Guild Wars 2

darkace.8925:

tl;dr – How do I deal with grind? I don’t.

Your point is incredibly naive.

Saying basically “If you don’t like the grind, just don’t grind, it doesn’t make any difference to you if other people do” is simply, well, wrong. People don’t exist in a vacuum. And ArenaNet doesn’t have enough resources to make content in the game for everyone.

If you don’t like to grind… Sorry, but a lot of people do, and ArenaNet is not going to make content for everyone. It’s far easier to make content for grinders and farmers (since it’s mindless, easy and basically mediocre content) than for real people, so there’s already a tendency to make more grind instead of anything else.

It’s logical, then, that ArenaNet would focus more on adding more grind to the game than adding fun content. Which means, for those who would rather have fun than pretend they’re Skinner rats… Well, soon they may find they are not ArenaNet’s target audience, and so no new content in the game are not going to be aimed at them.

Southsun is the perfect example of this. Interesting storyline? No. Decent storytelling? No. New, improved dynamic events? No. New world boss with unique mechanics? No. But 200% Magic Find with two identical events repeating over and over and giving a chest after completition? YES.

That is content for grinders. Easy, mindless, easy to build – aka mediocre. And that’s what most of the GW2 community wants, based on ArenaNet’s action. If you don’t like it, pretending the fact that people do wouldn’t change the game for you is not the answer.

theenigma.3597:

Nah games USED to be about fun and entertainment, now they are just blatant money grabs masked in a mediocre game to keep you playing . Insert RNG cash shop rant here.

That’s a trend started by pay to play MMOs. WoW has been the worst game of all times, simply because it taught developers that yes, there are 12 million players willing to play through mediocre content just to grind and farm.

This is the true issue with MMORPGs. Their community is made by farmers, grinders, addicts and exploiters (who are all the same thing, in the end) interested in doing whatever mediocre content they can do in order to get a shiny reward. As long as developers will try to cater to this Skinner rat mentality, all MMOs will continue to be mediocre.

DoctorOverlord.8620:

Raiding doesn’t have to be about item progression when a game isn’t worried about needless timesinks to keep players paying sub fees. The B2P model opens up new possibilities.

Imagine the idea of designing raiding content whose main goal is to be fun

Exactly, just like acquiring Legendaries!

Oh, wait…

This is a huge mistake. Raids will likely be the same RNG-filled content seen both everywhere else in the game and in all other MMORPGs. Instead of trying to refine the kind of content unique to GW2, just trying to cater to the MMO locusts who jump from MMO to MMO looking for the perfect WoW clone is a recipe for failure.

Plus, ArenaNet has always been rather poor when designing “end game content”. Prophecies had no end game content at release, when the Underworld and Fissure of Woe were added they had a very silly gating mechanic, and it took years to make those somewhat interesting. Factions’ The Deep and Urgoz’s Warren had severe bugs that took ArenaNet years to be fixed, and were killed due to the company’s poor design. Nightfall’s Domain of Anguish was such a huge mess that ArenaNet had to change it considerably multiple times, and all people ever did there was farm.

I would rather see more content like we have in Queensdale – an area rich with dynamic events that chain from each other, telling multiple small stories here and there – than a “raid”. Too bad ArenaNet doesn’t understand where its own game shines the most.

Isilhgaard.4013:

Carrots are good for you!!!

For donkeys, who are blindly led from carrot to carrot without the ability to know any better, yes, they are great.

For human beings, who are not so easily decived, not so much.

I don’t think the dungeon is too hard. I’m far from being the most skilled player in the world, but the PUG I was in defeated the last boss in my first try.

I don’t like the cannon mechanic in the last boss, though. ArenaNet relies on dodging way too much – we have way too many bosses in which the main strategy is “dodge attacks and hit the guy”. I wish ArenaNet would make a dungeon in which endurance regeneration is negative, so dodging is impossible, and people would need other kinds of defense.

ArenaNet promised, a while ago, that they would change the Dragon events to make them more interesting and fun.

Among the current Dragon events, my favourite one (in other words, the only one that I don’t think is a design failure) is the Claw of Jormag event. Unlike the other events, it has a lot of attention to details:

• It gives you many options in how to tackle it. You can use your normal attacks against the ice wall in the first phase, or use the Pact guns, or use the Pact bombs.

