By the way, I note that after having made a (relatively) big lore deal of gargoyles going missing between GW1 and GW2, Anet then went and dropped enemies called “gargoyles” into the game over Halloween that looked nothing like GW1 gargoyles and appeared to have no associated lore.
I assume this was just an error, that no one noted that “gargoyle” was already a defined term in Guild Wars? I’m happy to say it was just Halloween and chill out, if that’s what was going on.
Or alternatively I can assume that the missing gargoyles lore is just an in-joke to explain away no-one having designed art and animations for them in GW2.
I will name my Kodan Guardian “Ima Polar Bear Rawr”.
He will be the best bear-man ever.
That is all.
Nerfing dye drop rates trivialises the efforts of everyone who bought a full set of exotic 80 magic find gear just to farm dyes. I am not such a person but I could have been if you’d left the dye drop rate alone. I demand compensation. Also, ponies.
Does that mean that you can pretry much?get an unlimited number of skill points to be able to continuously afford these? And what coin are they talking about?
Yes. Once you hit level 80, each time you get enough XP to “level up” you get an additional skill point. This can be repeated endlessly.
The coin is the regular sort, ie, gold, silver and copper.
Then don’t do PUGs/Dungeons in the mean time… get people you know. I still have yet to complete a single dungeon due to this.
This was very helpful. Once I stopped considering it a minor interface bug, and started seeing it as PUG dungeons being indefinitely disabled, my annoyance completely vanished and shiny rainbows and singing birds appeared.
It’s practically working as intended already.
Experience differ from person to person. I actually agree with you, some jumping puzzle can be frustrating.
I think you missed my point. They could make ALL the jumping puzzles a heap of fun, and it would still be a waste of their time. If I wanted to play jumping puzzles I’d go load up Mario Brothers, and I’d have more fun.
Or to put it another way, if Arenanet could make a first class console-style platformer that could compete with the best stuff put out by Nintendo, Ubisoft or Naughty Dog, they would, and we would be talking about that game instead of Guild Wars 2.
Or to put it yet another way, if you rounded up all the people who thought, “Man, I’m indifferent about the MMO aspects of Guild Wars 2, but I sure do like the look of those jumping puzzles!” and bought a copy as result, you would have almost enough people for a rousing game of chess.
If they can’t be good enough at it to be memorable, and they can’t be good enough at it to boost sales, and it doesn’t enhance or tie into any other aspect of the game, then why are they doing it at all?
Or to put it still another way – if they shipped Guild Wars 2 with a built-in copy of, say, Red Faction Guerilla (to pick an example of a game that was good without being exceptional), I would shrug and be glad to have it. But if they told me they were going to devote development resources to MAKING Red Faction Guerilla from scratch, just so that they could ship a copy with Guild Wars 2, I would wonder why they would do that and who would possibly think that was a good idea.
(edited by GregT.4702)
Also they should put in areas where I can play Call of Duty and maybe a naked ladies zone and also I should be able to order real beer delivered to my house from the Trading Post.
I think it’s ridiculous that Guild Wars 2 doesn’t cater to all of my possible interests and replace all of my other pastimes and games. Why you make me still play Halo, Anet? WHY?
platforming mechanics it handles poorly. Agreed.
Wait whut? What do you mean it handles it poorly? I dont understand.
Sorry, I mean that it’s not an engine built for traditional platforming gameplay.
By “platforming gameplay” I’m talking about your traditional jumping-from-platform-to-platform gameplay seen in games like Super Mario Bros or Ratchet and Clank, or hybrid forms of it seen in stuff like Uncharted or Assassin’s Creed.
