Guild Wars 2

I… don’t… understand…

There is this great (so much fun) Snowball-Minigame in there now – it get’s removed after the holidays.
There was this fun DOTA-style minigame in at Halloween – it got removed after the holidays.
(and so on, there were quite a few of those in there, included activities like the hunger-royale)

and now we only have one (?) constant minigame in the game: Keg Brawl. It’s fun. But why is it so alone? I can see that Anet want’s to bring content first for the lv.80 crowd, but why remove all those fun minigames? They could keep it at least until the other 29 minigames appear (looking forward since the blogpost on the minigames a long time ago). As Colin said: I want to play to have fun.

Sometimes I want to make a break of vertical and horizontal progression – to bring some variety in there. The thing is: it’s already a finished bugfree design but it get’s removed from the game after a short period of time.

It’s clear that those minigames from the holiday-events stand as content for those events, but you could change the looks and sell it just as a new activity with nice achievements (and leaderbords in the future). Don’t throw such great designs over board Anet. Those deserve to be played longer than a short period. The DOTA-like Halloween Map could have had a new Wintersday-Map too.

Is it perhaps a problem of having “too much content/game-modes” in the game and thus splitting the community?

I just think I should be able to play the role of a great supporter / tanky helper with my Mesmer instead of having to switch to my guardian who spams hammer1 for perma-protection for everyone standing in my huge symbol.

I can see, that guardians should have an advantage to support, but I would love to see others taking this role and doing it just as fine when played well.

(to be fair: mantras were buffed, but I find it quite boring to spam mantras to heal – yes, it’s my problem, not Anets… I… just… the tanky-build was so fun to play sniff)

I feel like it gets more and more difficult to play any other role than dps. I would love to see buffs on support builds.

I feel like damage-builds are more important than others to everyone and Anet listens to the majority. The last days I tried to get away from the damage-role on my mesmer and tried a tanky-build. I loved the regeneration from phantasms and the protection I got from it by illusionary membrane. I heard it’s tons of fun in dungeons and I want to play something different than dps. Now I’m not sure if it’s possible anymore.

I would have felt much better if they turned Ill. Membrane trait into a major trait instead of limiting it to 3s protection every 15s.

my take on an improvement would be pretty brutal I guess:

-) cut the waypoint-ressing in this big events
-) the area is cut off from the rest of the world when the event starts
-) everyone can participate, but once you die you stay dead until someone resses you during the fight

In my opinion the absence of graveyard/waypoint-rushing a boss in the fractals greatly improved the experience in comparison to early-dungeon mechanics.

this would lead to huge wipes and a lot of dead people lying around and waiting for a resurrection, but the positive part: the group gets smaller and smaller and the event suddenly much more interesting. Only really good players stay alive and beat the encounter – or you get ressed.

It’s brutal, but it’s also a challenge – shouldn’t be the high level zones be all about challenge? A developer once said that if you want to experience harder content, just look for higher level mobs / areas. But what if you are 80 already, where to look now if not in the lv.80 area?

Yes, dungeons are much more difficult and I could look there, but what if I don’t have 4 other people to play with? Or what if I want difficult content in high-level zones? The events there would allow this… but not for too big groups currently imho.

I’ve played a while in high level PvE zones now and got a mixed experience when I take a look at the challenge-aspects. I have the feeling that I’m not really making any difference in the boss-events. This feels very different from group-challenges in GW1 since in a way it’s much easier than encounters in Queensdale when you just stay near the “big zerg”.

I like that you have to stay near a group in Orr because else it’s a pretty hostile environment. Once you are in a group though, it’s easy as any Queensdale-event.

I saw quite a few people in forums saying that GW2 has no cool “raid-mechanics” because there is no trinity, and then I saw this post:

When I read this I was like: Wow, I want that.

I was really surprised since I never got that when I played those events. There were always too much people around to make any meaningful contribution.

Yes, a lot of people want a casual experience too, when it comes to big raid-like events, but on the other hand: if I feel I need a challenge in those big events, I have no chance to do this.

The solution at the moment for difficult open world encounters: get up at 3-4 a.m. in the night and find people who want to do this too.