• The Pact guns have been perfectly tailored for the Claw. The monster has an attack in which waves of ice come down in lanes, pushing people away from the dragon; and the Pact gun has skills that quickly move your character to the left or the right, avoiding this attack. The Claw can call for an unblockable ice attack that falls on players, but the Pact gun has a fire shield that grants invulnerability, and thus counters this attack.

• It’s one of the few bosses in the game that actually has different phases, adding a bit of variety to the fight. The transition between phases even looks cool, with the dragon literally falling from the sky.

• The second phase is less interesting, though. There is a mechanic to protect the Pact golems while they try to stun the Claw, but we never know how many golems are needed to stun the dragon. It’s still better than the other dragon fights, though, that are basically a matter of auto attacking huge piñatas.

Now, the latest patch has introduced some changes to Jormag:

1. The Claw begins the second phase back at full health (it used to be that he would begin the second phase at 50% health). It’s not just a matter of showing the old half bar as a full bar; he takes considerably longer to kill now.

2. There are a lot more ice spikes destroying the golems on the ground. Players still have no idea of how many golems are needed to stun the dragon, which makes coordinating to keep they alive somewhat troublesome.

3. The small mount in which players would often stand to attack the Claw has been removed from the map.

Now, ArenaNet is claiming this is a bug.

I think that’s a lie. Those are too specific changes to be just a bug (the mount has vanished?). I believe this is a preview of how ArenaNet plans to improve the Dragon events. Just like the Karka Queen has been made to be an improved, more fun version of the world events (that same Karka Queen no one ever bothers to fight).

Aren’t you all happy at how ArenaNet continues working to improve the game?

JustTrogdor.7892:

So anyway do you, as a player, often stop to look at other’s gear? If so in what situations?

Nope.

As you said, I try to get a look for my characters that I enjoy, regardless of what others would think. Which means, I don’t care about rarity – I laugh at the idea that using armor that is more time consuming to acquire comes with some kind of prestige.

Unfortunatelly, kids often think that having something expensive is a symbol of status, so it’s not uncommon to see them asking for a new skin to be added to the game with some insane time requirement or with an extreme degree of rarity. Considering how there is nothing in GW2 that actually rewards skill, just multiple rewards for time spent, I hope ArenaNet just ignores the kids and makes content for everyone.

It depends a lot on your build.

This topic is an interesting read about some of the offensive attributes (power, precision and critical damage). The posts from Blood Red Arachnid in this topic is also a good read. A few calculators can list how much damage mitigation each degree of Toughness gives you, as well as calculate how much healing you get with different levels of Healing Power.

ArchonWing.9480:

But that’s also irrelevant. Why are we talking about business marketing and demographics? The topic at hand is between a subset of players that play the game talking about the amount of playing.

As I have described above, those topics are the same thing.

ArchonWing.9480:

You’re missing the picture. It is definitely a part, but it’s not the whole part. See, people do indeed have lives outside the forum.

Irrelevant. No business model is focused on 25 years old adults who like in Oklahoma near big parks and have dogs named Bill. Target audiences are broad groups, to which people can easily state they belong to or not without having to describe their whole lives.

So can we know who players are based on a short post in the forum? For everything that actually matters in the context of having a discussion about a game, yes. I don’t know if that’s enough from the point of view of “forum warrioring”, but then again I have never been fond of wasting my time with such trifles.

Kythan Myr.4719:

After reading through all the whines in GW2 guru forums, I have started to wonder if Anet has stopped listening to the community.

ArenaNet listens to the community. But you are confusing “listening to the community” with “doing what the community asks”. Let’s be honest – the majority of the playerbase lacks the ability to be good game designers. If ArenaNet did exactly what the most vocal parts of the community tell them to do, we would have a disaster far worse than what GW2 is right now. In fact, you could point any topic from Guru and I could point you ten reasons why it’s completely stupid.

No successful business does exactly what customers ask them to do.

Hoyvin.3241:

I spent $200 on gems (yes, I’m an idiot, but generally only once, which you can read above) to try to get a token so I could get the dragon shield skin.

Two. Hundred. Dollars.

The addictive factor of those boxes, and the slot machine feel of opening them, is reason enough for ArenaNet to keep selling them for now.

