Guild Wars 2

Chaotic Storm.2815:

What happened to the days when an achievement felt like something. whats with all this every day stuff earning us points I feel like i’m being spoon fed these points with no actually effort.
where are the achievements for killing so many creatures in a set time, killing a boss in some crazy fashion. Speed running a jump puzzle. where are the actually achievements we can be proud of?

Wasn’t that the point of achievements in the first place to be something we could show of and say “hey look what crazy thing I managed to pull off”

gasp man, let me give you a manhug… I miss those too :’(

no, it’s just time to stop being hostile towards the developers and rage like maniacs (not everyone should feel adressed, but quite a few) and start being constructive. Would you answer here as a developler when you’d know that kittenstorm will be incoming? You can’t talk to those people. I mean, what could you reply to “left us here to rot long ago” or the endless tomorrow post? seriously?

the wood in LotR was nice to look at but heavily tube-like. You couldn’t just run how you’d like. You really prefer that over GW2s zones?? O_o no thanks for me!

RoRo.8270:

Anet gave up on reworking dungeons and adding stuff to fractals quite some time ago. They are focused on the living story which revolves around RNG cash shop items

yeah, not true. This quote from Colin:

…And as mentioned earlier, the dungeons people enjoy from our living world release will be researched by the keepers of the Fractals of the Mist and used as way to continue to expand and build on our fractals permanently going forward….

…This means as holidays we’ve run in the past approach, you’re more likely to see larger living world projects like permanent updates to existing dungeons, world areas, etc. …

…Yeah for clarity, we’ll also be working on dungeons outside of the fractals. Sometimes content that makes sense will end up there as a way for us to update our fractals permanently, sometimes we’ll be working on other dungeon content permanently.

meanwhile dungeons get no good reputation while time passes:
CoF P1 naked in 8 minutes
http://en.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/1gwkrg/cof_p1_naked_in_8_minutes/

my personaly opinion: Anet should increase their teams in order to keep dungeons AND living story running and getting improved upon.

I’m not sure if I should be happy about the work on more dungeons since the old dungeons were supposed to get reworked… and only AC got some love if I remember correctly.

Also I think the rework should rather go in the direction of making explorable modes hard. At the moment I don’t know if anyone would consider explorable modes as “hardest content in the game”. I guess it’s Anets goal to create better rewards for dungeons and then make them more difficult since everyone who plays dungeons probably has the full set of his favourite dungeon without too much challenge getting it. It would make no sense to make the dungeons harder and leave the rewards the same.

Sometimes it seems that living story development hurts dungeon development. Roberts team, the dungeon team (?!) has worked on the Southsun Cove content (which I found quite ok).

just to add something: I was posting a thread in the dungeons-forum that the last developer-reply was months ago. A cc-mod told us to forward it to a dev but there hasn’t been any answer yet. I guess it’s because of the athmosphere in this section of the forums. Most dungeon-fans seem to be quite angry and frustrated. If I were a developer I wouldn’t answer in these forums since it mostly isn’t a constructive environment anymore imho. There should be done something.

I wonder what’s Anets view on the situation that Living Story achievement points and daily/monthly ap count towards the normal achievement points. Personally I love how the HoM works. I also love it’s rewards: armorsets, minis, weaponskins… awesome!

Sebyos.4089:

Keep dreaming about GW2 having good PvE bros. What has AN done in a YEAR that gave you any hope ?

Fractals & the Molten Factory

I tried a Gamer Mouse but it doesn’t work for me personally. I need my right hand to fully move the camera and I can’t do this viable and at the same time handle skills with it.

personal preference

there wasn’t much getting used to the G13, it worked quite fast actually. I played with keybinds on the keybord at first but since the keys are diagonally I always had problems hitting the right key when moving up or down with my fingers. The G13 has the keys one below the other.

nice topic I love Orr, I currently have no screenshots but I’ll make one or two for this thread.

I also love Caledon Forest
http://i.imgur.com/TaF4npL.jpg

Anzu.5702:

It never should have been this way in the first place and should have been more tied to the actual world. I.e. to get component 1 you need to get 100 pieces of Blah which can only be gotten from chains X of Dynamic Event A, B and C, or monsters Blerg, blerg2 and blerg3. Hindsight is a wonderful thing (and I realise your business direction of gems and in particular gems to gold meant you had to give gold a lot of weight) but this would have filled your beautiful world with players for a lot longer. Players doing a lot more of one of the things that sold me on gw2; Dynamic events.

I think this would have been awesome for the game. Seeing how people grind gold and T6 mats extensively you are so right with your opinion imho.

