Guild Wars 2

Fluffball.8307:

Why would you choose to use a class with a pet as their profession mechanic if you don’t want a pet? Serious question, because I am super confused. That’s like wanting to play a guardian but in light armor and only using duel pistols.

I don’t understand how people don’t get this. It’s like they’re only capable of thinking in gamist terms. Let me try again-

The Ranger is about more than the pet – ruggedness, survival, archery, etc. It has a unique theme even without the pet that no other class has. The fact that you can’t get the Ranger’s theme without being saddled with a pet that doesn’t even function that well is annoying. The pet should be optional.

Yes, I’ve suggested that the game needs dynamic respawn rates. They should implement this for both mob respawn rates AND event restarts, which would help encourage people to go where they want to go without worrying about not being able to do anything and provide some reward for moving around the map and doing different things.

coglin.1867:

We have a waypoint system. I can never wrap my head around the ridiculous obsession with mounts. They are unnecessary and generally look ridiculous.

Because running across the countryside day in, day out isn’t far more ridiculous than using mounts.

Mounts are typically seen as a good thing because they just give players something else to pursue and can be interesting. Personally, I think it’d be cool if they went all the way with it and set up rules for mounted combat.

They really should have mounts, if for no other reason than the fact that a lot of MMO players expect them and it would add greater variety to the collectibles in the game.

They don’t need to replace waypoints, they can just give a smaller speed boost than in
most games and be mostly for novelty value.

I love me some celestial gear, and Ele is a good fit for it.

Peow peow.2189:

You think this is a bad ranged weapon, why dont u check out thiefs pistol auto attack. roflcopter

Yes, the auto on Pistols and Longbows both have always been much weaker than they should be. They are improving the auto on Longbow for Rangers while Warrior Longbow, Thief and Engi Pistol remain pathetic.

Medens.4960:

Einlanzer.1627:

Ryan.9387:

I think the simplest solution to your problem is this,

Don’t play Ranger.

While I respect your frankness, the problem with this is that there are many character archetypes contained within the Ranger class that don’t fit the theming of any other class. So I want to play a rugged wilderness survivor, but I don’t want to pet. What am I left with? Nothing. I don’t really think that’s an optimal situation. Pets should always be an optional component of any class unless the entire class concept revolves around pets (like say a puppetmaster class).

If all the classes would have (an option for) pets, ranger would be more useless than it already is. In pve my pet is the key of my survivability. Without it I would die and I would be useless.
Warriors and guardians already have huge hits and hp and survivability. Addidng a pet to that would make them immortal in PvE.

I don’t have a problem with the pet myself, but I haven’t been in a dungeon/fractal yet, so I might change my mind.

You misinterpreted my post. I wasn’t saying all classes should be able to have pets, I was saying that pets should always be optional for any class that has them.

Killsmith.8169:

Einlanzer.1627:

OMG OP for about the thousandth freaking time, the name ranger has nothing to do with using ranged weapons, it refers to roaming ranges of land, i.e. like a scout or a warden. Seriously, how can so many people not know this? It’s like an elementary level vocabulary word.

Regardless, Rangers are unparalleled archers and no other profession does as much DPS at range as the Ranger does. L2P.

You’re right, Ranger has nothing to do with using ranged weapons. Just out of curiosity, what percentage of ranger weapons are ranged? (Hint: It’s high.)

This is irrelevant. Weapon options are about adaptability, not power. Rangers have more adaptability at range due to their ranged prowess, which in effects means they are ‘better’ at range than other professions. That does not give credence to the idea that they should actually do more damage at range than at melee, or that shouldn’t have melee options.

Ryan.9387:

I think the simplest solution to your problem is this,

Don’t play Ranger.

While I respect your frankness, the problem with this is that there are many character archetypes contained within the Ranger class that don’t fit the theming of any other class. So I want to play a rugged wilderness survivor, but I don’t want to pet. What am I left with? Nothing. I don’t really think that’s an optimal situation. Pets should always be an optional component of any class unless the entire class concept revolves around pets (like say a puppetmaster class).

I don’t feel pets should ever be a ‘forced’ gameplay mechanic for any profession unless the entire theme of the class is about pets, which is not the case for Rangers. It should be relatively easy to bake pets into a profession’s skillset without making them mandatory.

Making pets such an overly prominent component of the Ranger’s kitten nal was a mistake that you can see the results of now in-game. Rangers should be as strong as any other profession without a pet, then have weaker versions of the pets in their utility lines that are options alongside their other options. Their F skills would make more sense being survival themed, like different traps.

Their heads are far too large for their bodies. That is all.

It’s especially bothersome considering that Air doesn’t have a whole lot else going for it, which I find to be true on most weapons. Air just needs some buffs in general.

The issue with them being weak at lower level is part of an overall design issue in the game that’s questionable at best – the classes vary significantly in their defensive potential but not nearly as much in their offensive potential, which is very noticeable right out of the gate at Level 1 and makes the squishier professions (thieves and eles in particular) very tough to play at low level.

