Guild Wars 2

KOPPER.1458:

Explain why you think this is a F2P game now? You still have to buy the game and you don’t need to spend anything on it, as you now do not.

Sure, I’ll explain why I consider it an f2p business model currently, imo. At launch it was clearly a b2p model, you bought the game to play, no sub cost. In a subscription model game I play, I pay by the year and that includes free expansions regardless of subscription plan. That game has little to nothing to do with RMT beyond some clothing options for the most part.

The two games business models were very similar, but anet charges for game content release/expansions rather than for a monthly sub being the difference, both imo acceptable. Neither relying on RMT stores to drive the game as f2p’s do.

That has changed for gw2, go buy yourself an infinite continue token and ponder that. Sure, you can get some plays in, but to keep playing, you need to purchase from the gem store. Also, there has been no real talk of a paid expansion, but they are ramping up the gem store evermore so each passing month. You may need to buy the ever cheapening game to get in, but once in you are paying for new content ‘a la carte’, it is no different than how an f2p business model operates. That has already started.

The only game I recall that wasn’t an f2p but didn’t speak of a solid expansion release by the end of the first year was earth and beyond. There was no f2p back then, and an expansion wasn’t announced because by then the game had been abandoned by the investors for something else (i.e EA land ex-sims online). I suppose if the f2p business model was the usual back then, they would have gone to that, but it wasn’t so the game was abandoned of development and then closed soon after.

GW2 is the second mmo game I’ve come across that was not speaking of an expansion by years end. Since this game is not a subscription game, then they must have changed modes, which by how they are boosting the usage of RMT, has switched over to an f2p business model, or wrapped up in one at this point. As time goes by, the initial purchase price will continue to decrease as they more so rely on gem sales to drive this business plan.

As for you not needing to spend money on it, someone does and you exchange gold for it. This can only work temporarily as players have more and more gold while less new players spawn. They will need to bring in new players which will spend money to catch up. Once new incoming player accounts dry up, even to the point of lowering the initial entry price to $0, and likely those players refusing to spend money, as with all f2p’s the system breaks down given time, and has become so mundane (grinding for gold exchange etc) most players have long since left for a shiny new game.

At this point it goes one way or the other, so I put it as in an IMO response. I assume they are watching the numbers while psychologists, economists and investors are all attentively attending meetings on the future of the game and it’s business model.

I wouldn’t hang onto it, you never know they might put them on sale when the cap is extended. Trying to get your gems back then to buy the slots more cheaply might take longer than the sale lasts.. hehe

Delete. I already have a stack of 250, but I keep that stack for a link joke. Not as funny though as like linking dull knife when there is a gear link frenzy in LA. But still, a joke is a joke, and these chests certainly qualify as such.

Really? On a European server? Usually when there isn’t a pacific server, the pacific island nations come to our US/NA servers in mmo’s. They are going to open a Chinese server I’ve read (and suggested months ago), but I know you guys cant play there for reasons I won’t mention here. On FA I’ve seen Australian and Japanese guild names. At least I know Australians are very active here such as in United Aussies (uA) or whatever. There was a JPN or JAPN guild here, I forget which, but I’m not sure how active they are. Ask around, guest around, you’ll probably find something.

about $7000 …oh wait no about $7/mo avg. More so in the beginning but nothing any longer. If they release a full expansion I’ll buy it and maybe get back to the avg $7/mo, But as long as they keep relying on gem sales, sell tokens to play temporary content, increasingly gravitate everything to the gem store rather than crank out epic content on full expansions, my interest in this game drops like a rock. So now I just don’t spend any more, and later if it keeps going in this direction maybe I’ll play/support something else.

Spent more early on on a few bank expansions and a couple inventory slots on a character. Used to get lvl80 transmute stones early on in the game (map completion and I think dailies before laurels), but those shifted to the the gem store where I bought some straight and others using gold exchange. Bought a character slot then two with gold exchange (have 8-80’s). Bought one set of armor skins (early on).

