Guild Wars 2

If you ask me balancing a game to an esport level is hard enough. Adding more gamemodes will only make this harder, if of course those game modes are supposed to be competitive.
Just look at LoL (I know referencing it the esport example gets old) and how reluctant they were to add an additional game mode.

That said I’m all for less serious non competitive game modes to break the tedium.

Yeah different teams do different things, there’s no arguing that point. It’s a matter of resource allocation by the people higher up, and where the game’s priorities lie. Judging by the frantic event developement it seems obvious where that is.

Bursty game is bursty. I suppose one should expect nothing else from the studio that pretty much invented the “1 2 3 burst” gameplay.

It may be they just go afk because they don’t like the team setup they see once they’ve joined the match. Happened all the time in random arena in GW. Very annoying and not much they will do about it.

It’s not that bad. Only against tiny asura mesmer is it infuriating.
Usually I’d get my target easy enough by approaching the intended target and letting auto target do the rest, naturally you can’t do that against a mesmer with clones up. So you need to do it the old fashioned way and click the kitten mesmer, but man are those tiny asura hard to click!

I wouldn’t say mesmer is OP overall, just glass cannon mesmers with their silly high survivability through trickery. Honestly I can’t fathom why it was thought to be a good idea to let all classes be able to go glass cannon, but only give some the tricks to pull it off (mesmer and thief notably)

I agree wholeheartedly, a good write up OP.

Well the problem with GW2’s pve is that it seems to be designed with the traditional rpg combat in mind. With that I mean your pve enemies casually run up to you and do one or occasionally two types of attacks while standing absolutely stationary.

How the games combat is designed that means the pve side of things loses a whole lot of depht compared to pvp where the combat system shines. Monsters will rarely leap at you, apply conditions, never ever attack on the move, purge their own conditions etc etc…
So as a result all those skills that are more situational are never really useful in pve, the way pve difficulty is scaled it becomes more about dodging and kiting enemies rather then having a solid strategy.
And that is what I think really misses compared to GW, the need for strategy in pve.

So yeah unless pve opponents get a complete overhaul to their combat mechanics a whole lot of situational skills are never really useful, or at least drasticly less useful. Other side of the coin is a whole lot of skills that are powerful but can be countered are stupidly strong in pve, like aoe ground targeted effects.

It’s a shame really, pve should be some sort of preperation for pvp fights but it such a different beast. I’m finding it hard to see how pve can be made challenging without resorting to one shot scenarios or non strategic challenging boss mechanics.

Haven’t read all replies, just in case it hasn’t been said yet:

Clones that are tasked to shatter no longer count towards the amount of clones the mesmer has in the world, even if they are still running to their target to shatter.
This means a mesmer can start generating new clones while the old ones are still running to their target to shatter. Note that at the mesmers end the illusions counter doesn’t update until the clones physically shatter (kind of an annoyance)

For example I’ve had cases where I’ve been on the chase with my mesmer and had a horde of 8 clones running towards a target, 6 of them running to shatter, or two three clone shatters.

This game is waaaay to bursty for arena fights.
It’s already bursty when everyone is spread out inbetween objectives, imagine the team wide burst damage you can pull off if your team is constantly grouped together in an arena.

frans.8092:

Shipwrecks were all over the Crystal Desert, they don’t neccesarily mean something rose from the sea. The structures on the east look like sculptures the sea makes from cliffs. Maybe the shipwrecks are the remains of the flood that washed away Lion’s Arch.

Actually the shipwrecks in the Crystal Desert are there because of receding sea levels rather then rising sea levels due to an antire continent resurfacing.
If I’m not mistaken those ships belonged to a seafaring people that made their home in the shallow waters above what is now the desert, until waters lowered and the ships came to be stuck on the newly surfaced dunes.

Anyway judging by the flora of the island it has this whole coral reef theme going on, so my first thought is it used to be a relatively shallow reef a ship could easily get stuck in. Island surfaces due to volcanic activity, what’s left of the ships gets brought along above water.

I’m pretty sure Sanctum Cay was waaaay further north. Isn’t it the island the Tengu now inhabit? It wasn’t anywhere near where the grove now is any way.

