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Having made the decision to stop playing at the start of January, this month’s blog post was always going to play a major role in whether I would return. I’m sorry to say that I saw nothing that would entice me back to the world of Tyria, which is a real shame, since I played from release and had a fantastic time.
The first two sections are just PR spin. “This is why we’re so great”.
We will accomplish this is by building a world that has truly unique storylines and event experiences that play out over extended periods of time, that shape the future and world of Tyria, creating stories for everyone to tell about the game for years to come.
We attempted to do this with varying degrees of success with our Halloween, Lost Shores, and Wintersday events. Thanks to each of these events and your feedback, we’ve learned an incredible amount about how to ensure big events like this are successful moving forward.
I highly doubt anyone would be talking about the “storylines” in the events thusfar. The storylines were virtually non-existent. “Shape the world of Tyria”? This seems to harken back to the claims that the Lost Shores would “Change Tyria forever”. What we got was a new island no-one had heard of, and since then, no-one cares about, and a lighthouse and a statue destroyed. Truly epic changes!
Frankly, this is just more promises with no substance. If “truly unique storylines and event experiences” are the goal, why on earth aren’t they present in the game already? There’s hundreds of events already out there, as well as quite possibly the worst storyline I’ve ever experienced in a computer game.
Systems and Rewards. Ah, some concrete info! Oh, more RNG. Prove me wrong Anet! Tell us what’s in those boxes! Because right now, it looks like they’re going to include a random item for the class in question.
but we don’t want to force our players on endless gear treadmills for new tiers of gear we add every 6 months. You won’t see another tier between Ascended and Legendary in 2013 for example.
No, we’ll just force our players on endless gear treadmills for new tiers of gear we add every 12 months. If you dislike Ascended gear my fellow gamers, be very, very afraid of that quote.
Honestly, this is all sound and fury signifying nothing. We received concrete info on one thing, the achievement rewards system (which is why that’s the only thing people are discussing). Everything else is promises without any substance or details.
“Trust us, it’s gonna be awesome!”. Fool me once, shame on me.
The 5 events are usually the first I end up completing, although sometimes it’s the gathering. The one that’s super annoying is killing 15 different enemy types. On days where I decide to complete the daily, I almost always have to go way out of my way to make that one happen.
How is that possible? 15 enemy types is nothing. Each zone easily has 30+ enemy types. If you guys are doing nothing but sitting in Orr, then yes the dailys will be awful to do – 1 enemy type and just a ton of grindy events.
If, however, you do them as you play – they will complete themselves in no time and you won’t need to go out of your way at all.
Please. Every zone does not have 30+ enemy types. The following zones are impossible to complete your daily in:
- All of Orr. Even if you go back to Straits of Devestation, it’s not possible.
- Southsun Cove. Karka, skelks, fish, drakes…last time I tried I believe there were 11 types? Regardless, it was less than 15.
Frostgorge may have enough enemy types if you included critters, but I believe I’ve tried it there before and failed.
Regardless, whilst you might get your dailies naturally during leveling, at end game you emphatically do not.
The difficulty in wow is paying attention and moving when you are told to move. Attack or stop attacking when you are told to, and have enough stats to do the required tanking/healing/dpsing for that fight.
What makes those things hard is organizing 10-25 (or even 40) people to do the right things at the right times. Not that the actions you need to take are difficult, but organizing a large group of people to wake up and pay attention was. As well as the time invested into gearing properly.
I wouldn’t call that skill so much as awareness and time.
Wait a second here. How is this any different to the PvE in GW2?
The difficulty is paying attention and moving when you are told to move.
You’ve just described virtually every boss in GW2 and most fractals.
Attack or stop attacking when you are told to, and have enough stats to do the required tanking/healing/dpsing for that fight.
GW2 doesn’t have as much of the stop attacking fights (whether that’s a good thing or not, well I don’t know), but stats play a huge role in your effectiveness in PvE, and your stat choice and build even more so. Given that all classes in GW2 are expected to do a bit of tanking, dpsing and healing in each fight, how do stats not impact your effectiveness on that in GW2? I could take your point here if stats in GW2 were meaningless, but they most certainly are not.
What makes those things hard is organizing 10-25 (or even 40) people to do the right things at the right times. Not that the actions you need to take are difficult, but organizing a large group of people to wake up and pay attention was.
So coordinating 40 people to do the right things at the right time isn’t an example of skill, but coordinating 5 people to throw orbs at the right time (Arah) or get through a swamp in 30 seconds (Fractals) is an example of high skill? Sorry, not buying it. The two tasks are identical; it’s just that one requires more people.
What surprises me is people being so adamant that GW2’s PvE is so radically different to WoW’s. I confess to not seeing that at all. I completely fail to see how “avoid and spank” or “kite and spank” is different to the much maligned “tank and spank”. You could make a strong arguement for the skill required in even a tank and spank encounter is greater than that required for a kite and spank encounter in GW2. In a trinity system, players must manage resources (mana, rage, energy, you name it) whereas GW2 only has energy. You have to manage cooldowns, but you had to do the same thing in WoW for that matter (and many of them were far more gamechanging than the pathetic elite skills most classes have. A well timed innervate could make or break an entire encounter). Trinity requires aggro management, and before 2 dozen people say that tanking changes in WoW made aggro management obsolete, I’m referring to vanilla WoW. I have no experience with anything from BC onwards. GW2 has an aggro system, but I doubt even Stephen Hawking could figure out how it works.
Where are the truly challenging GW2 encounters? Two come to mind, Lupicus and Subject Alpha. However the first has been soloed (which doesn’t exactly speak for it being truly challenging. If one lone player can defeat it, a co-ordinated group should have no problems). As for Alpha, the only real thing you have to learn is the composition of the red circles, and when to dodge or stand still. That, frankly, is a fairly low-skill challenge.
Everything else is a breeze. Players have waltzed through the toughest content GW2 has to offer almost the same week it’s released. It took players five months to complete Molten Core in vanilla WoW. And that was with co-ordinated, experienced guilds. I’ve pugged just about everything GW2 has to offer. You couldn’t claim the same about WoW back in the day (maybe you can now. I don’t know).
Which leaves us with the conclusion that either Arenanet is incapable of making difficult content, due to the restraints of their combat system, or they are unwilling thusfar to make it. Which is it? Time will tell, but it does seem odd that they would launch a game and keep updating it without so-far having added anything truly challenging.
That is just downright untrue; Gw2 style of combat is perfectly fine for providing a platform for challenging content that takes players a long time to figure out a strategy to beat. The reason why it isn’t so is because Anet has this obsession with creating purely content that is kitten easy, so that “everyone has access to it.” They haven’t pushed player skill in the slightest yet.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/Do-NOT-nerf-please/first#post126835
Have Arenanet just made easy-mode content? That’s an interesting question. On the one hand, Arenanet said prior to launch that explorables were meant to be very hard, and Colin above says that:
it takes time and practice to learn how to overcome stuff as hard as our explorable mode dungeons, and that’s exactly the kind of players they are designed for.
