Guild Wars 2

I think you can get it at any level and skin it.

1889 kills in WvW. I think WvW can be done at any level as you adjust straight to 80 when you enter it.
You will need an engineer, ranger, or thief to wear it.
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/World_versus_World

Also, guides: http://www.guildwars2hub.com/guides/world-vs-world
Get crackin!

Try this link, it shows it at WvW:
http://www.gw2armor.com/norn/male/wvw/medium/display.php

Also: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Invader%27s_Armor

I’m not sure of the reasons for not allowing clickable links in chat, but I’d appreciate this being lifted for the guildwars2.com domain. Been a few times I’d like to refer people to the forums in a clickable link in chat.

Now that I notice it, he looks great from behind. Very suave!

Oglaf.1074:

So? Different style or not, that guy looks like he should be wearing a police hat and doing the YMCA. For a Western company to make that style standard for their male armour would be shooting themselves in the foot. It just isn’t what their target consumers want (or can tolerate it most cases).

I wouldn’t predict a loss in gamers and potential customers for GW2 by introducing more options and equal styles to both genders. Some might stamp their foot and say “I’m leaving this game because of the extra options I don’t have to choose, and I’m leaving because I’ll have unfair or undue social pressure to choose those options (or as much pressure as female-avatar players have had to date).” or “I will refuse to play or buy this game now because more demographic strata of players feel included and like they can access things in this game”.

The commercial gains and social responsibility for having these options available (not enforced) is discussed very extensively elsewhere. In this thread, I want to be able to get a list of those options for me, and anyone, to reference.

Urthona.3198:

If you’re willing to consider other races, the Sylvari cultural armor is all rather revealing. T2 even makes you look like a literal fairy. If, you know, you’re into that. . . .

I’m really glad it’s in the game, my boyf is always attracted to that armour style! I don’t think it’s possible for my human to wear cross-cultural armours, is it?
It’s strange how the pink sylvari above just looks like a flagellated human! Put your skin back on, please! :p

That website, gw2armorgallery.com was great for reviewing armors in one screen and at a glance, especially the lower game stuff. I managed to get me a feathered coat, and used the pants from the embroidered outfit. It looks a bit too puffy in the legs and arms, and kinda like some sort of Arabian harem lord or such, but does well enough for now.

Introducing my (incomplete) Mesmer, Treio. :/

Thomassassinate.9370:

Wouldnt the sexiest of armors for the male be the most threatening? Skin area would be for female.

Can be/likely the same whether it’s male or female (O_O)
I want to dress my male avatar so I can see skin the way you appreciate skin on females.

I found the Tactical armour set which shows the most leg (not necessarily important to me), and shows the arms, but is ruined a bit with skulls all over it, and a tattered look. Not bad still, and could turn out nice with the right gloves, boots, shoulders, and helm.

I’m trying to find some sexy male light armour that shows some skin. Do you remember how it used to be in GW1? They showed arms, midrifts, legs, chests, etc.
Anyone seen some in GW2? Certainly point out cultural armour, though I’m hoping for Human.

[Moderator note: title edited for clarity]

smekras.8203:

that’s how things usually happen whenever i group with others, either in party (mostly for dungeons) or in passing (out exploring)

most of the time i don’t even know what class someone is till they use a signature move or trait. i don’t care if you are guardian, warrior or mesmer.. .the question is, can you add something to the group? if yes, you can be a tap dancing moa bird for all i care

Sorry Smekras, I mistakenly left out that I was referring to WOW. Was wondering if anyone had tried running WOW dungeons using hybrid classes and hybrid builds?

Smirgel.9460:

To be honest, it looks like it could work better in PvP. Confusion is a killer condition there because people use skills frequently, but in PvE mob take actions seldomly though when they do, they are more powerful than the damage you inflict with confusion.

Yeah, I was wondering if it was better for PvP, but I don’t do that at all. And you’re right about frequency of skill use. Waiting for foes to kill themselves with confusion seems crazily slow.

G’day all,

I’m leveling up my Mesmer and wanted your thoughts on this PvE build:
http://tinyurl.com/bxkmnx7 (goes to gw2skills.net)

It uses the scepter and torch to cause blindness to prevent damage, while pounding on confusion.
Blindness comes from Scepter 2, Torch 4, and Signet of Midnight.
IX Blinding Befuddlement in Illusions makes blind cause confusion.
Scepter 3 and Torch 5 help keep the confusion up.
Although all shatters add confusion, the idea is to keep illusions up to take any damage for you and deal damage through retaliation.
Phantasms have retaliation so will deal damage when hit, and Phantasmal Mage will give it to clones.
Mage and Disenchanter will give regen to nearby allies, while Disenchanter will keep a level playing field.
Illusions give bleeding on crits.
Shattering is either a last resort, or something to do when all the illusion skills are off refresh and a new stock can be created quickly.
Scepter 1.3 overwrites an illusion with a clone, also causing confusion.
Condition durations (blind, confusion, burning, bleeding) are extended 23% through runes and Domination trait points (this build editor didn’t have Runes of the Mad King, although those are rather costly anyway).

