Guild Wars 2

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

I’m not taking “griefing” lightly — I’m saying it’s not a dire problem for the majority of the population. Most people don’t experience it, because many of the events have already been tweaked appropriately. The exceptions can be addressed by reporting people who are verbally abusive and letting ANet handle it.

Alright, of course verbal harrassment is handled via reports. I didn’t even mention the hate chat because reporting is the way to go. But reporting won’t change the fact that there is an incentive to fail the event and doesn’t solve the problem. The number of people who are effected doesn’t really matter. If only a few people cannot do an event because someone or a group actively hinders him/her, that’s a problem. Ignoring it because it doesn’t affect a majority of players would give the message that ArenaNet doesn’t care about you. This is not really a thing where you can convincingly take the side of the zerg. Zaithan’s minions are trying to take the fortress, the heroes are supposed to fight them back. That is how the developers intended the event, there’s no room for interpretation.

The right thing to do for the zerg would be to just miss a cycle and let people do the event. That OP let the zerg go about their business and only started killing the boss when they were done is a courtesy that I would expect from the zerglings.

daw.4923:

wasnt easier to swap map?

How do you swap map instances at will? I’m only aware of LFG and taxi, and that’s probably only used by event farmers

If you just log off and back in, you’ll land in the same instance as before, right?

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Things could be better, but they aren’t dire.

Well, I sure hope that is not ArenaNet’s view on griefing. Just put yourself into the person who wants to do an event, and then a bunch a players come and scale up the boss so you cannot do the event. Or a small group makes it a hobby to join Triple Trouble events to kill the Amber head so fast that the event will fail every time.

Griefing is nothing to take lightly.

That’s what I’m doing with my thief. Berserker build with P/P and Staff. You will likely end up using staff much more than pistols. For me, it’s not unloading for the might and then switch to staff anymore. It’s rather clubbing the mob and dash backwards when my health is low, then shoot to heal, then back to his toes. With the right traits, you deal more damage with staff than with Unload. In fractals, if you don’t stack to your group, you might cause difficulties because the boss jumps around. Also, you want the boons and heals from team members. If you face several adds, you use staff anyway.

I switch from Deadly Arts to Trickery and back, depending on the fractal. Deadly Arts is best if you go melee most of the time, like Molten Bosses. At Mai Trin high levels, I will always be as far away from her as possible. So when I do that fractal, I use Trickery, it’s awesome for initiative, and has value for the team. Basically, I decide which weapon I will use most, and adjust the traits accordingly. Most of the time, I choose staff over pistols.

Unload is not more dps than staff, sad truth. You can deal awesome damage with pistols though. Last week, I partied with a thief and she only used P/P, outdamaging everybody else with a large margin. I don’t know which traits she chose, but she had that Nourishment that gives more damage to Molten Alliance, and of course fractal potions. But I was using potions too, and the difference could not have come from that Nourishment alone. She was also not ranging the bosses, staying close at boon providers. Maybe I would have come closer to her damage if I had chosen pure staff traits. I played a compromise between staff and pistols. Or maybe I just suck ^^

Just for those who don’t get what’s going on. The zerg in Cursed Shore runs from boss to boss, from event to event, in rotation, to get most loot out of them. To achieve that, they deliberately fail events because it makes Champions spawn, which provide good loot.

There are usually a few players who are not part of the zerg who try to succeed in the event. The zerg will than move close to, let’s say, the outer side of a wall. The idea is to be close enough to scale up the boss, but don’t get aggro. This way, the boss will usually be too strong for the few who try to kill him.

I admit that I took part in these runs a few times. Reflecting on it from the point of view of those who actually want to do the event, it’s clearly a form of griefing. The only difference is that the zerg does not intend to grief, it’s more a collateral damage for them.

Now that I think about it, I couldn’t be mad at someone who reported me for griefing in this case. In another game I played, you could kill a banker for loot and xp. Sucked for those who wanted to use the banker because it took some time to finish him. Same goes for quest-NPCs. If you do something deliberately that gets the quest-PC killed, like pulling mobs to him, it’s griefing.

