Guild Wars 2

I am sitting on a healthy 27 (have only spent one since HoT).

I looked through my achievements the other day and it looks like a sizable chunk of them are from the Hero tab. You get one from each story step achievement from the look of it. So say you’ve never played an Asura… you can go create one and play their story stuff up to level 30. That’ll give you 3 points in total if I’m not misreading my achievements. You don’t need huge amount of characters slots either… once you have level 30 story complete, you can delete the character and start over the process for another race.

If you do that for each race you haven’t played, that’s quite a few points for relatively low effort. Looks like you also get one for fully joining each of the Priory, Vigil, and Whispers.

I’m not sure where the rest of mine came from tbh.

I spent the past hour or so doing some events in Verdant Brink. After reviewing my inventory, I have something like 5-6 different types of bags in there, if you count the different colored tiers.

It’s a bit disappointing, considering how tidy Silverwastes was. Luckily, this character has quite a bit of inventory space, but I can’t imagine trying to manage all the different kinds of bag drops if I was working with limited space.

I don’t even get how there are so many from one zone. Like there’s Heirloom Seed, Vined Cache, Fallen Adventurer, Bag of Masterwork Gear, and (I think from a story quest I did) Verdant Brink Supplies. And that’s not even counting if you end up with blue Vined Cache and yellow Vined Cache at the same time, for example.

What I’m trying to say, you might want to look into it because it makes your zones look like a disorganized mess.

Seera.5916:

It depends on what you view as the greater evil: an incomplete trait line or a complete trait line with non-ideal traits.

Labjax prefers having a complete trait line over an incomplete trait line even if the complete trait line would have traits that are not [all] his ideal choice.

ANet had to choose between the two methods and no method is the preferred method of all players. Some prefer the one we have now. Others prefer the one Labjax offered. Assuming of course, the chose the one you want to unlock method isn’t a reasonable choice given the limitations of the code.

Yeah, that’s a good way to put it.^^

It’s actually very different because you’d have a full trait line much quicker. The choice aspect would be much the same, however.

Thematically, working through all the small stuff to get big stuff may make a kind of sense. Mechanically, it makes zero, since you are already level 80 and elites aren’t even hidden behind something like masteries (e.g. there’s not even fake level restrictions to getting your elite spec unlocked… the closest to it is that some HP are hidden behind masteries, but you need only the most basic of masteries now that the HP cost is only 250… that is, if you need masteries at all… if you go full Tyria and then Maguuma, I’m not so sure you do anymore).

You see what I’m saying? Like, mechanically… the restriction of the trait path is completely arbitrary. If it was restricted by mastery level or something, then it would make sense. But it’s not.

I guess I look at it kind of like… if I am level 80, why shouldn’t I be able to go straight down the line if I want to? Like… is it supposed to be arbitrary or is it supposed to matter. I wish their minds would be made up on that.

Edit: This was directed at Esplen, to be clear.

Zetsumei.4975:

I’ve not actually been killed by a sniper yet, I always seem to melt them waiting to see this infamous one-shot people are talking about lol.. is this an issue that comes with standing still or?

I realized that comment sounds incredibly condescending lol but I mean it in a genuine way, maybe its because I primarily wvw/pvp im never standing still and the sniper seems to never be able to cast the line attack fast enough as well as the animation being pretty obvious.

It’s probably the PvP instincts. PvE has a lot more “stand here and DPS mob” kind of mechanics, generally speaking.

Due to the fact that Elite Specs are Level 80 only and thus have no level restriction on the traits (only point restrictions) I think it would make sense for them to operate a bit differently for order of trait unlocking.

The best version of this would be if we could choose what to unlock next – whether to go toward the next trait line, or grab another one inside the trait line we’re at. If that would require too much UI reworking, then I’d be happy with the following alternative:

Instead of A, BBB, C, DDD, E, FFF

Go A, B, C, D, E, F

Then: B, D, F, B, D, F (or: Then BB, DD, FF)

Where A, C, and E are the minor traits and B, D, and F are the major traits.

This way you have a full trait line unlocked quicker. This alternative would not give you any options to choose which full line to get, unfortunately, but it also wouldn’t require any UI reworking. All that would need changing is some reordering of the unlocks in the Training panel.

