Guild Wars 2

Mushrooms aren’t even plants. They are a fungus.

X The Manimal.5293:

To be honest you did kinda sound like you were just complaining with no actual suggestion but that aside… I COMPLETELY agree with you.

A lot of suggestions are based on complaints. After all at its heart, every complaint carries a desire for resolution of the grievance that gave rise to the offense of the complaint.

Atlas.9704:

Ellisande.5218:

Atlas.9704:

Tybalt and Fogel, they learned and grew and even Fogel said at one point to the player that he considers them a child of his.

Forgal has no development either. Nor is there ever any situation which should cause the player to grow fond of Forgal nor Forgal to grow fond of the player.

Forgal is the same from start to finish and keeps the player at an arm’s length until he is about to die.

In game he does mention how your character has grown and he considers you like a child of his.

Yeah, right before he dies. But that isn’t a matter of character development, that is just heavy handed story telling where the writer’s wave their magic wand around and say “it must be so.”

All the growing that my character did and was going to do happened between the time I was level 1 and saw Destiny’s Edge fall apart.

The entire middle section of the personal story devoted to the 3 orders was nothing but unnecessary filler during which absolutely nothing of note happens and nothing gets developed, either your character or the plot.

Copain.1926:

Ellisande.5218:

Copain.1926:

I’ll agree the AI needs a bit of work, but something people need to realize is that The lighter classes should be dieing more if you’re not playing them well. The whole concept is that the lower your armor class, the harder you have to play.

No that isn’t the idea at all. The idea is that the lower your armor is the more damage you are supposed to be doing under the theory that the more damage you are doing then the faster the mobs are dying so you will be exposed to fewer hits.

Only an idiot would give up armor in order to get nothing or less than nothing in return.

Who said a single thing about not getting anything? Your compensation is the fact that you have insane flexibility and utility. You don’t see a Warrior ressurecting all his allies and then turning around and giving them all haste. You don’t see a Guardian causing bleed to his enemies then knocking them back before crippling them and causing Vulnerability while having an insane amount of other things to do (such as heal, Create large AOEs, and so on).

I think it’d be ridiculous if you got just as much damage as you lost in armor and all the ridiculous spells the lighter armor classes have already on top of that. It’d be insanely bland to because they said they wanted to get away from the whole “Tank/Healer/DPS” thing, but your logic is only cloth users should DPS and you should bring a Guardian along to take the damage for them.

WTF are you on? I do that kitten on my Guardian all the time. The only thing that actually seperates a Guardian from a thief is ability to stealth/port and ability to frontload all weapon skills at once instead of having them be apportioned over time via reuse timers and maybe access to one or two better slows than the Guardian has. But neither class is really going to be doing multiple things at once, at least not if you want to do anything well because you won’t be geared for it. Every class to a certain extent is able to heal/dps/cc/tank but the truth is that no class excels at any of these and simply becomes better at doing Y than X or Z but only in so far as they have the stat allocations and skill allocations which were necessary to make them better. However they never stopped being able to do X or Z and given the very limited nature of the skill selections available and over reliance on forcing the players to passively use autoattacks it is actually impossible for any class to only do Y and not also do X and Z.

You are clearly misunderstanding the idea of balance that I was refering to. When I said balance I very clearly meant that the difference in armor needs to be balanced by a difference in damage such that both classes are able to surivive the same kitten and come out of combat with the same amount of hp afterwards. I never said that one class (oh no I didn’t use profession!) should be doing damage and should only be able to do damage and one class should be tanking and should only be able to tank. Any such inferences, deductions or interpretations about my position that you made were your own and quite incorrect.

When Anet said that they wanted to get away from the holy trinity then what they essentially said was that all the classes would ultimately have to become similar and leave their specializations behind because the game is no longer going to be able to provide for super squishiness or super tankiness. Thus every class will have to be self sufficient. And at its heart self sufficiency requires that every class is essentially the same in so far as every class needs to be able handle the same exact situations by itself. If self sufficiency was the only balancing test then you’d have some classes that were simply rocking the game and others that were just barely getting by because the only standard you’d need to meet would be whether or not the class could solo PvE content.

