Guild Wars 2

Thanks for the ideas!

One other thing I should mention: I would like it to take less time to dispatch enemies. I find that if I have 3 or more arrayed against me, I have a hard time with the group.

But, his “build” (if you can call it that) is basically random stuff I’ve picked up along the way. I started this thread so I would know what direction I should go with his ascended gear.

Mostly open-world PvE, and most of the time solo. But, I think I want to reserve him for when I’m with a team, so I would like to have the build have some healing ability.

I would like to elicit ideas for my PVE-only engineer’s build. Berserker seems too vulnerable, so if you like berserker, please say why as well.

Thanks!

I bought a bunch of keys during the sale (63 gems per key, buying 25 at a time), and kept track of what they netted me:

> 64 gems per chest, and
> 37 silver per chest.

These figures do not include items which have no purchase cost and no selling value (like account bound stuff.) It also does not include crafting bags (I was too lazy to calculate these.)

If I had paid regular prices for 25 keys (84 each), I still would have netted 43+ gems and 37+ silver per key.

Good ideas, all.

Devata.6589:

The ‘creation’ is done by unlocking the dungeon. But additions to it could and should imho be done in a way like this. I think the ‘earn a portal to a WvW map by claiming and keeping a keep in that map is the perfect example.

The content fits the reward.. Sure people are ‘forced’ to do WvW if they want that portal.. but heyy.. it’s a WvW portal. Guilds have a reason to maintain a keep or tower or camp (make they all work but some give a better skin to the portal). That is imho way more interesting game-play for guilds then.. ahh just do some stuff, earn some influence / currency and buy the portal.

For specific content, like a WvW portal or a 10-person dungeon, it makes sense that you would have a bottleneck at whatever is required. So, yes, for getting a WvW portal, definitely you should do something WvW-ish. (I avoid WvW and PvP like the plague, so I’m not conversant in those pieces of the game.)

If they produce something like the 10-person dungeon idea, then it makes sense that you would have to have a group of 10 people earn the right to go in. In a way, story mode dungeons vs. explorable dungeons was a good model for this (when it first came out). Now, you pretty much can do it with anybody, but early on, you had to complete the story before you unlocked the explorable. That model would work.

If it works, then they could add 15-person dungeons, or whatever, with similar requirements.

Devata.6589:

I disagree. The guild-missions are fun but influence just slowly drops in based on what guild-members do. There is no challenge or fun game-elements involved in getting them. It does not feel like an achievement you do as guild.

Lets say you would have a guild-dungeon and you completed it and got a special reward based in your effort, that would give the guild a challenge, goals and rewards.

Now this is a good argument, although my statement still stands.

I could see making guild-based dungeon-like content that requires more people. Using a dungeon as an example, maybe a 10-person dungeon. I do think that dungeons being designed for exactly 5 people makes for a more interesting experience. So, making a 10-person or 15-person dungeon-like activity would make sense.

But, to forcibly limit the creation of the guild or guild hall to something like that is a bad idea.

Devata.6589:

Like I said, that is the weakest point in GW2. That is not great, that is boring.

I mean, even look at your own example.. you are not getting you legendary weapon because of economic reasons.. It’s a game. Getting a legendary weapon should be for completing legendary content, not based on economies. People can brainlessly grind gold and buy a legendary.. That takes all the value (from a game perspective) out of the legendary and indeed just makes it some economic thing.

I am baffled that you even give this as a reason why it’s good. Yeah I did not get a Legendary, not because I was not able to defeat that epic boss but because of economic reasons… Really, this is the explanation why it’s good? I would give this as reason why it’s bad. Different tastes I guess.

Economic = resource utilization. In game terms, that’s everything you can spend time getting, not just gold. Crafting items, other currencies, gear, etc.

I choose to spend my time (my economy, if you will) working towards other objects, like ascended gear, rather than legendary gear.

So, yes, it was a good example.

CorrynnStarr.7942:

Daddicus, if the requirement was 1500, then i would go find a 1500 member guild and join if i wanted to play the content… that is where we differ mainly.

Really? How about 15 thousand? 15 million?

