I REALLY like this update. The new map is beautiful, the new soundtrack is great, listening the NPCs singing with the synched song in the background is amazing, and the search for the crystals is very fun. The common dialogues and all the talk about Glint are very nice.
Still, there is one small thing annoying me. Considering that:
…Acquiring the recipes is annoying. We have relatively little time, it’s a gamble which more often than not gives unwanted results (and the drop rate of desired items only decreases the more recipes you have unlocked), and it’s more of the RNG that is so common in GW2.
We can buy the recipes from the Trading Post, sure, but the way we acquire the recipes isn’t exactly good. I wish we had a less annoying and more reliable system in place.
Sorry but your point is invalid, the gear highly surpasses all gear choices for my hybrid style of gameplay and there is simply nothing that beats it, I will not even say what else I want to say for fear of being reported.
Ridiculous. Your “hybrid build” would be better served by a combination of current available gear. Go on, tell us your build so we can prove how your “highly” Celestial gear is bad for it.
A lot of lag here (in Brazil) right now. It’s always at this time of the day that I get the most lag.
We have a common mentality brought from other MMOs, and exemplified by many topics in this forum, in which people think the point behind crafting is to make gold.
It’s not.
And the proof is in how ArenaNet implemented Celestial items. They are account bound when crafted (take a look in game, if you have a character who has learned the recipe for one of the armor pieces or the weapons). Which means, the most time consuming crafted items are going to give exactly zero gold to crafters.
IMO, this is great. The point of crafting is – guess what! – to craft. To make the items with the stats you want, without needing other players to buy it from or to run dungeons with in case there is a popular dungeon with the stats you want. And to make the skin you want, if you enjoy one of the crafted skins.
I believe ArenaNet could use this system to greatly improve crafting. If all crafted items were account bound, ArenaNet would be able to increase the amount of available skins and reduce the crafting grind (the grind for ectos is ridiculous, not to mention how, even if you craft as you level, you will still need to make a lot of items you won’t ever use just to increase crafting levels).
When crafters become able to craft Ascended items, I hope they will also be account bound like this.
The way they use cooldowns is infact removing all “need” of grinding and still make the items valuable. Something similar should have been in place for all exotics imo so crafting infact was something worth spending time doing.
Smart move anet
Armor will be tradeable but the charged quartz is accountbound and on a 24 cd.
Armor is account bound, like the weapons. You can see it on the item description of any character who has learned an item recipe. If by making “the items valuable” you think you will make gold with those Celestial items, well, you’re wrong.
To sum it up. Why has it suddenly become a ‘first come first serve’ policy where players that discover exploits get rewarded, while those that come late or don’t exploit get a kick in the nuts?
What has happened guys?
I think ArenaNet has learned that the GW2 community is dominated by exploiters, farmers, grinders and addicts (who in the end are the same thing), so if they banned all exploiters they would end with next to no players.
Take a look at dungeons now. Ascalon Catacombs today is done mostly through exploits, by hitting bosses from where they cannot hit you, even if it would be faster to kill the boss in other ways.
That’s who’s playing this game with you.
ArenaNet achieved something incredible by making a game in which it’s so easy to play with other people, only to have it filled with people who you don’t want to play with.
I really like the animation for the third Necromancer dagger skill – the character holds the dagger up and uses it to slice its own hand, making a nice slashing sound. It’s very fitting with the whole “sacrificial dagger” theme.
Using full Celestial stats (armor, runes, weapons, trinkets), all of exotic rarity, plus having a 15/15/15/15/10 spread, an Elementalist would end with more or less:
Thoughts? I wonder if the high Critical Damage, together with sigils increasing Precision, would be enough to offset a bit the low Power.
Why couldn’t the achievement skins be unlocked like the Hall of Monuments?
That’s how the achievement skins work. Couldn’t you wait a few hours to see by yourself before making a topic complaining on an issue that doesn’t exist?
The lack of understanding or compassion for others in this thread is astonishing.
Keep in mind that, while I wouldn’t use the same words as the poster you are quoting, he is right when he hints that not all content is for every player. I don’t like sPvP, but I’m not complaining about the new sPvP map. If my connection was so bad that I couldn’t do jump puzzles, and it has been very bad these last nights, I wouldn’t complain about the jump puzzles in this update – it may not be content for me, but it is nice for other people. Same with those who have some kind of disability – that’s a pity, but not all content in the game will cater to them, just like all content in the game doesn’t cater to me, and that actually improves the game itself.
