Guild Wars 2

Zaber.5609:

I like the new feature, adds a sense of progression for us PvErs. And why are people complaining about grind in a MMORPG? Doesn’t make sense at all.

Did you read my post, or even the opening sentence?

I’m not asking about progression, grind, gating, etc.

Outside of all of that, can anyone defending the new system present a good argument that it adds some new interesting challenge to the game. By which I mean, how does it challenge a player’s skill? Not gear acquisition, not time spent, not any of that.

What does it add in terms of player skill? As far as I can see, nothing. But I would love to be proved wrong.

This is not a discussion about gear grind, vertical vs horizontal progression, or even the gating of content. Just about the new mechanic.

This extremely dangerous condition ticks percentages of player health away and can’t be cleansed by normal means. Players who wish to delve deep into the Fractals will find that Agony makes progress increasingly difficult, until they reach the point where some defense against this condition is a must. The only way to mitigate Agony damage is by building up resistance through Infusions

So, it doesn’t matter what your stat build is, how you proportion vit/toughness/power/etc. Doesn’t matter what weapon sets you use, what utilities, what elite – doesn’t matter when and how you use them. It doesn’t matter when you time your dodges, or how you conserve endurance. Basically everything Anet has built the game around “skillful play” is rendered obsolete by Agony. There’s only one thing you can do:

Get new gear that mitigates the condition. No active skill on your part, just a new passive defense against the new condition.

What has this added to the challenge of the game?

I can imagine, say if Agony was an environmental effect around some of the new mobs – say an invisible one of shifting densities, and the densities determine how much damage you take. Perhaps the more infusion, the better you can see the low and high density areas of Agony Mist (this could be as simple as the famous red rings, with different widths to indicate strength). That would at least involve new player skill, new player tactics. Perhaps its sometime advantageous to risk a higher density area to gain positional advantage – or any host of other possibilities.

Now, that idea is rather uncreative and is not necessarily what I think should be done. But its an example that the new mechanic could have added something interesting to the game – interesting meaning it involves player skill, not just a pair of Agony Proof Underpants.

This is my challenge to all of you defending the new Ascended/Infusion gear. What does it really add to the game to challenge player skill? You are all very quick to shoot down opposition to it – but can you defend it as an interesting game mechanic? Can Anet? I do want to know – does this very simplistic damage/mitigation really add something?

“I would have won, if it wasn’t for that ranger’s pesky pet!”

Notice how all the pro-Ascended gear threads (defined by their OP) are not getting merged into this thread, even though they are also basically “thoughts on ascended gear”

Latinkuro.9420:

I’m a casual player and even I have 4 crafted exotic sets, 1 dungeon armor set, full compliment of exotic weapons usable by my profession, world completion is at 56% only.

Hmmm, hate to break it to you, but you’re not a casual player. Well, obviously there’s a spectrum from casual to totally hardcore. You may not be at the top end of hardcore, but I’d say you’re not representative of the “true” casual if you either farmed or paid for all the materials for 4 crafted exotic sets and have a full compliment of exotic weapons.

What Anet really needs to do is reveal some of their data mining that led to this decision. Anet claims the forums aren’t a good measure of player feelings, won’t do in game surveys because they’re flawed (but hey, so is everything), and then claim they have more scientific ways to determine how players feel and are acting.

Well, pony up Anet. What sort of data mining and statistical analyses has led you to the conclusion players want this new tier of gear? Its not me, that’s for sure, I have 1 level 80 in rare armor and a couple of rare/masterwork weapons.

Great post. Agony/Infusions add nothing to the game. Mobs get new unblockable attack type, players need new items to mitigate it. No interesting mechanics, no higher skill required…just a passive gear effect.

Wait and see might be an option, if Anet didn’t go ahead and say what the new mechanic is.

New content mobs get new condition. No amount of player skill can get around the condition, you have to get the new gear to mitigate it. So, once you have the gear, you’re fighting the same difficulty fights you were fighting before, just with the new attack negated (or nearly so).

How is that innovation? How is making gear even more baked in and unmodifiable innovation? What new mechanics is any of this introducing? Seems a redo of what a lot of other MMOs offer.

There’s so many options, yet Anet goes with this. If it was some new skillset to master to deal with these new mobs, I could see it. Or new mechanics where fighting them involved certain movements and tactics (like there being safe areas you had to navigate between) – pretty much anything that might involve player skill.

But no. Mobs get new attack type X, players must get gear Y to mitigate. Everything else stays the same.

Diogo, I have yet to see any argument from you that actually backs up the claim vertical progression is necessary. All you’ve done is assert it is, and use as proof other games use it.

Yes, you can base a game around vertical progression. You can innovate within that box. Doesn’t change the fact its still a box, and a small box.

I get it, you like vertical progression. However, you can’t seem to understand not everyone else does. And no, its not necessary, its not integral to gaming.

If its the path Anet wants to take, then fine, its their company, their game, and their revenues. They just need to be upfront and honest about it.

Furthermore – even within your own paradigm of vertical progression – I don’t see how you can think that baking in the rune/upgrade slot as an unmodifiable stats and repurposing the slot as an infusion slot is somehow innovative. Its a total hack, and will end up getting dead-ended in not too long. What’s the next step – baking in the infusions and freeing up the slot for yet another upgrade?

DiogoSilva.7089:

Joiry.2504:

Your own argument basically invalidates itself. Yes, there are plenty of RPGs (MMO or single player) that have vertical progression. Why does GW2 have to be Yet Another vertical Progression Game? Anet made and continues to make noise about how innovative it is. Yet your argument is, well, everyone else does it, do GW2 should do it too.

Vertical progression is not a mechanic. It’s an essence of videogaming.

I’m going to give an example from a different medium: storytelling.
A writer can also decide to write a story without characters (yes, some have “done” it) to be original, but does that means it’ll be any good? Does that means that any story that has characters in it is cliché and a cheap rip-off of any other story ever writen? Nope, the originality behind a story has little or nothing to do with it having characters or not, but how those characters (and how other storytelling elements) are told.

The existence of vertical and horizontal progression do not make a game less or more original. What truly defines its originality is in how it’s executed.

I don’t know if GW2 will do it right or not with the next patch, but some people’s hate with an essencial aspect of videogaming is incredible.