You can’t escape a reduce to absurd argument by accepting the number, for a reducing argument scales infinitely. At some point, even you will have to admit that the number is too large.

The instant you hit that number that you don’t accept, you have proven that any chosen number is arbitrary.

Devata.6589:

Yeah just do some general stuff and earn a currency that way… boring! That simply is not fun, and we have seen the same with influence, it was a boring system. You should get specific task to do with the guild, challenges you complete as a guild. That makes a guild fun.

Seems to be working fine right now.

Devata.6589:

Again, it’s not about not allowing small guilds to exist or not giving them a guild-hall.

Devil says it is. He flatly stated that any guild smaller than 15 should not have access to guild halls. (He was generously willing to go down as far as 10.)

Devata.6589:

Having a small guild also has it’s advantages.. like having more bank space per members and you do have any of the following problems.

This is a good point. Here we have something that is truly unfair to larger guilds.

It should be corrected.

Tarnicus.2865:

… Doing so did not detract from anyone’s enjoyment but increased my own.

Excellent.

Somehow, the other side, has decided that my having a guild hall will detract from their experience. I just can’t understand why they think that way. It makes no sense. My guild has absolutely nothing to do with their game and their experience.

Their one solid argument is that scaling doesn’t work right.

So, fix scaling. Do it right for this purpose, and that argument evaporates.

Devata.6589:

In fact, if a game is built around the principal you describe here (buy your rewards) then you will get a very boring game.

Incorrect. That’s the way it is designed right now, and it works great.

There is certainly content that I choose not to get (like Legendary weapons). But, that’s my choice, based upon economic reasons.

What they’re demanding is that I be excluded from content simply because I don’t meet their arbitrary reason.

Devata.6589:

Maybe the question many people ask themselves is what size makes a guild. Is one person a guild? I would say no. Personally I would say you need a minimum of 15 people to be considered a guild but at the very, very least 5. Of course this is an oppinion and I agree to disagree with people about this.

Finally, someone who admits that it is an opinion. Thank you.

Devata.6589:

Another thing is that a bigger guild should have something to show for it or / and a bigger guild should not be bored soon because everything is designed for smaller guilds.

Why? This is just an opinion, too.

Devata.6589:

Take the scaling, to some extent that is fine, but do / use it to much and it is extremely unfair. I remember from the CDI about this subject that some people asked why a bigger guild should have the ‘right’ to have more. Well it’s not about the right, it’s about manpower.. or lets look at it form the other side. Why does one guild (a bigger guild) have to put in way more man-power and man-hour to get the same?

I fail to understand why you believe big guilds have to put in more manpower. If it were done correctly, every guild would have to put in exactly the same amount of manpower per person.

Devata.6589:

I am all for giving all guilds (and then again the question, when do you talk about a guild) equal opurtunities so that getting a guild-hall is also availible for smaller guilds is fine, just as that they should also be able to get at least all the basic functionality. But there is no shame in the fact that a bigger guild has more to show for it, they also put more man-power and more man-hour into it.

Why? Why should any group of people get more just because they have more people?

Kal Spiro.9745:

That’s your flaw. You’re not entitled to anything. You have the game, and you can play the game, but that does not entitle you to be able to access every single aspect of the game whenever and however you please. It only allows you to play it within the bounds that the developers set for it. If, as is very clearly the case, the developers set this bound beyond the capacity of a small group then you are not entitled to play it with less. You’re free to try, and you’re free to fail or succeed on your own merits, but you’re not entitled to it just for paying money to gain access to it.

Actually, we are. If they advertise guild halls as part of the release, and do not specify limitations, then it would be false advertising to change an aspect of the game such as that.

However, if they changed the guild requirement either before the release, or as part of the release and stated so, then your argument has merit. They also are entitled to change it after release, per the usual EULA, but that would be considered unfair to most of the community.

Yeah, you’re right. It requires 3, and it’s not part of the achievement list. So, there IS a reason for them to sell one by itself.

Still, no reason to not sell 75 as well.

Either of those would be great ideas!

As far as I can see, sun beads are used ONLY to get those weapons, and ONLY in quantities of exactly 75 per weapon. There’s really no reason to lower the quantity allowed to by to anything less than 75.

