Guild Wars 2

Don’t put rewards behind content that you want people to savor, or it ends up becoming about the reward instead of the experience and turns what would ordinarily be a fun thing to play through that you want to play for the fun of it into a frustrating gate that you play through to get the extrinsic reward.

Veneratio.1980:

At 5 cents it’s overpriced!

Can’t believe the whinging around today. Glad it takes a little bit of work to achieve things. If it was too easy people would be kittening in a week that they had finished. Anet can’t win.

Personally……love what they’ve made.

Please.

I’m finished already, and I’m not complaining that it was too fast, I’m complaining that it burned me out to the point where I don’t want to play the new maps anymore.

I wouldn’t say bored, but I definitely don’t want to go back to Maguuma anytime soon. After finishing my chronomancer unlocking, the forced skill point grind completely burned me out on the new areas.

19 skill points, and only 1 of them was in any way interesting, and I suspect that that was because I had a position where you were supposed to use a mastery to effortlessly beat it, but I could technically do it without due to the shorter commune times and mesmer invulnerability chaining.

Exploring was actually pretty awesome in the beta events where the game wasn’t locking class mechanics behind skill points.

That’s a good sign, for when I start it.

Personally though, I’m holding off on the story until I have all the masteries I need first so that I can experience it as a continuous whole rather than having it disjointed by mastery grinding between each chapter.

IAMANDLOVE.3095:

MMO is a grind there is no escaping it. I have always enjoyed good MMO with a good grind.

Disagree. It’s just that it’s traditional for MMOs to encourage grinding, it doesn’t mean that it’s inescapable.

IAMANDLOVE.3095:

I had high expectation for heart of thorn and so far I must admit I love every bit of the mastery system grind it is simply brilliant.

I actually do like the mastery system. I actually feel as though most of the complaints about the masteries that are flooding the forum are actually brought on by the requirement to collect skill points for the elite specialisations.

If you take out the specific goal that forces you to get to certain places that need masteries, you eliminate a lot of the frustration. It’s awful when you need to get a skill point, only to be rejected because the person refuses to fight you due to not having a mastery (Why can’t I just attack him and force him to defend himself?).

But when I had no actual goal set by the game, and was just waundering around the map and exploring during the beta, I’d see the things that required masteries, and just move on, because I was losing very little by not having them, then I’d simply come back once I did, it actually added to the experience.

IAMANDLOVE.3095:

As a matter of fact i dont feel like I am grinding rather I am working towards some mysterious big goal! My only complaint would be I feel there is not enough grind!

I don’t feel like I’m working toward anything with them, but it definitely didn’t feel like grinding until they became necessary to unlock mechanics, and no, there is definitely enough grind.

Spurrlock.3219:

No one’s putting a gun to my head but I’m definitely being forced to complete a large portion of the jungle before the rest of the content. And that sucks because I’m loving the jungle. Its beautiful and awesome and I want to take my time with it, but more than that I want to be able to use elite specs because that effects every other stream of gw2 content, so it looks like I’m rushing the jungle.

In a perfect world I could enjoy the jungle with my elite spec, instead being forced to (nearly) complete the jungle if I want to use that elite spec in dungeons, fractals, wvw, and guild halls.

I feel more or less the same way. When I played through the story, I waited months locking myself out of anything vaguely story related until they fixed it after the NPE changes so that I wouldn’t ruin the experience for myself, then when going through it talked to every NPC, exhausted the entire dialogue of each, and stopped occasionally just to savor it.

With the way that this is structured, locking class mechanics designed to fix holes in the base classes behind going through multiple maps, thus forcing a mad dash through it in order to get the points to play the class I want to play though HoT with really ruined any sense of atmosphere. I finally finished it, but now I’m familiar with more than half of the maps in the expansion.

The hero point gating completely ruined half of the open world form me by turning it into a scavenger hunt instead of an adventure that I can go through at my own pace for its own sake. If they’d given my the option, I’d have just secluded myself in PvP to avoid spoiling it until I had everything that I needed to play through in a continuous way, but SPvP was given no methods with which to progress masteries or skill points.

The whole idea that we were sold the game on was that the game was supposed to be enjoyable to play because it’s fun, not so that we could prepare to have fun and then have fun after.