Instead of having some baseline compensation for their relative lack of defense (stealth and range don’t really cut it), the compensation is built into their stronger utilities and traits. This means that until they get some of the better tricks in their kitten nal (usually by level 20 or so) they are less than mediocre, and then they are mediocre until they get some of the higher level traits (around 60).

In a nutshell, neither class is good enough at mitigating damage to compensate for their squishiness, at least in lower level PvE. On Eles, the problem is largely that their control abilities are not as good as you’d think and they consequently lack the ability to keep themselves out of harm’s reach. On Thieves, the problem is that Stealth is very lackluster as a defensive tool (it’s designed to work more as an offensive one when it should be an even boon to both).

Bump for great justice. I’m curious to see if there’s anyone else who would like to see this. The generic names are just dull.

While for the sake of symmetry there should be a 3rd heavy armor class, I’m not sold on the Dervish concept – it has too much thematic overlap with the Guardian.

Instead, what we should get is the only obvious missing archetype – an arcane warrior. They should be the jack-of-all-trades fighter-mage class, with trees in each major arcane magic type (elementalism, necromancy, illusion) along with an offensive magical weapon specialist and a tank tree.

My only complaint about Ele in open world pve is that the gameplay feels restrictive between the lack of available weapons and the lack of competitiveness of the different attunements – Fire is far and away better than the other 3 80% of the time when you are solo. Earth can come close with a heavy condition build, but the utility on Air and Water doesn’t compensate for their relative lack of damage or AoE capabilities when there isn’t a party involved (it’s questionable even then).

mzt.3270:

Einlanzer.1627:

thefantasticg.3984:

Einlanzer.1627:

OMG OP for about the thousandth freaking time, the name ranger has nothing to do with using ranged weapons, it refers to roaming ranges of land, i.e. like a scout or a warden. Seriously, how can so many people not know this? It’s like an elementary level vocabulary word.

Regardless, Rangers are unparalleled archers and no other profession does as much DPS at range as the Ranger does. L2P.

Anet wouldn’t have this preception problem if they would have correctly named the class Beastmaster instead of Ranger. And yes, this is a preception problem.

It’s perception, not preception, and the Ranger name isn’t supposed to create the perception that it only does ranged fighting, because that isn’t what the word Ranger means.

You’re right, it’s a perception problem, but it’s a problem with the player base not with Arenanet.

and thus is not really a great example to base any critique against others who think rangers use ranged weapons because in all purposes, they are the ones who are legitimately correct.

Uh, no. Not at all. A ranger is a warden, or a scout. In most cases they would be proficient at both melee and range. It just so happens that because of the mechanics of this game melee is a little stronger than range in raw numbers. In practicality it isn’t so black and white, though.

Something else I’d like to add is that Arenanet crafted the perfect world for endless expansion with the awesome and innovative level scaling mechanics that only gate content forward, never backward, ensuring that old content is never totally trivialized by new content.

In light of that, choosing to do this ‘living’ world concept where the focus is more on changing the existing world rather than constantly adding to it is a total shot in the foot that makes even less sense than it would in another game. They should be capitalizing on this – they could still easily find ways to drive and/or concentrate the player population if that’s something they’re concerned about.

Arkantos.7460:

I want sword in off hand

Everyone says this, but I don’t understand why – dual wielding swords isn’t Thiefy at all. A viable Offhand light option would actually make more sense, as would MH mace and/or axe, two hand quarterstaff, or any number of other options.

thefantasticg.3984:

Einlanzer.1627:

OMG OP for about the thousandth freaking time, the name ranger has nothing to do with using ranged weapons, it refers to roaming ranges of land, i.e. like a scout or a warden. Seriously, how can so many people not know this? It’s like an elementary level vocabulary word.

Regardless, Rangers are unparalleled archers and no other profession does as much DPS at range as the Ranger does. L2P.

Anet wouldn’t have this preception problem if they would have correctly named the class Beastmaster instead of Ranger. And yes, this is a preception problem.

It’s perception, not preception, and the Ranger name isn’t supposed to create the perception that it only does ranged fighting, because that isn’t what the word Ranger means.

You’re right, it’s a perception problem, but it’s a problem with the player base not with Arenanet.

Mika.9815:

I remember your older thread.

It’s usually not cool to reply to just correct a spelling mistake, but the word is “role” and not “roll”.

People often say it isn’t cool, but I would argue that extremely basic spelling mistakes should be called out simply because we have let education slip so much in this country that people don’t even care about basic spelling, which is pathetic.

It’s something that really deserves accountability.

mzt.3270:

@ Einlanzer.1627

Quote " People who can’t escape from HAVING to label classes as melee or ranged classes have issues. GW2 has handled this right by giving every class a variety of options that are meant to tactically supplement one another.

Oh, and in case it hasn’t been said yet in this thead. The label ‘Ranger’ is equivalent to a warden, not a ranged weapons master"

Ahh I see, Anets vision of ranger must have been modelled on this guy then

Nice attempt at sarcasm, but you fail. It was molded on the D&D ranger, like almost every class named ranger, which ultimately leads back to Aragorn in LotR. So yes, it was molded after the wilderness warden archetype.

