Guild Wars 2

Ithilwen.1529:

Fix what’s here, then […]

Accretion-based development doesn’t work like that, sadly. You never fix, instead you throw another superseding idea at it.

Feanor.2358:

I don’t think ANet want to push the game in the direction “kill 1 dragon, exp: kill 1 more dragon, exp 2: kill 2 more dragons, …”.

And what hints at that?

I mean both the base game and the first expansion work that way.

Nyel.1843:

Another question: must it be either Jormag or Primordus? Where there hints in game that we’ll battle them next?

I dunno, only like… the entirety of the current LS3?

On a whole, hexes would bring us a lot closer to a more specialized class, a disabler and CCer.

Maybe we just need bigger reworks? Actually ripping out skills entirely? It’s time to bring a larger tool to class balance?

Illusions for example could be fun as a skill type, even though Illusion of Life is fairly weak. But the general idea is interesting, something like Illusion of Strength: Affected allies gain 25 Might and Fury and Swiftness, this stacks with existent effects (!), however after X seconds they gain an undispellable Cripple and Weakness for a few seconds.

Vayne.8563:

I’d honestly be surprised if this is the case.

Why? Will only be one Dragon? I mean I suspect it’ll only be one (can release two smaller xpacks back-to-back, one for Jormag, one for Primordeus), but I bet they keep the general MO from HoT.

Could also just disable gliding in it. WoW frequently disabled flying or at least temporarily blocks it, for good reason.

OniGiri.9461:

I agree its hard to keep track of some things. But isn’t it also good to have many different sources for one “thing”?

Hrm, not necessarily.

I mean in theory it can be positive, gives a lot of choices how you want to spend your time. Though honestly if I were to think down that path I’d come back to the argument that Ascended items being “better” wasn’t a good idea to begin with and they should have differentiated themselves only through the infusion slots and nothing else.

But ignoring that part for a second, the downside of having many ways to do X is that it’s very confusing what you are supposed to do if you want X. More so because not all of the ways were implemented around the same time or even given the same attention.

Meaning that if I want an Ascended Weapon, I might end up doing something which is woefully ineffective, never knowing that methods A and B, instead of C which I am doing, are far more effective, one because it was implemented later in a more well-defined environment, one because it is outdated and was never fixed up to work the way it was intended to and I can buy oversupplied mats (hypothetical example).

The dev-workload keeps increasing. If they ever want to make, say, Ascended items 10% more difficult to get, wow do they have a lot of things to do. And that’s just ascended items, they have this problem for virtually anything in the game.

There’s usually two ways to “fix” the mess which results from it:

• Can just keep the acquisition/gameplay types for each result very small. This obviously fixes it (say, Ascended is crafted and that’s it, no exceptions), but as you said there are upsides to having multiple ways of getting things.
• Alternatively, can “clean up” the old ways. Say Ascended gear in PvE is acquired either by crafting or by zone currency or by FotM drops, then the former two can be upgraded every so often, removing the old recipes and vendors in favor of the newer ones (with either a significant delay or a way to exchange the zone currencies for example). Especially for vendor-bought items this makes sense as the new zones feel very throwaway and tend to not last all that long.

Of course, this is more of a fine-tuning element when looking at just one specific thing: Ascended gear.
But this problem affects virtually everything. There’s sooooo many attempted design ideas lying around, and nothing is ever polished or cleaned up, leading to this ever-growing mountain of abandoned elements. It’s a bit like how zones get outdated in other MMOs as the level cap increases, only we have it for design components. :<

OniGiri.9461:

Im glad they try out new stuff. If i wanted the same ol’ same ol’ – there are plenty of other games that deliever that.

That is indeed good, but I wish that just once they’d stick around and then polish up the systems which worked, instead of promptly throwing 10 more things against a wall to see what sticks.

Development by accretion is doable, but feels insanely messy in a long-lived game such as an MMO because the game ends up with hundreds of separate systems and components.

Quick, list me how many different ways to acquire which type of ascended armor exists! It ought to be a quick list, but it’s everywhere. Because no one ever went back and re-streamlined the slowly aggregating bits and pieces.

It hasn’t even been announced yet. So we’re probably getting the announcement with the final episode of LS3 again, somewhere around autumn.

Then it’s a year or more until the xpack comes out, because as Crimson said they had too much negative feedback over the polish.

So either late 2018, or early 2019.

Or, more likely, RIP and in GW3.

Ithilwen.1529:

Except that after the huge Glamour nerf, Mesmer was under powered for a couple of years.