Thoughts?

Kobra X.6903:

Its not a theory, they did this

They merge topics a lot. There is the occasional deletion, I’m sure, but only if something is unnecessarily rude and incendiary. I have never seen a well-mannered complaint topic disappear.

Thanks for your entries.

Given the limited number of them and the fact that some people are showing up with them at the last minute, I’m going to extend the deadline to Sunday, in the afternoon: November 1st at 1pm Eastern Standard Time.

So if you want to squeeze in an entry, you’ve still got some time. That gives you roughly 24 hours from now.

Thanks for your interest and participation. Loving the creativity!

Eh, I read it out of curiosity. There isn’t a lot of “reviewing” in there. Seems like he describes new features from a clinical standpoint more than he actually gives an opinion on them.

The normal level ones, I’ve started popping a Shiro Daze on them as Rev and then hitting them hard, to try to take them down before they can stealth.

The elites, veterans, and champs are harder to manage because you can’t as easily burst them down. I know it’s gonna sound like a lame solution, but I find the best way to handle a lot of these new mobs is to burst them down.

Like that Portlandia sketch “put a bird on it,” except replace that with “burst them down.” What do we do? BURST. THEM. DOWN.

CC is the other theme as well, with HoT. Many of the high level mobs have breakbars and breaking those bars can do serious damage to their cellphone’s signal… er, I mean, serious damage to their ability to function.

Ok I Did It.2854:

When you contact support, you are not contacting the dev’s they are 2 completely different teams.

This.

Nor do devs make the call on what support is and isn’t supposed to do. Dev is short for developer.

Developers make the game. Most of them have the managerial experience of a gnat. A handful manage people and larger things, such as the game director. Most devs have zero experience running a company on the financial end.

People sometimes talk about devs as if they are all executives of the company. Nothing could be further from the truth. If a game company has 5 people in total, they might all have an executive say, but Arenanet is obviously not a 5 person company.

Seera.5916:

It’s supposed to be something that shows you’ve played the entire game.

I desperately wish someone would explain this reasoning because it didn’t make sense to me a year ago and it still doesn’t make sense now.

First, let’s get this out of the way… this is not a complaint thread. And if you come in here to tell me “not to complain” or “play something else” or “this is what you asked for,” please just hit the X on your browser and do something else.

This is feedback in the form of my reaction to the Exalted Weapon Cores that you can purchase from the vendor in Auric Basin.

1) The core recipe has no information on how it’s used to make an auric weapon and I don’t see any other auric pieces on the vendor, so I guess this is a trial and error process until people have guides up. Kinda confusing what the deal is here.

2) So I bought an Exalted Greatsword Core to see what the recipe is like. Requires 10 Auric Ingots (an account bound material) which are each made from 30 piles of Auric Dust (another account bound) and 30 Auric Slivers (tradeable). So far, it looks like the only way to get these materials is opening the chests under Tarir in AB. There are enough chests you can probably get 30 or so Dust in one run. The Slivers seems to be more rare.

Oh and the keys to open the chests you have to buy, I’m pretty sure, with currency for that map. So basically farm AB a crap ton to get the mats for this.

3) I feel deeply overwhelmed looking at this recipe. If I ignored it and farmed AB a bunch of times, it probably wouldn’t be that bad. But I can’t help but scratch my head at the fact that I got an Auric Weapon for free from one of the story missions and yet I need to go through a zone-specific, account-bound process just to craft the CORE for another one. I don’t know what else is needed after that, as there seems to be no recipe for the weapon itself.

As far as I can tell, this is just for an exotic, too. An exotic and a skin.

I am ok with long-term goals, but looking at the core, I am overwhelmed, confused, and feeling like there are a million things that are far more interesting to do.

Bleak.5796:

Geez. While indeed this is a questionable design choice (probably not even intended) people overreact over every little bit.

Welcome to the internet.

Yeah, I don’t know what happened here. Seems like a mistake, since collections are account bound. It’s user error waiting to happen.

