Guild Wars 2

Daroon.1736:

Cyninja.2954:

Daroon.1736:

Cyninja.2954:

Daroon.1736:

Crysto.7089:

Financial suicide.

Clearly something very significant and serious is going on at Anet at the moment and all the evidence suggests that the things I have described have contributed to a serious fall in player numbers that could affect the long term future of the game.

The simple fact is that once Gem store sales start falling (and of course I have no evidence that they are at the moment) the game becomes unsustainable.

To underline this – If you can locate the ANET Financial report Q4 2015 thread – you will see that revenue for HOT was less than a normal quarters gem sales.

Gem sales and by implication active player numbers are the be all and end all for ensuring the game stays in existence.

For many businesses the value of ‘good will’ far exceeds both income and assets and Anet could clearly use some good will at the moment to maintain current, entice back lost and attract new players..

So your solution to all this loss in revenue is even more loss in revenue? Okay….

Clearly you are not familiar with the term ‘loss leader’ – look it up – Also look at the Q4 2015 financial statement.

Gem store sales are the revenue stream and to sustain that income the game needs a stable (not shrinking) player base.

Anet needs to win back old and entice new players to the game – Another poorly received expansion that generates less revenue than quarterly Gem sales (as HOT did) may provide a nice blip on the balance sheet every 12 months but if player numbers
decline, the viability of the long term future of the game is sadly going to be in question.

Oh I know what a loss leader is. I find it funny that you’d apply this to an expansion for an MMO. Then again, maybe you should read up on what characteristics usually qualify a loss leader, especially:

- A loss leader is usually a product that customers purchase frequently—thus they are aware that its unusually low price is a bargain.

- Loss leaders are often scarce, to discourage stockpiling. The seller must use this technique regularly if they expect their customers to come back.

- The retailer will often limit how much a customer can purchase.

- product is sold at a price below its market cost to stimulate other sales of more profitable goods or services

Lol – well done for copying and pasting a few lines from the Wikipedia entry for loss leader:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_leader

Sadly though the ability to Google search and copy/paste doesn’t convince me that you have enough understanding of the concept to see how it would apply in this situation.

Care to share your thoughts on the Q4 2015 financial results?

First off, what you are looking for is this: http://global.ncsoft.com/global/ir/earnings.aspx not hard to find if you had spent 10 second googling.

Second, if you’d taken the time to actually read through Q4 2014 and Q4 2015, well read is a bit much since it’s nicely put in graphs with a lot of bells and whistles, you’d have seen the rise in sales accross the entire year of 2015 (prepurchases etc) compared to 2014. Given only the pure numbers, we are talking 85.6 BN KRW to 101 BN KRW, which is a 17.99% increase in revenue (13.68 MM Dollar). That is not calculating for the lost revenue from people getting the gems discounted with delux editions or any late adopters who bought HoT not within the first 3 months. For a over 3 year old game, not bad. Especially after a big slump in 2014 (compared to 2013).

Hell, NCSoft even specifically mention:

GW2 solidified its position as main revenue driver, by adding on expansion pack sales to stable in-game item sales

That’s not stuff you make up to fool investestors, stakeholders or shareholders. Especially when they could have left that out.

Now, I’m still waiting on any type of evidance where any MMO developer has provided any huge quality expansion free of cost. Or any type of research which has to do with digital goods and customer retention favoring getting new customers over old ones. All the literature I’ve read in the past has shown otherwise. Here is a small article which is semi current: http://oursocialtimes.com/70-of-companies-say-its-cheaper-to-retain-a-customer-than-acquire-one/

And while we are at the subject of customers, read this: http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/177409-only-0-15-of-players-account-for-50-of-free-to-play-game-revenue

EDIT: the reason I’ve stuck to wikipedia was and still is that you’ve not provided any amount of qualified analysis which would warrent more effort from my part. You did not even get your loss leader definition as it is represented in the wiki right. Show me some basic understanding, and we’ll go from there.

Daroon.1736:

Cyninja.2954:

Daroon.1736:

Crysto.7089:

Financial suicide.

Clearly something very significant and serious is going on at Anet at the moment and all the evidence suggests that the things I have described have contributed to a serious fall in player numbers that could affect the long term future of the game.

The simple fact is that once Gem store sales start falling (and of course I have no evidence that they are at the moment) the game becomes unsustainable.

To underline this – If you can locate the ANET Financial report Q4 2015 thread – you will see that revenue for HOT was less than a normal quarters gem sales.

Gem sales and by implication active player numbers are the be all and end all for ensuring the game stays in existence.

For many businesses the value of ‘good will’ far exceeds both income and assets and Anet could clearly use some good will at the moment to maintain current, entice back lost and attract new players..

So your solution to all this loss in revenue is even more loss in revenue? Okay….

Clearly you are not familiar with the term ‘loss leader’ – look it up – Also look at the Q4 2015 financial statement.

Gem store sales are the revenue stream and to sustain that income the game needs a stable (not shrinking) player base.

Anet needs to win back old and entice new players to the game – Another poorly received expansion that generates less revenue than quarterly Gem sales (as HOT did) may provide a nice blip on the balance sheet every 12 months but if player numbers
decline, the viability of the long term future of the game is sadly going to be in question.

Oh I know what a loss leader is. I find it funny that you’d apply this to an expansion for an MMO. Then again, maybe you should read up on what characteristics usually qualify a loss leader, especially:

- A loss leader is usually a product that customers purchase frequently—thus they are aware that its unusually low price is a bargain.

- Loss leaders are often scarce, to discourage stockpiling. The seller must use this technique regularly if they expect their customers to come back.

- The retailer will often limit how much a customer can purchase.

- product is sold at a price below its market cost to stimulate other sales of more profitable goods or services

Then read up on how this is usually part of dumping campaigns. Then finally, please explain how this relates to digital goods. I imagine your thought process is something like:“Free expansion = more players = more gem revenue.” I’ll let you read a bit about digital sales and marketing to figure out how this is not even true.

What you have not ansered though is why arenanet should offer a costly expansion for free when they effectively are:

- trading guaranteed revenue (price of the expansion and prepurchase) for possible future revenue (higher revenue from gem sales and bigger player base)

- having to upfront the cost of the expansion since developement is not free. This usually gets covered to a certain degree by prepurchases and expected sales, all of which fall flat at no cost expansions.

- how not even most free to play MMOs with way more expansive and restricting free to play models offer free expansions. Definately with the amount of content offered in HoT

About possible higher ffuture revenue, you’ve provided not one shred of evidence this would even be the case.

Hence, again the question:

Cyninja.2954:

So your solution to all this loss in revenue is even more loss in revenue? Okay….

Daroon.1736:

Crysto.7089:

Financial suicide.

Clearly something very significant and serious is going on at Anet at the moment and all the evidence suggests that the things I have described have contributed to a serious fall in player numbers that could affect the long term future of the game.

The simple fact is that once Gem store sales start falling (and of course I have no evidence that they are at the moment) the game becomes unsustainable.

To underline this – If you can locate the ANET Financial report Q4 2015 thread – you will see that revenue for HOT was less than a normal quarters gem sales.

Gem sales and by implication active player numbers are the be all and end all for ensuring the game stays in existence.

For many businesses the value of ‘good will’ far exceeds both income and assets and Anet could clearly use some good will at the moment to maintain current, entice back lost and attract new players..

So your solution to all this loss in revenue is even more loss in revenue? Okay….

Crysto.7089:

Financial suicide.

This.

Or the alternative, a such massive money grab shift in the business model that no matter at what price the next expansion were to be sold, the game would be unplayable.

Rozalina.3196:

I don’t get why there are people that don’t like the idea of adding endless gathering tools to the wardrobe. It would make gathering so much more enjoyable because you won’t have to worry about what character you left your endless gathering tools. Yes, not everyone is switching through multiple characters but there are times where it is necessary like anyone working on their Guild Halls right now need a TON of flax so unless you are loaded with gold you will need to gather most of it. So, I put all my alts at the flax farm so It just took so much time to shuffle my endless harvesting sickle through all my characters everyday. If endless gathering tools was finally updated to the wardrobe system it would make gathering less stressful. So, instead of worry about what character my endless tools are on I instead could enjoy getting different looks for them that I like. It just simplifies the endless gathering tool system which would be nice. I’m not saying endless gathering tools are bad, but adding them to the wardrobe would just take them to that next level which would make them even better than they are now.

No one is arguing that the change would not be great. The argument with these kind of ideas is and always has been: what benefit does arenanet get out of it?

The gemstore convenience items are part of their business model. A change as suggested here would cut into their revenue since now every account will only get 1 gathering tool. Now you could make an argument that the amount of more gathering tools sold due to a better deal would outperform the amount of gathering tools sold when a single person buys multiple. This goes against the theory though that it’s easier to get money from a returning customer versus money from a new customer.

FrostDraco.8306:

1.) “Secondly it would stop people from only doing the mossman.”

Seems like the only person that has a problem with this is people like you who enjoy controlling others. You are free to run any fractal you like, its doesnt mean the rest of us HAVE to join you. I do non-swamp all the time for 51+, and have no issues getting people. Seems like you are the one with the issue here.

2. ) "I have played all the scales, I found it extremely enjoyable, most people are just spoiling their own fun. "

And now you are trying to tell people how to have fun…sigh. I’ve played every scale. I do not enjoy Jademaw, cliffside, and thaumanova. Just because you find them enjoyable doesn’t mean the rest of us have to. How dare you try to tell people what they are going to have fun doing? What is this, North Korea?

3.) “I have been getting similar feedback from guildmates I convinced to play some of the harder fractals.”

So you use a small sample size, and you think thats something to base it on? Im not opposed to more challenging fractals. But come on. This isn’t even half way decent as a survey.

4. ) “If you do not like challenging content you might want to ignore high level semi-hardcore instanced pve…”

Fractals is high level but it was never hardcore. Take that trash back to the raid threads because it stinks.

5.) “Finally this would, viewed long-term increase the number of players who play high-level fractals whilst at the same time ensuring party quality.”

Assertion. Assertion. Assertion. All presented without evidence, and shall be dismissed as such.

