Stealth needs to come away from being front-and-centre of thief if they’re ever going to be able to do anything more than just be annoying in spvp and wvw. The way it’s implemented is tailor made for running from fights but has no way to actually contribute anything, since you (justifiably) can’t contest spvp capture points while in stealth and a sneaky single-target spike attack is just not threatening in the larger fights of wvw.
Given that the game was sold on sound bites like ‘Everyone, including casual players, by level 80 should have the best statistical loot in the game’ and ‘no-one finds that [grinding] fun’, I don’t see that they have any reason to exist. How can anyone enjoy working towards something that is based purely on grinding the same content that has existed since launch? How can anyone with even a miniscule amount of skill consider stats worthy of being called a reward?
If you don’t think it’s possible to get people to work towards something other than stats I would like to remind you that there are people that have unlocked every single crafting recipe in the game, despite most of them being irrelevant and that legendaries originally were just PVT exotics with a fancy skin that you had to transmute if you wanted a different stat type; that didn’t stop people grinding for it.
Grind doesn’t have to be for advantage for people to be willing to do it. More power doesn’t have to be on the table for a reward to be worthy of a player’s time.
Gear grind is the reason why other mmos are scrub games. This game was sold on no gear grind. It could’ve stuck to its guns but instead decided to cater to people that it wasn’t even marketed towards.
Nice job not answering why ascended deserves to exist when it contributes nothing to the game, by the way.
Yet more ‘you don’t need it’ and ‘complaining about nothing’ to defend ascended. If ‘you don’t need it’ and it’s ‘nothing’ then why does it even deserve to exist in the game? Defending ascended is literally defending a grind that has absolutely no reward. ‘People will leave if there’s no VP’ you say? Good. Let them go back to their scrubby games that give ever higher stats as a crutch so they don’t ever have to be good at anything.
It’s almost as though bandwagoning has resulted in a massive surplus of players that end up forming larger groups. Who would ever have expected that?!?!
Better idea: remove stealth entirely then make thief into something that isn’t a waste of a character slot.
The fact that ‘you don’t need it’ is used to defend ascended gear shows how truly worthless it is from a gameplay perspective. Why would anyone consider it a good thing that pre-release promises were broken for the sake of giving players an objective that is so unworthy of being pursued?
People try to say it needs a grind or people won’t play it. I’ve played over 2.5k hours since launch, none of it was spent grinding. All grinds are simply false gameplay for unskilled people to use as a substitute for what their ineptitude prevents them from achieving legitimately.
You do realise that warrior was the most played class even when they were garbage right? Even now most ‘how to beat a warrior?’ threads end with someone effectively saying that when you know what you need to dodge you should never lose 1v1 against a warrior.
Rather than charges I think conjures would be better balanced by having a shorter duration than their cooldown, and adjust conjurer to either raise the uptime or reduce the cooldown.
Keeping the need to cast before use but then allowing them to be swapped is definitely a good way to handle it, though.
Have you ever played a staff ele? I’m guessing no.
The sar-chasm is wide with this one…
Staff ele is literally the only thing I play btw.
Man you’re such a scrub for not 1v1ing his 1v1 build with your team support build. =D
Insulting backpedalling after getting killed because of it is pretty funny, too.
People still complaining about not being able to mindlessy attack people? Yes, let’s remove strategy from the game. Heck, just remove WvW, that’ll be easier.
So using an auto-attack that you still have to position and aim is mindless while throwing on a passive boost that kills your enemy for you with no input isn’t?
Ret is the spammiest, least skilful thing in the entire game and the difference between what it’s merely annoying against compared to ‘you can’t win, you can’t break even’ is arbitrary. You can’t use it to defend against burst even though that’s what it was arguably made for and yet certain weapons on certain classes are rendered useless by it.
You can call out ’don’t attack hard counters’ all you want but something has to deserve a hard counter. There is no reason for one auto-attack to be a suicide button when it’s functionally no different to any other auto-attack.
What is the 1 thing driving people to play? No it’s not fun. It’s reward!
The best reward for a pvper is fun pvp.
Nobody defending the current ret has said why multi-hit attacks need a counter despite not having higher dps than any other form of attack.
Tell me where you have to pay real money to win something.
You can pay to not play the game all you want but no amount of gear can make up for being bad. Someone could pay for his level 80 and all its gear then go to a dungeon and get kicked 5 minutes later for constantly dying, go to wvw and be 100% rallybait or go to spvp and find out you can’t buy a thing in there.