Gorwald.6170:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htHRErZM7QM

This, as a reminder we’ve been allready told we gonna have nice changes and see what happened? Nothing, we got even more worse.

And this video was posted on the 16 november 2012 ! After the ébig changes for ranger" we never had…

So you can still listen to promise of Jon, personnaly i’m rerolling engineer who are closer of what i’m thinking about a ranged class…and without a kitten worthless pet to worry about…

Oh and btw, if you want to see a real ranger class and how it should be worked on, i suggest you to test the next module on neverwinter…the archer/ranger is awesome on it…

People who can’t escape from HAVING to label classes as melee or ranged classes have issues. GW2 has handled this right by giving every class a variety of options that are meant to tactically supplement one another.

Oh, and in case it hasn’t been said yet in this thead. The label ‘Ranger’ is equivalent to a warden, not a ranged weapons master.

OMG OP for about the thousandth freaking time, the name ranger has nothing to do with using ranged weapons, it refers to roaming ranges of land, i.e. like a scout or a warden. Seriously, how can so many people not know this? It’s like an elementary level vocabulary word.

Regardless, Rangers are unparalleled archers and no other profession does as much DPS at range as the Ranger does. L2P.

I actually think Ricochet is perfect as it is right now and prefer having it over Piercing. It doesn’t need to be 100% because that would make it OP relative to Piercing due to the relative frequency of shots and the latter having much stricter positioning requirements.

However, I think both piercing and richochet are too ‘mandatory’ to have for Warrior rifle and thief pistol respectively, and feel like they should be given a baseline percentage of 25/50% that the traits improve to 50/100%

The AA doesn’t really need multi-target because it’s specialized for single target and Death Blossom gives you a reasonably good ability to deal with adds/small groups (especially with some condi boosts), but in general it’s intentional that Sword/x is slightly better at handling groups and D/D is slightly better at single target.

As a side note, though, I take issue with the way the game handles single/multitarget attacks in general. Attacks capable of hitting multiple targets (with some exceptions) should really deal primary damage to one target and reduced splash damage to adjacent targets to make the various sets feel a little less pigeonholing. Having it set up the way they do has a tendency to create larger than necessary gaps in the functionality of various sets.

Longbow is mostly fine, and will be even more fine after the Dec 10 patch. 3, 4, and 5 are utility-oriented (not every skill can be for DPS, lol) and can be very useful (especially 5, though it could use modest buff).

Warriors’ Longbow can be very good but is highly specialized and therefore quite ineffective as a primary weapon.

woeye.2753:

Einlanzer.1627:

The simple fact is if you’re somewhat good at one you’re likely to be somewhat good at the other too. NOBODY would ONLY use a bow or ONLY use a melee weapon – bows and swords are weapons with two different tactical uses. Most people who used one some would use the other to supplement it when needed. I.e. no matter how good an archer you are, you’d virtually never try to use a ranged weapon in a close range skirmish.

Well said. But when it comes to PvE in GW2 it’s almost always a bad choice to use ranged weapons. There’s no tactical use case for them. Or in other words: GW2’s PvE is all about pure raw DPS. Since melee gives the most DPS ranged is out.

In some situations, yes, but not universally. There are some things many people fail to consider – the most prominent being that in some fights you get more uptime with ranged weapons because you don’t need to move around or dodge as much. I would argue that that’s a bigger reason for the imbalance than the relative risk is.

The DE timers are definitely too fast in most cases, along with mob respawn rates. They need to generally be on a much longer timer and have their rewards increased to compensate. It’s a major de-motivator to do these things and one of the reasons that champ farming in lowbie zones is very popular while Orr stays barren and useless. The rewards aren’t worth the effort and on top of you’re disincentivized to bother due to how little difference it makes

They need to implement a scaling system where the population of a zone affects the event timers, and then also modify the rewards for how long it’s been since the event was last completed.

I love how people obsess over defining classes as melee or ranged in MMOs. Firstly, the Ranger is called a ‘master archer’, which it is – no other profession uses both bow types and no other profession does almost melee-strength DPS at range. That is not meant to be extended into ‘bad at melee’ or ‘good with all ranged weapons’. Currently, ranged damage is designed to be slightly inferior to melee damage due to uptime and risk vs. reward, and with rangers the gap is smaller than it is with other professions. Rangers should, like other professions, do slightly greater damage at melee than at range for the same reason every other profession does – being in melee (theoretically) puts you at greater risk and also (theoretically) requires you to spend more time moving and dodging, meaning bigger gaps in your attacks. Whether those things are actually true is a little debatable, but if it changes for rangers it needs to change for everyone else too.

