Guild Wars 2

Hello,

First let me say that I want to have a discussion about this. Don’t be mean or flame. I’m going to say my side of this and I would love to hear what everyone thinks about the topic.

So something I’ve noticed since the start of this game is classes can do everything. Stuns, immobilzies, large amounts of damage, condi damage, etc. If this is a good or bad thing depends on perspective, but another problem I have with this game’s pvp arises from it.

There are way too many skills that are game changers (as in they can turn the tide of a battle) for every class and each one of these skills has a little to no CD/call animation or they have little to no cooldown.

For example i was in a 3v1. Now I was on point and I wanted to decap it, I knew chances of me winning were slim. I figured I’d try really hard to dodge their skills that could change the tide of the battle and survive/CC as long as possible. It was a spirit ranger, engineer with a rifle (no idea his build), and a mesmer. Within 15 seconds I have about 5 condis on me and 50% hp. I throw up my healing turret to get rid of some condis. The Minute i remove them they are back. Im trying to dodge their important attacks, especially the mesmers immobilize + shatter burst. But every time I use a dodge, I end up not dodging an attack from one of the other two, these attacks are huge too. Apply a bunch of condis, CC, immobilize, or burst damage. Each of these can wreck you in a fight. So not only am I trying to dodge and watch the animations of each of the players, I also have the 3 clones of the mesmer and the 4 spirits of the ranger on my screen. This plus the animations it became very confusing on what was going on. I finally say F it and just start spamming dodges as much as possible, doing random CC and blinds trying to hit as many as I can. I sadly only get the engineer to about 25% and go down from the endless stream of physical damage(mesmer burst too), condi spam, immobilizes, and CC. I ended up decapping it (somehow despite my spamming and no idea what was going on). I amazingly also capped it after I threw down the elixir R toolbelt, rezzed myself and capped it (they players aren’t too good on the otherside).

It really got me thinking though. This game has way too many low CD skills that can turn the tide of a battle easily through CC, condis, burst damage, or survivabliity (evades, blocks, etc). There aren’t a lot of classes that can win in a lot of outmanned situations because of this. Throw in the AI and you’ve got a lot of models, animations, and important skills going off at a constant rate. I find myself getting confused more often in large battles and just saying F it and spamming as much as I can to be effective.

Thoughts? Could we maybe see less spammable skills. Less spamming of everything (cc, condi, burst damage, etc). More cast times and noticeable animations? Less AI perhaps?

bel unbreakable.7145:

its cool to get decent loot from the champions now but since weekend in orr ive never seen so much nasty chat or such badly behaved players in a long time
where did they all suddenly come from

It is because people are fighting over champions because its so heavy about tagging him. For example the zerg has a set group of champions to kill in a certain order. You kill a champion without a zerg you mess up the whole system and create some bad feelings. Then you have a bunch of bots going in there. I think less of timed spawns would help reduce bugs and “farm paths”.

darkace.8925:

Sirendor.1394:

It’s not really like players are harvesters always looking to farm more and more, it’s just that in this game money is needed for everything… and it takes a lot for anything. Instead of motivating farming, make everything as efficient as the rest to make money, so players aren’t restricted to grinding.

Outside of cosmetic skins (Legendary weapons, T3 cultural armor, etc) what is money needed for? I mean, sure, you need some to level and outfit your characters and a tiny amount for way points and repair costs. But beyond that, I’ve always felt gold was kind of needless after a certain point.

PS – I was about to click “reply” when it occurred to me many players convert gold into gems. I’m sure that’s a contributing factor to why so many of the highly-desirable Gem Shop skins are offered via rng boxes, but that’s a discussion for another day.

To the level 80 player, gold = progression. You need gold to get any sense of progression. First the initial gear, although you have other options for this. Once you get pass the gear level it is usually what you said. Skins and Legendary weapons. That is progression for a lot of people and gold is a huge part of it.

Hello, since the introduction of champion loot, a few problems with the open world have been highlighted. Most notably are the following…

1. Zergs vs Monsters

2. Profitability

3. Timed Spawns

4. Low Level Zones/downscaling

1. Zergs vs Monsters. You will never win against this. Put in more monsters = more lag/frustration. Put in One hit AoEs = boring overdone mechanic. You must intice them to spread out. The only way I can see this happening is by taking advantage of the dynamic event system and the world. Work on making a champ harder by himself, but easier if players do different events in the zone and defend different places. Give all the players involved a reward for killing it. What we’re seeing happen is these new weapons you’re giving out are dropping in price significantly if they’re in Orr or Frostgorge. I would not be surprised if they become very very common/worth under 20g.

2. Profitability. Notice how now that these champions give something to the player, they all of a sudden start getting done? Players have looked for the best farmable area (frostgorge) to run different farming routes and this has caused the prices to drop a lot.

3. Timed Spawns. In this game these will never work. With the open world and the reward system+timers, it takes a lot from the game. Reward players with champions/world bosses when do events in the world, not when they wait 10-3 hours. Holding 3 camps, escorting this guy, taking out X amount of enemies in this area, etc.

4. Low Level Zones/downscaling. Thanks to downscaling being not 100%, you have taken out the chances for players to go back there. While some may say they want to feel like their player has progressed, what is the point if you never go back to those zones. Since the rewards are less profitable in low level zones, very few people go to them to kill the champions. However if all the rewards were the same, the champion rewards the same (all exotics like it is in 80 areas) you’d see a lot more people going into areas. Now some of these areas are very easy to farm (queensdale) so you’d have to fix that in some way.

I’d really like to see you guys take advantage of this new loot system. Instead of just letting players go through these boring farming patterns and causing the items to becoming common/low in price.

