You do know that you can get the skins from Dragon Coffers that drops from every single thing in the whole world right?
And rather frequently as well.
Lol. Like 1 in 1,000, at best. That’s not “frequently”.
The way the nodes worked for Wintersday was much, much better. The greatest chance for the best rewards came from the presents that the node would spawn along with the mobs. The mobs also had loot and were worth killing, but if you were late to the node or didn’t tag all the mobs, you still had about 1 1/2 minutes to loot the presents that dropped and those presents were “phased” so each person could loot their own.
Today’s changes will encourage more cooperation, but it seems like just another flawed attempt to avoid the fact that the previous way was the correct way and these changes have been detrimental.
As long as they didn’t actually reduce the coffer drop rates, this is a good thing. (well, except for the 5 seconds of invulnerability, which can make it harder for people to share nodes and ensure everyone tags each mob before they die).
The OP, IMO, is completely wrong. The increase in HP is good, as it allows people a better chance to get there in time to tag the mobs. The initial invulnerability is bad, because it now makes it harder to reliably tag the mobs. Why is this bad? Before the change, I would tag and then decrease my damage output considerably if others were at the node. to ensure that they also had a chance to tag. Now I have to be much more aggressive to ensure that I get full contribution, making it harder to make sure everyone gets a share.
My suggestion? Give the mobs a few seconds of protection as they fan out, rather than invulnerability, so that people have a few seconds to tag where they are much less likely to kill the mobs outright. This would make the orderly sharing of nodes a lot less stressful.
I’d prefer to see the skins sold directly as well. I’d be fine if they wanted to also offer the skins at, say, a 1 in 25 chance from a premium box in addition to the direct sales, with other goodies to sweeten the pot. (The “consolation” prizes in the current boxes are obscenely poor).
I’d even be fine if the offered the skins for direct sale and then offered the same skins with a particle or glow effect via an RNG chest. That way people willing, ready and able to buy the skins, maybe even multiple skins, can do so, but there would be something with higher rarity/prestige for those who are into that sort of thing.
No matter what, the odds should be much better than they currently are for future RNG chests.
Another alternative would be to have the RNG chance at the skins, but also have every box reward a token, with the ability to trade 20 tokens in for a skin. That way, you’d be guaranteed a skin for every 20 boxes, but you’d still have the lotto chance of getting skins via RNG. I’d be willing to bet if they did this, they would sell at least 10X as many boxes as they do with the current system. I can even imagine them selling 100X as many boxes.
Who ever is making the decisions on the gem store offerings and the RNG odds has probably cost NCSoft tens of millions of dollars, if not much more. They have also cost the company a lot of good will. It used to be that some of us would buy gems even if we didn’t have something we wanted to buy, because we wanted to support the game. For me, those days are long gone.
How many customers do they need to alienate and how many tens of millions of dollars monthly do they need to miss out on before they wake up on this issue?
So their game design has been reduced to players having to actively protest their heavy casino gambling design before the company tries to implement fair and reasonable reward systems? Shouldn’t the best interests of the company be the best interests of the players, not two things competing with each other?
Unfortunately the best interests of the company is simply to make as much money as possible — especially a public company like NCSoft. Now they can go about making money in many different ways, some of those ways will align closely with the best interests of the players and some will not. They have chosen one method of making money that does not align with the best interests of the players.
Exactly and I still am convinced they would make more money just selling the skins outright than resorting to the gamble boxes. Add in the good will generated, rather than lost and it seems a no brainer. Unfortunately, the presence of a brain doesn’t seem to be a prerequisite for…
I will spend ZERO on the premium dragon boxes. If the odds for a ticket were, say, 1 in 20, maybe I would find that acceptable. 100 to 1? No way in Hades. If the skins were sold for 800 to 1200 gems each, (800 for 1H and 1200 for 2H), I’d probably buy at least five to equip main and a few alts. Many people would probably buy at least one.
I’m not worried about “exclusivity”, because there are a lot of skins in the game, which has already created variety and if they offered new skins every other month for every weapon in the game, pretty soon even if everyone equipped premium skins, there would still be plenty of variety.
It almost seems like someone is just throwing away massive amounts of potential revenue just because they can’t admit that they were wrong to go lotto box for skins in the first place.
Also, get rid of the KD on activation. If there are lots of people around the projector, the person who activates it is unlikely to get any kill credits as the holograms will be dead before they recover from the knockdown.
Ye gods, this is insanely bad design.
Edit: I’m also seeing suspiciously bot-like behaviour from a lot of players. They’re appearing right next to projectors just before they reset, killing the holograms then disappearing again.
Has the API for timing these things been released? That’s the only way I can see these people are able to do this so accurately.
More likely, they are using Guesting to shuffle between their home world and two additional worlds. I only swap when the spawns are over farmed, or there is someone rush killing the spawns to prevent others from tagging mobs, but I’m sure me popping in on a node made some people suspicious who hadn’t thought of using guesting.
The Wintersday boxes werent as big a deal because it took a while (and a little thought) to kill those enemies, giving people time to get there.
Sort of. The Wintersday boxes definitely had stronger enemies, but the primary problem with those was that you didn’t need to kill the enemies to get the gifts. Open the huge gift, pick up the smaller ones inside, run away — leaving the toys inside to fight someone else (and of course by the time someone else got there, the spawned gifts would be gone).