Lauren.3061:

I’m finding the mentor tags annoying in most cases. I can both agree and disagree here, though. I think there’s some people with them who genuinely want to help (the person described above who led a thoughtful and detailed walkthrough on hero points in Maguuma for example) but it seems like most maps I’m in now are just covered with these tags, and I just find it’s incredibly cluttered and distracting. A majority of the time they’re not speaking either (perhaps just to their guild or group?). I think a select few are trying to use the tags to be helpful, but most are just putting it up to flaunt it or something?

I’m not sure what a good solution is here, but I would like to see these tags rethought a bit.

Hmm. This gives me a thought (I’m brainstorming). If they implemented a toggle for mentors to allow their tag to only show to party members, then in cases of small guild/friend groups, they could use that toggle as a courtesy so that their friends can see it but not the whole map. That way if a map has a lot of splinter groups of friends running around, it’s not going to be cluttered with a mentor tag on all of them.

I agree with you, SnowHawk, that Commander tag getting a special chat designation such as “[Comm]” would be awesome. The tech is clearly there, considering mentor tags, so it shouldn’t be too hard a thing to implement and it’s not like it’d hurt anything.

Megaserver should really reserve your slot in the server for a short duration if you DC. Not sure if they can detect the difference between that and logging off though. It’s one of those ideas that is great in theory.

I think the overarching problem here is not so much Dragon Stand itself, but the idea that there is no recompense for DCing in the middle of an event. IF you’re in a party and IF you’re lucky, you can get back in. Otherwise, you are just screwed out of whatever event you were working on, no ifs, ands, or buts about it.

It’s not very friendly to connection issues.

I’m glad it’s not just me. Although in my case, it’s not so much FPS as it is my computer getting really HoT in general in the new zones. I plan to upgrade soon though… I built this PC with average parts something like 5-6 years ago and have only upgraded the graphics card since. I’m still running a dual-core processor. U.U

Just last night, somebody used a mentor tag to guide people in a HP run in Tangled Depths. As in, he led us through most of Tangled Depths and got us nearly all of the HPs (the only one some of us couldn’t get, which he explained beforehand, required poison and wallows mastery).

So yeah… restricting it to low level zones would ruin that bit of fun and community spirit.

Spook.5847:

How is allowing scribe training in LA “catering” to anyone?

JediYoda.1275:

Market to new players and shaft the players that have supported them for years and even shaft the new players that even bought the expansion makes no sense. Its about equality and accessibility for all the guilds and all guild halls regardless how many members from1 to 500 are favor capped and time gated so it shouldn’t be a huge deal as many are making it out to be with this so called “catering” to micro/small guilds argument.

Anet admitted to they are trying to force players to be more interactive and claim the old influence system didn’t do that. Anet shouldn’t force us to play their way, we tell them how we want to play and they really should do more on their part to welcome everyone not just shaft a part of their player base.

Drow.2081:

It is not the “core design” of this game to force solo/family orientated players to do anything they don’t want to do. Where are you coming up with this?

Do you truly think solo players are going to run wildly into the arms of large guilds now because they might miss out on some content? Gee I wonder if there is a reason why forcing people to do things against their will makes them not want to be around. After reading this I don’t think I’ll bother going back to my larger guilds. Since I know now it’s all about forcing me even when I’ve said “no.”

Don’t shoot the guy theorizing Anet’s reasons. Sheesh. I’m on your side.

Drow, I don’t know where you got “force” from “encourage.” They don’t force anyone to do group events together, for example, but the open world is designed such that working together is not only fluid, but highly recommended.

I don’t like it anymore than you guys do, but if you look at it from their point of view, it makes a kind of sense.

And really, you guys don’t do any of us any favors when you use language like “force.” Force would be if you had to choose to join a fair-sized guild to join when you logged into the game. Force would be if the only content in the game was guild-based and you couldn’t do it unless you joined one.

Spook: I’m not sure what you’re asking.

So far, I am thoroughly enjoying it. Previously, I was maining a warrior in HoT. Rev is like warrior on crack, with, perhaps, a little more squish, mainly due to the way utilities work and not really allowing you to spec survivability cooldowns without losing bread and butter DPS or utility skills.

In other words, as DPS it’s not the sturdiest thing ever, but I have a feeling that if you specced/geared full-on tank, it’d have the potential to be one. It even has a taunt, so tanking clearly crossed their minds when making the class.

