Guild Wars 2

@ Redenaz

The world could be littered with vistas and points of interest, that wouldn’t solve the fact it’s a shallow world. In fact I don’t mind points of interest as they help you keep track of locations in the map but I am fully against vistas.

I think vistas were a completely bad idea. Vistas are a chore and nothing more, when I started playing back on release the one thing I’d always ignore was vistas. I couldn’t see the point to getting them because after the first two or three vistas I was done, it was boring.

I only started doing vistas once I realized I should get map completion. Vistas are nothing but a chore and they give a player nothing.

Showing the cutscene of a really pretty location is worthless, however a player actually going and exploring and experiencing those very pretty locations themselves is where the true potential lies.

Sure I can just walk around that mountain myself instead of just seeing the vista but what’s the point when I have literally nothing to do in all those pretty locations? Since they’re all barren and empty of things to do.

Giving players an actual reason to go and explore their world will do something that vistas could never accomplish.

As I’ve already said, the current state of the Personal Story is beyond horrible.

As goldenwing perfectly put it; “At best, in GW2, I am following a preset set of instructions in a story. At worst, I am being guided from zone to zone”, which was exactly what my friend who just started playing said.

The way GW1 handled Missions was fantastic! Why didn’t they just keep that? Why fix something that’s not broken?

I was dedicated to Liadri, I beat her on the first night. I remember failing to her countless times the first night and giving up. I went to sleep that night but woke up 3 hours later thinking about Liadri and no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t sleep – I needed to finish that.

That night I stayed fighting her for 2 hours straight trying to beat her, many times I got to a sliver of her health and failed.

Eventually I managed to finally beat her and when I did I literally tossed myself on the floor from my chair, heart racing, eyes wide open. I was trembling like a mad man and my breath was so fast I had to lay down and take a moment – it was great!

Needless to say, Liadri is still bad difficulty.

The feeling of failure being constantly thrown at your face with few glimpses of hope here and there with a final realization of yourself in victory is the best feeling ever!

Because of that I approve and appreciate more difficult and challenging content.

The way they did Liadri however was bad difficulty, it was impossible to last long enough to learn anything from the fight. You either did your research online or most likely would have never succeeded that fight, not without exterior assistance of some sort.

In the first phase, everything would instantly kill you other than her auto attack, you had no hints or clues about this going into the fight. If you didn’t use some sort of exterior information source you’d be lucky to understand the simple basic mechanics of that fight such as luring the shadows into the area to kill them and transform them into orbs to throw at Liadri.

The whole concept of the battle was almost entirely hidden, to top it all off the fight gave you literally no room for mistakes at any point. It had cheap kills, complicated mechanics that weren’t introduced prior to that in any way, no room for self growth and learning, and the list goes on.

That’s not even mentioning the technical limitations and malfunctions to the fight such as bad camera.

A good challenge should introduce the unique mechanics of a fight one at a time giving you a chance to learn and understand them individually before grouping it all together in one where the real challenge comes in.

The issue wasn’t that Liadri had various one hit kills, the issue was how they handled the entire fight, it was bad. A good challenge needs to teach their players and give them the tools they need to overcome it.

If you want to climb a mountain you’ll need the proper tools, food, sleeping equipment and so on to overcome that challenge. You’ll feel great when you finally reach the top but especially if you managed to overcome it mostly by yourself.

What Liadri does is put you at the base of the mountain almost entirely naked with some avalanches along the way with no warning – bad design.

RedStar.4218:

That’s because he isn’t cut out to play GW2. You know why hearts were put in the game ? Because during the first tests, the players didn’t know what to do. Anet had to modify their idea because the players that wanted to explore didn’t want to do it without directions, they wanted to be guided through.

Now that the game is released I also don’t really want to explore, but not because I don’t have directions. Because after wasting hours and hours on finding nothing at all, I don’t see why I should continue to bother exploring something when there’s nothing to explore (I’m exaggerating a little).

That’s where reward comes in, in the end people want rewards. What is there for me out in the world? Events which will give me some near worthless exp, a measly sum of silver, and a drop of karma in my oceanic amount of karma – not worth wasting my time for.

As far as loot I’ll just find some junk, few crafting materials, blues green with the occasional rare to be salvaged. There’s no motivation.

Before GW2 gives their players more rewards, they first need to create more rewards. The game has very few unique items.

Mathias.9657:

I agree traditional quests are awesome when they aren’t just grind x. Think pre-expansion quests in WoW that sent you across the world instead of sticking you to that one specific zone. Quests have evolved a lot and your example in the OP is perfect on how they should do them.

Events are probably too complex to be multi-zone faceted but quests sure aren’t.

You start off reading a scroll in queensdale and multiple tasks later you end up in an 80 zone summoning a lich to defeat him for killing your mysterious dead man who left his family to avenge his brother. Or something :p maybe his spirit gets summoned after killing the lich and you finally get to put him to rest.

Also, it’s easier to put in text than voicing everything, and a lot of people like me prefer reading a story. Remember when we used our imagination in older RPGs? Now everything is voiced and really takes away from the feels imo unless the acting is reaaaally good, which is rare.

Yes to everything.

A quest can be so meaningful yet so simple at the same time. I got chills just imagining how amazing it would be if your continuation/example of an epic quest were true in the game. It’d be able to pass so much emotion with so little, a lot more than “quickly! The risen are invading the south beach, run to the giant circle in your map and stay there killing them for a few minutes!”.