Which would certainly seem to indicate that Arenanet considers them a challenge. On the other hand, in the same post, Colin states that:
a couple months from now, many of you will likely be posting saying most of the dungeons are too easy and you need better challenges
Which points towards Arenanet recognizing that the current crop of explorables are easy.
Since release of course we’ve had the Fractals update, which brought in the infamous ascended gear. From the original blog post it seems clear that Arenanet sees Fractals as a definite end-game activity, and therefore difficult. However the Fractal dungeons have been easily cleared and the only barrier for many players is the lack of rings dropping, something that Arenanet rectified (with, I might add, yet another grinding system).
Which leaves us with the question: is the GW2 combat system truly capable of more challenging combat, and Arenanet has just been holding back, or are they throwing the best they can at us and we’re rolling over it easily. Given that Fractals and Ascended gear were implemented at least in part to provide more of an “end-game”, it would stand to reason that Anet would make the Fractals as difficult as possible, to keep players stalled for as long as possible. But I’m not Arenanet, so I don’t know their thought processes. All I do know is that they haven’t managed to give us truly challenging content yet. We can both draw our own conclusions as to why that is.
Uh… yes, they can. I have no idea why you think things are so limited; this isn’t a single player game from the 90’s where it would have been difficult to add in new content. They could even run with a modified version of the achievement tab if they felt they really lacked the resources…
You perhaps misunderstand me. Of course they have the capacity to code it in; they could give everyone a Legendary weapon tomorrow if they wanted to. However that’s the key: if they wanted to. Arenanet so far has shown no inclination towards including traditional quests in GW2, and I don’t expect that to change with a so-called scavenger hunt. Time will tell on that front though; I’m just not expecting much more than what I mentioned above.
The Trinity just makes the instructions for the people doing what they’re told easier to convey. It gives the few people giving orders nicely categorized game pieces to play with. I don’t want to be telling other people where to stand and what to do to get things done, and I don’t want to stand where I’m told and do what someone else says either. There is a line where things move past teamwork into being a cog in a machine, and the trinity and all that goes with it crosses it.
Being a cog isn’t fun for a lot of people. And assembling and maintaining a bunch of cogs isn’t fun for a lot of people either. Making people do those things when they don’t enjoy them to get the best items in a game is still a grind.
Absolutely! But that “cog” mentality is still very much present in GW2. If my Fractals group is doing the Harpy fractal, and we get to the poison golem, we organize ourselves so that the crystals are moved, ready to be inserted, and have people ready on all three platforms to activate them when needed. In the Swamp we co-ordinate in the extreme, something which is made exponentially easier with a Mesmer on the team. We move like machines against the Dredge boss, or against Lupicus, or the Butcher, or Rumbellous. We’re just as much cogs as we would be downing Ragnaros.
In almost every boss fight in GW2 there are places to stand and not stand, things to do and not do. The combat system doesn’t negate those things.
And whilst the gear in WoW required grind, so does the gear in GW2. If I want Ascended, I have to grind a hell of a lot of fractals and collect a massive amount of Tier 6 materials (and ectos!), which either requires gold or more grinding mobs. If we can say that doing Molten Core for the twentieth time wasn’t fun, then I can certainly say that fighting your way through 200 fractals isn’t fun either.
I believe Lupicus or some other soloed bosses weren’t designed for such, and even if they were soloed it truly required some player skill, just think about how the bosses hit you hard in GW2 so that you cannot just stand still (holy trinity is gone, no tanking!).
Check out Robert’s replies to the boss soloing threads over in the dungeon forum. Arenanet certainly doesn’t mind players soloing bosses. Now I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that mentality; the combat system Anet chose for GW2 supports that sort of thing happening, and it’s a great example of player skill. I agree wholeheartedly with Robert when he says that it takes a great deal of skill to solo a boss like Lupicus.
But that is not to say that bosses in WoW back when I played were not challenging. It took ages for even the best guilds to finally clear Molten Core, and for many guilds, it was simply out of their league. Trinity style combat is a whole other kettle of seafood, and it has it’s challenges. Does it provide developers with the opportunity to create more challenging content than the GW2 system? I believe so, based somewhat around the speed at which players have been able to defeat new content. WoW released on November 23 2004, and it wasn’t until April 25 2005 that Ragnaros went down for the first time to the guild Ascent. Players started clearing the highest available content in GW2 in the first month of its release. Anet’s decision to include a mechanic that needed extremely specific gear to counter it (Agony) and including a boss where it was impossible to avoid Agony through skill (Maw) indicates that they had reached the thresh-hold of challenge that their combat system could provide, and so they had to incorporate something entirely new to raise the difficulty, in this case, a gear check. We can debate the merits of that decision as much as we like, but the fact remains that in order to make a new dungeon sufficiently challenging, Anet had to introduce something new. That more than anything seems to be an indication that there’s a hard-ceiling difficulty cap on the GW2 combat system, and they have already hit it.
By the way, with regards to the scavenger hunt for precursors, I’ve honestly been scratching my head as to what that’s going to entail. To be honest, I can’t help but suspect that it’s simply going to be “Collect these drops from Orr, Frostgorge and Southsun and toss them into the Mystic Forge, along with a scroll or two”. I mean, they can’t give players a quest to get them. They could toss out some special harvesting nodes that you have to collect, but that’s no different to grinding really.
Why can’t they? I don’t see why they can’t do any of this, or where you make a case supporting such a claim. Maybe I just missed it in that tower of text.
Because the supporting systems aren’t there. You can’t give a player a personal quest in GW2 like you can in WoW. You COULD modify it into the personal story I suppose, but I don’t think that’s very likely. In either case, it wouldn’t work with an item dropping off a boss that starts a quest that only one person could do.
Cheapen them? They’re expensive as kitten, so a cheaper price is more than welcome. But cheaper in terms of quality of achievement? I think your own words speak loudly enough.
Cheapen them in terms of achievement. I fail to see how making a complete legendary drop from, say, the Maw in Fractals would not make legendaries seem like less of an achievement. If you see a player sporting an item that’s purely obtained through luck, you don’t think better of them, or think they’ve accomplished something. The RNG just favoured them.
I don’t know if you can cheapen it any further than “that guy must be a no-life grinder” or “that guy must have used RMT.”
My point is simply that when you see a legendary weapon in GW2, you don’t assume the player wielding it is particularly skilled, because all he or she had to do was grind a hell of a lot to get it.
That one boss was solo killed, but the guy didn’t get there by himself (afaik). Yes, there were similarly ridiculous examples in WoW raiding over the years; the one which most readily comes to mind was a pre-pre-nerf reckoning bomb paladin one-shotting a raid boss, but I know hunters would routinely be asked to kite raid level mobs as part of one encounter, and presumably could solo the mob given enough time.
He exploited part of the map to get there, but that’s beside the point. He still killed a boss solo. The paladin one-shotting a raid boss was hot-fixed by Blizzard within 24 hours of it occuring; it was never intended for players to do that. Contrast that with Robert praising the player who soloed Lupicus, saying this was perfectly intended. With regards to kiting a boss, you’re probably referring to the first boss in Blackwing Lair I believe, where someone had to kite the adds so the boss could be brought down. That’s hardly a soloable encounter; the rest of the raid was required to actually kill the boss.