Does anyone else feel like laughing at the OP now, considering how cheap everything is?
is that the first chest in our queue is the one we are waiting for next
Maybe that’s why the first chest in the queue is called “Points to the next reward”.
Bug or lasck of info?
Lack of reading.
The first chest was the one for 100 points. The second chest was the one for 500 points. Tomorrow you will get the chest for 1.000 points, with the weapon skin.
Massive lag as I write. Everything else using the internet is working fine.
Yes. It’s called Gem Store.
(No, there isn’t.)
Either they are cool because they are tough, or trivial because everyone can get them
The complaints you are talking about exist in the context of the new reward system for Achievement points. So it’s neither a question of “achievements are cool because they are tough” nor a question of “achievements are trivial because everyone can get them”.
It’s a question of “I want free stuff so please give me free achievement points”.
As soon as the reward system is implemented, the community will find ways to exploit the system as much as possible to get the achievement rewards. I can assure you that those doing the exploiting couldn’t care less about how achievements are meant to actually be a sign of something being achieved.
That’s the MMORPG community in a nutshell.
Dodging allows for greater build diversity without having to always resort to tanky builds
That’s not really what we see today. It’s all Bezeker gear; even in the few situations in which dodging is not the “end all be all” solution, the community believes it is and so still claims that the best tool would be Berzeker gear. Heh, it’s not hard to find people claiming that Berzeker gear is the best stats for all PvE, regardless of circunstance (and of number of enemies/attack speed/use of immobilize).
Removing the ability to dodge from some (not all) scenarios would add some diversity – at least in a few circunstances, it would become unquestionable that Berzeker gear is not the best option. This would finally remove the mentality that Berzeker is the best everywhere, and maybe people would begin seeing more variety even outside the dodge-less areas of the game.
There are 3 big candidates for all-stat items here:
Guardian
Elementalist
EngineerSince all 3 heal, inflict conditions, and do direct damage at the same time with almost any build you choose for them.
I’m curious to compare the stats of a full Celestial elementalist with a somewhat well rounded one using currently available stats. I doubt the full Celestial will be really better (I think it lacks enough Precision to use all that Critical Damage), but it will be something fun to play with once the build calculators get updated.
So now they’re selling level-up items on the Gem Store, behind some RNG… As much as it’s easy to level, that’s somewhat annoying.
A large majority of people find dungeons to be hard in this game for some reason.
Because when they ask for help or try to read guides in order to improve, or even just ask players in chat how to play better, they are given the same replies: “Go full Berzeker with full DPS stats”. It’s the most efficient way to play through content, and that’s because of dodging.
This mentality is bad for new or less experienced players. It tells them that unless they master a single mechanic, they are not going to become good. Removing dodge from some environments would force people to learn that mastering a single mechanic is not enough, at the same time it would force people to employ some diversity in their builds – suddently Bezeker with full DPS is not the best answer to everything.
Once that mentality is gone, applying the same concepts to the rest of the game would come naturally. But taking that first step requires extreme measures, such as removing the ability to dodge from CoF.
I wouldn’t want a Public Test Server on GW2. The community here is incredibly bad, so such server would end filled with whiners and exploiters using it for their own betterment in detriment to everyone else.
Culling has not been removed. I did Balthazar and Grenth yesterday with a very nice guild from Stormbluff Isle, and not only I couldn’t even see the name of a lot of players around me, I also couldn’t see the name of plenty of enemies.
I’m playing in high visual settings. Maybe that’s why I still have culling.
Make the legendary piece JUST the particle effect upgrade that can be applied to any armor piece
Not going to work.
It would look ugly, too, but one of the issues can be seen on the “Bazaar of the Four Winds” armors – ArenaNet has not figured out ways to allow players to dye armors with too many particle effects. That’s why we cannot dye the particle effects on CoF armors, and is probably why we can’t dye the BotFW armor.
Adding particle effects to existing armors would likely remove color customization from said armors, while giving no color customization to the particle effects themselves. In many ways, we would end with less unique looks, not more.
“Do you want to use Support skills?”
“No, just dodge whatever the enemy does.”
“Do you want to use gear other than Berzeker?”
“No, just dodge whatever the enemy does.”
Dodging is an issue. It has become a crutch. The belief that any kind of hit can be dodged (regardless if it’s true or not) has led to a “DPS only” mentality in which support is seen as useless (unless “Support” means applying Might or teleporting with a mesmer), and any stats combination other than Berzeker is seen as useless.
