Guild Wars 2

And yes I ask too, is this “80” set in stone or really a rumor?
I’d be far from surprised if set in stone, this mechanic has been on Mel for some time now, tough less than 80.

kossman.8206:

It was definitely unbalanced before.. This is their answer.

Doesn’t mean it becomes balanced just because it changed. It’s rather typical that mmo’s go from one extreme to the other, unfortunately. It’s out of balance because in the long run it’ll most likely be fail/undoable much like most temples have been the past several weeks.

Oh well, took me a year to get my 5k chest since I don’t intentionally grind for points, but dang it was a nice chest. A mini, really? heh now I don’t mind so much that I deleted my first character slot and that being a frustratingly fail ranger class.

kossman.8206:

omg… months ago were countless posts about how the dragons were too easy… Anet listened to us…

sighs I knew this post would come…

One extreme to the other…. As usual….
And to think… you havent even tried it yet….

/troll on

No, it’s just out of balance, dude.

Also someone mentioned that they didn’t know if it was living world or instanced. It’s obviously living world. They are revamping, not creating additional content. An instance would be new content while the old removed. Or you think it logical that the same dragon is fighting at two locations at the same time? Doesn’t seem to be to me.

Only thing I can think of is slowing down the spawn timer, or at least at some point. It won’t matter early on, as many players wander from new content to new content. But at times like this when you are usually looking at 20-50 during peak, Teq happening less often will mean more players during each time slot. Not ideal but doable.

chemiclord.3978:

But the actual class itself DOESN’T fit the archetype much at all. Rangers really are a melee class. Their best damage, much like all the other non-spellcasting classes, is done up close. In theory, they are a little bit versatile than the other physical damage classes when it comes to ranged options, but Rangers are still an inside/outside class rather than the reverse.

Yet you hardly ever see a ranger pull out a blade in high-end content. Yes, while leveling, but in final build it’s just not the norm at all. More often you will see a warrior back off and unload from ranged though, at least until recovered.

colesy.8490:

If you ranked players on this forum from competent to has no idea what they’re talking about, you’d be at the latter end with almost everyone else on the forum.

Rangers are fine, it’s bow camping bads who are the problem.

uh-huh, because most of us who have lvl80 rangers among other classes (or all) know nothing. Rangers rrrock! heh

It’ll work for now, but in the long run when numbers drop due to other content, I hope they rethink this and lower the required numbers.

So what, they do another zerg fest living story release down the road and those of us that do world bosses as our daily game and don’t like zerging are basically left with no game? Excuse me while I go solo another world boss, but at least (in some cases) it can be done when most everyone is off zergling the latest content farming boon and only pop in at the very last moment to collect their hard earned rewards. Oh look, another guy came in at the last ten seconds and claimed his precursor…

Or give us some long instanced high-end content raids, not that I’m any fan of instancing. But in the end, I think the masses will return to the most kitten easy farming available to them while the rest of us craving a challenge will have a rude awakening.

Remember Orr? Remember Southsun? Currently for some people, boss encounters are a significant part of the game, I don’t want to see this part of the game abandoned too.

Seems to be more stabilized active player wise, but growing in that new active players are constantly replacing inactive players to some percentage of the overall active population. Currently you just see less overall since most are off doing the new super zerging content. But sure, growing since this is a b2p so sub numbers just don’t count. Just like f2p, marketing loves it because they can boast of accounts created vs. actual active players, thus can spin it as a popular game when it’s really not. I think we will have a better idea of things by the two year mark as with most games, but certainly GW2 isn’t a failure like those that were washed out in their first year. IMO I think it’s doing well overall.

Blue boxers rule! At least Asura have a sense of style.

tigirius.9014:

That’s why when they posted the aniversary % numbers of which class was played the most, some of us were asking to post which ones per which category, WvW, PVP, or PVE to show that in PVE it hurts the most.

I don’t recall it being most played, I don’t think they said that …or anything really. I think if they did it by /age (hours played on class) rather than rolled, it would look much different. Everyone starts with five slots, chances are most have a ranger (mine is in #7), though dusty they may be compared to warriors, guards, thieves and even mesmers. Not to mention they are the most favored class for botting.

I have all classes and I find that the only real usefulness for ranger is like taking quick shots at the golem world boss at far range etc. But then my engi can do that too. I’ve only taken my ranger into TA since quick long range can help there. Otherwise my ranger sits and collects dust. My first real mmo ranger was in early EQ1, seemed more ranger like than here. This is more of a pet class like a tamer no matter how you cut it. I pretty much stick to spiders as mobile net turrets that stick more to range. They seem a little less annoying anyway.

