Guild Wars 2

I think the real problem is not that the Norn Elite is OP — as others have mentioned, taking it often gimps their offensive capabilities. The problem is the asymmetry in rewards. If the Norn beats you, he stakes you and gets badges/loot or simply the satisfaction of having staked you. If you beat the Norn, he escapes at the last moment using his elite. This asymmetry makes people unhappy.

In my opinion, this is the same problem with thieves. They win: they get loot/satisfaction from staking you/teabagging rights. You win: they stealth and run away. Whether they are OP is actually a different problem!

i think the issue with the OP’s post is that most people didn’t know about the

Mist Form —> 0 WXP

bug which led to miscommunication.

Leo G.4501:

Are you talking about Black Lion Chests? You can buy those on the trading post for 2 copper.

Yeah… BLC’s are likely the most worthless saleable drop in the game!

Anet seems to do this a lot: nerfing around the broken skill/trait, causing tons of collateral damage to builds not using that skill/trait. They did the same in GW1.

PvE and PvP skills split in GW1 because Anet realized they couldn’t balance both together. Why didn’t they do the same for GW2?

I find the internal cooldown for the spectral skills a BIG nerf.

Spectral walk with the internal cooldown now gives an absolute maximum of 16% life force (2% per hit over 8 seconds). However, this only happens if you’re being hit every second over those 8 seconds. You’re likely to gain much less as you probably won’t be getting hit that consistently.

Those new spectral skill cool downs is a huge nerf!!! This is just terrible.

please stop talking about the spectral walk jumping ability as that will surely get it nerfed.

bloodletting wolf.2837:

CobaltSixty.1542:

When you consider your base stats, ascended quality items give more like a 3-4% increase.

If you plan on playing any WvW 3-4% is a big difference.

This. Grinding for Ascended gear — if you’re primarily a WvW player — is not going to be fun.

PvE though… at least at this point, it makes very little difference. However, I expect that Anet’s newer content will be harder in the future to compensate for the better stats.

So in the end, once everyone has Ascended gear all that will change is that current content will become easier than it is now. And making new builds or toons will be more of a pain.

Move to a less zergy tier.

They do it because the tears of PvE players taste so good.

Smitty.9432:

I came here expecting something exciting. I guess the aliens got him o_O

Actually, there was a rare chance for something exciting but you didn’t get it.

Many many good novels have separate story lines that eventually come together. If the author is good, then they fit together well in the end. The reason we have so many threads about the Living Stories seeming disjoint is not because everyone is impatient and needs to see the connections immediately. It’s because Anet has proven to be terrible storytellers and we’re not trusting them to fit all these Living Stories together into a single, well-told story.

Did someone say intervention?

Devon, your behavior has affected me negatively in the following ways…

If an exploit gets widely known and used, then Anet would be surely be forced to do something about it — right? … whereas if only a few know, then Anet may not see it as a problem and it will never be fixed.

Either way, we all lose.

Ayrilana.1396:

Playing solo in a dungeon should yield you 20% of the rewards that you would get from a full group. This is assuming that the dungeon difficulty scales based on number of people in the dungeon.

But they don’t scale in difficulty at all… that’s why I think it should be 5 times the reward!

I believe Joe Biden casts the tiebreaking vote in this case.

Erasculio.2914:

IMO, this is more a sign that those elites need to be reworked so they would effectively be new skills (keeping just the same name) than that we would need more elites. If ArenaNet adds 5 more elite skills, those 2 engineer ones will continue to be useless; if ArenaNet reworks them into something useful, it would be as if the profession got two new skills, without in fact add more skills to the game, and while improving balance instead of removing it.

This is the path I would like ArenaNet to follow. Take all nearly useless skills and traits, and rework them into different functionalities so they become useful. We would end with more variety than we have today with the same number of skills, and players would have new toys to play with.

Personally, I HATE when Anet does this (this is a big part of what made me quit GW1).
I hated when I took a hiatus and came back with skills having become completely different. That’s why I’m a big advocate of the Magic the Gathering method of rotating out skills and bringing in new ones: players expect the change and expect skills to rotate out — you don’t get the “you killed my build” QQ.

(For example, I liked Spectral Wall as it was and now it’s basically completely different.)

By the way, even if they rework elites, the fact is that there are very few of them so that build diversity is still limited.