Heck, even if they sold in piles of 100 or even 500, I would just buy the extras and toss them when done.

Here’s another reason:

Some people will use the system to get a guild hall in very little time. (Some @#$%^ finished the new LA jumping puzzle in less than an hour. Grrrrrr!)

If they later discover that they had failed to do the scaling correctly, and then later have to bump up the strength, that would be a good argument. The early adopters would have essentially exploited their way to a cheap guild hall.

(It doesn’t work the other way, because if they needed to reduce the strength to make it viable, nobody will have attained a cheap guild hall, simply because nobody would have achieved ANY guild halls, or too few had succeeded.)

DevilLordLaser, here’s a reason you haven’t stated, but would be valid:

What if the content wanted coordination between smaller teams?

In GW1 PvP stuff, you had to have at least a semblance of cooperation on your team. In FA, you had to roughly split your forces in half at the outset, or you might have serious problems. In JQ, mobs worked well, but then the other side could counter by going where you were not covering properly.

Any kind of tactical or strategic design here would be a valid argument for a minimum size. It’s not quite the same as having 3 places you all have to drop the wist at the same time, but things like that would be valid.

Or, perhaps if you had to split off part of your team after some milestone in order to beat the clock, that would require some teamwork and a certain minimum size.

That’s part of why I’m willing to go with 5 people; it allows for 1-3 teams that have different, but related, objectives. If you used this argument, I could see it taking the number from 5 to something larger. But, I would caution them that there would need to be a real tactical or strategic advantage before requiring it.

Otherwise, just do the scaling correctly.

DevilLordLaser.8619:

I’ve articulated plenty of reason, Daddicus. You just don’t like it.

The content must be balanced around a given number of players, which the scaling system treats as its target number.

The scaling system is dodgy and unreliable, and tends to work very erratically for situations not involving gigantic megazergs a’la world bosses. It cannot be counted on to present a properly uniform level of challenge for all player counts.

Please respond to the specific examples I gave that falsify this set of statements about scaling. Scaling is not PERFECT, but it works darned well in most instances. And I believe it CAN be made to work at all levels, IF they choose to spend the effort.

Most of what you have written has been your opinion. However, your argument that scaling doesn’t work is a reason. Unfortunately for your argument, I’ve already provided examples that say your scaling argument is wrong. Have you ever done VW with less than 20 people on the map? I have, and it played out almost exactly like it would normally. Even the 7 minute timer played out exactly as we expected. (Except mids apparently had several newbies, so we had to take a 4th crack at the champions to win.)

But, your argument that scaling doesn’t work IS a valid concern. But, your argument is against scaling, not against the size. What we’re saying is that it CAN be done correctly.

I would like to see, if it requires a 3 hour marathon for 100 people, that it also require a 3 hour marathon for 5 people. If it’s a collection of 10 1 hour stints and 1 very large 4 hour marathon, again, that works for me. I wouldn’t even mind having to grind for it. (But, that goes against their code, I think.)

I want to think of it in terms of the battle and energy spent against the objective PER PERSON, not in total. Having a minimum size doesn’t change that goal. It merely allows them to be sloppy with their scaling code.

CorrynnStarr.7942:

this is my reason…
I cant expect the benefits that a large corporation recieves without BEING a large corporation. thus I cannot expect the benefits of a 6 member family if my family only includes 3 members… How can you feel justified to recieve a reward that took 20 people to get by doing it by yourself?!?!? A family of 8 on welfare receives xxxx amount of money a month due to dire circumstances… should every person in the U.S. get xxxx amount of money too just to make it fair and equal? please say yes… i dare you…

You get MORE benefits, by a long shot, than a corporation gets. They are different, but the comparison isn’t even in the same ballpark. For example, no corporation gets a deduction for dependents. Your family gets one for every person in it (within limits). The corporation gets to deduct the money they spend on each employee, but so do you (again, within limits).

From top-to-bottom corporations are at a huge disadvantage in the tax code. There’s only one worthwhile reason to create a corporation: to shield the owners from some legal actions.

