Rewards for raids don’t even have to be gear/skins. The XP/Karma/Money rewards that go with DE’s in the open world seem to cater to nearly everyone that does them.
IMO, if Arenanet is going to add raids, they need to make sure that people will do them for the right reasons: To have fun by attempting legitimately challenging content as a team, not for an obligatory gear treadmill.
So what should raids have that would accomplish that task?
-Tough encounters. Even if massive whining ensues over their difficulty, raids should be the final step in the difficulty ladder for the game.
-Mostly Currency rewards. No i don’t mean emblems and badges from that other MMO, i mean Money, XP, Karma, and crafting mats. This way, there will be adequate compensation for overcoming the challenges, but people won’t feel obligated to do the content just for the phat lewts. Make a kitten cool armor skin or something else cosmetic for doing the raid, but don’t overdo it or else people will start to feel obligated. Runes are also fine, as long as they are exotic tier only.
You shouldn’t make any content obligatory, for that matter, or else the game starts to feel like a job. People should WANT to do something because it sounds fun/challenging.
-Raids should feel like raids, not the 100-floor tower of bosses. I think the Temples are the best example of what a raid should be, save the fact that they are open world. You can never expect to hold a temple indefinitely, simply move in and take what you can from it for a brief moment.
-Reward accomplishment in raids more dynamically, similar to the bronze/silver/gold contribution medals in place already. For example, say the first encounter is “X person is trying to close the side gate, so to stall for time they send a legendary abomination out to hold you off.” If you beat the abomination fast enough, you should be able to run through the side gate and acquire a different path through the raid with more possible rewards than you would if you had let the gate close. Or you could take a third option and use an Asuran mind control device or something to take the abomination and barge your way through a third gate. Compare that to “either you kill the boss or you don’t”, and you have a lot of possibilities for raids, depending on what the group is capable of/feels like doing.
Main Menu: Heroes of Might and Magic IV – Main Menu theme
Ambient:
Heroes of Might and Magic IV- Grass theme, Snow theme, Sea theme
Heroes of Might and Magic II – Swamp Theme
Alisia Dragoon – Stage 5-2
Persona 4 Arena – Electronica in the Velvet Room
World of Warcraft: Cataclysm – Breath of Al’Akir, Thaurissan’s Reach
City:
Heroes of Might and Magic V – Haven theme (For Divinity’s Reach / Lion’s Arch)
Heroes of Might and Magic III – Inferno Theme (For Black Citadel)
Civilization V – Denmark Peace theme (For Hoelbrak)
Heroes of Might and Magic V – Sylvan Theme (For The Grove)
Heroes of Might and Magic V – Academy theme (For Rata Sum)
Battle:
Metal Gear Solid 4: For Liberty
Deus Ex: Unatco Return Battle
Heroes of Might and Magic III: Combat themes 2, 3, and 4
Boss Battle:
Persona 4 Arena: Shadows of the Labyrinth, and Battle for Everyone’s Souls
See if you can guess what my favorite series is music-wise…
1. Hands down the best dodge animation. Diving into a roll is cool.
2. My asura defies gravity when using Pistol Whip.
3. “I’ve beaten you… but you don’t know it yet!”
What would you add?
I would add http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DMsTK9aHr8 to the Orr areas. I’m actually quite disappointed that there doesn’t seem to be a seperate soundtrack for Orr. In fact, I don’t think Orr has a soundtrack at all ATM.
Near the Lion’s Arch bank…
Asura child: “Your face is funny! It’s all mushed and weird…”
Charr soldier: “No, YOUR face is funny. It’s like a little raisin…”
I think it’s more of a balance issue than anything else.
My thief using spear is borderline broken underwater. Two different evasion skills and a counter that restores initiative if it goes off. By comparison harpoon gun is simply awful, dealing what may be the most atrocious damage in the game, with two difficult to utilize line shots. On top of that, almost every utility skill in the game is not usable underwater, making even the OP water fighting classes weaker underwater than above water.
Arenanet is doing a good job so far with underwater, but dealing with a 3d space on a 2d screen will always be difficult to handle, especially when the NPCs can move seemingly flawlessly through it. Other than balance, my main issue is the difficulty of spotting enemies. You have to be paying attention to not only in front of, to the sides, and behind you, but above and below you as well. Unless you are moving very slowly through the water, it is extremely easy to be caught off guard. Getting pulled into a group of 5 krait out of nowhere with a veteran in tow is par for the course underwater.
1. I don’t have a sylvari. What does Trahearne do in the sylvari questline? Does his character get developed at all there? Or is he just another, “Hey I need your help get the Orrian MacGuffin for me plz”
2. And what if Trahearne was actually an interesting character? How interested would you be in the story then? I think the problem extends beyond Trahearne himself.