Yeah….the mists is pretty much the ‘anything/everything can/has/will happen here’ place, kind of like the whole multiverse thing in comic franchises it excempts any correlation with existing canon giving the creative team free reign to design content.

Not a huge fan of this kind of content but I have to admit some of the scenarios were refreshing, and some like the charr siege had actual bearring on the in game reality.

The colossus encounter? Who knows I certainly don’t see any reasonable explanation, I just chalked it up as magical mists dreamworld stuff. Maybe it’s a pop culture reference I didn’t quite get, maybe just something random.

Egh RNG not something I’d design a game around but who am I.

Maybe they’re his horseshoes?

Ragman.1690:

In the end they get what they want, getting content which they accomplish again in days and so on, in the end complaining that it is just another WoW clone

This. This ennerves me so much, people looking for a game and actively comparing said game to WoW, suggesting the game implements as many design principles from WoWlikes, then complains it’s a WoW clone. God how daft can you be. :s

Gehenna.3625:

I never actually played WoW myself but from what I learned from forums and rl friends who play(ed) it, WoW was just at the right place at the right time. They had the will to make something exciting and the longevity to make it work. People believed them.

At its dawn it was also a pretty darn good game for its time. Definatly not an extremely tedious gear threadmill it is now. Fair enough it had gear progression but it was more then just a threadmill, the content was genuinly fun and challenging.
I’d go as far as to say the pve in vanilla WoW was a lot more challenging then GW2 is, it was great infact before the expansions.

The block change is INCREDIBLE, I don’t know what people are on about. At first I thought it must’ve been a bug, heck I still can’t believe it.
If you’re really crafty you can block all those ranged attack and at the last split second throw for a nifty cripple to close the gap.

Starhawk.2958

I’ll give the game 3 more months before Mike O’Brien is fired and then posts that he’s leaving the company to ‘pursue other projects’, i.e. I got kitten canned but was given the option to resign. This seems to be the trend in the industry now when games are developed like this one is.

QFT So true it would not surprise me at all, although it seems premature to jump to such conclusions it’s definatly textbook by now.

/sign

Not going to stop playing over this, it’s still a very good game, just a slightly less good game.
It all depends wether this ascended gear is simply an attempt to fix the current design where your definitive gear is quite easy to obtain, or wether they intend to implement even more powerful gear down the road.
Personally I don’t mind a good grind to make that last bit of gear feel that more valuable, it’s only when it subsequently gets devaluated by the introduction of more powerful gear.
So what’ll it be Anet, a one time gear grind or a gear threadmill. Either take a step back or let us know with an official statement wether this is the last item quality you introduce.

Disapointing. I would have much preferred a less grandiose event that was actually playable.
This could’ve been nice, but try to make something feasible rather then just nice, please.

Good read, thank you for taking the time to write this down. Arah explorable is definatly a dungeon I need to complete by the sound of it!

I actually think this game took the steampunk elements way to far, especially in the pact, and it just causes inconsistency and poor storytelling in general in my opinion. Running around swining a sword right next to a tank column supported by aircraft, artillery and whatnot, just doesn’t make any flipping sense.

Personally I don’t so much mind the asura advanced technology since they’ve got the whole magitech thing going, and the charr only have the iron legion really emphasizing on steampunk. Why then the pact needs to be a steampunk army boggles my mind.

If you ask me this game needs to decide wether it wants to be heavy steampunk modern combat fantasy or either your regular fantasy setting with a touch of tech, because right now it’s so darn conflicting.

Roven Leafsong.8917:

The problem is that after a while, those childish notions of the idealised, romanticised fantasy hero become a little shallow.

Soooo much this. Words fail to quantify the amount of this.

But yeah I agree overall the setting leaves something to be desired. Story culmination just loses it’s value when heroism becomes the norm.

And yes that incident with Morden in ME3, sad thing. I more or less agreed with his view in 2 then suddenly he goes to a polar opposite viewpoint in 3 just like that. Needless to say I had to put him down.

