My biggest issue is and always has been the slow rate of group content updates. Instanced and “challenging” group content that is.
The game still continues to stagnate in such a boring state.
Raids were the only big addition in that department since the Fractals were introduced back in 2012.
We received nothing but reworks, one or two new dungeon paths and a few new Fractal paths in over four years.
Many of us were blown away to see the abundance of unique and fun dungeons when we first started playing and were even more surprised to see Fractals been added so soon after.
All of that dropped off greatly after that and we are still in that state even now.
I do not want to downplay the hard work and great polishing they have done over the years, but this is hardly what I expected to see in 2016.
Would love to see it return. Always been my favorite path in my favorite dungeon.
From what I remember, the removal was due to some glitches or bugs with the newly added Aether Path, which prevented something in there to function the way it was supposed to.
This removal was supposed to be temporal while they fixed those problems. Never happened in the end. One of the many things put on ice with the abandonment of further dungeon work.
As for the difficulty, the path wasn’t any harder than the other two.
Vevina’s Path (FW or former FW/FW) has always been the hardest of the three basic paths. It was even harder back then because of the three Nightmare Knights in front of Leurent. Most did not bother with blinds which led to them wiping over and over. This was so hard for many players that they decided to rebalance it.
Times certainly changed. People would simply blow up anything in there nowadays. We hardly need to see any changes or higher rewards if they decided to bring it back.
I have defended ArenaNet before as I actually do understand their reasons for it. There is also the fact that the game is build around attracting new players which most commonly purchase outfits. It makes sense.
But even with all of that, I still feel like they underestimate the mix-matching factor of armor sets a little. Many sets are being bought for one of the pieces only.
Phoenix lightarmor boots, Phalanx heavy pants and Aether Blade heavy pants are just the first ones to come to mind.
And even if you liked the full set but ended up getting bored of it like you do with the outfits, those pieces will stop people from feeling like they simply wasted money on something they never use. They gained many great options to mix-and-match with.
This is the reason why I do not bother to buy outfits. I like it, I get bored of it quickly, I do not really use it again.
Additionally, I wonder who else feels the same way that they would have bought many of the outfits if they actually were armor skins. There is usually a piece or two that we really like and would love to have as a seperate skin.
Quick question for the experts. I have a full set of Minstrel’s armor that I use for WvW healing/tanking, tricky solo feats, etc. and am starting to gear up for Raids. How much of this can I bring into a raid?
I like the boon duration, but the toughness seems too high, and I don’t want to steal aggro. Should I just convert all of it to Magi’s and call it a day, or can I bring some into a raid?
Edit: If some of it can be used for full healer, how much toughness should be considered max for raids, as not to steal aggro?
It is up to you and the tank to decide on how low you need to go. You should always aim to reach the base 1000 toughness even as a healing druid, however.
There aren’t actually any reasons to keep any toughness as you already are the most tanky person in the squad by a long shot.
Banners are unparalled in the amount of easy group wide offensive buffing they provide. There is no way around them if you are looking to be as efficient as possible in a group scenario.
Ranger spirits already are very close to the WoW totems you described. Not sure if they would want another set of skills to function exactly the same way.
My own idea has always been to allow warriors to carry one or even multiple banners on their back to make them fit a fast paced game such as GW2. That would not really fix the issue with banners and too much passive effect stacking in general of course. Would still make them less annoying to use, though.The spirits aren’t the best comparison. There is no option to move them, and you absolutely must use the GM trait to make them worthwhile. Banners are definitely the superior option of the two.
I was talking about the option to kill the spirits early to have a close to perfect reuse timing for the next wave or encounter. Something that sounds like his option to recall them whenever you want.
Where as you might get unlucky with the cooldowns on banners since you can not decide when to delete them even if you can actually carry them around with you.
If it is a decision between having banners or having spirits then you want banners for sure. I agree. It is not even close.
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Basically, Not that big of a fan of Greatsword, so my main damage set is Axe/Shield with Strength sigils for PS.
Also not much a fan of the mace, so simple enough, how is Hammer? Good in all modes?
(Not home otherwise I would have tested by now)
Greatsword and mace are currently the most powerful weapons in PvP and PvE. With longbow coming in third.
Hammer on the other hand is pretty bad in almost all situations and especially in PvE.
The Grinning Shield and Fractal Torch are my favorite non-legendaries. Like them more than their legendary counterparts.
Twilight will always be my favorite weapon, though.
Although, the degree of demonization towards raids is rather amusing. Opinions seem to range from ‘why raids are not a good idea’ to ‘how raids destroyed this game’. Almost like they are the root of all evil.
When in my opinion raids are the only reason why thousands of players even continued to play this game anymore after HoT.
Why a huge amount of players had to socialize, to form new guilds, found friends, gain experience together and make the game a bit more active and lively.
