Showing Posts For Etienne.3049:

More dailies needed per day

in Guild Wars 2 Discussion

Posted by: Etienne.3049

Etienne.3049

If I want to PvP, I can effortlessly get all three in a single match.

Not in real PvP (you might on a farm server but that doesn’t really qualify as PvP), you can’t effortlessly win, well, you might, but you can’t expect to, the odds of losing 5 completely fair matches (50% win chance) in a row is still above 3%, which is far from negligible.

What would be the point of bothering with PvE at all in that case?

You want to, you say so right after.

Then why are the PvP ones so easy? You can get any three of them in a single 15 minute match

Only if you win.

less time than most individual PvE dailies.

Aren’t vista and gathering faster? That’s often half of the PvE dailies already (I wouldn’t know how long the others take as I never bother with them).

I can’t imagine anyone who loves PvP, who ONLY plays PvP, looking at any PvP daily list ever and going “well, no point to any of that mess, I’m going to run some events in Tangled Depths for my daily.”

I could imagine someone who normally only PvPs and plays 5 or fewer classes well and therefore can’t complete the daily in only PvP as the 4 classes for the achievements happen to be the ones he doesn’t play well.
And obviously he wouldn’t be doing the events daily but the vista or gathering ones (or WvW spender, caravan killer, guard killer or land claimer).

More dailies needed per day

in Guild Wars 2 Discussion

Posted by: Etienne.3049

Etienne.3049

You can mix them across the 3 categories, giving you a total of 12 options, and there’s generally 2 easy ones in both PvE and WvW giving you 4 easy ones where you only need 3.

How Do you Feel About Multiple Guilds?

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Posted by: Etienne.3049

Etienne.3049

If anything we have too few guild slots, having multiple guild slots allows guilds to specialize without players being forced to choose a single type of content. Especially now that you can read guild chat of guilds you’re not representing.

Why More Maps?

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Posted by: Etienne.3049

Etienne.3049

Imagine a huge map. Now cut it into 9 smaller maps. Is that any better? You started with 1 map and ended up with 9. More is better, right? Not in this case? Then you really can’t compare on map count.

Actually, due to the player cap per map, yes, that is better.

There’s also a recent tendency to have one meta event per map, which would mean more maps give more variety.

Sure, there are other factors than the number of maps (map size, content density, variety, quality) but the number isn’t nearly as irrelevant as you make it out to be.

Attn Anet team: here's some OS X user numbers

in Guild Wars 2 Discussion

Posted by: Etienne.3049

Etienne.3049

If you have the money to buy a Mac-pc and you want to play games then you should buy a Windows-pc also. Or else don’t cry about it. It’s really ridiculous that you want to play games and decide to do it on an Apple computer… -.-

lol, still do not get how anyone can have that kind of attitude. (I personally run windows)
First of all, A-Net is clearly lossing money by not supporting mac or Linux as mentioned above or shown in any other post.

Asking people to not cry about it, when all they want is A-Net to include more players to the game……seems rather ignorant all around, beside the company actually lossing money if they had a childish attitude like that, the sentence alone is a hate complaint, as if to say, that the player base have bought mac, so therefor they should not be supported by any company, even though a suggestion like this would improve everything for everyone.

There are different reasons to have bought a computer of a certain kind, even if just becoming a gamer or interested in games a few months ago even tho you only got mac……

In conclusion, I DO NOT UNDERSTAND YOU, if everyone wins by supporting mac, I truly do not get this message at all, A-Net wins, the playerbase gets bigger so we win, the mac users wins, since they can play, there is no downside, so therefor i truly can not see your complaining of forcing people to stay in their place based on the brand of their computer……..

Beside the obvious hateful fact of “its an apple so you should not be able to do anything that is game based”

How can you be certain they’re “losing” money? I don’t have any numbers on how much they’d make from extra sales with a better mac client or how much said client would cost, and I’d be surprised if you did have them (I’d be surprised if Anet had anything better than a decent guess).

And I’d say the only way they could lose money on a mac client is by spending money making it and then not selling enough extra to recoup that investment.

And don’t call people who disagree with you hateful or ignorant, it just seems like a pathetic way to trick people into agreeing with you.

Potential Change to Reset Time

in WvW

Posted by: Etienne.3049

Etienne.3049

For Europe:
I’d prefer saturday as I’m almost always busy friday evening.
Friday-saturday midnight UTC (which, if I recall correctly, was the original time) would be slightly less good but still a nice one.
Friday evening is the worst for me as I’ll rarely be able to play at reset.

Then again, I am on a dead server, so until population issues are fixed you might as well disregard my opinion as I’ll barely be playing WvW at all.

Pre-order next expansion?

in Guild Wars 2 Discussion

Posted by: Etienne.3049

Etienne.3049

I’m currently thinking no unless:
There is an absolutely massive living world “season” coming up, several times the living world we have now.
Or there is a lot more content in the next expansion and a lot more diversity in the content and they are clear about what we can expect of the expansion beforehand.