Actually, I recall seeing a video of a hunter kiting a world boss across half of Kalimdor back to Orgrimmar. I’d put that on par with soloing Lupicus, given that it took longer with about as low a threshold for mistake.
Well, kiting something halfway across the world is very different to actually killing it. You’re most likely referring to someone kiting Thunderan to Orgrimmar, an event I actually witnessed. Regardless, it still took tons of players to bring the boss down once he was there. And world bosses are a little different to dungeon bosses in that there are hard-set limits on how many players can engage them at one time.
But there are still bosses which cannot be soloed. Are you just jelly that you can’t solo lupicus?
Not at all! I’ve personally soloed Butcher path in HoTW (took a while!) and I got a good sense of achievement out of it. I’m sure anyone who’s done something difficult in a game feels the same way, and my hat is off to the individuals who have soloed Lupi. That being said, it’s completely besides the point; none of the bosses required for legendary weapons in WoW could be soloed. Furthermore it merely strengthens my case for GW2 not having sufficiently challenging encounters; if the only way to make it challenging is to solo it, when it’s designed for 5 players, that doesn’t exactly indicate that it’s a difficult encounter.
Now let’s look at GW2. We have legendary weapons here, and whilst they’re currently no more powerful than exotics, we all know that Arenanet will raise their power to at least Ascended level in the future (they’ve directly said this). However, when we look at the acquisition methods for legendries in GW2, we are struck by some immediate differences compared to the WoW legendries. They all require dungeon tokens, but the different dungeons vary wildly in terms of difficulty. By contrast, all the WoW legendries required you to defeat the bosses of Molten Core. The crafting reagents required for the GW2 legendries all drop from regular creatures scattered across the high level zones of Tyria. None of these creatures are particularly challenging to kill. Skill points and gold are not gained through any demonstrated level of skill, but rather, by simply playing for a long period of time. The hardest part of world completion is WvWvW, but whether this constitutes a challenge is entirely dependent on how well your server does, and if you’re desperate to get it done, you can just transfer to a dominant server for free.
The net result of this is that when you see a legendary weapon in GW2, your first thought isn’t “Wow, that player has really accomplished something major!”. It’s “Wow, that player grinded a hell of a lot. Wonder if they bought gold to get it?” You certainly don’t automatically respect that player’s abilities, the way you would be far more likely to if you saw a Paladin sporting Sulfuron, or a Warrior with Thunderfury. At the very least, you would recognise that those players had completed the hardest content in the game, and had been rewarded for it. Yes, they’d gotten lucky, but luck was only part of it. Skill was also a major, major part.
So what’s my point to be made here? Simple. By removing quests in favour of Dynamic events, and by ditching the Trinity system entirely, Arenanet made it impossible for players gain better loot by any means other than grind. Think about it. Arenanet can’t give you, the player, a personal quest to assemble your Legendary. They can’t put in a drop from say, Lupicus, that then begins a quest that sends you to the depths of the Citadel of Flame to talk to a Flame Legion turncoat who will help you forge the mighty dagger Incinerator. They can’t just add legendries to the drop table of bosses, because that would drastically cheapen them, and furthermore, they can’t design bosses that are truly difficult to take down, because of their choice of combat system. You can argue the benefits and downsides of the Trinity system, but the fact remains that GW2 simply doesn’t have really challenging content. Giganticus Lupicus is widely regarded as one of the most difficult bosses in the game, and he has been soloed. Try soloing your way through Molten Core in 2006.
This wouldn’t matter as much if Arenanet hadn’t decided to put in vertical gear progression. But even if legendries had remained purely cosmetic, they would still lack the impact that legendary gear back in WoW had, because the only pre-requisite for their acquisition would be grind.
That’s why higher level gear will always require grind, and only grind, to obtain. It’s not that Arenanet particularly wants us to mindlessly grind Baracudas or Sparks or toss greatsword after greatsword into the Mystic toilet to get the reagents we require. I truly believe that they want us to be having fun, enjoying ourselves, and working on an epic quest to assemble that legendary item. But the design decisions they made prevent them from giving us that choice. Their only option is to give us grind, because that’s all they have left. They simply have no other option.
Many of us, both on the forums and in-game, have lamented the extreme amount of grinding required to gain legendary weapons or ascended gear. For that matter, it feels like the only way to get exotics is grind (either for gold or mats) or luck from drops or the Mystic toilet. It’s a formula that seems to be driving many people, including myself, to get burnt out with Guild Wars 2. But the fact is, Arenanet has no choice. And it’s because of their decisions with Guild Wars 2.
There are essentially three ways to provide gear to players in a game. They are:
1. Random drop
By far the most common method, random drops can very often be frustrating for players, especially if the item has an extremely low drop rate, and is bound to a character upon looting it. Despite this, it remains a staple of the genre, and a major contributing factor to its continued existence is that it can be tailored to challenge levels. Killing a meaningless minion is unlikely to net you much of a reward, but slaying a colossal dragon or <insert generic ancient evil here> gives you a much higher chance of awesome loot.
2. Making it
Usually done by crafting, but sometimes by other means, such as the Mystic Forge. Quite often the rarer or more powerful the item, the rarer and more difficult to obtain the reagents are.
3. Completing a quest
This one is very familiar. Complete a quest, get loot. The harder the quest, the better the loot.
I’m going to use an example here from another game to illustrate these methods and how they apply to GW2. Yes, it’s WoW, and yes, I’m well aware that even mentioning that acronym is enough to provoke waves of anger. But I use it because it is by far the most easily recognisable traditional MMO, and most players in the MMO market have either played it at one time or are familiar with its mechanics. So please don’t take my use of it to infer that I love WoW and can’t wait to dive into it once more. I haven’t played it since 2007 in fact, and it’s the early years of WoW that I draw this example from.
Back in vanilla, there were legendary weapons (there may be ones around today, I don’t know). Sulfuron, and Thunderfury were the only two (again, to my knowledge). There were also some high level epic weapons, Benediction and Rohk’delar, that were extremely rare. All of these weapons used all of the acquisition methods listed above. You needed random drops from bosses in Molten Core, but then had to travel farther afield. To craft Sulfuron, you’d have to be, or obtain the services of, a 300 Blacksmith, then travel to the Black Anvil in Blackrock Depths to craft it. Rohk’delar required slaying Onyxia, Benedicition requires an extremely difficult quest chain in the Plaguelands, and Thunderfury required you to defeat a 40 man raid boss (though admittedly, an extremely easy one, for a guild that had progressed that far in Molten Core).
One very key thing to note is that each item placed you on a quest to obtain them. Some parts you could complete by yourself, but before you could even get the quest, you’d need to take part in a major raid in the highest level dungeon available in the game. This meant that only a tiny fraction of the players on any given server even managed to get their hands on this equipment, and seeing it told you that the player had really accomplished something major.
