Showing Posts For Felbryn.5462:
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You seem to be assuming that ascended chests are the standard or typical route to ascended weapons, and I don’t think that was the intent. I suspect you’re supposed to gradually collect materials and craft your own ascended weapons, and the chests are like a lottery—nice if you happen to win, but not something you should count on (not even if you buy a lottery ticket every day for your entire life).
As for your suggestion, I feel that giving better drop rates to players who are already playing more (and therefore getting more drop chances) is a bad idea on general principle. The fact that you’re talking about using play time in only one game mode (WvW) for something that’s relevant in multiple game modes (ascended weapons also drop in, and are also used in, PvE) makes it even less palatable to me.
Why is this better than taking those X amount of gems, turning them into coin, and buying the materials you want on the trading post?
As far as I can tell, everything that inflicts toxic pollen does so rather frequently in a large area, which makes removing it quite weak. Temporary pollen immunity on the spray would make it a much better counter to the pollen.
I don’t like the idea of toxic pollen making you vulnerable to enemy attacks, though; it’s already a fairly complicated effect, and I would prefer to see the Anti-Toxin Spray being useful without feeling mandatory.
One of my favorite things about GW2 is the ad-hoc grouping in the open world, where it’s easy to cooperate with other players on the spur of the moment and for as long as you happen to be in the same area, without the logistical overhead or rules of forming (and constantly re-forming) an actual party. So my gut reaction to any major party mechanic that doesn’t work for ad-hoc groups is strongly negative.
I’ve also found that many people are currently willing to run a group with almost any combination of professions; offering major perks for mixing classes might make people unwilling to accept duplicate classes in their groups, even incidentally, which I think would be a headache. I remember forming parties in GW1 where everyone wanted exactly 2-3 healers in every group; I’m not eager for an encore.
Also, your example perks are crazy big.
I’d make almost the opposite recommendation, for the same reason: I think traits probably shouldn’t be limited by weapon-type at all, unless there’s something special about the trait effect that would make that impractical. For example, there’s a Mesmer trait that causes focus skills to reflect projectiles; fair enough, I can see how that wouldn’t be appropriate for lots of skills on other weapon types. But all the +10% damage, -20% cooldowns, +X <stat> while wielding Y weapon type traits strike me as filler that needlessly pigeonholes builds.
I realize that even specialists probably aren’t getting 100% use out of those traits because of weapon swapping, dual wielding, aquatic weapons, etc., so you probably can’t just do a straight replacement with universal traits, but I still think there’s a lot of room for improvement there.
Currently, all ascended gear has at least one major currency or ingredient in its acquisition that is account-bound (and not obtainable from anything that isn’t), so unless something changes there is no “back door” way to buy ascended gear. (For weapons you need bloodstone/dragonite/empyreal, for amulets you need laurels, for accessories laurels or guild commendations, for rings laurels or pristine fractal relics, for back items you need a vial of condensed mists essence or a sclerite karka shell). You could accelerate the process somewhat with gems, but you’d still need to do a significant amount of actually playing the game.
EDIT: Correction: You can make an ascended Triforge Pendant entirely from tradeable materials.
You could always buy legendaries, though—they have the same stats as ascended weapons.
I’m not saying that ascended gear should or shouldn’t be account bound on acquire, I’m just wondering why the request was to make them purchasable in the gem shop (which has no precedent) rather than unbound (which has one).
And since unbound equipment does have a precedent, I assume that ANet has already considered and rejected that option for ascended gear. Maybe they’ll change their minds, but I imagine it would take either a very compelling argument or a massive fan outcry.
(edited by Felbryn.5462)
Any particular reason you’re singling out retaliation? There’s also no runes for vigor, aegis, or stability.
Neither are there runes for blind, cripple, immobilize, or vulnerability (though there are for most conditions). There’s a +20% fear duration but it’s a 6-rune bonus on a set that’s otherwise unrelated.
And there are sigils that boost the duration of most conditions, but not blind, confusion, fear, immobilize, or torment. (Interesting that there are many conditions boosted by sigils but not runes and vice versa, suggesting that it’s not a case of those conditions being considered too powerful to boost.)
There’s also a rune for daze and a sigil for stun, but not vice versa.
Of course, there was also no rune for confusion until they added Rune of Perplexity, so I wouldn’t rule out the possibility of seeing those other ones at some future time…
(edited by Felbryn.5462)
Out of curiosity…do you see selling ascended gear directly for gems as being preferable to making it unbound (until equipped), so that it could be sold on the trading post? Why or why not?
What rewards would you like to see from rewards? Would they be different when you’re leveling up than when you’re level 80? What would motivate you to want to go around the world playing as many different events as possible, rather than the same 4-5 over and over again?
Whatever other rewards they have, they should definitely include XP and…anything fungible (coin, items, etc.). I would take notice if they started including ascended crafting materials, even in small amounts (judging from collectible storage, it looks like you’re planning at least one more ascended material—maybe it should come mainly from DEs?)