ArenaNet needs to change how encounters work in order to change the mentality behind this kind of reasoning. And, of course, in order to change the mentality, more dramatic measures are required than what it would take to simply make dodging less of a crutch.
I’m curious to see if the community can think of any way to deal with this issue. I’m against nerfing dodge or base endurance regeneration in the entire game, as I think those are good enough as they are in solo content.
One solution, IMO, would be to create environments in dungeons with negative endurance regeneration, so players cannot dodge. The boss fights in CoE path 2 are a perfect example of a situation in which the encounter would be greatly improved if dodging weren’t possible – players would be forced to understand how Subject Alpha’s attacks work and how to avoid them, instead of just dodging. Doing the same in all of CoF would also have interesting effects in the community.
lol, “zerker elitists”. Us “zerker elitists” just want to be efficient and for people to actually contribute their fair share to dungeons. You know, since it’s a party effort?
You are making two flawed assumptions:
Ergo, if players use Celestial gear or not doesn’t really matter to you.
instead it’s just three armour pieces that look the same for all three armour types
Looking the same for all armor types isn’t a major issue, IMO – it would give more options to the light armor users who want to look like a soldier, or to the medium armor users who don’t want to use the long leather coats.
The lack of a full set is what bothers me. I used to mix and match armors all the time in the original GW, but that’s something harder to do in GW2. I wish we could have full sets, even if they didn’t have all the particle effects of the shoulders, gloves and helmets.
im currently thinking warrior/thief/guardian. Thanks in advance for replies
Among those, I would pick Guardian, but this kind of question is better suited for the WvW subforum.
Skins
- Zenith weapon gallery (incomplete)
Dulfy, a question: is it me, or does the Zenith shortbow and staff’s animations change slightly when you use a skill? It looks like the green glow becomes somewhat orange.
The Shadow Behemoth still uses the old AOE circles.
He doesn’t. What you see is because he casts effects on a layer of water, and that’s what changes how they look.
Each point you earned can’t matter if you have like a 1k,2k,3k,4k tiers….And I have for example 4300 achievement points and the tier is for 4k. The 300 points rest are useless?
The 300 points are useful in that they bring you closer to 4500 for the next reward. See Dulffy’s guide here about how the system will work.
Creating a bank alt is not how “I” play
ArenaNet cannot cater to every whim of every single player. You are taking the “play as you want” comment out of context – you could say you want to play with 11 active skills instead of 10, yet ArenaNet would not listen to you.
There are already ways to deal with your issue. Either keep less items with you, or make alts. Inventory is something people will always complain about – there will always be someone who has a very strong believe that he/she NEEDS more and more and more, no matter how much inventory ArenaNet adds to the game.
I would be significantly happier if they were full sets.
But I actually understand why they are like they are. Making full sets would require significant work on each piece of avoid clipping; medium armor pants would need to be very different from heavy armor pants in order to avoid clipping with all those long coats.
I think the real issue is how ArenaNet moved away from the costume system they had in GW1. A costume was just a two sets piece – one covering the entire body, and one for the head. This allowed designers to create full “armor” sets without having to worry about clipping with individual pieces.
While I don’t disagree, look at ascended amulets/accessories, either laurels or guild commendations, both of which are time locked too
That makes sense to me considering how Ascended gear is more powerful than exotic gear, and one of the reasons why it was implemented was to be something slower to acquire.
Celestial exotic gear, in other hand, isn’t exactly more powerful than other pieces of Exotic gear. If anything, it will probably be less popular than Berzeker gear. I’m somewhat annoyed that one is so grindier than the other to get.
You also have 5 home instances, and while I was not able to complete the achievement to check…
Dulffy’s guide mentions the Quartz node in the personal instance is character based, so it’s only available to a character after that specific character has finished the BofFW meat achievement.
(edited by Erasculio.2914)
This is also due to the mindset change of playerbase. Guild Wars 2 is and was fun to play. It has only changed because we got used to it. It got old. Players got burnt out. What a lot of players really want is that “New” feeling. But no matter what that “New” feeling is no longer available.
I’m not sure that’s the only issue.
One of the reasons why I’m against farming is due to how I believe it creates a mentality in which players accept poor content just because it comes with a reward at the end.
Take a look at the recent Southsun event, for example. It had:
However, a lot of players went there to play. I’m willing to wager that this was because of the 200% buff to Magic Find and the guaranteed chests from the main dynamic events, regardless if the content was fun or not.
