Guild Wars 2

Jabberwock.9014:

Zerker will be more powerful than ever since we are getting ascended armor and power/crit chance/crit damage stack multiplicatively.

This.

In a game that almost always only relies on dodges/ active self-defense instead of party support and actual teamplay to beat content, full dps is king. The downed state also makes zerker builds even more viable, because there’s little to no risk running full dps as long as you can have a party member rez you out of downed.

darkace.8925:

Jemmi.6058:

How I understand it is that in Queensdale you may get a champ here or there, but in Southsun or Orr, you will see significantly more champs. That means you can kill them faster. Effort may be a bit higher, but reward will come in faster.

Queensdale has six champions that can all be killed very quickly in a non-stop fashion by a zerg. Orr’s champions, particularly spiders, can take significantly longer to kill. Obviously we don’t have all the details, but if this is more or less what we’re going to get I think people are just going to stomp easy-to-kill champions in the lower level zones. Hopefully I’m wrong, as I’d like to see Orr return as an end-game destination, but we’ll have to wait and see.

With enough people, you can generate champions each event, and with enough people, I wonder if they’ll even be that hard. Count that with all the trash mobs that also spawn on the way, and you’ll get plenty of champion kills + plenty of t6 materials and other loot from weaker undead waves. But this is just in theory.

I hope we get the pvp version of Valkyrie in pve as well. Power, Critical Damage, Toughness, Healing Power.

The pvp version of Valkyrie is one of the best amulets for a damage-oriented elementalist. But the pve version gives vitality instead of toughness + healing power, so Cavalier is the closer there is to the pvp version.

Cavalier is actually a decent set as long as you can maintain fury and have some extra precision from other sources. Sigil of Accuracy, 20-30 points in Air, a few berserker’s trinkets, etc. You won’t need the extra precision to deal high damage with your arcane utility skills or with sigil of fire, so getting around 50% critical chance (more so with food) with fury with Cavalier might be worth sacrificing a zerk-only gear for, while increasing your survival and self-healing a lot.

Allie Murdock.8152:

I believe Jonathan Sharp has mentioned this in the past, but I will repeat it in case you missed it. We are actually working on toning down skill particle effects.

How will it work? Will the particles’ intensity scale with the number of skills/ players on the field, or will it be a global toning down?

My computer runs effects decently, it only starts becoming a problem when there are too many on the screen.

Ghettoblade.7962:

Since when was there ever a ‘challenge’ in this game.

At the beginning, when people are still learning how to dodge, and go to story instances underleveled.

:P

We’ve been seeying Anet “testing” new weapons for the mobs in the latest patches, like the whip and the rapier. Interestingly enough, both fit a Mesmer perfectly. The rapier for their swordsman flavor, the whip for their (sexy) domination tricks.

Other professions where a whip would definitely fit, would be a Necromancer (sadistic torture), maybe a warrior/ guardian (torture in general, as a punishment or for justice in the case of a guardian), and it wouldn’t be a bad fit for Thief or for Elementalist, if with the right flavor. In theory, whip would also work really well for rangers (as beastmasters), but I’m not sure anet would go into that direction.

Rapiers are probably too elegant for a warrior, honestly. :P Even though they’re the master of weapons. But would work perfectly in an elementalist. Think of an elemental swordsman dancing between attunements.

I would personally love a mh sword or a rapier for an elementalist. My elementalist would love to leap, riposte and make a flurry of attacks while using elemental magic. A torch would make perfect sense for them too, but it doesn’t excites me. The torch could be a condition-damage off-hand, or something.

LordByron.8369:

The ability to switch stats at will its not something with low impact on the game.
just think how some professions can change from roaming to siege to zerg to defence with it in www.

Yes, it means less grind, and it’s awesome.

They can always make celestial’s stat numbers slightly higher. BTW, isn’t the new celestial exotic pieces better, comparatively to other exotic stats, than ascended celestial is compared to other ascended stats?

Being able to change legendary’s stats on the fly is one of the best little details mentioned in the blog. It means you won’t need to grind for different ascended gear every time you want to adapt your build to each type of content. GW2 is unfair to players with multiple builds or multiple characters, so this is a nice change, but it’ll only affect a small portion of the playerbase. It would be nice if Anet changed ascended’s soul bound mechanic to account bound. In the current system, players with a single build and a single character save a lot of money while players who like diversity and like to experiment are heavily punished.

The dungeon reward is smart. Not only it’ll scale with how fast each run is, but it’ll incentivate people to try different dungeons instead of repeating the same one over and over.

Good thing the game will have better tutorials too, especially considering how many forms of currency exist now, and how many forms of reward will exist in the future. It’s very important that new players will be aware of how the many currencies and the many reward systems work.

I found some things to be a bit vague, though. Will the new traits and skills just be unlocked with the current skill point system? Are they simply adding more skill challenges, or are they adding a new, different system to unlock future skills? It was a bit more confusing because they coupled traits with skills here. Won’t new traits be unlocked simply by speccing, or will they get affected by a new system too?