Also what you said about spoken dialog is true. There’s too many of those artsy cutscene dialogs and at one point you just start to subconsciously zone out during them. I find it hard still today to actually pay attention to what the characters are saying.

It just goes in one ear and out the other.

This is however also true about written dialog, if there’s way too much to read odds are the player won’t have the patience. I know that was true for me about the quest dialogs in GW1, walls after walls of text.

A game needs a good balance of both, enough reading to keep your attention and enough cutscenes to make you go awe!

It’s a very real issue in GW2, a lack of direction.

I got a friend of mine to start playing a couple of days ago. I told him to make a character and play alone for a little while so he can discover and learn things on his own a bit more, and get used to the mechanics.

A day later I go to check up on him and he says he doesn’t understand what he needs to do, he’s just running around killing things.
Said all there really was of interesting for him to do was the Personal Story Missions. Of which he said weren’t too fun either since you had to do a lot of traveling to get to a place, to either have a minute of conversation or two minutes of mindless combat and just move on.

Is it bad that I feel like I have to make excuses for why GW2 is fun?

It’s a real issue, lack of depth and direction. If they made the personal story more like the instanced story missions in GW1 it would have ended up much better.

GW1 missions were in a large open area, usually like small dungeons or just a large part of the map which you had to traverse yourself, find the objective on your own. Instead what we have now is a very small and limited location in which we need to stand still and kill things that approach.

It’s very restrictive, not enough interactive.

As for the Heart system not being quests because they have multiple objectives, so what? It’s still the exact same thing, think of it as 3-4 quests put into one with the reward of none.

Seriously, reward in this game is another big issue. Imagine having to play a traditional MMO with traditional quests. Now imagine if all of those quests just gave you a few copper, maybe a silver. That would get very boring very fast.

That’s what both the heart and events are, they have virtually non existing rewards. It’s nice how completing a heart opens up a little shop, I like to think of that as the “quest completion rewards”, still shallow though.

I agree entirely.

Challenging content with risk of failure is fantastic. Of course there’s a very fine line between good difficulty and bad difficulty. Good difficulty being the Clockheart and bad being Liadri.

Clockheart gives you a chance to learn, gives you room to mess up so you can learn from your mistakes. The fact you can actually fail that fight but learn from it and improve is fantastic.

Liadri on the other hand didn’t have any of that, it had cheap and simplistic difficulty. It didn’t give people any chance to learn, you either read a guide on how to beat her or had to bash your head against a wall of trial and error hundreds of times.

As far as having penalty for failing, I agree. However if there’s gonna be consequences for when you fail, there needs to be a worthy and equally balanced reward for succeeding, otherwise no one will want to do it after they did it once.

TheDaiBish.9735:

Personally, I think quests should only be used for personal development (learning new skills and traits, getting a specific weapon unique to your profession ect), since Events provide more in the way of immersion for kill and escort quests. That is:

• Quests for things that only affect you
• Events for things that affect the world

However, I do agree on your point that there should be little to no hand-holding (although chances are the majority of players will end up using a guide anyway).

I also think quests should be used for something more grand than just doing a task, such as getting unique rewards, or discovering something about the story or lore.

Imagine if you finally had a reason to explore the cities. Imagine going up and down every inch of the Black Citadel, that place has some beautiful areas which are just completely wasted.

The best quests in GW1 for me were those which gave new skills, I didn’t even care if it were mundane and boring, the reward made the whole experience exciting – reward matters.

Finally on the note of hand holding, people will use guides if they’re lazy, hand holding or not, let them. What matters is giving that opportunity of deeper and more immersive experience to the players who want it.

Now it’s important to understand the fine line between totally vague and completely obvious when directing a player. The Halloween scavenger hunt and the Tequatl scavenger hunt are examples of being too vague (or giving literally no clue in the Tequatl case). While the personal story quests with their giant glowing green star being an example of being too obvious.

A game needs to give their players choice, even if the end result will be the same a player wants to feel like he made his own decisions of how to reach the end result. That’s why it’s important not to hand hold.

Chase.8415:

Solution to condition cap is simple. Every time it gets to 25 stacks, an upgraded condition is transformed from the previous stack of conditions (i.e 1 stack of “deep wound” is equivalent to 25 stacks of bleeding with the damage as the entire 25 stacks of bleeding). They could technically do this unlimited amount of time and in addition it would still be balanced in PvP.

That’s actually something I thought about as well, with the same mechanics and name too.

For players of Guild Wars 2 the word “quest” is constantly thrown around as a hot topic and flash word where people just mindlessly bash without even thinking what it actually means.

When you hear the word quest you think “oh no I don’t wanna start running around killing 10 wolves”, when in reality that’s not what quest means, that’s just busywork. We already have busywork in the game – it’s called hearts and events.

Things such as “water my plants X times” or “gather X objects and bring them back to me”, those things which people so quickly blame on quests and hate are currently present in the game in the form of hearts and events.

So onto my main point, GW2 needs quests. Once again, I don’t mean “gather X things”, we already have that, we don’t need more.

What I do mean are quests which make you go out, explore, discover and challenge yourself in the world. Right now GW2 is completely barren and empty of substance and content in the open world.

When I’m walking down a road and I see a small cave in the distance and there’s no point of interest, vista, skill point or heart in there, I have literally no motivation to explore there. Now, if there was the possibility of me finding a quest in there which would nicely reward me I might have the motivation to explore the world a bit more.

On top of that the quests themselves could make you explore the world to complete them, as quests usually do.