So about $7/mo avg at this point and dropping. As long as they treat this game as an f2p, I’ll be spending money elsewhere. The concept of paying for expansions rather than a sub was doable to me since some other games charge for sub but release large expansions for free. But, I don’t like f2p’s and RMT as a means to support a game, it’s always fail in the long run imo. I’ve had subs 6/yrs+ in some games, f2p’s are just get rich quick schemes, disposable games that investors look to make quick money to then invest in another disposable f2p game. We should be looking towards a real expansion by now, not more content revolving around RMT.

tl;dr If I had known anet was going to launch as a b2p and then switch to an f2p model within that, I would have never spent a penny on this game. $7/mo avg up to this point but now $0/mo until they switch back to the b2p model. And I won’t be using gold exchange any longer either, I won’t promote the use of RMT/gems.

Viking Jorun.5413:

Daywolf.2630:

Viking Jorun.5413:

I just hear birds… All. The kitten . Time. I’ve checked everywhere, under my bed, under my Kudzu, under my charr, but nobody has a bird whistle. Freaky as hell.

Oh freaky, yes, I heard that last night. I don’t know if you ever messed with sound engineering, but it was like a hyper-active 3D effect on a bird whistle. It was so out of place, at first I thought it sounded like it came from down the hall. I have a bose system on a high end sound card, so over-lifelike I about went for some 12g quail load… heh would have been one less risen quail at any rate.

It was a joke. Kudzu makes ambient bird noises constantly.

ah yeah, but just the same, no one was around me at the time. Whatever it was, it was double the volume and using something like a 3D filter, yet clean and sharp.

Viking Jorun.5413:

I just hear birds… All. The kitten . Time. I’ve checked everywhere, under my bed, under my Kudzu, under my charr, but nobody has a bird whistle. Freaky as hell.

Oh freaky, yes, I heard that last night. I don’t know if you ever messed with sound engineering, but it was like a hyper-active 3D effect on a bird whistle. It was so out of place, at first I thought it sounded like it came from down the hall. I have a bose system on a high end sound card, so over-lifelike I about went for some 12g quail load… heh would have been one less risen quail at any rate.

goldenwing.8473:

Thank you for making the distinction between outdoor and instanced raiding.

Ah np, it had to be said. Although I never played DAoC beyond a trial later on, I already had long running subs to both UO and EQ1 at the time, then later long time in SWG as well as player classic/retro servers of the previous two. I did study the DAoC system though, since I have an interest in the development side of things. WoW just wasn’t my cup of tea heh, though I didn’t play vanilla WoW (beyond for four months later) since I had SWG and later EVE among other indie and AAA funded mmo’s.

But as I see it, there are a lot of things that can be fixed by polishing the open world stuff that exists as well as introducing 30 man instanced raids.

Such as for Orr temples which are very raid like, I noticed that at times it’s hard to get enough people involved in the whole chain, since all one needs to do is come in at the last possible moment and hit the last boss a few times and get full loot drop. This encourages players to be lazy, and if the chain should fail by the five doing the chain wile the 50 look on waiting for the last boss to appear, then they just go zerg some other world boss, or three or five of them while they wait to someone to bother with the temple chains.

Now I wouldn’t say to remove that as it is, let them still hit the boss a few times or whatever, but clearly those that added to the chain from point to point should have a greater % of a better drop from success at the end of it all. I mean how often do we spend 30m to over an hour working our way there then 100 people come in at the end and start linking the exotics they got while those that had been there only wound up with a couple rares at best? And those 100 came in from doing three or four world bosses in the time we worked the chain all the way down, or from champs.

I seriously believe that some adjustments could be made to the structure of it all, polish, to avoid this, and at least draw more people into doing the chains rather than just skipping it all and wait for someone else to do 98% of the work. That would seem more raid like anyway, and a % that would possibly drop an account bound ascended armor pc. when they look for ways to introduce them into the game. They need to figure a way to introduce the armor into the game other than how they did with the current weapons anyway, just like they did differently with trinkets, right?

As for instanced raids, I say 30 because that is the size of a commander squad. I know they have been talking about doing something with commander in pve content, what better purpose than to be the raid leader? No need for scaling instanced raids, just set them for 30, like dungeons are for 5 (min 20 can do like less than 5 in dungeons). Commander is the one that starts the instanced raid. Having two commanders even better, since if one quits/DC’s, the other commander inherits the instance rather than it just booting everyone out. Then of course radar map tracking of others in the squad, just like it would be seriously useful for guilds using squads in guild missions.