6.) “This is even more true if considering the coming rework for dailies, that will hopefully encourage diversity in fractal choice.”

You know what else would encourage fractal choice? Something you never once mentioned? Having more fractals! And ones that people actually enjoy doing!

7.) “You would still be able to skip the really annoying fractals to speed up your progress, but you could not just level from 40-78 with joining dailys, leaving you with a high level and essentially no idea what you are doing.”

And here we are at the root of the issue. You don’t like in experienced players in your fractals, and you think ordering people to play the fractals they don’t want is going to change that.

Here’s a pro tip: It won’t change anything. Well that’s too bad, but maybe if you spent time explaining mechanics (which takes of of 2-3mins), to the noobs in your squad you would have smoother runs. But that’s too hard, so instead QQing on the forums about making people play other fractals will help.

Think about this. If the fractals people currently run are easy, and you have people with no idea whats going on running them, what happens when you force those same people…..to run the harder fractals? You’re gonna have a bad time.

While the tone is a bit rough, I have to agree with the general sentiment.

The offered “solution” by TC is nothing more than a fancy “play the way I want you to play”.

Fractals have very serious issues, but forcing players into certain fractals or behaviors (especially after an easier system was in place) is just plain wrong. Either arenanet does a complete fractal revamp, or not.

Main issue for fractals is and remains that most of them are stale content over 3 years old. No amount of “fixing” is going to make current fractals more interesting or enjoyable. Sure, they are great the first hundred or twohundered times. Once you hit over 2 thousand fractals run though, it is a chore you just want to get over with asap.

The changes to fractals have been consistantly to make grouping easier. I remember back when fractals got introduced you needed people of similar rank to rank up (not to mention it was character progress, not account). All the changes to personal fractal rank increasing were done for quality of life of the playerbase.

The change from 1 fractal rank per fractal instead of fractal set was already a huge decrease in time commitment. You don’t see any old vets running around demanding people get downgraded. Any step back within this system would rightfully cause a lot of hate.

Best suggestion I would give is as follows: If you come up with ideas for improving the game, make sure they don’t endup alienating or discriminating against players. Improvements should bring quality of life features with them, not the opposite.

Not sure I can get behind this idea. There are multiple flaws.

1.) If we assume 20 mintes per fractal you would reach fractal level 76 (requires 107 ar, the last fractal doable in a optimal set without any ascended armor which gives 108 ar) it would still take a person starting fractals 1,500 minutes (25 hours) to even reach a fractal level where he needs ascended armor. Anyone semi interested in fractals will have aquired at least 1-2 pieces of armor by now.

2.) Using agony resist runes means that you are not using other more useful runes. It also means you are likely running exotic armor (I guess this is the main draw to implement the runes in the first place) which, while not much, has stat deficits versus ascended armor. So you are essentially depriving yourself of 2 sources for stats and effects putting more pressure on the rest of your team.

3.) At your proposed 375 relics and 35 matrixes (2,250 and 210 respectively as you mentioned) you are essentially asking a “new player” to spend valuable fractal relics (and they are valuable to new players) and close to 50 gold (at current price of 24s per matrix) on a temporary upgrade to his exotic gear which he will replace once he gets ascended items. Not to mention the runes are a downgrade for any other part of the game.

I just don’t see this as an actual benefit or improvement. Sure it would give players more choice, but not really valuable choice. Best case, players ignore the runes. Worst case, they actually get them only to come on the forums and rage about what useless runes they got conned into aquiring.

Ah yes, another one of those “I don’t like feature xyz”even though it is part of arenanets business model. Then a recommendation with absolutely no balance between arenanets business model and player quality of life improvements.

The day unlimited gathering tools advance from luxury items to common required items this kind of approach might make sense. Until then, at least try to make realistic recommendations.

Swagger.1459:

Cyninja.2954:

Swagger.1459:

Cyninja.2954:

That would make ascended armor mandatory where it is now mostly optional.

That in turn would open a whole other can of problems.

As is, ascended armor offers min/maxers a nice goal while it keeps the actual requirements to stay competative reasonable. Not sure I agree with the idea to buff ascended armor.

There would be nothing wrong with ascended armor falling in line with weapons and trinkets. It’s more than fair or reasonable, and the cost alone justifies the stat increase.

The only players who would complain are those unwilling to build a set.

I own 4 full sets of ascended armor and I still don’t see the need to buff the stats on it.

Also trinkets are way cheaper than armor, thus while they are mandatory in pve builds now, they are easy enough to come by.

Unless you want to part with an even bigger part of the playerbase (the ones who play GW2 more casually) there is no reason to make ascended armor better. Or if you do upgrade the stats on ascended armor, reduce it’s cost by aproximately 70% (though that in turn would anoy people who made the armor while it was more expensive).

If you went through the trouble of getting ascended armor, be happy you have best in slot gear. That should be more than enough comfort. Alienating part of the playerbase is not necessary.

You yourself have mentioned that ascended armor is not worth the investment. That’s the problem, it should be made worth it and fall in line with other ascended gear.

Nobody is alienated from getting ascended.

I argued ascended armor is not worth the investment from a cost per stat perspective. That does not mean it needs to get buffed though.

It all depends on what the goal of ascended armor and/or gear is supposed to be. For me personally, I like the current situation where the last stat increase costs the most. It gives hardcore min/max players something to do while not actually being required.

Not everything needs to be viable from an economic perspective. Asceneded armor falls into the luxury item category. Luxury items are less measured in their economic viability.

Kissy.9045:

I still have to leave the Terrace everytime that I wanna buy something from the dungeon merchant in LA T_T

I don’t get why this merchant is only in Lion’s Arch when it’s supposed to be in every city (terrace and airship included).

Please take this suggestion into consideration!

The dungeon merchant in the past was not 1 merchant, but multiple merchants, 1 for each dungeon, and they would wear the dungeon armor set. There was no reason to have 8 additional NPCs in every faction city at launch of the game, especially since Airship Pass and Terrace Pass got added in quite a while after launch.

They were based in Lion’s Arch since story wise LA used to be the main hub between all the races. This has been deluded quite a bit ever since the destruction of LA and the continuation of the games story.

While I do agree that it would be useful to have these merchants available, I don’t see the big issue. How often do you go buy stuff for tokens anyway? Especially once you’ve completed all the achievements for getting every dungeon skin, which would be done quite quickly if you are buying things daily at the merchant.

Keira Wildflower.7304:

Revenant Staff skill 5 is another one. Regardless of who you target, whatever direction you are aiming is where you take off to. I hate it. Warrior Greatsword skill 5 takes you to your target, so why not Revenant Staff skill 5? It’s like the skills are designed to not work in a kit and work in a system that doesn’t exist or something.

2 Different skills that work differently. Revenants staff 5 affects multiple targets and the inherent knockback works on breakbars. Warrior greatsword 5 is a single target rush. I’m sorry to say, but this is a clear learn to play issue since both of these skills are vastly different.

Keira Wildflower.7304:

Drop something and they dodge out of it, like there goes half your kit. Nothing lands and there is another dodge ready to launch while the first is being reloaded. This, alongside healing, is a nightmare to play against. You can play all your wrong skills and misclick anything in the match, but as soon as you need a heal or dodge, you got one and it’s so annoying when the fight goes that way. I could stay in a fight for probably days with how healing and dodges are now. Just time it right, and you are set for life.

If this were the case, pvp matches would go on for ever. They don’t. Reast assured, when facing opponents that know their class (and more importantly know their opponents class) you will get pressured and forced out of dodge and heal cooldowns. That is in fact your problem it seems, you go all out in the first few seconds of a fight not using proper pressure and skills to force your opponents to dodge and heal first before using aoe skills. Again, more of a learn to pvp aspect (and gain knowledge of every class) than it is a build problem.

Keira Wildflower.7304:

I personally have the playstyle of a HyperTank. Basically meaning, I like to survive bursts with plenty of health but still deal some damage. Impossible to have with all the healing in this game, which kittenes me off even more. Why does this game make me stressed out when it is one of my favorite past times? I feel like PVE is all that’s worth playing because the builds don’t make sense and their playstyles are so few and pre-selected. every kit I have seen does Berserker stats. Never have I seen someone use a different set of stats. If you build anything else, you don’t deal damage. If you build tanky, you might as well heal your opponent.

You do understand that itemisation in this game works as follows:

Damage <——————————————> Tank

The more you have of one, the less you have of the other. The main defensive mechanic of GW2, it being an action MMO, is the active damage mitigation (via dodge and skill use). If you require passive damage reduction on top of that via stats, your damage will suffer. More of an itemisation issue than build issue.

Keira Wildflower.7304:

I’ve even tested my build against a friend to see if we are actually using equal builds and how they effect us. His condi’s heal him. Mine don’t. Same build, different players. Shouldn’t matter, but apparently it does. So how are builds made and is it possible to be tanky and fight someone that will heal up everything you do to them?

Not sure what to make of this. First off: in general conditions do not heal. My guess is, since you sacrificed a lot of damage for tankiness, your actual damage is so low, he can outheal your damage. The best you can do is try running a condition build and get some toughness and/or vitality while getting high condition damage. Here agin though, every stat you spend on tankiness is a stat that is not contributing to your damage. You won’t get that “I can’t be killed but can kill everyone else with ease” statcombination because it literally does not exist ingame.

BrotherBelial.3094:

Obtena.7952:

Dear ANet

Do you realize that everytime we get an outfit, you are missing out on making sales in the Gemstore? How you ask? Because outfits are all or nothing: I have to either decide to purchase and wear the whole outfit or simply not buy it at all if there is a certain part of it I don’t like.

Do you realize I would pay MORE for an Armor set that I could mix and match with other parts because I believe it has more value to me that an outfit? Do you understand that I’m not alone when I say “Oh man, that’s a great helmet on that outfit, but the rest is ugly” and that prevents me from buying?

Just to make sure this doesn’t get dismissed as just a rant, I propose a solution: Do an experiment but offering the SAME skin in both an outfit and an armor, adjusting the price of each for what is necessary for projected revenues. See what happens. Make me eat words if I’m wrong. I will do so willingly.

