Guild Wars 2

While the cities could use some dirtying up to make them look more lived-in (Witcher 2 does fantastic everyday grime), the real problem is The Beautiful People.
There’s a severe lack of normal looking people in this game. Old people, fat people, people with limbs missing (of which I’m sure there would be a LOT of in a medieval feudal scenario), dirty people, ugly people, they’re all missing.
Well, apart from that one scary old lady skin that’s used maybe twice in the game.
I think such NPCs would add a lot to the game.

Then there’s mechanical things that don’t make sense; they’ve probably been streamlined for the sake of gameplay, but stuff like:
Submerging in water should extinguish burning.
Fire should do more damage to ice creatures, and water should do more damage to fire creatures.
Conversely, creatures that say “Immune to Burning” should be completely immune to fire damage.
And as hammer CCs are useless against giant creatures and bosses, maybe we should look at making slashing weapons useless against certain creatures to level the playing field somewhat. Elementals and oozes for example. Indeed, it would be more interesting to have oozes actually divide and multiply if attacked with slashing weapons.
There should be more methods of indirect attack, where a line of sight isn’t necessary. Say lobbing a grenade over a wall or firing a barrage of arrows over the top of a barrier you can’t see through.

And another thing that’s getting more aggravating as time goes on? Lack of variety in voice actors. Yes, there’s plenty of talented people providing voices for this game, but familiarity with the same lines repeated over and over again results in the curtain being drawn back and suspension of disbelief dissolving. For example, there’s one guy I know for sure provides a Dredge, Skritt, Human and Asuran voice. He’s done a good job of making them slightly different, but unfortunately I now recognise his voice whatever character utters the line.

Then there’s the tendency to rely on emote animations to animate characters in the world instead of making bespoke animations for unique situations.

But the problem with this stuff is that it all requires time and money to make the illusion more convincing.

Yeah, I’m in agreement with Mazer there; it seems to proc a lot more than the advertised 5%. It’s blatantly obvious when it does, as you get the howling wolf graphic above your character.

I use Superior Runes of the Pack on my Mesmer and confirm that the boons are granted to me as well as my allies.

So whenever I used to open Heavy Moldy Bags or the like, there was what sounded like a faint chainsaw noise. I’ve noticed this has changed recently.
Am I going mad, or did you really do this?
If so, why?
Not a criticism, I’m just genuinely interested. I’m fine with the new sound, I’m just fascinated by the reasons behind these kind of minor changes, like when the crest colour was changed on the Heron pet in the original game.

If you run in borderless window mode, this goes away.

What about Azurite too?
Will that now be able to be mined outside of the Molten Facility?

Edit: Doh, ninja’d by marnick!

It’s not explicitly called Commando, but each of the pieces displayed in the OP’s post are available through this means.

From DCUO, permanently unlocked armour styles that can then be applied to any armour at no cost, as many times as you like. And it also had complete colour freedom, allowing you to dye your armour any colour you liked without having to unlock dyes.
What I don’t miss from DCUO: Raids, trinity, dailies, tiny world, content gated by combat rating, gear grind.

From AoC, the more mature, less goofy feel, grounded in good lore (although they did take some liberties with the source material).
It’s also still one of the best looking MMOs I’ve played, and their armours are very well designed.
Melee combos were cool too, where you’d activate a skill, then follow directional prompts to successfully execute the complete combo.
And I hate to say it, but because the maps weren’t signposted with vistas, points of interest or waypoints, the sense of exploration was better.
What I don’t miss from AoC: Raids, trinity, massive amounts of redundant skills, overly complicated skill trees, gear grind, completely unbalanced classes and PvP, skills that felt like abstract game mechanics rather than actual skills.
For that last one, there was for example one particular skill that had no animation and no practical use outside of instances that was there purely to be pressed when certain bosses were using certain skills. It didn’t even have an activation time, just a cooldown.