This obsession stems from the fact that simplistic gamist-style systems (like WoW) just love to create this needless and arbitrary distinction between ‘melee’ and ‘range’ and then pigeonhole entire classes into one or the other, which is stupid. Guild Wars 2 does it right by mostly eliminating that distinction when it comes to classes and giving everyone multiple tactical options that are meant to seamlessly supplement each other.

The simple fact is if you’re somewhat good at one you’re likely to be somewhat good at the other too. NOBODY would ONLY use a bow or ONLY use a melee weapon – bows and swords are weapons with two different tactical uses. Most people who used one some would use the other to supplement it when needed. I.e. no matter how good an archer you are, you’d virtually never try to use a ranged weapon in a close range skirmish.

Yes, they seem to be stuck in the notion that ranged weapons should do less damage than melee weapons due to risk, but in many fights being at range is actually more dangerous than being in melee due to the healing and boon stacking taking place in melee range. There’s actually no good reason for it at all and due that design schema most ranged builds are considered inferior to melee builds on most classes. They need to backpedal on this and fixed ranged weapons across the board.

If it’s something they’re still worried about, there are better solutions, such as a.) designing encounters better and/or b.) give melee weapons an armor/def bonus.

So I know I may well be in the minority on this, but I really like the old beta flavor names for the secondary attributes (Malice, Expertise, etc.) over the generic descriptive names. Contrary to what most people seem to think, it would take very little extra effort to learn them and what they do (they have tooltips anyway) and IMO would make them seem more interesting.

I know I’m not going to change everyone’s mind who thinks otherwise, though, so would an interface toggle option to display them instead be out of the question?

Lonami.2987:

(New post unrelated to above)

HOME INSTANCE AND COLLECTING PLAYED STORYLINES

I really think all the Living Story (From The Lost Shores) should be compilled into instanced content, just like the Personal Story. Also, make them both replayable.

Then just access them from your home instance.

Your home instance is pretty empty, isn’kitten Why not add some sort of library, or display cabinets, where you have this item or painting of each story. Example:

So, right now, I arrive at my home. I have one big shelf, with a a space for each chapter of the Personal Story. Interacting with them opens my hero panel, in the story tab, but adds an extra option to replay them.

Also, I have other shelves, including other storylines. One for Southsun Cove, with the two storylines. Then another for Scarlet’s minions and their releases.

As you complete each storyline, the spaces get filled with paintings or other trophies to remember each chapter.

Unfortunately, not all the release stuff was instanced. No problem! Molten Alliance chapter? We can take a chunk of Diessa Plateau, instance it, add a few classic events and make you complete some. Even the Ancient Karka could be replayable with this idea, in a softer way, of course. For those events that stay, just make you go and complete them in the open world before continuing the story.

With examples, in case you don’t understand it:

---

Live release:

During a live release you have 3 things you usually need to participate in:

• Temporary events (open world).
• Permanent events (open world).
• Instanced stuff (instanced).

---

Archived release:

This is how they would translate:

• Temporary events need to be removed (I’m talking about stuff like Toxic Alliance appearing across the world, repairing sign posts during the Molten Alliance incident, finding and defeating Canach during The Lost Shores, etc). So we save them into new instances, so you can “experience” the story, in a softer way (instanced).
• Permanent events, they remain unaltered, so just send the players to complete them in a step of the archived story before unlocking the next one (open world).
• The instanced stuff remains the same instead of getting removed. (instanced).

---

So for example, how would we bring Secret of Southsun back? We have the 3 things in this case:

• Temporary: Settler fights, camps getting attacked with us discovering one settler was behind it. => We do instances for a few of these things.
• Permanent: Crazy karka, Karka Queen. => Send players to do this in the open world.
• Instanced: Canach’s Lair, Kiel blowing up the ship. => Bring back the original instances.

---

I think everything would be viable this way. It’s a quick draft, but I’ll try to improve and explain the idea better when I get to touch more topics later.

This is more or less what I advocate. They can retool a lot of the content that was in the game temporarily over the last year and reintroduce it as permanent expansions to the Personal Story along with enhancements to the PS centered around utilizing your home instance more and being able to replay story events. Suddenly, with very little effort, there’d be a good deal more content in the game that people can enjoy and you may bring back players that abandoned the game due to not feeling like they could keep up with the Living World.

This would include many things that people complained about being temporary (and that were always silly to make temporary) like the MWF and AR dungeons and most of the instanced content.

Then, they can shift their focus to gradually ‘growing’ the world and story instead of spending so many resources on removing and replacing content (destroying the feeling of growth and expansion that all MMOs need). On the ‘Living World’ side, we should just simply see a lot more focus on the DE content within each zone along with aesthetic improvements to the world like seasonal weather.

Aeden.5896:

Yeah I don’t know why they haven’t slightly buffed vital shot’s direct damage by 15-20%. It would still be a weak 900 range auto-attack but would be less hilariously underpowered against anything with condi reduction/removal and p/p builds.

Well, my presumption is that they need to just reduce the aftercast by .1-.2 seconds to increase the rate of fire and consequently give a moderate buff to both its direct and condition damage. If they feel like its OP for P/D (I doubt it), they can just slightly weaken the Stealth attack.