The only viable solution to this issue is changing the mechanics of the event chain. Make it so players are not tried to harmfully affect others. Break the event chain by increasing cool downs or adjusting loot or the Champ spawns.

Many of the Tyria rewards are outdated and need an update. Even the loot tables haven’t been touched and we loot stuff that might have been great 4 years ago, but is completely worthless nowadays. The economy has changed, but the value of loot has not. You can make 100 gold in a couple of hours if you focus on it. The gold you loot from common mobs is nothing. We still get like 1% more gold loot for achievement point stages (with chests at 3500/4000/4500 etc. APs). This is not a reward anymore these days. And honestly, who puts additional gold find on his amulet slot?

Is that bad or good? Don’t know, I guess we don’t need more gold from killing trash mobs, and updating it would cause inflation. It just looks weird to loot a few coppers after killing a veteran level 80 pirate. Maybe she spent all her money on rum. They could just remove gold loot from the game and nobody would notice any impact.

So yes, I agree, many old rewards are outdated. It just looks like a lot of tedious work and possible unintended impact on the game to get a team to update them.

GWMO.4785:

Also perhaps we should just call them puzzles from now on. As they don’t always involve jumping specifically.

And most of them don’t involve any puzzle, so maybe we should call them nothing :P

It’s difficult to tell that the first part of the post is Zlater taking the role of the player who joined his raid group. I think a lot of people will start reading and don’t know you and think you are one of those people you point at ^^

Asur.9178:

False!!

What’s hurting the game is them constantly catering to players who want to put in no effort to improve themselves and be rewarded for it, for the past 4 years.

Now that is a general statement as answer to a specific complaint/request.

ArenaNet is catering to players who have a wide range of characters, and expects everybody to use them as fit. That’s ok, but you can be unhappy about it and it doesn’t mean you are lazy or don’t want to improve. If you only play one character, you opt out of some of the content.

Let’s say you only a play a huge Norn Revenant. Jumping Puzzles? Sure, you need some tonic that shrinks you to even see that platform. High level fractals? Good luck finding a pug, even worse with raids.

I need some Mastery points and despise mini games, but I checked out that Chak Rifle Field Test one. It looks like my power thief will have a hard time getting two mastery points there because I have no condition boosts.

Jumping Puzzles are best suited for mesmers. You are supposed to fall, they are designed that way. They are mostly not even puzzles in the sense most people have of “puzzles”. They are jump’n run mini games, remind me of Mega Man. I’m levelling a mesmer with that in mind (fun for other things too though). Characters are tools for ArenaNet, and you need to have them ready to your disposal. Yesterday at Fractals, some guy wondered if everybody plays thief these days because the first two people to join his group where thieves. He noted that he plays thief as main character too, but chose the Guardian for farming the Molten Bosses.

To be honest, that’s the way I like to play MMO games. When a new boss comes out that requires strong debuffs, I create the class with the best debuffs. When a tank is best for the encounter, I will have the best tank with the best tank stuff available.

I’m the “puppet master” of my characters, and help them along their journey. I’m just too new to GW2 to have the set of characters I want.

But I fully understand that there are people who play one characters and want to be happy with it. And these people will have a hard time in some content because they lack the tools to succeed. Not because they are lazy or don’t want to improve, but simply because the game is designed for people with a set of characters.

Well, I wouldn’t mind a “sell all minor and major runes/sigils” button. I never kep any of these.

Vayne.8563:

Most people want mastery points but not everyone likes the content you have to do enough to get those mastery points. If those players force themselves to do that content, they’re not going to be having fun, even though the got the reward.

That’s how I feel about all those mini games in HoT. I will eventually do them for the mastery points, but they are a duty and not fun.

Last time the karka mini game was a daily. I entered the arena and we were two (at times three) players who just sat down at the side and waited until it’s over. I tried to enter and leave immediately, but you have to finish to make it count as daily. You also have to use a skill sometimes to not get kicked.

Most stupid thing in the whole game. But the fourth daily was something worse.

So yes, the fun is not the activity itself, but the reward. If both is fun, that’s great, and most of the things in GW2 are like that for me. Otherwise I wouldn’t be here. But as you said, something that is fun for one group is despised by another. I don’t mind some grind., but many Tyria Mastery Points are no fun to get.

