Where do people see all these characters running out and about? I took my guardian for some map completion adventure and haven’t spotted more then four players while adventuring in mid-level zones. So I was left soloing events and champions as usual.
The megaserver changes are being rolled out from the lowest level zones to the highest, so it is quite possible you are just above the level where the roll out is at this point.
PVP actually is not difficult at all. Its just finding a game that is not full elitist jerks that is difficult. Check the PVP browser list to see if someone created a “Dailies Only” game.
Forgive me as I have no interest in PvP and therefore I have no understanding of how PvP works in this game, but are you saying we can make “Dailies Only” PvP matches where we line up and take turns killing each other cooperatively like civilized people simply for the purpose of accomplishing the daily? I’ll have to look into that.
I couldn’t read all 9 pages, but after reading halfway through it occurred to me that there is a really significant difference between the experience of a new player and a new character. As a new player, there is a world of stuff to figure out in the first 40 levels, as you really have no idea how the game works at all and you are busy figuring out such simple stuff as repairs, where to go in the world, karma vendors, crafting, map completion bonuses, travel, the auction house, the bank… it is all shiny and new and overwhelming. Not having to deal with traits until later may be an advantage for those truly new players.
However, when you are leveling your third or fourth alt there isn’t much new anymore other than the new class mechanics and traits to play with. I don’t think gating the experience is nearly as important for these players on new characters. I really like the idea of vendors that only sell account bound items to max level characters that allow them to move through some of this stuff more quickly. Maybe you buy and send a “tome of knowledge” to your alt that teaches them 5 trait points in advance. Or an item that grants bonuses to experience and heart quest completion so your alt levels and little faster and moves through the heart completion quests a little quicker the second time through. That way, repeat players get the streamlined experience and incentive to roll alts while the new player get the unaltered experience Anet had in mind. That could make both sides reasonably happy.
Am I happy with everything? No. But I do agree with you that the world seems much more active and alive following the patch. Before then I would play for long stretches of time and never see anything except an empty world with unattended events no one was around for or interested in. Now there are actually other people around doing stuff.
Now, this same player on level 41 has access to 2 traits. Cause he got a trait at 30, and one at 36. TWO traits. He used to have many interesting gameplay choices by that point already, he had experienced compelling character and playstyle progression already. Now he has access to two godkitten traits, just like a 21 character previously did. You now feel as powerful as a level 20 character when you’re level 40, and your playstyle is as interesting and varied as back when you were level 20.
Compelling character and playstyle progression? I wonder what class you are playing. Selecting between choices like, “Critical hits have a chance to apply vulerability” or “Bleeds you apply last longer” didn’t seem to be that game changing until much later in the game when I started choosing groups of them that reinforced each other and worked together to support a play style and strategy.
At worst PvPers have to spend 5 minutes in PvE chopping a few trees if they want their daily.
I think it is mostly us PvEers worried we are going to have to crash the PvP zones and run around mashing the 1 key until we accidentally complete our fifth daily, or else get pushed into funky stuff like the daily activities or puzzle jumping.
During the Marionette LS, there was a post by Josh Foreman that indicated as much. He expressed a desire to raise the average skill level of the playerbase. If they’re still trying to push and prod the playerbase into getting better, I think they’re doing more harm than good. Stuff like the boss schedules and costs for guild world events is not reassuring.
Josh ForemanCan the average player skill be raised by challenging content like this?
Looking back, I should have just said no to this. I feel like questions like this led to the assault knight debacle. Something that’s challenging but not interesting. The new Shadow Behemoth fight is similar. It’s harder I suppose, but it’s not interesting. It’s not enjoyable to fight. I wonder who those fights were intended for: the actual people who enjoyed the open world boss fights, who anet thought that group was, or someone else entirely?
Or even better, does the average player even want to raise their skill? Or perhaps put another way, does the average player consider trying to improve their skill to be “fun”?
Interesting trend in the last three posters. I am over 40, the guy after me is over 50, and the guy after him doesn’t say how old he is but does mention being married. When you only have two hours max to play, you get a bit more picky about these kinds of things, since they can easily account for your entire playtime.