Their hint for the Feb patch is that it will address player progression. When asked about actual new content like maps, they say they need to prioritize and that it takes time to make those. It seems they can’t even find the time to make a website for live updates. What exactly are they working on then that’s supposed to be a big deal in Feb?
I will now make a predication.
The “big WvW patch” in February will do the following:
- Ascended Items are now available from vendors in your home Borderlands! Each piece requires 2000 badges of honour.
The fact remains that the elementalist is designed around switching attunements often, both due to high cooldowns on their abilities and benefits on attunement switching. The Engineer kits not only follow neither of those design principles, but must be slotted before a fight. This more than anything else cements their purpose, as alternate weapon sets to be switched to when circumstances dictate, just like every other class.
A negligable cooldown penalty isn’t an incentive to switch. Warriors can trait for a 5 second cooldown on their weapon switches, and guess what! They switch weapons when circumstances dictate. Enemy at long range? Pull out my rifle. Enemy up close? Pull out my greatsword. The exact same principle works with Engineer. Enemy at long range? Rifle/Elixir Gun. Enemy close up? Tool kit/Bomb kit. Of course you might switch into a weapon set to pull an enemy or CC them, just as a Guardian might switch to their Greatsword to yank an enemy closer. But there’s no penalty for staying with one kit/weapon, because all the cooldowns are low enough that switching isn’t necessary. Contrast that with the elementalist, who IS penalized for staying in one attunement, because their high power spells have very long cooldowns, and they don’t have blast finishers in the same atunement as their combo fields.
I’d do this on my Elementalist, Guardian and Engineer. In a heartbeat.
Are you implying that in a fight you do not switch kits on a regular basis, say at least once every 10 seconds (thus maintaining those 6 might stacks at no additional cost) ? I’d say that would be quite missing the point of engineer kits.
If you’re switching kits on a regular basis, I’d say YOU are the one missing the point of engineer kits. Whilst there are kit heavy builds that rely on rapid switching to utilize the most powerful abilities in each kit, kits aren’t designed to be switched constantly like Elementalist attunements. They’re meant to be swapped no more often than the alternate weapon sets on every other class (bar ele).
Now on my Ele, I switch like mad, dancing between the attunements constantly. Why? Two reasons. Firstly, when I change attunement, I buff myself and my entire party with handy boons. Secondly, the Elementalist weapon abilities tend to have long cooldowns, especially for the most powerful ones. My offhand skills all have cooldowns of 20 seconds or more, topping out at 45. It thus makes sense for me to switch to an attunement, blow it’s most powerful spells, then switch to another and repeat this process. By the time I come back to the first attunement, it’s usually recharged.
Compare that to Engineer kits. They’re all built like normal weapon sets, with low cooldowns (almost all sub-20 seconds). This encourages you to stay with that set, because you can continue to use all the abilities in a good rotation. Furthermore, there’s little benefit to be gained from the actual swapping; Kit Refinement is the closest thing, and only one of it’s effects (Super Elixir) provides any benefit to the group.
Hence I don’t believe kits are supposed to be swapped often and I further believe that most engineers don’t play that way. Most have one kit slotted and switch into it, or out of it, depending on circumstance: exactly what every other class (again, bar ele) does.
Fellow Engineers.
I have a proposal. Some may call it radical, overpowered, underpowered, or kitten. I’m still going to throw it out there.
Currently, we lack a unique mechanic to our class. Elementalists have attunements, Warriors have adrenaline, Thieves have initiative, the list goes on. We can equip kits to change our loadouts, but this is no different to equipping another weapon, and besides, Elementalists can do the same thing. Furthermore we can’t change our choices in combat, making our much lauded versatility rather moot.
My initial thought was to allow us to slot kits into the current toolbelt slots, thus freeing up our utility slots, but this was identical to the Elementalist attunements. But then a thought occurred. What if our unique element…was utility? Absolute freedom with utility. And then it occurred to me that all our utility skills can be grouped into four categories. And there are four toolbelt skills.
Instead of the current F1 through F4 toolbelt skills, we get four new skills: Turrets, Kits, Elixirs, Gadgets. When we click on one of these, our three utility slots change, providing access to three pre-slotted utility skills from the selected group. For example, if I pressed Turrets, my utility skills would change to Net Turret, Rifle Turret and Rocket turret, which I placed there earlier. If I then pressed Elixirs, the turrets would be replaced by Elixir B, Elixir C and Elixir U. And so on.
The beauty of this system is that it gives us access to no less than TWELVE utility skills. We could adapt ourselves in combat to any situation, providing not the best of anything, but truly some of everything.
Thoughts? Suggestions? Death threats? All are welcome!
The Engineer is a highly versatile class. While it doesn’t have the long range capabilities of the Ranger, or the melee capabilities of the Warrior or Guardian, they are comfortable at medium ranges in most fights. They have a lot of control, and use their boons to keep themselves (and allies) alive in a fight. They can use different kits based on the situation, but this extreme versatility comes at a cost in damage on their main hand weapons.
The design philosophy above is well known to us all by now. Much has been made of the poor performance of our kits, the numerous bugs that plague our class and the needlessness of the grenade nerf. But I believe there is a far deeper issue that ties into Arenanet’s notion of our versatility. Namely, our traits. Too often, they don’t support the versatility philosophy.
One core reason for this is that kits have specific traits that improve them, often drastically. If I’m about to enter a fight where I know large amounts of ranged AoE would be useful, I could theoretically slot in the grenade kit. But without the Grenadier trait, my contribution to the upcoming fight will be paltry. Compare this to a Warrior or Guardian, who can simply equip a ranged weapon in their second slot and contribute far more to the fight.
Traits like Grenadier, HGH, Infused Bombs, and Juggernaut encourage us to use one kit or particular play style almost exclusively, and are thus anti-versatility. A great example of traits that encourage versatility are some available to the Guardian.
Altruistic Healing is a prime example. This excellent grandmaster trait heals you whenever you affect an ally with a boon. Given that no matter what you do as a Guardian, you’re going to be throwing out boons to a certain degree, this allows you extreme versatility when it comes to weapon and utility choice.
Or take Empowering Might. Nearby allies gain might whenever you critically hit. Beautiful! It doesn’t matter what weapon you slot; this little beauty will work for you. Or how about Writ of the Merciful, all symbols heal. At first this doesn’t seem so versatile, until you consider that almost every Guardian weapon has a symbol skill. So once again, no matter what you do, this will help you out.
Elementalist, my other main class aside from Engineer, has some great examples too. The most well known are Elemental Atunement, which buffs everyone around you when you attune to an element, and Evasive Arcana, which generates a spell when you dodge. Once again, these are pro-versatility traits that actually encourage you to switch attunements, and thus be more versatile.
It should be noted that the Elementalist traits are by no means perfect. For a class focused around switching atunements to suit situations and avoiding long cooldowns, too many traits are focused on one attunement only, providing benefits only to that particular element. However, their trait lines, along with the Guardian, reflect a pro-versatility philosophy far more than Engineer’s currently do.
