While messing with the loot tables could make people actually kill things, many would have one of two problems:
1)not having the amount of time to play the dungeon and a bit of the rest of the game. Not everyone has enough time to spare 2h to just clear 1 path of arah
2)people get bored easily. even with increased rewards unless you risk the killing initial mobs and reset dungeons the rewards won’t make for the boring fight of killing a overly hp buffed silver mob
I’m writing those two just because of personal experience.
On launch after a week i had about equivalent of 4 days of gameplay. Now with work if i get time for a daily fractal run and clear the daily achieves i consider myself lucky.
Regarding killing silver mobs it’s insane the amount they take to get downed. Some aren’t that hard and you can just stand still attacking and watching the time fly by.
Obviously making rewards only at the end is a dumb idea. A noob group get to lupi and can’t make it further, leavers make the group split, (insert any other reason that makes you unable to clear the dungeon here) and you’re left with no reward and wasted time.
Regarding rewards/time ratio between paths.
The problem isn’t that some paths should have more/less reward depending on it’s difficulty. What it should have been from the start is that the paths should take about the same time to clear and they’re not well balanced causing such disparities. The paths it-selves need a fix not the rewards.
Just for the record, standing in a place where you can hurt the boss but the boss can’t hurt you back / can’t fight back is considered an exploit, and we are working on a solution for that problem.
Isn’t that annoying invulnerable mechanic that takes ages to disappear supposed to take care of that?
And what’s your take on 1 person maintaining agro to prevent invulnerable while the rest is somewhat safe? (in a sense that it’s unlikely the boss will go there but not impossible)
It’s funny that people would not consider “positioning advantage” an exploit. After all, you’re exploiting pathing and scripting of bosses.
So every time a mobs hits a wall or i go on top of a box so a melee mob doesn’t hit me while I heal I should be banned?
The objects around the world aren’t just decorations and should be fully utilized to get the most advantage on a fight. Walls to block projectiles is a common tactic to mitigate a ton of damage freeing the heal skill for when it’s actually needed.
The reason some professions have different armor and fighting mechanics is to take advantage of field positioning. While an heavy armored players drags the boss around dishing melee damage the rest could be in a safe spot focusing only on the offensive, lowering the chances of failure.
In gw1 having the higher ground meant little more range and damage. I don’t think that mechanic was introduced here but for the sake of the argument what idiot wouldn’t want the higher ground to maximize the dps and safety zone.
Those are a few positioning tactics that are/were used in most MMORPGs.
If objects and terrain weren’t supposed to be used give us a flat world with vertical walls to be sure there’s no possible hiding place nor high ground to take advantage. Don’t think it would be successful as an MMORPGs but as an arena battle royale with quick respawn could be fun.
Of course those walls with 80% inclination and your char can climb are, most likely, exploits and any jumping path that can cut a whole lot of the run needs to be fixed. Yet, not all positioning tactics are to be considered exploits.
Regarding AI it is exploitable by design. No matter how smart it is made, and some fixes are needed, in the end the AI as to lose no matter what.
I never look at terrain tactics as an exploit.
“Location, location, location”: Positioning is the key to survival (that’s what i learned in gw1)
Walls are there to block projectiles, fair game in gw1 so i guess the philosophy stays the same here. Just because the asura boss on fractal likes weapons with a huge arc doesn’t mean it’s an exploit to use the ceiling to block the agony shots.
Jumping and z-axis were added to the game to prevent a few bugs in gw1 and add more active gameplay. People that played gw1 might remember meleeing mobs from under a bridge just because they were on the “same spot”. Also if we can jump it would be dumb no to use it to dodge mobs that can’t go ranged or find new paths. At least i feel that some JPs seems to be there just to fully develop our jumping skills.
If mobs sometimes bug, and i still don’t know why/how, it’s anet job to know the issue and fix it. If a boss just stays there quietly put and not attacking i’ll be sure to not use stun, kd and fear to unstuck him. This is no exploit until you can actually cause the said effect at will.
The rule is kill or be killed. Maw won’t stop it’s laser attack when i get bugged with the pickup running bug so why should players do things differently when AI bugs?
Skipping is not an exploit when actually running through mobs, unless you can skip like 90% of a dungeon but i would call that bad design.
Now teleporting through use of camera, seen that on fractals to skip to the last boss avoiding a real annoying part, is an exploit.
The already fixed teleport issue at dredge fractal was an exploit as it was the direct damage on the seal fractal.
Some walls that we can run are obvious exploits but if anet doesn’t bother to hotfix i guess they’re not that worried about it.
Regarding the ban hammer i think they should direct the ban somewhere else (mat farming bots and gold sellers mostly).
A few suspensions i could see but unless is a rather broken bug (like dungeon offering 10x tokens or insanely fast clears) people should be safe to do as they please.
It’s not only loot.
I did arah p2 in a group full of first timers killing most things in the way: time spent ~=3h
After i did p3 with a pug (they explained me what to do since i was doing it for the 1st time): time spent 25minDungeons need trash mobs, something as to be in between some boss fights, but the time spent to clear a dungeon has to be reasonable enough for people to kill them.
