Guild Wars 2

I love the fact that the missions now have achievements tied to it. Difficult achievements you probably won’t finish on your first try. AWESOME!! Replay the mission until you’ve mastered it, exactly what I was missing until now from the achievement-system.

THANK YOU ANET!

I’m just curious, (I really have no clue), isn’t shortbow with piercing arrows at close range pretty good against groups of enemies too?

I’m curious why some people have that black/white attitude. If it’s a ranger with a bow, the dungeon-run MUST last more than 1 hour, it MUST have at least 2 wipes.

I could say the same to any other profession. Mesmer, keep your clones out of aggro! Necro, those minions are the reason why we wiped again. GS-Warrior, why don’t you have banners instead of full-signets? Thieves, just get rid of sword, please! … and so on.

In truth, every profession can be played in a lot of different ways and be viable. Not necessarily speedrun-viable, but wipeless viable without doubling the run-timer.

If you want to have casual runs, great! Join casual groups, it’s all good. We want to have fast runs, we join speed-clear groups. Everyone’s happy.

The best quote in this thread imho. Every one of you can choose which group you wanna join. I wouldn’t join a speedrun-group with an experimental new build with any profession. I don’t expect others to have a certain build when doing normal runs though, you don’t turn 30 minutes into 90 minutes just because of a build, it’s the player skill that matters, and how he/she can work with the chosen skills.

Dalanor.5387:

Picture is related.

how boring would this game be if every player/profession would play the exact same spec. Optimized – yes. But boring.

There are tons of factors which would lead to less dps: positioning, mistakes at combo-finishers, buff-food, rotation, etc. etc. … but people prefer to have a scapegoat, in GW2 called: Ranger

Lyralei.5920:

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

I would have no problem having a Ranger with axes, bows or swords in my group. Not everyone who runs dungeons is about maxing damage output, some of us still prefer the credo “play the way you want” & let others do the same. I don’t care if a run takes 5min longer. Personally, when I’m playing ranger, I love using axe/wh,axe and greatsword… it’s just more fun than sword to me.

Wait till your beloved bearbow causes your normally 30 minute Arah run to end up taking 3 hours including but not limited to aggroing everything in sight and bringing them to us, causing lupicus to eat 3 grubs and making lupicus chase her all over the place into us, causing the rest of us to die.

Because that is what exactly happened to me. We kept her until the end because the Ooze boss made her bear bounce nonstop and we found it hilarious.

If that person causes such problems and wouldn’t listen / react to this then of course I would vote to kick him. The thing is: there are a lot of rangers who use bows quite effectively and throwing all of them into the same cup is just stupid.

I would have no problem having a Ranger with axes, bows or swords in my group. Not everyone who runs dungeons is about maxing damage output, some of us still prefer the credo “play the way you want” & let others do the same. I don’t care if a run takes 5min longer. Personally, when I’m playing ranger, I love using axe/wh,axe and greatsword… it’s just more fun than sword to me.

Oh, stunbreaks don’t work with immobilize? I guess that’s what I was doing wrong :-/

Is this http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Tuning_Crystal_Station a endless gimick? Currently it costs about 11 gold on the tradingpost and I can’t see how this would be 1 use only… O_o

I’ve read the tooltip of “Decoy” and it mentions a stunbreak. Is it bugged? It doesn’t work for me, Arah-mobs still stop me.

Can anyone help?

source:

In Guild Wars 1 we had the expansions and we also had a Live Team constantly adding free content to the game and their still, seven years later, still adding free content to the game.

We’re going to do the exact same thing with Guild Wars 2 the difference being that the teams will be much larger supporting the game on both sides so we’ll have an Expansion Team working on expansions for the game and we’ll have a Live Team constantly providing content for the game and both of those teams will be extremely large, supporting the game from day one, right from the day it ships the Live team will be supporting the game and they’ll be supporting every aspect on the game, they’ll be adding free content to the game, updating the online store, setting up events in the game like our holiday festivals we had in Guild Wars 1, we want to give real breadth to the things that we add.

http://www.screamingjoypad.com/2011/09/exclusive-guild-wars-2-preview-and.html

@Konig: a while before release they explained what they want to do with GW2: They have multiple teams:

• The live team which works on regular updates to the game (turned into the Living Story Team as I would understand this)
• The main team – which works on expansion-content (now said to be delivered by either an expansion pack or with living story updates).