There are exceptions for the engineer too, though they’re fewer and less useful. Kit Refinement is a nice trait as it provides something for every kit. Unfortunately, given that not every Engineer runs with kits, it’s not as pro-versatility as it could be. Elite Supplies may be a fairly poor trait power wise, but it supports any elite skill you could use (though not racial ones. I don’t believe anyone would care about this). Ironically, our minor traits are the most pro-versatility traits at our disposal, as virtually all of them, except Steel Packed Powder, provide benefits regardless of the situation. Some may perform better with particular builds, such as the “on critical” ones, but still, even if you’re running a full tank build, you’ll still be getting some crits.
The moral of all this is that Arenanet has in fact made some classes with excellent versatility. It’s just that engineer, currently, isn’t one of them. Right now we’re not much at all, which is something that must be urgently addressed.
Having now gotten a few story modes under my belt, and completing my personal story on two separate characters, something’s been bugging me. There is a major disconnect between the personal story and the story mode dungeons. But this shouldn’t be the case.
There are a few reasons for this. Firstly, the primary character we are introduced to first in all our stories is our racial member of Destiny’s Edge. For the first 30 levels of the personal story, we adventure beside this individual as they help and guide us through the various challenges we face. At level 30, Destiny’s Edge has their first fateful meeting in Lion’s Arch. This remains one of my favorite parts of the personal story, mainly because of the excellent way that the events that lead to their breakup are explained by the children. In any case, the meeting goes badly, but Eir thinks she can reconcile the group by going to the Ascalonian catacombs.
Now, at this point, it would seem perfectly natural for the next story mission to feature your character going to said dungeon to accompany Rytlock to find Eir. It seems to be the natural progression of your early levels. Instead, you’re disconnected from this completely, and taken off on the Order missions. All this wouldn’t necessarily be a problem of course, except for the very final mission, which involves you doing Arah story mode. Your character meets up with the re-united Destiny’s Edge, and Caithe praises you for getting the team back together again.
But wait. There’s no actual check to see if you’ve done that or not. These characters are acting as if you’re some kind of hero who knows them all intimately, when in fact the last time you even saw one of them was fifty levels ago.
You could say that forcing people to do dungeons to progress their personal story isn’t a desirable thing. I would raise two counter points to this. Firstly, the existing personal story already forces you to do this with Arah. Secondly, story mode dungeons are currently extremely unpopular since there’s no reason to do them as the rewards are poor. Properly integrating them into the story would go a long way to fix this.
A frequent critisism of the personal story is the lack of persistent characters. Characters come and go, or are killed off, leaving the player feeling like as soon as they’ve gotten to know someone, they’re gone. But wait a moment. There are persistent characters. Destiny’s Edge. What better choice could there be than the mentor who leads you from the beginning? Why cut them out of the story? This is doubly damning when we consider that it isn’t Trahearne standing by your side when you kill Zhaitan. It’s Destiny’s Edge.
For that matter, why do story modes require 5 people? A far better solution would have been to make all the trash mobs into regular mobs, champions into veterans, and bosses into the slightly nerfed champions we encounter in our personal story. Beef up the Destiny’s Edge members so they feel like assets. It’s you and the heroes of old against the horrors of the dungeons. Would be an excellent way to introduce people to dungeons as well.
But I digress. My main point remains that the personal story feels like it swerves off track at level 30, only to act as if it didn’t at the final stage. Integrating the existing story modes into the personal story would, I believe, have resulted in a far better story experience for the player, especially as some of the story mode dungeons are really quite excellent in terms of narrative.
Just to play devil’s advocate here, but it may be that Arenanet had predicted that players would abandon Orr and flock to the Lost Shores as the prime level 80 farming location. If this had eventuated, the supply of Passionflowers would be significantly higher than it is now. One big reason for their low numbers is that Southsun Cove is a ghost town populated by skelk farmers and the trickle of people getting their daily orichalcum. None of those routes takes you near Passionflora nodes, so barely any are being picked.
In October, for a small writing competition, I started to write about my two main characters, a Sylvari engineer and a Norn elementalist. Little did I know that I would eventually have written just over 25,000 words!
In light of Arenanet saying that they want to see our creations, I thought it was high time to post my contribution up on the official forums. Unfortunately, due to formatting (the story has quite a few footnotes) I can’t directly post it up here, so I’m including a link to the pdf on my skydrive. From there, you can simply download it and peruse at your pleasure.
An Eagle in the North could probably be best described as adventure-mystery. There’s no sex or swearing (A sylvari saying “brambles!” really doesn’t count) and I intentionally wrote in detail about the world of Tyria so that someone who is unfamiliar with the world can still follow along, hence the footnotes.
(edited by Galen.9042)
Fix it how? If the champion loot is abnormally high it will be botted. If it is regular champion loot classes who can bypass it and mine the ori will do so as it’s not worth the effort to fight.
I would love to see a bot take on a Champion karka. Seriously, I would.
Given that Oceanic players were unable to participate in the Lost Shores finale, is Arenanet planning to allow us to join in future “one-time-only” events?
Whilst I am overjoyed to see a developer chiming in here, I remain stunned that nothing has been said to the Elementalist community regarding the complete destruction of our best trait, nor has anything been said to Oceanic players like myself who were unable to participate in the Lost Shores finale. Going by developer replies at least, Arenanet seems to care most about SPvP and WvW, dungeons, and perhaps Rangers. The other classes seem to be totally ignored, as is the PvE experience of players outside of instances.
Can we please get some developer responses in the class forums to let us know that something, anything, is being done to address the bugs and glaring balance issues that are still extremely prevalent.
As an Australian, I woke up at 6:00am to participate in the event. I stayed as long as I could, but by 8:30 the event hadn’t finished, and I had no choice but to leave for work.
And now I hear that Arenanet is planning more one time events like this in the months to come. Well if that’s what their time and effort is being devoted to, more content that I will never get to experience, then frankly I’m not entirely sure why I should be sticking with the game.
http://www.guildwarsinsider.com/qa-with-isaiah-cartwright/
Q: I love conjuring weapons as an elementist, I also love my elements (frost tends to be my favored one to summon) but both of these skill sets are unusable in water. Is there any chance a set of summonable elements based on water combat and conjurable water combat weapons will be added eventually?
A: Interesting idea! I’ll pass it on. : )
This is wonderful news! Given how powerful conjured weapons are on land, imagine their deadliness underwater! I’m also really glad that the team will be focusing on bringing these death traps to the underwater environment, instead of looking into other aspects of our class.
- Evasive Arcana – It was (is) a good trait without blast finishers, it was broken with them. Pretty much only used before to abuse on bunkers water fields.
So my D/D build that was using Evasive Arcana to get might stacks up on my party just wasn’t being used huh? If bunkers were the problem, why on earth was the trait not just nerfed for PvP?
And for the record, the trait is dreadful without blast finishers. The only useful one is in water attunement; the other three were only good for setting off blast finishers.
Overall, this patch was a massive disappointment. Elementalists desperately needed a complete overhaul of our underwater skills, not to mention our worthless elites, and neither was touched. Worse still, Arenanet seems to think that giving conjured weapons some extra stats will make them worthwhile. Are they just straight up delusional at this point? They might be thinking “Hey, engies use their kits right, so conjured weapons are just the same!” Except engie kits don’t have a cooldown, or charges, can be specced to be actually useful, and their base weapons are terrible.