How does this look?

Ethics.4519:

I don’t understand the point of this? Are you mad that you have to move while fighting? That’s what GW2 was built on

LOL! Before I learned to kite I was mad, but I’m honestly not mad at having to kite. I am honestly questioning it’s place as a necessary technique for this game. In another thread I have been part of a discussion about tanking versus professions, and I think I’ve come to realise that I am still learning how each class properly mitigates damage. My focus so far has really been about laying out damage and support, and now I think I can study my classes for the ways they survive well.

Ninth Requiem.3250:

Out of interest, which professions are your chars? On all of mine, I’ve had to kite at some point, even with the resilient ones (against tough foes, and just till I could heal up)

Main is Necro who rounds up foes and tries to keep them in wells. Next is Ele who has a moderate amount of kiting. My engineer kites a bit. My Mesmer seemed to need to kite in early levels, or before I grasped illusions better. Ranger kites a bit.

I’m wondering now if in WOW, prior to the last expansion and the set trait trees, did any groups try playing more like GW2? Some trait point schemes I tried were going 33/33/33 in the trait trees, but I never did this with a hybrid class.
Did anyone ever try it with a dungeon run with everyone being hybrid and no expert role? That is, everyone DPSs, everyone watches out for themselves and everyone else, everyone pulls the aggro off comrades who need help, and everyone heals when they need it.
Is it possible that the trinity is actually a social construct not actually required in WoW or other MMOs?

Also, Rune of the Flock summons an attack bird, too, and causes blindness (it pecks out their eyes!). It’d be a much cheaper alternative to the Rune of the Mad King if you need to save on munnies.

Seren.6850:

access to dungeons my main has, access to the fractal level my main has, access to dyes. They are my main gripes with alts.

I’m not too familiar with how the fractal leveling system works. Isn’t fractal level somehow intrinsically tied to what that character has done before?
If it’s not, and it’s a level based only the player’s experience with the dungeon level, then it does seem to make sense to be able to make this account bound.

Oldgrimm.8521:

i would like to have a tag system like any battle type console games heehheh

it would be chaotic and fun

This could be a fantastic way to PvP Tournament!
What great new skill to test, to be able to effectively play a series of different classes! Not sure how you could do it in PvE. Reminds me a lot of Heroes from GW1 tho.
I encourage you to make your idea a suggestion post!

Mungrul.9358:

I did have an interesting thought regarding soul-bond vs. account bound. What if all equipment was account bound?
I’m guessing the argument against would be that there would be more money floating around as there would be less for people to spend said money on.
But it would be an intriguing experiment.

For this, and most new features, I prefer being able to “acquire” this some way. The gem store is one obvious choice, but making these features possible from within the game is great for encouraging involvement, goals, and role play. Like the personal housing idea I said above.
Making items account-bound from soul-bound could use something special like a mystic forge (but separate to it), that might require special tokens, ingredients, or currencies to unlock an item. Being able to remove the soul-binding altogether (as suggested by Asuka Shikinami) could also be possible, but at a much higher, item-scaled price.

A summary so far…

Features:
- View the hero page of any alt
- View the craftable recipes page of any alt
- View the inventory (including bag types) of alts
- Optional toggle to bring up the “currently equipped” tooltip for alts that can equip items that are moused over.
- Be able to easily share account-bound items and currencies across alts, including town clothes, minipets, weapons, armour, tonics, etc. Make this possible without visiting the bank for “swap overs”.
- Be able to view (but not transact with) the bank from anywhere
- Making dyes account wide, or having the means to upgrade a dye to account-wide
- Allowing your alts to appear in your player housing instance, and interacting with their info and skills there
- Ability to remove soulbinding from items, or upgrade items to account-wide
- Ability to access the Karma of alts (a high trade rate maybe?)
- Account-bound Gear with stats that scale with level, possibly rewarded from personal story

Improvements:
- Better incentives to play in any area for equal or higher level characters, attracting players back to all areas of the world
- Wider variety of stat combinations (likely through special runes from holiday events, etc?)
- Make Personal Stories more unique than they are, keep them unique and relevant from 1-80.
- Add more unique “factions” per race, and keep these relevant from 1-80
- Add more uniqueness to dynamic events across areas and level-strata
- Add more standard cultural armors for level <80 so each race can keep wearing culturally appropriate level all the way up
- Turn tokens into currency that doesn’t take up bank space
- Streamline the character select screen for reviewing your characters easier (option for all on one screen, etc)

What’s new or great already for GW2:
- Making every area replayable regardless of level.
- No limits on number of crafting professions per character, with no waste of progress
- Biography and motivation choices

I give this a day or so more before making a suggestion forum post.