Why people like me continued to support the game with a few hundred euros over the past year while raids kept them interested. But maybe that is just me.Raids were successful for their audience. Focusing on raids, however, was made in very wrong way and turned out as complete disaster.
This is another thing I disagree with. As I would hardly call the use of a small amount of their resources a focus of any kind.
The not even half finished state they were in must have taken less than 5% of the overall effort compared to everything else that came with HoT.
Their incomplete state is the actual reason why we got hardly any new content apart from raid related stuff for months after the release of the expansion. They were finishing the raid while the majority worked on the Living Story and legendaries as well as (possibly) the next expansion already.
We would have gotten 10 raid wings by now if there had been a focus on them.
Those numbers aren’t really that surprising when you know a bit about international MMORPG markets. Every other game on that list (besides Wildstar) is hugely popular in Korea and even China.
Those are easily the two most important MMORPG markets for NCSoft by a long shot. Success in Korea and especially China is in a totally different league than success in Europe.
Some games which have been discontinued in the West due to a lack of players actually reach 2x-4x the amount of registered accounts of even WoW. A game that is also quite popular in Asia.
Dungeon Fighter Online, Fantasy Westward Jorney, RuneScape and Dragon Nest just to name a few. Dungeon Fighter Online had a revenue of $1,052M in 2015. WoW “only” reached $814M.
There is also a huge difference between revenue and profit. We do not know how much it costs to keep some of these games running. Some games might require far less technical investments to run (Lineage released in 1998) but they will still need a huge support and customer relations staff.
Looking at the western audiences only, Guild Wars 2 would be in the top 5 at least while it is probably not even in the top 25 world wide.
We are experiencing another big content draught at the moment. People go crazy, people start pointing fingers. Nothing new.
Besides, the 3rd quarter is always an issue in the US/EU – sandwiched right between people going back to work / school after the summer and lucrative events such as Halloween and Christmas.
Although, the degree of demonization towards raids is rather amusing. Opinions seem to range from ‘why raids are not a good idea’ to ‘how raids destroyed this game’. Almost like they are the root of all evil.
When in my opinion raids are the only reason why thousands of players even continued to play this game anymore after HoT.
Why a huge amount of players had to socialize, to form new guilds, found friends, gain experience together and make the game a bit more active and lively.
Why people like me continued to support the game with a few hundred euros over the past year while raids kept them interested. But maybe that is just me.
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I like your ideas to mix it up a little even if I am not usually someone to dislike a mostly offensive team requirement and even the timers. We certainly need some new ideas.
My main concern is the balancing issue with an encounter where personal damage plays close to no role at all.
People min-max the kitten out of everything as we know. Parties fully geared in defensive gear, with even more healing thrown in, would either turn it into a joke or force the developers to balance the encounter around them which then meant said encounter would be close to impossible with different gear.
You’d essentially only change one debatably dumb meta for another. The current meta actually looks more versatile and open compared to something like that.
Personally, I would like to see a high toughness requirement for the tank. There should be a lot of damage that can not be avoided by a load of defensive tools such as provided to a mesmer.
This would then also require some good constant healing rather than burst healing. Some classes can even outperform a druid without too much trouble there. Burst healing is a totally different story of course.
They could then go with the idea that our puny weapons simply do not damage a huge enemy to noticeable degree but instead of having cannons or something similar give us some way to enlarge two or three of our players. It would be up to those guys to perform the PDS part close to perfection during the buff phase. It would be a huge let down to me if there was absolutely no requirement for any of the plalyer to even know a half way effective damage rotation.
I simply would not like an encounter where actual class skills play no role in damaging an enemy or avoiding damage from said enemy. My current favorite of all of the boss is Slothazor because of the requirement to use reflects and pulls on top of everything else.
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Banners are unparalled in the amount of easy group wide offensive buffing they provide. There is no way around them if you are looking to be as efficient as possible in a group scenario.
Ranger spirits already are very close to the WoW totems you described. Not sure if they would want another set of skills to function exactly the same way.
My own idea has always been to allow warriors to carry one or even multiple banners on their back to make them fit a fast paced game such as GW2. That would not really fix the issue with banners and too much passive effect stacking in general of course. Would still make them less annoying to use, though.
The TP is and will always be your friend. You can play whichever content you prefer while still working towards your goal.
Try to see materials as just another form of currency. Something that you can exchange for another currency for example gold.
Do the parts of the legendary you enjoy and simply buy anything else you are missing, that requires you to wait or to do content you don’t like and cheapest and best of all simply buy the whole legendary there.
If this won’t do for you, if you want to earn everything yourself then I’d suggest going with dungeons as people have mentioned or big farm maps. Salvaging leather armor works well while start adding leather from the TP with the funds you are making while farming leather.Not a fan of account bound legendaries myself. Crafting Eureka was such a pain for me. I probably could have bought it for half of the price of all of the materials that went into it if it wasn’t account bound. Looking at how unpopular maces normally are.