However there is also PvP and if we assume that the devs want to balance the game such that any time players of equal skill face each other in a 1 vs 1 then there is a 50% probability each will win then the test becomes not just whether a class can survive soloable PvE content but also whether the class is too strong or too weak compared the other classes (whether a player with this class will win < or > 50% of the time against another player of equal skill using a different class). That is why damage has to be balanced around armor. A class with lighter armor is giong to be taking more damage and will need to deal higher damage in order to compensate for the difference. Obviously this doesn’t require one class to deal 100% more damage, a 3% differential could be sufficient (taking into account that stats can do more to modify the damage a character takes or deals moe than the value of the armor on that characters armor class).

Vayne.8563:

The fact is that the ONLY place in the world you need that gear for is the place you need to farm to get it. This is completely different from gating in other games.

No, that is the same argument that is used by raiders in every other game to justify why they should be the only ones to get better gear than those who don’t raid.

DarcShriek.5829:

Sylvari breast do indeed secreet tree sap and it makes excellent syrup for pancakes!

You just ruined syrup for me.

I hope you’re happy because I’m not.

darkace.8925:

Is this really a problem, though? When was the last time you said to yourself, “Oh crap! I’m out of lemons/apples/cherries/etc and I don’t know how I’m going to get more!”? It just seems like an answer to a problem that doesn’t exist.

Every time I need to make a pie. Or when I want to craft some dye. Those all need lemons.

If an item is needed for a crafting recipie then it needs to be able to be found in a node.

Writetyper.1985:

So there I was trying to solo lupi. It’s hard, but my god it’s fun. The first time I got kicked out after I had mastered P1 and was still getting used to P2 because of the server reset. That’s okay, I came back the next day, solo’d my way through path 2 to get to lupi in an hour or so, and then got to the fight at which point I managed to get him down through P3 to about 25% health after about 10 attempts and 45 minutes. And then someone accidentally clicked “invite to party” instead of “send mail”, and I got kicked, and I had to start again. From scratch. Turns out if you’re not in a party, and you get invited to one, you get kicked from instances, like dungeons. So,

I hate to break it to you but even if no one ever were to invite someone else randomly you’d still get invited by accident when they try to send you mail but accidentally invite you instead.

Considering that a DE doesn’t even give you enough of a reward to pay for half the cost of a death, they cannot be anything but impossible to fail and impossible to lead to your death.

However since they do still present a chance ot die and offer almost zero reward whatsoever then they still need to be nerfed until the reward covers at least more than the full cost of a death.

Atlas.9704:

Tybalt and Fogel, they learned and grew and even Fogel said at one point to the player that he considers them a child of his.

Forgal has no development either. Nor is there ever any situation which should cause the player to grow fond of Forgal nor Forgal to grow fond of the player.

Forgal is the same from start to finish and keeps the player at an arm’s length until he is about to die.

Hawkian.6580:

If you’re going after the crafting mats, you WANT the creatures to drop salvage items. Salvage the whites as well.

He clearly means the blue crafting mats. IE Sharp Claws, etc.

That would allow people to only take the good skills instead of being saddled with the 2-3 crappy to mediocre skills each weapon combination has.

kitteno.8103:

You’re grasping at straws. If you want realism, then Human female characters shouldn’t be allowed to wear heavy armor and fight in melee in the first place, since they’re physically unsuited. Or, maybe, Anet should cut our damage in half?

What a load of silly bollocks.

Throughout history there have been any number of woman who donned the same armor as men and went out to fight with them.

The reason why women generally did not fight alongside men is because of cultural norms that treated women as second class citizens.

I really don’t see what the big deal with the old Arah armor is. So it shows a hand grabbing the character’s boob, big whoop. But then I’m already so used to seeing that kind of thing on armor that to me it just looks perfectly normal.

