Guild Wars 2

KaosNinja.4967:

so, ArenaNet, no bullkitten no ring-a-round answers. are you going to open the Super Adventure Box again, or should i be demanding a refund for this 600 gem paper weight?

What? You didn’t use it yet? Why would you buy the coin right as the box disappears?

Everyone I know got plenty use out of their coin.

And honestly, I hope that if SAB ever returns they’ll just remove the infinite coins and give 600 gems out for them. The bloody coins ruined the whole point of the higher difficulty.

Another issue: Asuran Mesmers use the “wrong” Greatsword AA animation. Or rather theirs not only doesn’t look as flashy, it also seriously hurts my wrist every time I see it. Ouch.

I am quite annoyed by this, too.

I mean people keep saying “But underwater would need a huge overhaul”, but honestly, no. It doesn’t. It’s a relatively small set of issues which doesn’t even have a big impact:

• Not all skills available. Now, not all of them would conceptually make sense (Flamethrower), but that’s a minor issue in the end. There are some crucial class skills not available but really, rather than seeing all land-skills work underwater I’d rather have some of them work, some not work, and some skills which are underwater-only, giving classes more unique identity.
• Weapons being different is something which is good about underwater, IMO. I mean it adds a unique flavor, classes aren’t just carbon copies of what they are above water.
• 360° movement being a problem, well, if you dislike this then fair enough but it is the central component of the combat. It’s what makes it awesome.

Honestly, I think even across all classes underwater right now is “ok”. Certainly enough to feature plenty underwater content, though I’d abstain from fully-underwater zones until some things are changed.
And while I’d love to see those change, I absolutely hate the removal of underwater we have right now. It’s one of the most atmospheric parts of GW2, and plenty underwater areas hold interesting surprises. Yet due to the PvP-rage about it (I suppose) we’re seeing it removed instead. Bleh.

Things I’d change:

• More skills available, as above, but not all land skills rather I’d want classes to have some underwater-only skills.
• Remove the current drowning mechanic which is a carbon copy of the land one. Instead add that you can only revive by hitting the surface, making skills which float or sink you or targets very crucial to underwater combat and making depth both an opportunity and a problem.
• Long-term, introduce underwater-only content in PvE, making the revival via surface-only a very very real problem to PvE difficulty.

“There is no logical reason” <— problem is, there is.

You may not think it matters, but “too much content” is very much a problem in a multiplayer game from a design perspective. You do not want to spread your audience thin beyond a certain point. You want the active areas to be crowded so people can trivially interact. You want queues to be filled in shooters. Etc.

Part of this is deciding whether some content should be in the game permanently or temporarily.

Now, in the past most games opted for a sort-of-temporary approach. An expansion would bring new dungeons and zones, but the following expansions or patches would effectively remove the content as the characters move past the point where the content was sensible for them. Sometimes, this was done via level. In most MMORPGs, a lvl30 zone isn’t real content for a lvl50 character.

GW2 automatically downlevels characters. In that sense, no content is truly “below me”. This opens up a gargantuan world compared to the handful of “current” zones other MMOs have.
But, to counteract that, plenty content is made temporary. This is quite likely a very conscious design decisions to not make the world too large.

Now, ofc personal opinion will differ greatly on this. Personally I think if I had SAB permanently I’d play it religiously for 1-2 months and then never ever want to see it again in my life because I’ve seen too much of it. But I’d enjoy it, anyhow.

On the other hand, I can very much understand the reasoning for temporary content. Plus, it helps to keep people hyped. If SAB was permanent, there wouldn’t be nearly as much hype when it actually returns, and players wouldn’t use it as such a centralized meet-up point.
Now that isn’t to say that I wouldn’t like SAB to be permanent (personally), but it’s entirely wrong to say that there is no reason to keep it temporary.

Wolfheart.1879:

But so long since the last SAB period, you can’t help but wonder if it will ever make a return.

It’s only 1,5 years so far. I mean what I mind more is that they don’t use it as a reliable, annual, april’s fools joke. Every april for 4 weeks a new world of SAB, that’d be a very dependable event.

