Guild Wars 2

Most of the reasons to go against macro players is because “people interrupt us and get payed”. Well, if that’s your best hit, then you really have a problem. That issue is caused by inmature trolls (like proteininja said) and people that wants to make fun out of you. Or even by scammers that will try to make profit at any cost, which is reportable as far as i know. Will that change if they can’t play songs with a macro? NO. They will just find the most annoying item and spam 1-2-1-2-1-2-1-2-1-2-1-2-1-2 to still annoy you (believe me, i’ve seen it before in my previous MMOs).

At first I could tolerate reasons like “it took me a lot of time to master, should had some recognition”, but then again if you are doing it for a “reward” you took the short stick. GW2 has a rewarding system based in items and dungeons. You decided to spent 20 hours learning a song instead of doing 20 dungeons? That’s ok, but you shouldn’t complain about something that you did choose on purpose.

To summarize it, this thread did gave me this 3 thoughs.*

• Seems like macro players like me just play macro songs because we love music and we like to share it with an specific community that already knows that it’s a macro (friends, teamspeak, guild, party or community map). We don’t ask for money, ever.
• Seems like the actual non-macro players want to feel rewarded by all it’s effort, trying to get money out of concerts and not tolerating other players.
• There will be trolls in both sides, either using a macro or not. They will try to corrupt our songs playing other instruments, different chords or just randomly using skills.

Good job and /slow clap. I was a defender of the non-macro players since i know how hard it’s to become good at it, but after reading some of the posts in this thread, this is the picture that i’m getting and i don’t think it’s accurate (but i could say it’s 90% to invalidate replies like someone did above. Man, that was a little bit desperate and lame, honestly xD)

proteininja.5891:

I created gw2mb.com, so I feel a certain obligation to weigh in after reading the posts here.

I spent 6 months of my free time creating that website. I didn’t do it to undermine people who play manually. I did it because I love music.

I gotta give you +1 for that website. And here’s why, i’ll tell you my story.

I love music, always did. I’m 99% of my time listening to music, playing random arrangements in www.virtualpiano.net or playing my electric guitar. However i’m not talented enough to be good. I’m honest here and I accept the fact that after 6 years I improved very little because my brain is just that stupid and can’t coordinate both hands + other issues.

When I first saw the harp in-game I really knew that i had to get it. I love it’s sound and I love the way that I could play my favourite songs in-game to share it with the rest of my friends. But what happens? As expected i was unable to play anything remotely decent… and I wasted 700gems. So I did had the harp in my bank for months and then out of nowhere I heard someone in Divinity Reach playing really good. Asked how and he told me about macros and your website.

I did download some of my favourite ever songs from there (zelda <3 or yurima) and started playing in the Tequatls runs that I often command for my community. We are a group of 150 players that complete events like Tequatl on a Daily basis (and other events). I told them it was a macro and nobody really cared! The Teamspeak was silent at that times, the feels, the emotions, the memories… We all were mesmerized by the songs that my character was playing and it was GREAT!
We still do it often, there’s 10 minutes while we wait for Tequatl spawns after all defenses are assigned with nothing to do, music fits here very nice.

So… now we have a lot of players that want to remove my love for music just because i’m not talented enough… is not fair. In my opinnion that’s selfish and I will quote a passive-aggresive reddit comment that I saw yesterday from MrPhoenix_W.

Some people (that can play the instruments manually) want to be the only ones that can play them, since it’s something hard to do, they don’t want to share the acoustic space ingame with those filthy macro-players.

For those not familiar with the term, that’s called Elitism. I didn’t know I would see that outside dungeons or raids, but here it’s, one of the most toxic humans behaviours. I’m ashamed at this point of the thread.

Please stop with it and empathise with us. Me and lot of other players really love and enjoy to listen and share music with their communities. Just because we’re not talented enough shouldn’t be a reason to waste 700gems and break our hopes down.

1: Knowledge. No matter how good you are, if you don’t understand the fight you should not suceed.
2: Skill. Totally needed, of course.
3: Rewards. A raid won’t matter at all if nobody wants to go there because the rewards are not rewarding enough. Would be a wasteland, a waste of dev efforts, a wasted chance to teach players how to improve…. etc

Not a word about interrupts yet? It’s the most basic system mechanic needed for a raid fight. Enemies that will instantly wipe your group unless you interrupt them (dodge shouldn’t work if you fail).

I think that’s the very first step needed to build proper fights in gw2. Bosses ans thrash mobs needs to have access to powerful skills that should be interrupted when they are channeling it. To make sure it’s challenging, the execution of those enemy skills should be random, not something like “each 60 seconds exactly”. Obviously it should have a minimum skill cooldown to avoid bosses spamming it.

