In the lowest ranking match, the best server usually holds 100% of the map, has twice to three times the PvE rewards than the servers in the top WvW matches. Players can freely explore WvW and earn tons of badges doing so. Then create another character and do it all over.
I predict that in the lowest tier WvW matches, this trend will continue. Two servers will be populated by the unknowing and one server will dominate them, having ots of players who user server changes to game the system.
The guild “Legio Mortis” [LM] and friends wants to express its deepest appreciation and greatfulness to all our loyal customers at the „well“ in battlegrounds. So long and thanks for all the PvP badges. You are welcome to visit us anytime and make use of our exclusive service.
Keeping jumping puzzles clean since 2012
Enhanced destroyer:
With a ramp instead of jumping platforms and especially a longer downtime of his perfect shield, this boss would be ok. If the health is lowered and you still semi-afk this beast from the top, then lower health is not an improvement.
Subject Alpha:
If anything, this boss needs a buff. On the submarine path, he has no skill to damage a player right next to him. So if all players clip right inside him, it’s zero damage all the way, only interrupted by minor burning damage.
Crystals:
Alpha will cast one double-circle on each group member. If one person is in the crystal and all players rush towards the crystal, then the players outside will cause all the damage to be cast on the poor trapped player. The right strategy is to run away from the player inside the crystal. This way, the player will one get hit by one attack. Any class has plenty of utility skills to survive that.
I hope I can get a fullrun team together tonight, but imo this is the dungeon with the least balance problems. Every encounter has a clear and right strategy to do it. If there are only minor health adjustments here and there, then I suppose they are ok, but nothing on the scale of toning down any boss.
p.s.: I also like how many enemies in this dungeon can one-shot you, bot only if you have berserker gear. Anything with +health and the one hit kills are gone. If this is pure coincidence, we still need more of it.
I have found a bug I can replicate at will.
I have made a video.
Whom can I send the video to, as I do not want to disclose any other details. (This is to protect hidden knowledge)
Forum users need not apply.
The shorthand for Eternal Battlegrounds
Example:
Ultimately the same thing happens on tkitten map.
Ultimately the same thing happens on the “EB” map.
The German word for fat: kitten
The first one I had to google, the latter being somewhat expected.
(edited by FourthVariety.5463)
I have a few things to say about the [EU] VIZU vs the Rest debacle.
in WvW
Posted by: FourthVariety.5463
I play on Riverside.
I have the next week off, if that was not the case, I would not even been able to get this far. On a regular work week, I would not even bother with WvW because of its weird time structure, waiting queues etc.
Riverside Reality
Riverside is a German server. In absence of notable German speaking colonies around the globe, the Riverside server is on a European schedule. Riverside even has the extremist WvW guilds present.
During the day, things look very good. There are plenty of people present to give Vizu and Far Shiverpeaks a decent whooping. Particularly the jumping puzzle is defended teeth and claw with nobody else getting a foot near the chest. Riverside does not even mind Vizu and Far Shiverpeaks having some sort of peace agreement, by which they do not attack each other. (Best observed on EB map and when both servers try to combine forces to get up the well or through the dark room.)
In any event, people still need to go to bed. Usually Far Shiverpeaks drops out first and they concede all their stuff to Vizu. At the same rate Riverside goes to bed and concedes all borderlands to Vizu. Ultimately the same thing happens on the Eternal Battlegrounds map. Six hours from now, I will wake up to spawning in the base with 50 Vizu people at the gate, trying to camp our spawning point. But those are the Canadians, they will have to go to bed and you will push them back.
Meanwhile on Drakkar Lake
Drakkar Lake is a pretty shoddy WvW server. But as it turns out, there are two servers even worse than them. Which means Drakkar Lake holds 100% of WvW all day, all week. They have +15% in PvE on everything, it is crazy.
One Question
Why are only Riverside players allowed to play for Riverside?
Vizu is the living example of cross continental play not being a game breaking issue. At least for as long as ultra-culling is in effect and you suddenly have 20 enemies around you. Why not have WvW teams be cross-continent. Instead of pulling players from one region, each WvW shall consist of one European Server, one American Server and one Asian Server. Tabs are kept for each sub-team, so matchmaking can shuffle teams each time. This week you play along the Japanese, next Week it might be the Koreans. In any event, you never run into the issue of conceding the map because your server is not spread across timezones.