Sure, OK, I can see dealing with being down for a little while to fix an issue. That isn’t the way it has worked though. I don’t see any reason to believe that if CS no longer affected elites… anything further would be done.

Oh don’t get me wrong, I’ve played 98% or so of my time on the Mesmer, I readily agree.

Though I do think:

• First, that doesn’t change anything. CS affecting elites is really bad design, it ought to go.
• Second, the devs are rather slow. Especially when it comes to class/skill design. I’m honestly of the opinion that most classes need to go all the way back to the very first drawing board, working on the underlying class theme and from there getting a cohesive design. Still, that’s a separate issue, they patch 1-3x a year what ought to be patched every 2-3 weeks. Balance patches of the size we’re getting, that is. They’re tiny. But again, doesn’t affect the fact that CS on elites is pretty bad.

I mean, I don’t know why they are so slow, either. The balance patchnotes always read as if, given the raw amount of months since the last one, a single dev plus 2-3 QA people should have been responsible for this.

I doubt that’s the case, so there’s got to be another reason. Just wish I knew what, supposedly their total dev team is rather big, so having 5-10 people do nothing but balance and crank out numerical rebalances to a dozen or two dozen skills every week should be easy, plus bigger reworks once a month or every 6 weeks, removing and replacing skills or even entire traitlines.

Honestly the whole idea of splitting “types of DPS” (as in, Condition vs Power) is just really meh to begin with.

Whether you utilize more conditions (slower damage but difficult to avoid) or more direct damage (instant results, need to stick to the target) should be a result of class design and theme, not of the spec you pick.

I mean I get why it was done, otherwise there’d be too few things to specialize into. But specifically with Revenant, it’d be easier if Shiro was the DPS legend (period), and Mallix was about debuffing not about DPS. Stripping boons, extending conditions (others applied), applying debuffs, generally making life difficult.

This issue is still there as of today, constantly showing starbursts for events which don’t even get an explanation as you go near.

Sister Saxifrage.7361:

Not really. If you go straight from a level-appropriate map to a starter map, the starter mobs are definitely clearly tuned to be very easy. Still capable of killing a brand new player who, say, tries to skip instead of killing but doesn’t know where to go and pulls a train into a dead end (um, hypothetically. Not that this has ever happened to me. Ahem.) But compared to even a mid-level mob they have low health and low damage.

I quote myself: “might need a bit more numerical balancing, granted”

Alright?

Ithilwen.1529:

Absolutely NOT! Why would you even mention the idea of making CS not affect Elites? If history is a guide, It will happen without compensation of any kind.

While I agree, at the same time that’s still not a good excuse for letting an imbalance be imbalanced.

This was something the player-facing dev lead (Ghostcrawler) frequently brought up back in WoW: Yes, it seems unfair, yes this leads to a situation in which the class is now knowingly under- or over-powered, but if we have resources spare to fix issue X before patch but not issue Y which would re-balance the class, we’ll still fix X. Because it’s an issue.

Ramoth.9064:

Nah, not going to happen. Too low return of investment for Arenanet.

Which is a shame. Due to downlevel (might need a bit more numerical balancing, granted), in theory adding a 1-15 map is no different than adding a lvl80 map.

Yeah the new maps are fun, but they often feel a bit “throwaway”. They’re small-ish, feature packed but not built to last a long time. Get very stale very fast, and have little reason to come back once you farmed those 1-2 items you wanted.

I was talking to guildies yesterday, and I’d totally go for an opposite. A gigantic, 4-8 normal size, desert map which takes ages to roam around and has tons of spaced out events going on, there’s a fast-travel option available but all the waypoints are at the edge so walking into the middle carries some risk if you get overwhelmed.

Well it’s simple:

Right now, you loot a ton of items. Some of these items get turned into gold which is not made from the TP, but from selling things to vendors. Other items (or parts of them) get turned into crafting mats and banked.

Remove all the trash items, drop the money which would normally be generated by vendoring directly, drop the crafting mats directly, and drop the TP-stuff directly. Done.

There’d still be lots of actually dropping items, at the very least all rare+ things, and that’s probably still more stuff thrown at us than any other MMO does. But at least it’d not be quite as brutal anymore, and the effective items we acquire would be exactly the same. Just cut out the preprocessing step.

Can even scale the money dropped by the nominal 3cp per item salvaged right now. Keep everything the same.