But, back to your argument:

I’m not asking to feel justified to get what you had 20 people do to gain. I’m asking that the content work the same for 21 people. Or 19. Or 25. Or 15. Or 30. Or 10. Or 35. Or 5. Or 40. Or 45. Or 50. Or more.

That’s very different. There’s no reason to exclude any specific count of people from playing. Well, down to about 5, but that’s just my opinion.

It should play exactly the same with any number of people (again, within technical limits)

Let me rephrase in reverse:

Let’s say I wanted them to create Guild Halls (or whatever) via processes designed for exactly 5 people. 6 or more people simply aren’t allowed. I’m OK with scaling down to 1, but not up.

What are your thoughts? I’m betting you don’t like that idea much. (Neither do I, but for different reasons!)

But it is exactly what you are trying to do, in reverse!

How about this reductio ad absurdum argument: Let’s make that arbitrary number not 15, but 1500. If you don’t have 1500 people playing, you aren’t allowed to create a guild hall.

Would you accept that? Because that is what you are asking me to accept, except with a different number.

Ideally, the number of people should not in any way play into the content.

Kal Spiro.9745:

Incorrect. If it scales large guilds lose content designed for large groups instead of single groups or no groups at all. You have the entire rest of the whole game to be solo. Guilds in a game called Guild Wars have very little content intended for Guilds, meaning larger groups of players.

You have a point, but it doesn’t invalidate my point. The problem is not the size, it’s the scaling.

You apparently believe it is impossible to scale it properly, despite my giving several examples of where world bosses scale perfectly. I believe that it is possible to define content that scales properly, at least most of the time.

The more design time taken, the better the content will be at scaling. Failure to spend that time is not an acceptable reason, IMO, to exclude a large portion of the player base.

CorrynnStarr.7942:

Daddicus.6128:

CorrynnStarr.7942:

… does not mean I should have my guilds experience cheapened to accommodate you.

Can one of you on the other side please state how your guild’s experience is cheapened (in any way) by something you have nothing to do with (his guild)?

could you please link that information, because what I am reading is contrary to what you are saying, and I would like to see the source to determine its authenticity.

What do you mean? I quoted you, and responded completely to your text.

You stated that your experience is cheapened. I’m simply asking why.

You are not in his guild, so his and his guild’s experience has absolutely nothing to do with you or your guild. It cannot possibly cheapen your experience, unless one of you changes to the other one’s guild.

On the other hand, what you are advocating would forcefully prevent small guilds from even playing the content at all.

Majic.4801:

This whole imbroglio seems like an awful lot of effort to exclude people from content.

If would be nice to see more effort spent making the game enjoyable for all players instead.

We all paid to be here. Why not design the game for all of us?

Exactly. Thanks.

DevilLordLaser.8619:

2.) When, exactly, are they going to have time to fix scaling between building an entire new game and also rebuilding the entirety of this game? Or did you not notice the biggest combat system update ever on Tuesday as well as the unveiling of an entire rebuilt city, on top of resources allocated to kicking out an expansion? Scaling has been busted and half-useless since the game launched – if it was such an easy, done-in-an-afternoon fix, wouldn’t they have done it already?

The fact that they haven’t fixed it all over Tyria is irrelevant. That’s what needs to happen. We’ve been arguing that all along, so please stop leaving it out of your two-option-only choices.

DevilLordLaser.8619:

Before Daddicus gets around to sextuple-posting…

1.) No, it’s not a straw argument. It’s an argument of “if you’re willing to take on the extra difficulty of tackling content designed for more players than you have, awesome! Have at it! If you want that content to be ripped out and rebuilt around numbers lower than will typically be employed in the event because you don’t like any other options available to you, we have an issue.”

A straw argument is when you make an argument that you say your opponent has made, and then refute that argument. If your opponent never said that, then it’s a straw argument. Since we hadn’t.

And you keep excluding viable options. It is not a choice between those two things. But, I’ll deal with that in your next section.

Kal Spiro.9745:

This isn’t a strawman, this is a clarification. He’s trying to determine where he actually stands on this topic. Should being understaffed for the event cause you hardship, or should it be designed to handle understaffed groups at normal difficulty. It’s very pertinent.