That’s the part I dislike. We’d have the same total time so far (3x 1 month instead of 1x 1 + 1x 2), but it’d be spread out evenly.

Funset.7893:

Frankly I am not offended by the “joke” (maybe because a plane crash did not affect me personally so far in my life, thanks god), but I find the joke extremely stupid, because it is completely ruining the basic game experience and the fact that it goes on and on makes it extremely annoying.

How is it ruining basic game experience? Because your char has her arms outstretched? That’s hardly gamebreaking. :P

And well, I am constantly blasted by the media about the plane crash, and some family members lost people they know, but I can’t do anything but shake my head at people so upset about this.
They’re doing exactly what the tabloids like BILD want, they’re getting upset at/about something to fuel further hate tirades by these companies. In the process they’re trivializing the grief of the family members and friends in favor of wanting to raise pitchforks against anything even remotely relating to the crash. Well done.

I guess I can interpret everyone’s anger as a testimony to just how good non-world-2 SAB was?

Lopez.7369:

We just had a string of terrible plane crashes, including one last week. How does something so insensitive slip through?

The German forums, where people apparently had family members affected by this tragedy, are really upset: https://forum-de.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Un-gl-cklicher-Aprilscherz.

While I can relate (I’m from Germany and somewhat close to some of the victims), really, this would happen with basically anything they can pick, somewhere on the world.

It’s very difficult to avoid this, and ultimately you just got to pick your poison.

Wow, I’m at 3k hours and I feel that it is a lot. 10k! :o

So long as they take the infinite coins away again (refund gems or w/e), I’m fine with it staying permanent and all the weapon skins requiring hard mode.

Always cautious. I’m trying to outsmart my enemies, part of that is waiting for them to screw up. Then punish them relentlessly.

It’s why I love WvW. Faking and maneuvering carries more weight because it’s difficult to make split-second changes with a 50+ people mob of 75% puggers.

Vague Memory.2817:

Mesmers are probably the least favoured class among the devs, they have shown this time and again.

Ah, the good ol’ “The devs hate us”-wristing.
Always a favorite of MMO players everywhere because it does essentially the same thing religious omnipotent beings did for people in ages past to explain natural phenoma like lightning or tidal waves.

“Ofc we don’t get buffs, I mean, the devs hate us!” Easier than having to admit we frankly don’t know why we’re not getting buffed, false as it will be.
(Devs have much better things to do with their time, like developing or getting a coffee or heading home to their families early, than hating on single classes or favoring the others.)

Also remember Ghostcrawler in WoW. When he left, people asked whether he could finally talk about his ingame account, and what he plays. Because for years, people were certain that classes were being favored “Because GC plays them”, and specs like Holy Priest or Resto Shaman went essentially forgotten for entire expansions because GC hates them.
His reply? Holy Priest. Been his main ever since he started. Also makes sense, given the need to avoid personal favorites accusations. So the one spec people were sure the devs just forgot about for the most part, yep, personal main of the lead.

Alright. Sorry, Ross. And Zenith.

Zenith.7301:

LOL, you use living story as an example? Seriously? Please show me a video of your marvelous interrupts in fractal 50 or Arah where most of the damage comes from AUTOATTACKS.

And this proves what exactly, except that you lack the ability to look at more than a minority content few players even touch? AE heal on interrupt would be interesting (not my idea), and hey, it works in a lot of areas of the game, including the most prominently marketed ones (sPvP, WvW, LS).

Plus, what does it matter if it doesn’t work in dungeons? Retraiting is free and instant. Better to have a decent trait 90% of the time than, well, current Disruptor’s Sustainment.

F2 as a whole is really rubbish before traits.
A way to buff it would be to add poison and slow to it. That’d at least make it worth something.

I am thinking one more column would be good (added it quickly in a local copy), healing/casttime. This gives time-investment-efficiency, an important number when you got to figure out how much damage you’re sacrificing to keep yourself alive.

Because while MoH has basically the by-far highest healing over time, it’s healing per cast-time is rather low as you got to spend so much time casting it.

Lich Form is a rather dependable power, though. You don’t have half your talents affecting it, it only scales with your stats so that it’s more of a power-based move than a condi one.

