Great idea, I have been thinking about this problem myself. Another way is that transmutation stones could destroy the item but put the skin in an appearance tab. I imagine something very similar to the crafting tab with all the skins where the recipes are and on the right a dolly of your character and below him a button that says apply skin. I also thought it should be account bound as then you would collect all skins no matter the armor type. No skin would be too ugly to aquire, the only thing you would care about would be whether you have it already.
At present I don’t really care about skins but thats because I have the look I want and I don’t want to spend a fortune on new exotics and waste bag space for a set of sunday clothes. But give me an appearance tab with all my collected skins and I would switch and swap my skins on a whim.
I would love this. I’ve been having fun using the toolkit as a melee but, wow, a chainsaw would be amazing.
Went shortest and fattest, made him an engineer. I pretend he’s a dwarf.
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Please consider removing the champion mob from this mini-dungeon. While I do like group content I think it shouldn’t be in these little explorer’s hideaways as usually you are solo when you go off the beaten path. I was having a great time figting my way through the veterans and was telling my wife how amazing it was that you hid away little things like this. But then I got stuck with the champion and it ruinned the whole thing. It’s a secret tomb raidery kind of thing and having to start spamming map chat or come back with guildies really takes the wonder out of it. Another option might be to remove some of the very quickly respawing adds and make it so that the champion is a tough solo fight. You could always scale him up with extra people like you do in events.
This is just an aesthetics issue plus the 90 toughness on shields. If having 90 toughness on the focus wouldn’t create balance issues then it makes no difference if they swapped the abilities. I think they should, that protective bubble is a very spell castery type of thing and blocking is something for a shield. Let us be knights if we want to be.
I don’t like Norn in heavy armour as it looks stretched out, as though they designed it for a human then just widened it.
Very interesting take on things dybryd. I wonder if events eventually chain together more, so that one event leads on to another and another so that one might do 20 events even, that the feeling might be more like two unforgettable weeks in Paris than a quickie in the Nightclub toilets.
I do feel this lack of community too. I recently joined a big guild and did some WvW with them and for a while I was getting that feeling. But I don’t really like WvW or PVP generally so that won’t take me very far. What I would really like is some group goals in PVE. Taking a fort and getting the guild logo up in WvW is awesome for a group goal but there’s nothing like that in PVE. My only idea is that they bring in guild halls and it requires group effort to build and improve it. Imagine a corridor lined with empty alcoves which you can fill with trophies gained from guild runs of dungeons and DEs. You see this would be a group reward for a group activity. At the moment all the PVE rewards are individual such as skins.
I’m very much a map completionist, and I do most every DE I come across while doing so. Lately, some of them are failing because I am doing them solo. This is in the 30-50 zones.
Imo there is nothing wrong with the rewards for map completion. However, the “rewards” for other content might not be rewarding enough. Even in Orr, I find that “hard” events like the Lyssa event in Malkor’s or the Champions in the water are unattended, whereas the easy events (drake eggs, chicken coops) get completed all the time.
Yes it’s a ratio thing really. One idea I had was that when you complete an event you get a buff that lasts 10 minutes that doubles the rewards from the next event. It is refreshed each event rather than stacking. This might encourage people to farm chain events though. Well I’m not a games designer but something like this, some extra reward for events could make them more central again. Another thing that might change things is simply that over time people will get bored of map completion (especially if they have 100% world completion on a character) and decide to level alts more through events. This combined with Arenanet’s intent of adding a lot more events could change the game for the better.
I wish I had not mentioned in my OP that I found map completion personally boring. That seems to be the thing that people are challenging mostly and it wasn’t the core of my post. I think the fact that so many people seem to enjoy map completion though does make my position weak which is a shame because I do strongly believe it is a detriment to the social side of the game and undermines a very key thing Arenanet were trying to accomplish. People do do events. Thats not in question. But because the are doing, primarily, map completion they go off on their individual way once they are complete. In the BWEs groups stayed together, and I remember the excited talk of how meeting people just happened. My main point about map completion is that it’s just become the main way of levelling, whether thats because of legendaries, silver or just personal enjoyment, and that this makes the world a kind of lonely place. At least that is how it seems to me.
The cost to change back to a 400 levelled craft is 40s. It’s not a huge amount but can be significant for some.