If GW2 keeps adding vertical progression you can’t do this, because by the time you get back to the game all your previous work is probably rendered useless, and instead of jumping right into the stuff you want to do, you have to go and get your gear up to par again first. That’s where it becomes grinding.

GW2 is an online game. Nothing can change that. But as long as getting the better stuff is fun, it’s not a grind. If the game forces you to kill 1000 rats to get the loot you need, it’s a grind. If you can get it simply by knowing how to play (= horizontal progression) and exploring (=horizontal progression) and beating hard content (dungeons), then it won’t be a grind, unless you must do it countless times.

Equating vertical progression with having or not having characters in a story is a ridiculous analogy. You’re just declaring vertical progression is as inherent as verbs in a language. How are you even making such declaration?

Yes, GW2 is an online game. But you somehow seem to think vertical progression is the only way an online game can work? How completely defeatist are you? Its like saying a torch burns wood to produce light, therefore the only way to produce light is by burnign wood.

See, I can make any old analogy as well, and just declare it to be a true representation of the topic of discussion – gets us no where.

What it comes down to is innovation. You are clearly happy with how most MMOs/RPGs do things. That’s great – there’s nothing wrong with that. But not all of us are. There are plenty of games for you, games that provide the experience you want with vertical progression.

However, that’s not what Anet claims their game is. So, either they can live up to their claims, or be honest about the experience they intend to provide. Which is fine, so long as they are clear about things.

Personally, I hope they choose innovation instead of rehashing what all other games (by your own admission) already do.

DiogoSilva.7089:

GustavoM.7605:

DiogoSilva.7089:

Really, people, what is wrong with vertical progression?

It promotes power and repetition over everything else.
To make It more clear: Forces a player to repeat a specific content over and over again for a single goal: obtain more power, promoting elitism.

You’re wrongly associating “grinding” (the act of repeating a monotonous task over and over) with “vertical progression”.

I’m not sure if you have ever played a RPG outside of the MMORPG genre, but there’s plenty of rpgs out there where you become stronger by simply following the storyline, finding a new town and buying new stuff from the weapon’s shop, or finding a treasure chest in a dungeon for a shiny new sword, or even getting rewarded with that shiny sword for killing the boss at the end of the dungeon.

That is not grinding. But it’s vertical progression. And it’s very fun and rewarding. The entire RPG genre is build around a few concepts, one of them being (statistical) growth.

The big question here is, will the new equipment tier for GW2 require grinding? If so, it’ll be boring and repetitive. Will it be a proper reward for beating difficult content? If so, it’ll be fun and fair.

Vertical progression does not automatically means grinding. It depends on the implementation. Likewise, horizontal progression can also be a grind when it’s monotonous and repetitive, like most heart quests in this game.

IMO, a RPG is at its best when it has a healthy combination between horizontal and vertical progressions.

GW2 is at its best when you progress vertically through horizontal progression instead of grinding. When you get better gear, or better means to get that gear, by doing a lot of different tasks that keep the game diverse and prevent it from being a grind. I hope the devs never forget that.

Your own argument basically invalidates itself. Yes, there are plenty of RPGs (MMO or single player) that have vertical progression. Why does GW2 have to be Yet Another Vertical Progression Game? Anet made and continues to make noise about how innovative it is. Yet your argument is, well, everyone else does it, so GW2 should do it too?!?

Innovation means doing something new and interesting. Not rehashing what other games have already done, with a slightly different look and feel. Anet’s “innovation” seems to be devolving into “let’s do what other games do, but some how we’ll make it better” – and in fact, they make it mostly the same, and not really better at all.

Sadly I fear Anet’s innovation mostly went over to Undead Labs. Unfortunately I don’t like the zombie genre…

Loxias.2375:

Very emotional, but obviously a minority opinion, as I doubt they would introduce this without a strong customer desire. To put it simply, adding in improvable armor is about the ONLY thing the game could do at this point to make my friends and I play again, and none of us have ever played WoW, period, for the record. They tried to please the “no grind” crowd, and it seems obvious that it’s not as big a crowd as they thought. I think they’re “narrowing” their choice of player base to, “as many as possible” based on feedback, sorry.

Just because you declare it emotional doesn’t make it so. Let’s look at this new “improvable” armor. It has a new slot. But its not a new slot, its the old rune slot converted into an infusion slot. And the rune slot has been turned into yet another baked in value.

Look, I’m not against adding new shinies to the game that players can go for. However, this new system is a hack. If Anet wants to design a game with some long term measure of “progression”, they’d continue with the horizontal progression – and it could be more than just appearance.

What they should do, imo, is make all the mods on armor modular and swappable. Then Anet would have a better path forward to create PvE “grind” mods like infusions which gate specific areas of content.

A solution of baking in more stats (and thus needing to create a huge variety of stat variants of each armor) seems to be taking a lot of steps backward. It just leads to more and more grind.

Anet needs to reread the essay from Jeff Strain I linked, and realize they should be innovating, not regressing back to generic MMO mechanics. There are MMOs that do that already.

Can we get a clarification on how guild attendance works? The wiki has 2 supposed mechanisms (both I think are wrong, attempts to explain the same underlying murky system).

I’ve done some testing, using both a 7 player guild of friends, a 2 player guild of just 2 accounts I own, and some observations on a large 400+ player guild. There’s only one thing I’m almost certain of:

Each character from each account can, at most, contribute one attendance check to one guild in one 24 hour period (or possibly until the daily reset).

However, the above rule seems inconsistently applied. “Attendance” only seems to be checked at login, and its random. I can log in one character, check guild, and see +10 pts, immediately log out. Log in another character, get no points, then actually play that character for a while and never see an attendance check credit. I’ve done a lot of little experiments like this and the whole system seems to either not be working or if it is, is poorly designed.

(note to mods – this is a thread more about MMO design philosophy than specifically the ascended gear – its just used as an example)

“If you hate MMOs, you’ll love Guild Wars 2, and if you love MMOs, you’ll love Guild Wars 2”

This is the central thesis of Anet’s original Manifesto. It may not seem like the central thesis, but Anet’s design decisions show that it is. Anet is set on making a game that appeals to the broadest possible swath of MMO players as possible.