Just make us feel DANGER. And if you add Defiance to the fight, there you have an easy simple already-in-game mechanic that automatically build up group coordination (to remove defiance) and ready the boss up to interrupt.

hydeaut.1758:

Faux.1937:

It doesnt make it harder, or make it feel larger, its just annoying.

yes, terribly annoying, like a lot of other things in this map.

Trying to use some WvW-mechanics seems nice but it´s completely overdone, you have to hurry up to get even walls repaired, while doors stay broken and tons of Mordrems pure in, very seldom to get to some siege-weapons – and then you end up for example with Mortars in north of Indigo-cave which can´t shoot even at half of their full range because they will hit kind of a rock-bridge over the northern door.

Anet at it´s best, some nice ideas, bad execution.

Not annoying imo, making it harder since players need to rez others now instead of just asking to WP back since they wouldn’t come in time.

Also the door gets repaired when a dholyak gets to castle.

I was only defending blue for 3 hours but it feel pretty balanced with the aereal attacks.

In the first 3 hours a group of 30-40 players from my server teamed up in Teamspeak and did complete the new map events succesfully. That’s defending all castles + dholyaks and not letting any castle to be taken back.

Then we tried to do the 5 champions and the first time we failed, but second time we killed them 5 at same time before the timer runs out (even a legendary spawned near blue castle). The third time we failed as well.

However, the reward for the succesfull one was just 3 more yellows. I feel it’s unbalanced with the amount of effort taken into getting this event to suceed. Please improve.

Although that workarounds are still there, it’s annoying when it happens. I wish Anet could fix it. To add some information to the other post, you are indeed right, i’m officer of my guild and it often happens to the officers. Maybe it’s something related to guild permisssions? If that’s the case Anet could track it down at some point

I strongly disagree with this “suggestion”, and I also consider this is not a bug but a feature.

You are able to see players in different maps now, was requested long time ago. And anyway you have an actual visual to know if your party members are or not in the same map by just looking at their avatars. It’s not like you were wondering if they might or not might be in your same map.
If you see their face = same map.
If you see a black shadow avatar = different map.

Well, this is an issue we’re being suffering for months now. It never used to happen until a few months ago.

The issue
Whisper chat won’t connect instantly, instead it will do after a delay.

Example
You right click someone from guild/friend list and select “whisper”. Nothing happens. You go around, explore a bit, maybe even kill some enemies, fight back, then out of nowhere your character stop moving/attacking because the focus on the game swapped to the chat and you are writing “wwwsdadw1121122121266666”.

Detailed problem
You can’t send whispers with right click since the game first would try to make the connection (creating the purple chat options) before it allows you to type anything. This is an issue with your account being unable to ask for a new connection with the whispers server.

Workarounds
1: If you use the chat commands “/tell nameofplayer texttosend” and press Enter. The delay will still happen but whenever it gets processed (maybe 10 minutes later) the game will send the message that you typed earlier. This seems to point out that it was on a queue.
2: If you can’t send whispers to anyone because of this delay bug, we noticed there’s a way to force a working connection. How? with a Reply. I mean… you can’t send new whispers, but if anyone whispers you, you can reply back with no delay at all. This one seems to point out there’s a connection already created by the other player and your account uses it.

It’s often? Happens to more people?
Daily. We commented it a lot of times on teamspeak and sometimes more than 15 guildies are unable to send whispers while 1-2 players can do it. If you need this issue recorded on video or whatever, please ask for it.

Please fix it, it’s getting me killed more often that i’d like to admit and we’re getting into social troubles sometimes since you can’t send a whisper to anyone before it logs out because of the delay.

Real customization would be great to adress the capes issues. And by real customization i meant examples like: If you use a staff, choose to have an out-of-combat option to display it in the back OR in your hands.

I was really surprised by the little amount of options that players can change in Options in this game. I guess it’s done to save servers information, as large databases with our customizations would be probably something bad. However, that’s where local stored preference files actually fits.

Raid level attack
We didn’t speak about this (i think). But what is a raid level attack? It’s an attack from a boss or enemy that can entirely wipe your group unless it’s interrupted.

Interrupt is a system mechanic that i’d like to see getting involved with Raids. Every proffesion can interrupt, be either fear, stun, knockback, pull, etc.

If you make some thrash enemies have access to raid level attacks, the group will need to be focused in something more than DPS and you will also add the role of Interrupter. This will be more fun at bosses since they will have Defiance (let’s say 14 stacks, 1 per player) and they need to be removed to have the boss ready for when it’s channeling his attack. That channeling thing should be 5 long seconds for easy bosses and 1-2 seconds for final bosses.

What happens if you don’t interrupt? You all die, yes, the entire raid. You are free to repeat the encounter, but punishment is needed for challenges and chris already said they want challenging content.