MMO’s are first, last and always massive time sinks. The business model, whether it’s sub or store, makes that inevitable. The other factor that makes that inevitable is the demands by some MMO players to be entertained for years while playing many hours per day. Thus, it’s inevitable that MMO’s will provide at least some reasons for those who are “dedicated” (read addicted, if you prefer) to the game to feel that their time commitment means something.
I see this argument made a lot, but I’m not sure the underlying assumption is accurate. The number of people playing on average more than two hours a day long term has to be fairly small compared to the number of people who barely manage to do enough dailies to complete the monthly and follow the Living Story events. The vast majority of the world has a job, friends, family, housework, etc. to do as well, and gaming can’t really be anything more than an alternative to nighttime television for them. The assumption is that MMOs aren’t for those people, but of the eight adults over 40 that play games I know of, all but one are only interested in the MMO format (PvE only), mostly because they want to stay in one game long term, they like having other players around for the feeling of not being alone, they like the big open worlds, and they like the focus away from FPS-style “twitch gaming”. That segment seems to be growing constantly as kids that grew up gaming become adults and have kids and families of their own, but still want to game.
I suspect there are plenty of people who have more money than time and are willing to hand over their credit cards if you make them feel like they are the kings of your world for the low investment of two hours a day of moderately skilled effort and a couple bucks. I think the real problem is that the most dedicated players also seem to drive the community. Without them, would we have any internet buzz, guild leaders, websites dedicated to analyzing and explaining aspects of the game, dragon timers, etc? The real danger may be creating a casual paradise that the casuals never find or figure out. After all, we aren’t exactly out there game hopping, checking out every new release, writing blog posts and reviews about them, theory crafting, posting build suggestions, etc.
However, I don’t wanna end the previous post without making a suggestion that should cater to everyone’s desires. These I define as on the one hand us GW2 nerds wanting more dailies back in the achie rotation and on the other hand ANet/the game designers wanting to limit the amount of achie points while at the same encouraging (forcing) people to do stuff they don’t really like. I suppose what I’m suggesting won’t accomplish that last aspect as it will give people a lot more freedom in what to do than the designers might want to, but hope springs eternal, and there’s still hope that our having fun eventually will rank higher than forcing people into game modes they don’t like that much.
So, here goes:
- Keep the full set of roughly 60 different dailies in rotation (that would include all the previously available PvP dailies, as I suppose that the two/three/five tournament wins have been removed from the rotation as it is now; there’s no way to tell yet which of the PvE/WvW dailies might have been removed from the rotation as well).
- Of these, have a more or less random subset of 16 – 20 dailies be active on any given day.
- Limit the amount of achie points one can get from completing dailies to say 10 per day, thus still rewarding those who do more than the minimum of 5, but at the same time preventing an inflation of achie points from dailies alone.
- Finally, for those crazy achie hunters out there (yeah, I count myself among them), add a new general achievement of “Lifetime Dailies completed”. Have that give another 5 achie points or so with every tier, the tiers being e.g. 100/250/500/750/1.000/1.250/… This way, there’s still a noticeable, yet rather modes reward for those who – for one reason or another – complete most, if not all dailies.
Just to clarify any possible misunderstandings, let me give an example:
- Casual gamers and those who only ever want to do the minimum to get the daily rewards will get 5 – 6 achie points per day for a maximum total of about 150 per month and (after having reached the first two tiers of 100 and 250) about half a tier in the Lifetime Dailies achie, accounting for a nother 2 -3 achie points per month on average.
- More active gamers will complete around 10 dailies a day for a monthly total of 250 – 300 achie points and complete about one tier in the Lifetime Dailies achie, which yields them another 5 achie points per month.
- Crazy GW2 nerds and all others who go for the full package will complete 15 – 20 dailies each day. That’s still a monthly total of 300 achie points due to the cap of 10 points per day, but they progress about two tiers in the Lifetime Dailes achie per month, which brings their monthly point total to 310 – 315.