Huge knock-backs are just flat out mean to melee players. Like last night I started dagger storm with my thief and here along comes a ranger to blow the target far away seemingly for the fun of griefing reasons. Happens a lot actually. Especially annoying when on my warrior.

hollowcrown.4872:

However I think GW2 focuses too much on being funny and cutesie, which boxes of fun and celebrations and toymakers all of the time.

All the world ending stuff is completely contradicted by all the goofiness of fun boxes and the bad humour in the world.

Pretty reflective of RL, imo. All we need is Miley popping out of a fun box and dancing around lol

But seriously, I think the diversity is good for mmo game design. I’d like to see even more range, like bright alien florescent glowing forests to burning choking darker twisted landscapes where even the risen would have a hard time surviving. Maybe even introduce an Asura portal to a moon where they establish a futuristic sci-fi style base where the golems become the new overlords. IMO an opportunity to break the common molds of elves vs spaceships.

fellyn.5083:

Thoughts – why should magic find give Person A an advantage of Person B? You seem to imply that you deserve more than other players.

Risk vs. reward. At least as it stands now. If a group is all in MF gear, they are weaker and the risk is higher for failure but the rewards better on success (not speaking of chests). The new system takes away choice and risk to introduce account wide MF grind.

Lord Kuru.3685:

• The playerbase will have lots of MF, and will thus should be richer as a whole, with more good loot dropping — theoretically. However, that also means that Anet can more easily decide to uniformly nerf drop rates. MF does not have to be a factor in their decisions at all because everyone has the same amount of MF.

Not necessarily. Markets are driven by supply and demand. If you cant move an item due to supply, you aren’t any richer for it. What is moving rares right now is due to item consumption for instance. To keep that going since it’s purely moving under speculation, there will need to be a huge treadmill for that consumption. But even that eventually ceases, just like the drop in food consumables for instance.

After all, the high tier equipment are not consumables, they are not damaged nor destroyed. Part in what helps drive exotics sales is due to many people buying them up to dump into the mystic toilet for a precursor. But for rares, eventually they will start to drop as they have before unless some treadmill is maintained or they introduce item decay.

something more simple:
Game maps mini and full.
Nights that are not so dark.
WP’s and quick travel.
No item damage/loss
Food buffs rather than food survival.

Having no real hardcore elements apart from grinding out for a shiny weap that adds nothing special in stats. Not that that’s bad, but the only somewhat hardcore element to the game. But really, there is just nothing hardcore about this game. Some hardcore stuff would be good imo. Content is delivered in quick spurts, 20m and you’re done in most cases. It’s like zerg mentality. If there werent temples and boss pre-events, I would have packed it in long ago. But even that is pretty quick and easy as it is.

And no, I hated WoW. Think old school. uo, eq1, swg etc etc in their early days. There were things to do that consumed hours, days, even weeks. Not just farming to assemble a pretty weapon.

Acerola.6407:

@Daywolf

I’m totally in for doing temples again as those will give us new ascended stuff we need to create the new weapons! I hope that will liven up orr a little bit.

Two weeks now w/o temples I feel so lost lol
Yeah should be active very soon. Just hope they don’t overdo it, small and medium sized assaults are nice.

Anyway, so let me get this strait, people are complaining about the invasions farming as they themselves farm the invasions? All you really need is one win and then one participation per map… otherwise you are farming. Ya know?
I turned on my tag and led our victories, but now I’m done. Moved on

Don’t do invasions? Come join us at the temples where fail = fail.
…unless you are/were in an embers farming zerg :/

KarateKid.5648:

I don’t agree with the OP. I DO agree with this – lemme move stuff to where it makes sense for me, for goodness sake!

Don’t even need to move things around, just duplicate the keys elsewhere. I copied 5 to c, 1 to v, and 6 to e, just for my thief. Downside is it does it for all characters.

aladore.3945:

Jski.6180:

So you like the game up to this point but you hate combat that was in the game from the start?

No, the combat has always sucked.

Think about it. Let’s use a D/P Thief as an example;

- The first skill is a a close-quarter combat skill. You use it to stab your opponents when they are in range.

- The second is an attack that closes the distance between you and your opponents.