But I guess when you have two guys working on balance, we really shouldn’t expect much.
Arenanet seems to think that we, the players, are desperate for more content and bored with the end game. But this is only half true. Many of us are bored with the end-game, mainly because the only end-game zone is Cursed Shore and we fight one type of enemy over and over again. But as for more content, there’s an entire world out there filled with cool events for us to do. And yet, those zones are deserted.
Which makes perfect sense of course, because the rewards for going to those zones are paltry. If we want tier 6 crafting materials, we have to grind Orr. If we want coin and karma, the best place to grind is Orr. If we want exotic gear, we have to grind Orr. If we want ectos, we have to grind Orr. No wonder the other zones are desolate wastelands.
Instead of devoting time and money to creating new zones, Arenanet should make their current zones more rewarding. Give every zone a karma armour set like in Orr; Harathi Hinterlands could have a centaur set, Bloodtide Coast a pirate one. If I’m level 80 and in Queensdale, I should be able to find tier 6 crafting materials. Too easy to kill mobs, you might say? Then make level scaling harsher. I don’t see why I have to be two levels higher than the zone, especially when my personal story quests make me exactly the same level as the mobs I’m fighting (and even for a level 80 in full exotics, some of those fights are tough). If I’m completing dynamic events in Caladon Forest, reward me with the same amount of karma and coin I’d get from completing a Cursed Shore dynamic event. If I’m killing mobs in the Brisban Wildlands, make their drops scale to my level.
Give us incentives to go to these other zones, and believe me, people will abandon Orr at lightspeed. You have a massive, amazing world for your players to explore, Arenanet. You don’t need to try and win us over with events and new zones. You just need to give us a reason to play the game you’ve already made.
Although, I can’t help but try to imagine what the developers had in mind when they designed Orr. I think they wanted a wasteland… a non-inviting place, where the undead seemed unending and there was hardly a friendly soul to be found. Orr is the undead’s territory. We have to take it back from them. In that area of GW2, we’re playing by their rules.
So the real question becomes. How do we keep the essence of Orr while making it just a tad less annoying?
“We have to take it back from them”. That’s how we keep the essence of Orr whilst making it less annoying.
Currently there just isn’t much of an advantage in actually pushing the Pact front lines out. We do it for loot and Arah access, and that’s about it. If it wasn’t for the karma merchants, the Temples would virtually never get done. There needs to be a sense of progression, a feeling like we’re pushing all the way from Fort Trinity to the Gates of Arah. The basic elements are already there; they just haven’t been implemented very well.
I believe that Arenanet should link all three Orrian zones together. In order to move to the next zone, Malchor’s Leap from Straits of Devestation for example, you have to push the Pact invasion forces right across the zone AND take the Temples. This would not only give players some slightly different events to partake in, but it would also give players a goal to work towards and a feeling of accomplishment. Every Pact base, every waypoint across the zones would have to be won through bloody conquest.
But we need more incentive. So how about this. As the front lines advance, the corruption retreats. We already know from the personal story that Trahearne needs to cleanse Orr. So let’s do it! If players can succeed in pushing forwards, the land begins to heal. The Undead vanish, trees begin to grow, grass spreads across the ground. Of course, new enemies start showing up, taking advantage of the new ecosystem, and the new opportunities it provides. Perhaps a detachment of Flame Legionnaires arrive, eager to strike at the shrines of the human gods. Or marauding centaur tribe desiring new territory. There’s endless possibilities here.
Now naturally, Zaitan isn’t going to be too happy about this, so his minions will be constantly pushing back. Pact bases on the front lines will be under frequent assault. Players will have to hold the line against the Risen hordes, and if they fail, the corruption will spread once more.
Don’t just remove the Risen from Orr. Let the players do it. Trust me, nothing is going to motivate us MORE than getting rid of those guys.
I’m just wondering whether people actually read what’s posted before replying. I very clearly said that I was talking about using transmutation stones to transfer the appearance of different armour classes, not transferring the stats. Look at the box that pops up with you use a transmutation stone currently. If I tried to transfer heavy armour stats onto a piece of armour with light armour appearance, the resulting piece would still only be wearable by a warrior or guardian.
This would change literally nothing except the appearance of someone’s armour. No stats would remotely change.
GW2’s end game is built around cosmetics. Dungeon gear and Racial armour provide no better stats than level 80 epics. Arenanet gave us the tools, in the form of transmutation stones, to let us customize the appearance of our characters just the way we like it. As a roleplayer, I absolutely love this idea. The trouble is, the game doesn’t currently let us do that. Because you are still limited to light, medium, or heavy armour depending on your class. Take my Elementalist for example. She’s a corsair, and I’d love for her to look like a pirate. Unfortunately, virtually my only options are to make her look like [Edit] an Asian female.
I can think of no conceivable reason why this is. Obviously, it would throw off balance to let anyone have the higher stats from heavy armour. But what’s wrong with letting them just have the appearance of heavy armour? The current implementation of transmutation stones even seems to support this; if, for example, I tried to use the stats from the heavy armour on my light armour character, the item would show up as non-equippable!
You could make the argument that it makes classes less recognizable, but this doesn’t hold water either. For starters, if I see a medium armour class coming towards me in WvW, that could be one of any three classes. How do I tell which one it is? Well, either by looking at their class icon, or more typically, observing their abilities. The guy throwing grenades at me? Probably an engineer. The guy with two clones of himself who just teleported an entire army behind the walls of my keep? Probably a Mesmer. The unguilded human female with a Juvenile Brown Bear pet and a somewhat nonsensical name? Probably a bot. The fact is that when encountering other players, you recognize their class from their abilities, not their appearance. You might be able to argue that it would hurt SPvP, except you can’t use transmute stones there anyway, making it a moot point.
It would even be beneficial for Arenanet. More options for armour means more players wanting transmutation stones, which means more sales for Arenanet on the gem shop. It means more players running dungeons, because previously undesirable dungeons suddenly become desirable if you could choose any of the armour.
It’s win on all fronts. So why on Tyria can’t we do it?
(edited by Moderator)
Interestingly enough Cursed Shore and Orr in general is dead at the moment. Nothing but bots – everyone is in Lion’s Arch spamming “LFG MK” over and over and over again. Zero karma involved there, but it’s new and shiny. Perhaps your theory holds true, then?
It’s not a question of MK being new and shiny, though it does play a (minor) factor. You’re missing the point of why people run Plinx; it’s not just karma, it’s loot. Because Arenanet took the astonishing decision to give all mobs an equal chance of dropping items, the best way to get your hands on more rares and epics is to kill lots of stuff. And the Plink chain spawns a lot of stuff. That’s why people do the Camp defences as well; large quantities of mobs that are easy to kill in groups.
It’s the same with Mad King. People can complete it in 10 minutes, and they have a chance at getting epics from his chest. That’s why they’re running it non-stop: it’s loot.
