I use full knight’s armor, 0/30/10/30/0, might stacking runes, HGH + elixir H, B and C for PvE. It’s actually quite survivable and deals decent aoe damage. However I wouldn’t recommend using flamethrower in pvp, it misses all the time (by bug or design) and you end up doing a lot less damage than what it says on paper.
I really hope they focus on WvW in the next big update. It’s the one thing that makes GW2 stand out from the other MMO’s. There’s nothing particularly bad about PvE in GW2 but it’s just not that good, and can’t be improved on without seriously altering the game design. Build variety is lacking (fewer skills in general + no secondary profession compared to GW1), Bosses have high damage and hp without much utility and dynamic events don’t require any co-ordination to beat.
Collision detection is a good idea in principle and would end the unrealistic advantage of marching an army around in one big zerg but it’s probably not practical for WvW in GW2. Building human stairs Counterstrike style sounds like a really bad idea that would make capping structures way too easy. But I see your point, a large scale siege warfare environment should reflect the reality of the situation, for instance games like Rome: Total War punish “zerging” with collision detection, lack of frontage, increased damage from missiles, etc. A possible solution to end zerging could be to apply a cumulative speed penalty if too many people are in close proximity.
Again, in principle I agree with your idea of “resourcefulness” (otherwise known as emergent gameplay) but they need to be carefully considered so that they don’t break the game.
The vocal masses wanted instanced dungeon grinding for better gear.
How depressing. If ArenaNet is going to appease these players with a gear treadmill, they should’ve kept it out of WvW. Even making ascended items available in WvW sucks; it means you have to play for hundreds of hours just to get optimal gear for a new build.
It depends on the type of criticism. I feel that I’ve fully gotten my money’s worth in GW2’s PvE and WvW content so far. So to that extent, I’m not going to attack ArenaNet as “bad developers”, nor would I necessarily tell people to not buy the game. However there are also plenty of flaws in GW2, such as class imbalances, lack of build variety relative to GW1, lots of faults in WvW, vertical progression, etc. If ArenaNet wants to sell more expansions and/or continue to successfully monetize their gem shop, they need to listen to players and fix these problems to keep them playing.
Sarcasm aside, I think rangers and engineers need to be buffed. I kill rangers in WvW all the time because of their poor escape ability, and engineers just don’t deal enough damage. That engineer that took you a minute to kill was probably a tankcat, which other than having a very nice magnetic pull and crowbar ability, relies on the enemy retaliating themselves to death.
-Some kind of GW2 implementation of Hard Mode or Zaishen dailies from GW1 so players have a reason to revisit sub-level 80 areas again.
-Bigger WvW map, more towers/keeps, maybe spawn MOBA style NPC’s, siege towers and ladders, more structure upgrades and NPC guard upgrades so keeps are less night-cappable, more reward incentives for capturing and holding structures.
-No new ascended items please (hey couldn’t hurt to ask).
I agree with you that GW2 needs more activities that demand group co-ordination. At the moment, the only activity that really benefits from large scale co-ordination is high level WvW strategy (which I assure you consists of more than rolling around in one big zerg).
However given your otherwise well presented points, I am simply astounded that you think an endless gear grind would be a good thing. To me, vertical progression is like playing on a chess server where your reward for winning games is that you get to start with more pieces on the board. There’s no “progression”, you only keep up with other active players, and it makes a joke of the game mechanics when you have such an advantage over newer players.
Progression in GW1 was not just about getting nice looking armor, but about expanding your skill library and learning to play certain class roles in endgame PvE or PvP. This isn’t really possible in GW2 because they’ve simplified the skill system which makes it more accessible but leaves less room for creative builds.
So yeah, I think raids would be a great idea (or even PvE in a WvW environment, imagine that) but NO to gear grinding!
I like it, but only if they make it so you can be Axe from Dota 2. They should give warriors a new skill called “Axe Signet” with the passive effect of having a 15% chance to use cyclone axe when hit and a melee range elite that insta-gibs anyone on less than 3k hp =)
-Skill and build diversity.
-Optimal gear for different builds is easily acquirable, even with runes of superior health. In GW2, you need a new set of exotic equipment to use a different build, and it’s going to get worse with ascended gear.
-Zaishen quests and Hard Mode GREATLY expanding the end game variety.
-Endgame bosses that require indivudally crafted builds rather than just having everyone stack survivability gear and chip away at its health.