While it do like they are a bit harder, I still think they could be improved. A major thing about these bosses being harder than usual is that there are a lot of veterans around it. Anet has tried similar thing with Karka Queen and it is still very rarely done across all servers. When it is done people don’t understand what to do a lot (die, complain, die, stay dead expect rezz, etc) and don’t like to do it. If they do update, they must do them all. IF the other bosses are easier, people will ignore the harder ones. What I’d like to see is an update to those mechanics, but they should not just throwin a ton of one hit skills or a ton of monsters. Those aren’t the solution. I’d like to see more events around the entire zone that lead to the destruction of the boss. Guarding trebuchets of the seraph as they launch them at Shadow behemoth. Help Pirory scholars collect a special reagent that will help defeat shadow behemoth, etc.

StriderShinryu.6923:

Destai.9603:

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

But in the mean time, please keep telling us what you’re thinking. We are listening. Not only to what you’re saying but also to what you’re not. The very first living world team actually did the thing some of you have called for. Some 40 or so permanent events were added around the game in our very first content update. They were met with little interest or fanfare. Granted, Halloween may have stolen the show. But those events are still in the game today. I’ve seen very little reaction to them, however, positive or negative. Despite this, there are many events I would still like to add. Many zones and bosses I would love to revisit. As we get better at the living world, I strongly suspect we’ll have room to get around to them as well. Assuming that’s what our players really want. You are all the second half of the collaborative process, so thanks for helping!

I appreciate you sharing your feelings on the matter. First, addressing your statements about the content met with little interest – did you tell us about it? Did you advertise it or did you advertise the next achievement chase instead? The priorities here are misaligned. Week after week, a release is doled out and we’re expected to chase after a set of achievements. There are so many problems with the current approach in GW2:

I think this is a very valid response, and a question worth asking. I also feel that adding Dynamic Events to the world is not really something that should be viewed as a major content addition, at least not in the same way. Not that they don’t take resources, effort, etc. to implement (I’m very aware that they do), but DEs are never going to be something that takes eyeballs off LS content or makes headlines. DEs are a quality of life addition that breathe a little more life into the standard experience of being out in the world, they are very rarely going to be showstoppers unless you stick a boss at the end of them with major loot.

Think of it this way, you go to your usual grocery store and you find two things. First, they have changed the aisles around a little to make shopping more enjoyable. Second, they have an item you’re interested in on sale for 90% off but only for a limited time. While the rearrangement is something you’re likely to find longer term appreciation of, the thing you’re going to run out and tell all your friends about is the 90% off sale.

It doesn’t mean one is more valuable or desired than the other, it just means your expectations have to be different.

Yeah, I agree with you. I dont think DEs are a major part, but I’d like to see them become more important in an endgame. See them incorporated more into the zone and world bosses. See them become more important in LS. Add in some special bosses at the end that drop a unique skin, things like that.

Not even dragons. We have an abundance of unasnwerd questions and foes from Gw1 that can still be used in gw2. Yet they created what so far seems like an entire new story line, and enemies.

Palwa Joko, Menzies, Dhuum, The dragons, and White Mantle are some that come to mind that could birth some amazing stories. While they touched on the zephyrites and glint and teased some awesome possible story lines, we are now back to the all new stuff with Scarlet and Aetherblade pirates. Hopefully when they conclude this they make it meaningful to some existing lore instead of creating and solving a problem within a year.

I dont think they should touch her at all. The only thing they should fix are bugs in the mechanical side such as the abyssmal camera and lag.

One of the most fun things I have done in this game. It was very very satisfying when I finally killed her. More satisfying then anything I’ve done in the game.

Considering any forum goer would see the poop storm caused by the gauntlet and people having trouble with it, I think I know what OP is asking for.

OP, you’re good at video games. Congratulations.

Did I do it right?

DarcShriek.5829:

I’m being patient with the living story. I see this as a new strategy which needs time to work the kinks out. I think there is a lot of potential here.

Yeah in other post they recognize the mistakes and are working towards fixing it. Apparently the next LS patch is when things are going to get intense/good. We will see what the following year brings us.

Yeah It is wishful thinking for scarlet to be kiel, but I can hope.

The developers said we would recognize our arc Nemesis, so if the slyvari is scarlet and scarlet is the big baddie, I dont recognize her. Unless it is Caithe’s lover in the nightmare court.

If Scarlet isn’t the big baddie, my money is on Cadeacous.

So so far in this living story we know that Scarlet is the big baddie behind it all, perhaps.

You know who I think is behind this all, why Scarlet is doing what she is doing? She is white mantle.

So first Scarlet is theorized to be the person behind the Molten Alliance. But why? What was the point. They apparently found some kind of new metal from this alliance and these two factions working together. So now Scarlet has some kind of new metal.

Then she assassinates a captain of the council in lions arc. Why? Well we do know that it was from when some of the emissaries that were there put things into the effigy. It was a Chemical reaction. Why were they testing something like that? Majory investigate and almost had a solution, but was folied by a mysterious person. Someone told her there was more at work behind the scenes.

The Zephyrites come and the Aetherblades attack the kite baskets and try to retireve something from the wreckage. What is this thing that they want back so badly?

Now this living story they’re using STEAM portals. Steam Creatures are implied to be from some alternate future or dimension. Why does Scarlet need time travel or dimension travel? How is she/he using it to teleport to locations? Using inquest research into Chaos energy?

Here is my theory. Scarlet is researching this travel method and is apart of the White Mantle. What could the white mantle gain? Well we know that there is only one Unseen One left. How could he possibly stand up against his enemies by himself? He would need Mursaat from an alternate dimension or the past. Is the last Mursaat Scarlet? No, he is not.