I’m holding off on the story until I can play it in a continuous session instead of segmenting it, but my friend who has been doing it told me that some of the steps require masteries in order to do them.

Does anyone have a guide on which masteries I should get before beginning it?

PopeUrban.2578:

Eponet.4829:

PopeUrban.2578:

If you don’t have fun playing the game, what makes you think you’ll have fun playing the game after you get all those hero points and mastries unlocked?

Personal experience. I hated the grind to get the 14 skill points I needed to unlock the third trait section on chronomancer. Playing it is fun, it was fun during the beta weekends, but the grind to get those skill points taught me to hate Maguuma.

Exploring is much more fun when you’re not being constantly directed to specific points and you can just play at your own pace instead of being rushed through to pick up the mechanics that were introduced to fix inherent flaws in the base classes.

This is a thing that I see popping up a lot in this thread. People are playing characters they hate to access elite specs that they like.

What’s funny, I think, is that only people who played the betas feel this way.

I don’t know what I’d do about it in anet’s case. I understand the intent for elite specs to be meaningful progression. That doesn’t jibe with people who want instant gratification. You either build a progression system or you hand out the specs for free.

personally, I’m fine with it, and I play a thief, so my elite is basically completely unusable until I max it out. I’m having fun working on it while doing the story and meta chains etc.

But then again I actually like playing my character and am using the elite to simply refine, not replace a build or playstyle.

The daredevil is in no way unusable until it’s maxed out, it’s actually one of the better ones in that regard. When people tested it in the beta, the people that actually liked the class were actually predominantly the people that didn’t select any grandmaster traits, as the new dodges actually felt worse than the regular one.

Plus, thief is a great base class for exploration anyway. I was actually on the fence about whether I would trade out anything for it if I could. It’s similar to elementalist in that regard.

PopeUrban.2578:

Eponet.4829:

PopeUrban.2578:

<3 good luck out there, some of those are tough

I wouldn’t say that they were tough. Of the fourteen that I did and others that I skipped, they were either impossible due to mastery gating/dps racing as a low personal dps class without bringing in other people or trivially easy.

The only somewhat interesting one was the place of power inside the poison vines that I had to set up three illusions for, blink to the point, begin the channel, distort, and then when distortion was about to end, use blurred inscriptions with signet of midnight.

Which was basically a repeat of the Shrine of Melandru hero point, and a stealthless version of the shrine of Balthazar.

Most of the time when people say “impossible” I interpret that as “difficult”

The bloom that spawns the timed champ for instance. It was impossible, then I altered my traits for a specific champ (the terragriff) and respawned it until he showed up. Boom, done!

They’re not literally impossible, just harder to get to, harder to fight, or simply a longer grind on a mastry track. So, yeah, in terms of difficulty as related to core hero points, they’re generally more difficult in one way or another. Not saying it’s all necessarily interesting difficulty, but in a technical sense its increased difficulty.

When I say impossible, I mean in terms of at that point. i.e. “It’s effortless if you have the mastery, impossible if you don’t”, and some classes have easier times than others when it comes to DPS racing a timer, and the champion terragriff wasn’t actually a big deal compared to some of the ones in the later maps. Plus, thieves are great solo damage classes, your experiences aren’t exactly going to be typical of the standard mesmer.

Grinding mastery points isn’t difficult or interesting, it’s just grinding.

PopeUrban.2578:

If you don’t have fun playing the game, what makes you think you’ll have fun playing the game after you get all those hero points and mastries unlocked?

Personal experience. I hated the grind to get the 14 skill points I needed to unlock the third trait section on chronomancer. Playing it is fun, it was fun during the beta weekends, but the grind to get those skill points taught me to hate Maguuma.

Exploring is much more fun when you’re not being constantly directed to specific points and you can just play at your own pace instead of being rushed through to pick up the mechanics that were introduced to fix inherent flaws in the base classes.

PopeUrban.2578:

<3 good luck out there, some of those are tough

I wouldn’t say that they were tough. Of the fourteen that I did and others that I skipped, they were either impossible due to mastery gating/dps racing as a low personal dps class without bringing in other people or trivially easy.