Unfortunately I don’t see much that Anet can do to bring back these features as it conflicts with the design direction taken by GW2. What I do hope Anet does is expand the possibilities for emergent gameplay in WvW with the February updates, because it’s the only thing keeping me playing.
Right now turrets are basically weak immobile minions. The whole idea with turrets should be about area control with smart positioning. They should give turrets huge stat buffs accompanied by certain restrictions e.g. they can only shoot in a frontal cone.
Engineers aren’t too bad in endgame PvE. My flamethrower engineer is definitely not squishy and deals decent aoe damage, so it can farm gold reasonably well in dungeons. In PvP and WvW, I think they take a lot of skill and effort to play with not enough reward, relative to the other classes.
Here are my attempts at steampunk/cyberpunk on my engineer. Only problem is there aren’t any good engineer builds for me to justify getting more armor :/
This news about WM is the funniest thing I’ve read all day. What WM did all day every day was roll around with their doom zerg and capping structures with their sheer numbers. It’s the Starcraft equivalent of having all your units in one control group and auto attacking an area.
StarCraft ? Anyone I know using this “group and attack ground” are all in the bronze league. Are you in the tier 1 group or not?
Yeah exactly. Now WM have transferred to GW2 bronze league where their group and attack ground strategy can be effective again.
Before the grenade and elixir gun nerf, I ran full knight’s armor, 30/0/30/0/10 with the grenade, bomb and elxir gun kits. It had something like 2.2k toughness and had great damage, conditions and survivability. The 300 healing from inventions was enough without needing any gear with healing power. That’s been nerfed pretty hard though so I switched to a flamethrower build for PvE which is working pretty well atm.
If you actually read the post, I feel that he’s frustrated at the lack of fair play happening in T1. The fact that people are exploiting and cheating their way to victories or positions that they don’t deserve, yet thinking they’re amazing for cheating to earn that they did.
I’m not accusing Agg of cheating, but this is how I interpreted Jangs post. That he was tired of the lack of honor/pride in Tier 1 at the moment, and is tired of people abusing broken mechanics (is mechanics what I should be calling it?) to achieve/attempt to achieve victory(s).
Maybe you interpret it differently, but your original post just came across as an attack on WM. As for that flaming exchanged, that was just your guild leader (i think) not quite understanding something. I don’t think anyone can be mad at him, but it was a mistake which he apologised for.
Presumably the move to Kaineng was to get away from what he feels is wrong with T1. Just voicing an opinion on how I see things, personally I don’t see the point in trying to ‘call WM out’ unless you’re trying to kitten flex that SoS/JQ made WM rage quit or something.
I’ve read the post (or at least “Asuran Acolyte”‘s translation) and I admit that there is room for interpretation here. Did WM leave as a result of months of disillusionment or was it due to recent events? If it is the former, then WM’s decision to leave is bizarre at best since there is cheating on all tiers of WvW. I’ve been on different servers and T1 is no worse is this regard than, say T4 or 5. If it is due to recent events (which is my interpretation), then what exploits are Jang referring to? Unless JQ has been on a hacking spree that I’m not aware of, I can only see this as an attack on SoS. My post was a rebuttal to this.
Thieves are definitely the best roamers if you like playing solo, but I’ve had a lot of trouble catching ele’s with their mist form and ride the lightning, so maybe you should try that.
Its obvious you guys have came up with something….and personally i don’t blame you, If ya didn’t hand hold one another SBI would probably run you over… But please don’t act like nothing is going on.
Its sad
Ummm consider it from each server’s perspective. SoS wants to win first place. The score is pretty close with SBI and at one point SBI had the lead. Of course we fight SBI instead of diverting manpower to fighting JQ. What matters to us is the score difference between SoS and SBI, not our absolute score. JQ is far behind in third. We don’t even care if JQ has the highest potential points as long as we have more than SBI. JQ is probably too far behind to win 1st this week, so they aim for 2nd. They have to choose who they think will be easiest to beat into 3rd place. That’s their decision and they are kind of in a “kingmakers” position. I can’t say for sure what JQ’s strategy is, of course. Btw if you browse the threads for each WvW tier here, there are always people complaining that their server is the victim of some high level double team conspiracy. Coincidence?