(edited by FourthVariety.5463)
Maybe Governments should come up with an anti profit code so companies like anet can only sell their product at full price for half an hour, after that they get hit with diminishing reterns.
That was called progressive taxation and mostly lobbied out of existence.
If you look at games such as Skyrim or Dark Souls, you will find that they direct the attention of the player to the moment. They are spectacles which have their length, but they are also very self-conscious about having an end. Apoint where content depletes.
Games such as Diablo or MMOs direct the attention of the player towards the future. The action you undertake is not what is the center of the experience, rather than their effect on your spread sheet’s growth.
Diablo 3 struggled with this, since it could only progress to 60 and the progression afterwards is rather complicated and not easily understood. Hence Blizzard fixed this by introducing Paragon Levels, a new progression which fixes the perspective of the player. Hopefully, the player does not look at the mediocre gameplay of the present and returns to look at the future value of a stat again.
Player Type 1: In the moment player
ArenaNet focuses on depletable content and advertises the quality of this depletable content every chance they gets. Yet the content has not reached a state where it “remixes” itself to provide enough variation and instead hedges its bets on the players creating a lot of twinks. And although you can have different active events on a map, there aren’t different scenarios really. The map is static, at least when compared to 4X games such as Civ5, at best the GW2 map has one worst case and one best case state. It is not like the centaurs suddenly invade Caledon Forest ad the steam creatures show up in Queensdale.
Player Type 2: Grind Target Player
If you are in it to grind it, you will run out of steam. GW1 does not have that collectible card game element when unlocking skills in the same way GW1 had, so the first time the grind diminishes in value is around Level 30. When you hit 80, you are not directed towards a fashion grinding goal. Legendaries are a proper grinding target, but the process of getting them is obfuscated by the game. Smaller fashion grinding targets are hidden away in menus. There is also no equivalent to paragon levels, or anything measuring pure XP gained over total character lifetime. By comparison, PVP has its ranks, which seem to be more clear, easier to understand and stretch out further in time.
If mystic Coins constitute a reward so precious ArenaNet decided to grant only one per player per day (1.6 if you count monthlys), then there is absolutely no demand for them. Why? Is this the desired outcome that we have a token currency linked to an achievement and with the value of a random green drop?
If supply of Butter and Wood spiraled so much out of control that a gimmick recipe was introduced, then why watch while the same thing is happening to a material required to craft exotics.
If rare items have manufacturing costs greatly outweighing their usability and lifetime, then why be happy about it? Not sure if you noticed, but the price of rares is not the sum of their components, it is the average median of green items you need to toss into the forge to create them. That is not good, because on one hand it means that leveling your crafting skill goes largely unrewarded and it means the overabundance of green drops is growing ridiculously large. Why level crafting for a lot of silver and time, when you just toss 12 greenies in the forge and there you have your rare? It is even cheaper than buying the materials for the rare and yields the chance of a unique item for your personal collection. Something regular crafting can never do.
Thumbs Up:
- The glorious return of the GW1 fullrun
- The account bound tokens
- The bump to 80 for Ascalon and Caudecus Exotics
- Smiting of farmruns doing only the first boss.
Thumbs Down:
- Bugs handing out wrong number of rewards.
- Invisible “diminishing returns” with unclear cooldown (make it a status icon with a timer!)
- Forced marriage of skin and stats on exotics
Still weirded out by
- the price of a superior rune in contrast to what it does and the price of an equivalent rune on the trading post.
- Crucible of Eternity – Submarine: Alpha’s utter inability to deal with a group in melee range. (give that poor guy a 200 yard PBAoE knockback, so it can get interesting from time to time)
- Balancing of Magg’s Bomb Event in Citadel of Flame. Is this a gear check I do not get, is there an item that is supposed to spawn but doesn’t?
A few items currently make little economic sense:
Rare items
Green items are trash you can buy for 1-2 silver. Rare items costs between 15-40s. A rare item has an advantage of three levels over a green, i.e. 8%. If you are not level 80, then you will replace your gear often enough that the increased costs are not worth it. Especially when crafting, rare items are a colossal waste. It does not even make sense when you consider the crafting XP gained. The increase XP gain does not reflect the increase resource requirements 1:1, it is less efficient.