I actually posted a suggestion that I believe would go some way to fixing Orr a while back. https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/events/Fixing-Orr-Expanding-the-End-Game/first#post408052
No rant about Trahearne would be complete of course without mentioning his voice acting. Despite what many people say, I honestly feel that a lot of the voice acting in GW2 is good. There’s clearly some talented individuals out there that were hired by Arenanet. So why they decided that their most important, central character in their grand overarching story would have hands down the worse voice acting in the entire game is completely beyond me. Trahearne’s dialogue redefines “wooden”. He shows absolutely no emotion at any time, meaning that his “inspiring” speeches sound about as inspiring as an airport announcement that Flight 714 has been delayed. Of course the NPCs cheer and shout about how great it was, whilst the player is staring dumbfounded at how anyone could cheer at that. The final straw for me was in one of the last missions, where Trahearne and his faithful lapdog opps, I mean, loyal Commander, venture into the Orrian royal tombs to attempt to cleanse Orr. It’s a tense moment, the possible completion of Trahearne’s Wyld Hunt, and the culmination of years of research and countless lives. The ritual is completed, but alas, it fails. Oh the woe, oh the hubris! Not that you could recognise this from what Trahearne comes out with. “No, to come so close. How can we fail now”. He sounds exactly as wooden and emotionless as he does at any other time. He’s just had his hopes and dreams shattered completely, and he still shows no emotion. Was the voice actor on Valium 24/7 or something?
There’s just too much to fix. You can’t make players like this character with a few band-aid fixes. Arenanet would have to sit down and redo the entire personal story from Claw Island onwards to have any hope of redeeming their story. They won’t do this (it’s a tremendous investment of time and energy for what is for them bound to be a low priority), so my only hope is that the next expansion doesn’t feature Trahearne. Because he took what was, up to level 50, a very enjoyable story experience, and made it into total dross.
For the people asking for Trahearne to be modified to fit the story better, I honestly believe that this is impossible. The character is flawed beyond hope.
For starters, there’s no continuity regarding his abilities. Take Rytlock for example. Rytlock is a Warrior, and when you fight by his side, he does the sort of thing Warriors do. At no point does Rytlock suddenly whip out a staff and start shooting fireballs, and rightly so; it wouldn’t make any sense given what’s been established about the character. But Trahearne? Well he’s meant to be a scholar with little fighting experience, but then he gets given a sword and suddenly he’s a master of melee. Fair enough, the player thinks, he’s a Warrior or possibly a Guardian given that spin move. But then he suddenly decides to summon a bunch of undead minions. Quite aside from the fact that not a single person thinks there’s anything remotely strange about the guy who devoted himself to studying Orr being able to raise undead servants, there’s a major disconnect here. But it gets worse. Later on, Trahearne is tasked with cleansing the waters of Orr, channeling his power as he calls it. Excuse me, what? Where at any point was it stated HOW exactly Trahearne is about to do this? How does this fit with anything else he’s done?
Then there’s his selection as Marshal of the Pact. This one is a real kicker. You’ve got the Vigal, Order of Whispers, and the Priory all willing to turn command for this massive joint operation over to a person who’s sole benefits are that he isn’t a member of a particular order and he knows about Orr. He has zero experience leading armies, or even small groups, next to no combat experience, no pertinant knowledge about logistics, tactics or strategy, no knowledge of anything that isn’t Orr and no demonstrable charisma. And we, the player, are meant to accept that the Orders would accept someone like this as their leader voluntarily. It just doesn’t make sense. Trahearne should have trouble being selected to lead a community knitting circle, let alone one of the most important organisations in the world.
How about personality? Well this is a tough one, because Trahearne doesn’t have one. Leaving aside the truly dreadful voice acting for him (more on that later) his dialogue gives us virtually no insight into him as a person and we feel zero empathy for him as a character. We don’t care what he does because he’s not a character; he’s an emotionless drone with no distinguishing characteristics. What makes this immesurably worse is that every NPC, and our own characters, treat Trahearne like he’s oozing charisma from every pore. They cheer at his dreadful speeches and treat every tactical choice he makes like it was a brilliant insight. Meanwhile we’re sitting there thinking “This guy is really, really boring. Can we please just hurry this along so I can do my next quest?”. I tell you what, I bet most people weren’t thinking that when they were questing with Tybalt.
(cont)
I actually posted a suggestion that would possibly go some way to making Orr more interesting: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/events/Fixing-Orr-Expanding-the-End-Game/first#post383917
“the land of Orr should have a lot more purpose, be a lot more dynamic and involved and be interesting. Rather than a place where u go to one spot and just farm stuff. There should be natural progression, the involvement of players makes or breaks the history, the storyline and the environment around. The current end game feels like its nothing special, that’s the issue here”
Precisely. My suggestion is really aimed at making the end game of GW2 something truly engaging, and a two week long battle across three zones sounds a hell of a lot more interesting than running Plinx for the 80th time, or even farming a dungeon. The beauty of it is that it would satisfy the farmers as well, since they’d be experiencing even more events than before, and it would help players avoid the DR system by forcing them to be moving around zones as the front lines expand and contract.
@takatsu: The reason people farm CS is for legendary.
At OP point 1: Time to run my level 10 character straight Orr and start farming end game.
The problem with the OP ideas is that people want a constant and reliable area to farm. If people get forced out of their farming spot, then a lot of people will come here and complain. The other thing is that people want to do the final dungeon for whatever reason they feel like doing it for, and if players cannot do it whenever they feel like it, then they will come here and complain… (CoF is already super annoying with this as half the time it is undercontest and the events take forever to complete)
I specifically mentioned that the upscaling idea was the simplest solution to making all of Orr level 80. Simple solutions have far more chance of being implimented, but of course, if Arenanet was willing, they could alter the personal story missions and upscale Orr.
I don’t see anything wrong with Arah being the big “carrot” for managing to complete Orr. There’s plenty of other dungeons in the game. Up the rewards for completing it maybe. As for farming, bases would constantly be under attack right across the three zones, plenty of opportunity for good karma and rewards there. Besides, if WvWvW is anything to go by, players seem to be far more willing to engage in fun events than farm mindlessly.
Over the years of Guild Wars 2’s development, one question was asked above all others by excited fans: when is the game being released? And Arenanet always gave the same answer: When it’s done. It was a good answer, and one that gave many people, including myself, a lot of hope for the final product. We’d seen other MMOs rush out the door and fail horribly as a result; here at last there seemed to be a developer who understood that gamers wanted a complete, polished game at launch.
Arenanet themselves recognised this, as evidenced by comments such as this in an interview: "So many MMOs – and games in general, but MMOs in particular – have come out half-baked, they aren’t quite there yet, and the way the market is now you really don’t have the opportunity to grow.
“It’s not like seven years ago where you could come out, and if you stumble out of the gate and then make it grow and develop and say, ‘Oh, people like this content’ and slowly build your audience this way.”
Having played a character all the way through to 80, having completed the world 100%, done almost all of my personal story and ventured into most of the dungeons in the game, I have to ask: Whatever happened to “When it’s done”?