Then too, add another way to get ascended armor when available, rather than crafting or from fractals. Not saying the only way to get the gear, but certainly one way which would make open world raids and instanced raids to be raid like. Such as another way for such gear being through guild missions or what have you.

polish-polish-polish

An angel, has got it’s wings!
Next update, random harp sounds…

danbuter.2314:

Lots of “nice” comments in Map chat if you do.

Actually my block list for champ zerg farmers has exceeded my block list for gold sellers in recent patches. And it’s not just doing champs out of turn that gets them going. Please reinstate instanced dungeon farming for these kids. Out of sight out of mind.

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

In Guild Wars 2, the monsters raid you.

Also, check out Guild Missions

Oh yes, that’s right, overlooked that guilds are recognized as a group too. So you have parties, squads and guilds.

anzenketh.3759:

Daywolf.2630:

anzenketh.3759:

Daywolf.2630:

anzenketh.3759:

If you are looking for instanced raids you will likely not get that here as they are not going to increase the party size.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jy7CcwnfUdU

hmm? 30 is enough
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Squad

That is open world though.

You’re speaking of current use, I’m referring to mechanics. The mechanics are already there, just not the usage.

There are no mechanics in game to allow more then 5 players to enter a dungeon instance.

Read edit, I figured you would say that.

anzenketh.3759:

Daywolf.2630:

anzenketh.3759:

If you are looking for instanced raids you will likely not get that here as they are not going to increase the party size.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jy7CcwnfUdU

hmm? 30 is enough
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Squad

That is open world though.

You’re speaking of current use, I’m referring to mechanics. The mechanics are already there, just not the usage.

In other words, to break it down, this is usually programmed/scripted from the instanced side (I’ve programmed group instances) where the instancing script attached to the trigger allows or disallows categories of people when activated. So whether you call the script to allow a party or in this case a squad, it’s handles from the instancing script. Both parties and squads are technically the same, apart from how they are categorized by name to the instance. Like in dungeons, if the script was changed to allow for a squad, then it would allow a squad to join to that instance. But since dungeons are designed for five or less in regards to content, then the instance script is recognizing parties and not squads as it was programmed to do.

Vayne.8563:

Fractal weapon skins are still account bound and can only be gotten in higher levels of the fractals. Aside from that, time doesn’t make you hard core or even good.

Quite true. And really, there is no hardcore content in this game. The real debate is between casual and core gaming, not hardcore here. Three groups, including a center group. Generally people are in one or maybe two groups working from the center in most cases. Such as I gravitate towards core/hardcore.

So working from that perspective, GW2 started more in favor of the core player category, but has increasingly shifted to the casual player category. Now if we start talking old eq1 raiding, SWG open-world faction warfare (pre-cu), EVE corporate/alliance sovereignty in null space, having anything like those here, we’ll talk hardcore

Look, it’s like this. Being in a group 100% without a doubt CAN raise your loot drop rates. If you are using AOE spells or weapons on multiple mobs, and others in your party are using AOE as well, it won’t even be up for debate whether or not there is a drop rate increase. However, if you are using a strictly single target build or in a group hunting single targets such as champs, there is no real difference whether you are in a group or not.

There is just some threshold of damage that needs to be done per individual mob. Not in all cases, but in most cases, such as champs in invasions will drop if you hardly scratch them while not in a party. But once you reach that threshold of % or contribute to reaching that threshold of % as part of a party, then it kicks in the % chance of rolling a drop for you. That’s as far as grouping factors into the loot drop script, it doesn’t factor into the quality of the drop such as luck% can play into that.

But yeah, I don’t even understand how it’s up for debate. Go get yourself a strong AOE build and run something like grenth, once in a party of 5 and once w’o. You will probably avg 30% more drops in such a case as that, regardless of the quality of drops, but counting everything including salvage item stacks.

anzenketh.3759:

If you are looking for instanced raids you will likely not get that here as they are not going to increase the party size.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jy7CcwnfUdU

hmm? 30 is enough
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Squad

Yep, I’ve never asked for a gear link, not unless they are doing horibly bad. But in dungeons, it really is not hard to pick out the problems. If you can’t outdamage my guard, and I notice such things lol while I’m hovering over your corpse for a fast revive, then it’s time to pack your kittens and go find a jp. Really, I dont see a point to this thread, it would need to be a joke on a full group of newbies for them to not catch it right away.