I think the point is that the game offers stuff for different playstyles and the OP doesn’t like that people have other playstyles and wants to force them to help him with his events.
Sorry, but I can’t have a problem with people doing map completion and not stopping for events. It’s a choice and why should I or anyone tell them they have to do this or that?
Well people can play how they like of course. I never said otherwise. My point was that map completion was too rewarding, in my opinion, and it encouraged a kind of solo play style which I think, personally, is a shame because of Arenanet’s stated intent of being community builders. I, personally (do I really need all this qualification?), was a little fed up with the solo levelling style of other MMOs and hoped GW2 was a remedy to that. I have found that GW2 levelling ends up being just as much a solo adventure as other MMOs and the culprit, I think, is map completion. I’m not sure how stating my opinion is in anyway trying to force you to play in a certain way. Rewards do encourage certain playstyles though. Imagine if all the charr areas gave triple XP, I think you would find an awful lot of people in those areas, very few in the others. Now this sort of skewed reward obviously affects everyone, even those who decide not to go to the charr areas. My argument is that Arenanet ought to change the rewards for map completion to encourage more interest in DEs. If they were to do this then of course you will still have just as much freedom to play the way you do now. If you feel that lowering the reward for that playstyle is “forcing” you to play a different way then it follows that the current system is also “forcing” people to play a certain way. You can’t have it both ways, I’m afraid.
In the BWEs people seemed to form these groups and go off looking for events much more than they do now. I think it’s because map completion has taken over. The rewards in silver and xp are too good, the xp just from getting all the POIs etc is too good. No one needs to do events, so everyone just runs round solo doing their map completion. Maybe I’m wrong, maybe it’s different on other servers, I don’t know. Anyone else feel the same way, that map completion is too big a part of levelling? It’s pretty boring in terms of gameplay, going to points on a map and it really spoils the sense of exploration by hand holding you through the world. I feel that they ought to cut down the XP gain by few hundred percent and buff up the XP from events. Get people playing together more. But maybe they need to add in more events first.
I know I could personally switch off my map markers and play in my own way, and I do actually ignore map completion these days. But the community at large seems to be all these busy bee individuals with no time, no time for fun, as they have a POI and a vista and waypoint to get. Isn’t that why everyone runs off in their own separarte direction after an event, because everyone has their own separate map completion order? Maybe all MMO’s end up like this, like paper going from inbox to outbox. But it was different in the BWEs, I’m sure it was.
None will benefit you really. In a game like WoW a craft gave certain stats bonuses. In GW2 it just lets you make stuff, stuff you can easily buy from the trading post. If you are set on making your own stuff instead of buying it though then yeah armor crafting is a good choice. With this you could also take weapon smithing or artificing for making your weapons.
The problem with some of these big single mob events is that they last forever, and rarely have any interesting mechanics. They simply stop being fun after a while. So it’s only natural, with no fun being had, to wonder if there are any other reasons to do them. The answer is no.
Write a book, Boloth, it’s a great release for an over-active imagination. I really like the sound of your thief, but I’m sure I’ll never see him in GW2. But if you write that book I’ll read about him there. :P
Best thing about 10 mans is that you can take more friends. It becomes much more of a guild run with 10 than with 5. What are guilds supposed to do in this game outside of WvW? I think Arenanet had so much trouble with groups forming in GW1 that it went overboard making it convenient in GW2 – no trinity, only 5 needed, easy dungeons, no lockouts etc.
Another disappointment I have with dungeons – along with the boring drawn out fights – is that I don’t feel special in these dungeons. I sound like I need a big pat on the back or something. But what I mean is that nothing I bring seems needed or its already provided by someone else. I feel interchangeable. I think this is part of the plan of Arenanet so that people didn’t have to rely on certain classes or roles. But it leaves you feeling really unimportant. WoW has been slowly, slowly and reluctantly homogenizing for a while now because Blizzard knows that this feeling of importance is a kind of special sauce. In terms of rewards, I think there needs to be group rewards such as a currency that you can use to build a Guild Hall. All the rewards in the game now are depressingly individual…how does a legendary help a guild?
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GW2-For now Single Player Game with an option for Multiplayer, your opinion???