If game designers feel that the “bonus reward” can be a bit higher than 10 points a month, just increase the tier reward for Lifetime Dailies from say 5 to 10 points.
I wholeheartedly agree. Please implement it like this. Well thought out.
This would be about perfect. The pool changes so you don’t do the same ones every day, but there is a big selection and you pick the subset you want to do with no incentive to try to do them all since you only get credit for 10.
For everyone else… Yes, play-as-you-want is one of Anet’s core promises with GW2, but they also have a vision to unify all game modes. It’s hard to compromise between the two, and I think having to do one or two new thing that you don’t normally do isn’t too time consuming or unreasonable. I think Anet also wants to challenge players to step out and try new things, especially when they work so hard to improve every game mode. Give it a shot, who knows, maybe you’ll discover you enjoy pvp, or pve, or wvw. And if you don’t, it’s not like the game is ruined just because you need to occasionally do one or two little thing if you really want a laural for that particular day.
No, but it actually hurts the game to have people like me in your PvP or WvW or mini-game matches just because we need credit for the dailies. Can I try to sponge credit for stuff off a zerg or just stand around and hope the other players pull off a win for me? Sure. But why would anyone want me to do it? Yeah, I can stand there if someone attacks me and just wait for them to kill me so I can rez and get on with what I’m trying to accomplish, but how does that benefit me or my team?
I just thought is was a mindless zerg running around – who knew. I tried doing one and all I found it WAS mindless and nothing social at all.
I think that about sports fans. Mindless horde doing something stupid.
And yet…
Some people have a blast doing it. Being a sports fan is an EVENT to them. It’s a social gathering of people they suddenly have that one thing in common with. They don’t talk to all of them, they don’t even talk to most of them. But they’re there. Being part of a large crowd of people, doing something easy for silly fun. For some people… no, for LOTS of people, that’s an outstanding way to spend some time. Doing a champ train touched on a lot of those same points, being part of a big silly horde having fun. Cheering for a win, picking themselves up after a loss/derailment.
Exactly… being part of a large crowd of people doing something easy for silly fun, is… well, having silly fun being part of a big silly hoard. Yes, I could make more money and mats running dungeons I’m sure, but then I’d need to find 4 other people who are skilled enough to get it done or I can’t finish it because of them, and if I kitten it up then the other 4 people can’t finish it because of me , and it screws them up if I don’t stay to the finish… and who needs all that hassle and stress in their gameplay time?
A champ train was far more than the silver generated from it. People still don’t understand that for some it was a fun, lighthearted, social aspect of the game.
+1
I just thought is was a mindless zerg running around – who knew. I tried doing one and all I found it WAS mindless and nothing social at all.
You say that like it is a bad thing :-). In seriousness, it is a bit of both. I like to run around with other people taking down things I couldn’t do solo, but I also want to be able to come ,or go, or screw up, and not have it really matter to anyone else. In a dungeon, or WvW, or PvP, I actually matter, and me screwing up hurts my group, so I tend not to participate in those aspects of the game, but I also prefer not to just sit and farm solo all day.
1) I was thinking about a similar idea after reading about Frostgorge champ re-timing: eventually, we SHOULD be able to string world, major, and minor boss events together in a continuous run… once all the glitches get worked out.
That would be fun. I’d actually prefer it if the train moved around the world hitting a little of everything from Champions to Minor Bosses to world bosses.
A champ train was far more than the silver generated from it. People still don’t understand that for some it was a fun, lighthearted, social aspect of the game.
+1
I know I should read the patch notes more carefully, but can someone tell me if all the boss events start exactly on the timer now, so you know exactly when and where every boss will activate, or are these rolling “windows”?
^ I don’t want to do anything other then chat some days, should that give me rewards for the daily as well?
Well, there wasn’t a daily reward for chatting before, was there?