Actually, my memory is betraying me. I think the 6th collection – Mistward Helmet – either unlocks once the other five are unlocked or it unlocks at the beginning of Herald. Cause I know I had it unlocked way before I finished Herald.

Collections are a new feature filed under Achievements. How they work is you obtain various items that count toward the completion of the Achievement and once you’ve got them all, the Achievement auto-completes and there’s usually a reward chest that it gives you (in this case, a piece of Mistward Armor).

Some Collections require a special item or scenario to unlock them. Others unlock automatically once you obtain an item that is part of the collection.

For Mistward Armor pieces, the collections unlock as you complete specialization lines. So spending the hero points to fully unlock the specialization line Devastation unlocks one collection, Corruption unlocks another, and so on. There are 6 specialization lines in total, including the elite specialization Herald – one for each armor piece.

Once a collection is unlocked, you can go view it under your achievements and hover over various needed items to get hints for where you’re supposed to find them.

Note that once a required item has been soulbound (or in some cases, account bound) you don’t need to hang onto it. If you’re concerned about accidentally deleting needed items, you can double check by looking at the relevant collection and seeing if the spot for that item is filled out.

Many collections have required items that are only useful as part of completing the collection and can be sold to a merchant after the fact for 10 silver. You’ll encounter several of these in the Mistward Armor collections.

Ideally, you want to be able to market features to new players to draw them in. Problem is, if Anet goes out of their way at all to cater to micro guilds, that’s not really something they can market to potential new customers. “Come play a guild solo or with only a couple friends.” It goes against one of their core design philosophies; the idea that players can group together and interact with each other in a meaningful way, with ease, and are encouraged to do so. Running a micro guild isn’t much of a cooperative experience.

Ultimately, I think the decisions concerning the future of guilds were branding/marketing. Their game is called Guild Wars 2 and they wanted to push that aspect of it.

That is my theory anyway. I have a 1-man guild that I created so people would stop trying to invite me to their guilds. Which, over time, turned into a guild with a bank and a few low level upgrades. I wish I could make a Guild Hall and do missions as one person, just for the extra content of it and the challenge to see what all I could build on my own.

But as the saying goes, if Dwayna’s Wishes were Centaurs, then Street Rats would ride.

Something tells me Ventari’s Tablet was never envisioned to be great in fast-moving PvP. It seems like the sort of ability that is best for raiding and open-world group play, where positioning changes somewhat, but there is quite a bit of stacking and a lot of situations where moving a heal on top of somebody without putting yourself in danger could be useful.

Dengar.1785:

You’re confusing two things. There is nothing wrong with people soloing content that isn’t meant to be solo’d. If people manage to pull that off, more power to them. The problem is with complaining about being unable to solo content that isn’t meant to be solo’d.

PopeUrban.2578:

I’ve solo’d several on my heal specced guardian with pathetic DPS simply by swapping some traits. What I haven’t solo’d are one’s listed as group events as, y’know, healy guardian is generally more inclined to find a group for group events.

A good rule of thumb about anything Anet labels group events:

They don’t care if you can solo it, but they also don’t care if you can’t. That’s why they labeled it a group event, to tell you that the content was not designed to be soloable

Simple yes or no question, do you sincerely believe that the time limit makes a significant difference in the challenge of trying to do these solo?

Please explain why or why not.

Dengar.1785:

Complaining about being unable to solo something that isn’t meant to be solo’d.

Actually, I’m pretty sure some of them are soloable, but you almost need to have the right class for it and be geared really well.

I’d be curious to know how such people feel about the time limit… the ones who have solo’d hero challenges.

They did already lengthen the time limit, but I can see the justification for removal, since the lengthened time means that any minor sized group is going to get it killed in plenty of time, as it is.

The only ones who will still struggle are those who are trying to do it with, like, one person. I would argue that if you can survive past the time limit against a champion challenge, solo (especially now that they’re something like 8-10 minutes), then you’ve already proven your muster as a player and should get to continue the battle.

You’re either the tankiest mofo ever or you’ve got skills. And even if people were to cheese it with full on tanky specs and gear, I’d still argue they deserve the win for sticking it out so long, when they could do it in shorter time with a group.

So yeah… whatever way you spin it, there doesn’t seem to be any justifiable need to keep the time limit in place for these.