- The third is basically the same as the second with an added condition.

- The fourth skill is a ranged attack that dazes your opponents, rendering the, unable to use skills for ¼ of a second.

- The fifth skill is another ranged attack which lays down a combo field.

So, if my first attack is to stab my opponent, it would stand to reason I would be in range wouldn’t it? What would be the point in using the four other attacks according to their intended game-play functionality? Unless of course, Anet’s intention was to have your toon stand there and bore the socks off of you. If that’s the case, then “BRAVO!!!”. They did it with uncanny gusto!

You mean D/P for pvp/wvw? Or your rant about pve? It’s really for multi-targets. I’ve been running a d/d stealth /w shortbow in Orr since Dec. I’ve done uncountable temples runs and had no problem getting around CS even before the nerf to Orr. Problem about that was people going there to farm with their glass cannon builds didn’t like the difficulty of the zone while they farmed so Anet listened and nerfed it for them. Now it’s more or less minimal players since farming moved elsewhere and not so challenging for the rest of us any longer.

But in wvw, if you are going against like 1v5 then best off with D/P. If 1v1 or 1v2 D/D stealth. WvW zergs with the SB gets you a stack of badges.

Oh and yes, you cant just flip a few things around to go from one weapon set to another, you would need to pay your 2g for every switch. Luckily I’m pretty happy with my build just the way it is, switching over never crosses my mind. If I could, it would just cause players w/o a thief in one of their slots to cry “OP NERF!” …more than they do already when a thief out-performs them zerg farming or whatnot.

They will probably go up more. Oddly, my mystic toilet salvage kit is recovering far less ectos lately, but I should be in no need to buy. At least crafted rares and exotics are doing well, well from the crafters perspective. A lot of trash out there now though. We’ll probably see anything linked to extos continue to rise for a bit more.

Yeah, not EVERYBODY is zerging, it’s just the current thing that many are doing. The next big thing is going to be the return of the adventure box. Much of the current zerging is going to be gone.

Galen Grey.4709:

Behellagh.1468:

eisberg.2379:

They have been making the sales that is equivalent of 570,000+ subscribers paying $15 a month. There are like 3 games P2P games that have that many or more: Lineage, WoW, and Eve online. Eve Online just barely hit over 500,000 though. But all 3 of those games are in the asian countries, the biggest MMO player base in the world, where as Guild Wars 2 is only in EU and NA.

So yeah, it does look like GW2 has more sales than the majority of the P2P MMOs out there.

So Iceland (EVE Online) is an Asian country now, didn’t know that. Did China buy them out when I wasn’t looking. :p

he didnt say developed in china, he said released in china… Eve online was released to the eastern market in 2006

It’s a Chinese partnership, CCP doesn’t have a big say in what they do there in China with the game beyond the licensing agreements of the partnership. Also they track populations separately, so where I said I saw 50k peak I was speaking of the server in London and not combined with China.

And yes, what someone said, I also doubt Anet would use a CCP style population tracking system. Like I mentioned, it’s not always good for marketing purposes. For EVE it works since the game is 10 years old and shows it’s constant growth. Also it can be very valuable for the pvp aspect of the game to know what the current population is as well as for playing the markets.

Gehenna.3625:

It’s just semantics.

Not really. As a coder I recognize that there is a big difference between a multi-player system and a massively multi-player system. It’s a whole other beast entirely.

(1) No, …well for level cap specifically maybe, but in UO where it took me a year to skill cap a tamer, at the release of UO:AoS people were cranking out skill capped tamers in 20hrs. Not just tamers though, the whole game moved away from skill development to a new gear grind system mimicking EQ1 in many ways. Thus began sudden and long term subscription cancellation.

(5) Yes, Norn is horrible for JP’s. Also Charr is bad for it too. I JP my Asura mostly, sometimes my human thief. My Norn is a warrior, still feel it was a good pick for the race. Like in EQ1 raids, we usually had primary melee either big or used a temporary size increase. Assist and all that…

Oh I’ll add (7). Used for crafting your legendary weapon. They are adding a new tier to crafting soon. Some crafting professions and crafted items you can make gold from depending how the TP is going per item. Then there is an achievement and title, master crafter (I have). If you don’t like crafting, don’t do it, just sell most of your mats.