You do realize, that if everybody bought t6 leather straight from tp instead of at least trying to farm, the prices for t6 leather are gonna be around 1g per section?
And please, Eureka… its only half a Nevermore. And I completed Nevermore without TP.
But at least, for Nevermore and Eureka I could go out and do something specific to farm the specific material Im still missing.
Leather? Ive gotten more t6 fangs than t6 leather. Which is – just as a reminder – the rarer material dropped by the same mob category.
Thats how badly unaccessible t6 leather is. And thats why prices are out of whack. I mean, I get the rarer material more easily than the base one? But I need 3-5x the amount of the base material for any kind of recipe? Just broken.
Dungeons is a nice idea, thanks. Will try to animate a few friends to run them with me.
If you are mainly here to complain about the lack of an actual ‘leather node’ or leather ‘tree’, that’s fine. It is a valid complaint.
Just don’t talk down to People who tried to give you suggestions on how to find a way around this problem and even tried to share your pain with a few of their own experiences. I farmed my own Eternity ages ago, back when the precursors were way more expensive in comparison. Compared to how gold is just being thrown at you nowadays.
A big number of players does actually buy the materials on the trading post. Prices are still balanced around the amount of drops one salvages which is the main way of acquiring leather.
The much bigger issue is all of the material sinks they added with leather to balance the previously dirt cheap prices. Other supposedly much rarer materials were made much easier to acquire, in the attempt to balance the previously extremly high prices. This might need some rebalancing once again.
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The TP is and will always be your friend. You can play whichever content you prefer while still working towards your goal.
Try to see materials as just another form of currency. Something that you can exchange for another currency – for example gold.
Do the parts of the legendary you enjoy and simply buy anything else you are missing, that requires you to wait or to do content you don’t like and cheapest and best of all simply buy the whole legendary there.
If this won’t do for you, if you want to earn everything yourself then I’d suggest going with dungeons as people have mentioned or big farm maps. Salvaging leather armor works well while you start adding leather from the TP with the money you are earning by selling anything else you can lay your hands upon.
Not a fan of account bound legendaries myself. Crafting Eureka was such a pain for me. I probably could have bought it for half of the price of all of the materials that went into it if it wasn’t account bound. Looking at how unpopular maces normally are.
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Testing and practicing your own DPS rotations in a perfect scenario is still important to be successful but it is hardly the only thing that matters in raids. There are quite a few things which are debatably more important than your personal damage depending on the class and role we are talking about.
Nothing beats hand-on experience and practice during actual raids especially if you are just starting out as a team.
However, it can be hard to see and sometimes understand how much you are missing if isn’t pointed out to you in an obvious way.
I feel like many would be just as flabbergasted to see how much they are missing in the terms of applied buffs as a mesmer or the amount of well timed healing done by them as they were when it was pointed out to them that they were missing half the possible highest DPS during their golems tests.
Just a few ideas:
amount Buffs applied
buff reapplication rate
overall amount of healing
delay of your heals
amount of crowd control done
crowd control timing and speed
blocked and dodged damage
avoided /taken AoE damage
I would much rather have actual raid meters which would allow me to compare myself to others during the real encounter. To see where I need to improve and where I do well already. As raid meters seem to be unlikely and have so many outright oppose them I will take what I can get in the training area.
Don’t want warriors to get screwed again with another (gimmicky) off-hand addition only. Dual daggers would be a start even if hardly my favorite one.
That would actually be spears or even a new weapon like greataxes. Don’t see why a spear can’t be turned into a land weapon if staffs can be turned into a melee weapon for one of the elite specs. This would finally give some meaning and use to the hundreds of spear skins.
There are the big issues concerning the looks and styles of certain armor types and problems with many of the races. Just one example:
My favorite race are the Charr. Yet, I have such a hard time to find or mix-and-match any armor to my liking which isn’t male heavy armor. Light armor is all right and medium armor is quite terrible on Charr (in my opinion of course).
There is also a whole other aspect to this topic.
Many females seem to stick to female mostly while males tend to create characters of both genders (I am part of that group, both genders, more male than female) and quite often even prefer to play as females.
Don’t think this is hard to explain. We seem to forget that it is young women who are being seen as the personification of beauty in our society. One of the reasons why both genders do prefer to play such a character or simply spend most of their time looking at them. Those are also characters who are being given a lot of attention by other players no matter who actually plays behind the screen.
The current age of many of the male players does also play a big role of course. They will be drawn to something that fits their sexual preferences as most are at ‘that’ age (16-30) obviously.
Beauty and sexual attraction can be much more powerful and more desirable than cuteness or coolness of some character. This may not apply to everyone but the game doesn’t really give you a hard decision as it is so much easier to dress up a human female character in a sexy light or medium armor than to find cool looking medium or light armor for males if you aren’t into trench coats and skirts.
