulate the value of gems; they are indirectly manipulating the value of gold. The gem store is thier source of revenue.

How long can the playerbase tolerate gem price manipulation remains to be seen. I would argue that the breaking point will occur when the majority of the playerbase will feel the need to buy gems in order to avoid the boring gameplay.

This is what I imagined the end game zones would be.

If they built a sandbox like this; all these zones would be full and have queues 24/7.

Kynmarcher.2184:

Well… sadly not everyone is as hardcore as you and cannot solo veterans so readily. Some veteran combinations are rather nasty (dredge veterans come to mind) and so I disagree that all NPCs need to be replaced with veterans.

However I would like to see less champions and more silvers. From my understanding of difficulty NPCs rank like this:

Normal > Veteran > Silver > Champion > Purple

Champions and Purples should be reserved for meta event bosses/final wave trash.

Silvers should be present in mini-dungeons and at the end of dynamic event chains where they can be avoided or killed depending on player skill

Veterans should remain unchanged.

IMO I find it annoying when you’re trying to do solo explorations and your path is blocked by a champion because unless you’re a skilled guardian or extremely good at kiting or self healing you’re not going to go any further down that path (especially if said path is blocked by a locked door).

The same can be said for when you’re soloing dynamic events and suddenly a champion spawns which you can’t kill for the final reward.

The reason why champions aren’t soloable for the most part is because they have control resistances. They can’t be knocked down, stunned, crippled ect…

These control mechanics are essential since you can’t dodge every attack. I would remove control immunies from all NPC’s. In the absence of tanks and healers, control immunies make no sense what so ever.

Replace all NPC’s with Veterans.
Replace all Veterans with Silver.
Put more Champions in the world.

Your NPC’s are too weak and take up space.

Yours Truely
A very bored Hero of Tyria

PinCushion.7390:

LordByron.8369:

Now you cannot kill a thief with your ele even if the thief is bad (and they fail their burst because if they succeed you die) he will simply get away easily…

It is for that reason that I’ve begun changing my build to focus more on control and spike damage rather than survivability and sustained DPS. My theory is that I’ll have to avoid the thief’s spike, counter-spike him back, and use control abilities to keep him from running off before he’s dead.

When it works I win. When it doesn’t I die, but I would have probably died anyway. It just would have taken longer.

Culling makes this very very challenging (read: nearly impossible), but it’s a fun game to play.

Compared to the Frost Mage / Subtly Rogue cooldown fight in World of Warcraft; that is incredibly shallow.

Raptured.9307:

You know the “balancing” that this game is largely driven by on sPvP more than anything else (with some WvW changes and bug fixes here and there) right? Though the state of sPvP right now is rather sad… could use some new modes, ranking systems, connects to pve/wvw, etcetc.

I want them to continue to balance the game and make abilities worth taking despite the existance of SPVP.

Wether we like it or not SPVP is always going to be unpopular. The reason this game is never going to be an esport is because it’s too basic. There’s no depth in the combat system. The Elementalist is the only class that has any depth to it.

Look at the Warrior for comparison. The Warrior is too easy to play and too easy to be affective with. The skill ceiling is so low that you could train a chimpanzee to be a pro.

Kellhus.8071:

You could run d/d with the same build and still be just as effective.

The RTL cd change only mattered to someone using RTL every 15 seconds (read as: no one).

The heal change didn’t change the fact that we’re still highly mobile with several ways to create lulls in damage being applied against us.

You can optimize based on the changes, obviously, but you can still be successful without changing a thing.

The RTL change impacted me too much. RTL was a staple ability. I had it timed perfectly with attunment swapping. The change to 20 sec royally screwed me.

In PVE and PVP it had greatly affected mobility. It was untolerable. My attunment swapping rythm was all messed up.

Arenanet believed that the Elementalist should invest a lot more into the Air tree to get that 15 seconds. It’s a give and take scenario. You want that kind of mobility? Well you’ll have to give up something else for it.

It was deemed too strong in bunker builds in SPVP. Personally I couldn’t give a kitten about that stupid gametype that 12 people play.