The Mexican Cookie.3690:

Valid points, I agree with them, actually. Some players (like myself), find the fun in games comes from playing with friends. I get really bored if none of my friends are on, and this is also why I don’t pug

Actually, I agree with you on this point! It’s always more fun with friends… but when my friends are on, I do WvW… so for me, dungeons and PvE are for soloing.

Dub.1273:

Lord Kuru.3685:

Dub.1273:

I’m going to become so incredible rich if this happens.

But you’d have to do it faster than 5 times the amount of time it takes a 5-man to do it in order to make it worth it (assuming you’re solo). If you can, you deserve to be rich!!

I don’t even need twice as long and some dungeons are just a minute slower. Killing speed is slower but walking (usually 70%+ of the dungeon) is faster.

PS: I’ll be back soon cookie!

What dungeons do you do? Do you have a time for SE p1 that I can shoot for?

marnick.4305:

That’s indeed the point where they should go MTG.

I believe the magic number is in 5 more elites, 10-20 more utilities and 3 more healing skills per profession. Even at 2 skills per month, it’ll take more than a year to get there.

On how to implement the MTG, there’s several options. One would be Codex Arena style, but far slower. The other would be to Smiter Boon anything that’s temporary out of rotation.

I think your numbers for skills are good.

Considering each skill theme (for example “Corruption”, or “Wells” for necros) is made up of 4-5 skills, I’d like to see closer to 20 new skills per profession.

As a player, I’d like to see them introduced all at once (or maybe in two batches) as that seems more exciting.

Let’s hope the new skills start coming soon!

The Mexican Cookie.3690:

playing alone is no fun

In my opinion, the way dungeons are now, going through with a full party is much less fun than soloing (or duoing) because with a full party you can just mash buttons and get through easily.

(Trying to get the fastest time with 5 is interesting/challenging, but if you don’t have a regular group to do this with you, then this is not really possible.)

Dub.1273:

I’m going to become so incredible rich if this happens.

But you’d have to do it faster than 5 times the amount of time it takes a 5-man to do it in order to make it worth it (assuming you’re solo). If you can, you deserve to be rich!!

marnick.4305:

Imagine for a moment that there’s not enough skills in the game atm for proper balancing to be possible. Imagine that adding skills may be the solution here, whereas in GW1 it was the cause for imbalance. Imagine you might be wrong.

Especially in case of elites. With only 3 elites per profession, achieving balance is not possible, since build diversity is reduced to nothingness. Engineers de facto only have 1 elite. Other professions might as well have none. Adding 5 elites per profession would improve balance instead of reducing it. By adding a good number of utilities too, a real meta could develop which auto-balances as skill use shifts.

Without increase in the amount of skill, balance will not happen in GW2. That’s the current situation and it’s blatantly obvious to those who played GW1.

Interesting! Let’s say Anet adds enough skills so that every profession does have several reasonable builds. What then? They can’t keep adding skills forever or we’ll reach an unbalanceable point, but if they keep things static, players may get bored.

So maybe add enough skills so that the number is high enough that multiple builds are viable for each profession, and then go the MTG way?

I also really like the MTG way because it encourages the devs to be more bold in creating new mechanics. As it is, because skills are more or less “permanent,” I feel the devs are a bit conservative in terms of trying new things.

Orion the Cursed.1206:

All i can say is thakittens a very ambitious plan. They would have to come up with a whole set (hundreds) every change and we would have to adapt every time.

In mtg, we have to buy (pay for) our cards every time often but in rpg, this will mean we have to somehow re-aquire our skills every change. Not to mention change our builds. Mtg didnt start rotating standard until they hav too many cards they wanted to ban from tourneys suck as black lotus, Mox, and dual lands.

They can do like MTG and do only a few skills every few months: for example 1/3 of the skills every 4 months. The change wouldn’t be as jarring for players, and balancing would be easier as 2/3 of the skills would remain unchanged each time.

For example, Necros have around 60 skills total. Changing 1/3 would only mean 20 new skills every 4 months.

As for reacquiring skills; they can either make it automatic: the new skills simply replace the old ones; or make getting the new skills part of the fun.. for example, make it part of completing the current Living Story (I’d prefer the former).

I think the most important feature of this scheme is that it keeps the game from getting stale while always having a balanceable number of skills.

Latorn.4209:

Lord Kuru.3685:

That’s why Anet should follow the Magic: the Gathering model (Type II/Standard) where skills expire as new ones are added. Thus there is always the same number of skills in the game making it easier to balance while the game stays fresh as new skills are routinely added.