There aren’t many plotholes in the personal story, but the ones that I have found are pretty critical. For example:
Asura level 30 quest. You get the word out about Professor Gorr’s theory that dragons consume magic, despite the Arcane Eye’s attempts to repress you. What happens next? The council comes out and says that they’ve known this all along, and that they’re just going to go along like nothing happened. Zojja then takes about 5 seconds to say, “You’ll never get away with this!”. This entire plotline is never mentioned again. The very next quest is the meeting in Lion’s arch with your mentor. Umm… what??? The only explanation I can think of is that your character is moving on to bigger and better things, but still, we don’t get even a hint as to what happens next?
On top of that, there’s the whole concept of the “branches” in the personal story. No matter what branches you take, you’ll end up at the same ending. They aren’t really branches at all, are they? Though it’s hard to be mad at Arenanet for this, since coming up with, much less coding 100000000 different endings simply isn’t feasible.
But why not, say, 3 to 5 possible endings? I strongly believe that Orr shouldn’t be the only endpoint of the personal story. Arenanet kind of backed themselves into a corner by making Orr the only real endgame zone. Frostgorge sound is the only other place that comes close.
Hopefully when more content comes out, there will be more lv 80 zones, and more possible branches for story.
One of the issues I’ve had with crafting mechanics in MMO’s is that it’s not at all skill-based. You get your materials, you press the magic button, and you suddenly have a sword. Compared to the revolutionary fighting mechanics/dynamic event mechanics in the game, which seem to have turned out fantastic, I think crafting is the weak point in GW2 at the moment. If you don’t believe me, look for a page on the website that describes the crafting system in GW2. There isn’t one.
To make crafting more interesting and allow there to be a difference between good crafters and bad ones, why not implement minigames for crafting?
For example, say I want to cut a gem. The minigame would bring up a screen with a gem, and show a line that the player should try to cut on. The player would then have to draw that line with his mouse (or some other mechanic,) as accurately as possible. This would probably repeat several times, until the gem is finished being cut.
When the gem is cut, its final stats reflect how well the player did in the minigame. If you did poorly, it would give 2 power, if you do ok it gives 4 power, if you do well it gives 6 power, and fantastic gives 8 power. The game would have to be difficult enough that well-cut gems would be very rare and difficult to get, but it should be easy enough that the average player could get a regular-quality gem fairly consistently.
Each profession would have a different minigame, perhaps a simon says game for cooking, an accuracy game for armorsmithing, etc.
Of course, it would have to be a kind of game that a bot couldn’t easily complete, or a game that can be easily cheesed.
Any thoughts on this?
Edit: kitten meant to post this in suggestions… can a mod please move it?
You aren’t FORCED to WvWvW. Yes the achievement requires it, but nobody is forcing you to get the achievement either. Arenanet is just trying to encourage you to try new things, which isn’t at all a problem IMO.
If you have 100% exploration, lv 80, full exotic, maxed professions already, I think you’ve been playing a bit more GW2 than the developers intended. Even if they wanted to, I doubt they could make enough content to keep up with the amount you play each day.
You did seem to leave out PvP though, and the very nature of PvP means it won’t grow stale very fast. Why not try it?
Have you done all the dungeons on every mode yet? Why not try them with a different weapon set/skill set?
Experiment with different traits. You never know what might interest you…
You’ve done a metric crapton already, but I can still think of things left for you to do. I think that alone should show how much content is in this game.
I think the fact the the Trinity is not in use puts a lot more pressure on other group members to fill that role. You are responsible for managing your own health. You are responsible for making sure that the boss doesn’t kill you. You are responsible for helping bring down a boss. As I’m sure many people can attest, doing all 3 of these WELL at the same time is extremely challenging.
If you’re having trouble with organization, that’s not Arenanet’s fault. Hell, if you want to run a tank/3dps/healer setup you still can, though it may not work all that well. If you have a group of 5 people that isn’t organized, it’s perfectly natural for it to be a train wreck compared to a well-organized group.
And Arenanet, please don’t listen to this guy and think what you’ve done is wrong. It’s definitely different, but not wrong. I’m struggling just as much as the OP is by the sounds of it, but I love it! It’s going to be a long time before I master this game (if I ever do…), and am able to successfully take down dungeons. Compared to the 15 minute facerolls of a certain other MMO, I love this!
Not once, but twice now, my computer has crashed, and then refused to boot up again for 5 minutes exactly halfway through the poison golem in the Kudu fight. This computer has never crashed in a way like this before, and DEFINITELY hasn’t prevented me from turning it on again. At first I thought it was an overheating problem, until it happened at the EXACT same time the second try around. Pretty disheartening, considering the hours it took to beat the monster of a fire golem that came before it. I don’t intend to go back in there to test my theory for a third time, since doing so has involved 2-3 hours of wipes, half of which is on the stupid fire golem.
I’m not mad at Arenanet, considering how well this game has turned out, but I will be if it turns out that I can never complete the dungeon because of a mysterious game-breaking bug that I can’t find evidence of anywhere else.
Anyone else had something like this?