So the holograms are an improvement in that respect, so that you do have to actually kill the things that appear. They just die too quickly.
Actually, that’s not a fair representation. Yes, you could get the gifts that popped with out fighting the mobs, but the mobs also had their own loot tables very similar to what we see with this iteration. It was always better to kill the mobs for the loot. Higher HP meant other people had more time to get their and qualify for loot, but they also had a superb chance of getting their before the gifts despawned, so even if they missed the mobs, they got something.
I believe the gifts didn’t respawn for a minute and a half, which was more than enough time for someone in route when someone else popped the node to get the gifts.
It was actually close to perfect that way. The only change I’d have wanted to see would be to have the damage output lowered on some of the spawns. Sometimes the combo of spawned mobs was just too overwhelming for most people, which was why some people started to skip killing the mobs.
It was fun, grief free and community building. The Dragon Bash nodes are the opposite. The difference in design highlights the difference between innovative, thoughtful, experienced game design and something you’d expect from an intern.
This is getting very frustrating.
Feel alot like shared mining nodes from other MMOs – something I was hoping we were done with for good.
I understand them wanting to make some of them easier than the christmas dolls (which I personally loved) – but they could have at least let the ones in higher level zones keep a decent difficulty level.
I don’t believe for one second that any of the changes were the result of a misguided attempt to make these things easier/more fun. Every change to the nodes, plus the limitation of nodes to fewer zones than before, was clearly intended to produce the current situation. Add in the fact you need 100,000 Zhaitaffies for the wings and the odds of getting a weapon skin ticket from the normal chests seems to be less than 1 in 1,000, it becomes pretty clear this is just the result of a crass decision to sacrifice good will and the game’s founding principles in an attempt to try to get people to buy more gems.
It’s so contrary to the manifesto that it’s either a sign that the person responsible is one of the worst game developers ever, or they’ve decided that now that the champions of the Manifesto are gone, it’s time to dismantle it and morph this game into another genre clone.
I’m not sure which yet.
I know that sounds harsh, but sometimes developer actions are so beyond the pale that you feel like you have to metaphorically shake them for signs of life.
0/30 RICH Coffers. Stop whining, at least you got one -__-’
It’s not whining, it’s the sharing of information so others can make an informed decision whether or not they want to chase the dragon.
Apparently, if an event doesn’t leave a large portion of the playerbase disappointed, frustrated or annoyed then they haven’t done their job.
They’ve gone from one of the best development studios to being groan worthy in less than eight months…
I don’t see how this is terribly different from the last two events…
It’s completely different. The nodes no longer spawn community drops, the mobs have miniscule HP and the only way to get anything from the node is to qualify for loot, which is hard to do when some people are exploiting strategies to kill the mobs before anyone else can even tag them.
Each change seems to have been a deliberate move to take a fun, community supporting, grief free element and make it just the opposite.
That ANet has developers who could make such changes is bad enough, but that management didn’t catch and thwart those changes is ominous. The studio is looking rudderless this year, or the navigator has been tasked with scuttling the ship. Either way, it’s frustrating to see this game that had the very real potential to be a $billion title over it’s life time continue to squander it’s opportunity at greatness.
I completely agree as well.
What I don’t get is the 180 turn that ANet has taken. They went from being the studio that had it’s finger on the pulse of MMO gamers, designing perhaps the best MMO in the history of the genre, to 2013 ANet, which seems like a clone of every other mediocre MMO development studio we’ve seen degrade the genre over the last decade.
I’m baffled.
The sad thing is that doing this in the name of greed doesn’t really tell the whole story. It’s likely that if they sold the skins directly for 800 to 1600 gems, they would make more money than they get fleecing the “suckers” who buy the RNG chests. (I hope that the Wintersday Gem Store Skins aren’t used as evidence to the contrary. The Gem Store skins for that event had very, very low appeal).
So, it’s not just “greed”, it seems to be glee over the ability to get “suckers” to spend money on a lotto chest.
Not only do these boxes probably result in less revenue than direct skin sales, (possibly by a massive margin), but they also generate high levels of bad will towards the company.
Marketing research recently showed that the most costly mistake a company can make is to do anything that strikes their customers as “unfair”. Customers who come to believe they have been treated unfairly by a company are the most difficult and the most costly customers to regain and the negativity tends to last much longer than any other negative experience a customer might experience.
It’s a lottery box designed to get people with poor impulse control or gambling addictions to waste as much money as possible in pursuit of a weapon skin ticket. It offers better odds of getting a skin than an ordinary Dragon Coffer that you can get from game play. However, we are still talking long odds and it’s very possible if you sit down to buy these coffers until you get a weapon skin ticket you could spend $100 or more in that pursuit.
In short, it’s a way for them to fleece money from players who are prone to throwing money away on RNG, (Random Number Generator), lotto boxes.
I completely, 100% agree. It’s also fair to balme horrible game design, because in the preview video for Dragonbash on Twitch.tv, the dev touted the changes to the holiday nodes vs. how they worked during Wintersday and April Fools day.
They took a fun, pro-community, grief free element and made it into a frustrating exercise in node camping and griefing. (Someone already has a video guide to farming a projector while minimizing the chance than anyone else will be able to tag for loot).
