Guild Wars 2

You can’t just get better healing or better damage with standard gear, you can get better healing and better damage with standard gear. Healing power is an all-or-nothing stat and since most of ‘your’ healing is from people blasting your water fields it should really lean towards the nothing end of the scale. As far as everything else goes a PVT/knight’s combo does more damage before and after might stacks, has more hp and has more toughness. Overall a small bit of celestial is usually decent but generally any more than 2 pieces and you’re just spreading stats out too much.

Warrior gets a trait called last stand that nulls an incoming cc and casts balanced stance on a 90 sec cd.

Onshidesigns.1069:

Do you not see that this is trial and error, and not based on skill.

You’ve described 100% of pve in 100% of mmorpgs there. If you’re looking for skill in pve, you’re looking in the wrong place.

fellyn.5083:

I didn’t know the entire world was in GMT. Thanks for clearing that up.

Given that every time zone in the world is presented in the form GMT+/-X the entire world pretty much is in GMT.

I wanna be the Guild Wars!

You know what they say; ‘Death…good.’

Then why isn’t it self-contained within pve? People that play pvp content don’t want goals to strive for, they want to fight and win by outplaying their opponent. Anet apparently understand this given how they designed tpvp but wvw still gets treated like it’s just pve rather than strategic pvp.

To be perfectly honest if I had it my way there wouldn’t be tiers of gear. I can live with exotic though because it is so quick and easy to obtain. You spend less time grinding for gear and more time actually playing the game on a level playing field.

‘That honestly sounds more fun.’

At least it wouldn’t be time gated right? =\

Why should goals be grinding based and not skill based? Is pressing ans+1 on a calculator until it reads 1337 ‘working towards a goal’?

You do immediately get worse by not having an ascended weapon. If my 30 man zerg has exotic weapons and a similarly proficient 30 man zerg gets to do 10% more damage just because they pressed one button once a day for 14 days my zerg loses.

Can someone please explain to me what actual gameplay is added to the game by ascended gear? How much effort is Anet going to for the sake of nothing? How much effort does it take to not add anything to a game? Why are we being made to sit through a minimum of 2 weeks of time gating so that once we’re done we’re playing the exact same thing we were before?

Maybe instead of mercs we should be able to upgrade objectives to have risen thralls.

Join us!

Has anyone asked themselves what any race other than humans would even want with Orr? It’s a pile of ruins with nothing left but cultural significance to one race and one race only.

Celestial looks impressive on paper but in reality not all stats are equal. The gradient of power far outstrips all others, the gradients of precision and crit damage depend heavily on each other and power, all of which are spread thin, vitality is rarely necessary even in the small quantities celestial gives. Add to that the bit where there will be more than one stat you aren’t even using; like condi in a power build, as well as stats like healing that are all or nothing due to pseudo-exponential scaling.

It’s a jack of all trades that is terrible at all of them.

A guardian with exotic armour as its only source has 2127 armour. At 3000 that means effective hp is 141%. Add a judgement signet and it’s around 157%. That means your armour is effectively 3333.3 or 3000*10/9.

Power and toughness (really attack and armour) are directly equivalent in function. An attack made at 2000 attack vs 2000 armour will do the exact same damage as the same attack at 3000 attack vs 3000 armour. There isn’t really a ‘damage reduction’ stat in the game because of how attack and armour interact. Your ‘damage % taken’ could be modelled as a function of the minimum armour value for your class divided by the armour value you’re actually using and to the untrained eye this could certainly appear to have diminishing returns, but to then model it in terms of effective hp/healing you have to divide your hp or heal per second by the damage taken function. When you divide by a fraction you’re really multiplying by the inverse of that fraction, meaning that your effective hp/healing multiplier is your current armour divided by the minimum value of armour for your class. This function is linear.

The easiest way to look at the effect of armour is to remember that 1 point of armour counters 1 point of attack; every point of armour over the base is effectively subtracted from their attack.

There aren’t really any diminishing returns in how stats are applied but you can consider the fact that each new point added to any stat is a smaller percentage of the total than the one before it; adding 50 power to 500 power is a larger percentage than adding 50 power to 1000 power. In fact if you were to model power in terms of how long it takes to kill a certain target it would appear to have diminishing returns in the same way toughness gets called!