Advice: Boss channeling should make him invulnerable and happens each 10% health or so for 2 reasons:

• 1: To not allow a DPS burn-out and bypass the boss attacks (like happens with lupicus and reflects…).
• 2: To make sure the raid did kill it because because of an efficient way of interrupting, not just plain luck because of CC spamming once or twice.

timmyf.1490:

On the topic of combo fields, what if Raids included combo fields of new types… for example, a Draconic Energy Field which gives new effects for each finisher type? Perhaps these combo fields could be created by environmental weapons, so certain players may choose to carry and use the bundle to create the new fields?

That ties together a few different things: using advanced game mechanics, using bundles and other environmental weapons, and allowing some choice and flexibility in class and role.

I like new fields, but not the bundles part. A new skill that blast draconic fields for every player sounds awesome though.

Coff coff…. did everyone forgot we all did get a new skill in the tower of nightmares update? Was a lame one and not very useful/used, but it opens the door for a… Brainstorm!

I’m personally against the use of reflects for a Raid, I always though it’s an easymode legal of cheating against most enemies. I can’t enjoy a fight where reflects are used to skip what a real tough fight would had been. But that’s only my opinnion, so… my consctructive suggestion is: If you really need reflects for a raid, make sure all proffesions got one skill that reflect, or add a new skill that covers that up for every proffesion.

(and btw, I don’t know who said earlier that warriors can’t reflect. Warriors can reflect with mace 2 + sword 5 and trait V on defense, it just works with 1 projectile like mai trin steleport, not massive projectiles like lupicus attacks)

Example of Inside Raid Roles (hardcore mode)

Let’s call this “The Room”.

• There is 15 players and 2 big bosses (Trolls) in the center of the room (Zip and Zap) inmune to damage, however they can hit players.
• To damage Zap you need to set him into flames.
• To make torchs appear, you need to kill minions (Zap will summon them), 1 random drop of torch for each 10 of them killed.
• If you set Zap into fire, that stops minions to appear, but Zip will go to the South wall to get a bucket of water to help his friend.
• At that moment, to damage Zip you need to use 3 chains in the West and 3 in the East to drop down rocks from the ceiling that will stun Zip (if they hit him in his run to the water point bucket) allowing a 20-30 seconds window to attack.

That said you got already roles for any proffesion:
6 Chain players, would be great ranged players.
X Torch players, melee would be good for this duty.
X Free to help other players. Rezz if anyone dies, kill minions in the meantime, etc.

Notice that you can only kill Zip if you want to kill him first, attempting to kill Zap first would make Zip impossible to kill (it’s important to make a point here: Failing the first time must be a MUST, that’s how players learn for a second try).

Edit: Boss skills at your choice, but powerful enough to kill players. Even minions should be able to.

Okay, let’s fix the problem with hard proffesions, did you think of Inside raid roles?

Example:

• When we join the Raid, an NPC will ask for 1 volunteer to “keep safe X item” or whatever, it may not even do anything bad to you (like removing skills), just give you a buff, however if the player with that buff dies, you fail the raid.

There you have with a simple example. Roles inside raids, and every profession can do it. Not only 1 player that will be build as Tank, but also the role of others to Protect it. However we can elaborate this a little bit more and add a second role player.

Example 2:

• A player is poisoned (random player ^^) with X by a boss cinematic, so we don’t have a choice. Now that player will lose health over time and we need to make sure he doesn’t die.

With that example we already got healers role needed. However, anyone can do it or blast combos. People would eventually learn effective ways to heal.

Dalanor.5387:

Crystal Reid.2481:

snip

Fair points but you know too how people hates Aetherpath being long (and risk/reward not being in line for the majority but thats a different issue).

Not an entirely valid point since i found (and keep in my followers list) already more than 400 players that love Aetherpath and hate how short-lenght are the other dungeons.
Aether was hated because there’s fast dungeons and Aether can’t done “too fast”. The problem is not Aether being long, it’s that Aether takes X time while caudecus takes 5x less time. If All dungeons would take 1 hour to complete, this issue would had never exists because players would had been used to it. Right now the issue is that same content takes different time to complete, out of balancing.

I think that raids won’t have this problem since there’s not an stablished time for raids already. However, once we have raid 1, players will expect raid 2 to be that long as well.

Editted to add info

Crystal Reid.2481:

(imagine if we rebuilt the Marionette to be a 15 man encounter in a raid instance and that’s the entire instance)?

Stop writing in the forums, work into that! (hahaha i’m joking, don’t kill me xD)
I’d love the idea of fighting back the marionette once again, I just feel I had to say that <3.

About weekly or not weekly resets… I feel there should be a reset at some point. Otherwise you can’t balance rewards. If you can do the event 10 times per day, there will be players that will complete it 10 times per day. Now there will also be casuals that can only complete it once a week. How do you balance that both groups gets more or less the same chance to get the rewards? It’s not about spent time, it’s about balancing, a programmers nightmare.

I feel weekly rewards would be fine for a final chest or tokens based system, but the players can repeat the raid whenever they want for random drop rewards.