If they want to restore a bit of faith in ANet as a design studio, they will make these node work just like the Wintersday nodes asap. If not, it will be more proof that 2013 Arenanet doesn’t much resemble the studio that developed this game.
The wintersday present nodes were fun. the mobs were tough, so you wanted other people to show up and it also gave people time to reach the node and qualify for drop loot. Also, just activating the box would drop presents on the ground, so even if you were late to the node, you could still get something.
That was fun and supported community, while completely eliminating griefing. This, on the other hand, is just horrible game design. I can say that because they touted the changes vs. Wintersday. They fixed what wasn’t broken and essentially ruined the content.
Moa Racing, Dragonball and Holo-projectors all launched today completely grief prone in an anti-griefing game. I’m glad they are going to fix the exploits for the first two, any chance of making the holo-projectors more like the Wintersday Boxes, rather than being node-stealing, community griefing content? (Someone already has a video guide on how to farm holo-projectors while making sure no one else has a shot at the node).
Anet, you continue to disappoint. What is going on over there?!?!!?
Well, thanks, I guess, for becoming the poster boy for why the holo projectors are anti-community. You deliberately espouse killing the spawns as quickly as possible and with out ever waiting for anyone. Exactly the kind of game play this game is supposed to discourage, if not make impossible.
I was having fun until the easy exploit started to pop up in just about every match. If they fix the exploit, I’ll play again. If the night goes by with out a fix, then ANet will have lost even more good will.
These events should be a way to bring players back into the game, reward them for ordinary game play, build good will and make people happy by providing a fun experience.
Instead, we get another major disappointment and more proof that 2013 Arenanet is nothing like pre-launch Arenanet.
Grind, grind, grind. Annoyance and frustration. Crass cash shop policies driven by a strategy of fleecing people with RNG, rather than offering quality items people will want to buy at reasonable prices. Now, we have node stealing on top of it all, just to make it even more impossible to get rewards from game play that they really want to you spend $100 on trying to get from RNG lotto chests!
I love this game, but I’m coming to loathe ANet, which is something I never, ever imagined I would find myself saying. Sad, sad day.
If people keep buying these rip-off, RNG lottery chests, they will just keep doing this. Don’t expect that this time will be any different than previous times. It isn’t. They want to rip-off people with poor impulse control and gambling additions. They are fleecing you and robbing you blind.
Don’t buy these chests!!!!!
I’m assuming they made them the way they did to control the amount of candy in the economy, which hey that’s their call. I would be nice if the spawners spawned more than just 4 holos every 8 minutes, though, even if you had to do it in waves. Very difficult to get to them when they respawn unless you’re right by one.
Haunted doors respawned faster and there were way more of them. Gift boxes weren’t as important as these are, since you got the mats from the events. Of course maybe they didn’t like the way candy corn ended up being distributed or whatever, who knows.
Considering that you need 500 candies for the achievement and 100,000 candies for the wings, I think they went way, way overboard in trying to limit candies.
The equivalents to these during Winterfest and for April Fools were much more fair. The spawned mobs dropped packages anyone could loot, so if you were late arriving or didn’t manage to tag all the mobs, you still could get the drops. Also, the HP used to be a lot higher, so it gave people more time to reach the spot before the mobs were dead.
This current implementation, where the mobs have low HP and you have to tag and qualify for loot to get anything is horrible, mean spirited and makes this competitive, rather than cooperative.
I couldn’t imaging when I saw that this would be part of Dragon Bash that there was any way ANet could ruin it, but they have.
More evidence that the new philosophy is annoyance > fun.
I’ll stick to bullet points:
• REMOVAL of diminishing returns. It serves no good purpose and only creates confusion and stress among the community.
• REMOVAL of RNG based progression. What’s so legendary about gambling for a legendary? Exploiters/TP players destroyed precursor market. You have a better chance of getting a precursor from the mystic toilet.
• Solid, enjoyable and permanent content. One time events are good. But not one after another. Anet needs to spend some time on decent, permanent content within Tyria..
• Dungeon re-design. No mob/boss skipping, reduce trash mob hp, boss fights are boring enough, this is why the majority of mobs are skipped in the first place. Spending a half hour hitting at a silver/gold enemy isn’t fun.
• A more diverse selection of skills. Since it’s obvious we’re not getting extra skills for the current weapon sets. Enable classes to have access to a wider range of equipment. Why can’t rangers use rifles? Why can’t warriors use shortbows and daggers? Why can’t ele’s use swords and axes? Right now you can max every weapon skill even before level 10, then you end up using 1 or 2 for the next 70 levels.
• No ascended gear beyond accessories. Guild Wars has never been about fancy stat items, but clearly they want to cater to a certain crowd. This only creates more barriers.
• Addition of items worth buying from the gem store. Unlimited harvest tools (why were the sales limited? These were huge sellers, bring them back). More armor/weapon skins. More variation of town clothes (we have enough tops I think). I highly doubt the majority of people are paying real cash for things like boosts and a portable mystic toilet. Repair canisters? Revive orbs? Who buys these? I’ve still got the ones given to me from Traeherne on the 2nd to last mission, just taking up bag space. Give us things we really WANT to spend our money on.