Am I missing something, or miscalculating? Every patch that comes and goes brings disappointment because one of the biggest threats to build diversity Thieves have is such a simple thing that it’s absurd how long it’s gone unmentioned and unaddressed.

You guessed it, the weakness of Vital Shot. It seems very clear to me that it’s supposed to fire faster for its damage specs than it does, and while having a weak auto is a problem for any weapon on any profession, it’s a much more significant problem for Thieves due to Initiative. The autoattack has to be able to provide reasonable DPS on its own so you aren’t forced to stay Initiative starved just to deliver basic damage to your target. This is an always has been P/P ‘s biggest flaw, and it’s a flaw that can’t really be compensated for by any buffs or changes to any other area, and yet they seem reluctant to acknowledge it or do anything about it.

Please join me in spreading awareness of this.

Nike.2631:

ColinJohanson.2394:

Shinzan.2908:

I’m more convinced turning to a traditional content release concept rather doing this episodic thing would be better for GW2. The instances with Roxx and Braham, Scarlet’s playhouse etc could have been triggered after one finishes their living story as the next chapters so people can do them at their own pace and experience a personalized story. Doing it that way would allow for things like recognition from NPC’s or slight alterations based on our characters past choices.

Meanwhile the Molten Facility or Aetherblade retreat would have been better as new permanent dungeons, with explorable paths as well as their own rewards and armor.

In my opinion a game just shouldn’t try be a TV show.

I’m not sure the two need to be mutually exclusive. What if every X amount of time that seemed reasonable, the story simply kept being expanded in the way you’re discussing rather than be released in one big chunk?

But if you’re not up to that point in the story arc, you can play it when ever you get there.

Then that story has to exist inside of instances rather than your open world, and while your Living Story accumulates content (good) your Living World stagnates (bad).

The problem you’re running into is your pivot point for the Living Story has been so unwelcome, many people want you to direct your attention back to the Living World.

Its a resource allocation puzzle, to be sure. Hopefully this thread inspires you to shift priorities to a more middle road, and new insights garnered here allow higher quality on both tracks.

But the Living World is not working the way they wanted it to, and I have doubts it ever will. Part of this is a due to resource limitations, and part of it is due to the way the game was designed for launch (i.e. a personal story rather than a world one) causing a conceptual clash within the game that hinders the story-telling aspects.

IMO, it’s much better to shift their focus with it to improving the systems and content behind the DEs, and let the large-scale stories be told through PS style content additions (primarily new instances and dungeons). There is still a lot they’d have the freedom to do with the LW – tons of recurring events/festivals, new DE and meta events, world polish like seasonal weather, and the occasional temporary low-canon mini-story for novelty value.

ColinJohanson.2394:

Shinzan.2908:

I’m more convinced turning to a traditional content release concept rather doing this episodic thing would be better for GW2. The instances with Roxx and Braham, Scarlet’s playhouse etc could have been triggered after one finishes their living story as the next chapters so people can do them at their own pace and experience a personalized story. Doing it that way would allow for things like recognition from NPC’s or slight alterations based on our characters past choices.

Meanwhile the Molten Facility or Aetherblade retreat would have been better as new permanent dungeons, with explorable paths as well as their own rewards and armor.

In my opinion a game just shouldn’t try be a TV show.

I’m not sure the two need to be mutually exclusive. What if every X amount of time that seemed reasonable, the story simply kept being expanded in the way you’re discussing rather than be released in one big chunk?

But if you’re not up to that point in the story arc, you can play it when ever you get there.

I can’t speak for him, but that’s exactly what I mean when I say ‘PS expansions’. I don’t think it’s important whether it’s released in large chunks or gradually over time (in fact the latter is arguably better), what people really care about is three-fold:

a.) a sense of permanence that allows them to play on their own schedule
b.) a sense that the world is actually growing and not just changing
c.) that they play a pivotal role not just as an observer but in some ways as the actual catalyst.

The best way to achieve both worlds IMO is to focus world-scale story content into permanent content that operates mostly as extensions to the PS, with new features intended to upgrade the PS system such as being able to replay instances and story content and upgrade your home instance. Note that this would include some of the things already released and removed like much of the F&F content, etc.

Then, you could slightly modify the LW concept – keep it mostly centered on the open world, but in ways that add to existing content rather than replacing it, like enhancing the DE system, adding new DEs, crafting seasonal effects, etc. You could also continue doing the recurring events and have occasional mini- stories that occur outside of the larger canon and just serve to add depth and charm to the game.

Shinzan.2908:

I’m more convinced turning to a traditional content release concept rather doing this episodic thing would be better for GW2. The instances with Roxx and Braham, Scarlet’s playhouse etc could have been triggered after one finishes their living story as the next chapters so people can do them at their own pace and experience a personalized story. Doing it that way would allow for things like recognition from NPC’s or slight alterations based on our characters past choices.