Awhile back alot of people complained that ANet was adding armor to the gem store and not the game. So ANet said that they would no longer add armor to the gem store and armor would only be attainable in game, bar the sets that where already in the gem store.

I’d much rather see armor sets in game. Outfits are just that, all or nothing. You like it or you don’t.

This.

The decision to split outfits and armors into:

- outfits via the gemstore
- armors ingame

was one of their better decisions. This way the gemstore stays unmandatory and the outfits are a hit or miss. Armors on the otherhand are now mostly ingame only and can be attained without spending money on them for mix and matching.

Now we could argue that the ratio of outfits to armors added is skewed as there are way more outfits added into the game than armors, but that would be a different topic now right?

Cambios.7451:

Kamara.4187:

I have no issue with how the game godz are handling things. If there is anyone to blame its gold sellers and scammers.

The cure is worse than the disease.

So you make your entire game super new player unfriendly?

By the way, I also cannot buy things off the TP.

WHAT THE HELL?

When I start up a new MMO, that is when I have time to play. Not a month from then.

I won’t be able to game much at all in April due to the fact that my company is going to exhibit at PAX East. Right now happens to be when I have a little time to game… not a month from now, maybe not even 1-2 weeks from now.

My playing time is precious and rare. I don’t spend $100 on a game to be crippled and unable to engage in commerce.

STUPID AS HELL. Stopping gold sellers/spammers is not worth screwing over legit players this hard.

I fail to see how the trading restrictions prevent you from playing the game though. Yes, they are anoying. Yes, you will be limited in this part aspect of the game. Last I checked though, GW2 vanilla and HoT are both perfectly playable without trading or item exchange.

Somehow I feel you are making this entire issue bigger than it actually is. My advice: actually play the game instead of wasting time on the forums if your time is this limited.

Swagger.1459:

Cyninja.2954:

That would make ascended armor mandatory where it is now mostly optional.

That in turn would open a whole other can of problems.

As is, ascended armor offers min/maxers a nice goal while it keeps the actual requirements to stay competative reasonable. Not sure I agree with the idea to buff ascended armor.

There would be nothing wrong with ascended armor falling in line with weapons and trinkets. It’s more than fair or reasonable, and the cost alone justifies the stat increase.

The only players who would complain are those unwilling to build a set.

I own 4 full sets of ascended armor and I still don’t see the need to buff the stats on it.

Also trinkets are way cheaper than armor, thus while they are mandatory in pve builds now, they are easy enough to come by.

Unless you want to part with an even bigger part of the playerbase (the ones who play GW2 more casually) there is no reason to make ascended armor better. Or if you do upgrade the stats on ascended armor, reduce it’s cost by aproximately 70% (though that in turn would anoy people who made the armor while it was more expensive).

If you went through the trouble of getting ascended armor, be happy you have best in slot gear. That should be more than enough comfort. Alienating part of the playerbase is not necessary.

That would make ascended armor mandatory where it is now mostly optional.

That in turn would open a whole other can of problems.

As is, ascended armor offers min/maxers a nice goal while it keeps the actual requirements to stay competative reasonable. Not sure I agree with the idea to buff ascended armor.

Avarice.2791:

Cyninja, I do agree this debate is extremely small (A .2-.3% increase in group damage is laughable, yes.) I’m simply saying that there is no reason to not optimize your character. Stating “it’s not worth it” is just something I disagree with. Obviously both opinions, but the way you stated it warranted at least a response in my eyes. No disrespect.

In regards to the OP, I’m simply giving a few scenarios as to why Ascended Loot may be preferred, not to mention most guilds you apply for require you to be in full ascended armor.

True, and I agree that if you want to optimise your character you should get ascended armor, after you’ve optimised just about everything else (which could also mean getting multiple exotic sets to try different playstyles and familiarise yourself with the character). Lucky enough, there are multiple ways to get a cheaper first ascended armor set via achievements.

Avarice.2791:

I can agree…somewhat… but with that mentality is exotic gear even worth it to the player who believes 10g is too much? It’s only a 2-3% gain. (Idunno maybe more or less)

That is just the point. The stat increase accross all tiers is different. As far as I remember (and before the ascended stat change) it was aproximately:

10% increase in stat between white, blue, green and rare
20% between rare and exotic (meaning you get 20% more stats with exotic)
5-8% between exotic and ascended

This is looking at a full set. In case of ascended this stat increase is unevenly divided between all the slots with armor being a lot more expensive than the other parts of the equipment. While at the same time having single slots be more expensive than an entire full set of exotic gear.

Finally, as mentioned, this is a value statement. If you have the gold, the desire and the possibility to get full ascended armor, sure it might be of no consequence. But if you are limited in your purchasing power ingame, you have a lot of things which would bring more value to your character than a full ascended armor set.

Avarice.2791:

Indigo, what I am saying is it is a matter of perspective depending on what gold is worth to you, and how much time you have.

He is saying ascended armor is not worth it due to the fact that it inconveniences him gold wise. This is his perspective, and mathematically wrong, yet he states it like a fact. “Let’s clear up some misconceptions.”

That’s all I’m saying. This may be obvious to you, but I believe my point is sound where an advantage is an advantage, and those working on progression love advantages.

You have two people asking about the last spot in your raid. Both the same roles. One states he is all ascended with exotic gear. One states he is full ascended. You have no idea who is better, they each have the same experience. Who are you most likely to bring?

Two people show up for a job interview. Both have the same qualifications. One is dressed appropriately, one is dressed inappropriately. Who do you hire?

You are correct, I could have written 3 paragraphs explaining why I believe ascended armor is not worth it. For that I would have drawn uppon logical and established given facts like:

- the statistical increase between the different color tiers
- the statistical increase between the different ascended slots
- the utility function of the gold spent on the ascended armor

and so on.

“Worth” (http://www.thefreedictionary.com/worth) can be a subjective expression unlike mathematical facts. That’s why I incorporated into my reasoning why I do not think ascended armor is not worth it (the stat difference at current cost). I never said it’s mathematically not worth using. I said the math comes out to an insignificant 2-3% difference.

Avarice.2791:

You have two people asking about the last spot in your raid. Both the same roles. One states he is all ascended with exotic gear. One states he is full ascended. You have no idea who is better, they each have the same experience. Who are you most likely to bring?

Two people show up for a job interview. Both have the same qualifications. One is dressed appropriately, one is dressed inappropriately. Who do you hire?

I would argue that a 2-3% difference in stats comes more closer to one of the applicants having an A- compared to where the other has an A in one college course. Both show up to the same interview (aka they both got picked) and get to demonstrate on a limited basis why they believe they should get the job. TC is complaining about not even getting to the point where he can demonstrate he is desirable.

On whom I would pick? That decision would be based more on my conversation with said person or any fellow players impression than one having ascended armor or not. Honestly, worst case it would probably be first come first serve here if no other factors are available.

IndigoSundown.5419:

Cyninja may have worded his statement in a generic fashion (It isn’t worth it.). However, all such statements should be viewed as having the added phrase “to me.” Value judgments are rarely if ever anything other than opinions.

That said, someone who’s made the commitment to get Asc. Armor is more likely to have an optimizing mentality. While having it doesn’t equate to competence, PuG players cannot know the skill of some random person who joins their LFG. They can see if he has Asc. armor, which at least speaks to the possibility that someone has the mindset they’re wanting.

Yes, maybe I should have added “to me”. I did try to keep it light and show via sarcasm that I think the debate or issues some people have over such a small increase is laughable.

I could have fleshed out the the part more about how min/maxing can show your more familiar or devoted to your character (or some form of OCD ^^) which I agree to (again something where you could write paragraphs to). But then again, this thread or topic isn’t new and all of this has been covered bevor. If peopel still need convincing that 2-3% stat difference will not make or break their game or group, that would have happened long ago.

Let’s clear up some missconceptions.

ascended armor is worth it
No it’s not. I have multiple full sets. If at all the ascended sets make me less flexible since I’m more reluctant to switch to different builds. Back when I had 4 different exotic sets on my main I would try a new build every 2 weeks. The math has been done. Ascended armor (only talking armor) is aproximately a 2-3% increase in stats. Definately not worth the gold investment unless absolutely min/maxing and certainly not required for raiding from a stat perspective. Talking from a raid perspective not high rank fractals which require the agony resist.

ascended trinkets are worth it
Yes, they are. Biggest upgrade and easiest to aquire. Most are thrown your way by just repeatedly loging into the game, though there are more efficient ways of aquiring the different slots.

ascended weapons are worth it
Yes, less than trinkets but still on the “to get” list and the increase versus exotic is noticable enough. This should be your main investment gold wise. At 100-150g per weapon not cheap, but also attainable.

no armor vs armor
A full group of 10 people with ascended trinkets and weapons versus a group with full ascended everything will be at a disadvantage of 2-3%, not 20-30%. Math, read up on how it works.

ascended armor makes you a better player
Right, this also just in: Santa Claus is real, Trump would make a great president and if you stare right at the sun you do not go blind. Ascended armor though will show a certain type of commitment to the game (good and bad). If a raid leader feels he wants people showing this type of commitment it’s their call. You can’t force other people into smart decisions.

Summery
Get your ascended weapons and trinkets at your own pace. More importantly, make friends or join a guild if you are serious about raiding. Stop worrying about what others think or demand. If ascended armor was/is not worth the investment to you, stop trying to join groups that require it. Chances are high you would not enjoy playing with these people anyway.

The last time online has absolutely no bearing on if a member gets demoted or loses his rank (even if it’s the guild leader). So any hope you might have that this might happen by accident, sorry.

Arenanet have stated multiple times that they will not get involved in guild internal problems. This even extands to people loing their personal guild by accident and/or similar situations as the one you described ToraSempai. You could try contacting CS, but your chances of getting any assistance in this matter is 0.

If you want a guild with an active guild leader you basically have 2 approaches:

1.) talk with your current guild leader and have him step down.

2.) create a new guild.

You could create a second guild and run both parallel for a while, then eventually finish the transfer after everyone has successfully transfered.

EvilTwin.4125:

Aidan Savage.2078:

You want the expansion? You buy the expansion.