In other words, ArenaNet didn’t have to worry about the content being fun. Giving enough rewards was enough to make players flock to the area. This creates an issue – if ArenaNet doesn’t need to make fun content for people to play the game, just to give a lot of rewards, wouldn’t it be easier for the company to give up on fun content and just give reward after reward?
I think because they realise that the majority of their playerbase is likely to get somewhere with time, but maybe not with skill?
The question then is – is ArenaNet catering to time spent more than skill because most of their players have more free time than skill? Or do most Guild Wars 2 players have more time than skill because that’s the kind of player ArenaNet is catering to?
I dunno what the point is can someone tell me?
The point is that they have skins which some people enjoy looking at. If you think a Legendary is pretty enough to be worth all the trouble of getting one, go get one. If you don’t like how they look, don’t get one.
Per Dulffy’s guide here, we will now be able to craft Exotic Celestial armors and weapons. They require Charged Quartz Crystals, which require Quartz Crystals, and the entire system has a lot of time gates.
Regardless, it’s a new stats combination for armors and weapons. It won’t be as popular as Berzeker, of course, but…
MMOs are not about skill.
Stand in front of a dragon, press 1, go back to watching tv. Five minutes later, collect your loot.
As your example shows, MMORPGs are more often than not mediocre games. I don’t care about other MMOs… Why would Guild Wars 2 cater to time spent instead of skill? Just to be more of the same?
Here’s her very extensive guide.
I’m somewhat surprised with the way crafting works. This update adds Celestial craftable items, which IMO is great… But, the system feels somewhat grindy. We need:
So to make one Celestial item, we need:
Doesn’t this feel somewhat grindy to get a single item? It isn’t a matter of having something challenging to do… It’s just time gates.
Complaining that it will take YEARS to reach your goal is mistaken and shortsighted at best. The goals were intended to someone much more invested in the game
And why would ArenaNet want to reward people who play more time, as opposed to more skilled players? That makes sense in a pay to play MMO, for obvious reasons, but in GW2, it doesn’t.
That was a very pragmatic post Erasculio. I’m not sure why we butted heads so fiercely yesterday. I think we are of the same frame of mind, but from slightly different perspectives.
Probably because I keep butting heads with people, sorry :-P I agree with your post, too. I think ArenaNet needs to balance different perspectives, I’m not sure they’re quite there yet, but I guess there’s still hope.
Since most people do dragon/boss events in hope of an easy precursor
Actually, I think most people do those knowing they will get free, guaranteed rare items. Doing something for a small random chance to get what you want loses its appeal very quickly.
both were created for individuals who put a lot of time into the game
TBH, players who put a lot of time into the game doing mindless, easy content (aka farming, grinding, exploiting) don’t really deserve a reward. This kind of reward exists due to how pay to play MMORPGs work, but GW2 isn’t one of those games.
Rewards should be given for skilled players who can overcome challenging content, not for players willing to endure mindless content (that a bot can do better than a human being, for the records) while only focusing on a reward. People wonder why we have so little challenging content in GW2, but one of the main reasons is the way the playerbase is happy with the mediocrity of rewarding time spent, instead of rewarding skill.
Considering how one of the original goals of ArenaNet, a long time ago, was “skill > time spent”, it’s obvious they have changed for the worse over time.
It’s clear as day that rewards are set as a major issue among the lot of you. I want to know why rewards have to be such a priority. Why not aim at reworking replay value so people can have fun taking on missions without ever having a second thought about how they’ll be rewarded? Wouldn’t that be a better improvement?
Because players who have flocked to GW2 are MMORPG players, and they have been told by every other MMO that the reward is more important than content.
MMORPGs used to always follow the pay to play model, in which the best strategy to keep players around playing (and thus paying) was to make mediocre content that gives big rewards after a very long time – hence the “kill 10 rats” quests while very slowly levelling, and later raids for a 0.0001% chance to get the item that was the reason people were doing the raid in the first place.
WoW followed this model, was massively successful, and was the first MMORPG for a lot of people. This has led to a very high number of side effects:
(Do notice how, in Guild Wars 2, the time frame for the process above is exactly what would fit the release of Ascended gear, something ArenaNet itself described as poorly implemented. Guess what happened then?)