And I have no clue where the idea that there’d be more money entering the game this way. I mean that money is already coming into the game. My whole point is to cut out the intermediate step of having to salvage all the blues and greens and process the stuff we obtain from that. Part of that means dropping more money because part of what we salvage right now ends up being sold to vendors.

I have honestly no clue where everyone gets the idea from that I wanted to add money to the game. But is ok, after repeated attempts to correct you, I’m just giving up.

Misunderstand my suggestion if you insist on it. Is fine.

Iridium.6385:

I wish to have absolutely nothing from that game in Guild Wars 2.

I was not talking about the way their combat or world design works (though frankly the world design has some good elements). Rather all the things GW2 is seriously ailing in, that is overall engine / interface / QoL / convenience:

• That options menu. You can even select which types of sounds still play while tabbed out.
• The chat interface is already a lot better than GW2’s. Although as far as copying that goes, just go for WoW’s where user mods made chat a pretty nice and convenient affair, including reply-bots while you’re in a fight and notifying when the fight ended, and other such niceties. But still, just carbon-copying what FF14 has would be a huge improvement already.
• There’s a “part of this fight”-list at the left. In busy combat (which GW2 has all the time with the amount of spell effects flying around) it helps a lot to realize just what is there to attack. Wish GW2 had something like it.
• An inventory button row which shows how full your bags currently are.
• Separate inventory (and separately limited!) for gear.
• A pop-up window for markers/signs? Instead of having to remember 20 key combinations at all times? Yes please!
• Have you seen their support for deaf/hard-of-hearing players? I was hellishly impressed, you can turn on a mode where it essentially shows a waveform pattern at the screen edges, so loud sounds make the screen “flash”, kinda. Really really good idea, and helps a lot if you have a ton of background noise, too.
• An in-UI countdown timer? Shared by party and raid?
• Linkshells, which are essentially private chatchannels.
• Fully configurable HUD layout.
• The game doesn’t run like dirt on modern hardware.

And that’s just of top of my head. There’s more, like classes with jobs, multiple classes on one character, fishing, gathering being an actual class/job, why not take the good things from other games but not the bad things?

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

This would make the game a lot less interesting for a lot of people. Humans tend to put less value on stuff that just shows up (“drop cash, directly”) or that requires no effort (‘drop crafting mats, directly’).

Take spirit shards as an example. These drop directly and most people don’t realize how often they drop, because we never see them in inventory (outside of 3/day from dailies).

Well, yes. That’s the whole point. Right now I notice the loot, which is a bad thing because it’s a horrendously negative element of playing GW2, and the primary reason friends talked me into giving FF14 a shot. Which, to be fair, hasn’t even once filled up my bags. At all. Never vendored anything. At this point in GW2’s life I’d be through 1000-2000 shots of salvage kit.

Crinn.7864:

You really don’t want to deal with all the inflation that would cause.

The entire reason that this game doesn’t have sinks like paying for armor repair is because of the low amount of raw gold that killing stuff gives.

But… do people really not vendor the grey items which drop? That’s what the money would be, replacement for all the stuff you’d just vendor anyhow. Same amount. 0 difference.

ArchonWing.9480:

Yea, dropping tons of raw currency is not a good idea. It only has value because it can buy stuff. It doesn’t do much on its own beyond vendors and waypoints.

As annoying as the “salvage crap for materials” economy is, it works for a reason.

Again, I’m not arguing for adding money at all. You get tons of stuff in your inventory, yes? You salvage most of it Of the salvage stuff, you then vendor the sigils and the other gray stuff you got, yes? That part (and only that) would need replacement.

Because why go through all those clicks? We just turn it into money anyhow, why not just drop that money straight away?

PyrateSilly.4710:

How many other games have you all played? Every game that I have played has always had an inventory “problem”.

EQ1, DAoC, WoW, WildStar.

None of which had inventory issues of this type. That is because these other games did not constantly spam you with non-stacking items for no other reason that to waste your time and tendons later because you have to post-process all of them.

Either they gave significantly less items to begin with, or their drops were directly done as crafting mats and vendor trash (with a mass-sell option).

Worked. Fine, I might add. And then came GW2, with it’s addiction to salvaging things. Which at first seemed fine, make a Centaur with a Halberd actually drop that halberd, and since I probably don’t need that but it’s lore-wise cool that he drops it, I can then salvage it for crafting mats I can use.

Only… that’s not how it ended up. If that were all there is to, that’d still be fine. But I also have to dort items I cannot salvage, sort trash after salvage, use up luck, bank items, sell sigils, etc. And together, there is just an insane amount of time spent on this process.

