Double spiking is pretty powerful. A max Mesmer clone shatter x 2 would be enough to being any group down.
I suppose it depends on just how much time you have. You have to shatter in order to activate Continuum Split. With a 3 clone CS shatter, will there be enough time to get 3 more clones out and a Mind Wrack, before you Continuum Shift back?
Psionicists in Allods had the ability to jump back in time as well, and they weren’t ridiculously OP.
Your example is real world theft. This is just a game. example is invalid.
Ah, good point. So if my character could access your bank and pull stuff out of it, that would be all right. Why don’t we pretend?
You send me a couple dozen ecto. You can just suck it up and go farm and salvage some more rares.
I have 41 lvl 80 characters, 46 when the revenant will be available, and i have no issues with having to unlock traits again. I understand why people are upset but comeon… its a videogame.
That’s way too easy an argument.
In any creator/audience relationship there is a trust that needs to be maintained. For example, if the leading female in a romantic comedy is suddenly viciously slaughtered by a serial killer, audience trust is violated, and “It’s just a movie” doesn’t bring anything to the discussion. If an incredibly complicated plot is waved off with the protagonist waking up and it was all a dream, audience trust is violated, and “it’s just a novel” means nothing.
When a game revolves around progressing characters, and the progression is reset, audience trust is violated. In this case, “It’s just a video game” means exactly the opposite of your intent. Yes, it’s a video game. Most video games are built on the premise that you progress through play, and taking away that progress undermines a core part of them.
Obviously even I would prefer to have my skills and traits grandfathered in, but I don’t think that it’ll be the end of the world as we know it, if they don’t.
Being locked into three trait lines is too restrictive for switching between roaming and zerg WvW, solo PvE and zerg PvE. Not to mention changing up weapon use from time to time to keep game play fresh.
But I don’t think it’s the end of the world either.
I do, however, expect ArenaNet not to remove character progression and require we earn it all over again.
TBH, I think a lot of this worry is about nothing, as most of us don’t actually like every single trait and every single skill, and therefore wont be really missing them if we don’t have them unlocked.
Except for the linear nature of reward tracks.
I’m confident that each trait track will unlock all three adept traits before master, and all three master for grandmaster. I’m also confident that the more useful and used skills will be higher in the tracks. Most likely, the elite skills will be at the end of a reward track, which means we’ll be unlocking all skills of a particular type to get to an elite.
We’ll all be unlocking traits and skills we never intend to use to get to the ones we do.
Also this is a dangerous precedent for ANet to be setting and people to just be going along with it. What if they change something even more crucial and everyone has to get set back to level 1? Would everyone just “suck it up” and relevel their character? Hell no, they’d get angry and flood the forum with posts about how its not ok! Well to many of us this is EXACTLY what arenanet is doing, setting our character back and making us do EVEN MORE work just to unlock everything. That’s why people like me are angry and taking to the forums, so Anet KNOWS that they need to do something about it or their are going to alienate their player base!
Yes.
Resetting progression violates an important trust that players extend to developers in a game like this. When that trust breaks down, people eventually stop playing.
Players will not spend time progressing their characters if they are anxious about the possibility that they will be set back.
I feel sorry for those who spend large amounts of gold or time unlocking traits under the current system. Most of my characters were created before the current travesty of skill acquisition.
That’s probably where some of the disconnect is here. When people say, “Yeah, but it’s better than the current system”, I can only think that they didn’t know the system we had at launch. So they replaced a working system with one utterly broken, so it’s okay to fix that by putting in something just a little broken?
And all of this points to ArenaNet not really understanding an important lesson. Introduce new systems for new content.
When players asked for a system similar to elite skill hunting in GW1, they weren’t thinking that ArenaNet was going to go and make them get a trait they already had access to by doing zone completion. If ArenaNet had instead added a half dozen new grandmaster traits to the game and required a zone complete or a specific dynamic event to acquire them, it wouldn’t have been nearly as bad as what we got.
Same with trait acquisition 3.0. They could have made sure every level 80 would have the core skills and traits with 400 Hero Points, and then required us to go do Hero Challenges for the new Elite Specializations. Strict WvWers would still be annoyed, but it’d make a lot sense to be making the argument “Hey, you only need to do a handful zones of skill challenges to unlock your ES” than it is to be saying, “It’s only nine to ten zones of skill challenges to get back to the unlocks you already earned.”
It wont be that hard to get the other hero points you need. You won’t need map completion to do it, so just suck it up and do it.
I see. So I can come over to your house and walk off with your monitor, and you’ll be fine?
