Guild Wars 2

Tiger.7506:

My god!

Before people said: this game has no endgame.

The Anet tries to give us a balanced endgame .

Acendend gear is only a seasoning! It will not give you a big advantage over the exotic !

If you do not have a few minutes to play, please… quit the game! ( go to counter strike ) . Don’t try to play a MMORPG.

GW2 has a vertical progression smooth and easy to do (casual)! WoW is for people with no life!

If you want no vertical progression, do not try to play a MMORPG! ( go to CS, Lifet4 Dead, street fighters, Mario Bros )

Forgive me for the bad english!

The games endgame was obtaining cool looking exotic skins, WvW, and grinding for a legendary(if you wanted it). What they needed to do was expand on that, more skins, more events, more zones, more dungeons, more WvW mechanics/maps, new weapons(polearm!)etc.

ANet did not give us a balanced endgame and not even close. How are pieces of gear you need to grind 50-100 hours to obtain balanced? A more balanced way would have been making ascended obtainable multiple ways and not making it prohibitively grindy.

Ascended gear does give a big advantage over an exotic, unless you don’t count 10%-20% more stats per item as an advantage.

As for telling people to quit and not play MMORPG’s, I don’t think you’re qualified to say that. Most people bought this game specifically because it WAS a mmorpg where there wasn’t vertical endgame gear progression. There are plenty of MMO’s in the history that don’t have major vertical progression either so I don’t think you have any clue about what MMORPG mechanics are out there. Just off the top of my head there was SWG where the best armor in the game was easily attainable and had to be replaced constantly as it had permanent durability loss.

The poison of the MMORPG market is that developers can’t think outside the WoW box. It makes me incredibly sad since the game mechanics prior to WoW were really diverse. I was hoping GW2 was going to show more developers that endgame doesn’t have to be a gear treadmill but I guess that idea is out the window.

roguenub.1409:

If ascended gear was in the game on release, and the same means to get it , would you still have bought the game?

Why does everyone automatically assume people with ascended gear will just dominate you in WvW? You will get rolled on with all greens or all exotics / ascended either way, It’s mainly the numbers that count. If you don’t bother to play because the enemy slightly outgears you, then thats just dumb imo. "Ohhh I played hundreds of hours to get my full exotic gear, but now I can’t win because someone has more time to get slightly better stats than me =(((( ".

Getting ascended is a grind eh? It’s no less of a grind than getting your exotics.

It almost looks like people are just finding any reason to quit, and not willing to admit they got their money’s worth of the game. Same with this game and every other MMO game you’ve played, you get everything and you’ll have nothing left to do. You’ll get bored, and find something else to do.

If we had known about ascended gear and the grind to get it, I would not have bought GW2. It was sold to me as easy to get max stat gear with hard to obtain skins. I sold my friends on it specifically by telling them it wasn’t a WoW gear grind.

It does matter in WvW. Sure if you’re attacking 1v40 you’re going to get rolled, but quite often you will face even numbers. If 5v5, 20v20, 40v40, etc happens ascended gives an advantage. It is common sense that you want to give your opponents as little advantage as possible, thus you need to get ascended gear for that to be the case. There is a noticeable difference between rares and exotics so saying there isn’t much of a difference between exotics and ascended is a flat out lie. As for giving up because enemies have ascended, they are well within their rights. GW2 wasn’t supposed to have a gear grind for max stats and that helped promote WvW. Why continue to WvW when ArenaNet is going to continue to introduce new gear that upsets the balance of WvW. People already died way too fast in WvW and more stats means it will happen faster.

Getting ascended is no less of a grind than exotics, IT IS MORE OF A GRIND. I’m between hardcore and casual in my play and even I will admit that getting fully geared in exotics was probably too much of a grind for most casuals. Now you have ascended pieces that are harder to get than almost a full exotic set.

It is not an excuse to quit, it’s a reason. At worst, ArenaNet lied to people by going against their own philosophies on easy to obtain max stats with skin progression as well as grinding. At best, ArenaNet look incompetent not only for contradictory statements from before release to the IAMA, but for pushing out game mechanics that completely segregate and promote segregation the community. Either way people feel betrayed, like they are being looked down upon, and like they were lied too. If that’s not a valid reason to quit then what is?

I’ve currently quit for a myriad of reasons. Their poor handling of stat and class balance is a major factor. The lack of WvW development and support certainly pushed me as well. But the final straw that broke the camels back was ascended gear. It just flat out goes against what the developers said this game was about. I mean blatant contradictions from things they said earlier and after this whole thing broke are just staggering. “we don’t want grind” yet 250 ecto’s is clearly not a gigantic grind <_<. It just makes me feel like there is zero point in playing since the developers have absolutely no clue what direction they are heading in and anything that comes out of their mouths cannot be trusted.

Alastar.2863:

What I would like to ask the people who say they quit is this:

You complain about Gear treadmills and Grinding and the Ascended Gear,
Can you name ANY mmo that has less of a “Grind” then this game?
Can you name Any mmo that has an easier Gear Treadmill?
Can you name Any mmo that has absolutely NO issues with one weapon being superior over another? (outside of Eve Online [I think.] or Battlestar Galactica online.)

Personally I don’t feel any “grind” in this game is required. I think that is what Anet was talking about in their promises or “no grind” and the Ascended gear is completely unnecessary if you don’t want it. It has NO affect on pvp, maybe a tiny affect on WvW but the circumstances and the fact that you DON’T SIT STILL and that there are conditions and effects like Knock-back and stuns among many other effects make the small difference between exotics Ascended unimportant. Plus, if you feel you arn’t doing enough damage, MAN A ARROW CART OR CANNON or some kind of Siege weapon. Regardless of your gear they always deal heavy damage. Then in pve: if you are doing a lot of damage to enemies in pve and you have full exotics and maybe a couple legendaries then you really don’t need to worry about Ascended Gear if you don’t want it.

Also, one more thing, look at the Stats of the Ascended Gear vs Legendaries.

Another thing, Didn’t the people who say they “Quit” enjoy the game before they heard of ascended gear? the game hasn’t changed one bit, they just added that dungeon and a couple ascended items among other things. Continue to enjoy the game and don’t make a big deal over these little things.

3 out of 4 of your questions can be answered with WoW, which is known for being a gear treadmill. I can literally max my gear out in WoW faster than I can get ascended gear. Grinding out 250 ectoplasms or the gold to buy them is by no means fast, I haven’t farmed since the fractal patch but even at 1 hour(which I hear is unlikely anymore) that’s 250 hours. How is 250 hours for a single item not one of the most ludicrous grind you’ve heard of? Oh but they said they will change it….HOW DID THAT EVEN MAKE IT OUT THE DOOR.

Grind in this game is required for everything. Even exotics are a good bit of a grind to most players. You’re looking at 40+ hours of karma grinding, 30+ hours of gold farming(increases by the day), 100+ hours of badge of honor farming, or 30+ dungeon runs(30-60 minutes each) just to get a full set of exotics. You’ve already got your full set of exotics you say? What’s you’re /age, you’re probably playing a bit more than a casual. This game was supposed to be about getting easy max stats then hunting for cool skins, but max stats aren’t that easy to get.

As for ascended having little impact, you’re wrong. It allows people to live longer and kill faster. You say man an arrow cart/cannon but a person in ascended can do that job better because they will survive longer due to not only them having more stats but also because you will have ascended clad enemies doing more damage. Dungeon groups will only want ascended armor players so they can complete it faster(as getting dungeon armor is a grind and speeding it up is important). The10%-20% more stats per item is not “unimportant”, if it was then people wouldn’t be so upset with this decision. Even 1% is important to a lot MMO gamers, which consequently is why a lot of people picked up GW2. There wasn’t supposed to be a gear grind so there wouldn’t be a1% stat increase to chase after, they would finally be free to play and do what they wanted.

Finally, looking at the stats between ascended and legendaries, what am I supposed to see? ArenaNet already stated that when ascended weapons come out, legendary weapons will get a boost to their stats(we already saw this through a bug). Legendaries are PURELY for skins, they aren’t(or at least weren’t) supposed to be another stat tier. Legendary weapons actually back the original game design, easy max stats but hard to get skins. Ascended armor kicks that design in the crotch and says “Hard to get max stats and even harder to get skins!”

Does it need nerfed? Absolutely, along with the thief burst and all other super burst builds. With the lowest base health being 10k you should see 5k hits at most.

This game cannot even begin balancing classes until they balance the stats. Power/precision/crit damage scales so much better than all the other stats. Condition damage is left miles behind due to it’s scaling and the large amount of removal abilities/traits. Healing power is an absolute joke for most classes. Toughness can only mitigate power at a 1:1 but since crit/crit damage multiplies it out it’s left in the dust.

They have a few options. Add a new stat that reduces the chance of being crit, reduce the amount of precision on current gear(or nerf how much precision=1% crit), or make sure precision and crit damage don’t occur on the same gear. Then make it so healing power and heals in general are EQUAL to damage. If a thief wants to stack healing power and use on-hit heals to stay alive then let him! Condition damage needs to either be increased or make it able to crit. Lastly, remove the huge base HP gaps that classes get for no logical reason. Armor types should be useable by all classes but each having their own pros/cons.