But the first time I saw it in Lineage 2 I was like o_O.

Example: http://lineage2.stratics.com/content/gallery/comics/stabbymcstoo/index.php?img=L2-comic45.jpg

Caithe
Elli
Pale Tree
Zhaitan

I hate it.

We already have elementalists to control the elements which is mostly what they do in Full Metal Alchemist. There is very little, if any, alchemy performed. The only thing that really happens is manipulating one of the four elements. The only character who really performs “alchemy” is Ed. But even then there really isn’t any real consistency to Ed’s alchemy.

And the level of external control just wouldn’t be fitting for this game or any currently existing game. You’d need to create a brand new license for that type of physical manipulation to make sense.

kiba.2768:

being a hero doesn’t mean strutting around in your shiniest gear never getting a spot of dirt on it except when facing a dragon solo in which it would give up based on the shininess of your gear.

really, being a hero(especially one of the common people) usually means connecting with the common people on every level of their lives. so what if you have to go plugging holes in a leaky pipe? you just saved a town’s water supply and their agriculture.

so what if you have to go rounding up cows to put back in their pens? that’s less time a farmer has to spend chasing runaways instead of growing crops to feed his family

lastly, didn’t you ever watch Hercules? being a hero doesn’t mean only doing the best things. it means doing your best at any given task.

/rp hat

He isn’t talking about the type of heroes you’d find in Plato’s Republic. He is talking about the hero described in Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

From Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hero_with_a_Thousand_Faces

In laying out the monomyth, Campbell describes a number of stages or steps along this journey. The hero starts in the ordinary world, and receives a call to enter an unusual world of strange powers and events (a call to adventure). If the hero accepts the call to enter this strange world, the hero must face tasks and trials (a road of trials), and may have to face these trials alone, or may have assistance. At its most intense, the hero must survive a severe challenge, often with help earned along the journey. If the hero survives, the hero may achieve a great gift (the goal or “boon”), which often results in the discovery of important self-knowledge. The hero must then decide whether to return with this boon (the return to the ordinary world), often facing challenges on the return journey. If the hero is successful in returning, the boon or gift may be used to improve the world (the application of the boon).

One of the interesting questions arising from Campbell’s work is, “How does the hero cope with returning to the world of the mundane?” In Return of the King we see a variety of potential answers. One such answer is that the hero is unable to remain in the mundane world and must return to the supernatural world (Frodo departs with the elves across the sea). Another option is to have the hero adopt a type of life that was not available to them before they began their journey which is exemplified when Sam walks up and asks Rosey to marry him upon returning from Mordor, something that he simply did not have the courage to do before he departed with Frodo.

Also Hercules was only a hero because he was extremely strong and was otherwise a horrible person. All of his trials were undertaken out of extreme guilt for what he had done to his family.

Copain.1926:

I’ll agree the AI needs a bit of work, but something people need to realize is that The lighter classes should be dieing more if you’re not playing them well. The whole concept is that the lower your armor class, the harder you have to play.

No that isn’t the idea at all. The idea is that the lower your armor is the more damage you are supposed to be doing under the theory that the more damage you are doing then the faster the mobs are dying so you will be exposed to fewer hits.

Only an idiot would give up armor in order to get nothing or less than nothing in return.

GuzziHero.2467:

even ask where Zhaitan’s dragon magic glue comes from…

Horse hooves.

minbariguy.7504:

Just wanted to say thank you, Ellisande, for this post. It was constructive and helpful (at least to anyone playing a guardian, lol). It doesn’t really change how I feel about the frustrating nature of the Personal Story, which I feel is more of a puzzle game involving points allocation and finding the right weapon combos rather than experiencing an emmersive storyline (it just, flat-out, isn’t my idea of a good time) but your helpful attitude, advice, and input is still appreciated.