You are correct now, but at the time you wrote that she had not yet stated that. And I don’t agree with her that dungeons should work for fewer people (except Arah, which IMO should never have been a dungeon in the first place). I think content designed for exactly 5 is fine. Scaling is a great idea, but focused counts of enemies has its place as well.

DevilLordLaser.8619:

Several players have expressed a demand for the option to skip the stakes-claiming mission because they don’t have the numbers for a big epic fight, and the general opinion of the player base seems to be “sure why not.”

Unless you quote someone, I believe your statement is false. I just read the whole thread up to here, and nobody has claimed that.

Except YOU! Of course, you were putting words into our mouths which we did not say, but you said it several times.

WE ARE NOT ARGUING THAT! So stop saying we are.

Kal Spiro.9745:

Your average five man guild will not be able to run this alone. And that SHOULD be acceptable.

Why? One logical reason will be acceptable. So far, nobody on your side of the argument has articulated any kind of reason for your statement.

Our side, however, has articulated a very good reason: we paid for this game, and are therefore entitled to play it.

LanfearShadowflame.3189:

No, there will be something in LA. It’s currently there, just not accessible yet.

What happened to it? I was just in it yesterday.

Kal Spiro.9745:

The main problem here is that you’re in the wrong argument. Every time you say, “a five man guild should be able to complete the content,” it gets read as, “the content should be adjusted and balanced for a five man guild.”

The problem with this argument is that it’s not a decision between those two statements. You have violated the principle of the excluded middle.

We’re asking for it to be built to be played by 5-500 people, and have the scaling working correctly. That fits into neither of your two statements.

We know they can do it correctly if they want to, because they’ve done it perfectly where they felt they had a need (Vinewraith, Teq, Jormag, Great Jungle Wurm, etc.) They’ve also screwed it up royally in many events, but I think they can do it correctly if they want to spend the effort.

Majic.4801:

Good Lord, look at some of the posts in this thread. And you wonder why so many people don’t want to deal with larger guilds?

Just look at what they have to look forward to.

YES! You NAILED it!

Kal Spiro.9745:

Someone will always be dissatisfied.

Why?

CorrynnStarr.7942:

I disagree with you… because you are small you should not be entitled to the same things a larger guild has…

Why not? Give us a reason for your opinion.

CorrynnStarr.7942:

I cant expect to get the same tax break a major corporation gets. nor should i get the same tax break a family of 6 gets, for my family of three.

This is a particularly bad attempt at a justification. In the US, families get far more tax breaks than any corporation does, and corporations are also saddled with rules families do not have to follow.

DevilLordLaser.8619:

Because GW2’s event scaling system is extremely dodgy. It can handle some moderate swings – say, twelve guys instead of fifteen or eight instead of ten, or the other way around – but the system just does not, and never has, coped well with drastic swings in population count. If four guys tried to do an event designed for fifteen, the normal scaling system would make it either the next best thing to impossible, or ridiculously easy to the point where downscaling the event to four guys would basically count as a quick-clear exploit.

I’ve done VW on a completely full map, and I’ve done it with 6-7 per boss. It scales almost flawlessly (you can’t afford to have any newbies, though). Jormag I’ve done with about 12 and with a hundred. Again, same amount of time and effort per person. Champions, small bosses, all those “group” battles seem to scale very well.

There ARE flaws in the system. But, it works very well in most boss instances.

CorrynnStarr.7942:

… does not mean I should have my guilds experience cheapened to accommodate you.

Can one of you on the other side please state how your guild’s experience is cheapened (in any way) by something you have nothing to do with (his guild)?

DevilLordLaser.8619:

Once again I ask you: why should guilds with membership counts higher than five lose out on their cool stuff? Why can’t they have awesome new content designed for them? Why is it bad that not everything in the game can be handled by one solo player?

Again, this is a false statement. Why do you insist that he respond to your falsehoods about what he really is saying?

You lose NOTHING if it scales. He loses access completely if it doesn’t.

DevilLordLaser.8619:

Please, Lanfear. Do not wreck this for the larger guilds so the solo bankguilds can lay claim to their own personal Queensdale.

Again, completely unrelated to his points. How does his guild being able to complete a mission in any way affect your guild being able to complete that same mission with the same amount of personal difficulty (for each player taking part)?