Once all that’s finally ironed out we can begin balancing classes. Suddenly that thief has to worry about stacking crit vs crit damage. Does he crit more but for less damage or crit less for high damage? Perhaps middle of the road. Condition builds will become much more viable. Healing/vampire builds will actually be possible and poison suddenly becomes more important/tactical. You will actually have to have some skills to win a fight instead of insta-gib combos and <10s fights.

Brutalistik.6473:

Daecollo.9578:

Hundred Blades deals 1224 more damage then backstab does.

Kill Shot also does more damage then backstab does if you add in the 3% damage from burst tree, even more if you take into account burst traits… Kill Shot can also pierce and hit an infinite number of targets.

You want to know what kill shot and hundred blades don’t have?

Stealth and teleports…

be happy we thieves can escape the damage.

And warriors get 8k more life and 13.8% armor, meaning you can take 80%+ more damage. Don’t get me wrong, I think the warrior needs some more mobility but they definitely need their damage lowered. Also who thought giving some classes more armor and health was a good idea? There is zero logical explanation as to why the warrior gets 8k more health and more armor than an elementalist or thief, they all go into melee with a melee build. They should have just given everyone base stats with no difference then given armor types a pro and a con IE heavy armor lets you take more damage but reduces run speed. That would certainly boost the number of builds.

Phooka.9042:

AerictheBoss.9172:

That’s what you call a sample. When CNN does a poll they don’t poll the entire nation they take a sample and usually those samples are correct. Everyone should remember how accurate samples were during the election.

Not every sample is accurate, though. (See me earlier post about math and enhance it to include statistics).

If the sample is methologically slanted to include a vastly disproportionate amount of players from a small subgroup, it’s not representative. Xfire or what it’s called is not something the average gamer uses. Only a very specific demographic uses it. If I were to wager a guess, I’d assume that it’s mostly young, male hardcore gamers. That’s by no means representative.

Now let’s assume that players that favour competing with others over collaborating with others are mostly young, male and hardcore players. I guess it’s a fair assumption. I think we can assume that players using Xfire are dedicated and since they play a lot, above average players. I think it’s save to conclude that they are overrepresenting what casual old players in the respective threads here called “content locusts” and that they are far less attached to the franchise and far more likely to hop the next game and far more likely to have “completed” GW2 and thus not log on as much anymore (and rather “go on”). Since they want to be “best” they also need a way to show that they are “best” and are likely pro content-treadmill and will have left the game long before 11/15 because of this. Remember the threads about GW2 having nothing to do? That was them.

Every single new mmo has someone that tries to make this argument. While it has merit, they also ignore the games that have all come before this and proven that for a new MMO the Xfire numbers are reasonably accurate at showing trends. WAR, AoC, SWTOR all had massive Xfire dips and that was also shown in game. Perhaps you’re correct at the content locusts are what make up Xfire’s numbers, but then they also make up the majority of MMO players.

GW2 has seen a big dip in numbers. For most casuals even exotics were grindy enough to be out of reach or not worth the effort(who wants to run a dungeon 30 times for a set and before the nerf it was 90). No one wanted to sit and grind karma for 40 hours for a set and the fact that Orr was/is the worst zone in the game it didn’t make things any better. WvW provides zero progression and the badge system is a horrible joke. Getting 1 set turned out to be a chore so forget about getting a 2nd or 3rd.

ArenaNet has shown it’s hand time and time again and people finally get it. They want the game to be grindy. From precursor grind, karma grind, dungeon grind, T6 grind, to now fractal/ascension grind. What’s worse is they even increase the grind with lowering drop rates or nerfing event chains. Who thought 250 T6 was a good idea and obtainable by casuals? I can absolutely take the legendary weapons being a grind but top statted gear shouldn’t be and that’s exactly why I quit. That wasn’t what this game was presented as so why am I going to continue to play a game I didn’t want.

So content locusts? Or perhaps just the game not being what it was presented as. There will also be those unhappy with the amount of content, but I think there are a lot more unhappy about the way things are being handled and the amount of grind involved.

pixelrevision.5192:

Damage over time is always more situational and strangely tuned in comparison to direct damage. It’s more something that’s added because people like the play style.

In the case of the stack limits it probably has to do with spells like these:
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Epidemic
Without stack limits the amount of damage that could be done in a PvP situation (or a PvE one that depended heavily on adds) would be absolutely out of control with 2-3 Necros timing it in synch.

Unlimited stacks wouldn’t impact PvP at all. Currently it’s already hard to land 25 bleeds on someone and if you do get 25 on them they die in seconds(2k-3k a second not including direct damage). Then you also have the absurd amount of condition removal that was handed out to all classes that make this happening even rarer. You don’t hear people complaining about dieing to 25 stacks of bleeds and epidemic currently, so the chances of someone getting 40 stacks(4k+ a second) is beyond rare. It would seriously take a concerted effort between 2-3 people to time everything right and in those cases they simply deserve to land it.

On another topic, the Dredge fractal just once again proves how condition damage is worthless. The end bosses(ice elemental, mining suit) require lava be dumped on them so you do bonus damage. However condition damage is not included in that. Nothing like doing a 30k hit and bleeds ticking for 45…

Sheobix.8796:

Gluttony.2017:

Could a mod kindly remove the posts from KirinDave and Dredlord? Honestly, you guys can start another thread talking about the effectivness of target the weak, but dont hijack this thread.
Personally, I dont find necros weak, however, to simply perform on the level of a noob thief who justs mugs, backstabbs and then spams HS, you have to put in a lot of effort. Thats probably why most people complain. That, and because our trait lines are just messed up and lack any form of co-ordination. And minions arent exactly reliable (if they dont stand around and actually attack they usually get wiped out with one AoE attack). So yeah, thats my 2cents.

the reason why i don’t call thieves OP (as i play one myself) is that by holding at least 2300 armor and 24k hp as a necro (which is super easy to do) you don’t die from those combos, and the thief in question is left with 0 initiative and 3 utilities to pull from to get away from you until they regen initiative. and they are locked out of stealth for 3 seconds.

my juggermancer takes 3 consqecutive BS combos to get to 0 hp, and i also have a ridiculously tanky and powerful DS and lich form doubles my stats for the duration. sooo…..

really, we have a lot more potential than a thief does. They were built to blow their load like a rhino, but after that they need to dodge like mad or use roll for initiative, or just plain run away until they catch you by serious surprise.

I feel like you don’t have much experience with a thief. First off they aren’t out of initiative after a BS combo, they have 6 left and more than likely 7-8 from regen. Second of all at the very least that BS combo is doing 15k damage(bringing you below 50% health) opening you up for HS spam to finish you. They also aren’t "stuck out of stealth for 3s vs a necro considering they get a stolen 3s fear, giving them ample time to finish you. If you get into DS dodge out of life transfer range then come back and just pummel you. Lich form is a bit tricky but that’s the only time I’d actually run away, mostly just to waste the cooldown :P.

A BS combo is not the end of the thief, that’s the opener. If it doesn’t kill you there are a multitude of things a thief can do to kill you. Only when things look grim is it time to leave. A good thief is going to BS combo and continue to kill you, not run away and wait for another BS combo. Personally, I don’t even play a BS thief. I play a high damage but decent health/toughness build that is built around dodging, stacking might, using auto-attacks+quickness to get people quickly into HS butter zone. I haven’t had any issues with necromancers, but it’s not like there are a ton of them running around.

I play both classes though. The necro has some neat stuff, it’s just not nearly as cohesive as what the thief has. Even though the thief probably has less overall variety, what it does have all works together very well. I truly await the day that the necro gets an overhaul and becomes cohesive. I also await the day I can make a vampire thief or use traps…

Personal stories in SWTOR is what caused the rest of the game to be so incredibly lackluster. They spend all their money and time on those and ended up with everything else being incredibly sub-par.

SWG Crafting system- made crafters very important but also made gatherers just as important. Gave people a reason to farm mobs(ahh nightsister hunts!). People could truly make a name for themselves.

The Chronicles of Spellborn skill deck system- made a very in-depth combat system that truly rewarded skill and tactics. You not only had to predict when you would need skills on your bars but also set up combos, buffs, and debuffs. Even deeper you could add sigils(?) to enhance skills in certain ways. By a wide margin the best combat system used in any MMO to date, if I had to design it better I would remove the aiming and add dodging.

Gele.2048:

OOO can u stop crying just from 10 days playing and doing evry daily u can get the full EXOTIC gear whit karma what are u STUPID or something ? we need something to make me log in i had the gear whit karma the 2 week from playing this game if u suck at this game so much and cant farm gear whic compare to ANY OUTER MMO is EPICLY EASy dont play mmos go play barby for comsetics

10 days at 4500(?) a jug gives you 45000 or 1 piece of gear. That leaves 207,000 to go. At 378 per event that’s 548 events needed. At 5 minutes per event(unlikely) that’s 45.6 hours total or 4.56 hours a day. Yes you can do it in 10 days, for most though just those 6 pieces of gear will take them a month and that doesn’t include weapons, accessories, or runes/sigils. Even if you have 60k karma upon hitting 80 you still need to spend 32.4 hours grinding karma beside the 10 karma jugs.