Also, we get confirmation that precursors will be made through crafting, and that’s excellent news, but not enough. It’s better having precursors being farmed and grinded than depending on RNG, but what about the epic precursor hunt promised? Is that one still coming? There are people who want to get legendary gear by doing legendary tasks, like challenging content, epic bosses or exploring the world – not simply just by gathering and crafting materials.

One possible solution for arcane utilities is to take out the instant cast. Cantrips already follow the instant-cast design, and in my opinion, conjures should be instant-cast down the road too (simulating the weapon swap/ kit mechanic – I can’t see how conjure shield is ever going to be useful otherwise). If this were ever to happen, it would overload elementalists with instant-cast effects, and arcanes already fill several niches (combo finishers and burst support). So they could have a fast activation time, something like 3/4 of a second or even less. This would force air elementalists to interrupt arc lightning, or wait until the auto-attack is finished, stretching their dps for a few seconds. To compensate for the nerf, arcanes could have a slightly lower cooldown.

Another solution, still without completely revamping them, is to add a delay between activating the skill and the damage kicking in, especially with a visible animation. Something like a timed bomb. Maybe Arcane Blast can have its speed decreased to something more like the Guardian’s scepter auto-attack, and maybe Arcane Wave can have a pre-damage animation indicating that it’s about to explode. This would probably synergy poorly with Elemental Surge, but I wouldn’t priotize this trait over more serious issues: the trait can always be tweaked. Meanwhile, it wouldn’t interrupt an elementalist’s skill activation follow, while making them way more predictable. The damage could increase and/ or the cooldowns could decrease to compensate for the predictability.

I’ll take this opportunity to talk about the remaining arcane skills too:

- Add projectile reflection to Arcane Shield’s effect. Why? AS is a weaker Mist Form with the niche of punishing the opponent with damage. Currently, its extra effect is barely worth taking the skill over the far more reliable MF. By adding projectile reflection, the damage input can potentially be even higher, and it’ll allow your opponent to activate your combo fields for you. This change would be consistent with the other two arcane skills, because they too are combo finishers that highly specialized at damage. This would make AS the third combo finisher of the line, even though it would do so in a more indirect way.

Arcane Power: I have no ideas for this at the moment. :P

Also, Phantaram’s idea for a Elemental Surge utility skill is within a Glyph’s design space. :P Maybe Glyph of Elemental Power could be revamped to add an instant-cast, one-time effect mirroring Elemental Surge’s? Then just add the appropriate amount of damage and cooldown. Although for a sunbreaker glyph, I would much prefer a complete revamp to Glyph of Elemental Auras.

I’m fine with how strong protection and vigor are, and maybe even weakness as well. It’s just the numbers that still need to be further adjusted.

I think the combat system is better when conditions and boons must be strictly used at the right time, than when you can spam them and fill your UI with icons. In GW1, this was less of a problem, because the energy system slowed down the pace of combat a bit, and added more weight to certain skills. But without an energy resource, GW2’s battle system heavily revolves around activating your skills as fast as possible the moment you think it’s the best time to use them. It’s a type of combat where you’re almost always activating skills over and over.

This is not a bad thing by itself, but it leads to some problems, when we consider that most changes made to underpowered skills and underpowered traits, in order to make them more interesting, revolves around adding conditions and boons into them. This creates the problem where boons and conditions are raining from everywhere, cluttering the UI screen, and giving almost no time or opportunity to strategically react to them, especially when you’re at the middle of combat and you do not have the time to observe each tiny icon while still watching the battlefield and reacting to it. And I’m not talking specifically to the problem with current Necromancers, but with a general issues that already existed before.

There are some solutions to this. One, and this is a rather vague solution, is for the devs to find more ways to improve underpowered skills and traits without relying so much on filling them with conditions/ boons. I’d say one direction to go is to further explore the movement and positional aspects of the combat system, and enhance underpowered options with position tactics in mind. Another, is to make conditions and boons stronger but having them last for a lot less time, so that there’s a lot less “rolling through keyboard” (hyperbole), and increase the number of situations where players will want to wait and hold to use some of their available skills.

There are many situations where extremely strong boons like stability, protection, retaliation and vigor are way too easily available (usually by low cooldowns, like the vigor’s trait or that guardian’s “stand your ground!” shout, or by being available from way too many sources at the same time) and/ or last a bit too much (like chaos armor, where 5s of protection compared to the much weaker 3s of swiftness is totally uneven; or Elemental Attunement’s ele trait). These are some of the examples of skills and traits that add protection for 5s, when they could very well add it for 3s only. 3s is enough to weaken a burst, having it last between 5s to 7-8s from boon duration is a bit overkill, especially the moment once stacked duo to different sources.

Something like GW1’s districts would work really fine. Although if Anet does create this technology, they should consider moving it to PvE as well, at least for less popular explorable maps.

Sigil of Energy could be toned down to about 30%, and all vigor on critical traits need to be nerfed somehow as they’re way too strong. I suggest something like 6s of vigor every 10s (so that boon stripping is more relevant, and boon duration investment is required for perma vigor), but should they still be too strong this way, 6s of vigor every 12-15s could also work.