I’m not trying to be negative or flame anyone here; so lets get that out of the way.

My question is philosophical. I’m trying to understand the core design philosophy behind this type of gameplay system and why YOU think it’s fun.

To me this feels like a chore rather than enterainment. Tier 1 and Tier 2 is better suited for smaller sized guilds and the biggest challenge is to find all the NPC targets in the world. Once you find all the targets, you spam the NPC to talk to them in order to prevent them from walking away, activate the mission, post in guild chat the closest waypoint to the NPC and kill all NPCs before the timer runs out. Tier 3 will be out of reach for small guilds due to scaling and symantics.

Guild Wars 2 is an unfinished product and is technically still in beta. Classes are a complete mess.

-There are very few viable builds and the majority of traits are down right terrible.

-Condition damage is completely broken in group environments.

-99% of the world is empty and it took them 5 years to build it.

-Content is not challenging enough to satisfy skilled players so they gate content with daily tokens.

-Player culling

Please post a video of doing AC with lvl 35 players in blue gear, not greens or yellows, blues.

Then I might CARE about what you have to say.

Robert Hrouda.1327:

All new stuff in dungeons is going to be hard for the first few days. We see it all the time with new content – people fail and get knocked down when they aren’t used to that sort of thing, and they claim it is too difficult.
Give it a week or so for everyone to develop strategies, learn encounters, and build fundamentals, and they will claim it is too easy. Trust me when I say this, the numbers are punishing (but less than they were before), but knowing the mechanics will greatly mitigate the danger.

You guys are starting to get a very bad reputation for designing broken encounters and mechanics that don’t work. Every AC dungeon I go to players are bad mouthing Arenanet developers for incompetence. Bugs, broken mechanics and fake difficulty.

Yes fake difficulty.

Make a boss attack every second and give him knockbacks and knockdowns on every single one of his attacks. Here’s the best part, make a friendly NPC AI that is central to the encounter. Good thing this NPC is as dumb as a door knob and dies in 3 hits.

Probably the worst dungeon design I have ever seen.

Frotee.2634:

Seeing as my immersion in MMOs can’t compare to the immersion in a single player RPG or a good book, said MMO may as well amuse me – seeing how I have to deal with enough ‘seriousness’ in my real life.
Also, I like to laugh.

It’s childish comedy, not adult comedy.

I’m sure no one would complain if they added funny things that adults would laugh at. It’s like Star Wars episode 1 style comedy with Jar Jar Binks. It’s goofy and childish. Walt Disney does a very good job making stories where adults and childen both laugh. Their jokes target multiple demographics.

1vs1 arena would put class balance under a bright spotlight and the developers would be vilified daily.

Flamenco.3894:

Calae.1738:

The dark and serious tone will appeal to a mature and older audience. Guild Wars 2 is targeting teenagers with under-developed brains. They can’t go very far with a T rating.

I think Arenanet missed thier target by a few years. The average MMO gamer is 30 years and over now. There will be a lot of mature themed MMO’s released in the near future. I think Guild Wars 2 is going to have a hard time competing with thier happy fun land due to thier T rating target audience.

Let me tell you this that they are doing a great disservice by the goofyness of the tone and style of GW2 which is actually better appropriate for pre-teen people. And then people wonder why people have a hard time acting as an adult these days.

Treating people, teens and older, with the kind of tone in GW2 will ultimately doom the game.

The demographics will play against them that’s for sure. Blizzard tryed to attract a younger audience and new subscribers with Cataclysm and failed pretty hard.

The MMO market is not appealing to younger generations. Adding fluffy teddy bear backpacks ruins immersion and makes me feel like I’m in a bad children’s movie.

The dark and serious tone will appeal to a mature and older audience. Guild Wars 2 is targeting teenagers with under-developed brains. They can’t go very far with a T rating.

I think Arenanet missed thier target by a few years. The average MMO gamer is 30 years and over now. There will be a lot of mature themed MMO’s released in the near future. I think Guild Wars 2 is going to have a hard time competing with thier happy fun land due to thier T rating target audience.