I guess there’d be other situations where I’d end up pre-ordering, but I can’t exactly think of any plausible ones right now.

How would you play if death was permanent?

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Posted by: Etienne.3049

Etienne.3049

Never do anything without being in a fairly large group of players (5-10+ I’d guess).

That would actually be a terrible idea due to scaling.

I kinda figured only [Group Event]s and collection events scaled but according to the wiki more can scale, but mostly up to 10 players.
So make that a group of at least 20 or so players.

A smaller group doesn’t seem like a good option to me as you can always get disconnected or such or die to some cheap insta-kill, you basically need a big group to get revived.

How would you play if death was permanent?

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Posted by: Etienne.3049

Etienne.3049

I wouldn’t because:
This game is far too bugged/poorly designed for permadeath.
And it’s over the internet which is never 100% reliable and for permadeath 99.9% just isn’t enough.
Guild Wars (the first one) was far better suited for permadeath-style stuff, and survivor was bad enough already.

However, if I somehow would have a reason to play a gw2 permadeath game I would:
Not play PvP or WvW; unless these would be excepted from permadeath, in which case I would play WvW almost exclusively.
Only use armor with toughness main stat, either vitality or healing power and maybe one offensive stat (condition damage or power, depending on build).
Never do anything without being in a fairly large group of players (5-10+ I’d guess).
Primarily play in lower level maps.
Avoid anything marked as a [Group Event], they tend to scale very unpredictably and would by design negate the benefit of the group.

(edited by Etienne.3049)

Soul destroying...

in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns

Posted by: Etienne.3049

Etienne.3049

People who argue this is just fine are simply arguing the inconsistency is just fine as long as it fits their agenda.

If it’s fine for HPs to be soulbound, your reason for not arguing MPs should be is … ?

Looked at logically there’s no real difference between a specific character communing with an MP and their communing with an HP so the fact that one Point is soulbound and the other is Account bound is illogical .. of course, I suspect few would argue MPs should be soulbound to bring them in line with their arguments for why HPs should be soulbound.

Oh no, folks won’t argue for something logical when it’s against their interests.

The whole HP/MP thing is simply one huge fudge on Anet’s part, they know thatif MPs were soulbound their end-game would largely be deserted, people wouldn’t stand for having to grind MPs on every character.

Nothing inconsistent about it:
Masteries is an account bound system by design (and many mastery points are based on, account wide, achievements).
Whereas skills and traits are a character based thing (and couldn’t be account bound because they differ per class).
It makes perfect sense to me to have the points related to the account based system as account wide unlocks and the points related to a character based system as character bound.

That’s not to say I wouldn’t prefer the proofs (but not the points themselves) to be account bound, although for me that’s for storage purposes more than usage, but to say that this is inconsistent is utter nonsense (or a pathetic attempt to get people to agree with you by claiming anyone who doesn’t is dumb).

Suggestion: Mounts [Merged]

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Posted by: Etienne.3049

Etienne.3049

Game needed mounts and that’s something no one has ever managed to successfully argue against and thus it isn’t truly a dead horse.

Nobody has ever successfully argued in favor of this game needing mounts as far as I know (the argument always seems to be “I want it” and/or “other games have it”).

If nobody successfully argues we do need them we can reasonably say we don’t need them. (whether they would be a positive addition to the game or not is an entirely different argument.)

However instead of the simply mount system anet instead went with the useless clutter route. Swiftness, SuperSpeed, Traits, Runes, WP(WP are farther apart in HoT), S. Step, Signets, Speed Mushrooms, cosmetic mini mounts, gliding, and much more exist in the game and all of it is a pile of overlapping and useless clutter. Your builds are basically handicapped because many trait or slot for speed for example.

All of that and more that will no doubt happen in the future already exists in this game and it’s all pointless clutter and dev time which can all be given the boot with a simple mount system. More importantly the mount system is even superior to this cluster**** we have today since your not stacking, recasting, and so forth to keep up your speed.

Mounts are too little to late

Lastly if we had mounts then maybe the map desing wouldn’t be tiny little cut of sections and corridors as it currently is in HoT.

I agree there is a design flaw in how out of combat speed is handled. However that could be fixed by giving a 25% boost to out of combat speed and letting speed boosts not work out of combat; except in PvP, which would problaby be better off with the current mechanics.
Which seems like a far simpler solution than mounts to me.

Suggestion: Fun!

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Posted by: Etienne.3049

Etienne.3049

What should the Devs do when one set of players’ definition of fun is counter to another set of players’ definition of fun? Should both methods of, say, acquisition of items be implemented? Neither? Half and half?

There are indeed some things that some find fun and others don’t. There are also a few things I’d think many people don’t find fun:

Time gates: I can’t see how these can be fun to anyone, they seem more like an excuse not to bother balancing (like the old dungeon rewards) or a way to get people to log in regularly (like the newer ones; which apparently sounds positive in some business thing).