I’ll go for offense. If you use Invigorating Precision or other things that steal health, the additional damage will heal you more with the off potion. And the additional damage is huge, making it much more valuable for a damage dealing class than lowering the incoming damage, since your focus lies on avoiding damage anyway, and you do not face tank. For support builds the defensive potion is better.

I made the mistake to think “add a little more sustaniability” by using a few items that give me health or defense. The truth is, the life steal/regeneration that comes from more dps is superior. You just have to constantly deal damage, but that’s what we are trying do anyway.

Hevoskuuri.3891:

when mastering a profession, you can run around learning while leveling, or you might as well run around learning with all the important stuff unlocked for you and the full potential of the class right there for you to behold.

I totally agree with you about this. I think the bias that you should level up a character to fully learn it comes from other games, where this is the only truth. I didn’t expect such a change of playstyle after level 80 in GW2. Sometimes you even drop the weapon set you used the way to level 80, and have no clue how to use the bext one for max level. And levelling is so quick, how much can you learn in two weeks from 1 to 80 anyway? If you want to have your character craft, you do 24 levels without “learning your class” anyway. Level adjustment (great mechanics btw!) you don’t even mjiss out on the fun of content if you do it later.

For ArenaNet, GW2 level 1 to 80 is just the first page of a book with thousand pages. That’s probably why they gave the level 80 boost, because it doesn’t matter how you get to 80. For new players, only world exploration would be a good reason to level up manually. Or of course if you like doing it.

zectra.6978:

Faaris.8013:

zectra.6978:

Any class! Start from 1 and learn it, that work’s best for me – perhaps it will work for you, plus you get a lot of l00t now when leveling.

Have you even read the original post?

I did!

OP wrote “Would love to hear peoples opinions on classes with easy rotations”.

He doesn’t want to use complicated rotations, and asks for our opinion on classes with easy rotations. You just tell him to learn the complex rotations.

DeanBB.4268:

The problem with allowing everyone to use the same names with the account name added is confusion over which Legolas just <insert insult here> you. With unique names, if you know Legolas just scammed you, then you can take that to support. If one of a billion Legolas’s just scammed you, not so easy to sort out.

That could also happen if LegoIas scammed you instead of Legolas. I don’t really see that happening in this game though.

zectra.6978:

Any class! Start from 1 and learn it, that work’s best for me – perhaps it will work for you, plus you get a lot of l00t now when leveling.

Have you even read the original post?

Agreed, with Staff Daredevil (Thief) you can get along pretty well with auto-attack only. And if you want, there are optional rotations. Pistols or shortbow as ranged.

Cynz, your examples describe toxic people. I think we have established here that toxic people existed before dps meters. Just like kittens existed before the Internet. Its invention just gave them a new powerful tool to live their dream.

That doesn’t mean the Internet is to blame.

Wegloop’s Air Mask (or its light and heavy variants) is quite easy to get though:

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Wegloop%27s_Air_Mask

If you can enter Bitterfrost Frontier, go get it.

Vayne.8563:

There are plenty of people who play for only rewards. There are also plenty of people who play for fun though.

And then there are people who have fun getting rewards.

Ayrilana.1396:

I don’t see what a class would limit a player beyond DPS as the encounter is primarily mechanics based.

Maybe not a class, but the race. I would love to see a video of this Norn fighting in the small room to get a feeling for it.

Ashantara.8731:

Well, you can’t always rely on specific people being online when you are. It will force you to only do events at given times, which is a shame as there are constantly event squads outside of gw2community.

Nah, I don’t mean gw2community events, I join them in Team Speak anyway. But some players have a rhythm of doing events/metas, they show up every day at the same time.

I wonder if there is a real money market for popular character names already. Character name grabbing exists. I actually met people who create free accounts in newly released games just to secure the name, in case they want to play it at some point.

Menadena.7482:

Grimwolf.7163:

Psientist.6437:

Grimwolf.7163:

I have like 20 points left to go on my leatherworking that I can’t reasonably complete, because each item I craft costs roughly 20 gold. It would take about 200 gold to finish.
Most of them only sell back for ~6-8 gold, because idiots. And can take several days to do so due to low demand.

