Guild Wars 2

If I have some time I may compile a list of prominent skills to watch for interrupts. Not sure when I’ll get to it as I’m working on putting together a team for the upcoming tourney (in which I’d like to run a lockdown build)

calavel.6249:

Well, if you have the time for it I think it would be great to dedicate special attention to each type of active heal in the game, how to recognize it and how to best interrupt it. And how to deal with builds that rely more on passive healing/regen.
The ability to deny an enemy direct healing is one of the main strengths of an interrupt build to me.

A problem is that, at least in the current pvp meta, most of the popular builds are running heals that you can’t interrupt.

Guardian (shelter) and warrior (healing signet) can’t be interrupted. The first includes a block and the second is never actually used. Both of these classes are very common.

Engineer depends, but healing turret is very popular and requires brilliant reflexes to catch a 1/2s cast time when you consider latency and animation clutter.

Thief is uninterruptable if they run withdraw, and the good ones cover HiS with blinds and other stealth.

Elementalist (though rare) tend to know to cover ether renewal if they are worth anything at all. The upcoming meta may see more revert to signet heal, which also cannot be interrupted.

The only ones you can reliably count on to interrupt are other mesmers, necromancers without blood fiend, and rangers. They all have prominent heal animations with a significant cast time for easy interrupt.

The wilderness trait for poison damage would actually have been very nice way back in the trap ranger days. Might even make them worth trying again.

Looking at this from a tPvP meta perspective…

Nothing here is worth grabbing over what we already have. You have to give up too much for powerblock. The chaos trait is inferior to CI or PU. The illusions trait is inferior to iPersona.

Shatter remains the superior spec, which is inferior to many of the current OP meta builds that were untouched, as well as a few of the other classes that got something new they can work in. Added with the fact that all we got was some meta-unrelated bug fixes, Mesmer is the new bottom of the bunch in the meta.

cuge.5398:

The problem is… what does a mesmer have to sacrifice in order to reach that trait ?
I was thinking about a 30/10/30 build but… that way you loose deceptive evasion, and to be honest i can hardly imagine to play a mesmer without that trait.
I would prefere not to be like this, but i feel DE is mandatory in every build except a full phantasm maybe.

It’s hard but doable to play without DE, though you do get used to it after awhile. I played a 30/0/30/10/0 lockdown for awhile that worked decently well. This new trait isn’t going to change anything about the matchup with necros though. A lockdown mes already shuts down a necro (and a couple others) hard.

LunarNacht.8913:

Pyroatheist.9031:

Illusion of life is a PvP skill, and an incredibly strong one at that. It’s fine as is.

It is?
That means there are people using it?

I can think of situations when to use it but aren’t resurrection skills of every other class much better?

The only other res skills you’ll typically see brought in a tPvP game is the ranger’s elite spirit or (sometimes, not always) the warrior banner. These skills are game changers in team fights, so it’s not really a surprise at all that IoL is very potent in that game mode.

I’ve run it for my fair share, and honestly almost every time that I use it is during a close fight where my team has a good shot of getting a down. If nothing else, it gives you 15s of an extra person fighting that you didn’t have before. A shatter mes doesn’t really have to give anything up to work it into their utilities either.

I play tPvP without blink, decoy, or Mass Invis (or DE!). Truth is, without those, you really aren’t deceptive at all. A good player can easily find the real mesmer.

In order to make up for the loss of those, your build needs to bring something powerful to offset it. Mesmer doesn’t have much else to make the sacrifice worthwhile, but in my case it’s an ungodly amount of dazes/stuns.

Without these tools, you also need a very strong understanding of positioning and map awareness or you’re going to find yourself out of place and dead more often than not. I would highly discourage any mesmer from going without one of those utilities unless they really know what they’re doing.

1) I would consider switching out the GS trait for the boon rip on shatter. The boon removal will do you more good. Otherwise it looks like a fairly standard 20/20/30 shatter/lockdown hybrid.

2) A pure lockdown build can be more liberal with their rupts, but you will have to be a bit more careful. With only 2 daze charges, save them for heals, elites with a cast time, and stomps/rezzes. Landing these is a matter of always being aware of your target’s stability, reflexes, and lots of practice. Don’t tunnel vision too much or you’ll get blindsided and die.

