Guild Wars 2

Basaltface.2786:

how about we start getting more sets to begin with…

Pretty much this. At least, with luck we probably have some sweet Elonian style armours to look forward to in the coming expansion. Unlikely we’ll see anything substantial added before then. Anything less than four full sets will be a let down (and probably a ‘deal breaker’) at this point for me though.

Ornate and moderately impractical looking gear isn’t necessarily bad, imo. As long as it’s tasteful and well-designed. I love the cultural sets and would have liked them to be made available for all races. Also have a preference for those that reflect the current level of technology. Overall, Aetherblade is my favourite.

A 300% increase to your chances at something with a 0.1% chance of dropping just makes it three times as likely to drop, bumping the odds up to an underwhelming 0.3% (assuming my math is decent. It often isn’t.)

Ehh, I was completely over blues and greens by level 60. I think they have no business in level 80 loot tables. Just save me the trouble of salvaging and give me plain old mats, thank you The lowest grade of level 80 gear really ought to be rare. Not that the drop rates should necessarily be increased tooo much.

I think at least some of the exotics limited to the mystic forge should have been added to regular loot tables by now. I also think the lootable exotics should have more similar drop rates. For every twenty Stardusts there is only one Lord Taere’s Shadow. As new skins are added, some of the older ones should become a little easier to obtain.

I can’t think of a brand new class that would fit in with GW2 lore, but I would have made the revenant a bit more of a magic user, featuring complete transformation into each legend as an ultimate skill with an entirely new range of abilities becoming available as a result. Oh, and better ranged attacks.

Nightmare weapons are still among the best in game, I always have a full set on at least one of my alts.

The CoE medium armour was my favourite for a long time. Couple of my guys are still rocking the Arah heavy boots and the HotW heavy legs as well.

It’s laughable that they made a dedicated area for farming, yet some players got mad that people were farming it the wrong way so they nerfed a bunch of stuff.

This is why we can’t have nice things.

Lol, you guys have had it pretty kitten good for too long now. I think you can bear to wait a little bit if it means the rest of the community can be included. Fractals have been covered in dust and cobwebs for ages now.

Danikat.8537:

“There are no culinary applications for bloodstone dust. None.” – Chef Robertus

What about cooking with a Deldrimor stainless steel pan? *chuckles

womwom.5209:

Getting into raids in GW2 is actually really easy. The caveat is that it’s actually really hard and I probably should have just said that instead of offering hollow words of encouragement.

FTFY.

(lol)

duster.7013:

How do you only have 5 points with a thief on your team, rofl.

It’s deceptively easy for an average team to have their kittens handed to them by pro players. Dudes roll through, your character disappears in a whirl of flashes and spell effects, by the time the screen clears you’re all dead and they’re like 50 points up. Lol.

Zelanard.5806:

I fail to see how it is an inconvenience… The amount of time it takes is so short, that the fact that you even notice that you spend time on it, is a mystery to me… I mean really… we’re talking less than 20 seconds of inventory management in regard to runes sigils and salvaging…

Sure, it would be nice if it was sold with the sell junk button, but we do not need and AI to do such things for us.

It’s probably just the differing frames of reference, man. Most of modern life is completely streamlined and user friendly. It makes little things like this seem jarring in contrast.

I mean, the game is literally giving you garbage like ‘Here, you throw this away.’

Sly.9518:

You are under the assumption that players aren’t lazy……

It doesn’t take care of the literal junk items and other rubbish like runes and sigils.

It isn’t that much time in the grand scheme of things, but it’s the kind of inconvenience that we feel like we shouldn’t have to deal with.

For example, consider the simple forum post. Made a mistake? You can highlight an entire block of text and delete it. Bam. Gone. Now what would it be like if you had to press ‘backspace’ for each individual character?

Loads of people just play for fun. They’re the ones that are mocked on the forum, though.

‘Watching netflix, press 1 and collect loot’

‘Special snowflake’

‘Want to get carried’

And so on. People who are committed enough to this game to think and talk about it while they aren’t playing tend to take a more serious approach.