I don’t know I like the idea of the pale tree pretty much being a plant version of Glint, a wise renegade dragon champion helping the mortal races. Although the whole corrupted by ventari’s teachings seems a little sketchy, it’s no big leap to say a dragon’s champion can go rogue and even oppose the dragons.
The nightmare nature dragon you fight in the sylvari tutorial area does it for me, I can’t think it of anything else then nature dragon making attempts to regain controle of the pale trees consciousness.
Also the way sylvari are born is so akin to a dragon making minions, they are formed fully grown and ready to serve wich is also exactly what they do, except the playable sylvari serve the pale tree and are given choice to do so.

In the end there’s no concrete evidence, we’ll see when the last elder dragon is revealed if there is one, or we get to see another uncorrupted pale tree (malyck’s tree).

Scary that’s almost the exact same trait setup I’m using, except with desperate decoy instead of the retalliation on block.
I only wish chaotic transference would be easier to reach, get 10 in chaos for the damage resist per active illusion as well.

I much prefer using signet of illusion to really beefen up the clones. Can’t shatter clones that die instantly, and I imagine having more health helps them trick opponents in spending longer time attacking the fake targets.

What I really like about the sword clones though is they attack pretty fast, with a high precision they can get bleeds up pretty fast. Reason I like to get some condition damage along with signet of domination, helps staff be more effective to since that’s all condition damage. Might switch domination signet for a combo field to get more chaos armor going though.

Oh hang on I’m not using phantasmal haste. I’m not sure what I’m using in that slo, I think master of misdirection or confusing cry.

I use sword sword with much enjoyment.

Tried other offhands and I just like the versatility and low cooldown of illusionary riposite. The swordsman doesn’t really seem that useful though, but I tend to shatter the phantasms after their first attack anyway and he attacks pretty fast so there’s that.

Anyway yeah I’m aiming at toughness condition damage and precision, traited for retaliation on block. Staff as secondary weapon to get some chaos armor on and even more blocks for some nasty on hit side effects.

Have only run it in pve, can’t say how well it works in pvp.

Yes Portal is problematic, if you ask me Time Warp needs changes as well to balance it up.

Portal I think just needs to go, it’s way to powerful a tool in a point based game mode.Or at least changed so it becomes short range only, kind of as a kiting tool like Teleport but more static.

And time Warp, I don’t know an area effect quickness is to strong when making a team coordinated burst. If you ask me it would be more balanced if it did the exact opposite as it does now, instead of speeding allies it should slow down all enemy actions within the area. It would be more in line with the abilities mesmer had available in GW1, and make timing interrupts easier.

Coming from a pvp noob, take it with a grain of salt.

Largos as playable race. They’d have an all underwater start area, imagine how well your average player would like that!

Let’s see I’ll answer what I know, but my knowledge is spotty at best.

1. I think kormir was the last to enter the human god pantheon, before that grenth, a half god, overtook dhuum and became the fully fledged god of death.

2. Yes the gods physically inhabited tyria, they lived in orr besides the humans. They even had their houses in orr wich were considered sacred by the orrians. At the time of GW1 though they had already left but still had a hand in the world. Now they’re shwoing no sign of presense anymore.

3. The dragons’ only purpose is to consume magic, I assume so long as they do not intervene with one another they tolerate each other.

4. The pale tree is a mystery, it grew from a magical seed discovered by Ronin who planted it on what was left of his home and family after it was raided by bandits. Ventari was a peaceful centaur who tired of war and strife and lives to his own made code, etched in his tablets.

5. Kormir probably left Tyria alongside the other human gods

6. Sylvari have all the parts necesary for ntercourse but cannot reproduce, all sylvari are born of the tree.

7. No, that’s probably one of zhaitan’s minions

8. Orr was one of the human civilizations, one that was heavily based on magic and worship of their gods who lived with them for some time. It was sunk as a desperate measure to protect it from the charr invasion.

9. The titans were minions of the old human god of knowledge and secrets his name escapes me. He wanted revenge on the world because the other human gods banished him after he refused to take away magic from the world as per Doric’s request (I’m probably wrong here). The charr were pawns in his scheme to dominate the world.

