Guild Wars 2

sad thing that the devs confirmed that they don’t plan to rework the old open world bosses sure, new things have priority, but why not improving the ones we have… would also be the perfect time to award mastery points for a win.

no, not having to make schedules for a game is one of the reasons I love GW2. I don’t want to play instanced content with randoms and I don’t want the situation where people have to wait for their guildies to play content.

male human faces that don’t look like this:

http://i.imgur.com/zQ7t34C.jpg

Why exactly aren’t people allowed to post new suggestions considering mounts and/or dueling but other kinds of posts like “we want new dungeons”, “we want raids”, etc. come up at least once a week?

I’d love to create a thread to suggest ground-mounts in the new HoT-maps only as a new mastery to travel faster in the mid- and lower biome.

I’d like weapons that let me immerse in the lore of Guild Wars. I can’t stand most of the current Legendaries because they completely take me out of the gameworld.

9/10 login attempts fail for the last 2 weeks… sometimes I can’t login for hours (and it’s certainly not in prime time only)

Tried to disable the firewall, turn off the virus scanner – didn’t work.

EU-Drakkar Lake
Location: Austria

Blaeys.3102:

Reality is, it doesnt matter what they are called -that isn’t important

I wouldn’t say that, to be honest. People build certain expectations when they are presented with a term, and many might get disappointed fast.

https://31.media.tumblr.com/fb22f4e9b55756aa3015b728d13b3516/tumblr_mlxpayqcMM1s8xzf5o1_500.gif

well what I’ve learned from the blog I linked was that the maps (ideally) should be designed from the ground up with all the unlocks in mind. Adding new paths/secrets later on isn’t working that well. Maybe I got this wrong though. Of course, they could just add new maps with this in mind.

When thinking of Metroidvania games something comes to my mind:

• there are the big item upgrades (like super jump, screw attack, ice beam, etc.) which only exist a handful of
• there are the small upgrades (Missile pack, energy pack,…) with tons and tons of hidden locations for those.

What could be GW2s equivalent of those? Are mastery points the goodies that are “hidden” like all the upgrades in Metroidvania games? There is no vertical progression in GW2 so they can’t simply hide +100 health canisters or +1% damage packs.

I remember Colin mentioning in an interview a few months ago that they aren’t working on Polymock at the time. I remember quite well because I was pretty disappointed when I read it.

I’ve no problem with DryTop, Brett. Quite the contrary, I enjoy the variety of Drytop much more than the new map Silverwastes. What makes me enjoy Silverwastes is the ingenius implementation of the jumping puzzle, the meta-event design and the pacman-rewardzone. I just don’t feel very entertained by the stories happening there.

@Monika: I really respect your opinion, but I can’t really disagree more. Gameplay which can be mastered one-handed while doing other things is not something I’m looking for in this game. It’s kind of insulting to players who want to play something that challenges them AND tells a great story.

Actually what I really disliked most in the POI-presentation was the total absence of danger. I hope it was just because of the show-floor advertising, but regenerating each hit in an instant while being attacked from a new enemy-type is just a joke. Why having a health-bar at all when stuff like this is reality.

With all respect, I think roundbased games would fit more to your playstyle Monica. Games which can be paused at any moment.

I think the problem isn’t the variety of enemies but rather the existence of stories which can stand on it’s own, without the big theme: war.

In queensdale you found environments which have little to do with the war between humanity and Centaurs. You hunt demons, help woodcutters versus a queen-bee and skritt invasion.

Anthony Ordon confirmed that he loves events like Nochtli himself, events which aren’t focussed around fighting the big bad guy.

Example of an adventure: Go to a town, investigate an issue with NPCs that will ultimately lead you to a mountain, get ambushed by bad guys, cross the mountain, do a small jumping puzzle, unveal the story’s mystery, fight a boss, get back to the town, receive a nice reward.

what you’re describing sounds like a typical traditional quest to me (something I kind of miss in GW2).

When I hear the term adventures I expect a small story with interesting characters.

When I heard that Anet was inspired by Metroidvania games it got me really excited. I’ve found a blog from one of the designers for Metroid Prime and thought it could be an interesting read.

guide how to make Metroidvania-styled games:
http://subtractivedesign.blogspot.co.at/2013/01/guide-to-making-metroidvania-style.html

on planning level layouts:
http://subtractivedesign.blogspot.co.at/2013/01/guide-to-making-metroidvania-style_16.html

maybe this could be a good start to give players ideas what’s behind the design and to come up with new ideas for the GW2 devs… to make the game even better.

considering what we’ve seen so far I agree that “Trials” would be the more suitable name, especially when I think of the competitive nature – beating high-scores of your friends.

well we’ve seen profession specific armor in the trailer for HoT… remember the druid?

https://nerdybookahs.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/gw2_heart-of-thorns_ranger_druid_044.jpg

as the maps consist of 3 biomes it would be possible to fight Mordremoth at the same time in 3 different heights. Use gliders to land on him maybe…

I missed something that showed how adventures are different to the activities we know. All we’ve seen is how we start adventures and how the player killed mobs while a number in the UI grew.