I normally don’t like that the personal story missions seem to require specific weapon combos either, especially when that particular weapon combination may offer either mediocre or inferior performance in regards to the rest of the pve you encounter while leveling outside the personal story mission. Plus I really feel that players should have a choice of what weapons they are using and either the content or the weapons should all be balanced accordingly. It is pretty silly to offer someone a weapon choice and then turn around and shout “Just kidding!” by making that weapon only useable in a very tiny number of circumstances.

I realize that with only 2, 3, or 5 skills to allot to a weapon it is very difficult to both make all weapons feel unique and make them offer equal levels of utility (using the economic defintion of utility here to mean something along the lines of happiness or satisfaction) to the player. However if it really is impossible to achieve those 2 goals then maybe the concept of assigning unique skills to each weapon was actually a bad one.

Iruwen.3164:

Are you really complaining that you cannot simply charge into a mass of enemies and take them out all on your own when there’s a bunch of NPCs around to help? Melee warriors are already very strong in PvE. Being a barbarian doesn’t mean that you don’t have to use your brain, looking from the game’s perspective. Not even in Diablo III. You can lead the army, but not take on all enemies at the same time. I’m sure you know how to avoid damage and lose aggro after having played so far. That’s not a fundamental game problem, but a problem with players acting fundamentally unwise.

But Guardians can take on all the mobs and come out just peachy. Seems a little unfair that it is ok for one class, but not ok for another class for some inadequately explained reason other than simply stating up front that the mobs are unrealistically strong and your character unrealistically weak.

These are undead we are talking about. Undead have extremely weak bodies because they are undergoing decay. A shamble is probably more than an undead should be able to handle, never mind swinging a sword that would cause the undead’s arms to fall off.

Mystic Starfish.2586:

What you’re saying is that if she just closed the doors, and ran with them, that the outcome would have been the same? In that case, the risen have all the time to knock down the door, instead of fighting off an elementalist. Even postponing their chase for a minute is helping

Because of the numbers, the placement of the enemy, and the terrain the outcome would have been exactly the same.

Presumeably, it really is an island, so there is no where to retreat to. Because of that the undead could have and probably did have the island surrounded. So simply closing the gates to the fort isn’t exactly going to serve the same purpose as the narrow pass at Thermopylae. At best by closing the doors you are only going to cause the enemy in the fort a minute or two to run around to the door in the back before pursuing you, but that isn’t doing anything about the more substantial enemy presence everywhere else on the island. If the only enemy you had to contend with had to come at you from the fort that would have given you a very defensible position because the enemy could not have come at you at once but could only send as many as could fit through the passageway. However on an island you have to contend with the fact that the enemy can surround you on all sides no matter where you are on that island unless you are inside a fort.

But you ran outside the protection of the fort into a less defensible position. Sure the fort was essentially overrun, but was still better than running into the maws of the rest of the army waiting outside the fort. So if you somehow managed to make it back to Lion’s Arch after having the fort overrun on Claw Island it was only because the undead didn’t actually care about you. And they wouldn’t have cared about you regardless of whether or not Sieran was with you, unless they were specifically hunting Sieran down. So the only way that Sieran’s sacrifice could be thought of as protecting you from the undead is if the undead were only interested in making sure Sieran died. Maybe that’s possible but it seems more like grasping for straws. Thus Sieran wasn’t doing you any favors by staying behind because leaving the fort wasn’t providing any protection against the actual undead army and navy from which you would have been better protected inside the walls of the fort.

Notice that the game doesn’t even try to explain how you made it back from Claw Island? It is because there is no plausible explanation other than saying that the undead weren’t interested in killing you, they were only interested in taking Claw Island which they also had no reason in doing since they would have been much better served by simply attacking Lion’s Arch first since they would then have been able to launch a suprise attack. They could have caught Lion’s Arch with its pants down (since their ships were submersibles that couldn’t be seen or detected). There was no tactical advantage to taking Claw Island and there was no need to take it even if they didn’t need it since there wasn’t a sizeable contingent of soldiers who could have turned around and used guerilla tactics to seriously disrupt the Undead’s supply lines later on. The entire questline relating to Claw Island I and Claw Island II were complete bollocks.