After all, it’d only be a couple days of work to earn back the money to buy a new one. You can just suck it up and do it.
Hero Points & old characters: breach of trust
in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns
Posted by: Gibson.4036
Its only an issue if you want everything including the traits and skills you never use.
This keeps being thrown about, and it is very misguided.
The new unlock tracks are linear. That means the skill you want to use may be the very last skill to unlock of its type. To get the grandmaster traits unlocked in a specialization, you’ll be unlocking all of the adept and master traits along the way.
I will guarantee you that you will be spending points on skills and traits that you never use.
Hero Points & old characters: breach of trust
in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns
Posted by: Gibson.4036
If you don’t want to do map completion, that’s not Anet’s fault.
I don’t mind doing skill challenges to unlock stuff I don’t already have.
Removing progression I’ve already earned, however, and making me earn it all over again is unacceptable.
I don’t mind the new system for new content. Sounds like a fine way to go out and unlock new content like elite specializations.
I’m very unhappy about the fact that some of my characters are set to have some of their progress taken away, and I will be required to earn those unlocks all over again. That is unacceptable game design.
Wells sound like they might be the answer to giving Mesmer a little better AoE capability in zergy situations.
I bet F5 rewind is going to feel really trolly on the receiving end. Kamikaze mesmer leaps into the fray then is suddenly back at start with full health and reset cooldowns.
Wouldn’t be that hard to pull off, IMO. I say this simply because if you abuse the starter zones and go after their skill challenges, that’s exactly 36 out of the 65 you need, half of them right there. After that, it’s simply of going to the next lowest level zones. Here’s the math, starting with all the starter zones, with their total number in there, followed by the total point number you’ll have afterwards.
Queensdale (7; 7)
Caledon Forest (7; 14)
Metrica Province (8; 22)
Wayfarer Foothills (8; 30)
Plains of Ashford (6; 36)
Diessa Plateau (8; 44)
Snowden Drifts (6; 50)
Kessex Hills (5; 55)
Brisbain Wildlands (8; 63)From there you only need 2 skill challenges from wherever, and you’re done. That’s if I’m getting the amount you need total correct, that is. It’s not really a hard undertaking, just a bit of normal PvE leveling first. It’s actually the route I take when leveling new characters (in terms of starter, then higher level zones).
It’s definitely not a legendary amount of effort, but that’s a quite a bit of running around just to get back something I’ve already earned on my characters. Especially if it’s more than one character.
I had this concern also, which is why im going and doing skill challenges in advance.
400 points from 1-80 in the new system, plus the ~60 required for the remainder. No problem, just get level 80 on all your chars and do a few maps worth of skill challenges.
It’s more than a few maps. According to the Wiki, there are 202 skill challenges in the game. That means 65 skill challenges make up 32%. So to get fully unlocked, we will have to run through roughly a third of the game on each character that was leveled without doing skill challenges.
Doable, but still a very significant pain to unlock things that we already have unlocked. It is not acceptable to reset progress on characters in a game that is about progressing characters.
Would you prefer to have all your skills and traits wiped, and then spend the hero points that you have earned, possibly ending up with less skills and traits than you previously had, but giving you the ability to start working towards the new elite specializations immediately?
Or would you prefer to retain all the skills and traits you’ve unlocked, but possibly be placed into negative hero points, preventing you from unlocking the new specializations until you’d done enough skill challenges to pay off the hero point deficit?
Neither. If I’m in the hole, and have to earn my way out to progress past what I’ve already got unlocked, then it’s not much different than what seems to be the current, miserable plan, which is to make me earn again what I’ve already unlocked.
Either way, I’d end up going out and chasing skill challenges, not to get some cool new elite specialization, but to get my character back to where it was before ArenaNet decided to reset me.
Not sure why people are grinding their brains out for a rare chance at what will probably be a fairly limited beta test.
Will Hero Challenges award materials as well as Hero Points?
At the moment, if I do a Skill Challenge, I open the way for a future Hero Point, as well as get a skill point I can hold onto which will be exchanged for a crafting mat when the new specialization system goes live.
So, if Hero Challenges only award a Hero Point once we make the transition, it’s in everyone’s best interest to do the Skill Challenges now. Unless Hero Challenges will continue to reward mats as well ash HP.
Hero Points & old characters: breach of trust
in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns
Posted by: Gibson.4036
It is unacceptable for ArenaNet to relock things on characters that have already unlocked them just because they invent yet another new system to do so.
