Guild Wars 2

Does that means a balance patch is hitting tomorrow, or is that unrelated?

In action games with dodge mechanics, defensive stats don’t usually have much purpose but to make things more forgiving. Otherwise, they are important only when damage is unavoidable, like in traditional RPGs, where those stats are the abstract replacement for evasion mechanics.

Without a traditional trinity or anything of the sorts, in a game that is designed to be viable to all builds, players will give priority to those that can clear content faster or farm more effectively.

In addition to that, GW2’s design is bipolar, so while the game wants to be accessible to all builds, the reward systems do everything they possibly can to incentivate you to work towards a single stat set only. You have to be rich or very, very dedicated to built more than one gear set. This pidgeonholes the community even more into a single stat set, to the point that if, say, Anet buffed condition sets to be stronger than zerker sets in the future, everyone would complain because they would be forced to go through a massive grind again.

So the zerker mindset is probably here to stay. Not only would Anet have to revamp the entire combat system to make stat diversity work outside of very specific group content, they would also have to revamp the entire reward system to not scare players away from such change.

I’ve only played this fight after the nerf, so I don’t know how terrible it must have been before.

But boy, is it bad. It’s not about the challenge, but uneffective game design. The player is literally being spammed with 2 or 3 AoE circles, a special skill button prop and boss projectiles every single second, all of them which have visibility issues.

When you turn the camera to the boss, you can not see the ground, and you’ll die.
When you are busy avoiding the aoe circles, you may not see the special skill proc, or you may not use it in time, and you’ll die.
When you focus your attention to the small skill prop icon, chances are, an AoE ground skill will catch you instead, and you’ll die.
Sometimes you can’t even use the special skill because your character us at the middle of another animation, and then you’ll die.
And even when you successfully manage to avoid all circles and use your the special skill, the boss will throw a random projectile at you, and you’ll die.
You can extend your survival by blindinly dodging all the invisible damage, but once you’re left with no endurance and no block skills, you’ll die.
And no matter how successfully you pull off your plays, you’ll have to repeat that feat 5 seconds after, or you’ll die.

It was possibly one of the worst – if not the worst – encounter I’ve ever played in GW2.

Were there even any mechanics to learn? Because the battle does not give you time (nor visibility) to learn them. I know that it gradually gets more difficult (with the added NPCs over time), but that means little when the base mechanics are a pure mess. Sometimes it’s even impossible to avoid the circles because there are so many of them that you’ll only have half a second window to position yourself at a tiny safe spot, fight the camera, use a special skill AND avoid a projectile. It’s absurd.

Look, Anet, I like your intention of making this encounter hard. It’s fitting for an important story boss to be challenging, as it makes players respect him more as a villain. But this battle is challenging in the worst possible playable way: it’s incomprehensible.

This fight does not merely needs a nerf. It needs a redesign. The room must be bigger, because the mechanics are at odds with the camera. The main mechanics must be more gradual (and more visible), or else the player will not know why things are happening, making him unable to learn them and improve his playstyle. And the boss shouldn’t spam three or four things at the player at once, and so often, because that’s just pure chaos. it literally degenerates the fight into a “waste all your defensive CDs to damage him before you die”.

Carighan.6758:

Ofc, there are still plenty upsides. For one it gives you “something to aim for”. Secondly, you’ll breeze through the now-outdated bosses, which makes you feel powerful.

But overall, if balanced well, actual difficulty of bosses doesn’t go up in such a system. That’s its key flaw, because it becomes a negative barrier instead of a positive empowerment.

Those kind of bosses and difficulty spikes are important in games with vertical progression, or else there would never exist any kind of difficulty.

But the upsides you mentioned are what make stronger gear more interesting than agony infusion. There’s also another upside: whenever a mmorpg adds a new tier of gear and more difficulty bosses, the last tier generally becomes easier to obtain, which opens up older hardcore content to casual players who weren’t good enough at it before. In contrast, it’s possible the casual players will never tough any raid in GW2, because no raid is going to become “outdated”.

The downside, however, is that the gear loop gets tiring and repetitive after a long time, and that’s why GW2 attempts to avoid it.

But it’s important to understand that:
- There’s interesting vertical progression to be had outside of gear loops, as well as game-impactful horizontal progression. Many of the times there’s even an overlap between the two, but nonetheless, it makes you feel stronger or more flexible without gear loops (profession upgrades, skill collection, account upgrades, map upgrades, etc.).
- There’s cosmetic horizontal progression that can also make you feel stronger or more important in the world (good looking gear, housing/ guild halls, etc).

And GW2 is by no means perfect in any of it. Just the fact that Anet can’t give us full armor sets without taking months, and have most of them turn out ugly or ridiculous, is already a big red flag that GW2’s horizontal progression could be… better.

maddoctor.2738:

Nova.2890:

So again, what is the point of raids? To get armor/weapon skins?