The only exceptional stat is healing power, which has exponential scaling if you look at the effect it has in combat. It directly raises your hps and with enough it is entirely possible to outheal an enemy’s dps, however most classes can’t get anywhere near enough healing power for this effect to be noticeable. Generally this will only start to happen when you put multiple guardians and/or eles in one place and let them all aoe heal each other.

The pugs follow the comm better in pve because the pvemanders are just as bad as they are.

Only a WvW player knows that outmanned is a licence to chill.

I hope most of the people were just posting for something to laugh at and didn’t actually fall for such obvious trolling…

If Anet deleted every bit of ascended in the game forever and didn’t even compensate me for all the ascended I already have I wouldn’t even complain. I’d probably thank them instead because ascended is the most player unfriendly mechanic in the game and its only gotten worse with each new time-gating system for each new slot that gets the treadmill.

Ask not why a warrior goes into combat topless. Instead ask: why not?

Depending on how you measure them you could say every stat has diminishing returns. If you average 20 strikes to kill something at attack x then you average 10 strikes to kill that same thing at attack 2x and 5 strikes to kill at attack 4x, but when measured as damage dealt per strike it’s a linear increase.

It’s the same with armour. If your effective hp is 20k at armour y then it’s 30k at armour 1.5y and 40k at armour 2y.

I believe fear has a stack limit that prevents additional fear time being added once it hits that limit; this is likely to be the same.

This could be plausible if there was a limited timeframe available to transfer and a limit on how many free transfers can occur but in general it seems too open to being exploited. The entire organised wvw pop of a server could potentially jump ship and make two servers have a rating-coverage mismatch.

And outmanned means they have repair bills and we don’t! =D

The only time they’ve added traits so far has been while merging a pair of lesser traits together.

Typical boring instance pve fight. Almost duo’d it to death on our first try only to find that we didn’t have enough dps to win. I don’t really see how there’s any skill or genuine challenge to a fight where the only thing that decides whether you win or lose is dps, even when you play flawlessly.

Autocast skills always count as the type of skill they are, but the cooldown never changes, so earth’s embrace always has a 90sec cooldown.

Proc’d armour of earth counts as a cantrip activation for all those traits.

Shouldn’t people that do literally everything in the game just so their AP score can be bigger at least be good enough at the game to win CT anyway? And surely you would have plenty of experience doing things you don’t care for just to get those extra points.

Gunna give you guys a free bump and say that was a hell of a beach bash you and GWEN put on there. You guys really gave the impression that your guild is generally a cool place to hang out and do stuff and that’s what I’m after in a guild. Would like an invite if you can spare one. =)

Where’s this thread been hiding? Maybe we unsaw it, like my mes: Can Unsee.

I knew SoS would be a great server way back when I first moved to it. First wvw fight I went to and a single comm with a pug zerg thwarted a larger guild group with the gloriously simple strat of DISTRACTION CARNIFEX TREB. It had to sting to watch an upgraded keep go down without so much as a single defender to preserve it.

This all seems pretty similar to what I think about staff as well. Most skills have the numbers but are slower than slow. Things I would do differently would be:

Burning retreat: a lot of people have said similar things in the past; have it do damage at your starting location like a reverse burning speed. Damage would be around fireball damage.

Water blast: needs a more reliable way to heal allies. I would suggest a bounce effect like Mesmer staff 1 that heals allies it hits or have the heal centre on yourself rather than the target so you can control where it heals.

Healing rain: I don’t think this is good enough for its cooldown. Needs to have either a higher target cap or some direct healing in addition to regen.

Chain lightning: air 1 does more damage than fire 1 in every other set and I think the same should be true here. I like the idea of having its initial hit be severe then falling off as it hits additional targets. I also think it should require a dodge roll to evade (either super fast or homing).

Gust: more like Mesmer greatsword 5 pls. Staff is the aoe weapon.

Stoning: weakness is a weak condition. Give it more damage or 1s cripple.

Unsteady ground: cause immobilise on contact but no effect while you already have immobilise.

Shockwave: larger aoe.