Heh. I’d love it if Player Housing allowed you to “invite” your alts to it so you could interact with them there. This’d be excellent if the housing instance can become very well equipped, and you could commission your own alts to craft gear in front of you, and browse their skills and gear.
I much prefer it when such things are given a reason to be represented in game, something to “acquire” and actually “go to”.
Choosing which alts to invite to your home can also help you keep your characters within their own personality or context.

I like the idea that if you need to pay a compliment, tell it to everyone. If you need to offer criticism, tell only the person involved.

In this case, email your complaints direct to Arena Net. They are the ones with the power for change and so are the ones that need to hear it. They will use your feedback, the collective feedback, and their research as they see fit.

Use the forums for construction of ideas and generative, positive discussion.

It appears that both a DPS meter and an Aggro meter detract from the fact that success depends on much more than these numbers, which seems to be the way Arena Net wanted the game to be.
Gear, traits, and skill all play on outcomes. If any range of events could be won through on just one or even two of them, then Arena Net might see the need to change those events to fulfill the intent of active, responsive battle.
Getting and losing aggro depends on understanding how aggro works and knowing how to use your skills to mitigate damage (including the vital, non-scalar things Conner mentioned above, such as buffing, debuffing, rezzing, healing, interrupting, holding, dodging, elite skill, etc).
Doing damage individually or as a team depends on having on-par gear, knowing your own class and weapon/utility rotation enough to trait appropriately, and knowing how to act in combat (see again the non-damage, but very important behaviours Conner listed above).
I suspect Arena Net cares equally about those latter things as they do about damage output, and would design content and creature AI for it.

So is the answer that there isn’t an implicit class/role pairing, but instead the Scholars are designed to have explicit ways of circumventing damage while still dealing it?
That:
A) Warriors and Guardians have passive damage resistance through their armour and active damage dealing and support through their skills.
B) Necros evade damage through death shroud and continue dealing it; Mesmers evade damage by making illusions take it, and deal damage with them; Elementalists evade damage with armor spells, blinks/dashes/teleports, and weapon heal skills, while dealing aura and condition damage at the same time?

So the Soldiers have passive armour and active dps/support, but the scholars (and Adventurers?) have active evasion skills that generally dps simultaneously? This might mean Soldiers have less damage on average, but the damage that the other classes can take depends on player skill most of all.

I’m wondering what are the merits of kiting?

My main didn’t need to kite much at all. When I switch to an alt I find I need to do it to survive.
I’m not talking about the need to reposition for advantageous footing, but the need to keep running (usually in circles) from foes to keep 1 second out of reach while hitting them with whatever can target behind you.

There’s two things that bother me about kiting:
1) We have a dodge mechanic. Why do we also need to kite to survive? They both seem to serve separate but largely overlapping purposes. Note what I said above about the difference between finding a good, responsive spot on the battlefield and constantly repositioning 1 moment away from your foe.
2) If we ever saw real fighters doing this, they’d be a laughing stock. If the enemy did this to us (to our melee players), we’d be infuriated.
There’s a lot of merit for agility & nimbleness, but we see this in the class skills and dodge/endurance.
It’s also important to choose when to fight, but kiting is not making the choice to leave combat.
What is the logic in making this necessary so often?

Aggro has a few variables to consider that are unique to GW2, see and learn them at the wiki page on Aggro.
Still, some creatures have their own rules to figure out who they’ll attack, which means you could see all the aggro bar you want, but you won’t be clearer knowing why you are getting the pain stick or how to get it off you in that situation. It will come down to your skill in all cases.
The aggro rules are “just guidelines, anyway!”.

I’m been wanting to know the meaning of the armour categories, too. I wonder how they balance class skills when their defense scores categorically cluster based on classes?
Do the Scholars have a clear benefit to compensate? I don’t think being stereotypically ranged classes applies to the GW2 profession schemes (e.g., I believe Mesmers are more frontline fighters than engineers, and engineers to me are as scholarly as Necro and Ele background-wise, if not, more so).
Is Medium Armour the standardised value of 0, or do they work from a ceiling/floor value and adjust the skills accordingly?

I’m a serial altoholic across all MMOs I play. I like testing a few different classes and character choices, and of course, usually doing up a matrix to cover as many options as possible!

For GW2 I’ve penciled a table that shows my professions, races, attitudes, and crafting path. I also love being able to supply the best crafted gear to any of my characters through my alts, so expanding their recipe bases is very important and enjoyable to me.

So I’m wondering what would be reasonable and excellent features GW2 could accommodate for us altoholics?