I wonder how Anets perspective on this is. I guess they didn’t exactly want those big events turn out like it is now, because those events have pretty interesting mechanics already implemented. The problem: you rarely experience those.

Do you think there is a possibility for them to improve this in the future?

Ivano.2604:

Looking forward to these changes, especially the breakout :p
I forsee the Glorious Mighty NPC commander being slaughtered just 3 mt outside the spawn point already, and our “confident” minizerg of 6 people facepalming and roftling around while the enemies backguards stop running toward the fight cause their allies just killed the Glorious Mighty mentioned above :p

looking at the “scaling” of open world champions in PvE and how they just get destroyed by a zerg I fear you are right :-/

A pretty spontaneous idea for WvW:

You could take over a champion creature, get a corresponding skill bar and fight as this creature.

how to tame that champion-creature:
1.) buy a beast-rope for 5silver (you’ll need 10 of those for 1 creature)
2.) bring down a beast (any of the champion-mobs in the open WvW-world) to 30% health.
3.) chain it to the ground using the 10 ropes around the creature
4.) cripple the beast -> it drops to the ground and can be taken over by the player who has contributed with the most ropes.

characteristics
1.) Neutral status: the beast clearly fights for your team, but it’s attacks can hurt your own people too, so be aware of that. Your team can’t hurt the beast though.
2.) Not a siege-animal: none of the beast-skills works on structure
3.) drops good loot – not for the own team of course
4.) The beast is bigger than the npc it was before

Do you like this idea? Any more suggestions to add?

@Rizalee: agree, but when you leave a dungeon without wipe (which happens when you do it long enough to learn how the encounters work) you come out of it with a nice profit. In WvW the only way to achieve this is running around with big zergs and power-cap one thing after another. Also not fair, don’t you think?

maybe they should remove money from WvW completely (which wouldn’t work because of the WvW-PvE transfer)

I see now that my suggestion would be bad because you would compete with other players – you would hate to see other players coming to a camp you just wiped out on your own.

But repairs are a necessary gold sink I think. They would have to introduce an alternative to repairs. I don’t like the idea to leave WvW and play PvE (which some don’t like, that’s why they play WvW) in order to farm gold. Playing the trading post isn’t something I would want either…

I just want to play WvW and earn money by playing WvW.

Hermes.7014:

In my very own honest opinion, armor shouldn’t get damaged at all in any PvP situation.

Then you’ll need an other gold sink. Any idea?

@Spiky: you misunderstood my post, it wasn’t my intention to attack you personally. The thing I don’t like is that guardians are designed that they play most effectively in certain situations when doing most of the things you did. I respect you for finding a way to solo Kholer as a guardian, I really do! I played a Altruistic guardian myself and I know about the things you explained to me.

I just would prefer if a guardian would be better if he actually uses all his tools. Of coures you did the right thing when not using F2 and F3, what I wanted to say: It would be more fun if the guardian would have profession-skills which, when used the right way, give you an advantage. Not having to use those skills… so the less you do, the more effective you are, seems just shallow to me.

As an example of fun gameplay: in order to play a very effective bunker-build with the elementalist, you have to use nearly all of your tools available. Swap around in attunements constantly in order to combine your skills in a way that it’s like doing a combo. Take a look at this for example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TeZODCzAPgw&feature=g-user-u

@dzeRnumbrd: you are absolutely right, why didn’t I see this xD

Well I guess this problem can’t be solved that way. No repair costs would be bad too, since a important gold-sink would be missing.

The way it is at the moment doesn’t seem right to me, capping a tower/camp for a reward of 1s 96c… pfff – brutal for newbies in WvW.

Obly.9243:

Sorry, but this completely contradicts the game’s mechanics, it is supposed to encourage teamplay, not discourage!

What you are suggesting will result single players running away from fights to farm gold on ends running between maps overtaking small camps, contributing nothing to the effort of the server as a whole, as well as people afk-ing in the spawnpoint, waiting for the zerg to leave, camps flip and farm run them….like perma-stealth thieves.

playing/running with groups of 5-8 people is still teamplay. I personally prefer this group size to big zergs because you actually can see everyone (culling-problem), you can also play without lag (never experienced a zerg without massive lags & slowdown)

Why should people run away from big zergs when it’s much safer to go with the big groups (low risk). The amount of Karma you gain from capping points per hour is still very high. As I mentioned before, it’s important that there are incentives to go with a zerg at certain moments, and with smaller groups on other situations. At the moment it seems to me that this is not the case and Zerg is always the superior move.