[Quote]If the event to destroy the dragon totem has succeeded when the boss is not activated, Scholar Brogun will declare victory and return to Krennak’s homestead without fighting the shaman.[/Quote]
What does this mean? Every time I’ve done this event, after escorting Scholar Brogan the Totem appears, and after you burn down the Totem the Svanir Shaman appears. It SOUNDS like if you destroy the Totem to fast the Shaman will not appear, but I don’t think the Shaman appears until after you destroy the totem, so how do we get the Shaman to show up and play? Last night we just figured it was bugged when the event failed to spawn the Shaman.It means unless it’s Maw’s “turn” to pop, doing those “pre” events means squat.
Yeah, I guess what was confusing me was the assumption that the “pre” events don’t run unless it is that bosses’ turn to pop. Running the pre events outside the actual boss window is confusing as heck and seems utterly pointless. I can see a lot of potential for people to think they are running the boss event until the chain ends unexpectedly and they find out they just screwed up and wasted their time.
Okay, forgive my ignorance here, but the implication then is that Scholar Brogan can activate outside the Svanir Shaman window. If the BOSSES activate in a rotation, does that mean Scholar Brogan sets off on the escort and totem portion of the chain anyway every 15 minutes and 45 minutes after the hour, but the Shaman only appears after the Totem every fourth time?
It would save a lot of confusion if Scholar Brogan only activated inside the Svanir Shaman boss window and just stayed put the rest of the time. Mistaking it for a boss event until after the Totem disappears and you find out you wasted your time is going to be a bummer.
[Quote]If the event to destroy the dragon totem has succeeded when the boss is not activated, Scholar Brogun will declare victory and return to Krennak’s homestead without fighting the shaman.[/Quote]
What does this mean? Every time I’ve done this event, after escorting Scholar Brogan the Totem appears, and after you burn down the Totem the Svanir Shaman appears. It SOUNDS like if you destroy the Totem to fast the Shaman will not appear, but I don’t think the Shaman appears until after you destroy the totem, so how do we get the Shaman to show up and play? Last night we just figured it was bugged when the event failed to spawn the Shaman.
As it is now, if you destroy the totem before the • * If the event to destroy the dragon totem has succeeded when the boss is not activated, Scholar Brogun will declare victory and return to Krennak’s homestead without fighting the shaman. *
If the Shaman will not appear if the Dragon Totem is burned down too fast, and that is intentional instead of just a bug, then that is just idiotic. I logged in yesterday specifically to run the Frozen Maw chain, we did everything like we normally do, the Totem went down in seconds, no one said anything about a change, and the Shaman never showed up. We figured it was bugged, but if this is accurate, anyone who wants to can attack the totem prematurely and deny the event boss to the entire server….
Please tell me this isn’t true!
I’m not sure yet… I see it as a mixed bag. I think the bosses on a schedule might be an improvement as it may make it easier to know when to get on if I want to catch a particular fight or fights. I like the idea of the megaserver maps which I hope means more group events can actually happen in the leveling zones. I also like the idea of more rewards working account wide instead of character specific which may make playing alts more rewarding.
I’m a little bummed that trains might be getting nerfed before I had a chance to follow them for more than a few kills (a Ranger to 80 and then immediately switched and started leveling a warrior). I really don’t like the reduced selection of dailies, and while the trait system overall seems a little better, the selling of traits for gold seems at first glance to be a money sink to get new characters to buy gold with gems, which I’m not real fond of.
TL;DR I want an item that not everybody can get so that I can stand around in town with it equipped and wait for whispers to ask me how I got it so that I can feel superior to others.
There is no other reason to ask for what you are asking for.
Yeah, but if it is just a skin, then I really don’t see any reason to object. People who care about such things can show off their skins or notice them on others and be impressed if they are so inclined, and people who don’t care one whit like myself can play on with the same stats and ignore the peakittens.
I don’t normally post on these forums, but I felt an exception was worthwhile for this.
Please restore more choices to the daily achievements. Assuming I don’t want to do PvP or WvW, today I have a choice of 6 different things and have to do 5 of them if I want the daily.
I appreciate that you want people to experience all the game has to offer, but this is not the right way to go about it. I don’t play PvP at all and have no desire to. I do a little WvW, but I know players who don’t do that either. Please don’t try to force your players to play how YOU want them to, let us play how WE want to.