Think for example you explore a cave to find a dead body in the end with a note on it, you pick up the note which starts a quest. The note ends up being the last written words of the doomed person, in the note he explains how he regrets leaving his family in Lornar’s Pass, who are waiting for him in Pinion Pass.

You now find this note from a mysterious dead man and you have clues (it’s important not to just tell the players ‘go to location X’, let them figure it out but give them decent and simple clues) on where to go and what to do.

Once you meet his family they might reveal something about the dead man’s motivations, why he was there and what happened, etc.

I mean the possibilities are endless, imagine how epic it would be if you found this quest in a Lv1-15 area but had to go to a Lv25-40 area to complete it. Now you have a reason to go to this location, you have something to look forward to when you level up. You’re driven by your desire to find this location and continue on your quest, and imagine how fulfilling it would feel when you’re finally able to find Pinion Pass.

So in conclusion, I think GW2 needs these sort of hidden, mysterious, rewarding, and even challenging epic quests which send you out on an adventure. Also, rewarding is very important, players won’t be bothered unless they have a reward to look forward to. That’s why events feel so mundane after a while, their rewards are very uninspiring.

PS; quests are a great way to tell a story or dish out lore about the game, another thing GW2 currently lacks.

TL;DR – we need epic and challenging quests in the game which make you want to explore the world. Not talking about “gather X things”, we have those in the form of hearts and events already. GW2 is severely lacking depth and something to do in the world, and Living Story hasn’t been cutting it.

Sorry for the horrifically long post too.

I dunno, doesn’t even have to be that. It could even be more simple, you could just have like some 5 different conditions that all act the exact same way as bleed. But each class would have primary access to only one of those.

Maybe a combination of both types of conditions.

I’ve seen the “convert a stack into direct damage” suggestion many times but I think that very severely breaks the idea and concept behind the whole point of conditions and condition damage. If you’re gonna convert a smaller stack into direct damage why not just make all conditions direct damage?

It breaks the theme really hard and because of that I doubt that would actually be used by Anet.

The main issue is how condition damage has a cap based on how many condition builds are together. So if there are 2 or 3 condition builds together they start negating each other’s damage.

However when you change the main condition focus from an intensity stacking condition to a duration stacking condition, instead of negating each other the condition builds will actually help each other.

Also, using a condition which deals more damage the longer it stays on the target will make that “helping each other” thing even better. Since it becomes stronger the longer it’s in effect it also has the “feel” of an intensity stacking condition, since the damage becomes higher the more duration you stack.

So it doesn’t matter that it ticks only once per second if it’ll tick once stronger and stronger each second, so it’s the effect of bleeding without the cap. The longer the battle draws out, and the more condition builds are present the more damage this condition would deal.

I was giving it some thought earlier and came up with a very simplistic way this would play out.

It would start by dealing 15% of your condition damage as damage every second, and every second the damage would go up by 1%. So the first tick would deal 15% damage, the second would deal 16% damage, then 17%, 18%, 19% etc. Or something less rapid.

The last player to add to the stack would be the one dealing the damage, like how burning works. I imagine there should be a cap to the amount of damage it can scale up to, something along the lines of 250% of your condition damage each second being max. Details don’t matter, it’s just the idea.

So this way if you had a Tequatl-like event and you had some 50 condition builds, the condition damage wouldn’t explode instantly, instead it’s slowly rise through out the battle as more condition builds would stack more duration for this condition, thus helping each other out and keeping constant damage like the direct damage builds.

New conditions.

The issue here is that the servers can’t handle more than a 25 stack bleeding, your problem is that bleeding is the central focus of every condition build since it’s usually the easiest to apply and generally best damage.

Add new damaging conditions, like they did with torment, but switch the central focus of all condition builds away from bleeding.

I read someone’s post once saying the issue here is that auto attacks add stacks of bleeding, this quickly raises the stacks of bleeding with small duration bleeds.

Instead I think (and this individual who’s name I forgot) bleeding should be reserved only for non auto attack skills, add less stacks but for longer duration. That way condition cleansing abilities can be more meaningful and have a bigger impact, and condition builds will be able to fulfill their desires of not being utterly useless.

Not to simply remove bleeding from auto attacks and ruin the damage potential of condition builds, some sort of duration stacking condition should be added to auto attacks instead of intensity stacking.

A neat idea I had was a condition which dealt more damage the longer it remained on a target, this condition would perfectly suit auto attack on a condition weapon. Also staying true to the condition theme which is damage over time.

pdg.8462:

What Anet is saying by this new ascended armour is that you should all look like renaissance court jesters and like it.

That’s ridiculous to say when you have the option to transmute a look into a stat in the game.

Most of the people I know that have ascended weapons didn’t keep the look.

I’ve noticed my issue with heavy, out of the heavy armor the only part I really disliked was the boots.

The whole armor looks fantastic in it’s bulk, makes you look like a royal knight but the boots just make the outfit look like a shapeless mess. Boots need to be smaller/thinner.

papryk.6273:

Delryn.7235:

it looks regal and royal and elegant. .

looking like Gonzo the clown is elegant and royal? rly? xD

Yes. Their style resembles more traditional European balls, such as the carnivals in Venice for example. Things which happen still today as a cultural celebration, just because it’s not a part of your culture doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

papryk.6273:

looking like a clown is epic and royal? -_-"

Yes actually…

The style reminds me of those traditional regal balls, much like the Carnivals in Venice for example.

I for one just want to speak up against all this armor hate!