Grinding: Less so than time gates but I’d still think a lot of grinders just grind because they want to have more stuff than other players, not because they actually like doing the same thing over and over.

Suggestion: Mounts [Merged]

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Posted by: Etienne.3049

Etienne.3049

An entire world with no mounts for player NOR NPC’s is just too unrealistic. Every civilization has used them and yet Tyria can’t figure out how to tame a few?

I don’t think the pre-Columbian Mesoamericans (Like the Aztecs and Mayas) used any.

There is some history in Tyria of mounts, dolyaks have been used as mounts by dwarves and horse skeletons by undead. However, I wouldn’t know whether a dolyak is fast enough to be a usefull mount for a human (nor exactly why the Stone Summit used them, as only their monks did) and I don’t think I’ve seen a living horse in a Guild Wars game, so they may well be extinct (although the concept of a horse seems to survive).

Species usable as mounts are quite rare, there’s horses, camels and elephants as far as I know. I guess you could ride something slower than a walking human, but that’d kind of defeat the point.

[DKB] in crisis: please read

in Players Helping Players

Posted by: Etienne.3049

Etienne.3049

This isn’t important in the slightest, this is your guild’s problem and has very little to no value to anyone not asociated with your guild (which I assume to be the vast majority of players, 100% with any reasonable rounding, in fact).

So putting “please read” in the title and “this is important” in the first line of your post is incredibly misleading.

Suggestion: Subscription Plans

in Guild Wars 2 Discussion

Posted by: Etienne.3049

Etienne.3049

I really hope (and kinda expect) you’re trolling here, but if not:

1: This might well kill the game (and the developer even, I’d certainly never trust them again).

2: They don’t need your help for making money, they’re probably making plenty from the cash shop and RMT (and I suppose from somewhat small expansions sold at full game price, although those should actually cost a lot to make).

Ground targeting range color

in Bugs: Game, Forum, Website

Posted by: Etienne.3049

Etienne.3049

Since HoT I’ve been having my ground targeting circle be green despite the area I try to target it being out of range, when I try to use the skill it then tells me it’s out of range.
After this happens once it seems to indicate out of range as red for a very short while before turning everything green again.

Issue Reports: Heart of Thorns [Merged]

in Bugs: Game, Forum, Website

Posted by: Etienne.3049

Etienne.3049

Hearts and Minds
1st try: rytlock disappears instead of joining me, leaving mordremoth immune to everything.
2nd try: marjory disappears instead of joining me, leaving mordremoth immune to everything.
3rd try: the massive attack lasts longer than I’d expected it to and kills me (the one failure that’s not a bug).
4th try: see 2nd try, same happened again.

And no I’m not saying it worked the fifth time, I’m still trying, this is just the 4 times I tried before I got annoyed enough to post here.
How does this get through testing? It bugs more often than not, it’s not like it’s a rare bug that could slip through.

EDIT: I finally completed it (with broken shoulder armor) and I think I found the cause of this bug. When the rift opens (at 20-25% health of the blighted I believe) the blighted becomes immune to attacks but not to conditions (the ones already on it that is), nor does it cleanse them. If the blighted dies (to conditions) before it would change side it disappears and the story step gets stuck.

Kind of a shame you don’t seem to have bothered testing it with a condition build.

(edited by Etienne.3049)

How do I report a guild/pet name?

in Guild Wars 2 Discussion

Posted by: Etienne.3049

Etienne.3049

I don’t think there is a proper way to do it, they kinda refuse to implement one.
I don’t think you can add screenshots to reports, my last attempt to report a few guild names turned into a complaint about not being able to do so, as I can’t be bothered to try to type them.
Pet names is even worse as you may not even be sure who they belong to.

And yes, getting offended is a choice; as is breaking the naming policy. It is also no excuse.

Mordrem Invasion Feedback [merged]

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Posted by: Etienne.3049

Etienne.3049

This event is absolutely horrible.

Bad things about this event:
The events get repetative real fast, each might be good to do 2-3 times but you’ve got to do each 7 or so times per map to get max rewards.
The rewards are far too low/prices far too high or a combination of these.
There’s a daily part to the reward. To me daily rewards just seem like “we couldn’t be bothered to balance these probably so we’re going to limit them by real world time so the effect on the economy won’t be too big”.
The only way to get the top reward (I wanted to say a decent reward, but really, it isn’t) is to just tag events and move on.
There’s no way to see on the map whether you’d be on time to another event, so you waypoint somewhere in the area, run to the event, and see the last enemy die at 1500 range.
30 minute break between events, which is too long to wait and to short to do much else in this game.
And of course the bug at the start that reminded me of the quality of season 1 (where it was best not to play on the day of release).

Good things about this event:

Normally I wouldn’t post this in a thread called constructive feedback, but everything will get merged into here anyway.
The only constructive feedback I can give is the following advice:
The next time you design an event think, is any part of it even remotely like the Mordremoth Invasion event, if the answer is yes change it untill it isn’t.