This game was not supposed to be a grind. Sure for those that spend 4-5 hours a day playing getting exotics is easy, but for the people that were marketed this game as low grind they aren’t. If you want a game where endgame gear is hard to get then there are plenty out there, go play them but don’t drag that mentality here.

Mackdose.6504:

Logun.2349:

Bluebird.1890:

No. What we can blame people for is not having some patience after the apology is made to give them some time to try and fix the mistakes they obviously want to correct. We can also blame them for blowing the mistakes completely out of proportion to make it seem like the current status of the game is grind FOTM or you will be weak in comparison to someone who has grinded FOTM.

Neither of which is correct.

True perhaps, but if players didn’t ring the alarm bells now “loud and hard” the live team may have stayed on course to turn this into another endgame dungeon grind game, since they seemed to be oblivious to the impact this is having on the rest of the game.

Arena Net made a lot of statements on their game design philosophies over the years. I suggest watching a few of their developer and GDC Panels and you might get why people felt like this patch stepped on some of their core design values and why people were shocked to see this at all never mind 3 months after launch.

I did watch the GDC panels. Religiously. I still don’t feel betrayed, or understand why other people do.

Because

A. They said they wanted to make a game with less grinding→ Didn’t happen.
B. Gear progression would be skins→Introduction of ascended gear means they lied
C. Their continued stance that going forward they will have vertical progression that drastically alters how this game will be played.

I followed the game. I read and watched everything I could. I understood that top statted lvl 80 gear was supposed to be easy to get and things from really hard dungeons were purely cosmetic. At release this was fairly true although exotics were still a bit of a grind for most people to obtain. Now suddenly that is all changing. So either I missed an interview somewhere along with probably a million other people, they always planned this but failed to inform people, or they just started tacking on ideas to keep people playing. I bought this game on the premice that it wouldn’t be a gear treadmill like WoW, I’ve done that grind and I’ll never do it again. You wonder why people are angry? They bought something they thought and were told was different, yet suddenly it’s changing so it isn’t any different at all.

Strang.8170:

People ragequitting are too much in a subscription mindset.

Just stopping any money flow towards them is essentialy the same thing anyway, and with this you can play while it still lasts.

Personaly i´m going to wait and see, but not a cent will leave my pockets before i´m satisfied with what they´ve done with the new direction.

At this point why even put more time into characters when ArenaNet is going to continue down this path? I was planning on getting all classes to 80, but that’s been put on hold. I have no real reason to continue playing if it’s going to be a vertical progression. When they spend more time making WvW and DE’s that have depth I’ll start playing again, but I’m certainly not going to spend hours grinding out gear. I’ve played that game already and it got old 6 years ago.

Also just stopping the money isn’t enough. If you really wanted to show ArenaNet the repercussions of their poor designs then you stop playing. Those that are satisfied with the game are far less likely to buy stuff when there is no one left to play with. They aren’t going to buy gems to convert to gold to buy awesome looking armor when there isn’t anyone to show it off to. When no one is doing events they won’t put money into karma boosts.

EndlessDreamer.6780:

Distaste.4801:

Death Reincarnated.3570:

zippo burntfur.9307:

Imo the biggest screw up they did was limiting how you could get ascended gear, making running FoTM did not score much imo. If they would have made craftable version’s, and pvp version’s from the get go, I think alot of this firestorm could have been negated or atleast deminished.

ANet initially introduced Ascended gear via the FotM. They have written that this, perhaps, was the wrong way to go about. However, this new gear tier will roll out throughout the game; which will mean it will provide more accessible ways to get it.

The major problem with that is if we apply the current grind for ascended items to other avenues all you’re looking at is more flavors of grinding available. Think about it, 2000 badges of honor for 1 item, 1 million karma per item, or 20 dungeon runs for 1 item. Not to mention that both karma and WvW have severely limit stat combinations. They could add 20 different ways to get ascended items but if the current grind is any indicator they still wouldn’t be more accessible.

Read the AMA. They stated that they realized that the price of ascended items were disproportionate in certain ways to the amount of work they wanted people to put in for them in comparison and they’re looking in to it.

Here is the problem, exotics are already pretty grindy to obtain for most people. Even at 3g per piece of gear(cheap!) you’re looking at 36g for 6 armor pieces, 2-4 weapons, and 5 accessories. At 1g an hour(assuming no exotics/loadstones/etc drop) that’s 39-45 hours of grinding. But wait! we have to put runes in them! Want the rune of divinity? That’s another 36g, or 12g for another decent rune set. Then yet another 4-8g for weapon sigils. At least So upwards of 60 hours of grinding at the low end for a single set of gear.

Want just a dungeon set? If I remember correctly it’s 30 dungeon runs over 10 days at 3 new paths a day to get 6 pieces of gear(20 runs) and 2 weapons(10 runs). So if you’re doing a short dungeon(30mins) you can get it in 15 hours, IF that dungeon set has the stats you want. Otherwise you’re looking at 1hr+ dungeons and upwards of 30 hours. Remember that this is also the NERFED version, the grind used to be something like 90 dungeon runs. To give you a better idea, back in WoW vanilla I never did any dungeon more than 12 times to get a piece of loot I wanted(dire maul north orge staff only staff with +damage at the time!). 30 raids of MC would gear everyone out.

Karma? Limited stats and grinding takes just as long as money. At 387 karma per event(iirc) it takes 651 events to get a karma set. If someone saves all karma while leveling that’s ~60k upon hitting 80, leaving 496 events to go! Even at 5 minutes per event(not likely!) that’s 41 hours, 82 hours at 10 minutes. Anyone is free to do the math with karma jugs!

Badges of honor? LOL, you’ll get the karma for karma gear in WvW before you’ll get the badges.

My point is that for most people 30-80 hours for a single set of gear is already out of reach. I know many people who quit upon reaching 80 because they simply didn’t want to grind to get top statted gear, mostly because this game was touted by having easy to gain max stat gear and horizontal skin progression. Now they are putting in ascended at it’s 30-80 hours PER PIECE. Even if they lower the grind on it, it’s still going to be above current exotics, thus out of reach of most. I don’t even want to grind for a 2nd set of exotic gear set because it’s already painful and now we have ascended? If they are looking into things then they need a really drastic overahul of all current items to ease people into gear grinding.

ArenaNet failed at vertical loot progression if that is what they wanted to go for. WoW is very good at progressive tiers of gear so you feel like you’re constantly accomplishing something. GW2 you go from hodge podged gear at 79 to 80 rares right away because they are cheap. The jump from rares to exotics is huge. A full set of rares takes all of 3-4 hours(4g maybe using orbs for runes/sigils). You go from 3 hours to 30hours in a single gear jump. In WoW the investment was pretty even. The end result might be an epic set taking you 60 hours to get, but you got 2-3 upgrades getting there most of the time.

Death Reincarnated.3570:

zippo burntfur.9307:

Imo the biggest screw up they did was limiting how you could get ascended gear, making running FoTM did not score much imo. If they would have made craftable version’s, and pvp version’s from the get go, I think alot of this firestorm could have been negated or atleast deminished.

ANet initially introduced Ascended gear via the FotM. They have written that this, perhaps, was the wrong way to go about. However, this new gear tier will roll out throughout the game; which will mean it will provide more accessible ways to get it.

The major problem with that is if we apply the current grind for ascended items to other avenues all you’re looking at is more flavors of grinding available. Think about it, 2000 badges of honor for 1 item, 1 million karma per item, or 20 dungeon runs for 1 item. Not to mention that both karma and WvW have severely limit stat combinations. They could add 20 different ways to get ascended items but if the current grind is any indicator they still wouldn’t be more accessible.

why in the world would I reroll when it’s now absurdly hard to fully gear out one character let alone 2-3? In fact I was working on my 5th(60) and 6th(24) 80’s and ascended gear has stopped me in my tracks. I like having a variety of toons to play in both PvE and WvW, but now with upwards of 100+ hours per character to gear them it’s sucked all the fun out.

I’ve definitely been playing less. A few reasons off the top of my head

1. WvW is too shallow. Not only is there very few actual tactics, no progression, but it’s ultimately meaningless. It feels like they started working on WvW but got half way and gave up on it. The badge system is just bad, the maps too small, the copy and pasted maps get very boring very quick, and off hour populations are the key to winning.

2. Class balance- It feels like the classes were released half done. The necromancer is by far the worst offender as it has a ton of bugs, at release I think only half the traits worked. I cannot tell what balance they are working towards, some skills do tons of damage but similar skills on other classes do way less. Burst is a major issue yet they nerfed non-burst specs. They seem to be very inconsistent about balance on both skills and classes.