Instead of filling my inventory with dropped crafting mats. Which would be fine.

Why would you open boxes, affirming this shoddy business practice?

Bigger bags is a bandaid. The fix would be:

• Not spamming us with crazy amounts of green and blue items.
• Drop cash, directly.
• Drop crafting mats, directly.
• That’s it. Done.

Veil is a kinda meh skill to begin with. It has weird interactions overall and due to the very short duration is limited in what it c an even do.

I’d be in favor of lat out ripping it out and replacing it with a different “wall invisibility”:

Veil – 60s CD
Creates a wall of ephemeral power for 8 seconds, preventing enemies on either side from seeing allies on the other side. This wall breaks line of sight if you cannot see the target any more.

Essentially, you’d (I hope the engine can do this!) see the empty landscape when looking through the wall. As if the players weren’t there.

I am currently trying that with FF14, and while I have to say a lot of things Gw2 does spoil me for other MMOs, at the same time I cannot help but think just how much more developer attention is visible in FF14. Probably as a result of having a subscription and hence a lot more money and a more dependable income to work with.

And that’s FF14. A game already criticized for not getting enough attention from their developers.

So yeah, good things and bad things. I feel GW2 should learn more from other MMOs. Much as the unique elements like zone downleveling or freely shared combat participation are awesome, class design and skill/talent balance and design works better in other MMOs, and there’s no shame in copying systems proven to work.

The whole unique-modifiers thing can actually work tbh, but not if they aid in the primary use case of the spec. Or the class has to be built around it.

That is, a healer which heals via buffing targets works, but not a healer who also happens to buff, because then as soon as the healing is no longer super tight and super stressful (assuming pure healers heal more) then you’ll only want the damage enhancing healer.

It can work if someone were to hand out short-lasting targeted toughness buffs for example, effectively avoiding damage in return for healing less. And other such ideas, we obviously have Aegis and Blur, too.

But in the end it’s often easier to differentiate supports via non-support elements. A supporter who can temporarily become an ok DPSer is interesting for example, or one which is nigh-unkillable herself (nothing worse than the healer going down first).

Sadrien.3470:

if they give it a whole month, and one extra zone per year it would be the best festival by far.

Exactly. And the potential is near-endless because a lot of old 8-bit games had rather similar designs, but they could take a shot at different games every so often.

Like, what once we’re done with the 8 “classic” worlds and rescued the princess, they open Super Adventure Box X-2, where you have mini-stages with a boss at the end from which you get a power, and then this helps against another boss, and so on. Basically Mega-Man. And they could do that again for 3-4 years, sets of 8 mini stages each.

zealex.9410:

i mean last balance patch made almost all dpsclasses viable in pve give them but yea more focus on balance wouldn’t hurt

I dread to call that a balance patch. It was tiny. The game has far far bigger issues balance- and more importantly class-design-wise than what these patches 1-3 times a year can address.

We either need patches of that size monthly, or patches more akin to the class-reworks other MMOs are getting yearly~biyearly.

I don’t want it the full year, I think it serves really well as the recurring april’s fools.

Or well… could. Because it’s stagnant. I figured at least 1 zone would be added each year, if not an entire world.

Pregnantman.8259:

I have started playing chrono recently but before that I played DH a lot, which is, or was, the party block class. So I can say that in PvE for attacks that can be blocked, this skill one of the best in game considering its cooldown, pulsing nature and versatility.

Not really. See, in PvE the issue is the opposite. Aegis doesn’t stack. Mobs attack very slowly. Those 3 pulses of Aegis are ~equivalent to just one single 3s lasting buff of Aegis. Will block one attack.

Also, consider something else: If the skill is that useful, how come it’s probably the least used ability chronomancers can put on their hotbar? Is everyone just too dense and no one but you has realized the potential of this skill yet? Not impossible ofc, but statistically that’s quite unlikely.

More significantly, even the theorycrafters don’t use the skill. For a few reasons, but in PvE a simple one is that the extra damage I can add to the party by using just about any other skill I have in effect avoids more attacks than WoP could even if it worked out perfectly. Shorter fights = less damage taken. This was a problem people had to understand in WoW, too, that often the solution to the raid wiping was not to bring more healers but less healers (and more DPS), ending it faster. Mesmer is a DPS-enhancing Buffer class in PvE, and if not playing to that strength, one might as well just replace the char with someone who is better overall.

That is ofc ignoring the first point, the skill is not suitable as a defensive tool to begin with.