Are you trying to be a jerk or something? My point was a FTP player can get HoT by paying once whereas I have to pay a second time. If you don’t like what I said, say so, but don’t be a jerk.

So those 60$ you spent over 3 years ago were a bad investment I guess. Make sure to check your time spent ingame and do an exact cost analysis of how much dollers per hour you wasted. Then once you are done with that, go feel ashamed.

The outrage that came with HoT was justified. Arenanet caved and offered vets some benefits. This was over 1/2 a year ago. Get over it and move on. If you did not get your moneys worth, fine. My guess is you are just to stubborn out of principal at this point since the actual economic drain of HoT is minimal. Unless you are not interested in the expansion, but then don’t pretend and come up with bs arguments.

While I like your ideas, that is not going to happen.

This has been brought up countless times with multiple different approaches.

Main gist is: racial skills are supposed to be inferior to regular skills as to not force racial selection. They are ment as mostly lore and cosmetic skills and have been toned down or altered if they were outperforming regular skills.

The best suggestion so far which I would love to see was to make racial skills available to each race via the hero point system. That would allow access to racial skills from other races and would allow arenanet to improve racial skills (while requiring people invest more hero points). Only problem with this idea now is Revenant since arenanet have not made racial skills avaiable to the class so far.

I do agree they could have made the story around precursors more involving and add more lore justification as to why you spend all those materials in the first place. It is a bandaid patch and most events you need to visit actually do feed into the items lore.

Seera.5916:

Legendary weapons are not meant as short term goals. They only feel grindy if you try to get them quickly. You treat them like the long term goals that they’re supposed to be and voila, no more grind.

Agreed. Nothing more to add here.

Hyper Cutter.9376:

Basically, I feel precursor crafting should have been a relatively cheap (requiring little gold or anything that can be converted into gold, ie mats), but time-consuming alternative to the instant gratification of purchasing one.

Sorry to say, what you feel and what the goal of precursor crafting is are far appart. At no point was precursor crafting supposed to drastically reduce cost of precursors (unless you are unlucky with rng mystic forging). It was always ment as another option.

Also with the amount of outrage timegating gets in general, I doubt many people would have been happy with even more timegating, especially timegating which can’t be bypassed. I’d assume that’s what you ment since time-consuming gameplay is very relative in its effect on players. If we convert the gold cost of precursors into hours (aka the amount of time it takes to farm the gold) you end up with easy 40+ hours for the high demand precursors (assuming precursor price of 800+g and 20g/h farm) during which you’d have to not allow the player to earn gold. 40 hours is like a drop in the bucket for some players and probably 2 months of casual play for others. Tying this to gold just makes it easier for everyone to go at it at their own pace.

GravityVSGaming.3897:

I’ve invited 6 friends total to come play and half of them have selected the wrong homeworld thus rendering them unable to play with me and the rest of my Guild.

This is untrue for everything except WvW.

Megaservers mean you can play with anyone in the same timezone in pve or pvp.

Exclamatory.8351:

I attacked him, he screamed “Death!” and my game crashed. Nerf plox.

I think most people didn’t get the joke Exclamatory.

On topic, try running the GW2 client with the -repair command and see if it fixes any corrupt files.

For more commandlines see: https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Command_line_arguments

style.6173:

Cyninja.2954:

style.6173:

There has been no real other content for almost 6 months. People would complain at a restaurant if they had to wait that long. That’s the point of this thread.

I’ll assume you are refering to post HoT release (which going by it’s October 23rd release was 4.5 months ago and not 6, but minor details). So let’s see what this no new content is:

- Squad UI, Legendary weapons, lots of bug fixing post release during November
- Pvp season 1 in december as well as fractal reward rework and more bug fixes and balancing
- shared inventory slots and major balance rework in January as well as, once again, more bug fixing
- Pvp season 2 launched in February

all this while still having the seasonal Halloween, Wintersday and Lunar events.

Yes, they did add 2 raid wings during this time and WvW is having issues since the new maps are not as popular as expected, which is getting addressed.

So when you are talking about no content, I’m not really sure what you are talking about. Content does not magically appear out of thin air, especially when your team has been working on releasing and adjusting the latest expansion to customer needs/demands. Then again, since a lot of people like bringing up players numbers interested in content, maybe arenanet should start focusing on pve only and let pvp out to dry, you know since the pvp playerbase is a minor fraction of the pve playerbase.

As someone mentioned earlier, if the fact that 6 devs out of 300 working on raid content is a bother to you, then I guess there is no reasoning with you.

The holiday events were just retreads from previous years. Were there any new events?
Shared inventory slots? You are counting gem store items as new content?

I’m counting items demanded for by the community. The holiday events were retreads from previous years, which does not mean they run on autopilot but need to be adjusted and reimplemented. If you paid attention to why SAB was not released you would know that with HoT GW2 got engine changes which made more than usual Dev attention necessary even for repeat content.

The gemstore items while technically not gameplay content, require human ressources and are part of arenanets business model.

style.6173:

PvP is different. I’m focusing on PvE content

Let me rephrase that into an a bit more accurate phrase depicting what your actual stance in this topic is:

“I’m not getting exclusively the game content I enjoy, thus everyone else enjoying different content should get screwed so only stuff I want gets implemented. I’m now going to make a not well thought through topic about a completely different game failing (due to issues which you didn’t even correctly grasp) in an attempt to hide this fact.”

As is, the only crowed who has a justified complaint is the current WvW crowd. Unfortunately the new maps and changes which were supposed to keep them happy turned out overdesigned and not practical. Arenanet has been working on fixing this issue.

style.6173:

There has been no real other content for almost 6 months. People would complain at a restaurant if they had to wait that long. That’s the point of this thread.

I’ll assume you are refering to post HoT release (which going by it’s October 23rd release was 4.5 months ago and not 6, but minor details). So let’s see what this no new content is:

- Squad UI, Legendary weapons, lots of bug fixing post release during November
- Pvp season 1 in december as well as fractal reward rework and more bug fixes and balancing
- shared inventory slots and major balance rework in January as well as, once again, more bug fixing
- Pvp season 2 launched in February

all this while still having the seasonal Halloween, Wintersday and Lunar events.

Yes, they did add 2 raid wings during this time and WvW is having issues since the new maps are not as popular as expected, which is getting addressed.

So when you are talking about no content, I’m not really sure what you are talking about. Content does not magically appear out of thin air, especially when your team has been working on releasing and adjusting the latest expansion to customer needs/demands. Then again, since a lot of people like bringing up players numbers interested in content, maybe arenanet should start focusing on pve only and let pvp out to dry, you know since the pvp playerbase is a minor fraction of the pve playerbase.

As someone mentioned earlier, if the fact that 6 devs out of 300 working on raid content is a bother to you, then I guess there is no reasoning with you.

style.6173:

A big part of the issue with Wildstar is that they focused on the hardcore players at max level. That left the more casuals with nothing new to do.

Now GW2 is following the same path. They are releasing new raid content which is of interest to a minority of the players, , and is mostly a once a week activity for most of those who actually do play it.

So, why is ANET going down this path? There is nothing wrong with adding raid wings. the problem is when it is the ONLY content being released.

Yes, because 1 raid split into 3 wings being released over 1 year is comparable to the massive amount of content which got released over the last 3.5 years and with the expansion.

Are you serious?

redcomyn.4651:

The Anet people are themselves hardcore players. They are thus biased toward the viewpoint of the hardcore customer players. I think that they are confusing what they want to play with what the majority of the customers want to play.

You must not have any experiance with software developement. Being a game dev and working on a game in usually 8-12 hour shifts (not counting release date crunch times) does not equal gaming for 6-12 hours per day. Usually most game developers are way more casual in their gaming time since you know, working on something the entire day usually leaves you with the desire to unwind after work. Not to mention social comitments, family, friends, etc.

Kudos, great to hear.

My experiences with CS have been positive aswell in the past.

Last time I had to contact them was when I bought an extra banktab expansion even though I was caped (there was no warning and I had assumed arenanet had increased the cap). Took 2-3 days but was cleared up with a very friendly CS rep.

My general advice to anyone contacting CS is what I tell everyone who contacts others for help (or who wants something from someone):

1.) be polite! Yes, you might be correct and have an absolutely valid complaint, demand or other desire for whatever reason, doesn’t mean you need to be a d***k about it. Honey catches more flies than vinegar, and while the person on the other side might be infinately more complex than a fly, they will respond in the same way usually.

2.) Be precise. Same as writing essays in school. If your teacher cann’t decipher it, it’s wrong. Making life easy on the other side and letting them know you are not some mumbling i***t helps.

3.) Be persistant but friendly. Don’t give up right away. Let the other side know that this is important to you and you would love to have this issue resolved. Stay friendly though, if the other side decides they don’t want to help you, things will get infinately harder.

DGraves.3720:

The main problem with “casual v hardcore” is that games are made with this duality in the first place. When I was young you had one difficulty called “the f-ing game you just bought” and you either beat it or you didn’t. There were no difficulty settings.

For once I have to agree with DGraves. This entire casual vs hardcore argument is getting silly.

GW2 has got to be one of THE easiest MMOs on the market, even the HoT areas.

Now what are problems with HoT:

- no reward unless a certain time commitment
- megaserver system and how it doesn’t work well with participation
- raids being the only access to legendary armor

Solution, which arenanet are according to the latest reddit threads working on:

- HoT rewards with less time commitment
- fixing the megaserver and participation system
- maybe add some non raid way of access to legendary armor

Now none of the things mentioned have in anyway to do with how hard the game is. I will agree that if you define casual gamer as someone who has less time these changes should be made. Difficulty wise I have to say, if you can’t progress in GW2 I doubt you’ve ever played any games beside visual novels.

Biggest downside to deleting a character is you lose all progress character age wise.

That new character will be 1 day old meaning if your old character was 6, 12, 18 or more months old you lose on birthday gifts.

As with Guild Wars 1, there is usually no good reason to delete a character older than 6 months, unless you absolutely do not care about birthday gifts. The only reason to actually delete a character is if you can’t afford a new character slot or you absolutely want the name (though name change exists).