Could you expand more on the ‘because idiots’?

What would you call it when people craft something, and then sell it for less than it cost them to craft it?

The market rate?

It is odd. In RL adding labor to something increases the cost over that of the materials. The GW2 economy does the precise opposite of that. I am not sure how you would fix it at this point though.

If you produce much more than is demanded, you have that effect in real markets. Just take a look at 1 Dollar/Euro stores. There is a lot of stuff that you cannot produce for the money you can buy it for, even if you let slaves do the work. The shipping and handling alone is more expensive. Companies destroy overproduction to not harm their brand by selling it off with a loss.

Just in case someone who has the same issue as I had stumbles over this thread:

The game engine knows which parts of the disguise you already looted. That way, you don’t end up with two helmets while you need another part.

Problem is that the devs didn’t consider the case that someone deletes a piece. If you cleared some Svanirs and don’t plan on disguising yourself, you might just delete a piece to make room in your inventory.

If you need the disguise at some point later, in a few weeks maybe, because you forgot to get the Mastery Point in that area or the diver achievement, you will be surprised that you cannot get all three pieces for the disguise.

The game thinks you already have that helmet you deleted 3 weeks ago, and therefore only drops the other two pieces. Took me about an hour of farming to figure out, then I deleted the two pieces I had. From then on it took me 3 minutes to get all pieces.

btw, taxis are not explained in the game either, they are not kind of the lore.

I only figured out what a taxi is because I asked someone when I read about it in map chat. And then, only after I participated in a gw2community organized Triple Trouble event, I really figured out how the map instances work and how and why people use taxis. Now, I don’t even need an LFG to get to a good map instance because I can guess who will command and just /sqjoin. I’m pretty sure there are casual players who played for a year or more and have no clue how map instances and taxis work.

Haleydawn.3764:

jihm.2315:

we should be able to have same names as others dont see the problem

I 100% disagree. Names should be unique. I wouldn’t want to see anyone copycatting my names I may have spent hours putting together just so someone else can use it.

Are you creating characters in all online games you can find just to protect your copyright? :P

No worries man, you are a unique snowflake, even if other people have the same name.

Justin Time.7054:

I use to frequently create new characters in Gw2.
The one thing that makes me waste time in the process is the choice of the name.
When I think I found a good one, it exists already.
Then I improvise but seldom what is improvised satisfies me.
I wonder if there is a name database to check before creating the character, and if does not exist, I believe it might be a useful idea to create it.
I suppose it is difficult to implement my suggestion, names come and go at any moment, as characters are created and deleted continously.

I fully support this suggestion. And it’s not about lack of creativity or laziness really. In real life, not every name is unique either. Try finding a town with 150k citizens where everybody has a unique name (or find a Chinese village with 50 people). It’s ridiculous to expect us to create a name on the first try that doesn’t already exist, unless you use a random password generator.

I don’t see why there should not be a list kept up to date by ArenaNet where you can look up names you want to use before getting into character creation. LFG doesn’t work for new players, and for those who already have a character, you actually have to add the person to your friends list to see if the name exists, and then remove him/her again. That you are pressured to hurry at the end of the character creation doesn’t help. If your first three attempts fail, and you want to look up some lore to find a fitting name, you risk having to start over your character creation because it timed out. I think there shouldn’t be an idle kick while you create a character, or at least make every change an “action” that stops the afk timer.

When I created my Account, I assumed that you can choose any ingame name, and if chance has it that you and someone with the same name show up on the same map, you’ll get a number behind it, just like I’m not Faaris here but Faaris.8013.

Most of the time, you could probably just have your non-unique name visible while playing the game. The number would only become visible if the engine detects a conflict on the same map and instance.

Grimwolf.7163:

I have like 20 points left to go on my leatherworking that I can’t reasonably complete, because each item I craft costs roughly 20 gold. It would take about 200 gold to finish.
Most of them only sell back for ~6-8 gold, because idiots. And can take several days to do so due to low demand.