You can’t and won’t please everyone, and not everything added to the game will fit your tastes, but I for one am just overjoyed with these new armors.

They look epic, fantastic, regal, royal, etc.

I personally disliked every single armor added to the game since launch and just had to deal with it. This is literally the first batch of armors I enjoy.

I just wanted to let it known that there are those who actually enjoy the armor, I’m looking forward to them.

In case you haven’t seen them, here’s the code so you can see them on your own characters;

Light
[&AgGJuwAA][&AgF5uwAA][&AgGHuwAA][&AgGIuwAA][&AgGKuwAA][&AgGGuwAA]

Medium
[&AgF9uwAA][&AgF/uwAA][&AgF7uwAA][&AgF8uwAA][&AgF+uwAA][&AgF6uwAA]

Heavy
[&AgGDuwAA][&AgGFuwAA][&AgGBuwAA][&AgGCuwAA][&AgGEuwAA][&AgGAuwAA]

Edit; on a side note… why another light armor mask? I mean we have so many light armor masks already, so many that at this point they kind of all just look the same. Why not some sort of hood, or hat for once?

I find the armor to look fantastic and when I saw it (all three of them) I had a mini heart attack. I neeeeeeeeeed those armors!

Edit; I’m just sitting here admiring the armor so much.

I know it’s not for everyone, but I personally hated all the armor that was added into the game since launch, this is a really good breather for me. Finally something I personally enjoy.

Just as a breather – I for one am in love with the look of the new armors.

They won’t please everyone, but I’m glad an armor (or all three, actually) is finally being added to the game that I personally enjoy.

Also as far as bridging the gap, they meant in effort, time, and energy spent in gathering the items, not the stats.

Wow reading on all these negative comments I imagined the armors would be absolutely horrible. But I for one liked all of them, a lot! …except I have some issues with the heavy.

Love the light, finally much requested pants, it looks regal and royal and elegant. Just sad it’s all symmetrical but for once it doesn’t bug me because of how unique the armor looks.

Medium looks fantastic, like an epic dragon hunter. Those shoulders are great too. Although it’s still a skirt it doesn’t really look like all the other skirts, this looks more like a large loin cloth of sorts.

I have a big issue with the heavy “fat roll” look, but other than the chest and leg pieces it’s pretty kickin’. The helm looks fantastic, by far my favorite part about it. Looks like a mysterious dark knight while the shoulders just fit in perfectly, one being large metal and the other royal cloth.

All in all these armors look fantastically epic and royal, I approve.

It’s sad to say but lore and the consistency of lore, or powerful, unique and thought provoking story elements are not this game’s strong qualities. Which is made worse by the fact GW1 had such a powerful lore.

And female Norns will get super model haircuts.

TheDaiBish.9735:

I also think they said in an interview or livestream a while back that rather than introducing new professions, they’d add weapons to existing professions, but I wouldn’t quote me on that.

They said before adding new classes they’d first add new weapons and skills to existing classes.

I just hope when the new skills come it’s not like just one new utility for each utility type… oh my I hope it’s at least that.

My main is a human and I want to kill myself with the new hair styles.

The sylvari ones look absolutely fantastic. This makes me sad since all the male human ones look like a gel disaster.

Siphaed.9235:

As for the best dialog in the game, that is clearly Captain Penzan :…

Yes to this!

Yes to this so hard, just the other day I took my time to stick around and listen to his song.

Telling a game’s story or showing off a character’s personality through a short story which is removed from the game or character is worthless.

Imagine how much more powerful it would be if you got to see and experience Scarlet becoming mad and seeing her go through her personality change and how she got mad as opposed to reading it in an article outside the game.

That’s what makes a game such a unique and powerful product of entertainment, but Anet doesn’t use that to their advantage.

Why does everyone just skip vistas after they’ve seen a few? Because though pretty, vistas are worthless to give you a feeling of the setting and world around you. Imagine how much more powerful it would be if you actually had a reason to explore, see, and experience all those vistas for yourself, instead of seeing them through a telescope.

You know what, I agree.

I personally really like Scarlet and think her villain personality is very enjoyable. She’s an antagonist, she’s a quirky pest. I personally find that pretty cool, but it’s completely true that she (or anet) portraits herself with no depth of character at all.

Despite having that super deep background about knowing the world too well she acts like a 5 year old. I don’t mind the fact she’s a maniac, a wild card, half insane and all that junk, but she acts like she’s crazy for the sake of being crazy.

You don’t have to be super serious to be deep and meaningful, the Joker for example is portrait as an insane crazy lunatic, yet he has so much depth. All of which is shown with how he acts and what he does, instead of it being written somewhere completely removed from the character.

Wanze.8410:

Aberrant.6749:

Gathslan.1870:

Elbegast.6970:

Aberrant.6749:

IDK how you could call the teq revamp underwhelming OP. It’s some of the best content in this game. I wish MORE of the fights had multiple tatics/phases required in them like the teq fight (I also love lupi because of this kinda stuff).

The go and click on X teeth etc. part was stupid and just kinda tacked on there to make it a living story kinda thing though (seriously stop doing this skilless kinda junk a-net). But who cares, the teq fight is awesome.

This time around we’re getting a new dung. You havn’t even seen it. Wait until you’ve done it.

I would call this underwhelming. Day #2 of the new Tequatl encounter on my realm:

I love the time on the minimap ;p 4 am…
Nice.

Lol-ed.