Now, Anet, I think you guys are amongst the most talented in the MMO industry, especially on the technical and art sides. Game design itself, is fundamentally a voodoo art, and not a science. The task you’ve set yourselves is too giant – you want to please everyone: hardcore progressionists and gear-grinders, hardcore PvPers, hardcore open world PvPers, and then all the casual versions of those, and finally everyone in between.

This Ascended Armor silliness is just another example of ad hoc, poorly thought out game design. First, you guys seemed to totally ignore or forget what you learned in Nightfall. There, you corrected one of GW1s biggest mistakes, making armor and weapons completely modular with insignias and inscriptions. But, you threw that out of the window to make more MMO generic “baked in” stat’d armor. Combine this with the flaws of the transmutation system, and you’ve made a game that’s very grindy unless there’s only 1 set of stats and 1 look you ever want to have. The modularity of the system is almost zero.

Now, you take away even that with this Infusion Slot hack. And a hack it is. Its not a new slot, its the old upgrade slot re-purposed and renamed. This is your long term goal for gear progression – a ham handed hack?

And this isn’t the only issue, but I’ll keep this post short – Anet, you can clearly see in all the other posts and forums the conflict between the different desires of your too-large intended MMO audience.

Truth is, if GW2 is to survive, it can’t try to please everyone and end up pleasing very few with all the ad hoc, hybrid attempts to make one system to somehow magically unify everyone’s desires.

Finally, I just want to link something you guys seem to have forgotten, even though its on your own site:

http://www.guildwars.com/events/tradeshows/gc2007/gcspeech.php

Truth is, you are trying to make WoW 2.0 and I’m not saying that to be insulting. WoW appeals to a certain kind of player, not me, and those players aren’t “wrong” – they just like a different kind of game, and that game exists for them. GW2 needs to be a different game – but you won’t do that by trying to appeal to both the WoW-style gamer and the non-WoW style gamer.

Turns out, there’s no restaurant that serves every kind of food from every culture, and does it well. You’re going to have to narrow your choice of player base. Are you going to go with the progressionists, or with something a little less mainstream?

No.

Its not about a new set to grind, its about the terrible design of these new ascended items. This supposed new long term system is really just an ad hoc hack of the existing upgrade slot.

Disappointed. This new infusion slot system seems the beginning of an increasingly ad hoc gear system too many games have. Making more bonuses “baked” in just to make room for PvE specific upgrades is silly.

Worse, Anet is not even adding “challenge” to new high level content. They’re simply giving the monsters a new, more powerful attack which can only be countered with a new trinket. You either have it or you don’t. Nothing about skill or anything.

Its not even about gear grind…this whole system is just silly. Anet – you’re never going to please the full spectrum between hardcore gear grinders all the way down to casuals. You’re just going to end up with borked systems like this which end up pleasing no one.

Svenn.5209:

You might want to check out my post about this. I put up a very detailed solution on how to solve this problem.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions/Improvements-for-Collectors/first#post499627

The problem doesn’t need a detailed and complex solution. It needs a simple solution.

The best solution is one where we have 2 slots for each armor location. A stat slot and an appearance slot. Its simple and provides the maximum flexibility. However, Anet wanted to make money off of transmutation stones, so the best solution is a victim of monetization of the game. I’m not against Anet making money, or the gem store in general, but this is a case of the store effecting game design negatively.

Pendragon.8735:

I don’t know if YB and FA will see each other again. It seems possible that we could flip flop between 3 and 4. Though I think there is some reason for optimism that we can show better against CD than last time.

I’m not sure if DH or HoD can put up a good fight vs FA, though DH usually fights hard.

Has FA played TC yet, I think so, what is the lowdown on their strengths?

We fought them 2 weeks in a row. First it was BG/TC/FA – just after the BG infusion, so both TC and Ft. A got stomped. For some reason TC seemed to think we dragged them down further in that fight.

Week after, it was TC/FA/and some low tier server that pretty much never showed. TC farmed their borderland to rack up a high margin of victory (it was constantly nearly totally owned by TC whenever I was on). We matched up closer in NA prime time against TC, but their off peak was vastly better than ours.

Weakness? Hmmm, I guess as the RP server, they view themselves as honorable and never-say-die fighters. If you slight this attitude at all, well, they can be touchy about it. In general they seem like decent folk, except Crusaders of the Tarnished Coast. CoTC seems to like corpse dancing, spawn camping, and doing things like /point /laugh when there’s five of you forced back behind the BL spawn point gates, and there’s 30 TC waiting outside.

Pendragon.8735:

Holier than thou doesn’t make any one look good. Both sides have both good and poor sports. For as much “nice going” in the first couple days, there were dozens calling Yaks nothing but a zerg and complaining that FA didn’t have the numbers.

Ekove.4586:

The only reasons Yaks are not happy is because they might lose another matchup due to transfers mid way through the match..against an equally matched server initially…

And it is annoying that to this day FA keeps claiming to be outnumbered….come on, whether you got your transfers or not, you guys have the same numbers as us, and more sometimes (especially last night, we were completely outnumbered in every BL except our own). You would not have made this come back if you were as outnumbered as you claim, drop it already and stop pretending you’re spartans fighting the persian empire, and let’s have a good match for the last day.

There’s very few posts claiming FA is generally outnumbered. Certainly not “dozens” as in the first quote implies.

Its all been about off-peak coverage. Yak’s had better offpeak coverage over the weekend, and somehow FA had better weekday (as in workweek) off peak coverage. No one (well, very few I suspect), like having the scores heavily influenced off peak coverage issues.

If we did get transfers to help with off peak – well, what else was FA (or any server) supposed to do? Just leave huge gaps in coverage? Must all transfers happen only exactly during the new matching phase on fridays?

The match is now competitive for the last NA primetime, so let’s have some big fights. Yak’s will likely still win, but if FA narrows the margin of victory enough, its still up in the air who advances. Heck, probably big fights right before the reset tomorrow as well, unless Yak’s can keep their current lead through the night and morning.

Wow, out of game for several days and suddenly everything is topsy-turvey. It’s great if we got some off-peak coverage finally. But I still dislike the matches (thus ranking) gets mostly determined by off-peak coverage, whether we’re winning that or not.

