Guild Wars 2

Diva.4706:

No it is not cosmetic. You can buy a character. You can buy the gear. You can buy the ultimate “end game” skins. The fact you are equal power is not the point. You can be equal to another person, without even playing the game. Disappointing Arenanet, simply disappointing…

I just don’t get it. You’re playing the game, not for fun, but to compare yourself to others? Sure, someone can do all that you say. Instead of getting kitten-hurt about it, pity them for bypassing the game they paid for. Bypassing the game is one of the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen. I’d advise not letting your own sense of satisfaction suffer because of others’ choices.

Ulfnar.8317:

In my opinion, saying “PVE would be better off without WvW” is selfish. Sure maybe PVE would be better if you just deleted WvW, but WvW players and their preferences are just as valid as yours.

Personally, I have no desire to “do away with” WvW. Separation of PvE and WvW could benefit people who want exploration and monthly achievements but don’t want to go into PvE, just as it would benefit PvE players who don’t care to WvW.

ButterOfDeath.2873:

anti melee?
What if i tell you about reflection?

Except that a ranged player can just wait out the reflection. They will still have less down time than a melee who has to leave melee range regularly. Mob reflection abilities may have shorter CD’s than player ones, but there are CD’s and the abilities don’t usually last that long.

I am of the opinion that there should be: separate exploration for the open PvE world and for WvW.; and that there should be three monthlies, a PvE one, a PvP one and a WvW one.

As it is, fine, if I want these achievements I have to go into WvW, even though I do not find it fun. Yes, I can do without the achievements. I’m OK with that, as I can choose not to do these achievements.

However, achievements are part of “things to do” to keep people interested in playing the game. Forcing people to choose between game play they dislike or not doing the achievement is, imo, counter-productive.

Warjin.8942:

2. Gw2 is perfect for FFA with the level down to zone system.

You keep saying this, but it is highly questionable. Have to taken a level 80 in exotics into a beginner zone? If you had, you would have realized that the down-scaling is far from perfect. A level 80 might not have as much of an advantage as in other games, but it would not really be a competitive fight.

The only one forcing you to play the game is you. You don’t need outside assistance to fix that.

Hantu.2815:

IndigoSundown.5419:

There are many things the game needs to fully function under its current design. These include event bug fixes, rewards balancing, dungeon fixes, class balances and class feature bugs. I could go on, but this should be enough to make a point. If you believe the forums, these things are already long overdue.

I believe those in favor of this idea are grossly under-estimating the amount of dev time that would be needed to make it happen. I have nothing against the idea as an idea. Implementing the idea would, however, negatively impact the further development of the game for everyone. This is a factor arguing against its implementation.

The game is bleeding players every day. Any player who wants true PvP has already left, will leave soon or will not even start GW2 based on reviews from friends and media. This could attract the open pvp breed of players, turn around some who quit out of boredom and keep the current ones in the game.

I came expecting WvW to be the amazing open PvP experience as it is advertised. When I got here all i saw was a zerg of 20 people on a top of a tower and a few people nuking it from below….. for hours either side nudges. On the other side of the map there is a group of 5 running around capping supply camps killing NPCs. The moments of actual FUN PvP are so rare there.

Just look at the forums, every 3rd thread created talks about how bored people are and how there is little to do past level 80. In previous games I played, the PVE content was a fraction of what we have, yet the open PvP and clan wars did not let people get bored.

While I agree that PvP, especially WvWvW, is lacking, my experience of “nothing to do” posts was that they diminished greatly when fractals was introduced — maybe because the PvP players had mostly already left, whereas the gear crackers were lingering, hoping for a bone, which they got. Mostly what I see now are complaints about bugs, DR, drops, and such.

I think it’s already too late for the PvP crowd, at least until sPvP gets something new and WvW gets a complete overhaul — which I wish they would do.

Unlike others who prefer PvE, I would not care if such a server existed, but I suspect if it were not done right, the complaints would be loud. And I still think that those in favor are glossing over the complete re-imagining of the game that open PvP would require to be done right.