What are you doing, are you actually crafting Insignias? Buy 4 different cheap Intricate Gossamer Insignias from the Trading Post: Magi, Rabid, Dire, Shaman’s, that’s about 5 gold.

You need 4 helmets, that’s 12 hardened leather sections that cost 4 gold total (the other stuff is cheap).

Then you discover that kitten and sell it. Those 20 levels only cost 9 gold if you are lucky and use a crafting booster. It’s likely that you need to craft a fifth item though. Just buy another Rabid Insignia and discover them gloves.

You are welcome

I agree with Menadena, dps-meter users need to chill some more. But people who get rejected from raid groups might be better off taking it less personal, and not go on a rant about it. Rejection hurts, but it’s mostly not personal.

I consider myself a decent player/gamer, doing this for 25 years. However, I don’t think I’m ready for raids. I simply play this game for only 3 months. I only need three more armor pieces of ascended quality, then I basically have the hardware to do raids (nobody wants thief though ^^). But I don’t know kitten about other classes other than my thief, and I have yet to learn more about this one. I hardly know what kind of boons my team mates provide, or who can heal or shield. I believe you need to have a good grasp of how the most common 4 classes work before doing content where ignorance by few party members can cause a wipe.

Participating is fun, sure. And people often forget that winning is a lot more fun.

Djinn.9245:

People can say that players will discriminate or behave badly toward other players no matter what. But there is a difference between that and giving those players an approved tool with which to discriminate.

Not everything that excludes people is discrimination. If I don’t hire someone because he lacks the qualification/Skill set I require, that person could feel discriminated by skill-selection. I hope we agree that sounds stupid though. If I use an assessment center for my selection, is that less fair than using my guts?

vesica tempestas.1563:

Anet banned gear viewing, exact same problem, i.e fuel for toxic behavior. If you offer a tool that ranks people based on a couple of stats then that is fuel for abuse.

The thing is, those tools can validate if someone is experienced. And that’s all that is to it. It’s not about some umimportant stats. By the time you are ready for raids or high level fractals, you do have all ascended stuff and you learned which stats and runes work best to deal with the content. If you run around like a hippie with random stats and weapons that just suck for your class, it clearly shows you are not experienced or have no grasp of game mechanics, or just don’t like doing high tier content or you just don’t care (at which point, I wonder why you suddenly want to raid). All of these options are perfectly fine. Good armor, runes, weapons, sigils and rotations are necessary to succeed in raids and high tier fractals, and taking a look at them is telling a lot about a player’s ability to perform in that content. They can still suck though, and that’s where the performance-meter comes into play.

In a fractal pick up group you quickly notice how it works out. When I am lucky and there is no slacker, everybody stays in the group after the fractal, and we just do more fractals together. Without saying a single word, everybody knows. It’s not that everybody is perfect, but you see that everybody did their homework. Mistakes are no problem, just like in sports teams. Even pro athletes make mistakes.

In a group that has one or two slackers, everybody leaves after the advertised fractal. If you lose one member and the same fractal became much harder with the replacement, you know you got a slacker. You also know what the other guy contributed. You don’t need any other tools than your eyes. Gear showing and dps-meter might just save you the time and pain to figure out without them.

I’ll try to set some baseline for myself.

What are the factors that come into play when I try to estimate the impact of dps-meters on the game?

- What is my goal when I play the game?

This depends on my mood or my current goals. When I join a Tequatl event, I just want to have fun. I don’t do it for the weapon hoard, I just like hanging out there, and this means being on the map 25 minutes before he spawns and then taking him down. I don’t mind just standing there chatting for that time, or going through the achievements list to see what I can do next. Joining an organized Triple Trouble event is similar, and takes more time. At these things, I don’t care how much dps anyone deals, just join and learn the mechanics and listen to the commanders and have fun.

When I do a fractal for an achievement, or for other rewards, it’s different. I want to get it done in an efficient way. Most of them you can do without perfection. The Pareto principle works here, as in so many other areas. If you have one or two people who know their kitten, it’s fine. There are some fractals though that require everybody to know what he/she is doing. And as far as I can tell, that goes for raids as well.