Moreover, this system allows Anet to be more bold in introducing new and interesting mechanics since they’ll all expire in time anyway so damage to the game from such experimentation is limited.

As it is, Anet already can’t handle balance with the traits and skills we have now, there’s no way they’ll be able to balance with more traits and more skills. It seems Anet learned absolutely nothing from their experience with GW1.

You want SKILLS to be temporary content now? We’re talking about SKILLSSSSS a core feature of the game? Could it get more controversial than this? Just wait ‘til all the players come whining to the forums about being upset that they couldn’t play when skill “so and so” was active and their class was OP. >.<

LOL… good point. If this had been implemented in game when it first came out there would be less resistance. Nevertheless, despite the inevitable rage, I feel it’s still the way to go; adding more and more skills is just asking for an unbalanceable situation no matter how skilled Anet is at balancing.

That’s why Anet should follow the Magic: the Gathering model (Type II/Standard) where skills expire as new ones are added. Thus there is always the same number of skills in the game making it easier to balance while the game stays fresh as new skills are routinely added.

Moreover, this system allows Anet to be more bold in introducing new and interesting mechanics since they’ll all expire in time anyway so damage to the game from such experimentation is limited.

As it is, Anet already can’t handle balance with the traits and skills we have now, there’s no way they’ll be able to balance with more traits and more skills. It seems Anet learned absolutely nothing from their experience with GW1.

With the new dungeon rewards coming, do you think Anet will/should reward smaller parties more? That would be nice if a solo effort could get as much gold per time put in as a full party!

In my experience, if you have an ability that activates while you’re harvesting, then you get ruined. For example, Necros have a trait that gives regeneration when you hit 90% health; with this trait, if a mob hits you to 90% health while you’re chopping, you get ruined.

It’d be awesome if the enemy could hear your instruments! Imagine a massive zerg announcing their approach with 30 vuvuzelas, striking fear in the hearts of their foes! It’d be like the war drums of old.

Not sure how well your roaming tier worked out in T8 before the new matchup system, but if it was going well:

Maybe you could recreate your small-man tier in T1.. I believe their matchup has been the same for a very long time despite the match randomization (i believe there is quite a gap between #3 and #4 making it harder for the RNG to make a matchup that’s not #1 vs #2 vs #3). Of course if the reports of constant zerging are true (no idea!) then that may be a problem.

Anyway, if you insist on 5v5 fights, then you’re gonna have a hard time finding good ones as you can really only compete with other organized 5-mans — it’s practically impossible for a pug 5-man to beat an organized 5 man simply because of the organized 5-man’s ability to spike using voice comms — so your fun potential is really limited. I’m afraid this game may not be for you.

TenClub.7659:

Lastly Kiel to me is a better choice just for who she is if we go by a RP standpoint. She’s someone that has worked with my character and that my character knows/trusts. While Evon is a trader who I first met when he was sneakily standing behind me eavesdropping on a conversation.

I’m pretty sure Anet expects Kiel to win and this is exactly the reason. This is why the whole election thing is “rigged” (not quite rigged, but HEAVILY biased towards Kiel).
Kiel’s name has been out in the game for much longer than Evon: that’s probably enough to give her the win already (name recognition is a big deal — it’s why real life politicians always say “my opponent” instead of actually saying their opponent’s name).

The only way I see Evon winning is if it’s not 1 person 1 vote (do we know yet?) and the Evon followers are much more dedicated to getting him to win (which seems to be the case).

Bombix.3480:

I’m currently using the juggermancer/abomination build.
Full soldiers dagger/focus, staff.
WoD/WoS/x utilities with whichever elite suites the need.

I started SE story just to see how tough it would be. (Plus I still need to do it as well) time restraint caused me to only pull the first group and I died fast. I am going to try again with this build with more time allowed.

The DS power build sounds like it could have good potential. I am willing to try anything tho.

SE story isn’t too bad to solo, but it’s quite long and sometimes requires a lot of running back when you die. The part with Zojja opening the locked door is probably gonna be pretty hard (when I solo’ed this, I guess there was a glitch as the mobs didn’t appear until the door was way past 50% unlocked). Good luck!

Bombix.3480:

OK so I know it sounds crazy, but I want to know a few things.
1.) How many of my fellow necros have solo’d a dungeon(story mode/explorable)
2.) Which runs are the easiest to solo (if possible)
3.) Build you used or recommend now.