Take fractals for example:
You don’t need to kill all the mobs at maw but some still do it because of loot and they’re not annoying to kill. (extra kill time 5-10min tops)
Dredge and grawl sometimes are a pain in the kitten but they go down easily enough and you get awesome loot from bags. (you got to kill them anyway but at least i don’t feel that it’s too boring).With the “regular dungeons” you only get a bunch of silver mobs with too much hp and a lot of annoying skills that even with an upgraded loot aren’t worth the time to kill.
Again with arah: the deadeyes and asura techs on p2 are just there to avoid runners. There’s no other explanation to have 1hit kills at distance and permanent stun if they didn’t already know that people would try to skip content.
tl;dr
Just make dungeons not last 4x longer when killing mobs and most people will actually take and extra couple minutes killing groups that may cross their way.Path 2 isn’t that long, good team will clear it in 30-40 minutes max while path 3 is 15-20 minutes. Problem is, most pugs prefer path of the least resistance.
Like i said we were mostly arah noobs doing p2 so we killed almost everything on the way just to be on the safe side.
Yet i still don’t think that even an experienced group will do less than 1h if they stop at every single group they find on the way.
If the mobs were like in the fractals, mostly vets with a few normal companions, I could take an extra min and actually enjoy slaughtering undead. As it is now you spend as much time killing 1 silver mob as killing a whole pack of vets and this isn’t anywhere near fun.
Just so i don’t get misunderstood, I’m not saying to remove all of those hp buffed kittens but make them only appear in a few checkpoints like in a door to prevent full dungeon running.
My view on dungeon running is that it should be allowed to some extent:
You could skip a few groups here and there, by sacrificing loot and having an harder time to run back in case of death, while still not being able to run through the whole thing.
It is ridiculous know on how much content you can skip at the moment but i hope it stays this way until they finally realize that trash mobs shouldn’t take that much time to kill.
It’s not only loot.
I did arah p2 in a group full of first timers killing most things in the way: time spent ~=3h
After i did p3 with a pug (they explained me what to do since i was doing it for the 1st time): time spent 25min
Dungeons need trash mobs, something as to be in between some boss fights, but the time spent to clear a dungeon has to be reasonable enough for people to kill them.
Take fractals for example:
You don’t need to kill all the mobs at maw but some still do it because of loot and they’re not annoying to kill. (extra kill time 5-10min tops)
Dredge and grawl sometimes are a pain in the kitten but they go down easily enough and you get awesome loot from bags. (you got to kill them anyway but at least i don’t feel that it’s too boring).
With the “regular dungeons” you only get a bunch of silver mobs with too much hp and a lot of annoying skills that even with an upgraded loot aren’t worth the time to kill.
Again with arah: the deadeyes and asura techs on p2 are just there to avoid runners. There’s no other explanation to have 1hit kills at distance and permanent stun if they didn’t already know that people would try to skip content.
tl;dr
Just make dungeons not last 4x longer when killing mobs and most people will actually take and extra couple minutes killing groups that may cross their way.
Necromancer mark skill says it’s temporarily disabled, not much of an advantage here…
If it’s the last hit it’s a stupid mechanic that doesn’t help the team.
At the moment to have a decent chance of doing the achievement you either wait for the enemy to have less than 80% and snipe or wait for 50% and use the fast attack skill in close range. If half the team is waiting for those moments you’ll be watching a bunch of guys overkilling a single opponent with their best damage skills.
By using a tag mechanism you could make sure there’s no need to have everyone spiking the same target in hopes that one of them get the point.
In another matter i’m pretty sure i’ve downed a few guys and didn’t get any points, so my guess is that there’s also a bug lurking here.
I’m 1/5 for hours and can’t really say how i did the 1st one.
Even using scout and snipping them down doesn’t seem to work.
This should be like WvWvW kill tags, do x% of damage and when the guy is down/dead you get a point towards achievement.
Thanks for the update.
I finished all areas and was wondering what else i might have missed since so far i got:
-all vistas, points of interest, way points and skill points
-all zones uncovered
-all puzzle achievements (including crash landing and revenge of “pirate guy”)
For those tracking the areas:
Although not all wiki maps are up to date i think the pages list all the zones.
I just made copy of the zones for all the areas to Word (ignore sub-areas that sometimes are listed too) and just went over each map crossing the ones i had. Eventually I found the 2 missing places.
Not that practical but at least it’s systematic and way better than walking around aimlessly .
I left dungeons for last and after doing AC it didn’t change the Ascalon uncovered areas.
Regarding puzzles some count other don’t. For example griffonrook and king jalis refuge have their own areas.
Chantry seems bugged, even though i already had explored it i gained extra xp from returning there (chest reward for zone was empty) and got my world reward.
About the progress:
Map shows 100% complete
Char name (char select screen) 98% complete
Medal (char select screen) 97% complete →this has the same % has the “Been There, Done That” achievement
Still annoying not having an area uncovered tracker per zone when your status is like this:
Kryta 175/178, Orr 60/65, Maguuma 164/169, Shiverpeak 171/177, Ascalon 177/187
and you have no clue where to look…
(edited by Flameseeker.1563)
Would it be possible to had a track of how many uncovered areas and total areas each zone has?
I’m nearing 100% only counting hearts/vistas/PoI/SP but my explorer (area) achievement indicates that i’m missing like 3 areas in kryta and 6 areas of maguuma.
This is rather inconvenient since the map seems clear and you have no idea where to narrow down the search.