- How do my actions affect others?

Someone here said that requiring a dps meter affects the players in a negative way. Guess what, being ignorant does the same. It does affect your team if you come to a party that wants to get stuff done without being well-prepared. Even if your cyclists team consists of hobbyists, you cannot/shouldn’t join a team that’s cycling faster than you. In cyclist events, there are usually different teams advertised. They state their average speed and the distance. For example, there’s a team that does 25km/h average, and there’s a team that does 30km/h. You don’t join the fast team if you cannot keep up with them. Nobody would call it toxic behaviour if you joined the fast team and can’t do the 30km/h average and they asked you to switch over to the slower team or get left behind. You don’t expect them to cycle slower because you pretended to fit in. Your lower performance would affect the team negatively. There might be even greater rewards for the specialists team at the end of the race, as it it for higher tier fractals, and raids.

In the cyclists example it is obvious who can’t keep up with the others, in sports, it’s usually quite obvious how people perform. You don’t need a speed meter to see who can’t keep up. And in almost all sports, you pick your group. You start at the bottom and work your way up if you can and want. You can of course stay in the hobbyist league, and that’s totally fine. Enjoy your beer in the breaks of the game. If you are good and want to be part of the winning team, playing at higher levels, get better rewards, you don’t choose to join a pro team. You can’t just join a professional team. They choose you, and they decide how they measure if you are a good fit. In these circles, measuring performance is a given, because everybody is eager to become better at what they are doing.

Yes, you paid for the game and its content. But we all pay for the stadiums and the pro teams in sports, no matter if you even watch them playing or like them. They paid for the Open World content too, even if they only play PvP or do raids. Raids and high tier fractals are made for meta, it’s not elitism. If you can pick up random people and do raids, go ahead and do so. Anet wanted it to be the way it is. Only thing I disagree with is that this content is required to get legendary stuff, or to max your masteries.

So, look at what your goals are and how your actions affect others. Don’t call people toxic just because they don’t want to have a cyclist in their 30km/h team that can only do 25km/h. If you join them anyway, you spoil their experience, and they only have so much freetime per week to cycle.

Jasonbdj.4021:

Very hard to get into groups without exp, cant gain exp without a group.

Sounds like the job market ^^

babazhook makes good points here, he describes quite well my thought process when using my pistols. I use Unload until Initiative is gone, only then I can use something else. Even using Impairing Daggers while in the Unload chain will disrupt stacking, so I only use Unload 6 times in a row (mostly, all bullets hit the target). I even hesitate dashing out of a red area because it breaks the flow.

Damage-wise, I finally made a reality check for myself yesterday in several instances.
Although Unload feels like a lot of damage, the staff has slightly more dps. If you get a double damage spot at a boss, that’s even more significant. And that is using only the simple, boring auto attack on the staff, no bouncing around and no Initiative spent, and I could use utility skills. And, I didn’t adjust my trait line for staff, so there’s even more room to do more dps with it.

I will keep using double pistols for daily playing, but when it comes to serious business where people depend on each other, I take out the staff. The pistols are great for bosses that stomp me though, staff skill 3 gets me out of the danger zone, then switching to pistols and unloading is nice. When health is filled up, back to staff.

So, my conclusion is that P/P is a lot of fun for me, but it’s far from meta. I just don’t like tanking, which is what works with staff and all the options thief has to heal by dealing damage. Gets me into awkward chat with people unfamiliar with thief when I unload on Horrik in the Mai Trin fractal just to heal myself, without planning on killing him.

Ashantara.8731:

Okay, I am confussled: What shield are you talking about, and how can there be comrades when you are soloing??

Well, you are not alone in the fight, there are Rytlock, Marjory, Braham, Caithe, Canach and Trahearne in this chapter. You convert the Blighted versions of them to allies in the fight. I think Canach is the one that creates a shield to protect everybody in the flight phases. And apparently they changed it so now you can join them under the shield instead of using the vents and fly.

Ashantara.8731:

4. Soloing this mission is not recommendable. It is easiest done with a party.

ShadowGryphon.6257:

1: you can now hide within the shield.