What exactly has this hypothetical person won, exactly? Sounds more like he paid to lose.
If we include the same modifier from total armour used to work out effective HP to do effective heals on ether renewal we get:
Effective heal in Celestial
6933.97
Effective heal in Soldier
6998.91
I believe many of our other heals get better healing power scaling over time so celestial might just edge out soldiers here when you stack heals but it’ll take a long fight before the total HP you’ve used becomes greater in celestial than soldiers. Clerics can work because of the fact that healing power has a subtractive effect on enemy attacks. This means it has exponential scaling, meaning each point of healing power is worth more when you have 1500 healing power than when you have 300 healing power.
458 condition damage doesn’t make a significant difference when you only have 2 damaging conditions, anyone can cure 2 conditions per ele attunement cycle.
You can’t just look at stat total, you have to look at what the stat is actually doing for you, and it celestial’s case it’s either not useful at all or not present in large enough quantities to be useful.
Stat total means nothing. Using the same circumstances as the OP I get the following:
Effective power Celestial (fury)
1767.63 (2072.66)
Effective power Soldier (fury)
2028.78 (2227.68)
Effective HP Celestial
19222.87
Effective HP Soldier
25399.05
To outperform ether renewal in terms of pure healing over time it needs to be blasting a water field with 2+ targets or hitting 5 targets with no water field. All ether renewal needs is to pop earth attune and gets to waste an enemy cc on top of its 8 condition cure.
1/5
Rock paper scissors is sucky balance. What exactly is flamethrower so effective against that it deserves to be rendered literally unusable in its preferred use by an easily spammed buff?
Is it fair to say that regarding Ascended Gear we would like to see more ways to earn it and in terms of drop rates, a higher percentage chance of acquiring them through this method?
Chris
As long as ascended gear is ‘Better-than-BiS’ it will continue to run against the very core of character building in Guild Wars 2, regardless of how short or how long it takes to obtain. Optimising your character is not about just getting the biggest stat total, it’s about getting the right stats for you. This takes a whole lot of theory and practical experimentation to determine both how valuable different aspects of performance are to you and how to best achieve your desired level of performance.
Ascended appears to have been built in a very half-hearted manner to try to appease both stat-chasers and people opposed to vertical progression. As a result it’s utterly meaningless from a gameplay point of view, offering nothing to stat-chasers while still being vertical progression.
My earlier proposal which I will give the short version of here was for exotic gear to be able to be upgraded with customisation slots that allow for selecting a different skin, stat type and/or rune/sigil and the item becoming ‘ascended’ once it reaches a certain quantity of customisations, allowing it to then be used as a legendary precursor.
This setup would remove post-game vertical progression in favour of horizontal build variety without invalidating the effort people have put into obtaining existing ascended items, while also making ascended into a true bridge between exotic and legendary rather than competition for mats as it currently is.
The main reason why vertical progression shouldn’t be in GW2 is that the stat system is designed to reward players for using the right gear more than the strongest gear.
This has the result that someone could spend ages of time gating and power-grinding for mats to make a set of ascended gear and find that because they didn’t entirely perfectly optimise it there’s someone else using the same build more effectively in exotics, rendering all that effort worthless.
My concept for a horizontal gear progression system is as follows:
Using the mystic forge, players would be able to fuse level 80 exotic items together to add selectable stat-types, selectable skins or, with a more expensive recipe, both at once. Players could also use similar systems to add upgrade slots and an infusion slot, being able to add more agony resistance as well once an item is infused.
Items that have been fused in any way gain a fusion bar that fills up the more times you add skins/stats/slots/infusion and once full the item is designated as ascended. Once ascended, an item can then serve as a legendary precursor and be combined with the relevant gifts to make that item type’s legendary.
A legendary would be much the same as they are now but with the addition of gaining a new selectable upgrade slot any time a rune or sigil is slotted to it, rather than having to use fusion to add one.
It’d be cool if she epically messed up and summoned a dragon/woke something terrible and/or unintended.
I think there could be potential in something like this. If Scarlet dies at the end of the next round of living story then she dies the same way she lived; as an intensely aggravating villain with told-not-shown abilities that gets beaten all the time but exits stage left unfailingly, until she mysteriously doesn’t and gets killed instead. Even though the character would be gone the memory of her is unchanged; and really every villain ever in an mmo dies, it gets quite boring to have it end the same way every time. Having her grand scheme blow up in her face and make a huge mess, followed by her being forced at the end of a sword to help clean it up, could improve Scarlet as a character and have her story end with her as a character that people can at least tolerate.