Mystic Forge:
There were a few things one could do to break even by tossing greenies in the forge and hope for gold. The math just worked out. Currently though, the money you yield is too low. At the other end of the spectrum, tossing exotics into the forge in hope of special exotics, the money you need to have up front and the utter lack of working knowledge into this process prohibit the forge from driving down costs of exotics. Instead, we see run away costs of ultra-rare exotics and prices of regular exotics being driven up as a result.
Mystic Coins:
Here we have an item which cannot be mass produced in the same way any other item can be mass produced. The game hard-caps the amount of those coins. But oddly enough, when it comes to “Mystic Greatswords” and similar weapons, the prices do not seem to reflect the effort of having 50 skillpoints and 50 coins all that well. Considering what Mystic Coins represent, they are dirt cheap.
It seems Mystical Coins need more practical recipes appealing to a crowd beyond exotic-prestige players. From 1-69, you earn one of these coins per day, while making 1-2 levels per day. If each mystic coin amounted to one rare item of choice, players would get a huge perceived reward. On weekends, players probably still burn faster through their levels than they can restock 13 item slots with rare gear generated from mystic coins. This would stop the current status quo of newbie players flooding the market, while level 80 experienced player say “so long kittens, thank you for the cheap Mystic”. It takes me one minute in Orr to earn the money necessary to buy a coin which represents one player’s daily achievement. That is wrong. I stopped doing dailies, instead I just farm a bit and then buy a few coins.
Certainly, the effect on rares of level 1-69 would be devastating in terms of price. But mechanically speaking, from a gameplay perspective, the high price already makes them obsolete. Above 70 we have ecto salvage, which is a market force onto itself. This is why I said 1-69. The mystic forge upconversion (If coins = weapons, then coins = ectos) will take it from there to drive the price up to at least 1/4 ecto, alternative recipes for all players will get rid of this conversion alltogether..
Ancient Bones:
Compared to other T6 trophies, the ancient bones are dirt cheap. Kitten, they are even dirt cheap, when compared to T3-T5 bones. They drop too often.
@AvalonBright
Complaints about one-Shots:
Indication that your gear neither has +health, nor +defense. Your experience with other MMOs should mean you are familiar with the concept of “gearcheck”. Well, check your gear. There are no “clothies”, the difference between plated armor and cloth is marginal. An Ele +def armor easily outperforms a Warrior in berserker plates. Looks are deceiving, it is all in the stats.
Compalints about Zerging:
Indication that a boss mechanic has not yet been observed in great enough detail to predict behavior and enact proper responses. If you “get” any boss in the game, dying is simply no longer happening. Also indication of team not rallying downed members for whatever reason. Dungeons do not tolerate this. Rallying team members is always a priority.
Level 78 greens? That is still junk loot. One is better off grinding random events than going for those bags.
Humans can be related to the original hero, that can be retconned.
Sylvari have the bonus of the pale tree standing on a small human/centaur settlement called Ventari’s Sanctuary.
Norn just drink another beer and claim they were related by blood. Only a fool would try to argue with them.
Asura would never be caught claiming that they knew a human as anything more than a test subject, so a callback to GW1 is not required. All heirlooms are simply confiscated for testing purposes.
Charr, well Charr. I did not kill a million of them in GW1 to grind my titles to now give the rewards to a Charr.
As for the hall being in a desolate state of destruction. Well, that is what you get once ArenaNet catches on that you like something. You like GW1 Prophecies starting area? BOOM, nuclear war, everything gone. You like asian fantasy, woods and the ocean? Well, here is a slum and two wastelands. You like 1001 nights? Allow us to desaturate it for you, color shift it to purple and fill it up with zombies. You like your beautiful hall of monuments? Allow me to destroy it.
ArenaNet really has a fetish for destruction once you think about it. D3 is such a colorful game by comparison, no joke.
The entire charr intro is nothing but a lie. “With machines of war we killed our gods”. Don’t make me laugh. If anybody killed their last pantheon of gods, i.e. Titans, it was me, at level 20, being my awesome human self.
The legion is mother, the legion is father, pah, the legion is your sister telling you she is your real mom at your eight birthday.