For example, I’d like it to be easier for me to outfit and gear-plan my characters based on what my alts can currently make, and without logging out and in across each character and compiling all the info (often in hand-writing). A way to review the recipe lists of my alts, perhaps?
Conversely, when I’m on a crafting blitz with one character, I’d love to have a way to compare the things I can make with what my alts have in that slot. That way I know I can prioritise those items, craft them, and put them aside, and then spend the rest of my mats knowing I’ve already taken care of my alts.

What would be your favourite feature to add to help you play and manage your characters?
I’ve posted the summary so far (7/1/13) on the suggestions forum here. Please drop by and click the +1 button or add more ideas!

{There’s a possible hitch to requests like these: Does helping players depend less on other crafting players negatively impact on the market, or are altoholics inherently supporting the market more than what they don’t buy in finished products?}

A summary so far…

Features:
- View the hero page of any alt
- View the craftable recipes page of any alt
- View the inventory (including bag types) of alts
- Optional toggle to bring up the “currently equipped” tooltip for alts that can equip items that are moused over.
- Be able to easily share account-bound items and currencies across alts, including town clothes, minipets, weapons, armour, tonics, etc. Make this possible without visiting the bank for “swap overs”.
- Be able to view (but not transact with) the bank from anywhere
- Making dyes account wide, or having the means to upgrade a dye to account-wide
- Allowing your alts to appear in your player housing instance, and interacting with their info, skills, and inventory there
- Ability to remove soulbinding from items, or upgrade items to account-wide
- Ability to access the Karma of alts (a high trade rate maybe?)
- Account-bound Gear with stats that scale with level, possibly rewarded from personal story

Improvements:
- Better incentives to play in any area for equal or higher level characters, attracting players back to all areas of the world
- Wider variety of stat combinations (likely through special runes from holiday events, etc?)
- Make Personal Stories more unique than they are, keep them unique and relevant from 1-80.
- Add more unique “factions” per race, and keep these relevant from 1-80
- Add more uniqueness to dynamic events across areas and level-strata
- Add more standard cultural armors for level <80 so each race can keep wearing culturally appropriate level all the way up
- Allow cross-cultural wearing of cultural armours (I’m sure any tailor worth their salt can remeasure and custom make their culture’s clothes for whoever turns up! Extra fee perhaps?)
- Turn tokens into currency that doesn’t take up bank space
- Streamline the character select screen for reviewing your characters easier (option for all on one screen, etc)

What’s new or great already for GW2:
- Making every area replayable regardless of level.
- No limits on number of crafting professions per character, with no waste of progress
- Biography and motivation choices

I give this a day or so more before making a suggestion forum post.

I noticed this most for the map boss for Harathi Hinterlands, the Centaur lord in the north east. Feels more like a boss fight of endurance than skill.
Long, tedious fights like these really made me notice the repetition of fighting; normal combat has far fewer cycles of my skill bar. I wonder how they can balance fun, well timed battles versus hugely variable player numbers on map bosses other than health?

Professor Maciver is still broken as of today.

I played WvW for the first time this last weekend.
Strangely in WvW I feel the futility of playing games here more than anywhere else. Not in the sense that I’m not learning anything, because I am, but the rapid backwards and forwardsing of bases and resources makes me question the value of capturing them as goals.
The battles themselves can be quite fun and very involving, but in the quiet time that I sit back and ask “what do I want now?” I don’t easily have an answer from the WvW arena.

Illiander.8049:

You know, the best book I have ever read keeps telling me new things each time I read it. I wish all books did that, but only the very best manage it.

It’s not that it’s hard to understand, but that it’s that it’s so full of nuances.

The book is by Miyamoto Musashi.

Also, every game is striving to be the next Chess or Go. If those games didn’t keep people coming back, we wouldn’t even know about them today.

Yes, I agree. A book (or game) that continues to give new meaning as you read or re-read it is excellent. A book that causes you to struggle a lot with it asks you to accept the struggle or leave it. One that ceases to provide enough meaning for the time you give it also causes you, the reader/player to face the same ultimatum.

It will be great to see what games and books persist through time, like chess, checkers, hopscotch, solitaire, minesweeper, etc. It may be that they will last NOT because we keep returning to them, but because we see them to have enough value to teach to others. Even those players, however, will cease playing them when they give no new meaning.
We can already see how the education and entertainment industry (e.g., toys) is so incredibly competitive and market driven.

Surbrus.6942:

Pink is the colour that used to be associated with baby boys (light red). Purple is the colour associated with royalty and the divine. Pink and purple is one of the most manly colour combinations you can get.

Pink is a vastly misunderstood colour. It’s just a social construct when people apply interpersonal meaning to it. Whatever you think it means or represents is mostly a conclusion made by you and some peers here and now, but isn’t universally or historically true:

In the United States, there was no established rule in the 19th century. A 1927 survey of ten department stores reported that pink was preferred for boys in six of them and for girls in four. The foremost student of the role of color in children’s fashion, Jo Paoletti, found that “By the 1950s, pink was strongly associated with femininity” but to an extent that was “neither rigid nor universal” as it later became.