The chances of this simply being a tipo or oversight are very high.

Infused Backpacks right now provide:
- Unused Offensive or Defensive Infusion Slot (depends on recipe)
- Agony Infusion Slot

So if indeed there were a slot for upgrades, it’s likely overwriting the Offensive/Defensive Infusion Slot. I doubt arenanet are going to have people infuse legendary backpacks.

Having Legendary Backpack (Infused) as name is very unappealing.

That being said, let’s hope they get on that and fix this for clarity.

zOLtAm.7824:

But even if it was for upgrades, that should not be a big deal, 25/15/15 isnt that much.

Have to disagree. A lot of players would see this as legendary backpieces being mandatory (no matter how big the stat benefit were). Legendarys should not be mandatory.

DGraves.3720:

Cyninja.2954:

This is comedy gold. May I refer to this thread (https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Ascended-Gear-only-for-Power-CHANGE-THAT/page/2#post6012509) were DGraves was already peddling this nonsense talking about crests and lovingly twisting numbers so it fits his definition. Well less numbers since he was still in the process of doing his math but more general approach, which here already was critisied for logical errors.

So now the math you did yourself fits with the numbers others had before, great so we are all on the same page.

I guess you wanted a response pretty badly, fine. I am not busy.

“And you are still sidestepping the actual point. No matter if you look at single target effective damage or at total damage, if you come out on top with condition damage versus direct damage, the condition damage burst would be higher. Which is exactly what happened with burnzerkers and other high condition damage builds.”

This is horribly wrong. Big numbers produce a lot of illusions and for the most part the cumulative damage dealt getting to large bursts of conditions or high stacks completely outperforms the stack itself when considering both application (“ramp up time” was used in this thread) and swapping in ferocity.

I think people are right, this seems to be straight up reading comprehension and you not having some.

If skill a applies X amount of bleed stacks and does Y amount of total damage (no matter over what time). If Y is higher with more condition duration versus condition damage, you will be doing more damage total with more condition duration versus damagestarting a second rotation. Is this so hard to understand? Your math in this thread proves just that. Now READ and COMPREHEND that what I am saying is plainly put the exact thing you have been doing math for. I’ve been saying this all along but you seem to still not understand. This has nothing to do with bigger numbers. On the contrary, condition duration actually recduces the single numbers you get for more total damage (which can be noticed by taging for how condition damage gets displayed ingame).

DGraves.3720:

I chose a video on YouTube that does this, went to 1:04 to see the condition damage value, it is 1841. Now while I am not busy I am feeling lazy so I will just generously give 800 as an increase to encapsulate all the augmentations to see what happens and how many stacks it takes to hit 25k with 2,641 condition damage (E: Nah, let’s give him more, let’s make it 3,200).

We all know the formula, 3200*.155+131.5 = 627.5

25,000 / 627.5 = 39. It takes 39 stacks of burning to do 25k burns for some time which is not constantly maintainable.

I’m going to lazily use my engineer’s bomb 1 to analyze the difference in power. To make it fair rather than using my build I’ll just cobble one together in the build editor using Assassin’s w/ zerker trinkets.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vdAQFAEWeLKwNMETrvHcCDgx14GzCA-TRRAABbp8LRdAmq+DAPAA1UCCA-e

Using this complete kitten build let’s just plug in the numbers but first I will admit I do not actually know how a kit scales to the rarity of a weapon so it may be 1:1 or not and so to be fair I will use low-end of the rifle rather than high or average:

1035 * 2156 * 1.25 / 3000 = 929.775 * 2.14 = 1,989.7185

So without proper sigils, purposefully gimping myself in assassin’s to hold back on power, with no runes, and considering no traits or boosts or anything else just dropping one bomb will do nearly 2,000 damage? This completely unpolished kitten of a build somehow in your mind will somehow do less damage because of a lack of numbers?

The nice thing about this video is that it has footage of the actual feat which takes a total of 27s. My crappy build, if I purposefully lengthen the time of a bomb to 1s, in that 27s does 57722.3995 from just the damage alone ignoring the bleeds, ignoring other attack opportunities, ignoring effects that coincide, keeping in mind it’s a total kitten .

Now it began to dip about 32s after and it waivered on the way up, hit that big number but couldn’t actually stay there for too long, and then showed more of a pattern of ebbing and flowing. The damage for my PoS build doesn’t do that.

In doing the bare minimum possible, no rotation, I can calmly say I am not worried about whether condition damage or power gets the best out of stats. I mean realistically what do you think happens if I put it all together? Max out the fury? Take into consideration all the things that can be done? Increase my output by real values and take runes and sigils with berserker’s armor?

This isn’t even fun. It actually proves the point so well it’s almost like you just wanted to agree with me. It takes 23 burns to do what hundred blades does regularly. Hell it takes 4 stacks of burning to pretty much match one of my craptastic bomb attacks using the lowest end of the range and an obscene amount of armor on the opponent with nothing but the ascended armor stats by themselves!

How you people live your lives is up to you and what you believe is yours alone but my goodness …

Well, good luck to you. It was fun but I am off to actually play the game now.

So you compare direct damage which gets a huge factor of its damage from auto attacks versus condition damage which has its main damage come from skill and condition application, seems legit. See I don’t need to do any math to disprove you. All I need to do is read up or check which builds run the highest dps in the current or past meta and find one or 2 builds that were top tier while running conditions. Case in point, those did and still do exist. Hence all your mumbo jumbo is just that, mumbo jumbo.

DGraves.3720:

25,000 / 627.5 = 39. It takes 39 stacks of burning to do 25k burns for some time which is not constantly maintainable.

Now you are slowly getting somewhere. Yes, you need 39 burn stacks to reach 25k condition damage (which was close to attainable in burn warrior prenerf, see here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvT7avqfNG0 That is solo, no alacrity or haste and look, 20-25 bleed stacks too. Where is your math for that?). Ofcorse with condition builds you also apply bleeds with most if not all classes. Most condition builds apply muliple conditions. Power builds do not have this kind of benefit. They are capped at either running auto attacks or skills, depending on if skill use actually improves the damage they do (like thief in the current pve meta which just does autoattacks since using skills actually reduces damage done). So we are back to looking at total damage done over a specific amount of time (high there dps) in which case all it would take is to find 1 condition damage class being top tier to disprove you (condi engi and old burnzerker say high).

I’ll give your trolling a 2/10 because you are way to invested in anoying people with bad math. Good trolls get things rolling with 1-2 posts and then leave. Need more practice for the future.

This is comedy gold. May I refer to this thread (https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Ascended-Gear-only-for-Power-CHANGE-THAT/page/2#post6012509) were DGraves was already peddling this nonsense talking about crests and lovingly twisting numbers so it fits his definition. Well less numbers since he was still in the process of doing his math but more general approach, which here already was critisied for logical errors.

So now the math you did yourself fits with the numbers others had before, great so we are all on the same page.

Primary objective reason:

GW1 was no MMO, GW2 is.

Primary subjective reason:

People have pink glasses of nostalgia on and expectation management. GW1 was on live support for a big chunk of time post HotN release and people had low expectations at that point. Meeting low expectations is easier.

From a pvp perspective:
- the fast paced more role defined combat in GW1 worked a lot better than the open nature in GW2 (see GvG). It had its niche at the time.
- the counter system of boons and conditions is screwed as far as GW2 goes. Was way better designed in GW1. Sometimes less is more.

From a pve perspective:
- the crowd of player attracted to GW2 is different from GW1. More MMO style means more MMO style demands and problems
- the general shift in player expectations and how gaming is done. Back in 2004 MMOs were “the bomb”. Everyone tried to get on the hype train. It was effectively the start of the MMO golden age. Today not as much.

Equalised works best in my opinion, though it is the hardest to achieve.

Powercreep has many negative longterm effects on MMOs besides creating the threadmill of rotating buffs.

Pros:
- every one feels great playing their class once they “get their turn”. Well most people, some actually enjoy playing less desired classes or underdogs
- defintaly better than the alternative of nerfing classes (from a player fun perspective)
- arguably easier since you can just slap on more numbers or boost skills an undetermained amount since it doesn’t matter if you overbuff. You just cover your mistake by buffing other classes next rotation

Cons:
- severly shortens the lifespan of content. This goes double for a game like GW2 where you do not reset item and class progression every 3-6 months.
- does not actually fix the balance problem, just takes turns on who is overpowered thus continually putting people off
- very unhealthy for a steady and reliable pvp enviroment. Sure shortterm new builds emerge and things get shock up, but mid- to longterm no depth of strategies evolve. There is a reason to why riot and their moba are so successful.

Everything broken
Funny enough, this actually works since it removes a lot of factors which cause problems in balance. If every class can take out another class near instantly, does it matter how it happens (pvp perspective)? The focus shifts on other things like map and objective design and the player skill meta shifts from mastering your class to mastering the enviroment or objective. Pve wise it just makes old content boring.

Don’t think this would work to well in GW2 but it might. Seeing how arenanet removed tanky pvp amulets, they seem to have realised that the bigger the tankiness spread is, the harder the game mode gets balanced.

TheBravery.9615:

DGraves.3720:

Power creep. As offense goes up reliance on personal skill versus in-game defense rises as well.

Power creep doesn’t only effect offense, it includes defense, sustain, mobility .. everything

This, also the reliance on in-game defense would at best only be applicable in a pvp eviroment leaving pve out to dry. Moot point anyway since as TheBravery pointed out, powercreep is not limited to offense.

Asrat.2645:

Cyninja.2954:

Not sure if you were trying to be funny, but to answer your question, just about anyone who is not a sociopath since all humans have mirror neurons.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3510904/

The extent to which individuals are/feel egocentric differs per individual. While issues regarding basic needs and instincts will trigger more egoistical responses from individuals, more abstract thoughts and emotions will vary in response severity.

Overread the link, they are talking about synaptical signals when observing a similar action to our own on others.
True empathy is still impossible, since every humans brains is unique and will react different to the same situation. All you can do is observe the situation another person is in and their outside reactions and try to imagine how you would feel in order to relate to that other persons feelings. Its very questionable, how close to ‘feeling someone else’s pain’ that actually gets you.
However, that may be ‘a little’ offtopic.