Some sort of record tracking all the unique events I’ve helped complete would encourage seeking out and completing a lot of different events, even if there were little or no additional reward for filling it in. (I’m a completionist.) If it were broken down by area, it could also help me locate events I’ve never done before.
As a rule of thumb, events—like everything else—should give rewards roughly proportional to the required time investment. That means longer events need bigger rewards—but only for players who stick with them the whole time.
I think there’s a lot of unexploited potential in the concept of participation ranks. Currently, it’s easy to get gold participation in many events even if you only show up for 10% of the event, and that makes the ranks pretty much meaningless; it would be cool if I got rewarded when I participated more.
HOWEVER, that only works if players can trust that you have a sound metric for measuring participation, which probably requires both an overhaul of the system and an increase in transparency. Right now when I do an escort event, I’m not sure whether I get participation for being near the caravan or for killing enemies along its path (sometimes players push the front line ahead of the escort and I can’t do both), and I’d be surprised if I got additional credit for giving the caravan swiftness or protection even though I probably should.
Maybe an onscreen progress bar showing your participation rank and progress to the next rank, which visibly goes up for a wide variety of contributions, including dealing damage, healing/buffing NPCs and other participating players, and accomplishing event-specific goals? And probably an increase in the number of possible participation levels, with the highest ones requiring skillful play over the entire length of the event. Probably troublesome to balance all that, though…
On another note, players who want to participate in DEs need to be able to find them; I’ve sometimes gone a long time without stumbling across any. It may be helpful to increase the range they’re visible from…or perhaps scouts could reveal active events in a large area? Sometimes I suspect that one event people can’t or don’t want to complete (or possibly don’t even notice) is preventing other events from starting in the vicinity, though I’m not sure if that’s really how they work…if that can happen, consider adding failure conditions to more events so they eventually cycle out if players ignore them.
Disagree: titles should not be a route to character optimization. It would add to power creep and power discrepancy between players and encourage players to refuse groups to others based on their displayed title. Players should not feel compelled to complete boring achievements in order to be competitive.
Also: even if titles were going to grant mechanical benefits, double revive speed is OP. The 6-rune set bonus that increases revive speed is only 10%.
Just a thought:
Many living story elements are temporary in order to foster a feeling that the world is changing and progressing. But the fractals (or at least some of them) are specifically supposed to be parts of Tyria’s past. And supposedly the intent was to periodically add new fractals to the mix.
Why not reuse some of the content from temporary living story events to construct new fractals?
Take the Molten Weapons Facility as an example. There probably shouldn’t be a fractal that is exactly like that dungeon, for a variety of reasons, but there could be a fractal that reuses part or all of the map (certainly some of the art assets), many of the same enemies, and probably even some set pieces such as the room where you dodge all the traps.
Turning that into a fractal would certainly take some work (difficulty scaling, etc.), but presumably no more work than creating a new fractal entirely from scratch, so if you would have been doing that anyway, this should be equal or less work and could be a way to increase the library of permanent content and let some players experience stuff they missed while still allowing the living world to progress.
Optionally, it could also serve as a way to reintroduce some temporary crafting materials (like azurite) as rare drops within the appropriate fractals, so they can continue to trickle into the economy. (I’m not sure whether that’s desirable, but if you wanted to do it this would be an easy opportunity.)
2h weapons have different weapon strength and different skills than 1h weapons; there is no reason IN PRINCIPLE that they couldn’t be balanced against 1h weapons even with one sigil (or five, or zero). There’s also no reason in principle they couldn’t balance the game on the assumption that shortbows have 3 sigil slots and longbows have zero. Yes, it takes longer to build your corruption stack, but that’s not necessarily unfair if you’re getting something else in exchange. I’m not sure whether 1h and 2h weapons are perfectly balanced right now, but I seem to see a lot of people using 2h weapons in game, so I don’t think the lack of a second sigil is crippling them terribly.
The fact that Giver’s weapons give the same condition duration bonus on 1h and 2h weapons is definitely wrong…but so is the fact that all armor and trinket slots give the same amount of boon duration, and that it’s too small in most (arguably all) cases. I think the wintersday attribute combos must have been snuck in by the event team without going through the usual QA process or something. (This impression is greatly reinforced by the fact that the duration bonuses didn’t even work until months later.) Maybe they’ll overhaul everything for next wintersday?
In my mind, the glaring imbalance between 1h and 2h weapons is that dual-wielders frequently have to pay more to fill their weapon slots; this is particularly notable when crafting ascended weapons, where 1h weapons require almost exactly the same mats as 2h weapons, except you need to craft twice as many of them to get the same increase in stats. Since that’s a difference in acquisition rather than use, it can’t be balanced by a difference in stats, skills, or sigil slots.
Speaking as a Guardian who mostly plays PvE, I feel cautiously positive about the Symbol of Swiftness change:
- I like the fact that the effect doesn’t depend on whether I have swiftness from another source, for both practical and principled reasons.