You don’t really have a position to say that WM is just a ‘doom zerg’. Jang Gun is one of the best strategists to play a Guild Wars game. His commanding is pretty much unrivaled in GW2, and I’m fairly sure he was a very dominant player in GW1 (I’m not sure about this part, fairly sure he’s core). Perhaps their reaction to the whole Tier 1 shenanigans is poorly thought out, but the core WM as players are better than most players will ever be. Not really fair to belittle the guild, when I know for a fact that Agg have had problems with them in WvW.
(also @ Nashaan.3160)
I can confirm that some flaming was exchanged between Agg and WM by whisper, which I personally had no time for and would like to see discouraged. However, we absolutely did not beat WM by exploiting. Why then, did “one of the best strategists to play a Guild Wars game” feel so frustrated that he left the server to steamroll lower ranked players on Kaineng?
This news about WM is the funniest thing I’ve read all day. What WM did all day every day was roll around with their doom zerg and capping structures with their sheer numbers. It’s the Starcraft equivalent of having all your units in one control group and auto attacking an area.
They rolled over us for a few days until we smartened up and exploited the inherent weaknesses in their strategy. We had their main zerg scouted with thieves at all times. We avoided them on the open field and played defensively so that their numbers counted for little. We split our forces because their main zerg couldn’t be everywhere at once. And since they only had one zerg, they could not adequately defend newly capped structures, which we promptly took back.
Instead of recognizing this and changing his strategy, WM’s leader has posted a long and rambling post on GW2 Guru accusing SoS of planting spies, exploiting and openly admitting to taking SoS’ garrison by exploit in response to his perceived grievances. What a joke. They don’t belong on T1 with that kind of attitude.
Hmm, that’s strange, i could of swore it was just you decided to double team with JQ all night long every night.
My post was regarding War Machine who were trying to roll SoS bl most of this week, and the only double teaming that occurred was SBI and JQ against us. Maybe you are talking about SBI bl or EB (I don’t know, I wasn’t on those maps). Anyway let’s not have another “double teaming” debate; anyone with an ounce of empathy realizes that double teaming in a threeway battle results from everyone following their own best interests.
so you wrote 2 posts for just telling us that people are quitting the game cos of thieves?
LOL that’s what I thought. If you think thieves are OP in pvp, go make one and own everyone. This thread needs to be renamed “What I don’t like about GW2”. He has a point about the boring end content though. GW2 pays for it’s superb accessibility with reduced complexity and far less scope for buildcrafting than GW1. The PvE content on offer is pretty dull and the fractcal grind doesn’t help either. However the WvW meta is still very active and it’s enough to keep me playing, especially with the upcoming updates in Feb.
This news about WM is the funniest thing I’ve read all day. What WM did all day every day was roll around with their doom zerg and capping structures with their sheer numbers. It’s the Starcraft equivalent of having all your units in one control group and auto attacking an area.
They rolled over us for a few days until we smartened up and exploited the inherent weaknesses in their strategy. We had their main zerg scouted with thieves at all times. We avoided them on the open field and played defensively so that their numbers counted for little. We split our forces because their main zerg couldn’t be everywhere at once. And since they only had one zerg, they could not adequately defend newly capped structures, which we promptly took back.
Instead of recognizing this and changing his strategy, WM’s leader has posted a long and rambling post on GW2 Guru accusing SoS of planting spies, exploiting and openly admitting to taking SoS’ garrison by exploit in response to his perceived grievances. What a joke. They don’t belong on T1 with that kind of attitude.
For me, GW2’s endgame is executing high level strategies with 30-40 guild mates in WvW. That is, if you define endgame as activities requiring a high level of skill, coordination and theory-crafting that you do after achieving proficiency with a character.
I have nothing good to say about GW2’s supposed PvE endgame. FOTM has the gear grind cough I mean vertical progression that WOW players enjoy, but it’s a 5 man instance with none of the good qualities of WOW raids.
I have a huge problem with ascended equipment but I wouldn’t say any of this is “pay to win”. The closest “pay to win” problem in GW2 in my opinion is in WvW with its siege and upgrade gold sinks.
Yeah, as much as I like playing on my engineer, I have to agree with OP here. In WvW, I have to constantly kit switch and ground target with my engineer just to be as effective as other classes. By contrast, I get kills with my rifle warrior just as easily by picking a target and using my weapon skills.
I use full knights equipment with the flamethrower, so toughness>power>precision. You don’t need any condition damage at all since burning doesn’t scale that well and you get sufficient condition damage just from stacking might.