There’s also the bit where just playing for fun doesn’t allow you much progress. Apart from the things you can straight up buy from the gem store and trading post, most of the desirable and interesting items require you to complete a set of very specific actions, often under certain conditions as well. Hence the need for countless guides, meta builds and number crunching.

Just doing whatever feels fun will see you booted from parties, harangued and well…mostly poor.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

However, in this case, I have trouble caring about the Braham that’s presented. I feel he’s one-dimensional, inarticulate, and, well, boring. I have nothing against him, but neither do I feel anything for him either. In contrast to Marjory & Caithe — I was stung on the PC’s behalf by Caithe’s betrayal and Jory’s indifference — Braham doesn’t provoke any feelings at all.

This, exactly for me as well. Braham feels like a diversity hire. There’s very little to him besides being the token Norn. He’s not even a good stereotype, lol.

That would be a little redundant though, no? We already have moderate-to-challenging content that rewards ascended equipment in fractals and raids. Dungeon rewards are pretty neat, I think they just need to be more visible and/or have some other small, unique incentives.

Dungeoneer should be a part of the regular dailies instead and I’d add some optional treats to the 5g chest. A choice of the extra tokens, obsidian shards or a transmutation charge or something of the sort.

I’d prefer less garbage, tbh.

Or the ability to combine any four of ‘em in the mystic forge to create one that eats everything I can’t be bothered to get rid of manually.

We’re almost certainly getting mounts, those leaks are far too detailed and authentic looking to be a mere possibility.

I welcome the idea as long as they’re available across all of Tyria. A solid 50 or 60% increase in movement speed plus whatever special movement abilities they offer would definitely be an incentive to do more map completion. Also, you know…Fashion Wars 2, right?

However I am also dreading that they’ll make zerging around doing map metas even more tedious. Lots of us barely manage with just player characters and spell effects on screen, throwing mounts into the mix could make some parts of the game literally unplayable. Might be a good time for the low and mid-range system users to save up for some upgrades

The other bit that might be mildly annoying is how they scale with individual player characters, especially the Norn and Charr.

Neural.1824:

While some people like the look of the armor, this thread reminds me a lot of when the Ascended armor came out. A lot of people couldn’t stand it, and today few use it (the skins).
That’s the intent. Anet did as little as possible to make the appearance of the armor unique, added the features to make it Legendary, and will then go back to pushing outfits.
It’s a simple process really, and it worked really well for them with ascended gear:
1) promote new armor with new features that no other armor has
2) design it so that it’s unattractive to most
3) Sell more outfits on Gem Store
4) profit.

This is one thing that I’ve never liked about this game – they intentionally made so many low quality and badly textured skins at launch in order to sell us better ones.

It was at least tolerable when they released new armour sets regularly. These days….

Either way….keep on fightin’ the good fight, Blaeys. Here and on Reddit. You’re doing God’s work.

For what it’s worth the meta build for a condi DPS mesmer is incredibly fun and pretty easy to play. I’ve only tried it in fractals so far, but if you can get into a decent guild they will probably let you tag along for the easier fights.

I’ve been seeing a lot more ‘silent’ and no-req LFG listings for the easier raid bosses on reset night. Even if you lack experience and haven’t been trained (it is ridiculous that this is a thing in this game now, imo) you can probably hop into one and at least get some hands on experience.

Lots of people loved dungeons, lots of us still do too. There’s just too little incentive to keep doing them. Rewards typically dictate player interest in GW2’s various game modes.

This would be neat if the wildlife were more than an occasional source of amusement and/or a nuisance.

DiogoSilva.7089:

Remember the bladed kitten armor and the I-smell-bad armors from HoT? The incoherent mess that was carapace armor and its obnoxious blue-tinted version? The clown set that we have gotten for ascended? Now we get Arah Shiny Edition and Spiky Overload sets for legendaries.

Outside of revenant’s set, how many years have passed since we’ve gotten a good armor set in Guild Wars 2?

Aetherblade was probably the last full set I was really, really excited about. I still use quite a few of the pieces on most of my characters.