So… I gotta say, after playing the class more today, I’m starting to agree with Killyox. The CD just feels wrong. I don’t even have a logical argument for it. It just throws off the rhythm of the class, like a bad note in an otherwise wonderful symphony.

It’s not necessarily the info you’re giving out in the OP. It’s what others (or yourself) might say in the process of talking about the mission.

But yes, I would like to see the bugs gone too.

Oh btw, you should put the word SPOILERS in your title. To be considerate of others.

I take it the fixes didn’t do much then? I’m kinda holding off on going back to it until bugs are fixed. I really don’t feel like wasting an hour getting clotheslined by bugs some more.

Killyox.3950:

I am perfectly fine with this. Would make skill difference between two rev players easier to spot. These are still decisions we make whether good or bad. CDs are bad because they take away that decision making entirely.

And again… take into account number of Rev gap closers vs other classes and the fact others can switch out their bad utilities while we are forced to have them whether we like them or not. Because of this inability to change utilities ANet should be extremely cautious with any nerfing here.

Pretty much every class has more gap closers than Rev (maybe except necro)

Jalis has none.
Ventari has none.
Herald has none.
Mallyx has questionable 600 Leap but we will count it as gap closer.
Shiro has Phase Traversal.
Axe 4

That’s it. That’s all we have. 3 Skills for the entirety of the class. Pretty much every other class can have more (maybe not necro :P)

Don’t forget, we also have superspeed (albeit at an ongoing energy burn).

But I do see your point. I just don’t think raising the energy cost of Traversal is the answer.

Killyox.3950:

Labjax.2465:

Please realize that if you lobby for the class to be all energy management and they give that to you, the penalties for poor choice of energy use are going to become harsher and harsher as the class gets tuned and you may regret it.

I am perfectly fine with this. Would make skill difference between two rev players easier to spot. These are still decisions we make whether good or bad. CDs are bad because they take away that decision making entirely.

CD management is also a skill. It’s just an easier one to handle, usually. The only real difference between an energy-based class and a CD-based class is that the energy-based can spam the same abilities over and over until their energy is gone.

I agree with you that generally speaking, energy management requires more skill. In terms of you being fine with what you want… I believe you, but I’m not sure whether you’d believe you in 6 months time. A lot can change. Look at where the other energy-based class is at right now – thieves:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/thief/Thief-feels-significantly-weaker

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/thief/BUFF-thief-1

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/thief/dont-buff-thief-nerf-the-others

That’s just from browsing a few recent pages. There was more before HoT.

I knew this was going to get nerfed. I just didn’t realize it would be so soon. I don’t know what you guys are thinking, but it did need a nerf of some kind and be careful what you ask for because you may just get it.

If warriors had a move that allowed them to spend adrenaline to gap close 3 or 4 times in a row because “energy management,” would you really be ok with that?

Please realize that if you lobby for the class to be all energy management and they give that to you, the penalties for poor choice of energy use are going to become harsher and harsher as the class gets tuned and you may regret it.

I get why people want to be able to use Phase Traversal as it was. It was a heck of a lot of fun. But most OP abilities are.

All that said, I think there could be some compromise that might work, but I don’t believe that removing the CD again and raising the energy cost by some absurd amount is a good idea.

My recommendation would be something like this:
- Halve the CD (make it 2 and a half seconds)
- Remove the unblockable attacks part
- Possibly remove the damage

This way, you won’t notice the CD a lot, but it’s still not spammable and it’s a little more in line with other teleports since it no longer gives you insta free hits through blocking.

Thoughts?

Which ones are bothering you, maguuma or tyria?

So far, for my own part, I have a boatload of excess points that I don’t have the XP for yet.

Donari.5237:

People keep asking for gliding in the old world and arguing philosophical reasons for/against when the chief issue, always, is that the maps will not work for gliding. You think that there’s a neat building there? Guess what, it’s a two dimensional facade without a foundation, just floating there, because they didn’t need to create a full building when its front is all anyone can ever see running and jumping around on foot.

They’d need a year or two of applying many resources to literally remaking the world, just like Blizzard did for Cataclysm, before airborne travel could be an option. And I don’t think players want to go a year or two without any content updates just to add a travel mode.