There are many things the game needs to fully function under its current design. These include event bug fixes, rewards balancing, dungeon fixes, class balances and class feature bugs. I could go on, but this should be enough to make a point. If you believe the forums, these things are already long overdue.

I believe those in favor of this idea are grossly under-estimating the amount of dev time that would be needed to make it happen. I have nothing against the idea as an idea. Implementing the idea would, however, negatively impact the further development of the game for everyone. This is a factor arguing against its implementation.

In Gendarran Fields there is an event where pirates have taken over a village (Apple-something? — anyway it’s the village just north of the Lion’s Arch gateway). The event objectives are to put out fires and defeat pirates, including a vet. On a 31 engineer (right around the event level) I could not kill the pirates fast enough (specced for Power, using Rifle and Grenades, and this was after the grenade 1 gelding). Just before killing the second of 8 (?) the first one respawns. Taking all on at once was a no-go as they put out a good bit of damage and are mostly ranged, so clumping and AoEing didn’t work.

The asking price for many items is 1 copper above what a vendor offers. Why is that? It’s because the items themselves are not valued by purchasers.

If there were a demand that was greater than the supply, then there would be requests to buy, and buyers would be forced to outbid each other. Since that isn’t happening, the only possible conclusion is that the game is producing more of these items than there are people who want to pay for them.

This means their only real value is either the amount you can get from a vendor, or the value of any salvage results. Even if there was no “tax,” your profit margin isn’t going to go significantly above vendor price anyway. The only way to “fix” this would be to reduce supply (i.e, lower drop rates). Imagine how well that would go over.

You might want to ask this on the Elementalist sub-forum. The class’s theory-crafters hang there, probably not here.

LithePanther.5027:

Orr is not nearly as difficult as you’re trying to make it appear. I’ve taken 6 different characters through it solo with no problems except for a few skill-points that had champs on them.

It isn’t all that time-consuming to kill 1 or 2 risen which ends up clearing the path for you and once you realize that only purifiers pull you it’s super-easy to just avoid them.

While I agree with you in large part… with regard to “only purifiers pull,” the Risen Spiders would like a word with you.

Let’s say the drop tables have a 1% chance to get a green item. With 71% MF, you’d have a 1.71% chance. If the drop table chance to get a green item is really .5%, then your chance would be .855%. Different rare things have different tables, and we don’t know the various drop rates. We can infer two things through empirical evidence: (1) blues have a better drop rate than greens, greens than yellows, yellow than orange; and (2) over time, with a random distribution, someone with 71% MF all the time will get better drops than someone with none because there is a bigger range of numbers that will produce the rarer results. This may not manifest in any given finite time frame, however, because it’s random.

I paid $60 and am pushing 1000 hours of play time. Compare to SPRPG’s, where my $60 nets 40-60 hours of play. Compare to PtP MMO’s where playing for ~4 months and 1000 hours would have cost me ($60 box + 3 months x $15 =) $105. Since I can continue to enjoy GW2 going forward, the gap with both comparisons will just get bigger. Within the game, winning is being able to do what I want, when I want to, for as long as I want to.

So, I won and am continuing to win.

Players can progress through programmed content much faster than new content can be generated. Give everyone what they want as soon as they want it, and they will then be complaining about nothing to do. Giving them something to do that is within the scope of what programmers can produce involves those players repeating content. Provide said repeating content and you’ve produced “grind” because people want the rewards now.

How would you do it differently given the limitations on programming?

I would be unable to read the forums at all if the background were dark gray. My eyes are not that good anymore. Maybe a pale sky blue would be OK.

Big updates were already mentioned for January and February. GW1 had Halloween and Winterdsay events. If they had done nothing for the holidays, plenty would have complained about that.

TWMagimay.9057:

I’m starting to think it’s a language thing. In my mother tongue(a Slavic language), I’d never say I’m working towards smth in a game. I’d use a phrase closer to “to keep oneself busy/entertained”. And from what I’ve encountered in Austria, they don’t say “work” either. Have a friend who builds model air planes as a hobby(native German speaker), he also never said he has to “work” on it, used words like “build”, “create”, “finish”, but never just “work”. Also asked my Dutch fiancé about it…he also said he wouldn’t use “work” when talking about anything he does in a game. I guess in most languages “work” has a negative connotation(smth you feel forced to do and don’t enjoy) and thus people feel that talking about “work” in a game is wrong.