We didn’t see anything rewardlike
We didn’t see any UI that shows the points of our guildies/friends
etc.

It’s really difficult for someone who has no idea what an adventure is to get information out of this presentation.

it’s probably like Guild Missions, some are more challenging, some not so much. All of them become a challenge when you try to beat your friend’s highscores.

Having to do jumping puzzles in a certain time certainly sounds challenging enough to me. When I think of an adventure at skipping stones, I’m gonna have a hard time.

nGumball.1283:

Adventures are more or less replacing the heart system and therefore you will apparently find easy ones. Otherwise, casual people won’t be able to finish them and therefore will never be able to get mastery points and thereafter progress in the game.

that’s not what I got out of this, the way I see it outposts take the role hearts had. Outposts are places where a lot of events initiate (just like hearts).

You can find Adventures in Outposts, but in other places as well.

• Opposed to hearts, which are activities for leveling players which you can complete in a variety of ways Adventures have to be done in a very specific way.
• Hearts aren’t repeatable, Adventures are
• Hearts are targetted at leveling players. Adventures are for lv.80 players only
• Adventures can be anything: jumping puzzles, minigames,…

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

As a big fan of Nochtli myself I’m here to tell you that there’s still going to be plenty of unique and unexpected things happening in the jungle. I think Steve’s point was simply to illuminate the premise that we’d like to build on our epic map stories with events wherever possible. That doesn’t mean crazy hylek won’t play a role in say, surviving in the jungle.

yay, thanks for clarification

Steve Hwang mentioned in todays POI that almost all events in the new zones are themed with the focus on Mordremoth and the war against him (correct me if I’m wrong). He compared it to Queensdale where only half of the events were themed on the battle against the Centaurs.

I wonder if this is a good choice.

When I remember back to when I was exploring new maps, the things that I remember best are those small stories that aren’t related to “the big war”. Remember the story in Wayfarer Foothills where a Norn child was summoning a bear-horde? Or the event about that witch in her house with all the huge spiders around.

These are the stories you don’t expect happening, that are so interesting.

When looking at Drytop I really loved that Sparring-frog guy. I want more of those hidden unexpected stories, not only big events about “the war”, that really aren’t that interesting storytelling-wise imho.

Pacman, you basically have 4 buttons (up, down, left, right) and still it’s quite a challenge.

It’s not about learning a nonsensical combination of button presses but the efficient way to run and find the targets. When you have players who manage to get 90 vines in a limited time it will be challenging to beat that number.

Those arenas could also be used as dueling arenas where players can challenge other players.

I’d like to see really challenging 1-player vs. Mob battles that aren’t about hitting the enemy for 20minutes but rather about good avoids (like the battles in Queens Gauntlet).

It should be an instanced gladiator arena in the open world (so that others can easily spectate) with invisible walls.

To take this a step further, you could fight against a variety of enemies, e.g. an enemy (rare spawn) you find in the open world.

• adventure starts: you have 20 minutes to find a worthy enemy in the zone
• when you’ve found it and want to challenge it in a 1vs1 you mark the enemy with an environmental weapon
• a npc-warband captures that enemy and prepares it to battle you in the arena
• scoring:

the stronger the enemy – the more points you can achieve
the faster you kill him – the more points you get

it’s like 1-player guild missions with leaderboards – I love this.

small things I didn’t like that much:

• the UI-symbol on the map was almost too bright, couldn’t see it that easily
• the UI didn’t indicate the (sub)goals you should achieve in order to get a “good score”, just an arbitary number

I also wonder… what happens if another player wants to do the same adventure at the same time? Wouldn’t you have a problem finding the enemies when the other player has it’s own spawns?

Higher tiers in Mastery tracks require progressively more Mastery points and more experience to fully train.

This sounds to me like you will spend a long time in Heart of Maguuma to “train” the higher tiers of the mastery tracks. A bit grindy, but I don’t mind since it’s accountbound and I’ll have to do it only once.

Now the question for me is: are new areas/collections/goodies unlocked at lower tiers only (to make them accessible for everyone easily) which would kind of trivialize the experience or will we need to finish the top tier of a mastery to get access to interesting things?

lordkrall.7241:

Just getting XP does not seem to award Mastery Points.

Hm, that’s not what I meant.

You train the specific mastery tier you’re in by getting xp.
You unlock a (new) tier / a new mastery track by spending mastery points.