Meanwhile the Molten Facility or Aetherblade retreat would have been better as new permanent dungeons, with explorable paths as well as their own rewards and armor.

In my opinion a game just shouldn’t try be a TV show.

Yeah I can’t really see any good reason for that kind of content to be temporary rather than just being added to the PS so anyone can experience it on their own playtime.

The LW should focus on expanding the DE system, which should be mostly self-contained within zones so as not to disrupt the larger story, and adding further polish to the world.

Dand.8231:

I’m not so much complaining about the speed, I’m more upset about the general inaccuracy of tooltips.

If a move says 3/4, it should be 3/4 from start, to completion. Instead, moves tend to be 3/4 + arbitrary animation delay + aftercast delay…. your 3/4 could easily end up being 1, or even 1 1/4.

The actual recast speed of Dual Shot is about 1.25 seconds, which is far too slow for the damage it deals. It was the same for Long Range Shot (Ranger Longbow), until a couple of patches ago when they reduced it by .25 seconds down to 1 second, resulting in a roughly 20% DPS increase. They are further buffing the damage in the next patch in their continual attempts to iteratively balance the Longbow, but Dual Shot has so far been left alone.

This is actually an issue on several ranged weapons/classes, like the Thief’s Pistol. The fact that the AA is as weak as it is means that, while the Longbow is still very effective in highly specific situations, it’s highly ineffective as a primary weapon.

Trench coats are definitely too prevalent in the medium armor selections. There needs to be a better selection of skimpier armor (for guys too) and armor that doesn’t have a huge skirt of some sort.

BobbyStein.2315:

Einlanzer.1627:

In particular, more attention needs to be given to the conundrum of the conflict that exists between the PS and LW. Reconciling those two on a conceptual level should be the top priority of this conversation, IMO. I feel like most people actually prefer the former over the latter, but regardless of which one Anet chooses to roll with, something needs to be done so that the disjoint between the two isn’t controlling the evolution of the world and the lore going forward.

This is something that we’ve been discussing extensively. We’ll share more details when we’re able.

Thanks for commenting. I have a personal fear (fear is perhaps a little melodramatic, but bear with me) that there isn’t as much concern about the world ‘making sense’, so to speak, as I feel there ought to be. Being a bit of an over-analytical nerd, I suffer cognitive dissonance easily when two opposing concepts exist simultaneously within the same setting or continuity.

Having given it a fair bit of thought, I definitely feel like much of what we’ve seen labeled as “LW” (including most instances and dungeons) should have been implemented as PS expansions that could be triggered, unlocked, and progressed through on a player-by-player basis along upgrades to the PS like being able to replay content, reset your story (gem shop item), read NPC bios, and ‘upgrade’ your home instance, and maybe even recruit NPC henchmen to join you in instanced content.

The LW should instead be about enhancements to the aesthetics of the open world and the DE systems that are focused on enriching existing lore and adding new sandboxy content rather than changing existing content to conform to a new monthly story. You could even throw in the occasional temporary mini-story (autonomous from the PS and the development of the larger story) alongside holiday or recurring events just for the charm and novelty of it as well as.

This would allow the two to exist simultaneously without stumbling over each other too much. But, if you really, really want to go forward with how the LW has been set up and crafted over the last year, then you should really just more or less remove the PS and transform it into completed LW content that can be reintroduced later as “in the past” missions.

Brimwald.5894:

timmyf.1490:

Colin-

I’ve suggested this a couple times, but just in case it’s been overlooked… If you want to make doing Dynamic Events more rewarding, just increase the rewards! They don’t need to be different. Gold, Experience, and Karma all have useful sinks/conversions in game already.

I think that, rather than flatly increasing the rewards, you should scale the rewards based on how long the event went uncompleted. For example, an event like Champ Boar that gets fired off as soon as it’s ready will give the same rewards. An event that is often neglected, failed, or uncompleted, (like most of the escort quests), would scale gold, experience, and karma up based on a timer.

For example, if it goes 30 minutes before completion, you get double the normal rewards. If it’s 4 hours, you get 5x rewards. If it’s 8 hours, you get 10x rewards. That kind of thing.

This means that zones with low player population suddenly become very rewarding for groups of players who want to run through and complete events. Suddenly, these zones which are mostly empty are full of people. Players on high-population servers are guesting down to less-populated servers for the extra rewards (and those on the low-pop servers suddenly have open-world friends).

Very good idea. This will encourage players trying different events and has the added benefit of making leveling in places we hardly visit more enjoyable.

Colin, instead of just increasing these rewards, you should increase the skin diversity you can buy with them. For example, Karma only buys one exotic armor (temple). Gold only buys basic looking exotic armor sets on the TP. If you give us more to buy, then the rewards will feel more important like Karma did at launch (which is why players were farming karma in Orr).

I have to say I think this is a good idea as well, and it bridges off something already in the game – the xp scaling of mobs based on how long they’ve persisted.

I also agree with expanding uses for Karma in particular.