Some date the origin of the association of pink with girls in the United States to the 1910s or 1920s. Many have noted the contrary association of pink with boys in 20th-century America. An article in the trade publication Earnshaw’s Infants’ Department in June 1918 said:
“The generally accepted rule is pink for the boys, and blue for the girls. The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger color, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink#In_gender

There’s a huge culture of using shock in online communities to be overcome, and I’d say ArenaNet is daring to take a stand. I assume that the punishments are steep because they want the change to be steep.
I’m very likely going to get a temporary ban someday because of the way I can edge some of these rules, but I’ll learn to see what is acceptable in this community and change my behaviour for it. I won’t be happy with the consequences, of losing game time, but I’ll respect that the consequences were a result of MY actions. These philosophies aren’t something I necessarily hold when it comes to more serious forms of justice (civil law, criminal law, etc), but for an online game for I’m willing to accept this and I believe in both the intent and method.

I don’t believe a game’s purpose is to keep people coming back. That’s like having a book that’s so difficult to understand you must keep reading it over and over, hardly getting the point.A well written book can communicate the ideas hopefully in one read. A game, even an MMO, is capable of doing the same thing.

This is not the same as a book you can re-read and get a different meaning. When people refer to a game’s “re-playability”, it’s not intended to praise the game’s ability to occupy players, but intended to appreciate how a game can give multiple, diverse experiences to the one player each time they play it.

MMOs HAVE been made that people keep playing them without gaining more meaning. This is done, true, but perhaps it is not best for the playerbase. Occupation without new meaning in MMOs is perhaps something that can be toned down in the years to come in online gaming.

People do, and should, reach an acceptable limit on the game, and leave it for the next thing. It’s a natural and normal maturation process for the player. What’s not so normal or “healthy” is getting stuck in one game and not moving on. People can weigh up a personal time-to-benefit ratio amongst a handful of choices according to their own value system. If they find they get through a game, are still playing it, and not enjoying it, there’s plenty of opportunity for them to hear what their own minds and bodies are telling them and weigh up their choices. The rest of us, not at this state yet, will keep playing until we reach our own fill.

I would love to have this, but I don’t PvP so I don’t fully understand how this would change PvP battle.
At the very least, I’d love it for PvE. For PvP and WvW it could default back.

It’d give a great new use for the dye system.

I’m not very experienced with dungeons, but when I have I have tried to run my support Nec. That’s Well of Blood, Suffering, Corruption, and Power. Lich for when everything seems to be on cooldown.
Traits are
0/
20/ 4. Cast enfeebling blood when entering ds. 9. Wells use ground targeting.
20/ 4. Wells apply protection. 2. Marks are bigger and unblockable
30/ 6. Life Transfer heals allies. 7. Wells recharge in <36 sec (-20% time) 9. AOH Leaving DS
0

With this I can:
- do substantial AODOTs (wells, life transfer, locust swarm, lich),
- remove boons (well),
- remove conditions (well and staff),
- AOH with blood,
- AOH with life transfer,
- AOH when leaving ds,
- steal life (dagger),
- stun/interrupt (horn),
- dark fields x3 w/ protection,
- light field x 1 w/ protection,
- and enter ds when endurance is empty (causing weakness and poison AOE, and gaining fury 5s).

It’s not perfect or unkillable, but it feels very versatile, active, and helpful across the battlefield.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fQQQNBmQDbESrSPTzTjhPBIpA7nne094bHp44hB
(this build editor doesn’t seem to properly show all the effect with the icons at the bottom, but it gives a great trait summary by mousing over the traits button)

LOL!

" I DEMAND YOUR GENEROSITY! Give me your generosity! I gave you things because I expected you to give me things! YOUR’RE the greedy one! " lol!

This perspective on gift-giving perplexes me. When did we stop giving things of our own accord and without expectation of return?

Vasham.2408:

nofo.8469:

Rannulf.9417:

Vasham.2408:

Rannulf.9417:

Vasham.2408:

Nurse.1085:

I realize Anet must have done something to increase the cap or filtered it out or something, since the other week they all went from Full to Very High.

However, now they’re filling up again and I can’t get on the server my husband and Guild transferred to (which is Tarnished Coast). Neither can my sister-in-law.

Are these servers stuck at Full? Every time I look, it never moves from Full. Any Tarnished Coast members know what times I should be aiming for to camp the World Select screen?

Server status is based on the number of accounts tied to a server, not the number of players actively online. Even if Tarnished Coast was completely empty of players it would still read full. Shame Arenanet chose to lie about their subscriber numbers like that. : /

Not sure if serious or trolling. anet doesn’t have subscribers, and the server status do base on number of players online.