That Guy.5704:

correct. The point still remains that it appears that you can completely max out a specific mastery line without ever actually engaging in the content you are “mastering”

I think this is true, Mastery Points is a currency you get for doing a variety of specific content. You don’t have to fly much to unlock Mastery Points for the gliding-mastery, you just spend generic MP (like from map completion) at the end of tier 1 gliding mastery to unlock tier 2, if I got this right. Then you gain experience in Heart of Maguuma (by doing events, killing mobs) in order to progress this tier. Once the bar is full, you can spend mastery points to unlock the next tier.

skullmount, your comparison with the PvP reward-track makes a lot of sense, especially when looking at this statement:

Higher tiers in Mastery tracks require progressively more Mastery points and more experience to fully train.

So you

• complete maps
• find secrets
• complete story steps
• get good results in adventures
• …

in order to unlock a new reward track AND/OR a new tier of a reward track.

Then you simply get experience to fill the bar by…

• doing events
• killing mobs
• crafting

once the bar is filled, you can spend your mastery points to open up the next tier

am I right?

in the blogpost it’s stated that:

Mastery tracks are trained by gaining experience while the Mastery track is slotted on the Mastery training bar. Higher tiers in Mastery tracks require progressively more Mastery points and more experience to fully train.

I’ve seen a few posts where people claim that they will look for the fastest ways to gain experience in order to level up your mastery-tracks. As I understood it in the first place, we will only get mastery-progression by doing “very specific things” like completing a zone or finding a hidden secret… not that these points can be farmed.

Did I get this right or can mastery points be farmed as well?

Phys makes an excellent point in how something that isn’t grindy in theory becomes grindy when you take into account that all the “other” choices you have are far away from the most efficient.

It’s interesting, Anet worked on this already when we take a look at dungeons. They changed the gold-rewards so that it’s not very rewarding to repeat the fastest dungeon path over and over again.

I think it’s difficult to balance ALL activities to reward the same amount of gold/rewards in a specific timeframe because of the fact that people could easily exploit those options.

just naming 2 examples:
-) a jumping puzzle which has much better rewards: guilds will have their Mesmers port hundrets of people in a very short timeframe which breaks this time-reward szenario.
-) defending in WvW… would lead to tons of AFK farmers who just stand around and wait for their gold / also discourages active offensive play

I guess it’s really difficult to balance required time / effort with rewards because of all the ways people could exploit that options.

you forget that with new specialisations there will be entirely new profession mechanics (besides the new healing skill, a new elite and a new set of utilities).

The Mesmer has 4 F-Skills (Shatters) as profession mechanic. If those change you’ll get 4 new skills here. Depending on how complex those may be I don’t feel betrayed at all, just looking forward to play the new specialisation.

Do you think it’s possible that the dragon we saw (the one in the cave with the blue glowing eyes) is Gleam, Glint’s baby?

Mike O’Brien stated in the pax-presentation that Glint hid it’s legacy deep in the Maguuma Jungle.

hmm…

(here with pictures and why I think it’s real):
http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/2tkhtc/spoiler_speculation_glints_legacy/

huge spoiler in the title… omg

not directly after the patch (I’ve played the story mission without problems) but now a few days later: massive lag( skills I press execute half a minute later and mobs stand around for seconds before they are suddenly all over me.

- Your location – Austria
– Time and date of incident (plus time zone) – After 10pm (GMT +1)
– Game World – Drakkar Lake
– Brief description of what you’re seeing – Lag spike and delay
- Does the lag only happen while you’re in a PvP map? Does it also occur in the PvP lobby? Other maps? – Happens at least in PvE (Silverwastes) and WvW, haven’t tried much else.
– How long does the lag spike last? Does it ever clear up? – No idea, I stop playing when this happens for the rest of the day
– Of your last 5 GW2 play sessions, in how many of them did you experience lag? – 3 or 4 out of 5
– When do you remember first experiencing lag of this severity in GW2? – a long time ago (months) and it didn’t last long for me
– Do you also experience lag playing other games? NCsoft games like Wildstar? – Dont play it
– Do you live in NA or EU? – EU
– Are you playing on NA or EU servers? – EU
– Was your account ORIGINALLY created on NA or EU? EU

It was pretty clear for me that Sylvari are dragon minions when I saw this:

Mysterious Vine:
“This vine, while appearing to be touched by Mordremoth, has been grown from seed under the good influence of a hero of Tyria. "

From all we know about Ronan, Ventari and the origins of the seeds of the Pale tree it all makes sense.

Personally I think GW2 needs a better risk-reward ratio, even when no hardmode is introduced. Rewarding longer dungeons with more gold was a good start, but not nearly at the rate I would like to see.

There would be a lot of possibilities to reward people for taking a risk. Anet could introduce a challenge mode where you basically lock your character out of being able to wear better-than-white gear. Scale players back -2 levels of the current zone and the designers wouldn’t even have to design new content for hardcore players. Rewards should be appropriate of course (e.g. a new t7-crafting material that drops from mobs which are killed by players in hardmode).