Crystal Reid.2481:

• Is Legendary armor better than Ascended armor stat wise?
• Can this legendary armor be obtained anywhere else in the game?
• How do we prevent the introduction of Legendary armor from invalidating players who spent a lot of time/money crafting their Ascended armor?
• Is this a drop from raid encounters, or is it obtained through a “raiding reward track”?

I think you can see where I’m going with this. Ascended armor is already a pretty hotly debated topic because it did introduce a very slight vertical progression to the game.

Just make legendary armour same as legendary weapons. Desirable because of their unique effects, but not very stats desirable since ascended already got those stats.

Now, however, if we can swap stats for armours whenever we want (same as we do with legendary weapons already) they will be desirable for the raiding community but won’t place extra pressure for the casuals or people without one, because ascended would be equally worth stat-wise.

So imo Legendary Armour should share the same “swap stats” out of combat feature as legendary weapons. That will make them worth while they’re not more worth than ascended, hence it won’t devaluate ascended armour but will make legendary armour desired at the same time.

:D that’s the perfect solution. I can’t believe we found a perfect reward for raiding so early LOL.

Brainstorming rewards!

In my previous post I did spoke about a perfect way to get rewards (tokens based) but what rewards wouldn’t affect the casuals but hardcores would want? here are some examples!

• 1: +200% Magic Find buff the next 7 days (on raid completition). This would be really awesome and would improve the “possible” rewards of every piece of content that a player plays. It also opens the door to re-playability.
• 2: Unique skins (tokens based, no more RNG please).
• 3: Unique finisher (token based as well).
• 4: Unique Outfit (as well token based)
• 5: Unique Minis (meh, this one could be RNG from final boss, I wouldn’t mind)
• 6: Unique Titles! Yes! titles are something to brag about, a raid needs a title xD.
• 7: Gems. Yeah, might be a wild suggestion, but reward 100 gems per raid completed (once per week only, same as guild missions) and the raid will get lot of attention from your playerbase.

Let’s be honest. In the end we want brag rights. I would ask for better items, precursors or improved stats, but Anet already said that it’s unlikely that it will happen.

Reward & difficulty perfect scenario
Tokens and daily/weekly caps to obtain them.

Let’s say first boss in a raid drop 10 tokens (first boss should be easy).
A puzzle, trash mobs, whatever…
Second boss fight! he drops 20 tokens (a little bit harder).
More stuff…
Third boss! he drops 30 tokens (this should be hard).

The raid tokens should be only obtainable daily per account (or weekly if the raid is long enough and takes 7-8 hours to complete, which would be awesome).
Now let’s say the… [insert desired item from raid vendor NPC] costs 60 tokens.

If you are an skilled player and got an skilled group of players, you can clear the entire raid in 1 day and get the 60 tokens, getting your reward without RNG. If you, however, are not good enough to beat the last boss but you can at least kill the first boss, you can just keep coming week after week getting 10 tokens each time until you get 60 for your item. A hardcore group would get the item in 1 week, the bad group would get it in 6 weeks.

With this system, hardcore groups are rewarded, but not-as-hardcore groups can also get the desired reward (and encouraged to improve, which is always good). This system is in my opinnion the best rewarding system for raiding.

Sidenote: You can as well place a random miniature that only drop from final boss in an RNG based move to improve replayability. That way, when someone gets all the items from the npc, he will still have a reason to go raiding.

I noticed that groups work together better when they’re forced to fight multiple non-stackable enemies.
An example of that we’ve seen it already in Lion’s Arch attack, at the Scarlet Holograms fight. There was a moment where you needed to kill a blue one (with insane phisical defense, but conditions did lot of damage on it), a green one (that we used to melee because it’s attacks were “easy” to dodge) and a red one (mostly ranged because of all the fire fields that it fired to us).
That entire fight was a masterpiece of Raiding content and i’m sad that we can’t fight them anymore. That was the right direction, keep the good work there.

Why it was good? 2 Reasons.
1: Teamwork rewarded. If you killed all 3 at the same time, the little 18 holograms that spawn later wouldn’t appear, saving you a nasty fight.
2: Controlled Chaotic Fight. When a non-experienced group or not very good one killed the 3 holograms but didn’t made it at the same time, 18 little holograms appeared (6 for each of the previous ones). They were chasing players, moving around etc.
The result was a lot of players killing them BUT each player had a goal. You would see necromancers chasing the blue ones, warriors dpsing the green ones and guardians trying to reflect the red ones, as example. Everyone had a goal and they often had to run through other players fight and try to not get involved because your personal enemy was a few meters away and was your duty to kill it.
It was hell, but it was awesome hell because it was a chaotic fight in a controlled battlefield where your personal awareness of the battelfield was mandatory if you did want to become useful.