Everyone I meet in AC are very bad at this game. It’s not like this game is hard too. I see players that are not even dodging. They’re just standing still auto attacking. Is there anyone out there that is any good still playing?

I don’t do SPVP. My build is for PVE and WvW, small to large group play. I created this post because I’m curious how you guys adapted to the Feb patch and how you changed your builds.

Build prior to patch
http://www.guildhead.com/skill-calc#mcszz9Mz0mlvbmMMvbo0G0xGzocsqVo

Build after patch
http://www.guildhead.com/skill-calc#mcszz9Mz0mlNbmMMNbo0G0xGosVsqVo

Trait changes
The nerf to RTL was large enough for me to drop Zephyr’s Boon for Aeromancer’s Alacrity. The shorter cooldown on Shocking Aura and Updraft is nice.

The nerf on boon durations made my decision to drop Zephyr’s Boon and Soothing Disrutpion easier. Instead of using my cantrips to provide condition removal; I’ve opted to take Cleansing Wave which now removes 2 conditions when switching to water.

The loss of Vigor on Cantrip activation and Swiftness on Aura activation was a hard pill to swallow. It allowed me to be very mobile while not attacking any targets; which was very useful. In order to get around this, I decided to drop Armor of Earth for Signet of Air. The constant movement speed increase compensates for lack of swiftness but, Vigor was a loss I couldn’t recuperate. The loss of Armor of Earth reduces my survivability however, Cantrips are no longer used for any other reason other than stun breaks and damage prevention; which helped to compensate.

The loss of Fury on aura activation had me change my equipment by reducing Vitality in favor of Precision.

Overall, I lost Vigor duration; 7 seconds of Protection and Stability, 1 stun breaker and about 2k health.

Did you change anything?

Scepter is the worst weapon for the Elementalist. The list of problems with this weapon are so long that it can be safely categorized as useless. It’s slow, weak damage output, clunky mechanics and doesn’t synergize well with any offhand.

It’s not just useless/broken traits/skills that limits builds anymore, now it’s acsended items. When you combine these 2 together you get quite an ugly mess.

It’s too bad class design/balancing doesn’t get much attention.

Easy things are not worth doing. Difficult things are worth doing. Auto attacking NPC’s to death are for the mentally challenged.

Would it be possible to setup a test server so that we can test your patches before you release them? The amount of bugs in this game is mind boggling.

Frellin.6318:

Withdraw is incredibly useful the way it is. Making it more like a third dodge is not really needed. The main issue I have is finding non-stealth thief builds that I can enjoy. I mostly do P/D and a little S/D. You are at a disadvantage against bunker builds and condition builds without having the condition removal and healing from Shadow Arts traits and Hide in Shadows.

Sure, for PVP. I don’t PVP much. I find conditions in Guild Wars 2 to be very poorly implemented. There are 11 conditions in this game. Condition removal tools work in sequence from oldest to newest.

There’s a very good reason why Blizzard scrapped the old dispel system. It’s doesn’t promote skill and strategic play at all. At high levels of play, debuff removal was nothing but spam. Over here, its the exact opposite, debuff application is nothing but spam. The worst part about all of this is that you can’t remove the dubuffs you want first. Condition removal tools are limited by a priority system; which is total crap.

Thief’s don’t have protection, healing and barrier skills like Guardians do. They can dodge quite a bit though. The evasive builds of the Thief can be effective if you know when and what to dodge.

Our only effective condition removal is stealth. Stealth can be tricky in a melee group since the NPC you’re tanking will turn around and smack your ally in the face.

Thief tanks work but, not nearly as well as Guardian.

I’m starting to dislike the idea of fighting hordes of NPC’s. The next target swapping is a pain and our AoE can only hit 5 targets anyway. Not to mention the fact that AoE will be nerfed in the future as well.

Example:

Reduce the amount of NPC’s in the game by half and changing them to Bronze, Silver and Gold. The higher the tier, the more HP, armor, damage and abilities these NPC’s have. They should also not be immune to any type of conditions, stuns and knockbacks in order to be able to solo them.