Pendragon.8735:

We don’t have much morning crew (I don’t think) it was like that when I checked in a couple hours ago, so likely overnight, or even late last night, I know we started pushing points back up even then.

I logged in ~9:30am eastern this morning and the map was mostly green, maybe 20% Yak’s control.

FA doesn’t necessarily need to win the matchup to take the T3 slot that Henge’s fall will open up. We have a 34 pt ranking lead going into the match, so if we can limit the change in ranking between FA and Yak’s to less than 34, we can squeeze by. Right now Yak’s is estimated as gaining ~100 rank pts and FA 42, a difference of 58. Haven’t looked at the ranking formula in detail, but I’d guess a 10-20k?? loss could narrow the difference to less than 34.

Hopefully I can look forward to intense battles tonight.

Cogbyrn.7283:

I hope people don’t assume that FA is represented by a vocal/whining minority. It’s like saying all of Yak’s doesn’t understand Thief mechanics because one guy complained about a C&D Thief defending a point for a large number of minutes against their large zerg.

Its not whining to state the obvious – we have nearly nonexistent off-peak coverage which both directly hurts us and has follow on effects.

Does Yak’s have skilled players and organization? Sure, I saw that myself friday night and sunday morning. But is that the only reason they’re winning? No. Ignoring the off peak dominance is being willfully blind. And the advantages it gives when the next peak time comes around.

Winning/losing score-wise doesn’t bother me so much as the effects it has on our match ups. We either get to stomp lower tier servers (which is not interesting – in fact, those weeks I mostly skip WvW) or we face a constant uphill battle, knowing whatever gains made will be retaken uncontested in a few hours.

I don’t think the carts should be removed, but they are overpowered. I say this having used a cart on several occasions to almost single handedly drive back a substantial attacking force.

I would limit the number of carts on/within the walls of a fortification. Maybe 2 for towers, 2 per southern/northern side of a keep’s outer walls. Maybe 6 (but if they could be coded to be spread out) on Stonemist. Actually, maybe the better limit is an exclusion zone – no arrow cart can be build within X range of another.

They could probably us a 10%-20% damage nerf (depending if a build restriction was placed on them, like above).

People can talk tactics/strategy all they want – it can help a bit in WvW. But WvW is primarily determined by population and siege. And if you have the pop advantage, you pretty much get the siege advantage.

patricide.1062:

Now, as I have said time and time again, we have a strong alliance that works very closely together. THAT is what is making us strong. You may think we have tons of zerglings, but the honest truth is we have great response time and we are able to pool our manpower between maps to assist in any hot spots. This doesn’t get us tons of points in the first few hours, but it definitely works in the long run.

You guys may have great organization – and I’m sure it helps a lot. But don’t try and pretend the fact that FA has near zero NA off-peak coverage isn’t a huge help as well. That’s our server’s weakness, plain and simple. Whatever organization you have, its effect is massively multipled by having the whole map, and a whole (NA) nighttime to supply and reinforce up. It’ll get worse for us during the weekdays, when we have to go to work/school, so your night gains will last for most of the day.

Honestly, some of this WvW “advice” comes off as patronizing. I’m sure our comments about our coverage issues comes off bad to you guys. That’s the nature of things – winners don’t like their victories questioned, those on the other side don’t like being considered weak for the wrong reasons.

muhconstitution.4052:

I don’t really get how this is happening, unless we’ve had an influx of Oceanic/Asia/EU players in the past day or two. Every morning last week the entire map was owned by CD and we had to spend basically all US prime time regaining it.

Its not you, its us I enjoyed fighting Yak’s last night – we’re well matched at primetime.

FA has a very small off-peak presence. We have just enough dedicated off-peak players to beat servers lower than tier 4, but get overwhelmed against anything higher.

My main issue is I don’t want to get stuck in a cycle were one week we trounce in a lower tier, move up, then the next week have good fights but bumped down due to off-peak scoring, and so face a week of trouncing again. You can see how perpetually alternating between uphill fights (due to everything getting fortified overnight/weekdays) and just rolling over two smaller servers is not the awesome WvW experience I was hoping for.

But that’s nothing to do with Yak’s. The system is the way it is, and you take advantage of it or end up like us. Its really on Anet’s doorstep. Not saying its an easy problem to solve (and make off-peak still fun), but its one they should at least acknowledge.

Well, we’re going in as the highest ranked server of our tier – if we continue to fall behind 10k pts a night (and probably worse during the weekdays), our loss penalty will be much higher.

But, as you point out, we’ll be saved this week, and possibly next week, by the continuing descent of Eredon and Denravi down the ranks due to their population losses. But longer term, unless we get an off peak presence or Anet gets their something out of their somthings on nightcapping, we’re looking at that cycle of WvW for a while. Uncompetitive matches one week were we stomp, then get good fights for a week during primetime, only to be sent back down due to night capping, so we face another week of uncompetitively stomping two lower servers, etc, etc, etc

Some fun fighting in Yak’s BL last night. Unfortunately, I wake up and look at the score, as others have mentioned, and see we are again whomped by having a very minimal “off-peak” presence, with nearly the whole map blue.

So, looks like we’ll get sent down a tier or two again, where we’ll headstomp the other two servers, kicking us up again, be nightcapped back down, headstomp back up, get nightcapped, headstomp, etc…

To expand/clarify on my comments about short bow:

auto-attack – could use just a touch more damage. Or make the +5% SB damage trait more accessible. Actually, in general I dislike how the +X% damage on weapons traits (in any class) is tied to getting a specific set of attribute bonuses. This really needs (obvious a larger, all profession rework) a trait slot not attached to any of the attribute boosting lines (or available in all of them).

Choking Gas – this works well as a solo player, or possibly with just a few players. Great to put poison on a few trash mobs if fighting several. But due to the mechanics of poison, it just doesn’t scale. Once you fight a veteran or stronger mob that lasts more than 30-60 seconds, poison becomes very redundant if there’s several players around. In big boss fights, the duration stack of poison drops by a pixel or two on the timer before its refreshed. This, of course, is more an issue with the poison condition than anything else. Perhaps (like the other poisons thieves use) the choking gas can have an actually effect other than just inflicting the poison dot.