And, as a bonus point: You say the skill is strong enough. Comparing other skills. That’s the wrong perspective IMO, as seriously, GW2 has way too weak skills which are way too spammable/stackable.

There’s just very little impact behind what we do. Old Facet of Nature was a balance problem, but a good one. The game needs skills this powerful and impactful. Things need to feel strong. However it should have been a lengthy CD, the culmination of all a Herald does for the party, once in a while they can go totally crazy and shoot boon duration through the roof. Likewise, why is Quickness a permanent buff now but only 50%? Why isn’t it a burst tool with 200%-300% speed, Time Warp in a crucial burn moment in a raid for maximum DPS, going entirely off the charts?

Yes, Guardian has plenty weak skills. I can sympathize. What I cannot do however is agree with using weak skills as a balance goal. It’s one type of balance, but GW2 clearly can’t live off of it, as the past 4,5 years have shown.

azizul.8469:

it is here because PLAYERS REQUESTED for it…. even if you didn’t, many others did, and yes, you don’t have to buy it….

They requested a skin to be a rare random drop and be account bound, from an already RNG-bound real money gamble mechanic?

Such a skin would be awesome as a reward from a quest akin to the HoT legendary precursors. It doesn’t actually have to be a legendary, just implement those long quest chains for them, including a ton of mats at some point so it drains the economy (which is, after all, equivalent to real money spent).

Cristalyan.5728:

See the interview of Mark Katzbach explaining that the Alacrity should be reduced to give a 33% recharge speed instead of 66%. He said the team decided to not reduce the duration of this buff but instead to reduce the intensity because they don’t want to have two mesmers in raid instead of 1. This decision was generated only and only because of the impact the Alacrity had on the raids. Do you still want an example of skill nerfed because of raids? All the skills generating / using / sharing Alacrity. Almost all the Chrono specialization skills.

Which is extra hilarious because of everyone running two Chronos. Or well, most of us.

I mean they had the right idea: Make stacking optional, but never require it! (this usually slightly discouraging for stacking then, but that’s still better than the alternatives)
Only instead of then acting upon it they resumed the slow process of minimal balance patches 1-3 times a year with nothing in between, which currently just kitten s GW2’s combat gameplay to mediocrity.

A lot of class potential isn’t realized. I’d go as far as saying that none of the classes’ themes is realized, and even worse, for most I couldn’t even tell you what they are supposed to be from the ingame loadouts and graphics styles!
Right now the game could easily do with getting the balance patches we usually get one~three times a year every month or even more frequently, just because they is so insanely much work to do.

Vayne.8563:

MMOs are like homes. We live in them. We spend hours, days, weeks and months in these places. We adopt them to become ours. This game used to be “my game”. That is, the decisions the devs made in releasing the game on launch was about 90% of everything I wanted in an MMO (with a few small omissions).

But as time goes on and the game starts to drift from that initial game, this game becomes less my home. I’m no longer the guy who does everything in the game, I do less. And as they add more and provide less of the other stuff, I do even less.

As there’s less for me to do, I’ll just move to the next game that comes out,. eventually, when I’ve done everything I want to do. For me that won’t be this year, or next year. Hell it might be never.

But I’ve moved on from MMOs before and I move on from them because their focus changes. What they offer changes.

And I’m a guy that puts up with a lot of change before I move. I promise you there are a lot of people who walked away from the game because it’s become less casual than it was…probably more people than people who are raiding now…in my opinion.

Games like this are a comfort zone for some people. You take them too far out of their comfort zone and you force them to rethink their bound with the game.

This isn’t about raids being too difficult. I CAN do raids. I can join a raiding guild and beat every boss, just like I beat every elite area in Guild Wars 1. Being a raid isn’t my issue.

Not enjoying raids, and seeing rewards I want locked behind them, that’s my issue.

Exactly this.

I came to GW2 based on three elements:

• Very casual experience. I am a busy working person now, I have very very little time for a MMO since I also want to play some other games, and having one which absolutely doesn’t try to punish me for it was and still is really really cool.
• An exploration driven game. No endless quest chains as a way of handling, things “just happen”. I get to find them. Or not. Wow. This was amazing at launch, sadly the game moved a fair bit away from that by now. Especially with the newbie experience rework.
• WvW. I played DAoC before WoW, and I <3 RvR. And here comes GW2, another game where PvP is all about siege warfare, huge battles, material gain and providing PvE buffs from WvW, drawing everyone into the mode even just to help out. Little did I know that WvW is nothing like RvR was, and not in a positive way.

