Guild Wars 2

Haette.2701:

People were impatient waiting for new content. It was going to happen, already said flat out it would happen, but they HAD TO HAVE NAO so now we get this crap.

It’s true, there’s always a swarm that joins and new MMO and just blazes to max level then screams about how bored they are till the dev’s panic and well… here we are.

I mean, look at all the content in this game that was available from day 1, and it wasn’t enough. Apparently none of this game’s content exists unless it’s level 80.

I’d just like to say the general attitude and idea of backbiting people for being disappointed about this sub-par patch and expressing it for perfectly valid reasons sets a bad precedent.

It’s bad enough we’re like the red-headed stepchild of GW classes, we don’t need to start turning on each other as well.

It seems a bit insane that you cannot refer to devs who post in the forums by name. It makes 0 sense.

(Cont from previous.)

Which is why I loved GW1. It has it’s flaws, I will never say it didn’t. I played since day one and remember early prophs and the massive OP farming builds and wealth disparity (which over time became much less of an issue) and the bizarre bugs. Or how about doing the Iron Mines of Moladune 6x to get all your armor fully infused? I remember 90k Superior Vigor runes and GWEN melting us all in Ascalon City at the end of the first beta, lol.

GW1 had it’s problems, and it was not an MMO. GW2 is an MMO that defined itself on the same basic tenants of GW1, which was an ultimate balance and no grind (that wasn’t optional). Allow me to deviate for a moment on that ‘optional’ point. If you wanted to max titles and get elite armor, which afforded you no real advantage spare bragging rights, then you chose to grind. Saying there was a grind in GW1 isn’t a false statement but it is misleading. The grind was only there if you decided to do it, nothing you did made you better as a player. That level 20 set of armor I got in Prophs for my warrior in Drok’s Forge lasted me till I upgraded to 15k, but the stats never changed. When they wanted to make PvE harder, the mobs got more interesting and diverse builds, better AI, higher levels than the player could achieve … to force you to be more careful in how you chose to engage them. Not once, in any challenge in GW1, no matter how difficult or tedious it was, did they decide to to give us ‘better’ armor or new ‘stats’ to compensate for this. They just made the game harder and harder left it to the players to adapt, come up with a build to counter it, and overcome it.

I have no problem with them saying, ‘hey guys we decided to add a new armor Tier that will slowly become the best set and it won’t go beyond that.’ What I do have a problem with is the implication that a stat increase is somehow needed in order to give players an incentive to play when they managed to prove with Guild Wars 1 that they didn’t need to do that to have a successful game. It sets a dangerous precedent and I have been down this same road many, many, many times before in games outside of Guild Wars.

It feels stupid, knee-jerk, and short sighted. It’s the same trap that every MMO I’ve played has fallen into. This time, and with my experience with Guild Wars 1, I actually believed it would be different, because nothing in the hugely successful Guild Wars 1 ever led me to believe that ANet would change their minds about gear = progression. I was totally blindsided by this and it sort of knocked the wind out of my sails.

I’ve ground for gear. I’ve played the old school MMO game for too long, and I was hoping to finally see a happy marriage between Guild Wars 1 and the good aspects of an MMO. Nothing I saw in the manifesto or elsewhere gave me any indication that the core no-grind gear ceiling was going to change. Now instead dad’s sleeping on the couch, mom’s dating the pool guy and the kids are on the forums blaming each other for the mess.

I love that they’ve added new content so rapidly, but the fact that they have (according to a Dev on the Ranger sub forums if you want to look) two people working on bug fixes, radio silence about the sheer amount of displeasure and wedge this issue has driven in the community, and a blatant addition of vertical progression is really troubling. This was something they have never done before, and suddenly they need to do it to appease people working on a legendary? So they can feel like they are progressing in a game series famous for your progress being getting more skilled/proficient at your class? How come they never did that for people in GW1 who farmed for Obby Armor or some other expensive long term goal? If the actual possession of an awesome item barely anyone else has is not enough to retain them, giving people a slight stat boost and an ‘edge’ over other people isn’t going to either. Trust me, I know. Same thing has happened many times before, and I guess the buck does not stop here.

They nerfed the engineer, the least played class. I really don’t understand this game’s direction anymore, it’s like a beautiful ship with a drunken captain and a maniac for a navigator.

Halloween was solid, even with the weird decision to make the skins only available via Chest RNG instead of selling them directly through the Gem Store.