Cluster Bomb – overall, a great ability, and one that can take some practice to get the air denotations to be right for various situations. But I find the high arc of the shot to scale inconsistently with distance. Obviousy GW2 is not a reality simulator, but remember that the optimal distance angle is just 45 degrees. More practically, I’m wondering if maybe there could be a hold-release mechanic for this shot. Longer hold = greater angle/arc. I’m not talking about seige weapon long holds, but maybe a up to a second or two. Again, just for angle, not distance (a normal tap would just shoot flatter than currently).

kiwiburner.2186:

Uhm, you can still type in a value, you just have to push the enter key. Hadn’t crafted in a month and took all of 10 seconds (and 1 go of crafting only 1 item) to get it.

This is the new system. Get used to it.

Of course some people out of many are going to happen upon the correct method just by chance.

And why should players “just get used to it” if its terrible. Even taking the hitting enter thing out (which really makes no sense whatsoever) – the new box is tiny compared to the old one. Even clicking on it is annoying. Sure, I could get used to it, but why? Were people typing in their desired number of crafting runs too quickly for Anet? I doubt it.

The old box should be reverted, and if they want to add an arrow/scroll support, it should be a button/icon next to the old style box.

Shortbow – I feel this needs a little more umph! – not too much, I don’t want it to be fotm. One specific, I feel choking gas is great as a solo skill, but in groups isn’t useful, especially given it makes a combo field. Any veteran or greater mob seems to be under a constant full duration poison stack, so what good is one more set of poison attacks? I love cluster bomb, but I feel the arcing trajectory is off, or perhaps inconsistent? The high arc is great for castle walls (attack or defense in WvW), but hinders the usefulness on the open battle field.

Pistol Whip – needs a new purpose after the nerf. I don’t want it to be OP like before, but right now Headshot + sword auto-attack feels just as effective, if not more. You use 1 less initiative, you regain initiative (with auto-attack) and you remain mobile instead of rooted.

Flanking Strike – the main issue with this skill, imo, is the same with Serpent’s Strike on the ranger. The forced movement around your target really limits the skill. In tight area situations it can fail. In narrow ledge/bridge situations you have to be very careful or you’ll fling yourself off. And if the target moves a bit you often miss.

And, okay this is total graphics fluff, but I feel totally silly using dagger storm. The frozen form – on-tippy-toes with arms spread and locked while spinning around is, well, ridiculous. Maybe an animation dev can work on a more active, kung-fu-ish leapy type deal. Again, total fluff.

When did they do this, I haven’t crafted in a couple of weeks. Its horrible – I had no idea how to use the new system until it was explained to me. Revert to the old box…typing in a value is so much more convenient than scrolling.

Not sure if it was the patch, but after the patch instance sizes seem to be down. I was doing it in a 4 person (including me) instance, and I’ve had by far the best performance so far.

I think it really shows why having lots of other players is the main issue. Not only could I make it farther, more consistently, and – I was able to correct for mistakes in a previous jump with more reliability – because I could see where I was landing.

Anyway, if instances are just 4-5 players now, that might be good enough, if my last hour+ experience is to go by. Still think solo instance would be best tho.

Valca.1234:

Man, when people give advice, think about it and not dismiss it like that. Esturk and the others are giving proper advice as I too would have pointed out those method of jumping even when using a charr and if somebody were to pause awhile and think about what they wrote, it would have made sense to almost everybody. Sure, its harder in practice but that’s what people are doing to get around this added challenge in this jumping puzzle.

It’ll be totally off-putting for some people including me if it was by default a solo instance and I can probably imagine people making threads saying the game ain’t encouraging community bonding and pointing at the solo instanced jumping puzzle Halloween event as an example.

I know someone who is good at playing the TP for gold and I respected him for that but he can’t do jumping puzzles for nuts but after some advice and trials he could eventually complete it.

You are completely missing the point. Sure, its possible maybe you could just do it by pure timing, and no visual feedback. But that’s clearly not what Anet intended – the puzzle would be a lot different if it was.

And I don’t see how it being solo is off-putting. The inherent difficulty remains the same. Again, this is not a request for a nerf to the puzzle itself – simply remove the other players from it.

I have to ask, if you happen to get into a low-player instance of the tower, or if it happens to have no large characters (ie norn, charr) – how is that player skill rather than dumb luck. The session I made it the furthest, and more consistently made it farther, was one in which there was a single norn and no charr – just human,sylvari and asura.

Esturk.2183:

Joiry.2504:

Esturk.2183:

I understand the frustration, but you need to time the jumps based on the screen, not your character. Just remember that you are always in the middle of your screen.

You need to see more than yourself, you need to see what’s at your feet – what you’re actually jumping from, and what you’re jumping to. A quick survey of some jumping vids shows success is highly correlated with all the other players failing fairly early on.

Also, it doesn’t help when people try to intentionally grief, see the screen shot attached. I’ve also never seen so many anti-norn and charr comments in chat (note, I doing it on a human).

When you get it down, you don’t need to see much. All you need to remember is the direction and distance to jump. With enough attempts you will memorize each jump. I know this won’t make you feel better, but I could make that jump even with the big ’ol tree thing in the way.

Dude, its not a matter of “feeling better” – I’m not complaining about the basic difficulty of the jumping itself. I’m pointing out that the other players are the problem (through no fault of their own – unless they’re trying to grief like I showed – I’ve seen other instances too, bringing elementals along, etc).

Trial & error learning, when you cannot even observe what went wrong (ie did I jump too early, did I land in the wrong place from the last jump, etc) is not fun, its not interesting, its not a good experience.

Timing isn’t something you just develope. There needs to be feedback – and more than just, I fell and died. The whole point of the puzzle is to learn it – and its clearly visually designed. If Anet’s intention was it to be a purely timing thing – with no visual feedback other than you fail, then they’d have made the screen black for the whole thing.

I’m not asking for anything to be made easier in the puzzle itself. I just think that a lot of the frustration people are having is the side issues. The players in the way being the major one. The other is having to stand around doing nothing – that’s one of those things that builds up in the background, adding fuel to fire each time to miss a jump.

Esturk.2183:

I understand the frustration, but you need to time the jumps based on the screen, not your character. Just remember that you are always in the middle of your screen.