The only somewhat interesting one was the place of power inside the poison vines that I had to set up three illusions for, blink to the point, begin the channel, distort, and then when distortion was about to end, use blurred inscriptions with signet of midnight.

Which was basically a repeat of the Shrine of Melandru hero point, and a stealthless version of the shrine of Balthazar.

Zaron.1987:

ReaverKane.7598:

Sure, there’s no MMO without grind, but they could not have removed the experience gains from Halloween stuff from giving mastery progression. Many of us were planning on using the halloween as a jump start for those masteries, instead of having to just repeat content.

its a kind of timegate. same as the exp reduce at dungeons.

Anet dont want that all rush their (tyria) masteries in few days and lacking content.

They’d be lacking content just as much as without it. All it does is redistribute where the lack of content is so that it happens earlier.

BlusterWolf.2103:

I was expecting with my map completed characters I will be able to enjoy content with new elites and say goodbye to old base classes cuz I got bored of them after hundreds hours of playing. Now, WoW, Anet you really out done yourself, you really expect ppl to grind through your new content and still be as excited as now to play through them with mentally burnt out farmed “new” elites after like 2 months of grinding?

Well, with world completion it took me about 6 hours to unlock the third grandmaster trait, which is far from 2 months.

That said, I’ve now learned to hate Maguuma and want nothing more to do with it. The ridiculous grind completely killed all sense of exploration as I just chased points on a map instead of exploring at my own pace.

When will you be giving me back the crown you borrowed?

You promised to put it back in my hands yourself.

Methal.9045:

after release lol
working as intended? lol boy did they EARN that level 80 =D

They did. That’s 19 and a half PvP tracks.

Shoe.5821:

you don’t need 400 HP to use the elite specs. half of it is complete nonessentials.

Right, except that the entire master and grandmaster trait lines are gated behind picking up every single other adept trait and skill first, regardless of whether or not you want them.

200 points doesn’t even get you the ability to select 3 traits.

201 on my mesmer

Like 0-50 on every other character

Sarie.1630:

Yargesh.4965:

Another storm in a teacup event. Wonder what the next end of the world will be?

It’ll be when they find out that in order to level a Revenant you can only do so in WvW, given it’s in the mists, in order to attune your new Revenant to the magic of the mists.

Oh, and that you can’t use Level Tomes.

Wahey.

No, no, no. You can only use level tomes earned through SPvP. That’s also in the mists.

The test has some major issues, like… they classified online groups the same way as ones in the same room.

I love working with people in the same room as me as we discuss different approaches. I hate working with the typical groups I end up with online who would rather just look up the answer and follow a script rather than working things out for themselves, and then if that fails just immediately quit.

Anyways, I ended up with

Mastermind: 20
Conqueror: 16
Daredevil: 15
Seeker: 10
Survivor: 7
Socialiser: 5
Achiever: -10

You like solving puzzles and devising strategies as well as defeating impossibly difficult foes, struggling until you eventually achieve victory, and beating other players.

» No Commitment: You dislike being asked to complete everything, preferring to pick and choose which tasks you will attempt, or simply messing around with a game.

It’s almost as if I’m the sort of player that wants to “Play my way”, prefers gameplay that’s fun to play rather than because you get as a rewards, and would rather “Have fun instead of preparing to have fun.”

The weird thing is, in Demon’s/Dark Souls, I actually have completed everything, spread across multiple characters with differing builds.

On the four option one

The Innovator

11% Ace, 39% Effector, 67% Innovator and 50% Strategist!

Innovators are players that like to “seek”, be it seeking new places, new inventions, new skills, new knowledge, and the like. Innovators are self-oriented in that their focus lies largely on their individual experience and what that experience can do for them as players. While this might make Innovators sound selfish, many Innovators enjoy working with other players and using their skills to benefit a group. However, the group interaction is not the end-all and be-all of game play for the Innovator, and it’s absence from a game is not as detrimental to the Innovator’s enjoyment as it would be to an Effector or a Strategist.