Edit: Zerg / Large guild group running around overtaking a nice keep, reward for example 5g (your idea), size of group 40 people 5/40 = ? (Not gonna cover any repair costs or worth my while) that’s what your suggestion will result in, people backing off huge fights all together because at full / highly populated servers in WvWvW this means the reward for taking a keep will give you about….1 Copper?

5g/40 = 12,5silver… how much silver do you get at the moment for capping a tower? I think this is not too little but too much money. 5g was just an example that needs to be balanced. 5g/100player (very rare that so many players run with a zerg) would give each person 5silver… Now tell me how much a lv.80 pays for a full repair.

well I would like to see that guardian-survival needs clever usage of their profession-specific mechanics – else why are those there in the first place? The video shows not one usage of F2 or F3. Yes, there are still the passive effects of those, but I think making it possible to spam 1 skill and surviving such an encounter is not fun gameplay.

personally I would like to see the difference of a good and a bad player when I watch them play. I don’t care about which gear they wear.

this guardian didn’t rely on
-) active F2
-) active F3
-) skill 2-5
-) weapon-swap
-) blinds
…

just good regeneration (gear, traits) and perma-protection via autoattack

Hooray!! Thank you Anet :-) nice to see such an improvement for holiday events

so Dec.20 – Jan.3 … yeehaaa :-D

Well compare the income in WvW by playing and the costs for repairing. It’s Imho not balanced. Just my opinion of course, perhaps I’m doing it wrong.

Zergs are a problem imho because the reward-risk outcome isn’t balanced. Why should anyone run around in small groups in WvW when an enemy zerg is dominating a part of that area? In the end what I saw was not small groups fighting over supply camps at the same time in different places but people grouping together all the time to big zergs and playing the culling-5fps-spamfest game.

Don’t get me wrong, at some points zergs are great (e.g. defending/attacking towers) but Imho there should be a time for zergs and then there should be a time for smaller groups.

Maybe I experienced WvW very different to you, Awesome.

My suggestion would be an incentive for players to group with smaller groups in order to capture e.g. supplycamps & actually get a good reward for doing so.

I really hope that once a city got a visit, the toys / events / activities stay there until the end of the holidayevent. Otherwise I would have to log in everyday which I won’t be able to. I’d miss tons of fun events :-(

This reminds me of the one-time Karka-event, I hope this time it’s different :-/

Repair costs and big Zergs are a problem for some people. But with one change this can be adressed:

Don’t remove repaircosts, instead events (defending, capturing) reward you with more money, BUT that money is divided through all the people around. This would mean, the more people are participating, the less money you get for the event (retaking a supply-camp for example).

This would also encourage people to run around in smaller groups instead of zerging all day long. It’s about risk-reward.

simple example:
so give out 1g for a successful conquest of a supply camp. If someone takes it alone, he gets the full 1g. If 5 people take it, each of them gets 1g/5people = 20silver

what do you think?

about the repair costs:

they shouldn’t remove those, instead they should reward you with more money in Events, BUT that money is divided through all the people around. This would mean, the more people are participating, the less money you get for the event (retaking a supply-camp for example).

This would also encourage people to run around in smaller groups instead of zerging all day long.

so give out 1g for a successful conquest of a supply camp. If someone takes it alone, he gets the full 1g. If 5 people take it, each of them gets 1g/5people = 20silver

kreese.9461:

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

I like the change on the wall-repair. So it makes more sense to me now to stay on my siege-equipment and support the invading allies in order to keep the wall-% down.

there should be better rewards for people using siege while an objective is captured – if you sat on a treb for an hour smashing a wall in an epic supply struggle what do you really get besides numb fingers

I agree. Couldn’t an object count as 1-3 enemies also?

Spiky.8403:

Drew.1865:

Agreed if you melee kholer he’s going to pwn your face. I range him.