I wonder, though, if eventually most players won’t feel burned like that. The RNG system is one tailored to build frustration – you buy something hoping you will get what you want, but more often than not you won’t get it.

Linking this kind of mentality to one’s products is risky. If most of the time buying something from ArenaNet leads to frustration, are people going to buy an expansion? Or are they going to feel like that would also lead to frustration?

And that’s pretty much a perfect example. The first player wants content that rewards time spent and skill, but not money. The second wants content that rewards skill and money, but not time spent. The third wants content that rewards time and money, but not skill.

Do you know who, among those three, is right?

Whoever ArenaNet wants. Whoever is ArenaNet’s target audience.

If ArenaNet wants as its main audience the demographics between 20 and 40 years made of players who have little time but a lot of money and skill (I wish the reading comprehension here were good enough to understand the lack of commas in that phrase), being told that everything in the game is perfect as it is by people outside that demography is not so relevant; the opposite would apply if ArenaNet had a different target audience, and the players I described above were complaining about the game.

So yes, who players are matters. Who spends the longest playing the game, and why they play the game, is obviously relevant to ArenaNet. The different opinions of different kinds of players is, of course, important to ArenaNet.

Trying to hide behind a “what other people do or say” empty statement is just a weak excuse. Everyone here plays the same game, and we are all ultimately talking to the same developers.

ArchonWing.9480:

I thought that was so 2001, but I guess I was wrong.

You are wrong.

It’s rather obvious that you are wrong, too. You are basically claiming that it doesn’t matter who the players are, and that’s completely nonsensical. Just look around this forum – a large number of topics are about what should be rewarded in game, about whether challenging content is good or not, and so on. And the differences in opinion often are due to different backgrounds. Borrowing a comic strip someone linked here last week:

Khal Drogo.9631:

Dodge? Never heard of it. 10s Boss kills btw. And HOTW is so boring ….

Same idea applies. Even if Defiant didn’t exist, the most meaningful crowd control against those bosses would still be killing them.

Chewablesleeptablet.3185:

Instead of just defiant stacks how about a percent chance the CC will take effect?

Would be pointless. You can use berseker for everything because no boss has any relevant attack that cannot be dodged. If no boss has any relevant attack that cannot be dodged, there’s nothing worth interrupting. If there’s nothing worth interrupting, between wasting time with crowd control or just doing more damage, it’s always better to do more damage.

Siv.4351:

Things that I simply cannot care about:
Dredge alliance being a minor nuisance
Sad leaf man. (iunno, the whole SS content was so ridiculous I never even logged in)
Pirates. Again.

I think ArenaNet simply realized that most of their community doesn’t really care for a good story, challenging content or deep combat design; rather, GW2 players want to farm and grind.

The Southsun event is a perfect example of that. Extremely poor storytelling, which gives me the feeling they were not even trying, and very bland and repetitive dynamic events. But some of those events happened in very short cycles, gave a chest at the end no matter how many times people did them, and were together with a 200% bonus to Magic Find. Needless to say, people flocked to Southsun like honeys to bee.

That’s the kind of thing people want, so that’s what ArenaNet gave them. Any change to dungeons would likewise be ignored by the majority of players, unless ArenaNet nerfed CoF path 1 (after which a lot of gnashing of teeth would issue) or changed another dungeon to be easier to farm than CoF 1 (in which case people would just farm like they do today, but in a different location).

Aevic.9675:

I hate the idea of living story in some ways. It makes for less permanent content and more content geared towards people who play every single day. I for one do not play this game everyday.

It’s not a matter of making content for people who play every single day; rather, it’s a strategy to keep people playing more often, and to concentrate people in a few areas.

If the Aetherblade dungeon were permanent, a few people would try to play there, figure out if it’s somewhere better to farm than CoF01 or not, and if not everyone would leave it alone to rot. The few players who actually wanted to give it a try would have a hard time finding groups.

With the limited duration, more people are going to check the dungeon now, since they are (in theory) not having a chance to do so later. A lot of people will try the new dungeon, making group finding for it easier (even with the lack of a decent LFG feature in game). It also adds a sense of novelty to the game for those who just check what’s happening once in a while.