I like the idea behind a “breakout event” but it’s currently poorly implemented. The breakout NPC force is too strong and happens too often. The resources and manpower required to hold the last tower and keep the supply coming in to repair the damage from bubble protected catapults far outweighs the benefit of holding a tower.
I’ve seen some people mention that something like a break out (or a similar event where NPC’s help you out) should happen when your server is outmanned. I like this better, as it evens the playing field and adds a buffer to the inevitable discrepancies in peak hours between servers.
Since the update, I’ve found condition stacking and kit switching with grenades, bombs and pistol with my engineer to be very effective in WvW. The only things I’d complain about is the elixir gun is a bit under powered now, and they need to fix the ridiculous glitch where the flamethrower misses targets at point blank range.
But this is the thing, power grenade builds are not as effective as it once was, we now have to go into condition damage to make up the dps we had lost. 30 points to grenadier traits doesn’t mean anything without putting some in condition damage. I feel sorry for our young engineer saplings that would have to painstakingly put up with measly pebble damage until they get the grenadier traits only to do sup par damage.
Right now, I am all out power, precision and condition damage, using full berserker set and chucks full of crits. All of that! to actually be on par with a warrior and to make my grenades viable.
Well I’m using rabid armor, carrion trinkets, rampager weapons and runes of the undead. Without any traits that’s 1.1k condition damage. You can then choose to stack bleeding with grenades by putting 30 into firearms for 1.4k condition damage or 30 into inventions and use bombs for some versatility. Berserker gear for grenade builds are no longer viable since spamming 1 is pointless other than to stack bleeding with shrapnel. The way around this is to go full condition damage and to kit switch when 2/3/4/5 are off cd. To be honest I like not having to spam 1 now.
This build doesn’t work for PvE though. I used to run a high power and toughness build with knights armor, grenades and bombs that was super tanky and could deal decent direct damage. That build is no longer viable, so I’ve switched to a tanky flamethrower build for PvE.
Since the update, I’ve found condition stacking and kit switching with grenades, bombs and pistol with my engineer to be very effective in WvW. The only things I’d complain about is the elixir gun is a bit under powered now, and they need to fix the ridiculous glitch where the flamethrower misses targets at point blank range.
At first I didn’t understand why Anet thought it was necessary to nerf the grenade auto-attack so much but now that I’ve played around with a few different builds I think it’s not that bad. Basically the nerf has made one particular style of play not worth playing which is any build that mainly deals direct damage through grenades. The optimal way to deal damage with grenades is now through condition damage: With shrapnel, sigils of agony and superior corruption, you can land 10+ stacks of bleeding in a matter of seconds.
Sorry grenadiers with exotic berserks/knights armor, you’ll have to switch to rabid/carrion to be effective (but you can definitely still be effective).
There’s heaps of room to expand on the economic system of WvW. For example maybe you could have “upgrade trees” for camps and structures like in some strategy games, so you can choose to upgrade it to provide lots of supply at the expense of protection, or you could make it heavily guarded at the cost of generating supply more slowly, or you could make it dedicated to running supply to keeps by having stronger escort parties with more supply, but players can’t take supply from it.
Static discharge is the only build that has what OP wants, but I wouldn’t recommend it. Unlike the glass cannon rifle warrior (which still has heavy armor even with no toughness) and the glass cannon thief (stealth), the static discharge build has very little utility.
Nah compared to other skills and builds turrets are almost a useless gimmick.
I only ever use the thumper and thats when I am soloing PVE and trying to grind groups of mobs.
I am sure ppl can find uses for them in other situations but there is other better options to accomplish the same thing.
They either need there damage increased or they need to be made more unique.
-Flame turret should be a continuous attack to enemies that get in range, basically like spamming #1 on FT.
-Thumper turret needs to cripple when it hits.
-Rifle turret needs to looks and act like the turret in the icon, a rapid firing gatling gun that can put down continuous sustained damage. (not look like its a baseball pitching machine from 1912)
-Rocket turret needs to not look like 3 taped together toilet paper rolls, and it should fire a whole ton of rockets (like those old chinese rocket boxes) that do AOE damage at your character’s location.
Also the toolbelt skills for rifle/net/rocket should be made to mark the targets you want your turret to attack. so suprise shot someone then drop down your rifle turret and it will be locked on to that person.
All good suggestions. Stationary targets with low hp and mediocre damage output are basically useless in high end pve and wvw, especially when positioning and avoiding aoe is so important. If they buffed turret as they currently are with 50% more hp I bet people still wouldn’t use them.