Sixty five skill challenges is a significant number. A third of the challenges in the game is a lot of running across zones to unlock what I already have unlocked. Yes, I can casually spend the next few months doing so, but the point is that I shouldn’t have to!
For those that say the 400 from leveling will be sufficient for whatever build we need, because there are skills we don’t, you are missing the fact that unlocks now happen down linear tracks. We will most assuredly need to unlock skills we aren’t planning on using because they appear earlier in the track just to get to the skills we do plan on using.
Yes, there is a work around for this poor decision. That doesn’t mean it’s not a poor decision to make players go back and unlock things that have already been unlocked.
If a game company wants players to stick around earning new things for their characters, they better not pull the rug out from under them by resetting their progress and making them earn the same thing over again. Especially if they are not sitting on huge piles of excess player good will.
Hero Points & old characters: breach of trust
in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns
Posted by: Gibson.4036
A simple solution I haven’t seen anyone make yet:
Adjust the numbers so all core traits and skills are unlocked by leveling to 80. This can be done either by adjusting how many points the tracks cost to unlock or the number of hero points gained from leveling up. All HP gained by skill challenges will then be used for elite specializations.
Done. No one’s character gets nerfed, and no one ends up with extra HP.
This should be the rule of thumb. New systems should be applied to new content. It would have saved a lot of grief over the first trait revamp if the new trait unlocks were only applied to new traits.
if you are opposed to having to do skill challenges per charachter, you should try to get the system changed, because in the long term, you will end up doing waaay more than 65 points per charachter
traits is 60ish point
5 skills is like 25-30 points
then spec unlock/or mechanic unlock.so probably 90-120 per elite spec
and they currently plan to add more later on. (though they may not do it any time soon)
Yes. That will be very difficult for WvWers in the future. I can accept, though, that new things may have new requirements that need to be met.
My biggest frustration is having to go back and get characters that already have unlocks back to where they are now. That’s unacceptable game design.
But do you actually NEED every single trait/skill in the whole game? Most people having one or two builds, not four or five.
The HPs you get for simply being lvl 80 will be enough for multiple different builds.
You’re not accounting for the linear skill and trait unlock process, though. If the skills you want are high on the reward track (where the most useful/exciting ones are likely to be placed), you will have to advance the tracks through the skills you don’t want to use to get to them.
400 points from 80 levels. 65 skill challenges for full trait and skill unlock.
That means you will have had to do 1/3rd of the skill (hero) challenges in the game if you want to remain full unlocked.
Sorry WvWers.
65 skill challenges is not a trivial matter. That is 1/3rd of all skill challenges currently in the game.
Current characters who have all skills and traits unlocked without doing skill challenges should not be nerfed until they run through 1/3rd of the zones in the game.
This is not acceptable.
65 skill challenges is not a trivial number.
That’s 1/3rd of all skill challenges currently in game. That means running across 1/3 of the zones with a fully unlocked WvW character to get back to where they are now.
“Stop complaining because your complaints are as worthwhile as a fart in a hurricane. Also you don’t understand the processes by which this change is happening, and your “demands” won’t work and won’t happen. Regardless of how good anything is, what you have to say won’t change anything."
No worthwhile company takes this stance.
Any company worth anything prefers a complaining customer to one who quietly stops being a customer.
If you don’t like people complaining, why are you here reading and responding?
Over the last three years you haven’t gotten the message?
WvW is the red headed step-child.
Go to the Heart of The Mists and have everything unlocked.
As long as you remain there.
If you’re a longtime player, even if you don’t PvP much… I’m sure you’ve managed to unlock most if not all of your traits, yes?
Yep, and I’d like it to remain that way, even on characters that haven’t done many skill challenges.
That’s it. You’re grandfathered in. Only thing you’ll have to work on is the new stuff and anything you haven’t unlocked yet.
Except we don’t know that. The way the blogs read, it looks like we’ll have only as many Hero Points as levels+skill challenges we’ve done. On some of my characters, it looks like that means losing access to my fully unlocked traits and skills until I go out and do more Hero Challenges.
That’s why I’m asking that they grandfather existing characters.
Simply unlock all core specializations and skill tracks for old characters.
Crisis averted.
Hopefully.
Incoming level 80 Revenant train through low level zones to hit all hero challenges.
My Elemetalists would all like to know… What happened to our Arcane Magic??? ~Merry Rose ~ Tenui ~ Tana ~
I read the two articles and no explanation was given about why the Arcane Magic was removed.
It hasn’t been removed. Look at the list of reward tracks.