I was always under the impression krytans were a bit more Mediterranean in their looks. In GW1 they had a good mix south-European to north-African skin colors. Jennah retains some of those influences, while the average Krytan has gotten a fair white-wash. Even the types of trees which are growing in Kryta these days point to a more colder climate than 250 years ago during GW1.
Input Code Room
The Split
(1) Button Pusher
(2) Two guys left side
(3) Two guys right side
Step 1
Keep the button pusher safe. Should not be too hard. Only use ranged attacks, try to kill them robots before they explode. If you see a red circle, there is still time to kill the bot. Attacks which bounce automatically are preferred.
Step 2
Push the button once and only once. No shalt though push the button twice, or not push the button at all. After you pusheth the button once there shalt not be another pushing of the button.
Step 3
Kill the big robots, run away from the small ones. Use ranged attacks only. High priority target are bots with the skill “daze”. Call them, all players target this robot and kill it. Second priority are robots with the skill “fireshield”. Then kill the third big robot.
After all three big bots are dead, go back to starting positions and do it again.
If you do not focus fire, you will die
If you refuse to go ranged, you will die
If you do not constantly move out of the red circles, you will die.
If you do not help up downed teammembers, this will get expensive and you will die more.
If you are awesome gozu, you push the button five times in a row. But that requires certain team setups and a fiendish group intelligence.
Do you feel pressured to support GW2 via the cash shop? Why or Why not?
Posted by: FourthVariety.5463
I do not feel pressured, I also bought 800 gems so far.
At the same time, I feel there is unnecessary stuff in there. I liked when GW1 had a game mechanic similar to a collectible card game. I do not like the cash-shop exhibiting tendencies of monetization strategies of collectible card games.
Guardian:
In a group you spam Staff skill #1 to make sure you hit everything humanly possible.
On your own you have great survivability and a greatsword which kills almost everything.
No other class has a mixture which is so complete.
Substituting level progression with gear progression and call it “endgame” is not really ArenaNet’s style.
But it is rewarding as hell. Think Diablo 2/WoW.
Farming for 2 months just to get a stupid-looking unicorn stuff (well, i kinda like MLP:FiM, but not the point) is useless, tedious and plain dumb. I do get my gear to smash mobs/players more effectively.
I think WoW, Diablo3 and Torchlight 2 have that portion of the market pretty much covered. It does not make a whole lot of sense for ArenaNet to try and enter that section of the market. Even if some players of GW2 come from that section.
Love interest? Try playing human and listen to Logan and Jenna. That is teeth-gritting telenovela right there.
I also think the type of cutscenes and the length of missions have done the writing a disservice. GW1 was way better in that regard even if it had only a fraction of cutscenes. Due to the cutscenes, there is a total lack of establishing shots and it shows. The open world has at least vistas for that now, but personal story and characters do not have that luxury.
Logan needs a bit more of this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itmNiTwHOsM
ok, maybe a little bit less uber-macho, but you get the idea.
For the most part, I think personal story missions struggle with their short length. There are so many missions which only consist of one fight and a short story frame.
I always point to the mission “A Light in Darkness” as an example for a mission which does it right. That is an all around awesome mission. Right amount of length, every character, every location is properly introduced. You fight your way in. There is a small plot twist, then some more fighting and you exit this mission with a good outlook on what is to come.
Compared to that, most other story missions are just small fights which can be completed in one minute and two short dialog scenes. There isn’t even room for character development in these few lines.
For future expansions, ArenaNet has quite the challenge ahead of them.
ArenaNet needs a guideline in which spots NPCs have to stay before a cutscene.
ArenaNet needs an automated TV director who then correctly shoots the NPCs
The background can still be substituted should it become necessary.
Add a few more different idle animations while you are at it.
Add a few talking animations
Characters need to know where to look.
Locations and characters need establishing shots (same pan over and over anyway)
Missions need more length, so they can at least have three semi-proper micro-acts
If that happens, the current writing will be the smallest issue, because it is far from being as bad as it often looks in that particular cinematic style of GW2. Then sprinkle the result with a few GW1 style cinematics and custom camera work and you have a winner.
Substituting level progression with gear progression and call it “endgame” is not really ArenaNet’s style.
Submarine: (This strategy only works for submarine)
Thrashmobs: I assume, you know how to kill the mobs without abilities.