WatchTheShow.7203:

When I was doing the world bosses (before they nerfed it to once per account per day to farm enough gold for my legendary, I never once got a precursor. I did all the world bosses as soon as they came up all day, every day for about a month. I got 1 exotic warhorn from Jormag (didn’t even sell for 1g), and 1 exotic zombie hand (think it was a sceptre) from Tequatl, which sold for 1.2g. I mostly just did the bosses to salvage rares for ectos.

That’s pretty low. A few weeks ago when most were farming invasions, I had 3 exotics from world bosses in one day. Really odd. But usually, I’ll get a few a week. More often from temples, least are from dragons. I seem to get them more often from some places than others. Like MAW, pretty rare, but I remember when they added the bonus chest, it was on overflow until they nerfed it all to daily. Have gotten I think 1 exotic from my many MAW runs, a trinket which is on my guard.

I got an exotic once or twice from JP’s (one last week, 78 dagger), and I don’t do them a lot… My guess is that the rate for anything better is probably the same or lower than getting a precursor from a world boss.

How many times? You know how many of these chests are in-game? It takes me hours just to get through a sliver of them. Anyway it’s not the amount of available chests, it’s the % to the drop. 30 chests I’m lucky to even get 1 exotic worth 1g. I’m not even considering an legendary any longer, sold off all those mats. The only other thing you can do is play the mystic toilet as many do. Pull out the CC# and buy tons of gems, convert to gold and buy exotics to dump in, working as intended me thinks. Legendaries should have been the standard for the game, most weapons should have looked nice imo, making the game look nice, but this makes more money I guess.

huh? I’m pressing the kick vote option. See how fast my fingers move. Click kick gone. That’s how it works. I don’t care if someone has shiny gear, click kick gone, many times. nuf

You got lost in SWG?!? how…. nm
I loved getting lost in eq1, seriously lost without a compass or map and no instant TP/WP. Loved it! Oh, and when it got dark… oooh RUUUN!!! Was awesome… <3 (early eq1 anyway)

Here? …
love is a strong word…
would need to think on it

edit: I don’t know, I’m starting to think you never played SWG. /me shrugs

Five open slots, so make five classes? Play each to lvl 10 then decide. Early on, I just decided to play all 8, so I didn’t have a prob with decisions… though in the end I liked the stealth thief and fire ele the best. Stealth thief was obvious for me, but didn’t have a clue I’d like the fire ele. No one can decide for you. Of course with ascended gear incoming, I guess the decision is more critical now, for the time investment to fully gear up. If spvp it doesn’t matter much, but in wvw it can matter, especially faced with players in all ascended gear at some point. So just try the classes then stick to one I guess.

Raids as in old-school style open world raids? Or instanced raids? Probably closest thing to old-school raiding are cursed shore temples. Nice when there are 20-30 people doing it, but too easy when 100 show up to farm now – for ascended mats etc. Mel is one thing, but from doing gates of arah you open up the anchorage WP so you can then work on grenth afterwards. It’s a nice run really, if 20-30 there it can be a challenge. The other temples of Orr are worth doing too, they all take a fair amount of people to do. Unlike world boss encounters that most strong characters can solo. Dragons thus far have been more of a simple farming event as well, though jormag offers a little challenge – although I have never seen it fail.

Instanced raids, nothing like that here. Would be nice to see something like planes of power here (eq1), keyed progression. But seems like the devs are more focused on easy content for grinding and for 10yo’s heh. Lets not over-complicate things I guess.

Pray For Kosmos.5849:

jweez.7214:

Colin Johnson plans for this to be the last tier of gear. Exotic was just to easy to ascertain and anet had collectively come to the decision to try akittenagain. Googling quotes doesn’t help your cause. We all know what they said and they know what they said.

Exotic being too “easy” is just a cop-out. They planned this all along. They need to explain to the fans why they changed their game design abruptly.

I could probably agree with that. At least they left the door open for it, to see which business model gets them the quicker money. It’s always been there, because they did it with legendary weapons to start and still 90% of my guild is more about grinding that out rather than doing stuff with one another. Then added ascended trinkets for more grind, seeing if players will do it.