3. Gear treadmill- Sorry, but I don’t have 100 hours to grind FotM or mobs for mats. I don’t want others having a stat advantage over me in WvW either. So it’s pretty much down to don’t play. Want a dungeon set of armor? Only 20+ runs at 3 a day or 54 in a single day. I expected very hard content with good rewards and instead of got super easy or impossible content with breadcrumb rewards.

4. Dynamic events being under used/developed. The ancient crab event(with a few tweaks) is a good example of what I want to see more of. Not these overly repetitive events that finish in 5 minutes and have zero impact. Claw of jormag is a good example of an epic event simply because they visually put more into it. I mean the first time you see it you question why everything else is so lackluster. I could write a ton more on this but lets just leave it at dynamic events can be a whole lot more.

Rika.7249:

How is Hundred Blades not okay?
It effectively roots the warrior to the ground, simply walk away and all the damage has been mitigated.
Pistol Whip was nerfed because it was / is spamable, with a stun attached.
Hundred Blades is just Hundred Blades, and the warrior has to effectively give up an entire utility slot, maybe even 2, to land a good Hundred Blades once every millenia.
This is a non-issue.

The problem is the amount of damage that hundred blades does. I understand that rooting is bad, but there are other skills that do the same thing and do not offer the same damage. Mesmer sword #2 I believe roots them and doesn’t do near the same damage. There are many skills in the game that put the user at a disadvantage for using them and don’t do the damage of 100b.

As for giving up a utility slot, every class does this for certain builds. The thief backstab build you want the % damage signet. 100b want’s bolas or bullscharge(preferably with frenzy). Play some other classes and you’ll quickly learn that the damage on 100b is insane compared to other skills that risk just as much for no where near the reward.

I’m all for making 100b not root the player because it is bad for melee, but the damage needs to come down to reasonable levels. All of the big burst skills need to come down in damage so skillful play wins fights and not sure fire combos.

Also, if I see one more person say “dodge it” I might blow a gasket. Following that logic we just need to give every player 1 hit abilities, but hey it’s balanced because you can dodge it. Every ability can be dodged and that should have no basis on the balance of the ability. Don’t get me wrong, there should be hard hitting attacks that you want to avoid but shouldn’t be dodge or die.

Columba.9730:

unknowable.8470:

Columba.9730:

unknowable.8470:

I love this game still and hate the community and how they behave… Or at-least the community on the forum.
It reminds me all too much of what I see in other games, players not actually reading what developers write, thinking about how changes actually impact them or responding in sensible manners.

But then again you are all the 90% right, whatever your idea is EVERYONE holds the same idea.

I find it funny that people talk about grind in ascended gear, the rings drop and fairly easily with one guarenteed and if you cannot afford a black slot after doing over EIGHTY fractal dungeons I have to ask… How bad are you at this game… I mean seriously I get what 60silver roughly per three dungeons at LOW LEVEL DIFFICULTY in those dungeons… You get through 80 dungeons + to the level you are required to actually use the back slot item and you get a ring AND can afford a backslot item… It is that simple.

The stats on the item make a 1%-2% difference to your OVERALL character strength which is NOTHING and a lesser difference than rare to exotics. And makes no difference in world vs world, especially if we cannot select runes and have rune effects in play (and people who use runes for their stats only and don’t work with the effects are just bad players, like the glass cannon only groups, lacking in intelligence)

There is still no gear grind in the game that isn’t optional, none that effects the gameplay in a meaningful way and ascended isn’t even a grind atm due to how they implemented it.

All I see is a bunch of people having a kneejerk reaction without actually having a closer look at how it will effect them and the way the game is played.

lol i have looked closely. it’s hours and hours of a grind in content some of us hate. How difficult is that to understand. the rings don’t always drop. How can you say what is a grind for some of us? It’s not optional. stop saying that. the stats are at least 20% better than exotics. not optional.

Buutttt you don’t need them, the stats are 8% better than an exotic and you don’t need them outside of fractals and even then only after level 11…
That 8% stat bonus is a 1-2% character power bonus at best and even less as you cannot get a full set yet.

Multiple analyses have shown its at least 20%, lol. This is only the beginning.

Actually, It truly depends on the stat you are looking at. Take the jewel slot stats, those are 20%-28% better for regular stats and crit damage is 33% better. However if you go by the item stats it’s only like 4-6% better and crit damage is 33% better. Overall the items are ~12.5%-24% better depending on the stats you want. Condition damage doesn’t increase nearly as much as crit damage or magic find. Which is another thing, why is the stat weighting in this game so wonky? I mean it feels like they just tossed stats on items without doing the math.

Kiviar.7063:

The problem with +heal is that with no tank classes and the spastic aggro model, mobs are forced to do very limited levels of damage so that any single player can self mitigate them regardless of class. Even a small increase to +heal scaling would greatly improve players survivability in all areas.

I don’t know about other classes but on my thief if I get 1k healing power my on hit heals me for 150 instead of 100. My regeneration will heal for 255 a tick(iirc). With just my on hit heal and sigil of blood I cannot even outheal my own bleeds I would apply with a single Death Blossom. It would take 10s of regen to mitigate an average hit(2.5k) and 62s to regen my entire health bar(16k).

Healing can safely be buffed. It will make a healing build actually survivable. Remember that by stacking +healing you’re losing other stats. People might last a lot longer but they won’t have nearly as much damage.

Columba.9730:

20%+ vs exotic. It’s not minor.

From the current rings I’ve compared it’s more like 23.5% if you’re using crit damage % and 12.25% if you’re using condition damage.

Even 12.25% is huge though, it’s the current equivalent as playing without your helm and gloves equipped.

offence.4726:

It’s a personal effort after all , if you are a casual gamer who maxed his exotic set and have probably second BiS inslot why would you want ascendant gear for +5+10+20 stat ? Where will you be using that “hardcore” gear , once a week in wvw or the daily dungeon ? It’s the same previous mmo argument and here it comes: play harder ( work harder ) then the rest get an extra edge it’s just like in the real life or is it not ? No one is forcing you to do it you will still be competitive either way. So why cry about an extra +5 stat you don’t need and won’t use ?

Where will the people be using ascended gear? Once they have the best gear they sure won’t be using it for fractals. More dungeons, as per Anets statement, will use the agony mechanic meaning that casuals will be forced to get ascended gear or be unable to do the new dungeons.

Also with the stat differences and more and more ascended gear you won’t be competitive. It’s like saying a level 80 with white gear is still competitive with someone in exotics. Sure they still do damage but there is a big difference between them. Now the stat differences themselves might look small but combined with the large amount of % damage traits it gets multiplied out.

Just the berserker jewel stats gets upped by 6 stats and 1% crit damage. That’s 20% more of each stat and 33% more crit damage. Just using the accessory slots jewel stats, that’s 36 stats and 6% crit damage JUST FOR THE JEWEL SLOT. Then on top of that you have 5 extra stats per infusion slot. That’s a total of 66 extra stats and 6% crit damage for jewel slot alone.

As for gear, comparing the pale tree ring and the berserker’s ring. It gets 4 extra power, 2 precision, and 1% crit damage OR 6% more power, 4% more precision, and 33% more crit damage. For the overall ring including jewel slot and infusion it is 21 extra stats and 2% crit damage or 13.5% more stats and 33% more cit damage. If you feel so inclined to average in the crit damage it’s 23.25%. If you use condition damage instead of crit damage then that average is 12% and the overall average is 12.75%.(Its late so math might be wrong!)

Even at the low end making ascended players 12.75% more powerful is A LOT. If you want to see the difference then try taking off your helmet and one of the following: boots, gloves, or shoulders. That will give you a 12.09% overall gear stat reduction. Your chestplate is worth 15.5%, rings & pants are each worth 10%, neck 13.8%, earrings each 8.6%. Maybe you like playing without a piece of gear. Oh and this doesn’t include a back piece as when I ran these numbers there wasn’t much of a choice there :P.

P.S. ArenaNet’s weighting of stats is INSANE, % crit damage varies so much a crossed all pieces of gear. Current exotic gear has it ranging from 16 stat points on helm, pants, rings to 12 stat points on shoulders, gloves, and boots. I designed my current set of gear around maximizing my total stat points based on these fluctuations, IE use a power/toughness/vit helm instead of berserkers because the 2% crit damage costs me 32 stats, where on say boots that same 2% crit only costs me 24 stats.

Loosifah.4739:

I still fail to see how adding a single tier of equipment into a game that’s only 3 months old to add more abilities and mechanics to the game is adding a kitten treadmill.

Now I could see your point if they release another content update, with yet another tier above ascended. But I highly doubt they’re going to do that. Especially with the amount of crying that went on with this recent update.

Also you have to realize that not even half the amount of people you think were “crying for a treadmill” actually did so, right? I know that I didn’t; and neither did any of the dozens of people I personally know.

They’ve been making this update since they released the game; they may not have intended to release the new tier of equipment so soon; but it was going to happen eventually.

It’s ONLY been 3 months and most casual players don’t even have full exotics. Yet we already have a new tier of gear coming out that’s better and takes a stupid amount of time to grind out. It is most certainly a treadmill since it is purely designed to keep players working towards new gear. The grinding is designed to keep people playing the game(treadmill) and the gear is a carrot to get them to grind.