Yes. Be glad that at least there are unique/exclusive rewards in Raids. That’s more than enough for a game without vertical progression and honestly that’s what made most of those who bought GW2 buy it instead of other games.

In theory, horizontal progression should be as rewarding as vertical, just in a different way, so saying “just be glad that rewards exist” is wrong, because you’re implying that they don’t have to exist in a game that focus on horizontal progression, which is not correct. A game without rewards has neither horizontal nor vertical progression: it has no sense of progression at all.

And I highly doubt that most people bought GW2 because they only wanted to collect skins. Horizontal progression is not only about cosmetics (and even GW2 is kinda bad at that, because it’s unable to offer you full armor sets most of the time). It’s also about impactful gameplay mechanics that widen your options (more skills and abilities, be it either in combat, like elite specs, or outside of it, like gliding in GW2 or mounts in other MMOs, etc), quality-of-life upgrades that improve your gameplay experience (infinite gathering tools, account upgrades, speed boosts, etc.) and non-vertical means to gain access to locked content (like some of the masteries).

Sometimes, horizontal progression overlaps with vertical when it makes you indirectly stronger. Like the new downed skill. But that is perfectly fine (and interesting).

In fact, people love vertical progression. Entire genres are build on it because of how much players love it: RPGs, MMORPGs, MOBAs, etc. Deep vertical progression is almost synonymous to RPG-like gameplay. What people who bought GW2 do not like, however, is endless gear loops that invalidades your sense of progression every few months.

When you obtain a new downed skill, or unlock glider skills (unfortunately for one map only), you’re getting stronger than before, but not through a new gear loop.

The problem with some Anet’s design decisions and part of the community is that they were, for a period of time, convinced that vertical progression = gear loops and that horizontal progression = quaggan backpacks. When you could that with the negative effect that the gem store and the trading post had on rewarding content, then you’ll have the excplanation for why GW2 was a very unrewarding game for years.

EDIT:

GW1, in comparison, had a clearer sense of horizontal progression. There were very few levels and max-stats armor was super easy to obtain, but the game was filled with elite armor that offered cosmetic upgrades only (not only quaggan backpacks and your monthly new mask like GW2), and the entire game was built around skill upgrading, collecting and hunting, and the existance of different builds for different modes and different maps. Sure, being an older game, GW1’s sense of progression is also more restricted than what it would have been today (it offered very few account or map upgrades, unlike GW2), but, at the very least, it’s not a game that was confused about its identity. GW2 still is.

AliamRationem.5172:

I would only do so for the sake of completion rather than because the rewards themselves are compelling.

Unfortunately, that’s the state of most reward systems in this game. Achievements, most masteries besides the few important ones, most rare collections, wardrobe unlocking, etc.

Anchoku.8142:

End game has become unrewarding for me because there is less social interaction and more impersonal grind.

The newest areas, HoT+, do not encourage grouping, social dialogue and dependency, cooperative adventure, whatever keeps players chatting.

The old areas didn’t either.

I actually enjoy the new maps over the launch ones simply because gameplay is better integrated into the environment.

FourthVariety.5463:

GW2 is no different from those specialist games. GW2 leans heavily into completing progression bars and achievement systems. After you did everything once, the game hopes it can motivate you to do some things 100 or even 1000 times. GW2 is specialized in that way.

I don’t think people are into the MMORPG genre so that they can spend their time filling achievement bars.

Achievements are an… interesting way to incentivize players to explore the world and get deeply into new content, but they’re still not a meaningful reward system by itself. More like an additional guiding hand.

Good reward systems should be tangible and impactful, either by allowing visual customisation (skins, decorations) or expand or improve the way you approach the game (vertical progression, horizontal progression that affects gameplay like QoL upgrades, higher skill and build selection, etc).

GW2’s been failing at consistently offering new armor skins (because they take “too long” to make). Most of the good new weapon skins are not tied to content but to gems (so they rarely contribute at making the content feel more rewarding). Skin customization is not incentivized due to a rental wardrobe system, lack of saving skin template and large focus on premade outfits. Guild Halls are behind massive money sinks that make it harder for smaller guilds to appreciate them.

Skill progression is tied to elite specs which we’ll only see in expansions, and any spec that does not works with berzerker gear is going to be ignored by most of the playerbase after toying with it for 20 minutes. Most masteries and map/ gliding upgrades are generally way too context sensitive, where you won’t get meaningful progression outside of a single map or two, few exceptions aside. Changing build stats outside of pvp is gated behind massive money and time sinks, meaning that only rich players will be able to enjoy the condition or healing weapon and skill sets that the game offers right from the beginning to everyone.

GW2’s horizontal progression is mediocre at the very things it attempts to do.