(edited by Etienne.3049)

My problems with PvP

in PvP

Posted by: Etienne.3049

Etienne.3049

I occasionally like to play some PvP but there are a few reasons I can’t enjoy it as much as I think I should be able to, these are:

No way to see how good/bad I am whatsoever. If I understand correctly, using mmr the game will try to make me win roughly as many matches as I lose (that’s not literally what it tries but rather the result of what it does). As far as I can see the only thing that could remotely indicate skill except for the very best and worst players would be mmr, which is a hidden stat. Hopefully leagues will fix this to some extent, but given how horrible the leaderboards were (quantity over quality) I kinda doubt it.

Skyhammer. This horrible excuse for a map comes up every so often in unranked. I do not want to play it, at all, ever. The only way I can avoid this horrible map is ranked, which, in my recent attempt at avoiding Skyhammer, seemed to be a bit over my skill level (although I might be able to drop my mmr enough to get better matchups, if there are enough people there) and rather full (2 out of 4 or 5 matches if I recall correctly) of people who like abusing their own team (they got reported, obviously).
So my options are: risk Skyhammer, risk abuse or risk causing a 5v4 (or hotjoin I guess, but I don’t really wanna do that either). None of those are remotely enjoyable to me.
The obvious solution seems to be to allow players to pick which maps to queue for, this may extend queue times a bit but I’m willing to take that to be rid of Skyhammer forever. No, I don’t consider the increase in queue times this could cause for other players a valid argument as every player should be playing for his own enjoyment, not to fill up a slot so someone else can have fun.

Guild teams. There is currently no way to play where I can not encounter guild groups. Any game that does include guild groups (on either side) it kinda feels like my influence on the outcome is rather limited. The obvious solution is to give me solo queue back, which should never have been removed in the first place.

WvW Test invitations

in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns

Posted by: Etienne.3049

Etienne.3049

First off, I would say none of the arguments you give (playtime, kills, rank, guild leader, commander) would make your opinion any more important than the opinion of anyone else.
As far as I can think the only statistic that could be of some merit to determine the value of your feedback would be gems bought and/or spent multiplied by the fraction of your playtime spent in WvW. No, I would not like them use this method to value any form of feedback.

Secondly, if they allow you in based on those statistics how many more people who are, by those measurements, equally or more qualified than you would they also have to add to the test?

And I’m sure many people with any interest in WvW would like to get a bit of experience with the map.

Should Waypoints really have a fee?

in Guild Wars 2 Discussion

Posted by: Etienne.3049

Etienne.3049

I’d say there shouldn’t be a fee.
It accomplishes nothing positive as far as I can see, the effect on the economy has to be negligible.
But then it’s such a small amount I can’t be bothered about it much anymore.

no its not negligible cause everyone use it very often.
one port 3s —> 100.000 players almost a sink of 3000 gold for ONE port. and now look on an normal play time and player mass

its all but not negligible.

on the one hand it doesnt hurt the single player much and on the other hand its good for economy

3 silver I think would be slightly over the average price of one teleport (from Lion’s Arch you can reach the vast majority of the world under 3s and I’d think a good part of teleports is within a map) but even a 3s gold sink is only 20s worth of goods sold on the trade post, while that’s slightly better than I initially though it was as a gold sink, it’s by no means a big one.

And taking arbitrary numbers of players and calculating an absolute amount of gold that would hypothetically be removed by this number of players taking a certain action seems rather useless to me, for one it seems to be completely unimportant how much gold is removed in total but only how much is removed per gold created.

Should Waypoints really have a fee?

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Posted by: Etienne.3049

Etienne.3049

I’d say there shouldn’t be a fee.
It accomplishes nothing positive as far as I can see, the effect on the economy has to be negligible.
But then it’s such a small amount I can’t be bothered about it much anymore.

Does it matter how you buy LS S2?

in Living World

Posted by: Etienne.3049

Etienne.3049

Are you sure you don’t have the ones that it doesn’t seem to contain?
Otherwise this should be a bug if I’m not very much mistaken, as as far as I know that pack should be all parts you don’t have at 20% off compared to purchasing them seperately.

(edited by Etienne.3049)

Is HoT pay to win?

in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns

Posted by: Etienne.3049

Etienne.3049

I would never count an expansion as pay to win.
I associate “pay to win” only with cash shop (gem store) kind of junk, like just stat improvements without any content associated.
An expansion should be expected to give new stuff, some of which is better than old stuff (as perfect balance is impossible and this game doesn’t come anywhere near that).
So I’d say no.