Alpha:
The entire group closes in on Alpha. You have to stand inside Alpha. Press F11 and disable “Melee assist”. He does not cast Dragon Tooth on his position, he does not cast his Impale spike because no player is in range. He jumps and causes burning and he summons some essences to heal himself. If you are close and 1-2 people spam heals, you will not die. Crystals will break in general AoE. If a player goes down, he has to be rallied by the others immediately. Alpha should go down in five minutes. Repeat three times, done.
B34R-Golem
When the group enters the room, one person will get aggro. This person will go back to the entrance and hold the aggro. unless this person dies, he/she will have aggro. Stand inside the red circle. Do not attempt do dodge it. Do not run towards the rest of the group. If you are inside the red circle, continuously kite left and right. Not too slow, not too fast, you got to have the right rhythm. The golem will only attack you, always miss and you will have drawn the short straw for this encounter. The other player do whatever, which results in a dead boss.
Laserbarrier:
Undress, jump, done.
Security Console:
If you are new to this then hack, clear the big guys, hack again. If you have two Eles using Staff and Air Attunement, then congratulations, you found easy mode to dispose of the small golems. Else, two players left, two players right, trigger golems outside the console range and kill them before they explode, should they be too close.
Should you save the Inquest?
No, because killing the additional enemies is bothersome and Alpha is easy, should you stick to hugging him.
Ice Berserker
The idea is to make him charge into the electrified posts. Stand next to them, but do not stand on the small flat pedestals. That will cause him to glitch. Ideally the group splits between two posts and he will then charge either post and slowly be shot down. You want to have 25 stacks of bleeding, you want poison, just to keep the pressure up when his armor is in place.
That is submarine in a nutshell. 45 minutes, nothing too challenging. You need to rally fallen team members instantly to avoid Spawn-Zergs and boss resets. Usually the group should not wipe on this path.
Other paths are marginally harder and longer. Either because you have to actually avoid Alpha’s attacks, or because some of the bosses seem unfinished (Enhanced Destroyer). I recommend rare level 80 gear and green trinkets (earring, ring, amulet). I recommend using Valkyrie or Shaman sets. Anything with +health will turn off those one hit kills you get from running Berserker. One hit kills are not a flaw of the game, they are a drawback of your glass-cannon berserker gear. You want to take that off for this dungeon. +Condition damage is also a good idea, since it avoids the armor of the ice berserker.
I made 85silver yesterday on a random pug explorable with players whose only dungeon skill was a willingness to listen and talk to each other. Took 50 minutes into an allegedly unplayable dungeon.
How to play dungeons:
http://www.wartower.de/artikel/artikel.php?id=672
We should not forget that gold is merely a commodity like any other drop. If the intent of a player is to gain more wealth and store it in something which has currency-like properties, then we do not know which item will be the blessed one.
Will it be ectos in some throwback to GW1? But ectos had their value even in the face of total market oversaturation.
Will it be Mystic Coins because their supply is more limited and less prone to straight forward farming?
It is certainly not going to be gold coins. Only after we have a somewhat reliable and stable proto-currency to chart values against will we be able to know how the economy is doing,
GW2 is very diverse. As a result it is very very easy to find something you hate to the point where you vow to quit the game. But it is also just as easy to never have run into that problem, find something you like about it and defend GW2 in the forums.
This inherent structure of GW2 is dragging players into a fight, because it is easy to gain a perspective on the game which is incomprehensible for other players who never experienced it. Best example is the whole divide between players who hate dungeons, players who love dungeons and players who never have been in a dungeon.
If GW2 was a modern military shooter, there would be multiplayer and single player and those two modes would have been developed by two different teams at one studio.
GW2 has not only single player and multiplayer. It has sPvP, WvW, open world PvE, personal Story PvE (single player RPG), coordinated PvE (dungeons), and a loot game (grind-for-fun) attached to it. That is not counting the minigames, which were cut down to a minimum and that is not counting all the social features, trading post, etc.
There is your problem. ArenaNet might have a large team, but still not enough teamsize to deliver on something this all-encompassing. Naturally, it is going to be hit and miss for a lot of players. No MMO ever managed to include that many sub-games and be more than mediocre on average.
But people just cherry pick their one favorite mode and if it is anything but absolutely spotless perfect, they will complain in this forum. The rest is playrs who love the game rushing to its defense.