I stayed because the game has tons of potential. Sadly, “has potential” is still what I’d say about GW2, and 4,5 years in that’s a quite kitten ing statement.

Malchior.5732:

Lets be real here, your utility choices for most classes are already an illusion of choice.
So many garbage utilities on most classes that never get used and many more that are useless without the appropriate traits. So what’s the point?

Exactly this.

It’s telling that even without the ability to choose utility skills, Revenants still prkittengends / traits / gears-stats according to a build meta type you pick from a rather short list.

In other words, why isn’t our character customization a simple dropdown, “Condi DPS”, “Healer”, etc? I mean that’s about all the effective choice there is to the system.

Zedek.8932:

Just to be clear: FF14 and square enix live off of their big names, NOT by their actual quality. Else, FF14 would be €1 / month because the €60 for the game or expansion is only worth it. All the other stuff inbetween is Ca-Ching for something else.

Oh definitely.

But that was sort-of my point: Even in FF14, it works better. You don’t really need to search for a long time to find evidence of how the moneymaking scheme of GW2 doesn’t seem to be working out all that well.

Of course, that being said, I get what I pay for, and per-money-spent, GW2 has tremendous value. Just so long as you don’t entirely overdo the time you spend on it (because then you run into issues with the lack of manpower available for continued development), it works fine for the money it asks of you.

Meh, I don’t see how this actually fixes much.

I mean, the problem is how individually weak the legends are, as a result of the combination of:

• Lack of multi-role support in GW2 (due to item-stats, if you are set up for power DPS and switch to Ventari, you don’t become a healer).
• Double-dipping energy costs/CDs, restricting usage of utility/elite skills significantly.
• Limitations of the ability to use the full power of a legend because you’d need all the corresponding traits (overreliance is death to a role-switcher).
• Flat out weak skills which only work as a result of being semi-spammable (see energy costs though).

To work properly, they’d need to dig a bit deeper IMO, though it’s all still relatively simple fixes:

• Changing legends sets you to 0 energy.
• Weapon skills have CDs, skills 4 and 5 of all weapons have a conditional element which generates energy.
• Legends auto-swap stats. That is, if you are in Ventari if your highest stat is not healing power, it’ll “transform” all your highest stat into healing power temporarily. So say I wear Beserker, and I swap to Ventari, my stats are now as if I were wearing Healing / Precision / Ferocity gear. Ofc this is only while I’m in Ventari, but works the other way around, too (Mallix gives Malice, Shiro gives Power, Jalis gives Toughness and Glint gives Concentration).

In essence, Revenants could be the role-switcher their class mechanics seem to imply they were intended as. And it’s not that big a deal to get them there, much detail work as there’d still need to be done. The stat-swapping would really be the big thing to enable this.

And how cool would that be? Be a “full” power DPS and a “full” condi DPS? Or be the DPS who becomes the tank as necessary. Or the healer. The full is in quotation marks because due to runes/sigils you’d still be weaker, but only marginally so. :o

At this point I’m just about ready to admit defeat and pay 10€-12€/month if in turn all the skins and all will be achievable ingame somehow.

I mean I tried FF14 recently, and it definitely shows how their sub income gives them a lot more space to work with as developers. Which is a shame, because as an underlying framework, GW2 is worlds stronger.

Don’t worry, they’ll be random non-tradeable drops from a BL chest near you soon™!

Though to be fair, it’s not just the FotM pace which is very slow.

If I had to give one big advise to the devs, it’s that you need either a) improve the snail’s-pace at which development currently works, significantly so or b) work out how to provide meaningful game development in spite of it.

Because right now, everything from Fractals over PvE, Living Story, WvW, UI, QoL, it’s all extremely slow.

A good example here is Edge of the Mists: It was meant to be an “overflow” map, to fix a problem which was very common after release, long queues for WvW. Yet by the time it finally came out, a mix of slow EotM development and no WvW development had fixed the problem a wholly different way.

It was a kitten good solution. Only it came out far too late to be meaningful.

TexZero.7910:

Or, just hear us out here.

Personalized Sound Effect Sliders, for a more personal touch.

Makes tons more sense then the homogeneous solution approach that will just end up annoying everyone anyway.

Let people make the choices of what they hear, how often and from what sources.

Oh ofc that’d be even better, but let’s be realistic: It took how long to get a salvage-all option?

And considering that you probably want something like volume and frequency for both yourself and others, I fully estimate this to be implemented somewhere by 2020

I think it’s the wrong fix to the right problem.