Scarlet is Kiel. Wait wait, hold on. Why? Kiel has almost been there in every story instance. She is the only new character they have developed through the living story. You may be asking ,why? The Unseen Ones are notorious for manipulating people. They did it with the rise of the White Mantle. Scarlet is White Mantel and she is Kiel. She uses the Molten Alliance as a chance to increase her standing with the lionguard and help with southsun/refugees. She then uses Dragonbash as a way to assassinate a council member and give her a chance to gain power in Lions arc. So now she she has power in there and has heavy influence in a major city, she can set her sights on her main target, Kryta.

Ok ok, so say Kiel is Scarlet. What could she possibly gain from attacking the Pavilion? So say the Queen is murdered. Who do you think would try everything he can to take power and lead Kryta? Cadeacous. There is already confrontations of the shinning blade and the ministry guard (under cadacous’s thumb). Why does the Ministry Guard want in there and why is the Shinning Blade taking a stance on them? Ansie knows. She has an idea of what is going on.

So basically Scarlet is Kiel. Kiel used the MA, Refugees and Dragon Bash to increase her standing in Lions Arc and give her more power. The developers said our nemisis is someone we know and it doesn’t deal with dragons. What other storyline is reasonable to developer in this game that doesn’t deal with dragons. Palwa joko is out of the question. So the white mantle is the only other one. She is trying to take over the two major human cities, Kryta and Lions Arc. She is the only other character that has been developed in this living story.

If you doubt this theory, answer me this.

Why the Molten Alliance? Why the alliance between INQUEST and Pirates? Why kill a councilor in lions arc? Why attack DR? What forces are behind Majory’s backstory?

Also I think Canach is gonna come out of no where and be a hero and be apart of the Braham and Rox party.

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1totIebX5FebfELWWIs6JDMYgLPS5XEDV2dCIEro6Oes/viewanalytics#start=publishanalytics

Recent results. I probably wont do one for the last living story patch, these next few weeks I’m going to be a lot more busy.

What if the person is Cadecous. He doesn’t have a huge involvement in the personal story is for humans during the first like 5 levels of it. He isn’t seen in game at all except for the dungeon and in one area in DR (queen jennahs room).

I think that certain stuff should be perm and some stuff should be temporary. The point of temporary content is to get players to get back into the game. All these players say they dont have a lot of time to do this stuff and what not. I dont think many of them have played MMOs. Don’t get me wrong, I understand where they’re coming from. MMOs take time. It’s the nature of the game. Look at WoW. Only like 5% of the playerbase sees the endcontent of the game. Simply from time constraints. MMOs take time and no matter which one you will play it will be this way. Also I love new ways of thinking. I love having to think about a new way to deal with a boss or new mechanics. It makes it interesting. The game is already insanely easy, I like they introduce new mechanics to players so they have to adapt and think.

With that being said, there does need to be more perm content.

Examples:

Flame and Frost: Put a section of one of the maps involved to be the remnants of the Molten Alliance. They launch raiding parties on nearby towns and what not, but they are no longer connected to the larger force. Basically a splinter group. You have to do a meta event chain to eventually get of the center of their last stronghold. IN this center is the last molten weapons facility where players can do the dungeon. However, the story instances and rewards from the story arc are no longer there. So you wont be able to get jetpacks or fused gauntlents.

Secrets of Southsun- You did a pretty good job with this and the Queen. Thought I’d like people to be a bit more enticed to wonder whats happening to the wild life. Perhaps put “wild spawning” censors and journals talking about them and what not to make the players ask “What the heck happened here”.

Festivals- these are hard to make perm content for and we have too many. Dragon bash, holidays, baazar. Too many and its really hard to make perm content, especially when things like the Baazar seem to have a completely separate story line.

Aetherblades- The Jumping Puzzle is good, but I wouldn’t mind seeing some more. Maybe Aetherblade ships will sometimes raid various Lionguard camps till the end of the story when scarlet is dealt with.

It is doable. It is hard, it should be. The only problem I had about it was the camera angle. But after 35 tries I was finally able to do it, so it’s possible. Some classes may have a harder time, that is just the nature of the game sadly. I thought about it hard and its a problem for anet that is impossible to counter unless they design separate fights for only each class or just make all the classes the same. Both of which are really lame.

You’re gonna rage and its gonna be very very angering, as all hard games are. It is doable, I had a necro friend do it so it’s not as impossible with necros as many think. He said spectral walk was great

Good luck out there! Trust me, once you do get that minipet you feel awesome. I’m still on a happy go lucky high about getting it haha!

5. Timers ruin the community, don’t rely on them. I did world bosses way before rares were even rewarded. I was part of the small community that did them for fun. People teased me in my guild about it, said it was a waste of time for lack of rewards, but I didn’t mind I had fun. Then came the Rares and people took an interest in them. I got excited. I worked with other guildies and players to roam around the world and find world bosses, we’d community with each other to tell people when they were up. Community and social interactions with players were plentiful, it was fun. Then the timers arose. People didn’t need scouters or other players help to find bosses. They just watched a website and went to that. Those social interactions when poof and now players pretty much ignore one another for boss fights. It really took away from the experience and highlighted the problem with timed spawns.

Now lets talk about the living story.