I bought this game specifically because it wasn’t supposed to be a gear grind. The best stat gear was supposed to be easy to get but not great looking. The harder to get items were to have awesome skins. Well turns out that even exotic gear with proper stats isn’t easy to get, you need to grind either mats, karma, badges, or dungeons to get it. You’re forced into grinding things you don’t want to for certain stats as well(IE badges or dungeons for toughness/vitality/power pants). It’s very disheartening when people save all their karma from 1-80 and the most they can afford is 1 maybe 2 pieces.

Now people are forced to grind even more for best statted gear and you wonder why they are angry? They were sold this game on flat out lie. The manifesto has been linked, there are plenty of videos/interviews/etc where devs talk about making everything accessible and now we have gear that is not accessible and further segregates the community.

Seera.5916:

So those of us who weren’t level 80 and were on our highest level character were only supposed to get items that were for level 80 characters?

You chose to play on your lower level characters. Why should those of us on our highest level characters have to wait longer to use items because you chose to not play on your level 80 character?

I was playing on my level 55 elementalist. Got one set of gloves I could equip right away as they were level 53. A couple pieces of exotic armor for level 62 and above. A level 80 exotic accessory. And a harpoon gun of some level which I didn’t commit to memory since I can’t use it.

I wish they had coded THIS event to only give you items you can use (as in: scholars not getting heavy armor). 2.5 hours for mostly items you can’t use at all even if you were level 80 would anger me.

Now as long as a low level person stayed with the zerg they could get to the end and possibly even get the chest. So was a very low level person supposed to get level 80 stuff as well? I’d have been disappointed if I didn’t get anything I could use within the next 10 levels but not angry if everything had been for level 80 characters.

Now, if I had been under level 40 (ie: less than half the way to level 80), I would have been angry at ANet for only giving me level 80 items. Because I would have just spent 2.5 hours on an event that gave me a reward that I won’t be able to use for several more levels.

because any exotics <80 are worthless? The same reason the dungeon exotics are all level 80. You will outlevel that gear so quickly that it’s worthless.

I’m absolutely furious that we got scaled loot. I was on my 52 elementalist and getting 62 exoitcs is a kick in the groin. I have 4 level 80’s that could have used some level 80 exotics or even a pre-cursor. It should have been flat out level 80 stuff for a level 80 event, PERIOD. It would give low levels something to look forward too and give people with an 80 already something to use.

Jason Segel.2908:

Jasher.6580:

Jason Segel.2908:

Jasher.6580:

Jason Segel.2908:

BurnedToast.3781:

Blacksarevok.8104:

Condition damage = PVP
Direct damage = PVE

This seems to be how the devs are intending it.

If anything condition damage is worse for PvP for two reasons:

1. Everyone is constantly spamming condition removal.

2. Burst damage is king, you’re over there trying to stack bleeds meanwhile warrior is literally one-shotting people with killshot from 1400 range or thief is exploiting culling to backstab/pistolwhip people to death in 2 – 3 seconds before they can even be targeted.

At least in PvE mobs don’t (usually) cleanse and during dungeons they have enough HP to let you stack up before they die.

They can spam condi removal all they want. Necros dish out all condi with staff, sceptor + off hand dagger build. They can try to remove the conditions but sceptor auto attack loads them up and using epidemic you can transfer one person’s conditions to everyone every 15 ish second? staff condition is all aoe for slot 2 3 4 5 and sceptor + off hand dagger condition is slot 2 and 5 is aoe. gg

Then why aren’t Necromancers dominating high level spvp?

Most necromancers dont play their strengths. A necro paired with a guardian at a point is amazing.

I can do 3 complete condition removals on myself + all allies in the area. I can grant 12 seconds of protection on all allies, regen on all allies, convert allies conditions into boons, rez 3 downed allies while i channel the move that does that while moving which is the best rez in the game, i cause all enemies incoming hits to hit 50% less for all non-critical hits by casting enfeeble blood which lasts for 10 seconds and I can recast every 10 seconds…. Necromancers are for sure in high level pvp, they are in free tpvp and paid tpvp for sure.

I don’t know how it is on your server but the smart teams have a necro because of all the utility we have.

Support Necro yes, condition damage Necro, no… which was the whole basis of this thread. Condition Damage.

Support necro is the same thing as condi necro….
I am support necro for my utilities, slots 6 7 8 9, slot 4 on staff. i am max condi damage and i still provide support. u just gotta know how to trait it, what runes to use. you’re a thief and i see you post about thieves all the time. please don’t tell me what a necro is good for. i win ia lot of paid tournaments and free tpvp with my friends.

If you’re running utilities in your 7,8,9 slot then you don’t have epidemic. The scepter AOE’s are alright but they are so incredibly easy to avoid and difficult to land. Scepter #1 conditions might kill someone eventually but in the time it takes you to apply 1 set(2 bleed 1 poison) on my thief I’ll have done 3k+ in auto-attack damage myself. I’ll not only have out damaged you(3k vs 2.2k) but I’ll have done it faster(2s vs 7 1/2s). Not only that but again sticking with my thief, any conditions you apply are gone when I hit 75%(trait), then again when I use heal, and if I’m rolling the precision signet that’s another condition gone. Every 45s I can completely remove conditions twice and remove a single condition as well.

Don’t get me wrong, necromancers can do alright, BUT that doesn’t change that condition damage is underpowered compared to direct damage. Condition damage should be doing more overall damage than direct damage because it takes time to do the damage and it can be removed, but it doesn’t. This comes down to crit and crit damage scaling differently. They either need to make condition duration more abundant and remove the cap if there is one or remove crit damage from main gear stats and relegate it to sigils like duration.

Ralathar.7236:

You guys really need to learn some patience. As someone who has been playing MMORPG’s for over a decade you need to wait until February minimum to make any real judgements on half of the things you are making knee-jerk reactions too.

I know some of this stuff is not to your liking now, but give constructive threads and avoid whining as much as possible. Do your best to help them build the game better. Games generally do improve and get better. This one started out pretty dang good and you wouldn’t be upset at all if they hadn’t done such a good job to start. Being upset requires that you care.

As someone who has played MMO’s for over a decade, ArenaNet had their shot and blew it. This isn’t a knee-jerk reaction. WvW is far less in-depth than Vanilla WoW AV. The only good points it has right now is that siege is placeable anywhere and walls can be broken. It needed to be far more in-depth to keep people playing it and certainly needed a goal.

ArenaNet has failed time and time again. The whole orb buff thing was a no brainer and shouldn’t have made it passed internal discussions. Stealth+culling issues are major game engine issues that should have been accounted for when building the game. Night capping needed to be accounted for in the scoring system, especially since they knew they had no plans for an oceanic server. The entire PvP badge/bag drop thing just blows my mind, who thought it was smart to just drop bags of loot in the middle of PvP battles? Now we have a failed class balance patch and ascended gear?

6 months is not enough to fix what’s wrong with WvW. You would need new bigger maps, more in-depth mechanics(ladders, tunnels, buildable walls, worthwhile NPC patrols, minefields, tougher siege equipment, less AOE, less burst damage, etc), better scoring system, better population regulation, more anti-zerg mechanics, etc. Basically an entire WvW overhaul, otherwise it will just continue to get stale.

Yes it is the centaur king one.

Honestly, I’m not sure with the new rules. You’d probably have to test it. They stated 55+ events should now allow you to get level 80 gear so perhaps level 42 events can still get you level 70 gear? You’re not going to get 300+ karma I don’t think though.

You’re going to be hard pressed to find a chain of events with more mob kills that runs that regularly though. I mean on my ele that I’m leveling I regularly come out with 40-50 centaur bags alone. If level 42 stuff does drop 70+ loot then that’s probably one of the best events for farming rares.

Ulari.9547:

Distaste.4801:

This patch addressed nothing that truly needed fixing.

Condition damage is still lackluster compared to Direct damage in both scaling and PvE viability. The limits on bleed stacks, poison/burn duration, etc is just downright dumb. When putting down a poison/burning field for others to use HURTS your damage you know some designer screwed up big.

Burst damage is still sky high. If you want skill to be involved in a fight this needs brought down so most fights last 15s-20s. Who thought 60%+ crit and 100%+ crit damage was a good idea?

Class bugs from beta still not fixed.

Certain classes in a state that is absolutely laughable and shouldn’t have been released like that.

Class base health and armor need rebalanced. There is no logical reason why some classes have 8k extra health and heavy armor and others don’t.

Trait system is still forcing players into traits/stats they won’t use or don’t want(huge reason some classes are in bad shape).

Healing scaling not even close to damage. I want to make a class that does tons of self healing but since heals scale so terribly it isn’t viable. I can get hit by a 20k burst but healing isn’t even close to that.

Traps in PvP show up as giant red circles…not much of a trap then is it?

They seriously need to get a team of at least 8 people together to work on classes and combat. Every single aspect of this game(PvE, SPvP, WvW) deals with classes and combat, it is a HUGE part of the game. How they thought only 2 people was smart is beyond my comprehension. I want to know where the developers from pre-launch that understood what MMO gamers wanted went to. This patch is like they looked at what people wanted and just went the opposite direction.