But these gear locust people’s insistence on better gear somehow factoring in to their design direction is utterly confusing. This game lacks a lot of basic features that GW1 had that should have been in here, and what I mean is things like being able to wear any ‘town clothes’ in the PvE environment if you so choose. The ability to re-distribute your ‘traits’ in town (for free and without having to visit an NPC) and save templates to try different ‘builds.’ I didn’t expect a copy of GW1, which I loved, but I was expecting them to keep at least most of the better features and expand on it instead of throwing the baby out with the bathwater to make this game.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot I like about the game. But this is reading to me like a bad repeat of every MMO experience I’ve had while WAITING for this game. Namely AION and SWTOR. In both games the same thing happened there that’s happening here, with oddly the same arguments being presented on both sides.

Anyway on those game’s forums, (and in most cases I just lurk MMO forums because, even here, people are amazingly rude, bullheaded, and passive-aggressive) this argument was there. There were the people, these locusts that rush to ‘endgame’ expecting it to be like WoW and have just as much content as a game that’s been out 7 years apparently. They ramble in indignant fury when they don’t have anything to do after blitzkrieging all the content in weeks then angrily demand the devs to give them more content, leading to rushed patches and introduced power creeps.

Those in favor accuse anyone opposed of being crybaby QQing casuals who should kittenoff and die in a fire, and those against it eventually realize that they can’t win and leave. Then those in favor blame the casuals for leaving and without enough people to draw from to keep their fledgling ‘elite’ guilds alive by doing the dungeon grinds for the gear they want, the game takes a nose dive and the cycle repeats in the next game. (This hasn’t happened in only AION and SWTOR, but those are the most recent examples I have experience with.)

I’m one of those people. I’m a gear locust, and I want it to stop. My problem is that I hate, in a fight, thinking when I lose if it was me or the gear differential, so I get OCD and MUST HAVE THE BEST gear so that I do not feel at a disadvantage. In SWTOR or AION, especially in PvP, gear was a must. If you didn’t have PvP damage % you were useless. AION’s grind was too much even for my OCD (miragent’s and the dying PvP environment that forced you to PvE for PvP gear) but SWTOR… oh man, I went crazy. I took over the biggest guild on the server (political nonsense, but I got what I wanted) and proceeded to just destroy people in PvP, (Gunslinger in Full WH, 600k+ per match) and I watched people get bored after getting all their gear. They got bored, and then they wanted more gear. They got bored when they got it (the 1.3 patch) and the guild fell apart, all the long-time members got all their gear and left. We were huge, 3-4 fully geared raiding groups, at least 2 fully geared PvP teams, and it all just dwindled and died.

Gear treadmill isn’t a good metaphor. It’s a gear marathon, and once you reach the end, you collect your trophy, then you’re too tired to go around again. That’s what happened to everyone, they got their gear, and once they got it there was nothing left to run for. The new patch, for some, offered hope. They would say in vent to me about how 1.3 will make them want to play again, and then they saw it just added new gear but nothing really new, just more of the same only slightly harder so after they powered through that (in literally less than a month) they left. I myself, seeing the game just dying all around me, well, I quietly uninstalled and never logged in again. I feel bad for the guild, but they kept guilting me into trying to keep things going and it was just depressing.

It wasn’t enough to hold people’s interest in AION either, and a slew of others. LOTRO is another good immediate example. I don’t know much about RIFT or TERA and what I have seen is mixed at best.

Here’s why. If your only incentive is to get the best gear, if it’s stats, then for the majority of people like this who I’ve led, played with, or talked to, once they get their gear they treat it like they’ve beaten the game and demand more. It’s the only incentive that makes them want to keep playing, and if it takes too long to add more they leave. It becomes an endless unsustainable cycle.

(Cont, post limit reached.)

I should have just kept my main’s character name from GW1 and used it on my Warrior, because apparently instead of fixing a class to make people want to play it the solution is to just buff the popular ones?

Someone in the balancing department must be drunk.

Fox.3469:

I’ve always defended Arenanet in everything, i love their game and would have kept playing for years even without any content update, but now i feel like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QiZNSzWIaLo

lol! So true.

So it’s better gear, they will release it piece by piece (even giving us some of it for free from what I read) and yeah…

I’m sick of this in MMOs, all of them. For all of the people talking about ‘it gives us something to do!’ Not really. That’s a fallacy. You know how this works, you power through it, get your pieces of whatever, then quit. Coming back only to get new pieces of when they are available before returning to GW2 dormancy, sort of like the Elder Dragons themselves. Only instead of rising to eat all the magic in the world you rise for the best phat lewts to stand around in town in for a week so the peasants can gawk at your superiority before you get bored and leave again.