The problem is that Anet already has a lot of trouble releasing a single armor set, so asking them to release 5 of them, only to make each of them available to a restricted amount of players, is not a good idea.

Fixing forum bug.

maddoctor.2738:

There are two commonly used ways of blocking players from obtaining something:
a) Put it behind some type of content that not everyone will be capable of finishing
b) Put it behind heavy grind, either repetition of the same content, heavy material grind, gold or gems

Since a) is something players of this game dislike with a passion, the most widely used method by Anet as their reward acquisition system is b). It also helps with their gem store, as impatient players can skip some of the grind by paying and converting to gold. Which leads us to the problem at hand, of the items not giving a feeling of accomplishment when you get them. It’s more like “finally I got my legendary, now it’s time to do something fun”

It also doesn’t helps that, outside of legendaries, there’s very few rewards to work outside of farming gold to buy rare skins from the TP.

More collections like Mawdrey or HoT’s elite spec items, or an improved/ slightly less annoying version of Silverwastes’ carapace armor collection, would be lovely, as they engage players into quests that make use of newly-released content, and aren’t either too easy as story rewards/ achievements usually are, nor too hard and long as the legendary journey, filling a gap for medium-term rewards that GW2 generally lacks.

Obtena.7952:

I think the most constructive answer for you is that you shouldn’t play games you don’t feel entertain (which is the reward you get for games) you for your time.

For some players, it may be the opposite: the rewards ARE the entertainment, and not vice-versa. And, usually, the best games strive to acchieve both ways: to have entertaining content with entertaining rewards on top of that. And I assume plenty of gamers would rather have both in a single package, instead of having one at the cost of the other. If GW2 has a hard time achieving both forms of entertainment, then players should definitely speak out, and developers should listen to them.

Also, some of the GW2’s defenders in this thread are proving the topic creator’s point. He said that GW2’s rewards are underwhelming, and some of you folks are justifying why they are meant to be underwhelming. Conclusion: rewards in GW2 are underwhelming.

Here’s a big question for all of you: can a game that focus on horizontal progression be rewarding? If so, why is GW2 failing at it?

Think about it:
- Wouldn’t GW2 feel more rewarding if the karma map bonuses that you can purchase from the latest new maps applied to all of them at once, instead of forcing you to buy them again whenever a new map comes out?
- Wouldn’t GW2 feel more rewarding if the glider skills could be usable everywhere in the game and not only at bloodstone fen?
- Wouldn’t GW2 feel more rewarding if we had more collection adventures like the ones we’ve gotten in HoT for elite specs?
- Wouldn’t GW2 feel more rewarding if it rewarded you with entire armor or weapon sets each new map, like Dry Top and Silverwastes did, instead of a quaggan backpack or a pair of gloves? And wouldn’t it be even more rewarding if, following GW1’s wonderful model, which Silverwastes also did, if you could unlock a more prestigious version of a new armor set by simply playing the new content?
- Wouldn’t GW2 feel more rewarding if runes and sigils were actually exciting to salvage, if loot had more to it than collectible materials, if Luck was a more interesting investment than merely a stat with diminishing returns that becoems too subtle too fast?
- Wouldn’t GW2 feel more rewarding if you could work for more account upgrades, QoL changes, etc. like we once did with Tyrian masteries, instead of having most of them be placed behind gems?
- Wouldn’t GW2 feel more rewarding if its horizontal progression systems were simply better and more streamlined (wardrobe, stat swaps, rune/ sigil swaps, build templates, skin templates, etc)?

Not to mention potential future additions:
- Mounts? (One of the most popular horizontal progression systems in the entire genre).
- Housing? (Same as above).

All of those features or improvements would have made GW2 more rewarding without having it rely on vertical progression.

Unfortunately, most of the features I’ve mentioned are as they are either because of the business model (which is fine, I guess), or the trading post, the later which forces Anet’s designers to add huge money sinks behind every little thing in order to keep its precious economy in check, but at the expense of a fun and rewarding gameplay experience.

I feel like I should bump this with my opinion instead of creating a new thread, as it is not too old.

GW2’s endgame is unrewarding because it is unrewarding.

Vertical progression exists, but it’s not meaningful. It was designed that way to appeal to two different playerbases, but it ended up appealing to no one. Lovers of horizontal progression design hate ascended gear. Lovers of vertical progression design would much rather play games entirely dedicated to it than waste their time for months to get a subtle and optional 10% boost.

Horizontal progression is apparently the big focus of GW2, but it’s generally mediocre or highly flawed. Masteries are finite, and only a few of them are truly meaningful outside of a single map – same for purchasable map bonuses. Legendaries are too hardcore and niche, but there’s little else giving you that sense of adventure that comes from collections, meaning that your averagle player is left empty-handed. Visual-wise, Anet takes too long to implement new, complete armor skins, and they are generally mediocre: bland or ridiculous, copy-pastes of other existing skins, etc. Wardrobe is driven by a rental mechanic, which is unsatisfying, and there’s not even a feature to save and load customised skin sets.