Thing is, the distaste a lot of players have for outfits is that there’s no mixing things up. Even the best armour sets are kind of unimpressive if you use all of the pieces. But the right combination from three or four different sets can be amazing.

Ah lay off the OP, lol. Vitriol? Nah. Maybe a little salt if anything but it’s a pretty reasonable post expressing a strong opinion. Lots of people don’t even care for most of the legendary weapons, it isn’t a stretch to surmise that many are disappointed. There’s not as many of the ‘wooo! hype train!’ type posts you’d expect following this announcement. Probably due to the relative inaccessibility of this armour, if we consider what I expect will be massive costs in addition to the skill wall you need to bypass and beat a bunch of raids.

Sounds good to me. Not keen on having another currency added though. I’d rather have the skins simply be very high priced, or have it added as a collection type achievement similar to the Machined weapons.

Jade weapons would be an amazing addition. They did some great work on Ebb and Flow,

Here’s what I’m rockin’ these days.

Aesthetically, Human is a solid choice as you’ll have access to some of the best medium cultural armour at T2 and T3. Sylvari can work pretty well too. Some of the makeover kit hair and face options allow you to make the sneakiest, most sinister looking characters possible.

I have a human female, if I were to re-do my thief character it would probably be a Sylvari male.

Bloodstone Fen
Easy to get around and it’s vertical in a manageable way. Gliding is a joy here. Visually, it’s exceptional with particularly unique and interesting design of both the environment and mobs. It’s relatively easy enough to farm Blood Rubies but I think as this was the first one out the gate, they borked the acquisition method and/or amount required for purchases. The meta events are also a dreadful, boring slog. Simple enough for sure, but not much fun.

At launch this map was a 9/10 for me, down to a 4/10 now. Would not play again.

Ember Bay
Drab, bleak environment. Navigation is aided somewhat by the Thermal Tubes but it’s kind of a pain getting to some areas. While I understand the lore at work here, recoloured Destroyers just feel like lazy design, and overall the population of the island feels sloppily thrown together. It’s like Southsun and Fireheart Rise had a baby. A really, really ugly baby. The events and hearts are surprisingly fun, at least, but Petrified Wood farming is also a pain in the kitten.

At launch I hated this place, 3/10. Up to a respectable 6.5/10. Worth an occasional visit.

Bitterfrost Frontier
I dig this place. It’s a kittenristmas-y, highlights the best design elements of the Shiverpeaks area with just a touch of verticality and it’s easy enough to get around for the most part. The mobs are unspectacular but not lame or infuriating either. However this map absolutely wins as a farming zone. Winterberries are the easiest and most satisfying items to gather, and this map’s Unbound magic collector offers a good variety of useful items at friendly prices. Icebound chests are also a nice, welcome touch. Loads of replay value in this place.

Was mildly interested but overall positive at launch, 7/10. Grew to love it. Up to a solid 10/10.

Lake Doric
It’s amazingly cool in some places, kind of bland in others. Visually interesting overall and it really captures the feel of a war zone. It’s always a pleasure to beat on the White Mantle, and the peripheral enemy mobs fit the map’s theme well enough. Jade Shards feel like the most balanced of all the new map ‘currencies’. Not quite as easy as Winterberries but not a pain like Blood Rubies. The vendor for ’em also has a decent array of items for sale. giving this map a good bit of potential replay value. The leather farm, albeit a bit disappointing, does add to this as well.

Original rating 6/10, but the Queensdale Extreme!™ vibe kind of grew on me. Will likely be playing this for quite some time. Final rating 8.5/10

This fight was pretty awful. Not too difficult, as compared to the average dungeon or fractal, but it was pretty unpleasant. The room was a bit too small and I struggled more with the camera than anything else.

Overall though, I really don’t like this design direction for boss fights where they just throw a whole bunch of kitten at you simultaneously to make things ‘challenging’. This seems to have started with raids and is slowly creeping into fractals and now even story content. Not really digging it, tbh. All the visual clutter really detracts from the design of the boss and environment (both of which were top notch).

