Guild Wars 2

This is explicitly stated in the story mode through two lines Dessa says, so this thread is more a spoiler than a theory.

You’re constructing a lot of straw man arguments in your posts. This thread is specifically about gold reward. Of course the current gold reward is better than nothing. The complaint is that it could and should be better, given the difficulty, time requirement and cost of fractals and comparisons to rewards in other content.

The point is high-level fractals are disproportionately unrewarding compared to dungeons. You can try to add whatever factors you wish, but it’s not convincing anyone because the things you listed aren’t what a lot of players care about.

What most people are saying in this thread is the general opinion of the fractal community. ArenaNet should take note.

Besides, nothing could make fractals more rewarding to new players than making them a viable way to earn gold.

It’s QA, not Q&A. QA means quality assurance, and Q&A means questions and answers.

I would imagine most people doing high-level fractals either already have all of the items that can be bought through tokens or don’t care about them. So that analysis doesn’t work.

That’s actually another problem with both dungeons and fractals: Currently, tokens lose their worth quite quickly. Although it’s at least possible to buy salvageable exotic and rare items with dungeon tokens.

ItWasntMe.7102:

Seeing as this is the ONLY content in game that requires time/coin/laurals or other resources to get AR added along with the time prison it locks us into~~~ FoM is severely under rewarded. Rush-stack-melee dungeon paths offer more for a lot less time/coin investment & headache.
I can play 3-4 FoM daily "box reward’ levels each day for 6 months & not recover half of the coin it cost to get my AR~ in the sense I choose to spend my 2-3 hrs locked into one portion of game knowing FoM content rewards less than other content~ I am in reality LOSING money that would easily be made elsewhere even in open world PvE. FoM is a GOLD SINK for players that like it.
To play past lvl 10 for others is a total waste of time if they don’t like FoM or need to make coin during their game time to meet their other needs ~which sadly depletes the population options for those that like to climb the ladder. hehehe C’est la vie.

Really good point. I’ve already sunk quite a bit of gold into agony resist.

Asia Skyly.7198:

I posted as much elsewhere. The reward should be 10s/personal level. 3g at 30 seems fair. The challenge/length is sufficient to justify it.

I assumed this would be the case:
Lv. 1-10: 1 gold
Lv. 11-20: 2 gold
Lv. 21-30: 3 gold
Lv. 31-40: 4 gold
Lv. 41-50: 5 gold

This would make a lot more sense, given the time commitment and difficulty required and a simple comparison to dungeons rewards.

Read what I quoted. I was responding to a comment about what happened before the update.

Nabbo.2845:

This happened even before your update, though. Playing with clueless Rank 1s is VERY frustrating when you have more than 2.2k games under your belt. Makes me question the whole purpose of Solo Q!

Hopefully your changes will adjust the MMR in the near future.

That only happened if your rating was so low that you deserved to be paired up with those kinds of players.

Necromancer here.

This part has always been pretty easy, and I never understood why people saw it as really difficult.

Kill one side, kite the rest and hit the switches and panel. Easy.

By the way, if you can’t PUG what’s supposed to be the hardest group content, that’s a feature, not a bug.

Me too. It would at least give some form of confirmation.

I like the nerf, including the unfavorable priority system. Having to think about the corruption cap adds an interesting layer of play to Corrupt Boon. It also helps differentiate good from bad players.

Bhawb.7408:

Condition cap could potentially be worked around (giving the higher level mobs a higher condition cap, removing it for them, or giving individual caps on those mobs), but I don’t see that happening right away, especially because of, say, Epidemic (as much fun as it’d be to Epidemic 50 bleeds…)

However, the condition cap is not what kills condition builds in PvE. It is an issue, yes, but only when you have 2-3 condition users in the group that center around the same things (Mesmers and Engineers, for example, tend to have very few bleed stacks, but focus on other conditions).

The problem is multi fold.
1) My 1500 condi-damage conditions can get overridden by the 100 condi-damage Ele’s, or Guardians. This is a big issue because those classes in specific have passive conditions that they can’t not apply, and then my 900 DPS burning just got turned into a 400 DPS burning.
2) Conditions overall suffer from lower DPS, worse high-end scaling, and lack of “buff-ability”. Power scales the best with full investment, and in PvE there isn’t much of a downside to being full zerker. Also, the majority of buffs to damage have to deal with direct damage, boosting it even higher.
3) There is a ton of “condi hate” in PvE. Condition removal, debuffs to application, bosses having the majority of their eHP in HP and not armor, structures in general. There are quite a few mechanics to work against conditions, and relatively few against power.
4) Boons can generally do the exact same thing as conditions, but better, more reliably, with higher uptime, and almost no downsides. Just look at Protection vs Weakness.

They really need to address these problems (and they somewhat have in the newer PvE designs) before conditions are on-par with power, even if groups will be limited to 1-2 condition players each.