Then, the answer to your question, about why must the game be about rewards instead of about fun: because that’s how other MMORPGs are. Because that’s the model MMORPG developers are copying. And, more importantly, because that’s what MMORPG players demand. Trying to make anything different will only lead to a massive number of players complaining about the lack of grind, the lack of rewards, and so on.
That’s something ArenaNet has learned while they slowly turn their game from something that tried to focus on fun into something focusing sorely on the rewards, of which the best example was the latest Southsun update – mediocre content, but players went there in droves due to the 200% buff to Magic Find. That’s what MMORPG players want.
Why is this? What is it about this game that has so many people chronically convinced that they’re the underdog?
Because whenever someone fails, they are not willing to admit that they are to blame for their own failure, so they feel the need to blame someone else, in this case ArenaNet.
Players are not exactly very smart, on average. I think, PvE wise, Guardians, Mesmers, Necromancers and Elementalists are balanced now.
There is a wealth of solid player ideas and suggestions for fixes/improvements (e.g. the neglected “Profession” that is the Ranger and Warriors who are useless in PvP) but only a small handful seem to be acknowledged.
The great majority of which is very, very bad.
More often than not, gamers are not game designers, and there are very good reasons for that. Players are usually unable to understand how what they think would be “cool” for them would not be good for the game as a whole.
Developers are important, and their time is valuable. I would rather have developers working to improve the game than wasting their time reading bad suggestions in the forum.
The entire Suggestions forum was meant to be temporary, when this forum opened soon after release. If you consider how the search feature is broken in this forum, that means almost all suggestions are gone once they leave the first page (as there’s no way to search for suggestions about a given topic), so the entire section is pretty much useless. I wouldn’t be surprised if no one at ArenaNet even bothers to read it.
With the exception of Final Fantasy XI, the Final Fantasy games are not MMO’s. They are single player games, they run through a stream lined story from beginning to …yes, you guessed it, END. Oh and one more thing, there is plenty of grinding in many of the Final Fantasy games, you grind expirience, and certainly currency and you earn rewards for each and every kill.
Wrong about Final Fantasy, for the records. And the difference between single player games and MMOs is huge – reaching the level cap in single player games is often not intended, and it always (pre-WoW) isn’t the goal. In MMORPGs, to keep the addiction going, the level cap becomes the goal, to the detriment of everything else.
You are working from the flawed assumption that there being an end is a bad thing. It’s not. It used to be a bad thing from the point of view of pay to play games, for very obvious reasons (none of which is good for the players). In other MMORPGs, that’s not an issue; rather, it’s something ArenaNet already knows a way around.
My brother and I are leveling together, and I just thought that a great way to level might be to go to Orr
Go to WvW and join a zerg. You’ll level through the capturing events, and being scalled to 80, despite being a weak 80, will help you survive.
GW2 is a very young game and for what it has done and how it has improved so far they are doing a great job. I hate to break this to everyone who printed off the manifesto and are using like a pass/fail check list, but that document doesn’t mean anything anymore. It was a statement of intent and to put it simply, things change.
That sounds more like an excuse to accept subpar content. Two years is nothing; it’s the same thing as if Marvel announced they are going to release a movie about Iron Man, and two years later when the movie is released people learn that, despite being called “Iron Man”, it’s about Ant Man.
If ArenaNet promised in their Manifesto more than they could deliver, it’s still their fault for not being careful enough with their promises. There is no amount of fanboysm that can change how they simply couldn’t achieve what they stated as their goals.
There seem to be quite a few people that thought they were going to be playing an MMO with zero grind. This boggles my mind.
Ah, that explains it. Try reading here. And read my other posts to see how you are wrong when you claim there hasn’t been “one viable solution” to the issues currently afflicting MMORPGs.
(edited by Erasculio.2914)
The fact that we DO see an increased amount of MMOs alone shows that the genre is profitable enough to develop for. If it was suicide for the company nobody would do it.
Ignoring how many companies have comitted suicide by developing MMOs, failing, and then going bankrupt. Even big companies have been suffering – see what The Old Republic did to Bioware, or how Square Enix mentioned that another failure like Final Fantasy XIV could cost them the entire company.
It’s not only some people that have rose colored glasses and are unable to grasp reality. Game developers can also look at WoW and think they are going to get a piece of that pie too, believing all the many MMO failures are because those other companies weren’t as smart or innovative or whatever. Typical “it’s never going to happen to me!” mentality, only in the end it does.
MMORPGs are dying. It’s a deserved death, actually. MMORPG players deserve those games to die, too, to get rid of their addiction.
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