You need to see more than yourself, you need to see what’s at your feet – what you’re actually jumping from, and what you’re jumping to. A quick survey of some jumping vids shows success is highly correlated with all the other players failing fairly early on.

Also, it doesn’t help when people try to intentionally grief, see the screen shot attached. I’ve also never seen so many anti-norn and charr comments in chat (note, I doing it on a human).

I don’t mind a difficult jumping puzzle – I don’t mind having to learn the path and jumping and timing.

However, I do not want to have to stand around waiting after each failure, doing nothing. Then go through a (brief) cutscene. Then, have to deal with all the other players on the screen obscuring what I can see for the jumping puzzle.

Its not the difficulty. Its the design. Waiting around, other players in your way. That’s what’s frustrating, not having to learn a difficult jumping puzzle.

And if a solo instance isn’t possible, well, then Anet will have to rethink this puzzle.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Inquest_armor

Spendrik.2961:

How come no one talks about the free devil horns? I think they’re pretty cool. Oh wait, everyone gets them, therefore it’s meh?

Well, its a matter of taste I suppose. Personally I find them subpar – feels like Anet just didn’t put much effort into them. Nearly every GW1 holiday hat from the first couple of years looks better imo.

Kana.6793:

Joiry.2504:

So, my questions, in summary – does a skin really have to be owned by just a few people to make it special?

Yes, same as pretty much any real world product (excluding things that are special for sentimental reasons of course).

Any real world item?

If I buy a high end graphics cards and processor, I do it for better gaming performance, not because few other people have them. If I buy a coat that’s more expensive because the materials its made of work better to keep me warm, that’s the value I get out of it. If I buy more expensive ingredients to make dinner, I do it because they taste better.

Skins that take a lot of work or skill to get (rather than RNG) are of course a lot more special, but if they’re challenging to get then the result is still that only a few people will have them.

So, you’re sidestepping one of my points/questions. If the argument against making halloween items more available is that rarity makes them special, but the specialness is random, why make them rare in the first place? Everyone knows the “specialness” is dumb luck.

Plunder.8195:

You want to have every player and their grandma walking around with the Halloween themed weapons for the rest of the year?
That’s why they are hard to make/get. Same for any other unique skin.

You can still get the temporary skins somewhere in LA if you wish to. Why don’t you use that option?

The question is (if you read my post), why do you care if everyone and their grandma is walking around with halloween items? Does that really impact you? That is the heart of the questions I ask. Why are people hung up on a random, dumb luck obtained skin be a sign of uniqueness and specialness? I know, I know, people aren’t exactly always very rational, but still…

And second, again if you read my post, I have little interest in the halloween skins. I’ll likely save the keys I’ve earned in game for a holiday that does have skins I like (which, given my tastes, is unlikely – I find most skins like these too gaudy).

So, I hope no one takes this as a qq thread, or a qq about qqing.

First, some disclaimers. I have not opened any chests for halloween. I have not bought any keys for the event and, in fact, have not bought any lottery type item ever. I’m not against the gem store in principle – at some point I’ll likely get an extra character slot, maybe some storage, possibly even a skin if one shows up I like.

Second, I personally don’t particularly care for the halloween skins. The Mad Moon shield slightly interests me, but my only shield user is one of my least used alts. And, in general, most of the hard to get skins (dungeons, etc) also don’t interest me. So, I’m not really looking to make anything easier to get (ie gimmee now on a platter).

One argument is that rare skins have to be rare – otherwise they don’t give the owner a sense of “uniqueness” and feeling special. I remember in one thread a player talking about how one dungeon skin was his favorite looking, but because it had an easy to farm path at the time, too many people had gotten the set. And so it was “ruined” for him to wear, despite him liking it the most of all sets. I personally find that bizarre. If a set is my favorite, I’ll wear it because its so, not because of who else is wearing it. Heck, my favorite (overall) weapon set are the Krytan weapons, and they are super easy to get.

The second argument for rarity is that too many players are from the “instant gratification” or “WoW easy” mentality. That there should be effort and/or skill involved in getting rare stuff. Okay, let’s go with that. How is getting lucky with a super rare skin using chests a measure of effort or skill? I have about a dozen keys I’ve earned in game that I haven’t bothered to use. Say I use them for this event, and get a rare skin – I’m either instantly “special and unique” or potentially very rich, through no effort of my own, just luck. It likely won’t happen, but odds are, given the number of players, it will happen that some will open just a few chests and get really lucky.

So, my questions, in summary – does a skin really have to be owned by just a few people to make it special? Is it not cool because of the way it looks to you? And if rare skins are to signify specialness, is a random lottery the way to hand them out? A Legendary weapon (minus the randomness of the precursor) basically requires a huge amount of effort – completing/farming nearly the entire game’s content. Halloween skins are just dumb luck – so any specialness you may try to associate with them being rare really just seems an illusion to me.

Lwio.7942:

Or like Lotro’s hunter not have a pet, up the dps, traps etc. Or give us a choice dps and traps or pet, I know what I would choose

Here’s an interesting experiment I bet Anet will never do.

Take whatever Anet internally uses.measures the split of the “power” or effectiveness of rangers and their pets: ie 80%/20% or 70/30 or whatever. Allow a petless option for rangers, which gives a buff to abilities equal to only half of the “power” Anet thinks a pet represents. Do it for a month, data mine the heck out of ranger player behavior, and see the result. (note, this is not a solution to the pet issue, rather a way to measure how much players actually feel their pets are effective)

I’m willing to bet a significant, if not majority, of players choose the petless option, even tho in terms of “balance” they should be underpowered, only getting half back of what their pets would provide. And I bet in PvP and WvW the skew would be even higher towards petless.

And just to keep beating my drum, classes should be about player skill, not AI skill.

Its not just the score, any side who wins the graveyard shift sort of ruins it overall for the rest of the day, even if those other times are even numbers.

When one side wins the night, then you wake up, and find everything not just owned by the other side, but massively fortified. And arrowcarts everywhere – couldn’t move very far on FA BL without coming up against bottlenecks with obscene amounts of arrowcart coverage. And once a side has enough trebs, they can effectively keep any other in range trebs from countering them.