I disagree. My argument is pretty solid. The theme and setting that the game establishes have nothing to do with individual player design choices. There’s room for both goofy and grim elements either way, but I would have preferred a heftier serving of grimness. At least we still have Canach.

She’s pretty annoying for sure. Seems far better suited to a children’s cartoon. And I like dumb, goofy cartoons well enough but the cuteness just seems out of place here. We’re up against ancient dragons and evil cults, kitten .

I feel ya OP, one-man wolfpack right here. A lot of what’s in this thread rings true for me as well. I’m basically a ‘friendly soloist’. In parties and squads I’ve got no problem with communicating to get the task done, even a bit of friendly banter or one-liners in map chat from time to time. I’ll compliment another player on an especially cool or interesting character, help others when I have the time and so on.

However I’ve just never, ever felt the need to join a group of people to commit to and play with regularly. When I do group up in any way it has always been because I needed to, either due to the nature of the content or for the benefits.

I dunno man, those AFK necro guys are like spiders. It’s a little gross and skeevy when you see ’em around but they kinda help us out. Makes my winterberry farm a lot smoother when they clear the mobs and draw aggro so I can just harvest in peace.

Meh, this just speaks to the need for VIP/Premium access to convenience services. Something cash only. Pay once, use forever.

You guys know that over in China GW2 players can buy all 5 permanent contracts for about $35?

Hell, I’d pay that much for a permanent transmutation contract alone. Lol

Nash.2681:

Sorry for this unholy thread necromancing, but I’m so kitten frustrated right now.
All I need for the “Dark Harvest” is this very machined greatsword hilt for the collection.
I did 2 full DS Metas now (even though I hate this kind of dull mass events but well….), opened around 50 pods but yet I got no hilt, neither from the pods nor from the end chest.
Am I doing something wrong, is this some kind of bug or is it just my cursed RNG?
Any help appreciated.

It’s probably just RNG. When I was going for the Warhorn I completed the meta from start and opened every single pod on the map and didn’t get anything, eventually looted it from the 10th or so pod halfway through the second meta attempt.

While trying for both the machined GS and Torch I got the necessary pieces one after the other from pods during the first event leading up to the Mouth of Mordremoth battle. All I can add is that I was tracking the achievements when this happened, maybe that helps. *shrugs

Really depends on whether or not you need the gold, and if you have any use for ’em at all.

I commend you guys who have the discipline to save up things like that. Every couple weeks/months I get bored and sell basically everything just to give a my toons a makeover or buy a fancy mini or something.

Rauderi.8706:

I’d fix dialogue by making it skippable, then building that into future design.

HINT.
HINT.
ANET.

Lol. Agreed. Most of it just feels like filler, during the LS bits for the most part I just want to skip everything that doesn’t involve combat. Especially the bits where you wait for an NPC to saunter over to some trigger point. More stabbin’ less blabbin’.

The one to Rule.2593:

The only people who think the timers are even a problem are those that either don’t raid or go with utter newbies who don’t know the encounters. The timer is not why people fail 99% of the time

Agreed. Inexperienced and unskilled groups rarely ever last long enough for this to be an issue, in my experience.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think a straight up easy mode is necessary. But there could be some small concessions made to make the content less hectic. I’ve come up with a couple ideas, to broaden this discussion a little

→ Potions, similar to those in fractals, offering +25% buffs to damage, defence and mobility across the board. These could be sold at the raid vendor for magnetite shards and gold (thus indirectly reducing the overall reward and offering an incentive to at least try a few bosses the normal way first)

→ Perhaps also add practice motes that disable the enrage timer and give one free resurrect after dying (like the mistlock singularity) and of course reduce the reward for each boss beaten under its effects.

→ A raid helper NPC golem that can be hired at the beginning of the instance that does a small amount of damage to bosses and healing to players, while maintaining
boons consistently. It would randomly take half of all rewards from each successful encounter (shards, gold and drops) as a fee for it’s handler.