Although it certainly is easier with a group (as basically everything), if you can really join your comrades under the shield now, I think that’s a fair solution that allows easier soloing. It was weird to be excluded from the shield anyway.

I would already be happy if I could go to the Black Lion guys, pick up the stuff I ordered, come back to the crafting station and would be right at the crafting point where I left, instead of clicking through the 5 sub-recipes.

Also, the settings I made to only view Master/Grandmaster recipes should stay that way until I make changes again. When you log in next day, it resets to show all.

There are so many variables the devs can use to determine how aggro is directed. I got the feeling that the Legendary Bandit Avenger knows I’m playing a thief and attacks me as soon as I get as close as 900 range after firing only a few bullets at him. Or maybe he knows that I killed X bandits or whatever. The possibilities are endless. They could even change how a mob aggroes with every respawn, by using the random generator to select from several options.

I would love to have a glimpse on the code that’s used for aggro (or not, depending on the documentation standards Anet uses).

Krait.

That’s all that needs to be said about underwater combat. Remove Krait from low to mid level and people might start enjoying underwater combat more. Or give people a chance to counter their pull, so we are not their playball. Krait are what stays on my mind about underwater combat, and that’s why I hate it.

aurensei.5283:

If they have the time to run around (or stand around) the nodes and wait for the them to re-spawn – why hate people for that? It’s their time! Why report people for doing boring grind?

I think some imagination helps here. In another game, my character was standing at the same mob for hours, farming for a specific dagger. People must have thought I’m weird or crazy, or just a boring grinder.

What they didn’t know is that I was playing that same game with another account actively, having a ball in a little PvP war with another guild. It just took me a look and pressing a key at the other computer every respawn to get the dagger at some point. If I was whispered at, I replied, if I wasn’t too busy running around with the other character.

There are people who own several accounts and have several computers running.

Don’t know, the update suits me well. I’m playing P/P Staff Thief anyway, and now I can Unload 6 times instead of 4 before getting low on initiative. With the might stacking, that’s awesome, and against mobs/bosses, they usually all hit the target and you get 2 initiative back.

6 Unloads, switch to staff, swing it for a bit, before the weapon switch cool down finished, you have max initiative. Switch back to P7P, Unload again. Only annoying thing is if someone in your group gives some kind of haste boon. In that case you Unload too fast and cannot chain 6 of them. If that happens, the might stacking doesn’t work as well and you actually deal less damage because the chain is broken.

Fact is my build became more powerful with the update, and the additional damage is quite visible.

There’s no room for a shortbow in my regular build, maybe I’ll test it at some point. Not talking about PvP here.

Guys, this thread keeps popping up on top because a troll has fun with it.

Just let it die, this thread should not have been resurrected for a personal vendetta anyway.

They should rather put a cool down timer on those one armed bandit chests. After every 5 keys used, you have to wait 5 hours or so, or you can only use 2 keys per day or whatever sounds reasonable.

In Germany, slot machines are required to have a cool down timer by law, and those chests function exactly like slot machines.

IndigoSundown.5419:

I can tell if another player is using bulky versus glass gear when I see what happens to their health bars when they get hit.

I’m pretty sure that’s quite often the case for players who have knowledge of the class in question. You can also quite easily see how fast someone can wipe out a couple of veteran mobs, and you also see who spends more time swinging. That wasn’t so obvious for me when I started because I didn’t think that a few percent more of this or that makes such a difference. I spend the first 2 months playing in a mix of rare armor with completely different runes and stats. I didn’t get how runes worked ^^

Now, I can tell if someone is using crap as I did or if they actually understand that numbers make a huge difference here. The jump from mixed rare to berserker exotic with proper runes was astonishing. It was like training basketball with a hoop that’s a little bit tighter and then switching to a regular one.

@OP: what gear are you actually wearing? There really is no good reason to not get exotic when your character is level 80. For your own sake, gear up! Very few people notice the damage difference between ascended and exotic I guess, but they do between rare and exotic. You will not regret the small investment.