Not so much trolling, as predictable human behavior on the outskirts of acceptable verbal conduct.
If you think dungeons are too difficult, then here is a list of what you should do:
http://www.wartower.de/artikel/artikel.php?id=672
Stick to those rules, fight your way in and you will be rewarded with a new game inside a game. An endgame of sorts if you will, or at least something that is not mass-zerging everything from Kryta to Orr and into the Eternal Battlegrounds. A start to a journey that will help you understand those players who ask for even more difficult dungeons.
If all the mobs/bosses had normal sized health pools, we would end up in a situation similar to CoF. GW2 dungeons are very very short, you do not walk very far. The number of encounters is also very small. To achieve target length of one hour, the health of monsters has to be absurd.
The personal Story: A Light in Darkness
Awesome mission, right length, hits all the right beats, great cinematics. Especially awesome, if you do not play Sylvari and have never been to the Sylvari area before.
I bought a named staff called “Delusion” and it turned out to be the skin of Shadow Staff from GW1, only more colorful. Dying weapons, please iterate!
4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42
Wait, no 80 &14
Move away from glass cannon for dungeons. Keep an attitude of changing your build while in the dungeon, or while still learning a dungeon. Buy rare (yellow) level 80 gear. You will be fine.
Subject Alpha also differs from encounter to encounter. For example, at the end of the “submarine” path, he will have that knack of not casting PBAoE on his location. So the safest sport is right next to him. But do not go in and spam him. You may not use knockback, you need good supportskills up all the time and from time to time he will spike one guy into downed state, which will require a fast rez.
I acknowledge that this dungeon is pure hell from the “we all just did it for the first time perspective”, but once you have figured it out, it is the best dungeon around. Add to the fact that some bosses still have a few bugs (no aggro switching on B34R Golem, boring enhanced destroyer fight) and you will definitely want to have more of this one.
I remember a time, when ArenaNet publicly demoed the game and dungeon bosses did not have CC immunity. It was a slugfest during which no boss ever had the chance to do anything. They were just drowned in CC and died. No challenge whatsoever.
It is not the crystal. The crystal is just one of those moments where the group is challenged to act as a group and focus fire instantly. Except when Alpha catches my Ele, in that case, I teleport out of it, or use mist form, or obsidian flesh, or some other trickery to annoy Alpha.
I talk more about avoiding all the other damage without much effort.
Subject Alpha is an awesome boss and if you think it is too hard, then you are missing something really elemental about this encounter. I won’t spoil it, but if you do find out, it is one of those things after which you scream how you could have died so often and miss this. Double thumbs up for Subject Alpha.
Remove all the “because games are like that clutter”, such as:
1. Remove teleportation costs.
Too annoying, if you want goldsinks, create better ones than that. Meeting friends on a whim is always better.
2. Remove armor repair.
In the open world, it only hurts those player who are weaker to begin with. Dungeons are better off, if players had a limited pool of repawns to use.
3. Allow full trait respec outside combat, remove unlock costs.
The little character development left beyond 30, should not be hindered by unlock costs. Changing traits means you are willing to try something and learn, why would anybody punish that by associating costs?
4. Right click friend → teleport to location
Playing with friends = #1
The music, the story, the graphics, the rest = very distant second.
5. Replace all instances of Soulbound with Accountbound.
I want the game to reward me, not one aspect of me I am representing in the game.
6. Replace junk loot with direct money drops
No, I won’t buy those extra slots, thank you. With that amount of people to sell to, all this type of loot does is to waste mouseclicks.
Some bosses have flaws by design, i.e. characteristics which prompt a certain player behavior that was intended by a developer and is considered to be the desired “fun gameplay”. Regardless of whether the players consider it to be fun or not. Example: dodgeroll to exit red circle of death.
Some bosses have designflaws, i.e. they show behavior which prompt a certain player behavior. However, it was not intended by the developer and the amount of fun is debatable. Example: killing the enhanced destroyer (Infinity Coil 3) by using only longbow attacks.
Beyond drawing red circles on the ground and animations amidst effect spam, GW2 does not have good communication skills. ArenaNet is fetishist about constructive feedback, however their own game hardly ever gives the player any of it.