To add my 2 cents:
Today I found a Jumping Puzzle in Orr where there were a few chests with T6-Mats along the way to the top. Now imagine that those chests would be in every JP across the world and would have a lot more T6-Mats so that it becomes the best way to farm this stuff for every JP-fan. Then add such chests with tons of mats to the open world for completing events too, for everyone who doesn’t like Jumping Puzzles at all… and so on. So that every favourite playstyle has ways to viable farm mats.

In a way it’s already in the game: You can buy those mats chests via laurels. You get laurels mostly for playing the game the way you want. Imho it’s in a very basic state at the moment though. + Ascended items have priority so that no one would waste his laurels for things other than ascended gear. When you have all the ascended stuff it’s maybe wise to safe your laurels for future-implementations to the laurel-vendor.

CrossedHorse.4261:

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

just something for players who think they aren’t good players:

a good keybind AND/OR a nice gamepad work wonders. I absolutely saw a huge increase of skill when I look back at the release compared to now. I use this: http://img.clubic.com/02283070-photo-logitech-g-series-logitech-g13-1.jpg and it’s like magic. The best thing: my thumb controlls my movement WASD via the small joystick. The gamepad is great for every PC-game also, so I’d recommend it to everyone out there who still plays with the keyboard.

just to give some casuals hope, you will get better. You will get a lot better using keybinds / gamepads. You may not notice it that much because it consists of thousands of tiny steps, but others can see the difference clearly.

This sounds amazing. I’ll be saving up for one. I’ve often wondered how players I admire seem to keep up the constant motion while firing off skills at the same time (not saying this is how they’re all doing it, of course), whereas even at high level it seems others were much less fluid with their multi-tasking. I thought they must have a third hand or something, lol.

Thanks – and thanks for the encouragement. GW2 is definitely a game I want to become good at.

My pleasure! Believe me, it makes a huge difference. I tried the keyboard first but when it didn’t work out I felt bad and was quite convinced that I’m just a bad player. I had problems strafing while pressing other keys and F1-F4 were rarely used. Now I cycle through the Ele-attunements nearly too fast… it’s so handy. I don’t even have to use shift+commands, every single skill can be used with pressing 1 button. I even have a hotkey for the map, the charactersheet and my inventory.

if you haven’t found it yet, look here:
http://www.amazon.com/Logitech-G13-Programmable-Gameboard-Display/dp/B001NEK2GE/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top

it seems a bit expensive at first, but I use it for every single game and imho it was worth it. If it would break somehow, I would buy the same again and again. Believe me, when you have the keybind in your head (configured how it is logical for you) and don’t have to press multiple commands with the same finger while trying to move with the same, you will become much better.

this is my personal gw2 configuration on the g13:
http://i.imgur.com/pteyNyB.jpg
G14 – V is the most important one. Having “Dodge” on one button instead of double tab is so much better.

Devata.6589:

The fact is that Orr is ugly and people don’t want to be in ugly places. So lets say they would put stuff there that makes it worth to be there Orr they are there for that only but still do not like being there. I can still remember the complains about Orr from people that where farming in Orr when that was still possible.

Ugly places like Orr should be in MMO’s but they should not be so big, they should be in between good looking area’s (not like now, one big area) and it should not be the end-content place.

Best is to add new maps that do look great (Think: Sparkly Fen, Timberline Falls, Celedon Forest) and make it worth to be there in stead of trying them to be in ugly Orr.

very subjective, I find Orr one of the most beautiful places in the game. It’s colorful and at the same time has this death-theme…. I’ve never thought both would be possible at the same time.

just something for players who think they aren’t good players:

a good keybind AND/OR a nice gamepad work wonders. I absolutely saw a huge increase of skill when I look back at the release compared to now. I use this: http://img.clubic.com/02283070-photo-logitech-g-series-logitech-g13-1.jpg and it’s like magic. The best thing: my thumb controlls my movement WASD via the small joystick. The gamepad is great for every PC-game also, so I’d recommend it to everyone out there who still plays with the keyboard.

just to give some casuals hope, you will get better. You will get a lot better using keybinds / gamepads. You may not notice it that much because it consists of thousands of tiny steps, but others can see the difference clearly.

Ah I see what you mean. Well we want the same thing then.

CrossedHorse.4261:

By all means, add new achievements, but don’t make them count towards some of the meta achievements all players would like to collect.

Well I like a part of how they handled the latest living story rewards: The Shattered Wings were easy to achieve for every player if you show a bit of dedication and the other wings were more difficult to get. There is only a difference in appearance so you can see who tackled the harder stuff. The problem imho was: these wings were tradeable, so everyone could/can buy those for 13g. Also the way to get those was grindy.