The GW2 engine wasn’t designed to do that well (or if it was designed to do it well, they didn’t succeed). It has issues with camera positioning in tight spaces (a traditional problem of 3D platforming), it has trouble conveying which slopes can be walked up and which can’t, it handles fall damage unpredictably on slopes, it’s not very good at identifying and explaining non-standard mechanics (like, say, the wind on that windy jump puzzle), and it has trouble with offering appropriate rewards for that kind of activity. Characters have a poor range of movement options (move, jump, roll), and a keyboard/mouse combo in any case is not an ideal input method for this kind of gameplay. On top of all that one of the key advances in platforming games has been in recognising and rewarding intent as well as execution through stuff like auto-camera-focus, ledge-grabs and dynamic jump length, and GW2 obviously has none of that. And timed jumping puzzles or jumping puzzles involving moving platforms occasionally cause problems for people with slow-loading computers or poor internet connections.
That’s not to say it CAN’T do it – I mean, a lot of the jump puzzles are pretty fun – just that it’s not playing to its strengths. You could probably make a kart-racing game in the GW2 engine as well, and it might even not suck, but that’s not what we came here to play and I don’t think it’s a terribly smart use of development time and resources.
(edited by GregT.4702)
I’ve experienced a couple of players using this to grief PUGs – if the group won’t play the leader’s way, won’t use the leader’s strategy et cetera, the leader leaves and causes the whole group to be kicked.
With the way tokens work now it’s particularly aggravating to have the leader rage-fail the whole group on the last boss. An hour or more down the drain.
I do the harpies event near the Ascalonian Catacombs every couple of hours with about 20% magic find and I tend to get 3 to 5 dyes per event. That’s at least double what I was getting a month ago from the same event.
Now, granted, the average dye is worth about 15 copper on the Trading Post, so it’s not like I’m making a fortune, but I am pretty sure the relative drop rate has gone up.
EDIT: Saw patch notes. Bugger.
Shinee – to deal with the underlying point of your post: sorry you don’t enjoy the game, and I hope you find another game that suits you better. There is no game that satisfies everyone. The objective sales figures and the anecdotal evidence of the RMT market suggests that you are probably in the minority – that people like the game, or at least want to spend money on it. There’s no reason you should have to like the game just because other people do, and it’s great you’re clear about what you like and what you want from your leisure time. It may be the case that if you played a little more you’d like it more, but as a general rule you should be able to make a good assessment of a game from its opening hours, and if GW2 hasn’t sold you in its first 10 hours then that’s ultimately on its head.
To address your specifics though, I’m really not sure where you’re coming from. I play on a mid-high-end machine and I can play just fine with all the settings at max. I find the game graphics to be technically proficient, and the underlying art and aesthetics to be gorgeous.
Your complaints about dungeon design, AoEs, and conditions and boons suggest you don’t understand them very well. There are good reasons for these deliberate design decisions, and they form some of the basis of the challenge and complexity of higher level play. Your problems with these aspects suggest you either didn’t get very far into the game, or didn’t think very much about what you were doing. Once again, the game absolutely should do a better job of explaining these ideas, and do so at an earlier stage of the game, but being ignorant of the mechanics doesn’t make your complaints valid.
Lastly: jump puzzles were a bad idea, and even when they’re well implemented they’re wasting design resources that could have been allocated to something the engine handles well rather than platforming mechanics it handles poorly. Agreed.
If you’re doing a lot of salvaging, I’d recommend using the more expensive salvage kits, you’ll get a lot more out of it.
Better yet, if you’re doing a lot of salvaging, throw a blue, green and yellow salvage kit into the Mystic Forge, plus a Mystic Forge Token, and get the awesome Mystic Salvage Kit.
The benefit in not having to re-buy kits as often is worth the price alone.
I started putting them in our guild bank, until I realised that no one else in the guild wanted them either.
Just vendor them. Major and Superior runes are pretty cheap; you only tend to use minors from level 1 to 20 and any given alt will find enough minor runes to equip themselves without having to buy or scrounge them from someone else.
My experience with the Straits of Devastation suggested that it wasn’t intended for solos or for levelling, but rather for level 80 or near-80 characters working in group of three or more.