I have a thief and I agree that stealth needs to be changed. No other class can run around the map without fear of being killed. Yes there are ways to counter stealth like looking for smoke fields and stun + burst damage but these only ever applicable when the thief is attacking you or some other objective. A good thief can always pick a fight on their own conditions, something which no other class can do. It’s like playing Dota 2 against Rikimaru but you can’t buy wards or a gem.
Sky, you’re on my server and thus I maybe feel a little more camaraderie- and desire to reassure you- than I would any other random poster here, so if you happen to come back and check this, let’s talk about it a little bit.
1. “no matter what lies you people spout, the fact is that Infusions have stats in addition to Agony resistance” – I’m not sure what people or what lies you are referring to, but you are right of course- the advanced infusions do have stats beyond agony resistance- a total of +5 to one stat of your choice. Do you truly find this to be a significant factor at present?
2. You have 8 characters and multiple builds for character- surely, being capable of doing it in the first place, you realized that this would be a more time-consuming and difficult undertaking than having just one character. Any additions to the game you wanted for more than one of your characters would require more effort on your part than if you only wanted to grab them for one character. This was the case with Exotic armor and superior sune sets, it was the case with Exotic weaponry and superior sigils, it was the case with exotic accessories (which I still don’t have all of on my two main characters personally- you must have a huge /age!). The crucial point here is that you appear to be indicating that you believe you NEED to do all of this (whatever this is, since we’re all speculating) for all your characters… which brings me to my final and most important point.
3. “Even if I played 24/7, I would spend most of my time grinding gear… and very little time enjoying the game.” – Why? What do you consider yourself unable to do now that you were able to do before? What content is inaccessible to you unless you have a 5% increase in base stats? Why would you do something other than what you wanted to do when you log on? This aspect of the entire discussion boggles my mind. It strikes me as something of a holdover attitude I cannot understand from other MMOs, never having played them (besides GW1).
Obviously, if you want to do very high level fractals, you need agony resistance. And you have to get that by either playing lots of fractals (which presumably you want to do if you want to play the high levels) or spending lots of gold. But other than that, I have literally no conception of why someone in your shoes can’t simply ignore ascended gear entirely for the forseeable future and go on your merry way.
Don’t listen to Ahlen, by the way. I heavily value horizontal progression and GW2 has it in spades, and I have no doubt it will continue to be available even by the time you’ve spent 10x the asking price of this game on another.
Anyway, if you ever find yourself wanting to log on and chat about this while doing something you actually enjoy in-game, message Hawkian The Blade.
You seem like a smart guy so I’m puzzled as to why you are puzzled. Wanting to kit out multiple characters with optimal gear for pvp is entirely reasonable. WvW is arguably the best thing about this game and build crafting multiple characters is fun and was one of the highlights of GW1. As it is, exotic armor is already quite time consuming to get which restricts the variety of builds you can make on each character. Once we get full ascended gear and have the level cap raised, experimenting with different playstyles will be even more difficult.
Grinding has no place in pvp environments. Previous MMO’s could get away with powerful grind items because their combat systems sucked anyway. However games that are purely focused on the integrity of its gameplay (e.g. GW1, Starcraft 2, Dota 2, Chess) are highly sensitive to non-skill based advantages, no matter how small. Now some people will argue that GW2 isn’t like those games because it’s an “RPG”. Well GW1 players were hoping that GW2 wouldn’t be a traditional “RPG” and are feeling like they fell for the bait-and-switch.
I ran into a few engineers running this build in WvW on my alt thief and whilst they were tough to kill, their actions were fairly predictable and there was no way I was going to confuse/retaliate my self to death.
For a variation on this build (same skills), I tried 10/10/20/10/20 with full rabid armor and rampager weapons. Damage is mainly dealt through bleeding/poison with the pistol but you still have magnetic and gear shield for defense. Also pulling people with the tool kit is really fun and confusion deals 925 damage. It’s a different play style and you certainly can’t go 1v4 but people who want to use tool kit but aren’t getting loot bags in WvW should give it a shot.
What exactly is horizontal progression? I dont understand this concept, how can a game move forward into new challanges by sidestepping?
What is it you want Anet to add in terms of content? Is it things like the Southsun Cove? The place no one goes because there is nothing to do there that you cant do anywhere else?