What I would have loved to see: the holo-wings are for people who meet challenging stuff. The way it is now every player can grind both rewards. Meh.

CrossedHorse.4261:

As a casual gamer, I wouldn’t be adverse to harder content being in the game. However, I would say that it would be a wise move for Anet if they made it in such a way that it was entirely optional and didn’t count towards some of the achievements as there’s probably no way for me to get them.

Yes, shout “man up and do it” to me all you want, I know where my skill level is and I know where my tolerance for fun is, and they don’t equal the 2 hour battles that some others find fun. I don’t judge them for finding it fun at all – all the best to them – but the more casual people shouldn’t be punished for not enjoying this either.

Basically, what I’m saying is, balance is needed. It’s likely that if Anet introduce harder and harder elements, a lot of people who originally tried GW2 for the very fact that it is designed so a casual gamer (perhaps, one like me who doesn’t have many friends who are also gamers and so can find it harder to group up and tackle dungeons with people who are tolerant of my inexperience and the fact that I choose builds I like to play rather than ones necessarily optimized for one particular gaming aspect) can enjoy the game and not feel marginalised or punished for this.

Don’t get me wrong, but don’t you think that players who show skill should be rewarded with achievements? A lot of players like to work on difficult content until they become good enough to get through it and there’s nothing as rewarding as to meet a challenge. Why do you want all the achievements if you know that at the moment you can’t compete with the average player?

Difficult content isn’t always in the end of a looong dungeon etc. It’s not always group-stuff. Some Jumping Puzzles are quite difficult for most players and those who make it to the end should be rewarded for investing the time to learn the puzzle imho.

Furthermore there are tons of achievements for casual players, but how many are there for skilled players? This should be in balance imho.

ColinJohanson.2394:

a large part of the player base was asking for more exciting and difficult open world content in our top end areas.

I think it is important to not only add exciting and difficult open world content to top end areas but to all zones of the game – not necessarily on the path from heart to next heart but offsidely. The reason why is because

• a lot of players who reach lv.80 start leveling new characters and are looking for challenge along the way to 80. It’s boring to play trivial content until you’re lv.70+
• the game scales you back. It’s designed to open the whole world for lv.80 players. But why would anyone go beyond Orr if nothing challenging + rewarding can be found elsewhere? The big metaevents are a good start but most of those are much too easy imho.

I think that most players now are veterans instead of new players. I could totally be wrong though. If I’m right those veterans look for rewarding things to do once 80. If they won’t get rewarding stuff in lv.80 zones anymore and nothing to do in low level areas they either lose motivation or start a new character. A new character who can’t find exciting stuff loses motivation quite fast, at least that’s what I’ve experienced.

I’m happy that you work on new rewards, this is what the game needs at the moment. I hope some of it is quite creative and not always “moar power”. Minis are ok but I don’t see how they are top priority for players since the system is a bit clunky and you can’t use them for anything. Completionist who haven’t bought all the holiday minis will never get a full collection now, so that’s not motivating either.

I hope this wasn’t too rude I tried to be a bit constructive.

but why hinder those events from spawning when too few people are around? This doesn’t make sense imho since it’s just taking valuable content out of the game. The more events are in a zone, the more it feels alive.

wow exotic shoulderarmor… a unique reward! I’m hyped now too Finally something to show that you’re skilled?! We’ll see.

process execution.8014:

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

Now hopefully it won’t get predictable with Mai Trin being the villain. Because that would be way too easy.

My prediction (and hope) is that Kasmeer is the villian. Nobody can be that powerful and beautiful and not be a kitten!

I do think so, she’s going to need this unshakable buff for something…
http://i.imgur.com/2YauWF3.jpg

I’ve forgotten how beautiful the zones are… Divinity’s Reach is stunning, haven’t been there for months. It shouldn’t feel grindy to go back to those zones (like the effigies), the story implementation here is exactly how it should be… awesome!

• the bar cutscene – painterly style is what made me fall in love with GW2, it’s finally back again
• the trailer with the awesome song

what I would have done different:

• give each player a personal holo-spawn. The loot from his spawn belongs to him but others can spawn theirs afterwards and everyone can help. Cooperation, not competition.
• not as much grindy achievements. Anet really needs some creativity in achievement-design.

unique rewards is an entirely new direction from what you wanted to achieve in the beginning. Back then you stated that there shouldn’t be unique rewards so that people don’t feel they have to do certain content and can play the game the way they want (paraphrased). As time went by I found out that I really missed unique viable rewards.