A year or two seems like a bit of an exaggeration. It can’t be that hard to remodel / fill out a few buildings, if they are at all organized with their assets.

I’m just not going to buy words like “difficult” or “1-2 years worth of work” unless they come out of the mouth of a 3d modeler who works at Arenanet.

puts on hardcore hat

Maguuma has quite a few new mobs with new mechanics, or mechanics that are an old mechanic on crack. Learning how to handle those mechanics means you’ll be better able to take them down.

The most significant trend seems to be mobs that charge through you in some capacity. Rolling Devils, Mushrooms, Centau- I mean, those mordrem on mounts. A lot of that type are a more robust and dangerous version of the old Centaurs that charge you.

The other main type is mobs that go stealth and then drop crap on you or port away and shoot you from afar. The Froggy Things™ who go stealth and the Mordrem Snipers, who go stealth and then drop teragriff type lines on the ground.

Having a few CC attacks on hand is probably a good idea for these zones, as well as some gap closers / teleports as your class allows. Speed will allow you to outrun mobs if you wish. CC will give you time to hit them, or slow them down, depending on whether you want to run or fight.

Reflects will have some use for the ranged enemies if your class has them, but I find the easiest way to take down the ranged type is to hit them with a stun or KD and then burst them down as quickly as you can.

Stability will help you avoid KD from charging mobs, but won’t necessarily keep you alive. Again, stunning or KDing them can help, or dodging to the side when they charge.

Oh and when you’re fighting mobs that have a break bar, be sure to abuse it liberally. Wait for the bar to turn blue and then throw all the CC you’ve got at it (cripple does not seem to count btw… I’m not sure what all CC counts). If you break their bar, it will usually give you an advantage. I’m not 100% clear on what the advantage is, but for some mobs, it seems to slow or stun them for a time.

Eh, a little unintended soft nerfing of a few JPs is not the end of the world, as far as I can tell. The reward for completing them is just an achievement and a few basic chest rewards, right? It’s not like you’re getting a special title or something.

Even if gliding did make some JPs easy, it’s not like you couldn’t still do them the normal way. And as the game grows older, a few soft nerfs of old content isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Copestetic.5174:

This is a lot of people’s fear, and it’s rightly justified to feel this way. The same people that gave bad reviews and complained here and on reddit will do a repeat of that to trivialize Raids.

No, they really won’t. An elite spec that isn’t even elite is the definition of casual content. Raids are not. Give people some credit for basic intelligence to discern between the two.

If the raids hold back too many people, they most likely will get nerfed a little, but not for months and it will only be after new raid content is out. That’s how it works in raiding games and Anet has no reason to stray from that model.

In fact, this isn’t even a raiding game, so the raids may not see much in the way of nerfs at all. In raiding games, it happens because most of the content is a funnel that leads you to raids. But that’s not the case here.

I killed probably something in the realm of 50+ nightmare court last night for that one. But I may have gotten lucky.

This is just a guess, but since the drop is yellow, it’s probably classified in the loot tables as a rare item, so magic find may help significantly.

Wow, I didn’t even realize you could hold the jump button. I’d just been dealing with the delay sometimes, like, “Hit space once, hit agai- come on, why am I still falling. I HIT SPACE TWICE. Well, there goes my air height…”

I wouldn’t be surprised if I’ve been accidentally turning off my gliding by holding the jump button and then hitting again thinking that I need to.

As someone told me a year or so ago, this is not F2P, it’s B2P (buy to play). Particularly HoT content, which is where most of the “qq” is.

So you can take your silly argument about “mostly free” like it’s a ball and go home. People paid money for the expansion = they want their money’s worth. That creates tension when expectations are not met.

Unfortunately, we don’t live in a utopia where money falls from the sky and everybody is rich. The world economy is a mess, for a lot of people. People are pinching pennies left and right, and looking desperately for something to distract them from the struggles of the reality they’re immersed in. Some of those people turn to video games, so it makes sense that they’d get upset when the little money they have is not yielding the desired result.

There is a massive world beyond this game called reality and it affects the game market in very profound ways.

Ithilwen.1529:

Stop crying about other people crying about other people.

