This way, PvE becomes the traditional RPG experience where you can grind one “main” so you feel like you’re “progressing”, meanwhile the people who like playing with different classes and builds have WvW and sPvP.
What about the people who enjoy playing with different classes and builds but have no interest in WvW or sPvP?
You guys are s—- out of luck, because you have to share the same PvE world with the rest of GW2’s players and they want grind, so ANet has to make the sensible business decision and cater to them. Sorry.
I completely agree with OP. However, the player base of GW2 demand grind and vertical progression that they have been accustomed to in other RPG’s. I think ANet should find some middle ground: Make the WvW skill/equipment system identical to that of sPvP. This way, PvE becomes the traditional RPG experience where you can grind one “main” so you feel like you’re “progressing”, meanwhile the people who like playing with different classes and builds have WvW and sPvP.
Actually quite a few good tweaks and bug fixes have been added. However more vertical progression has also been added. So the result is a net negative.
Make WvW skills/equipment like sPvP but with free transmutes for PvE armor. Traditional MMO fans can grind PvE to their hearts content. PvP players can play a variety of builds without having to grind. Win-win?
This was one of the leading complaints back when ascended items were announced. Vertical progression discourages different play styles due to the time investment required to optimize one play style. Brace yourselves, more grinding incoming.
I thought the goal of the game was to let everyone play how they want, when they want?
Nope. Again, when they say, “We don’t want players to grind” they are telling people that grinding won’t be a playstyle as supported in the game as casual play. That is for the betterment of the game, for the records.
Simple solution that will please the maximum number of people: Implement sPvP gearing and leveling in WvW with free transmutes for PvE armor. Traditional MMO fans can grind ad infinitum in PvE in pursuit of progression. Players in favor of horizontal progression are probably more PvP inclined and can play all varieties of builds on par with everyone else without needing to grind first.
Traditional MMO fans, aka grinders, have half a dozen PvE MMOs to play already. GW2 is the only MMO close to something enjoyable for a PvE player who doesn’t like grind, aka isn’t deceived to become a donkey chasing a carrot.
I said it would please the maximum number of people… not everyone lol. Judging by the forums and what I assume is Anet’s professional market research, there is a strong demand for vertical progression. Fine, GW2’s PvE is nothing special. I do hope they don’t ruin WvW though, it’s quite good and no other fantasy MMO offers anything like it.
Simple solution that will please the maximum number of people: Implement sPvP gearing and leveling in WvW with free transmutes for PvE armor. Traditional MMO fans can grind ad infinitum in PvE in pursuit of progression. Players in favor of horizontal progression are probably more PvP inclined and can play all varieties of builds on par with everyone else without needing to grind first.
Funny thing, EvE, is probably the most grindy game out there, but not at the faults of the game its self, but the community of elitist PvP and PvE players, who will not even look at you unless you have 20m skill points in most cases
I’ve only played for 2 months and I haven’t had this problem at all. I’m having a blast with Eve-Uni and looking to join a null sec alliance in the future. The people you’re talking about are probably small corps of elitist low sec pirates but they’re allowed to have the kind of corp they want. Also, obligatory post of a recent huge battle in Eve involving 2.7k players, WvW fans take note http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLqb-m1ZZUA
GW2 is still a great MMO and better than most other MMO’s but it sure as hell isn’t the “non-MMO MMO” like GW1 was. If you don’t like it, just be happy that you got your moneys worth on the original price tag and go play another game. If you’re looking for a quality “non-MMO MMO” I can recommend Eve Online.
Hey, the complete set will be released incrementally throughout the year, and once they rolled it out, we will see how many people still complain about new gear tiers, and how many will have gotten used to the progression. Provided the acceptance is high enough at Christmas 2013, ANet will once again have the option to bless the game with even more gear. Why do you think they explicitly only mentioned that they won’t be introducing new gear in 2013?
Lvl 80+ ascended gear ahoy!
I can’t believe people actually think ascended items “bless the game with even more gear”. New traits and skills is content. New armor skins is content. Ascended items with higher stats that, once acquired by everyone after hundreds of hours of grinding, makes the gameplay no different as if everyone still had full exotics, is not content. It is unimaginative filler.
Those new infusions will be a problem. It might end up forcing me to stick to one build which will be a pain. My 3 characters each have 3-4 viable builds with exotic gear
This is a HUGE problem with ascended items (heck it’s even a minor problem with exotic items for players who mainly WvW and don’t farm gold much). Unfortunately there are a lot of players out there who like spending hundreds of hours grinding for new gear so they can feel like their character is progressing. What I propose is that Anet allows everyone to fit whatever armor they like (with free transmutes) in WvW just like in sPvP, since build-crafting is vital to all forms of PvP. PvE players who like sticking to one build and grinding ascended items can still have their progression.