On top of that, the entire loot system is based around collecting an endless amount materials that have no immediate use. Looted gear is nothing but salvage fodder. And if you don’t care about crafting, all you can do with the massive material spam is to sell them at the TP one by one until your patience runs dry.

When the “best” rewards GW2 has to offer in the last patches are a single piece of skin, or an item that converts excessive useless materials into slightly less useless crap, then it’s safe to say that GW2 is one of the most unrewarding RPGs I’ve ever played.

Not to mention that most of the interesting skins and horizontal convenience items are locked behind the trading post and/ or the gem store, leaving little opportunity to have good rewards placed on in-game activities.

It’s a solid game otherwise, and some rewards ARE meaningful and impactful (some of the masteries, for example. Some good skins here and there. Etc.), but Anet has had trouble at designing a rewarding game since day 1, regardless of game design philosphy, and regardless of their focus on horizontal progression.

Karl McLain.5604:

For those asking about it: We’ll be keeping tabs on a few of the buff (+nerf) splits and will take them into other parts of the game in future updates, as is seen fitting.
Thanks for your continued feedback!

-Karl

I agree, some of those pvp-only splits should be global, especially in regards to small buffs to skills like arc lightning or virtue of justice’s burning duration. It’s not like PvE eles are spending their time using that AA much, or guardians gearing for condition damage, so I don’t see how those buffs would hurt PvE.

EDIT: If you want to make baseline guardian more viable, the solution lies in baseline traits. Radiance needs a good grandmaster trait for zerker dps builds. Move writ of persistence to that spot, and symbol builds will love radiance + zeal set ups, forcing them to choose between virtues and dragonhunter for the third line.

It’s quite a simple change that can (hopefully) do wonders.

Millin basin, GH crystals, vision crystals, wood/ rubies from new maps, chak eggs, reclaimed weapon parts.

OneKlicKill.4285:

This mindset is why skill balance in this game is so bad right now. Anet caters to people like you who don’t want it to be “hard” to learn small differences between game modes. Look where that has gotten us every balance patch….

Anet has almost never splitted skills in the history of GW2, and I’m heavily in favor of skill splitting, so how exactly did my mindset affect in any way the game’s balance?

But I’m just too “lazy” to appreciate the fine beauty of clumsy changes, apparently.

I think some people are missing the point.

This thread is not about being against skill splitting in general, but specifically against large functionality changes. Splitting the values for damage, heal and durations for boons, conditions, cc, etc, are all fair, because they keep the functionality, but when more mechanical changes are done, especially to energy costs, cooldowns, casting times, aftercasts, etc, they break up the internal rhythm set by players and change the “feeling” of using said skills.

It’s very clumsy when things get that far.

The changes for Blurred Frenzy, for example, are perfectly fine to me. But imagine if they suddenly removed its blur effect for one of the game modes. It would suddenly become a different skill!

Krysard.1364:

Splitting game balance is a good idea tho, so o/

My point is that I’d rather they split game balance without splitting game mechanics. Or else, it’s going to create the same issue that they had with GW1 and tried so desperately to avoid.

I’m all for splitting skills between different game modes, but only when it comes to adjusting effect numbers.
Ex: a skill dealing 1000 damage in PvE but only 900 damage in PvP.

But when skill splitting changes how skills are fundamentally played, forcing players to relearn their own profession inbetween modes, like the PvP-only change to Revenant’s energy upkeeps, things only start to become confusing and messy.

I know that the blindfold and the legend invocation create some subtle ties with GW1’s Ritualists, but honestly, I hope we don’t truly get a “Ritualist” elite spec for them.

This is because, honestly, Revenants are more like dark knights than exotic spellcasters. The GW1’s cues are just that. Revenants also have a bit of Dervishes (Avatar form, “boon shattering” in its vaguest form), and the bard-style Glint spec fills the Paragon role (either intentionally or not). Revenants are both the third soldier profession and an epic version of old ritualists, and I don’t think a normal “ritualist” elite spec would simply fit them.

But that’s just my opinion.

Benjamin Arnold.3457:

Correct, and making sure it doesn’t clip with certain body types, which can still sometimes be a problem I am not an artist so I’m not sure exactly how difficult this all is, other than what I have been told.

It’s a bit frustrating, however, how a game driven by horizontal progression and cosmetics is so underwhelming at delivering new armor sets. A full armor set is probably one of the most rewarding things you can have in a game like this, yet, Anet has so much trouble with it…

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

DiogoSilva.7089:

I wouldn’t mind to see hearts back if they were: more interesting and having less of them. And perhaps repeatable? but ONLY if they were more interesting.

