Guild Wars 2

Why can’t the game be both?

Can’t the game be fun and rewarding?

Why must it be one or the other?

I am a guy who plays Minecraft. Minecraft is a game with zero story, zero incentives, zero carrots on a stick. However, it’s actually fun. I’ve played it for a year already and I’ve never had a moment where I felt I had ran out of things to do. There was always things to do, and you could set goals for yourself to do. Want to build the tallest tower in the world made out of wood? You could do that. Want to make a really elaborate maze out of ice? You could do that.

Guild Wars 2 on the other hand rubs me the wrong way and I realized why.

Of course people would say Minecraft and GW2 are completely different games, apples and oranges… Yes the gameplay, graphics and goals are different. But as much as they are different, you should not forget these PC games in general share common concepts and family features. One of those, is respecting the player’s time and the effort they put into something.

In Minecraft, if you want to start on your massive project, it would involve you mining and gathering all the necessary materials, this could involve getting lots of wood, to getting rare things like diamonds. Some might be grind, some might be not, but the concept here is that the game never punishes you for doing it.
You want to strip mine an entire mountain for diamonds? You will find at least 20-30 ores for your efforts, and you can keep doing it again and again until you get your supplies.
Maybe you prefer to take it easy and walk around caves to look for them? Will probably net you 5-10 diamonds, but it’s slightly easier as diamonds are easily seen in the walls.
Minecraft does something right in the sense of it rewards you proportionally for the amount of effort you put into it. You spend more time, work harder, the game gives you what you legitimately earn.

Guild Wars 2 lacks this. In between anti-bot farming code (which isn’t perfect) comes the dungeon nerfs to the rewards. Making a dungeon hard is fine, but the rewards doesn’t reflect on the effort you put into it.
The anti-farming code doesn’t stop bots from farming events. Bots have infinite stamina. They never grow tired, they never need to eat, sleep or handle any other thing in real life. They exist solely to hit the same mob over and over again 24/7. They don’t care if they are getting 1% of drops anyway, they’ll just keep trucking on.
Human beings simply cannot compete with this, the time we spend on running DE is real, we spend real effort, real time, into doing events and dungeons. However, the harder we work, the less we are rewarded.

Bots however, cannot do dungeons, so why the rewards for dungeons are reduced and a 30 minute timer cap placed on them makes no sense to me.

• “But you don’t need to get that gear because normal gear gives you the same stats!”

That is a comment I hear often. Guild Wars is a game without a carrot on a stick, much like Minecraft. That’s why people complain there’s no endgame, because the game doesn’t provide them with that direction.

So what do people do in games where they’ve (somewhat) finished? People will make goals for themselves to give themselves something to do, it lengthens their game experience. People in Skyrim mod their games, some people start a new building project in Minecraft, some people start in harder game mode, or some people try to drive that motorcycle to see how high it can go off a ramp in GTA. People create goals for themselves in games all the time, and there is nothing wrong with that.

However, Guild Wars offers these goals, but they are from two extremes with no intermediates. It is either regular gear and stuff that you can just get from levelling up, or extreme time consuming frustrating unrealistic time sinks.
There needs to be an intermediate spread of things to do that isn’t crazy easy or crazy hard (gear, vanity items, goals) that can be reached in intervals. What is wrong with having something of medium difficulty and others slowly scaling up to being hard, really hard and then to legendary hard?
Once a player realizes he can finish one goal, he will try for a harder one and so fourth challenging himself to do better.

I think Anet has the wrong idea of making things too expensive and scarce because they think that making people work longer for them will increase the lifespan of the game. It likely won’t, because there are human limits to patience, attention span, and interest. The game needs to sprinkle a bit of reward for a player’s effort to encourage him forwards, to know that all his effort isn’t completely for nothing, instead of punishing people for putting honest effort into something.

I know my post is kinda wishy washy, the preview window is small and I’m kinda sleep deprived…. But that’s my 2 cents on it all.
I’m not mad at the game or anything, but I’m getting the feeling of ‘meh’ and ‘why put effort into it?’. It doesn’t come from boredom, it comes from too many restrictions on what I want to do in game.

Auflauf.1679:

Levelord.5746:

The fastest cooldown on a skill to bring out a clone is 6 seconds before bringing out another one. GS has this, scepter has this, staff has this and so on (without trait for 15%)

I dont know what to say about this…this is just so wrong. If you ever played a mesmer, you should know. If you would understand the class, you would understand what is behind my idea. You dont have to agree, but you would see the reasons behind it.