So what to do at cap? There is quite a bit. Myself, I run Orr temples a lot and with my commander tag on and also do some boss events like fire ele etc. Temples are like open-world mini raids. That stuff has dropped dead recently more or less due to the zerger fests going on but that is more of the recent thing. You can google for Dragon Timer to get the timers and locations on that stuff. But yes, dungeons, fractals, guild missions, living story, spvp, wvw, etc etc etc you’ll find some things to do.

tl;dr once I got to tl;dr but my hope or what I wanted when rumors of GW2 were floating around early on was: skill based sandbox Even skill-based sandbox w/o levels and the game world was more like Metrica Province in genera, like10k years in the future from GW1, yet parts even way more far out and alien like than it is now. But hey…

eisberg.2379:

darkdomino.9578:

Math is not my strong suite, but someone correct me if I’m wrong here:

You’ve got 400,000 active users and you’ve sold 3,000,000 copies….

According to my fancy Android calculator, that’s like 13%…. 13% of everyone who bought a copy of GW2 is actually still playing the game.

That’s…. pretty terrible. I’m not sure how A-net can feel good about numbers like that. I feel like they need to recover a LOT of lost ground to get back to where they were.

460,000 concurrent players at once, meaning at one point in time (lets say at 7Pm on a on a Tuesday) there were 460,000 people online at once. Now some years ago a P2P mmo developer talked about how there is about 20% of the playerbase that plays at peak time ( the busiest times of the day) which is about a 4 hour period, and the other 80% play during random times on the other hours and random days. So 460,000 at peak times, would mean about 2.3 Million active players that play at random times and random days all together.

True, but I wonder what it is now, you know? EVE Online tracks that stuff in real-time, you can follow the charts over time, publicly accessible. It’s been a few months (inactive atm), but I’ve seen it peak at 50k on log-in, and that counts all time-zones apart from China now. That game is not just a year old, you know? One of the few, if only, that has constantly picked up active accounts over the course of it’s life, not blossomed at the beginning and then fell off to low numbers as most do.

The point is, active numbers change. Peaks are kind of funny over the course of months or years. One month they may be up, the next month down. Then it all repeats again maybe with a light variation over time increasing or decreasing overall. I have no doubt 400k at a peak for GW2 at some point, but I wonder how those numbers read over the past 12 months. I remember EQ1 used to do that at the beginning, at least log-in population numbers per server. I don’t think marketing finds that favorable though, there is a lot of marketing exposure and putting out more data on such things may not be as favorable as just mentioning overall post-launch highlights.

darkdomino.9578:

Math is not my strong suite, but someone correct me if I’m wrong here:

You’ve got 400,000 active users and you’ve sold 3,000,000 copies….

According to my fancy Android calculator, that’s like 13%…. 13% of everyone who bought a copy of GW2 is actually still playing the game.

That’s…. pretty terrible. I’m not sure how A-net can feel good about numbers like that. I feel like they need to recover a LOT of lost ground to get back to where they were.

Interesting. I mostly stick around lvl80 content, and yes for months pop has been dwindling there. When I’m not doing that, I’m leveling characters, working on my 8th-80 for all classes. I see more people around those lower levels (I’m on a popular server) but more so looking like lvl 80’s banging out their dailies real quick. Mid levels mostly silent now. Not much going on with dungeons any longer. Mostly I just see people doing farming zergs with invasions. A little bit of that is ok… but going off to do other things I mostly find empty places. Usually this time in the evening I’m doing a temple or something, but I was just at a loss of what to do other than zerg and I’ve had way too much of that already (having not done much really). But forums are populated Hope things pick back up again some.

Carzor Stelatis.9435:

If the might of the Star Wars marketing machine couldn’t make the subscription MMO work, that’s a pretty sure sign that it’s the last decade’s business model.

What, SWG? Really? Maybe you never saw what they did with the game using CU and NGE? 5 years in that game, ended in a patch. 90% of our guild (PA) left due to it. The game literally emptied out over night, busy zones turned into like Orr at launch day of the living story here. Try EVE Online as an example? Or even drop mention of WoW, but overly dropped mentioned of a game I just didn’t have a taste for. It’s not the marketing model that sells a game to the masses, but the quality. Sadly, f2p’s are mostly about the model and how to lure people to spend in the RMT shop. Revolving everything around that makes for bad game design in most cases.

Gehenna.3625:

Daywolf.2630:

darkdomino.9578:

People often hold up GW2’s free2play model as one of the best/fairest in the industry… is the model working?