That’d be ok. If the phantasm we become wouldn’t be affected by traits it could be balanced really well.

The problem with this would be how variable our Phantasm power is. In a full Phantasm spec, you’d have 30% more damage, 70% more health, 20% faster CDs, you pulse regeneration and passive Fury. Good luck balancing that one.

Meh, I though the phasing was awesome in that it allowed me to have my own personal version of the world. And yes, it’s good.

But it’s not what I am looking for in my MMORPG. I want this done properly, in my Dragon Age, Planescape or Mass Effect. In my MMORPG, I’m looking to socialize, and every single phasing makes this inconsistent. I am not trying to play a RPG here, effectively I’m trying to play the world’s most complicated chat room minigame together with others.

Ah, Bethesda Software. ANet’s supreme marketing department.

Vayne.8563:

The game needed to make it take longer to kill stuff in early zones, so people that are actually in those zones could get credit for events.

Not only that.

If “downscaling” is a central element of your game, then it needs to work. At present, a lvl80 is still too strong compared to a lvl20 in a lvl20 area. Even with the harsher downscaling as of this patch.

So if anything, we’re not quite there yet. Getting there, however. I hope this was on purpose, because downscaling is one of the sales arguments for GW2 (having a giant world which is “all current level” for you once you’re higher, instead of always only 2-3 zones), so it really ought to work as good as possible.

Prototypemind.4026:

I’d just like to know where these bug-free MMOs that people seem to be alluding to are, cause I’ve never played one or heard of one.

Come to think of it, after the 2-weeks rollback in EQ1 years and years ago, the only other significant bug was a … was it 3 hours rollback in WoW? I think it was 3 hours, but not entirely sure any more.

Kasteros.9847:

Cos u can’t meel at all, u lose ur stack and then get stunned – dead during zerg fights and u lose stacks in no time. Already 50% of skills is cc like. Just 1 hammer warrior can take down 2 stacks for every 1 of 5 ppl.

So a melee warrior is really effective now, that’s what you’re saying? As in, you can’t melee because there’s so much melee going on? :P

If this is intentional, I welcome it, I just wish it was communicated.

I really think a lvl80 downleveled to lvl30 should be roughly similar in power to a lvl30. That is to say, the lvl30 needs better raw output as she lacks abilities, traits etc, so she gets more raw oompf, the higher-level player gets “overnerfed” to make up for their variety and adaptability.

Well we just had a set of that and some more things, the Carapace/Luminescent armors, Sinister stat gear, minipets from the new zones, etc.

It’s not perfect ofc but it’s quite a lot of content and after a long drought might indicate that they accepted the criticism and will add more items ingame again instead of the gemstore.

[quote=4879964;Sorel.4870:]

PEOPLE’S WHOLE LIVES PASS IN FRONT OF THEIR EYES BEFORE THEY DIE. THIS PROCESS IS CALLED ‘LIVING’.
(Death, The Last Continent, Terry Pratchett)

Could be that it’d be more successful, could be the opposite. On the one hand, you could more easily recruit players from traditional MMOs. OTOH, you’d lose the current players, or at least a percentage of them.

Difficult to say. But the uniqueness of the class setup would be lost for sure.

Fay.2357:

The crying this would generate would dwarf everything else we’ve previously seen. It would get removed in a week, and the devs would apologize to everyone for accidentally giving mesmers something interesting.

I can do better! A weapon which’s auto-attack tags a target so that their next auto-attack hits a friendly target (their friend) in range instead of the intended target.

In other words instead of dealing damage myself, as long as I attack someone I’ll cause them to attack their teammates.

Rome.7124:

what’s so good about it? It’s not like currently Mesmers do best damage in game, and survivability against thieves is a joke. It doesn’t matter about damage and disabling/debuffing capabilities when you lose 75% of your health from a burst that thieves unleash out of stealth.

Because my ideal for Mesmers never has us as viable damage dealers. That’s not what I want the char to be, I could play plenty other chars for that (another of my issues, though less so, is that there’s no real reason to prefer a class over another, ultimately they’re too samey).