The dragons want to consume magic, the more the better. Dragons achieve this with their minions, Zaitan’s minions are the undead. The more minions he has the more can bring magical artifacts and stuff to his mouths.

Most of the charr we get to see so far are iron legion, they prefer their tech over their magic so it’s natural for them not to have much respect for it.
Furthermore the charr have had bad experiences with some more destructive elemental magic under leadership of the flame legion.
I’d say it definatly fits in their lore but especially fire magic has that negative association to the flame shamans and god worship.

Is what I think anyway, not really an expert

Yeah the whole humanoid shape thing doesn’t entirely add up with Malyck who looks just like any other sylvari but comes from a different tree. Chances of that tree being burried on a human graveyard as well seems slim.

I definatly wouldn’t mind a dolphin pet to add to the aquatics. Always struck me as strange you can tame a shark but not a dolphin.

Come to think of it, giving specific people the right amount of information at the right time to entice them to work to resolve an important matter, like telling you the what and where’s about dungeons, is pretty much exactly the order of whispers’ approach.

I agree with your two points, I think the former is to be expected from a fairly new game (gw1 wasn’t perfectly balanced either and had fotm builds) but sure enough ANet kind of dropped the ball by not having a sort of ranking to promote healthy competition.

I’m normally a pvp fanatic and thouroughly enjoy some good competition. I never really got into GW1 competition because the random arena system promoted one or more succesful teams stomping on the less balanced/lower skilled new teams. I’m sad this problem is making a return and is perhaps even more problematic now in GW2.

In fact despite really enjoying pvp I’ve avoided it so far, knowing full well I’m best off learning as much I can before even trying to compete. It would be way better if I knew I would be matched with and against more equal skilled players instead.

Unless a legendary fits a specific character I’m not inclined to get it, and because most of them seem a bit over the top none of them probably fit any of my characters.
I prefer a more modest and subtle look over giant flaming swords and other fancy effects that really have no business being on actual weaponry.

Rehashed Jibe Tube.7102:

does the grumpy old norn they partner you with when you join the vigil count?

Hey don’t diss forgal! He isn’t grumpy, he’s the most awesome warmaster! Seriously the best character in the game to me so far. Much more likeable then freaky Sieran.

Aanyway yeah I’ve got to agree where’s all the old folks. Fair enough there usually isn’t state of the art healthcare in fantasy settings and the big bad wars going on sure don’t help but still should see some more elderly around.
Strangest thing is npcs that are supposed to look elderly, grey hair and sometimes old voice and all, but share the same body type as youthly characters despite there being models for the elderly. That’s just weird.

All charr were partly responsible for the atrocities commited during the reign of the flame shamans, despite this instead of showing remorse for that dark time in the history of their race, they continue to openly mock the civilization they helped eradicate and gladly benefit from land gained in a conquest fueled by foul magic granted to them from a malevolant god.

Sure, they no longer follow the destructive flame legion, but that didn’t stop them from continuing to wage war on humans who were only fighting for their dear life. Certainly to conquer territory you need to wage war, but even the charr should realize there is no glory in kicking someone when he’s down, or in this case nigh completely destroyed by the flame legion conquests.

Charr may no longer want to burn everything but they are still warmongers, extremely cruel to their prisoners and completely remorseless for their mistakes in the past.

So I’d say it’s fair to say the charr are the evil ones, for being unwilling to attone for their past and destroying (or slaving them to their death) rather then subjegating those they conquer.

The problem is that unlike your average (monk) healer in GW you don’t need energy to continue healing back up. Where once you’d be pressuring the healer’s energy with sustained damage, now sustained damage is absolutely pointless unless you’re managing more effective dps then the tank you’re hammering away at is healing effective health. Given how strong healing is this makes sustained damage far inferior to burst.

Personally I see nothing wrong with point holding tanks, only with the fact that sustained damage has no real place in the metagame. If anything it’s sustained damage that should beat the tanks, and the bursters preying on the more frail dpsers.

I don’t know how one would go about fixing this, other then seriously re evaluating the way healing works.