• Guild Halls, Guild Halls, Guild Halls. Need I say more?
• More sPvP maps and game-modes.
• Target cast bars.
• Almost a year on, where is the in-game LFG tool? Surely we can’t rely on a third party app until the end of time. RIFT managed this tool in a few months of release, and a month or two later, even made it cross server/realm. Is it really too difficult?
That’s all the important things I believe are missing from this game. Other than that, keep up the good work Anet, and hopefully NCsoft will get their stuff together and focusing on their MAIN MMO.
I 100% agree with the above post. Pretty much the same list I would have put together.
For the Living Story, I’d be fine if the temporary content was used to provide the transition to permanent changes to the game world. When I read about the F&F LS, that’s what I assumed they were doing. Unfortunately, we had four months of temporary content that resulted in no notable changes to the zones effected and no new permanent content. What a waste of potential and development time.
For the Gem Store, I’m just as confused as I am by the LS. Priorities of what they develop for the gem store are all wrong. Much potential wasted and much revenue left unrealized.
What two things do I think the game needs the most?
1.) A new team put in charge of the Gem Store and Economy, with the staff, talent and resources needed to realize the full potential of the gem store, lead the transition away from RNG lottery scams and towards a store stocked with items worth buying, along with an intelligent analysis of what’s wrong with the economy and specific plans to fix those problems.
2.) An “A-team” of developers tasked with efficiently adding new Dynamic Events in every zone on an ongoing basis, as well as planning permanent changes to the game world that will provide the “end points” which future Living Story events will support.
Whether this requires a staff reshuffle, or new hires, it’s clear that there are some internal issues that need to be addressed while the game still has time to get back on track towards realizing it’s full potential.
Given how horrible the odds are at getting skin tickets from these long odds, premium event boxes, I’m going to have to guess that your odds of getting one from a normal Dragon Coffer will be somewhere in the range 1 in 1,000, or even higher. (I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s actually closer to 1 in 10,000).
Southsun is just a bad zone. It’s not up to the standards of the rest of the game, all the mobs there are just annoying to fight and I personally hate the zone so badly that it forced me to just skip the Southsun LS entirely. It seems that most people feel the same way and I’d be willing to bet that this LS had just a tiny portion of the participation seen in the last LS, probably by a very large margin.
I just pretend Southsun doesn’t even exist and pray that any future zone expansion will be nothing like this mini-zone.
Bad, bad, bad.
I think the problem isn’t just the average cost to earn the mini, but 50 Silver per race makes the fun of just betting on the races too expensive for most players. It ends up being content for a tiny portion of the population, which is really a shame.
BTW, I re-watched the twitch video, http://www.twitch.tv/guildwars2/c/2406718, and apparently the mini will be trade-able.
http://www.twitch.tv/guildwars2/c/2406718
From two hours ago, the livestream with one of the Devs on Dragon Bash, including Dragonball coverage.
Knowing a drop-rate is however rather pointless. Since a 10% drop rate does not guarantee that you will get one with each 10 chest you buy. No matter how high the drop-rate is (unless it is 100%) it is IMPOSSIBLE to know how many chests you would need to buy to get one.
You could be lucky and get one on the first try, but you could also be unlucky and not get one on 20 chests. IF they offer an exact drop-rate and people don’t get the drops after x amount of chests, they will simply claim that ArenaNet lies in order to sell more chests and so on.
We know that there is a low chance to get a skin or whatever, that is all we will know and also all we actually need to know.
That’s a poor argument. Knowing the odds allows players to make an informed decision on whether they want to chase the odds in the first place. RNG means you could spend a lot more or a lot less than the average, but if the odds are 1 in 100, people should know that before they set down with the intention of spending until they get the item they are chasing.
If the odds were actually 1 in 10, I might chase a ticket. I have to assume that the odds are closer to 1 in 100 or 1 in 500 or 1 in 1,000. I really don’t know, but with Arenanet and RNG chests, I just have to assume by default that the odds are very steep.
So, I boycott the chests. The only way RNG will be phased out or the odds will at least be made more fair would be if pretty much everyone boycotts the chests. As long as people continue to prove P.T. Barnum correct, ANet will continue the crass practice of long odds RNG chests.
If we could stomp out RNG chests as viable revenue generators, then maybe they’d actually work on providing the kind of cash shop they promised prior to launch, which was a store chock full of cool weapon and armor skins, other cosmetics and items of convenience. So far we have three premium armor sets, one of which is among the worst PC armors ever made for an MMO, the very rarely available, limited time, direct purchase weapon skins and a bunch of town cloths that I never, ever actually see anyone wear around town.
RNG chests were the worst compromise on integrity the company could have made while still sticking to their pledge not to sell power in the cash shop. It also has made them extremely lazy on producing armor/weapon skins sold directly to players for a fair price. Not to mention that it de-incentivizes them from selling direct purchase skins, because those skins might lessen demand for their RNG scam chests.
I have to believe that they could have made more money with a continual stream of direct purchase skins, but it seems as if some at the company much prefer the “thrill” of fleecing suckers than the concept of making an “honest living” selling desirable goods at a fair price. IRL, those people are usually called criminals, but I guess virtual currencies and virtual items provide a sense of cover for an otherwise obvious lapse of ethics.