What do you think?

LieutenantGoogle.7326:

with that logic shouldn’t ele staff fire and updraft roll be a targeted dodge as well rather than always backwards? Engineers rocketboots also?

If I was the designer that’s how I would have designed it. A dodge move that only moves in one direction doesn’t make any sense. The reality is that you can dodge in any direction; the only thing is that you have to face the opposite direction of where you want to go.

There’s a reason why we build things to be less confusing. We want many people to understand how to use it (low skill floor). Our ability to master the skill and use it in spectacular ways is what differentiates us from inexperienced players (high skill ceiling).

Sericenthe.5310:

WvWvW still provides enough fun for me that isn’t “loot” based to make me play.

That’s player created content though. The sandbox type of conent is replayable to infinity. There will always be people playing chess and that game has been around for 1500 years.

You want to try an interesting experiement? Remove all the loot in the game and see if the content is fun enough to keep people playing. If it doesn’t; what would that tell you about the quality of the content?

My build is identical to yours. The only difference is that I use the 20% cooldown reduction to cantrips. I use Armor of Earth instead of Cleansing Fire. reducing incoming damage by 33% at the press of a button has saving me more times than I can count.

TabMorte.5297:

You do realize you could use skill or effort and get ascended items via fractals as well right? Though it won’t have utility slots it will have options for all the same defensive and offensive infusions as the laurel gear.

The laurel gear is added as an option for people who 1. don’t want to use the skill/effort paths to getting ascendant items or 2. have maxed out on the skill/effort returns and want more still.

In either case I have no issue with time being the alternative to skill/effort.

Of coarse. That particular demographic doesn’t mind repeating an easy task for long periods of time. The sad part is that there is no equivelent reward for the player who enjoys extremely challeging content.

The fractals are the hardest difficulty content we have. We can’t get accessories or amulets from there. The funny part about all of this is that this is the only content in the game that actualy requires acsended items. No other content in this game requires acsended items.

CoRtex.2157:

Zepidel.5349:

without dailies any hardcore player could be in BiS gear in less than a week easily, and then have nothing to do. It took me 2 days to go from my 1st lvl 80 to being in all exotic gear, about 5 days to have all the dungeon skins I wanted. The sad truth is there is really no endgame in gw2, there is 0 incentive to bring your realm glory in WvWvW by defeating the other 2 realms. The fractal “infinite” dungeon doesn’t get any harder with each successive level rather it just add artificial difficulty via agony (would it of been so hard to change the fight/level mechanics each tier and then scale damage and resists for those 10 levels?) oh and agony resists are based off of your RNG on getting loot.

So,, time to bring back skill-based dungeons with extremely rare drops in end-chests (like new legendaries for example) & ecto alike mob drops. -> this will keep you playing for months until you got most of the rares u want, and it doesn’t feel like a grind, because it’s not easy content and you get great rewards from it.

Can they design content that is challenging enough though? Strategies to any encounter can be posted on youtube. The question is, can the developer create content that requires incredible coordination, communication and lightnig fast reflexes? So far from what I’ve seen; they can’t.

Here’s what I think is happening.

The developers can’t find a way to create content that is fun/challenging enough for a certain demographic to keep playing. In order to try to keep thier business, they’re placing these time gates on acsended gear in an effort to create a buffer of time to develop new content.

Personally I think this is a big mistake but, they’ll find out the hard way.

Culling is entirely server side. There’s nothing that you can do on your end to reduce this effect.

By the way, my friend was laughing. Hard. He’s probably never coming back. What I fear the most is those that do leave for awhile, come back and see the grind ahead of them, they’ll quit before getting started.

I have multiple characters and would like to be able to gear them all. Unfortunatley, the above calculation is just for 1 peice of gear. It would probably take me years to complete an entire set for multiple characters.

I have played many mmo’s before GW2 and I have never had to grind this much. This is a whole new level of grind. To me, this is completely absurd.