I also want to reiterate again that I think that enhancing DEs and adding new ones should be the primary focus of the LW. Instanced content and new dungeons should be treated as expansions to the PS and should be mostly permanent so they can be player/character focused.

I think some of the content that was bundled with the LW in the past year should be placed back in the game permanently as expansions to the PS (unlocking as you progress along a chain and ending with, say the MWF dungeon) along with upgrades to the PS allowing you to replay missions and see story events again.

While it’s certainly worth talking about at some point, I wish we could get away from focusing on the execution and various mechanics surrounding the LW and instead work on pinning down the concept itself.

In particular, more attention needs to be given to the conundrum of the conflict that exists between the PS and LW. Reconciling those two on a conceptual level should be the top priority of this conversation, IMO. I feel like most people actually prefer the former over the latter, but regardless of which one Anet chooses to roll with, something needs to be done so that the disjoint between the two isn’t controlling the evolution of the world and the lore going forward.

I feel like this is something that needs more attention than it gets.

cesmode.4257:

Einlanzer.1627:

I also wanted to add that if, despite the opinions of many, they feel that constantly changing/disrupting/removing content to achieve the concept of a ‘living world’ is really the way to go, then they need to just go ahead and dismantle the Personal Story so that it is no longer controlling the evolution of the lore and creating cognitive dissonance.

The conceptual conflict between the PS and LW is very detrimental to the evolution of the game and finding a way to resolve it, even if it isn’t a way I would consider optimal, should be a top priority,

Curious to compare them like this, but I do think that more people would rather have instanced personal stories than living world.

Im just so tired of these patches being so achievement driven. Its all you do is go through a checklist. Who cares about the story? (sad but true)

Yes, I agree (see my above post), but Arenanet seems convinced that their living world concept is the way to go. If they are going to continue on as planned with it, they need to get rid of obstacles that are interfering with their creative freedom with it and resulting in immersion-destroying cognitive dissonance for players.

To that end, the PS leading up to the battle in Arah and the story modes of the launch dungeons should be treated as ‘completed stories’ and be removed (at least until they figure out a way to let players play past content) because the persistent presence of the PS hogties the lore to those events which restricts their ability to truly change the world through the LW.

In other words – it needs to be one or the other, it’s not sustainable trying to have a persistent PS (which is driven by the player/character) and a dynamic LW (which is driven by Anet) at the same time.

I also wanted to add that if, despite the opinions of many, they feel that constantly changing/disrupting/removing content to achieve the concept of a ‘living world’ is really the way to go, then they need to just go ahead and dismantle the Personal Story so that it is no longer controlling the evolution of the lore and creating cognitive dissonance.

The conceptual conflict between the PS and LW is very detrimental to the evolution of the game and finding a way to resolve it, even if it isn’t a way I would consider optimal, should be a top priority,

I think RPGs benefit from a level system because it helps create structure around advancement and throttle the pacing of it, however, I do think it’s definitely arguable that 80 was too many and that they should have stuck to 20 or 40.

However, I will also argue that the scaling mechanics make it a much more trivial issue than it would be otherwise, largely because it helps the conceptualization of it as an abstraction rather than a literal growth in huge amounts of power.

Pifil.5193:

ColinJohanson.2394:

Our take on phasing, and why we never did it to begin with is: the world isn’t progressing, it’s just fake progressing for you and the person next to you isn’t seeing it progress simultaneously. One of the biggest things we wanted to accomplish with Gw2 is that the things that happen do matter, they happen for everyone, and everyone experiences them together. This is really putting the social aspect of the game and immersion, above the personal aspect.

That doesn’t make phasing wrong, but if you judge by the above pillar it makes phasing wrong for Gw2. Each design decision we make takes that into account as one of the games core pillars. When something in the open world happens, it needs to happen for everyone, and we gauge everything that way.

Edited to add: This specifically applies to experiences in the open world, and doesn’t mean we couldn’t do things like letting you see moments in time in the past, or experience living world instanced (or “phased”) moments on their own timeline.

But by putting the group above the individual you further diminish the importance of the individual in a game where our actions are already pretty irrelevant because the Living World just carries on regardless. To put it another way; if a tree falls in the forest and I wasn’t logged in and able to see it fall then does my presence matter at all? No. It does not.

The benefit of phasing is that the world changes for your character permanently due to your characters actions, due to something you initialised. Not just because some other group of people did something while you were off screen. With phasing you have the benefit of still being a hero in a game where there are thousands of heroes. You don’t just arrive a second too late to contribute to an event and then come back when it refreshes.

Now I’m not saying that everything should be phased but it wouldn’t be a bad way of handling Living World “quest” areas, if phasing was a possibility then we could go back and play through the Flame and Frost or see the toxic Kessex Hills on a new character in the future and you would be constantly adding a body of new content that could remain accessible and completable by new customers rather than content that is lost forever after its two weeks in the spotlight are up.

While I wouldn’t necessarily argue that the game really needs phasing, I agree with the general sentiment here. Colin seems to be hung up on the idea that the world changing and being disrupted independently of the player-character (defined as ‘living’) is some awesome concept when I would argue that it simply isn’t, and is the primary reason why the LW has all but doomed the game to failure.