Is this what people are really after?
What people are after is content that stands on its own merits and rewards players for skill and co-ordination, as opposed to content that adds arbitrarily higher numbers to your screen in recognition of your repetitive 100 hour grind.
Why cant we have both though? I very often do dungeons with players who have recently reached 80 and are still in rare or below gear. A lot of them do fine if they know the dungeon and how the fights work.
‘Gear does not a good player make.’
I never found getting my exotic gear hard or a grind though personally. I enjoyed doing the events and participating especially as while doing them I knew that every one I did earned me karma towards my next piece.
There is a balance I think, that balance comes between the player enjoying what they are doing, feeling like what they are doing will ultimately improve on their character and feeling left behind and rushing to grind out enough cash/karma/whatever to catch up and play with everyone else.
Am very opposed to the whole you must have ‘x resist’ to do something though i must say and the fractal leveling restriction so I completely agree with people there.
We had both before the the Lost Shores update. To kit out your character in WvW with full exotics and runes costs something like 40G which is fair enough. You can get by with full rares while you work towards it doing a variety of activities that don’t feel like grinding.
Now Anet brings in ascended rings which requires much more repetitive grinding just to get one. Taking into account that we now know Anet will raise the level cap and introduce full ascended equipment in the future updates and we have a grind-fest that’s up there with the worst MMO’s.
There is no good reason for ascended items to exist. Are there players out there who were not satisfied with everything GW2 had to offer, but are now actively playing because they can out-grind other players for what will eventually be a sizable advantage in WvW? Maybe, I don’t know. But those players need psychological counselling and should not be catered to.
What exactly is horizontal progression? I dont understand this concept, how can a game move forward into new challanges by sidestepping?
What is it you want Anet to add in terms of content? Is it things like the Southsun Cove? The place no one goes because there is nothing to do there that you cant do anywhere else?
Is this what people are really after?
What people are after is content that stands on its own merits and rewards players for skill and co-ordination, as opposed to content that adds arbitrarily higher numbers to your screen in recognition of your repetitive 100 hour grind.
I’ve not played for the past couple of weeks. For me, it was a combination of the Fractal + Ascended + Reddit AMA. It’s kind of ironic that it was the Reddit that finished pushing me over the edge.
Based on Chris’ responses, ArenaNet knew just how volatile the Ascended issue was going to be. With that in mind, they agreed that a great amount of communication would be needed. Also the Ascended gear access would have to be offered through multiple venues when it was released in order to avoid fragmenting the community. Yet when it came time to act, ArenaNet basically rolled out Ascended in a way that was pretty much 100% the opposite of what they had agreed upon internally. Does this mean that ArenaNet had some kind of temporary amnesia that caused them to only release Ascended through the Fractal dungeon while giving almost no communication on the subject? Or was ArenaNet greatly “stretching” the truth in their Reddit AMA answers?
No matter how you look at it, I’d say that there’s a real disconnect. I no longer have any clue about what ArenaNet’s vision is for GW2. Their actions and lack of communication say one things. Then their Reddit responses say another. You’d have to be psychic to sift out the truth from that garbled mess. As a consumer, I no longer have trust in the long term prospects for the GW2 product. Either the supplier (aka ArenaNet) is completely at odds with itself or the supplier just thinks that I’m an idiot. Neither one of those scenerios are very comforting to me. I’d much rather play a flawed MMO that has parts which I disagree with, assuming that I felt confident about where the designers were mentally and knowing that their actions matched their words.
I keep track of the GW2 forums in the vain hope that I’ll see some kind of ArenaNet response that will change my mind. There are still many features that I love about this game. But in the mean time, I’m seriously looking into other MMOs and will probably slide back into a subscription-based soft trinity MMO within the next couple of weeks. My time is just too valuable to invest in a game which I don’t feel confident about.
I think this is the most accurate response. FOTM and ascended items were poorly designed, draws everyone away from the beautifully crafted land of Tyria into repetitive dungeons, fractured the community and introduced vertical progression. Although these updates have made the game worse, it’s a stretch to say that the game is now ruined because it. I have no intention of grinding for ascended items and I’ve been getting along fine in WvW without them.
The more concerning issue is what updates will be introduced in the future. We now reliably know that there will be more ascended items in future updates (albeit easier to obtain and obtainable outside FOTM, but still many factors more time consuming to get than full exotic), and that the level cap will be raised in future expansions. These are deal breakers for most GW1 players who expected GW2 not to implement the exploitative mechanisms used by most other MMO’s. I’m not quitting because WvW is still fun but I’m not buying any gems either when there is so much uncertainty about the game’s future.