I should add I’ve not done a lot of pvp, I’m going by what I hear and what I theorize here.

Sadly this appears to be a recurring problem, GW had (in my opinion) major issues with certain skills and builds never seeing any use, or at least depending on the dominant metagame.

Of couse GW2 is a lot more limited in build variety compared to GW nigh endless possabilities, and here’s hoping Anet doesn’t go the same way as then and intorduce even more classes and skills making balancing even harder.

Still a build needs to be designed to work,shouldn’t expect every patchwork of skills and traits to be viable, but I agree that every weapon set should have at least one viable way to build.
GW2 is still new, let’s hope Anet manages the balancing in time.

That jumping puzzle was AWESOME, by far the best I’ve completed. It didn’t quite take me 10 hours, just about 1 hour of frustratingly fun griffon dodging.

Just popping in to add to the list of happy players. Great job I love the story build up!

Death and loss is a natural part of life, if your children are entering their teenage life perhaps it’s time they learn about these things as well?

Yep here to. I entered one of the king’s trick doors wich caused a load screen to pop up, been there for well over 10 mins now. :o
I guess I should consider it part of the trick heh.

Kind of feel bad for killing those bandits when I came upon them, them fixing the road we will be using and all.

Being kicked from that guild was the best thing that could have happened to you.
If a hot headed idiot like that is allowed to be officer then it is not a good place to be, you should thank the guy for saving you the trouble of leaving.

I’m not sure if naming and shaming is allowed though? I’ve not read the forum rules in detail, might be a good idea to blur the names out just in case.

We will likely be seeing an entirely different theme when we go up against another elder dragon who will most likely be featured in future expansions.
Crystalline minions and destroyers to name a few, zhaitan’s undead horde was just the beginning.

Oh wow this is VASTLY imroved.
I’ve only tested it out for a minute and can already see the difference. Gone are the FOV headaches, time to really enjoy the scenery!
Here’s a before after on my end. Is only a quick comparison.

As a sidenote I usually prefer a FOV of between 90 and 100, it’s still fairly narrow for my taste but it’s definatly no longer claustrophibaclly small.

I strongly agree with your first two points and the one about magic find.

Crafting is something you put effort into, you should be rewarded for it besides ultimately being able to make a legendary. Right now it punishes the player with fairly high material costs, not good.

About the skins it would be a lot more practical if we had a sort of wardrobe with armor and weapon skins we’ve collected throughout the game, instead of having to manage with transfering looks between items you will be having to store in an inventory. A game that did this very well in my opinion is dcuo where you permanently acquired a style after equiping an item once.

But then I storngly disagree with the combat critique.
Me I love the dynamic so long as it does not devolve into a zergy clusterkitten. The skills themselves may not be as convulated but the way you use them in a dynamic fight is so rich, wether it’s reacting to changing combat conditions or timing it just right I find the combat to never disapoint.
I should note I’ve only played mesmer and ranger in depht, maybe some classes are more about simply mashing skills whenever they are off cooldown, but I can’t judge that without trying.

That’s a shame I really like ascalon, even if the once blasted wasteland hasn’t fully recovered. Next to magooma it was my favorite place in prophecies (pre searing ofc), I simply love the autumn colors.
Never was a big fan of kryta then and now, just to green for my taste, like someone took a verdant landscape and toned down all the red colors and overdosed in green.
So far I’ve rarely gone there because it’s so removed from all the rest, and my personal story never led there. I do intend to explore it fully later though!

If you don’t like them just don’t do them, I don’t see the problem here.
Me for one I much enjoy these puzzles, great addition and a change of pace of the regular adventuring. The more challenging the better as far as I’m concerned.
I agree that the camera issues kind of dampen the fun a bit but it’s still plenty fun.

I don’t know I prefer it the way it is now rather then as in GW1.
Being able to select skills to form a skillset introduces sooo many variables, how skills combo with one another etc, to say nothing of the dual profession system, it’s just nigh impossible to balance propperly.
Now on the other hand you have a well rounded skill set suited to a playstyle, one wich can be much more easily be balanced.
Making it more about how well you can use your skills rather then picking a cookiecutter setup.