The only stealth I have a problem with is the d/p stealth. Every other stealth has a long cooldown (HiS, SR), sucks, or is CnD, which can be used constantly but also be prevented from working. The combat system in GW2 is supposed to be about seeing your enemy and responding to his actions. You also have high risk involved in combat because any skill can be made to fail by an attentive foe and you still pay the opportunity cost for it. With d/p stealth you kinda don’t have either of those aspects. BP+HS is 100% reliable initiative based stealth and once in stealth you have 4 seconds and as many attempts as you can fit with which to land backstab. If you don’t hit at all you can just stealth again immediately (you remembered to bring enough init regen for a 9 init combo right?) and you’re no worse for wear.

When I used a carrion p/d thief what I found is that generally I would ruin the day of anyone that couldn’t dodge CnD, but it turned real intense, real fast when up against someone that could. The other thing was, regardless of how good my opponent was, if I got into stealth, they took a sneak attack to the face but the only guarantee of getting stealth was HiS or SR, both of which need a specific situation to justify their use.

Explain how 5 players is Massive Multiplayer. Torchlight 2 is a single player game and I can play with more people than that.

Events already bring community interaction and as much as you like to pretend dungeons are more challenging, trial and error becomes equally as much of a faceroll the moment you find the correct sequence of actions, it’s still pveasy.

Jonez needs to be harder to kill and heal himself. When someone pulls the priest over it’s a massive pain because you probably don’t have his aggro and he probably has defiant up so you can’t cc him away. There’s nothing quite like watching Jonez just stand under a mega-ice-spike that’s going to do 2/3rds his hp and not being able to do anything about it.

Edit: actually fighting the priest and defending Jonez when all he has to worry about are shades is perfectly fine, there just needs to be less chance for one person to just ruin the whole thing.

The best thing about the boon hate trait is that they merged the existing grandmasters into a trait actually worth using to make room for it. >.>
The only real buff warriors got this patch was dogged march and a little bit of signet-y stuff.

The party size is what makes all of the difference. The reason they call it living world is because the whole map is one giant party with a size of whoever wants to show up. Dynamic events happen just the same whether 1 person shows up or the whole map limit show up. That’s massively multiplayer. Instances are pre-planned with a set number of players. That’s co-op multiplayer, as featured in every game with a multiplayer mode that isn’t an mmo. By making the ‘living story’ take place in instances instead of the ‘living world’ Anet are wasting what makes their game unique. The content in the dungeon is no different to what you get in dynamic group events, but scaled for 5 players only, meaning not dynamic at all.

The easiest way to see the difference in gameplay between an instance and an event is that in an event you don’t have to say LFG, you don’t have to replace anyone that leaves half way through and you don’t have to say ‘full sorry’ once 5 people are there. And if you want a real challenge the scaling on group events means solo isn’t out of the question.

So I did the dungeon with a pug. Bo-o-o-o-o-ring. The final boss looked kinda cool but well, so did Zhaitan. Didn’t mean it wasn’t boring. If I wanted to play aoe-dodge-a-thon I could just do Grenth, which is actual living world content. The dynamic event system was the only thing keeping pve from being a sleepwalk, using instances just makes it feel like I’ve stepped out of GW2 into a much worse game coughWoWcough. It was the same with the instances for The Razing really, but at least I didn’t have to wait for a party to find out how disappointing those were. =D

Why not just give each team a reason to be in multiple places at once rather than forcing them with unassailable bases? Right now every supply camp is ‘linked’ to at least 2 bases. If camps gave out actual important bonuses to the team that holds them when fighting over a base they’re linked to and didn’t have 3 min recap immunity your team would have to play strategically.

The other sort of map control I think could work would be artillery firebases. Basically each base would contain a super-treb that can swing the local balance in favour of the team that holds it, but is very, very easy to capture. Killing the treb would cause a capture circle to appear for 2 min and the treb would respawn after the time ends or if another team captures it.

Large scale pvp doesn’t have to be just a collision between 2 zerg balls that proceed to auto attack each other to death because skill lag stops them doing anything else. Having to fight over multiple places at once raises the skill level of the game and makes it more like strategic pvp and less like pve that just happens to have human players as enemies.