I feel like that every 2 weeks the overarcing storyline for the living story should be progressed. Instead this year it seems like you keep giving us block after block of a foundation for a wonderful story that aren’t connected. For example, the baazar. I though this was really cool event. The voting system was cool. The zeyphyrites and Canthan feel was awesome. However the over arc storyline of Braham, Rox, and Scarlet was not progressed too well. I got really interested with the zephyrites and their connections to glint and I thought “Oh man, this could be really cool”. Instead we get a new festival that has nothing to do with kiel or the previous story arc except that the Aetherblade pirates are involved. Flame and Frost was the best story line so far in terms of progression. Sure it was a little too spaced out, but every update you answered something in some way. First we start seeing refugees and we help them, then we discovered what the main enemy force is, then we go save some more refugees, then we raid a main base of the force and destroy them. We learn of a person known as Scarlet, then boom we’re in southsun dealing with an almost entirely new set of characters where the only connection to the previous storyline is the settlers.

tl;dr :
The Open World needs more incentives for people to go out into it. In a game where endgame progression is heavily reliant on gold acquisition, simply karma/silver/experience rewards isn’t big enough when you can farm one area. World bosses need to convenience players, almost need players, to spread out in the entire zone to defeat them. You will never be able to counter zergs by spawning large amount of enemies or one hit AoEs. Use your dynamic event system more in world bosses! Remove timed bosses. Put more reliance on chain events and meta chains. My most fun world bosses are flame temple tombs, catacombs, and modniir. They are done the least cause they dont have set spawns or timed spawns. They have a large chain of pre events. It’s awesome.

The living story needs to be more connected. Everything feels so disjointed. You’re taking way too long go progress the story. I feel like im getting mini game after mini game or filler after filler. It doesn’t feel like it’s having an effect on the world at all. The pavilion is cool and all, but I feel like you just literally gave the farmers and “island” to farm on leaving the rest of the open world with new champion rewards and awesome visuals “not as efficient”.

Suggestions:
For World Bosses. Put events around the map that help defeat the final boss. Balthy for example. Remember that base you captured in the northern assault? Well they launch a special projectile that will cause balths new skill that decimates players to be ineffective. So defending it is viable. I have loads of ideas that i can go on and on about, in a lot more detail. Remove timed spawns. Put more reliance on chains and surrounding events to spawn a boss. Make it so you can fail it (through timers perhaps) so that it’s harder to farm. Making failing it have a noticeable effect. Queen fails, nothing happens. It’s really lame.

For the living story. Just connect it more. It’s becoming so disjointed I’m starting to lose interest. I feel like im seeing filler after filler. First the molten alliance, an alliance between two unlikely foes. Whoa cool, can’t wait to see what happens next. Oh look another alliance between 2 more unlikely foes…really?

I really want to see this game flourish and I feel like you’re turning the things that make this game unique and special (open world and living story) into something that uses a ton of the run of the mill mechanics that we see in a lot of other MMOs.

So I was surfing the forums today and I saw this post,

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

Thanks for the feedback everyone and please keep it coming. Personally, I find that one of the hardest parts of being a desginer on GW2 Live is coming to terms with the fact that not every update will please every player. We do our best to deliver appealing content with enough variety to keep as many people as satisfied as possible. And If there’s one thing we can do consistently, it’s improving the experience of said content each time. I think we made some great strides with the Jubilee. I think we have a lot of room to keep growing. But our team isn’t done yet. We’ve got some exciting things coming later this month. Things you’ve never seen in this game before.

But in the mean time, please keep telling us what you’re thinking. We are listening. Not only to what you’re saying but also to what you’re not. The very first living world team actually did the thing some of you have called for. Some 40 or so permanent events were added around the game in our very first content update. They were met with little interest or fanfare. Granted, Halloween may have stolen the show. But those events are still in the game today. I’ve seen very little reaction to them, however, positive or negative. Despite this, there are many events I would still like to add. Many zones and bosses I would love to revisit. As we get better at the living world, I strongly suspect we’ll have room to get around to them as well. Assuming that’s what our players really want. You are all the second half of the collaborative process, so thanks for helping!

The part that really struck me was about how they added all these events in and on one did them. It got my think about this game’s open world, the living story, and the general feel about it. I’m in a large guild, I’m one of my guilds “PvE commanders”, if you want to call it that much, and I go out into the open world a lot and do random events, help random players out, things like that. I am in the ambassador or have connections to many other big guilds and when I do open world things I try to contact as many people as I can. But before we start, let me say one. Unless you state exactly where those events are, people will not do them. We can walk by where they spawn and have no idea there is a chance for a new event there.

So first lets talk about the open world.

1. Dynamic Event Rewards are not good incentives to get people into the open world. Right now the progression for end game players is centered around one thing, gold. You want a legendary? You need lots of gold. You want that cool skin from the mystic forge? You’ll probably need lots of gold. So people naturally find ways that best earns them gold. This is why we saw CoF, shelter, and other farming areas done so much because they were most effective at earning gold which allowed them to progress their characters. You’re recent patch has done a terrific job at getting players to spread out and not just farm one thing. The game is still pretty reliant on gold, however crafting mats, SP, and more are becoming more accessiable to players without needing a ton of gold or time, allowing progression to be less focus on gold. Still the problem persist with dynamic events. Still im seeing a problem. Since patch i’ve done a March of Ascalon (going around ascalon looking for champions) and Southsun Chest Run. Each time I had people whispering me “Dude, why dont you just go to pavilion, its so much easier to farm!” or “Hey man, I found this champion that spawns like every 10 mins, you should come here with your group and just farm it with us.”. Players if given the opportunity, will always go after the easier route. Just how it is. It is why we have DR and what not on a lot of things.

2. Fights are not challenging. Once you become level 80, going into lower level zones it is pretty easy to fight. You kill things very fast. Once a certain amount of players joins in (usually 5 or more) it just becomes a cake walk. Then you have world bosses in which players just auto attack. They don’t interact with NPCs or the world, they just sit there. Even in pavilion you still sit there autoattack. Sometimes you may die, but you get quickly rezzed or waypoint.