After testing in wvw for a bit I noticed there is almost no change in damage and healing with kits on. Weapon damage to kits would have been a better step imo but alteast we didnt get nerfed.
Yeah I expected as much. There a few good engineer builds out there but I was hoping ANet would give all kits a buff so the flamethrower/elixir gun are actually worth using in WvW. When I get home I’m going to give my pure condition damage grenadier another try. Should easily reach 1.75k cd without food or buffs.
I don’t know. I had a great time leveling my first two accounts to 80 but PvE got boring after that. I think the story missions of the next expansion will suffer from the same problem. The selling point of a new expansion would be the new explorable areas due to the fantastic art design in GW2 as well as new skills for each class. If GW2 gets a huge WvW overhaul and the expansion unlocks new skills, then I’ll probably buy it.
Tyria takes place hundreds of millions of years after the ending of Mass Effect in an isolated galaxy with a destroyed mass relay. Everyone is an organic/synthetic due to the green ending. The unlimited ammo comes from secret Asuran embedded mass effect technology.
Sure, why not. The question is what kind of role it will serve in group combat. I’m thinking something like a warlock or battle-mage could work, where it’s like a guardian but with control instead of support skills.
Yeah I definitely miss the build variety in GW1. I think secondary professions had a lot to do with it. Experimenting and eventually arriving at a great build was one of the most satisfactory aspects of GW1. I think I was the only warrior in GW1 that ran the Southern Shiverpeaks =D
Since you already have a thief and mesmer, get those up to level 80 first before making an ele. If you want to pick one, it obviously depends on your play style but also what role your guilds needs you to do. Thieves are great at roaming solo or in small groups but they don’t contribute as much support to your main zerg.
Hmmm I’m not sure if “endless turmoil” is what GW2’s endgame is lacking. It kind of already exists, with the current dynamic quests and the Pact constantly struggling to take Orr. What GW2’s endgame lacks are:
-A high level of required co-ordination. Dynamic quests are not challenging at all, with everyone just shooting at the boss and doing their own thing.
-High-risk high-reward content. In GW1 you had to pay significant gold for cons and entry to have a shot at the end-game, but you were rewarded accordingly for succeeding.
-Complex mechanics that can be approached in different ways. There isn’t much reward for devising new player/group builds for the endgame. Most general purpose PvE builds do fine.
-Interesting player-made content. I’m looking at WvW here. There’s so much potential to make the meta-game more interesting by adding more keep upgrades, control nodes, player-made fortifications (Orcs Must Die style, perhaps) etc. More ways for player creativity to create new exciting gameplay.
but never liked the fact of making an alt because I feel like I’ve lost all my progression with my main
No idea what this means. The only obstacle to making an alt is the time it takes to get it up to level 80, and whether you have enough gold to kit it out with full exotics. I recommend you mess around in sPvP until you find a build that you really like before committing to leveling an alt for that class.
Flamethrower is fine for PvE. Tanky, good aoe damage and minimal effort to play. Go 0/30/10/30/0 with full knight’s equipment and either precision runes + lifesteal food or might stacking runes. Direct damage > condition damage for the flamethrower, especially since your might stacks will provide you with more than adequate condition damage.
You have big map, events etc, great views, interesting places and monsters, lore, hearts. Why do u think most 80s ppl grind whole day the same 2 dungoens to get new shiny? For fun? They farm gold doing same thing ove rand over again? For fun?
:D
Ouch, truth hurts. To be fair, ascended items will indeed be available from a variety of places in the next update. If it turns out that everyone will easily get their set of ascended equipment, then it will just seem like a redundant and pointless addition. If they still require a long term time investment then what you said applies. If Anet wants to try and appease both groups, I think they should change WvW to the sPvP item/level system (with free transmutes for pve armor). That way, tradtional MMO players get their perceived progression and players tired of the old MMO tricks probably won’t complain too much.
1)even if they will raise the level cap, this dont really justify a new tier of items, or only partially. But i really dont get Why raise level cap and item stats? the kind of progression we (the poeple that follow this project from the beginning) wish, is all about skills and build diversity! Like the previous guild wars.
2)the main problem about the ascended tier is only because it introduce a different progression, if this set is the only one released on the whole Gw2 lifetime(to fix the easyness of the exotic gear), i dont see the problem, but without any statement we know that they will release New sets, not this year, but maybe with a future expansion, and this is against the advertise made for 5 years.