Indeed, an American idiom for “work” is “the daily grind.”

Grind was originally used with regard to video games to describe things the player would prefer not to do but feels compelled to do to progress in the game. In Rappelz, for instance, you need to grind monster kills to level, so you can grind more monster kills to level again.

The term “grind” now seems to be further evolving to mean, “Doing anything for any length of time if I don’t get what I want in a time frame I think is reasonable.” Even if, in the case of GW2, the stuff people want is optional. Heck, the whole game is optional.

@Diva.4706

I am sorry to hear that your GW2 experience was spoiled by something someone else did. I hope you can regain the sense of enthusiasm and enjoyment you previously enjoyed. Why is your enjoyment based on what other people have or don’t have, and how they got it? This is something that is never going to be under your control no matter what game you play. The best way to regain your sense of enjoyment is going to involve deciding that it does not matter at all what others do or don’t do, or have, or don’t have.

Magic find is two things:

1) A (small) tax on farming. You need to have the gear, and regularly buy or craft the consumables.
2) An incentive to buy the buff on BL if you want the highest MF you can get.

What it does is that drop tables have to take MF buffs into consideration, so rare drops are rare for those with the buff, and very rare for those without it.

I preferred GW1’s system with no MF. Low drop rates just meant stuff was rare for everyone, not less rare for those who paid the tax.

Nausicca.6038:

Monkman.3748:

IndigoSundown.5419:

The grind only exists if you have to have the best of everything ASAP. The grind is all in your mind.

For normal exotic and dungeons ones, I agree that there is no grind but for anything like name exotic/corrupted/destroyer weapons and ascended items the grind is gigantic. For 1 corrupted weapon, it takes 30 corrupted lodestones, you’re lucky to get 1 per hour, usually you get 1 every 2 hours, and then there’s the DR that kicks in and makes it almost impossible to get the lodestones after it comes. I also have to state that the only place to get them are in Frostgore sound/honor of the waves. So is an estimate of 60 hours of doing the same stuff to get a weapon is not a grind?

You don’t need it. ANet doesn’t force you to do it. Your “ugly” exotic has the exact same stats as the corrupted/destroyer weapons. It’s just aesthetics. It wont change anything to your PvE/ WvW experience.

But it will keep you playing this game.

This is true. If you want “it,” then you have to do what it takes to get “it.” If that’s grind, it’s grind you chose.

If these optional features were easy to get, then many players would have them already. They would then be on the forums complaining about “nothing to do.” I’d hate to be a game developer.

Gord.8654:

IndigoSundown.5419:

Map completion and legendaries are two of the longer-term objectives in the game, and both have WvWvW components. I would have preferred there be long-term goals that are PvE only, with similar-length and separate goals for WvWvW and for sPvP. This would have given players who want to play in only one of these arenas, more to do, AND given people who want to play in more than one arena more things to do.

Instead, we have players who don’t want to be in WvWvW but feel forced to be in order to complete those long-term goals. It’s a design flaw that is unlikely to be addressed.

OP, you have two choices: abandon the goals; or embrace them fully. If you embrace participation in WvWvW, then use chat, get players from your server to go with you, outnumber them and you’ll get the kills, not them. However, abandon or embrace, don’t try to participate half-heartedly and then complain about people killing you in a PvP map.

I really do appreciate everyone’s opinion here and I really do feel both sides of the coin are right. There are things that need to happen in WvW naturally (intel, communication, etc). That is not the point of this post.

Again, the point of this post is that a group of people went out to specifically harass players. I posed no threat to anyone there, did not take an aggressive stance with anyone there, and there was no tactical advantage or bonus for them to hold the area. I have also played WvW and we all know that probably no one in that group got a badge let alone a loot bag for killing me. I’m not looking for anyone to get in trouble, I’m looking for a solution. Is it really that hard or horrible to allow people to pass by and complete the JP if they are not trying to attack opposing players or affect the battle? Especially when it is 30 on 1. Come on really?