As for the amount of time Sieran gave you by sacrificing herself, it is as I said, zero. But even if we assume that somehow the undead were really really stupid and didn’t have the island surrounded (but you actually do see that they have the island surrounded during the quest) and only held the area between one side of the island and the fort such that they would have had to go through the fort to get to you, then Sieran still did you no favors. Because she tried to take on an entire undead army that had already wiped out nearly all of the fort’s guards within 30 seconds, she could have maybe provided a 1 second distraction or 10 seconds if they stopped to eat her. However had she gone through the door with you then she could have used her magic alongside yours to AOE down the enemies inside the confines of the very narrow passageway outside the fort’s entrance. Thus by not locking herself inside the indefensible fort where she couldn’t do bunk to hold off the undead she could have placed herself on your side of the door where she would have been able to hold back the undead for a much longer time by taking advantage of the very narrow passage.

We don’t need more gold sinks because gold sinks unfairly harm the poorest players while doing little to reduce gold from the players with the most gold. And the point of goldsinks is to remove gold from the richest players as they are the ones who are most willing and able to pay higher and higher prices which is the source of inflation. This is also why gold sinks can never work.

What we need is a progressive income tax.

I get more utility out of opening them than I do from seeing the few silvers I get from selling them.

Plus it is really hard to find the right dye on the auction house because without actually putting them on your armor you don’t know what they are going to look like on your character with all the lighting effects and what not.

And I once got 2 black and then 2 white in a row. So that was pretty nice.

Supasilvafoxy.1247:

minbariguy.7504:

Not too much I can say, OP, except that I feel your pain and I had already arrived at the same conclusion you did. I don’t bother with them anymore, either. You’re certainly not the only one who feels the way you do.

/signed

The stock response to being able to solo ones personal story seems to be – get a few levels – ask friends and guildies to help.

I refuse to do the latter as this is supposed to be ‘my’ story not anyone elses and the former advice to get a few levels doesn’t work either as the levels level up as you do. I acquired ten levels on a char then went back and tried to do the mission. It automatically had leveled up to one level below my current level. I still couldnt do it.

I too give up on the personal story as life is way to short to waste time being irritated and frustrated.

Good luck! Happy Gaming

Actually the levels really do a make a difference, at least at the moment. The reason is because the extra stats you get from traits don’t seem to be getting scaled down alongside your base stats and equipment stats.

But Guardian I really think it all comes down to using the Greatsword and making sure you choose one of the utlity skills that can create a fire combo field so that you can pull all the mobs into melee distance, throw down the fire combo shield then press 3 to create a fire shield from the finisher on the fire combo field and then hit 2 for the aoe damage spell. With a few more whacks of the greatsword all the mobs should be dead.

For the bosses its just a matter of kiting them around while using 5 for the pull to knock the boss on its butt, 3 to blind it and 2 to do damage while you are running in circles.

Every single personal story fight on a Guardian can be done using 1 of the 2 strategies above.

Mystic Starfish.2586:

Calcifire’s first half of the first post, and IceBlink’s explanations
I had some trouble understanding at first too, but upon a second playthrough, it’s a bit clearer. As pointed out, Gixx’s line about learning responsibility is a big clue. She’s supposed to be portrayed as a happy go lucky, I can do whatever I want type of person. I think in a spectrum of duty between the three mentors, we have Forgal at militant, Tybalt at likes to have fun, but gets the job done, and Sieran at party all the time.
With that in mind, her interactions with the PC give her an attachment to the world, and she realizes how much danger she always puts others in. So, as her last act, she decides to save the people she cares for, effectively learning that not everything is fun and games.