Divinity’s Reach is one of the most impressive cities in a RPG, there’s plenty of storytelling potential in there, and I was getting worried it would get forgotten by Anet in favor of Lion’s Arch. Glad to know it’s going to get its day, and I hope it’s relevant enough.

The problem with balancing Burst Eles, is that each skill is fine by itself. Lightning Strike is a decent skill when used isolated. Arcane skills are decent skills when used isolated. But the sum of it all leads to a really strong instant-cast combo. In that way, I’d say that turning the arcane skills from burst skills to utility skills (lol) is a clever idea. Keep the automatic critical for the sake of activating traits and sigils, but low the damage for something else.

However, is adding conditions (or boons) a good choice? In my opinion, GW2 already suffers a bit from too much access to conditions and boons. Almost every action and traits adds one of them, and that ends up filling the UI bar with plenty of icons. I don’t feel the combat is very strategical when it turns into a condition/ boon spamfest. Maybe if the combat’s pace was slower, it wouldn’t be a problem, but GW2’s combat is pretty fast. But then again, how many interesting ways are there to make skills diversified and interesting without adding more conditions/ boons?

But if something like this were to happen, Fresh Air would probably be a bit underpowered, no? It’s already restricted in use (only works well with scepter), so should this trait become useless someday, I would recommend fusing it with Aeromancer’s Alacrity (-20% cooldown), especially to make it more distinct from Tempest Defense (which is already a burst trait, even though it’s a bit niche), and to make it more useful to other weapon sets.

One of the big things against world immersion is how inconsistent the world feels like. So, for example, a player picks the human race, and they get wowed by how absolutely wonderful Divinity’s Reach is. There’s very few RPGs, much less MMORPGs, that can get towns as awesome as DR. It’s the perfect place for a role-player to create their ideal knight or spellcaster, it’s the perfect place for a lover of epic fantasy to start their epic story, etc, etc. And then, the moment you leave Kryta, you see high-tech magical cyberpunk settings with gaming simulators and neon lasers, massive steampunk settings full of rust and smoke with the steampunk equivalent of the Death Star, and of course the mundane modern stuff from the gem store.

I don’t mind this mixture of different technologies, but it feels unnatural the way they did it in this game, due to how isolated each technology is from each other. The moment you leave one capital to enter another capital, it feels like you’re just started playing a completely different game. Why isn’t DR filled with Asura and Charr technology too? To give a fake sense of Lord of the Rings or Final Fanatasy IX/ XII fo a few hours? It creates expectations on the playerbase and then right after crashes those expections.

But I’d say inconsistency is a general problem with the whole game. If we look at many of the issues, we get to see that Anet wanted to appeal to as many players as possible, and tried to add as many different kinds of features as possible, but in turn they all feel isolated from each other, sometimes clashing with each other, creating this sense of inconsistency. Like, for example, they designed this entire game to be driven around cosmetic rewards, yet where’s the budget and the effort to support this model? Some of the armor was shoehorned into different races to ugly results (most charr’s armor), most armor consists of pallete swaps of the same model over and over with different (and most of the time, unnecessary) added details, being the medium’s armor the most glaring. And then whenever we get new skins, they are either gated by gems, or are comestically very restricted by not dyable, by not being part of a complete set, or by being the same across all armor types. I can understand that creating armor sets might be hard or time-consuming, especially when there are so many races and the like, but Anet should have thought this through since the moment they decided to make this a cosmetic-driven game. (As a side-note, there’s also too much emphasis on particle effects, and too little on different forms to make appealing equipment. There’s especially a lack of elegant or majestic pieces, while everyone in Tyria is shining like the sun.)

Regarding dynamic community, player-created events, stronger guild content, better group content, and many other mechanics can be designed to support it. I don’t think the Trading Post is inherently bad by itself, as long as the lack of human relationship from trading is compensated by something else. However, I’d say crafting is truly a missed opportunity to enhance the community. It’s nothing but another progression mechanic, as said. If I’m not wrong, Anet is planning a crafting revamp later this year, so let’s wait and see what they’ll do with it.

If we’re talking about the UI in general, I would love the clean, sleek type of UI that GW1 has over GW2’s artsy look. The first thing I notice, whenever I log back to GW1, is how much better its UI is.

I guess the long post can scare people away. If anyone has any suggestions to improve the format and readibility, please tell!

I’m all for a more offensive-oriented “conquest” mode. I remember suggesting several months ago the idea of marrying conquest with base assault, because it supports a more offensive/ “push it” playstyle while making more flavor sense. Both things would also make this kind of map more appealing to stream viewers.

Hope you can make this kind of map, as I can’t wait to play something like it!

JonathanSharp.7094:

Solo que revisions are on the horizon guys, hang tight. I can’t give an exact date (that gets me in trouble), but it’s is on its way.

Really awesome news, thanks!