One of the community managers admitted to it being based on number of accounts. Denying the truth won’t change it. It’s probably all Arenanet can do to prevent NCsoft from shutting the game down after it failed.

Show me a link until then you’re a troll.

He’s right. Crawl back into your cave thanks.

I posted the link awhile ago. You clearly haven’t checked back up the thread to look, or read it and are going through the stages of acceptance. Anger and Denial are the first two after all.

Vasham, there’s a point to be made about what your words bring to this discussion or the forums. You don’t appear to be a troll, but you do seem very upset about Guild Wars. Rather than have constructive words about it, you choose to say the negative. It’s not trolling, it just doesn’t support the positive, constructive, helpful tone other players want to share.
It’s not my intent to be saying “Don’t have those feelings” or “Don’t talk about it”, but your comments don’t suggest you are talking to help you or others. Therefore people will mistake you for a troll or or wrongly believe you are attacking their values. If you haven’t already done this I would wonder the merits of simply detailing what makes you upset and then leave it to the dev machines. Catastrophising and doomsaying will push people away from you, or simply have your efforts deleted for the sake of the helpful.

I wonder what it would take for all teleports/zone outs/log-outs to leave a lingering non-combat “cloud” avatar that others can interact with for whatever reason (reporting, whispering, friending, etc etc). Would be very cute if it looked comical like from a Looney tunes cartoon, but a bit more mystical/fanciful to suit the context.
I’m sure it would take a bit of programmatic engineering to make it work without concerns, but it’d eliminate some of the anti-social elements of players being “untraceable”.

GW2 also tries to make combat strategy a moment-by-moment event so that you engage your full attention and work hard to respond to what is happening now. Having predefined roles decided before dungeons can also take players away from combat. Healing and support isn’t what box you ticked an hour ago at the start, it is now when the cooldown has ended and you can choose between clicking the button or waiting a sec for your group to get the right formation to get max heal, or dodge from that huge hit and wait until the AOE effect ends before dropping the turret and hope to goitre you get through the next cooldown or one of your comrades are also looking out for their teammates. It’s faster combat where we are having to adjust to the new circumstances that have arisen since we could last use our skills, and ArenaNet wanted it that way.

I’m curious about the OP’s point that

In short: In a game where there is essentially only a single role to fulfill in a party, then the class that best fills this one role is the best.

Its not a question of whether or not other classes are viable, just that, given a player of equal skill, a number of classes are simply better

Over the years I’ve noticed new classes in other MMOs come out as hybrids of the trinity, or existing classes be shaped over the years into three distinct trait lines. It’s as if allowing as many classes be have the possibility of being tank, healer, or DPS satisfies the most players and upsets the least.
The other obvious function of this is ensuring that when a new class is released, or a class gets an overhaul, that dungeon runs and events aren’t unbalanced by the attention given to new roles. For example, a Thief class is typically DPS (excluding Rift, etc). If it were released new or given some fantastic changes, a lot of players might migrate for a time to that role and leave the game wanting tanks and healers. I remember the times where finding tanks and healers was a real struggle. Even though both roles were a minority in the team and the playerbase, this parallel didn’t lead to easily finding people ready to play them when you needed them.

Healer classes are never only healer roles, too. They are mixed with a good dose of DPSing, and depending on the class can also spec to Tank (Paladin classes as an example).

Hybridising classes to possibly take on any role encourages players to fill needed gaps rather than stick to their guns. As such, I think classes across MMORPGs represent Group Roles less and less, and are allowing for more opportunities regardless of class restrictions.
GW2 does this to the extreme. It visualises a way that each class can possibly support others within the lore of the role and gives every player the opportunity to spec that way, whether for damage dealing, damage taking, or giving teammates a foot-up (though not to the point of allowing or requiring the trinity for dungeons and events).

Might be a place for some interesting skill changes down the track, for later expansions. It kinda sounds like you are wanting more qualitative changes to skills, like the way runes changed skills in Diablo 3; still same skill, but just plays out differently. Would that be right?

Whether they’ve succeeded or not in implementing their goals, the ArenaNet Dev team were able to clearly verbalise the things we’ve experienced and learned as a group from other games and talked clearly about moving forward from these experiences.
For example:

I give these quotes not to argue or discuss whether they were implemented or how well there were/were not put in the game, but to make a point that the developers were paying attention to where many of us were coming from, what skills and knowledge we may share, and what would impact on what would be fun for us now rather than what was fun when we were learning these things new.

On the forums we have many players trying to communicate what has been fun for them (what they’ve learned already and enjoyed doing so). Some parts of what they say speaks for us as a group based on shared lessons, and most of what is said is about some core things they want to relive or enhance from their own journey. But there’s still an unanswered personal question for themselves, “how long can I keep doing this before getting bored?”.