That + npcs rezzing + 4 different phases + all the laser areas in the ground = masterpiece of raiding content ^^

I get this thread is all about new ideas, but hey Anet, you had a really good one, it worked really nice. It had my entire server engaged, enough to say that we killed the 3 holograms 75 freaking times in that 2 weeks (i did keep tracking them since i needed the obsidian shards for my legendary, which precursor actually dropped at that time as well xD).

So… to summary it a bit: It could be interesting and might be worth to try to have 3 different bosses at the same time. Each of them with different skills but all together (maybe even involving minions, you can’t damage 1 of them if his minions are alive, etc)

I hope you get my point.

Edit And please NO more timing fights. Even if takes 2 hours to kill an enemy, we should be able to do it at our own pacing.

I was reading about dodges and I can’t help to think of a perfect scenario where dodges are really useful: Twilight Arbor Aether, last boss – Clockheart.

If you go ranged, that fight touchs something that I can clearly say it’s one of the best things about GW2 combat system: Positional awareness. In that fight, the boss throws some gears that will always land on you. Your positional awareness is what will keep you alive, but a dodge to exit from a gear that will land on you in the last second is a really good concept. ¿Why? Because the damage will still be there after you dodge, you can’t just step back and stay where you were, that piece of land gets “corrupted” by the gear and you need to keep moving.

TL;DR Dodge should be used to improve mobility, not to become inmune to all damage. Achieving that might be a programming nightmare, but that’s my feedback. That’s where dodges fit.

edit: For a raid fight, a place where you are forced to keep moving and the room getting corrupted over time slowly would be really nice. It wouldn’t matter your build, your class or whatever, only your positional awareness. That said i’d like if this doesn’t happen in a boss fight (the toxic community would just try to do an insane DPS race and ignore the mechanic) but instead in a puzzle to the room of the boss. Something like… i don’t know, running from the rock in Indiana Jones… with lava, enemies that can cripple if you don’t dodge, jumps, etc (Not like the lame attempt at volcanic fractal, that’s level Easy of positional awareness, i want level Hard where people needs to dodge even arrows thrown by you from the far distance and you see them coming… pew pew… i can dream ok?!).

I love karma. Anabasis already said everything I could say. We did remember what happened to Miku and did make sure the thread did get the deserved attention with proofs against BolaOcho. The spanish moderators already deleted the thread, so I hope the guy is banned :P

Enable bodyblock in the WvsW map for 2 weeks. What do you think? Might remove the entire adventage of being in a big zerg.

Sounds like the WvsW would be different each time (not as hardcore as fractal instabilities). This might help the servers I guess, but I would like to say that wvsw maps need specific and personalized rules. Not same rules for everyone.

Example: Reds got 10 players in the map and blue got 50 players. Then reds should be able to track down the blue players on the map (by game system, or maybe 10.000 unit range. Same as EotM tracking torrets, the ones that you buy in the observatory). That way a small group can havoc a big group just because they’re outnumbered. When the numbers are back to normal, that system would stop working.

I think the english word is handicap.

Set -maploadinfo command on the client and try to join the maps. Let’s help Anet trying to track down the broken server.

This one is bugged, Anet: http://prntscr.com/4z7ksv

I’m currently sitting on 1 spare gem. Is that gem going to live there forever since i can’t buy 399 for the next 400gems item? can’t believe how messed up this is.

I hope too many requests is not what it’s causing the game to lag for everyone else…

Hi guys.
I’m gonna be honest for this thread to make a good suggestion and improve the game. Before Guild Wars 2, I played Lotro for a while, and I can’t help to say their music system is waaaaaay better than ours. I’d love if the GW2 programmers could improve our systems to match the ones of a 7 years old one.

Why other MMO system is better? I’ll give you 3 reasons.

• We had not only 3 octaves, but 8. More sounds = more songs.
• ABC files. The game Lotro doesn’t allow Macros at all, however they created a system where, if you just type “/play example.abc” with an instrument, it would read and play the file. I believe that was done client-side so it removes the problems of server lag and the “fear” of players using macros (since it only works with an instrument and stops if you stop using the instrument), but instead you get the awesome situation where players can play songs that would be impossible by a human being. (And there’s already hundred of abc songs in the internet for us to play)
• Sync players to play songs. Yes! it was a thing!. The /play command allowed 2 players (or more) to sync the same song if they had the same .ABC file. That did let us play the same song with different instruments at the same time. Or 1 lute doing the chords and 2nd lute making a solo, etc.

There was some groups making special announcements and even concerts of 100+ players back then. Example of all systems in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKWpJdWOpPE (the player lagged while recording, but you get a pretty clear idea of how cool those concert were).

So… feedback?

hybrid.5027:

Solved puzzles have limited replayability. No one enjoys solved puzzles.