The problem usually comes up in regards to “spam skills”, such as Thief Unload. OTOH, consider a Mesmer with Quip: One skill on a fairly long CD uses the special effect.

In other words, just add an ICD to the sound effect if it is a problem, so that it can play at most every 3-5 seconds. Then it can no longer be spammed, but will still fire for classes who already have very limited access to legendary effects to begin with.

Yeah but Ori, that’d be entirely useless in PvE then, which is kind of meh for a design.

Takashiro.8701:

If you get knockbacked/pulled out before the final tick you lose the stacking buff? So it’s kind of like a shadow refugee for mesmer’s? I really like this idea.

Hrm, that’s another way to implement it. I was thinking more that I would have X seconds of the buff if I get pulled out, but without the enemy being inside at the end of the well, and them hence not getting the debuff, that’s not doing anything.

To get the full-invulnerability effect, I both need the stacks of the buff I get from being inside during the ticks, and I need the enemy to get hit by the final tick.

Although now that you mention it, flipping those (tick is a stacking debuff, final pulse is a buff to allies) would probably be better both for PvE and PvP balance, crippling mobility in raids if you want to use it, and allowing PvP players to pull you out before the final tick (they’d still have the debuff, but without you having the buff that’s not doing anything).

To me the biggest loss of identity is maybe in the underlying shift in design focus.

At release, GW2 was all about the world, as a crucial element of an MMO’s design. About providing a consistent, self-sufficient (events bounce back and forth without us, living store happens whether we’re there to experience it or not) and vast world in which the players would get dumped with comparatively little guidance, able to explore and learn at their own pace.
This rather brutal approach was then in turn balanced by intentionally under-balancing the game to a significant degree, old Orr zones (again intentionally, I suspect) excepted.

Nowadays, it is about providing a continuing trickle of content and a mountain of boxes to tick to keep the players engaged and coming back. To this end, a lot of steps were taken to make players feel more in control, from significant power creep in HoT over more interrupt/active-counter centric PvE enemies to crafted/quested legendaries.

Nowadays, everything is about player agency. The original design didn’t even care much about it, it was about world consistency.

And frankly both are good designs, but the modern one is entirely unlike what I originally came to the game for

Oh, kitten , didn’t see that. TYVM! Shall do!

So, after playing some Final Fantasy 14, I was impressed by some of their quality of life elements. Many of which seem rather easy to implement all in all, and I’d love to have them in GW2, as options at least:

• A way to toggle AFK from the chat window. /afk, probably. Turns the Away-state on or off. Bonus points if there’s an option to automatically go back to online when I move or use a skill.
• A castbar for myself, being able to see precisely when my skills actually fire off versus me pressing the button. Yes, a lot of what we do is instant cast but far from all, and it’d be nice to have this additional information available.
• Instead of just “mute when in the background”, being able to select which sounds play when tabbed out. Something rather cool in FF14 is that I can set, say, combat sounds and whisper sounds to play in the background, but turn off music and player instruments and all, yet only while not focusing the window. Really nifty option.
• A way to have shared chat channels independently of being in a guild. All you have in common is a chat channel, that’s it. No tag, no nothing. Good way to stay in contact with a group of friends easily.
• A list which shows participants in a fight, it’s off to the left and kinda small in FF14, but it’s nice to have the option if the main fight is just too much chaos. Good for targeting things which are hidden under larger enemies, 15000 players and a gazillion spell effects.
• Speaking of targeting, a target-of-target window, showing who my currently selected target is now mainly aiming for. This is good for assist-targeting without having to specifically use the call-target marker every time: If I click on a raid member instead of a mob, I can use the ToT-window to retarget easily.
• Manual spell effects settings. Being able to set for: Myself, my party, my raid, my squad, WvW Enemy, WvW Friendly, sPvP Enemy, Others, all individually, whether to show full spell effects, reduced spell effects outside of ~1500 range, reduced spell effects flat out or no spell effects (it’s my choice, give me the option), that’d be really useful. Right now, often combat is hectic and annoying because everything is just a giant blob of colors.
• The inventory icons in FF14 show a set of little dots which clearly mark which slots are occupied and which are not. This is a really minor thing, but it’s very cool to have, and I didn’t know so far, but I totally need this in all MMOs.

Many of these are individually tiny, yes, but they’re nice QoL additions.
And some like the slash-command for afk should be very easy to implement as the UI action already exists, just currently it is an option in a dropdown. So all that remains is to add the slash command, then make it trigger the very same action as selecting Away in the dropdown.