3. Many events don’t feel like they’re part of the world. Sure they unlock a waypoint or a useless vendor that sells something you don’t need.

4. Zergs. You can’t fight them, you need to be creative. Every open world boss will attract a zerg. There is no mechanic that you can give the boss to “solve zergging”. You must give mechanics to the WORLD to solve zergging. Giving bosses massive one hit AoEs or stuff like that wont do anything against a zerg. Spawning a ton of other enemies will only cause lag an frustration. You must convience players to spread out in a zone to fight a world boss, and you must make these spread out events effective/needed.

When you fire the rifle, the actual animation for the muzzle flash/smoke appears inside the weapon at your hands instead of at the muzzle.

Please fix, it looks soooo baddd. I’m on a norn, here is a screenshot.

It is possible, but it is very hard. I think they wanted it to be hard haha. Took me 35 tries and 6g of sprockets and frustrating camera angles to do it. Granted I did it by taking advantage of infinite swiftness and vigro with blocks and invurnablities. The necro of which, has none. Sorry necros, I feel bad for you all.

Fungalfoot.7213:

Demented Sheep.1642:

It an achievement. You generally get achievements for achieving something.
There are many ways to get achievements points and some of them are repeatable so why dose it matter that there are a few you might not be able to get that others can? Achievements points don’t affect your ability in combat so it’s not going to unbalance anything.

You’d have a fair point if the great achievement here wasn’t rolling the right class.

Me, I’m all for hard content. But it needs to give all the classes a fair shake. We can’t balance solo content around guardians.

Yeah honestly some classes have a lot of an easier time doing these things than other classes. They say that all classes can do them, what they fail to mention is that some of them its a lot harder.

They honestly should have made this instance, removed the poorly designed dome, and then made it a spvp instance so that people can reroll a class and be 80 and do it.

Gathslan.1870:

I did it easily as a warrior, the boss fight is amazingly awesome. For the first time in GW2 i had my heart start beating faster as i beat her!

Yay for harder content! BIG kittenING YAY

Don’t get me wrong I love hard content. What I dont love is anet making something hard with bad camera angles and lag.

Dont even get me started on the announcer. Half the time shes yelling at me thakittens about to end, turns out its for the other freaken fight that someone else is doing.

deviller.9135:

It’s not impossible. The one which make it impossible:
1. Camera (will be harder when you use larger character)
2. Zerg below you (especially player with high natural latency (oceanic people): make delay in taking the rune, make animation and timing screwed up, and rubber banding). >>> I beat her when there is no activity from boss and there is no zerg farm due to no pin up.

As a warrior I can say: bring heal signet (regen HP (if you have some V and T, this regeneration will beat her damage)), use longbow (as you can damage her without LoS (use F1 and 3) and constantly moving (in addition it has fire condition dmg and bleed), bring signet which restore (enhance regeneration of) endurance, bring 1 break stun (you don’t want when you pulled you still in the floor for next 1 s), for your last utility (elite is still the same signet of rage (what warrior has for solo lol)) it’s up to you.

Endurance food is your friend (as warrior has poor condition management).

Don’t push your luck if there is boss event or zerg farm below you (especially with the ach throw 8 light (I had not finished it yet….))

Yeah I have no idea why Anet hasn’t really figured out how to predict zergs and where they will be. This boss fight is all about timing and paying attention. They give us a kitten camera that makes me wanna just say its not worth it, and then throw in random lag spikes for the huge amount of players and monsters below us.

She is not impossible. The biggest thing I’m having trouble with as a norn is this dam camera.

Anet seriously, take whoever designed the camera system/domes and slap them for me

Hello,

So with the new champion skins, people are reporting them dropping from multiple sources. Such as somone saying Mecha dropped from a champ in CoE while another said he got his mecha anchor from the troll boss.

So are these skins unique to families of champions or could they be dropped by more than one family?

Another thing, are the weapons dropped from the little bags that drop from them (such as branded strongbox) or do they drop from the champions themselves. I’m asking this because if they drop from the champs themselves, MF would be useful.

So it has been a while, but I finally decided to do the Sinister Triad champion in brisban wildlands. Now I realize that this is a stab at the holy trinity, but it could also serve as a possible preview at future skills. The “tank” of the group who is a champion uses a skill called Taunt. This skill is an anti fear, instead of fearing people away from the caster it causes them to run towards him.

Thoughts on this being a possible skill in the future? It seemed to be AoE too.

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

If you completed their instances on that character, they should recognize you. Logan, Queen Jennah, Countess Anise, and Faren also all have different conversations based on your choices and progress in Human stories.

They weren’t clear in their complaint. This interaction is in the Pavilion, not in the opening ceremony. So this is in the open world part that these chat conversations are happening.

They’re very elonian, which I think is awesome.

1. The new area is meant for rich people, its a large gold sink. Knowing more than a few market manipulators, they’re more than happy to pay for it and don’t mind, so mission accomplished there

2. They’re supposed to be hard. Current legendary bosses in the open world suck majorly. Hopefully they aren’t a lag fest/massive zerg spawns of karka like queen is.

So I was doing some spotted champions here and there and I noticed that the White Mante Knights and Demagogue both have helms that are unique to them.

They can’t be found in the game and they’re worn by humans. Perhaps future armor? They surely look cool.

Since the character models are all glowing it is hard to see them and you can’t really make it out

However in the portraits for them you can clearly see the helms, look in the attachment.

Thoughts?

Atherblade pirates=alliance between Inquest and Pirates

Inquest= mechanical geniuses that are asurans.

New mechanical guards are robots

Yeah I’m sure nothing could go wrong.