3) Pistol for lockdown, focus for shatter, sword for 1v1. I like pistol purely because it has the fastest on demand interrupt of all the offhands. I would go with focus if you want to bring a bit more on the shatter side of the build. It’s easier to set up big MWs with a pull. Sword is a strong dueling OH with a hard hitting single target phantasm and a nice block.

5) A lockdown mesmer can’t disengage as easily as some others (though the 20/20/30 hybrid is more forgiving with this). Because of that, going far is a gamble. Since you are running Moa, you always want to be in the team fight when it’s up (go mid to open and immediately moa the focus target). You can very easily neutralize a target with it and give your team a number advantage, which is often enough to win the fight. It’s very good to quickly get rid of a guardian.

Support home and mid as needed. Stay in the back in really big fights unless you are comfortable with both blurred frenzy and distortion available, and punish people who overextend out of the team fight into your backline.

Raunchy.6891:

So I’ve been trying out Nettle’s 30/0/30/10 build that he was advocating (with my own tweaks) and I think it’s probably our best 100% lockdown build. Which I like conceptually. Lockdown is more of an all in kind of build to me and this personifies that perfectly. My only issue is that it probably wouldn’t perform that great in a team queue since you have very little survivability so once you start getting focused you won’t be able to stall/kite very much unlike with the extra survivability/confusion of the 20/20/30 setup, also not having signet of domination frees up space for more ways to survive. Overall though I love it. I think I’ll try it with Moa for a while to see if it’s useful lol.

Also I’ve come to see how Mirror Images could be really useful with this builds low illusion production.

So I’ve gotten better at this build, and I’ve taken it up to ~300 on the team leaderboards now. I think I can go even further with it with a bit more practice. Smart positioning is the key.

I would love to see the return of Panic or Blackout as an elite in this game. They aren’t mantras specifically, but I think it would be a really cool tool to give Mesmers more of the gw1 lockdown play style. Something like:

Panic
“Target foe and nearby foes become panicked. When a panicked foe uses a skill, all nearby foes are interrupted.”

Duration: 6s
Recast: 180s
Range: 1200
Radius: 360

Blackout
“Mesmer and target foe’s skills are disabled.”

Unblockable
Duration: 5s
Recast: 120s
Range: 130

…of course with durations and recasts balanced depending on how strong these are in gw2 combat as compared to gw1.

Mrbig.8019:

I don’t want to sound rude, but PvE players majority of times are scrubs in PvP.

Same for WvW players.

We need PvPers, not scrubs.

A game needs those “scrub” players to thrive as much as they need a healthy population of top tier players.

Look at successful competitive games like LoL. The good majority of the large playerbase and stream viewers wouldn’t be considered high tier players, but that’s fine. Someone has to fill in the % ranks in the leaderboards, just like someone will need to fill in the lower ladder levels when that comes along.

More players = better matchmaking with more active queue options for the system = better pvp community and better support.

I’m not saying changes and balance for top tier players don’t made, because they do, but I am saying that all levels of skill should be given consideration.

Pushing far is situationally useful and as an opener can be worth it if you can delay the cap long enough without sacrificing the mid fight (depending on the map). Problem is, the vast majority of people don’t grasp conquest strategy and make stupid decisions like pushing far at completely wrong times.

So in general, unless you really know what you’re doing and have good map and game awareness, I would agree.

Unfortunately for you, a lockdown mesmer pretty much hard counters eles. Fortunately for you, not very many people play them.

P.S. 20/20/30 isn’t even the best trait layout for a true lockdown build.

The build I posted isn’t meant to 1vX, unless maybe Moa was up. It’s meant to be offensive team support that happens to counter some meta builds in a 1v1. It’s kind of unique in its role.

In 1v1, if you nail the lockdown, the build can work over popular builds like spirit ranger, decap engi, most any necro, thieves (tricky, all or nothing), shatter mes, etc.

The team responsibility, notably its primary role, comes down to damage pressure and shutting down priority targets for your team’s heavy hitters to burst down quickly and easily. It’s shades of gw1 mesmer in a team fight.

Its weakness is disengaging and facing heavy stability, but no build has everything. I personally think the upside makes up for it. That, and it’s super fun to feel in total control of a fight by not letting your opponent do anything.

A lot of people have the problem that they see some utilities and traits as such “must haves” that they don’t experiment with new builds such as this one that can be effective without them.