Anyhow, that’s just my 2cp. FF14 is an interesting game for sure, but most importantly I feel there’s a lot of small but also quickly implemented QoL elements GW2 could benefit from.

And I don’t think FF14 has a patent on any of them.

I’d more or less inverse the effect I think, and align it to the ticking-(positive|negative)/final-(negative|positive) most of the other wells have:

Well of Precognition
Creates a well of temporal and spatial precognition. Allies within the well get a stacking effect for every second they stay inside. When the well ends, enemies inside are marked, and cannot hit allies with the well effect for the duration of that effect.
Ticking effect duration: 1s (this stacks, and only starts counting down once the well ends)
Enemy debuff duration: 3s

Meaning that it’s effectively 3s of invulnerability, but it comes out delayed any can be avoided if the enemy dodges/blocks the final effect.

The whole copy-conditions (or copy-boons, also recently nerfed) is only a problem because they decided to go with a “weak but spammable” approach to everything.

If conditions were very very rare, but individually crippling and powerful, then there would be much less threat in it. Yes, still a lot, granted, but far less.

Example:

Torment
Torment a target enemy for X seconds, making them lose 2% of their maximum health every second. The damage ramps up for every second that they’re moving, up to 10% per second. The condition will not end if the target is still moving when it expires.
They have to stop for ~1s to let it drop at the end.

Condition Damage has an interesting role here: It increase the maximum cap on what 2%/10% can be. So in PvE you can do a lot of damage to a moving enemy but only if your condition damage is high.

And, as I said, this condition would be rare. Really rare. Getting hit by it is evil, but in turn, getting through it means you can rely on not getting it again for a certain amount of time at least.

vesica tempestas.1563:

Actually it does, because a % of people are affected by perceived monitoring, their behaviour can change negatively, its human nature, people do strange things when under pressure, and its niave to assume this is allways positive.

While this is correct in general terms (as in, human psychology and nature), do explain how DPS meters do anything which didn’t already happen before.

I mean, were you just as concerned that someone can read what you were doing or not doing in the combat log?

The thing to keep in mind with UI mods is that generally speaking pure UI mods do just that, they adapt the UI. In this case, they count what is happening, but the information was already available to the client beforehand, just presented in a different and – usually – far less efficient manner. Add a UI mod, and you can view the same information in a more useful way, but you didn’t actually add any information.

Doam.8305:

What is group content pre hot and what in core tyria prepares a player for the things in HoT?

I agree that this is a problem, but I see the fault entirely on the pre-HoT side.

HoT feels much more balanced. Still easy, but you cannot go brain-AFK. Things will kill you if you do, unless you are grouped (then it’s entirely trivial again). Which is a nice balance for a social MMO. Group up and it’s all safe haven, go solo but then pay attention.

But ofc, yes, it’s a harsh lesson from pre-HoT, but that’s because honestly, the old world is pretty… boring? As far as PvE goes? It’s all very very bland.

vesica tempestas.1563:

Kicking people is a good thing

Not truly what was said. Before, people were kicked over:

• LIs
• Achievement points
• Gear
• Weapon choice
• Skill choice

How is that better (or worse) than for DPS output? If anything, at least the DPS is related to the actual thing someone is doing, unlike the first 2 of those other points!

vesica tempestas.1563:

your suggesting its ok for pugs to have a potentially hostile atmosphere which is a bad thing in a community driven game right?

True story, 10 years ago people pugged in much much bigger raids and there was very little of the anti social behaviour we see now.

As someone who led raids, both guild and PUG runs, from Vanilla WoW all the way to the end of Cataclysm (Emerald Dream EU, same name), you are flat out wrong here.

Sorry to call you out like that. But if you truly believe that, you have a very strong case of rose-tinted nostalgia goggles.

I would say that in Vanilla, people were more or less like they were in GW2 since release (this hasn’t really changed recently, tbh, GW2 feels the same as ever). From TBC forward it became a lot more competitive as dungeons and raids could take a very long time so underperformers were immediately dealt with.

This relaxed only after LFR was added, but only for LFR. PUG a normal run, and it was the same as ever, understandably so as if anything fights had become even more mechanically challenging.

LFR was different by virtue of being so nerfed that it didn’t matter, plus the system built the raid for you. But in the end, really, LFR was too easy for even the most die-hards to truly care. You had the odd whining and complaints and yeah it was crazy to see DPSers do less damage than the healers, but no one had to care because the bosses died anyhow.

Anyhow the point is: No, it wasn’t like that. Really not.