Others have suggested that the guild who killed you might have been there to protect friends. They could also have wanted kills for their monthly. The reason for their being there does not matter. They were legitimately engaging an “enemy” in a “war” zone.

It sounds like you believe that you are entitled to run the JP without interference when you want to, whereas by placing it in a contested zone, ANet has clearly stated you are not so entitled. By your stance, I would be entitled to say that because a vista is a PvE objective, then opposing players are griefing me by opposing my entry to the area where it lies.

I suggest that instead of focusing on wrongly thinking that you were griefed, you instead focus your attention on the real issue. As long as there are achievements that require participation in PvE and WvWvW, there will be people in WvWvW who don’t want to be there, and people who do. The people who do are going to run around killing enemy players, it’s what the map is for.

The obvious solution would be to separate PvE and WvWvW achievements. You might actually get some support on that one.

The grind only exists if you have to have the best of everything ASAP. The grind is all in your mind.

Map completion and legendaries are two of the longer-term objectives in the game, and both have WvWvW components. I would have preferred there be long-term goals that are PvE only, with similar-length and separate goals for WvWvW and for sPvP. This would have given players who want to play in only one of these arenas, more to do, AND given people who want to play in more than one arena more things to do.

Instead, we have players who don’t want to be in WvWvW but feel forced to be in order to complete those long-term goals. It’s a design flaw that is unlikely to be addressed.

OP, you have two choices: abandon the goals; or embrace them fully. If you embrace participation in WvWvW, then use chat, get players from your server to go with you, outnumber them and you’ll get the kills, not them. However, abandon or embrace, don’t try to participate half-heartedly and then complain about people killing you in a PvP map.

Your definition of “beating the game” is that “the one who gets to the top first, with the most whatever beats it.” There are two problems with this. There is no top. MMO’s are ongoing experiences. You can define a top all you want, but that’s you. Having the most of whatever is not a static thing. You HAD the most a minute ago, but since there is no “end” to an MMO, someone could pass you at any time. Knowledgeable game retailers will know these things.

Regardless, most companies will not refund video games, they will only replace a defective copy with a good one of the same thing.

1. Roles are horribly under-explained and unclear

While it is certainly true that there is no hand-holding by ANet, it certainly seems like many players have figured out what they want to play and how. It also seems that dungeon roles, the primary (and really, the only) place where roles are important, have been figured out by those groups who are breezing through dungeons fast enough to complain about DR. In GW1, ANet did less to try to teach players how to build and play, and more to encourage them to have to figure it out. The real issue with GW2 with regard to roles is lack of depth in build options, not lack of explanation.

2. Dynamic events don’t work in their role as quest replacements

There certainly are issues with dynamic events, and some of them get nailed here. However, having played Rift, I’ve never gotten the feeling that DE’s are as repetitive as rifts. Maybe that’s because the combat in GW2 flows so much better than Rift’s antiquated GCD, static play.

3. Area flow is problematic

I’m beginning to see a pattern here. The writer seems to think that a game needs to point people in the “right” direction. While some direction seems in order, I am less fond of feeling like the developers are holding my hand, telling me, “Go here until you get to level x, then go there…”

4. Crafting is a freaking mess

Hmm. Same issue, really. “They didn’t hold my hand so I think it’s a mess.” His point about salvaging parts is well taken. However, “In other words, if you want to craft, odds are good-to-definite that you will outlevel every single item you can make until the level cap, at which point there are a handful of relevant things to make and a lot of lower-level junk you don’t need…” is directly counter to my experience.

5. The story is weak

OK, it IS weak in many places, and the good parts are drowned out in the rest. While I don’t hate Trahearne the way some seem to, and I understand that making each player the "Marshal’ might be problematic, I would rather they’d gone for a feel of the PC as the head of a commando team, with team build-up and interactions, missions, failures and successes, instead of the endless, “Accompany Trahearne while he …”

6. So it’s bad, then? Oh, heck no.

He got that part right.