From GW1?
Free build respecs and the ability to save/load builds.
Gear not tied to stats to the same extent it is in GW2.
The Minor/Major/Superior rune system, where there was a reason to use a Minor rune instead of a Superior one. The minor rune would give a smaller bonus, but with no penalty. The superior rune would give a much larger bonus, but would also carry a hefty health penalty. The Major rune was a compromise between the two.
Being able to extract upgrades from armour without destroying the armour through the use of Perfect Salvage Kits.
Fort Aspenwood / Jade Quarry.
Last Online Guild functionality.
Low level cap with almost the entire world balanced for that level cap as opposed to 2 zones.
The Crystal Desert.
Any profession could use any weapon.
Profession specific armours, so a Necro was different to an Elementalist was different to a Mesmer.
Dances divided by sex and profession resulting in a total of 20 dances.
The Divine Aura I had for buying the Collector’s Edition.
The ability to play anywhere in the world with anyone in the world, no matter the continent.
What I don’t miss?
Everything being an instance, therefore no open world.
Not being able to jump.
Invisible walls.
Trinity.
Glowy hands and obsidian armour on Every. Last. Monk.
Heroes.
Henchmen.
Mapping by hugging the walls.
PvE only skills.

There’s a couple of other things that annoy me about its current implementation:
It’s very limited how much can actually be put in it, and when you go to edit it, any text already there disappears.

With lots of people, it’s bearable. But once the Living Story stuff concludes, I can see it going back to being abandoned unless they drastically change the variety of mobs on the island and the mechanics of the Veteran Karka.

However, I’ll correct a previous mistaken statement I made in this thread; baby Karka can be removed by dodge-rolling, something I didn’t realise before :o

I realised something this morning.
While each race has their own cultural tiered gear, default gear has all been designed for humans.

Why is there no default gear for the other races?

This is most obvious when looking at default armours on Charr, where geometry and textures have simply been stretched to fit the character model.

Can we get some default armours that have been designed with other races in mind?

Ideally, it would be nice if your characters of different races crafted armour with obvious racial influences, such as Charr armour being steam-punky, Sylvari armour being floral, Asuran armour having that techno-Aztec motif and Norn armour consisting heavily of furs.

I understand that the Cultural armours were an attempt to cater to the styles and fashions of different races, but when the default armour has so obviously been designed for humans, it ends up adversely influencing the game, both stylistically and philosophically.

Yeah, they put so much effort into designing the basic race, and an absolutely phenomenal effort into making female Charr, yet the armour implementations are insanely bad. Even a lot of the cultural gear is awful (especially the medium stuff).

Well, Earthshaker’s an historically interesting skill in the same way Meteor Shower is.
Both can now be considered “Watered Down” equivalents of their GW1 counterparts.
See there, both used to cause AoE knockdown, not just stun. And with the right gear, that knockdown could be 3 seconds, with no breaker skill to get your behind off of the floor.

Yeah, Hammer Shock used to be a root too, but they removed that. It feels like it shouldn’t be rooted as well; if I play my Guardian for a bit, spamming Whirling Wrath on Greatsword, then come back to Warrior, it takes a ling time for my brain to re-adjust to the root.

So some further thoughts.
I’m pretty much tied to hammer now as my Legendary is The Juggernaut, and there’s no way I’m not going to use it.
I know it probably makes me biased towards hammer, but I think the damage needs drastic tweaking.

It’s just too situational a weapon at the moment. Merciless Hammer’s damage bonus hardly ever kicks in, or does too infrequently to make a difference.
With Backbreaker currently broken and only knocking down for 1 second as opposed to the advertised 2, you only get one swing in before the enemy is back on their feet and no longer taking the extra 25%.

I have specced heavily into Defense, Tactics and Discipline for a build that while heavy on CC (which again is far too situational to be reliable), lacks a certain “Oomph” on damage output, even though Power is impressively high thanks to gear. But if I spec away from this build, I’m severely breaking a lot of hammer’s functionality.

My build is as so:
All Exotic P/v/t armour and trinkets, with Crests of the Soldier on the trinkets.
Runes of the Soldier

Traits:
0/0/20/20/30
Defence: Embrace The Pain, Merciless Hammer
Tactics: Leg Specialist, Lung Capacity
Discipline: Inspiring Shouts, Mobile Strikes, Burst Mastery

Utilities:
Healing Surge
For Great Justice!
Shake It Off!
On My Mark!
Signet of Rage

The idea is to spam Earthshaker as frequently as possible, so everything is geared towards increased adrenaline gain. And this build does achieve that very nicely, allowing Earthshaker to be used as soon as it’s off of cooldown.

I have thought about taking 10 points out of Tactics and putting them into Arms for Unsuspecting Foe, but I’d lose a lot of shout synergy for a non-guaranteed crit; adrenaline gain wouldn’t be as high meaning less Earthshaker, I’d be more prone to conditions and normal damage output would be impacted due to less frequent vulnerability, might and fury.