Aren’t all boss fights like solved puzzles after a while? Yet you need to complete it.

spoj.9672:

You are still misunderstanding us. Just because we use speed to measure variability of a puzzle doesnt mean we are talking about tailoring for speedrunners. Its bad design because there is literally no choice. If you give players multiple choices on how to complete a puzzle, naturally some strategies will be faster and some will be slower and some will be safer while others will be riskier. This is what i was trying to say.

You still don’t see our point. You are asking for something that’s already there. It’s pointless.

• Riskier: Newbies first choice. Everyone tries to outdps the elementals, defending oozes at same time as moving it away. Not kiting elementals.
• Safer: 4 Players moves all elementals to 1 side, 1 more player gets both oozes and move them slowly on the other side (yes, both oozes follow same players on same path). Then, at the end, he moves 1 ooze to the other side using he gap with no fire near the exit door.
• Experienced: 2 Players move oozes. The other players use reflects, blindness and fears/stuns in order to not let elementals hit the oozes, but there’s no need in killing elementals.
• Safest: 2 Players move all elementals away, then 2 more players move oozes. The first players nuke down the elementals.
• Fastest: 2 Players get the buff and move to the middle of the paths. Then 2 Warriors with “Fear me”, behind the oozes, move them really fast until the oozes reach the maximum feared range. Then warriors CC the other elementals. (To test if a guardian 5 greatsword could make an ooze to go across fire quickly and use that as shortcut to save time).
• Challenging: 2 Players strategy. They go in, different sides, kill their ooze, aggro all elementals and run to the end. Bleed the elementals at the end and use lot of condition damage, then they run to the respawned ooze and move them to the gear while the elementals die because of the bleeds (I use to solo 1 side doing that).

I can give you more strats. Do you still need more choices?

And by the way…

Do you really want completely linear dungeons and puzzles in the future?

Yes.
I’m not sure what you find odd about it. Seems like i’ve been doing dungeons and raids wrong the last 9 years of my life in many different MMOs and I should learn what a dungeon is O,o

If i understood this right, the perfect scenario for “free” would be a puzzle that could be completed in different ways.
However the players will always choose the easier one, and that’s already happening. It applies to the Ooze Font. Players choose to do it in 20 seconds aggroing eles away instead of defending both oozes all the time (which is also possible and works fine). You can also choose to OutDPS the elementals, or can choose to reflect projectiles with Feedback or use Walls from Guardians/Thiefs.

I don’t see “only one” way to complete it, I listed 4 in a few seconds. The strat to follow can be adapted to the group capabilities and suceed in different ways. Yet people always choose the easier way, hence it will eventually force a “restricted” way to complete the puzzle once it become as popular a AC runs.

That’s why my answer it’s the same as always: Ooze font is a good concept for repeatable content.

spoj.9672:

Ayrilana.1396:

So any obstacle within a dungeon that doesn’t have combat elements to it is poor design?

The difference between the puzzles hybrid listed and aether puzzles is quite simple. The aether puzzles slow you down and theres no way to really counter that. This is not bad because it hurts speed runners. Its bad because it is forcing extra timegates on people who have already completed it. Excessive timegating causes irritation for most players not just speed runners.

The oozes move a set slow speed which makes kiting very slow and there is no way to be faster than that set time. You cant speed them up in anyway which makes strategy approach for the puzzle static. Its either be slow or even slower if you fail. If we could use cc to push them to the other side then I would actually say thats a huge improvement. You could even give them defiant stacks to make it harder for groups to full cc them across. With the electric room you have to wait for the patterns to move and there is also waiting for each phase and the final switch to activate.

The only limiting factor in many other puzzles is your own characters movement speed. Which can be boosted with the use of skills and coordination. The puzzles are also more open which allows the use of portal tricks etc. The aether puzzles force you to complete them in the exact same set way everytime. Whereas other puzzles are a bit more free. Which concept do you think is better for repeatable puzzles? Restricted or free?

You just described Ascalonian Catacumbs burrows… where a group of Pugs can do same as fast as a group of Experience players. That puzzle is based only in DPS and that’s bad design. Aether ones are well-designed because as example the ooze font puzzle can be done (as usual to me) with 4 players in just 20 seconds, or 10 minutes with an experience group. Result: Experienced players get rewarded and NOT punished on replayable content. 20 seconds vs 10 minutes seems to me like a good adventage, not like AC burrows.

That’s just an example. Btw the electric floor room shares the same example. If you are fast enough and experienced you can activate all 4 platforms in the very first second of activation timer, which leads to a 40 seconds room if done right. A group of unexperienced players might as well need 5-10 minutes and they might die multiple times in the process.

Learning is a good design mechanic. Once you learnt you can reduce the timers to it’s minimun while others struggle there for hours. Yet you guys still complain? I’m starting to think that Aetherpath is just an excuse to rant over at Anet for the lack of love the other dungeons did get in comparison with this one.