I posit that if the games are not offering as much to learn now as they did when we were newbs to MMOs and we had this whole realm of gaming to experience and understand, then generally people will feel greater disappointment as each game released within it’s generation has less for us to learn. This isn’t to say we don’t have a lot of fun and cherish some fantastic minutes, hours, or days of playing pleasure. We are just growing up.

Groovy.6749:

OP while you are raising very interesting and dare I say philosophical questions about how we perceive games and engage with them, the underlying denominator of all this is the difficult subject of “fun”.

Since “fun” is extremely biased and even more challenging to disect, I think the discussion at hand is ultimately going to circulate around one question : “how long can I keep doing this before getting bored?”.

And I believe the answer to this will

Thanks for bringing the discussion back to the topic!

And yea, I’m interested taking the idea of fun being something intrinsic to an object, and turn the attention to the relationship between the players over the object. To do that means wondering where players have come from individually and as a group so as to understand what they will take away from the game in each transaction.

Individually players come from many different prior games, both MMO and not, and I suspect this is a pretty powerful factor in what they will experience in each game they come to afterwards.
In this I talk about what skills and knowledges they’ve acquired before and what they get from this game. Things like intuiting skill combinations and sequences, figuring out what’s best to open a fight with, choosing which stats are valuable to them, being able to co-ordinate eyes and hands between screen, keyboard, and mouse, distinguishing roles and what it is like to influence the fights of other players or be influenced by them, etc etc etc.
These lessons aren’t happening through tutorials, they’re most often happening through intuitive user interfaces that are built on years upon years of human factors engineering and development.

As a group of players who have often experienced interfaces, values, roles, and power strategies in other games we can come together in this game with some common skills and knowledge about how games work across multiple levels. Our individual differences define what is fun to each of us (what skills have I learned to apply here to solve these problems that makes me feel good?), but where we have come from as a group probably shapes much of what the designers create for us.

I agree with Groovy comments that LFG tools are the lesser of two evils. I haven’t used the website, but my first glance at it is “Ugh! A lifeless ugly table!”. Sure, the aesthetics are not comparable to the function, but it appears so kitten lifeless.

If they internalise an LFG tool into the game, I wonder if there’s a way of making the appearance of grouping more lively and interactive? Maybe something that lets you see the groups grow and form as people are waiting. You can look to see who is in groups, and those who join groups (obviously) have their “listing” immediately removed.
The content of these aren’t relevant but the design ideas are the kind of thing that’d make looking for groups more than lists and tables:
http://globalmoxie.com/bm~pix/Radial~s800x800.jpg
http://www.thewanderlust.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/radialMenu.jpg
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-bwmca-mJa20/UHqWflBnQxI/AAAAAAAAEuQ/bJcRJB7zIQ0/s1600/radial+menu.jpg
http://blog.fatal-abstraction.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/ColorIt-Menu.png

They look unfortunately consoley, but would nicely represent the fluidic movement of grouping and joining with others.

Raine.1394:

OP, I don’t believe we learn and attain mastery in order to move on. We learn, if anything, in order to then employ that mastery. So, I don’t think that people who leave have learned the lessons the game had for them.

Games meet a variety ‘needs’, that’s why we play them. It might be fantasy, we would really like to be that hero that saves the day and we know IRL that probably isn’t going to happen. So we make-believe. It might be abnegation; I might just be burned out and want to smash a few monsters mindlessly. These are the kinds of needs that games fulfill. Most game genres fill a niche among all the reasons people game. MMO’s address a broad category of gamers and seek to have many things going on in the game to meet peoples ever changing desires for entertainment. And, the MMO life-span is measured in years. If people leave in weeks or within a few months then, most likely, something about the way the game was conceived failed to meet the needs for which they bought the game. Or, perhaps the game just didn’t live up to their expectations or hopes. I pretty sure that games don’t teach lessons or participate in learning journeys. It’s entertainment and it either entertains or fails to.

Yes, I totally agree with what you say about many different “needs” or motivations that bring people to games. Lately I’ve adored Nick Yee’s summary from his research:
http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/archives/001298.php?page=4
http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/pdfplus/10.1089/cpb.2006.9.772

There’s plenty of reasons that people come to games. I’m not suggesting this mastery principle is an overt or conscious process, but I tend to follow Raph Koster’s “Theory of Fun” in that fun is happening while learning is occurring. When all the learning curves off (including what we gain after applying previously learned stuff, so effectively the end of the chain of learning), then our experience of fun curves off, too. People may still be otherwise motivated to continue playing, but the draw card of fun that is experienced now (rather than hoped for) weighs much less heavily.

PearlGore.7419:

Where did you get that “Most” people do not enjoy GW2? Out of Your kitten

PearlGore, if you are referring to the quote I provided Zeldain, then I agree with you, and is kinda the topic of this discussion.
If it was something I said, which part are you referring to?