But she doesn’t save the people she cared for as it is perfectly obvious that sacrificing her life wasn’t going to make a difference because of the huge numbers. So either everyone was going to live regardless or die regardless.

The problem isn’t with the player, the problem is with the mob. It is an elite mob that has unavoidable autoattacks and constantly stacks poisons on the player which last for 30 seconds that are immediately reapplied after they are removed. Anet either needs to severely reduce this mob’s hp or severely reduce the mob’s overall DPS (I am talking a 50-60% reduction here).

for forgal, his death was to end his legend (due to norn having a racial attraction to committing suicide in new and impressive ways)
for tybalt it was that you helped ease his regrets about not helping fight the dragons (and in the end, he goes out, literally fighting a dragon, not bad for a coward, eh?)
for sieran it was that she just never learned and was punished for that (actually, if you think about it, sieran geting punished for not learning is a running theme as well, it’s just played for laughs until claw island).

All of those are really good reasons for why Forgal and Tybalt died (they wanted to die) but insufficient for why Sieren died. It was completely obvious that all that would happen would be that she would die doing something that wouldn’t have made a bit of difference. This wasn’t a matter of being reckless or poor planning on her part, this was simply her suddenly becoming an obvious sacrificial lamb because the authors of the story wanted to elicit some emotion from the player in the only way they knew how. However because it was so unbelieveable it didn’t elicit the correct emotions.

I wouldn’t mind if they charged for substantive updates like they did with GW 1.

Palador.2170:

Heijincks.9267:

She should have flew over the wall. I mean she did that during one of the personal story jumping puzzles.

She needed to slow them down. To delay and distract them, so you would have time to escape. That means, she had to stand her ground, and give them a target. A moving target, maybe, but even she has her limits.

And how exactly was one more body going to significantly slow down an entire army? The entire conceit was ridiculousness itself. Her sacrifice was just a pointless waste of life. Especially because as a mage type she could have just used her magic to solve the problem.

The best way to ensure Sierren survives is either imagine that in the real plot Sieran wouldn’t act so stupidly or join the Vigil so you only lose the throwaway Forgal.

Yes killing Zhaitan with guns instead of your characters own strength completely ruined the fight.

Our characters should be stronger than some random guns on a single air ship.

Dot damage from mobs is just generally ludicrous. You cannot avoid the application of it and once its on there is no guarantee you are going to get it off or even have time to do so before dying. If I’m at really low health I can generally dodge/run around to avoid damage until my heal is up and be fine. However with a poison I can’t avoid the application no matter how I move around the field and if I’m on low health and everything is on cooldown (consdering how few skills we have available at any given time and the ridiculously long cooldowns some of them have this is highly likely) then I have no choice but to die even though I in any other situation I could have exercised proper care to avoid taking damage until I had some type of heal up. And saying that we should be required to take condition removal really doesn’t seem fair considering that we are restricted to only being able to choose what skill goes into 5 slots, of which at least 1 of those slots will not have a skill available that can remove conditions and probably would have a 240 second cooldown even if it did.

Thankfully Guardians can passively remove 1 condition every 10 seconds.

Daegranos.7451:

And the dungeons are all about destiny’s edge!

But for the personal story to make sense and be continuous they needed to be part of the personal story.

And that would have been way better filler than the whole join an order crap.

Also favorite moments are almost anything involving Elli, just because she reminds me of the fox demon announcer from the Dark Tournament arc of Yu Yu Hakusho.

That coupled with the fact that no one else ever died from taking an arrow to the knee.

Not kidding either. He died from a single arrow whereas I’ve been pinchusioned and come out perfectly fine. Of course I am also a Sylvari so I don’t have to worry about that pesky things called organs.

chibishewolf.6730:

Ellisande.5218:

I’m having a reading comprehension problem today.

Did you say that you are only having problems on your thief and never had problems on your Guardian?

I have do have a lvl 80 Norn Guardian, however I am also stuck with that character somewhere along the personal story path as well as my Thief. I say this only to give an example that it is not purely one character I am having troubles with this on. Albeit, my Guardian is much further along in the personal story then my Thief, troubles none the less.

