Ah, a strawman. When did I talk about GW1? Next you’ll say that you never directly said I said that even though that is the implication. I see that you are not in the mood to think of solutions for the current lfg problem through logical argument so have fun in the game.
Sigh, is your only argument that you’re more skilled than me because I disagree with you so my argument is invalid? Seriously, if your only argument is a personal attack against me I suggest you rethink your position. I’m not saying you need to agree with me. I’m asking for a reasonable conversation regarding game mechanics and how it encourages a healthy community.
What the puppy gave you the idea that GW2 should promote pug play? Was it the lack of LFG system? Or maybe the lack of a match-maker? Or could it have been the lack of inter-channel/map communication? Obviously this dungeon was supposed to promote social play. As in, talking to others, being part of a group and, well, knowing people. You choose to rely on a system that’s not even in the game and then complain about players being selfish, because they’d rather do what they want to do instead of doing what you want to do. How does that even remotely make sense?! Seriously, I’m as anti-social as it gets and still had no problem getting 3 lvl 7 guildies to run lvl1-5 with me. And the guild I’m in only has 20-ish members total….
Have you been paying attention to the rest of the game? Mobs? Loot? XP? They’re shared (heck, in the first couple weeks there were people who gave high end loot to random people in the same zone with them if they couldn’t use it). Quests? Done dynamically with others to achieve a common goal. Healing and rezzing? They give you xp to give you a benefit for helping someone out.
Fractal levels? I’ve got mine, go find someone to run at whatever arbitrary level I’m not at. Do you see the disconnect here? There needs to be a system to encourage people working together beyond thinking how can I get the most loot for myself as fast as possible?
You seem to be incapable of parsing arguments correctly. You do realize that the new content (the actual events you’re doing) is not 100% linked to the progression system further balkanizing lfg? Or is that what you’re here for? Is the new content for you this forced segregation by gameplay mechanics? Well, lets hope they take out all the mechanics that encourage teamwork for your sake.
You’re assuming player skill with keep up with the difficulty. There will always be a portion of the player base at the lower levels.
Not true. What happens is early comers get to the high difficulty, and then there is not enough critical mass to get past the first few difficulties any longer. Especially if gearflation makes higher difficulty easy and you have to grind a very gradually increasing difficulty curve on top of everything else.
And the inevitable rebuttal we hear is this new content is optional so go back to your old content, peasant! It is like people don’t understand that encouraging the fracturing of the playerbase is questionable game decision at best.
You do realize that for this game to continue to run there has to be a decent and engaged player base, right? You can’t be elite in the game if it shuts down due to not enough active players. But why would there be few active players? Perhaps it is because they were told by others that the new content is reserved for the worthy? That they should just go back and be happy to sit at the progression ceiling arbitrarily decided by a group of players in the game? Fractals aren’t for you. You missed the leveling up boat. The next elder dragon isn’t for you. You missed the leveling up boat. Etc… You see the problem here?
I want this game to succeed, and this newly emboldened attitude of I’ve got mine is not a good way for it to progress.
I’m level 60 and have not hit a dungeon yet. I suspect by the time I hit 80 there will be numerous new dungeons put into the game. I’m a slow leveler due to two kids and a full time job running my own business. Oh and I got a late start on Mac. So I always just wrote off ever getting into a dungeon and that never bothered me. If I get to do one then cool but if not it doesn’t bother me. Is there a queue system to get into a dungeon? Seems like that would fix some concerns people have.
They have said that an lfg queue system is low on their priority list. I doubt it will be in by the time you decide you want to do a dungeon (I wouldn’t be afraid to do a story mode dungeon if you can get a group for it, they’re relatively easy and fun).
If ANET doesn’t require you to have ascended gear and upgrades to even have a shot at completing the new content, then its not progression. If ANET does that, then its content gating. ANET was supposedly against content gating.
Sounds like you need to take another look at the bit ArenaNet gave out on the Ascended gear (from Linsey, if I recall correctly). They’ve added “optional progression”. Get it, optional. If you want harder, you progress. If you want the same, you don’t progress. So yes, you’re gated off from “hard mode” because you choose to not progress.
I don’t get how anyone could be against being “gated” against going to higher difficulty places.