I’m writing in response to a post made in another thread:

Zeldain.5710
That’s assuming players enojoy the activities involved in playing the game. Most do not.

There’s a LOT of talk of and from people who have stopped playing GW2. Few people seem to accept that this is OK!. Those people have learned all they personally need to learn from it. Let me explain what I am trying to say here.

When I talk about “learning” here I don’t mean “great big life-relevant axioms”, and I don’t exclude it. I also don’t mean “employable skills”, “encyclopaedic facts”, or even “fine motor skills”, but it means these, too. By learning I mean all of these, any of them, or just one of them; learning is whatever is acquired by the person.

So it’s not a shame for either the players or the designers when a player stops playing a game as it generally symbolises that the player has reached their own personal fill on what they can acquire. In fact, for designers this can be a source of pride that players have made gains from their creation (though some might lament that the player didn’t see all the content). It is really only for each player themselves to answer the question “Did I learn this game too soon/late?”.

Or really, “How long did I hope to take to learn this game?”.

I believe there is a large amount of angst in the game community targeted at game makers because players are learning games faster than before. But really, when players honestly acknowledge for themselves all that they have learned about games, MMOs, RPGs, etc up until now there is little surprise that players have much higher expectations (read, very different things to learn) than they used to in years gone by.

I may be wrong in assuming that many players, especially those posting on the forums, have over 5 years experience and learning under their belts already. That’s really quite significant mastery for the player-base, and the game industry is struggling (in my view) to design games or “learning” that matches their mastery. How many other things have you actively pursued in your life as long as this? Most of us would probably count the number these persistent pursuits on one hand.

So now we have large numbers of players moving periodically from MMO to MMO looking for a game that teaches something they haven’t mastered yet.

GW2 has attracted and retained many players who are still learning and having fun from the content.

It has also gone through the roll-over of players who feel they have already mastered these skills and are still seeking a new lesson. Those players will have drifted on as they were likely doing before this game was released.

Some players are holding on to GW2 because they hoped to be learning as much new lessons as they first did when playing GW1 (or <favourite MMO here>), and they want this game to replicate that previous learning journey. Unfortunately it can’t do that because the player is forever changed from what they learned from GW1 and other games.

Most people are probably moving between these three states as times change, new content and hopes are created, and the player still tries to find either content within a game or an entire game that matches their own stage and make-up of skills, knowledge, and desires.

Arenanet made some great gains in learning from the experiences of players as players and designers went through the “infancy” of MMORPGs. They have designed a game around players that have already learned what other MMOs taught them and tried to see how to mould some content around some things these “adolescent MMO players” hadn’t learned yet. They have also used a lot of devices and methods that are already familiar to many of us.

If GW2 leapt too far from what we were capable of it would lose many of us down the crevasse between skill acquired and skill required (i.e., not be too hard for most). But it also has redesigned some of the fundamentals of GW1 and MMOs generally so that it gives many players something new to learn and understand (i.e., not too easy for most).

As players and adults we are responsible for our own learning journeys. If we find we have learned all we need from a source then it falls to ourselves to make the decisions and pathways towards teachers and experiences that match our own position and place in that journey.

puffintoast.6501:

So much here that could be vehemently argued against, but this one in particular:…

…In a nutshell, this is a prominent issue to an awful lot of players, as they continue to churn out new content to capitalise on gem-store herding, instead of correcting and adjusting core mechanics of their game.
Far from inefficient and impractical, the success or failure of MMO’s hinges solely upon the devotion of time and resources toward a functional and rewarding playing experience.
I am sure the developers at ArenaNet are acutely aware of this, however their allotments of time are skewed terribly in favour of Nexon’s directives, not the interests of the game, or of it’s players. To the new investors, we are here to serve the gem store solely.
This is why since Lost Shores the ship has commenced lurching.

I’ve +1’d a few posts here, mostly those that have acknowledged the effort and likely positive intentions of the developers. I’ve liked the OP’s honesty and fairness, too.

For Puffintoast, and all those who believe the worst will happen or that devs/producers/investors have bad intent:
What will you accept as evidence to the contrary?
Over what time span will you watch for signs of the opposite?
How will you know them when you see them? (Because you’ll feel like your dreams have come true??)
What evidence can humanly be given to you given this social and commercial context that would move your mind in a different direction?
What is fair for the humans behind this huge operation?

I don’t normally go for holiday events, I’m enjoying this event far more than I thought I would. I love how I can casually participate in the PvE Presents out in the world while I’m doing my usual thing, and get more involved in Lion’s Arch/Tixx if I want to.
Good job!

Been getting this, too. Although now I’m getting download broken with connection problems. Gone from 5700 files or so to 4300 now.