Innovators are often investigators: they are drawn to a game because of the appeal of discovery, be it the discovery of new places, new possibilities, or even uncovering plots and unraveling riddles. Innovators enjoy learning for their own sake, whether or not their knowledge might benefit a group, and sometimes might be reluctant to share what they’ve found with others under the attitude of “go find it yourself”. They are not generally hoarders, however, and are usually excited to share their passions and discoveries with others if given the opportunity. On the field, most Innovators are to some degree mildly active players, and tend to take positions that allow them to use their knowledge and skills to make sharp attacks rather than prolonged straight-on combat.

Why do we need access to taunt? We have the most reliable access to group wide aegis, especially with the new shield skill.

Selectively blocking attacks is far better than a couple second long CC effect that’s blocked by defiance on anything worth using it on anyway.

Ragnar the Rock.3174:

Save yourselves granting the guardian resistance is practically a must nowdays or you will likely kill yourself in team play.

Running it alongside contemplation on purity is also an option. You might take one tick, but unless you’re running no vitality and your entire team is covered in conditions, or you’re almost dead anyway, one tick is unlikely to kill you.

ProtoGunner.4953:

A mount usually gives a speed boost of 60-100% which is much more than the boosts. Also, here are areas where running on foot is just silly and takes long like in areas where WPs are often contested or WvW.

Also, after playing like 100 other games (Witcher, Destiny, Batman: Arkham Knight, Heroes of the Storm etc.) I came back to GW2 and constantly want to summon my horse/car/sparrow etc., be cause it feels so natural to have them in such games.

The areas are designed taking into account the speed at which you can travel. If they introduced more speed boosts, it would result in the areas being designed to take the same amount of time as it otherwise would if you have the speed boosts, but even longer without them.

While it would seem nice in areas that were already designed without such speed boosts in mind, in any new content it would just result in more empty space that makes travel on foot take even longer, and using a mount take the same time as if it were simply designed without mounts, but possessing the same annoyances as WoW’s mounts have, the main one being the constant remounting breaking the flow of the game every time you want to do something, and the boring travel in which you just press straight forward rather than actively using your abilities.

Kaiser.9873:

SpyderArachnid.5619:

quercus.9261:

Well if it’s 170 points to unlock the trait lines I can live with that. As long as I don’t have to buy weapon skins as well to get the traits unlocked.

A pewpew ranger in WvW is useless but a druid won’t be. 170 points is the minimum required to even bother logging a ranger in to WvW to get more points by doing WvW. 170 points is the starter level to not being useless.

I grinded out those 170 points in Tyra and didn’t enjoy one second of it. I did it only because that is what was datamined. I doubt more then 10 hp in the new maps will be available without masteries.

Already confirmed to be 400 hero points. A character who has done everything in Tyria, should have around 200+ points. Then you can get 10 per hero challenge in the Magumma. So you’ll need to do at least 20-40 hero challenges in Magumma to get your elite spec.

As I read it it will take 400 for the entire unlock, which will be traits and cosmetics. It is entirely reasonable that we could unlock the entire trait system with the 170, and then spend the other 230 on cosmetic items.

Colin stated that there are skills and traits that require more than 200 points.

“It’s 400 points total to unlock everything in an elite spec training line – I just can’t remember off hand how many points folks have currently if they have done all the existing ones, but it’s right around 200. The rest you’ll need to earn in jungle to unlock the deeper skills/traits/etc. in the training line.”

RapidSausage.4620:

I’m a dedicated wvwer and that’s a bad idea imo, it defeats the point of the new pve content and defeats the point of wvw ranks.

I’m more than willing to do pve for hero points as long as it’s the new map, plus you probably won’t need all 400 points for the core functionality of the elite spec, i believe the bulk of the points will go towards skins and the likes so it’s a pretty good deal.

The bulk of the points are going to be needed for actual functionality.

“It’s 400 points total to unlock everything in an elite spec training line – I just can’t remember off hand how many points folks have currently if they have done all the existing ones, but it’s right around 200. The rest you’ll need to earn in jungle to unlock the deeper skills/traits/etc. in the training line.”

Outright stating that there are skills/traits in the 2nd half of the track.

If the bulk are going toward cosmetics, then they’re cosmetics placed early on in the trait line that are blocking access to the important parts.