Repeatable, more interesting hearts are called dynamic events — we already have them.

Certainly, but only in the new maps are they “more interesting”. In the old maps, they’re rare and randomly scattered, without a real incentive to do them (outside of exp and heart farming).

Dry Top, Silverwastes, and Bloodstone Fen have neither hearts nor adventures, so I doubt anyone thinks that adventures are “replacements” for hearts. They are their own thing.

The second poster in this thread thought they were replacements.

People have been talking about why pvp died long before HoT even existed.

I wouldn’t mind to see hearts back if they were: more interesting and having less of them. And perhaps repeatable? but ONLY if they were more interesting.

And no, adventures do not replace hearts, for a simple reason: ALL adventures are jumping puzzles or mini-games.

Swagger.1459:

We have pve designed professions

Do we, really? Most of profession skills and mechanics in this game are 4 years old, made at a time where the combat system was still new to the playerbase and Anet. Professions were designed around cool ideas and concepts, but not truly polished towards any specialized mode. That’s why some weapons offer everything any pve player would possibly want (AoE, DPS, mobility, some CC) while others are as useless and pointless there as they can be.

This game’s balance is very generalized. Nowadays, Anet basically takes some of the mechanics that work well in pve, some that work well in pvp, and put them together for new elite specs. And that’s probably the best they can do.

It’s clear that they not have the time or budget to balance even a single game mode, as they are probably devoting half of their time creating new elite specs and using all their art budget into them, so much less can they balance 3 game modes at once.

The most balanced pvp games are those that are entirely dedicated to pvp. League of Legends’ Riot, for example, has several teams working on new champions, 2 teams working on remaking existing champions from the ground up, 1 team working on polishing existing champions’ mechanics and 1 team balancing the meta with number tweaks. Anet has a single “skill & balance team”.

He could outrun a centaur.

I’m sorry, I couldn’t resist.

I’m fine with the mastery system, but I hate how mastery points are distributed. Putting a lot of them behind gimmicky, optional and challenging mini-games is a nightmare to a player who wants to enjoy GW2 as an RPG and not as a platformer. This forces you to hunt for other “optional”, extremely hidden or time-gated points, which require you to be at the right place in the right time, and such a thing can take hours if you miss a single event. And that’s for 1 point, when yo’ll need as many as 24+ to complete the remaining masteries.

One of the best things bloodstone fen had, was requiring only 1 new mastery point but offering 5-6(?) easy ones. Thank god for that.

Seems like this threat went waaaay off-topic!

I still find the last scene’s direction/ presentation lacking. The story details there were good, but Caudecus personality was way anti-climatic after 4+ hours of built up and Lazarus entrance felt unimportant (I wouldn’t probably mind Caudecus if Lazarus entrance had been more stylish).

And I’m not talking about Lazarus dialogues. I’m talking about the visuals, the music, the camera angles, the pacing, everything that deals with his presentation. He simply popped up, told us a few words and PUFF! disappeared. Anet should have created a better scene for that. If there’s one thing that the cinematic’s team is really good at, is at presentation. They should have asked that team to do one for this scene. And if theres one thing that Lazarus needed after so much hype and build-up, was a good presentation. Which he hasn’t gotten.

Is honor better than zeal for sword?

creepmatic.9435:

In addition to that Radiance still hosts the old Powerfull Blades trait (10% dmg to sword/spear) under Retribution. And i don’t understand why they don’t update the tooltip.

I didn’t know about this. So sword has a hidden, “free” 10% damage increase with that trait, heh? Does it stack with the other bonus you get from retaliation, or not?

There’s plenty of interesting story bits in the last cutscene, and S3 definitely has a lot of potential.

I think my issues are more with story presentation. Both with scene direction (Lazarus entrance needed more screen time before he started talking, I think) and in the dialogues (“Im the white mantle but I suck at it” and “I’m the big bad guy who has been hyped up as this extremely dangerous villain for generations, but hey, don’t listen to this old clown, I have a virtous ambition for you all, bye”).

I think Anet handled the story fine, but failed to stylize it. The whole episode – and the entire raid subplot beforehand – were building up and teasing for something big regarding the white mantle, and what we’ve gotten was very anti-climatic. It almost felt kind of troll-ish.

I have nothing against Caudecus ignorance nor against Lazarus “pretty words”, but there was something there lacking that totally failed to estabilish how important Lazarus entrance should have been. It seems like not even the characters didn’t care about about the big bad guy neither. “Oh, wasn’t he supposed to hate us? Maybe people do change over time”. Yeah.