Think of some GW1 abilities, or even look to other games. Range reductions, anti-stealth debuffs, various kinds of feedback damage or debuffs. Say every time target player uses an ability which moves them, they get moved the wrong direction instead. I think those thieves will be a weeeeee bit frustrated. :P

Me Games Ma.8426:

What do you mean by “state”? HP, conditions, boons, cooldowns, …?

Yeah, that exactly. And a few more things:

• Position
• Facing
• Selected target, if possible (otherwise keep current target).
• Health.
• Conditions / Boons.
• Cooldowns… not entirely sure about this. I think it should reset, but it could become a massive balance headache.
• Current casting state (that is, if they were mid-cast when afflicted, they’ll be casting the same again).

I think what they meant is that between Mesmer changes in general and the Chronomancer spec, we’re causing existent PvP paradigms to break down in HoT.

That actually sounds really good. Tentatively hopeful about Mesmers becoming less about damage and more about raw disabling and debuffing again, now.

warbignime.4610:

So as some of you may know, popular stream Sodapoppin recently quit WoW

Never ever heard the name before. So much for impact. :P
From a cursory glance he sounds like he should rally be playing LoL, but w/e, we can stomach him. Just be friendly to people, it spreads fast in GW2 because the game mechanics already urge you to be friendly and nice.

warbignime.4610:

That was another guy not him. He quit WOW because he think wow’s pvp is unbalanced and boring.

Wow, smallscale PvP in a MMORPG is unbalanced. What a rare and novel concept…

It depends a lot on what you want from your MMO. If you enjoy a themepark, GW2 doesn’t work too well because it only has that in limited amounts.
It works really well OTOH if you want a world in which to “exist”. It’s more reminiscent of older MMOs like EQ1 or DAoC in that regard, providing a background against which to socialize instead of providing a fixed game with a sidedish of social features.

Zarathustra.1458:

I actually think it should be innate to diversion. Diversion as it is has a kitten long cooldown, doesn’t stack well and is an absolute pain to use with the whole clones being tissue paper. So I actually think it should be innate, so it can be used with the illusionary persona.

Come to think of it, I’d love to see a rebalance on shatter as a whole.
It’s our class mechanic. Even in a Phantasm-spec, it should be desirable and useful. All four of them. how to specifically rebalance for that I got no clue, though.

Ofc, ultimately I’d prefer clone/phantasm generation to be our class-bar, and shatter to be weapon/utility skills. But anyhow…

Come to think of it, a spell which forcibly resets an enemy when it expires would be awesome. Something like:

Chrono Trap
Mark target enemy. 5 seconds later, that enemy will reset to their position and state when they were marked. Effect ends without taking hold if the target dies.

Ross Biddle.2367:

And like portal it can be placed over a ledge so the targets fall to their doom?

:O

Please!
It was the darkest day in WoW when they removed the ability of Warlock Portal to send people to their deaths.

Knighthonor.4061:

I am curious about why Anet didn’t just get rid of the DPZzzzz role and keep Tanking and Healing if they didn’t want a trinity.

Eh, I don’t understand. GW2 has a “DPS role”?

Levetty.1279:

As I constantly point out, anytime somebody tries to start a conversation about the weaknesses of the Mesmer class and the poor way in which the balance team have handled the class somebody always comes in to tell us stories about how they can take on entire enemy zergs or 1v1 thiefs with no traits.

Very tiring.

What’s even more tiring is having to constantly scrolls past these endless posts of self-flagellation. Which fill every classes’ forum, mind you. Because everyone is certain ANet treats them the worst.

Vieux P.1238:

play it in a ranked spvp tourn. Why should i?

Removing the context makes the quote equally as valid.

(sorry, couldn’t help myself, still completely baffled something like sPvP is in a MMORPG)

AnniMira.2506:

Scepter did not even hit. Guess I have to hit in their running direction, not sideways.

Rule of thumb with the Scepter is that if you need to use the auto-attack, you don’t. The auto-attack was buffed significantly but is still very very weak. Scepter is however extremely strong for the 2 and 3 skills.

Tenrai Senshi.2017:

Worst: Mass invisibility (Mesmer skill).

Why? When you consider the low stealth duration and long cooldown of this skill, it just really doesn’t seem that impressive to me.