No, because this isn’t f2p, it’s b2p. So it can’t be working with the model since it wasn’t used.

In f2p’s, generally 95-98% of players never spend a dime. B2P, everyone pays up front, thus it is not “free”. Reminds me of people that used to insist GW1 is/was an mmo.

For someone who’s being very specific about him calling this f2p while he obviously meant b2p, you certainly take a big liberty with freestyling some numbers here.

You have no idea how many players spend money in f2p’s.

And GW1 can be considered an MMO in my view. I don’t really care if it is or not, but the truth is that the only thing it missed by the standard definition of an MMO is a persistent world. Well, since most MMOs have a persistent world for leveling that is pretty much devoid of players after a few months of release and instead everybody is stuck in dungeons or raids or whatever type of instance, I don’t really see that difference as a very significant one.

Actually I do have an idea of the statistics. Few report, but some have over the years.

No, GW1 is not an mmo. But then they call about everything an mmo these days, better for marketing propaganda. The only thing massively-multi was in essence a 3D lobby.

hollowcrown.4872:

Long raids with guaranteed Precusor drops maybe?
Would make it seriously worthwhile, but unfarmable.

ehhh imo precursors a bit much, but a bit higher chance for the drop at the end, yes. Maybe a BL key as a guarantee, chance at a more rare exotic. Chance at some unique weapon skins. More so account bound stuff, but not excluding things you can sell at TP. Not a huge gold farm, but still very compelling to those more into content and fair rewards for the time investment. Plus this would rejuvenate temple participation and such, chances of getting an account bound raid key more based on full chain participation rather than just coming in and whacking the boss a few times at the end.

Soronthar.7236:

Last night I had a very weird experience: I did Maw with less than 20 people (it was way past midnight). For the first time I saw the Shaman moving, I discovered that it actually transform into something after some damage, ans noticed the red circles that needs to be evaded. It still lasted less than a minute, but more than the usual 20 seconds.

Same. Did MAW like 14hrs ago or something, about 6 or 8 people that responded to my chat alert. Soloing Teq for a bit with my fire ele. Stared at Golem pre-event by myself until I left. Temples contested for two weeks. fun-fun…

What I just don’t miss are the farming zergs rushing in at the last moment of the boss to grab their hard earned loot while I’m trying to log back in after a DC from their huge sudden swarm. Of course the same people that were talking trash to you a little while before when you were asking on chat the boss pre-event status and they calling you noob and all that crud for doing boss events and not zergling with them. Need more punctuation? …!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Yeah, yeah, 20 people instanced raids, I’m game. Long raids with good loots. Even longer raids, spanning multi-days/sessions but with the same people for each part, as in you cant join once it’s already progressed past session 1 so that people don’t just get in at the end to farm. And not just raids you start whenever you wish, but need to find a key (1 per raid group) such as from a related boss event or temple assault with a 1 in 50 chance to drop the key. Scaling off, but choose difficulty once at the beginning, then to end, no matter how many hours or days, are still locked to that first choice. Not choices by vote but by the key holder who is raid leader.

darkdomino.9578:

People often hold up GW2’s free2play model as one of the best/fairest in the industry… is the model working?

No, because this isn’t f2p, it’s b2p. So it can’t be working with the model since it wasn’t used.

In f2p’s, generally 95-98% of players never spend a dime. B2P, everyone pays up front, thus it is not “free”. Reminds me of people that used to insist GW1 is/was an mmo.

and no lime + coconut
What’s with that?!?

skullmount.1758:

I’m sure its already been said. The thing maybe by number of those professions created, not necessarily the most played.
As for races, its kinda obvious Sylvari and Charr are the least (no good looking Charr armor, except T3 heavy).

I like T2 heavy better. Maybe not as nice as my Asura T3 light, but straight up good armor if done right. I have a white Charr with flame legion colored T2 including flame legion shield. Only non flame legion color is celestial on the under layer of armor. Lots and lots of complements. Main thing I don’t like about T3 is it take the horns away. Those things just like pop off or something? hehe

Not much, really. Maybe pre-searing. I didn’t even get the last couple expansions or so, just wasn’t mmo for me. GW2 is more my genre, though pure futuristic sci-fi would be more in step with past choices. At least GW2 has elements of that but sort of in a steampunkish alternate universe/history way.

Klawlyt.6507:

LadyRhonwyn.2501:

And nobody loves the Charr… Almost worth getting a female engineer charr… (already have two mesmers…)

Nobody loves the charr because we remember… (thousand yard stare)

…We remember Ascalon.