Stooperdale.3560:

I’m not sure why you need so many people? Camp Karka is the hardest camp to clear so do that first. You can then send two people to each of the other camps to clear them simultaneously. I’m guessing the queen would then spawn before any of the camps are attacked again. This means you only really need the minimum number of people to take the queen down.

The problem is that to do it with a small group it requires some good coordination and players. Not many want to bother uncapping the camps because of lack of rewards and time. Then when the queen spawns her timer goes up and you get entire zergs porting in to scale/lag the event.

Basically this event needs a TON of work. If you switch to YB and message me when I’m on I can organize a group for island control, but I will not do queen.

Queen is a very poor event for a few reasons. 1, extra mobs that spawn decimate zergs and are very hard to kill. 2, very lagg. 3, timers/pugs make it hard to organize. 4, rewards aren’t worth it.

http://www.twitch.tv/deified123/c/2665462

That was the last time I tried to do queen. We had around 15, if not less, doing the pre event and initial fight. Thanks to timers at the end we had around 30, if not more. They scaled the event, agroed more vets and other karka, then when they died they didn’t bother rezzing. Once I finally go down I see that there are like 20 dead players just sitting there waiting to be rezzed. It’s despicable.

We’re having a discussion about the issue in another thread in this forum that I posted.

Mesket.5728:

Dodging at the right time its not a proper mechanic for zerg fights. Not everyone can afford a 30 ping connection and not everyone lives in the same zone close to the servers. I can never go lower than 450-500 ping and on average I play with 900 ping. I prefer mechanics like Jornag’s Claw (withouth the safe spots) where you have to move, soak damage, heal, attack the pillars to protect the bots,… something else than pure autoattack that does not resolve in a devastating dodge-or-die attack.

Exactly. I dont think these events should be failable based on if players die while fighting him (which happens in that karka vid I posted because everyone died and just sat there). Instead, as I said earlier, make the event spawned multiple events throughout the entire map that leads to the death/success of the boss. The event should be failable upon if those events fail. Not if players don’t dodge a one hit AoE attack and defeat the boss in a time limit. That will never work.

Tom Gore.4035:

Isn’t that the JP in Hinterlands, though?

If you’re talking about the original post, no it is not.

Abyssmal Shadow.2785:

Artesian waters, however truth be told, you an unlock that at the end of the personal story so I don’t really think that counts.

yeah you go there with the personal story, but it is still a very cool/fun area. Here is another. It’s been posted a bit in other subforums, but it’s a random asura looking thing in the straights of devastation. There was a rich mithril vein near it. Its in the northern eastern side of the map

I’ve been playing this game since release and I like to do PvP occasionally, I can’t help but feel like there is too much of a lot of things in the meta.

1. Too much AoE. Seems like every class, their main damage sources are either AoE or cleaves. Necros, Engineers, Eles, somewhat mesmers if you consider their AoE shatters, etc. Most battles take part on points, this means that players must stay on those points to keep them from losing point, this creates quite an annoying gameplay style where you’re just seeing a abundant of AoE animations covering a point none stop through battles.

2. Too much CC. I remember yesterday I went up against a team where it was 3 necros and 2 engineers. They would focus someone and they’d baiscally be locked down for 10+ seconds at a time. This means classes with lots of stability, blocks (since not too many unblockable skills are in the meta right not, except for necormancers warhorn), and invulnerabilities usually do great. What makes it worse is a lot of these CC’s are AoE or Cones. There is noting more annoying then popping a stun breaker, dodging two more CCs, then getting CC’ed for another 8 seconds while you run against or wall or take a nap on the ground.

3. Too much burst. This game doesn’t have a direct support role. This means high burst damage is only negatable by defensive damage negators (invurnabilities, stealths, blocks, etc). This coupled with the high amount of CC, the game quickly becomes way too fast paced to really be interesting in fights.

4. Too much Condi application- There are a few classes who can apply a lot of condi really fast, most notably necromancer and engineer. This coupled with the large amount of CC, AoE, and burst damage it becomes quickly annoying.

I just feel like you’re asking way too much from players. Since each class can do a lot, when they focus someone on the team it is very hard for that player getting focus to counter it. So you use your dodge to escape that 8k heartseeker? Well now you dont have a dodge and that necromancer just applied every condi to you. Oh you used your dodge to escapes the eles CC so you don’t nap on the ground while you get pummeled with damage? Well that engineer just knocked you down. Oh your just dodge that high hitting AoE from the engineer? Have an ele’s high damage hitter.

You wonder why Mesmers, guardians, and thieves are popular? You wonder why necromancers want stability, blocks, or something besides high damage and deathsrhoud? It is because of the high spammablility of this game’s combat mechanics and no direct support role to help negate that damage in fights, those are the only ways to counter them.

Even if you tune down the particle animations, I promise you it wont fix the problem. There is so much that each class can do and how big of a difference everything a class can do in a battle, it’s often feeling like a big spam fest on top of a small point location.

If you introduce more game modes will this change? Maybe. I honestly feel like a lot needs to be reworked in terms of pvp game mechanics. This gameplay style is ok for WvW and open world PvE, but I feel it’s lacking in PvP.

This is of course my opinion and I could be wrong.

Edit: Someone Mentioned AI, totally forgot about this. You have so many summons in this game. Spirits now, clones/phantasms, minions, turrets, guardian summons (last 3 aren’t really in the meta), but it is still a lot. When designing summons, keep in mind that players must not only watch the players in the battles animations (which is a hassle as is) but now also the summons animations. You give those people with summons strong weapon slot abilities and it quickly becomes very annoying.

Im Mudbone.1437:

Would be nice if you mentioned the location too.

The original I posted is in a cave on the mountain wall east of the Vigil keep. Look for the dead ram/mountain sheep.