Banners did not receive any changes apart from a minor change to the stats years ago. Makes me believe that they will receive some rework eventually. All of us know the problems with banners in PvE, not even mentioning PvP or WvW.
Doubt PS warriors will leave the meta unless they outright force us by cutting down banners, EA and PS simultaneously. A nerf to banners alone would not change anything.
My issue with this topic is not about taking newbies or less experienced players to any of the wings. It is not even about feeling like someone is wasting my time. My problem is and always will be with people not being honest with you and those who feel entitled to everyone’s help, time and effort by simply playing the game.
My honest advice is quite simple, though:
Try to be honest with others and try to be charming. Tell them you know they are probably or even clearly asking for someone more experienced but you aren’t a bad player and a quick learner. You might not be experienced with all of the bosses in a certain raid wing but you are willing to learn if someone would be so nice to explain the raid to you. Many would much rather go with someone nice like that than someone who is more experienced but doesn’t communicate or help to make the run enjoyable in any way.
There are those who’ll kick you, and without a reason even when someone needs to be blamed for the wipe of course. I still feel like there are way more nice groups out there than most seem to think.
Also, it is their good right to exclude you from the run if they feel like you aren’t or wouldn’t be up to what they are asking for. It might not be the nicest of things but there is nothing wrong with it.
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Spending my own time there almost entirely roaming by myself looking for good duels or small fights and all – I still think that some people take the concept of honorable duels in WvW way too far.
An open battleground is still an open battle ground. It is my own bad luck to have an enemy interrupt my 1vs1 fights and vise versa.
I am a big fan of the rule ‘A red name is a dead name’. And if you decide to jump someone or not is entirely up to you.
It is so silly to be in the situation where you have two enemies, one of them fighting your ally, just to watch them gang up on that person after he was about to win. Quite astonishing how quickly many seem to forget about the rules once they start losing.
In any case, I agree with you. We have been begging them to implement a true duel feature for ages now.
There is no area outside of WvW where you can wait for random opponents interested in duels to show up. I met so many players that way in other games.
Our current options always limit you down to having very few people as your possible opponents. You end up asking your friends or guild mates to join a sPvP map or go to the guild hall with you. Public dueling servers are always brought up but even those will only have very few people to practice against.
Other games had areas outside of towns or cities, right outside the gates, where people met for duels. This stopps cities from getting anymore crowded and laggy than they already are and leaves grinding areas clean for PvE. It also got newbies all excited about the game when they left the starting city and instantly saw all of the big boys fighting with their shiny toys.
They could try to do some sort of a test run outside one of the major cities. Just to see how popular that would be.
I mean, I am aware how very unlikely that is. People in this game seem to hate dueling features with a passion.
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Non Raiders blocked from XP bar spirit shards
in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns
Posted by: Henry.5713
This blew up way more than I intended. I just thought it would be nice for non raiders to still be able to get spirit shards.
Raiders generally don’t want to be nice to non-raiders. Supposedly it cheapens their experience. Thus you will find some people protesting suggestions like that just on principle.
It is rather amusing how ofting the ‘elitist card’ is being drawn to completely downplay and even discredit anything raiders disagree with, are worrried about or simply argue against.
Interesting enough, I actually seem to agree with his idea. It also wouldn’t bother me in the slightest if non-raiders were able to gain shards this way. I even think that it would be fair. I am probably not a true ‘raider’.
On a serious note, never liked raids being tied to masteries in any way. That inlucdes being rewarded with mastery points or the requirement to have any specific mastery.
Harshly lowering the already bad exchange rates (when compared to gold bought from RTM sites) any further would probably remove any incentive people have to buy gold directly from ArenaNet.
The only things holding players back from using those sites right now are the fear of getting punished by the devs, the weird superstition that you will most certainly get hacked for even thinking about visiting those sites and most of all the ability to exchange gems for gold.that problem can easily solved by banning the trade between players. like black desert online did
Easy solutions can have huge consequences.
Trade between players only happens through game messages right now. It already has a pretty low gold cap per week. They could completely remove the ability to send items and gold through messages, certainly.
The gold selling sites would then move to sending you gold through the TP. Simply having you set up a junk item for whichever amount of gold you bought with cash. ArenaNet could fight this by implementing set item prices on the TP. We would then have a system that is pretty close to BDO.
I do not even want to imagine the kitten storm that would happen. This goes against everything MMOs and the player driven, ever changing economies stand for.
A system which allows players to exchange gems for gold and vise versa freely is such an effective and smooth way to fight both RMT traders and a cash shop that can be seen as ‘pay to win’.
However, the prices should never be too greedy. This game is ‘buy2play’ in the end. Raising gem prices would hurt them heavily in the long run. A change like that to take the drive of the economy from the players and the simultaneous gem price rise would be seen as a huge kitten you to the players.