Liewec.2896:

so many PVEers in here to say “i disagree, give me them all!” what a shock…

we earned them, they didn’t, they want them anyway.

when was the last time you saw a PVPer turning the tables and moaning to be given wings of the sunless, or any of the countless PVE weapon skins that never made it to PVP?

It doesn’t need to have anything to do with PvE vs PvP, it’s about available vs unavailable.

The Glorious armor is PvP exclusive, but it’s still available, the tribal/stalwart armor, isn’t PvP exclusive, it’s not available at all.

Sizer.3987:

although something so specific as “+% damage in reaper shroud” would be bad since other classes wouldnt get any use out of them)

That would be great.

I wouldn’t want to end up having to grind for say, dragonhunter just for the runes with no intention to play a DH if they happen to be useful to a chronomancer.

What about a machine gun stream of ravens?

Miellyn.6847:

yeah 50g, are you serious? fractals lvl 50 are 20g
expect 250g+, most likely even higher if it ever happens

Didn’t they say that it was like a 10% chance of an ascended item per boss? IT sounds as though the rewards aren’t as backloaded as fractals are. If anything, it’s should probably be cheaper given that fractal 50s have a higher than 10% chance at the end than the 10%.

250 for a full run through perhaps.

Derenek.8931:

Skins aren’t as important as stat swapping. This makes them suddenly more powerful than ascended gear. All players will eventually feel they have to have that gear to be part of end game

Or…for the same price you could make like 20 ascended weapons, all of which can contain the ideal sigil for their stat set rather than having to share, and can be spread across multiple characters to avoid having to transfer all your gear every time you play something else.

AntVenom.9431:

I think we should have Runes maybe even sigils for the elite specializations, for instance maybe reaper runes with power toughness or power condi, with a on 3 perk, giving you like a sigil of fire ability but frost because chill is vary heavy on reaper as of right now, or a X amount of (Trait) is converted to an X amount of (Trait.) and a on 6 with extra damage in reaper shroud or something. I think this would be awesome if legendary armor had 2 rune slots like I predicted ;3. And maybe a corresponding sigil to the class?

I don’t think your prediction is going to happen, at least not in HoT.

They already said that ascended armor would remain the highest tier, which it wouldn’t be if legendary was made strictly better than it rather than equal.

eldrin.6471:

It takes 4,860,359 xp to lvl from 1-80 now they lock 1 mastery track behind 17million xp.
sadly i already bought the expansion and since i hate grind it looks like il be locked out of large chunks of it.

You can’t really use hard numbers for that. The xp gain for most things actually tends to be based on a percentage of the xp needed to level, so, while you need much less xp to level from 2 to 3, you also get much less for doing the same thing.

Morfedel.4165:

Please explain how this is any different from leveling from 1 to 80. Or, you know, the leveling experience in any MMORPG.

Also, consider this. For those of you complaining about stuff being gated in terms of exploration, it took me maybe an hour to unlock hang-gliding 1, which is the single most important of the skills for getting around. It was trivial.

Leveling to 80 can be done in base Tyria, WvWvW, or even SPvP, whereas Maguuma masteries can only be advanced in Maguuma, a region that, unless they haven’t announced anything for, doesn’t have heart quests, only has four maps, most of which we wont be able to get map completion xp for until we have most of the masteries anyway, doesn’t have dungeons, and can’t be contributed to via WvWvW or SPvP.

Apparently the beta weekend masteries were actually accelerated in order to allow people to test them, and unless there’s something not shown, the only ways to advance them have been the personal story, which you can only get XP from once, or doing the same event chain over and over.

On the plus side though, people with a dozen level 80s can probably do the personal story with all of them for a good amount of XP due to masteries being account bound.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

eldrin.6471:

To max out one mastery we will need to grind out 17mil xp.
What happened to no grind? I have been looking forward to this expansion for months now a week before launch i find out this.

The don’t “grind it out.” Keep in mind that before specializations, you gained a skill point every 254,00 xp, so a million is equivalent to leveling 4 times. 17 million is leveling up < 68 times, i.e. similar to leveling up new toons now.