Limits on the siege weapons in WvW need to be lowered, or even remove arrow carts entirely. Its dominating the fights and I wonder why we even have different classes. This isn’t an attack on TC, but rather the game mechanics. You gotta use (abuse) the system or else it will be done back to you.

People focus on the orbs (which are a problem too), but when one side has all the artillery, evenly matched fights won’t ever happen even with equal numbers at primetime.

Wow, where to start?

Claiming pets just reduce to a DoT is silly. Its like saying everything is made of atoms, so we shouldn’t really bother with the difference between a rock, a tree and a glass of water. You already going in that direction by saying how an auto-attack is just another DoT. Sure, but you just reducing everything to damage, that occurs over time. Creating definitions like that is pointless.

Pets are more complex than DoTs. They move, they die, they get snared, etc. They can take aggro, they have utilities, etc. And mesmer illusions are really more than DoTs as well, though I wouldn’t really call them pets either. Clones don’t do any significant damage – they are there to distract and be shattered.

I’d take issue that other games “balance” their pets well. You may be able to roflstomp with them, but that’s not balance.

Furthermore, you totally ignore the fundamental argument I make. Pets are not player skill, they are AI skill. The skill is either lower to yours, or equal and greater. In the first case, its dragging down your performance, in the second its carrying you. And whatever percentage of the class’s power/effectiveness is placed in the pet, that’s the percentage to which your performance has nothing to do with you, the player.

“Balance” is generally viewed as the player’s skill determined an outcome, not the mechanics or AI of the game determined the outcome. You can’t get around that.

Carighan.6758:

How come other pet-based classes in other games don’t show this “inherently unbalanceable” problem?

Carighan.6758:

I was more talking about Rangers and Warlocks in WoW, Shadow Knights and Necros in EQ1, Necromancers, Sorcerers, Druids, Enchanters, Bonedancers in DAoC.

DaoC is actually not a bad example.
They also had F&F pet classes (Theurgist, Animist). While these were massively powerful for both PvE and PvP, they were for a very different reason than their pets or their general class power. They were required due to an arbitrary mechanic in PvE (they had to later add Call of a Thousand Storms to make midgard able to keep up in PvE). In contrast the general permanent pet classes were the pinnacle of PvE kill speed (due to focus pet reflection shield damage to facilitate AE grinding of targets), and had superior defence in RvR (this was more noticeable on the Necro than any other petclass), since they never had to expose themselves long enough for a target to become dangerous to them.

So yes, currently, Rangers have some issues.
The concept of a permanent pet, nope, that’s perfectly viable and balanceable.

First, the two disposable pet classes have a bit of the issue, but since they have little of their “power” invested in the pets, its less of an issue. Each pet is essentially one utility slot worth of the classes effectiveness. Those utility slots can be used or not used for disposable pets. The ranger, however, has the entire class balanced around the permanent pet – thus all skills, damage, etc have the pet out and functioning as an implicit assumption.

Second, I’m not seeing how any of your examples show that permanent pet classes are balanceable. You basically site a bunch of examples of the pet classes being, sounds like, overpowered. Which really proves my point.

Above a good example was made – the pet is an aimbot. Sure, not a true aimbot like in an FPS, but basically the same concept. However much of a classes power is invested in the aimbot, its that much non-player skill being used. Whether the aimbot is good or not is another issue. But its clear, the more power in a pet, the less player skills comes into the equation. Be that the pet dragging the player down or carrying the player to victory.

The best thing that can be done is to depower the ranger pet, return more of it to the player. The pets don’t have to be as weak as necro or engineer pets, and a new class mechanic could actually breath some life into the concept of a pet. I mean, is anyone really satisfied with “attack”, “return”, “passive/agressive” and the F2 ability? Its barely anything different than GW1, except when your pet goes, you’ve lost a good chunk of your effectiveness.

First, let me make the distinction between what I call “disposable” and “permanent” pet classes. Simply, necros and engineers are disposable pet classes. Their pets are designed for relatively quick turnover and not much of the class’s power resides in them. In fact, they are optional. A permanent pet class like the ranger has a significant portion of classes power in them, and they should (in theory) stick around for a while.

Second, understand I love rangers. Since way back in pen and paper AD&D days, back before so many thought of them as a “pet class” – before the concept of a pet class even existed. None of this post is about putting down the ranger.

Anyway, on to the main topic – a permanent pet is inherently unbalanced. Why? Simply the AI. A significant portion (20-30%?) of the class’s effectiveness is invested in the pet. That effectiveness is under the control of the AI, unlike non-pet classes that have complete control over their effectiveness. If the AI is poor, it drags the player’s skill down. If its too good, it carries the player. Even if it is somehow perfectly matched to the player’s skill, its still carrying the player – that’s 20-30% of your effectiveness you don’t have to think about, freeing you up to focus on the remainder. This is the core of the matter.

How to get around it? Well, one way would be to give the player complete control over the pet. Make them much more like a GW1 hero. Expose the full skill bar and give movement controls to the player. In fact, with the ground targeting system, you could probably implement a pathing system (ie multiple ground targeted locations to follow) and come up with some other clever things. However, all this would require a high threshold of skill to play the class, perhaps the highest in the game. While this might a few some happy, Anet will never do this. Rangers are too popular thematically to be a high barrier to entry class.

The only other solution I see is making the ranger more like a disposable pet class. At this point, those that dearly love their pets are likely sharpening their claws. No, I’m not advocating going back to a GW1 system that totally kittened pets. But, let’s think a moment about what has really changed from GW1 to GW2?

You still only have 3 basic commands (attack, return, passive) with the addition of one player controlled pet skill. If you want your pet to be able to do anything else, you have to use up a utility slot. Gasp, just like GW1. All that GW2 has done is shifted power from your character into the pet, given you one extra button, and a pet swap. All with a pet that can only hit stationary targets and dies horribly in AoE (of which, there is a lot).

So, I think the mechanic has to change, and it not be so pet focused. Rangers are about nature, wilderness skills, and yes, some level of animal interaction. I don’t have a perfect solution, but I think looking at the Engineer toolbelt is a good inspiration – its probably one of the two most interesting class mechanics in the game (honestly, most of the mechanics are subpar). The other is ele’s attunements. I could see a combination of these two – a sort of set of pet/non-pet toolbelt-like skills which are modified by some kind of nature attunement/utility skill choices.