I’ll look for a source of this, but it’s been a while.

Thanks for the clarification Bobby, at least I hope that she’s still working on content for GW2. I absolutely mean no disrespect to the LS1 writers, like I mentioned above.

I agree with FlamingFoxx that the important thing is the translation from the writing board to the actual live game.

Guys, we’ve seen some of the blog-posts from the LS1 writers and these were quite good; people just complained that those weren’t released ingame instead – not on it’s quality.

What I’m trying to say: the problem wasn’t the quality of writing but the way it was integrated into the game. It seems that they had to cut almost everything with depth because there was simply no time to include it because it takes obviously a lot of time to create new events which make use of those story-bits.

On Reddit some guys who followed the chinese stream (where Ree was interviewed) posted that Ree Soesbee would be the new writer for the upcoming Living Story Season.

Can someone confirm this? This would be huge for me personally, I absolutely LOVE her work.

sigh I’m sorry for the Anet devs, they are working like Dolyaks and then they got blamed for losing their supplycamp on a zerg of enemy thieves

I wished Dolyaks could fly

Paul.4081:

Horrible, the next time a dev gets a bright idea that dev should be forced to actually play the game for an hour to check if they’re genius idea is actually worth it. In this case it is not.

Can’t preview available traits in a selected slot without spending points? Thanks for adding the extra work to the previously easy system, numpties.

you can easily preview each of the traits in the list on the left, just click on the traitline and not the slot.

one thing I thought about recently: why do people spend so much thought on a part of the game-experience that makes up for a very little percentage of their playtime.

I mean: you spend a few days/weeks on leveling up a character and months/years for playing that character. I don’t want the excitement gone when I’ve reached 80, so in that spirit the new trait-system makes a lot of sense. It’s something to progress your character when he’s reached max level even further.

Sure, some players won’t like this since until now once you’d reached lv.80 your progression was mostly over and you were on an even playingfield – some consider this one of GW2’s strenghts but on the other hand others found GW2 becoming stale too fast because there’s nothing to work towards to.

It’s probably bad communication from Anet’s side that they have turned the trait-system into a long-term progression system away from a leveling system.

I love the new trait-implementation, but the requirements for specific adept traits are way off. Anet said that this wasn’t intended… but now I wonder: how could this happen? There must have been thoughts behind those high requirements, but no word on this anywhere.

Can someone from Anet clarify on the “it wasn’t intended” mystery? Seems like a rookie mistake to me, am I wrong? I don’t suppose this is some kind of bug in any form…

the way I see it Megaservers aren’t working as they were supposed to be YET. If working properly you would meet more RPers instead of less than before. Imagine you are in RP-guild1. If you load into a Megaserver you’ll be put into a map with those RP-guild1 members inside… but not only this. Now player xy from RP-guild1 is also part of RP-guild2. All those RP-guild2 members will actually be in the same map-version as all those RP-guild1 guys.

In theory this would make your map-version a huge RP-guildX pool. It’s just not working yet, there are reports from several guys on Reddit how they aren’t be put into the same map as their fellow guild-members.

I don’t like how zergs now completely destroy the challenge of an event. It’s just facerolling bosses because of the huge number of players participating.

I get it, the number of active players seems much bigger now, but with the way the scaling works at the moment, it’s just a autoattack-toomucheffects-battle which only caters towards loot-farmers.

(experience taken from following encounters: Jungle Wurm, Shadow Behemoth, the two world bosses in Mount Malstroem, Fire-Elemental)

I can’t believe what I’m reading,… people requested a system like this since release of GW2 – something that has been in GW1 from the get go. Now we got it and people cry how they need to do open world stuff / quests in order to unlock it. Seriously?

Personally I think this is wonderful. I have tons of new traits I can work towards to, and if I’m tired of a build I have to go adventuring to become better. It feels much more like GW1 to me, in a good way.

No, I do not want everything unlocked from the start.
Yes, I want more stuff to do in the open world.

Honestly: thank you, Anet! These changes made the game so much more fun to me.

I see you’re using soldiers gear and berserker trinkets in your build… can you tell us more about these choices.