If you absolutely must solo it, focus on AoE and survivability, and maybe bring some potions of undead- and krait- slaying – they’re ridiculously cheap on the trading post.
Concept: 8 / 10
Art, sound & choreographed events: 8 / 10
Effectiveness as a celebration: 8 / 10
Playability: 5 / 10 (low rating mostly due to bugs, poor quest design, and difficulty)
Social interaction: 6 / 10 (event oddly didn’t promote a lot of active socialising)
Memorableness: 9 / 10
Fun: 7 / 10
==
To compare it with my Halloween experiences in other MMOs:
- It was in the same style as a World of Warcaft Halloween or a DC Universe Online Halloween, but the GW2 Halloween was just better in every way, most notably scale and complexity.
- It was quite different from a Guild Wars 1 Halloween, which were much simpler and more focused on player socialising. I prefer that simple style of seasonal event, and therefore liked the GW1 version better.
Got trashed by Modus Sceleris in Fireheart Rise. Went to investigate a juicy looking chest, and when I opened it, it vanished, and suddenly charr were everywhere and throwing grenades at me. Combination of surprise and very tough mobs got me killed in seconds.
As far as I can tell they’re supposed to be a griefing guild or something? All the mobs have [Guild Leader] or [Guild Initiate] or something next to their names.
Anyway as I understand it the Modus Sceleris events are all new.
- If I’m going to look at my character’s butt constantly while playing it might as well be an aesthetically pleasing butt.
- Studies show female avatars tend to do better in in-game negotiations.
- Human model is large enough to be seen and small enough to avoid the camera issues that plague charr and norn on jumping puzzles.
- Human/norn/sylvari armour models tend to look better and be more visually distinctive than asura and charr.
- Human starting areas are more visually attractive than the other starting areas.
- Human backstory is more relatable and does not require you to immediately digest a lot of lore.
- Humans offer a wide range of roleplaying choices and do not require you to assume your character is a warrior or a scientist.
- Everyone knows what a human is; the other races require explanation.
- Humans were the only available race in GW1 and players may want to “continue” their character.
- Female character and armour models in GW1 were particularly well-done and players may expect the same in GW2.
- Many single player games offer only a male avatar and players may want to take the opportunity to play a female while it’s available.
Probably more reasons but those are plenty.
(edited by GregT.4702)
This puzzles me too. The rest of the game is built around social play and encouraging teamwork.
But Magic Find armour encourages you to deliberately nerf your character’s survivability or damage output in the hopes of getting better loot; in social play, this means your team members are picking up your slack and you’re gaining the benefit. It’s all cool if everyone knows what’s going on but in PUGs it’s a very subtle form of griefing.
Rytlock, Ogden, Magister Tassi, Fen the Giant, and that Halloween quaggan dressed like a ghost.
With occasional assistance from the Crush Cubs.
Should be a well balanced and entertaining party, I’d think.
I got the whales too, and they vanished when I got close.
G-g-g-ghost whales!
I just noticed giant artillery targets on top of the rocks in Sanctum Harbor.
Is this new to the 1 November update or did I just never notice them before?
And where’s the gun I’m supposed to hit them with?
“spent too muckittens”
Censored words are “much”, “on”, “keys”.
It’s censoring a mildly offensive word for white folks.
Another swear filter fail.
I’d buy costumes again, providing they look interesting. Was happy with the ones I bought this year. Have no regrets.
I probably wouldn’t buy Black Lion Keys; that whole thing was a disaster. I mean, I bought 10 keys and got an Endless Mystery Tonic, and I still think I spent too many gems on keys. Can’t imagine how those who bought 100+ and got nothing must feel.
I will probably spend money on minipets again, and on gold in order to buy things like ectos while they’re cheap, and then nerdrage again about feeling compelled to get them while they’re available. That is to say, more pets and sudden oversupply of exotics will likely make me pay money, but diminish my experience with the game and hasten my likely quitting day.