Traits are horribly unbalanced. For example, Necro: Blood 5 point talent: Gain 5 seconds of regeneration when your health reaches 90%. Necro: Death 5 point talent: Summon a jagged horror when you kill a foe. The Blood talent can be useful, and is at worst never unwelcome. The Death talent rarely makes any difference and can be downright detrimental. While balancing a trait system is a thankless task, the trait system is not ANet’s finest work.

So many of the traits are either downright useless or at best only situationally useful. Would the talents be more fun if there were more meaningful options? Maybe. Are they fun as is? Not very often.

One thing to keep in mind with regard to confusion in PvE is that removing the condition is a temporary respite. Most mobs in GW2 have 1-2 moves. Those who use confusion can usually put it right back on you as soon as you remove it. This differs from skills like Empathy and Backfire in GW1, where the mob versions of those skills had the same length cooldowns as the player versions. Players in GW2 do not spam confusion, nor do their confusions last as long, or stack as high as mobs’ do.

I do not share the OP’s sensation of confusion “forcing me” to run a condition remover. It didn’t take long in GW2 to realize that I was always going to have condition removal on my bar anyway, whether confusion was in the game or not. I also do not find Reef Drakes and Princess Dolls to be enjoyable fights.

The confusion damage when you use a skill is applied before the skill takes effect. Under the wrong circumstance, you can kill yourself using condition removal to get rid of confusion.

Xista.7391:

IndigoSundown.5419:

Of course, speed runs and exploits are rampant in many games, so it should come as no surprise these things are happening here.

I’ve done dungeons in both WoW, and Rift. Neither had the amount of speed runs, or exploits that I’ve encountered the last two days of playing GW2. The group’s I’m paired with in GW2 skip as much trash as possible (by simply running through it, and hope it resets), and uses terrain exploits to its fullest.

So yes. This does come to some surprise that people are abusing game mechanics this bad.

Is that because people in those games are less inclined to skip trash than in GW2, or because the dungeons are designed to make skipping harder? I don’t know about WoW, but there was plenty of skipping and terrain exploits in Rift at one point.

I just have trouble reconciling:

" … we want to avoid “whack-a-mole” style balance. HUGH increases and HUGE decreases lead to meta instability, and thusly, we try to make multiple small tweaks rather than putting in massive changes that we have to later correct."

and

“Grenades: We didn’t want to totally take away the power of this kit, but when it is able to proc sigil abilities, it becomes very strong due to its powerful AOE nature. So we’ve toned down this kit a little due to the sigils now working on engineer kits.”

with:

““Grenade” skill now does 30% less damage to balance against using sigils.”

Based on pre-launch blogs about explorables, I got the impression that the events in the dungeons would vary more. What we have are static dungeons with an event here or there that might spawn, and might not. Though there are three paths, some of the encounters take place in multiple paths (Spider and Kohler in AC for instance).

GW2 dungeons are different in some ways from other games (e.g., no trinity play), but in many ways the dungeons are depressingly similar to a “standard” MMO’s. Of course, speed runs and exploits are rampant in many games, so it should come as no surprise these things are happening here.

Manticore Five.9867:

Don’t ever, ever, EVER force a player to take a pet if they don’t WANT a pet, ESPECIALLY if you have dungeon mechanics that turn that pet against you.

+1

You aren’t forced to trait 5 into Death Magic. That said, Death is the Toughness line for Nec’s. Toughness to my mind would lend itself more to a daggers/wells build, which has to get in close to targets to be effective. Instead, Death Magic focuses on staff and minions, both of which lend themselves to not taking aggro.

Since the traits are unlikely to change that radically, at least make all minion traits be choices. That way, people who don’t want minions but who want toughness traited don’t have this thing shoved down their throats.

Reanimator was a horrible choice for a no-choice trait. I’d favor replacing it with something useful. As is, the thing is both useless and actively detrimental in some situations.

I am also displeased with the necro “changes” in this patch. My biggest disappointment was seeing Reanimator in the patch and having it read something other than: Reanimator: this trait has been removed and replaced with [hopefully, something useful, or at least not detrimental].

That said, the engineer did not fare well in this update either. It’s most viable means of dishing damage was significantly nerfed. “Gaining” the bonus from weapon sigils is something every class gets. Making sigils work with kits was a bug fix, not a buff.