Eg – the type of pet is the rough equivalent of the elemental attunement, and the skills it provides on the “nature belt” are thusly modified from this and the utility skills. Wolf/canine pets would give one set, birds another, etc. And the effects would depend on whether the pet is out or not (this requires a permanent pet storage option – or at least an “empty” slot so you could switch to no-pet).

Again, that’s all rather rough, and in fact, more of an example of ways of thinking of new mechanics rather than me saying “it must be this!”.

In short – you can’t ever balance a strong pet (ie perma-pet), because the AI will either always drag you down or carry you. Anet won’t ever give full control over pets, so a new class mechanic is needed.

BlackRabbit.1259:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiku

Animation glitch Is not nerf
Quickening Zephyr working Fine, Tooltip doesn’t lie
250’000 rangers are all wrong

Glitch unseen is fixed
quickness cannot catch arrows
rangers’ cries unheard

Passive Aggressive.3154:

Is there a game where crafting isn’t a tedious bore with only max level perks as a reason to even do it? Because it sure hasn’t been any of the games that I’ve played.

Yes. As the poster above me points out, SWG. It wasn’t perfect, had its issues, but really drove a good economy while a server still had a population.

Warhammer online had a decent idea for a crafting minigame, it was just stuck on a terribly limited underlying crafting system and was horribly implemented.

Allods Online had perhaps the most interesting mini-game for crafting I’ve seen in a themepark MMO. You had 6 rounds of dice rolls, giving possible negatives or positives to apply to one of three crafting scores. I can’t really explain it well briefly, but each round you made a decision based on several factors. Eg: do I accept a small negative now, to forstall a bigger negative later; accept a decent positive now to lock it in or gamble on a better positive later.

So, yeah, there are more interesting crafting systems out there. Are they usually in themepark MMOs, no. But then, GW2 is supposed to be innovative and outside the box, right?

Anet should make Discovery more of a minigame (or all of crafting). They already have plenty of minigames in the game, one more built on the same architecture would be a good return for a system that is considered major in most MMOs. After all, the reason I pay Anet money for their game is they’re supposed to be experts at creating interesting content and mechanics.

Edit – just to summarize, if your experience in crafting is purely MMO themeparks, yeah, you probably have never seen a interesting crafting system.

Passive Aggressive.3154:

Are you crafting smart? Leveling tailoring only via discoveries and for the most part only learning the shoulders, gloves, helm recipes to level with because they use the least amount of mats?

This pretty much tells you everything that’s wrong with crafting. What you’ve just said, what’s in all the crafting guides. You aren’t actually “crafting” – you’re just grinding through the lowest cost items to get to 400. Its just a means to get some level 80 exotics and legendaries. There’s no fun or interesting things to do.

Unless you follow a fairly rigid method of levelling crafting, its a huge time and money sink. It offers nothing that most people interested in crafting for crafting sake care about. Its just there for those that want to make one of the legendaries – ie players who probably wouldn’t even bother with crafting if it wasn’t needed for this.

Crafting is a bore and a grind. Discovery is not interesting in any way (its completely predictable and just becomes annoying after you figure the basic pattern out).

So, yeah, there is a method to level crafting easily (and I’ve followed it to an extent), but that fundamentally misses the complaint about crafting. Its neither fun nor interesting.

Proven.2854:

In the case of a sea of players, you have too much on screen. In the case of clearing a fight and looking for a handful go bags, you can hold down Left Ctrl.

As for changing badges to honor, right now badges are the one thing that can’t be efficiently “farmed”. You have to get a group and you have to do stuff, or you have to get to a location and defend. Both things botters have an overall hard time programming around. Still might be worth changing it to just objectives, but as I’ve been saying, the system now rewards most when you’re in small groups and skirmishes, and changing to something like honor for doing objectives would just benefit zergs more.

Its not simply about zergs (and trust me, I’d rather skirmish than anything else). Bags do literally spawn beneath the ground surface. I’ve seen just the top of the bag or its sparkly bit at ground level. And even if this wasn’t an issue, my general experience in WvW is, you move or you die, skirmish or zerg. Running around to find my bags back, visible or not, is not the purpose of WvW.

Its also the case that in a fight, you should be fighting. Not spamming to find your rewards. Its absolutely silly to have to do this. Do you have to pick up a bag to get your PvE xp? Do sPvP players have to pick up a bag to get their glory? No. And they would howl to the stars if they did.

In terms of bots, I don’t see how an honor points system would change this. Points would still come from player kills, just in different forms. it would be graded to your contribution – be that contribution damage, or in the form of buffs/healing to the players doing the damage.

I understand you like skirmishing over the zerg. Great, so do I. However, your argument that the current bad system somehow encourages skirmishing is weak. You want to encourage skirmishing – I’m sure there are a ton of better ideas.

I’d suggest 1 or 2 free transfers per month, reset with the monthly achievement (ie no rollover, use ’em or lose ’em). That would throttle bandwagoning a lot, but still leave open the option to switch servers longer term due to populations, queue times, whether you like the guilds on a server, etc.

“Badges of Honor – Should be a currency like gold or karma.”

This I think should get priority (over some bug fixes). The reward system is inadequate and not very fair. This new currency should reward activity other than just killing (like being a support player – I know, tricky to measure, but something rather than nothing is better).

I’ve found I have about a 1 in 40 chance of a badge drop on my shortbow thief, and about 1 in 10 drop rate on my engineer. I don’t know if that damage output or the fact I move around a lot so I might be missing bags.

Also – missing bags isn’t just a matter of zergs vs small groups. The bags themselves are sometimes invisible or under the terrain surface (sometimes you see the sparkly effect just about the ground). There’s really no good design reason badges aren’t directly deposited into your inventory.

However, I wonder if these discreet badges are really the best way to reward WvW. As mentioned above, they don’t reward support characters. And if it has to do with the amount of damage done, its even more unfair.

Anet should probably create a currency like karma, call it “honor” for example, and award little bits for various activities. Some for how much damage you contribute to a kill, or for being the person who significantly buffs/heals others who are killing.