Q: Will Hero Challenges award both a Hero Point and the new MF material?
Because if they don’t, then we should be out doing all the skill challenges we can before HoT. A skill challenge done now means a Hero Point later, plus a skill point that will be converted into a potentially valuable material.
I really got the impression that skills were tied to the specializations, but i might need to wait a few weeks and see if this is actually the case (it seems to be that way for elite specializations for sure, not sure about the others though).
Skills are earned along the way to completing the profession reward tracks. In the water magic example, you can see “Signets”, “Conjuration”, “Cantrips”, “Glyphs” and “Arcana”.
Looks like in order to get a certain skill, you will be spending Hero points unlocking all of the other skills along the track until you get to it.
So how will racial skills be adapted to the new system?
My guess? Core game Mastery system.
Does this mean elite specializations are another way for Anet to try and force PvE’rs to play a game they don’t like to get content? I for one will be ultra salty if this is the case, I want nothing to do with PvP.
No, it just means you don’t have to PvE to be able to use the specializations in PvP.
The major difference between an MMO and a single player game, and the reason why I started playing MMOs in the first place, is that the game changes over time.
There are different kinds of changes. An MMO can change because new stuff is added that shakes things up, or an MMO can change because old things are dismantled and replaced with something else.
Sometimes you’re going to be part of that majority that like whatever they changed/kept, and sometimes you’re going to be one of the few who are disappointed that something was/was not changed.
True. And as customers, we should express our views whichever side we end up on. A complaining customer is better than a former customer.
Space has a point. Over the last three years we’ve gotten big changes that are presented as “a foundation” to build the game in the direction that ArenaNet would like to go. At some point, it gets hard to live in a house that keeps digging up and relaying the foundation. The house itself never seems to get very far in construction.
But they didn’t lock stuff that we had access to previously. When they reworked the trait system it was bad, but for people that already had their trait unlocked, nothing changed.
I had characters who had access to grandmaster traits, and no longer did after the trait system rework until they leveled to 80.
I don’t why they would change that now. If you already have stuff unlocked, they will most probably still unlocked with the expansion.
It’d be great to get confirmation of this, but the blog post doesn’t read that way. It is vague enough, however, that grandfathering could be possible. It’s also very possible that they are thinking, “New system, no way to convert it directly, sorry” and that players who have everything unlocked without doing skill challenges will be screwed.
Yes, that is annoying. Correct me if i’m wrong, but I didn’t see anything in the article that tells us that characters who are grandfathered in will have to gain all of their skills back. So…I don’t see an issue with old characters. If it is in there then feel free to quote and correct me for being wrong.
It’s difficult to tell from the blog. The way it is written, it sounds like old characters will be reset, and awarded Hero Points equal to their level and skill challenges completed. This sounds like a big step backward for characters that have unlocked traits and skills without doing skill challenges. It’s possible there will be grandfathering, but that has not been stated.
There are already waaaaaay to many types of currency in this game. It’s friggin ridiculous. For the sake of full disclosure here are a “few”:
Copper
Silver
Gold
Skill Points
WvW Badges
Guild Merits
Guild Influence
Laurels
Karma
Fractal Relics
Guild Commendations
Council Commendations
EIGHT different kinds of dungeon tokens
Bandit Crests
Geodes
WvW Claim Tickets
Candy Corn
Cobbs
Sprockets
Ugly Clothing (three different kinds)
Jorbreakers
Fortune Scarps
Several gear claim tickets
Ecto
Black Lion Scraps and Tickets
soon: Hero PointsWhat did I miss?
Technically, some of those are crafting mats.
Though I agree that the game has too many currencies. We need more avenues to exchange one currency to another. Any system could include a loss, so that the most efficient route is to earn the appropriate currency.
Will we have trait templates?
Pretty sure they have recently answered this.
And the answer was, “Not at this time.”
The biggies:
1) Do you have any plans to grandfather characters who have unlocked traits and skills without doing skill challenges? Or are these characters simply a casualty of this rework, and require earning again what they’ve already earned?
2) Will we get information on the skillpoint conversion into the new material far enough in advance to make decisions about whether we should spend skill points before HoT launch or hold on to them?
And the not-so-biggies:
3) Will traits continue to be level gated or could I conceivably take a low level character out chasing hero challenges to get access to specializations and traits early on?
4) Will the Hero challenges in areas under level 13 remain in the game and will characters under level 13 still be locked from accessing them?
5) Are there still “on-kill” traits in the new system? If so, will they ever be fixed to work in instanced content?