To be honest I haven’t met a non-group event I couldn’t solo, and I can solo most of the group events. That may not be everyone’s experience, though.
I’ve also recently levelled an alt 1-20 without help from guildies and that was a perfectly enjoyable experience too. It was over Halloween, to be fair, but I was in the Charr areas, not the areas with the Haunted Doors, so if anything there were less players around than normal.
Certainly it probably wouldn’t hurt to hand out a zone-wide buff for underpopulated zones, much like you get in WvW when your server is outnumbered. I appreciate your general point that, like any MMO, as more people hit 80 the lowbie zones get progressively more quiet, and I applaud any mechanics intended to progress that problem.
For me it depends on whether they’re attempting an exploit. If it’s one guy attempting to farm gold by running multiple accounts, then sure, ban them. But if it’s a lonely dude who’s bought five copies of the game just so he can awkwardly attempt dungeons without making friends then there’s no real problem; it’s no different from him having four friends who’ve promised to give him all their loot.
I’m still hoping that they’re going to make all this meaningful by, for example, giving you a custom emote every 1000 points or something.
I mean, I love watching numbers go up as much as the next person, but I like there to be a story behind how I made the numbers go up (other than “I spent a lot of gold”), and I like to be able to share that story with others.
GregT, aka fanoby
I believe you took some liberty with my words and did a poor job at that.
Not looking for a game to fulfill my life, I am looking for some changes that would help a lot of us invest more time into a game we like.
Sorry, I was replying more generally to a lot of complaint threads that were irritating me, which you perhaps unfairly took the brunt of.
Your thread’s still without merit though. You’re saying that you expected this to be a completely different sort of game, on the basis of nothing in particular, and now you would like it to be more similar to the sort of game you imagined it might be. For better or for worse, it isn’t attempting to be that sort of game, and it would be to the detriment of all those who did pay attention to the pre-release advertising for them to abruptly change course now.
Specifically:
(1) You are misunderstanding the classes, their abilities, and how to play dungeons. Admittedly the game does a bad job of teaching this but I suspect you will understand your error if you run more dungeons. If you can’t tank, you need to learn the mob AI better. If you think every class is purely a DPS class, you need to pay more attention to the skills you’re not using.
(2) I’m not aware of the game ever advertising loot as a play incentive; but in the event that they did, your lack of interest in it is reasonable but not a good reason to change anything. There is plenty of unique loot to be gained in dungeons both as drops and as tokenised rewards; some is dull and some is not.
(3) Yes, stat progression has an early cap. If stat progression is all you care about, yes, that must be disappointing to you. This isn’t a lack of content, it’s a deliberate choice – promoting player skill requires capping the amount of power that can be gained by grind. Anet have chosen skill over grind, and they’re unlikely to substantially turn around on that, because that is their niche.
(4) If you don’t feel like you’re something special when grouping it’s because you’re not very good at playing your class. Get better. A skilled player in a class looks and feels unique and is very much noticed by their groupmates.
(5) Personally I think GW does epic better than any other game I’ve played, mostly through its art assets, huge and memorable bosses, and dynamic events. I suspect you’re just referring back to your complaint 3, though, that the gear grind stops early. If you feel that gear grind is epic then yes, again, you will be disappointed here.
(6) Halloween was arguably the biggest, most complex, and most involved seasonal event ever done by an MMO. Yes, it had problems, but they were not lack of ambition. I don’t really know what you expect here. You mention wanting a cool hat; counting the purchasables I personally ended up with five different awesome Halloween hats. What else do you want?
(7) I have no idea what you are talking about with “mob balance and respawn”. You’re supposed to be able solo groups of mobs. Respawns of single mobs shouldn’t be an issue.
(8) I suspect Anet will eventually bow to pressure and introduce mounts, but seriously, why? This is already one of the easiest MMOs to get around; it’s rarely more than a 1 minute walk to anywhere, provided you have the waypoint. Yes, not so much in World versus World or Orr, where it takes forever to get anywhere, but unfortunately that’s part of the balance of those areas and unlikely to change easily.