Are there any plans for a duo queue as well? It’s not as important as solo, but a hybrid solo/ duo queue is cool when someone wants to play with a friend for fun, without the risk of facing premades. Part of the fun of a mmorpg is playing with friends, and a duo queue is a way to do that in pvp without having to make a highly-coordenated voice-chat hardcore team.

If I could make some suggestions, is to tie other game pillars into exploration.
1) Add challenge, by making exploration more “excitingly” dangerous. Make more patrol enemies that can pop at the middle of existing fights. Make some champions roam more often. Make some good enemy formations that require high skill or a good party to pass through. Create a sense of unknown with unidentifed enemies, where the players wouldn’t know how strong they are (veterans or champions) until they aggro’d them, but more knowledgeable players would be able to identify those enemies by subtle model details. Better yet, make some of those enemies patrol some of the more dangerous areas. This would create tension, it would make some normal encounters feel timed, and it would reward players who could aggro properly, who could identify monsters by their visual, or who had good knowledg and coordenation of the map. It would also help make each map feel more distinct from each other.
2) Add story. Events can potentially be used to tell better stories or show more world lore. Secondary gameplay mechanics could be created the reflect the unique-ness of each map section and the lore behind it. Maybe in the krytan maps filled with several temples, you could pray in them for something, and follow events that would teach you some lore behind those temples? Maybe going into a more dangerous place in fireheart rise could cause a charr mob to run against you, and you would need to run and survive, or stealth and watch mobs talking to each other in a way that would teach you more about their lore. This already happens in some degree, but it’s so hidden. It should be far more prominient. Learning about Tyria’s lore should a natural consequence of each piece of the world we explore, not something “hidden” in a single NPC’s dialogue or a single object every once and then.
3) Add cooperation. If there are more means to interact with other players, the world will feel more alive, more memorable moments might be created, and the chances to meet new friends are higher. However, GW2 has a bit of an issue with cooperation, and this is the focus of my third point.

COOPERATIVE CONTENT

GW2 lacks mechanics that support player cooperation in general. Anet worried so much on making GW2 solo-able, at the cost of cooperative content and mechanics. One of the biggest problems with this is the way combat system was designed. They didn’t like that traditional heals spent too much time clicking on health bars, but instead of improving party support mechanics, they removed them altogether, and party support has degenerated into aoe skills. It certainly lacks depth. Another problem, is how self-sufficient each build is. The key to deep team playing, is each player covering the weaknesses of each other player. It’s another example where the extreme focus on solo players came at the cost of team players. If I could make a suggestion in this regard, is to add a good system to support party-support builds who want to directly help other players (something better than clicking on them and spamming heals). I’ll be creative with a suggestion for this: a partner-bound system, where several of your actions directly affect a player “bounded” to you, without having to click on them. Another suggestion I can make, is to go the FF14’s route, where players can choice between jack-of-all-trades builds for solo content, and specialized builds with easily identified weaknesses, for deeper team content. GW2’s trait system can be used for this, if the devs ever wish it. And both solo players and team players would be happy.

Better cooperative mechanics would not only enhance world immersion for our fellow explorers, but it would allow devs to design deeper group content, which GW2 is currently weak at. This could indirectly improve the strategy (or lack of) behind some of the hardest events in the game and – better yet, if new mechanics are created for party support, Anet could also have them be identified by the event’s reward system, and have events reward the players that support other players as much as it rewards players who kill the mobs.

There are still a few issues with party support. One of them is the fact that most party-driven builds are not viable for most of the game, as it is meant to be soloable. This even removes build diversity from the game. It wouldn’t be so bad if builds could be swapped any time without requiring a massive gold sink for equipments, but changing the equipment system is too late for that now. A possible solution could be to bring back the hero/ henchmen system from GW1. It could be restricted to instanced content, but it could go as far as existing in the open world, at the very least like FF14 did with with its animal partner system. This way, party support builds could be used outside of dungeons and fractals, without requiring massive equipment changes. You would always have at least an ally to support.

Story, Immersion, Cooperation, Challenge

Four pillars that can greatly enhance the player’s interest and investment on a game. The fifth would be: Competition; and the sixth, perhaps: Grinding. I’m unsure if Reward counts, because players like to be rewarded (or, in broader terms, satisfied) by what they do, be it grinding or following the story, be it helping the community or doing challenging content. I’d say Reward/ Satisfaction is the consequence of work + pleasure, and and those should be inherent to any of the other five pillars.

We know that Anet intended for GW2 to be a MMO game that would bring back plenty of RPG qualities to the genre, like the storytelling and the world immersion. We know that Anet intended for the game to reward skill over grinding. We know that MMORPGs are driven by their community, and that’s one of the key differences between them and single-player RPGs. Community usually means cooperative gameplay or competitive gameplay (pvp).