(edited by Fiontar.4695)
Unless I misunderstood, it looks like the shattered wings can be purchased for the amount of… 100,000 Zhaitaffies! I doubt anyone grinding the world pop-ups, or via any other game play means, will ever come close to 100,000 ZTs over the course of the event, so people who want to go that route will likely have to purchase a fair portion of those ZTs off the Trading Post. Most will likely have to spend cash to buy gems to trade for gold to do so. Just another very crass way to drive revenue.
(edited by Fiontar.4695)
They are account bound because ANet wants to maintain it’s icy grip on the amount of cash/gold someone will have to pay, on average, to obtain these tickets. If they were available on the TP, people who “get lucky” and obtain a ticket after just a few tries might be satisfied to offer the tickets on the TP for prices that would decrease the amount of cash spent on boxes during the event.
there are some people with poor impulse control or outright gambling addictions that will spend well over $100 chasing after a ticket and if they could instead buy the ticket of the TP, ANet would lose the opportunity to exploit those players weaknesses to earn revenue for the company.
Yes, it is that crass. The company is becoming more and more crass with each passing month and it won’t change unless people stop throwing money at them in support of the questionably unethical “lottery” based offerings.
In your opinion these are the only ways for us players to have made money? Exploiting, ripping people off, or doing a speed dungeon? The majority really?
That and gems, but why bother mentioning that. My drop rate is so abysmal, I can’t make any money by actually playing the game, and since everyone else says ‘OH! Random is random!" I’d be fair to believe that everyone else’s drop rates are terrible as well.
The players that I know that are exploiting the markets are the same ones who didn’t get the axe from the karma and winter exploits. So yes, from my experiences these are the only real ways to earn money.
But I know you’re going to argue my opinion, so go ahead. Tell me that my experiences are the absolute kitten bottom of the barrel bad luck and that everyone else is doing so much better just because rng favors them. Tell me I should keep trying after 10 months instead of accepting that the game is broken as hell or that perhaps you’re just lucky and don’t really care about anyone else or any generalized idea of fairness.
go. right. ahead.
I think you will find I’ve probably spent more real cash on this game than most just to prove bugs, errors or statistics in game to support peoples efforts on knowledge and making money. So no, I won’t say that it is just you, but bad luck happens. Sometimes there are reasons for the bad luck, but sometimes it isn’t bad luck at all. It can be the fact that people depend too greatly on one spot, one method, one way of obtaining loot/gold that when it changes (as all things do) it basically cripples them. There is a saying I’m sure many know- Don’t put all your eggs in one basket, and it holds true here as well. But calling everyone bad because they make money is just silly, we aren’t all magically lucky though luck plays a part and its name is RNG. We aren’t all exploiters (at least I’m not, never exploited or played the TP) and we aren’t all out to kill everyone’s hopes and dreams either. Not everyone is doing better than you, some are probably doing worse than you. Some are doing better/worse than me, that is just the way of things. If you think that exploiting and playing the TP is the only way people make money than you just have to experiment for yourself on better ways, because clearly they are not. It isn’t the game that needs to change, it is the mentality of the gamer when it comes to things like this. Everything in GW2 is basically simple and easy, leveling, crafting, gearing, so people tend to get comfortable and when they actually want something and have to work hard for it, something seems off. That is just the feeling I get from forums anyway.
I play the game, a lot. Have been since launch. I mix up my play to keep the game fresh. I don’t chase after the gold earning opportunity of the month, I just play. Playing like a player, not playing to earn gold as the primary objective, I’ve found the game impossible with out occasional purchases of Gold with Gems.
So, no, most players not looking for legal “exploits” to maximize gold earning rates are not sitting on a comfortable amount of gold. Most likely they either have to scrounge up every copper to be able to make necessary purchases, or they have to resort to buying gold with gems.
Now, this makes sense, I guess, since the game relies on the gem store to provide a revenue stream, but I wish people would stop pretending that it’s easy to earn gold in this game just by playing. It isn’t and never has been.
I agree with the poster that most people who are sitting on a large enough sum to see 64ish Gold for a mini as fair have likely either made a concentrated effort to research and make use of identified gold farming routines, made money of of the TP, or have actually made use of exploits to accumulate gold.
Arenanet seems to be becoming more and more crass as time goes on and it doesn’t help matters that some people insist that you can earn plentiful gold in this game by just playing “normal”.
I witnessed a really good TC commander loose confidence and direction just because we are facing SoR today. I hope commanders finding themselves intimidated will take a breath and get their wits in order. I have a lot of respect for people who take the Commander tag and I can appreciate it can be stressful, so this isn’t a rant. I just hate to see good commanders get frazzled just because of the match up.
So, chin up, collect yourselves and lets get back to the kinds of actions our server has been excelling at. I think most of us “scrubs” don’t mind if we wipe, as long as we regroup and look for some where else to push. We seemed to spend a lot of time today just not doing much of anything productive and just setting ourselves up to be run over by the SoR ZERG due to sitting too long in place, too often a place that was not really defensible.
Let’s get up, brush off the dust of SoR’s boots and get back to intelligent, hard to predict, hard to pin down combat actions!