I am truly glad PlanetSide 2 comes out next week because at least I will have something to do while ArenaNet gets it’s act together.

Quoted because it sums up how I feel and is better written that I could have done at the moment.
The only point where I differ is on the healing front… I am fine with no dedicated healers, and the advertised no holy trinity.
But condition damage (bleed stacks which have been discussed on the forums for more than a month), class bugs, trait bugs, etc. are just awful.

Ulari <—disappointed

Oh I don’t want a dedicated healer, I just want healing to be a viable option for sustaining fights. Take my thief. If I stack all healing gear and use my heal that heals on hits, with 300 healing I heal for 103 per hit and 1k healing I heal for 149 a hit. 700 points of healing and it only scales for 50 hp? Same goes for the healing sigils(water/blood), they will heal for like 400 where the sigil of air will hit for 1k.

Heals suffer the same way conditions do except worse. They are scaled lower, cannot crit, and stack in duration. Then there is the fact that there are a lot more damage abilities than their are healing. Healing should scale equally as well as damage at the very least. I should be able to use my thiefs on hit heal and outheal a 3 stack of bleeds but honestly I can’t. 1 thief DB without any condition damage will apply 3 stacks of bleeds for 10s at 42.5 per tick x 3 per second for 127.5 per second. Even with 300 healing and doing 1 hit a second I can’t outheal it and that’s ignoring the direct damage it also does lol.

Hope I fleshed that out for you. All I want is a bit more healing(not a healer) tossed into combat for some more build variety. I mean at least then classes with poisons would have something worth using them for.

Jaggedwraith.7891:

I know about the strights and the centaur bridge in kessex hills.
Are there any other fast event chains and where do they start?

Northern Gendaren fields you can bounce between the centaur rock hound event, kill 2 veteran event, defend the town(name escapes me but its west of the 2 veterans), and another event to the far west to kill a champion+2 vets.

Norther Harathi centaur event(4 event chain with ~10-15 minute downtime after) absolutely tons of kills for loot and xp. It cannot be soloed.You can then take the southern waypoint and there is a camp there that gets attacked every 5 minutes or so.

Southern Bloodtide there is an event to defend the camp from risen followed by an escort(you need to start it) to get some eggs. ~5 minute downtime iirc after escort then the defend event starts again.

Southern Sparkfly at the dragon area there is a krait event that happens very often and an event to defend a gorge that happens often as well.

Those are the ones I know of off the top of my head. Populations are dwindling though so some might be harder than others depending on a class.

OEXTRA.1780:

Sylosi.6503:

OEXTRA.1780:

I’m greatly disjointed in how most of you forum gamers are behaving. Yeah sure the new armor rank has its ups and downs but why are ya’ll acting like it’s the end of the world? So what the stats are better, but not enough to make exotic obsolete. Hell I don’t even have full exotic yet, yet I have no problems completing any and all PvE content because (gasp) gear isn’t that important in this game. It helps, but this isn’t a heavily gear based game, so really as long as your build is good, and your wep is good enough, it’s all good..

Because they sold the game on the basis there would not be vertical gear progression nor a load of gear grind and that people could play it their own way (now people who stay will be forced to do dungeons to play WvW), which is why many of us bought it, within 3 months they have totally gone back on their word.

Also people don’t just PvE, we do WvW, once they’ve added ascended to all the slots it will make a big difference vs exotics.

Lots of us are quitting over this and I doubt this change is going to help the game that much, because many of the people it appeals to also like things like raids, specfic roles, addons, etc.

1. Exotics are top gear now….are people forced to get a full set for WvW? No….they’re not.
2. Wait till the content comes out to make such claims as “once they’ve added ascended to all the slots it will make a big difference vs exotics”.
3. If you want to overreact and quit before at least waiting for the content to come out, go ahead, but honestly it’s a tad ridiculous if you ask me.

1. Yes, they are if they want to be competitive. Otherwise they are cannonfodder. Yes those extra stats do make a big difference.

2. It’s the same difference between a guy in exotics now vs a guy in rares. Exotics have a distinct advantage and ascended will have an advantage as well.

3. It’s not an overreaction honestly. It’s 2 months into the live game and they are already going against their manifesto. They should have never put more stats on the items and infusions should have been completely fractal based boons. They screwed this up even after an outcry a few days ago when people learned about the gear.

ArenaNet needs to step up to the plate now. They need to rework ascended gear in about a day. They need to get more people working on classes/combat because the 2 that are currently working on it apparently cannot handle it. A new trait system that doesn’t force people into traits/stats they don’t want. They need to do some real work with WvW to make it far more indepth than it’s current shallow incarnation. All of this needs to come before they start doing more work on new content/gear progressions.

Dual.8953:

Rottaran Owain.6789:

Dual.8953:

Okay I calculated all the combinations for Thief minus possible stat points. 1.8029 × 10^15 varients.

Big, meaningless numbers are still big and meaningless.

Now that there is a cop out answer. There are certainly more builds in that mass then players have discovered. In truth, thief probably is the low end of combinations only sporting only 5 main hand and 2 off hand weapons.

Korath.7402:

Please do explain to me what all these viable specs are for my Ele. Clearly I must just be doing something wrong by wanting to survive for more than two hits.

Find them yourself. It’s humanly impossible to try them all.

It’s not a cop out answer. You can say there are 2 billion builds but the truth is that players can quickly identify what does and does not work. In your number of builds there are builds using pistol traits that aren’t using pistols, venom traits and they havn’t slotted any venoms, trap traits with no traps, etc.

If you rule out skills that are largely considered UP(like thief traps), traits dealing with those skills, and traits that do not impact a build at all(pistol traits on a DD/SB build); the total number of builds per class is much smaller. Now you can spend time coming up with an algorithm to do the actual math, but that is a waste of time because the human brain already does it when people are speccing.

This patch addressed nothing that truly needed fixing.

Condition damage is still lackluster compared to Direct damage in both scaling and PvE viability. The limits on bleed stacks, poison/burn duration, etc is just downright dumb. When putting down a poison/burning field for others to use HURTS your damage you know some designer screwed up big.

Burst damage is still sky high. If you want skill to be involved in a fight this needs brought down so most fights last 15s-20s. Who thought 60%+ crit and 100%+ crit damage was a good idea?

Class bugs from beta still not fixed.

Certain classes in a state that is absolutely laughable and shouldn’t have been released like that.

Class base health and armor need rebalanced. There is no logical reason why some classes have 8k extra health and heavy armor and others don’t.

Trait system is still forcing players into traits/stats they won’t use or don’t want(huge reason some classes are in bad shape).

Healing scaling not even close to damage. I want to make a class that does tons of self healing but since heals scale so terribly it isn’t viable. I can get hit by a 20k burst but healing isn’t even close to that.

Traps in PvP show up as giant red circles…not much of a trap then is it?

They seriously need to get a team of at least 8 people together to work on classes and combat. Every single aspect of this game(PvE, SPvP, WvW) deals with classes and combat, it is a HUGE part of the game. How they thought only 2 people was smart is beyond my comprehension. I want to know where the developers from pre-launch that understood what MMO gamers wanted went to. This patch is like they looked at what people wanted and just went the opposite direction.

I am truly glad PlanetSide 2 comes out next week because at least I will have something to do while ArenaNet gets it’s act together.

bwillb.2165:

Fritz.5026:

Rottaran Owain.6789:

Fritz.5026:

the things that pass for logic on this forum are always amazing.

do you honestly think the thief class would be so popular if it wasn’t so powerful?

personally i hope the patch moves the class towards a more balanced position. low risk + high reward is obviously broken which is why the class is so popular.

edit – also comparisons to warriors are always so genuine because warriors can turn invisible to avoid retaliation and teleport across the map when things are not going their way.

In TF2, you’ll see a large number of spies, and snipers on a 12 man team when you go into random pubs. Usually 3 or more of each.

In reality, a well put together team of 12 players would have one sniper in most situations, and have one spy who goes on and off.

People rarely care about what’s really effective. They play what they feel is “cool”, or “leet”.

in competitive games people always gravitate towards the most powerful classes available.

its really just simple logic. people want to win. the powerful class increases their odds.

this is not rocket science.

Riddle me this: Why do you see no or almost no backstab burst thieves in tPvP?

Because bunker builds are far better at accomplishing the goals of the conquest gamemode, holding capture points. A bunker is supposed to, hopefully, survive until assistance can kill the enemies. Even if a bunker dies they still keep enemies from capping for far longer than other builds.

A thief restricted to sitting on a point will die because they are a class that depends on mobility. Staying stealthed on a capture point also doesn’t keep it from capping. So the best role a thief can do in SPvP is roaming. Then there is group synergy, the thief has very little in a bs build. So most will run other classes with more group synergy.

Alice.8694:

I expect the end of the thief… If this isn’t the patch that’ll do it, a following one will.
It’ll be a class where only the very skilled can barely struggle to maintain a decent kill/death ratio. Due to insistent reductions in burst and stealth and the classes overall lack of self defence, with the exception of running away.