There are only three ways they could have set it up:

1. Drastically reduce the amount of XP to max.
2. Drastically increase the number of masteries, so that you have to choose carefully.
3. Keep the number of masteries manageable and require 17 million ish xp.

(1) would mean people would level up fast and run out of things to do. (2) would mean having to make tons of spreadsheets to keep track of the different options, something that seems to be unpopular. Or (3), the current system: a manageable number of masteries with high XP requirements.

Do you have a fourth alternative that offers the same degree of customization, doesn’t get fully maxed by the “fastest” players in a few days, and remains something we can manage with the types of UI we see in the game?

Or (4), the current trait system.

You can get points to unlock it by completing specific content (i.e. hero challenges), or just get the XP (Unlock everything at 80) for people that don’t enjoy the specific content.

Preferably tying the specific content to challenging solo content, which is something that’s currently lacking, and will probably always be lacking if there’s anything exclusive behind it, so, putting a fast track as a reward for completing it, but that players unable/unwilling to play it can skip by just grinding xp would be the ideal sort of reward for such content.

Additionally, the kind of people that will be aiming for challenging solo content are also the kind of players who can deal with having multiple options available to them in a short period of time, and are far less likely to need gating in order to avoid being overwhelmed.

Morfedel.4165:

How many rpgs of any kind out there doesn’t have some kind of leveling?

I spent years playing on a Neverwinter Nights roleplay server where you literally just created your character on your own computer within limits (Level set to 30, no items above effective item level 20).

Leveling is the most unimaginative way of adding a sense of progression. For instance, progression in SPvP comes from actually getting better at the game, not because playing mind numbing tasks for longer but never learning anything entitles you to having higher stats or more traits.

In the server I played on, there were just so many areas that it would take ages to actually get through each of them, that, and the fact that hanging around the Red Lion Inn’s bar and chatting was so much fun, assuming we weren’t charting an expedition into the Orchards of the kitten ed in the infinite layers of the abyss, Reclaiming our souls from devils in the Hells after accidentally selling them, breaking out of the prison planes of Carcerei after being trapped in its deepest layer, joining up for a stint in the blood war, journeying deep into the hearts of outland in order to reach the library of thoth, and then reading through the tomes contained within in the search of a description depicting the scene described by an prophetic character viewed within their dreams in order to figure out where it was that they were seeing, staging a heist on the god of thieves in the depths of Gehenna, before reaching the treasury getting caught and trying to escape, dealing with players plotting to overthrow one of the factions and gathering support, etc, and that’s not even counting the portals, all tied to random easily obtainable junk that we’d discover from just hoarding everything as we explored in order to try and find each of them and determine just which item corresponded to each key.

Character progression is a crutch that’s only needed if your gameplay isn’t interesting enough to generate a sense of progression from developing your skill as a player/You don’t have enough content to keep people interested.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Yall forgot the shards though. If he uses the PvP pots after launch he will get those shards that he can sell if he wants.

Don’t forget the transmutation charges though.

The shards aren’t just being added, they’re replacing transmutation charges.

So, what do you value more? Shards of Glory, or Transmutation Charges?

We could use zealot trinkets in PvE too.

leftyboy.9358:

Eponet.4829:

leftyboy.9358:

Time gating is nothing new. It’s been in every single game I’ve ever played. It’s in place to always give you something to journey towards. If everything was given to you all at once how long would you play; be honest now.

Well, I ended up at rank 80 in SPvP.
Played Super Smash Bros. for hours even when I had everything unlocked, all of which I never used.
Ran through Devil May Cry 4 multiple times with everything unlocked.
Played Dark Souls PvP repeatedly when I had no need for humanity
Played Starcraft 2 for 10s of hours despite having every unit and map available from the start and no friends to play it with.
Back when it was active, played on a local vault NWN RP server as pretty much my only game played for years.

I’d say… quite a while unless the gameplay is awful.

You mention you played those games for hrs, 10’s of hrs, repeatedly , and multiple times. All terms for relatively short gameplay return once you had everything.

Well, to put it in context. When I was younger, my friends and I played it at some point almost every time we had people over.

If you think getting to rank 80 in SPvP took a short amount of time, you clearly haven’t done it or have a /very/ skewed perception of what short means.