(edited by Etienne.3049)

Restrict free accounts in WvW to EOTM only

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Posted by: Etienne.3049

Etienne.3049

I definitely do not agree that free accounts should be limited to EotM at this time, it seems a bit premature to call for that. If they end up really causing all the problems feared by people in this thread they could easily change it later on. If they don’t cause a problem I’d rather have them in real WvW as I feel my server could use a few more people (more than a few actually).

underwater black screen

in Bugs: Game, Forum, Website

Posted by: Etienne.3049

Etienne.3049

Got logged out before I could post and lost what I had typed, I know it’s a separate issue but you might want to have a look at that anyway.

dxdiag tells me:
AMD Radeon HD 7800 series
AMD Radeon HD 8550G + HD 8600M Dual

My NVIDIA card doesn’t give this bug.

If full dxdiag could help I could send it but if it can’t I’d rather not bother.

ArenaNet Overthinking it with these Names

in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns

Posted by: Etienne.3049

Etienne.3049

In my opinion dragonhunter is simply a poor fit for the setting (largely because the main goal of every single player character is killing(/hunting) the dragons, and how different the dragons in GW2 are from what dragons normally are).

Daredevil on the other hand I find an absolutely horrible name, to me it sound like someone who does dangerous things like jumping across a ravine on a motorcycle or such pointless acts.

Assault Knight Cores

in Guild Wars 2 Discussion

Posted by: Etienne.3049

Etienne.3049

They are still available on the trade post and thus by no means unavailable. If I recall corectly you can only use 10 a color, 10 of each color is 270 gold to buy directly (by placing orders you might be able save a bit), which may not be cheap but it definitely isn’t that expensive either.

Also, that box doesn’t exist and therefore seems rather pointless to discuss.

Guild Wars 2 HoT Release Date? [merged]

in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns

Posted by: Etienne.3049

Etienne.3049

I’d be somewhat surprised if it’d be this year at all.
It could be, of course, but given how much is known about the expansion so far I wouldn’t assume it.

Arenanet has already made it clear that the game will be released in 2015. So the question of it being in this year is established already.

As was pointed out 3 times (they all did in quick succession so they may have legitimately missed eachother’s posts) before you did, to which I already replied so this seems a bit pointless.
Also this is a video game, they have announced (well, even less then announced even, more of a remark, on a third party site no less) the game will be released in 2015, this is no proof it actually will as video games sometimes have their release date pushed back.

Guild Wars 2 HoT Release Date? [merged]

in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns

Posted by: Etienne.3049

Etienne.3049

I’d be somewhat surprised if it’d be this year at all.
It could be, of course, but given how much is known about the expansion so far I wouldn’t assume it.

They announced just a couple weeks ago that it will be this year. Since there is only a couple of months left in 2015 I doubt they will miss the deadline, most stuff is probably already complete with some minor adjustment. Otherwise they wouldn’t have announced that.

Ah, must have missed that one; which is no surprise when they announce stuff through third parties. What’s wrong with your own site? (Somewhat off-topic but I’ve been getting quite annoyed with that for a while now.)

In that case I’d expect december, if it isn’t going to end up postponed into next year anyway, which does happen with video games.

New trait system Good or bad?

in Guild Wars 2 Discussion

Posted by: Etienne.3049

Etienne.3049

EDIT: Just to be clear, my main grievance with the new system is that most of the time, I find my self with zero choices for one of the traits in otherwise fine line.

EDIT: And no, I’m not saying “Roll it back” I’m saying “Keep improving it. Maybe with bit more diversity next? Pretty please?”

EDIT: For example, in old system we had traits in inconvenient locations. Now we have locations with no convenient traits. I’d love if this was addressed by either ensuring that each trait is always viable and not bound to a weapon or skill type, OR if we could still choose other traits from the entire trait line incase we can’t find “grandmaster” trait that is usable for our build.

I know, it’s been some time since the trait update. I was having a break, and when I come back… How… why did you guys let ANet get away with this?

I’m not going to calculate every possible build for the old system, just interested in the more viable ones, that is, 2 maxed out with one major trait in third line, and 1 maxed out with 2 major traits in 2 lines. So there are some hundred million more builds than I’m numbering here. I also used quite a few builds with one maxed out traitline and rest at the first major trait each, but some would argue those builds are useless. Still, freedom to choose is freedom to choose.

So, the calculation for one traitline in the old system, is that you get to choose 1 out of 6 for the first trait, 1 out of 10 for the second except for the one you already picked, and 1 out of 12 for the third, except for the 2 you already picked. So the calculation is:
6*(10-1)(12-2) = 540
A traitline with 2 traits would be:
6*(10-1) = 54
A traitline with 1 trait would be:
6

For both cases, you get to pick 3 out of 5 traitlines:
(5 nCr 3) = 10
For both cases, you get to choose which of the 3 traitlines is the one with different amount of traits:
3

So, for the 2 maxed out, we’ll get:
10*3*6*540*540 = 52488000
And for the one with 1 maxed out:
10*3*54*54*540 = 47239200
So the old system with 3 trait lines chosen had
99727200 builds. Or, actually more since we’re not counting in cases where two lines have minor trait as their last choice.