We’ll maintain our status as the best at retreating, but only just and only if a class with movement skills and ranged snares hasn’t brought them that time.

Even if Backstab, mug, and C&D damage are nerfed into the ground the thief class will be just fine. You know how I know? Because I and many others haven’t been using/abusing them and I do absolutely fine. The thief has plenty of self defense between evade attacks(HS/DB) tons of dodge(endurance back on dodge/increased dodge regen), blinds, and a bunch of passives that can stealth+shadowstep you on disable, stealth if your health gets too low, etc.

As long as the other super burst builds receive a similar nerf we will still be a strong class. At least then the thieves who have no idea what the class is capable of outside the backstab build can start learning what the class has to offer.

tom.7468:

why has none suggested just leave 1 of the working builds alone and fix broken skills so there will be more useful builds? this goes for all classes not just theif.

Because the thief working build downs people in 2-3s. If we buff all skills to that level PvP is just going to be a skill-less insta-gib fest. You’re correct that thieves would change builds if unload would do 20k damage, but this games PvP would die so incredibly fast.

Phantom.8130:

hellfish.6740:

If my elem…

quercus.9261:

I only play WvW on my mesmer.

both light armor wearing casters

Phantom.8130:

people also tend to be ignorant of how class dynamics work as well. they tend to think that every class should have an equal chance of beating every class, like in a FPS. however, in all RPG’s, it works like paper/scissors/rock. only, it’s light armor/medium armor/heavy armor, or in some instances casters/physical damage/defense. 1 is designed to beat 3, 2 is designed to beat 1, 3 is designed to beat 2. people don’t understand this and think that 1, 2, and 3 should be designed to beat everyone. they don’t understand that while classes have strengths, they also have weaknesses, and that other classes are meant to expose those weaknesses.

And? The thief isn’t supposed to kill cloth classes in 2-3 seconds. The entire idea that the stealth classes are supposed to instant kill casters/clothies is dumb. The point of the stealth class going after those classes is because they can stealth and get back to them where non-stealth classes are killed before they can reach them. If we are going to use the same rules from other games that features the above then thieves shouldn’t be able to scratch a heavy armored class and ranged should completely destroy the heavy armored.

None of that applies in GW2 though because those roles/rules were tossed out the window. We have cloth class builds that are melee based and heavy armor class builds that are ranged based. ArenaNet caved the pressure to put in a stealth assassin and surprise! It failed horribly. There is no place in this game for it. There are no stealth counters, damage doesn’t bring them out of stealth, and heavy armor classes don’t eat them for breakfast.

The sooner we move away from people trying to use rules/roles from other MMO’s, the sooner we can get a balanced class that actually takes some skill to play.

Not this again, there was just another thread about this the other day where a thief was trying to justify the current OPness because thieves aren’t as OP as rifle warriors. Newsflash, rifle warriors need fixed as well. 20k+ bursts, be it from a single shot at 1500 yards or a Mug+C&D+Backstab+HS combo, are not okay. The burst in this game needs brought down and once it is down we can actually have fights that last longer than 5 seconds. With longer fights we can get a better sense of balance.

Rayya.2591:

i am not going to post more then this.
An tanky build on medium armor that can output insane damage.It can surive an full burst from full glass cannon thief, without any dodge roll or stealth.
When ppls will stop make standard glass cannons , they will not die in 2 hits anymore.

Umm no. I run a thief with around the same stats and I still die insanely fast. Lets look even at the low end of the spectrum. 3k mug+3k C&D+6k backstab+4k HS= you dead. No dodge roll or stealth? I don’t think so.

Kholer isn’t hard, but he can be incredibly frustrating with any sort of latency fluctuations. Oh to count the number of times that I’ve dodged and been yanked out of mid-dodge to insta-die. I’m all for mistakes costing you but instant death on a thrown attack you need to perfectly time a dodge to avoid is kinda dumb. I mean with the red circles it’s very straight forward, move out of the circle or die. You know where it’s going to hit and you can dodge out of it as soon as you see them. With his attack you need to time it perfectly, which is wait until you see the animation then wait half a second before you dodge. Dodge to early? You die. Dodge too late? Well you wont! You’ll be dead. I’ve killed him without dying once and I’ve killed him where every single pull gets me due to latency.

The loot isn’t worth it, the waypoint isn’t needed, and the chance you mis-time a dodge or get yanked out of a dodge is enough to seal the deal; skip him.

jojojoon.8607:

Forest.4197:

I know JQ has quite a nice Taiwan/Japan alliance, but WM actually still trumps because they get on earlier (which boggles me)

Right now, WM alone probably has more players than both BG and JQ combined on some borderlands at night time. Combined that with the Oceanic guilds, SBI currently has by far the best night time crew on NA servers since HOD prime days. WM is essentially like RUIN on the EU servers.

On Saturday ~5pm est my friend and I decided there was about 4 people online for BG in Eternal. Looked like SBI and JQ had maybe 25 people on and were busy fighting over BG’s stuff. It was a pretty sad state of affairs. If this is a sign of whats to come then arenanet might need to implement a system of combining servers just for WvW.

Dynheart.5402:

Had a good post until the end.

What makes you think that JQ is flavor of the week; being 3rd and then 2nd from these match ups? 2nd place with IoJ here? Makes absolutely no sense.

I will tell you we have been trying to fill the gaps. Also, we have been missing a TON of asian players, mainly Chinese players. These players kept WM in check (and I know they are absent atm). No really beat them per say, but made sure WM didn’t run away with the map. We, as a server, have been trying to fill that gap until that blows over….when ever that is. Recruiting doesn’t = bandwagoning.

Going from 3-4 hour ques, when we won 3 times in a row, to 10-15 min ques…Doesn’t sound like bandwagoning to me. Sounds like they left is more like it; which I’m glad.

I can’t speak for SBI’s server.

Well a reason JQ could be a flavor is that guilds don’t want to join the #1 server. They want to join the #2 and beat the #1 server. It makes them feel like they aren’t bandwagoning. They won’t join the #3 server either because it would take a lot more transfers for them to be #1.

As for queue times, this is a problem on all servers. The population is drying up because WvW is actually incredibly shallow, Alterac Valley version 1.0 had far more depth. What you’re seeing is that as people quit they are being replaced by others transferring in. As the lower servers hardcore wvw populations dwindle to transfers slow and the servers being propped up by those populations will have dwindling populations as well. The lost shores patch will probably spike populations again and if it has enough content keep people playing for awhile until the same thing happens again.

Yep, burst in this game needs nerfed and that’s been known since day 1. Are you trying to point to another burst build that also needs nerfed in order to say the thief is fine?

Honestly a decent solution at this point is to just nerf the amount of crit and crit damage that people can get. Make it so gear only carries power OR precision, not both. Once fights last longer than a few seconds we can finally get a read on which classes need some real buffs or nerfs.

lordkrall.7241:

No. It does not punish “real players” it punish farmers.
And ArenaNet simply don’t want people to spend all their time farming the same event/mob/area over and over and over and over and over again.

They have a DR system in GW1 and have had that for several years. It is not going away anytime soon.

Legendary requirements say otherwise. If ArenaNet didn’t want farmers, who are real players btw, then they shouldn’t have made the legendary requirements consist of tons of farming. Heck all the crafting professions require farming to level. I had to farm t1 and t2 mats to level my hunstman. Jewelcrafting I had to farm gold.

If a real player want’s to farm then let him. That’s the way an economy works and ArenaNet is capping that due to DR. That DR actually hurts casual players because that means less supply, thus higher prices.

Tying stats to certain trait lines was not a great move and forcing minor traits on certain lines is bad. Using the necro as an example, If I want to spec into staff skills I am forced to take minion minor traits that do not help me one bit. If I want to be a condition staff build well too bad! You get toughness and boon duration in the staff line. You know all those boons you get from staff skills…

If they would just do away with trait lines, attach a cost to each trait with how deep it is in the line(ie Tier 1 major trait is 10, tier 2 20, tier 3 30), and allow us to just spend our points directly on traits I’d like it more. Then move the stats to their own progression system so people can put points into the stats they want, not the ones they get stuck with.

To expand on that! You would get 65 minor trait points and 130 major trait skill points. Meaning you could get 4 tier 3 minor traits, 6 tier 2’s, or 13 tier 1’s. Obviously they would need to expand the number of minor traits(they already had a bunch more iirc). Obviously the same would be possibly with major traits, meaning that you can either have a few powerful traits or a lot of slightly less powerful traits.

Stats is just as simple as any other stat point system. Give people 140 points, each point increases a stat by 10(or 1%). Cap each stat at 30(or 30%), perhaps even a soft cap, and let them mix and match as they please!

Eadgyt.5987:

Personally I like Orr, a lot..
It’s supposed to be annoying (hard), after all, you’re far behind the arch-enemy’s lines..
Why would there be safe-points?