True, if you view emotions or events happening in a living beings brains as fully unique between each member. While it is true that under those circumstances you might never be able to feel anothers pain since you’ve literally setup the definition for it to be unique, if we view processes in the brain as similar inbetween subjects, we come close enough.

Simplified mirror neurons make an observer go through similar emotions/processes in his brain as the observed within his own brains function. While this might not trigger the exactly same amount of fear, pain, joy, or emotion in the observer, does it really have to? Extreme experiences might not be shared equaly, but if person A knows how getting hit on the head after a fall of hight x feels, he will come very close to feeling for person B after seeing him experience a similar fall.

Also the topic at hand was egocentrism and not pure empathy, and for that purpose mirror neurons are more than sufficient to accomplish a break from ones own world view, even if one is not aware of it.

DGraves.3720:

All people are egocentric. It is just a matter of degree. For who can feel the pain of others?

Not sure if you were trying to be funny, but to answer your question, just about anyone who is not a sociopath since all humans have mirror neurons.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3510904/

The extent to which individuals are/feel egocentric differs per individual. While issues regarding basic needs and instincts will trigger more egoistical responses from individuals, more abstract thoughts and emotions will vary in response severity.

DGraves.3720

I answered this with the fact that you can summarize all the DoT in 1s. I’ll explain it again, if you have an attack that strikes for 1,000 and comes with a 10s status that deals 100 damage every tick you can summarize this as actually worth a full 2,000 which means that you can accurately compare the full damage of an attack including it’s damage over time against the instant damage of an attack. The reason why I only look at one stack is because I only have to look at one stack. I do not have to stack them up and know for a fact that no matter how you choose to split out the damage it comes out the same. A proof:

1,000 (10×100 all in one second) is directly proportional to the crest of 10 stacks of bleeding that you will get if you apply once a second. Because it is multiplication you can shift these numbers however you choose including breaking them up into different fragments of time. So whether you wait for all ten of your bleeds to stack up or you take it at face value the natural DPS of a stack of any condition is the same.

This of course cannot and likely will never work for dual-natured statuses such as Torment. I can’t think of anything off the top of my head that is simple that will predict whether your target moves or doesn’t.

And you are still sidestepping the actual point. No matter if you look at single target effective damage or at total damage, if you come out on top with condition damage versus direct damage, the condition damage burst would be higher. Which is exactly what happened with burnzerkers and other high condition damage builds.
Thus your argument is no argument. If You have 20 stacks of 1,000 damage over 10 seconds, that still comes out as 2,000 damage per second and would be more than any direct damage of 1,000 damage per second. Which is exactly what high damage condition builds do. Thus I can’t agree to your point that condition builds can never reach or surpass direct damage builds.

DGraves.3720

Fury? Fine. I’ll just accept it though it’s questionable to actually mention.

Might? No. Condition damage is taxed heavily which means that coefficients for the two are so different they are not worth comparing. The highest coefficient for a condition is 15.5% (burning) and I think the lowest coefficient for a damaging attack is 20%, and those would be the only two comparable, and I don’t think there’s any autoattack that hits low enough to be 20%.

On the contrary, especially fury (EDIT NOTE: had writen ferocity, ment fury. Obvious mistake but still corrected)has a huge effect on condition builds. Many (if not all) condition builds have extra conditions be applied via critical hits. So while in a limited damage model which only compares coefficients this would not come up, in the big picture it does. At the very least you would have to adjust your damage model for procs from crits to get a proper overview.

The scaling issue with might is dependant per skill. True, most direct damage attack have better coefficients. Then again many condition skills apply multiple condition stacks. Thus flatout saying one is better than the other is false since it would need to be looked at on a case to case basis.

So no, I do not agree that condition builds benefit less from fury or might compared to direct damage builds.

DGraves.3720

Condition damage does only condition damage. As I said prior a 100s bleed for 100 damage does the same amount of damage PER TICK as a 1,000,000s bleed for 100 damage. Condition duration does not change that. Condition duration actually is like precision in which it doesn’t directly effect the damage done by the condition and instead, because pragmatism, we skip a step and simply convert it in by setting it to 2 (or double) but that isn’t how it works mathematically.

It’s understandable why people are skipping and leaping to these conclusions but that’s also what drives the idea that 100% is best condition duration and it’s just not always true. Also, for the last time, there aren’t multiple “breakpoints”, as there is only one, because there only needs to be one.

Unless that 100 damage per second attack for 10 seconds ends up becoming a 100 damage per second attack for 20 seconds. Yes, the actual damage per tick stays the same, but the amount of stacks doing damage increases. Factoring this out (or not mentioning or calculating for it) is missleading.

Thus it does increase the damage of the condition. Unless you are at a specific breakpoint, your condition attack will do more damage overall or benefit more from condition duration. So until you reach the breakpoint, you are better off with condition duration over damage. That is unless we start looking at fights and conditions not running their full corse.

DGraves.3720:

Yes, typos, they happen. I was busy. I still am but figure I may as well explain how these things work. Also, I am not hung up on math I am very concerned for the logic; a lot of people are lying to themselves because they are jumping to conclusions, using bad formulas made up completely by someone else, or just not thinking it through.

No problem, just seemed like it:

DGraves.3720:

This is not champion level mathematics. It really isn’t. I don’t know how you managed to mess that up. I really don’t.

I’m almost of the mind that you think if you graphed condition damage and condition duration you’d parallel lines. No, you don’t know what that means, I do, but you do not, and that is really all there is to it.

DGraves.3720:

You can do it for all of them. I’m busy now.

I will agree to the fact that many people just jump on the bandwagon without doing their own math.

DGraves.3720:

Cyninja.2954:

Correct, I unfortuntaly used hanzo instead of doing the math myself which did give scewed results. Okay, so you have effectively proven there are break points for condition duration usefulness. How does this reduce the stat though to not being part of condition builds?

Unless you can prove condition duration is less valuable than condition damage for every single breakpoint, you still need to show that it is not part of the condition damage equation.

Not to mention that you did not answer any of the other points.

There is actually only one point and all you need is an equivalency formula.

If you know that burning damage is [131.5 + X(.115)(nY)] where X is condition damage, n is the natural duration, and Y is condition duration then set Y to 2 and solve for X. That will tell you how much condition damage you need to get equivalency.

To get the highest DPS in a system in which you are giving up condition damage for something else you want as little condition duration as possible. You want to compress, that is shorten, the duration of all conditions as much as you possibly can without losing damage.

I did ignore the other points because the moment I read this I just thought, “no point”. In which if you’re not actually thinking about what you’re saying you’re wasting time. And you’re not. You just totally gave your agency to someone else who probably has errors in their own logic. I don’t know what Hanzo is but now I know not to trust it at all.

The formal formula:

[b + X©(t)(d)]

b: base of the condition
X: condition damage
c: condition coefficient
t: native time
d: condition duration

You can do it for all of them. I’m busy now.

You mean the equation is [131.5 + X(.155)(nY)] and not [131.5 + X(.115)(nY)], but hey, it is simple math and errors like that can happen.

Hazno (typo) is and outdated condition damage calculator (which I figured out after redoing the math) http://gw2.hazno.net/ so you can fault me for not double checking and making my life easy.

Then again, you did account for trait modification on your formula did you not? You know since trait duration modifications interact differently with condition duration:

[outgoing] = [base (unadjusted)] * (1 + [trait]) * (1 + MIN{ 1, [specific modifier] + [Condition Duration] } )

but yeah, let’s not get into that now.

And while your answer is nice and smug, you keep circuling around the fact that all your assumptions and statements so far in this thread are bogus. Let’s do a best of from this thread:

Condition damage never reaching consistant burst damage:

DGraves.3720:

… But it doesn’t. At all. I’ve no idea how you guys do your math and crazy numbers but condition damage isn’t ever going to do better than raw consistent burst simply because one stack never hits that kind of damage. Ever.

Which is a pure balance thing. If arenanet wanted to they could adjust for whatever they want and make conditions do as much damage as they like. In fact, burnzerkers were doing just that and other condition builds are not far behind at the moment. Your argument here, looking at single stacks while condition classes are more than capable to stack multiple stacks with single skill uses. You focus on single stack damage without looking at overall damage done in a timeperiod.

Putting off protection and armor as not worth mentioning

DGraves.3720:

No, they aren’t, but they are effected by your ability to actually stack them; some classes clearly are not as good as it as others and while there are places where it does win out again it’s not only not the norm but since protection is just a 33% increase to armor overall you can also call it a 33% decrease to ferocity so again you may not win out with condition damage depending on the class and so forth and so on.

If your argument where in any form true, arnenet would not have adjusted fractal 50+ enemy toughness to bring power builds in line with condition builds.

Also the ability to stack conditions is moot. Aside from engineer ideal rotation, there is almost no class in this game where rotations would be that difficult to pull off. This is a completely seperate point. If you want to compare protection or armor mitigation, then do it versus resistance or cleanse.

You putting of condition duration as not a dps increase, then showing that this is only true for certain breakpoint

DGraves.3720:

Condition builds tend to veer on the much lesser side of direct damage; most of their skills have lower coefficients to compensate, many of their skills are not BiS options for power (or anywhere near) and rarely, if ever, could be comparable and supplemented, and then again they lose ferocity almost 100% of the time trying to instead rather desperately increase the duration of the condition so the stacks get higher so the amalgamated number looks prettier.

BRA never claimed power damage from condition builds to be top end. He merely stated that power damage from condition builds does get the benefit of might stacks and fury.

And last but not least my favorite:
Power builds working off 2 stats and condition builds off 1

DGraves.3720:

THIS is bad because that means ascended is a frivolous quest for players who do not use power as their main stat. Not only that but power feeds off of two stats, itself and ferocity, and condition damage feeds off of one, itself, because duration does not in fact increase the damage dealt per tick just per cycle and that is a very different thing to measure when talking about DPS and capturing the highest value sustainable second (HVSS)

Power builds working off 2 stats (and it still is 3 no matter how you like spinning it) and omiting the condition damage increase from duration by showing certain breakpoints existing (which by the way no one contested in this thread).