’You’ve completely bent the game to your will to do something that isn’t even supposed to be possible, but you didn’t do it in the grindiest way possible so you cheated’, is what I’m reading here. It’s an entertaining accomplishment regardless of how it was done.
Stop ignoring the fact that the reason we want BiS to be a given and not a reward is because that’s exactly what Anet sold the game to us with. It’s the principle, not the numbers, that enrage people. Stats are not a reward and should never be a reward, because if they are you stop playing a game and start just pressing buttons to watch numbers go up and that kind of rubbish is the reason I ditched WoW for GW2.
As for stats not mattering, sure in pveasy you can just run through everything blindfolded in whites but wvw is pvp and pvp with power creep, no matter how small, is bad pvp-no exceptions.
Ret should definitely scale off the damage your receive rather than the number of hits. It should not be arbitrarily more powerful against certain classes just because their attacks are spread out over more hits.
Faowri gets it. The game we were sold considered best-in-slot gear to not be a reward but rather the standard, and that assorted horizontal progression tracks would be the rewards. The game we have right now has only skins as horizontal progression and the vast majority of weapon skins and all armour skins take less effort to obtain than their best-in-slot equivalent.
Fortunately the stat gain from ascended isn’t as severe as it would be in another game and we do have a kinda-sorta promise that ascended is as high as tiers will ever go, but the entire premise and execution are so aggressively against the philosophy we were given pre-launch that it can’t help but leave a sour taste.
The trait books aren’t bind on pickup; you can sell or trade them.
The new heals definitely are meant to be different rather than better, but arcane brilliance requires so many ‘ifs’ to even approach the potential of our current heals that it’s just flat out worse instead.
Generosity would hardly redeem this. Not only does it still rely on landing hits; the reason why the skill is so unreliable in the first place, but you only get 1 condi clear every 10 seconds and can’t use sigil of battle or energy.
Going by the numbers on the stream and comparing to existing heals it appears that under absolutely ideal circumstances (arcane brilliance is not interrupted and hits 5 targets, glyph is not interrupted and is used in water, ether renewal is not interrupted) you would get:
279.07 hp/s using arcane brilliance,
235.96 hp/s using glyph of elemental harmony, and
263.18 hp/s using ether renewal.
This is using 0 healing power and assuming the numbers shown in the stream were 0 healing power as well. This means that arcane brilliance is only doing 18.3% more hp/s than glyph and 6% more hp/s than ether renewal. That’s… not very good considering how much more likely you are to get those ideal circumstances for glyph or ether renewal and that ether renewal in particular is also removing 8 conditions at the same time.
Overall my verdict is that this skill suffers from the crippling disadvantage of not being ether renewal.
Currently male light armour is either boring, a robe, or a robe that is boring while female is either boring or a decorated bikini. It leaves most light armour toons looking rather samey.
I would be in favour of having male and female versions of armour looking relatively similar since that would straight away open up sexy for male toons and robes for female toons. Look at heavy exotic gladiator armour for a good example of male and female armour being similar; the only real difference is in the chestpiece since the male version doesn’t have to cover any specific location like the female version does.
ITT: if your personal primetime is different to the server primetime you’re violating my game mode.
It doesn’t matter how you brutalise the scoring system because wvw will always be decided by overall coverage. Additionally, everyone that cares about ppt more than pvp is in t1, which has 24/7 coverage anyway.
The thing about mmo’s is that they have very long lifespans. If you aren’t trying to make your game different from the established games then you’re just trying to get people to pay again for the same game they already have. To use your car analogy it’s as though we have 2 cars with the same wheels, the same engine, the same number of doors and seats, the same cargo space and the same fuel tank. If one of those cars comes out a year before the other the second car will not have any success. It would be technically just as good as the first car but everyone that wants a car with those specifications has already bought the first one. Car 2 could even have slight improvements in performance over car 1 but it wouldn’t make a difference, there’s no point trying to steal an existing customer base from a competitor. If instead car 2 has a different engine, fuel tank, cargo space, etc to car 1 it would be able to claim it’s own segment of the market instead by targeting different people to those that already have car 1.
To be more specific to GW2 it’s clear that what Anet is targeting are those people that like the base mmorpg playstyle, but don’t like the specifics of existing games in the genre. As one of those people I can tell you my opinion of raids is that you may as well be playing DDR on your keyboard, that the only difference in holy trinity roles is what bar you’re looking at while playing DDR and that standard quests could be replaced with greater exp gains from kills and I wouldn’t notice the difference. These opinions are obviously not the only reasons anyone that plays GW2 over other mmos would state but I can also say that it’s almost certain that if I didn’t hold those opinions I would be playing a different game.