The problem is they created a system encouraging people to rush as fast as possible through this optional system. You can throw the optional label on about anything, it doesn’t make it healthy for the community.
How so, you may be able to “rush” but you can also go back at any time and considering you may eventually hit a wall in difficulty it may actually be beneficial to go back with people of lower level’s in order to get some easy gear to sell on the tradeing post and such
Where is this wall? Level 10? Level 20? Level 30? Again, look at the lfg and lfm disconnect. We have people spread out over what is basically 10 different dungeons at the moment. The goal may have been to add progression without limiting ability to access new content but that hasn’t happened because the progression system does not encourage working together and compromise. The rest of the game encourages teamwork which is why playing it has been so fun. You create a system that rewards working together and you get people that are much more inclined to work together (e.g. xp for helping to rez someone). You make a system that rewards selfish behavior and you get selfish behavior (e.g. I want as much loot as possible so I want max level fractal).
If it would be too hard to find relevant level group, then hardcore players will adapt and lower their demands.
That’s how you need to play it – adapting to situation. Not always whining on forums.
Yup, because I haven’t lowered my demands…oh wait I don’t make arbitrary demands in lfg because I’m playing this game for fun. Call it whining, but trying to make and get into the instance can be a multi-hour event if you don’t get lucky. I prefer to call this asking for a design choice to be reconsidered to help fix some issues. But feel free to feel superior because of xyz choice. There is nothing better than whining about people whining. Sheesh.
If ANET doesn’t require you to have ascended gear and upgrades to even have a shot at completing the new content, then its not progression. If ANET does that, then its content gating. ANET was supposedly against content gating.
Sounds like you need to take another look at the bit ArenaNet gave out on the Ascended gear (from Linsey, if I recall correctly). They’ve added “optional progression”. Get it, optional. If you want harder, you progress. If you want the same, you don’t progress. So yes, you’re gated off from “hard mode” because you choose to not progress.
I don’t get how anyone could be against being “gated” against going to higher difficulty places.
The problem is they created a system encouraging people to rush as fast as possible through this optional system. You can throw the optional label on about anything, it doesn’t make it healthy for the community.
I’m wondering what people will do after the weekend when we will be less able to hop onto overflow servers to look for more people and keep the lvl 2,3,4,5,6,7,8,etc… requirement they are looking for. The mechanic, unfortunately is spreading out the limited player base. This isn’t about being in a good guild yada yada. This is about finding pick up players being much harder.
So after playing the new patch I’m going to sum it up as being a moldy cake. It looks pretty and there are parts that are tasty but then you have all these mold spores ruining it.
Dungeon, great design. Making a group for it is hard due to fractal levels encouraging people to demand the highest level they can do and no lower. Then there is the issue of getting the group in the same instance and what happens if someone drops (I’ve had to four man). I’m not sure how they can fix this.
One time event is great and it makes the world feel more permanent. The bugs and 1 day only timing make it very hard to participate, though. This is easy enough to fix. Growing pains.
Ascended gear. I’m not really sure what to think of this yet as no one really has access to it yet. Gear treadmill yada yada. Frankly, I think the fractal level lfg balkanization is the bigger problem here. I understand how providing some progression for tight nit groups is a good thing. The problem is we have the relentless drive for breakneck progression in lfg pugs. I’d say make fractal progression somehow linked to guilds but that could be another can of worms (for the record I am guildless because I’m trying the whole cowboy route for a while). This is a serious issue and could severely hurt this game.
I don’t think people are 100% blaming the players for this happening. The problem is that anet created a situation where this would be inevitable. They did a pretty good job before now limiting it (exp dungeons had a bit of it but it was mild). While the per dungeon progression has some good features (no do x dungeon then y then z and good luck if you haven’t done x yet) it seems to be amplifying the lfg option.
How many LFM and LFG spams do you see in /map and how many of them are mutually exclusive due to the fractal level requirement? They took all the minor problems and greatly amplified them.
The way I’m approaching this is by being fine with any fractal level at or below my max because frankly I’m looking to have fun, no rush to the highest arbitrary number possible. I’m hoping more people realize this too as it might make finding groups much easier in the long term. (I’m ignoring anet fixing this as they don’t seem inclined to at this point since for one reason or another they’re after population numbers.)