Are you using a greatsword on your Guardian? If not that might be the problem because quite frankly I found that the GS really helps a ton with the personal story missions that throw packs of 4-5 mobs at you nonstop.

The other weapons kinda suck. I know people will say differently but the other weapons really do suck in comparison when it comes to doing the personal story missions.

Instead of desiring more races I actually desire fewer races than we currently have.

It is my opinion that you would not have multiple races either evolving or being created together.

In terms of evolution, the two races would have been in close competition and the superior race would ahve either wiped out the inferior race or at least so blunted its evolution that it wouldn’t have obtained full sapiency (unless they could crossbreed in which case you’d be left with just humans and nothing else).

In terms of creation, no god is going to make multiple races because they are only going to make satient something imost like themself as anything else would be an affront to their own being.

So aside from removing all the really stupid looking nonplayable species (birdmen, frogmen, lizardmen, ratmen) I would also remove the Charr (catmen/dogmen) and maybe or maybe not the Asura as well (but the females are adorable!). Basically if it is derived from an animal then I would remove it.

The largos are a special case because they look like L2’s dark elves with animal parts attached to their back (are those wings? fins? are they used to attract potential mates/prey?) rather than animals that were made to stand on two legs (if extremely awkwardly but their is an entire evolutionary process that makes humanoids into sentient creatures, you can’t just take an animal, make it walk and then say done. You have to consider if this is the image that evolutionary forces would have created which I can say for the animal races most certainly not. You aren’t going to evolve to both have fur and wear clothing that is going to rub against that fur or evolve into a shape that clearly is not balanced like the Charr or frogmen).

Certainly not. This game just doesn’t offer enough bang for the buck.

darkace.8925:

Corth.7069:

Metal uses:
-Heavy Armor
-Weapons
-Sigils/Runes
-Jeweler

Cloth/leather uses:
-Heavy Armor
-Medium Armor
-Light Armor
-Runes

huh, imagine that, more uses for metal.

I fixed that for you. You’re welcome. And low and behold, equal uses for metal and cloth. Which brings us back to the problem at hand…gathering cloth is more unreliable, more time consuming, and more costly than gathering metal.

More unreliable yes. But it isn’t either more time consuming or more costly. To mine ore you need to wander around the map until you find a node, fight a mob and then use up 3 charges from your pick.
To “mine” cloth all you need to do is wander around the map until you fight a mob. Then you use your salvaging kit on the drop. That’s one step less because you don’t need to find a node.

Cardstar.1963:

Are you guys not using salvage kits? I tend to salvage all whites and blues and you get loads of level appropriate mats with them.

Thankyou Captain Obvious.

Actually it makes perfect sense when you remember that only leatherworking and tailoring need leather but armorsmithing does not whereas all 3 need cottonish materials.

So those who started with armorsmithing would have a glut of unused leather pieces lying around. Their tailoring alt therefore probably has access to a ton of leather but not much cotton and so can level up their tailoring just by making the pieces that require leather. Well that’s how I did it.

Then I started leveling leatherworking and I still had more leather than cotton. Cotton seems to be required for everything but also the most scarce resource after the blue items which you never get enough of.

My question is, who made the terrible decision to make butter and chocolate come from loot bags and why?

That was just a horrible idea. We already don’t get enough of the other mats that come from loot bags, this just made things worse and it made things worse for no reason whatsoever.

And don’t get me started on the completely moronic change to Chilis and Vanilla. I have never once come across Chilis despite them being so prevalent in the recipies for certain level ranges where they are impossible to obtain. Also up there was arbitrarily hiding certain mats like cherries on random NPCs. Seriously that was just stupid. Either make mats come from appropriate level collectable nodes or sell them from the cooking master vendors.

randomfightfan.4091:

I know there are a lot of bad thieves out there but when you have a truely good thief in your party, one that really knows the class, they can bring more to the group then any other class.