1). No, build diversity is the kind of progression that GW1 players want. However I assume Anet did their market research and found out they could increase profit by appealing to the WoW/traditional MMO crowd.
2). To be honest, I think even a one off tier increase is bad design. If anything, they should make maxed armor more accessible by making more types available for purchase through karma, so that players don’t have to grind 50G to get optimal gear for a new build. That they would do the opposite and dis-incentivize build variety puzzles me.
I’ve witnessed great strategies used by a lot of WvW commanders since the beginning. Zerging may seem like a substitute for skill but when all servers are queued, it takes skill and co-ordination to crush an evenly matched enemy zerg. The biggest problem right now is that the meta-game hasn’t changed much and there’s nothing worthwhile to fight over (other than server ranking). Unfortunately I don’t think WvW is going to continue to capture my interest without a major overhaul next month.
Yaaay new ascended items goes back to playing Eve Online, a game that actually gets progression right
Eve Online, the one game where part of your progression happens without actually playing the game.
True, but that’s not the point. The “level cap” in Eve is way higher than GW2 and you can buy expensive equipment to give yourself a small edge, but the point is nothing in Eve makes you unreservedly stronger than newer players. Progression in Eve (and GW1) is about unlocking more gameplay options, not about grinding for higher numbers like in GW2.
Not necessarily. Remember the first room of The Deep in GW1?
With a 12 man party and each of the 4 transporters only letting 3 players, the group had to make sure to organize in a way that (almost) every 3 man team ended up with at least one healer to defeat the first few aspects of Kanaxai. After that, the group reunited.
If you want a kind of endgame that allows and requires specialization, you have to separate party members from each other. If you allow players to choose who is separated into which solo challenge, you can turn up the difficulty/specialization even more. Create a room for a dungeon that requires a player to survive as long as possible in order to allow the others access to an area that – once completed – will free you and allow you to return to your team. Naturally, players would start demanding certain professions with certain survival heavy builds to maximize their chances at completing this challenge.
I think you will find it hard to design a variety of interesting “solo rooms” given the skills on offer in GW2. As long as you aren’t a glass cannon and have some aoe skills, every class can deal with most situations with a general PvE build. Also, individual specialization doesn’t make up for the lack of group synergy. Combo fields are not enough to overcome the fact that group composition is very simplistic in GW2.
What I’m getting at here is that yeah, Terras and Kanaxai required small specialized groups going around efficiently completing tasks, but that’s not the MAIN reason why GW2 endgame is so much worse than GW1. The reason is that there are fewer skills, less build variety, less enemy skill variety, no secondary profession, every class is too versatile, very little reward for synergy through group builds and no “high risk/ high reward” endgame due to the loot system and nerfs to newly discovered ways to make gold. This is why I say that huge changes are needed to improve GW2’s endgame.
This is possibly the best thing that could happen to Guild Wars 2. This game has no longevity, and the only players who aren’t quitting are those who seem to enjoy nearly pointless, monotonous grinding with extraordinarily little to no reward. Please, for the love of your fan base, implement this, or something different with the exact concept as FoW and UW from GW1. The current dungeons are mediocre at best, and Fractals is the biggest joke of a dungeon I’ve every played. Even Cabal’s terrible instances are better than that thing. The game needs to have some content added before it fails beyond reparation.
Easier said than done. In GW1, you beat the endgame through co-ordination, clever build-crafting and team composition. In GW2, you beat the endgame by dodging 1-hit kill AOE attacks through twitch reflexes and slowly chipping away the boss’ hp. This is by deliberate design to make GW2 more accessible and to make each class more independent by making all kinds of utility (healing, condition removal, range, aoe, etc) available to everyone. This isn’t something that will change if ANet implements FOW GW2 style.
I think it will be very difficult to improve the endgame without huge changes to the game mechanics. WvW is the only place where GW2’s endgame rises above the competition. I think they should work on improving that first.
+1. GW1 had much better endgame. It’s not that fractals is “bad” but the developers should have known that it would become GW2’s singular PvE endgame area due to ascended items. As GW2’s “flagship” endgame area, fractals is laughably lacking. FOW, UW, HM Duncan and RoT had better endgame qualities beyond anything currently available in GW2.
I’d be fine with a compromise where players get 1 free transfer, say, every 6 months. If not, I’d still rather have paid transfers over free weekly transfers.
I sympathize. Recruiting from other servers is a zero sum game that comes at their expense. I’d place the fault on ANet rather than the recruiters though for designing WvW to be a numbers game. We’re not going to play sub-optimally just because some people don’t like it.