People keep saying that the only way to have a community in a MMO is to keep people addicted to grind. That’s not true, though – the scope of players willing to fall for the Skinner rat box trick isn’t that great. Another way to keep people playing is by periodically adding more content to the game, so players have a reason to come back. Adding incremental pieces of content risks fragmentating the community too much, but if every single month there’s one activity where most of the playerbase is meant to go (the Molten dungeon, Southsun, now the Aetherblade dungeon), returning players who join the “area of the month” will find a vibrant community waiting for them.

The irony is that ArenaNet probably realizes this, but they still keep the game filled with grind :-P

Latinkuro.9420:

Yes, but the sooner they realize it is wrong to make people pay and still lock the thing behind RNG

They won’t realize it’s wrong for as long as people continue to pay.

killcannon.2576:

People won’t leave, it will make people stay and play the game. Example? The current game.

You are factually wrong.

Where is my evidence? Every single WoW clone out there. All of them had gear grind and yet all of them had massive hemorrhages a few months after release, exactly like GW2.

Making a WoW clone is catering to a niche market. There aren’t that many people willing to be deceived by MMO developers, who believe players don’t know any better than donkeys being led by carrots in front of their faces.

ArenaNet’s main failure with GW2 is not failing to cater to MMORPG players; those just jump from MMO to MMO after complaining how each game is not enough like WoW. No, their failure was not catering enough to everyone else – to those who do not like MMOs.

Vayne.8563:

3335 Hours over the past 9 months. Mind you, quite a bit of that time I’ve been on the forums at the same time. lol

That’s more or less 12 hours per day, each day, for every week, during all those 9 months.

Do you, like, work or something?

Bright.9160:

Not to mention, I don’t run CoF out of principle and haven’t done it in like 2 months.

I wasn’t saying you farm CoF. Only that CoF is one of the best examples of how, despite a strong foundation, the combat system in GW2 is so shallow that it allows berseker gear to be the best for any profession.

Bright.9160:

• Run full berserker
• Learn how to dodge
• ???
• Profit

This doesn’t always work, of course – there are many situations in which dodge is not enough.

CoF1 is not one of those situations, so people don’t see any point in defensive gear these days.

The issue isn’t as much with the players, though, but with the poor design implemented by ArenaNet. By making dodging so proheminent, ArenaNet has made a large part of support irrelevant (all the interesting kinds of active support that help the entire party to withstand damage), and has created a mentality that leads to a lot of elitism.

Sarie.1630:

Wow, that title was a bit pretentious. Sorry for that.

The game has been out for almost a year now. I’d like to take the time to review the direction the game is taking and discuss some improvements I’d like to see, and possibly some current features I’d like to see remain as they are. For lazy people, or people who do not care, at the end of each section will be a TL;DR blurb. Prepare your butts and buckle up, it’s Wall o’Text time!

1. World Bosses

They just don’t do enough. I’m talking about the dragon champions, shadow behemoth and fire elemental especially. I know, many people want to get in quick and farm them as fast as possible in order to move onto the next. I understand that, I do, but too much of me wants these to be far more difficult. Ulgoth and the Megadestroyer are not bad fights in my view, and the fire elemental used to be great in beta. Many of the other bosses need to be far more dangerous than they currently are. I assume it must be difficult to achieve given the numbers of players who turn up to these events. Preliminary ideas could be as follows:

I would like ArenaNet to think bigger than that. Those are meant to be some of the most epic fights in the game, so they should be treated as such. I wish they would have:

• Multiple phases. Jormag is the “least bad” one in this aspect, but all dragon bosses should have more than one phase.

• Random phases. Using Jormag as an example, he always goes from the “ice barrier” phase to the “exploding golems” phase. Ideally, there would be many possible phases, so one time Jormag would go from the “ice barrier” phase to the “exploding golems”, but another time he would go from the “ice barrier” to “army of frozen moas”, and some other time he would begin at “Pact cannons” and go to “exploding golems”. This kind of variety would really help.

• Failure conditions. Ideally, all dragon bosses should be capable of defeating the players, and changing the area around them until players manage to fight them back. Such as icebrood dominating the north section of Frostgourge Sound, or the Shatterer increasing its corruption to the west, and similar effects.