Here’s what the Living World should be – Arenanet doing the world building, perpetually adding new content and setting the framework for the story that is to be told through the perspective of individual and groups of players/characters on their own timeline. This is how the game was at launch.

Here’s what’s happening – Arenanet is trying to modify the world on a rushed schedule in a piecemeal way (making the content feel kitten), then also forcefully driving the narrative, removing the significance of individual characters and consequently disengaging players. This is the current “Living World” model.

The simple reality is that the current model does more harm to the game than good. Arenanet needs to shift away from thinking that constantly disrupting existing content to drive a narrative that’s broken anyway and is divorced from player immersion is somehow a better design approach than simply expanding the world with new permanent content that players can enjoy on their own schedule as part of their character’s development and timeline.

They don’t even really have to make sacrifices to do this – they can still use monthly ‘special events’ in the form of autonomous side-stories to help create some focus around the end-game and direct players to certain areas. They can still use recurring holiday events and festivals, and can even do occasional side-stories as temporary content as long as it doesn’t try to disrupt existing content in a permanent way.

Pifil.5193:

ColinJohanson.2394:

Our take on phasing, and why we never did it to begin with is: the world isn’t progressing, it’s just fake progressing for you and the person next to you isn’t seeing it progress simultaneously. One of the biggest things we wanted to accomplish with Gw2 is that the things that happen do matter, they happen for everyone, and everyone experiences them together. This is really putting the social aspect of the game and immersion, above the personal aspect.

That doesn’t make phasing wrong, but if you judge by the above pillar it makes phasing wrong for Gw2. Each design decision we make takes that into account as one of the games core pillars. When something in the open world happens, it needs to happen for everyone, and we gauge everything that way.

Edited to add: This specifically applies to experiences in the open world, and doesn’t mean we couldn’t do things like letting you see moments in time in the past, or experience living world instanced (or “phased”) moments on their own timeline.

But by putting the group above the individual you further diminish the importance of the individual in a game where our actions are already pretty irrelevant because the Living World just carries on regardless. To put it another way; if a tree falls in the forest and I wasn’t logged in and able to see it fall then does my presence matter at all? No. It does not.

The benefit of phasing is that the world changes for your character permanently due to your characters actions, due to something you initialised. Not just because some other group of people did something while you were off screen. With phasing you have the benefit of still being a hero in a game where there are thousands of heroes. You don’t just arrive a second too late to contribute to an event and then come back when it refreshes.

Now I’m not saying that everything should be phased but it wouldn’t be a bad way of handling Living World “quest” areas, if phasing was a possibility then we could go back and play through the Flame and Frost or see the toxic Kessex Hills on a new character in the future and you would be constantly adding a body of new content that could remain accessible and completable by new customers rather than content that is lost forever after its two weeks in the spotlight are up.

While I wouldn’t necessarily argue that the game really needs phasing, I agree with the general sentiment here. Colin seems to be hung up on the idea that the world changing and being disrupted independently of the player-character (defined as ‘living’) is some awesome concept when I would argue that it simply isn’t, and is the primary reason why the LW has all but doomed the game to failure.

Here’s what the Living World should be – Arenanet doing the world building, perpetually adding new content and setting the framework for stories that individual or groups of players can tackle as part of their hero’s development on their own timeline and can be enjoyed by everyone. This is how the game was at launch and is encapsulated by the various explorable zones, dungeons, dynamic events, and personal story.

Here’s what’s happening – Arenanet is trying to modify the world on a rushed schedule in a piecemeal way (making the content feel kitten), then also forcefully driving the narrative, removing the significance of individual characters and consequently disengaging players. This is the current “Living World” model, which is mostly an abysmal failure despite having some interesting content.

The simple reality is that the current model does more harm to the game than good. Arenanet needs to shift away from thinking that constantly disrupting existing content to drive an uninteresting narrative that is divorced from player immersion is somehow a better design approach than simply expanding the world with new permanent content that players can enjoy on their own schedule as part of their character’s development and timeline.

They don’t even really have to make sacrifices to do this – they can still use monthly ‘special events’ in the form of autonomous side-stories to help create some focus around the end-game and direct players to certain areas. They can still use special holiday events or recurring festivals, and can even do the occasional temporary side-story event that is similar to some of the living world content that came out in the past year, it just shouldn’t try to disrupt, change, or remove existing content.

I just want to ask – can we please get a buff to Vital Shot so that P/P can be functional? Currently, it’s broken by being too dependent on Initiative for damage, which screws up the usability of every utility skill in the set AND your mobility.

It’s all because Vital Shot has an overlong aftercast, leading to poor direct damage and sub-par bleed stacking (even compared to equivalent skills like the Warrior’s Bleeding Shot, which also has better range). It consequently fails to carry sustained DPS the way it should be able to and pigeonholes you into Unload spamming, which is neither fun nor terribly functional.