If we look at the current state of GW2, we can see that it is driven by grinding. Grinding is defined by timesinking (repeateable) content that is monotonous and skill-less. Almost every goal you want to acchieve in this game, be it skins, ascended gear or acchievements, is obtained through grinding and farming, which goes against Anet’s initial intentions for this game. To give several examples of grinding and farming in this game: We have world bosses, where players grind gold by going to their location at the right time and auto-attack until the event is completed. We have several dungeons, especially CoF path 1, where players follow the same easy pattern and get plenty of gold and some items. We have Orr events, where zergs auto-attack through everything. We have dailies and acchievements that mostly consist of doing easy tasks X amount of times.

The purpose of this thread is to look deep on what went wrong, discuss and offer suggestions and feedback to Anet.

CHALLENGING CONTENT

First, I’d say the amount of grinding is not a bad thing by itself, as long as there’s more alternative content that involves some serious degree of challenge to acchieve the same goals. If a player could choose between harder content, or safer-but-slower content, we would get several player types happy (those who want to be challenged or have some fun, those who want to grind and farm, and even those who like to do a bit of both). The main problem with grinding in this game, is that there’s no funnier alternative to acchieve the same goals. Want to get dungeon armor? Repeat the same dungeon over and over – there’s no option to choose a harder but more rewarding route. Want to get ascended gear? Either repeat fractals over and over and pray for the RNG to smile upon you, or farm dailies each day. Want to get tier 6 materials? There’s no alternative to event/ zerg farming. Maybe if the more challenging champion encounters rewarded as much – if not more, tier 6 materials than event chaining. But they don’t.

This estabilishes challenging content as a possible alternative to grinding content. Challenging content would still need to be repeatable to a certain degree, but if well designed, it should be varied enough and remain challenging for each repeat, to never fall into grinding territory.

WORLD IMMERSION AND EXPLORATION

There are, however, some mechanics that also incentivate more grinding than what was meant for them to be, like world exploration. This is also a very important issue, for a different type of players. Hearts are the most generic and grinding quests out there, and they can’t even properly tell a story or reveal tidbits of Tyria lore, like traditional quests can. And outside of Hearts, map exploration is mostly driven by rushing from point to point for a mathematical grind in filling a bar. There’s almost no mechanic that slows down the pace and allows us to immerse in the world of Tyria and let us smell its flowers, so to say, to appreciate it. The only exception are the vistas, which are non-interactive cutscenes, which makes them more intrusive than immersive. There’s no reason to interact with most players you find in the field, outside of the occasional rezzing. There are some interesting jumping puzzles for those who like them, but outside of that, all maps play the same. Exploring Tyria is mechanically cold, and this doesn’t helps world immersion.

We have seen, in the latest living world updates, the devs trying some new stuff. For example, tying exploration tasks to acchievements, which leads to more creative tasks and better attention to detail than the original system (example is the crystal collecting in bazaar, which makes it a very unique map; or the swimming and NPC dialogue acchievements in southsun, which are tiny details that make the world feel more alive and immersive).

Vol.5241:

On the same token, what’s fun pressing random buttons on your keyboard and staring at your screen for several hours? Why are you playing a game at all?

There are many reasons to play a game outside of grinding. Reasons driven by storytelling, world immersion, community/ cooperative gameplay or challenging content. Four precious things that GW2 lacks.

The irony is that Anet wanted GW2 to be the least grindy game out of all MMORPGs, and focus on other RPG or MMORPG qualities. The fact that they have created the exact opposite of what they intended shows how badly they screwed up.

It’s not up to the player, it’s up to Anet and how they design this game. The argument that this game is perfect and players are to blame is not a very good one.

Anet has promised us that skill would take players to the top. I don’t even mind the existance of grinding, so that less skilled players can get the best stuff too. But for those who don’t like grinding, where is the alternative challenging content that was promised to us?

Blaming the players’ choices is a bad argument, because there are no meaningful choices to be made. There’s no choice such as “I can play this really challening content and get things faster, or go the easier way and grind for a long time”. You either grind for most of the rewards in this game, or you don’t get them at all.

Players can’t create new content. Players can’t redesign existing content. Players can’t make existing content more difficult and fun. It’s all up to Anet. So no, the problem isn’t with the players’ choices.

Also, not every player is a wandering “today I feel going there doing this stuff” type. Especially when GW2 offers “so much to do”, yet most of it isn’t special at all.

Tell me, what’s there to explore, outside of grinding hearts and rushing to vistas/ points? There’s almost no lore to be found. Most maps play the same way. There’s almost no exciting hidden places nor dangerous creatures to fear. Outside of a few hidden jumping puzzles, exploring is heart grinding and point rushing.

WvW is mostly driven by zergs, with poor support for smaller squads. Dungeons are mostly filled with boring encounters that can one-hit kill most builds, and are otherwise boring and easy because, as long as you can dodge everything, all they have is high HP.

locoman.1974:

DiogoSilva.7089:

I so want Abbadon’s Fall.

Trehearne should help us there, so we can see him and Kormir side-by-side.

Does Abbadon’s Fall refer to the actual GW1 mission, or when Abbadon was defeated and trapped in the first place?

Good question. I have no idea.

I’m very well aware of what grind is.

AntiGw.9367:

DiogoSilva.7089:

I would like to know what’s left to do in GW2 if a player chooses NOT to grind.