I’ve been trying out the signet fire aura spec with a staff (20 in fire to make burning auras plus the 10 point aura ones and 30 in earth for the signets). I’m coming from d/d (I wanted to see if I could make staff do something different) but it seems to work. The only downside is that you have no or few points in arcane so you swap attunements very very carefully.
Take root elite is pretty good (arguably better then all the elementalist ones for instance). This is kind of an anomaly as the racial ones aren’t intended to be super powerful. The racial heal is nice but the super long cooldown and the propensity for mobs to instantly attack any healing turret it generally isn’t worth it.
Probably the biggest reason is if you want to glow in the dark.
Here, I just went and took some screen caps of my juvenile cats for you. :p Notice how the lightning aura and corresponding boons appear but the equivalents do not appear for fire.
Magnetic Grasp through RoF still gives Fire Aura. Just logged in and tested it after reading this post. Don’t say kitten that isn’t accurate.
I was playing last night and it did not. I tested it several times. There is a thread on this bug. You see the animation of the fire aura but one does not actually proc unless they pushed a new build that fixes the issue over the last 8 hours.
Technically the signet version is more compatible with staff because the signets make up for the lack of weapon skill auras. Frankly, I think the signet build might be a better fit for staff because the complete lack of arcane really hurts your ability to get in and out of a fight as d/d where as that is not as huge of an issue for staff.
If you like buffs, pick underpowered classes like the elementalist. .
Stop with that crap already.Ele is obviously not underpowered for Anet or they wouldnt just continously nerf it again and again anda again after each patch.
They probably dont even care about ele’s problems this moment since the whole game could be balanced with out his presence in tpvp.
Actually we havent got a considerable buff ever.All these erased playstyles were available for us since the beggining but we couldnt see them..it took me 3 betas to realise ea had a blast component.Its quite depressing thinking of this.
I do agree that part of the problem is that the prof isn’t exactly self-explanatory. It takes a lot of thought to figure out how to setup your skills to allow you to develop a play style for your weapon set because we have so many weapon skills.
As far as buffs, they’ve actually done a decent job buffing d/d (e.g., air used to be a complete joke as far as actually hitting people with damage). So we know they can fix issues with skills being completely useless. Don’t know if they just haven’t gotten around to other issues or if they are aware of some build that makes the ability really good.
While nice that they got some attention, I’m still dubious of their real utility. My preferred way to fix the issues is to take the elemental specific conjure off a cooldown. I base this off looking at eng kits. Eng can swap back and forth quickly between kits but the F1-4 more group focused abilities the kits also give them have a cooldown.
At the moment, by having the long cooldown we run into the issue of eles feeling like they have to stay in the conjure weapon for a prolonged period of time, beyond the utility that the weapon provides (the weapons do have some nice utility skills that fill in some gaps). This makes us gripe about the drop in damage as well as complain when people run off with the weapon we conjure on the floor because that is the only way for us to swap back in to the conjure after the utility skills come off cooldown without waiting for the much longer conjure cooldown.
Basically, either remove conjure on the floor ability and cooldown or remove cooldown for the ele swapping in and out and somehow have a cooldown on the conjure on the floor part (I have no idea how they can do the later).
Players found bug with EA. Players exploited EA bug. Bug fixed. Players QQ and threaten to quite because they can’t exploit anymore.
I think the main problem is that staff has been having problems for a while (they’ve been doing a decent job fixing d/d although their fixes ended up being more buggy than fixxy this patch).
As far as elementalist specific changes, you guys do realize you added more bugs than you fixed, right? And the listed fixes only half of them actually are true (and they’re all the ones aimed at pvp healing nerf). I do understand your priorities for this patch but it would be nice if you could give us some idea when the new bugs you introduced will be fixed and when the listed fixes will go in game. Thanks.
They bugged out magnetic grasps ability to make fire auras too so I’m not surprised that eles only got bug fixes that are nerfs and all the buff ones are still bugged out (if not adding new ones).
Essentially, staff has been asking for help for a while now but instead got a bug fix which comes out as a nerf. They were decreasing pvp healing all over the place and the extra blasts increased healing output. (I’m d/d aura 0/10/10/30/20 because I’ve been unhappy with staff since BWE2 so this is my interpretation of the events.) I’m really curious as to what they’re doing with staff.
it boggles my mind why they dont release patch notes early.
people can start theory crafting if they know changes. now we have to log and discover new skills s
We did have that freakout from the ascended gear blog this week that relied mostly on speculation. Early notes will just give people another chance to freak out prematurely (not saying they can’t make bad changes).