If they wanted to give us gear that affected specific dungeons or made them easier in a progressive manner, why not just make it so the existing exotics could be modified in certain places or in certain ways that were interesting or difficult enough to satisfy this supposed majority of QQing ‘hardcores’ who want to start the gear grind all over again?

It just… baffles me. In GW1 we had max stat gear, and when they added Hard Mode we never got anything better. We had to make due with the skills available to us and our wits. That’s more of an achievement IMO than doing a dungeon X amount of times or farming X coin so you can ‘feel’ like you’re achieving something simply by virtue of your stats.

Some people approach this game with the old school MMO way of thinking, fretting over max stats, the ‘best’ builds, and the Legendary Grind. A-Net advertised this as a new way of doing things, no stat grind, do things for fun! What I’ve seen is that some people can’t comprehend doing something for fun without some sort of arbitrary reward to make them feel accomplished. I was hoping A-Net would listen to their fans and not alter their vision just to appease a minority of players, who in my experience in many MMOs over the years, cannot be pleased. Yet RNG is fairly rampant (even for freaking goofy Holiday skins, which should have been purchase from the cash shop just like armor) and this new ‘tier’ of gear has started making me think that this elusive army of ‘hardcores’ (of which I guess I could count myself in name only) who supposedly desperately want these features, are the people they are listening to the most.

PS: Wow, this post ended up being much longer than I intended.

TL;DR:

oZii.2864:

Oh that speculation 12 rares salvaged = 1 ecto definitely suggest a nerf to Ecto Drop rate o.O. No further testing is needed on the matter.

Please, spare me your sarcasm.

Just stating my experience on the matter, when I referred to ‘we’ I was talking about the particular group of people that I play with on my server and not the whole market as there’s no way to know what other people’s motives are.

I was farming Orr yesterday and everyone in the group was getting gold drops, normally we convert them into ectos. Now the rate you get ectos has gone way down it seems. I salvaged about 12 rares and got only 1 ecto. Therefore now most of us are playing it safe and selling the rares themselves and letting the buyer assume the risk of ecto conversion.

Okay, basically the Lyssa event is over yet hordes of mobs continue to respawn at the alter where the Karma Vendor is. There’s about 20 regular mobs and 3 Veterans and you need at least a group to get near the vendor, even then the respawn rate is insane and catapults bombard you the whole time.

I watched about 3 people port in, take a few steps , then get swarmed and massacred while I was laying there dead wondering just what had happened. I seriously doubt this in intentional.

I did it with a Exquisite Emerald Jewel. You just copy the skin and keep the stats over your level 80 back pack you get from personal story or guild armorer. Copy the jewel you want too and there you go.

I’ve been toying around with the Flamethrower lately because I hate Grenades (having to constantly ground target and move I find quite annoying, and miss a lot.) I’ve tried all the different weapon combos, and basically found that when you spec towards a lot of crit and use Incendiary Powder from explosives and Juggernaut from the Firearms line that in situations where you’re fighting mass groups of mobs the flamethrower can be pretty useful. Typically like, for example, in Orr farming as it doesn’t have that annoying slight delay that Grenades do where sometimes everything is dead before they even land.

With Juggernaut though, I don’t end up having to kite as much thanks to the extra toughness so I can just stand there and spray away. If it gets dicey just switch to my Elixir gun and hit #4 for a quick exit. In PvP I’ve tried it but ONLY in WvW and ONLY when moving with a zerg where I can just spray mindlessly in all directions. I haven’t tried it in sPvP because I’m not entirely convinced it would be very effective.

Though, with a high enough crit, fury up ( Elixir B ), I can stack bleeds, vuln, and burning for extended durations effectively giving me what feels like pretty good DPS against most targets as even if they cleanse the conditions the constant attacks reapply them fairly quickly. So I end up doing with #1 roughly 2.2k plus burning plus bleeding. It seems to work, there might be more powerful burst builds but the sustained damage feels pretty consistent.

I can’t afford any more keys, I’m broke till next payday which is long after the holiday, and I threw out all my Mystery Tonics a few days ago because they were taking up bank space. FML

In the game (SPOILERS RED ALERT AWOOOGA) one of the Orr personal story quests I went through with my engineer involved going to the Temple of Grenth in the Cursed Shore as part of the quest line to find the Source of Orr had a Priestess of Grenth come along with us. As the quest progressed she explained that Malchor is, in fact, Grenth’s father and that it is the ‘biggest secret’ kept among the various Priests of Grenth.