Since enough players focused in on grinding, it’s worked out for them. For those doing the single character grind, yes exotics were very easy, while legendary weapons provided the never-ending grind for them. For the rest of us with no real proclaimed “main” and gearing multiple characters, as well as with each having stat, sigil and rune choices per character, the exotic tier was far from easy. Now where is the new content? Oh we re-gear for it now, grind it out again, for content someday, and play temporary content that needs gems to buy a continue token in the meantime.

Corvindi.5734:

Gems for gold. The root of all unsatisfactory grind in this game. Some of us were there warning you from the beginning.

Sorry we weren’t wrong.

QFT. Quite correct, sir. Everything has come to revolve around it and will only become increasingly so as it has.

And the way it stands now, it’s absolutely endless this treadmill is. Completely unreachable with what has been added and what they plan to do. With the supposed focus on content, over the past year I came up with eight classes averaging two sets of exotic armor, half in transmuted cultural, 80% transmuted armor and weapons, three sets of weapons avg, half with two sets of trinkets while still working on getting them all ascended trinkets, and two commander tags. Why? so as actual playable content is released, I can do better than bring a knife to a gunfight.

Easily, if I had focused on one character/class alone, I could have bought most of the mats for a full set of ascended (weapons, trinkets and armor) as well as produced one or two legendary weapons. But now to outfit all my characters to the new tier, and considering I haven’t even finished the added trinket tier yet, well… I don’t see myself sticking around the next 5 or 10 years to do it now, especially with the lack of focus on actual content. I just don’t consider herding the masses of zerg farmers around from place to place every month for mats, and gold to buy mats, as actual content. And though I’ve bought gems with gold and some real money, the real money stops since obvious the bar has been raised so high it would take wheelbarrows full of cash to ever catch up and update all my characters to the current tier.

I’m obviously not the type of customer they want. One that spends a little money ave $10 a month and enjoys to play expanded content. They want players that are going to start a new account, spellbound by a new game to play, start dropping truckloads of money into the gem store to catch up, start a gambling addiction, then finally burn out – quit – and make way for the next new player account.

1. IT/server staff
2. game support staff
3. forum moderators
4, sales/promotion department
5. game dev psychologists (e.g fun vs RMT draw/addiction)

GW2 pretty much takes the most easy kitten (baby cat) stuff from some 15yrs of mmo history and wraps it up into one game…. and adds more kittens. imo the selling point is the population focus, all working together to defend against the onslaught of kittens. I’m not sayin it’s a bad thing, just sayin…

Really? Out of eight classes, only my thief seems so ridged. I never change anything on my thief apart from gear and the elite skill slot between two skills. Most flexible is probably between my ele and guard, I’m always changing things on the fly with them. The rest of the classes, eh I change things around but just to switch modes, not out of necessity. I’ve also been adding in vendor kits and such, like mortars and teleportation guns, there is a bit of variety out there on those vendors. Other than that just been waiting to see those new skills. But pretty much I’m not locked onto one class, I like the variety of changing to any class when I feel like it.

The last time? Well a month ago I bought a Charrzooka for my engi, paid quite a few gold for it. I was horribly disappointing when I found out it animated and sounded like just a normal rifle/shotgun. I felt like I had just completely wasted a small chunk of gold. About a week or so ago, when doing world bosses with my fire ele, I got a charzooka drop. I was like “YES!!” and quickly listed it on TP to get my money back :P

What? No record of it? That’s really odd. Stuff like this is stored in your character/account database, and they should be keeping back-ups. So either they didn’t say that or are too lazy to look? Running a database query on the backups should give a complete history of the item in question.

Wolfs Shadow.7234:

I came back because my friends got into it again, but are on a different server.

err you can guest for free. You can even be in the same guild. You just cant wvw. You want to f33l and sp33k l33t @ p33ps and transfer to a T1 wvw server, then pay forward your 20 bucks. Yup.

It’s all the zerg farming, since that started. You see, when you get so may players together, it causes bandwidth and resources to multiply exponentially, probably a ripple effect through the server cluster. They could fine tune the server code, making it less laggy, but then that would cause the precision of player tracking to go down, even to the point where it would make players seem to run backwards etc. lol and that’s not pretty I’ll tell ya. But yeah, that’s how it works, but the solution is just to tone down the congregations of players somehow. Yeah, I was lagging so hard today, I just finished my daily and logged out. I figure I’ll log in after midnight and play a couple hours when less laggy.