This is troubling. I’m not sure how I missed this quote people keep referencing by Mike O’Brien from 2011, but I was certain they wouldn’t increase the level cap. It;s even more disturbing watching people fail horribly at trying to understand what fans of lateral progression want and why…
This probably also means that they’re abandoning a lot of their emphasis on aesthetic gear choices. Less of the game most likely will actually be about having fun. It’s an inherent part of catering to the VP reward crowd. You’re not designing the game around fun content, you’re designing it around carrots. And no matter how many carrots this crowd eats, they won’t see that they’ve been running in place for several years.
This makes my hopes for seeing things like the activities that were supposed to be in at launch much, much lower. After all, why should they provide fun content when there’s a new audience of people who are more content chasing artificial rewards in the form of numbers. It makes no sense to me, but you can’t teach people to have higher standards.
When Keg Brawl and WvW stop being fun for me, I’m through with this game. They’re no longer my favorite game development studio. :/
This. Raising the level cap serves no gameplay purpose, it’s just a carrot that defies the principles that made GW1 such a great game. They haven’t actually done anything yet so I wouldn’t jump to conclusions, but if they raise the level cap in a future expansion/update I’m certainly going to stop playing. Maybe I’ll go back to Dota 2. And if hell freezes over and Valve starts introducing vertical progression then I guess I’ll have to go outside or something.
I’m still playing WvW as it’s great fun but I may quit if Anet introduces more and more ascended gear. Not because I’m against progression and hard-to-obtain gear but because it compromises PvP gameplay which is GW2’s main selling point for me. I had full obsidian armor in GW1 but I would not want it to give me any extra advantages in PvP because if I succeeded in PvP, I wouldn’t know if my success was attributed to better skill or just having better gear.
Well a set of 42k armor will give you exotic soldier stats, but I don’t think you can get the equivalent of soldier’s amulet in PvE, so you’ll have to use either clerics or carrion trinkets right.
Right, until you can afford the invader accessories and such, or get the ascended Power/Vit/Toughness rings.
However, with the FoTM update there’s a lot more BoE Power/Vit/Toughness trinkets and rings floating around. I’m still shy a few badges for my amulet, so I picked up a rare one off the Trading Post for 40s. It’s called Amulet of the Dead. There are rare 80 accessories called Soldier’s Field Guide. And rings called Soldier’s Ring. They’re all level 80 rares. :>
Well a set of 42k armor will give you exotic soldier stats, but I don’t think you can get the equivalent of soldier’s amulet in PvE, so you’ll have to use either clerics or carrion trinkets right.
I’ve been wanting to try a different play style than the usual grenade/elixir gun builds and this looks really interesting. One question, what equipment do you suggest for WvW? Full carrion?
OP’s examples of people dying at their computers are a bit extreme, but otherwise he’s right. Games should be able to stand on the merits of their gameplay, sound and art design, graphics, story, community etc. It is no secret that since the inception of MMO’s, developers have found it easier to extract profits from their players with psychologically exploitative, skinner box game design such as grinding for levels and high-end gear, gift boxes, etc.
Maybe Anet will make more profit as a result of ascended gear, in which case I should really be blaming the players for demanding grey goo instead of content. If Anet wants to keep players playing, I think they should’ve gone with the relatively new trend in online gaming where games such as Dota 2 and Minecraft can keep players interested and entertained in a social environment by sowing the conditions for emergent gameplay. They could’ve done this by building upon the WvW framework or even introduce that to PvE. Instead it looks like they’re going back to the tried-and-true gear grinding formula =(
The distinction between those asking for a cap and those asking for creep is not imaginary.
I have stopped playing the game altogether. On principle. Every other MMO out there has “progression” (except for GW1) and laughably they all do it far better.
Looking forward to A/net going around and pleasing each player out there, personally.
This is what Anet needs to realize. GW2 has very good art design and inherits a lot of GW1’s stat capped (up until now), skill, creativity and synergy based gameplay. The story and character progression however, are mediocre. At best they do not detract from the game. I simply don’t see how Anet stands to benefit in the long run by compromising on their original manifesto with cheap, psychologically exploitative mechanics and doing it WORSE than the other MMO’s.