Sarie.1630:

4. Remote Areas

I’m one of these players who loves remote areas, but this one is quite a tricky one for me to explain. I always loved places like Dreadnaught’s Drift, The Falls and Mineral Springs in Guild Wars 1. Yea I know, it was all instances and I was the only player there, but these places had something else about them. Perhaps it was psychological, knowing I was 2+ zones away from the nearest town, but they felt so remote, quiet, and peaceful (once you’d killed the mobs, anyway!).

Some places in Guild Wars 2 succeed in almost creating the same feeling. Northern Lornar’s Pass, and much of Snowden Drifts are two areas that spring to mind, but you’re always aware that there are 2-3 waypoints within a minute of you. I’d like to see, in upcoming areas, some more remote locations – some locations you need to want to go to, rather than need a reason to. It’s a tricky one to sell I suppose, but the world is large enough to contain such regions. Get far enough from a waypoint and the background music turns off, and you’re left with wind whistling over mountain tops. It’s not make or break, just something I’d like.

TL;DR: If you skipped to here this section is not for you.

Loved this section. And for the records, very few things can make me laugh on the internet these days, but your TL;DR did it, nice job.

I wish the forum would show this information, together with an average of hours played per day, below our usernames. Then I would know exactly when I’m talking to someone who plays the game 12 hours per day for 8 months.

Zelkovan.2630:

Me personally, I think Defiant/unshakable needs to be reworked so that control is actually useful in dungeons

I disagree with your opinion.

Remove Defiant, and do you know what would change? Nothing. No boss has anything players have to interrupt. It would still be better to focus on DPS to kill a boss faster, than to waste time interrupting it and then kill it.

Switch the idea around, though. Keep Defiant exactly as it is. Add an ability that players HAVE to interrupt, or they fail the encounter. What’s the result? Players are forced to take control abilities, and they also need some team coordination to use the interrupts at the proper time.

The example above is extreme, but the idea behind it is true. The issue isn’t with Defiant; it’s how boss encounters are badly designed so interrupting the bosses is irrelevant. The same applies to common enemy encounters – common enemies don’t have Defiant, but no one bothers to use control abilities since it’s faster and easier to just kill them.

HiddenNick.7206:

So what is the focus in this game?! I’m trying to find this game goal and as far as I know there is none!

The goal is the same goal as in any other good game: to have fun.

People are too used to mediocre games (aka MMORPGs) these days.

Nick.6972:

Why can’t monsters dodge, flee or avoid AoE?
Why is AI so bad?
Why are most regular/ veteran monsters so pathetically weak compared to us players?

Once upon a time, the GW1 enemies were patched to have a better AI (by the time Nightfall was released). They would kitte and avoid AoE attacks unless players used some kind of movement control to keep them in place.

And yet, despite being able to control the skills of the entire party and having access to nearly one thousand skills… Players complained that they were stuck running in circles behind enemies, and that this was the game’s fault.

OP, I agree completely with you. However, little improvements to the AI were enough to make it smarter than players, and that was among the GW1 community, who was better than this one. Here, we have more people interested in loot than in deep combat mechanics, so…

pullnointer.1476:

aware, they are just not as prominent as eles.

Depends a lot of your build. I have more than 5 in the Death Magic trait line for Necromancers, so I have to take the Minor Trait that summons a (useless and with 5 HP) Jagged Horror whenever I kill something. Which means, I can’t stand listening anymore to the comments about a minion rising and a minion dying.

pullnointer.1476:

they get unique voiceover when swapping attunements

Necromancers get unique dialogue when summoning (or losing) minions, warriors get unique dialogue when adrenaline rises, rangers get unique dialogues when the pet dies and when it revives, and so on. It’s not exclusive to elementalists.

Ascii.9726:

How soon is “soon” :P see someone like me sitting on 10k achievement points have been begging for such a system for months now.

If you got most of those through the small repeteable achievements like “Agent of Entropy”, I would expect you to be in for a bad awakening when those points are not considered in the achievement rewards. I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s one of the reasons why it’s taking so long for ArenaNet to implement this – finding a way to reward achievement points without rewarding ways to basically exploit them.

Iason Evan.3806:

When they talked about skill though it was in terms of PvP, not PvE and loot.

Nope. This is the same ages old discussion we had in the original Guild Wars, when people claimed it was a PvP game while in fact the PvE part of the game has always been the target of more investment.