- This makes it more attractive to use in combat, when I’m more likely to benefit from several pulses.
- I also use Writ of Exaltation, so if I time things right I can get two pulses from the same symbol even when running at top speed; thus, the out-of-combat effectiveness should be close to the current version for my build.
I’d like to see a similar principle applied to Temporal Curtain, but I think the only reasonable way to do that involves limiting the effect to once per curtain per player, which I imagine may be difficult for technical reasons.
The Searing Flames change also caught my notice because I recently considered and rejected that trait on the grounds that the cooldown looked too long, so I’m glad you’re reducing it.
I’m looking for a guild on the Fort Aspenwood server that will provide me the opportunity to participate regularly in guild missions—these must occur on a sufficiently predictable schedule that I can arrange to be online at the right times. Occasional dungeon/fractals groups would also be welcome.
I want a minimum of overhead. Guilds that require membership dues, online meetings, or similar levels of bureaucracy need not apply (voluntary ones are fine).
I play a level 80 guardian, typically 5-10 hours a week, US Pacific timezone, almost all PvE. I have a decrepit but serviceable microphone and several voice chat applications. I help edit the wiki from time to time.
I joined a small guild when I started playing but it has mostly disintegrated; I may represent them from time to time if they muster an organized group, but have no problem representing my new guild for the bulk of my time.
I don’t think un-soulbinding items would break the economy, but allowing it in all cases would probably break the trading post.
Most weapons/armor of a given type always drop with the same upgrade component. If you could insert whatever upgrade component you want and then sell it on the trading post, you’d end up with about 100 different listings for each and every equippable item, all slightly different due to upgrade components. Personally, that’s not something I’d like to see.
That doesn’t necessarily prevent them from offering it as a service if you haven’t changed the upgrade component in your item, nor is it a problem for making things account-bound instead of soulbound. But I’m reasonably confident that an option to completely unbind ANY item is never going to appear, purely for the sake of sanity on the trading post.
The pieces that are missing from the set aren’t even the same for different armor types. Based on what you’re missing, you must wear light armor.
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Equipment_acquisition_by_stats#Karma
Medium actually has a full set of rabid armor just from temples (though not all from a single temple). My guess is that they just assigned soldier’s, rabid, and magi stats to different pieces at random; I don’t see any rhyme or reason.
If you want a complete set of rabid light armor, I believe your only options are dungeons or Khilbron’s armor:
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Khilbron%27s_armor
Turn the question on its head: why should you need to formally create a group in order to work together? If some other players are doing the same things as you, but in an ad hoc group instead of an official party, why should you make progress faster than them?
It seems to me that the current mechanics are designed to reward everyone who contributes, whether they’re grouped or not. You’re effectively asking for non-contributors to be rewarded, too, but only if they’re in a party.
I think issues with bots and powerleveling are probably much more significant than you seem to think they are, but even if they weren’t, what you’re asking for still strikes me as pretty weird.
The game has started refusing my login because I haven’t changed my password since you updated the blacklist. I think this is a questionable policy—the entire reason those blacklisted passwords are dangerous is that an attacker might use it to discover my password via guess-and-check, which means that ArenaNet should ALSO have been able to discover whether my password is on the list via guess-and-check sometime in the past 4 months (if it’s truly a practical attack), but that’s not why I’m posting.
Since I’m fairly confident that my password is NOT on the blacklist, and I have never used it for anything other than my Guild Wars 2 account, and I’ve already memorized it, I attempted to “change” my password to its current value. This produces the following error message:
“Unavailable password. You or someone else has used it before, or it’s on a known list of passwords stolen from other games or websites. Please use a new, unique password for your Guild Wars 2 account.” (emphasis added)
This concerns me for several reasons:
1) Refusing to let someone re-use a password generally does NOT improve security. Studies have shown that users either work around such restrictions (e.g. by rapidly changing their password to exhaust the buffer and return to the original), or they react to being forced to memorize more passwords by choosing easier-to-remember (and thus, usually less secure) passwords. So I think it is very unlikely that this restriction is doing your users any favors.
2) This message implies that I can find out whether someone else in your system has used a certain password by attempting to change my password to it. If true, then not only are you allowing me to guess the passwords for all your users simultaneously (probably a security weakness), but you must somehow be checking the new password I’ve entered against ALL the other passwords—which ought to be ridiculously expensive (computationally) if you are following good security practices and storing only expensive, uniquely-salted hashes of passwords. Which makes me pretty sure that either this message is inaccurate, or you’re storing the list of passwords “someone has used before” very insecurely.
3) You’re not even going to present different messages depending on whether the password is blacklisted or previously-used? The entire reason the blacklist is dangerous is because the bad guys already have it; if someone is trying to use a password off of that list, it would be courteous (and not meaningfully less secure) to inform them that it’s on the list, so that if they’re using the same password somewhere else (an unfortunate but common occurrence) they will realize that’s a problem and can do something about it.
So: why do password changes work this way?
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