Here is video of me soloing Kohler with guardian, using hammer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ib0JnigqvE4

wow this actually looked just contrary what it should look like: you just spam 1 and keep your utilities on CD, this looks nothing like skilled gameplay to be honest. I will have to try this, but I’m kind of disappointed now. A boring rotation/CD-spam? I wonder if this is working as intended.

where is the skill in that?

I agree on the autoloot on badges. The game emphasises movement a lot and it happened to me not only once when I killed an enemy and because of strafing I had to look for my lootbag after a big fight. In my opinion you shouldn’t have to focus on searching loot while a big zerg is going on around you.

I’m happy with these changes, sorry for the offtopic-comment. I like the change on the wall-repair. So it makes more sense to me now to stay on my siege-equipment and support the invading allies in order to keep the wall-% down.

what happens if the superior troups decide to not-cap the last supply-camp from the losing server? Just don’t cap it in order to prevent the breakout-events… ?!

we have at least an elementalist who can do Kholer

A lot of us former GW1 player loved the mechanic in GW1 to find bosses around the world, it was a bit like a headhunter mission and was lots of fun.

As this mechanic isn’t in GW2 because it’s simply not needed I thought it would be a nice homage to bring this back as an achievement.

—> find all the veterans (or even champions) in the game (1 of each species) and kill them.

I just had this idea as I realized that some of the veterans in GW2 have pretty good hideouts and it would be fun to “catch them all”. WoW has something like this with rare spawns; those each have a unique Name and it was very engaging to hunt all of them down. Since it was pretty hard it was a kind of long term goal.

what do you think? Do you think this could be fun?

to summarize this idea:

reward returning and exploring of every zone with the focus on exploring & doing something different than the last time (find 3 of 10(?) hidden champions; dynamic events instead of static landmarks)

-) unique zone-rewards
-) longterm-reward: cosmetic untradeable gear
-) shortterm-reward: level-scaled crafting-mats as alternative to farming-routes in Orr.

hm it would be possible to spawn Event-groups next to each other instead of single events. What I mean with that: the content designers could add certain objectives to single events which are events in itself but relatively close to the mentioned event.

for example there is this event where you have to defend a norn-hut from invading bears. By the description above it could look like this:
-) the boy who was responsible for the bear invasion needs to be protected while he runs for help somewhere else.
-) the cattle around the hut could get nervous and you should keep those in their stable.
…

—> the more people are there, the more by-events activate (instead of simply bigger numbers of mobs/health)

I’m aware that this would be a lot of work, but instead of implementing new events on different timers, there could be implemented new events which are active while others are running.

I think Anet shouldn’t be afraid of quests like this Legendary-Questline. To make this working I would suggest a individual interface for Quests like this one and the holiday-event quests. It was very strange to get the new Questhelp/Questtext via Ingame-Mail. If you want to keep the lore-text, you’d have to give up Mail-Space.

Call it a notebook your character uses to keep track of certain things. This way the holiday-Event-quests could stay in there to make it rereadable. Scavenger hunts are fun, if done the right way.

on a further note I would say that you should find 12 (or so) different events, so that you can’t spawncamp events and do the same on and on. You should be roam around and explore the area to find new events.

This way the players would really learn to know the content Anet has designed for us, other than the content near hearts and PoI only. + it’s more difficult to do

oh, I wasn’t talking about WvW… xD

ok some problems might come up with the skillpoints and legendaries:

-) 10 skillpoints for a lv.30 charakter is too much. Maybe 10% of the level —> lv.80 character gets 8 skillpoints; lv.30 character gets 3.

-) Legendaries might be a bad description, because the Armorpiece should be cosmetic-only, and not Endgame-gear. A lv.30 character shouldn’t be rewarded with Ascended Gear. Make the new Items like the HoM-Rewards: Skin only + integrated Transmutation-mechanic.

-) 4 different zone-helmets → mystic forge → legendary-helmet … this would be a bit shallow. Better: Bring those 4 helmets to a certain Priory-NPC who unlocks a Legendary-Questline for you (similar to the Halloween Event Questline to get to know the story of Mad King Thorn). This would lead you through old zones and gives you lore + at the end the new Legendary Helmet.