(9) The more special you make one-time events the more people cry when they miss them. Yes, it’s awesome if you’re one of the people who can be awake to see the event, and yes, it’s really annoying if it’s at 2 am your local time or while you’re at work. I don’t think we’re going to see a big focus on these, nor should we. I’d rather have day-long or weekend-long events like we had at Halloween. They feel special without being punitive.
(10) The boss is Zhaitan. You can fight him. He looks awesome. There are another four or five dragons behind him waiting to appear in future expansions. Yes, the game does a terrible job of telling you who Zhaitan is or why we care, and yes, I agree that it should do better. But there is definitely an end boss, and he’s pretty epic.
So yes, in short, you were poorly informed when you bought the game, you are poorly informed now, and you want to make that someone else’s problem.
GW2 is great but there are real problems with many aspects of it. These are not those problems.
“I was led to believe that Guild Wars 2 was going to be a meaningful world-changing event that would improve my quality of life and make me a better person who holds the respect of my peers. Instead it is just a game and everything in it just trivial virtual goods. Fail, Anet, why you not make game that justifies my existence?”
Perspective is a terrible thing, and from time to time it can unfortunately get in the way of your fun. I expect Anet will fix that in an upcoming patch.
The content, and the book itself, was great. Finding the content was pretty terrible.
Time limited puzzles
Time limited puzzles are always a fail if the answers can be obtained through Google. I like puzzles, but I’m not going to waste time trying to solve them when there’s about five million other Halloween things to see before the event finishes. I’m sure some people solved them honestly, but I’m doubting that was the usual experience.
Resource consuming puzzles
I appreciate that it was easy to get ridiculous stacks of candy corn, but it still felt punitive to have the candy corn meter use up a candy corn every time you whipped it out. It felt like being punished for not immediately getting the right answer (which was probably the intention) and it created a strong incentive to look up the answer rather than work it out, to avoid wasting corn on incorrect guesses.
Non-specific clues
I can see how most of the clues took you to vaguely the right area of the right zone, but I can’t for the life of me see how most of them told you the actual correct place to look. To be done properly, the clues should have directed you to an area, and then it should have been obvious once you got to that area where to go (a sign or pumpkin or whatever in the location). And I -still- don’t know how you were supposed to work out what kind of scan to use at any given spot! Were you just supposed to try them all?
Didn’t work well with groups
As it turns out you didn’t need to know exactly where to look because most of the time someone had already just spawned the ghost. As a result it meant that a lot of players missed the events / conversations that spawned the ghost. I know you were supposed to kneel in front of that Dwayna statue for one but I never did because the ghost was always up. Also some ghosts (such as the very first one) were hard to see if someone was standing on top of them and body blocking them, which was pretty much all the time.
Vanishing ghosts in dangerous areas
The fact that the ghosts despawned after a bit and had to be resummoned created an incentive to hurry through their conversation rather than actually pay attention to it. The fact that some of them were in dangerous areas where you could be attacked while talking made it even worse. I didn’t really get to take in the lore.
Buggy
Several of the ghosts were buggy, particularly the one that spawns the ghostly flames and the one in Provenic Crypt (saw him get stuck in a wall twice). Very annoying.
Summary
So yes, I liked the intent, I liked what parts of the lore I got to see, and I absolute love the reward item. But the execution itself had a number of problems that stopped it from being great.
I’m only level 59, haven’t had a chance to play for a few days and have 21g. If you’re that broke playing many hours a day you’re doing something wrong.
Biggest lie in this thread, especially because you purposely ignore the reason for the thread and give your non-sense 2 cents that doesn’t help anything.
The cultural prices are way way too high. No one is ever going to spend that much on a full set, which is why after months of playing this game I’ve yet to see ONE player in a full-cultural suit. Not ONE.