Yeah? Start that war back up and see what side I’m on in a flash haha. Say Charr, Asura and Norn take the rest of you guys on! It’s so on!

At this point I don’t think there is any going back. They are becoming addicted to it, and if Anet pulls it away they will whine like newborns Like last night, running boss metas, WP’d into a zone and asked status over chat. Yeah, pre event started I discovered on my own, but no one there yet. But zergers on chat showing hostility, mocking for doing bosses and not in their 1337 farming zerg making “real money”.

Hey, I’m there for my daily chance to get a precursor, maybe I’ll sell it to you for all your farming monies over the past six months! Those boxes don’t even drop anything but cheap rares or cheap common exotics. A few hours of doing boss runs and I have a bag full of fair rares that sell for more than they did last week lol. And maybe a nice rare-ish exotic. Yeah, sell lots and lots of masterworks as trash, a boon for us master crafters :roll:

But wow, once this is over, how do you think it will go? Next gold mine, revamped adventure box.

Xsorus.2507:

You guys realize that graph is from the start of the game right?

Actually if you look for the graph just after launch, yes it’s pretty well identical, from like Oct 2012. I was going to mention it, but it was on some guys blog and didn’t want to link it. Yeah like to a tee as I look close at it now, from launch…
hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm……..

Oh here, with following source links I came up with this:
https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/john-smith-on-the-state-of-the-guild-wars-2-economy/
Now, is that the same stats or not?
I just see a slight move, and it doesn’t give % on the original.
I’d still like to see most hours played on class, I think that’ll say much more. We all start with five slots after all. And I’ve seen a lot of people leave the game and be replace by newer accounts. Then yes, the huge amounts of botter accounts, many probably banned accounts.

Oh and as for warrior, I won’t be surprised if the numbers start to slip post CoF1 nerf. This lost page doesn’t include most hours played per class? Oh I found the page https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/guild-wars-2-the-first-year/
(edit: oh someone already linked it, saw the post but missed the link)
Yeah, everyone rolls a ranger and warrior I’m sure, but I wonder what the stats are for most played class. Or even most played class non-solo. Mine is thief without needing to look.

Yeah, botting. Also solo players. Farmers with a quick hit and aoe. Lastly, easy leveling. Link doesn’t work, so I take it most rolled character classes which used to be guard back before the dungeon changes long ago. Rangers, most annoying class award. Yes I have one, but I have all classes.

Phineas Poe.3018:

Daywolf.2630:

LanfearShadowflame.3189:

Leaving engineer out for the time being only because I’ve not had a chance to play mine and it would be unfair to rank her without experiencing her gameplay for myself.

Just my 2c

goes like this
equip nade kit
1234511111111111111111111111111111111111111111112341111111111111111111111
11111111111111111111111111111151111111111111111111111111111111111111

You don’t have to use the Grenade Kit. And by the way: you should always use Freeze Grenade (4) first in your rotation.

OP: I think Engineer is the most entertaining class in the game by a wide margin. It’s not just fun to play, it’s fun to theorycraft and test new builds.

There’s a lot of different ways you can take your Engineer, and there’s considerable depth to it, perhaps more than any other class. I do also love the Warrior and Guardian, but they are very simplistic. Even if you’re a DPS Guardian, you’re still going to be using many of the same utilities as you would if you were an Anchor/AH Guardian. This really can’t be said of Engineer builds; they’re really quite diverse.

Hm? nah I don’t think it matters on the opening, not in high-end pve content or wvw. Maybe you are thinking solo where the target cares about you early on? Bur doing solo stuff with an engi imo is pretty much a waste. Pretty much you are going to go kit engi on end-game, grenades and bombs. Sure, you can make an elixir build, but meh, you most often already have a mesmer or guard around you on high-end stuff.

I’m not saying engi is a bad class, just not at the top for fun. It’s my solid #2 class for wvw and #1 choice in sieges on both sides of the wall. But not for “fun” but simply to bring the gun to the gunfight when a knife or pair of daggers won’t do. Most classes have 2 or 3 solid builds, but for engi this requires key mashing on 0 targeting which will make your finger bleed hehe.

But individually, we all have our own idea of fun. I put up three choices that fit for the tactician. They require you to think ahead and change tactics as needed. All classes have tactical aspects, but I see thief, ele and guard as the challenge since if you don’t think ahead you die. Guard is a bit forgiving though, but if you die it often results in a party wipe.