This forum makes it very easy to perpetuate incorrect information (e.g. some of the “stealth” prof nerfs either were in for a long time or didn’t actually exist).
As far as why they’re only good in PvE, it is because they’re so insanely situational that you have to be able to plan ahead to find a use for them (e.g., you’re d/d and need to use the frost bow on a boss fight). The only time I use them in WvW is if the other team is careless and stands above me on the edge of a cliff and I pull them off it with the shield (basically, my use for it could be entirely replaced by a grab/pull skill with the corresponding cd).
There are a couple humans you can talk to down there that give some more info as far as what they’re doing there. Why the Sylvari are there? I have no clue.
The seeds could have been put there for someone to find. The problem I have with the last stage of Sylvari being a pale tree is that shouldn’t the Sylvari have completely overrun Tyria by now (since it is implied the trees could match the dragon cycles)?
I thought the other tree was addressed by the Pale Tree not being a dragon but rather just a champion.
Incase anyone thinks that I believe this is anything more than fun to think about but likely not true you’re wrong. The fact is, we have no idea where the Sylvari came from prior to the seed being found and planted.
And sylvari are just a third-world country with no influence whatsoever.
That’s false. They’ve systematically (and disproportionately) populated all three orders, with highly-placed members in all three and shock troops throughout. They’re very common in corrupted zones because their immunity to dragon corruption means that they won’t add to the enemy’s numbers, so while there are very few sylvari in general, there is a lopsided number in the Orders because the Orders are fighting the dragons— which is the sylvari’s instinct and mandate from the Pale Tree as well.
Their influence is out of proportion to their numbers. When the Pale Tree talks, the Orders listen, in part because the Orders are so densely packed with Sylvari, many either in positions of influence or rank.
This is also why the Orders give Trahearne more leeway, too. All of the Order Sylvari are very aware that he is a Firstborn, ordered by the Pale Tree to research and cleanse Orr as his Wyld Hunt— he’s been there his entire life, alone, doing nothing but studying everything about it. As (most) Sylvari defer to anyone with greater experience in any given field, respect the Firstborn, and obey the Pale Tree, you can bet that they will be influencing each Order they’re in to go along.
All of this is pretty crazy, when you consider the very popular theory that the Sylvari are simply minions of a sixth Elder dragon. Sure they are friendlier than their Nightmare counterparts… but in only 25 years they have gained this much power and influence? What if this was their [former?] Draconic master’s plan all along? Infiltrate and consolidate power for the resistance against the Elder Dragons, fight the Sylvari dragon’s enemies (other Elder Dragons, as well as any opposition to this consolidation of power ie Flame Legion, Inquest, etc).
Once the Sylvari dragon does emerge, he already has already taken taken out any threats against himself from the non-Sylvari races, as well as the other Dragons.
The Sylvari as minions of a sixth dragon has as much evidence supporting it as Sylvari being agents of Melandru. Fun to think about but really shouldn’t be used as evidence for any argument.
Race doesn’t really change much. The only Sylvari specific thing I can recommend early is when you’re creating a character toggle the lights (lightbulb icon) because Sylvari bio-luminesce and you don’t want to be stuck with a wacky glow color.
Ever since the agro changes post bwe3 healing seed has been off my bar. The thing used to be pretty nice in dungeons but now mobs just make a beeline for it.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the planet was spinning so fast it would fly apart in reality. On topic, I thought they decided on the cycle time with respect to average play time.
Back during BWE1 they also had a bunch more vendors in the instances (I believe, I was mostly hanging out in the Norn zones). So yeah, would love for them to do something with it eventually but I’m content to ignore it post-30 until they get the rest of the game figured out. (The Sylvari one really is pathetic.)
If we wanted to get all deep about this one could say he might be unpopular because too many people see part of themselves in him (e.g. quick to complain about stuff on the forums and give up easily). Does explain why he comes across as somewhat of a Mary Sue (pops out of nowhere and is given the job to save the day which is normally what the player does in games).