Just because a server can’t muster the numbers to even cap a single map doesn’t mean it’s bad content. I’m sure the 4am part had something to do with that though :P

That would be a wednesday as well.

It’s ridiculous how you’re all just dismissing the very true and sad facts Elbegast just posted by pulling cheap tricks.

Yes it’s on a wednesday, what other day would it be? If it’s the second day of the release it’s gonna be wednesday since all content updates are released on a tuesday.

And the fact it’s 4am on his clock means nothing. I play in the US servers yet I’m 4 hours ahead of the server time.

But either way, all of that is meaningless since I remember back with the Zephyrite Sanctum update how one time I got on at 6am my time which was either 2-3am server time and the sanctum was full of life.

Despite the late hour and despite being in the middle of the week there were people jumping around everywhere, doing the sanctum sprint and all that jazz.

That’s because the Zephyrite Sanctum was an actual update that added lots of things for players to do, enjoy and experience. While even though I appreciate the Tequatl change it’s undeniable how it barely added anything new to the game.

So there’s a lot of misdirected fire going on around here… again, to my “surprise”.

Let me try to clear somethings up. I’m not saying the new dungeon path will be bad (since you know, I haven’t played it yet). I’m not saying I don’t want old content to get new updates, in fact I think they should stick to mainly updating old content before adding new ones.

What I am saying is that compared to all other updates in the past this new one and the Tequatl one are very small. They add very little to the game, there isn’t a lot to experience.

In most content updates they added a variety of new events for you to go out into the world and do, things that make you go from map to map. You had a lot to do.

On top of that each content update came with a few life improvements, such as the wallet, better drop rates, brand new items, revamp to champs, etc. Those things alone were enough to get me excited.

What I’m saying is that both this and the Tequatl update had a noticeably smaller amount of things being added to the game. Worst of all they’re coming one right after the other.

Although I was expecting a lot, lot more from the Tequatl update it didn’t bother me too much. But now that we have another small and lackluster update around the corner it’s just left me with nothing to do in game.

Now on a completely personal side; I find myself logging in every day for a few minutes just to get my quartz crystals, charge them, craft stuff for the ascended weapon and log off. I can’t even be bothered to do daily anymore.

Which is something that saddens me a lot that this game which I dedicated a lot of my time, effort and attention is leaving me with nothing to do. I constantly find myself running laps in Lion’s Arch as a means of killing time and trying to find something to do.

You can’t ignore this, even if you personally aren’t feelings this, you can’t ignore the fact this is becoming a bigger and bigger problem among many players.

Pariah.8506:

Vayne.8563:

No, it wouldn’t force people to play together. The people who want to play together would play together and everyone else would simply leave the game. In case you haven’t noticed, people don’t like to be forced to do stuff. That’s what a lot of the complaining on these forums comes down to. I don’t want to be forced to do dailies.

If people don’t want to play alongside others then maybe, just maybe they should play a single player game. The point of an MMO is player interaction, GW2 has none of it. You simply zerg down stuff in a horde in which every single person is doing his own thing, there is 0 atruism. There is no necromancer casting Order of Pain solely for the benefit of the melee classes, there is no elementalist that let’s his colleague know he just cast Searing Flames so that it can be combined with Ash Blast. All the other members of the horde may as well have been replaced by mute robots and you wouldn’t even notice it.

Vayne.8563:

Many MMO devs have said straight out that you can no longer ignore the number of people who solo in MMOs. There are more of them than you think. More to the point, there are also people who play at off hours or in different countries who don’t have a zillion people playing when they play.

And many MMO devs adhere to the f2p p2w business plan, does that mean it is the best course of action? It’s up to the devs to balance, to think out every situation and to do it well. And yes, I am aware of people playing at off hours, we call it WvW.

Vayne.8563:

And then you have the fact that the world is huge and people are off doing whatever they’re doing which takes them out of the open world.

The world is not huge, the world is many times smaller than it is because a player can get anywhere at any time because the world is littered with Asura Waypoints meaning the time spent getting somewhere becomes negligible. Meaning anything worth doing immediately gets overwhelmed by a surplus of players anyway.

Yes to so much that you said. Especially about the waypoints, I am bothered beyond belief by the gross amount of waypoints everywhere.

Although I agree it’s impossible to cater to 100% of the people 100% of the time, I think completely ignoring the solo base is wrong. I appreciate an MMO that can let the soloers play at their pace while still making them naturally interact with others players.

It’s what GW2 does pretty well, what it doesn’t do well is the challenge and the actual benefit or even need from communicating with each other, which there is none.

Woah with all the misdirected hate, alright here we go.

@Kaphei
- I did do Tequatl, it was frustrating yet fun. I think they made some really big misses in how that worked out but I love the idea of making things more challenging and thought provoking. Most other updates however have had a variety of new things added to the game, such as activities you can do in whole areas or multiple areas and etc. Tequatl didn’t, it was an event about doing one boss, that’s it. No background was even added to it, it felt more like a big change to one boss they called “an event”.

@Windu
-It’s not proper to think that just cause they’re not charging you for it directly that it’s free. Or even that just because it’s free we shouldn’t expect quality with our product. This game is something I really enjoy and I genuinely get sad at not being able to enjoy it for so long.

@ahuba
-Yes, it is my opinion, what else would it be? I never stated that any of my opinions were facts. This is something however that I care about and wanted to see other people’s opinions on this. All opinions.