With your definition of a grind, even chess is about grinding stuff.

By “my” definition of grinding, chess the is the opposite of grinding.

Grinding is a term used in video gaming to describe the process of engaging in repetitive tasks during video games (…) which it is often necessary for a character to repeatedly kill AI-controlled monsters, using basically the same strategy over again.

Gathering, killing 10 rats, repeating cof, and all the stuff that is both mindless and repetitive is grinding. Exploring the world is mindless and repetitive. Farming events is mindless and repetitive.

Chess, in comparison, requires a lot of improvisation and strategy, and is challenging to master. Every match can be completely different from the previous one, and every match can offer an unexpected challenge. It’s the complete opposite of mindless repetition ( = grinding).

I so want Abbadon’s Fall.

Trehearne should help us there, so we can see him and Kormir side-by-side.

So, besides the living story content, the only new feature this update will bring is a new wvw ability line?

I would like to know what’s left to do in GW2 if a player chooses NOT to grind.

World exploration is a mathematical grind. Gold farming is grinding by its very own nature. Getting dungeon armor is grinding. Fractals at some point also start to be highly repetitive, especially when grinding ascended gear. Dailies are grinding. All of them are highly repetitive, and outside of one or two dungeons and high-level fractals, they’re mindless.

So, what’s left to do in GW2 if a player chooses not to grind?

Following the storyline? GW2 is not particularly good at this, and the living story’s content has been only worth one or two cutscenes every month, and is constantly cycling through different plot archs pretty fast, not unlike the main narrative. Very few are excited by this.
Doing dungeons once? That’s fine, if unrewarding. This game does not have the best dungeons ever, but it can work… for a few hours. Many players find most dungeons in this game boring, however.
Doing jumping puzzles? That’s fine, but not to everyone’s tastes. Let’s not forget that GW2 is primarly a mmorpg.
Doing mini-games? Like-wise.
Doing PvP? GW2’s pvp has a lot of problems, and those are getting fixed at a snail’s pace. Generally, players don’t spend much time there, and most of the pvp community has left or is inactive.
Doing guild missions? Gated to once per week or so.
Interacting with the community? Nearly non-existent in GW2 due to the lack of mechanics that support or incentivate it.
Doing repetable content that’s actually challenging and varied? There’s almost none.
Exploring the dangerous parts of the world and working hard to beat challenging, exciting encounters? This is nearly non-existant in this game.
Having fun creating, customising and experimenting your own builds? GW2 is not very exciting at this, and it actually punishes you with massive money sinks and lack of mechanics to make it convenient (like the lack of templates).
Doing fun stuff with friends? Content that requires group play, especially deep team-playing team-building strategy, is almost non-existent in this game.

Back then when I thought this game was going to be the best ever, I wanted to get a legendary. I wanted to beat every challenging content, explore the massive, exciting world and face all its dangers, finish through its epic story, get the legendary skin and show everyone my dedication to what could have been a legendary game. I wouldn’t even mind grinding every once and then, as long as the game mostly stayed true to the devs’ intention of skill over time, and I was even expecting for grinding itself to be varied, interesting and risky (aka, not grinding at all).

Then the hype train crashed real hard.

Turns out that exploring Tyria was a massive mathematical farming rush, without being exciting, nor dangerous, nor even properly paced and varied to be very immersive. Turns out that the challenging content was almost non-existent, and whatever existed was boring and required grinding for any real reward. Turns out that the story was rushed, cartoon cheesy and not well written. Turns out that the entire end-game revolves around RNG boxes, dps zerg fests, and grinding mindless dailies, mindless events or mindless dungeons. Turns out that the whole experience was not only repetitive, but unrewarding. There’s not even any real value to the titles the acchievements give.

So, yeah. I quickly gave up of the idea of getting a legendary weapon. It has no real value except to those who like having a secondary job in a virtual world.

By the definition you have posted, it is indeed a puzzle. Especially considering the limited recharges of each ability, which creates a challenge to overcome (against resources), and demands you to go back to point 0 every time you fail, requiring patient effort. Also, the twitch required.

As I’ve said in other threads, Anet has made the decision for GW2 to be a cosmetic-driven game, yet they do not seem to care about adjusting their budget to even support this model properly.

So we’ve got a game that wants us to “work hard” for the sake of incomplete skins. Take a look at the AP ones.1. Only three pieces. 2. Same for all armor types. 3. Can’t even be died. At the very least, they do look nice, but wasn’t cosmetics supposed to drive players motivation in this game?

(My hope is that the artists are busy with ascended gear’s skins and the like, and that we’ll get something awesome in the future).

Craptrain.7203:

Meh, that’s not always true. I’ve solo queued before (and gotten a full team of solos) and face-rolled organized guild teams (decent ones at that). During these wins my team had 0 communication, 0 strategy, and 0 cohesiveness. We just all did what we thought was best.