He needed a more fearsome/ respectful entrance (the current one feels more like “Surprise! I was here all along listening to you talking! But I’m left out of time and gotta go fast, so listen quickly”). His dialogue to Caudecus should also have been more humiliating. I mean, despite Lazarus clearly having more power to do whatever he wants, I still got the feeling that caudecus got to humiliate him back quite effectively. “I’m THE white mantle leader and I’m saying to the last mursaat, of all things, and right on his face, that he is irrelevant.” Shouldn’t the super-powerful being Lazarus have been a bit… nastier at replying to that? “Hey guys, just ignore him and follow me instead” was not a very compelling reply.

I think Anet didn’t manage this scene very well. Lazarus felt unitentionally at the same level as Caudecus, to the point that if Anet were to reveal him as a comical villain next episode, I wouldn’t be surprised. Even when it clearly shouldn’t have been so, considering his demonstrated powers and all the story and air of mystery built-up until that moment. It was very tension-breaking.

S3 Episode One – Ending Spoilers

After so much build-up with the mysterious explosion and its reversal, the scattered and richly-detailed notes about executions and dangerous magic, the stylish and very artistic cutscenes that delivered a very bad kitten story presentation and the dangerous and mood-setting music…

The white mantle’s leader is (or acts like) a clown, Lazarus pops up out of nowhere and disappears and we get a “oh, btw, primordus is active thxbye” line. Episode’s over.

What?

I did find most of the episode to be very well written, and some of Anet’s best storytelling, but I couldn’t take that ending seriously. It was the very definition of anti-climatic.

I’m not sure exactly what it didn’t work, but it surely didn’t. Was Caudecus meant to be a comical villain? Or was his voice acting and his cheesy lines that just didn’t deliver? I am THE the white mantle leader. I am serious about that. Please, TRY to take me seriously. Oh, a Mursaat. Go away, don’t bother me. Was it the no-budget Lazarus entrance? Hey guys, sup? Here’s some dialogue, bye, thanks for listening. Sorry for no big entrance. Was it the lack of follow-up after primordus reveal? Primordus is active. Now, let’s stare at the sky in silence while we think deeply about life, the universe and everything.

Maybe I expected much when I was hoping for a stylish cutscene that would set up the white mantle as the dangerous enemies they were being built-up to be, or for a grand entrance of the last Mursaat that would leave us in awe.

Thoughts?

To be honest, GW2’s armor design isn’t… the best that is out there. It has quite a lot of gorgeous female scholar sets, but everything else suffers from a lot of problems, like lack of variety, ridiculous designs, unnecessary details, lack of theme, oversized parts, etc.

You see some nice exceptions, especially in regards to story characters that are heavily marketable outside of the game (logan’s armor, rytlock’s revenant armor), but your average in-game set is horrible (bladed, leyline, ec).

What’s the point of an expansion offering new armor sets, if those are so ugly that they could very well not exist?

msalakka.4653:

Fade to Black.7042:

Prob 26th, along with the patch.

No. There won’t be a balance patch until the fall at the earliest, September/October.

Balance patches are bundled with the big content patches now, so it’ll definitely be at 26th July, unless they changed plans.

Josh Davis.6015:

The Lesh Prince recently developed some tech that makes skill-splitting more feasible than it was previously – you’ll see some PvP (and PvE) splits in the next balance update. It’s important to understand that changes will still need to be global, but we’ll definitely have a bit more flexibility moving forward.

Keeping parity between modes when possible is important to us – but when it’s not feasible we’ll look at splits.

edit: that clickbait though

What Anet shouldn’t do: Have the split skills work vastly different between PvE and PvP. In GW1, some of them used to be completely different from each other.

What Anet should do (and abuse): Change the numbers between different versions but keep the same mechanics and “feel”. There’s a massive amount of useless PvE skills out there that could benefit from PvE-only buffs.

(Unfortunately, “Keeping parity between modes when possible is important to us” might still translate to “if a skill is fine in PvP, it’s okay if it’s useless in PvE, as long as it’s useful in at least a single game mode” philosophy).

Ayrilana.1396:

And then people would be posting how they needed to be refunded for all of the excess gathering tools.

Obviously they would ask for that, but this change would still be for the best of the game.

Of course, what is best for the game and what is needed to keep anet’s income to pay their developers are not always in harmony with each other, thus why some QoL changes need to be sacrificed and others need to be a luxury (shared slots).

GW2 is intentionally designed so that even your average perfectionist player can’t do everything that is there to do without unbeliavable dedication and time investment put into it, so you may well not try to do so.

It’s kind of… unsatisfying, coming from GW1, but it’s to be expected from a game that tries to appeal to too many different players at the same time AND relies on “spamming” the gemstore with new high cost skins for income.

Give the story mode its own achievement list (or share most of its achievements with the ones from normal raiding, excluding the prestigious ones), give it a one-time reward like all story instances, make it soloable but scalable like arah’s story path, and you would have something very close to your typical story instance.