You just hit thieves with a daze and then dont let them do anything. They die super fast if they are locked down. It takes very precise timing though, because they have so much evade. It comes entirely down to you landed a decent chain of CC. If you do you win, if you don’t, you don’t.

You can run decoy instead of mirror images, but it slightly lowers burst potential. If you don’t have the 3 charge daze mantra and dom signet, your lockdown isn’t quite enough to always get the job done.

I love the build because it has such a rewarding skill ceiling. If you aren’t on top of things you can get trashed, but if you nail the lockdown sequence you can manhandle anyone that doesnt have multiple stability applications (which is mostly just guardians and some warriors). Additionally, it’s one of the strongest mesmer team fight builds I’ve used. If people are assisting, it’s very easy to train down anything with my lockdown + team damage support.

It’s extremely reminiscent of the gw1 mesmer playstyle, which is what I was going for. It takes practice to be good with it… I wouldn’t expect to get a good grasp on the build before a day or two of matches. I’ve been running it for a couple weeks and I still feel like I can greatly improve.

The crit rate isn’t a big problem, 35% isn’t insignificant. It isn’t shatter burst level, but it’s good enough to kill most people with the large amount of CC it has.

I initially toyed with energy sigils for more dodging, but I switched to fire to up the damage pressure. I have to be more careful with my dodges, because each one is important. The biggest hurdles to getting this down at first was getting used to limited dodging and no DE.

An ideal lockdown sequence goes something like daze mantra → berserker / fast mind stab → dom signet → mirror blade → swap/iDuelist → daze mantra → daze shatter → iLeap / MI / MW → Magic Bullet → auto attack pressure and last daze mantra if needed. Try to time dazes to interrupt, so give the opponent enough time in between to try to do something. Most people are predictable coming out of CC. If most of it lands, zerk builds can’t survive it. On tankier targets, I will try to soften them up a bit before using any CC.

trooper.2650:

I was using 30/10/30/0/0 with traited mantras but with MoR as condi removal. A lot of fun. Your build seems good but having low crit kind of sucks in pvp. Mind linking the build to see the gear, etc?

I’m running this: http://tinyurl.com/mmmwyx9

Mirror images is my stun break / MW burst without DE. The damage isn’t shatter level but its plenty high to kill most things before dazes and stuns run out.

20/20/30 might be the most versatile, but I’ve found a 30/0/30/10/0 that is better as a pure pressure lockdown spec. It has a higher skill ceiling, but if I play it well I can 100→0 almost anything outside of guardians while hardly being touched. This is in top 1000 tPvP play.

The only thing I’ve had to get used to was not using DE as a crutch to churn out clones, and better usage of more limited dodging. Once I got past that, I’ve found this to be the strongest trait spread for lockdown in tPvP.

The 30 in dom allows me to take harmonious mantras, which gives me an additional mantra daze and a 3 charge mantra heal that cleanses 6 condis every ~12s. This frees up a utility slot to allow me to take signet of domination, which is what I feel puts the build over the top for massively long chained lockdown (approx ~12s continuous stun/daze, ~22s with moa).

I play exclusively lockdown in tPvP, and I run MP with MoR with great effectiveness. However, I run a 30/0/30/10/0 with 3 mantra charges. It’s going to be a little ineffective with only 2 removal charges, and the heal itself is inferior to ether renewal without the 3rd charge.

With 30 dom a 3 charge MP/MoR is better than the condi removal mantra and a heal on par with our others, but without that extra charge I don’t think it’s worth it. I would pass on it specifically for your build.

I prefer pistol over focus or sword for interrupt heavy builds. The pistol interrupt is more reliable and instantly on demand than the other two options, with the sword taking 2 button presses and the focus taking 1s-2s of set up time before the pull. You aren’t going to be purposefully interrupting many heals or important skills with a set up time. A guaranteed stun is also more effective than a daze or a pull (for interrupting… a pull is more effective as a positioning mechanic).

Phantasm specs fall apart in bigger team fights. When combining the build with mantras, they are going to have low hp and no uptime with all the aoe and cleaving that flies around.

Full mantras are cumbersome because of the long channel. Against skilled opponents, you’re going to be punished hard for doing it mid fight, and even if you’re not you are taking yourself out of the fight for a noticeable amount of time. It’s a little unfeasible to have all of your utilities and healing wrapped up in 11 seconds of channel time.