• I am talking about sPvP
• mesmer is said to be maybe the strongest (=OP?) class in an 1on1 situation in PvP. I am an average player and win >90% of my 1on1. This is not right.
• I play a phantasm build and just wait for my phantasm to kill the other guy = the sustained damage feels way to high to me. So I recommended a limited lifespan for phantasm. Sure, you can kill a phantasm, but it always hits 1 time and while the other guys tries to kill my phantasm, he is doing zero damage to me. It is a win-win situation for the mesmer. So I thought: maybe a phantasm should not do damage right when it spawns.
• Clones are meant to deceive. But they dont, they are just annoying and make sPvP a mess because they stay forever. You can kill clones, but they are way too harmless to do that. And shattering does not work very well right now, so almost nobody does that in pvp. I thought about how to make them real deceiving and not so annyoing. If a clone stays in one place for a minute, you know it is a clone and its just annoying. It does almost no damage, its not deceiving, people dont shatter….what is the use ?

Those were my thoughts about the ideas.

And please dont say ever again, that a mesmer can only have an illusion about every 6 seconds. This is just wrong. You even have one utility skill that gives you 2 clones at once.

Yes, but what happens after you summon them all out? They all go on cooldown, what you do between those cooldowns is the point I’m trying to make.

So far people are bringing suggestions into the thread, but you’re not interested in hearing any of them. All we’re seeing is this:

• I play mesmers better than everyone else
• Everyone else doesn’t know how to play mesmers
• I’m so OP because I can down noobs and obviously never tried tournaments.
• I’m making a thinly veiled thread about mesmer fixes but it’s actually about changes I want for mesmers to fit my playstyle, while telling everyone else that they are crap if they play differently, while ignoring critique of my ideas.
• I can never be wrong because I am an obvious expert on mesmers and I will continue berating everyone who doesn’t agree with me, and telling them that they’ve never played mesmers before.

You’re not interested in hearing a discussion at all even though I’ve tried. This is all just some glorified form of self vanity.

Check your attitude, then people might give your thread some credibility.

Auflauf.1679:

How about reading everything before posting ?

illusions = clones and phantasm

clones last for 3 seconds
phantams last for 15 seconds

And I have never seen a mesmer doing shatter builds in pvp….because they suck right now. Phantasm seem to be way better.

EDIT: cooldown 6 seconds for a clone ? You dont have a clue about how mesmers work…

The fastest cooldown on a skill to bring out a clone is 6 seconds before bringing out another one. GS has this, scepter has this, staff has this and so on (without trait for 15%)

Your Edit: Please don’t try to sound condescending. Stroking your own ego online isn’t going to impress or intimidate anyone.

If you want clones to die within 3 seconds I need a reason why you propose that. It’s too short to distract mobs, it’s too short to distract players in PvP, and you cannot maintain any of them long enough for maximum effect of Mind Wrack.

Having the shatter mainly apply to phantasms is not a big enough incentive to use shatters over phantasms. Phantasms provide a bigger DPS and a bigger benefits (like reflecting projectiles or applying cripples) to justify throwing them away, especially when you want them to do max damage in their final attack. In general I don’t think the timers on illusions will work well and probably isn’t a good idea.

Auflauf.1679:

Nagaae.7698:

It isn’t hard to maintain three illusions at a time?

it is easy right now:

You start with sword / sword and go with skill 3 – leap = 1 clone
then you have a skill that creates two illusions = 2 clones
= 3 clones within a very short time -> shatter

Then you summon your phantasm – skill 5 and change to staff and use skill 3 and 2
= 2 phantasm and 1 clone within a very short time -> shatter

Mind wrack currently has a 15s cooldown and most clone based weaponry has a 6 second limit cooldown. With clones lasting 3s requiring you to shatter them immediately. This now opens up a good 15s window where you have to summon phantasms out, but because you have to wait 6 seconds to summon out an illusion, you are literally having 6 seconds of being completely vulnerable.
PvP players will kill you right there once they singled you out and monsters will aggro on you as a priority.

Clones (not phantasms) are meant to have a dual purpose to encourage build diversity. These 2 are the main ones, but not restricted to:

Shatter fodder

or

PvE, PvP distractions (where every hit a clone take is one that you don’t have to)

I think what you are suggesting is pushing the Mesmer playstyle into one corner as pure shatter builds. If that’s the case a better fix would be to look at the mesmer shatters and how to improve them, like Mind Wrack.