I’m in a full-cultural suit, appearance wise, although the stats are from my crafted leather exotics.
But I agree with the point that tier 3 is too expensive, yes.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/info/news/Update-Notes-November-01-2012
Halloween’s gone, but you can still get “Attend The Party”. Halloween chests are gone.
Paid sPvP tournaments are live.
Orbs are removed from WvW.
Bugs in WvW, Sorrow’s Embrace and Caudecus Manor are fixed.
That’s all, folks.
A lot of things are fun. Your PvP activities compete with them.
Flicking rubber bands into a bowl can be fun. I’m probably not going to be doing a lot of it any time soon while I have triple A videogames on my PC. Likewise, I’m not going to play your casual PvP activities “for the heck of it” unless either (a) they are competitive with my other PvP options (such as League of Legends), or (b) I am invested in your brand.
Brand investment
I will play your PvP over its competitors if I am invested. I am invested if either (a) my friends are playing it, and I can play with them socially, or (b) it provides a reward which I value which you are uniquely able to deliver as the custodians of the Guild Wars 2 brand, which may be the satisfaction of seeing interesting Guild Wars content, or just some titles or loot for my GW2 character.
Unique content
You can make casual PvP attractive by adding unique content – that is, by making it something you’ll want to see. WvW has a little bit of that flavour – watching a castle get sieged is pretty epic and is eye candy as well as fun. But on the whole this takes work and development time, so is probably not a great option. The Halloween PvP was, while not ugly, nevertheless visually bland and there were not a lot of memorable moments coming out of it.
Rewards
An achievement per se is not a strong reward. All it gives you are points. You can also get points from dailies; these are interchangeable. You can’t do anything with points and you can only show them off to guild members, as far as I know.
A title is slightly better. It at least allows you to demonstrate what you’ve done to others. However currently titles are underwhelming at best, printed in tiny text, without displaying how you got them, and only shown at all after someone has deliberately clicked on you.
Cosmetic armour, unlockable emotes, and unlockable miniatures are better still. They are push-advertising of your prowess, in that the choice of whether someone sees them is in your hands, not the viewer’s.
Rewards as Unique to the Activity
Trick or Treat bags were a terrible reward for PvP because you could get them from other places. That prompted the obvious question, what is the most efficient way to obtain these items? PvP was among the least efficient ways, as it turned out. Players wouldn’t be playing PvP for bags unless they were ignorant of the better way, so effectively there was no reward-related reason to play the Halloween PvP. Rewards for an activity need to be unique to that activity, or else it will be competing with the other way of getting that reward.
Rewards as Unlocks
Probably the most important thing is that rewards should be unlocks, not items. Items require you to store them in your bank. For an average reward, being forced to store it can turn it into a punishment. A much better system is to treat rewards as unlocks, accessible either from a menu (like titles) or from a special vendor (like Hall of Monuments stuff), allowing you to obtain an instance of the reward for free on any character at any time, without having to manage the storage of it.
Rewards as Conversation
The other key thing you need to work on for ANY reward is to make it part of a player’s conversation with other players. The easiest way to do this – and I can’t believe you haven’t already – is to announce achievements in either or both of guild chat and local chat. E.g., it shows up in Guild Chat, “John Smith completed the November Monthly Achievement!” It prompts chat about the achievement, promotes envy from those who don’t have it, and increases the desirability of achievements as a whole.
Anyway, those are my thoughts.
(edited by GregT.4702)
I’m only level 59, haven’t had a chance to play for a few days and have 21g. If you’re that broke playing many hours a day you’re doing something wrong.
For the record, I ain’t broke. The reason I’m asking is because these were not the original prices of these armor sets when the game came out. It was raised because it was exploited by people. These armor sets total to 10g before it was raised to fight the exploit loop found. And time has passed and possibly the loop fixed or not. So maybe put the prices back to it’s original state to be in loop with the other armor sets like the Orders.