The problem with that idea is that all the elder dragons are corrupters and simultaneously the most powerful things in the whole GW universe. Remember that the reason the elder dragons were asleep for 11000 years wasn’t because they were beaten back, it was because they won and ran out of food as a result. The first thing Zhaitan did when he woke was demand Orr to rise, and Orr and all its dead rose to serve him. To have this unfathomably powerful thing get shot down by fricken laser beams and 22222 spam from one airship is just weak.

The only boon hate thieves gained is that flanking strike steals a boon instead of just deleting it and the placement of destruction of the empowered means warriors are most likely giving up a fixed 10% damage trait to get it. I don’t really expect to see warriors or thieves use their boon hate anywhere other than bunker busting in tpvp.

Large scale pvp =/= select all → attack move kekeke

Make it so that map control means something and isn’t just for the 10 minute score update and wvw might actually deserve to be called pvp. If WoW can make a large scale pvp map (Tol Barad) that requires strategic play and makes zerglings lose I don’t see why GW2 can’t top it.

‘M’ in MMO; what about the other M? 5-man instances are hardly massively-multiplayer and they sure aren’t living. I used to play an MMO that had 1-4 player scaling for 100% of its content and identical rewards for however many you brought with you. You wanted to solo? Go ahead. Got one friend on you want to play with? Knock yourselves out. Want a guild group? No worries. Just want to do it with anyone? They had a hotjoin for that. It was a near perfect solution.

GW2 has the means to top that though. The dynamic scaling system can scale content for up to 100 players yet we keep falling back into the old exactly 5 players template every other MMO uses. This is supposed to be a living world. Instances are not living. Pre-planned parties are not living.

lordkrall.7241:

Why would you even play a MMO in that case?

So that I can play on my own when I want to, and I can play with others when I want to, in the same game. The majority of the time in GW2 you can even do that within the same content.

Playing a multiplayer game =/= wanting to cuddle up with everyone 24/7.

This honestly feels like a step backwards to me. The whole ‘living world’ concept has pretty much meant ‘you don’t have to party to group’. The thing that makes an mmo feel alive is simply that other players are in the same world as you and you can work together or on your own as you want. Instances on the other hand aren’t really alive at all. You hit a button to enter and then you and your party are whisked away into a completely static and detached world. How is that a ‘living world’?

People say ’it’s an mmo of course you should have to group’, but let’s look at applying that logic to other parts of the game and seeing how much worse it becomes. Imagine if all dynamic group events required a 5-man party to activate them first. Imagine if dailies wouldn’t progress unless you were in a party. Imagine if you had to be in a party to join wvw. All of that content would be made immeasurably worse overnight if such changes were made. Now imagine if the living story finale was a dynamic group event chain with a short downtime and a daily reward, similar to maw before it got nerfed (again). No shouting LFG>MWF in map chat, just MWF up and everyone that wants to be a part of it can just do it, regardless of whether they can be divided up into groups of 5. That sounds much more in the spirit of the game than an instance to me.

On the contrary, you are the one defending trial-and-error based newbie-unfriendly content with l2p. In case it wasn’t clear, the periscopes are a long way outside the game’s learning curve. Dodge-or-die style ranged cc is something bosses do, not level 2 turrets.

Someone who is new probably hasn’t worked out all the nuances of knowing when to dodge and how to predict enemy actions, because those things can only be learned through experience. An experience that will no doubt be extremely frustrating since the price of failure is dying repeatedly. Going by all the hate the periscopes have been getting and the fact that Anet nerfed them it’s not unreasonable to assume that’s exactly what’s been going on.

Fluffball.8307:

By now you should have figured out how to deal with these…

Yes, surely people that have been playing for half an hour and are encountering the mechanic for their first time much sooner than they would otherwise have encountered it should know how to deal with these.

Usually if you call Melandru in map chat people will show up to it. It’s a lot easier than most of the other temple events and still gives you all the loot so it usually picks up quite a large zerg when it happens on my server.

I prefer to think of it instead as removing world completion from WvW. A pve goal in a pvp game mode makes pvers and pvpers alike sad. Except those bads that like to gank pvers so they can feel like they aren’t bad, but we don’t care about them.

Of course they won’t, because they don’t rock like SoS. =D