(there are tons of unique rewards but I have no idea what to do with them. some like the teleportation gun are awesome but it’s imho awkward implemented. Should be permanent and with a higher price attached to it instead of cheap and awkward to use. Those items could have been new found utility skills).

Can you give us a small hint in which direction these new rewards will go? Is it similar to the mystic forge (which I don’t like personally). Something to gamble or something which is tied in with the lore of GW2 (which would be awesome)?

and to Colin if you’re still listening: a wardrobe / collection alá the pvp wardrobe would be nice for pve too, because bank-space get’s smaller and smaller the longer we’re around collecting stuff is fun, but cooking is fun too (not mentioning the tons of cooking-mats in half a dozen bank tabs)

fractals aren’t only for the hardcores, you can go in at lv.1 with likeminded people (lfg – webpage or the lfg-tool later this (?) year).

The problem I think could arise: People want to play the new dungeon but fractal-rounds are random. The number of fractals gets larger too, so the more content they bring to fractals, the less likely it will be to get a new one.

Wouldn’t it be cool if every player can set his/her favourite fractal and one of the 3 will be the most-voted one. Or That you can choose to play specific fractals with reduced rewards or without rank-up chance? So that people can alternatively visit fractals because they are interested in one specific fractal.

if they intentionally left the sclerite-chests to stay, will dragon-coffers stay too? I doubt it since they drop everywhere, but it would be kind of nice if there would be a chance that these still drop on a lower frequency (like the black lion chests).

the only problem I have with this system is spending real money on rich coffers and not have a guaranteed ticket. Imho rich coffers should cost 800 gems and have 1 guaranteed ticket.

@Qazmodon: I don’t get what you mean with “place”. You’re repeating it over and over but your specific suggestions are few and vague. You say that they shouldn’t add more stories… I think quite the opposite is true: they should give dynamic events more stories/background. At the moment a lot of these seem hollow, because they end abruptly and don’t go on further most of the time. Long chains are rare. And stories are told mostly in the personal story.

“objects had value”… please elaborate. Legendaries also have a certain value, is this the value you’re talking about? How did reputation matter?

You seem to assume that everyone knows UO, but I really think that’s not the case and I have no idea what you mean. Tyria isn’t a place? O_o

30 holo-knights means 7g20s
7g20s = about 250 coffers

well devs think that the rewards they currently have are enough incentive for us to do difficult content. 2 guaranteed rare items are not rewarding enough though imho. What I think the problem is: there is too little unique reward in GW2, especially for difficult content.

Skins for dungeon-tokens were a good first step, but now that people have geared up and do each dungeon at lv.80 instead of the level of the zone dungeons aren’t difficult anymore. Downscaling is still weak and players downscaled from 80 still destroy anything.

Think of it: if those Sclerite Backbags would have been skins dropable by the Karka Queen, how much more people would still be there…

risk – reward

value in the trading post: 13g and falling. Suggestion: do a few dungeon runs and you’ll be able to buy it in no time.

edit: 12g 11s

I hate this too, we should report them as botters, since it’s basically what they do: they leave their ingame character do the work while eating a pizza and watching TV.

1 coffer currently costs 2.65s in the trading post

—> 1000 coffers = 22g 52s 50c

how much costs a T3-cultural helmet? 20g? I really don’t see a problem here. Bringing your gold to the vendor or the trading post… not much of a difference.

seriously though, you get those daylies for playing the game. If you don’t enjoy playing any aspect of the game, this game is not for you. Last week I got my daylies for basically doing WvW only. On an other day I didn’t do much besides dungeons.

complaining here basically means you have no idea how to play the game (don’t do daylies actively, just let them “happen”), as cliche as it sounds ^^

this game isn’t for you and you are playing it wrong

Nike Porphyrogenita.8137:

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

Question to strife: what gear do you and your friends use in dungeons?

We pile on Sentinels because it makes up for when we fail to dodge.

Interesting, I thought the answer would be Berserkers. I like this

I know I will probably never be a part of a speedrun-group but I also know from WoW that there can be a pretty nice design in mob-encounters that isn’t all about aoe-ing mobgroups down. This would be quite boring.

I don’t say LoSing is bad, or that the people who do it are bad. I’m just saying that I want encounters vary from one to the next. There was a time in WoW when you had to choose between aoe and single target dps.

