Guild Wars 2

Well, I think there are three major issues with the gem prices and how buying / selling them affects the gold/gem ratio.

1. Spending gems for gem shop items don’t seem to refill the gem pool and thus lowering the prices. Instead it seems they simply vanish after being spent.

2. As in RL, the majority of gold is owned by a small percentage of players, either earned by massivly playing the TP or by a hilarious amount of luck leading to find several precursors. I’m talking about those ppl sitting on thousands of gold, not knowing what to spend it on. For them, gold to gem ratio is completly irrelevant since it doesnt matter if you have to pay 8, 10 or 12 gold for 100 gems. If they want some, they get some, thus rising the gold to gem ratio slowly but steady.

3. Gemstore prices are mostly completly nuts.
Example: 800 gems equal 10 €. Now let’s see what you get for that:
- additional character slot – fair deal imo
- full armor skins – outch, that’s pretty much on the edge, at least now they’re account-bound
- prices for single armor pieces, additional bag slots (since they’re still char-bound) several boosts, black lion keys, infinit gathering tools (though now account-bound still have to be handed from char to char which is anything but comfortable)- common, are you kidding me?!

What does this lead to? To me it seems, as if we got a little group that can buy anything from the gemstore by exchanging gold to gems at will (ironically most of those are the ones complaining most about the game, I assume) on the one side.
On the other side, we got the majority regular players (you know, those with a full time job, families, hobbies beside GW2) those who mainly still enjoy the game despite everything that could use some improvement and that will probably still stick with the game even though TESO and Wildstare got/get launchend, simply can’t keep up with the gold to gem prices and thus are forced to either spend real money if they find something pleasing in the store or bite the bullet, if they’re not willing to spend the gold they earned within a month or two for just one skin or a reasonable amount of black lion keys.

Yeah, gem shop items are totally optional, still it feels kinda frustrating that playing the game on a regular basis (let’s say 4 days a week for an average of 3-4 hours each; normal playing [this being considered leveling some Alts, doing some Dungeons and FotM (not speed running, just playing with friends), some guild activites, may be some WvW now and then) leaves you that much behind concerning comfot features and optical customization possibilities.

Josh Foreman.8250:

I don’t have time for more replies, but I’ll keep reading. Thanks for the feedback everyone!

Unfortunatly i stumbled over this topic way too late so I hope you will still read this.
A lot has been said about the marionette event, so I just like to give a quick summary of what I see are the main issues with it:

1) Overflow system. Though I see why this system is there, but some kind of “select your overflow” system (thinking about the way you could select districts in Gw1) would be great. The way it is, ppl either have to log on hours (!) before, hoping they can join their home world somewhen (and plz, no “come on, you just have to join 30 mins before the event starts” answers- this is simply not true), promoting heavy afk’ing (no fun at all to see dozens of afk players standing at a waypoint / autorunning against a wall when the event starts).

2) I can see how you want big zergs to be split and i really welcome this change of mind. I also appreciate you try to enforce the community to actually communicate and coordinate- but tbh, that never really was the problem in every attempt i took on the marionette. Wether there were commanders or not, ppl talked to each other, gave feedback about their lane status, etc. BUT (and that’s by far the biggest issue of all):

3) Making the whole event dependent on things players can not influence themselves (talking about how others platforms perform) is just a no-go. Yeah, adjacent platforms get buffed with boons when another one succeds, but unfortunatly they do not buff the players sitting at their PCs themselves.
Though the fights themselves aren’t hard at all (heck, is there any hard fight at all with dulfy&co. spoiling walkthroughs for everything within a day?), being unable to help others, forcing you to stop and stare and watch 1 platform fail is just ultra-frustrating. E.g. you could have made somekind of portal pop up after destroying the generator, letting players choose on what platform they want to help.

Actually I am at 5 or 6 attempts, having always succeded on my platform, with 0 wins at all. Just frustrating.

Thx for contributing to this.

Wallace MacBix.2089:

Don’t forget world bosses. Even with only 10-20 people attacking something it has constant max stacks and yet you only see 1-2 tics of your own conditions.

True. I admit, I don’t have a clue yet how to bypass this without raising condition stack limits or giving every player his own stack (problems might be huge lag issues, see post above this one).

Vick.6805:

I think we need to keep in mind that condition damage is very situational in what parts of the game it is effective. Also, conditions have secondary usefulness not considered when looking only at DPS (example: poison reducing healing effectiveness).

PvE Mobs barely heal…

Condition damage builds are currently entirely viable for soloing in PvE, no matter what mob tier you’re fighting. Conditions may or may not do as much DPS as direct damage, but that doesn’t single-handedly determine a build’s viability.