Great post.

I think bleed cap has to go, though. If Epidemic is what’s keeping that issue for all classes, then Epidemic needs to be reworked.

Until they remove the breakable platforms and make the cannon evadable, yes.

ronpierce.2760:

I will say, I don’t mind falling but engineer magnetic pull being conveniently a slow-cast spell and pulls you right over the glass that they casted it on, and there’s basically no counter other than stability, it’s pretty GG. At least fear you can cleanse/CC break before you fly off if you have it.

I think it’s the easiest pull to avoid. Just roll after the animation flashes.

It’s really unlikely that it actually failed. It’s more likely that Jonez got stuck, which sometimes happens. (Although Temple of Grenth is probably the temple chain that bugs the least.)

Either way, at best stream viewers witnessed one of the major boss events in the game bugging in the same way it has bugged since launch more than one year ago.

That is rough. So funny.

For those not familiar with the issue: The temple events regularly bug at different spots. At Balthazar, one of the events leading up to the final event fails to spawn or gets stuck. At Lyssa, the cannon regularly locks up. At Dwayna, sometimes the Malchor escorting event doesn’t trigger. At Melandru, the escort event sometimes doesn’t spawn. At Grenth, the escort randomly stops moving and the event fails to progress.

Wow. I watched a bit farther into it, and three ArenaNet tags have to give up on the event and find something else to do after they’re unable to fix it.

I agree. I don’t know if the solution is removing champion bags, but I am not satisfied with the status quo.

COF path 1 had problems, but it required some skill and organization to efficiently farm. Champion farming allows everyone to funnel into one zone or even event and leave the rest of the world vacant.

I still don’t have Dawn of the Season. But if it doesn’t count for the meta, whatever.

Justin has an incredible amount of patience.

I love the content, but it’s so unrewarding. If farming zones like Frostgorge Sound are going to remain in the game, shouldn’t living world content at least match it? Shouldn’t living world content always be the most rewarding so players actually do it? Shouldn’t it at least match world boss farming?

Maybe the problem is that Frostgorge Sound just needs to be nerfed. But it’s really sad that a lot of people are abandoning the tower — arguably the best PvE content in the game — after one or two days because the rewards are awful.

I love the content, but it’s so unrewarding. I don’t know why they’re so skimpy with loot in living world content if they’re going to keep ridiculous farm zones like Frostgorge Sound around. Shouldn’t living world content always be the best place to farm so people actually do it?

I’m missing this achievement.

Michael.7382:

Dear Justin, the part with “accurate skill” is not fun at all. If u want to loose next player, sure it may be funny for You.
Since when a leadder position is accurate measurment of skill? A TOP1 is unbeatable godlike and top700 can’t beat a top5 coz they are far away fro meach other?
I’m not some kind of pve player that farmed skyhammer to r50, I played tournaments much to lvl up to 50 (took me half of year to make 40-50).
Funny thing, I try to help “fresh” guys when they ask for build or some kind of help, I belive in pvp in this game, I’m still here while many ppl alrdy left frustrated and You come to me with such response? Nice to know how much respect You have to Your players.
I jsut wanted to talk about it, maybe to improve it to make the game more fun but I see You don;t care about it?

There is a huge difference between the top 100 and rank 500-1,000. It’s genuinely astronomical, and anyone who’s played at both levels can vouch for it.

Playing a lot doesn’t really mean anything. I know a lot of players who play a lot but are still really bad at the game.

This entire thread seems to confuse playing a lot for skill.

Jon Peters said they want to make control and condition builds viable in PvE. That’s something, right?

Sweetbread.2679:

Honestly I’d just give up on this game ever being a sequel to Guild Wars in anything, but name. I’d love for it to be that game, but the devs have already abandoned everything that made Guild Wars the game it was in favor of cheap gimmicks, dumbed down gameplay mechanics, gear grinding, and generally shallow gameplay. It’s going to be a lot less grief to accept this game for the shallow cash grab catered to idiots that it is than the sequel it should have been.

Guild Wars 1 was filled with cheap gimmicks, and it definitely had hard counters. I understand the anger many Guild Wars 1 players feel toward Guild Wars 2, but this seems like a really bizarre thread to lash out in.

At this point I have to assume they’re purposely avoiding this thread.

Vanthian.9267:

WvW isn’t even PvP and I don’t understand how you people can actually think it is…. You are hitting doors or walls over 90% of the time. It is a giant mob attacking a keep while another giant mob tries to keep the keep. It is a joke.

It doesn’t take much skill to roll a group of 20 when you have 50+.

It’s a shame you have this perspective. Roaming can be even more fun than structured PvP on good nights. Fighting people in outnumbered situations is fantastic, especially when increasingly random variables push the limits of everyone’s individual skill.

Admittedly, the competition is absolutely worse in world vs. world because most world vs. world players are terrible. But it’s still a lot of fun.

