Guild Wars 2

I’ve been enjoying the dungeon, and glancing now and then at the massive hatestorm with it, however the only real issue I personally have with the dungeon (besides disconnect issues) is how much it splits players up.

I think Anet went a little bit overboard with the amount of difficulty levels. Not only does it make it much harder to actually find a group for your character’s specific level, it also makes it a big PITA to group (well, “progress”) with guildies unless you all decide to not PUG whatsoever.

I’ve gone back to lower levels to help other guildies try to catch up to my level in hopes that we could be on the same level and progress together, but it just doesn’t end up working out. Most of our guildies are on completely different levels.

And since the difficulty doesn’t really change at all (not that I noticed) besides going into a new +10 tier it just seems sort of pointless. I think it would’ve been alot better had they cut down on the levels a bit perhaps making it either 1 tier every 5 levels and just require 2 runs to upgrade a level?

Or perhaps just have a progress bar to upgrade to the next tier so the 1-10 tier simply becomes an Exp bar of sorts that you fill up doing 1-10 runs. And if the difficulty from 1-10 actually does change (again not very noticable really) then just take the average progress level of each party member and set the difficulty for that tier (with anyone 11+ counting as lvl 10).

Ex : 5 people group up with levels : “24, 20, 6, 9, and 1” (first 2 count as lvl 10) group can only do Tier 1 Difficulty at difficulty level : 7.2

Atleast this way the difficulty levels wouldn’t fragment the playerbase/guild members so much. (LFG Tier 1, LFG Tier 2, etc).

That skill is definately very very strong.

Although instead of reducing the pull range, I think a good compromise would be to make it suck targets onto the center point instead of yanking them past the curtain, this would nerf it’s ability to fling people off walls and ledges a bit but also make it much better tool for gathering things to be aoe’d, and would work much better with iWarden.

Yay/Nay? =p

I kinda felt bad for Zhaitan. Poor thing just sat there holding onto that tower for dear life as we slowly and painfully killed him with fireworks. Like we were celebrating at the same time as we were killing him, as if we already knew he wouldn’t win (it was obvious).

“All I can do is teleport a bunch of minions around and that didn’t work oh no what do I do now?!?!?!”

~~Pew, pew pew~~

“Nooooo stop it please!”

~~Pew, pew pew pew pew~~

“Go cute little Dragon worm snake thingies! You’re my last hope!”

~~Pew, pew pew pew pew~~

“That didn’t do kitten! NOOOO!!!!!!”

Destiny’s Edge : “WE DID IT, sorry for being dead the whole time”

While it’d be nice to be on the OP side of things for the sake of simply not being bad.

I don’t want to be OP. I just want to be FUN. Thief and Mesmer were my first 2 classes starting from Beta, it’s just too easy.

I just want to see how builds/skill/playstyles fleshed out and have the various options other classes have, and things to make people jealous of us.

Choose Engy.

You will NOT be dissapointed.

Plus they’re getting alot of changes with the patch, most likely buffs. Necro we still have no idea yet.

There’s no harm in rolling both and just playing til you see which one fits more, and then see the changes with the patch and go from there.

To the poster above me, I’d say engy’s are much better team condition scrubbers. Elixir Gun and Thrown Elixir trait, enough said. Necro has a broken Plague Signet that doesn’t scrub and a 5 second condition convert on a 60 second cooldown. Putrid Mark is NOT a reliable ally condition scrubber whatsoever.

Engy can do alot of neat things.

The only thing necro’s have over other classes as far as Condition Removal is having condition transfer baked into 2 weapon skills, and the healing skill. The former can be unreliable at times because of the delay. We do ok because of it, but it really limits our weapon choices.

And as a necro, I’d take Null Field over Condition/Boon wells anyday. =p

Only good thing about boon conversion is for stability and that’s what Corrupt Boon is for.

Mesmer.

Unless of course they sneak up on you which any of them with half a brain should be doing. =p

But you do get like 0.3 seconds to react to the initial CnD/Mug and blink or decoy/dodge. And the clones/distortion can make it a PITA to get the combo on you.

Aedelric.1287:

Spoiler -

I will try not to be too harsh, but it is hard to do when he literally does everything I am about to type.

He is a horrid glory thief, constantly takes credit for the players hard work. Has a position of authority that he did not earn and at every corner he shows he is not capable to lead.

Firstly Claw Island onwards is Trahearne’s personal story, not the player character, which instantly irks anyone who is paying attention to what is going on around them. Seriously, this is meant to be my (your) story.