I am looking to see if it is possible to solo dungeons with a necro. I have seen the warrior videos from wethospu (sorry if I misspelled) and only one necro in TA. Thanks

1. I do SE p1 most days for fun.

2. SE p1 is great: No silver mob groups. All bosses can be pulled so it’s 1v1. And most importantly, none of the fights become so long that they’re tedious (bosses are champs except last one who is legendary). It’s got to be the easiest dungeon to solo.

3. I use minions for the first two bosses (golem and Nokk) and the last boss (Tazza). The buff to the healing minion a few patches back has made it really good for this dungeon. I started with knights armor and trinkets but am slowly swapping out for berserkers piece by piece as I get better at the dungeon. I use what’s almost certainly an unoptimal 30/0/20/0/20 (that’s my WvW build that I don’t like to change just for this dungeon).

Try it!!! Running this dungeon solo and slowly improving my times has been the best PvE experience I’ve had in this game. Note that if you move behind Tazza while you are her only foe (all your minions are down) then she will reset and you will be VERY angry.

by the way:
HotW p1 is also doable, but the last boss is REALLY tedious.
SE p1 is almost certainly doable as well, but the APC part is REALLY tedious (i’ve never done the last boss solo).

Authority.6145:

Also regarding gear.

What type of gear I need in world vs world? Full berserker with ascended accessories?

What profession are you? I’d say that full berserker, while optimal for all forms of PvE, is generally a bit too glassy for WvW.

Authority.6145:

So when you kill one player what do you get instantly?

Your reward is that you get to /sit spam the guy you killed

NSP! We have lots of small man teams (SPCA, Splt, XOXO, tM…) and we love them all: we never give grief to anyone just because they want to small-man!

We usually have a good amount of people playing in the earlier parts of your timeslot and much fewer people on towards the end. It’s rarely very zergy during these times so your group would definitely make an impact any time you’re on 10-6 EDT (you’d make a HUGE impact during the later hours).

Also, we’re in the lower tiers so you’re not going to be experiencing skill lag and enormous zergs steamrolling through 24/7.

Now is a great time to come to NSP:

After fighting AR and BP a few months back, we started a decline (we lost lots of guilds, there was lots of server infighting as well) that we only recently have started recovering from.
In the past couple months however, things have improved a lot — we’ve gotten some great contributing individuals and small guilds transferring over.. moreover many native NSP’ers have really stepped up their presence. Morale is way up and everyone’s been having a lot of fun these past few months. Now is the perfect time to come to NSP!

BlazeQ.1095:

Sinester.3572:

where is ur jokes now ?

The strong commanders were off for the night. You didn’t face an organized group at all. The loss of our BL was my failure, but my leadership isn’t that great to begin with. But be proud, I’ll be back and just a little bit stronger each time. Count on it ;-)

Too much Beer you NOOB! Sorry, couldn’t resist, puns intended.

meep.2601:

well they did just change “outmanned” so this is prob very high on their priority list

No doubt! Expect this issue to be fixed in 5-6 months.

AntiGw.9367:

Gotta love people that try to hide stuff from developers. So funny

I don’t think anyone is trying to hide anything from devs. Rather, if you tell other players your great farming spot, then it will fill up with players: that’s what leads to the inevitable nerfs.

Gasoline.2570:

You just had to post it? Next thing you know anet has nerfed it.

This. Exactly. Or: (putting my tinfoil hat on) you want Anet to nerf this area so that the price of armored scales (which you no doubt have stockpiled) will go up

Vayne.8563:

Holographic projectors were created originally by the Asurans who are quite known to make the occasional dangerous device. That’s perfectly in keeping with lore.

No problem with this: it makes perfect sense.

Vayne.8563:

The idea was to create practice nodes for people to fight dragon minions, which is what comes out of them. And as Asura often do they went a bit overboard.

Was this explained somewhere in-game? (Not trying to be argumentative: I always assumed Anet was just lazy and didn’t bother to come up with one, it’d be nice to know that at least they tried.)

Anyway: why were they dropped in random places all over the world.. why not put practice nodes next to the practice golems in LA, for example? I find this explanation a bit “thin.” On the other hand, I liked that the presents from wintersday, which basically was the same idea, had a nice explanation (as promotional material dropped by Tixx).