Oh and another thing. I’ve noticed in the past, when bots are out in force, they cause lag as well. Not as bad, but noticeable. I haven’t seen any of that lately, but in the past when it was bad, lots of lag then I’d see a bot on a node. The lag now, it’s more recent, since so many have joined the legions of zergs to farm for new weapons.

Oh regarding the forums, that’s some backend database error I would guess. I highly doubt it has anything to do with the in-game lag. It’s spitting out quick errors for some reason, not so much about a slow-down or a time-out.

A lot of the guns are that way, sadly. Such as I bought a charrzooka, no rockets, just shotgun blasts. It’s the point when I started to realize Anet designed stuff that way so you will drop tons of real money into gems to buy a legendary. Why make the game legendary when you can make more money with mediocrity? I wasn’t expecting to blow things up etc, but it would have been legendary if it at least acted like a charzooka to some degree. Luckily I got a charrzooka drop a few weeks later, sold it right away to get my gold back. I figure some other guy wound up saying “wth!?!”.

tom.7468:

Nuka Cola.8520:

i can’t believe some are actually asking for nerfs… are you like stupid or something? this is probably the game that received the most nerfs in its 1st year than any games released in the passed decade and you want more? like wtf

exactly he want it to take longer to grind for ascended etc. What happened to play the way you want !? some people just want to get legendary in this decade. Then others want to nerf some of the only profitable farms. Not everyone have time to play 15hours a day. Some people like me have jobs for them profitable farms are good.

I don’t think you read his post. I must agree with him in that it causes problem for others that are in the same zone doing other content. It’s very problematic for all in the zone. I don’t agree with his solution, but I do agree with his premise. Of course proposed solutions get heckled, but fun-fun we can just keep at each others throats in the zones until the game melts and everyone logs out for good.

Oxe.6142:

Daywolf.2630:

Oxe.6142:

Mahaedros.7085:

Oxe.6142:

I think Fort Aspenwood is now in Tier 1 for WvWvW

This one was hilarious.

Blackgate, Jade Quarry and Fort Aspenwood

Two of those are T1 servers. Aspenwood isn’t one of those two.

https://leaderboards.guildwars2.com/en/na/wvw
hmmm reads T1 though rating is #5. But it’s in T1 slot, sooo. Like last month, rated 5 ir 6 but in T3.

Anet added a random component to matchups some time back. This week SoR was placed with T2 and lower teams and Aspenwood was placed with T1 teams. That doesn’t change the rankings, SoR is #2 in the game and a T1 server.

The problem with this is that T1 servers are miles ahead of T2 servers in terms of ability, coordination and participation. It’s simply not fair for T2 and below servers to be matched up against T1.

Case in point, the current scores of those matches.
http://mos.millenium.org/na

Keep in mind, next month everything changes with this WvW league thing and every server in the top league will be facing T1 servers every week for 7 weeks. It’s going to be a slaughter.

Well yes, it’s rankings that count. But nonetheless, FA is in T1. As for coordination, it’s maybe a bit more than that. Actually FA has fair coordination, but often overall composition is different, at least when FA does have population. Compared to like another server that is say very thief heavy.

And also it’s probably one of the few upper ranking servers that remained stable when server transfers were introduced, not much change one way or the other. If at that time, FA had focused on moving up a couple ranks, chances are many that had transferred to those other servers would have transferred to FA for WvW. So sure, the gap widens over time, but that is the fault of Anet.

Dagraan.2854:

Daywolf.2630:

1. Decrease the champ timers in Orr and Frostgorge, significantly.
2. Increase champs in Southsun Cove.
Problem solved.

have you ever fought the champs in southsun? or actually been there to begin with?

Ok, 1 vote for nerfing champs. Southsun to hard for ya, I understand.
Myself, I vote not to nerf champs, but to just move the focus elsewhere, increase champs in Southsun, increase spawn timers in FG and CS.

@Orin See, another extreme, it all revolves around dungeons now. You are working from a narrow view of the game, content and class builds. Meanwhile my guard can solo champs and some world bosses, yet you somehow think guards are useless. My guard is my main dungeon choice, not for glass cannon speed runs (which has been more or less nerfed out), but for regular mixed groups, and especially melee groups. No certain class or build is “necessary” only if you are a in a narrow view regarding the aspects of the game. Farm on, Bro!