Ayrilana.1396:

Its sole purpose was to give players that want a challenge just that. Raids entire existence is for those that wanted a challenge. Adding a story mode changes that purpose.

Meh. Raids are just content. Like everything else in the game. Sure, the devs have a vision for content they create and the marketing guys add a slew of buzz words to jazz it all up, but on the player side there is no inherent value or purpose to anything in the game. It’s all just stuff to do.

As amusing as this idea sounds, it could never work. They’re barely managing to put out vanilla versions of armour and outfits.

TexZero.7910:

It actually makes me believe that 90% of the complainers never used to do fractals back at the old 50 scale and only started doing it when they thought fractals of the swamp was hard.

A lot of people only made the switch to fractals when dungeons became redundant. And, yes, the ‘Swamp of the Mists’ days made the transition a lot easier for many of us. Prior to that I only made it as far as scale 30 because anything higher was essentially pointless to me.

And of course the introduction of raiding changed a lot. On the most basic level raids are exciting content with great rewards, tuned to a level that is a ways out of the comfort zone for most players who would otherwise have been interested in them.

OniGiri.9461:

Well you can’t do a lot about the way people feel. Change is necessary to keep things alive and also to keep people interested.

That’s exactly why raids ought to be ‘changed’ to offer options that would make them more inclusive.

:D

mtpelion.4562:

Real cute attempt a false equivalency there.

I’ll agree with the last sentence of your post though.

No, it’s a perfectly valid (if a bit dramatic) assessment of your logic.

‘Accept the system because it has been intentionally established’

I definitely agree that the wardrobe system should be revisited though. It’s not terribly difficult to obtain transmutation charges, but changing looks feels a little restrictive. We ought to be able to play around freely with the skins we’ve unlocked, not sit and think about whether it’s worth losing one look for another.

Rasimir.6239:

Dungeons aren’t as important in this game as they are in other, similar games. It’s not the be-all end-all endgame, but rather some activity among many, and accessible at different levels, not just at endgame. I feel they are in a decent place for this game, to fill the niche they have found over the years.

They used to be, though. sniff.

Dungeon rewards are in a pretty good place overall, but I do feel like they need a little something more as an extra incentive. There’s very little reason to run them after you’ve collected all of the skins.

I’d suggest adding dungeons to the daily rotation, or some new items to the dungeon vendor (Transmutation charges would be just perfect)

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Fractals are the gw2 dungeons and gets all the love.

Raids get all the love. Fractals are tolerated and from time to time get yelled at – ‘Why can’t you be more like your brother?!’. Dungeons are the family embarrassment that lives under the staircase and they never take anywhere.

Switching traits can be a bit of a headache unless you’re really familiar with the class, and even then you can forget which line has what if you just choose one spec and stick to it (as I imagine most people do).

This topic has come up fairly often over the years, but rarely makes it past a page of replies. For what it’s worth I am honestly surprised they haven’t added and monetized this feature. I could see most people happily paying 600 – 800 gems for each additional build set, per character even. It would quite literally revolutionize the way we play.

Yeah, been waiting on this for a loooooooong time now. Should’ve rolled out with the Elite specs, imo, since some of ‘em drastically change the way your character can be played. Here’s hoping this gets implemented before the next expansion. I’d love to be able to instantly switch between Healer Druid and Condi Ranger when out of combat.

Jubilant.7280:

It makes me mad whenever I try to help out Casuals that they don’t bother to invest their time and effort into improving their gear or ignoring mechanics. Especially infuriating when after multiple sessions, they just give up. The raiding community is more than willing to help Casuals get into raids, but they have to put in the effort and time to learn in order to become a better gamer. Otherwise, please stop complaining about the implementation of dps meters, reducing the difficulty of raids, or any of the crying to Anet. We’re more than willing to teach and help you out if you bother to actually invest the time like we did into improving yourselves.

It really bothers me that people see nothing wrong when you gotta repeatedly use terms like ‘invest time and effort’ to refer to an activity as trivial as gaming.