Posted by: Grumwulf.9602
There’s lot of things to do as a single player and in a group, but I think what the OP is getting at is that there is nothing in PVE that promotes a sense of camaraderie. There’s no group goals. It’s just individuals coinciding on their very individual goals. This isn’t much different in WoW, yet WoW somehow created a sense of guild pride with their progression. In WoW if you strive for a stat improvement that’s also an improvement to the raid teams chance to down a boss, so individual and group goals aligned. In GW2 PVE its just 8 groups of people going for 8 different skins. It’s so shallow.
Just want to add to my above post: if you could only buy armor once you had the achievement for the whole dungeon, but these cost a universal token earned from any dungeon, but defeating a wing the very first time gave double or triple to usual reward, then what you will have is a system where people will be have a varied experience while at the same time being free to play with their friends. Simply by getting Dungeon Master you might be able to buy a whole set of your choice with weapons. Wouldn’t that be more epic than farming the same easiest wing over and over?
I understand Robert’s point about the armors and what they represent but that just doesn’t compare in anyway with not being able to play with your friends. One of GW2’s central design principles was to create a game that facilated social gaming rather than created problems for it. The reward system as it stands undermines the social gameplay. The whole idea of skins standing for difficult achievements is undermined by the players ability to run the easiest wing of the dungeon in any case. My solution is to link the ability to buy skins to the achievement of completing the entire dungeon (all wings). But you buy the skins with a universal token. That way the skin really does measure an achievement – all wings versus several runs of easiest wing, but it was bought with tokens accrued over any number of dungeons. Think about it. I can do all of Arah, then save up my tokens doing whatever. Skins should be about difficulty not farming and nothing is difficult when it’s on farm anyway.
My sister in law actually dropped a precursor in story mode Citedal of Flame. Not sure what off exactly. But this drop chance from dungeons is already in the game.
Just a question of rewards which Arenanet have a good history with. They’ll make us want to go back to all these zones and they’ll have new stuff waiting for us when they do. Not sure how they will do it, but it will be something along the lines of a really awesome thing that you need thousands of smaller things to get and these things are spread over the world.
Yeah it really should be account bound but of course with the usual level 80 restriction. Its more than just weapon its a huge achievement. And the way it is now it’s just a massive disincentive to ever roll a new main.
Thing I hate is when you have a target low but you haven’t actually targetted them, you’re just in melee range, so when you heart seeker you just shoot past them. Always feel so stupid after that :P
I like the concept of legendaries and wouldn’t mind going for one as a long term goal. But…I don’t like the look of any of the current legendaries. For the idea to really work it needs more skins, tastes vary so much you are only going to snag a small number of people with just one skin per weapon.
The solution – and Arenanet should have done this from the start – is to hide the panes of things you cannot collect. It is just a kick in the teeth to the collector types (thankfully I am not one, but MMO’s do have a tendency to attract them) to have panes that cannot be filled. It’s like giving a boy a sticker book where there will always be a couple of pages impossible to fill. Just have it so those pages only show up when you DO have the sticker. This isn’t an issue of wanting GW1 pets its an issue of completionism.
I agree with Quintal. Earlier I said the magic find on food was ok but it’s true that magic find food is the only food I use, completely making pointless all the other, more interesting, foods.
I think the 40% or so you can get on food, and the stats you sacrifice from the other food is just about right for magic find. It’s still a choice, it’s still pretty significant but it doesn’t affect your enjoyment of being optimized in your gear.
I’m quite hopeful because I think all the major problems with the game are rewards. The content is fine, the combat is fine…more than fine, amazing. But the game has left me disappointed in the rewards and how it doesn’t really encourage group play outside of PVP. But these are things that can be easily fixed as they are not core issues. I’d like guilds in PVE to make sense, to have a raison d’etre. I’m a team player, I’ve learned that from playing this game, individual rewards such as skins, titles, legendaries just don’t appeal to me in the same way that, for example, beating the Lich King (in WoW) with the guild did. There’s plenty of stuff to do with a guild but you can just pug it easily enough and even then its just 5 individuals going after individual rewards. I’m hoping guild halls will solve this – if we have to farm the mats or whatever as a guild to build one.
There’s two kinds of players, those that tend to prefer improving their character, and those that tend to prefer improving their guild or group. Neither is better than the other. Toon-centred players come in two types, those that think WoW is a bad game because it’s all about the gear and those that think its great because its all about the gear.