Zandur.5012:

Just buffing mortar range up to 2000 base and 2500 with traits wouldn’t take them much time and would give engineers a reason to use their 30 point elite skill. Don’t get me wrong tho, your idea sounds amazing and I would love to see it implemented at some point.

Thanks, and I know. I don’t expect an overhaul atm for much of anything, and I’m happy with Supply Crate for the moment anyway. (Elixir X is fun but it’s DPS and usefulness is fairly questionable.)

I do agree with your post, by the way, as I’ve tried a large multitude of setups in terms of gear, traits, skills, and have yet to find any practical purpose for the Mortar. In WvW it’s range means it’ll just be killed by AoE spam lightning fast and it basically makes you a sitting duck in sPvP with a laughably short range. It’s funny because you would think a mortar would pack more punch, but in one Fort Defense I fired on this small group crossing a bridge, and they basically just stood there and took the damage like the joke that it is, and keep in mind I was in full exotic berserker’s gear!

In PvE I suppose one could argue in the big ‘mob spawn’ events it’s great, I find that doubtful. I’d rather just equip, as other people have said, grenade kit and keep my precious supply crate.

I always thought that there should be two ‘modes’ to this Elite. You can place it on the ground when you first build it, and it has increased range (maybe fix the slow moving projectiles at little) or you can pick it up and use it like a PBAoE bazooka similar to blunderbus.

^ I dunno, I kinda like the ‘duelist’ set, I just wish the boots were slightly different. It’s werid for an engineer to have throwing stars strapped to her boots.

Ruggy.7819:

I accidently stumbled upon a jumping puzzle while exploring Malchors leap.. one of the awesome things about it was every few jumps was a chest of smuggled loot!

Whoever hid there loot in such a dangerous location.. one of the final zones of the game, filled with the most hostile of foes… must have been hiding some AWESOME stuff.

By the time I reached the end of the puzzle I was 18 sticks of butter and 14 bars of chocolate richer.

The body drapped over the treasure chest in the end didn’t die from the exploration or the climb or even some fatal wound by a risen. He died of cardiac arrest, his butter and chocolate bender turning tragic.

Shaaba.5672:

If the people who want it won’t buy it for 2c, then it will never sell and continue to clog up the TP.

Ho-ho! I see what you did thar.

To be serious for a second. I agree that higher level begs shouldn’t be dumping a lower level crafting mat, at least give us a tier 5-6 ingrediant!

I was out in Sparkfly Fen by the dragon event area. There are about…. oh15 bots just running back and forth between the Arcanist Lab and the Silvari camp. There’s also the bots that just camp the Arcanist Lab itself, auto-attacking like a bawz.

So I was doing the event chains to level, since it’s a good spot because something’s always going on. I die, and the bots res me. Then I go to fight the Krait, and there’s some players over by the area they spawn in to attack the lab. Like there’s this guardian who AoE pulls them in and we just wipe them out every time along with some other players.

The moment the event is over they go back the lab steps and stand there. When it starts again, they move back to the spawn and use the same skills again. AoE pull, then massive AoE spam. Once it’s over they go back to the same spots and stand.

It’s at this point I realize something.

Of the 20+ people I’d been playing with for the past hour… not one of them… not a single one, was a human player.

I don’t mean to sound pessimistic, but this is seriously ridiculous. I can go to any number of zones where events spawn and see just swarms of bots. Like Orr’s tunnel outposts that have constant ‘swarm’ events, or the Hirathi Hinterlands event where there’s always 20 bots or so chillin.’ Or just go outside any area with non-hostile mobs and watch the teleporting train of rangers run on by killing everything.

‘It doesn’t effect my game’ is something I see a lot of people say. Really… so if you want to participate in an event and can’t get full rewards because the bot swarm kills everything so fast that doesn’t effect anyone?

You guys need to, and this may sound a bit draconian… get a GM to actually GO TO THESE CONSTANTLY CAMPED AND EXPLOITED EVENTS AND BAN PEOPLE MANUALLY ON THE SPOT. Or just ask the players where they see the bots at in a zone or two… or three or four. It’s completely asinine how long it takes to see any of these bots go away. I’ve seen the same groups of them on a map for days in some cases, and half the time when I’m mapping I see more bots than players! It’s much worse than you guys may realize or are willing to acknowledge openly.

Normally I wouldn’t take the time to complain on the forums about it, but it’s so bad right now that I can’t help myself. I have issued way too many botting reports over the past few days. If it was just every now and then I’d wait it out, but I’m just seeing swarms of them everywhere.