Hi guys

I’m came up with an idea about certain activities which could encourage people going out in the world (https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions/how-to-make-old-zones-more-interesting-again/first#post910063) , but with that OR in certain events that might get into the game from Anets workshop it would come in handy to have a kind of Anti-Zerg mechanic in place in order to encourage people to stay in smaller groups but don’t run around in a Zerg.

so
-) we want people to play in smaller groups
-) we don’t want them to run around with the zerg

…for specific Events that might come up in the future.

So what this thread should be used for: gathering ideas for an anti-zerg mechanic.

I really loved the one mechanic from the Hunger Royale Event in one of the Beta-Events. People on a map constantly lost their life and had to eat one of the few survivial-rations which could be found rarely in the world. So people who went on their own stayed alive much longer, because they found their own rations. A group-buff to the 7 nearest people would probably work for smaller groups, but it’s a very spontaneous idea.

Do you have any good ideas? Don’t forget: there should be no grieving.

there would be one problem that would come up: Zergs. There needs to be a certain Anti-Zerg mechanic which favours 3-8 players but encourages groups to stay below these number of members, otherwise zergs would trivialize the content.

The big number of zones is one way to split up big groups, since everybody would want another cosmetic gearset, but there has to be something else.

forgot to mention: These pieces should be bind-on-pickup. Else people would just buy them on the tradingpost

At the moment there is little incentive to visit old zones again. The idea:

Give each zone a monthly achievement (it gets reset after a month):
-) find & play 12 different events in that zone (get gold-medal for each)
-) defeat 3 different Champions
-) 2 levelups without dying, (not xp, to make it interesting for low-level players too)

(this would also show people that there can be a great variety of events in a zone instead of them believing that 100% Map-completion is all there is)

the reward should be really good, and most important: it should scale to your level.
-) a lot of T6 crafting- material for lv.80s (to make it seem not so important to farm only high level zones), craftingmats scaled to your level
-) Skillpoints scaled to your level (lv.80 -> 8sp; lv.30 -> 3sp)
-) a part of a Zone-related non-statistical gear-set OR a zone-token

so this could work as a shorttime goal (T6 mats etc) as well as a longterm-goal (you need at least 6months to get a complete set (e.g. Frostgorge Sound —> Corrupted Ice Set)

(additional idea: make a very epic optic set. To get the helmet of that set, you’ll need 4 helmets of zone-related gear sets.)

example: To get the “Knight of Melandru”-Legendary Shoulderpiece, you need 4 Shoulderpieces from different zones (Queensdale, Frostgorge Sound, Kessex Hills & Wayfarer Foothills).

EDIT 1: forgot to mention: These pieces should be bind-on-pickup. Else people would just buy them on the tradingpost

there would be one problem that would come up: Zergs. There needs to be a certain Anti-Zerg mechanic which favours 3-8 players but encourages groups to stay below these number of members, otherwise zergs would trivialize the content.

The big number of zones is one way to split up big groups, since everybody would want another cosmetic gearset, but there has to be something else.

EDIT 2:

ok some problems might come up with the skillpoints and legendaries:

-) 10 skillpoints for a lv.30 charakter is too much. Maybe 10% of the level —> lv.80 character gets 8 skillpoints; lv.30 character gets 3.

-) Legendaries might be a bad description, because the Armorpiece should be cosmetic-only, and not Endgame-gear. A lv.30 character shouldn’t be rewarded with Ascended Gear. Make the new Items like the HoM-Rewards: Skin only + integrated Transmutation-mechanic.

-) 4 different zone-helmets ? mystic forge ? legendary-helmet … this would be a bit shallow. Better: Bring those 4 helmets to a certain Priory-NPC who unlocks a Legendary-Questline for you (similar to the Halloween Event Questline to get to know the story of Mad King Thorn). This would lead you through old zones and gives you lore + at the end the new Legendary Helmet.

EDIT 3:

on a further note I would say that you should find 12 (or so) different events, so that you can’t spawncamp events and do the same on and on. You should be roam around and explore the area to find new events.