I like your idea of an increased mind wrack damage, because now the player has to decide between sustained constant damage from phantasms that are squishy by nature, and trading them for a good amount of spike damage. I would also split Mind Wrack into 2 different types; dealing more damage with phantasms, and slightly less with clones.

HxCFTW.8192:

Kitten? SRSLY!? Why can’t you just say it is easy rather than calling it an animal?

This guy apparently doesn’t understand how forum censorship works.

So… how can you stack 3 illusions if they only last 3 seconds?

You’ll never be able to shatter 3 illusions at the same time because they die within 3 seconds of being summoned and the fastest cooldown to create a clone is 6 seconds.

I’m not sure if you even play a mesmer because your suggestions doesn’t make sense and seem counter-intuitive to it’s shatter mechanic.

DusK.3849:

The DE cap only applies for repeating the same event over and over. Spread out and stop farming the same 2-3 DE’s in Orr.

People keep saying this, but even playing an alt (where there is no incentive or need to farm events) because there are so many areas to do events in (as opposed to only 2 lvl 80 areas), this DE cap makes no sense for people running around doing different events levelling up normally.

http://i47.tinypic.com/2ic331u.jpg
http://i49.tinypic.com/wl5h.jpg

Why can’t the DE caps just apply to lvl 80’s only because that’s the level where people usually farm for the most karma. Putting the cap on people levelling normally is plain ridiculous.

3) The arguments people are frustrated about is the difficulty finding groups for dungeons that isn’t about token farming. Want to try a different dungeon? Too bad, everybody is doing CoF speed runs for tokens. It’s an incredible waste of development talent designing the other dungeons when nobody else wants to run them.

4) Lack of incentive to run the other dungeons repeatedly. Running a dungeon for personal enjoyment is fine, but the novelty eventually wears off after the first few runs as it does to anything that relies on novelty value. There is very little incentive to run dungeons for dungeon armor skins, so people will tend to run the easiest, fastest dungeons to max out their armor stats.

5) Many dungeons are still broken with broken wings that do not start events at all, or simply have bosses that do not start combat or give the appropriate end loot. The 2 wings of CoF is an example.

6) Dungeons do not have consistent difficulty within the same run. Some mobs can be pleasantly challenging, and further down the road a boss can be mind numbingly boring and stupidly easy.

7) Bosses and mobs aren’t difficult, just long, boring and frustrating. Anet jacked up the HP of some of the bosses so high to imply difficulty that the fight becomes a 10 minute bore fest.
A boss that only has 1 or 2 mediocre combat mechanic but has millions of health doesn’t challenge my skill or ingenuity, it only challenges my patience. You can literally sit there afk and still down a boss in most dungeons, it just takes an obnoxious amount of time.
At the end of the fight I don’t feel accomplished or clever that I’ve beaten a boss, I just feel like I’ve wasted time that I could have spent doing something else more productive in the game.

8) Your post demonstrates the complete lack of understanding about the core issues affecting dungeons in GW2. All I see is a post advertising self-elitism and vanity over one’s talents under the guise of using your son’s method of playing the game, rather than addressing design flaws.

You have my vote for a pistol MH as well. I really hope Anet puts this in the game.

Zen.1740:

“This isn’t a QQ thread”.

Stop defending the creepy brand-loyal apologists who will send you death threats for criticising GW2. The camera sucks, as many people have commented on it. The point is valid, you don’t have to be so light-footed about giving the criticism. If people don’t like it, too bad, they will get over it eventually.

+1

A bit off topic, but I never understood those creepy brand loyalists either. They remind me of those Apple brand fanboys.

Kaldor.3567:

Xenteko.1238:

I cannot believe that you could actually release an MMO these days where people have to stand outside the instance spamming /s to manually get a group together.

It’s incredibly lazy and makes what should be a simple affair take far more time than it needs to.

I think it is incredibly lazy to not actually have to find a group by being social. Its not like the dungeons are required like in some MMOs to move forward with the development of your character.

I think it’s incredibly ignorant that you don’t realize that trying to advertise for a group for a dungeon will activate a chat spam algorithm that prevents you from saying anything more than twice.

If people think an LFG system is not needed, then fine, I can live with that, but why have a spam filter for LFG in chat? In zones where your adverts for a LFG group gets buried quickly, this is incredibly counter-intuitive.

If you want the chat system clear of LFG calls, then you either:

• Give us the LFG interface,

or

• Remove the LFG spam filter and deal with the fact that this is the only way we can get people together for a dungeon run.