With the previous system and lots of choices you could reasonably get the daily just by general PvE play, without having to select what you were going to do based on the daily achievements. Now with the reduced choice you need to do certain things or miss out on the daily reward. Not happy.
Exactly my feelings as well… 5 out of 6 leaves little choice in PvE play for doing the daily. Depending on what the 6 are, it may be preferable to just skip the day, where before there were almost always 5 that could be accomplished while working on other goals at the same time (map completion, etc).
Personally, I’m kinda sad… Crossing paths with one of the trains is one of things I enjoy most in my play time. Seeing them teleport off to waypoints I haven’t unlocked yet is one of the things that motivates me to keep leveling and unlocking new map areas. :-(
I don’t think I’ll ever understand why people oppose compensation for things like this. … All I see is people who are bitter that we exercise our forum privileges to ask for a good faith refund that will effect them in no way.
There are always the handful of people who oppose everything. In threads like these there are also always quite a few people who react less to actual request itself than they do to the degree they believe the poster feels they are “owed it” or “deserve it”. The opposition is triggered by “We should get…” or “You owe us…” language they see as indicating a feeling of entitlement to the request as opposed to “It would be nice if…” language indicating a simple request for something desired but not owed.
Ultimately though, I know a lot of people get fed up with these types of threads in general because they will come in an endless stream unless the game is never changed in any way or the company makes a blanket policy of never giving any compensation to anyone for anything ever. Everything hurts someone, somehow. If you grind out a top tier item and they release a higher tier, some people will be hurt. If items are character bound, so you grind out one for a second character even though your first character has one they don’t use, the Anet makes those items account bound instead… well, you did all that work for nothing.
If someone is going to be “hurt” by every change, and we want the changes to keep coming, and we want the company to be able to mitigate the effects of the worst harms, even though they can’t try to compensate everyone for everything…. then there will always be an arbitrary cut-off line where people who got hurt just a little differently got compensated while other people didn’t. There isn’t any other way for it to be. Which means some people have to be the ones that get left out. And if they always come to the forum to complain, we will just have a never ending stream of these complaints.
After a while some people fall back to an attitude of, “It has to be somebody, and that somebody is you, so suck it up, stop your whining, and go play your game.”
Wouldn’t it be simpler to allow max level characters to obtain account bound items with +EXP% attributes. Get, say, two +50% EXP trinkets, equip them on your alt, and bingo, leveling takes half the time.
It would probably be slow enough to allow people who already know the game to learn the mechanics of a new profession before hitting 80, would require almost no new programming (the coding for +EXP is already there for the boosters), and would make leveling new characters a little less “grindy”.
I also think it is a great development. I spend a lot of time in mid-level zones that are practically empty and having more players in the map will be really nice.
The problem ultimately stems from the games design philosiphy. Everyone is equal, everyone is special and everyone gets credit for everything.
In traditional MMO’s you have to compete for kills and resources and loot from bosses. This means you have a much higher overall rarity to items that drop because only 1 person gets it. In GW2 EVERYONE gets full rewards for everything. This means the items are significantly less rare and mostly seem like junk because everyone is getting them.
Getting a rare (blue) item in a traditional MMO is rewarding and makes you feel accomplished. In GW2 getting a rare (yellow) item seems like a waste of time because everyone is getting yellow items.
That is why loot seems like crap in GW2.
It’s actually simpler than that. Loot seems like crap in GW2 because it is crap. In other competitive games like WoW RNG is on your side. Good, exciting, loot will simply be yours over time—you are rewarded for playing the game, which is as it should be. In GW2, not so much. The experience here is crap, crap, and more crap over time. The simple answer is that this is because of a bad loot system. It’s actually that simple.
I’ve said this for years, some games are pro player some are pro game. GW2 seems to think a groin shot each time we open a chest promotes us to play more, and keep coming back. OR buy something. The exact opposite is happening. Players are leaving.
