Guild Wars 2

jsduke.6537:

GW2 is doing something different, though.

I hope that you will acknowledge this: If you like “Permanent Content Only” games, then you have TONS of options available to you. But if you like “Living World Content” games, then you have precious few choices. I like the Living World Content better. That’s my cuppa. I hope GW2 doesn’t change that, because if they do then I have nowhere else to go to get it.

How is anything about “Living World” content unique aside from the fact that Arenanet removes it from the game after two weeks? It’s the same post-release content expansion you get in any other MMO. It’s not like Twilight Assault can end in defeat, with Scarlet’s minions taking over Tyria. The endings are predetermined. World of Warcraft could delete every new raid instance or dungeon after two weeks and have as much claim to a “living world” as Guild Wars 2 does. Read about what SOE wants to do with Rallying Calls in Everquest Next. That would be a genuinely evolving online world, not what we have in Guild Wars 2.

Arenanet is expending hundreds of man hours on content that no new or returning player is ever going to see. It perplexes me they think this is a good idea, and I fail to see what it brings to the game aside from a sense of superiority to those who manage to finish LW content before it’s removed. The reason you don’t see many games follow this model is because it’s a bad idea. As far as I’m concerned it amounts to Arenanet trying to keep their customers loyal through ransom.

The concept behind Living World is neat, but the application is a staggeringly bad design decision. ArenaNet is basically holding their players hostage, because if they take a break they’ll miss out on content that they will never see again.

As someone who took a long break myself in light of all the issues plaguing the game at launch, this has really killed my enthusiasm to stick around. The fact they’ve included actual, tangibly useful items like weapon recipes in Living World content and then removed from the game only makes it worse.

Is Vulnerability stacking going to be affected by the upcoming condition stacking nerfs?

Queue times have dropped significantly for most servers, along with population. The queue isn’t going to be an effective deterrent to this behavior.

So who are these three guilds that left SBI? Caedas and…?

I’m going to be very disappointed if JQ fails to get first place next week after all the monologuing I’ve read in this thread.

I’m forever gutted that the flamethrower is a kit rather than a proper weapon, as I thought it would be when I first heard of it in game previews all that time ago.

Nobody is ever ‘forced’ to farm in any game, so I’m not sure how that’s relevant. I don’t understand the logic driving people to claim that diminishing returns somehow make the game less grindy, either. All Arenanet has done is force people to intersperse other activities into the grind, making it drag on even longer. I don’t see how people farming karma is going to negatively impact the game economy.

Punishing people for playing the game is rarely a wise decision, and being forced to go do something else you don’t really want to do because the game has arbitrarily decided that you’re done with X activity for the day does not make for good game design.

It’s pretty inferior to grenades when it comes to AoE. The damage isn’t that impressive, and Supply Drop is probably the best ultimate to have in PvE for those moments when you need a panic button.

You may have trouble recruiting new players; TC has been consistently full every time I’ve checked over the past two days, even during American and Euro off hours.

ArenaNet’s belief that the servers would eventually balance themselves out was somewhat overly idealistic, I think. A lot of people are willing to endure worse things than long queues if it means they get to “win”, even in something like WvW where the bonuses for doing so are largely irrelevant.

Thief is far and away one of the most potent professions in WvW compared to the others.

SBI has had unusually short queues from the very start of this match. Most of the borderlands were instant join for a fairly significant portion of the afternoon on Saturday, which was surprising. I’d guess it’s a combination of other games coming out this past week + burnout over the fights in tier 1; it’s obvious from this thread that a lot of SBI players are disheartened over their coverage compared to HoD’s.

As far as SBI/JQ backstabbing and who started what, eh. The same thing was said a couple weeks ago when JQ was in the match, and both servers started attacking each other early on in either case. Tier 1 is always going to be a fight for second place until another server emerges with coverage that is equal to HoD’s. I’d say last week proved that after the focus on keeping HoD in third completely fell apart once the weekend was over.

Most armors have horrible, horrible texture stretching on male charr. I ended up transmuting my crafted exotics to the charr tier 1 cultural armor on my engineer for this reason.

Funniest part? Even the charr cultural armor has texture stretching on charr models. But at least it only happens when you perform certain animations rather than all the time.

misanq.2769:

The hyperbole on this forum is really starting to get out of hand, frankly.