It would attract:

• All players who do story instances;
• AP hunters;
• Mastery hunters;
• All players that participate in new, accessible content during patch day because it’s new (aka, the entire playerbase that enjoys living world);

And if they made it more like a dungeon path instead (repeatable), it would further appeal to:

• All dungeon players.

That’s a lot of appeal, isn’t that right?

And the epic raiding mode would still exist as it normally does, on top of all that.

Absurdo.8309:

I do appreciate your thoughtful posts.

Still, if raiding is in the minority, then lorehounds, who are not satisfied with a completed raid instance, and who cannot beat the raid, must be even smaller.

Story modes for lore have no replay value. It’s a one and done. Seems like an incredible waste, especially when most of the lore can be gathered through a completed instance.

I see it more like the personal story or the living story chapters.

It’s a one time deal (unless you replay it with different characters), but it would attract the story-driven crowd (and not merely the most dedicated lorehounds, which I agree that they should be a minority – I’m talking instead about your average player that does GW2’s story instances but doesn’t exactly cares about going to the LFG asking for cleared instances) AND give those people something to do while they wait for season 3. In addition to that, it could be a gateway to make people more familiar with the raid mechanics and get them to try the harder version without getting intimidated by the idea.

Killing two birds with one stone.

EDIT:

And this isn’t just “likes raids” small. This is a group that meets all of the following criteria:

- Dedicated enough to be interested in lore.
- Can’t beat the raid.
- Is not satisfied with a finished instance
- Is not satisfied with just fighting the boss

It seems like a very minor segment of the population with very demanding requirements. I think everything you already want is in regular mode raids — story mode is not necessary.

A story mode for raids should be marketed by Anet like part of a living world chapter or anything related to that. It should appeal to everyone that enjoys completing story instances in this game.

If that wouldn’t appeal to enough players, then the concept of living story wouldn’t either.

Also, I doubt that your average non-raider is aware that raids are telling a story potentially relevant to their interests. If more people knew what it was about, then there would probably be more people demanding it, don’t you think?

BobbyStein.2315:

I just wanted to call out your thoughtful and informative post. You’re exactly right. A person can get pretty much all of the optional and supplementary lore by exploring a cleared raid instance. They will miss out on character interactions, enemy dialog, and player commentary that would be triggered during fights, however.

We try to structure the cleared raid instance experience to still convey all the most important bits of the narrative. If we’re not meeting that expectation, then we’ll have to look at ways to improve this. You’ve all given us some great feedback for consideration. Thanks for that.

I am still of the opinion that there’s nothing wrong with the story being delivered through gameplay. That’s what players that enjoy storytelling in a game expect out of it in the first place. Storytelling in gaming is not only about written text or cutscenes, it’s also about putting ourselves inside it and interacting with it. Giving the tools for people to check the lore on a cleared instance is a nice extra, but it’s as interesting as asking them to read a movie’s summary on the internet instead of downright watching the movie and experiencing it first hand, don’t you think?

The inherent flaw with storytelling in raids is that it wants to appeal to two distinct audiences. That’s why a story mode is a simple and elegant solution, and possibly better than forcing the narrative designers to sacrifice storytelling through gameplay for the sake of “lorehounds”. I know that you’re sick of this talk by now, and that there may be plenty of background problems with it (for example, the raid team may not have enough people or time to implement such a feature), but I’m just defending my position.

Vinceman.4572:

And a big NO to making raids easy! They are good as they are and many decent players have been successful in there. We don’t need the last percent of content to be like the other 99% cakewalk.

I’m not saying that raids should be easy. I’m saying that the story-driven experience that raids offer should also be available to players that enjoy story-driven content but not hardcore, organized raiding. All Anet needs to do is add an optional story mode. It’s quite simple. If their content appeals to two distinct audiences, then it should be accessible to both audiences.

TheLilith.2849:

Please tell me the difference between: 1) I enter raid – they are easy mode (with less reward) which scales and I can solo and 2) Boss have 1 hp so I can explore and if I encounter anything I just 1 hit it and continue exploring? As from what I see 1) is your idea on it and 2) is mine. And apart from boss fights how does it differ from using lfg to ask for an opener for cleared instance or just after some events?

A normal boss encounter (even if easy) can still create the narrative illusion of being something epic. A boss that dies in one hit, meanwhile, does not.

That being said, if the difficulty is important to the story’s experience, then I agree that adding an easy mode wouldn’t be a perfect solution. But by this very logic, “going to youtube” or “checking the wiki” is still a bad argument, because there is no difficulty in that neither, so you’re still not fully experiencing the story. I’d say a possible solution would be a slightly-more-challenging-than-normal solo story mode. As long as your average player perceives it as hard (relative to their skill level), then the gameplay-narrative will be successful at communicating its sense of epic and danger.

hardy.7469:

So when there’s another massive content drought and raids are the only thing being released in terms of content and story, will you still say the same thing to gloss over how inaccessible the only major content updates are to the majority of the players?