A single run of Bloody Palace alone in DMC 4 takes 1-2 hours assuming that you don’t fail and restart at any point ever, and I did. I still haven’t beaten the Dante version of it yet. The campaign takes around 4-6 hours each time if you’re not speedrunning it while not ever failing, and, at higher difficulties, you will unless you’ve already played it for long enough that you’ve memorised every enemy pattern or cheat by using items.

I have well over 100 hours of Dark Souls registered in Steam alone, while I was primarily a console player during its early years, the majority of which were spent in PvP.

Starcraft 2 I played a game or two most nights for several months.

The Neverwinter Nights RP server, well, that was much longer than any of those except possibly SSB. What do you consider necessary to count as a long period of time? 10000 hours?

leftyboy.9358:

Time gating is nothing new. It’s been in every single game I’ve ever played. It’s in place to always give you something to journey towards. If everything was given to you all at once how long would you play; be honest now.

Well, I ended up at rank 80 in SPvP.
Played Super Smash Bros. for hours even when I had everything unlocked, all of which I never used.
Ran through Devil May Cry 4 multiple times with everything unlocked.
Played Dark Souls PvP repeatedly when I had no need for humanity
Played Starcraft 2 for 10s of hours despite having every unit and map available from the start and no friends to play it with.
Back when it was active, played on a local vault NWN RP server as pretty much my only game played for years.

I’d say… quite a while unless the gameplay is awful.

Qugi.2653:

Press one key to do two thing not allowed. If you make key that jump and dodge from one key press against rules. No different than make key that jump and for example use skill 2 at same time. Or key that say dodge and use skill 1 at same time.

What about a key that pressed cntr+t at the same time to target something?

Maaason.5843:

i just want to look at players gear so that i know how much i could be improving

You don’t need to look at their gear for that. It’s simple, there are common, fine, masterwork, rare, exotic, and ascended/legendary in ascending order of power.

There are different stat/rune sets, but they all have tradeoffs, so you shouldn’t just look at what someone else has and blindly copy them.

So, how much you can improve your /gear/ is the difference between whatever tier you have and ascended, how much you can improve overall isn’t something you can tell by looking at gear.

TJgalon.5012:

I do not mind the mastery system. It sorta like, give me to many options and I’ll choose none. This way, with Gliding first anyways, i can ease into it, and still have fun exploring with my partner.

Oh wow.

I thought it was okay so long as it was account bound, but you just worded it to make it sound like the New Player Experience/ the 2nd iteration of traits.

I can accept the fact that it’s an attempt to slow down the rate at which people go through their content, but please don’t try to claim that it’s a great thing because it makes it easier to get into.

Having everything available right away is by far the better option as it allows you to see and experiment with it holistically, and see how things synergise without spending hours with each individual aspect in a vacuum.

Having played WoW in the past, I found an issue in that while leveling, /so/ many people in my guild actually formed terrible rotations that they had to break their habit of using once they finally got the rest of their skills, because they had them handed out piecemeal, and so they just took their basic rotation and stuck with it all the way to 100.

If anything, the mastery point gating is the type that’s likely to cause people to choose no option. Look at what happened with traits and gear.

With ascended costing so much to make, no one experiments with it, they either don’t make it at all, or they ask what the best set to make is, and then make that.

Under trait system 2, people would again, not buy traits until someone told them exactly what build to use, and then very rarely change from it.

Investment kills variety.

Derenek.8931:

ok, just so you guys are aware.
exotic to ascended isn’t merely 10%

it’s a difference in 30 in the primary stat on amulets and 20 on rings and accessories
The a change of 5-15 on armor and weapon stats.

that’s a 150 point increase per stat. That’s equivalent to ten levels of level gain.
so
lvl 80=blue gear
lvl 85=green gear
lvl 90=yellow gear
lvl 100=exotic
lvl 110=ascended
lvl 115=legendary

thats what is equivalent to a 30 level stat difference between a character with standard gear and a character with ascended gear.

Try fighting a level 50 as a level 80 and you’ll know just how big a difference equipment stats make. Heck, fight a level 70, thats only a ten level difference and you’l still wipe the floor with them.