Here’s another for you guys in Harathi Hinterlands by The Company/Doyak resting place

Hey guys,

Post some of those hidden locations that aren’t for map completion for JP/mini dungeons.

inb4 grove bamboo forest.

I just found a new one today and was a big hassle to get to. If only chest rewards scaled
:(

ilr.9675:

On NSP, we never fail Karka… even one night when a ton of Reddit nubs showed up and made EVERY event take 2x as long as it should have. (This is relevant because a lot of Anet’s devs rolled on NSP so it’s going to influence their perspective). …..with KQ, we’re slowly but surely conditioning more players to TURN AROUND and LOOK BEHIND THEM to see those insanely overtuned Crazed Windriders basically “RailGun” sniping the entire backline support for 10k damage per shot. The more of us we can get with reflects & Pulling Physics (Especially stupid worthless Rangers who only run Bows & Bear…. to instead put an Axe in their Offhand once in a while and hit the #5 key while standing front of some Eles & Engineers…) which just destroys those things in record time.

But yeah… if I could boil this all down to one thing I see more than anywhere else… it’s Rangers or atleast “Ranged Attackers” in general going to these events when they’re too lazy to learn how to actually play with skill or atleast read the Map Chat once in a while… These tougher ones like Grenth, Balth, & KQ many times will actually succeed, or fail depending on just the sheer ratio of how many competent or incompetent Rangers you have b/c D.E’s are basically the last refuge for the 2nd worst balanced Class in the game…. of which there are lots and lots of them attending usually.

I Hate making tutorials, but If I have to, I’ll start making some for the Ranger forums which none of these people actually READ, ….but then when people see these awful players being awful, maybe they can send them a Mail linking to those tutorials? I dunno… It’s really hard to pinpoint where the failure on this issue lies, if it’s purely with Anet, or just the kind of player that Ranged/Ranger tends to attract?

That’s the problem, I can’t control what these people do and I can’t gather enough people that I know personally to work together. This coupled with timers and randoms it becomes very hard to control a zerg and get people to play it.

mtpelion.4562:

I think that the pre events are where the challeges should be implemented and that the reward from killing the boss should increase based on how many pre events you were involved in.

The world boss itself cannot be made challenging due to the number of participants involved (the lag alone makes a dodging requirement onerous).

Yeah the lag really makes it hard for Anet to take advantage of the dodging requirement. That is why I am supporting the concept of involving multiple areas of the map that are far away to eventually lead to the death of the boss. For example with the SB example i gave. You had the catapult, garrison, casters, and frontline (infront of the boss/attacking it directly). Someone can just defend one of those areas and defeat the boss. Of course it wont be as fast, but it should be doable. Like if someone just stands there and defends the catapults while everything else fails and no one is at the frontline, then it can succeed but it takes times.

I also support rewarding people for doing pre events more, they’re the unsung heroes of the open world haha.

vorpal.1497:

I agree with basically all of this. But as you pointed out, the fix would require a monumental reworking which is sad. Still, the game is great fun in its current state if teams are evenly matched (which is a rarity because of the way teams pair up with randoms, but that’s an easy fix).

I think their best bet is to just tone down a bit some of the major things like AoE and condition spam, and let things settle.

Yeah I think that would be a good start. I think if they make skills more on the personal level/less AoEs it may be easier to balance.

Esplen.3940:

It’s hard to balance and make boss fights interesting when you have zergs of at least 50 people hitting a boss. They weren’t made for that to happen.

That is why it is a problem. Anet is thinking like that. World Bosses aren’t dungeon fights. They shouldn’t be. Right now they are simply dungeon fights with lots of people.

World bosses should include the entire zone. Multiple events that lead to the ease of killing or act of killing a world boss. The trick is not only to balance it with zergs in mind, but give them incentives to separate.

Here are two I can give examples of.

Karka Queen- Make it so theres a point in defending the camps during Queen. Defend the northern most camp and consortium NPCs who actually kill stuff run towards Steam camp and set up along the walls and fire at enemy NPCs and they acutally do damage to help players get rid of all the extra NPCs. They also do damage to queen if there are no other enemies around. Then if you defend captains retreat a boat spawns and players can then fire the boats cannons onto karka queen.

Shadow Behemoth- Defend the monastery and the will send casters to the area above the shack in the middle. These will deflect shadow behemoths AoE drops that he reigns down from above (buff these to do considerable amount of damage to the front line fights as they hit). You need to defend the casters from waves of shadow enemies. Then to the west you have the seraph set up catapults to reign fire upon shadow behemoth. Defending these from centaurs. Then to the north at the garrison you can defend that against waves of shadow creatures and it will send Seraph Reinforcements to each area to help players fight (they would actually be useful).

The trick is to convince players to spread out. Each of those areas above would receive the same exact rewards as the frontline fighters.

World Bosses are WORLD bosses. They should heavily involved the ZONE/WORLD as a whole instead of smushing everything together in one area. This includes not only events but things in the open world. Cannons, interactable objects, etc.

Hello,

So I do open world PvE a lot, more than anything else in the game. Before I get into this discussion please watch these two videos.