1. Decrease the champ timers in Orr and Frostgorge, significantly.
2. Increase champs in Southsun Cove.
Problem solved.

Oxe.6142:

Mahaedros.7085:

Oxe.6142:

I think Fort Aspenwood is now in Tier 1 for WvWvW

This one was hilarious.

Blackgate, Jade Quarry and Fort Aspenwood

Two of those are T1 servers. Aspenwood isn’t one of those two.

https://leaderboards.guildwars2.com/en/na/wvw
hmmm reads T1 though rating is #5. But it’s in T1 slot, sooo. Like last month, rated 5 ir 6 but in T3.

Really? Because on my server 20 people do jormag and a 200 man tsunami zergz in at the last moment to get their hard earned rewards, then go back to champs. Then I log back in and get mine…

Mahaedros.7085:

Oxe.6142:

I think Fort Aspenwood is now in Tier 1 for WvWvW

This one was hilarious.

Blackgate, Jade Quarry and Fort Aspenwood

FA is usually in T2. Was in T3 last month for a week or something, even though it had a score to be in T2. But at least FA made a serious killing there in T3 hehe. But, pretty much all year, T2, even before transfers. Not sure what happened this week, probably a lot of wvw combatants forced out to grind/farm/beg for ascendeds :/
They should just bring the spvp locker to wvw imo …but w/o the respecs.

tic.7425:

Awesome, open a smithy in Queensdale, and I’ll buy all my ascended gear from you, and i’ll be sure to return to get repairs….

yea…

Yea… the day they open persistent world housing. Even in SWG (pre-nge when people played), player built towns and shops made crafting worth while. But here, it’s not really mmo crafting, there is no social aspect to it, and never will be. Even in EVE, there are social aspects to crafting, especially in logistics. Here, you gather from an instanced node, can craft in an instanced zone, post your junk on the TP from an instance, and collect your gold. If crafting were not really-really-really easy here as it is, seeing that there is 0 social aspect to it, would be just better off zerg farming with everyone else.

sazberryftw.3809:

Peetee.9406:

I think Thief is the most overplayed class. All you need to do is equip 2 daggers and hit the 2 key. If you’re hitting any other keys, you’re def overplaying.

Thief is one of the hardest classes to play well. S/P blind spam is a lot more effective in a lot of places than D/D skill 2.

Yep, I agree with that. That pistol is good for multi targets, D/D is more single target focused. 1v1 or 1v2 hard hits and good stuff! For more, that pistol works well. That’s why I carry a bow with D/D, make up some for lack of multi-target effectiveness. A lot of bows too, sigils for the situation.

Peetee.9406:

I think Thief is the most overplayed class. All you need to do is equip 2 daggers and hit the 2 key. If you’re hitting any other keys, you’re def overplaying.

hah I wish. But not so simple with a D/D stealth thief. I have something like 7 stealth triggers and use all weapon skills on key remapping. It can be that way though, standing behind a world boss or champ when it’s concerned with some other target. Otherwise the keys can be pretty intense, especially in wvw. I have all classes, I’ve found that the thief takes the most concentration to play right. But then, I see less thieves being played on my server over recent months. But then in wvw, I see some other servers just exploding with thieves. My most played class, anyway.

Oranisagu.3706:

you can disagree with me as much as you want or claim I have no idea about group play – that’s your right of course, everybody can have his own opinion. just as I think you’re completely wrong, if you think a cleric guard would be necessary in any dungeon. and I think you’re incompetent if you even consider ranging an option for most fights. my mesmer is always in melee range and only leaves if he really needs some breathing space. my guard who has a higher base toughness as well as a lot of sustain always is in melee range, despite being zerker.
so you have your view, I have mine.

The difference in our views is that you are talking in extremes and I am not, though you think I am. Example, I never used the word “necessary” as you presume I did, but somehow you heard that. Yet you claim guards with healing “don’t do anything useful”, which too is an extreme, though that one was in writing. Even in that, I can only guess that you take it that a guard that can heal is 100% heal and nothing else, since your post had a lot of extremes already. Not only does my guard heal very well in cleric armor (as many guards have a set of), but can dish out damage quite well. Healing + damage but with less group buffs, works for me.

Now if this is about extremes, then yes warrior is difficult, because the extreme of warrior is glass cannon. Glass cannon builds imo are fail in most cases, it’s a farming build for constant repetition.