Malleus Maleficarum.2603:

Lex Talionis.5396:

Malleus Maleficarum.2603:

As for Necro minions, true they didn’t fix those(but they did give a fix to reanimator which everybody complained about).

People complained about reanimator for reasons other than the pet dying in 6 seconds – namely that the pet was useless for the purpose of dealing damage and ended up a liability in many situation where giving your opponents more targets (for spells to chain between) was actually detrimental to your wellbeing.

The necromancer thread was actually appealing for the removal of the trait entirely so they wouldn’t have to put up with the existence of the pet which locked them into combat.

i understand that. It’s unfortunate there are side effects of the trait, but wouldn’t you say some help for it is better than none. With it dying in less time, it might work better than before (ik it’ll still be bad and a pain in PvP) in absorbing hits meant for you, and like some people had said in that thread that’s like an aegis on your necro for every hit your minion takes

Reread the patch notes. Reducing its degeneration means it will be around for longer, not for less time. I’m pleased that “your” classes all got what you perceived as buffs. However, the patch was not overwhelmingly positive to everyone else. As far as Reanimator goes, I’d prefer removing and not replacing it if the only other option is leaving it in.

Tyr.1965:

Rustypipes.6238:

Lex Talionis.5396:

Malleus Maleficarum.2603:

Anet absolutely crushed this patch. they addressed almost everything i can think of that had been wrong with some of the professions i use, and the problems i’ve heard on the forums.

Necromancer pets.

Yeah, this one. Necros did get some love but not where it mattered most, our pets.

We have pets? Oh that’s right; we do. See, it’s been so long since I’ve had them on my bars that I forgot they even exist…. not to sound snarky lol

Fwiw, even when/if they fix them, I doubt I’ll go back to using them much.

I’ve been getting better drops from veterans and champions for some time now. It’s rare that i don’t get at least a blue, but no golds or oranges yet. I have gotten more/better drops in general over the last week or more: first exotic drop I’ve gotten in open world since launch, and quite a few rares. I even got an 80 rare from one of the mobs in the Blood Witch event (not the witch) when I did it with a friend and some other folk.

Yes, this is anecdotal evidence, but that’s likely all anyone has. Fwiw, the character I have with magic find gear has gotten significantly fewer blues, greens and golds than the ones with no magic find. Guess RNG is random, neh?

I prefer the open world content. I hope they will make it more rewarding, because people like better rewards, and this might entice more people to do the major events.

The ability to exchange gold for gems is an optional feature. That makes it a privilege, not a right. The exchange rates are based on supply versus demand, as others have already said. If the supply of gems for sale is lower than the demand, the exchange rate goes up in favor of gem sellers.

The problem, if their is one, is that players who want gems but aren’t making gold are competing with players who want gems and who are making gold. The solution is not to have ANet artificially manipulate the gem exchange rates, which is what the OP is asking them to do. The solution is for the player who wants something from the gem store without buying gems to figure out how to make gold.

nerva.7940:

they have failed to deliver a convincing, replayable open world. end of story. i didnt buy this game to grind dungeons, so i certainly havent been participating in FOTM, which is where everyone is.

My experience has been similar and dissimilar. I often see people in the open world. I also find open world events more appealing than dungeons, because they are less about following scripts, which gets boring.

I agree that the “The whole game is endgame!” hype was not optimally implemented. However, recent changes have made rewards scale better. Now, if they can find and correct the issues with down-scaling…

nerva.7940:

i dont get the continuous GW1 references. i hated that game. WoW was better is every single way, which is what everyone played. GW2 feels like a brand new product. it has lots of flaws, but it feels very fresh. if they actually stuck to their freaking manifesto for the new content updates, the game would have simply exploded with players.

The constant GW1 references are from people who liked GW1. Your dislike of it does not apply to them. While that other game appealed to you (and many others), this too is a subjective thing. Personally, I though WoW was a steaming pile of dead kitten, with unappealing character models, antiquated combat mechanics that were actively anti-fun for me, a pointless gear treadmill, and face-roll PvP once you had the top gear unless you were in Arenas.