What would be the point of a hardmode if there were no unique rewards for beating the challenge?

Of course a hardmode should have tons of unique rewards. Else you’d get the same result as we see now when looking at the Aetherpath dungeon. Very few run it because it’s not worth the time investment. Casuals see no incentive at all to try it, work on becoming better… to risk getting killed over and over again… for what? Weaponskins with a droprate as rare as a precursor?

Originally the story mode dungeon was considered a normal mode dungeon and the explorable paths the hard mode version of that dungeon. For some players (newbies mostly) this is still true (I’ll count myself as one of them since I don’t play dungeons a lot and find even the first ones quite difficult with a group of newbies).

Most players know those paths inside out though, they’ve learned some effective strategies how to overcome those paths and so these dungeons aren’t considered challenging anymore.

Anet has all the metrics, it seems that not many people played dungeons so there is no need for them to create new ones.

But they did anyway. They created the Aetherpath, a dungeon which was considerably harder than all the other paths. Not long after it’s release they stated in an interview, that they won’t repeat a release like this in the future. Why? I have no idea, probably because even though it was considered hard, not enough players played it. (I guess because people didn’t get the OP loot they expected). So no dungeons in the near future…?!

…well this doesn’t seem to be true 100% since they opened a CDI about raids not long ago. It seems that they want to create hard dungeons for bigger-than 5 man groups.

joshc.3129:

THIS ISN’T WoW! The maps aren’t big and we don’t need mounts for speed boosts or whatever. From skills to boosters the game basically hands you speed boosts!

The ignorance of many of you is astonishing, a lot of people would prefer exploring a map on a mount than waypointing from A to B to C, so please: don’t speak for everyone but feel free to add an “Imho” to your posts of this kind.

btw. a lot of people don’t see mounts as speedboosts and wouldn’t care if a mount would have none. They love them for the looks. This has been said in all those countless posts you’re refering to more than once.

I think the problem is that the exotics aren’t sould/accountbound so that you can sell them on the trading post. If the droprate would be a bit higher, the items would loose their value considerably so that you could buy them for small amounts of gold. Nobody would farm those bags anymore.

A solution to that: add souldbound/accountbound drops to the loottable. You might get one exotic very very very rarely (and could sell it) or you might get an exotic very rarely (but only for you). I’d make them salvageable into ascended mats / t6 mats though.

I’m quite happy with the amount of stuff that’s happening in Drytop and now Silverwastes. Can’t say that for most of the other maps so far.

can’t wait when I’ll be able to post this here:
(a flying carpet, a flying broom, a tunneling tool… it’s not too far away)

Crovax.7854:

7306 in total.
0 Precursors but a lot of named exotics.

43 exotic weapons (I’m sure not all of them named…) out of 7306 champion bags. So the chance to get 1 exotic weapon out of 1 champion lootbag is about 0,6%. omg.

much faster imho: farm t6 mats in Drytop or other lv.80 zones and sell those in order to get the money for the Lodestones. Did this for my Infinite Light… and now I’m not even using it because I like Lord Taere’s shadow more xD.

maddoctor.2738:

I’m afraid listening to the players got us other bad updates too. For example how many people were screaming “Give us Deathmatch!” in PVP, and now that we have a deathmatch map (Courtyard) everyone rages at it, including those who were asking for it.

Exactly that, can’t agree more. There are basically contradictory opinions in every area of this game. Some people, for example, would love to be rewarded for doing something different in WvW than running with the zerg all the time. Hell, I would play the ruins a lot, if there would be a real incentive for me to do so, because I like them and the design of those small battle-arenas.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

With the break, I’d rather be disappointed in anything less than at least one full zone and a story that’s three times the length of any previous episode (read: minimum of 9 full instances!). More if it involves killing Mordremoth, which must be a dungeon. -sagenod-

quite entitled players have become when looking back to season 1… where a new zone was something quite rare.

Lyssan, I don’t agree with your point of view. Imho they fixed a lot of things that are broken. example: the dailies until now had quite terrible rewards. Always the same bland mystic token, karma (for what?) and a laurel.

The new system rewards you for your effort: the harder the daily – the better the reward. You also get stuff that matters for you since it’s content-related. Furthermore people don’t feel compelled to do every daily that’s available just to get the most possible achievementpoints.

To go on with the fixes: you finally have a non-mystic forge way of being rewarded with mystic clovers and other mats that contribute to your legendary crafting. You have to choose though… a chest of laurels OR a chest with ascended mats (people swimming in those won’t get more of them, also a fix in my eyes) OR a chest with Legendary-mats OR a chest with experience (something really useful to help leveling alts – another problem)

So for me an overall good change which fixes quite a lot of problems.
(and who is telling you that they don’t work on bugfixes at the same time?)