Quite simply, the game feels like it was rushed out the door. The further you progress through it, the more this feels evident. The early zones and early story feel excellent; there’s a good mix of mobs and events, and your personal story really draws you in. Even the voice acting and dialogue feel good. Perhaps it’s no co-incidence that only the early zones and story were opened up for large scale beta testing; they’re by far the most polished.
Past level 30 things start to get worse. Your story now heads down one of three paths, and your previous experiences are all but ignored. Zones start to exhibit more and more bugged events and skill challenges; I don’t believe I completed a single event in Gendarian Hills when I 100%ed it.
At level 50 comes in imfamous Claw Island mission, where everyone’s personal story stops being personal and becomes virtually identical. This more than anything else feels like Arenanet panicing at running out of time and simply deciding to homogenize all personal stories so that they wouldn’t have to spend time recording and coding personalised missions depending on your character choices. The quality of the story dives dramatically, details of which have been discussed to death already, but coupled with truly appaling voice acting this begins to look more and more like a rushed job.
Finally we reach the end zones, where bugged events are the order of the day, you’re forced to fight just one type of enemy ad nauseum, leading to combat fatigue after mere hours, the events feel lifeless and unimportant and the personal story becomes a tiresome drag of listening to Trehearne’s wooden and uninspiring dialogue whilst your character plays no significant role whatsoever, and every remotely interesting character gets killed off. Even the Dragon events, supposed to be the biggest of the biggest meta events on offer, are either trivially easy (Shatterer, Tequatl) or somewhat challenging but impossible to fail (Jormag). They function as loot pinatas and have absolutely zero effect on the zones they spawn in, and are on regular timers at that.
So I really once more must ask Arenanet: Whatever happened to “When it’s done”?
Orr has a problem. Namely, most of it’s going to waste. Players at the level cap naturally clump in Cursed Shore, it being the only 80 level zone in the game. This leaves both Malchor’s Leap and Straits of Devestation largely deserted, and a population of level 80 players becoming increasingly bored with running the same events in Cursed Shore over and over again. There’s plenty of excellent events just next door to them, but since they’re lower level, they’re understandably neglected.
What seems puzzling to me is that Orr seems to be designed to be one gigantic meta event, starting at Trinity Fort and working all the way to Arah. Of course it doesn’t currently work that way, because the events in Malchor’s Leap and Straits of Devestation have no impact on Cursed Shore, aside from disabling temples, and are certainly not required to reach the final zone.
I believe there is a way to kill two dragons with one airship here: expanding the end-game and getting players more interested, not to mention spreading players out a bit more so things don’t feel so crowded. My proposals are as follows:
1. All Orr becomes level 80. The simplest way to achieve this without large scale redoing of the zones would be to simply scale all players entering Orr up to level 80, same as WvW. Then it’s just a far simpler matter of changing mob levels. Loot should be virtually unchanged, and crafting nodes are already max level.
2. Progression to the next zone requires completion of the dynamic events in the previous zone. For example, before players can even move into Malchor’s Leap, they must invade the Straits of Devestation alongside the Pact, and fight a three front war all the way across the zone. Orr should be where the biggest and best meta-events take place, and I can’t think of a better one that a three zone war front.
3. Holding camps will be of vital importance, because undead counterattacks can push you right out of a zone. Players will have to protect their lines of supply in earlier zones, ensuring that Pact outposts remain secure. Ultimately, I’d love to see players given the option of upgrading Pact outposts just like in WvW, and have supply caravans making their way forward (or supply choppers for that matter).
4. Every 2 weeks, when the WvW resets, so does Orr. Players must start over, reinvading the zones and securing their positions.
Frankly, this seems to me to be the original intention for Orr; one giant struggle to press into Orr. Redone, these zones could be so much more than they are now. The events across the zone deserve more attention than they get, and level 80’s are desperate for more content. This seems to me to be one of the easiest ways of achieveing that goal, rather than making all new content.
(grenades should not be an auto attack- get better at using them if you are complaining about that still).
Get better at using them? People aren’t requesting an autoattack feature for grenades because they’re difficult to use, they’re requesting it because it’s tiring and not in any way fun to be spamming your 1 key that much. Even if you instead go 1 – Mouse 1 to cast, it’s still a completely unreasonable amount of effort to have to go to. I pity the people without mechanical keyboards out there who play Engineer; they’re going to need new keyboards at this rate.
Orr has a problem. A completely understandable one to be sure, but also a fixable one. The problem is that currently, there is only one level 80 zone, and it’s Cursed Shore. It’s where everyone in Orr hangs out, and why shouldn’t they, when as said, it’s the only level 80 zone. This leaves the rest of Orr a ghost town, which is rather problematic for two reasons; the first being that a lot of content is going to waste, and the second is that people are rapidly becoming very bored with running the same events over and over again.
When I first set foot in Orr, my initial reaction was “Awesome”. Here I am as part of an invasion force, trying to push into the enemy’s stronghold, as evidenced by the dynamic events based around this very theme. But as I continued my way inland it became clear that these events were in no way nessessary to advancement in the zones, and in fact the only one that really mattered was the one to unlock Arah.
My suggestion is as follows. Firstly, all of Orr should be level 80. Story quests may have to be slightly altered for this, but I believe this to be easily overcome. This alone would open up far more content for max level players, yet I believe that Orr can be far more than that. Orr should function as a giant warfront, with the Pact pushing against Zaitan’s minions right across all three zones. You can see that this is the intent of the dynamic events currently in place, but with the ability to just move onto the next zone, they’re not really providing that sort of experience. Here’s what I propose.
Until the dynamic events in one zone have progressed all the way to the end, the next zone is locked out. For example, the Pact must push the Orrian’s all the way back in the Straits of Devestation before they can enter Malchor’s Leap. Camps will constantly be under siege, as they are now, and losing them will be far more problematic for your world. If you can succeed in opening up the next zone, the first zone will lock down and cannot be taken back until the Orrians push you out of the next zone.
This would give the entire battle for Orr a new character. Players would experience far more content and have a real sence of acomplishment. They would feel immersed in a battle that felt truly dynamic, knowing that their deeds will have a great impact on the land they fight in. Orr should be the place where the biggest and best meta-events take place; a battle that rages across three zones would unquestionably provide that!
If Anet could impliment this, it would also open up the possibility of more events being added in, even Orrian fortresses manned by legions of the undead that must be taken to secure entry into the next zone. The keep lords could be Zaitan’s dragon minions (and we all love a good dragon fight!).
So, thoughts?
My biggest disappointment is the Sylvari cultural armour sets for medium armour users. The Tier 3 set for Light and Heavy is quite frankly drop dead gorgeous, but the Medium set is woeful by comparison. The only vaguely acceptable one is the Tier 1 set, which is a bit of a downer. The only dungeon medium armour set I’ve found to be actually worth going for is for Twilight Arbor, but it does rather make me not want to run the other dungeons.
All this could be solved by letting us use the look of different armour classes in transmutation (and likely give Anet some extra dosh on the gem store) but I’m not holding my breath for that to happen.
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