I hope Anet themselves believes it’s filler because it’d be worse if they actually thought this was true, meaty content!

BlueSoda.6297:

So after reading all of the comments below and doing my best to respond to as many as I could I’ve come to the conclusion that the community does not want to actually play this mini game, and only wants the achievement points.

It seems a large percentage of players get their fun not from playing but rather from collecting achievements. I wonder if this can somehow be used in real life, to encourage certain behaviors through a system that offers official “achievements” (but no other rewards)?

These infinite tools are/were very popular. Anet would be stupid not to bring them back on sale every few months or so (with different skins and effects to encourage even more sales). I’d say just be patient and save up some gems.

It’s harder to make a politics type story exciting than a “traditional” sword and sorcery story — I just don’t think the writing team is up to it.

The settlers are stuck with bad written contracts. So destroy them and they’ll all be freed! I found that SO simplistic and didn’t fit well with the world created.

The OP has the perfect comparison: the storytelling is of Star Wars Episodes 1-3 quality.

What’s the story behind the holographic projections? Why were they peppered all over the lands? Where they part of the dragon bash celebration? And if so, why where they created to be so dangerous?

krippler.9826:

Softspoken.2410:

Fear’s been stated to be both a control effect and a condition, but which parts of the game effect / respond to it are still kind of foggy right now.

It comes down to when it’s convenient for ANet to balance the game. They said they never intended for sigil of paralyzation to affect fear, but they were just trying to cover their a—. It’s pretty clear that they intended to treat fear as a stun but now that they don’t like the balance, they want to cherry pick situations where it’s affected and situations where it’s not.

yeah.. this is just a terrible balancing technique .. it just causes confusion amongst players. We need more consistency! Please, less "i before e, except …. "

consider NSP. We have a few hours of high-pop, organized zerg play every day, but usually have low WvW population. However, we do (I feel) play pretty well considering our numbers! So if you come, you can really make a difference — you will have much more impact on our server than if you went to a higher tiered one.

To be honest, we were in a bit of a freefall for a while with really low morale and guilds leaving, but in the past few weeks we’ve seen a bit of a resurgence with some native NSP’ers stepping out into the forefront as well as some really good contributors transferring in (individuals and small guilds).

Plus, we have a very good PvE community if you’re into that. For example, we have daily, commander led, temple runs in Orr every day starting around 5:00pm pacific time.

I’m sure one of our more esteemed server members will show up in this thread soon and give you more info — for example, I believe we also have weekly guild meetings to discuss grand strategy — I’m just a lowly pugger but I wanted to get our name out as an option!

I find running dungeons solo (or with 1 other) much more fun than with a full party.

With a full party, you can (for the most part) just faceroll through everything while with 1 or 2, you actually have to take time to learn the boss mechanics and do some buildcrafting just to be able to finish — it’s actually a really fun (if sometimes frustrating) challenge.

Start with SEp1 .. the bosses are all static with very clear tells on their attacks. It’s a good dungeon for learning how to solo. No exploits needed (you do have to pull a few bosses to the right place, but I don’t consider these exploits — the pulls are simply to isolate the bosses, not move them where you are invuln.) I usually solo it with my necro most days — it’s been REALLY FUN slowly developing my build and getting my times faster and faster .. it’ll be a sad day when I get to a point where I can’t improve my times.

Plus (a HUGE plus), the bosses don’t have enormous loads of health like in most other dungeons so fighting them is challenging but doesn’t get tedious. With a guardian and warrior, I’d say you could do this dungeon in 25-30 mins after just a bit of practice — so it’s somewhat rewarding lootwise (vs time spent) as well!

Wethospu has a thread here with lots of solo vids that you can check out.

p.s. I just thought of a fun challenge: kill all three golem champs (again, SEp1) at one time instead of pulling one by one. With a guard + warrior it may not be too hard! In fact, maybe it can be done with just a guard?

p.p.s. SE p3 is also fun but does get a bit tedious at points (e.g. the APC part) — if you’re soloing, I’d recommend giving the first boss a few tries each time before giving up and exploiting him, just so you can get the dungeon done (otherwise it gets frustrating). After a bit, you’ll figure out how to do him legitimately.

Similarly for the last boss, give a few tries before finishing him using a full party from gw2lfg — when you post that you’re at the last boss, your party usually fills up really fast. Eventually, you’ll get it all by yourself.

Good luck!