And your solution with no negative side effects is what? Every chest drops a top tier item? Bosses drop currency and after 50 world bosses and your character is fully geared with best in slot? Bosses drop upgrades with low frequency but the upgrade is insignificant enough so it doesn’t really advantage the players that get the drops over the players that don’t? Upgrades are put out in such a way that some players have significantly better gear than others at 80 and those that don’t have the upgrades settle for being weaker characters or have to grind out gear to try to keep up with everyone else?
Deploying trinity affect the design of the game as a whole.
I don’t understand why more people don’t seem to get this. If you need a tanky person and a healy person and some DPS people and a CC person to do fulfill specific roles and certain levels, then the entire concept of allowing any number of random people with more or less any reasonable gear and skill level to jump in or out of world boss fights, and allowing most any group of players to be able to hook up and run a dungeon goes out the window, and with that the fundamental design criteria around which the dungeon and world bosses and their mechanics are built.
You’d basically have to re-design all the professions, skills, talents, dungeons, gear, and bosses around a whole new concept of how they should work.
It is a bit of a “kittened if you do and kittened if you don’t” situation. If you have great loot upgrades but give them out easily so everyone gets them, there isn’t much point to releasing the upgrades in the first place as the people who want them want something harder to obtain and better than just average to work toward. But if everyone doesn’t get the upgrades then the player base starts segmenting into tiers based on gear level, which is the very situation many of us came to GW2 to get away from. I personally moved to GW2 from WoW because I got tired of seeing my gear become sub-par again after every time I finished grinding out a new tier.
You lose some people either way you go, but I suspect they will stick closer to the current system than not simply because there is plenty of competition for grind players in the market and not much for people who want the treadmill to slow to a crawl at some point.
Did you not read that megaserver replaces overflow and overflow maps will not exist anymore?
No matter how tanky you are, you still have to dodge in and out, swap weapons and range.
Thanks for the response. The part I don’t understand is, in the context of the above quote, is this: If you are a DPS warrior and get 2 shot if you fail to range or dodge properly, so you swap DPS attributes for toughness and vitality and still get 2 shot if you fail to range or dodge properly, can you even be “tanky”??? Can you meaningfully increase survival against PvE that way or are those attributes really only meaningful in PvP?
I had a priest and a paladin in WoW, and the paladin could stand and take hits that would absolutely one-shot my priest. I don’t get the impression that is even possible here, no matter how much toughness and vitality you stack.
(edited by DavidH.7380)
Okay, I’m a new 80 figuring out how things work beyond normal open world mobs and veterans. From reading the discussions on the forum and looking at level 80 build recommendations, I’m piecing together the following understanding of how this game currently works for end-game PvE.
Damage mitigation is oriented around player movement to the point where passive character and gear stats like toughness and vitality are ineffective as a substitute. Even “tanky” characters like guardians and warriors don’t trade blows with mobs in dungeons and stay up on the power of their armor, health, damage reduction skills, and healing from themselves and the members of their group. I’m not quite sure yet if that is because even they can’t survive that way or if it is because they can’t hold aggro so the “tankiness” doesn’t benefit the rest of the group while everyone suffers from their lack of DPS.
As a result, all classes from the squishiest to the tankiest gear for maxium DPS and the strategy is for the group to burn the boss down as fast as they can while dodging as many attacks as they can and success depends on getting the boss down before too many people miss time a dodge and get 1 shot.
Is that somewhat correct, or am I just completely misunderstanding what I am reading?
Not traveling to other zones of the same level range will definitely limit your progress. There are group boss events like Shadow Behemoth in the human area and The Frozen Maw in the Norn area that are fun and have great loot chests. The daily usually includes kills or events in various world zones, and your get laurels for completion that you will want to have once you hit 80.
Don’t limit yourself so much. Explore a bit, travel a little, see the world, and then come back to your story a little stronger. Is it any less realistic to travel on the way to your next personal story step than it is to do map completion, odd jobs, and waste time looking for nice views?
Try this guide
Just gave that a quick scan. It looks promising, but perhaps even more importantly it teaches weapons and abilities I’m not familiar with yet, so even if it doesn’t end up being the final answer it would teach me a lot of good stuff about my profession.