Do you NOT want to follow the trend of making raids easy to get into for all players? Was it your intent to have an outdated view of them?

Just because you said the raid lore is “side” and not “main” lore doesn’t ignore that for almost 8sh months, it’s really been the ONLY lore (and content) to come out.
Unless you would rather us NOT play the game and instead just read the Wikipedia for the game?

Also if the raid lore is relevant to other stories that you’ll make it available in other places? Why not just make it accessible in the first place!?

I agree with you. “Normal” GW2 players have been stuck in a gameplay drought while hardcore raid players, besides getting their hardcore content (which I have nothing against), are also getting a narrative experience exclusive to them. For the third time after HoT released.

I have nothing against raids, I have nothing against hardore content, I have nothing against the raid team and the awesome work they have been doing.

But Anet must remember: hardcore raiders are not their only audience for story content.

Do some of you understand why people enjoy narrative game design? Why there are people out there who buy games for the story? They could very well stick to books and movies only (but they don’t).

Gameplay allows for very immersive storytelling in an unique way. It allows you to experience the story right within it, interacting with the world, with the characters/ NPCs and having to deal yourself with the dangers of adventure.

If your most intelligent suggestions are to “go to youtube”, “ask for a instance with gameplay cleared” or “ask Anet for a mode where all bosses have 1 health”, then you are clearly missing the point. You could very well tell them to ignore GW2’s story, ignore storytelling in videogames, stick to books and movies and play GW2 only for its “intended gameplay”.

I personally am not a hardcore raider. I can’t see myself ever raiding. However, the story that they are presenting in raids is really interesting, touching on subjects that players (especially from GW1) have been asking for years.

Yes, I definitely want a “story mode” for raids. Ideally, by having it work like Arah’s story mode: tuned for solo playing that scales if you invite someone else. Let us enjoy the raid’s storytelling at our own pace, do some of its explorable achievements (those that can already be done through “cleared instances”), a simple final reward at the end of it, and call it a day. And, who knows, maybe that would also be a good way to have more players jump into actual raiding.

Josh Davis.6015:

TheLastNobody.8319:

So I….it’s working as intended but the tooltip is just wrong? How the hell is this thing even a GM? At this point it should just be a minor trait at most! Give it a 1 second ICD and it would still be worthless.

I believe the trait functionality changed back when Embrace the Darkness changed. I agree that it’s lackluster – hence why I’m here. There’s a number of decent suggestions in the thread. I’ll bring them to the team and see what we come up with.

This is a grandmaster trait. If you want people to feel excited about a grandmaster trait, you should make the effect epic, not the cooldown lower. What people like about the tooltip description is that the effect is very promising. Condition transfering sounds build-defining just as much as double fury effectiveness or 20% higher damage on <50%HP. 1 torment stack every 10 seconds does not.

I also personally dislike the conditional trigger, because it’s passive as well as it is useless in pve (where you don’t wanna get hit in the first place).

TL;DR: Either make the effect more exciting, or lower its tier. This regardless of any small cooldown buff.

Ryou.2398:

DiogoSilva.7089:

Not everyone wants to play piano with their keyboard. That’s what elementalists and engineers are there for.

Some people prefer more streamlined and relaxing mechanics, and having both weapon swap and legend swap is already enough.

So you get to decide what classes aren’t piano players? Why only two classes out of the many? That’s bit unfair there are plenty who wish to play piano as well beyond being just a ranged character.

It’s also unfair that if you want to play a traditional elemental mage in GW2, you have to be a piano player AND an attunement-dancer generalist. But that’s a flaw with this game.

It would be better for each profession to have at least one more mechanically-demanding elite spec (revs, guardians, warriors, etc) and at least one less mechanically-demanding elite spec (elementalists, for example), than force entire professions to be stuck at specific complexity levels.

Not everyone wants to play piano with their keyboard. That’s what elementalists and engineers are there for.

Some people prefer more streamlined and relaxing mechanics, and having both weapon swap and legend swap is already enough.

InsaneQR.7412:

Fact is they need to split the energy cost from the cd, eother a skill has a energy cost or a cd not both.

How is that a fact? Where do people get this idea?

Having both CD and energy makes the skills easier to balance for anet, and individually stronger which makes them more psychologically satisfying for us players.

It’s not the revenant’s mechanics that are broken, it’s everything else. The spammable combat system (only CD or only energy) is one of the reasons for why GW2 pvp/ esports failed. But Anet can’t simply revamp their entire game now.

CD prevents players from spamming the same skill.
Energy prevents players from spamming skill rotations.

They work really well together.

Having it hidden outside of combat woult help too. Sometimes you can’t appreciate some of the tiny details around you because you don’t want to waste your swiftness skill.