Oh yeah, well you stop crying about other people crying about other people crying about other people crying about other peoples’ problems about the people who are crying about other peoples’ problems.

So there!

:)

Tollz.4152:

I get what you’re saying and I agree for the most part. In regards to you analogy to say WoW, Blizzard actually make certain achievements and titles unavailable after they nerf them to acknowledge those who were able to do it before the nerfs. I’m just saying Anet are listening to and rewarding a lot of crying about the amount of effort.

I did enjoy the time I put in and it was my reward, but now the next bloke gets to come along, put in half the time and get the same reward….. I hope you can see how that is rough.

Intellectually, I definitely get why it is rough. Emotionally, I’m not sure I can relate on a personal level. I’m thinking back to when I was in similar situations, but I played a raiding game for 2-3 years with the philosophy of passing on gear for others half the time because I was part of the leadership and wanted to help prove the point that our “loot council” type setup was not biased (it didn’t really need proving, but some people get paranoid). I enjoyed getting showy items and titles, but I was never playing for that back then, so I may not be familiar with living such a mindset. I encountered it all the time in other people, but I was always pushing myself in the direction of being satisfied with other things.

For example, the quiet satisfaction of wearing an outfit that I spent two hours putting together. That kind of thing gave me an outlet of accomplishment in a game that no one could nerf, or take away from me.

I’m so tired of people creating threads for the sole purpose of telling other people to stop complaining about something. It’s really getting meta and obnoxious, and needs to stop.

Wait a second.

Oh, F-

I’m not saying your irritation isn’t legitimate, but you don’t need a title to brag. You did it before most people and not only is that something no one can take away from you, but it’s something you can brag about.

Let me pose an analogous scenario to you that happens in raiding games all the time: Top guilds compete to see who can kill the bosses first. Pretty soon, the top guilds get the bosses killed and get them on farm status (meaning they can kill the bosses without fail each weekly reset).

Fast-forward to a few months later. The top guilds have been farming the bosses for a long time and a few 2nd tier guilds are getting some kills, but most raiding guilds are struggling a lot with progressing. They are getting killed over and over by tight requirements and unforgiving mechanics. So to ensure that the bulk of the raiding population (the lower tier guilds) don’t give up on the game, they nerf some of the harder bosses. Inevitably some of the people in top guilds complain about this, but there is no special title for it.

The people in the top guilds already got their reward, in the form of 1) getting all the rewards before everybody else and 2) being able to brag about their accomplishments. In fact, they can now say “I killed X boss pre-nerf.”

This is usually how it works in MMOs, that for the first ones there, the thing that separates them from the people who came later is the feeling of knowing that they got to the finish line first. Like a race.

If you got this stuff before the nerfs, you already placed first. You won the race. Anet could give you a badge to say that you won the race, but I have to ask: Are you sure the medal is what you did it for, or was it for the feeling of beating the competition?

Lythoc.6307:

Which is also no accomplishment if you did in 14 hours or a few days, because as many say: ’It’s not actually as challenging as people say’ So where is the accomplishment in it then if it’s no challenge?

It’s a twisty psychological game of wanting a way to feel superior. I don’t mean to talk down to hardcore players – in fact, it would be silly to do so since I have a hardcore mindset myself – but that whole dance of “it’s so easy, you guys are such whiners” and then in the same breath “I’m so amazing for doing this” are both a way to feel superior to somebody else.

Even talking down to people who somewhat got their way can be a way to feel superior.

And to reiterate, I’m not trying to invalidate the opinions of hardcore players. They are every bit as valid as the other end of the spectrum. Just commenting on the motivation behind some of the vitriol. Another of those motivations is that for some time, hardcore players have felt threatened by casual players, feeling that games are being dumbed down and made too easy.

The fear is somewhat understandable and legitimate; games as a whole are definitely more forgiving and friendly than they were in the Mario days. However, I have to wonder why anyone would cling to a game like GW2 as a bastion of hardcore play. It definitely ranks as one of the most casual experiences I’ve seen. But I think that’s why I enjoy it. I have a tendency to go hardcore and get burned out, and it’s a lot harder to get burned out with this game due to the low ceiling.

People need to realize that their perception is going to differ depending on how many HP they already have from the old maps on a character.