It’s also intensely annoying that while this build does what it says on the tin versus normal mobs and unsuspecting noobs, it gets broken easily through interrupts as all the skills are massively telegraphed; blind breaks it almost completely; Stability makes you a flailing idiot that’s easily ignored; and Defiant nullifies it massively, meaning that most of the time you’ll be relying on autoattack.

I can’t think of a single other weapon that’s broken so easily by so many things.

With that in mind, maybe Merciless Hammer should have the situational qualifier removed so that it’s a straight damage boost, but lessened to balance it, say to a permanent +10-15%.

And the Crab Tossing is RIDICULOUSLY laggy at the moment.
Horrible achievement. Still, I shouldn’t have expected anything but lag from a Southsun event.

Um, you’ve been able to report bugs using the /bug command since beta, and this didn’t change on release.

I don’t know any of the names mentioned here.
The only Guild Wars name that’s ever stuck with me is the guild name “War Machine” from the first game, but even there I couldn’t name individual members. And I don’t think they have a presence in GW2.
Then again, the only famous gamers I remember are old Quakers such as Thresh or Fatal1ty. Thresh because he won Carmack’s Ferrari and was the first example of a “Star” pro-gamer, Fatal1ty because he has good marketing.

Some Whispers weapons have moving parts.

GuardianOMS.8067:

You can answer all your questions by remembering that males are the intended audience for these games.

That’s an incredibly sexist statement.
And even if it’s true, then developers are insane for catering to a predominantly male audience. If they make games that appeal to both sexes without ostracising one in favour of the other, they have potentially doubled their audience.

Yup, historically influenced stuff would be really nice.
When they open the Crystal Desert, I’d like to see some Saracen or Bedouin style armours, lot of flowing garments interspersed with chain and scale mail.

Anything but ridiculously spiky or glowy gear please.

Dungeon Siege had this, and it was great.
+1ed.
And yeah, it should be a Skritt

The veteran or champion risen knights have extra skills too; one bombing run attack that leaves a trail of fire fields and a temporary invulnerability bubble.
I will say that it seems grossly unfair to have the skillpoint in the south of Malchor’s Leap guarded by both a veteran elemental or risen as well as the champion risen knight.

The veteran risen chicken attack is irritating however. As the event in Malchor’s isn’t supposed to be a group event, the egg skill has far too short a cooldown and does too much damage considering. My warrior is in a complete exotic P/v/t set, trinkets and all, yet each egg hits for 4,000 points of damage. And seeing as how the cooldown appears to be somewhere around 1-2 seconds, you burn endurance quicker that you can regain it. If you pull more than one veteran risen chicken during the event, you may as well give up, as the eggs seem to be a little fuzzy when it comes to dodging too. I’ve successfully “evaded” an egg only to still take damage.

I don’t play Mesmer often in WvW, much preferring to burn stuff with my Engi, shoot stuff with my Ranger or pound stuff with my Warrior, with the occasional Thiefy backstab.

However, I’m massively disappointed that ArenaNet bowed to pressure on this one.
Confusion sorts the good players from the bad, and if people were dying too often from it, it’s their own fault.
It doesn’t last long, and so is easy to wait out.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Mesmer, while powerful, is a shadow of how the profession played in GW1. If whiners here hate Confusion, just imagine how quickly they would have rage-quit under the effects of Backfire, Wastrel’s Demise / Worry, Empathy, etc.

Confusion is in the game to punish the ignorant auto-attacker.
By nerfing it, ArenaNet is encouraging more mindless play.

If I were one of the designers of the game, I would be massively disappointed that so many people were spending so much time in such a small part of the world.

As a player, I honestly can’t understand the mentality of people who are happy to do such a repetitive task over and over and over rather than play the game.

These people aren’t playing; they’re working.

But it takes all sorts I suppose.

Personally, I can’t stand playing instanced content more than a couple of times, and I have done very few explorable dungeon paths, finding them tedious, drawn out grinds.
Yes, I know CoF P1 is very fast, but there’s more to the game than money.

Anyway, one of the pleasant side effects of playing normally is making money. I did world exploration, some Orrian temple events and a little WvW this weekend and made over 40 gold.

Step out of CoF P1 and have some fun people!

I displayed Been There, Done That when there weren’t many other people with it (first two weeks after release).
I also showed Distinction In Applied Jumping for a short period.
But in general, I think they’re unnecessary screen clutter and try to leave them turned off out of consideration for others.
I think a more interesting implementation would be portrait right-click functionality, where you could bring up a player’s achievements and earned titles (no gear, obviously).
Kinda like a short biography.