Yes. There’s no point in having an armour set that’s exponentially more expensive than its peers unless it’s at least slightly more attractive in terms of either stats of appearance.
I mean, maybe if you could wear cultural armour as town clothes AS WELL AS battle armour, and it came with costume brawl skills as a result. That would still be lame, but at least it would be an attempt to justify its price.
All cosmetic gear should be account bound, not soulbound.
All gear bought with gems should be account bound, not soulbound.
All limited time / seasonal gear should be account bound on pickup, but not soulbound.
Dye packs bought with gems should unlock the dye account-wide.
Everything else is fine. Dye drops being per-character are a bit annoying but it’s usually only between 10 and 150 silver to get the specific combination of dyes you want for an alt, providing you don’t need your alt to change colours every day and providing you can live without celestial/abyss dye, and keeping them per-character makes it more fun when an unidentified dye drops – it’s more likely to be usable.
Ditto. I can craft equivalent stats to a tier 3 set for about 9 gold, and sure, there should probably be some discount representing the time and investment put into maxing the discipline, but surely 10% of the cost of the cultural set is not an intended discrepancy?
Especially considering that a lot of the tier 3 cultural sets look fairly boring? I mean, it’s not like they have animations or particle effects like the legendaries. The norn female medium set, for example, is arguably uglier than the basic level 1-80 medium drops.
Hi. Just throwing it out there that if you’ve got any spare dev resources in upcoming months, a grouping tutorial (in terms of dungeon grouping) would be great. Even if it’s just a cutscene.
A lot of my guildies come from other MMos, particularly WoW, where they were either semi-casuals or high-end raiders. They understand that Guild Wars grouping doesn’t work like WoW, in that there’s less segregation of roles, but they’re having a hard time getting their head around exactly what the differences are. When they get blocked or stressed they tend to revert back to WoW solutions, which are sometimes valid (attracting ranged enemies by staying out of their line of sight) and sometimes not (looking for their aggro generating abilities to help them tank).
It would be really helpful to have something to point them to which spells out both the philosophy and the specific mechanics of how things like healing, monster aggro, pulling, and boons/conditions work in dungeons. As well, it should explain concepts and commands like combos and group targeting, and give you a little idea of what some of the other classes can do group wise (which classes get abilities useful for pulling mobs, for reviving downed allies, for reflecting projectiles, etc). As far as I’ve seen there’s no really good training for this in any of the overworld PvE play, and it’s presenting a barrier to transitioning over to dungeons. For myself, I only just learned that thieves have a ranged pull yesterday, and apparently all the thieves I’d been dungeoning with previously didn’t know about it either or hadn’t realised that it was valuable or useful.
I mean, obviously my guildies can do what the rest of us did, and learn by playing multiple classes and banging our heads against the dungeons until we get it right, but that’s not the BEST way of presenting that learning experience, is what I’m saying.
On this topic I’d also love more UI options to more clearly display who’s giving you boons and conditions (without having to mouse over the icon, that is), and better show the effects of beneficial AoEs laid down by allies.
(edited by GregT.4702)
The design philosophy of the monthly appears to be specifically to encourage you to move outside of your comfort zone by experiencing content that you wouldn’t do normally. I strongly suspect that some of the upcoming monthlies will feature other gameplay that not everyone interacts with, like “Complete X jumping puzzles” or “Craft X items” or “Consume X drinks”.
Which is fine.
(EDIT: Actually probably not drinks unless they just want to make artificers rich and everyone else poor. But you get my point.)
I do object to the WvW requirement being there every month, though. I find myself going to WvW just to farm kills, which is not the same thing as playing to win or playing for fun. One month was enough. I’d experienced WvW, decided it’s fun during the 10% of the time there’s a balanced matchup and terrible otherwise. Something else now, please.
Sorry Gaile, your temporary fix does not work for me. Per Lynspottery above, it redirects back to the malfunction page/post link.
“I let them fight ankittenep moving.”
The censored words are “and”, “I”, and “keep”.