JonPeters.5630:

Even though we wont do it for Dec 10. I just wanted to throw out a wacky possible idea for Dhuumfire that we could discuss…

• Life Blast has a 100% chance to cause Burning on hit (2 seconds long). 6 seconds ICD.

Obviously the #s are ballpark and not necessarily final. The % chance, duration, and ICD are all subject to change.

Jon

Would this replace the current Dhuumfire? If so, there are a few problems:

The inner cooldown for this would effectively be 10 seconds because of Death Shroud’s cooldown.

Attaching a condition build’s damage to Death Shroud is a completely different beast than doing it for a power build. Condition builds barely keep up life force if they’re not killing targets, which, as we both know, is fairly difficult in a close PvP match. Power builds are constantly overflowing with life force. Given that, it seems a little impractical to ask condition necromancers to rely on Death Shroud for damage, especially since it’s also condition necromancers’ main survivability tool.

I also have a few questions:

If you do this, would you give Curses a worthy 30-point trait? Like I noted above, there are a few reasons a condition necromancer wouldn’t take this new trait, so it could end up an effective nerf to condition necromancers as the class sees decreasing use in high-level structured PvP.

On that note, are you guys concerned at all that necromancers are seeing less use in high-level play recently? I assume you think the warrior nerfs will help necromancers. But I’m unconvinced the warrior nerfs are that far-reaching, and it seems mesmers and elementalists getting enough new anti-condition tools to keep necromancers under control.

On the PvE side, are you guys doing anything about bleed cap? The last update we got on this issue was more than six months ago, and there have been a few large threads asking for an update in that time span.

I’ll be asking about this issue in the balance threads. Hopefully someone responds.

Bleed cap. Any updates?

Are we going to get any response on bleed cap soon?

It’s nothing like the rank 20 finisher. It’s more like the cow finisher.

Yeah. The net result is no impact in PvP, minimal effect in WvW and hugely beneficial in PvE.

No. That would make the game unplayable at a competitive level.

Caed was in one of my matches tonight.

Feel free to add this condition necromancer build: http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=;044Z-JGlHVF084JIkJ0;9;4TJ;0J39A18;529-KNm6-JG4hoHAhoHA2Vj. I don’t want to take credit for it because it’s fairly standard, but it’s what I run.

Taking anything but Consume Conditions in PvP is bad.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Not only was the toxin condition a disappointment, but Anet went the extra mile to screw us over once again.

They added the downed state to PvE mobs now. This is another slap in the face to condition users since now PvE enemies are cleansed of ALL conditions upon being downed, which means direct damage is capable of killing these enemies faster. To make it worse, if enemies recover they are AGAIN cleansed of all conditions.

That’s a good point.

With all the talk about balance recently, it seems this issue isn’t even on ArenaNet’s radar anymore.

So what’s going on with bleed cap? We haven’t had an update on it in months, and it has enormous consequences in PvE.

At 11 percentile I could probably smack my keyboard with closed fists and still carry my team, so it’s definitely not just your teammates.

Update:

I will be streaming for 25 hours straight this weekend for Extra Life’s charity event. If it goes well, I’ll consider streaming often from now on.

Here is the stream: http://www.twitch.tv/lopezirl

If you want to donate, please go here: http://www.extra-life.org/participant/derekandgerman

Nothing in the current patch.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

The addition of toxin may be a glimmer of hope for condition users. But more than likely it will be a NPC only condition just to slap us in the face.

I’m pretty sure that’s krait-only.

They also haven’t fully leveraged torment yet. So if alternate conditions are how they want to address the bleed cap — and I don’t agree with that approach, considering torment can also be capped at 25 — then ArenaNet should start with torment.

How would critical bleeds help with bleed cap, though?

Cyclonite.5786:

I believe Anet flat out doesn’t know what to do with conditions so they choose to do nothing in fear of breaking something. The whole point of damage over time is that you are trading instant damage for slower + more overall damage over time. In GW2 zerkers have both the highest instant damage and highest overall dps, that is problem. Lets get this thread more posts, Anet needs to realize that.

Judging by the lack of a response even after one was promised, I’m starting to think that’s the case.

Skill lag is one of the signs that ArenaNet doesn’t really know how to manage a AAA title. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that if skill lag was so bad in, say, Tol Barad or Wintergrasp, Blizzard would fix it in the next patch. (Obviously those zones had some lag when they first launched, but it was never hours-long unplayable lag like has always been the case for active world vs. world.)

If it’s really as un-fixable as some people insist, then, honestly, world vs. world shouldn’t exist or, at the very least, the season idea should have been scrapped.

It seems to be a consistent issue with ArenaNet: When they run into a technical limitation — whether it’s bleed cap, lag, queues or even culling — the developers ignore it and let it stand for far too long instead of designing with the limitation in mind.

This is pretty obviously PvE-only, along with the toxin condition.

Really great video.