They are already fighting the gold inflation with the self-adjusting exchange rates. You will never be able to buy 1000 gems with one hour of grinding.
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Harshly lowering the already bad exchange rates (when compared to gold bought from RTM sites) any further would probably remove any incentive people have to buy gold directly from ArenaNet.
The only things holding players back from using those sites right now are the fear of getting punished by the devs, the weird superstition that you will most certainly get hacked for even thinking about visiting those sites and most of all the ability to exchange gems for gold.
Everything with banner is kind of broken, cool down too long, cast time too long, easily interrupted in the HOT era, to cap it all off it doesnt rez people most of the time because there health pool is so low or they have poison on them.
All in all Anet didnt balance any core spec lines with HOT and the power creep. When you have the down state before when it was 10-30-30 focusing more on a cele/defensive scene in WvW and PvP. Skill like banner were so vital to team play.
With HOT with the increased stats to 30-30-30, increased CC, increased healing and along with some really gimmicky builds in WvW and PvP there is literally no reason to use any of the old skills for many classes.
Currently there is no reason to use the Elite Banner anywhere in the game, as well as rampage, as well as cultural skills. Warriors use 2 banners in raids and then 2 stances in PvP and then PvE is a combination of those 4 utility skills based on the event you are doing.
Seriously whens the last time you used call Owls or jungle worm? I wanted GW2 really badly so i could turn into a bear, people have seen me use this elite skill and asked what that was, it goes to show Anet really isnt too worried about the class skills as long as raids/WvW/PvP can make sense in a small way.
All classes have some type of role in raids so i guess they must think banners are on the list of ok skills.
We seem to be in the need of a big rework of so many existing skills. The release of the expansion made the situation even worse as it added powerful new skills which made quite a few commonly used skills obsolete.
About racial skills: They have been designed and even changed in the past to make them ‘weaker’ versions oft any non-racial skills. This was done to avoid players feeling forced to use a certain race for any given class because of their special skills.
The fact that some of those skills are still useful as they have some unique effects without a non-racial counter part and others are exactly what they are suppooed to be, flavor skills for role-playing mostly, is a balancing issue. One of many.
Would be a fan of tiers if the first tier started at our currently difficulty level and then went up from there. I for one like raids to be designed for and balanced around raiders.
It really comes down to what you prefer.
Zealot has more than enough healing power to keep people up. Bosses still do not require the druids (yes even two) to run anything but Magi to beat the timer.
To be honest, I like both.
I like Zealot as a starting set especially if you already have Berserker’s trinkets ready to swap into for good damage. It is a ‘jack of all trades’ set which is more than good enough when you are starting out.
Magi isn’t any worse of a starting set, though. It is all about rather being ‘safe than sorry’. You will be rocking 25k+ hp which allows you to pay more attention to the other players and your rotation.
The difference in damage is pretty tiny unless you are running sword/axe almost entirely in which case you’d want to swap to Berserker, anyways.
The difference in healing power (about 400) does not make much of a difference if you are stacking all of that +% outgoing healing.
The major difference is all of that vitality. Such a high health pool is not needed to finish the raids of course. It is nice to have, though.
Honestly, the only thing I greatly advise against is getting both sets. That is the only huge waste here.
I’d probably go for Magi armor if I intended to add Berserk’s armor later on and just stick to Zealot armor if that is to only thing I’d ever plan on getting (as most players already have Berserker’s trinkets they could add to that set for more damage).
To create outfits requires far less work while they still sell at a good price. They are the types of items people by on a whim usually. I feel like most of us buy them just to hardly ever use them afterwards. Also, there are always new players picking them up because the low level gear doesn’t look too fancy.
Once again, are they like the high quality armor sets which allow you customize your character’s appearance with thousands of different combinations as well hundreds of dyes and goodies like the scarfs or special helmets? No, not even close.
I do not give a kitten if they shall add armor sets to the gem store only without any way to acquire them in-game as long as they are something high in detail, with lots of customization options and customized to fit all of the races. I’d pay 2000 gems if I feel like they are worth that price. Most outfits aren’t even worth 500 gems to me.
We seem to forget about the option to trade gold for gems, also. Armor sets would still only (considering how easy it is to farm gold now) cost you something like 300-350g even at a high price of 1000 gems.
I for one like the option to pick my way of playing and farming gold to earn an armor set I love much more than having to do collections or challenges I do not enjoy to acquire a set I really want. Might be just me, though.
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PS: I’m not trying to talk theoretics about how to fight condition classes, or anything like that. What I’m saying is that when they DO land, you’re usually dead.
Your point seems to be that you do not want to improve your own play against condition classes or adjust your utilities to something more suitable, instead you wish for conditions to be changed in a way that would benefit you personally (change the high toughness you already have to lower condition damage on top of everything else that it does?).