One fix needs to be made. Legendary and Ascended have the same stats.

Ross Biddle.2367:

Fay.2357:

Projectseph.2670:

What about WvW pvp?

I’m guessing that the fact illusions disappear when the target dies doesn’t create as much of an issue due to the fact that other players wont die as quickly as a run-of-the-mill mob?

You’re correct, they don’t have that problem there.

No, in WvW and PvP group fights they’re close to unusable for entirely unrelated reasons -_-. They’re so low on health that any sort of aoe pressure smushes them instantly.

They can also be kited relentlessly by highly mobile opponents xD

When Hot releases, Chronomancer will get wells and a shield to beat on the enemy with in large scale fights.

and super speed illusions for the kiting issue

Ross Biddle.2367:

FYI, Mesmer will suck until you’ve unlocked all your trait lines etc.

Ehh, shatter builds do okay with just dueling in standard PvE. Open world enemies tend to die quickly enough that the lack of sustained damage isn’t a problem unless you’re soloing champions.

I’m predicting that Dragonhunter is actually probably going to end up seeing a lot of use in PvE.

It’s also worth noting that ranger, mesmer and necromancer are generally considered not worthwhile as base classes, and the power engineer that scrapper pushes isn’t either, engineer tend to be condition builds as it is.

Meanwhile, the elite specs that are seen as the worst are on the classes that already have a very strong base.

Daroon.1736:

XsWalrus.4371:

Alrighty, thanks.

I was about to be like, “I need more tomes.”

Nobody needs more tomes, I think everybody has enough to level up more characters to max level than they can possibly play on any given day.

If you’re an SPvP player anyway, then again, they’re put in due to SPvP not giving XP, PvE/WvW players have probably just leveled up those characters from playing them elsewhere.

Mesmer illusions are weird.

I think the justification is that they’re projected directly into the mind of the target, hence why phantasm summons can miss, thus, when the mind they’re contained within dies, they no longer exist.

But… they can also be seen and attacked by enemies other than their targeted foe, and the illusory berserker and warden deal AoE damage, while the warden literally reflects projectiles.

So… I have no idea what’s up with them.

Wake up probably

Mine is chronomancer, the only issue I have with it is that a certain part of it is well alacrity is overtuned to the point that people are going to complain if you don’t use them.

When the only complaint is Warrior Banner Syndrome, it’s a good sign.

Vella the knight.6072:

why should I get ascended armor anyways now since there is gonna be legendary armor that will be any stat i need for the armor type. So glad i choose to make more money over ascended armor that only real place in fractals. and as they said you could have mix ascended pieces and exotics I mean the most basic of ascended kitten should be every item is ascended besides the armor

If it’s like legendary weapons, you’ll still need a different set of runes. A condition build with scholar runes would probably actually be worse than an exotic set running the right runes, and they’ll probably also cost as much as 10+ ascended pieces of the same type.

Legendaries sound like a good investment in theory, but, in practice they’re not all that great.

Nike.2631:

Astralporing.1957:

Maybe because people would rather like that content to be about skill. Yes, i know why raiders would prefer it that way – it lets them pretend to be skilled, when the real difficulty lies in a completely different category.
Grind is not challenge. It’s just boring.

And here I thought the genuinely skillful would relish the challenge of something that tests them to the utmost rather than being trivialized by having a higher tier of gear than it’s designed for.

We’ve already seen content scaled for exotic gear in a post-ascended world is not a challenge. It’s boring.

I want a fight that takes BOTH skill and preparation.

The ideal solution would be to scale down ascended gear to exotic/scale up exotic to ascended.

Ascended armor is simply too prohibitively expensive for it to be reasonable to expect people to experiment with different sets of it. It completely removes the element of playing around with your build to see how to approach things.

Customisation is fun, progression is not, and ascended gear ruins the former.

Preparation is only enjoyable when you have to think about it, i.e. tailoring your builds for the encounter based on your understanding of the mechanics involved. Just grinding objectively higher stat gear doesn’t do that. There’s no trade off to make to it, the trait system is interesting because in order to take one trait, you have to forego another in that spot, with ascended gear, you don’t end up with more of one stat at the expense of another, you just get more of it.