OP since there’s gonna be tournament of WvW starting, until 27 you can freely transfer to any server which is at certain rating for WvW https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/get-ready-for-wvw-spring-tournament-2014/ check this out.
Yep, that is why I am asking this question. I’m trying to get feedback from other players about which of those worlds might have more activity during PST than my current IoJ.
Although I don’t mind the transfer not being free, Id just like to know what the active Worlds are before I pay to move.
I am also completely prepared to pay for a transfer, but I figure it couldn’t hurt to try a free one first.
Hey OP. IoJ has one of the largest WBT trains in game and is almost never stopped. It maybe that you’re in an off timezone or just didn’t know.
The WBT starts every night at daily reset (5pm server time, PST).
Interesting. Two things come to mind. First, I don’t usually get on until after 9 PST. Perhaps I am just running too late for the late EST and early PST crowd to still be on. The other thought is that I occasionally cross paths with a train, but I have never been able to follow since they usually head off to some 80 level I hadn’t unlocked yet. I was planning to wait until after I’d been 80 long enough to have access to follow to all the events before actually transferring, but the free transfers for the next couple days made me think about doing something sooner.
I agree that GW2 isn’t ideal in many areas, but it surprises me how many people seem to want to solve those issues by making GW into a standard MMO clone. I thought the whole point of GW was that it doesn’t work like a standard MMO.
The standard solutions have side effects. Progressive dungeon tiers leave the entry dungeons empty for new players, but if you give entry players a gear ladder past all the older dungeons and you dilute the rewards of the players that played through them to get to the top ones. Implementing the “trinity” means certain classes are needed and others aren’t in order to make a dungeon run successful. Grinds give frequent players a time sink to work on but quickly separate players that play a lot into a different class than players that only play occasionally.
There are huge challenges to trying to make a MMO equally rewarding for min/maxers, people who play what is fun rather than most efficent, people who play a lot, people who play only a little, etc. Going back to the traditional solutions just eliminates any chance of progress toward finding better solutions.
Pick up a sword or GS and learn to melee with it.
What would you recommend for a dungeon offhand with a sword?
Hmm… my ranger is my first character and just hit 80 today. I know bearbow is the hallmark of a n00b (and yeah, I leveled halfway as a bearbow). I’m now playing with axes and a lynx in a skirmishing / beast mastery build around bleeds / precision / condition damage, but I know I need a whole new approach if I am going to do any dungeons or fractals.
Any recommendations about what the best build for a new player would be in order to be useful instead of a rangetard in dungeons?
I just hit 80 today and I initially chose Isle of Janthir as my home server. I am in the US west coast so I’m on Pacific time. As a new 80 I’m relatively new to the chest events but when I try to attend events like Shatterer or Fire Elemental on IoJ there often aren’t enough people there to complete the event (though Shadow Behemoth and Frozen Maw always seem to have enough).
I don’t know if the issue is my play time on that server, if there just isn’t much action on certain events on all servers, or what. I’ve been guesting on Tarnished Coast and Yak’s Bend, and those servers seem to always have enough people to run the events, so I’ve been thinking of transferring home worlds. With the free and reduced cost transfers to half the servers this week I thought I would ask if any of the free/reduced cost transfer servers have very active PvE events. I don’t think it can hurt to try one before I resort to paying to transfer somewhere.
I suspect the only way to address this issue which seems to creep up in all MMOs is to reverse the way things currently work and and have the game constantly adjust to balance rewards based on what the players are doing instead of setting the rewards static and the players adjusting to maximize returns.
Simply put, things players do more of are things they find more rewarding than things they do less of. If the pattern holds for hundreds of thousands of players, clearly an imbalance exists in perceived effort/risk/reward. Perhaps MMOs could be programmed to analyze those trends and adjust rewards up on content that is under utilized and adjust rewards down on content that is over utilized (while accounting for external factors like special events). That kind of system might roughly track a balance point where the majority of players find most alternatives equally viable or it might possibly lag behind player trends resulting in the currently popular activity constantly changing as the last popular activity becomes progressively less rewarding.