The first kind love GW2 because GW2 is all about the gear but that gear never goes obsolete. The second type are disappointed in GW2 because it never gets better. But what about the team-centred player. These players loved WoW when WoW is about beating all the bosses and tend to get annoyed when their guildies seem more interested in gear. These types of players came to GW2 thinking great, here is a game with no gear progression, we can concentrate on the glory now. They were wrong. GW2 is just as gear centred as WoW but there are absolutely no group goals at all. So in the end the only group that a fully happy with GW2 are toon-centred players that don’t like their gear to become obsolete.
There won’t be stat progression in this game but there needs to be something more than toon-centred progression. Not every player is obsessed with improving their own individual toon and would rather work at group goals. Thats what progression in other MMOs offered to that type of player, not gear, but group goals and the toon-centred player never realised this because he/she can’t get beyond their own toon-improving way of looking the game. We need group goals to justify guilds, something like constructing a guild hall but you can only get the mats while doing group activities such as dungeons in a guild group.
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When you wear full crit gear suddenly you see huge crits, when you wear condition gear the spew of little numbers over the mobs head gets much much impressive, when you wear healing or toughness gear you see your survival improve. What do you see when you wear MF gear, except all those above things go down? You don’t see anything, you just know theoritically that your bags are filling up twice as fast. Boring.
No, that’s just what you all sound like. You know what I do when there is something I don’t like in the game? I focus on the things I DO like and ignore that which I don’t. Magic Find is not game breaking in any sense. You all seem to have valid reasons for not liking Magic Find but there is one obvious solution. Don’t use it.
The obvious solution, the choice not to use it, is exactly what the entire thread is about.
- if you wear magic find gear in dungeons you are kittening your party for the sake of personal gain.
completely untrue, the group you party with matters far more. My group has no issue in dungeons only explorable versions really have us in any danger. Many of us who go wear magic find and it has no impact at all on the effectiveness of the group.
I think that highlights another problem, that dungeons are too easy. However the point that magic find is choosing a stat which only helps you the individual over another stat that could, theoretically, help the entire group is a good one.
I hate magic find. In sPVP there is a wonderful minigame of working out the most optimal gear, traits, and runes combination. We want to do that in PVE aswell arenanet and not feel like we have to pay a very heavy tax for the privilege. Magic find is boring. But if you don’t have it you are paying a huge amount in lost gold for that choice. Not only that but it adds to the problem of wealth being unevenly concentrated. Please just double the drops rates and get rid of this stat on everything except food.
I think the only thing this game needs is more group goals with group rewards. What I mean is something like a guild hall you can collectively work towards with your guild. If you don’t like grouping up then you won’t be missing out as the reward itself is a group reward and not an individual reward like a skin. The problem is when either you feel forced to do group activities for individual rewards, or when you want to do group activities and there is nothing collectively to work for.
The biggest problem I have with the PVE side of this game is the lack of any group goals or group rewards. Dungeon rewards are about the stats and look that you want as an individual, not about what the group wants or needs. This is a flaw in many MMOs, that group activity is coerced with individual rewards. It is even worse in GW2 because it is very easy that your individual dungeon goals will not even align with the goals of your friends. Compare the situation to WvW where a guild can capture a fort. In this case a group goal is rewarded with a group reward. People who like to group get group rewards, people who don’t like to group dont feel like they have to get a particular look.
One way that GW2 could correct this is with a hall of monuments style Guild Hall. Guild halls are obvioulsy group goals. What if doing group activities such as DE’s, Dungeons and WvW awarded group rewards such as materials that you could use to build and improve a guild hall? Imagine a guild hall with a long marble corridor and along it empty plynths. On these could be the trophies of your guild endeavours. Imagine having the group goal of building an Asura gate for your guild hall, when you do dungeons to farm the necessary pieces you will be doing a group activity for a group reward and not merely farming your look.
All my best moments in WoW were from raiding and getting the guild to 12/12 in progression or whatver the number was. It mattered far more than gear and it was a group goal. The problem right now with GW2 PVE is that there are no group goals. None at all.