So sure, be smug all you want. Then again, maybe be careful when using math, your posts so far have not been void of mistakes:

DGraves.3720:

If you have for instance 1108 condition damage and a 10s burn and up that by an 90% condition duration for an 19s burn you will do 5,761.56 versus a doubled up 946 condition damage burn at 20s for 5,562.6 and yes it gets worse and you go up and it requires less and less condition damage.

- 90% of 10 seconds is 9 seconds, not 8. I know you did the math right, but typo so let’s make fun of that.
- 1108 – 150 = 958 (you know since 10% condition duration is 150 expertise, why go lower?), thus your resulting damage numbers change from 5,562.6 to 5,599.8. Yeah, minor details, but you were so hung up on simple math, I’d hate to deprive you of these minor corrections.

Small fyi, while I did use the wrong formula (the old one, not the current one) my numbers using that wrong formula were actually correct, so let’s not lean to far out that window huh?

DGraves.3720:

Cyninja.2954:

90% of 10 seconds is 19 seconds duration, not 18. Thus your equation ends up being:

first rotation
1108 condition damage (605 burning damage per second – )
10 seconds
—————
6,050 condition damage total

19 seconds
————-
11,495 condition damage total (5445 bonus from duration)

Thus we now end up having for future rotations:
605 burning damage per second
+ 544,5 burning damage per second (from our condition duration broken down to 10 seconds, the actual damage per tick is also 605 but only for 9 seconds)
———-
1149,5 burning damage per second (11,495 for 10 seconds)

Now instead of 90% condition duration let’s use condition damage at (1% duration = 15 stat points expertise) = 1350 more condition damage (let’s omite the fact that you can’t have double condition damage on items)

2458 condition damage (943 burning per second)
10 seconds
————
9,430 condition damage

11,495 > 9,430.

Please show again how duration loses out to straight condition damage. How is condition duration not part of condition builds again?

Wiki:
(0.155 * Condition Damage) + 131.5 damage per stack per second at Level 80.

131.5+1108*.155 = 303.24

303.24 * 10 = 3032.4

3032.4 * 19 = 5,761.56

---

131.5+946*.155 = 278.13

278.13 * 10 = 2781.3

2781.3 * 2 = 5562.6

This is not champion level mathematics. It really isn’t. I don’t know how you managed to mess that up. I really don’t.

I’m almost of the mind that you think if you graphed condition damage and condition duration you’d parallel lines. No, you don’t know what that means, I do, but you do not, and that is really all there is to it.

Correct, I unfortuntaly used hanzo instead of doing the math myself which did give scewed results. Okay, so you have effectively proven there are break points for condition duration usefulness. How does this reduce the stat though to not being part of condition builds?

Unless you can prove condition duration is less valuable than condition damage for every single breakpoint, you still need to show that it is not part of the condition damage equation.

Not to mention that you did not answer any of the other points.

DGraves.3720:

100% condition duration increase the duration of a condition but does not increase condition damage. They are not the same thing. This is only true under optimal/normal circumstances. I.E. if there is no condi-clear. A bleed that’s worth 5s and a bleed that’s worth 5,000s are both worth the same if the condition is cleared at second 3.

This is specifically why you do not equate the two or convert one into the other. It only is true if the full duration passes. You would not ever adjust your initial tick damage due to condition duration; that’s the same problem you would have when adjusting your power by your precision. I imagine that’s coming up.

Wrong, it increases the total damage the condition does. It does NOT increase unique or single ticks. Your are looking at single tick modification and omiting important factors which, if you wanted to compare direct versus condition damage are relevant.

Yes, the per tick damage does not change, but the overall condition damage does.

A bleed that is worth 5k will be worth 10k once the first cycle is over and for every cycle henceforth no matter if the single stacks still do 5k since condition duration has effectively doubled the amount of stacks on target. You have drawn multiple conclusion without taking the extended duration into effect (like stating condition duration does not increase condition damage).

That is in fact the main problem. You correctly kitten different factors, then omit part of the equation and come up with bogus results.

DGraves.3720:

See above: Separate Variables.

Which is of no consequence when looking at the final result and comparing overall damage numbers. Sure the process of HOW those damage numbers come to be might be interesting, but when comparing for final result the process becomes secondary.

DGraves.3720:

Just because it’s a part of a build does not make it an equivalent element in a build. Look, there are three things distinctly wrong with taking critical hit chance and converting it to power.

1. Battles are over too soon for averaging to work. You don’t actually get enough strikes in to see a true effect of averaging and that’s just the way the game is. Averaging naturally takes thousands if not millions of iterations which can be seen with any number of experiments including basic penny flipping.

Wrong. Optimised power builds hit 100% crit cap with ascended and boons. No need for averages when you are caped. What this has to do with precision not being part of a power build equation is beyond me but hey, you brought it up.

DGraves.3720:

Just because it’s a part of a build does not make it an equivalent element in a build. Look, there are three things distinctly wrong with taking critical hit chance and converting it to power.

Okay, something is part of a build but it’s not an element of said build. Okay.

DGraves.3720:

2. When one uses 100 or 0% of any randomized aspect they are setting the value to 0 or 1 which renders it “set” or “unnecessary to consider”. You would only care about your average critical hit chance if it was greater than 0 and less than 100. You don’t “convert” precision into power you literally just set precision to a value that renders it unnecessary to account for when you use 100%.

Which makes the stat still required to hit that 100% thus having to factor for it when doing itemisation and stat value adjustments. Precision does not magically hit 100% because you want it to, you need to devote value of that stat on items to reach the cap.

DGraves.3720:

3. Your precision does not directly effect damage (A.K.A. it is not in the damage formula). Your precision effects the random nature of something. Your Ferocity directly effects your damage under a condition (critical strike) and your power directly effects your damage under all instances.

- https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Critical_hit

Damage = (Skill damage * Positive multipliers) / (Armor * Negative multipliers)
- https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Damage_calculation

Oh wait, you ment the power damage formula which gets calculated before adjusting for critical damage. Yeah sorry, unfortunately we don’t stop at intermediate points for damage calculations but only once every step has been passed.

Precision is a damage multiplier. The fact that it gets applied after the power damage calculation might be interesting for comparisons inbetween stats (say what break points it be of more value to stop adding precision over a different stat) but as far as total output goes it is an integral part of power builds. Less so for condition builds.

DGraves.3720:

And by the way you don’t need 100% condition duration to do the most damage with a condition. There is a real formula for that and while some condition duration is required the difference between values depends on the base length of the condition and the sacrifice between condition damage and expertise. This gets more apparent with burning.

I was using the 100% as an easy example. True, condition duration might not be the best value per stat allocation. But that only means that a different stat might be of more value at certain breakpoints which in turn directly proves that condition duration is of value to the overall damage quation thus making it a required stat.

DGraves.3720:

If you have for instance 1108 condition damage and a 10s burn and up that by an 90% condition duration for an 18s burn you will do 5,761.56 versus a doubled up 946 condition damage burn at 20s for 5,562.6 and yes it gets worse and you go up and it requires less and less condition damage. I enjoyed finding a breakpoint because I didn’t buy into it right away probably because I made condition builds when I first started a long, long time ago.

90% of 10 seconds is 19 seconds duration, not 18. Thus your equation ends up being:

first rotation
1108 condition damage (605 burning damage per second – )
10 seconds
—————
6,050 condition damage total

19 seconds
————-
11,495 condition damage total (5445 bonus from duration)

Thus we now end up having for future rotations:
605 burning damage per second
+ 544,5 burning damage per second (from our condition duration broken down to 10 seconds, the actual damage per tick is also 605 but only for 9 seconds)
———-
1149,5 burning damage per second (11,495 for 10 seconds)

Now instead of 90% condition duration let’s use condition damage at (1% duration = 15 stat points expertise) = 1350 more condition damage (let’s omite the fact that you can’t have double condition damage on items)

2458 condition damage (943 burning per second)
10 seconds
————
9,430 condition damage

11,495 > 9,430.

Please show again how duration loses out to straight condition damage. How is condition duration not part of condition builds again?

DGraves.3720:

Cyninja.2954:

DGraves.3720:

THIS is bad because that means ascended is a frivolous quest for players who do not use power as their main stat. Not only that but power feeds off of two stats, itself and ferocity, and condition damage feeds off of one, itself, because duration does not in fact increase the damage dealt per tick just per cycle and that is a very different thing to measure when talking about DPS and capturing the highest value sustainable second (HVSS).

You really need to actually read up on condition damage and stop makeing assumptions or wrong conclusions.

You can’t even spell “making”! So ha!

But really, let’s hear this:

You can’t argue DPS and then omit condition duration.

Considering “normalized crest value” actually contains it innately, I’m not. If you have 1,000 dps on a bleed per second the duration is required to be calculated into it to even solve for it’s crest. So actually yes, yes I can.

Single condition ticks are meaningless unless you only look at initial tick application (which is bs since you don’t base any type of damage arguments over alpha damage. While that is interesting it is near meaningless in a game like GW2 for pve and at best slightly meaningful for pvp).

False.

You can actually take the initial damage and extend it out over and number of iterations or scenarios. But this is another discussion for another year and likely with another person. The entire basis of a hypothetical is always singular instance combined with variables.

Condition duration extends the amount of ticks so at the very least at the end of 1 cycle, the second cycle will have a higher DPS since conditions from cycle 1 are longer present.

False. God why can’t you people understand the concept of continuity? When you have any attack that does damage over time you have to use capture seconds in order to figure out how effective it is, an attack that does 1,000 straight + 1,000 dot is equivalent to an attack that does either 2,000 dot or 2,000 straight damage. They are the same. Because for some reason you don’t take the attack in it’s full value in the second it’s applied you trip over yourselves with this nonsense. That’s why you can just take the crest value and apply it across the full minute since most DPS calcs use minute 2 anyway (due to nature of continuity).

Also power benefits from 3 stats (power, precision and ferocity).

Two. Precision exists regardless of power and regardless of ferocity values so if you have precision, toughness, vitality 70% chance to do 1.5 damage is simply 70% chance to do 1.5 damage. Power increases base damage and ferocity increases damage from critical strikes. Yes, you can roll them together, and no, you really should not since precision works independent of all factors noted above.