But that is like asking for healing power to function like a life line that brings you up again when someone 100-0 instant bursts looking at how irrelevant healing power is against a burst thiefs when you do not run any defensive gear or traits or even utilities.
Condition damage is there to outlast burst damage in longer fights. It is especially good against tanky strength builds as those lack the damage to take down the condition player while his conditions tick away.
I am not saying condition builds do not need to be looked at. Some readjustment might be required.
Still, your proposed toughness change would put it completely over the top. I am sorry, it sounds to me like you are simply allowing them to play their game. Taking fights you can not win or refusing to adjust to what is needed. There is nothing wrong with disengaging someone who keeps stealthing to do just that.
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“Spellbreaker”… sounds like an interesting idea. I am still hoping for a new two-handed weapon and greataxe most of all but I will take a new set of melee weapons any day.
The major reason is the fact that we did not see dungeons change in years apart from the reward changes (big nerf and eventual rework). They aren’t new, they aren’t exiting, they aren’t up to date and it even feels like ArenaNet pretends they do not exist.
We no longer play the game from four years ago where dungeons were by far the best way of making money, money which then was used to buy pretty much everything from exotics to legendaries or materials to craft those. Or better explained “the best way of acquiring everything you want”.
You are simply forced to spend a lot of time playing HoT maps for accound bound materials now. Many places outside of dungeons will also reward you with ascended weapons, armor and trinkets nowadays.
Dungeons can not compete with that anymore. It doesn’t matter if the gold rewards through liquid gold as well as the trinket recipes are good if another place will flat out drop you the ascended gear you need.
The only ones who actively play dungeons now are some veterans with dungeon recipes and no real need for ascended drops from fractals. Basically those who already acquired everything they want.
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There are a lot of unique features and enemies one could recycle for Fractals, no denying that. Look at Lupicus, he could be turned into a raid boss even.
I like that they polish old parts, even that they reintroduce content they are obviously proud of. It is still about time we see something completely new for Fractals.
And I still believe that we will see changes to dungeons someday. May it be new ones or new paths in existing ones. They have surprised us before.
That is kind of how a player driven market works. They might try to add ‘sinks’ but it is mostly up to the economy to dictate the prices. The overall amount of rares seems to have gone up after HoT hit. The power creep led to faster completion times on absolutely everything and therefor increasing the overall amount of loot. Kind of applies to most content. Multiloot might be a big culprit here but far from the only one.
Also, stopped giving a kitten about whether they nerf it or not a long time ago. People will never agree even with the slightest changes as long as they are being effected by it.
There will always be something else to farm eventually. We are already seeing a new very casual friendly daily-hearts system. Seems to be the direction the game is taking now.
Dungeon recipes are among the few niche drops you can get from a specific place. Even better, you can’t get them from TP and their drop rate isn’t abysmal like a precursor.
Isn’t? My experience shows something else. I have been running a dungeons a lot, had several precursor drops from them (well, that did likely involve a ton of luck), but have yet to see a single recipe.
Interesting, have collected 6 or 7 dungeon recipes after years of running dungeons and I am yet to drop a precursor there. Those drops are just a matter of RNG in the end, I guess.
Would hurt to see the recipes being added to the vendor as that would lead to people trying to cash in on the higher priced ones as much as they can just to completly abandon dungeons again after prices went down to nothing.
That is from the point of view of someone who owns some of the most profitable recipes of course. Even though, I was still running them even during the completely nerfed reward phase. Yet, at least now you do not feel like you are completely missing out on rewards if you do them instead of simpy joining the multiloot train like everyone else.
Even the pulsing stability from the early version of it wouldn’t be strong enough to justify that crazy cool down time and the cast time nowadays. I am also in favor of a skill rework to a shout or anything similar.
Fractals became easier, a bit more complex and a lot more fun.
The question is more about ‘when?’ rather than ‘if?’. They might go the more flash even if just as hard to balance approach and simply add a new class again.
Although, I would love to see battleaxes (melee cleave weapon), flails or halberts / spears (medium ranged melee weapons). Certainly think they should be added before we go all crazy with gaunlets, katanas, whips or throwing stars.
Really depends on how they approach the problem about adding a challenge. There is a fine line between challenging and annoying. With everyone having a different idea on how hard or how easy they want raids to be on top of that.
However, don’t think there should ever be mechanics which simply punish players for playing well. Boon stealing having been the biggest culprit of that. You can not give guardians relatiation on every skill and then add something like that. It is like adding something that completely reflects 20% of the outgoing condition damage back to the players or allowing monsters to steal 50% of the outgoing healing.
It probably looked like it would lead to players being careful about boons instead of going crazy on boons like before. But as players take the easiest way out always they simply jump on classes which do not even have to face these challenges.
Challenges which make people pay attention to their movements, even challenges which make healing or boon spam less effective without outright turning it against the players are fine. Anything that punishes people for playing badly is totally fine.
