Showing Posts For HappyHubris.1096:
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how can anyone make a pve build without including warden’s feedback?
it’s a massive group utility coupled to the strongest AOE weapon mesmers have in the game, and the projectile reflect in world events beats out any source of damage including 100 blades.
put up that focus wall and watch entire groups of ranged in DE’s just melt themselves (now THAT is LAZY), and in dungeons, between the warden, the focus wall, and feedback you can shut down ranged 75% of the time.
How would one work this into a build without destroying damage? It certainly looks potent.
Right, so why not add “boring skin” sets that we can work on by running different dungeons?
Hmm, maybe I approached this question from the wrong direction. My beef isn’t that you have to run Dungeon X for the Dungeon X Set, it’s that dungeon running into a cohesive set of statistics requires mind-numbing repetition of content.
What if there were boring brown sets of each exotics stat type that accepted any dungeon token as currency? That way I could mix and match explorable modes without “wasting” progress towards getting exotics, while dungeon set owners could still showcase their “dedication.”
As I prepare for the journey to gear my character up with exotics, I’m struck by a simple question: Why do dungeons give unique tokens?
At first glance, the answer is simple: dungeon sets require running and re-running the same place to thematically link each set to its inspiration. Why would I run Twilight’s Arbor for Ascalonian Catacombs gear? But dig deeper and we’re left with a situation that sacrifices “fun” and “community” in the pursuit of purity.
Guild Wars 2 is a cornucopia of interesting things to do. Level scaling allows us to fluidly shift to any content that we want to play now: Story Dungeons, Explorable Dungeons, Character Stories, Par-Level Zones, Beginner Zones, PvP, etc. Until we try and acquire our dungeon sets. Then we need to grind away at a single zone to the exclusion of other content. We can’t even choose our grind: gear stat mixes necessitate a very limited choice. This is far from ideal.
It’s even worse when attempting to pair up with friends. Different classes gravitate towards specific types of gear. This means that the dungeon that I need to stick to for my grind might be completely different from my pal’s target; we either choose to play apart or throw away progression. A community built around dynamically chipping in becomes locked into separate treadmills. Why would I fulfill a TA group’s LF1M when my dungeon set comes from AC? Unique dungeon tokens fragment the playerbase and push us to be selfish.
Why don’t we use a unified currency for dungeon sets? While it would sacrifice some thematic appropriateness, we would be encouraged to pursue fun wherever and with whomever we desire. If certain paths are uniquely easy or short it would be trivial to balance their token rewards around difficulty; ideally each path would offer a similar risk-to-reward ratio.
Guild Wars 2 is supposed to innovate in reducing grind and enabling fun; dungeon tokens offer the opportunity to take this philosophy one step further.
I’m very glad that heroes or henchmen are not in GW2.
Having 7 other entities means that the AI is controlling 84% of your actions, and it abstracts you from the action. When I tried to get into GW1 before I loved the solo elements of the story, was less enamored with a few other guys thrown in, and absolutely despised having 7 AI minions to water down your play.
Arenanet did the right thing by having one character per human player.
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