I honestly thought I was back at school when he asked me to quiz the pack people what they thought of him, what is he fourteen? He steals credit from the priory in regards to the cleansing ritual as stated above. He comes right out of left field and acts like he is the player characters BFF, without even earning it like Forgal and the rest do, he even completely forgets you met before if you have the Sylvari origin. He rarely makes any decisions as the leader constantly relying on the player character to make almost all of them.

He states multiple times how hopeless the situation is and that members of the pact are throwing their lives away, while they are right in front of him, seriously bad leadership. His speeches are delivered quite flatly, not entirely the voice actors fault, it is correct for a Sylvari to be emotionally impared as most seem to be, but the speeches all lack that `Commander Shepard´ special something. As for his use in combat, he is pathetic but that would be nitpicking.

I must say it really was a feat of writing, but Arena Net did manage to create a character more disliked than the glory thief Kormir, who stole Godhood from us. That is not a good thing by the way!

It boggles my mind that anyone can find any endearing qualities in the character.

“Yeah… hey commander? I don’t know what to do, any ideas?”

~Later on~

“I did it!” ~whispers~ “Thanks commander, now go do this”

Derk.3189:

Knote.2904:

As long as there are actual boss fights with actual mechanics, and it’s challenging and fun, I frankly don’t care lol.

BUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUT… I’m not counting on it.

This. Arenanet’s new mini dungeon has shown some promise. Fights like the Vexa’s lab boss is really quite fun. Some other boss fights really should get updated. Most of the HotW bosses; I’m looking at you.

This is what annoys me. They’ve shown they CAN make good fights.

Sovereign Eye of Zhaitan (while easy) was awesome, that bullet spray move.

Rhyse.8176:

I think it’s because he sounds like that Xtranormal character.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qN0W2j-XWR8

I’m so tempted to make a video about trahearne lol.

“No! The ritual failed.”

He’s whiny, lifeless, and get’s so much credit for stuff you never see him do.

Oh, except for when he upstaged my necro by summoning 5 flesh golems and everyone praised him for saving the day despite the fact that he literally does nothing while I kill everything for 99% of the story.

That’s all.

And that voice acting…. my god it’s like he didn’t even care.

As long as there are actual boss fights with actual mechanics, and it’s challenging and fun, I frankly don’t care lol.

BUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUT… I’m not counting on it.

I don’t see how this game will go on w/o skill splitting.

Spvp, WvW, and PvE are 3 COMPLETELY different games. Trying to balance everything for all 3 seems impossible and insane to me.

There are too many events that simply spam waves of mobs at you with seemingly zero HP scaling. Thus you get this competitive tagging mess of 20 weak mobs spawning and instantly being mowed down by aoe to get loot, repeat this for 5 minutes or so and that pretty much sums up 90% of events.

On top of this tougher mobs (Champ/Vet) aren’t nearly as rewarding for the time and effort it takes to kill them.

My suggestion is a fairly simple one and can kill two birds with one stone. Have Champion and Veteran mobs count as multiple mob kills in terms of loot dropping. Basically you kill a Veteran Mob and it drops 2-3 regular mobs worth of loot, while Champion mobs can drop 5+. Suddenly they are actually rewarding and worth the time to kill instead of being compelled to skip them.

To take this a little further, since there are many different levels of diffculty for Champion and Veteran mobs you could give them a star rating based on said difficulty that also corresponds with their loot drops. (Some veteran mobs actually take awhile to kill while others don’t, and there are Champ mobs that are pretty easy/quick as well).

A very rough example :

1 Star Vet/Champ – 1.5x/3x loot
2 Star Vet/Champ – 2x/4x loot
3 Star Vet/Champ – 2.5x/5x loot
4 Star Vet/Champ – 3x/6x loot
5 Star Vet/Champ – 3.5x/7x loot

Now, back to the events. What you can now do to fix this tagging mess, while also making events more fun, difficult and varied, is do what you did to the Bridge Event in Kessex Hills.

Instead of massive waves of centaurs being spawned to be farmed at the bridge event, now only 2 centaur workers spawn at a time, while tough Veteran Mobs spawn to fight the players, if even more players show up a Champion Mob actually spawns, and then Catapults are actually sieging the players.

This is much better than just throwing waves of mobs at players, and with the rewards increased on Champ/Vet mobs it can still be good loot. Of course this doesn’t mean mob zergs can go away completely, but a good balance of tough boss mobs and moderately sized packs of mobs to flank players would be great.