We might need some rebalancing and a look at certain fractal level – instability combinations but it feels like we are on the right track.
I certainly enjoy fractals more than I have in a long time (and I main a druid – always had an easy party spot for even easier T4 runs.)
A meta is not simply being decided upon by a few players who prefer it that way. It is the colaboration of thousands of players with a lot of trial and error. Those builds have been proven to be effective if used with the right meta strategy.
Many feel like it is the only thing that could ever work or nothing better could possibly exist. That is of course silly as the meta does indeed constantly, even if slowly, evolve and change. New ideas find their way into it eventually.
There are two sides to this one, though. Isn’kitten bit silly to see those with little experience in raids argue so hearthfully against builds which have been proven to be effective thousands of times?
Makes me wonder if the entire thing isn’t more about wanting to feel special for running something nobody else does than actually playing a good build?
I feel like both sides can take this one way too far sometimes. Play whatever you want to play. Make your own party with whichever requirements you wish to set but respects others ideas and wishes to run anything (yes this includes a full meta party) they like.
Gold sellers will always be present even if people are able to buy gold directly from ArenaNet. As their prices are far lower than direct sales through gems.
All you can do is to block them, report them and move on.
The association between gold selling sites and hacked accounts ins’t always wrong but it happens far less often than people seem to believe. It is like saying “if you download some bot you will get hacked”. I have played some games where half of the population would have gotten hacked if that was the case. It simply depends on which sites you are using.
The majority of their gold comes from gold bots or farmers. They even buy gold from “normal” players trying to make a quick buck.
There wouldn’t be a market if they had to ‘hack’ someone to gain gold. Who would be so silly as to hurt their own steady customers just to have them never return.
ArenaNet could go the route of nerfs and cut down healing values or at least base healing values. This would of course mostly kitten off everyone and might not even make people pick up different healers.
The way I feel about it, what makes a good healer on paper is having a class that you would already bring because of their powerful party wide (mostly offensive) class unique buffs play the healer. It is even better if said class does not sacrafice a huge amount of personal DPS to go that route or loses any of those offensive buffs when going healing spec. Either by having high healing numbers with offensive gear or if their personal DPS wasn’t too impressive to begin with even in DPS gear.
All of that combined with the much more frequent need of burst healing over consistant healing in raids makes druids a perfect choice.
Doesn’t mean that others can not do the job equally well of course. All of that fits Ventari Healers almost as much as it fits druids. We simply have not realized their full potential yet without people mastering them to the degree they have mastered the druid.
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But it’s about time that we get the option to inspect other players with not only gear but also stuff like the kill counter or anything similar.
Eternal title + active tonic buff + showing appropriate mini (all not fakeable) already are enough. You don’t need to inspect the gear. If there is someone inexperienced although he is bringing the proves from above you will recognise him very soon due to his playstyle (2-3 pulls) otherwise you are "inexperienced"as well.
I never had strong issues with pug groups that made these requirements. VG, Gorse, Sloth, Trio, Escort & KC are “first/second try” in almost all attempts.
That is exactly the point, though. You have to go through some length to have them show you all of those. Just so you can be sure they have killed the bosses at least once and you still won’t know if they are experienced or not unless you go through some trial and error attempts to see who is underperforming.
Of course, you can never be completely sure that someone is going to do great without actually trying for obvious reasons.
I still think this is too much busy work and so ineffective at party organization when compared to a simple pop-up window with your/their application that would show you/them all of the information needed. The need to protect people from elitism and the usual great polishing of GW2 seem to colide here.
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Astral Force is generated through healing (1.5% of the bar per intance) and direct damage (0.75% of your bar per hit). Condition damage and pet damage as well as potential healing done to those at full health don’t work.
A quick succession of AoE hits like Whirling Defense is a good way to generate Astral Force quickly.
Fixt.
A quick succession of hits can be Rapid Fire as well, and you’ll end up with less than 8% after using it, which is still extremely low.
The best way to fill CAF is AoE regen via Haling Spring / Resounding Timbre / whichever other means you have.
If you don’t have those – resorting to AoE attacks like barrage and Whirling Defense is pretty much the way to go.
Good point. I should have worded that differently. Those numbers (1.5% and 0.75%) are indeed per target hit/healed and not per skill used. Which makes using a party healing skill or AoE skill against multiple targets infinitely more effective at generating Astral Force than hitting a single target.
Although, Whirling defense is still more effective than simply auto attacking a single target (which happens quite often in raids). The reason why it is being mentioned as a way to gain Astral Force in the guide.
(edited by Henry.5713)
Astral Force is generated through healing (1.5% of the bar per intance) and direct damage (0.75% of your bar per hit). Condition damage and pet damage as well as potential healing done to those at full health don’t work.