To be fair, that’s basically what I’ve done for a lot of content, including raids. But when the crux of the anti-easy mode/casual raid arguments boils down to ‘you gotta waste a bunch of time doing a bunch of stuff you won’t enjoy but I swear it’ll get better eventually’, I think there’s a real problem with the content.

Everyone has different views on what makes for a suitable effort : reward ratio. I’ve seen some videos where people were ecstatic after their first boss kill after trying for hours. Wasn’t like that for me. My first successful VG was more along the lines of “I spent two hours in here for this kitten???”.

We’re definitely at a point where anyone who wants to beat these raids should know what they’re getting into. Lots of people think they can hack it but really can’t. Lots more will just lose interest and bugger off.

‘Every casual wanna raid but nobody wanna be a raider.’ Until these people get what they want, expect the complaints to continue.

LucosTheDutch.4819:

Nah, ideally, all raid content would have:

1. Lots of references to GW1 lore and tying GW1 lore to GW2 lore.
2. Lots of connections and tie-ins to the GW2 stories, preferably showcasing integral parts of the story.

I know this is just wishful thinking and Anet would never do this because the entitled crybabies would lose their mind, but wouldn’t it be awesome if Lazarus, Primordus and/or Jormag would be really difficult raid bosses? Yes, yes it would, it would be very awesome. But it would upset the entitled crybabies too much, and since a large portion of the GW2 community are entitled crybabies, Anet would never do this. But one can dream, right?

Ideally, all content would have lots of references and tie-ins with GW1 because the characters and lore of those games were amazing.

I don’t consider players who bought and continue to support the games as ‘entitled’ though. What, you think people need to earn the right to have good content by…. showing skill and dedication like the raiding community? That’s ridiculous. All players deserve skill appropriate content of the same quality as the last raid release. It’s probably not going to happen, but the mindset that hardcore gamers (or any other ‘subset’) are somehow superior is borderline toxic, imo.

Sykper.6583:

This might just be a stretch but maybe just maybe these bosses are so epic and fantastic is because they are a real challenge to face and not the current incarnation difficulty level of Chak Gerent in TD for instance.

Imagine seeing Samarog sweep you with a giant spear, and the damage that shows up indicates a Skritt in Dry Top hits harder. You lose so much immersion when the boss isn’t as threatening as its appearance. Why do you think the Mouth of Mordremoth fight is disliked so much compared to the triple boss coordination before it? It’s almost ironic really, well-designed and epic encounters cannot be weak to fight.

Ehhhh. There’s a lot of truth to that, but when I’m in an RPG I like to think of my characters as unstoppable juggernauts of kitten-kicking. So I expect a bit of a challenge, but I’m the hero here so there’s never any real doubt that I’m gonna win in the end.

Of course, I’m not an unreasonable man. I wouldn’t expect open world accessibility in a raid, just something more like T3 – T4 fractals accessible.

There is a massive gap between “You won’t beat this unless you spend a couple hours wiping repeatedly while you try to memorize a bunch of stuff and time everything perfectly” and “Pay attention cause this guy will kick your kitten if you’re sloppy.”

But as is, I’m probably gonna have to suck it up and give raiding one more go. This stuff looks waaaay too cool not to experience firsthand.

I watched some play through videos, of Samarog and Deimos as well as the cinematics that show us Saul’s lore. Honestly, those little snippets with Saul are far more interesting than the LS3 episodes I’ve completed thus far.

Also, it’s a real shame to design such utterly epic and fantastic kittening bosses and not make sure that everyone has reasonable chance of beating ‘em. That ’Queensdale 2.0’ kittenshow that is the new map is just….god-kittened inadequate man. They’re really starting to treating non-raiders like the proverbial red-headed stepchildren.

Daddicus makes a sound point, though. It’s basically the same people, but different circumstances. It’s usually perfectly safe to stop and help someone in the core maps. In HoT that could often mean you ending up dead next to ‘em, and a long way from the nearest WP. Lot’s of people would probably like to help but decided against the risk.

As a general rule people’s attitudes and behaviour tend to worsen as content gets harder.