Moa seems decently balanced. Its got a long CD, you aren’t completely helpless if you get hit by it, and it can be blocked/evaded/blinded/etc. That last fact alone is pretty big, as nothing is worse than blowing a 180s elite for no gain.

I think its strength lies in team fighting, where it is a bit underutilized. It requires a team that focuses well, which you rarely get in solo arena and don’t always get in team arena with partial queues. You can target a guardian to open a team fight and eliminate him quickly, which gives your team a fast window during his respawn to win the point. It’s also effective to easily neutralize a high threat like a thief, who is too glassy to survive without stealths and steps/evades.

It works very well in a lockdown mesmer build (which is a build that isn’t seen much). It was actually used quite a bit more back before MI with lyssa runes became a common thing.

Thighum.7295:

Except that it is harder for a d/d thief to get into stealth through CnD in the first place because they have to get in melee range to use it compared to the bp/hs combo. Also CnD can be dodged, BP/HS combo doesn’t matter if it is dodged.

Precast CnD->Steal/InfSig is a thing and is fairly easy to land if the thief isn’t completely incompetent, and you really don’t need to do it more than once or twice in a fight unless you’re running some cheesy WvW stealth build.

As a thief player myself, I almost would like to see making stealth drop if the BS is blocked or evaded. It’s so silly to be able to just chase someone spamming BS until it connects, and is a crutch for bad thief players and a crux against skilled players trying to anticipate the thief.

Mostly from an overall spvp balance pov (as that’s the mode I play the most)

1. Elementalist
2. Warrior
3. Mesmer

Big thanks to anet for this mode, it’s nice to see some difficult content in the game.

Finally finished all of world 1 the old fashion way: no guide, solo, all by trial and error. Little bit of feedback:

I don’t see how most people can do this without an infinite continue coin or an unreasonable amount of bauble grinding. Infinite continues should be a thing for this mode. Games like I Wanna Be the Guy/Boshy/Gaiden version don’t completely fail you out if you die too often. You always have that checkpoint there. It’s what makes these games possible for people to play. The infinite continue coin is borderline p2w, and I’m pretty disappointed to see this approach.

As for the zones themselves, 1-1 and 1-2 had a great balance of trial and error along with difficult jumps. The only part I was truly stuck on for any significant amount of time was the very end of 1-1. Everything else was manageable with persistance and gave a great sense of accomplishment.

1-3 I didn’t like as much. It felt a little heavy on trial and error (spikes and invisible floor drops), and didn’t have too many hard jumps in it that weren’t already there in normal mode. The toad king could’ve been a little harder. The only part that was tricky for me was how fast you had to move on the lily pads, but that was picked up pretty quickly. You could “tank” his hits at the middle and just whittle him down since his health didn’t refill unless you had to continue. Would’ve been a bit more fitting if he regen’d his health after each death.

Overall though, really fun for me. Looking forward to doing W2 over the next couple days!

Infinite continue coin ready to go.

Come rage with me

http://www.twitch.tv/epicnettle

Jett.1239:

Nettle.9025:

A guide isn’t going to let you sail through this mode. When you get further in there are some very difficult jumps and maneuvers you have to pull off.

As it should be. What SHOULDN’T be, is that the infinite coin is the only way to play the game as it’s intended to be played (alternatively, farm baubles all day).

I totally agree with that. The charm of games like IWBTG is there is no gameover (barring hardest difficulty), there is just last checkpoint.

I enjoy these types of games and had the gems lying around, so I caved for the coin. I can’t imagine doing this without it, and I think it was an awful decision.

A guide isn’t going to let you sail through this mode. When you get further in there are some very difficult jumps and maneuvers you have to pull off.

There are 4 houses in the hub, each leads to a different world. They have a number on the outside saying which.

Or run out and buy some dramamine. I used to have motion sickness problems and that stuff works wonders.

If you’re running a burst build with arcanes, you can even more reliably land CE if you are willing to use elemental surge over evasive arcana. Earthquake→CE, pop arcane blast for the last second of the channel to immobilize them. They’ll have about a half a second to move around after they get up from the KD. A good player can anticipate a LF and still dodge, but with this method they can’t dodge or move out.

Just thought I’d share that alternate method, since I haven’t really seen many eles utilizing it.