This way the players would really learn to know the content Anet has designed for us, other than the content near hearts and PoI only. + it’s more difficult to do

I think Anet shouldn’t be afraid of quests like this Legendary-Questline. To make this working I would suggest a individual interface for Quests like this one and the holiday-event quests. It was very strange to get the new Questhelp/Questtext via Ingame-Mail. If you want to keep the lore-text, you’d have to give up Mail-Space.

Call it a notebook your character uses to keep track of certain things. This way the holiday-Event-quests could stay in there to make it rereadable. Scavenger hunts are fun, if done the right way.

can someone explain to me what this coming “scavanger hunt” is and where it was mentioned?

Fractals are perfect imho in this department

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Hi All,

Thanks for your feedback we really appreciate it. I would like to take the opportunity to answer your questions in an AMA on Reddit on Monday 26th (12pm PST- More details to follow) to talk about recent updates to the game and our philosophy for Guild Wars 2 moving forward.

Please keep in mind that there we are about to begin the Thanksgiving holiday in the US and are out of the office (and likely in game) until Monday. Happy Holidays everyone!

Chris

Nice

Are there other developers answering our questions too, or only you? I’d love to see Colin in one of those AMAs ^^

I dislike:
-) one time event, I was there by accident. I didn’t hear about it because I didn’t play 24/7 on that weekend and was kind of surprised when I found the big raid going for the boss.
-> my friends didn’t get this either, most of them weren’t there
-> no second chance for them

-) really bad lag issues. It wasn’t only me, chat was full of hate because of this. It got a bit better in the finale, but still awful. This is when I’m glad that my friends missed it. I’d love to see a open beta for such events a week before the actual event.

I liked:
-) those anti-zerg attacks from the ancient karka which killed a whole bunch of guys in an instant… I like this. It was a difficulty-setting I would love to see in meta-event chains like the Shatterer. Absolutely fantastic, I really wasn’t sure in the end if we would make it, tons of people on the ground…

-) love the new jumping puzzle and pvp map. Really hard JP where I had to give up in the end. It’s great, now I have something to work on.
-) the PvP Map seems interesting with all the different paths.

today I had the most epic experience in a game… ever. It happened in the Karka cave, but it had nothing to do with the encounter. There is this lava-pool where the boss died a horrible death, found a dead guy in there and wanted to revive him… well how stupid am I? ^^ Got ignited and it hurt like hell… tried to climb back up but I couldn’t find a way outside and so I died horribly. When I looked at the next waypoint… well… I had only the first one unlocked.

Well I way lying there and was joking with some other guys when suddenly someone jumped in there too. He tried to help me but he shared my misery. More and more people tried to help and after a few deaths later they actually managed to help – it was epic ^^ I was never more proud to be a part of this community. Those guys beat lava Made my day!

I frankly have no idea why ascended gear is something you need to grind for. Max-stats was obtainable relativly fast up to now. This is how it should be – Colin said it himself. I really don’t care for Infusion-grind though.

forrae.6708:

WvW is great. No need to visit the dungeon for best loot. Chris already stated that the new tier (ascended) will be available in WvW also.

note he didnt say when. if yet another tier of gear comes out after ascended, this could happen when ascended goes out of date. other games do this often, make the previous tier super easy to get when its outdated.

so this is what you experienced in GW2 so far?

The way it is now: Max tier for every content – WvW & PvE. Tell me: why should they change this?

Omega.1473:

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

what did you guys do from 1 to 80? Sit on the same gear for 80 levels?

No, I geared up and HATED EVERY SECOND OF IT.

Lol why do you still play a game you hate then? I don’t buy Need for Speed, realize that I hate it, play on and on and go to the forums and cry about it. If you hate the main content of GW2, then why bother playing it? Just to troll in the forums?

Kudzu.7569:

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

what did you guys do from 1 to 80? Sit on the same gear for 80 levels? Get used to it: GW and GW2 were always games where you got better gear while playing the content. Now that there is new content, there is new gear. It’s a reward mechanism; you get your shiny because you do well.

Except that in GW1, the new gear you got was for looks only. So no, there is no comparing the horizontal progression of the original GW to the stat-increasing vertical progression they’ve just added.