This would eliminate alot of the difficulties of tagging as well. Of course another good band aid fix would to actually give regular mobs some hp scaling in zergs. =p

Cool, so that IS considered a bug?

If you really want to fix it.

Remove mug.

That simple. A 10 point trait that gives a free 6k hit on steal? I thought it would’ve been changed before release, but it wasn’t lol.

It’s like the biggest factor in burst for nearly any thief build.

Or atleast make it a 30 point trait in Trickery. If you really want that extreme steal burst then you have to give up your Power or Crit tree.

LOOL.

So you guys are going to sit out and miss an event over some silly overreaction.

This just keeps getting better and better.

“We’re just gonna sit here…. they’ll miss us, just watch, they’ll regret this….”

“Stand your ground guys….. "

This actually sounds pretty good.

It’s better than basic Diminishing Returns for sure.

All this does is gate higher difficulty for those that want the challenge, w/o impeding casuals who just want to experience it. It’s actually sort of brilliant when you think about it.

Yeah, it’s literally just magic resist gear from vanilla wow. I’m not sure how much I like this idea. Just tying this dungeon gimmick to specific gear, it’s more obvious than requiring a certain gear level for DPS races.

Yes for new tier of gear with small stat difference.

Nay for Agony gimmick tied to gear. Not sure if I like this totally.

Only the infusions will be required and probably change for each dungeon, thus all this really is an attunement/gating thing, which isn’t TOO bad, unless said infusions requires the previous dungeon to get, which is essentially a mini gear treadmill.

If it’s just a small attunement thing I don’t mind that too much, but it’s clunkier having to add a whole new tier of gear for it.

I’d rather just have the new tier of gear w/o this infusion/agony nonsense, it’s just an annoying dungeon gimmick tied to gear upgrades which I’m not fancying.

Having a tiny bit of stat difference on the new gear to have something a little more to work for I think is perfectly fine.

I like the new rarity of gear, an extra tiny stat difference to aim for.

I’m not sure I like how the dungeon “gimmick” is tied to specific gear though with infusions.

TBH I can tolerate this possible pseudo-treadmill if the content is actually fun. If this is just more of the same old rehashed “Anet version of hard” dungeons then screw that.

Atleast WoW fights were fun, IMO.

Most devs are thick skinned.

I had to laugh when I first saw they were doing this before the halloween event.

Sure scummy f2p MMO’s do them, but they were 100% free. I payed $60+ bucks for this game. Just give us good quality skins and fluff and we’ll buy them, it’s really that simple. If they truly did this to have the items be “rare” then they should only be attainable in game through something like a dungeon or w/e, not on the cash shop.

Unfortunately even if alot of people have learned their lesson and don’t buy into it this time around there are still stupid rich people that will spend stupid amounts of money on these things, there are people that do that in all the past F2P mmo’s i’ve played, I’m talking thousands.

And while I don’t normally mind this, as it basically gets these super rich people to blow their money on a game to support the developer, it’s making these cool skins completely exclusive to them which isn’t very fair.

Buy this new super awesome mega epic legendary sword for only 10,000 Gems! As a reward to only the super rich that support our game! You other lowly peasants can enjoy this hat you can wear in town.

^ This is wrong actually. The strongest way to PvE is NOT conditions, in fact in many situations conditions are pretty awful. Pretty much any grouping activities, mobs will either have maxed condition stacks or will die too fast and power is just superior.

Staff/Dagger and Life Blasting + Wells with a power build is much better (overall) and works for everything. Plus nothing beats a double well + Life Transfer combo. Of course you could combine all 3 if you really wanted to, double well, epidemic, life transfer.

Conditions are fine if you’re solo.

You can go either path, Power build with Wells, or Condition build with Epidemic, that’s really about it for leveling, you could also take 20 points in Spite for 30% minion dmg and slot minion utilities instead which is also decent but you won’t have the same aoe dmg.

Deadly Spirit Guy.4769:

“For Great Justice”

Edit: Actually, I rather like the dialogue between the asuran child and the charr, makes me feel like there’s more acceptance between the races now.

It’s “For Grape Justice”.

GregT.4702:

I really can’t see Primordus being the whole point of GW:EOTN, Zhaitan being the end boss of vanilla GW2, and then having us take down Bubbles in a one-weekend event.

Anticlimactic much?

Considering how the Zhaitan fight went….