Telling us about the system is foundational to moving on to tell us about each individual elite specialization. It’d make no sense to do it the other way around.
We’re one week closer to the point at which you find out how you can specialize your favorite character.
So you may not have access to everything right off the bat, but I imagine that you will get a lot, and you will be able to decide what things you want to unlock first. So I don’t imagine it will be that bad.
It depends on how you unlocked things in the first place.
If you’ve done a lot of skill challenges, it looks like you will be fine.
If you haven’t done skill challenges but you have all traits unlocked because A.) you bought training manuals, B.) your characters are old enough to have been grandfathered into full unlocks, C.) You did some of the new acquisition hurdles like defeating specific events for traits then it looks like you are going to get a nerf until you go out and do skill challenges.
If you haven’t done skill challenges but you have all skills unlocked because you earned and used skill scrolls then it looks like you are getting nerfed until you go out and do skill challenges.
Now Anet gives them a system to do so, by playing your character and unlocking new abilities and traits, and people call it grinding and content locking.
It would probably help if they didn’t keep finding ways to lock content we already had access to. They should have learned from the first trait rework.
It’s okay to add new things and give us a hunt to get them. But don’t lock out old things with much more difficult gating and don’t replace them and make us earn their replacement all over again.
The only real alternative is not buy HoT and walk away from GW2.
This is the first point since it was announced that I’m unsure of whether I plan to purchase HoT.
Don’t make me go back an earn things that I’ve already earned before. That’s not acceptable game design.
Making players have to earn or buy things again once they’ve already done so is a quick route to “Why bother?”, /uninstall.
Over the lifetime of GW2 I think it’s been very clear that one of the quickest ways to gain the ill will of players is to set back their characters and make them earn something all over again. With the first rework of trait acquisition, ArenaNet wisely grandfathered our old characters so they did not have to go out and unlock traits under the new system.
Please, make the wise decision again with this new system.
Six of my characters have access to all traits and all the remotely useful skills for their profession. On some of these I earned them through leveling skillpoints, skill challenges, and buying training manuals. On others I earned this through skillpoint scrolls and being grandfathered into unlocks when the rework went live.
I’m concerned that, under the HoT system, some of my characters are suddenly going to lose access to traits and skills because they do not have enough skill challenges complete to have enough Hero Points to unlock them.
ArenaNet, please let us know that you plan to grandfather our characters under the new system. All core specializations and core skills should be unlocked for current characters.
There simply isn’t enough player good will to burn by sending us back to unlock things all over again.
I love how in the new thread “Top questionable decision Anet have made” almost everyone has the current Traits system in their Top 2.
I was thinking the same thing, and came here to see why this thread has moved to page 2. It really needs to remain front and center until we get the promised fix.
Though, like most, I’m very wary that the fix will be as bad as what we have now.
9. Moving world bosses to a regular timer.
Not only is this more convenient than it was before, the way megaservers work requires it (since every map instance used to have its own independant boss timers, including overflows).
Convenient, but way less immersive. See my post about FE.
10. Including Fractal rewards in Mawdrey recipe.
Is running a level 1 fractal five times (less now, if you wait for fractal dailies) really that hard?
I’ll get to it eventually, but yeah. It definitely doesn’t fit with the way I play the game. I know, hit the dailies. I haven’t been able to line up the days I find a good chunk of time to play with the dailies yet.
Fractals were introduced for the people wanting elite, endgame instanced content. More power to those people, and I have no gripe about ArenaNet adding Fractals or spending time developing them. I love how they introduced Agony so that people who did Fractals would get their AR for doing more Fractals, and it didn’t effect any other part of the game. They did a great job of creating a division between Fractals and the rest of the game. You can safely ignore them or not, as you desire.
Mawdrey, as a neat little LS reward with a long scavenger process (if you count the previous two back items to get there) was a nice idea, but for some reason ArenaNet decided to break the clean division between Fractals and the rest of the game with it. I think that decision was misguided.
It’s not, by far, the worst decision they’ve ever made, but there was no criteria about the scope of questionable decisions. So I included it as a minor questionable decision in my overall list.
I’m not the only one. Posts I’ve made mentioning this in the past are among my higher rated posts on the part of other forumites.
11. Too many waypoints.
What?
Again, convenient, but not very immersive. The world would be a be more cohesive if we had about 1/3rd of the waypoints we have now. I’d rather have the population moving through the world more rather than teleporting to world bosses, node farms, and events as we check off our endgame to-do-lists.
(edited by Gibson.4036)
I got to 30 purely solo. It’s not difficult.