Also happened to me, but I’ve also lost to plenty of premade players that were nothing special. It depends on the degree of skill of each player. Certainly, no matter how organized you are, if you can never win in combat against better players, you’ll never get any points. But there are average players who can coordinate really strong bursts or are very efficient at team rezzing, and against those, unorganized teams just don’t have a chance.

Kurakura is right in that a well-organized team is better than an unorganized team with individually better players. Of course, at high level tpvp, all players are good. :P

Well, skill-driven gameplay is what we were promised by Anet. I brought GW2 fully expecting a challenging game, like GW1 is.

However, GW2 is an experimental game. It’s trying to innovate, to do things differently, and usually those kind of games are unpolished. When a company decides to do a new game, they have the option between trying something different, or taking something that already exists and improve upon it. While a company like Blizzard takes working formulas and makes them even better, Anet likes to try different paths.

The consequence is that no one – including the devs – know those new mechanics will work out until the game is finally out and millions of players are testing them. A lot of the most promising ideas, like the lack of a healer, the lack of required roles, the dynamic events, etc, had a lot of unforeseen problems that were only discovered after the game was out. There’s a lack of depth in the current combat system, the lack of trinity has degenerated the game into a dps train rush, the dynamic event system had poor scaling, the dungeons were not as exciting as they could have been.

Ultimately, what happened to GW2 is what usually happens in experimental games: it brings new mechanics, those are usually unpolished or broken because they’re new and thus they bring new unpredictable problems, and we’re left waiting as Anet (or even any other company) takes those new ideas and improves them in the future.

We’ve seen better event scaling lately, better dungeons (even if only temporary), and who knows what else might come, but this is all still in a very experimental phase. Players who want solid, tried-and-true challenging content will have to be busy with other games in the meantime, and wait for GW2 to grow.

Hellfire’s demonic alien helm looks much better than radiant’s helm, in my opinion. Outside of that, Radiant is more unique, and more elegant and subtle while still looking really nice.

This game needs more simple/ elegant/ majestic cool-looking equipment. There’s too many bland, generic pieces of equipment; too many clothes that are too busy with unnecessary details; and too much overly flashy stuff.

My elementalist is wearing CoF armor, not because I love looking like Sauron, but because it’s only one of the very few male scholar armors that I find to be good looking. If someday anet makes some really nice elegant/ majestic/ lordly scholar armor, I’ll pick it, but until then, I much prefer my “noob” Sauron armor than looking like a fashion disaster.

This is never-ending.

Gold rewards are better than gem rewards, because it makes pvpve players happy, and because gold can be traded for gems other players have brought.

If you think the wvw rewards are bad, don’t even touch pvp. :P It’s all about farming glory endlessly, or getting skins you already have and having to salvage them for random materials.

Henchmen/ heroes were one of the best things about GW1, because it allowed the devs to design group-driven content while still allowing “solo” players to enjoy it. It made both types of players happy. It also added a lot more customisation, it opened up new builds (“solo” players could use party-support builds), so players who liked more depth were happy. It can also potentially be an excellent new currency sink for GW2, as you’ll have to equip your heroes, which can make the economy happy.

“It’s optional” is a terrible argument.

First, the people who are defending the game’s current state are going against anet’s own views. The devs have always intended for GW2 to be played for fun, never to be a real world simulation. And yes, this means that anet’s execution on their own ideas needs improvement, and that’s a problem with the game, not the players.

Second, if we’re going to use the cheap and easy “it’s optional” argument, we can pretty much use it to every single situation. Afterall, playing GW2 is optional. You can always not play it just because you think the game isn’t perfect. Doing new content is optional. You can always be stuck to old content and keep waiting for new patches. Getting better stats is optional. You can always challenge yourself or ignore gated content. Everything is optional, so every single piece of criticism is worthless. That’s how terrible the “it’s optional” argument is.

Dailies weren’t meant to feel like a grind. They were meant to reward players for logging in everyday doing stuff their like. This is the official word. Anet’s developers have presented dailies this way. But currently, there are several issues with the daily system. For example, a player who likes exploring the world can get almost always get the full daily in 20-30 minutes. Meanwhile, a player who likes dungeons, or a player who likes to follow the storyline, can very well spend 0 minutes or more into the game, and only get 1/5 of the daily, sometimes more, sometimes even nothing, forcing them to do repeatable, mindless stuff they don’t like. That’s grinding.

This, is a fault of the game. Dailies also used to punish WvW players before, but Anet has since then added more WvW-specific dailies to fix the issues. There’s still not enough dailies for some other major goals of this game, like story-driven content or group-play content, but this is a fault of the game, and we should point this out in hopes that Anet will listen again, and continuously improve the daily system.

It has nothing to do with choices. Real choices are choices like which type of equipment to invest, or which type of content to give priority to. Dailies are not about choices, they are about rewarding players who play the game everyday. They are not perfect at what they’re trying to accomplish.

Regardless, GW2 needs a lot more group content. More, and better. GW2 is currently a better single-player game than it is as a team-player game.