1. A typical world boss fight. This one is the final boss of ogre wars but sums up the experience pretty well. People standing around, auto attacking. Many of whom are lagging. Particle effects lighting up the sky. Everyone being pretty chill and just not doing anything as they casually attack.

http://www.twitch.tv/deified123/c/2665505

2. Karka Queen fight. This represents a small portion of the open world events that are actually hard and failable (such as grenth temple). What do we see in this video? Problems that represent Anets new take on open world events. When I was doing the pre events I had about 15 with me at the time. Once the queen herself popped, the online timers kicked in. At this point the number of people nearly trippled before we got her first HP bar down. This combined with the particle effects ( i know they are getting "fixed, well see how it does though) and the overflow of monsters in the area (we had tons of veterans, hatchlings, and all these other mobs that would do insane amounts of damage or CC attacking us and doing all these crazy AoEs as we were fighting the Queen). We eventually fail and people wonder no one likes this island or the event. You’ll see in the video tons of dead players just standing there dead. This is because players in this game have been conditioned in open world bosses to be lazy, to expect it to die and for other players to rez them. Once they die they sit there with the event scaled up with them and not doing anything. The entire zerg had died and only 5-10 had rezzed. It’s despicable.

http://www.twitch.tv/deified123/c/2665462

Anet please figure out how to do world bosses well before releasing anymore. IF you do release more YOU MUST fix them all or increase the reward of the new one heavily. Two rares wont cut it. If people can be lazy and auto attack one boss or challenge themselves with another boss and get a small increase in reward, people will opt to do the lazy one.

Right now there are a few things that I find are very problematic in PvP (also in WvW). Now some of these are less prevalent in tpvp, but I still believe they are an issue.

Problem #1:

First lets start with something that I see a lot in PvP. Too many have such independent roles. What I mean by this is take for example the DPSers of the game currently. The main people who I see are doing DPS are Warriors, Thieves, Mesmers, rangers, and necromancers. Now some of these are very good DPSers. I find that Thieves, mesmers, and necromancers are currently the best DPS classes. The problem is that they are so good at dps and the lack of cast times/noticable casting animations/tells causes pvp matches above 5v5 (sometimes 5v5) to become too cluttered and not enough counterplays. When I’m in a battle in 5v5 or higher, I have to watch a mesmers animations, his clones animations to watch for shatters, watch a necromancer for his marks, watch a thief, and then watch the other classses for their changing animations. If I am fighting with guards nearby i have to watch them too. That means if all these things focus on one enemy, that enemy to defend himself has very limited choices. If I miss a thieves heartseeker, boom there goes 7k of my HP (this is 1/5 of most classes hp, and it comes from a skill that can be casted again right after). If I see the thief and dodge his burst combo but don’t see the mesmer, boom there goes 7k hp from his burst combo. If I don’t see the necromancers condi combo boom I have every condi in the game.

What does this mean?

This means that defensive damage negators (things that negate damage that you do yourself. Things like blocking, invurnabilities, stealthing, aegis, protection, etc) take the reigns in the meta because they can help negate the damage from multiple sources. So classes that don’t have a ton of these (such as necromancers whom are poor in the defensive aspects) cant really get dominated quickly when they get focused. This means classes with a lot of these, such as guardians, can be very good tanks/bunkers.

What would be good:

I think if classes took more reliance on boons to perform things well and had to get these boons from other sources would be great. In order for a class to do 8k or more, a target needs to have at least 10+ stacks of vunability on him and the classes themselves who are capable of doing this insane DPS can not apply these. This would increase teamwork by a ton. Same with crit chance and fury, tank classes and what not.

tl;dr #1: Too many classes can performing amazingly well at rokitten th dps and tanky wise. This mean large battles are insanely hard to survive getting focused from mass CC or having one character off screen just decimate you in a couple of hits. Put more emphasis on classes working together to perform roles extraordinarily well.

Problem #2:

AoEs. There are way too many AoEs and Cleaves in this game. Both support and offensive wise. This takes a huge chunk away from battles on the personal level. It also makes it very hard to counter roles. If someone get’s focused hard, his allies don’t have a lot of direct support skills that they can work together on to try to negate that CC.

What this means:
This means that classes that have a lot of AoE skills that do considerable amount of damage or support will become very popular. Mesmers for example have amazing utilities and weapons that have some sort of AoE effects, on top of their shatter skills. Guardians have some of the best AoE support skills.

What could be done:
Honestly you’d have to rework and redesign a lot of skills to reduce the AoE in the game. This could take a long time. However, I think this PvP in it’s current state might not survive. I am hoping that it does though.

tl;dr #2: Too many AoEs, reduce AoEs overall and it could make large battles more immersive on the player level rather than the group level.

Side Note: One of the reasons I make these is not because I like to whine or complain, it is because I care about this game. Many players do this and others simply insult them. Most players wont come on the forums and complain if they truly hate the game. The players that do actually care about the games survival and suggest things that in their eyes might help it survive. Me personally, I’m really scared for this game. I have no idea the community for this entire game will react when the other big name MMOs are released, some scheduled for later this year. I’m hoping for the best, but preparing for the worst.

Elbegast.6970:

Queen’s Jubilee* …..as in Queen Jennah’s celebration/party/festival.

I am blind, thanks for spotting that. I completely missed the ’s. I was wondering who the heck Jubilee is hahaha.

Hello,

Here is some new infromation for everyone.

http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/setView/news/gameId/473/showArticle/28202/Queens-Jubilee-to-Commence-August-6th

My prediction? I think this next living story will heavily involve Ebonhawke and the Ascolonians finally making a peace treaty that sticks.

Also the concept Art. For the Crown Pavilion (first attachment) it is a huge falcon/hawk. These are popular in Ebonhawke. Then you have the Charr looking onward saluting, perhaps in agreement.

Oh god this is my dream patch.

I think this is the best theory so far OP. We don’t see similar golems anyway else. The topic of the structure the fractal is on is at hand of course. Perhaps the entire lab when taken out of the mountain looks similar to the one we see floating in the fractal.

The best thing I can guess is that the mad Asuran has something to do with progeny because if the golems were designed in such a way so that they interact with young asurans, they’d probably be made to look a bit kiddish.