And yes, I agree that these people were toxic. The dps meters are not the problem. I never used one yet (thought it’s against the rules), but will look for a good one (any suggestions?). I wouldn’t even mind a gear meter, just to know what I can expect before starting a fractal. I wouldn’t kick anyone, but I would like to know beforehand how long this will probably take and who’ll probably suffer. Also, I wished someone would have seen my crap gear and explained to me the impact of switching.

RoseofGilead.8907:

If you’re sitting there coming up with finicky "what if . . . " scenarios, you probably already know what you’re doing isn’t in line with the “rules” stated by devs.

That.

My impression is that he’s trying to outsmart the GM and ArenaNet as a whole, while exactly knowing that he’s afk farming and that it is against the rules. The intention of the rule is very clear, but a hard definition is not possible. You can also filter names you don’t want to see in the game or in the forums, but that doesn’t mean that all names that are not banned are allowed. The intend of forbidding a range of offending names is clear, but it’s impossible to list all offending ones.

Same with the afk farming rule.

Fun thing is that there is no ruling government and no judges that tell ArenaNet what afk farming is and what not. They have the last word here, and the interpretation lies with them. It’s not smart at all to pick that battle, just move on man! ArenaNet and the GM don’t have any beef with you personally, you are not that important. There is no supreme court that will rule for you.

It’s like in other areas, the majority just does it for casual fun, a minority decides to take it a little bit more serious or even to a professional level. It’s not bad or good, it’s neutral. The more people that get into the game, the more of the serious players will evolve.

Reading through the other thread here about using youtube, I feel like a lot of people have fun just by roaming around in Guild Wars, and that’s fine. Some people here seem to think that if people go less meta about the game, it’s somehow bad. Competition drives skill enhancement, and most people love this game because you can play it without competing.

You will always have people who get into the details because that’s how they have fun playing games. Don’t try to force this upon people who are casual players by making things harder in general, they won’t suddenly change their character or playstyle, they will just look for a game that suits their needs better.

And that’s coming from someone who thinks that numbers are more important than looks, and considers “just roaming around without goal” as a waste of time.

Dawdler.8521:

Thats not technically a scheme, its players willing to pay to be members of that guild… its clearly an entrance fee just to be on a trial period. You fail the tests you wont get your money back. If people cant see that they are blind.

Also, what kind of guild gets rich by taking only 10 gold from people? You need a lot of new starters in your guild to make decent profit with that scam. And you need to spend time with them for the trial period. Unless you just take the gold and immediately kick them, I don’t see how that works better than just begging for stuff in Lion’s Arch.

And if you did that to me, I would spend my crafting time in Lion’s Arch telling the map which guild to avoid and why every 5 minutes.

You encountered a troll. Some people are toxic, and from what I could see so far, the higher the tier of the fractals, the more toxic people you’ll meet (I was told T3 is worst and T4 better then).

Just look at the LFG ads, where people write things like “… one mistake = kick” or “no noobs”.

On the other hand, some people who join pugs are the reason that this exists. If I advertise my party as “farm”, then don’t leave after the first run. Farm means we are doing the same fractal over and over again for loot.

I had some frustrating experiences with pugs in fractals, but the vast majority of people are nice and forgiving, at least in lower tiers. It’s better to remember those and put the toxic people on the friends list with the alias “toxic”.

Two weeks ago a Necromancer soloed the Swampland boss from 25% on because the rest of the group died. We applauded him and made fun about our failure. He resurrected us and we took the chest, all fine.

Feanor.2358:

Luimes.4281:

Faaris.8013:

My Thief uses pistols in PvE. You start a fight with mad damage using Unload until your initiative is drained.

It’s not the meta build for pve fractals/raids but open world sure u can do whatever u want.

When it comes to meta though pistols are not even close to being viable most of the times

10 thieves with pistols took down Sabetha recently. Surely, that should qualify as being close to viable. It’s not optimal, but that’s another story.

Also, I can take down single mobs faster with double pistol than with my staff in low tier fractals. Often, after unloading four times, the mob is already dead or the boss becomes invulnerable again. I usually unload as often as I can and then switch to staff. When my initiative is back, I switch back to pistols for those four might-stacking Unloads. It might be an unusual “rotation” but I don’t think using staff alone has better dps against single targets.