When I look at strifes videos it seems to me that there isn’t much variety in strategies to play most effective in GW2 since encounterdesign seems to be broken by berserker-gear. Correct me when I’m wrong. Question to strife: what gear do you and your friends use in dungeons?

so I got mine on day 2 of 30 days… Yeah, it’s really bad

why then making skills for every mob when you just ignore them by clumping and bursting? Those mobs need their mechanics improved so that they can’t be clumped up that easily.

Do you really find fights like this fun? There should be a difference fighting mob A vs. fighting mob B.

Bright.9160:

Lol, if they rework the boss mechanics, the only thing DnT (and we for that matter) are going to do is focus on how to beat it as fast as possible again and treat it as a speedrun.

Some people enjoy playing the game that way: efficiently. And will go out of their way to find the fastest and most efficient way to beat content.

yeah my point was: a lot of content can be broken by running by the mobs stealthed or leaving out certain encounters instead of fighting and using strategy (other then clumping up the mobs and burst them down). I’ve nothing against speedrunners, it would be more fun if there were more significant fights in this run instead of leaving enemies (e.g. former Kohler) behind imho.

as this thread seems to be all about the holos now I’ll add my two cents:

I feel like it would have been a better solution to make it possible to activate the holos manually once per zone (until all have been activated which resets the thing). The one who activates it get’s automatically credit for all of the mobs. Others can help but don’t get the higher droprate but only normal-mob droprate.

The other one can then activate the same node again and now it’s his and others can help him.

This way you’d never have to worry about the tagging. You’d be happy to see other players because it’s easier to fight these holos with a helping hand. Furthermore you have an incentive to find all the nodes on a map instead of running back and forth between the same ones all the time.

And after you’ve found each holo-projector in a zone you have the choice to repeat it (all holo-projectors become active again and wait for you to activate them) or you can move on to the next zone.

Strifey.7215:

This is why I stopped playing. I have a couple videos that I can’t even bring myself to commentate at this point because I’ve moved to other games and just don’t really care anymore.

The recent story content and the gameplay/guide videos put out by a couple devs recently basically killed any hope I had of them improving anything related to challenging/teamwork based content outside of the very light, casual friendly stuff related to the living story.

I understand why you’ve moved on. I’d love to see videos of you and your group working out difficult boss-mechanics (when they have fixed/worked on those) instead of how to exploit / beat the dungeon as fast as possible, treating it as a speedrun. I’m sure your feedback on the dungeons in GW2 would be of high value to the devs.

I think two of the reasons why Living-Story content is not hard stuff is because

• it’s only temporary. A lot of people would complain not having enough time to complete it.
• it’s difficult to find the right balance in the time-window Anet has to produce that content.

I guess we will see more difficult stuff for permanent additions to the game instead of temporary content.

well it seems no Dev will show up and comment on this thread, even when forwarded from a cc-guy. I guess everyone is busy with Dragon Bash :-/

Julie Yann.5379:

I just guest to a low pop server, find a zone that isn’t very popular and have all the holos to myself. If I see a node with ten peeps around it I don’t waste my time trying to tag something, I go somewhere else. I’ve been paying a fortune in WP fees but killing 300 holos in under an hour makes it all worth it.

so you don’t like to see other players… that’s what this topic is all about, not those holo-projectors mainly.

If I’d like to diskuss the holo-projectors, don’t you think the topic would be named: “my problem with holo-projectors”? I don’t want other people to run away from my, my friends or my guild. I want to make friends.

so I bought 100 normal coffers for 3g and got one ticket on nr.30. This would be my (around) 400th coffer (farmed 300 yesterday – no ticket)

so my suggestion: farm gold and buy coffers via. tradingpost. Much less stress than farming those in the open world imho.

love the helmet… it fits the theme perfectly

ahaha yes of course ^^

you got the minis, haven’t you? Anet gave everyone who bought gems until a certain day this month a nice little gift

http://i.imgur.com/NXK0B4v.jpg

I would not be surprised if there is some sort of activity/content which drops much more of those coffins next week.

Reminds me of the grind in Flame and Frost, where people were doing those activities in the first days to get the stuff – days later you got much more from different activities.

Caedmon.6798:

Well,i’d say it’s about time after 10 months,people have been suggesting to give looting its own key or auto loot everything in wvwvw for an eternity now,and after 10 months they come with this…Im glad its finally being adressed,but 10 months is an awfull long time of suggesting..

they are working through their list of priorities, it’s good to see progress in this department

yesterday I saw 4 people standing next to the holo-projector and doing nothing. I watched them for a couple of seconds, while standing next to the thing. Well, I decided to open it and they burst down the mobs while I was laying on my back…

I’m definitely not happy to see those guys again