I tried a few dungeon-runs yesterday, it was basically a lesson on how to exploit systems (one guy who was really awesome and showed the newbies how to do the dungeon (so I didn’t report him) came in with 10 minutes of protection), skip enemies most efficiently and how people don’t want low level characters in low level dungeons. I used the lfg tool looking for a “relaxed run, free for all, newbies welcome”.

We got tons of champion bags in short time and really good loot compared to my daily WvW adventures.

It’s not balanced good enough if you ask me. Some guys also might run 5-10 dungeons a day, it took us newbies more than an hour to complete p1-3 of Caudecus’s Manor.

Running WvW since release got me a handful of exotics, tigirius has a good point. I feel open world and WvW isn’t as rewarding as it could be imho. Long term goals seem fine (I love the implementation of the WvW-Meta reward – the exclusive weapon set) but I’ve been killing countless enemies in WvW and all I get is stuff to salvage mostly.

I think it wouldn’t be too far-fetched to see some of the gem-store items drop from mobs since Anet already gives them away for free lately. They must think that this way more people buy stuff in the store.

Think about it:
They could create meta-goals like “collect all 5 of destiny’s edge minis”. Now let 2 or 3 of them drop from open world mobs – don’t you think people would storm the gem-store for the missing ones? (Bad example since you get Rytlock only from the digital edition of the game, but you get the meaning). Even more so if there would be a corresponding reward to it (like a title).

IndigoSundown.5419:

• changing the way the game rolls for loot (roll for rarity, then roll on appropriate table); or
• adding items to the “rare and better” table once the game determines that you qualify for such?

If the latter, I foresee little impact. Thus, my comment.

well instead of having 100.000 possible drops as a whole, you then have 120.000 possible drops as a whole.

random numbers inc.:

• Before there was a 90% chance to get something common, 9% chance for something rare and 1% chance for something exotic.
• After the change: 85% chance for something common, 10% chance for something rare and 5% chance of something exotic

(these 5% consists of 1% exotic armor/weapons like before and 4% something different like bags, minis, gemstore consumables, keys, tonics, bags of craftingmats, valuable buff-food, dyes (what a pity that this is gone with the 15th), treasure maps, instruments (or a voucher for 30% decreased price in the gem-store) and much more).

That’s my suggestion. Sure it has impact on the trading post and gem store purchases, but it also has impact on the fun the player has when killing and looting stuff.

Any updates on how the new grandmaster-traits will play into the healway build?

IndigoSundown.5419:

Given the rate at which I get exotic drops, adding more to the exotic loot table would have little impact.

you misunderstand me, those drops shouldn’t be instead of the exotic drops but added to the loottable. The more you ad, the bigger the chance to get something

Yeah, it seems I’m just not very lucky. I run with MF of about 120 and do mostly WvW… little exotic drops have happened to me so far

Personally I think that those open world drops could be good for the gemstore. Don’t you want to complete a halfway filled collection? Why not have Minis drop from certain rare-mobs who spawn every 8 hours, walk their paths a few times and disappear again after that? Reminding you of the mini collection by giving you that drop would probably increase the sell-rate in the gem-store, because some people just want to finish what they’ve started.

Not everyone likes Fractals and not everyone likes to delete and create a new character constantly just to find a gambling-item.

One thing I find odd is: Why isn’t there a much bigger variety of loot in open world drops?

• 15-18 slot bags (droprate: exotic items)
• transmutation stones (droprate: exotic items)
• common/rare minis (droprate: exotic items)
• makeover kit (droprate: exotic items)
  …

in order to not screw with the market, just make those drops accountbound

You wouldn’t get a lot of bags, a lot of transmutation stones,… BUT you would get something of these more often – which would make killing mobs / WvW enemies feel much more rewarding imho. Furthermore people would learn to know some of these items and perhaps makes them want to buy more of those in the gem store.

The way it is now I pretty much know what to expect from loot mostly. Nothing really surprising most of the time: blues, some greens and occasionally a yellow. An exotic? Once every half of the year.

Morsus.5106:

If just the latter is yeas I’m likely to just salvage, re-acquire the weapon, salvage, re-acquire, etc. to get lots of Dark Matter and Ectoplasm.

good point, it would have to be a new type of salvage kit which only gets you the scrap without the dark matter and ectos.