It wouldn’t be new. =p

No it doesn’t.

15 god kitten chars.

Yes, yes, and yes.

It’d be cool if it had something to do with Orr.

Considering Orr used to be submerged and everything.

If I may, I’d like to expand on this idea, somewhat, in a way that could work in tandem with Death Shroud.

I was thinking about our pets, and the pet system Age of Conan Necro’s Had. I think they could implement that here, where basically you have 10 pet slots (in the form of dots), you can fill them up with an assortment of pets:

Mild melee pets being 1 point.
Mild ranged pets being 2 points.
Beefy melee pet with aoe ability being 3 points.
Ranged pet with cc being 4 points.
Strong ranged nuker pet being 5 points.

Etc. So you fill out your arsenal of minions using this point system. 2 strong nuker pets, or 10 weak melee pets, or 5 weak melee pets 1 strong nuker pet, etc.

NOW, if you don’t want to use pets, you could fill these slots with buffs/passive/procs using your Pact system. In a way, it could work similar to how trait trees do now. Each point commited to a Pact type would give a passive buff/effect per point, and each point benchmark (every 3/5/7/10 or w/e) of the same Pact type could change how Death Shroud or its skills work.

Using that you could modify Death Shroud completely to fit your playstyle, or use the standard death shroud to be a Minion Master, where as Death Shroud is there for survivability and to support your pets instead of being a standalone powerhouse.

They would have to completely create a new UI from scratch for this, similar to the Ranger Pet Menu. But my god if this ever happened it would be incredible.

digiowl.9620:

Ah yes, i have noticed the lack of affected width.

Yeah, it would be nice if it was changed to a splash/explosion effect or just had a much wider width.

I’ve been mulling this over in my head for a little while.

I was mainly thinking about how, as a class that’s designed to absorb hits as opposed to avoid them, Death Shroud/Life Force having a flat dmg/hp value, becomes inferior to avoidance with dmg (in general) being so high.

PvP, and dungeons mainly, there is high dmg everywhere being thrown around, simply having 2 life bars is not as good as being able to avoid most of it completely, or avoid it when it really matters.

On top of that our self healing really isn’t that great, you would think it would be considering the Blood theme/lifesteals etc, pretty much all of our strong healing is tied to one overpowered Healing Skill (Well of Blood) with healing power. However this is completely different topic.

Back to Death Shroud, something that made of me think of this was one shot mechanics you find in spades in Dungeons. Being able to Death Shroud at any % and completely ABSORB an entire One Shot mechanic, feels…. incredible, and unique (although not too different from a block/dodge/invuln of course). So I was thinking, perhaps instead of having a flat HP value, Life Force/Death Shroud could instead be sort of like a flexible Distortion (mesmer) effect.

For example, while in Death Shroud, you would be completely invulnerable, basically completely absorbing whatever is thrown at you with no effect (Or just basically taking 0 direct and condition dmg). And instead of being reduced by the dmg dealt, it will simply decay at a much higher than that it does now, say 10% per second.

Obviously this sounds kind of broken, and it would definately need to have the rate at which you can gain Life Force changed a bit. At the same time, this would affect our dmg considering we rely too much on Life Blasts (in power builds) for dmg. My thought was Death Shroud skills would be completely about Utility and instead we’d have access to our weapon skills while inside. The 3 skills could simply be made to be our f2-f4 skills. Atleast this way our weapon skills don’t need to suffer at the expense of Death Shroud.

You could also take this a little further, and have your weapons skills be SLIGHTLY improved or adjusted while inside Death Shroud, some slight extra effects, or procs, or something rather than just extra dmg. The point is to keep Death Shroud MAINLY a defensive mechanic that gives access to some utility skills, and not be our main dmg tool.

digiowl.9620:

Knote.2904:

All you can do is try to using Staff auto’s to pierce

Soul Reaping VI makes Life Blast pierce as well.

Not as good IMO.

The hitbox on the projectile is alot smaller than Staff Auto’s.

It’s a pain trying to hit more than one target with piercing Life Blasts, good luck trying to tag with that.

If you’re talking about Dagger Power builds, part of the problem with us compared to the thief, we’re designed to be bulkier and tank dmg, while thieves are squishier but avoid it. So off the bat we’re at a disadvantage in melee just because of how this game works.

Mobs, especially in dungeons, spew out so much dmg, so naturally the more dmg there is being thrown around, complete avoidance becomes better and better and suddenly, having a 2nd health bar means squat.