I made my Warrior’s current mixed set to take advantage of him having The Juggernaut; I wanted large areas of plate mail with minimal useless “decorations” such as spikes and rivets.
Yet I also wanted it to look like it was a set, so each piece had to work well with the adjoining piece/s.
It was also important that it actually look like heavy armour; I can’t stand sets that leave the neck, arms and legs exposed.
My only concession to decorative armour is the plume on the helmet.

The pieces and dyes are:

Head
Pit Fighter’s Helm (Karma Vendor)
Charred / Midnight Rust / Gold

Shoulders
Commander’s Shoulderplates (Human Tier 1 Heavy)
Charred

Chest
Vigil Breastplate
Charred / Midnight Rust / Oxblood

Hands
Whispers Gauntlets
Charred / Oxblood / Midnight Rust

Legs
Vigil Leggings
Charred / Midnight Rust / Oxblood

Feet
Pit Fighter Greaves (Exotic skin)
Charred / Midnight Rust

There is a clipping issue; the knee plate for the boots clips through the Vigil Leggings skirt on the left leg. But I think these boots are the best heavy boots in the game for the look I’m going for, so I’m willing to ignore that.

Yeah, I’ve experienced this too, especially when going between professions.
+1ed.

That’s why I qualified the statement with “large percentage”. I didn’t say “all” or “every” as you imply.
But please, continue using straw man arguments.

+1ed. Loved this feature in the first game.

I’ve +1ed you as it’s a good suggestion, but I don’t think it’ll happen as ArenaNet probably don’t want people using the Trading Post as extra storage.

I don’t even have any Ascended gear, yet I have all 8 professions at 80 in exotic gear and my main has a Legendary.

I don’t play Fractals as I have no need to; I’ve seen them all at least once, why would I play them again?

And the Advantages offered by ascended gear are too tiny to justify the grind to get.

Plus, I hate the idea of repetitively playing the same instanced content over and over again.

So no, I have no infusions, and I don’t waste laurels on Ascended gear.
I have no need for agony resistance, as I don’t play content that requires it.

And to re-iterate, while skimpy options exist in MMOs, even if they don’t make up the majority of styles, they WILL be the ones used by a large percentage of the male population on their female characters.

And while there may be some women who don’t find the skimpy outfits offensive and degrading, a lot of women will.

Quite a few of these women may choose not to buy the game as they may perceive it to be populated by over-sexed men-children who like nothing more to ogle scantily clad “babes”.

So in including these skimpy outfits, developers are ostracising a large potential customer base.

Sexism and pandering to the male gaze isn’t just ignorant.
It’s bad business.

Ah, then be careful what you wish for; that animation “locks” and stops you from dodging or moving about freely. While it may look cool, it is very dangerous and takes a lot of experience to master.
Your only ways to dodge while attacking with sword as a Ranger are to wait for the animation cycle to end or to use Hornet Sting, which isn’t instant.

I appreciate what you’re going for, but I’ll have to refrain from upvoting this. It would do a lot of damage to the way melee classes play.

You can now get this set through WvW, and even better, it’s just a skin which can be applied to any existing set without the need for a transmutation stone. It’s pretty cheap on a per-piece basis too.
To get these skins, go to your Borderlands, head directly south from the spawn point and talk to the “Armor Master [Armorsmith]”.
The skins are in the very last Buy tab.

Possibly a good idea for a legendary, but I’d like to see it on lots of people:

How about a set of weapon skins specifically for Elementalists that change appearance based on the wielder’s attunement?
This idea when applied to armour would be really cool too. Let alone which it gives other players more visual cues about what element the character is attuned to.

This would definitely be useful for newer players.
Over time however, you get to learn the various “Steps” of speed.
Still, +1ed as the game suffers from a severe dearth of tutorial information.

Careful with quoting statistics Rubykuby; they’ll vary from country to country and report to report, so much that I can confidently say no-one knows true figures.
For example this report, again published in The Guardian quotes a headline figure of 80% of reported domestic violence cases being committed against women.

To drag things back on topic, there’s something that’s been niggling away at me in regards to claims that there are less skimpy outfits for female characters in the game than otherwise.
While this may be the case, I’d like to posit a few theories.
It’s widely agreed that most female characters in these kind of games probably have a man behind the controls.
And a lot of these men will like to dress their characters in scanty clothing as they like a bit of T & A.
Therefore, while there may be less skimpy outfits than more modest fare, the ones that you will see more often will be the skimpy ones.