And exactly what support can you offer for this opinion because let’s not kid ourselves, this is purely your own opinion here.

I’m having a reading comprehension problem today.

Did you say that you are only having problems on your thief and never had problems on your Guardian?

jobah.7241:

(By the way: I can understand the general problem of balancing a game for all players. But is it necessary to have a profession, like the guardian, where you can autoattack all the way from lvl 1 to 80? It kind of destroys the whole purpose of progres and learning to play)

That is pure opinion right here of which I hold the opposite view.

These mobs are joenobodies whereas my character is the hero of [random fantasy themed place name]. It doesn’t make sense for an existance to easily beaten by an inexistance unless the existance really puts a lot of effort into whereas the inexistance can get by by doing what we would effectively call facerolling if done by the existance. That is also why champions should not have higher stats than player characters, it just doesn’t make any sense.

PolarApe.9351:

jobah.7241:

Im really surprised to see these kind of threads – I thought everybody complained about the game being too easy. But I guess im just not that well informed.

It really is that the quests and mobs and mob density and timing are identical for all professions.

I have two humans, a Warrior and a Necro – my Warrior had zero issue in Story Mode… my Necro… well. Cast times and placement of ‘Mark’ times are killing me in places my War sailed through by spamming autoattack and standing in place. They’re both durable, stacked Rabid gear on my Necro – it’s just he’s still in light armor, can’t handle small spaces where you can’t kite, and multiple knockdown/pull/interrupt mobs, without blowing through all the most powerful skills… which are then on cooldown for the next wave or waves…

Yes, there’s Necro builds that handle the problem stuff better than mine(and there’s Warrior builds that wouldn’t have handled the tougher SM moments as well), but you can’t retrain in an SM instance.

It’s the inconsistency created by a consistent design (story mode) put up against an incredibly customizable element (the character). So there’s really insanely frustrating moments that eventually a lot of players will run head on into…

Precisely. Story mode content needed to be designed around the player who needed to design their build around the situation they are going to encounter during the majority of their gameplay which also takes into account their preferences for how they want to play. Since story mode usually places the player in situations they would never or rarely find themselves during normal play (ie Claw Island I, Claw Island II, Breaking the Blade), it isn’t right to require or even expect that players would or should have to change their entire build simply to complete a 20 minute personal story sequence when their build was already fully functional outside of this single 20 minute experience.

I am not sure what the proper solution is, but I am quite sure that requiring players to change and then change right isn’t it.

Keta.9601:

Ellisande.5218:

GuzziHero.2467:

SPOILERS AHEAD

blinkblink ALITD isn’t even difficult if you have any kind of ranged weapon and are prepared to back off rather than facetank.

And that is why boss design fails. It needs to be melee friendly and not just ranged friendly.

Equip your warrior with a rifle and your guardian with a scepter or staff. Thieves have pistols.

But what justification can you give for saying that classes that were designed to be played at melee range, that were designed to attract people who wanted to play a melee character, should suddenly have to switch to a ranged weapon for one boss fight that was so unpoorly designed as to essentially lead to instant death for melee classes in melee range?

Wouldn’t the more appropriate action be forcing Anet to fix the bosses so that the melee classes can continue to function as melee classes?

Shimond.2478:

BrotherBelial.3094:

I finished my PS today. From the 3 bags I got was a dagger, a medium helm and a short bow. Nothing a warrior can use. And all blues. So they are all vender trash. Haven’t seen what the pact trophy thing I have is for yet. But I’m guessing its for a pact weapon. I hope it’s better than rear as I’m in full exotics.

Just a rare with a unique skin.

Honestly none of this should be a surprise, guild wars has never really been a loot-centric game, 1 or 2. It’s more about looks, I guess.

That isn’t true. GW 2 is most certainly a loot centric game now.

I prefer Elli

We call trash mobs trash for a reason.