The only reason the scrap exists is to sell “the item” to other players, or to say it in a better way: sell them a treasure-map to the wanted item.

I’m clarifying:

• Lord Taeres’s Shadow drops, it’s accountbound and can’t be sold.
• If you want to sell it so that others can wield this weapon, you have to salvage it.
• When salvaged, you get a specific fortune scrap out of it.
• This scrap allows one 100% drop of that source-item (Lord Taeres’s Shadow) from it’s original source (the pirate-champion mob)

It brings people out in the world and gives them the guarantee to get the item they want, they just have to find the drop-location (which is described on the scrap-tooltip).

But why? Because buying special loot from the trading-post takes out most of the excitement you get out of the adventure. People who play the trading post won’t have to go out into the world ever. It’s a toxic system if you ask me, if someone wants something of value he/she should show the heart to do something for it, even if it’s just finding a mob and killing it.

Taku.6352:

No.

I’m impressed… not.

We have a lot of interesting skins in the game, but most of those are tradeable with other players. People who don’t want to get involved in the grind for rng skip ahead: they use gold which they have farmed / flipped / bought from real money but at the same time they “lose content”. They haven’t met the same challenge / some might say they haven’t earned the specific reward.

Imagine you get that really special skin from finding a very rare mob in the game, a mob that wanders around and can’t be found easily.

Here my suggestion: you can’t directly sell the rare piece of equipment you’ve found but rather a (let’s call it) “itemname-fortune scrap”. (how to implement this: the item can’t be sold on the TP but you can salvage it for that fortune scrap). Having this thing in your inventory increases the low droprate of this item to 100% on that very specific enemy. But players still have to find the mob in the world and kill it to get the piece of equipment. The scrap has a description of the location of the mob in it’s tooltip.

example: You find Lord Taeres’s shadow in a champion loot box. You can’t sell it on the TP but when you salvage it you get a Lord Taeres’s shadow fortune scrap. The tooltip says: "very rare champion reward from pirate(?)-champions. The person who buys this will get Lord Taeres’s shadow at a 100% droprate when killing a pirate champion anywhere in the world.

what do you think?

I think the “problem” becomes most apparent when looking at Legendaries. You can either have that long-term goal where you complete a journey (world completion, dungeon tokens, tons of t6 mats from lv.80 zones, WvW tokens,…) or you flip offers on the trading post until you have the coin to buy it without having experienced anything of the things described.

Personally I think that Legendaries could have been much much more. Reward Tracks for sPvP is a good step to earn some of the mats, but I would like to see a system to earn your stuff for PvE (like Zone-progression).

hardmode would be pretty easy to implement in the open world:

• scale players to -2 levels of the zone

Could this be seen as griefing other players to make event scale up for them? Well it isn’t considered griefing if low level players play with other folks. Furthermore: if the HM-player dies, he won’t count towards scaling anymore.

My problem with the way long-term goals are designed: it feels too dependant on the tradingpost. I doubt that most people accumulate all the needed mats through collecting them themselves. All those hundrets of t6 mats means a LOT of time doing Orr/Frostgorge sound and/or Champion-box farming. Not that fun.

If I would design long term goals, I’d make them muss less dependant on the TP.

@Ema: It seems you live behind a giant rock if you haven’t noticed the tons of new stuff we get since release… the feature patch seems to have some significant changes as well. And all of your frustration because of a feature which got delayed…?! LOL.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Release
This combined is much more than a expansion would have released in one go in the same time. It’s not all permanent, that’s true, but when you play the game regularly it’s huge – and because of the living world focus you’ll always be around people instead of having wastelands after the first few weeks.

totally understandable, flooding new players with tons of skills/traits at once is a bad idea. With those small speedbumps you’d get the traits in a couple of hours anyway… I can not see any downside here. If you play sPvP and love it, you’ll be there in no time.

25SP (more/less)… that’s just pure speculation.

Kaon.7192:

Why do I get the feeling that each and every single one of these new traits will be at least as much of a grind as the 25 SP healing skills?

I hope the traits cost tons of a certain currency – preferable karma since you’d still have to play the game for that.

Roy, have you considered a unique title or some other reward for players who go the more effortful way of the adventure?

Mark Katzbach.9084:

Because of that, we are looking into several ways to integrate building your precursor into our new updated reward and progression systems we’re working on, which is requiring additional development time and iteration.