As someone said before, this dungeon actually feels like a dungeon, not wandering around in a random place where you don’t know where to go next (i had really bad newbie experiences in ascalonian or caudecus because of this very reason).
Aether’s design is as simple as: You see the exit door, open it. It doesn’t matter if you need to kill an enemy, complete a puzzle or defend mickey mouse, your goal is to open next door, same as every dungeon in every other proper mmo ever. And then, at the end, if you want, explore the dungeon as an explorable place. Well design overall, no matter how I look at it.
The only valid point on what you guys said is that cutscenes should be skippable.

spoj.9672:

I wouldnt mind losing time on those puzzles if they were actually engaging and not tedious and irritating especially when repeated. This is a design problem that anet seem to be running into a lot. The aetherblade fractal and molten facility fractal are no different in this regard.

For you, it’s.
For me it’s a really good design and not the usual “just hit stuff” old pattern.

Is not a design problem, it just doesn’t suit your taste and seems that you are selfish enough to not tolerate other people’s tastes.

I didn’t want to get into that kind of discussion, but Spoj, you Sir are wrong.

I’d love the day that people stop measuring dungeons on “how much time I lose in this room” thoughs.

Norjena.5172:

A real “play range if u´re skilled” post?…..no comment. Yeah i want to spend 5 minutes on each generator killing 2hits holograms 1 by 1……wtf….
And sure you are a fun player. Because all others don´t play for fun…i know, i love this kind of comment.

As Infamous Darkness said, my comment was: Melee if you want, but learn how to dodge. Otherwise range them from a safe position to avoid deads due to unskillful playgame.

That said, most people complete dungeons like it was a job, because they are “forced” to farm tokens for their skins/weapons/legendaries. But how many do it just for fun despite the reward? That’s the real question.

Some of the players in this thread are known speedrunners and doesn’t care about tokens, but they care on how fast it takes to complete the dungeons. That’s your own definition of fun? cool for me, I don’t have problems on what you do to have fun. I’m just explaining how I (or other players) get fun and not trying to burn down your own definition of fun, which seems what some of you are trying to do. This is an issue with the community that i’ve seen along the years i’ve been in GW2, this attacks are the result of toxic elitism, so let me remember you something.

• Nobody decides which is the best dungeon. Everyone has their own taste and you should be aware of it. Saying Aetherpath is not a good dungeon is as stupid as saying that nobody likes the colour Orange. There will be always people that does, either u like or not. Period.
• Criticism against the players that like X instead of Y is not good. It eventually can lead into the gaming racism. Just because someone is different, you shouldn’t try to manipulate their thoughs and make him “accept” your own taste or choices. If someone likes X and you don’t, then ignore it. Don’t attack that person. Freedom of choice, you know.
• Giving your own personal opinnion is something good. It lets people research and manage their own thoughs about it. As example: If you say that clockhear is faster and easier on melee, say it. Someone that always killed him ranged will try to kill him melee, probably complete it faster and easier, but if then he decides to go back and keeps ranging it because he find the fight more fun don’t be toxic and tell him that he doesn’t know how to play. He made his choice, and you have no power over that.

TL;DR – We are all different, we all make choices, don’t force others to accept your own choices.

Hey Chris,
I’d like you to check the next link if possible. It was a suggestion for another MMO that was ignored by the developers along the years, but it did cover most of the stuff a guild needs. This suggestion was just a player’s idea but he did photoshopped and created the entire UI needed for it. He did also took feedback from the players, same as a CDI.

Right now this CDI is working perfectly, but i feel that you guys should actually “see” how a proper guild pannel could look in the future. I hope this post is ok and I don’t get in troubles for linking it

Link: https://www.lotro.com/forums/showthread.php?385713-Kinship-Revamp-Proposal

Needless to say it was the best suggestion I ever seen in any MMO. It’s sad it was completely ignored, specially the Calendar.

Norjena.5172:

These exploding holopirates are rly bad designed and annoying. Not hard, just annoying.

Not so much, only annoying if you melee them, since you need to dodge in the exact second they die. Just equip a bow and pew pew, u know.

hybrid.5027:

What is specifically challenging about it? None of the bosses are hard and the puzzles are more annoying than they are difficult.

As someone said, pugging it.

After 300+ runs i’ve done Aether in every possible way. Yeah the fights and puzzles are easy once you find a way to complete them easy, but i’m aiming here at the “i’ve never been there, will be a new experience” public. In that case Aether with 5 newbies that doesn’t know what to do is imo challenging.

About the fun, i like Clockheart fight, but only if the group doesn’t melee it, otherwise i’m bored. I like to spend 20 minutes killing him at range. What’s the challenge into that? Sometimes i don’t even hit him in 5 minutes because i am all the time rezzing the people around. I like that, i don’t want to kill him fast, I soloed it too many times, i like that all 4 newbies in the dungeon can kill the boss and stay alive while i just support them rezzing and randomly stopping tier 30 (and no, they don’t know what i’m doing xD).