So the old system with just 3 traitlines with points in them had 99727200 builds. That’s not even counting the builds with 4 or 5 chosen traitlines, or counting the builds with minor traits as last chosen traits, as people argue those are less viable builds. (They’re still a choice tho, but a figure as high as 99727200 is quite enough for this thread.)

Now the new system:
So the new system lets you select 3 traitlines out of 5.
(5 nCr 3) = 10
The new system let’s you select 1 out of 3 traits, then 1 out of 3 traits, and then 1 out of 3 traits for each trait line. That is
3*3*3 = 27
So the total number of builds available for the new system is…
10 * 27 * 27 * 27 = 196830
196830 total. The absolute total. There is no other possible trait combinations than that. Just 196830.

So now we have (1 – 196830 / 99727200) * 100 = 99.80 % reduction in freedom to choose. Actually, MORE than 99.8% due to all the builds I did not count. But they were a bit less viable, so who cares, right?

I’m not sure how I’m going to get over this. 99.8%? We have 0.2% of the freedom we used to have when it comes to builds. Now, I know, HoT will double the amount of possible builds there will be since they’re adding a whole new trait line. So we really lost “only” (more than) 99.6% of possible builds.

Couple that with the update to dailies and the fact that HoT will now have some weapons and F# abilities bound to traits… I’m starting to be worried that we’ll eventually just have 3 ways to play each profession in the future.

To Arenanet: I had a reply typed out but then this got merged and I lost what I had. Please do something about that.

The assumption that the number of possiblilities going from one huge number to another, slightly lower, huge number means it will eventually become just 3 is frankly ridiculous.

There were horrible choices made in the update that introduced the new trait system but the trait system itself was not one of them.
I’m not saying the new one is better (I’m not even sure which I prefer yet) but it’s far from as horrible as you try to make it seem.

Guild Wars 2 HoT Release Date? [merged]

in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns

Posted by: Etienne.3049

Etienne.3049

I’d be somewhat surprised if it’d be this year at all.
It could be, of course, but given how much is known about the expansion so far I wouldn’t assume it.

Server raids?

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Posted by: Etienne.3049

Etienne.3049

servers should mean something other than wvw.

Why?
Why should I be limited to playing with the people that happened to choose the same server?
I can see the use of servers for WvW (although given the current state of WvW I’d prefer to see them replaced there too). But in PvE? I can’t see why they should matter/exist.

Why care about number of maps?

in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns

Posted by: Etienne.3049

Etienne.3049

People care about maps because they can’t think past MORE = BETTER. If there was 1 map and had more content than all of the maps combined so far, this would possibly blow people’s minds. Anet can’t afford to blow the minds of these kind of people.

Well, there’s the problem of expressing “content” in any sort of value that can be compared to another value; As well as possibly differing opinions as to what actualy constitutes content.
If they’d manage to get as much content (the way I’d evaluate it) as the base game in a single map the size of this map would mean that even on a full map you’d still hardly see any other players; so I guess in a way that would blow my mind, the poor decision making of such a hypothetical situation that is.
At the moment I’d actually be pleasantly surprised if the expansion contains half the content of the base game.

As they won’t and probably can’t give me an estimate in “content value” (say, with the base game having a content value of 100 and of course fitting my valuing of content) I’ll have to use something else to estimate the amount of content.
And since number of maps has some relation to total area and total area has some relation to amount of content, I’d accept number of maps as that is the only one I don’t consider entirely unlikely to ever be released.

Another thing is that ironically I can’t try the content (helping me make an estimate of the value of the expansion, as they won’t give us any information about it) in the expansion without buying the expansion and I won’t buy the expansion without having any idea of its value.

Why care about number of maps?

in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns

Posted by: Etienne.3049

Etienne.3049

Because I want to know the amount of content included in the expansion.

I’d prefer to know the total area of maps in the expansion but measuring that is kind of tricky. I definitely do not see inaccessible areas (mountains mostly, and presumably the parts where you can glide down in the expansion) as contributing to the area and would prefer to count water as less than land; another person might see that differently.

Also I like to have a bit of diversity in maps (a potential problem regardless of the number of maps as the expansion is in a single region as far as I know), the higher the number of maps the greater the chance of them being somewhat diverse.
To me amount of content adds to replayability.

But because answering these questions might take quite a bit of time I’d accept the number of maps as at least an approximate indication of the amount of content.

If they were to say there’ll be over 20 Diessa Plateaus (at a cursory glance the best map to use as a unit of mesurement for area) in area (accessible land area only) in several different styles (like the regions in the base game) then the number wouldn’t be that important. As I don’t expect them to give me such a figure I’ll have to make do with the number of maps once they finally reveal it. And I really hope it’s more than “an expansion worth of content” (as I recall them saying about the living world).