It doesn’t.

And, to the rest of this section of words (that I didn’t quote), the scaling was the most brilliant move ever made by any MMO, period. It doesn’t always work correctly, but that doesn’t take away from the genius of the model.

DevilLordLaser.8619:

I’ve done a three-man dungeon run. It took four times longer than a typical five-man run did and was significantly more difficult. Is that acceptable to you? If it isn’t, then we’re right back where we started.

What on earth does this have to do with his points? It’s a straw argument.

Torsailr.8456:

Your first point that scaling doesn’t work very well isn’t a good reason to tell small guilds they can’t have a guild hall. It’s a reason to get anet to fix scaling.

Absolutely correct! What I don’t understand is why the other side can’t see this.

CorrynnStarr.7942:

I’m not trying to sound uncaring, but this game wasn’t built to work around 3 man guilds… or even 5 man guilds. It has been stated already that its initial design was for 10+.

This is completely false. The game was designed for 10 and UNDER groups. It was even documented that way, until they finally decided to embrace zerging a while back. But, many events still only scale up to 10 players. You run into them a lot during the daily event runs. 15-20 people can nuke some events in seconds (because that event still caps scaling at 10).

DevilLordLaser.8619:

The new Edge of the Mists Wuv maps that are also a core part of HoT are out of my immediate, and all conceivable future, reach. I’m never going to see that content, despite having paid for it.

You have a good point here. Guilds are really PvE-focused items.

DevilLordLaser.8619:

[GTFC] puts together a team of ~15 on a designated “get your butts online” day and fights hard for three hours to vanquish the map and claim our stake. Everybody who was there feels awesome, as well as exhausted, at having earned our ground.

Lanfear logs on, solos the event in twenty minutes because of massive, drastic downscaling, and claims the same stake, earning the same ground for his twobie guild

Tell me – why, exactly, did we waste our three hours again, when it would have been enormously quicker and easier to just send one designated dude to go and get the unlocking out of the way?…

Your logic is fatally flawed. You are changing both the numbers requirement and the time requirement. He’s not asking for that. I don’t think any small guilds will complain about having to spend the same 3 hours, if that’s what is required.

What we ARE complaining about is that we simply will be precluded from doing it AT ALL, for the simple reason that we aren’t big enough. If implemented, that would be completely arbitrary.

Everything in this game except dungeons scales. Why shouldn’t guilds scale like everything else?

Thanks, guys.

3 of my 80s have the mapping title, and the others are all quite a ways through it. So, they likely have plenty of hero points.

I’m just worried that if I do the obvious and train everything, then I’ll be missing out on something later. But, there doesn’t seem to be any way to know right now. I wish ANet would chime in with specifics about what we’ll be able to buy or not buy with hero points.

Soren, I suspect something is coming.

Gummi, it’s clear I wasn’t clear. Let me try again:

If I chose, I could (on one of my level 80s) train every skill and trait in the list.

My question is why would I NOT do that?

If there’s no answer to that, then my follow-up question is why didn’t ANet do it for me during conversion.

I understand lower-level characters needed special-casing, but this refers to level 80s only.

It came up because I hadn’t done my ranger’s yet (forgot), and I was in VW. I always turn on my condition-remove skill when in VW, but I couldn’t because I was no longer trained in it. I had to wait until the battle was over to fix it. So, it made me wonder why ANet chose to not train some things, but they did do others, when they could have simply given me all that I had before.

This is regarding the new trait stuff. I read that you can re-train everything you had if you are level 80. I haven’t actually tried yet, but I believe it, from the numbers I see.

But, I can’t understand why you would ever NOT do that.

I suspect ANet thinks there is a reason, because otherwise why didn’t they just train you in everything during conversion (for level 80s).

Can anybody think of a reason to bank hero points?

I’m sorry, but I don’t understand: how do you get a new version of a mystic conduit?

Aenesthesia.1697:

why can’t you? will your guild dissappear if you keep playing like you have up till now?

Technically, no it won’t disappear.

But, that’s because THEY CAN’T GET ONE! So, yes, it will go away. The new rules exclude them from ever even starting the process.