What so many people cannot understand is that when they say “PvE”, what they are actually meaning is “PvE based on grind as seen in every other MMORPG”. This is not what Guild Wars is about, so no wonder some people think it’s not a PvE game.

Likewise, the idea of “skill > time spent” has been meant for all aspects of the game, both PvE and PvP. Unwillingness to accept this is the unwillingness to accept a PvE MMORPG without grind.

Achrisos.1360:

and 1.3k + healing power

Ok, but… To reach 1.288 Healing Power, you would need to dedicate almost all your eqipment to it, plus have maxed the Inventions trait line. The result would be that Healing Turret heals for 6208 and Regeneration gives 291 health per second.

Meanwhile, with more or less half of that amount, around 564 Healing Power, Healing Turret would heal for 5484 and Regeneration would give 200 health per second. And you would free the majority of your attribute points for something else.

Is it really worth spending all those attribute points? Going from Toughness of 916 (the baseline) to 1853 (in other words, also more or less doubling it) goes from 10,04% damage reduction to 38,35% damage reduction… Feel more of a difference than increasing Healing Power by that amount, and that’s by using less attribute points.

Bazookajoe.5624:

Bla bla bla

Most of your issues come from the fact you want a WoW clone – a game in which the goal is to grind levels and then grind gear. The original intention behind Guild Wars 2 was to avoid exactly those things (see the link in my signature). So I can’t say I’m sad you are not happy with the game.

tolunart.2095:

Erasculio.2914:

Tolmos.8395:

If you have another suggestion on how they can afford to keep the servers up without us needing to buy gems for cosmetic things that we want in the game, please by all means share it with the crowd

Using the same system seen in the original Guild Wars. This isn’t exactly hard to figure out.

I hope you don’t own or manage a company. Just keep doing things the same way you did ten years ago is not the path to success.

And changing a successful model for the sake of change is not the path to success, either. Unless that’s how you run your own successful company?

And for the records…

tolunart.2095:

The second biggest problem is crafting – nodes are usable by everyone, not just the first person to get to it, so the market is flooded with crafting mats and its use in leveling means that a lot of people end up with crafted goods they don’t need, and sell them on the TP.

…So your solution is to make crafting nodes work like they did in games released ten years ago? I see.

Bright.9160:

Until the day they give the option to stow away your pet completely, and give the ranger DPS a boost for doing so and fix the sword autoattack, I’m not taking a ranger on my runs ever.

It’s funny, in the context of this topic, that the so-called “fix” to rangers is basically to turn them into warriors.

Tolmos.8395:

If you have another suggestion on how they can afford to keep the servers up without us needing to buy gems for cosmetic things that we want in the game, please by all means share it with the crowd

Using the same system seen in the original Guild Wars. This isn’t exactly hard to figure out.

HiddenNick.7206:

Developers gives you new ways to acquire more powerful items and then you can use those items to overcome certain challenges and receive even more powerful gear or other rewards like unique skins or mounts.

In other words, other MMORPGs are about rewarding time spent in gear treadmills. As flawed as GW2 is, I’m happy it’s not about that (yet). Regardless, this game has been released more than six months ago, had you done a minimum of research about it you would have learned that no, gear treadmill isn’t the focus of GW2. Buying without research = “a fool and his money…”.

Vayne.8563:

Your last line isn’t expressed like an opinion at all

Vayne, you need better arguments than “it’s just YOUR opinion!”. People don’t need to say “Disclaimer: what I’m going to say next is my opinion” all the time. It’s implicit in the context of what someone says (I thought editors knew all about this kind of thing). Likewise, saying something is irrelevant just because it’s an opinion is also a very weak argument. There are baseless opinions (“the sky isn’t blue, it’s yellow!”) and opinions with a strong reasoning behind them that are worth discussing.

Guns and Giblets.9308:

There is a serious reward deficiency. It would be nice if the PvE was well designed enough that it could be played for its own sake

This is what I believe the game should be. Increasing the rewards would likely make people play more than they do today, sure, but to me it would be a sign of ArenaNet stating they cannot make a fun game, hence the need to fill that void with bigger rewards.

Zepidel.5349:

against, ANET has bigger prioties than letting OP make his character look like Pico from Boku no Pico.