I have to agree on Staff Elementalist. As is, it’s a very poorly designed option. It’s the AoE option. It’s not a particularly feared AoE option and if Arenanet really goes ahead with AoE nerfs to all professions, then Staff Elementalist will be… nothing. We aren’t nearly good enough at anything else to be considered a jack of all trades. More like a fool of all trades, competent at none.
In PvE, my Staff Ele usually rolls with at least one Conjure Weapon in utilities, along with Fiery Great Sword as the Elite, because the conjured weapons seem to be much better balanced and much more capable of damage output than any of the staff attunements.
In WvW, I don’t have that option, because the utility skill bar has too many mandatory skills that rank ahead of even considering a conjure utility.
I feel like I can bring utility to a zerg or wall defense via AoE and crowd control, but 1 vs. 1 are either very long fights I can either eventually win, or eventually get away from, or five second fares where I’m stomped into the ground because my survival skills and mobility have been countered long enough to burst me out.
Damage 1V1 is just far too pathetic with staff. I can kill people much, much faster with my defensive Guardian with 1900ish Attack Power and 5% skill rate than I can with my staff Ele with ~3100 attack power at ~38% crit rate. We can’t even blame that on the ability to AoE, because though the Guardian AoE may not have many options at range, I can get in, burst AoE and get out alive and do more AoE damage than I can with my Staff Ele.
Something is just not right with staff ele damage numbers. AoE numbers might actually be ok, if non-AoE skill damage received a 20%+ boost.
You can still do well with a staff if you’re a good player. But you’ll have to be pretty good, and would probably do better with another profession. But if you’re good, it’s possible to do well with staff, even 1v1.
Hence, “good” player. But not everyone plays this game like those players who put in more hours in the game!
Doesn’t mean eles should be buffed to god mode for casual players, at least better chances of survivability rather than getting downed most of the time. maybe 10% more HP, 1% increased in mobility, 0.5% additional damage to all skills (I know, this will let lots of people screaming and foaming at their mouth on OVERPOWERED eles.) and less 100 range (1200 to 1100 range) (due to increase damage).Maybe weapon swapping. But I personally don’t want weapon swap because it will only allow more people to foam at their mouth and screaming OP at us.
Anyway, we eles need a buff. But not so much. Just enough to make us survive more. Yeah, yeah, switching attunements in battle is the way to survive, but that is if we don’t mess up. One mistake and we are downed.
I also rolled the other 7 profession and even if I make a mistake, they can still take it without problems (unless there is a ultra champion hitting them with a no-cooldown skill). My guardian and warrior I practically can stand like a tank for long periods of time and take hits after hits before eventually dodging away for a heal and buff before going in again.
When I am on my ele, I stand FAR FAR away from the boss and still run all over the place to avoid their attacks because 1 hit and I am downed.
That is why I like to play an ele, I have to dodge, use all skills, all attunements all utilities, looked at the health, concentrate on what I am doing and such…..I remember when I first play GW2 and roll my ele, I was dying left, right, up, down and center. (New to GW). Didn’t even asked for help because I didn’t know much. And I didn’t even know how to use the other 3 attunements. Only use fire all the way until level 40 before someone told me I need to use the other 3 to survive, so, I started learning how to switch attunements in battle and I got better at NOT dying alot. Lol.
So, once eles get AoE nerf, staff is basically useless in anything. I can park my ele in LA and do chatting. When I am doing dungeons and other stuff, I would have to log in with my other characters.
Start with a 20% base damage increase for non-AoE staff skills and a staff trait to increase range to 1500 and we might be starting in the right direction on balancing Staff Elementalists.
IMO, AOE skill damage is mostly fine. However, I think someone entered some wrong numbers in a spreadsheet to come up with single target Staff skill damage.
I have two 80 Eles on separate accounts, one D/D and the other Staff. My Staff Ele takes opponents longer to kill, but that hardly ever matters because the D/D ele still has a much better chance of killing a foe before reaching zero HP than the staff Ele. I’ve killed players one on one with D/D in maybe five seconds, but almost all my Ele 1v1 kills in WvW have taken well over 30 seconds.
When you play a profession that many other professions can kill in 5 seconds and the quickest you can kill is 20+ seconds, then something isn’t right.
My current Staff build is balanced, with over 3100 attack power and ~38% crit rate and decent crit bonus. My defensive Guardian with 1900 attack power and 5% crit rate can still kill players 1vs1 much more quickly!
Forget about underwater damage output for any ele weapon set. It’s FUBAR across the board. I bring that up because it seems to provide additional evidence that someone either entered some wrong numbers somewhere, or someone is just clueless on how to balance damage numbers for the profession.
The idea that a .5% damage increase would bring balance, or that any damage increase would require a range decrease strikes me as fairly absurd.
If the devs ever do decide to actually nerf AoE damage, than Staff Ele would probably need an increase to their single target skill damage 2x-3x the percentage decrease in AoE damage to even be in the ballpark of balanced.
(edited by Fiontar.4695)
I’ve been enjoying Staff Elementalist in WvW this month quite a bit. I do agree that the positioning of some key Staff traits is, unfortunate. I think other than that, my biggest issue is that damage is just pathetic. I have over 3K attack power with my build and I still take for ever to kill someone one vs. one. Never had that problem with D/D!