Stop trying to wiggle your way through with bad analogies, comparisons and straight up faultly argumentation.

Sadly there’s little to nothing to “wiggle” about. Instead of the general “You’ve no idea what you’re saying!” I will go with “This is why you don’t actually do 25k dps.”

That might fool people who have no clue of how damage calculations in this game work, but not any semi competent person who has a base understanding of mechanics.

It turns out that people are better at fooling themselves into obscene silliness. I need do very little to nothing.

This has got to be THE worst drivel I have read in a long time.

Where to start…

DGraves.3720:

You can actually take the initial damage and extend it out over and number of iterations or scenarios. But this is another discussion for another year and likely with another person. The entire basis of a hypothetical is always singular instance combined with variables.

And if you want to be able to compare over time damage versus instant direct damage you would have to adjust the initial tick duration damage for the total amount of damage it would do over x-amount of time versus direct damage over x-amount of time. At the very least you would have to factor for the INCREASE the condition damage increases thanks to duration extension.

100% condition duration increases condition damge by exactly 2 since condition now apply for 2 times as long. You would have to adjust your intial tick damage by either 2 or adjust for multiple condition stacks. Hence looking at single stacks is meaningless.

DGraves.3720:

False. God why can’t you people understand the concept of continuity? When you have any attack that does damage over time you have to use capture seconds in order to figure out how effective it is, an attack that does 1,000 straight + 1,000 dot is equivalent to an attack that does either 2,000 dot or 2,000 straight damage. They are the same. Because for some reason you don’t take the attack in it’s full value in the second it’s applied you trip over yourselves with this nonsense. That’s why you can just take the crest value and apply it across the full minute since most DPS calcs use minute 2 anyway (due to nature of continuity).

And condition duration increases the amount of damage the attack does over x-amount of time by x-amount. Hence only the first rotation is not affected by it, every one after will be. That is why I said alpha damage does not matter. But thank you for once again proving my point while showing you have 0 understanding yourself.

DGraves.3720:

Two. Precision exists regardless of power and regardless of ferocity values so if you have precision, toughness, vitality 70% chance to do 1.5 damage is simply 70% chance to do 1.5 damage. Power increases base damage and ferocity increases damage from critical strikes. Yes, you can roll them together, and no, you really should not since precision works independent of all factors noted above.

You can’t be serious. I mean, really. Wow….

Precision is an integral part of power builds until you cap at 100%. To state that precision is meaningless in the power damage calculations is, not even sure what to say.

DGraves.3720:

THIS is bad because that means ascended is a frivolous quest for players who do not use power as their main stat. Not only that but power feeds off of two stats, itself and ferocity, and condition damage feeds off of one, itself, because duration does not in fact increase the damage dealt per tick just per cycle and that is a very different thing to measure when talking about DPS and capturing the highest value sustainable second (HVSS).

You really need to actually read up on condition damage and stop makeing assumptions or wrong conclusions.

You can’t argue DPS and then omit condition duration. Single condition ticks are meaningless unless you only look at initial tick application (which is bs since you don’t base any type of damage arguments over alpha damage. While that is interesting it is near meaningless in a game like GW2 for pve and at best slightly meaningful for pvp). Condition duration extends the amount of ticks so at the very least at the end of 1 cycle, the second cycle will have a higher DPS since conditions from cycle 1 are longer present.

Also power benefits from 3 stats (power, precision and ferocity). Stop trying to wiggle your way through with bad analogies, comparisons and straight up faultly argumentation. That might fool people who have no clue of how damage calculations in this game work, but not any semi competent person who has a base understanding of mechanics.

Have to go with BRA on this once again.

TC has this the wrong way around. If the game gets balanced around ascended gear, then power builds will require ascended while condition builds can easily get away with non ascended armor.

That being said, while TC is correct that pure stat wise ascended armor benefits power builds more (thus making it a requirement), both damage mechanics work in such a different manner that it’s impossible to just flat out demand a change without adjusting for every difference between both mechanics.

As is:
Power Builds require/provide:

- instant damage
- require 3 stat types for optimal damage (power, precision, ferocity)
- are subject to toughness/armor damage mitigation (both pve and pvp)
- are subject to damage mitigation from protection and weakness (weakness being more a pvp thing, but protection does appear in pve)
- benefit from ferocity boon (while condition builds do too, crit chance is a primary damage stat for power builds while it is secondary for condition builds)

Condition builds require/provide:

- 2 stats for damage (condition damage + duration)(with precision for procs coming as third stat secondary wise depending on class)
- ignore toughness/armor/protection damage mitigation
- are subject to cleanses (more of a pvp issue, almost non existant in pve)
- are subject to resistance boon damage mitigation (again, pvp issue and not pve)
- are fire and forget meaning condition builds can rotate to safer play once conditions are stacked
- benefit more from buff food (do the math of how much condi duration food gives in form of stat value)

All that being said, yes numerically power builds draw a bigger benefit from ascended armor. That means though that ascended is more of a requirement for power builds compared to condition builds. What remains to be proven by TC is how this creates an imbalance in the actual game with all the points mentioned above.

Astraea.6075:

keenedge.9675:

We used to be able to reset skill point distributions, so why not allow that for masteries like skills ?

Sorry but this is false. We never had the ability to reset spent skill points. Not even in GW1.

I think keenedge.9675 confused the old trait points (which were granted for leveling – see historic changes under https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Trait) with skill points (which are now hero points).

Also you are correct, neither GW1 nor GW2 has allowed free respecs of skill points with the exception of complete system overworks.

Sonic the Hedgehog.5169:

IndigoSundown.5419:

Mastery points should never have been a thing in the first place. ANet pulled the trick of hiding progression behind specific content with traits 1.5. I’m seeing some of the same people who complained about this approach with traits supporting it with masteries. Apparently it’s OK if it’s account progression rather than character progression. To me, it’s a bigger steaming pile because a lot of the points are behind things like mini-games, silly achievements in story missions or lengthy/expensive collections.

Masteries per Character Progression is already to much work, Why do that and Map Completion the same time that’s to much work.

You know how long it takes to explore 100% of Tyria and do Masteries for each and every character, I might as well just stick to my main character and never play my alts again.

Map Completion is more than enough that we have to do it per character.

Mastery points, not Hero points. My guess is you are confusing elite specialisations with the mastery system, otherwise you make absolutely no sense.

On topic, there are currently 66 Tyria mastery points available total of which you will require 49 to max all the Tyria mastery tracks.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Mastery_point_unlocks
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Central_Tyria_mastery_tracks

This leaves us with 17 mastery points which can be ignored. Going through that list, I see maybe 10 mastery points tops that are hard to get and/or require dedicated grind or vast amounts of gold [Fashion(1), all Legendary SW enemies (4), all the Tripple Trouble achieves (4)]. That leaves you with 7 more to spare which you can ommit.

Will this be doable in one evening? Probably not. But none of those achievements are in any way hard. Even the tripple trouble achievements are super fast IF you invest 5 minutes in finding an organised group which does the event regularly (gw2community still does him 3 times per day).

Yasi.9065:

Wow, the ability to read and comprehend is really on a decline in this forum.

After the whole run… meaning…. after doing… you know… hard to believe but really… doing ALL dungeons that were commonly done before dungeon nerf each day… you know… like CoE 1-3, TA 1-2, AC 1-3, SE 1+3, CoF 1-3, Arah 1-4, CM 1-3…. I tallied up liquid gold + salvaged stuff. Divided that tally through time spent running all dungeons… and got 1.2g per hour. I did not take tokens into account, because that depends on the level dungeons you run and what you actually want to do with those.

Those drops you are so proud of… they didnt really make a dent at all. You have to get really lucky to get something like a charged lodestone, to make coe worth your time. But then, you have more chances getting one from crafting materials bags you get thrown to death with in hot open world.

Please keep deluding yourself into thinking dungeons are worth your time. It keeps you out of my way while you do them.

As others have pointed out, the math just does not add up, by far not add up.

The liquid rewards alone would be more than the 1.2g. Now there might be multiple reasons for your gold earned being low:

- not taking into account for breaks in between runs. those 5-10 minutes breaks between different paths add up fast
- not being speed clear runs. yeah those 20 minute AC runs sure are speed runs…
- you need to brush up your math skills

Biggest problem with your 1.2g number, and this was pointed out, the bare minimum dungeon liquid gold reward is already higher per hour than 1.2g (https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Dungeon). So no way you did speed runs and got less than the bare minimum reward.

Depends a little on what class you play. In general zerkers is fine, but you might want to consider condition damage.

That being said, unless you absolutely want to craft the armor now, just get to fractal 75 and hope for armor drops from chests. You don’t need armor to progress that far (98 ar was easily achieveable without armor I believe).

As far as kitten tup to reach 150 ar:
7 in every ascended piece = 98 ar (with ascended armor and infused backpiece)
3x(10) and 2x(11) = 52 ar (double upgraded rings)

Now if you decide to not use ascended armor until absolutely needed you end up with 108 ar (ascended weapons, infused backpiece, double upgraded rings and all trinkets. exotic armor) which is good until fractal level 78-79.

So here is my recommendation:

- hold off getting armor until you reach 75+, you might get lucky and get 1-2 drops
- do the bioluminescence achievement and get yourself a chest piece

then commit to full ascended armor.

Fractal levels 1-30 are for inexperienced players and so people can get used to fractals (evident by how more difficult fractals are added later. First Mai Trin for example is at level 25).

Fractal level 31-50 are for intermediate players and to get used to instabilities.

Actual fractals start at 51+ (aproximately equivalent to pre HoT fractal level of 40).

High end fractals can be considered from 75+ with 90+ being the top end.

Now go and do some serious fractals instead of limping around in the infant difficulty mode. Fractals scale up to level 100 for a reason.

That being said, yes fractals overall where changed significantly and especially dealing with agony is no longer as difficult as it used to be. Back in vanilla fractals getting hit by an agony attack ment instant death. Arenanet instead went and added agony to multiple more boss attacks while reducing its lethality.