Definitely this. There are a thousand more important things in the game, a lot more core issues to address, thousand of clipping to fix, and so on. They should fix what’s broken before adding more (broken) things.

pullnointer.1476:

get him on dungeons again, we haven’t had a single dungeon change since ac

The change to AC didn’t really improve it. The Graveling Scavengers, for example, went from being an example of how to counter a foe using skills available to each profession, to being a high defense/low damage enemy relying on an uncounterable mechanic to be an annoyiance, not something fun to kill.

Astralporing.1957:

Of course the main problem is that this MMO (like most of them out there) won’t let you be a Steve Jobs

Exactly.

/15chars

silvermember.8941:

Tinted glasses is strong in this one.

Guild wars 1 had just as much mediocre content as any MMORPG.

Nope.

GW1 is a hugely flawed game. ArenaNet took it apart and basically self-destructed it before the game could reach its full potential, and it was impossible to salvage it so they decided to begin again.

And even then, even with all those issues, the game has always been better than the other MMORPGs. Mostly because it actually tries (most of the time) to be a game for human beings, instead of being a glorified Skinner box waiting for rats.

Healing Power is one of the stats with worst scalling in the game (together with Condition Damage). Is it something worth investing into, through equipment, or is it better to leave Healing Power alone and focus on other attributes?

The Law.4809:

I, for one, can’t imagine someone enjoying having to spend 30 minutes (or 1 hour and 15 minutes in case of Jormag respectivelly)

Irrelevant.

You are not talking about players wandering as they explore Frostgorge Sound who may or not find the Claw of Jormag there, and to whom the time between each dragon event is just something to ensure he doesn’t see always the same content at the same time.

You are talking about the horde of players who religiously watch the event timers looking for events to farm in order to get their daily rare items. In other words, you are talking abour grinders. Those don’t care about “enjoying” content or having fun, they just want to grind as much as possible.

Hence, your comment should actually have been “It would be easier to grind without the dragon spawn window, so please ArenaNet, remove it and let us grind in peace”. Meanwhile, I think ArenaNet has already listened to the grinders more than they should.

ArchonWing.9480:

Yes, but why are you comparing a factory worker to Steve jobs?

Because it’s the perfect metaphor for grinders. Factory workers are doing something mindless, easy and that they don’t even enjoy under the assumption that hey, they have to eat somehow, so of course they are expected to work like that to get money. Same thing with grinders – they are addict to a mediocre system in MMOs under the assumption that hey, grinding is part of MMOs, so of course they are expected to grind like that in order to get rewards.

Meanwhile, Steve Jobs did a hard, challenging work that he actually enjoyed, and got a reward for it bigger than anything the Chinese factory workers will ever have. It would be the in-game equivalent of giving players fun, challenging content and making it the main source of rewards in the game, as opposed to grinding.

In many ways, that’s also the difference between a teenager who skips college and ends up working in a fast food, claiming that he has to make money somehow and that will do…And a man who builds a career as a laywer or as a doctor, doing what he likes the way he likes, finding motivation in the experience of working as opposed to only in the salary he gets at the end of every month. I think part of the reason some people cannot understand why grind is a bad thing is how many MMORPG players are like the former, and not like the latter.

Deified.7520:

A player who has pretty much quit the game just got heavily rewarded, more than player who is very dedicated and has triple his gaming hours.

“Dedicated players” are the farmers, grinders, addicts and exploiters who keep MMORPGs as mediocre as they have ever been and who don’t really deserve anything but to be told how good they are at wasting their own life.

MMORPGs give a fortune to the in-game equivalent of Chinese factory workers who work 18 hours per day 7 days a week doing mindless, easy and boring jobs. ArenaNet’s RNG system is the in-game equivalent of allowing those factory workers to bet on the lottery.

Both systems are incredibly flawed, but one isn’t worse than the other. Grind shouldn’t be rewarded, just like RNG shouldn’t be rewarded. As ArenaNet used to say, “skill > time spent”.

TooBz.3065:

It’s terrible design. If they are all that bad I’m surprised this genre ever got off the ground.

They’re all that bad.

MMORPGs rely on keeping people addicted to mediocre content, so they keep doing mindless and boring tasks over and over for some small and irrelevant reward.