@Chew
-As I stated in my original post, the Tequatl update page showed exactly what we’d end up getting. That felt weak but I believed they’d end up doing a sneak content reveal like they did for the Speech, however that didn’t happen. All of this has led me to believe that we’re getting what we’re seeing for this Twilight update – as in not a lot.

@CuRt
-That is exactly why I never actually said “festival”, I said “updates such as festivals, parties, and these festive events”. I said all of that specifically to avoid people saying what you did. I’m not talking about festivals, I’m talking about these party and happy gatherings coming in too frequently as compared to the more core gameplay improvements on the game. That makes the whole game feel more like a social rpg instead of a fantasy one.

Mikau.6920:

Healing Power Overpowered? Are you kidding me? And I play main Guardian.

Healing Power is the most broken status now. How at super high healing power the scales becomes too high? It has a linear scaling… This isn’t power/precision/crit, it, yes, scales exponentially.

Also some skills not even scales with healing power at all.

I think what the OP meant was more along the lines of healing power is not well balanced between classes, as it’s completely useless for most.

You gotta admit for guardian and elementalist healing power does what it’s supposed to do, it’s not overpowered but it’s good. While for just about every other class it falls flat in comparison.

In other words a nearly useless stat for other classes.

Nova Stiker.8396:

Delryn.7235:

Zacchary.6183:

Healing power affects certain professions more than others. coughguardscough It really all depends which profession its on.

Healing power is a useless stat for thieves. I don’t know a single thief that runs anything more than what the SA traitline gives them.

Ooooh healing power thieves are badkitten! Using the shadow refuge, healing while stealth, and building a stealth build around it you become almost immortal. You won’t be able to kill anything but you’ll provide fantastic support for your allies.

Shadow Rejuvenation has a base heal of 293 with a healing power multiplier of 0.1.

So at 1500 healing power, Shadow Rejuvenation heals 443 health a second and can last 4 seconds for a total of 1772 health with 1 Cloak and Dagger.

At 0 healing power, 1 cloak and dagger can heal for 1172 for a difference of 600 health.

That is sadly not a huge difference considering how much healing power you are putting into the trait.

For the most part, as has been stated few skills get a full 1.0 from healing power for any class. And for the most part healing isn’t supposed to be this main fantastic thing in this game.

For most (if not all) classes healing isn’t meant to be used as a “oh crap I’m dying let me heal up”, it’s meant to be used constantly when not needed so you won’t ever actually need it.

Even though it only heals 1,700 instead of 1,100 you can’t take the number alone into account. You gotta take the cooldown, how well you’re gonna use it and when. Using the thief’s healing mixed with stealth and low base HP, you should be able to keep your health up constantly throughout the battle. You’re not supposed to start healing when you’re dying, you’re supposed to start healing when you first take any damage.

And with that in mind, the thief works wonderfully. He has lots of group heals, and most of them are pretty decent, regen here and there, etc. That coupled with stealth makes those 600 points go a very long way.

A healing thief if he takes any sort of damage usually can heal that right back up instantly while going in stealth. That topped with decent (not fantastic) group healing and the most precious of all, stealth rezing. A healing/assist thief works fantastically well.

Mesket.5728:

Rhaps.8540:

They didn’t use their skills particularly intelligently, they just spammed through their skillset like in gw2. The only big difference with gw1 is that we had prot/heal monk monsters that would spam these skills on nearby monsters if they themselves weren’t damaged.

Not only monsters in GW1 used protections and heals on their monster allies. They also rezzed dead monsters and constantly interrupt rezzing players (and other important skills), they spiked damage on one target (no CC = dead) and yes, they moved around to keep distance.

It was not perfect, I give you that but it was probably the most fun AI you would encounter.

I can’t imagine why they didn’t spend more time working on mob AI.

but well… the game is filled with inconsistencies. Just to begin with… a game with no tanks and healers, replaced with control and support… we have toughness, vitality and healing but we don’t have CC duration or Boon Power stats (all boons yields the same numbers no matter who cast it). Expecting a better AI when this game has design errors so deep on its core its expecting too much.

Know the saddest part? I honestly don’t expect there to be any amazing game changing fixes either. I assume we’ll just get more of the same going on.

For example the condition cap, it’s a huge flaw which I’ve just had to learn to live with.

It’s only natural to grow used to your surroundings after a while and that initial drama and awe wares off. However for the most part I never had any initial drama and awe with the places in GW2.

I’m very happy with a lot I’ve read in this thread, a lot of really good points coming from everyone.

It’s understandable that an MMO requires good lighting for its players, which is why there’s no open world legit dark areas (those jumping puzzles don’t count, they’re dark as a gimmick, not for the sake of being dark). But I would have loved it if you had the option of making the night in GW2 an actual night; dark and creepy, noticeable.

To add to the lightheartedness of everything, the enemies in GW2 pose no threat. There is no reason to feel tense, and even if they made the game all around darker, that wouldn’t change with the current overall style of the enemies.

Even in Orr everything is just so barely threatening that no amount of environmental change will help with that.

Someone stated that the first time they went into Orr it was tense, frightful. I don’t know how it could have been. I’ve been playing since the release and I went into Orr without knowing about how it was gonna be, I remember my first character, looking at the map and seeing that Lv80 place thinking “that’s gonna be where the real challenge is” nope…

Getting there for the first time it felt just… normal. Like any other map in the game, nothing special, just more undead. Even back then with weak gear and simple notions of the game it was a cake walk.

They need to improve the enemies before they improve anything else. And I don’t mean adding cheap copouts such as one hit kills, dozens of CC and a huge health pool, actually fix that AI you have.