Tyria is a beautiful world to explore, but it’s also not very exciting. All dangerous encounters are easily identified and ignored, epic encounters are trivialized by their lack of difficulty, there are not (worthwhile) treasures to be found in its hidden corners, the heart system is generic and can’t tell a story or express the lore very well, and the entire experience is a mathematical rush to 100% each map. All maps play and feel the same, outside of the visuals and the music, and the only time a player gets to appreciate them mechanically, is through non-interactive vistas.

But with living story, we have seen acchievements substituting the original mechanics for world exploration. We see acchievements that reward players to look for certain spots at the world, demanding them to watch the view around them to spot specific objects. This allows, mechanically, to slow down the rhythm of the game and give players the proper pace to appreciate the world around them. Much better than non-interactive vistas, because they’re more involving. We see acchievements that reward players for spotting certain NPCs, unlocking NPC dialogue, or doing tasks as simple as finding the beach and swimming. This adds world immersion, and improves the atmosphere of the game, without even requiring too much time for those who don’t like it. We’ve seen acchievements support a map entirely made of jumping puzzles, and acchievements to guide the player through the story in each map. Generally, we can conclude that this process allows the developers to be more creative with world exploration, and make it far more interesting than the old and repetitive heart/ vista/ etc rush.

I think in the future, maybe in an expansion or something, 100% completing new maps should be tied to 100% (or close) completing of acchievements tied to the respective maps. Permanent acchievements, mind you. Not temporary. Instead of having to rush through future vistas and future hearts, new maps would mechanically reward world exploration through the completion of acchievements, and each map would have its own unique set of acchievements to make them play differently from other maps. Likewise, when pressing M, instead of showing the number of hearts and vistas completed, because they wouldn’t exist, it would show the map-specific acchievements completed instead, and those would count toward overall world exploration.

What do you think?

And to make an extra suggestion:
- Also add acchievements to boss/ champions/ hard encounters, and add one-time rewards for completing them, like a shiny new sword or the like. The system is already in place, where specific acchievements can already reward one-time treasures.

For a MMO, Gw2 is already lacking strong community-driven content, from guild support to team-driven gameplay, including teamplaying support in the actual combat system. GW2, in general, was meant to appeal to both solo and party players, but ended up being heavily sided to solo players at the cost of the others. Dungeons are one of the very few things in this game that involves parties, and they’re already not very good, to the point that devs have promised to improve them.

If dungeons were to be solo-driven, then GW2 could very well be a single-player rpg disguised as a mmorpg.

kokocabana.8153:

Entitlement threads again. Every game requires you to play the way the developers have intended. They give you choices, but it is still the choices they decided on. That’s like complaining that there’s no space cowboy class in this game because the devs are forcing me to play with the classes they made.

There’s a difference between demanding a game to be exactly like what they want, to complaining about the game not being what was advertised/ promised for. The former is the player’s fault (entitlement), the later is Anet’s (failing to live up to their own promises).

P.S. Anet didn’t intend for dailies to require grinding. Or at the very least, that is their official word.

Dawdler.8521:

Guilds are ancient history, now its all about fast paced solo PvE farming with new stuff to farm for every 2 weeks.

Remember when MMORPGs were about interacting, playing and coordinating with other players? Challenging content that demands and rewards team playing, community-driven events, strong guild support, strong competitive (pvp) infrastructure, etc.

GW2’s definition of a massive online multiplayer game is doing repetitive single-player tasks while having the bonus visual effect of watching other players running around. It’s like a B-tier single player RPG, except that it requires an internet connection and is filled with money sinks and decisions to protect its economy. The extra, is that you can say hello to people in the chat, and get a reply.

Dailies are grinding. There’s no other consistent way to get laurels (even the new ap rewards are too slow for laurels specifically), so it’s not as simple as “it’s optional, don’t do it”.

Also dailies reward players who waste their time doing needless stuff for 10 minutes (crafting crap for the sake of it, going underwater farming 25 enemies for the sake of it, etc) and punish players who spend 40 minutes in, say, a dungeon. That’s because dungeons and several other activities take too much time and are worth too little in a daily, while unnecessary grinding is faster and allows you to complete an entire daily.

People who can only log for an hour each week day won’t be able to, say, do a dungeon, or explore the new bazaar map, or participate in a guild mission sequence, or follow the storyline, while finishing the dailies at the same time.

Only players exploring the world can fully complete dailies without wasting their time in stuff they don’t want. Outside of those players, the real option the daily system gives to you, is between having fun, or halting your fun for the sake of laurels.

Not to mention that dailies also punish players who can’t log in every day, even if they were willing to give twice the effort the following day. In comparison, the zaishen daily system present in GW1 was far more sophisticated than this one, as it allowed you to stack zaishen quests for up to 3 days. Not to mention that they were also more exciting, as they revolved around single epic objectives (killing bosses, doing dungeons, etc) and had no mindless gathering/ crafting/ whatever filler inbetween.

Tracker.6483:

How about providing Stability Power-Ups on the map that become available to channel-grab for the team?

This! :P That’s one of the best suggestions I’ve read for Skyhammer.