1st person camera mode

LanfearShadowflame.3189:

Leaving engineer out for the time being only because I’ve not had a chance to play mine and it would be unfair to rank her without experiencing her gameplay for myself.

Just my 2c

goes like this
equip nade kit
1234511111111111111111111111111111111111111111112341111111111111111111111
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Wokao.7394:

Gizmo.9178:

ranger ranger ranger ranger ranger ranger ranger 100%

don’t let the haters fool you.

Is ranger like really OP in PVP or something? Why so many haters.

No, ranger not op, just annoying pet and long bow often used to grief melee players in pve. I deleted my first tanger, but ran out of classes to level up, so wound up leveling one to 80. I just use the long bow to build stacks then use a shotr bow. I use spiders as a mobile net turret. Otherwise, almost a waste of a slot… heh.

Milennin.4825:

I don’t understand…

1. achievement
2. a boss drop which has the best chance of precursors.

If everyone is doing minions like early on, you get nearly the same amount of champ drops. But then you get the boss drop as well. I’ve gotten some nice stuff from that. But that’s over, there is no way to convince people that the easy rout to less is not as good as the harder rout to better. Lazy always wins.

just for fun?
I’d say stealth thief, fire ele and any guard build. But really just depends on your play style.

Aretak.3826:

Whole discussions seems moot. People who think subscriptions were/are ever a good idea are living in the WoW era still, which was the epitome of money grabbing.

WoW? The whole f2p (yes this is b2p) and RMT driven games have hurt the development of sandbox mmo’s more than anything. It’s harder to include RMT into a sandbox as a driving force. It’s far easier to convert the rest to f2p RMT and get sudden surges in revenue for a short time then move on to making another when it deflates.

But that started in the dev chatter back in early UO, concerning the avg 2yr life of the majority of subscriptions vs. getting money fast rather than sustained income. But yeah, a game like EVE can keep bringing in money over the long haul, but the money surge for RMT and f2p (or the like) is more attractive to investors that want the payout fast.

WoW was more the end-game for general subscription based games, as the meh-jority of new mmo gamers wanted a quick f2p game to play while they kept their WoW subscriptions up. This has been a driving force in the new business model, yet at consequence to the existing mmo players.

MadNail.6257:

So what should i pick? The priorities thats important for me:
mobility> escape abilities > survivability > single damage > aoe tagging > burst damage> sustained damage > aoe damage> crowld control > dots

You don’t like thief but you describe it to a tee? There is a difference between a lvl 10 try-it-out thief and a lvl 80 d/d stealth thief, or with pistols or whatever.

You leveled a warrior first, so most people that start with warrior (or early on) go to guard next.

I prefer subscription. If any RMT, just purely cosmetic or account related (i.e. server transfers etc.). The problem is that when a game focuses in on RMT to make money, the designers start to revolve everything around getting people to spend money into RMT. This means design decisions may not be focused on providing the most engaging and fun content, but simply to drive sales for the RMT shop.

But we knew what we were getting into when we bought this game. Eventually the people like me that had/have subscriptions in other games and yet spent money buying gems here will move on (or play less), while those that will only play RMT based games but never spent money will see less content roll out.

Arc DLad.2194:

sazberryftw.3809:

Don’t really get who would prefer to ‘complete’ over farm once you have ‘Kill Scarlet’ achievement.

the issue is that people haven’t got that achievement and are working hard to get it but the commander/zergers are just farming till time runs out.
its a case of " I did the event at launch and I’ve got the achievement first so you can’t have it now" because i’m farming. happens on orr a lot these days aswell

Well I focused on minions with my tag until mid-point yesterday (then turned it off). Early on in this I had lots of boxes as everyone was trying to get a success. Now it’s shifted so that the few still doing minions are in smaller groups and not getting as many boxes while the farmers get much more. It’s become pointless to do minions any longer imo, I still wind up with less than I did and I still don’t get the boss drop no matter what. So far the best quality item drops have come from the boss, but that doesn’t happen at all any longer.

You see more tags farming because many have made so much from farming that they are buying tags to zerg farm more. Could they turn their tag on, issue orders, and lead a successful chain to grenth success? probably not, but more commander tags to block stuff out like that for everyone else. But hey, win for RMT and driving up exchange prices so people will spend more money in the game.