Also, don’t even get me started on the legendaries. Oooh the legendaries, I’m just happy I have absolutely no desire to get any of them.

Legendary weapons, especially in this game which are so few and so difficult to obtain should actually feel legendary and fantastic, instead they feel like party props from a child’s birthday party.

Well that was distracting. After reading this thread (yesterday) I felt like playing GW1 and I did just that, but forgot to reply, anyway…

It’s true, GW1 had fantastic AI despite it not even needing it. It wasn’t a dynamic game, so it could easily pass off with average AI. But instead it had fantastic AI.

The enemies would move out of AoE fields, weaker ones would stay further in the back, they would use skills in a smart way etc.

While GW2 which is a fast paced dynamic game which would require a more interactive and intelligent AI has one worst to that of GW1.

Enemies don’t interact with each other, have simplistic skills, don’t move to get out of trouble. Don’t use interesting and smart skills, don’t dodge, etc.

What I liked in GW1 was that every encounter posed a threat, even if it were just basic regular mobs. You couldn’t just sit back and autoattack them to death, doing that more times than not would put you in trouble.

Every encounter forced you to actually pay attention and make sure another group wouldn’t attack you while you were engaged with enemies, it was a lot of fun.

However in GW2 the enemies tend to be alone, spread out, far apart, and dumb. They don’t pose a threat and are nearly harmless.

Zacchary.6183:

Healing power affects certain professions more than others. coughguardscough It really all depends which profession its on.

Healing power is a useless stat for thieves. I don’t know a single thief that runs anything more than what the SA traitline gives them.

Ooooh healing power thieves are badkitten! Using the shadow refuge, healing while stealth, and building a stealth build around it you become almost immortal. You won’t be able to kill anything but you’ll provide fantastic support for your allies.

Especially if you use condition damage together with the healing, that way you can bug your enemies a bit while never getting touched.

In my opinion the three best classes for healing power are thief, guardian and elementalist, but that’s it. For everyone else healing power underperforms.

I think the class which gets the least use from healing power (ironically) is a necromancer, because just about nothing the necromancer has scales with healing and when it does it’s a miserable amount like 0.1%.

ThiBash.5634:

Today, we did a level 10 fractal with a level 33 mesmer guildie that went in there for the first time. He didn’t go down any more often than the rest of the group.

Earlier this week, I did an AC story mode run (level 35) on my level 25 thief because I didn’t knew my level was too low. I got defeated a few times, sure, but overall I held up a lot better than anyone expected, including myself (think I went down maybe 5 times or so). Even ressed my teammates a few times.

So no, not required. This game is more about player skill than gear in any form. Gear checks are a relic from other games that we do not need.

I understand people’s obsession with perfect gear because in most other MMOs and games similar to this gear was the sole thing which defined your characters and ability. But I imagined at this point players of GW2 would have understood that gear isn’t what defines skill in this game.

I guess if you’re so thick headed where you’re not willing to play with different types of players to find out how everything works, you’ll never find out that gear isn’t what defines skill here.

Although everyone can just play with who they want and although the lfg tool honestly does need a bit added to it to help the filtering cause right now it’s extremely simplistic I think the idea of adding stuff like a gear check to it is ridiculous.

Gear doesn’t make a good player, the stats from rare, to exotic, to ascended change little and barely impact someone’s performance. Especially in PvE where most things are pretty easy.

I’ve seen many legendary wielders run around like headless chickens not having a clue about what they were doing, while I saw new players doing a dungeon for the first time being able to take orders amazingly well.

If you just exclude new players totally they’ll never get the chance to improve, after all we all had our first times. Everyone has to learn.

Yesterday on the lfg tool I got one or two players to do fractals level 10 who had never done fractals before, it took me literally a minute of explaining to them what to do in major parts and everything went extremely well.

In fact much better than how it goes when I’m with some more expert players.

TheGuy.3568:

I am sorry to say this but when the kitten did gamers get so lazy that failing a couple of times equals I need a manual? It is like if you don’t get a trophy it doesn’t matter. I do not know if you guys know this but their was time where you did a boss dungeon puzzle and you literally had to figure it out and that was half the challenge. Want your loots? Work for it.

Yeah there was also a time that games gave you information within the game itself.

The main complaint here isn’t “too hard, need nerf”, it’s how badly the information is given to players within the game.

I would love to learn and work hard towards whatever goal in game but that’s kind of tough when you’re thrown in the middle of the fight with little to no information on what to do.

Dakan.9463:

Wait you need a manual to get the mechanics? O.O

Come on whats hard about that? Jump over waves, don’t stand in poison fields, read the tooltips on the turret skills… Figuring out what to do is incredibly easy. Doing it and coordinating a huge zerg of players that seemingly lack the ability to read is not…

You’re being bombarded by risen and attacks the whole fight, on top of that you have a ridiculously short time frame to beat him in. If you take too long actually learning what the cannon skills do during the event you might die, or waste too much time.

With the clusterkitten of stuff going on quickly learning everything on the spot becomes an unforgiving task.

Not to mention if you’re near shallow water the red AoE circles don’t appear and by the time you realize you’re standing in one it’s too late.

Most of the “challenges” introduced in GW2 either require tireless mindless trial and error or require you to read up on what to do outside of the game.

cpg.7140:

Delryn.7235:

What Anet needs to do is start actually passing along information to their playerbase within the game itself. Unless you look for info on what’s going on outside the game you can’t complete most of the “challenges” they give us.