I’m not against the idea but invulnerable yaks seems kind of gimmicky. How about more yak upgrades? You can upgrade yaks with heavy plate armor and have an asuran alchemist riding it that throws elixirs or something.
I think it has more to do with GW2’s reduced complexity and boring PvE. I had to “grind” for my set of obsidian armor in GW1 by doing FOW/UW and running the Shiverpeaks but it was fun and challenging and didn’t feel like “grind”.
I agree that PvE is fine when it actually benefits the big picture, but the quaggans, dredge, and ogres are worthless. I can solo their “help”, same for the look outs along the roads! They need more NPC’s be along the lines of vanilla WoW Alterac Valley 1.0. Ivus was a battle changer if you could get him up and fed. The same for reavers and wolf riders. Using them at the right time meant taking the next spawn point, but using them at the wrong time was just letting that work go to waste.
I’ll farm mobs for drops to spawn some ultra powerful NPC’s to aid in the fight. I’d also like to fight those same NPC’s.
Harpies could assault towers/garrisons by flying over the walls.
Skritt should steal supply from towers/garrisons
Sentry NPC’s should actually ping the map and show enemy dots.
quaggans could actually bring a lot more than 3 NPC’s and a veteran to assualt a garrison/tower.
Ogres could use their siege equipment to siege a tower/garrison.
Again assuming that all of the above are powerful enough to actually impact the enemies instead of be minor nuisances.
Other improvements- a wall on borderlands that prevents enemies from just storming up the map like it’s their territory. As it stands the servers borderlands are at a disadvantage when it should be their major advantage. Actually the only way enemies should get into your borderland is through a portal in EB after they take your garrison, but that’s a whole other post :P.
Good suggestions. By having accruable PvE advantages on the battlefield, servers can be “punished” for turtling inside keeps and refusing to fight the enemy on the open field. This way heavily defended structures can actually be captured without golem rush/night capping if the attackers outplay the evenly matched defenders.
On a slight digression, I also want to see expanded upgrades for towers and keeps, keeps that become visibly more powerful as they are upgraded, and rewards for holding/upgrading structures which makes it more of a risky investment than a gold sink. Now to find a way to get this through to the developers…
Commander achievement should be unlocked when you hit a target of a combination of other achievmrnts.
Sacking
Defending
Escorting
Upgrading
Supplying
Building sieges
Enemies killed
Once all have been maxed out then the commander title and icon is unlocked. Paying for commander can breed many commanders people just should not follow as they are neither skilled or understand WvW.
Just for kicks though just put paid+multi achievments together.
Yeah I agree with this. It’s hard to systematically quantify “commanding skill” but that should root out a lot of incompetent commanders.
PvE is fine as long as it fits into the larger PvP picture. For instance LoL and Dota 2 are PvP games but the lane and jungle creeps add a layer of strategic depth to the game. I agree that things like the giant grub and the centaur/skritt areas should be removed since they don’t add to the PvP. But things like quaggans, dredge and ogres are fine (in fact adding more of them as well as more NPC upgrades for towers and keeps could be the answer to inaction during off-peak times and night capping).
I tried using a short macro on my logitech keyboard to auto-click 1 for the grenade kit, but it doesn’t work that well given the delay between grenade throws. 1 isn’t worth spamming after the nerf anyway, just cycle through 2-5 then switch to something else like the bomb kit, wait for cd, repeat.
Simple. For the sake of simplicity and least disturbance, I want ANet to not introduce any more ascended items and brush it off as a failed idea. Currently, the ascended items on offer are minor enough to not have a negative impact on gameplay. However a new tier of equipment that takes hundreds of hours to grind (in fractals or otherwise) is not acceptable.
Create a “Hard Mode” option for players who have finished the story. Players who have it toggled when leaving a hub will enter separate zone from non-lvl 80 players with enemies of dungeon level difficulty, and accordingly good loot. Also have a daily quest giver who gives a set of tasks every day to be completed in hard mode in a different zone. With sufficiently good loot, it will draw players away from the disastrously designed fractals and save GW2’s endgame for a while.
THAT would be cool. Actually I’d love to see a water map, with Islands, long bridges you could blow up, and ship to ship combat!
Yeah. And I’d like to see building sites for player made fortifications and towers and keeps that start small but become enormous once fully upgraded. Technical limitations though =(
My female Asura bought some sm3xy T2 cultural armor but then found out that there were no good condition damage builds to wear it for. She is very depressed and has moved back to her parents at Rata Sum.