Presumably censoring a marginally impolite term for a lesbian, but nevertheless swear filter fail.
I thought there weren’t enough skills either… and then I hit level 30, did my first dungeon, and realised I’d been playing the game wrong.
The five skill choice isn’t because the game’s simple, it’s because it’s complex. You’re expected to use ALL of your skills, and ALL of your weapons, and know the ins and outs of each of them, and know exactly what you’re capable of at all times. And then you choose just five of them to bring with you at any one time.
I can only assume that some people find the skill system overwhelming and stressful already without having the added hassle of having to understand the difference between PvE and PvP versions of skills. I know it came as a rude shock to some of my guildies to learn that they would be using ALL their skills at endgame and not just their favourite four. But to be honest that type of player is unlikely to enjoy PvP very much anyway.
The reasons in favour are not just balance but also fun. For example, a combination of skills might allow you to stun-lock an enemy so it can’t move at all, but require a lot of player talent to work and have quite obvious counter-tactics. That might be balanced, per se, but you still wouldn’t want to have it in PvP because it’s simply not fun to be stun-locked, even if you could have beat it by taking different skills or something.
To all of you who haven't gotten your Endless Tonics yet, my heart goes out to you
Posted by: GregT.4702
My Endless Mystery Tonic is fun but I’m not sure it was worth the cost of even one Black Lion Key, let alone 9000 or something.
She’s got my vote! Seems like it’d be fun to have a reoccurring festival host!
I second this motion.
Particularly if she puts the smack down on all of Tyria’s seasonal characters, who I imagine to be Sigvild The Jolly Winter Norn, an Asura-built Seasonal Mechanical Battle Rabbit, and some kind of drunken green charr with a pot full of gunpowder and Guinness.
Two level 74-ish exotics from MKL that I salvaged for ectos, the slippers from the Clocktower, an 80 exotic from Ascent of Madness that I sold on the TP, and an Endless Mystery Tonic from a Black Lion Chest. (I think the EMT is technically a rare but it’s rarer than the exotics so I count it.) Plus Mad Memories: Complete Edition, which I love more than any of that other stuff.
AN should put a 5g cap on how high a player can sell a skin halloween skin.
Basic economics fail. Fixing pricing in legitimate markets in such a way that demand exceeds supply will cause the creation of unregulated illegitimate markets.
That is, people will stop selling on the TP and negotiate it privately through mail trades, leading to trade spam and opportunities for fraud.
On my very last Black Lion Chest for Halloween I got an Endless Mystery Tonic. The description indicates it smells of furniture polish, and indeed it turns me into various types of furniture. Pretty hilarious although not necessarily what I expected given its legendarily poor drop rate.
Can anyone tell me are there other types of Endless Mystery Tonic that turn you into other things, or is it just tables/chairs/chests/hammocks?
It does not surprise me at all the amount of work that went into that statue. I remember the first time I saw it, I went “Holy kittens, that’s a ridiculous amount of detail for just one piece of scenery in a fairly large zone.” Very well done.
I see now it was a mistake to make the hardest jumping challenge in the game part of an in-your-face update like a holiday event.
Thanks Josh – this is exactly what I hoped you’d take away from this. The Clocktower is awesome content, and if you’re going to do more jumping puzzles I’d like more in this style. But this level of difficulty needs to come with time to explore it; trying to beat it under the time-pressure of a seasonal event was just really stressful.
Bring back the Clocktower as an all-year-round zone, or more like it. But make the seasonal instances something casual that everyone can enjoy.
Also I didn’t mention it explicitly elsewhere because the difficulty was the big issue, but the concept of the map was really great and inventive, particularly the clock-face finale.
Magister Tassi was the Ebenezer Scrooge of this event.
No candy, but you DO get to go play in some caves and a sewer. Also, nothing says Halloween like “writing a biography”.
I expect her to return at Christmas and send us off to gather rocks or shovel manure.