Another problem is that we actually rely on Death Shroud for alot of our dmg, our weapon skills are g-imped because of it. But at the same time Death Shroud is main survivability mechanic.

If you’re soloing/leveling, conditions do fine.

If you plan on doing the boring competitive tag farming in Orr I suggest another class.

I rolled a warrior to faceroll tag whenever I decide to farm events, just a billion times easier spamming 1500-2000 dmg auto attacks every 0.5 seconds to tag mobs that die within literally 1-3 seconds after becoming vulnerable.

As I said before, AoE direct dmg for necro’s is completely cooldown based. We’re just not that good at tagging in those extremely zerged events.

That’s not the only way to make money however, and it is pretty boring to begin with, so unless it’s really important to you, you should be fine. Plus if you group up constantly any mediocre dmg you can fit in usually gets you decent drops.

Unless they’ve fixed it, that trait gives Sceptre bleeds a 45% increase not a 33%, and only for the auto.

I’ve been facerolling bads with my necro since beta, that doesn’t change a thing however.

It’s a kitten good thing they buffed wells when they did, we wouldn’t really have anything to use as a crutch.

Yeah pretty much, we’re very cooldown dependant, and our weapon skills overall are just bad. We rely on Death Shroud and Utilities for alot of our dmg.

Also the only mark that actually does decent dmg is Putrid Mark. The rest do like 200 dmg and with power will at most crit for like 400-500.

All you can do is try to using Staff auto’s to pierce, lay down the underwhelming mark dmg, and space out well and Life Transfer cooldowns.

There’s also the bone minion explosion if you feel like dealing with that.

I’m going to assume you’re talking about tagging here. =p

Dee Jay.2460:

Knote.2904:

To be fair, while Thieves do need changes, this has to do with WvW.

Stats are way, way, inflated there compared to Spvp.

How so?

Are you serious? Oo

You have stats on every piece of gear in pve, including all jewelry slots, and weapons.

Also most of the burst comes from Mug, which is an incredibly OP trait imo.

Then again, those do look like numbers you could get in Spvp against a squishy.

I’d rather do hardcore 3v3 with teammates than Conquest any day.

There is still ALOT of strategy, and on the fly strategy that is just addicting, although that depends on how small the TTK is….

And really, conquest is just boring. If they want to stay away from just normal deathmatch for Esports then they need something with more depth and will have more varied play than Conquest.

But god this game desperately needs a competitive solo queue.

To be fair, while Thieves do need changes, this has to do with WvW.

Stats are way, way, inflated there compared to Spvp.

I found them dissapointing.

Why would I want to spend 100g+ to look like a Zojja wannabe?

More like what’s going to happen to all the past zones?

They haven’t even been touched. (Maybe 1-2 tiny things)

You’d think with the “whole game is endgame” slogan they would work on the replayability of old zones, new events, revamping old events to be more challenging and interesting instead of mob spam, and having better rewards for higher levels and maybe even unique rewards.

A little bit off topic, but similar problem. I see the page for the Lost Shores all this shiny new stuff or w/e, but all I can think is “So all these zones are just being thrown away?”

Until it’s impossible to do all the content without the max level gear, this isn’t a gear treadmill.

Axes are for cutting trees.

Or for warriors to tag mobs with.

Yeah I have the same issue. Settings don’t make a kitten difference for me.

My CPU isn’t very strong, but I believe it’s because it’s AMD and this game has problems with AMD CPU’s or something like that.

And they’re still working on it. There was something on reddit about it I think.

My specific set up runs this game perfectly. Therefore it must run perfectly on every other set up.

^ Logic.

Personally, the performance is just awful for me.

Until we see some more improvements in optimization I probably won’t be seeing much WvW for awhile.

Also people just being too hard to kill sometimes. Makes me almost miss Warhammer a bit. Not only could I play a healer and go full blown support/rezzer, coordinate with a high DPS melee and sneak up on a group of people and go to town supporting him, but I could also go play a DPS char and be able to set up kills even in zergs.

Here it’s just, spam aoes or w/e is it in range, and never get a kill unless they die from something else. Get caught out of position a little? It’s ok, dodge roll your way back into your zerg and heal, if you get downed, 5 people instantly rez you.

And on top of the lag it’s too hard to be useful in these situations. Only satisfying thing to do would probably roam and try to find a 1v1.

Well if it’s only “slightly” stronger than exotics, then that’s optional, and they’re not wrong.

Exotics aren’t mandatory either.