And from my experience, this would appear to be true.

Of course, without metrics extracted from the game to back this up, I have no way of proving this to you.

One thing that isn’t beyond doubt however is the “Take me now” idling animation of human female characters. It’s why I don’t have any.

I’d say I get at least 3 a day.
In the past they have inadvertently both nerfed and buffed the drop rates of dyes, but as of now the rate seems quite consistent.

Kraggy.4169:

SO yes, I’m one of those noobs that are screwing you up because the game hasn’t seen fit to teach me this kind of mechanic.

Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply that people who don’t know about Defiant are noobs; far from it!
I think it’s a failure in communication on ArenaNet’s behalf.
Here’s a link to the Wiki article explaining the mechanic.

I’m all for more localisation.
I understand it’s not a trivial thing to develop, but there does seem to be a rather large Italian contingent on my server, and I didn’t realise they didn’t have an Italian version of the game.

You can buy an exotic P/v/t helmet from the WvW armourer.
However, be careful when buying it!
There are 2 armour vendors; one sells the gear for just WvW tokens, whereas the other sells it for tokens + gold.

The seller selling for tokens + gold requires less tokens.
The seller selling for just tokens requires more tokens.

The gear bought for tokens + gold is statistically better!

Just a warning.

Even so Tuomir, you’re detracting from the point:
The minipet system COULD be improved.
I get the feeling a lot of people here aren’t so interested in the subjects posted and are more interested in arguments.

Answer me straight and true:
Would the ability to equip and display minipets in the same way we equip and display armour be an improvement over the current implementation?

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

Its not that I’m opposed to a special mini pet slot. But you say the amount of people using mini’s is minimal? Where do you get this statistic?

Sigh
I don’t need statistics.
I can count the amount of times I’ve seen people using minipets in game since release on my fingers and toes.
Sure, there may be some crazy server out there where everyone is displaying minis all the time, but on Ring of Fire, seeing a mini is notable by how infrequently it occurs.

Edit: And besides, why the hell are you against someone suggesting the system needs to be improved?
If you use minipets, wouldn’t an improvement to their implementation benefit you too?

Also, I occasionally log back in to check birthday present and such, and a few things recently hit me like a freight train:

My Warrior’s head was MASSIVE. I think it had its own gravitational pull.

The running animation is horribly janky now I’m used to GW2’s smooth animations.

I CAN’T JUMP. WHY CAN’T I JUMP?!

And the controls are just different enough that it’s incredibly confusing going back and having to remember the whole “Select Target > Hit Space to Attack” thing.

But I really wish my GW2 descendant had my GW1 character’s money

Furikake, thank you for putting into words something that has been bugging me as a hammer warrior for a LONG time. Defiant just cannot be coordinated effectively in large-scale PvE events.

Hell, even in small scale group situations with otherwise experienced players, many don’t understand how Defiant works and will waste the CC opportunity with a sub-optimal CC skill.

The amount of times my Ranger friend has used Point Blank Shot “because it’s funny” when I’ve been about to hit the mob with either Backbreaker or Earthshaker is infuriating. He didn’t understand for the longest time what the stacks of Defiant were on a mob, and I’m not sure he fully understands now.

And to be fair, this isn’t his fault.

ArenaNet explicitly stated during development that they wanted to move players’ focus away from health bars and the associated buffs/debuffs and on to the mobs themselves.
There is no visual cue on a mob indicating its Defiant status, therefore the ONLY way to properly control a Defiant mob is to go against ArenaNet’s stated design goal and watch the mob’s health bar.

Fail.

Good suggestions; I’d like to add one more: make chat tabs “Tear-off”, so you can have different chat windows floating in other areas of the UI. That way you could have the combat log displaying at the same time as another chat window.
I understand the developers want to preserve the look of their user interface, but at its basic level, the user interface should be what the user wants to see, not what the developer wants them to see.

Can I just clarify what you mean?
Are you referring to the Ranger’s 1-handed sword attack?

That’s a workaround rather than a fix though Malafide. And it doesn’t address the fact that krs is essentially correct.
The amount of players using minis is minimal as they’re not convenient to display.
I still think the inventory slot idea is the best for minipets.

Let me appeal directly to ArenaNet’s money bone:
I am not buying minipets from the gemstore at the moment because of the degree of inconvenience involved in displaying them. I am sure many others feel the same way.
If they were easier to display, I would have no qualms about buying them from the gemstore.