Condi Damage vs. Power Damage [merged]

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Posted by: Etienne.3049

Etienne.3049

Often I see claims about condition damage in comparison to power the I believe to be untrue and/or unhelpful. I’m not going into the exact numbers as I don’t know them and they aren’t quite relevant to the point I’m trying to make here (they may well be relevant in other discussions).

First of all, I believe condition and power should be balanced soldier’s to dire against moderately armored targets and without traits (as at that point you are comparing classes and traits which should be balanced against each other, not against base stats). If in this situation the balance is wrong, blame the numbers instead of resorting to any of the following:

Conditions ignore armor: True, but this isn’t completely in favor of the condition damage users. If power and conditions are properly balanced against a moderately armored target, power would have the advantage against low armor targets and conditions the advantage against high armor targets.

Conditions only need 1 stat, power needs 3: I’d say power gets to use 3 stats that all multiply in a way whereas conditions only get one stat with possibly precision as a secondary which scales worse than with power and needs traits to do anything at all.

Conditions are passive while power is active: The user still needs to apply the conditions making this claim utter nonsense. Just count condition damage as done when the condition is applied and you should be able to understand that (almost all of) the same counters to power also work against conditions.

There are however several downsides to conditions that should be compensated with a higher base damage (against a moderately armored target):

Conditions take time to kill, during which the opponent can still do you damage and maybe even kill you. As well as conditions not doing their full damage due to the target being dead.

Conditions can be cleansed, thereby not doing their full damage.

And finally there’s one complaint I saw somewhere today: Conditions are strong in burst and sustained damage: If this is true, fair enough, conditions shouldn’t do burst damage, at all. Somehow I’m guessing the problem here was burning.

Beta Key / Portal Drops

in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns

Posted by: Etienne.3049

Etienne.3049

What some of you are missing out on, is that once a player got a portal he/she should have been removed from the player pool.

I don’t think any drop in the game works like that, meaning they’d have to program a way to stop the item from dropping for people that already have one which would cost time (no clue how much as I can’t program and don’t have access to the game’s code) and give absolutely no benefits whatsoever except for stopping these nonsense threads from showing up all the time.

Weirdest place you have looted a precursor?

in Guild Wars 2 Discussion

Posted by: Etienne.3049

Etienne.3049

A destroyer at the dredge camp in Eternal Battlegrounds (unfortunately it was an aquatic one, which are essentially worthless). That was however the weirdest 1 place out of a total of 1 places.

Tokens should be wallet

in Guild Wars 2 Discussion

Posted by: Etienne.3049

Etienne.3049

I agree, definitely on the bandit crests and geodes. I’ve got an entire bank tab worth of slots occupied by bandit crests, mostly because I wouldn’t know what to spend them on and party because I like to have some in case I suddenly need them.

For festival tokens I would prefer if they were included but I’d be fine with them not being included as long as permanent currencies are.

Braham Eirsson - a wrong name

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Posted by: Etienne.3049

Etienne.3049

Whether it’s -son/-sson or -dottir/sdottir depends on what the possessive form of the parent’s name happens to be. A man named Helgi would have a son named Helgason and a daughter named Helgadottir, while a man named Gudmundur would have children named Gudmundsson and Gudmundsdottir, respectively.

Makes sense, especially since the Norn apparently do speak a language other than whatever humans speak (in addition to the human language) which would probably be the one used for names.

There’s a few on the wikis that still look odd (the name with -son or -dottir removed looks odd for a possessive) but that may be due to me not knowing any language close to old norse.

Braham Eirsson - a wrong name

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Posted by: Etienne.3049

Etienne.3049

I know that the norn are not exactly the same as historical cultures they are based on but it seems to me like the Norn wouldn’t have a lot of written official texts like laws and name documents so they would be likely to have naming customs rather than rules leaving Braham free to pick the name from the parent he actually liked. (I know I’m pretty much guessing at Norn culture here and may very well be wrong.)

Most likely he just wasn’t famous enough himself to make others use a different name. He could claim all he want to be Braham Borjeson, and other Norn would still call him Eirson. Because, for them, that would be his main defining characteristics – being a son of a Legend.

Makes some sense, they’d still have to know who his mother was for that though.
And most player characters aren’t Norn and might well call him by whaterver he’d introduce himself as.

Braham Eirsson - a wrong name

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Posted by: Etienne.3049

Etienne.3049

I also found this kind of odd, at the current point in the story it makes some sense for him to be Eirsson, having been reconciled with his mother and all.

I know that the norn are not exactly the same as historical cultures they are based on but it seems to me like the Norn wouldn’t have a lot of written official texts like laws and name documents so they would be likely to have naming customs rather than rules leaving Braham free to pick the name from the parent he actually liked. (I know I’m pretty much guessing at Norn culture here and may very well be wrong.)

Also the name you know a person by is usually the one that person has given you so if Braham would have prefered not to be associated with his mother he could easily have introduced himself with a patronymic rather than a matronymic and it should take quite a while before anyone would notice that’s not the name he would traditionally use (until he’d tell someone who his mother is or until you’d meet someone who knows who his mother is and tells you).