It’s become simply annoying how little amounts of information is actually well distributed in the game. Or how well they explain new things they add within the actual game.

Right. If you need coordination among a large group, give us NPCs that will take command and direct people with separate sub-events or something.

Exactly. Something as simple as before the event starting NPCs start telling you how to use the cannons would be great.

Then during the events they explain to watch for the poison clouds, the waves (which is the only thing I actually heard an NPC mention), etc. Info on how to beat the boss to help you along.

Dulfy exists, but this complete dependency on dulfy/wiki etc to be able to play the game is ridiculous.

A lot of players, including myself often times don’t want to be spoiled. So I don’t wanna watch a guide on how to beat him, I wanna experience that thrill myself but it’s not possible if none of the tools are given to the players within the game itself.

What Anet needs to do is start actually passing along information to their playerbase within the game itself. Unless you look for info on what’s going on outside the game you can’t complete most of the “challenges” they give us.

It’s become simply annoying how little amounts of information is actually well distributed in the game. Or how well they explain new things they add within the actual game.

IndigoSundown.5419:

One of the ironies of MMO design is that players demand a large open world with lots to do there. Then many of them race through it, barely pausing for breath, food, or sleep to get to max level. At that point, they ignore the open world in favor of whatever a particular game offers for endgame.

GW2 did a better job than many games of enabling players to go into every zone, find challenges (as long as they’re willing to look for them), find things to do, and (hopefully) have fun. So what do many players do? They ignore 90% of the open world in favor of whatever content is the most lucrative.

At some point, the MMO genre will die because developers will refuse to put all that time, effort and money into gameplay that will be ignored — in favor of instanced content that is modular — which means it can be changed up easily, providing variety; which has variable challenge levels for different demographics, and in which the rewards can be more tightly controlled.

Although I don’t entirely disagree with everything you said, I think there’s more to it than that.

A lot of players do want to get to max level as fast as possible, however on most cases those are characters that are trying to level up alts. Though it’s not uncommon for first timers to want to level fast, odds are they won’t ignore the world that’s given to them.

I was confused about what WoW and even Gw1 had when I first played them that GW2 doesn’t have (now mind you, GW2 is my current favorite MMO even though some times it feels more like a chore than a game).

In both games (more WoW than GW1) you really had a lot to do. When you saw a cave you knew that if you went there you’d find something to do. More often than not it would be quests, but usually the quests would give you something to do, somewhere to go, places to explore and in the end you’d be rewarded with some really nice loot or skills.

It motivated and almost demanded exploration and examination on a players part. That combined with the fact you couldn’t or could rarely waypoint meant you actually got to do a lot of the exploring yourself, which led to you finding more things to do and new places to see along the way.

In GW2 they removed all of that, replacing it with the “efficient” waypoints which kind of ruin immersion, and the dynamic events which at later levels give you little to no reason to do them since their reward is crap.

On that note, if all quests in more traditional MMOs always gave you some EXP, some money and some sort of second currency, you’d eventually get really bored of doing them. They need to add more and better rewards to doing these events.

Two things GW2 doesn’t have which greatly impacts this part of the game: waypointing and no quests.

First of all there are waypoints absolutely everywhere, you have just about no motivation or reason to actually walk somewhere when you can cheaply waypoint there, especially if it’s in a city.

It’s not completely true that most areas are barren of players, the real issue is that the high density of players are located within a few spots in the maps, those that matter and those they can get to with waypoints.

If there were no waypoints, or if GW2 was like GW1 which had less instant traveling, you’d actually see players walking from place to place, giving it a more alive feeling.

Second, although quests are a cheap way to make players explore areas, their “solution” with dynamic events didn’t quite fill the gap. Especially in cities which have literally nothing for you to do in them.

You have no reason to explore that long corridor in a city, or go behind that house to see if maybe you’ll find something, a quest. Or even out in the world, you really don’t have much of a reason to explore.

I understand and kind of agree with both sides. But you have to understand marnick’s frustration. If they added at least a few permanent content to be enjoyed at your pace, the ones you might miss out on wouldn’t matter much.

If they added one permanent part for every non permanent, the non permanent you’d miss out on wouldn’t matter as much. But for now all you got is temporary, so you really do feel rushed and pushed around too much.

This has been something that’s bugged me a lot lately in the recent patches and the recent “challenges” – they are all trial and error.

It’s really cheap and frustrating difficulty.

Most of World 1 of SAB is an example of good difficulty; where every move may be very dangerous or kill you, but you’re given tools and information to make a wise choice of how to proceed.

While Most of World 2 of SAB is an example of bad difficulty; trial and error everywhere. Your vision is blocked or obstructed or most of the hazards just don’t show until it’s too late. You have to die, memorize, and proceed.

Another example of this is the previous Aetherblade Dungeons to face Mai Lin; that was good difficulty. Everything in there was dangerous and could easily kill you, but you were given all the tools to surpass it, and you had to rely on coordinated team work to get through.

While Liadri is an example of bad difficulty; there was literally no way to beat her without dying to her dozens and dozens of time, memorizing her attack patterns, and trying to finish the fight as fast as possible. The small luck factor involved helped just tie the whole bad experience together.

Anet has done good challenges in the past, so why are they now insisting on these cheap, shallow, and frustrating excuses for challenges?

They did in fact state that any item previously with magic find would have the option to be double clicked once so you could choose which stat option you’d want for the selected item.

This includes ascended items and obviously ascended back items as well.