I don’t think Staff needs radical changes. I think the path to fixing Staff Elementalist can be achieved via the following:
1. Increase base damage of all four #1 skills. Adjust upward incrementally until balance is found. (We are a fair ways off from that point right now).
2. Make at least one skill from each attunement a finisher. (I don’t mind having to work a little for the addition DPS we need and having to do combos for respectable damage would make the build even more fun, imo).
3. Reposition staff related traits into more logical positions in the trait tree.
I’d add that an implied #4 is that A-net shelve the idea they were tooling with that AoE needs to be much more limited in the game. IMO, it’s the most non-nonsensical thing that’s ever come out of an A-Net dev, ever, but specifically to Staff Elementalist, if they ever did nerf AoE and make AoE skills non-viable for single target attacks, it would be the absolute death of Staff Elementalists.
Or, of course, you could just scale the reward based on the character level, which happens for most loot in the game. Legit players shouldn’t suffer for slapped together loot tables!
Players were exploiting it by deleting and remaking characters, so we made it based on your entire account.
Edit:
Due to the reward being so high, and the upscaling for the living world, this was seen as being bad.
If at all feasible, for the future, wouldn’t the better solution be to limit to once per character slot? There has to be some way to flag each individual slot, with deletion/creation of a character in a given slot flagging the subsequent characters for that slot ineligible for rewards like this for, say, a week after creation?
Or, just have a variable for each account that limits the amount of times that account can earn that reward based on the total number of slots allocated to that account? (In this case, if people wanted to delete/create for what ever inane reason, the could do so, but wouldn’t be able to get the reward more times in total than the number of slots attached to the account).
A lot of people play alts and it’s getting more and more frustrating to do so with all the reward systems that can now only be done once per account.
Best to fix an exploit in a targeted way, rather than a “fix” that punishes legit game play!
It won’t change until people stop buying them completely, or just boycott the gem store until Arenanet stops with the foolishness.
Why they would want to emulate one of the most game-detrimental, short term revenue boosting, long term revenue destroying ploys in the MMO cash shop milieu is difficult to fathom.
The boxes are very unfair by design and research has shown that “lack of fairness” is the most destructive trait for a company/brand to acquire and the most difficult and expensive to overcome.
They gave us single and multi-player options, which is better than just multi-player, but they continue to avoid scalable dungeon content, which is really the proper solution.
“Living Story” has proven to be a failed concept. Sorry guys, but a lot of development time is being wasted that would have been much better spent elsewhere.
I love world PvE, exploration and Story. The Living Story would appear to be in line with what I like from the game, but in practice it just isn’t working.
The story part apparently gets written by the writers, but the rest of the team just can’t get the story properly into the game. Most of the content isn’t fun, doesn’t feel like it really has an impact on the world and is temporary.
I’m really at a loss. If you look at what the company produced in five years, compared to what they’ve produced in the last eight months, it seems like their efficiency is less than 33% of what it was pre-launch, maybe even worse. I mean, all those zones, all those DEs and all those Personal Story elements, then in eight months we haven’t even had one full zone’s worth of content, or a tenth of a single character’s personal story in narrative.
It would be slightly less disappointing if it was because 3/4 of the company was working on a full expansion, but supposedly they haven’t done any work on an expansion as of a month ago?
It’s just weird. Either they have lost their rudder as a studio, or they are working on some other project, which wouldn’t make much sense given the potential that GW2 had, but has been squandering, with each passing month.
I love the game, but thus far Arenanet has shown they really only know how to make frustrating dungeons and it almost seems like they’ve don’t even attempt to make dungeons that are fun.
I’m guessing maybe someone is stuck in the past, when many games were frustrating and if you didn’t have to play through a stage many times before you learned the exact sequence/timing, then it was considered “too easy”.
To be honest, I never found those games fun, but luckily games have mostly moved on from that paradigm. It seems, though, that someone never got that memo.
- Veteran Karka retaliation that lasts forever: annoying
I was grouped with someone earlier who was instantly downed by reflecting a karka’s projectile at it (the kind that causes poison IIRC) and hitting the retaliation for numerous ticks. It was pretty funny. I need to find a way to do that to people in WvW…
Several posters have discussed ways of dealing with the things I found annoying, and while that is great, it misses the point. I can already deal with them fairly effectively. I suppose why I found these annoying is that 1. I can’t really use them myself and 2. all the effects would be enormous fun to use against other players in WvW. Retaliation that lasts more than 30 seconds, muhahaha. Life bar reset, haha, jokes on you buddy. Karka hatchling effects, let the rage quitting commence. Really effective confusion, oh wait, Arenanet decided that was hurting the game.
I suppose I am also still burdened by the memory of fighting the Ancient Karka. It went on so long and became so tedious that I can recall sorting my inventory during the battle just to pass the time… and that was before the life bar reset.
Good point. Funny how mechanics that they admit aren’t fun and could ruin the game, anywhere else but in Southsun, somehow make perfect sense for the mobs in Southsun.
This game, over all, is incredible, but when they make design mistakes, they really go overboard with those mistakes and then often, stubbornly, cling to them.
Its a MMO it good when they add new instance that make you work with other players….