There are a few reasons for the silence in this game. First is that a lot of the people you see in game are doing map completion which is a solo activity. You can do it with other people but often you are going west and they are going east… Second, natural human shyness. Not much you can do about that. Third, mob respawn rate. This really is the secret killer of chat. You can’t stop in this game to make a joke or say hello because the whole game pushes you relentlessly, breathlessly forward due to mob respawns. In boring old questing WoW you could set your own pace in the world, you never felt you were missing out on stuff going on just over the horizon, your quests were quite safe in your log, and if mobs respawned a bit quick in some areas you just mounted up and flew up a bit where they couldn’t touch you. Want to make a joke in guild chat, mount up, type out, then continue with your quest. In GW2 there is no time or space for chat. The only safe places are cities but theres nothing much to do in the city. Seroiusly I don’t want flying mounts in this game but I do see a huge advantage to them that I hadn’t realised before. They help you to chat with your friends while still playing the game.
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I auto attack in these. But not everyone does. I’ve seen a few higher level players steam roll through stuff who were either oblivious, showing off or trolling. The downlevelling was meant to prevent this problem and is clearly not working for the 1-25 zones. I wouldn’t mind at all if they increased the downlevelling for these zones because while people on this thread might do the responsible thing a lot of others won’t.
I think the problem with a lot of people, why they feel so disappointed at level 80 is that they had to level to 80 to begin with. In my opinion the game shouldnt have levels or gear tiers. It should be right from the start a game that isn’t about progession. Instead they get you going up up up and then it’s all flat. It should be flat from the start or it should never flatten. No levels, no one single story arc, just a free and open world full of stories. And if they question why people would play a game a with no levels and no upward direction then they have to question why people would play a game with no progression at level 80.
Personally I wish no.3 was a block. It would fit the fencing style much better. It could be short duration unlike the blocks of warriors and guardians so that timing would be much more tricky but of course with initiative you could block a few hits in row. Even better would be to have it something like the underwater ability. Cally it Parrying Strike. Flanking strike is a clownish ability in my opinion.
You make some good points Teoh. But how does toughness fit into this? If the playerbase suddenly started stacking toughness would that make condition damage more desirable? Personally I really love the feel of pistol/dagger but after reading your posts it seems I am kittening myself somewhat.
I see what you mean Fluffy. But this isn’t just about the me, me, me types. The kind of guild I prefer is one where nobody expects the help of anyone else just because they are in the same guild. Sure, people help each other but it isn’t a requirement. It’s not about being selfish. I have never asked a guildie to run anything just so I could get something. I just wouldn’t be comfortable having 4 people spend their time helping me that way. At the same time while I wouldn’t mind helping my guildies if they asked me one or twice, I would resent it if there were constant requests especially as I would never make such a request myself. That is why I believe the best guilds are ones where the people all want to do the same thing anyway and special requests are kept to a minimum. In GW2 the dungeon system does not allow for this. It is anti-social, and I am amazed it is in the game, with Arenanet’s avowed aims at creating a socially centred game.
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Well if Arenanet made karma account bound then you could use it to buy nice gear for your alts as they levelled up, the stuff you couldn’t afford the first time round. Afterall gold is account bound and so are pvp tokens. Why not karma? It makes no sense to have it character specific if dungeon tokens, wvwvw tokens and gold are account bound. Not only that but all the karma you earn on alts will be useful, no matter how low level, or deleted, or forgotten. It’s all adding up to this one big useful pile.
It’s reacting to the sh and the it at the end I think.
I agree OP. And it doesn’t matter what stats you want or if they are really suitable or not, what matters is that your friends all have different goals in the game. It’s really a very bad design to split the community in this way, 1 community becomes 8 different sub groups. And Fluffycalico the type of guild that demands that kind of sacrifice for the good of the guild is the worse kind of guild in the game and thankfully very few of them exist. The best guilds are ones where people do things together because hey everyone wanted to do that thing anyway and doing things with friends is fun. Save self sacrifice for real life.
Pistol dagger is very good for kiting groups of up to 4 mobs. Simply autoattack one target while running in a tight circle and hit dancing dagger every few seconds as initiative allows. You can kite more targets than this just as long as dancing dagger gets all of them.
This is one of my favorite abilities, so I hope they don’t nerf it. But if they did nerf it I hope they do it so that if the dagger rebounds to the same person it does half damage, but does full damage if it hits four seperate targets. That way it’s still great for packs in PVE but isn’t so powerful against pet professions.
It’s just a little change, but it would make the thief perfect in my opinion.