None of these things (at least as of my posting, I see you have placeholders too) actually address the root causes of zerg behavior. Essentially, the biggest cause of zerg behavior is that anything that can be used by 5 people can be used by 25 people to equal or (usually) greater effect. Yeah, 5 people can easily take an unupgraded tower, but if the tower’s upgraded (walls and doors) there’s not much they can do as they’re generally going to be busted by a larger group before they’re able to take that. But with 25 people, not only can they potentially fight off a group that attacks them, they can take a tower wall down 5 times faster (theoretically, basically a group of 25 sets up 5 times as many catapults as a group of 5 can).
If you want to reduce the frequency of zergs, or improve the experience for smaller groups, you need to find ways to make things scale logarithmically with group size. Essentially, you need to make things that are more useful in a group of 5 than a group of 25. As an example (although a gimmicky, probably not fun example) would be to scale catapult damage inversely with the number of people in the vicinity. If only 5-10 people are around, it does 8000 damage to a wall, but if 20 people are around, it only does 6000 damage. This still allows “zergs” to be useful. A group of 20 would be able to put up 4 catapults doing 6000 each for 24,000 damage per attack while a group of 10 would only put up 2 catapults doing 8000 each for 16,000 per attack. But it would encourage the group to break up a little because instead of attacking one structure for 24,000 damage, they could break into two groups of 10 to hit two structures for a combined 32,000 damage. That’s the sort of adjustment that would be needed to try add more smaller group play to WvW.
Just as an extra note, all those numbers are made up purely for example. That’s not to say groups of 25 are bad (the squad limit is 50 isn’t it?) but I needed an arbitrary figure to use as an example. The important concept here is the idea of scaling in that direction, where damage per player decreases as player counts increase. It’s also very important that total (theoretical) damage increases with group size because a group of 50 people should always do more total damage than a group of 25, just less efficiently.
Yup, completely agree, but your example of scaling catapult damage is of course silly. Possibles solutions:
-Switch to the GW1 loot system where loot is split up among all nearby combatants. Roaming WvW with a small group will become a challenging yet profitable activity like soloing UW or FOW in GW1. This should do something to change PUG behavior by giving them incentives to not zerg.
-Organized guilds will still zerg regardless of loot if it gives them a tactical advantage. In RTS games, collision detection, bottle-necks and weakness to AOE go a long way to discourage zerging. Perhaps a “zerg debuff” can be applied if too many people are in close proximity, which reduces movement speed and increases damage received.
I don’t share the cynicism of some people here, there’s nothing wrong with tanks (lore-wise) seeing as how the Pact deploy steampunk technology including tanks in a Vigil story mission. The problem is it needs to be balanced and serve some kind of gameplay purpose. I suppose it would be a mobile, ranged siege weapon with longer range than the omega siege golem. Not at the top of the WvW updates priority list but it’s not a dumb idea.
Hey, we get it…you think you’re pro. With spam recruitment guilds like MERC, you obviously MUST be. But then, that begs the question…why are you on the forums making excuses as to why you got curbstomped last week…hmm…
Hey, it’s obviously truth man…MERC Officers processed literally HUNDREDS of vacation applications! Those that they denied, had to give WvW without a zerg a try for once. Needless to say, it didn’t work out very well for them.
So here we see crewthief.8649 claiming that SoS were short on numbers that week and hence had to “give WvW without a zerg a try”, whilst also claiming that JQ’s win could only be attributed to individual skill rather than other “excuses” such as SoS being short on numbers due to New Year. I think there’s a contradiction here but you need above average IQ to see it.
Actually, I was referring to MERC zerging about…but yeah, I suppose you could attribute that to the rest of SoS as well. The funny part to me, is that apparently you think that only SoS dealt with the Holidays, LOL. Does that seriously make sense to you? What was that about IQ score?
You are misinterpreting the correlation between player presence and global holidays. Its not that New Years will mean a certain server will definitely have less players (because it’ll happen to all servers), it means that player fluctuations will be more probable. How much, is not gauged by the holiday unless there are cultural implications (and the relevant servers it may apply to). When people attribute player fluctuations to holidays, it is very much valid because that’s the truth. Did SoS have people going on holidays because of the New Years? Highly, in fact definitely, yes. Did SoS have more players going on holiday than JQ? No one except Arenanet can actually tell us this, but to completely dismiss this fact (that more SoS players left than JQ); is foolish. To completely attribute the loss to this fact is equally foolish.
Yeah I don’t disagree at all. From what I’ve read though, some JQ players take offence at the mere mention that SoS having fewer players was a factor (see responses to Jedahs’ comment). However, if JQ’s victory was (mainly) due to factors internal to JQ, then we should see more victories from them in the future, won’t we?