Darnis.4056:

If DAOC2 comes out and is buy to play it would CRUSH gw2

Its called Camelot Unchained and its coming next year

Cactus.2710:

mjasa.5821:

I have been waiting all day for MT Maelstrom what is up with it not showing up a whole day. I looked at the link for zones and it has not showed up for a long time.
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Scarlet%27s_Minions_Invade!/history

I don’t think it really matters anymore. As best I can tell, I also need Mount Maelstrom for completion and it always fails. Tonight we started the third wave with almost 20 minutes left and at best finished two thirds of it before time ran out. The zergs just got larger and farmed harder (hard to blame them if they don’t care about the achievements), and Mount Maelstrom has so many difficult-to-access spots on the map that most don’t even bother trying to hit the minions there. The situation has gotten progressively worse as the days have passed and fewer people needed completion, and at this point I have zero confidence that we will be able to complete this zone even if it pops every three hours.

It’s a really kittened up game design all the way around.

You don’t actually have to succeed on the invasion to get credit.

If I jump in an area, tag a few champs and events for 5-10 minutes, then afk until the end I get credit.

Oh god an IWBTG reference from Anet. I love IWBTG.

No amount of walkthroughs can prepare you for a game like that. Extremely frustrating but very rewarding once you beat it.

EchenSketch.9142:

Basic Breakdown

S/D Berzerk Amulet+Gem Eagle Runes or Divinity Runes
1 Sigil of Endurance 1 Sigil of Air

0/30/0/10/30 *Don’t know trait names off the bat, deal with it.
Air: Bolt to the Heart, 10% more damage in air attune. Fresh Air
Water: Cleansing Wave
Arcane: Elemental Attunement, Vigor on crit, Evasive arcane

Utilities, Glyph for heal, Arcane Wave, Lightning Flash, Mist , Glyph for Elite

Burst Combo:
Air auto attack, Air 1, Air 2, Lightning Flash, Updraft, Fire, Dragon’s Tooth, Phoenix, Ring of Flame, Arcane Wave, Fire Grab, Air 1 , Air 2, Dead

That is what many people run, but there is a better burst build that gives you an almost guaranteed CE hit even in 1v1s, for a second burst rotation. And no, I don’t mean LF→CE.

This is stuck using traits from the D/D glory days that aren’t ideal in a pure burst build in this meta. I’ll post up a guide tonight I think.

Fishbait.6723:

Nettle.9025:

In pvp, Ele can be built to be a very effective burster on the level of a thief.

Erm, what?
Show me an ele doing 7-`13k hits like thief can with press of one button.
Sure, fresh air isn`t too bad, but it also is a one trick pony.
You blow those cds, you`re done.
Thief blows its cds, it can just stealth & come right back at you.

Never said an ele could do it in one button. To be fair, a thief burst is about 4-5 buttons (BV→BP→HS→steal or inf sig→BS). I know, I mained thief for over 1k tourney games.

The thing with ele is that against all but a few builds, its not hard to bait out dodges and stunbreaks. Sure you blow your CDs, but it doesn’t matter because your target is probably dead. And with the right build, you actually have 2 burst rotations as there is a way to fairly reliably land CE in a 1v1 that most standard fresh air builds do not use.

It has a weakness to builds with multiple stunbreaks (particularly s/d thief) or lots of stability uptime, but any balanced build is going to have a weakness.

I understand where you’re coming from. I came back to the game a couple weeks ago and was banging my head trying to get an old d/d build to work. I was having horrible losing streaks and trouble winning any fights.

I completely reworked to a burst build (I used to main a burst thief so I like this style) and now I’m finding a lot of success.

I haven’t really seen a solid tpvp burst ele guide, so I might write one out today or tomorrow. The basics are S/D 10/30/0/0/30 with double arcane, but the traits themselves are a little unconventional outside of fresh air.

You are doing it wrong. Unless you are playing against top competition, ele is viable. The problem is people are stuck trying to make the old approach work in the new meta.

The sustain ele is not viable in the current meta, so you need to shift accordingly. You cannot sustain through the large amounts of condis and aoe being thrown out anymore and also expect to kill anyone.

A well thought out heavy burst build, when played properly, is very viable. It plays similarly to a burst thief with a different flavor. There are only a couple builds that can shut it down, but it can counter many of the currently popular ones.

There is a way to almost always guarantee a CE burst in a 1v1 against all but a couple builds. Even if they manage to get out of it, it leaves them completely open to an air->fire->air burst if you are running S/D fresh air. I’m totally surprised more people don’t do it.