I guess i’m a player that cares about stuff that most don’t. I play for fun. I don’t measure how much time or how much reward I will get. I’d still go to Aether daily even if there was no reward and takes 4 hours to complete it. Just my opinnion

Exactly what Olba said. I tried both in every enemy of the game, since i always play with those 2 skills on and i gotta say that Endure Pain won’t work against some physical Instakill attacks, but Defiant Stance always does.

You need Aetherpath, which is imo the best dungeon ever in gw2, the only one that’s fun and challenging to go with a group of friends

For the joy of brainstorms! has anyone though on themes?
Example:

• The leader could choose “mordremoth” and the entire walls would be decorated with thorns.
• He could also choose “Ice” and the ground would be replaced by ice.
• Other possible themes could be Halloween, Fire, Snow, Swamp, Desert, Fog, Asura, Ascalonian, Charr, Metal, Grass…

I think the way to Unlock themes could be fun. Some of thems should be rewarded in an specific area/guild mission. Other themes could be maybe sold in the gemstore.

I’m joining the thread and didn’t read all posts, but i’d like to share and idea i always had about guild halls.

What if we literally build them up instead of “getting” it built? There could be a system in which the guild upgrades have a cost on materials, wood, clay, leather. However, obtaining that materials would be more or less like crafting a legendary weapon or mawdrey. They should involve a journey and a challenge.
Those items should, however, be obtainable only once per month per account and be account-bound or guild-bound if such thing exists. That way people wouldn’t be able to “buy” their guild halls off the Trading Post.
If the guild needs (as example) 10 clay stuff, then all 10 members of a guild should help each other to get the work done. If instead you don’t wanna have more than 5 members in your guild, it’s ok, but you should be aware that small guilds is a choice, and by choice you have to work harder, waiting 1 month of cooldown to create the other 5 clay stuff to build it.

What do you think?

Vayne.8563:

If he was doing that, he did a bad job

He did a good job. You didn’t get it. Accept it, everyone make misstakes.

Labjax.2465:

I got an idea though: When someone makes a new character, send them an automated Anet-officially-stamped mail welcoming them to the game. That way people will be exposed to what official looks like in a very immediate and real way, and will know what to look for. You can even put info about what official will look like in that very same mail.

This, and remove the warning from all mails. It’s annoying.

You can always “buy” the trait as well.

Any info about this, Anet?

Bumped so u don’t miss it :P

As a player from baruch bay, this is frustrating in the borderlands… Reset the tournament! (Not gonna happen xD)

Shen Slayer.3058:

I don’t think Teq is worth doing anymore with the high failure rate, especially when the drop is worst then Karka and that is 100% success rate and takes 2 minute.

O,o i’m sad about your server. In mine Tequatl dies 7 times per day… every day. We didn’t failed in 9 months. Gotta love the spanish teamspeak community

Let’s talk about “worth” as you said. The Lover Precursor dropped for me 5 days ago in Tequatl ^^
Here a picture: http://prntscr.com/4pirsb

Have a nice day.

For me it’s quite simple: Because they don’t want to separate WvsW, PvE and PvP.

Skills that are perfect for PvE gets nerfed just because of PvP/WvsW.
Skills that are ok in PvP gets changed because of PvE/WvsW.

Honestly I love PvE but i hate WvsW/PvP. That’s ok, i’m not here to criticism it, i’m here to say that i love a part of the game that gets changed because of another part of the game that i will never play (no matter what you try, not gonna happen).
The game constantly gets random changes that doesn’t affect me at all but gives me problems because it’s a nerf in PvE. I’m not talking about bugs or exploit skills, but actual useful CC skills that could build up for very challenging fights in the near future.

That said, I can’t hype anymore just because i see they’re trying to make GW2 an eSport and wasting too much time in a game-mode that i don’t enjoy while other aspects of the game that i enjoy (dungeons) are forgotten.

Today, we had 120 players+ on teamspeak waiting to complete the Three Headed Wurm. The guild [eter] Eternity dark souls activated the event. We used items, food, buffs, everything went smooth, we were helping the vigil crusaders… and then the map got closed. Without a warning. Without notice. Just everyone was kicked into random overflows.

We wasted time, items, 10.000 guild influence, merits…

Suggestions
-Please contact that guild and give them back the cost of the activation.
-Please code a warning text in the chat if you join a map that’s about to be closed.

More info:
The map ip closed was 206.127.146.91:0 at 16:10 more or less on 27th september 2014 (+1GMT European time)

Sadly getting money in this game is luck based. I have 3.000 hours of played time with my warrior in more than 1 year and I never ever won anything worth. Then last week i did get 2 precursors, 1 in Tequatl (short bow) and 1 in the mystic forge with 4 random yellows (rifle).

So… take it easy if seems unfair, luck works this way :\