Like you, I think GW2 feels fresh and appealing. I have hopes that they will make good on their promises to spread the Ascended love to other gameplay areas. This would improve GW2 greatly for me, and I already like it a lot.

Some changes that I think could help.

1) If an event is successfully completed, have the area remain in friendly control for a longer period. Two days ago I was farming Malchor’s. Saw the Melandru statue effect was up. Crossed the zone, and 20 minutes later it was down. 40 minutes afterwards, it was back up. That is too short given current population on many servers.

2) With regard to events that spawn around places of importance, put the things on a timer. If no one completes the event after a fairly lengthy time, the event fails, and the extra mobs despawn.

3) A revamp to the rewards system for open world content may make it more enticing for people to leave town and complete events. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the drop revamp in recent patch notes is working. I know of 4 exotics dropping in Cursed Shore in the last two days (2 were linked, and both I and my roomie got one). Prior to this, I had neither gotten nor seen one linked, and I’ve been in Orr a lot.

4) Don’t restrict waypoint travel if an area is contested. People are more likely to be willing to come in response to a call for help if they don’t have to cross half the zone fighting or running past mobs. The Grenth event in CS comes to mind, with the nearest open waypoint often being at Meddler’s.

Conditions do. You can hardly be downed in GW2 without being under the effect of some (often long-lasting) condition-based DoT.

Better gear helps, a lot. Being 80 helps, some. Having a friend or guild-mate to run with helps, also. Some classes do better than others. My warrior can go around solo with near impunity. My necro almost the same. Mesmers lack AoE but creative use of clones, illusions and phantasms helps. I haven’t taken my Ele south of Sparkfly, and leveled that class to 80 in Frostgorge Sound (I’m still on the level 62 story, so no Orr yet).

Unfortunately, Wv3 is a PvPvE setup. Essentially, it’s GW2’s answer to PvP servers in other games, with events, mobs and opposing players, all with a healthy dose of siege stuff going on. Personally, i would prefer more separation of PvE from PvP than Wv3 provides. I very much enjoyed PvE exploration in GW1, but knowing that I have to Wv3 to get exploration in GW2 makes me sad.

Also, I liked Alliance Battles from GW1, which are the closest thing to Wv3 in the older game. Wv3, however, is often horribly unbalanced in numbers, which is anti-fun for me. Silly me, I didn’t do the Wv3 exploring when HoD owned its Wv3 maps. As such, from the PvE side, I side with the OP who is essentially asking for less of the PvE influence in Wv3.

Since I regularly get drops from mobs I start attacking when they are at <10% health, I don’t think you have to do a lot of damage to get a drop. That said, in zerg events, mobs die so fast that probably only the first 2-3 attackers per mob are getting any damage in at all.

I’ve gotten very good results in zergs using: Whirling Axe on a Warrior; Burning Speed followed by Ring of Fire on a D/D Ele, and both Wells and Marks on a necro. With the wells, though, I have to be positioned properly right from the get-go. If I have to move very far at all to drop one, the mobs are dead and I get nada.

TheAmpca.1753:

If this game is based on being able to customize everything about your character why are all the skins locked to different class types. If I want to play a guardian charr who is really strong and powerful why can’t I also make him look like a fairy princess? I do agree in WvW and sPvP you should be able to tell what class type by the armor, but in PvE? Honestly in addition to this there are so many clothing types that have been completely ignored in this game, such as monk robes and many asian stylings that I would like to see.

sPvP is handled because you have separate armor there. I question whether there is a need in Wv3 to identify targets by armor types. The class icon is on their portrait when you target them. Further, IDing class by what others do is not hard.

So, let us transmute armor looks from other armor types, please.

I guess there is no accounting for taste. There are any number of pants skins from medium armor I’d prefer for my light armor female character. I’m just not a big fan of skirts, especially skirts over pants. And I’d kill for my necro to be able to wear the Duelist Skin. Say, why can’t we transmute armor looks outside of our class, again?

Uttered in Ebonhawke. “I’ll just AoE these chickens for the Indiscriminate Slayer achievement!”