This. These threads never fail to attract people who claim they’ve unlocked the Konami Code which turns their engineer into a 3v1 unstoppable juggernaut of destruction that can’t be countered by any other profession, but then they always neglect to offer any insight as to how that’s possible. Probably because the claim has no basis in reality.

It’s a common element amongst the playerbase of mediocre/undpowered classes throughout the history of MMOs: Dominators in City of Villains, the Magus in Warhammer Online, the Metaphysicist in Anarchy Online; all of these classes had a die-hard segment of their population which insisted they knew something that everyone else hadn’t figured out, that everybody else playing the class was just doing it wrong. People have a deep seated need to grasp at any straw which will make them feel better than their peers, and the human capacity for self deception is without equal.

It’s a gimmick build that most people play for a day or two and then abandon when they realize it’s not really viable outside of murdering undergeared nubs in WvW.

They’re not bad, they’re just mediocre. They won’t even scratch the surface of a well geared warrior or thief’s damage outside of the supremely gimmicky Static Discharge build (which even then only manages to attain via a bunch of long cooldowns what warriors and thieves can do with their regular rotations) which will most likely get nerfed given the history of engineer ‘fixes’.

Almost all of the higher level/cooler looking armor looks awful on charr, unfortunately. If it’s not the coat hang problem it’s the textures being hideously stretched out and terrible to look at. I too use the rascal coat since it has the least noticeable stretching of any item I’ve found thus far, but even there you can clearly see the belt buckle is unnaturally stretched out and odd looking.

Don’t even get me started on how bad the 400 Leatherworking exotics look on them.

That was a slip up on my part, it’s late here. There are three borderland maps, Red, Blue, and Green, and the Eternal Battlegrounds. They all count toward world completion.

You have to do all three WvW maps, including both Borderlands. For the missing hearts, try checking:

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Category:Lists_of_hearts_by_region

…and counting the hearts in each zone, then comparing that number to what you have unlocked on your own map. It’s a pain, but it’s what I had to do before I figured out where I was missing some. Much cheaper than teleporting everywhere to check the completion percentage, too.

So… what happened to him? I chose to help him escape and he said he'd contact me later when things had settled, but he never did.

I’m completely done with all the personal story quests now. Was it like this for everyone, or is it a bug? At one point it sent me on a mission to rescue some lady I’d never heard of who supposedly helped me acquire an artifact I’d never seen before, so I’m wondering if my personal story got borked somehow.

I’d bet you’re missing Frostgorge Sound. A lot of people assume it’s like Orr and has no renown hearts, but it has eleven.

As for the other questions: you do not need PoIs from dungeons. You do need PoIs and vistas from WvW. The three WvW maps are always the same, you don’t have to complete them for each server match up. Many of the vistas and PoIs are located inside keeps which may or may not be controlled by your server at any given time, so it can take a while to complete each map unless your server tends to conquer everything during off hours as some of the more populated ones do.

Several of the things you complained about in the post were willful decisions on the developers’ part and won’t be changing any time soon.

I’m sure many of you gathering materials for your crafted exotics have heard the claim that drop rate percentages are affected bonus XP or that the drop rate decreases dramatically after 10 minutes. These sound like the usual brand of unsubstantiated rumors that pop up in every game with RNG, but I’m wondering if there’s ever been any statements made by the developers to suggest that this is true?

I’m wondering because earlier today somebody said the drop rate had been tied to bonus XP in order to discourage botting, but that would be horribly unfair since bonus XP is not individual, but rather tied to the mob itself (it isn’t about how long it has been since you killed it, it’s about how long the mob itself has been alive). It would defeat the spirit of cooperation ArenaNet has tried so hard to foster amongst the playerbase if one guy could effectively punish everybody around him by farming an area for too long.

CptCosmic.3156:

condition damage always scales the same on every ability. you just dont have the proper equipment for a condition damage build.

That isn’t true. The damage formulas for each condition effect are up on the wiki. Poison scales miserably.

Level + 0.1 * Condition Damage per second.

Power for certain. The only reason to even consider going with a condition build for grenades is in PvP where targets will be moving around constantly, and even then it’s still fairly pointless. The only real beneficiary is Shrapnel Grenade, Poison seems to scale really, really poorly from the testing I’ve done over the past few days. It seems like the skill is meant to be used for the combo field rather than to do direct damage.

Grenade’s #1 skill does a ton of damage in power/precision/crit damage gear if you can spam it on stationary targets.