Take the Asaclon dungeon. There you have three different graveling challenges each trying to teach different group behaviors. One graveling attack requires the team to split. The other attack requires coordination of traps, the third requires a “freight train build” and swarm behavior. Three different skills, very interesting, very coordinated types of play. If you know that, you can grow as a player entering these dungeons.
But the game does nothing to introduce those concepts. Instead, the game just confronts the players and hopes fansites and magazines, along with Youtube take it up to themselves to instruct players and train them. That is the error of the way dungeons are made, not their initial difficulty! It is a lack of communication. For the most part, players are in happy attack spam country, a type of GW2 where anybody just does as he pleases. The dungeons are an entirely different game, have a different culture of playing. That does not depend on dropping the right cake at the right time, it means altering strategies, traits, weapons and utilities for “tough” boss encounters. Things a player never experiences in the outside world.
A game made for accessibility would take greater steps ensuring the NPCs gave feedback on what went wrong, or how the group needs to behave. Not in a click-away dialog box, but with “in your face” soundbites that tell the players what they did wrong and how they should behave. Red circles as a teaching tool only go so far.
Subject A’s red circles anyone? Did you figure them out? Or do you still run out of dodges? One line of dialog can turn this encounter from ultra-tough “I hate this game” to “hey this is fun”.
Colin is right in claiming that players will figure it out, but it is never about the players who master it, it is about the number of players who are turned off to the point of quitting GW2 over this “endgame”. Maximizing the amount of active players requires the game to start teaching its players better. Difficulty by means of obfuscation and activity never served anybody. Give me four willing pugs and teamspeak and everybody can do every dungeon. Give me four players with the wrong attitude and dungeons will never work.
(edited by FourthVariety.5463)
I can confirm the Staff “Delusion” having a unique skin, just not an icon. “of corruption” refers to the sigil inside and is not part of the name. The look of the weapon is that of Shadow Staff from GW1, if it were amber and had a green jewel in the middle. Shame you cannot dye weapons anymore, but great looking staff nonetheless.
Sure you are level 50. But some of your stuff is just level 48, some of it is blue, some of it is green. You constantly level up and you constantly replace gear. So you never are quite 100%. Ever wondered how far up you rank on a scale of 0-100% ? Ever wondered which armor piece to replace?
Visit www.guildwarstools.com to get an answer.
most notable the “Traveler” inscription cannot be crafted. It seems that Traveler also boosting condition damage seems to have a huge impact on the price compared to the craftable explorer inscription.
Same goes for rune of the traveler outperforming rune of the pirate, even though that is one mean parrot you get there. Seriously, it hands down beats any pet or summon in the entire game.
Dark Souls:
You put unspent souls at risk because you chose not to spend them. You never put a resource at risk which is part of your character’s strength, such as levels, armor, attribute points. Only very select moments in Dark Souls will negatively affect those. The monsters which can petrify you and permanently take away health can be counted on one hand. As can the enemies which are allowed to break your gear aggressively. In essence, Dark Souls puts your excess wealth at risk and not your bottom line. At worst, you do not move forward. If you die, you are punished once: loss of souls, nothing more.
Guild Wars 2:
This is a game which will happily break your armor and drain your resources, even the ones you did not want to put at risk. By dying, you are punished multiple times. You get death penalty, so next time you die even faster, because every death negatively affects your healthbar. Your armor gets damaged, meaning you lose money. You can lose more than just the money you are earning on the current run (Dark Souls), you can leave a dungeon with less money than you entered.
In comparison, GW2 is far more unrelenting and vengeful about dying than Dark Souls is. For the most parts of the game it does not matter, but dungeons make this trait of the game very visible to the less experienced players.
There is also a night and day difference between doing a dungeon with normal people and doing it with powergamers who are level 80 and have at least partial exotic gear. Gear can make such a difference in this game. To think you are ready just because your level is the right numbers is wrong.
If you end up split from your group in your own version of a dungeon, then do this:
(1) Exit the dungeon
(2) Enter another dungeon of the same type (story/explorable)
(3) Exit that dungeon as well
(4) Go back to the to the entrance of the original dungeon in which your partial team is waiting for you
(5) Done.
This works whenever you do not get put into the same dungeon than the rest of your party. It odes not always work, when you get a network error after having played a dungeon for a while.