GW2 is better than most MMORPGs, which translates to saying it isn’t as mediocre, but it still has a long way to go before going from “not a mediocre game” to “a great game”. I’m not sure ArenaNet is moving in the right direction, though.

rfdarko.4639:

Nothing is rewarded in PVE except direct damage – not the fault of the warrior class, just bad mob design.

I’m not sure if it’s just bad mob design, or if it’s an issue in the entire combat system.

Bright.9160:

Erasculio.2914:

and we never really had tanks in GW1, so I definitely don’t want them now.

Wat?

Tanks as in the classic “Taunt” MMO mechanic, in which a character could use skills to control who monsters would attack. We actually had that for a very short while in GW1 (the “gear trick” in Sorrow’s Furnace).

And they have always been, since the original Guild Wars. This was for a very good reason back then – warriors were useful in PvE, sure, but they were the best PvP profession, combining a lot of power with the need to be skilled in order to use them properly:

• They had the highest sustained DPS in the game

• They had Frenzy, a stance that increased attack speed by 33% but increased damage received by 50%; using it at the right moment and cancelling at the right moment was a key skill in PvP

• They had Bull’s Strike, an attack that knocks down a foe, but only if said foe is moving

• They had ample access to Deep Wound, a condition that reduces a character’s maximum health by 20%, and reduces any incoming health by 20%

• More importantly, warriors were all about positioning. A warrior had to attack a target in order to build adrenaline to use the really powerful skills; those were all in melee range, so in order to go for a kill the warrior had to move close to the real target. In other hand, a lone warrior who went deep within enemy lines to hit a foe would risk overextending, going beyond the reach of the support characters (usually a Monk) and thus not only dying, but also exposing the support character to enemy attack.

With all those traits, warriors were the profession that required the most skill in GW1, and which gave the biggest rewards. Many of the best PvPers in GW1 used warriors, yet a team of 8 warriors would never win anything serious since they lacked other necessary team roles. It’s easy to understand why warriors were ArenaNet’s favourite profession.

In Guild Wars 2, the idea was likely to introduce the same concept – make warriors the most skill-demanding yet one of the most powerful professions in PvP. One of the main ArenaNet PvP designers has always made public appearances in game with his warrior, for example. I’m sure they put a lot of work in the warrior…

…And they failed miserably. Warriors are the “easy mode” profession in PvE, but they are seen as rather weak in PvP.

Now, I know the reading comprehension isn’t the brighest one in the world around these parts, so I don’t expect most people who reply to this topic to think it’s anything more than a “OMG warriors are imba! Nerf plz!” post. But the real issue behind ArenaNet’s failure to make warriors what they were in GW1 is how the combat system in GW2 is extremely flawed.

All those aspects in GW1 that required a lot of skill, like stance cancelling and the precision required to effectively use Bull’s Strike? Gone from GW2. The importance of positioning? Gone. Overextending, in the meaning of moving too far away from the backline, doesn’t really exist in GW2 since support is so weak that there is no use for support-focused characters. Conditions as important as DeepWound? Gone, due to how the entire buff and debuff system isn’t as relevant now.

All those important party roles that had to surround a warrior in order to allow him to succeed? Gone.

Now, I’m strongly against a trinity based system. I don’t want healers back in GW2, and we never really had tanks in GW1, so I definitely don’t want them now.

But the real issue with the game is how everything other than DPS is borderline useless. Control and Support are so weak that ArenaNet itself cannot find any way to make warriors useful in PvP other than increasing their damage patch after patch. That’s not going to work. While in the original Guild Wars a profession could be made more powerful by giving it more utility, in GW2 said utility is so weak that it’s irrelevant.

Yet ArenaNet has not noticed any of this. Even when creating the game with the intention to make warriors as brilliant as they were in the original Guild Wars, they have failed to acknowledge how there needs to be a full spectrum of team roles – which doesn’t need to be DPS and healing, it could very well be control and damage and support – in order for the game to work. No wonder sPvP is the failure it is in the game right now.

LanceKing.3017:

Can you make a town clothes for those people who like grinding (me) ?

Unless it’s a donkey suit with a carrot dangling in front of the character’s face… No. Grind is already rewarded more than it deserves to be.