Condition damage is also viable in small groups (such as dungeons). However, team synergy needs to be a consideration (don’t have five condition builds in the group) whereas with direct damage builds, you don’t have to worry about it.

Sorry, but this is plain wrong, the maths have been done over and over again. Ofc you CAN do everything with a condition build, but you will always contribute less to your party than a direct damage build, thus making you some kind of ballast for your party. Support, though it got buffed lately, is simply not more needed than before.
The fact that you CAN do it doesn’t change the other fact that you could do WAY better.

And I say it again- open world play can’t count as a reference here since 99,99% it doesnt really matter wether you wield a spoon or a mighty weapon. World bosses, I admit, are something special though, see Wallace Bix’ post. Though experience tells that it doesnt really matter what you do cause it ends up in a Zerg-Fest anyway.

Vick.6805:

Condition damage builds are potent in WvW at the moment, as condition removal is nowhere near as easy as applying the conditions to a wide area (have to admit, Epidemic is an awesome skill), and the large-scale group condi removal that used to be available has been nerfed (example: Cleansing Water). I don’t think conditions need a nerf, but I wish condi removal was slightly easier to trait for and/or provide in large group settings.

TL;DR:
1) for world bosses, limit each player to 25 stacks, not 25 stacks for the entire group
2) make condi removal slightly more available for WvW combat

Well, I started this is about Condition Dmg in PvE, not WvW or its removal, so I won’t comment on that since I consider it OT.

Meh, accidently activated the Q&A button.

It’s not about “I can’t do this or that”, I got all major achievements (including Dungeon Master) myself, it’s about equalitiy.
Just because you can do doesn’t mean that you are not in a disadvantaged.
And to be honest- 99,9% of open world fights are face-rolling easy, no matter what you’re running. Dungeons and Fractals are where it becomes interesting and where the difference starts to be significant.

Korossive.7085:

Launch is fine. Remove “Invulnerable” message.
Without that – they’re a cake.

This- SO MUCH THIS!

Alright, I hope I start this off the right way.

I think everyone agrees that the current combat mechanics strongly favor direct damage over condition damage in PvE. Wether it’s intended or not, going for full (direct) DPS + knowing when to dodge carries one through almost every aspect of GW2 PvE. Add some reflects and a bit of condition removal and you’re set for hack’n slaying through everything.
Specing for anything besides raw direct damage will only slow down your party. I mean, there’s a reason why there’s so many “lf full zerkers or gtfo” (no offense, just the way many ppl use the lfg system, feel free to check yourself).
I did the maths on my Conditionmancer’s bleeds (and got them proven by the new condition damage indicator) – it’s just pathetic compared to direct damage.
One may not like that, but that’s just the way it currently is (ok, Tequatl was one step away from that by making critical hits useless against it).

Speaking about PvE Condition Damage, I see two major problems with it:
- stack-cap of 25
- conditions can not crit

I also see why this can’t be changed easily. If so, conditions would become totally op in WvW. Just imagine some Engineers and Nec’s spamming, let’s say 50 stacks of bleeding, each tick able to crit, and spread with epidemic in an enemy zerg- pure slaughter.

So here’s my idea of how to adress both sides- PvE players looking for a different and still viable and competitve playstyle and the PvP people:
Since you can’t change the condition damage itself without huge balancing issues (as said above)- simply change the mobs. I’m thinking of it this way:

Champions and Legendary foes already have the “Defiant” ability (or buff? debuff? call it the way you want)- so why not add something similar to all enemies? Let’s call it “Contingent” for now. I’m thinking of it this way:

- regular mobs: no change needed imo, current condition damage is already enough to mow through this “trash”
- veterans (bronze): get the “Contingent” debuff. Works like “all condition damage applied hits 33% harder than regular”
- lieutenants (silver): get the “Contingent” debuff. Works like “all condition damage applied hits 50% (or 66%) harder than regular and can crit (regular crit modifier only)”
- champions (gold): get the “Contingent” debuff. Works like “all condition damage applied hits 100% harder than regular and can crit (with the personal crit modifier)”
- legendary (purple): get the “Contingent” debuff. Works like “all condition damage applied hits 150% harder than regular and can crit (with the personal crit modifier)”

The name of this new debuff is surely debatable, so are the concret numbers of the amplified condition damage. But I hope you get the idea and give it a closer look, because I strongly believe in it being a rather simply yet pretty effective way for supporting build variety and giving players more valid options for PvE.

42:6:3:2158 for me and my wife…. so typical this has to happen right at the start of the weekend and not during the week while working people wouldn’t care much about it… curse you Murphy!

€: Log in just worked- let’s hope it will last…