A quick succession of hits like Whirling Defense is a good way to generate Astral Force quickly.
Spirit of Nature is somewhere between almost completely useless and the most powerful elite skill in the game depending on the situation. Sustained healing, stability and of course the party-ress or self-ress if need are very powerful. They will become less needed as your group progresses further and becomes less shaky, however.
The good part (even if it really isn’t) about druids is that their other elite skill choices aren’t really that great for raids. Glyth of Unity is okey as an added damage multiplier with the option for the healing side of it. Although, it isn’t exactly a big sacrafice to swap it for the safer and more support orientated Spirit of Nature.
The druids should judge the situation and the needs of the raid group and pick their elite skill accordingly. Just like Bast Bow, I have tried out the spirit in all of the situations possible and have found a few instances where I’d clearly pick it over the glyth.
In any case, there isn’t a perfect choice unless you are talking about speed record attempts where the glyth would be the clear choice.
I know how unpopular of an opinion this is going to be…
But it’s about time that we get the option to inspect other players with not only gear but also stuff like the kill counter or anything similar. They can limit it to party members only or to those applying to join your LFG for all I care.
There is a need for people to judge other players for certain content in this game. We end up having to go past that anonymity by asking for LI or AP or having others link their gear to you. Really didn’t take the community long to post guides on how to fake LIs to cheat your way into experienced groups for easier kills.
The DPS-meter is another good example. There isn’t any way to judge someone’s performance apart from paying a lot of attention to them during the raid when you are already busy enough. It happens too often that you have someone join who is entirely inexperienced in PvE. You know the stereotype of the Bearbow player, all of us have met them before – “What are you talking about? I do good damage, always kill people in WvW”. The only way to improve as a group in raids is to see your own mistakes and your problems. A lack of damage and ineffective builds are a huge problem.
I for one would love to see different statistics on damage dealt, boons applied, boons removed, healing done, etc. This would also stop people from simply focusing on damage and look at other important factors.
The entire system is designed to protect players from the bad sides of elitism. I like that about the game, don’t get me wrong. However, there is nothing that protects the other part of the community from the players who simply abuse the system, knowingly or not.
The combat in GW2 is great for its time but I think a more skillful style of play is what most players are looking for now.
Thoughts?
Can’t say I fully agree with that. There are many forms of skill based gameplay. It was a conscious choice to go for a mix of tab and action instead of full action combat like in let’s say Tera. Older games already did a full action combat and were debatably less skill focused than GW2 with it’s mixed combat system.
It allows for a very quick combat system that is not only fun to pick up and play but is also very deep if you want to master it to that degree. It frees you up from having to aim your auto attacks but still has quite a few skillshots. Positioning to keep your target as well as positioning by your foe to avoid said targeting takes skill as well.
If there is one thing that I do not like then that is how the game progressed towards passives and way too much AoE specially condintion AoE. Most are asking for the game to return to mostly active skills. We should have many and more “skillshots” but I really do not want to see absolutely everything being turned into an FPS aiming system.
A timer has no place in competitive weight lifting. It’s not about speed.
World’s Strongest Man competition. :b
Pretty sure people would pull a clock on you if you deliberatly waited for the weights to crumble into dust to make it easier.
I’d advice you to simply try it yourself. Most dungeon advertisements are pretty casual nowadays. There just aren’t that many anymore now that dungeons lost their popularity.
In any case, you will always meet an kitten or two no matter which content you play. The idea that almost everyone is some elitist that will kick you for any mistake is just silly and wasn’t even true during the old dungeon farming days where people expect others to be experienced as well as very geared.
I find that more often than not people who claim to have gotten kicked for no reason were actually at fault themselves. And taking myself as an example, I usually do not even kick someone even when they clearly do not fit any requirements I set or know the dungeon I want to run. It includes myself swapping to some group support for the skips and waiting on the less experienced.
Most bosses are so easy that you can take them down with four to allow those who didn’t make the skip to teleport to you. Funny enough, it is a lot more common to see those who died skipping leave the group because they missed out on some trash loot than to see the mean elitists kick them for missing the skip.
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I find it interesting how much people dislike idea of buffing the low rewards of the (debatably) most challenging PvE content in the game when they do not mind the crazy and rather easy multi-loot method and even go to great lengths to justify this amount of loot (check the recent discussions about that topic).
We seem to forget how raids are actually a pretty big money sink until you can consistenly kill most bosses without too many tries. You usually have to farm gold outside of raids to be able to efford the best food. Like the only content in the game where this is the case.
The idea of being punished for helping friends and even strangers by clearing the raid multiple times per week is kind of sad and doesn’t really fit Guild Wars 2. Even then we still do 2-3 full-clears each week to help others. Most don’t, though.
Better rewards and more so rewards for re-runs would give quite a few raids a reason to do multiple clears and even bring along those less experienced for obviousy reasons.
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