That might make sense, but for the arbitrary requirement for five players. Even the ability to scale for 3-5 players would be a vast, vast improvement for people who want to do group content with friends, but can’t because they can’t often get five people together at once to do things.
I tend to think that scaling for 1-5 would be best, because it no longer gates content vs. people who just insist on always playing solo, but also provides easy access to content for group sizes of 2-5. I think people would group up more often with that level of flexibility than they do with the current 5-man requirement, not less.
However, if Arenanet just couldn’t pull off successful scaling for 1-5, even 3-5 would be worth the development effort, as I would expect that for every notch the range would be widened, it would make the content viable for exponentially more players.
I think this subject takes on more urgency in light of NCSoft’s other big game in the pipeline, WildStar. If, and I admit it’s a big if, Carbine can actually pull off the announced scalability of WildStar’s dungeon content from Solo to full raid size and any size in between, then it’s going to make the lack of scalability in GW2, a game that every where else scales, seem all the more pitiful.
GW2 was always supposed to be about removing the barriers to grouping and incentivizing players to play together instead, rather than forced grouping. That Dungeons currently enforce an arbitrary party size and create serious barriers for groups of 2-4 playing the content together seems to be a symptom of intractable, old school thinking, lack of developer ability, pure laziness or some combination of the three.
The Mob design in Southsun is probably the biggest reason almost no one ever went there before the LS event. (That, plus the pitiful reward for the amount of effort).
Now we have the LS and completing it, for many, is worth the effort, but I think by the time most people are done with it they will certainly never, ever want to return there and, sadly, the experience is draining enough it might turn some off from the game entirely.
In short, the mob design makes playing this LS event about the most opposite from fun as you can get.
I get flashbacks of Asian Grinding MMOs when I go to South Sun. The continual level of annoyance you need to overcome to achieve something doesn’t actually make the achievement seem more worthy. Rather, it usually just results in the souring realization that the game just excels at being a colossal waste of your time and mental energy.
It’s an approach that is completely in-congruent with the design philosophies around which this game was developed, which makes it just feel like really weak, cheap game design in context.
Yeah, I don’t get why we haven’t had any new armors in the gem store since launch either. There are some existing NPC armors and new ones that have been added that would seem no-brainers for gem store sale, but nada.
The awkward functionality of Town Clothes makes them of much, much more limited appeal than full armor skins. I’m glad they are expanding those offerings, but it seems to me their priorities are completely backwards in putting Town Clothing before Armor Skins.
I’ve got a bit of a counter question to the actual question being posed here, because I’m always curious to find out what people think (regardless of whether or not I agree with it):
We have a lot of “If it ends with a dungeons, I won’t even do it” and “I wasted all my time on F&F / Personal Story because it ended in a stupid dungeon”, but riddle me this:While you were doing the personal story, the little F&F preliminary stuffs, where you enjoying it? Did you have fun doing that content? If you answered yes to that, then do it and enjoy it anyways and if there IS a dungeon at the end, just ignore it.
For anyone else:
“MMO” does not imply grouping, or imply not needing grouping. Everyone needs to back off of that term.Majority of complaints stem from “final-step” Dungeons (think personal story), as players who don’t want to do dungeons (some with medical issues or IRL obligations) hit a ‘brick wall’.
“Personal Story” does not mean the story focuses entirely on you, just that it involves you, so we again need to all back off of using it in arguments about how dungeons “aren’t personal.”
OP: If you see the red Anet logo by your thread, then you will know that Anet has given you an answer (without you even needing to hop in and read through anything), and it will save you some of your time. Chances are, they are a bit busy to answer you, so I wouldn’t expect an answer – however, if you enjoy the game go play it anyways.
To be honest, F&F just felt like busy work and an extension of the daily grind. I did enjoy the MA pop up DEs, because they were fairly well designed and the added event density was welcome, however, I didn’t find any of the rest of it to be particularly fun. (Well, I did like the story instances, but felt let down that they were only single part affairs. I would much rather have had a series of 4-6 story instances for each character over two months than one each that culminated in a ::gag:: 5-man Dungeon).
Me and my friends primarily did them to give Arenanet a chance to show their concept was viable and for the achievements/rewards. Among the five of us, we did a very good job of keeping pace with new achievements when they became available, but all of us stopped bothering when the Dungeon was announced and made a crucial element in completion/reward.
Now, you are probably going to say “the five of you, why didn’t you just all group up and do the dungeon”? Well, there are five of us who are real life friends, but getting more than three of us at any time is difficult with our schedules and was impossible during the time window the content was available. We all play together via VOIP and the social aspect is a big portion of what makes it fun.
The arbitrary requirement of five people for a dungeon is probably too big a burden for most people who play regularly with RL friends, rather than playing as part of a large, faceless guild. Allowing scaling for 2-5 or even 3-5 would make the content much more viable for many more people.
GW2 already has a number of mechanisms for scaling content. It’s hard to believe that they couldn’t successfully design scalable dungeons, if they actually wanted to, incentivizing grouping with more people, but fully supporting smaller group sizes. Another NCSoft game, Wildstar, is planning on offering Dungeons that scale from solo all the way up to raid size. If they succeed, imo, it’s going to make Arenanet look even more foolish for not trying to at least allow scaling for 1 to 5, or 2 to 5.