:)

Except your not behind enemy lines, the army has pushed inwards. Armies don’t usually cover every square inch of land, they form lines or fronts. If say the pact has advanced to pentinent waypoint then everything from there back is clear of most of zhaitan’s forces. If you follow the storyline as well then:

TLDR: Tons of mobs in Orr standing around doesn’t make sense storywise or strategically passed SoD.

Jinks.2057:

You are seriously complaining about thieves in sPvP and tPvP.

Stop.

No one that plays higher tiers have any problems in dealing w/ glass cannon thieves. The people that are having problems are people running around WvW…..Anet doesn’t balance on WvW, but yet you horrible players keep complaining.

Stop.

Umm the entire Bunker build meta is due to the fact the YES people have problems dealing with glass cannon thieves and the insane burst builds in general. It also plays into holding points since that’s kinda how you win the game. So while thieves aren’t going to be the ones carrying the current SPvP maps since they are conquest, that doesn’t make them any less OP, especially when a new game mode comes out.

So just like RFOnline? In RF every week you vote for a race leader and 8 council. The race leader is obviously the one with the most votes and the council is determined are those with the most votes after the leader. The council are then appointed by the race leader to certain teams(sub-leader, strike, defense, support) In order to be nominated you needed to be in the top 100(iirc) of points gained(kills) that week. The race leader gets a bunch of extra buffs/abilities and the council get some as well. Off the top of my head the race leader was able to put messages in the middle of the screen, change the tax rate, huge radius constant AOE buffs, and use nuclear weapons. The buffs they get were substantial, something like 30% attack and 30% defense with council giving slightly lesser buffs.

That system was definitely better than the current system, in fact a lot of the RvR stuff in RFOnline is better than the current system. Allow the leaders to tax vendored/AH stuff and have that money go to a war fund for buying siege. Have timed events like RF’s chip wars that allow access to rare resources. ArenaNet can really expand WvW to be incredibly in-depth and fun but I doubt they will because it needs to be casual friendly.

Cover Girl.2580:

tufy.7859:

Respectfully, people need to get tougher skins. If a little smear campaign makes them stop working towards a goal, they won’t do very well in life. As far as I’m aware, BG did nothing wrong and none of the accusations were ever proven. That’s all there is to it, any form of negative campaign will only make me push harder to prove the accusers that they’re wrong. Less feeling defeated/betrayed/whatever and more working towards your goal for the win

I actually can say with all certainty there was some orb hacking present. I witnessed it, screenshotted it, and reported it. I was there when the GM came into the zone and asked where the orb was and I showed him. he reset that particular orb, and within 15 hours it was back in BG’s hands and “unavailable again” for capture. There is no way to discount the fact that one or more bad eggs from BG did something not “working as intended”. This is where the animosity came from. If there were no substantial backing to all of our claims, A Net would have never removed the orbs as a fix. They don’t just take things out because some people whined… if so, SBI, JQ, Jump puzzles, and Orr would all be gone

Orbs weren’t taken out just because of the tier 1 incidents last week. There have been hundreds of orb hackings across all brackets. While I know that orbs were hacked your claims could have been completely false and the change still would have been made. Both servers also fail to recognize that there was orb funny business from their servers as well due to SBI and JQ bad apples.

Honestly I think SBI and JQ played right into the hackers hands(tin foil hat). It is well known that hacking orbs does not help the server getting the buffs, in fact it has quite the opposite effect(Use GoM as a case study). If a hacker wanted to ruin a WvW server the easiest way is to constantly hack orbs. I think someone had some real animosity for BG or even the HoD guilds and decided to quit while sacrificing his/her account. I mean it wasn’t like BG was having a hard time getting orbs through normal means so it wasn’t like the hacker did it because he/she was fed up of other servers having 3 buffs. SBI and JQ got trolled.

Rukia.4802:

sorrow.2364:

Dude, I play Necromancer, don’t say to me how’s the feel when none wants you.
I know how it feels to be underpowered and weak and, since I alt as Thief, trust me, Thieves are far from underpowered.
I think that a nerf on the base damage of backstab doesn’t hit the Thief effectiveness at all but it instead will give Thieves more balance among their possible builds.

Again, I don’t know on which basis you say that they won’t split skills in PvP and in PvE as they have already done back in Guild Wars 1 and they are still doing in Guild Wars 2. If the nerf is also in PvE, means that probably ArenaNet thinks that this nerf is needed also in PvE. They know their job.

My brother runs in FULL magic find gear and spams his marks on staff and facerolls 90% of pve I watch him all the time, sure which my thief could do that bro… necro’s have it easy. You even get minions to top it all off.

ANet needs to split pvp and pve skills because they’re already mucking stuff up because of all the QQ coming from WvW heroes.

umm any thief with a shortbow can do the same exact thing. Circle strafe while using cluster bomb and viola! dead mobs. You also have no clue about necro’s. Those marks due really low damage due to how messed up their class is and unbalanced condition damage is compared to burst damage. Even in maxed out condition damage spec the 2nd mark isn’t doing more than 3.5k damage from the bleed. My thief can do 4k easy with his clusterbomb every other second while the necro is waiting for that bleed to tick and the cooldown to be up. Minions you say? I kitten near wet myself laughing. Minions are the worst and buggiest things in the game by a wide margin. They take up utility/elite slots BTW and I’d rather have a useful utility skill than the current minions any day of the week, it isn’t even a contest.

I have 4 80’s so far; Thief, Necro, Warrior, and Engineer. You have no idea how good the thief class has it. What’s worse is you think Necro’s have it better, yet they are by far the most UP class, terrible trait designs, and with more bugs than a few of the other classes combined. The thief damage is OP along with a few other classes/builds and it needs brought back into line. Personally I’d start with nerfing crit/crit damage rates but either way it needs fixed sooner rather than later. There is a reason that pug SPvP consists of mostly the thief class and it isn’t because they are perfectly balanced.

Shadow Phage.9084:

Arbacus.8296:

there is also the whole thing of comming into t1 and meeting the most disgusting no moral hacking exploiting spying quantity over quality zerg we have ever seen in mmo gaming

It took me a bit to come up with a response to this that wouldn’t result in an infraction.

Your server was the epitome of what you describe, as of last week. Straight map hacks to orbs (before orbs were removed), exploiting the rendering issue for massive constant portal bombs, turtle zergs (its not exactly skillful to clump for overlapping buffs/heals), etc. I understand every server has its share of people you’d rather not associate with due to their questionable methods. I’m sure SBI has it’s bad apples. I haven’t seen any yet, but I’m sure there are a few. With that said, you and your server should be one of the last to attempt to claim the moral high ground.

I don’t believe ANY of the tier 1 servers can hold the moral high ground. While BG had a blatant hacker, that could have come from another server just to make BG look bad. Every server has and still has hackers, they just haven’t been caught yet. Portal bombs are used on all sides so trying to pin that and abusing rendering issues on BG is inane. All the servers benefit exploits, unsavory tactics, and have hackers so there is no high ground there.

After last weeks forum showing your true colors(have you read any of the stuff coming from your servers players? what 5+ threads closed/deleted? And you think BG is bad?) are out there as well. BG got dealt a raw deal by a hacker(s?) and by other servers trying to bring our reputation down with forum campaigns. I guess you guys were successful, but I wouldn’t celebrate for too long because what goes around comes around. All it is going to take 1 hacker and a few forum warriors to mark you as the server who has to hack to win, why do you think people gave up on BG midweek last week? If we win we needed to cheat to win and now because of those forum campaigns BG lost players and morale. But hey if you think smearing a servers name due to the actions a few players is “high morals” then wait until it happens to you.

There is no tier 1 server has moral high ground right now, if you think so you’re seeing through rose colored glasses.

FrozenLuv.6017:

Hey look, A wild screenshot appeared with absolutely no detail except for the death breakdown. With nothing about your build, their build and the overall circumstances of your death, your argument is meaningless. Its like me turning up to a court case and my only evidence against someone is my own word.

No his argument is rock solid. 13k in a single hit from stealth. Let’s look at worst case scenario and it’s a glass cannon with the lowest health, that’s an INSTANT KILL. How are you justifying that? Even a glass cannon should live through a bunch of hits. In this case the poster is a necromancer, that’s 18k base HP. Assuming the thief has stealth on steal his 2 hit combo with steal doing 7.7k and backstab doing 13.1k for a total of 20.8k damage. That’s 2 shotting the highest base HP glass cannon classes. The only argument you can even remotely make is whether it’s fair that glass cannon classes die in 1-2 hits. If you win that argument then of course all other classes/builds need buffed to match that balancing level. I’d love to see your face when you hit necro marks on the ground that instant kill you, but lets hope ArenaNet doesn’t go that route.

I am a thief and this stuff needs fixed before it ruins the class. 7.7k steal is OP, 13.1k backstabs from stealth are OP, 6.6k C&D is OP. There is NO justification, glass cannon or otherwise, for that kind of damage. That goes for all classes with super high burst. People want fights where they can actually react, use skills, and put up a fight; currently that is not happening because of classes like the thief that drop nearly any build in a few seconds. There is no skill in 1-2 hitting and that makes PvP unfun and boring.