My issue with MI is that it’s not mass invisibility. I wanted to cloak a zerg. Yes I understand that’s a balance concern but well, how awesome would that be?

Whatever a Balthazar armor is. Human gods are a pretty boring concept, they’re just some statues being worshipped. Don’t really see them as interesting outside of the joke with the grenth-statue in the LS.

Devata.6589:

I would have sold an expansion every year and put fun content in it that rewarded these things. People would then hopefully buy the expansions every year because they know there is all this fun content in them. Eventually I might have even earned more by selling the game and expansion on yearly base.

Wel now you’re delivering content, but how will you make money?
Because not to burst your bubble too much but that content takes a smaaaaall amount more money to create than gem store content so your sales reach better be close to 100% (mind you no sub, so this is compared to the previous sales) or you’re not making much money.

I feel completely “so what” about it, because this is something I’m used to from any other MMO I’ve played so far. Yes it would be more awesome if that weren’t the case but I lack something for comparison.

Wethospu.6437:

And all of that could be achieved without any RNG elements.

Yes but then it’d have a lower skill cap. Why do that?

To expand on what Nike said, “triumph” does not mean winning a specific fight. Good skill is knowing when to not feed the enemy a kill, and return with superior context in a better match-up.

A player handling random elements well obeys rule 22 (if in doubt, know your way out), knows when to judge whether to push for a win or retreat and keep the danger manageable, etc.

Fighting to the death and then crying about a string of bad luck is a sign of a lack of tactical knowledge, IMO. Yes, your procs could have gone better but why did you let that kill you?

Sure I can, I did above already.

Yes, full-knowledge planning can be difficulty, sure. Chess isn’t easy, despite having full information (not quite true, but glossing over that for now). Just predicting and interacting with the other players and your team mates is very chaotic and as such, very difficult to work around that.

But that’s just one thing. Risk management in regards to random or pseudo-random elements is very much a real skill, one which is needed often (just think of most board games or many real world situations).

A good player can win a fight against a specific enemy no matter what the enemy does, assuming that enemy doesn’t get a really lucky string of crits and procs.
A truly great player can not-lose that fight even if the enemy gets a crazy string of random benefits. She planned ahead of time what to do if things go worst-case-scenario, and how to get out or react if the situations should arise (with the very high chance / frequency of crits and such sigils, it’s rare for outliers to have a big impact).

Sagat.3285:

Skill in rng..plz lol.

Yeah, comments such as these explain the state of modern gaming far better than extensive analysis ever could. Sad state of affairs.

I enjoy something which is about player skill, which is why I enjoy random elements in my RPGs. Sorry, but I really fail to see how one can consider this to not be player skill. It’s an old argument which has been done to death before, and I’m surprised players still raise the “But it’s RNG! It can’t be player skill! Has to be bad!”-flag at times, when what they’re actually wanted to say was “Please nerf Sigil of Flame/Air”.

Which is fair enough, mind you. But just say it straight out, because making random-event-management not a player skill just makes it look like you’re grasping.

Zenith.7301:

And people hate good duelist classes no matter what because most people just care about winning 1v1’s.

Sadly this.
PvP games could be improved a lot by making 1v1 a tracked offence. That is to say, it counts as strikes against your account if you 1v1 a lot instead of fleeing and coming back with a superior tactical setup. Nothing happens on its own but if you suffer any actual infraction these strikes are factored in for determining how long you’ll be out.

Players would hate it, but it’d improve the game a lot.
Alternatively, NPC snipers auto-kill the winner of a duel for being stupid and standing around damaged and alone.

Wethospu.6437:

Is luck a player skill?

No, but that’s not what I said. I said that planning for/around luck is a player skill. Actually it’s a human skill, and a very important one as many events in our lives are influences by such a complex chain of events that they are factually chance-based from our perspectives.

Planning around this, and knowing what to do depending on how a random (or pseudo-random) event pans is important. It actually requires more skill because it creates a very large decision-tree. “Player uses attack X, sigil procs” and “player uses attack X, sigil doesn’t proc” is after all twice as many situations to plan for than just “player uses attack X”.