Paul.4081:

Don’t expect GW2 to run well on your machine. My comp. can run all the newest games and I can add multisampling and sparse grid anti-aliasing etc. using Nvidia Inspector. In GW2 without any AA (except SweetFX) it runs like a slideshow at times. LA is a consistent 20-30 fps.

Hmm yeah that’s odd, mine is a couple years old, older model at least, got it a year ago. As long as I set to medium textures, it all runs fine. AMD system with an Nvidia card. Textures shouldn’t be an issue with the card, but they are with this game. AA on I notice no degradation. Also reflections just don’t work at all. But otherwise, pretty stable. Guess results may vary.

mjharrison.3209:

The art is great, no complaints there.

Oh that. I’d give the art a 5/10. The world art is pretty good, but the player gear art is pretty mediocre. I’d give it a 6/10 on that count, maybe 7 for trying, but I don’t think they are doing the best that they can do quite frankly, so a 5. …edit: so a five (that ok, filter?) edit2: lol then it decides to accept the “5”.

So you have some outstanding gear in the game, but most of the rest is really something that needs a transmutation stone to make it look acceptable. For the most part, you can only get those from RMT/Gems, as well as for many of the newer skins (e.g. lion chest scraps etc).

Legendaries should have been the standard, much of the exotics more in pace with how legendaries look. But making legendaries not the standard, and of little variety, drives gem sales for the heavy grind on materials to get one.

So it works in their favor: create 90% mediocre gear but sell more gems from the exchange. But, in the end, what matters is game-play, right? I know that is true for some, and it’s certainly something that kept me away from WoW hehehe (so many bored players always there). But for that, game-play, I still say one needs to play to find out. GW2 seems to be going through a transition …it seems. So even more so now, I wouldn’t even begin to speculate on the future. I’ve seen mmo’s go through big transitions into a literal crash and burn, so my answer could be jaded from such experiences, at least regarding big non-indie projects.

Oranisagu.3706:

I hate when people say guard or warrior are easy to play while mesmer is hard. no, it’s just easier to play bad on the heavy armor classes. good play is just as demanding on a warrior or guard as it’s on a mesmer.
I don’t really main anything, if I did, i’d say mostly mesmer and lately my ele again. having a bad mesmer in your group is just very clear. no pulls, no reflects, no nullfields or disenchanters, the whole group suffers and everyone can see it plainly.
a bad warrior is harder to spot. they probably just don’t do much damage while not bringing anything else to the table.
healing guards? easiest to play, you don’t do anything useful, heal mainly yourself and the group has to do all the work. I prefer a decent zerker guard with AH and purevoice. fights last shorter and I don’t have to worry about condi removal myself.

No, for sure, warrior is far more forgiving. You can even put it down for a month and pick it right back up. It’s hard to be a bad warrior, apart from those that should just stay at range when dodge is too complected for them. They can always roll a ranger.

Mesmer is about the middle of the road, so I disagree with you there too. Harder than warrior for sure. Not as hard as ele though.

Healing guards are somewhere between warrior and mesmer. You miss a dodge while up so close, you are going to feel it. Thinking guards do nothing useful only shows a lack of understanding about the class and party structures. I’d certainly take a cleric-guard in a heavy melee party rather than taking a ranger into such a party and w/o that guard. A pet is no substitute.

I didn’t say it was getting easier or anything, it was already easy at launch, and has in almost every game released the past decade. Drink all the codliver you want, crafting will never be wonderful in and of itself, it’s what you do with it that makes it good. But with the TP and account bound bs, it could never be really good, no true social aspect to it, long since gone.

But sure, forcing people to do it is probably the lowest form of game play. Not only does it mess with people that think crafting is tedious (don’t we all?), but for us that endure it and yet look favorably on crafting, our experience is taken away by the overflow of crafters and their wares that really want nothing to do with it all. Just a flood of it.

Such as mentioning UO, well classic UO, basically the same thing happened there. Devs decided to give special rewards through crafting. drawing all players into it, while removing the other social aspects of it. That was around the release of AoS, and the point where UO really began to loose subs as a result of the crazy changes in many parts of the game-play. More or less the game became a grind-fest, pushing players into content they didn’t like and burning them out on the treadmill, while everything became marginalized and all in their new luck suits. Sound familiar?