I would have been happy if they had added a form of grinding so long as it didn’t add any stats to armor. With stat increases at end-game you always risk creating gated content and requiring players to grind long hours (even if they don’t enjoy that playstyle at all) just to see the parts of the game they do enjoy.

Really? I thought I’ve seen some green items somewhere when sorrows furnace was released…

What do we know of tiers in GW2 so far? Do we have to grind those new tier items for weeks like in other games? So far: No. Why should it be different now? They already said that Infusion is the thing you will have to grind, not ascended gear. Do we have to use a new tier in order to play new content in GW2? Absolutely No. The new dungeon (all 9 shards) are entirely open to everyone; even to everyone without ascended gear. You’ll only need this gear in order to unlock a new difficulty – for the same content. So you don’t need to grind for new content but for a new difficulty.

Crater.1625:

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

what did you guys do from 1 to 80?

Grit my teeth and wait for it to be over so that I could be maxed out and actually start playing the game instead of working on my character.

(I wasn’t willing to put up with even that much grind on my second and third characters; I crafted right to 80.)

Come on, there is so much to do without the need to work on your character. I can’t see where I have to work on my character in GW2 when playing the game. It’s not like there is a gearcheck ANYWHERE. I was fully able to go to Orr with my lv.71+ gear and had no problems at all. Even dungeons are no problem if you are a good player. Skill > Gear in GW2 – proven true for me because I experienced it this way.

Please tell me where you had to grind in order to play the game. Maybe you’re doing it wrong.

+ see: it has been made entirely possible to level your characters by crafting. This is intended, it caters to you. Where is your problem?

drwookie.6391:

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

so this is positive:
-) all content available to everyone – horizontal progression
-) challenge mode for people who need vertical progression – something to work towards

Correction:

all content is available to everyone who wants to grind a dungeon

Those of us who play this game because we believed we could play the way WE WANTED without feeling left behind are screwed. I play WvW solely. I am now being set up to be at a statistical disadvantage to those who want to grind dungeons. I have no interest in grinding dungeons, I don’t play other MMOs for that reason and I play this one because I was told (by their manifesto and their overall original game design) that I would be able to play the way I wanted.

This is clearly not the case.

did you even read my post?

all content IS available, you don’t need to grind the dungeon. Every shard can be played with the gear you have before entering the dungeon. It’s only the harder difficulties of this shards (this is not new content, only the same content with more healthpoints) which you need to devote for – aka grind.

WvW is great. No need to visit the dungeon for best loot. Chris already stated that the new tier (ascended) will be available in WvW also.

You absolutely can play the game you want. Others want grind. Where can they find it? It was said in the Manifesto that you could play the way you want. Now those people can finally find it in the new dungeon.

again: the new dungeon (all 9 shards) are playable without grind. There is this optional component to it that you can get to harder difficulties in this dungeon by grinding Infusion. Optional.

what did you guys do from 1 to 80? Sit on the same gear for 80 levels? Get used to it: GW and GW2 were always games where you got better gear while playing the content. Now that there is new content, there is new gear. It’s a reward mechanism; you get your shiny because you do well.

There is no gating, no treadmill: all of the new content (9 shards, new zone etc) is fully available for everyone. People with exotics are free to try it. Hell, even people with rare only will be able to beat this content…

…and then there is this new stuff: the challenge mode aka scaling dungeon. You’ve probably seen the 9 shards (all of the new dungeon) a couple of times when you find the same shards become much harder. So if you want to try this new difficulty mode you’ll have to devote yourself to it. You’ll have to use the Infusion-loot you aquired while playing the new dungeon in order to unlock the same stages in a more difficult version. You could try it without, but you will probably die. It’s the same as the dungeons before: if you are lv.20 you shouldn’t try Ascalon Catacombs. You’d die horribly.

Don’t forget: you’ll be able to choose a lower difficulty. You don’t need to play the dungeon on lv.5 when you go in there with friends. Show them the shards on lv.2 if you like.

so this is positive:
-) all content available to everyone – horizontal progression
-) challenge mode for people who need vertical progression – something to work towards

the line of sight change kills the mesmer in WvW for me(

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/leah-rivera-on-the-new-fractals-of-the-mist-dungeon/

about the new dungeon