TL;DR if it wasn’t different to the games we already have we would just keep playing those.
He’s not speaking for anyone, he’s making a perfectly logical deduction based on the activities of wagon-scrubs over the last 6 months.
I’m a WvW player and I don’t go into the JP to play a jumping game, I go in there to kill other players while they’re trying to play a jumping game.
That’s not real pvp, stop pretending.
Pve needs to gtfo of wvw.
Roaming mastery: 1pt, sends you to heart of the mists when you try to go to wvw.
Siege masteries aren’t absolutely terrible but still a case of ‘have it or gtfo’. Applied fortitude and guard leech are the most absurd, disgraceful things in the entirety of GW2 though. This is not a game for people that want to just smash buttons and watch them get better returns for nothing. YOU are supposed to get better after you cap out your gear, not your character by just jumping on the next treadmill.
The entire advantage of minions is that they are completely expendable. Some of them are even designed to be sacrificed.
That is so strong compared to every other utility we have.
They’ve gotten to you haven’t they? It may be strong compared to ele utilities but that’s chump change compared to any other class.
They made trib mode SAB, so why not Mad King’s Clocktower, now with 110% more die?
It is always unprofessional to insult your customer, no matter what they are doing.
You would rather deal with DB’s SEA instead? =D
The whole point is you can’t make sure you have enough not-terrible players to offset the noobs without exploiting the overflow system. No amount of carrying can make up for people not waypointing or turret gunners that don’t use 2.
Having been in a Teq win now it’s painfully clear that as long as the people present aren’t going to just sit there and hope to be carried you can just faceroll it.
Spamming “1” for 5 minutes just to get a guaranteed Rare loot isn’t fun.
Neither is waiting an hour, playing flawlessly and getting absolutely nothing because half your team is made of noobs. Pulling your weight in this fight is not elite. Succeeding at any pveasy content is not and will never be elite. Having your reward for your effort being able to be denied by a small number of people being useless is male bovine excrement.
The only enemies in this fight are your own teammates, and given one of the platforms GW2 was sold on was ‘no griefing ever’, that should never happen. You should not have to hijack overflows with your premade guild team just to be sure that you won’t have victory stolen from you either.
Recurring anime/cartoon villain is exactly how she feels to me.
“Looks like Team Scarlet’s blasting off again!”
That was already pretty much the feeling after the last time we saw her. The only good thing about Scarlet at the moment is her VA hamming it up.
There’s a huge problem that isn’t on your list there: the server struggles to handle the level of dps stacking that’s needed to win. I’ve actually been in a successful run of Teq but I haven’t killed him because in the final burn phase I got massive skill lag followed by a dc about 15 seconds before he died.
I also tagged everything except the waves as being a problem with the event. Almost every facet of it is just a way for the failure of a small number of people to deny everyone a chance at victory.
The real reason they would’ve lost is because they didn’t get rid of the pugs, not because the fight takes any skill.
There is nothing elite about being able to stick to a script. If there was we’d all be bragging about being extras in a film. The only reason Teq still doesn’t get beaten is because people have so much anti-skill that they couldn’t even play WoW successfully.
1) Full grasp of game mechanics
2) Ability to pay attention to map leadership. Joining squads helps a lot if not on voice comm like Vent or Team Speak.
3) Full Exotic gear. Masterwork and Rares are welcome, but not preferred.
4) Understanding that we will rez downed players, but not dead ones. If you are dead, WP quickly so you can rejoin the fight.
5) Ability to multitask in combat. You may go from attacking Tequatl, to defending turrets in the blink of an eye. Be prepared for anything.
6) Take your bathroom breaks BEFORE Teq lands. Leaving to go to the potty, while on a turret will make people upset.
7) Full agreement that failing the event isn’t the end of the world. Use the loss as a learning tool. Know your mistakes, and fix them.
None of that is even close to elite. If you can do all of that in wvw you just barely aren’t useless. The simple fact is that people can fail at things that take no skill just by being lazy.
Guard leech needs to be buffed or applied fortitude needs to be nerfed. Preferably the latter.
Both need to be returned to something that only applies to guards. Having 230 ranks of mandatory pick traits is a ridiculous gameplay situation for a pvp game mode.