So I’d guess either Braham chose to use his mother’s name even though he didn’t like her (for whatever reason, maybe he did like the prestige associated with it (although this would imply that there are few enough Norn for Eir to be a rare name)) or the writers messed up.

Also, related but somewhat off-topic, there doesn’t seem to be any consistency to whether it’s -son and -dottir or -sson and -sdottir.

Racism in Tyria??????

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Posted by: Etienne.3049

Etienne.3049

taking back what was rightfully theirs?

Destroying Ascalon, forcing Khilbron to destroy Orr and helping the Mursaat take over Kryta?

I miss Living Story

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Posted by: Etienne.3049

Etienne.3049

Season 2 wasn’t actually a bi-weekly update, the average time between two consecutive season 2 updates was 4 weeks (slightly shorter, though nowhere near 2 weeks, if you count seasonal events). That’s just for season 2 whcih was preceeded by a fairly long break if I recall corectly. Can’t remember the time between season 1 updates, so there may have been bi-weekly updates at some point but there haven’t been for a while now.

Words without a meaning

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Posted by: Etienne.3049

Etienne.3049

Yes they do, the ones that are words at least, as well as the abreviation (which stands for “random number generator”).

“Play how I want” has possible meanings depending on whether the “I” is the designer or the player, and possibly some other factors.

“Pay to win” still has a definition, just one that is slightly less clear than the others. It means that by paying one could get an advantage over others, it’s just the size of the advantage required to qualify that is subjective (I’d say any advantage no matter how small qualifies (yes, that includes strength/armor boosters)).

Heart of Thorns Wish List:

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Posted by: Etienne.3049

Etienne.3049

Playable skritt.
PvE condition overhaul (removal if necessary).
New maps.
Anything to change WvW a bit (it’s getting somewhat stale for me).
An attempt to balance WvW (balance world populations mostly).

Anybody DONT want Pax to be an Xpac?

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Posted by: Etienne.3049

Etienne.3049

You’re getting fresh, free stuff every 2-4 weeks and complaining you are getting a stagnate game… so yeah, your demands are pretty ridiculous.

Average time between any 2 subsequent season 2 updates has been 4 weeks, there has been a large break between seasons 1 and 2 and I have no reason to expect there won’t be a huge break after season 2. Every 4 weeks is a rather optimistic estimate.

What’s more important is what we have actually got since launch which is:
Fractals
3 new maps (one of which I don’t like at all, Southsun, though that is of course subjective).
9 new (healing) skills (I might be missing some though).
2 new PvP maps.
Edge of the Mists.
WvW rank.
8 living stories which I’d think doesn’t come close to half the personal story.
Some updates that are nice but not gameplay related (account wallet/wardrobe).

I may have missed some things but this should be most (note that I’m only counting net gains meaning +3 and -1 PvP maps makes +2 and the amount of dungeon paths added also comes to 0 and only gameplay, ascended added nothing in terms of gameplay and therefore isn’t worth mentioning).

Now GW1 (which had campaigns rather than expansions but the difference isn’t that big) had after 1 year:
A new set of missions I think at least half the size of the original.
New PvP modes.
New maps, also probably more than half of what Prophecies had.
2 new classes.
Many new skills.

And possibly more, it’s been a while since I played it.

That’s GW2 after over 2 years compared to GW1 after one year with the intention of adding that much every half year (the only time that happened (Nightfall) was bigger).

I think that if for GW2 we had gotten one expansion, half the size of Factions, each year we’d have more than we have now.

I really don’t like the DLC method games in general have started using (selling junk without gameplay value for ridiculous prices (compared to their near-zero value) or worse cheat DLC along with the occational piece of actual gameplay that would probably cost more than an expansion if you’d buy an expansion worth of content).

how do you feel about passive swiftness?

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Posted by: Etienne.3049

Etienne.3049

I much prefer the speed boost Engineers and Warriors get (a trait instead of 1/3 of the skill choices).

But in general I dislike the existence of such mechanics (in any game), I kinda feel forced to use the signet (N, E, T, R), trait (W, En) or a lot of swiftness skills (G), and dislike playing my Mesmer because he’s just so slow, because the default out of combat speed feels so slow.

I’d hope they’d eventually decide to increase base out of combat speed (at least in PvE and probably WvW, not sure about PvP) and make speed boosts only work in combat (and game modes without the increased out of combat speed, if any); but I’m not expecting any change because this mechanic (speed boost with a cost that after using it makes playing without it feel slow) was old before they started developing GW2.

TP 200 listing display has me stuck! Pls Fix

in Black Lion Trading Co

Posted by: Etienne.3049

Etienne.3049

Yeah, I would also really like to be able to see all my listings (not 1000, all, although 1000 would help a bit). I couldn’t care if that would be on the old or new trade post (I find the downsides of the new TP to massively outweigh the benefits and this is by far the biggest downside).