Sure, it’s not good news, but it makes a lot of sense to me. Imagine Anet would implement a wardrobe system (something which is rumored lately)… wouldn’t you want to use your legendary-skin on each of your alts – with infinite charges like the achievement-skins? Of course this means more work on their side.

Anet hasn’t scrapped the feature, I’m sorry for overreacting at first.

Mark Katzbach.9084:

The way progression and rewards work in Guild Wars 2 have changed quite a bit since we initially talked about that feature

Hmm I guess this has to do with the introduction of ascended gear and how we can aquire ascended mats from activities all over the world – a thing that was mentioned by Colin when he talked about Precursor crafting. So this has taken it’s place then?!

What I’d like to add is my perspective: I was excited about the precursor crafting not because we would have gotten a reliable way to get a Legendary, but because there was this glimpse to add some “legendary” backstory to the Legendary itself – something that has been missing for these epic items since forever. To me personally a Legendary feels more like a gemstore item than any truely legendary artefact rooted in Guild Wars lore. A toy for rich people mostly, not something I’ve earned through a worthy adventure.

Gold is more important than Karma (something which isn’t affected by real money). I feel karma is quite broken because of this.

My personal experience with loot drops in GW2: it isn’t exciting for me any more. I don’t play the game a whole day, playing the game for 2 hours a day gives me 2 rolls on the ultimate bag. I guess my chances for these rare items are below zero.

Trying to be constructive:
Add more non-generic stuff (not crafting mats, shards, bags etc.) to the loot table. You have stuff that drops all the time and stuff that drops for 1 person in 100… rarely. Why not include things in between?

Things with a 10-20% chance per try. Things where not every average player get’s lucky, but having an actually realistic chance to get something you want to have.

examples:

• a new unique mask like the one’s in the gem-store
• a black lion key
• a platinum coin (worth 5g)
• a part of the ultra-rare item – non-tradeable – combine 10 of those to get the rare one.

you could also add more “very rare” drops like the ones we currently have

• rare/exotic minis from the 2-set
• a makeover kit
• a bag of gems (50-150 gems)
• an instrument

I think they would redo the Zhaitan fight if they had the time for it. I doubt they have, since there is tons of stuff to work on with the 2-weekly schedule of the living story (which I like).

the Battle for LA wasn’t my kind of gameplay;

not having anything building on the strengths of GW2:

• exploration (I don’t count finding Peter as content for exploration)
• traversing puzzle-like environment
• fun small-scale action combat

instead having content which GW2 tends to have problems with:

• big scale zerg content (scaling issues, stale gameplay, screen cluttering, particle effects)

Personally I tried the events in LA, found them really boring because the legendary bosses take forever to kill – then getting no loot and the bugs that the teleporters won’t work because all platforms are blue instead of 3 colors.

… then skipping the whole final battle via a teleporter… loved the end-sequence but I have the feeling that I’ve missed the whole good part… still can’t bring it over myself to try it because it’s a 1 hour investment to get to the knights and when failed means 1 hour more – with the chance of a bug at the bosses again.

I loved the Marionette and the dead end investigation – my favourite part of the finale.

found an updated gw2-wiki post about Mordremoth, with interesting infos:

http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/1zmy0l/connection_between_mordremoth_and_the_other_pale/

so the other (Malyck’s) Pale Tree is in Magus Falls, just where Mordremoth is. More infos and source in the link above.

let’s take a look at a different view here, not the “all afkers are evil” point of view:

What if someone has supported the evacuation for about 30 minutes and suddenly the doorbell/telephone rings. RL incoming. Would you say it’s ok for players like this to port to the entrance and stay afk for the last 15-20 minutes of the event?

hmm I guess fighting over a citizen isn’t a great idea. What if running citizens drop bags occasionally? Then it would be for everyone around, so you’re rewarded for patrolling that area.

That’s what the wiki says:

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Ultimate_Citizen%27s_Rescue_Bag

Instance content is the only way to go

absolutely disagree. Instances are a breeding pool for elitists and I REALLY enjoy playing with random guy XY, even though they are not best geared top skilled players. It’s awesome to find new friends that way and sometimes you feel like being a hero when helping not-so-skilled ones.