In pvp, Ele can be built to be a very effective burster on the level of a thief.

Sir Vincent III.1286:

Best to describe this story is liken to putting make-up on a pig.

Everybody already know about the pig and making it nice a pretty doesn’t change the fact — it’s still a pig.

So what exactly did we learn that is useful from the story? Absolutely nothing! The pig is still a pig, only prettier with flowery words to describe what happened.

Besides, this story is not well thought off.

She claims, “So much makes sense now. The Pale Tree, the Nightmare Court, Caithe and Faolain…it’s all part of a grand design.”

Yet she believes that she’s not part of that design and can change things however she wants.

“We can change the rules…well, I can. And I’m going to.”

WHAT THE H’?!

If she’s as smart as the story claims her to be, she would have realized that her every action are perhaps part of that “grand design”; that all her actions are preset and predefined and there’s no way for her to escape that fact.

But whatever, let the reality in Tyria implodes.

He warned her repeatedly about the danger to her life and her sanity

implies that maybe she isn’t all quite there anymore after this. Combination of genius and insanity maybe, so she believes she is an exception.

I don’t mind getting short stories, but I do enjoy reading in general. While I would prefer seeing more of this in game, I understand it’s much easier and faster to write up a short story than it is to put it in the world. They would either have to spend a (presumably) good amount of extra time creating cutscenes, or give us watered down information in NPC text dialog.

I am totally fine with getting major plot points and supporting snippets in game, and getting the depth of those snippets from short stories like these. This is especially true when those details are from other characters’ perspectives.

BTW, thank you Anet for listening to us about wanting more info and then so quickly putting this out. It would have been easy to entirely ignore the complaints.

Delvoire.8930:

People are mad because they haven’t said how or why Scarlet is using the Molten Alliance or the Aetherblades. That’s simple really. It’s because there is more story to come. In two weeks will get some more information or the journey will take us on another path. All of this has been for a purpose.

People are mad because it was stated that this patch was going to answer a bunch of open ended questions, and it didn’t really answer anything. We were under the assumption that we wouldn’t have to wait to find this stuff out. All we got was a completely new villian who was not fleshed out.

IMO zerg content is always going to be mindless. To me, zerg anything is extremely boring and repetitive… whether that is orr farming or WvWvW zergs or these invasions. It almost always comes down to mashing 1 and facerolling your AoEs on CD.

I can’t think of many ways to make combat/encounters interesting when you have 50 random people spamming dps on an event that requires you to kill something. At most tactics can be introduced at a macro level (see invasions and spreading out), but the fights themselves will continue to be uninteresting when they must be designed to allow 30+ unorganized people to participate in them.

The Scarlet fight at the end is the worst offender. Here she is chanting die, die, die while 100 people wail on her, and yet not one single person goes down.

Group or solo organized content will always be more intimate, because it can be custom tailored for a set, small amount of players.

Assuming she’s a recurring character, I’m not too hung up on the personal nemesis thing. That rivalry has to start somewhere, right? This is that start. Granted, she could have been better introduced.

What I’m more interested in is seeing how well Anet can evolve the relationship. Not holding my breath on this one, but I’ll at least give it some time to play out.

Elothar.4382:

Nettle.9025:

Money is the problem with skill based rewards in MMOs. Gamers are entitled. Many people simply cannot accept that there is some sort of reward locked behind content they cannot complete. They will complain of bugs, bad mechanics, cheap designs… but rarely will they admit they simply are not good enough to do it. This creates an unhappy, unstable player base.

And thus, we get content pushed out and designed for the masses. Everyone can do everything, so the game can have maximum retention and make that $$$. It’s not unlike little league soccer back when we were 10. Everyone plays, and everyone gets a trophy at the end of the season. Can’t hurt anyone’s feelings.

To be fair, highly skilled players also complain if they feel the content is “beneath them.” Your post comes across to me as laying all the blame for all the game’s shortcomings in your view on casual, less skilled players. Perhaps I am wrong and just reading it the wrong way. A little empathy goes a long way.

And…yes, I readily admit that I am just not skilled enough for some content and…no, I do not feel entitled to the same rewards as those who are skilled enough to do it.

Sorry if that came off as kind of elitist, I was simply trying to explain why a heavily skill based MMO either isn’t happening or would be a niche game. Also, you may accept that, but many people do not. One only has to look at all the Liadri hate over the past two weeks to see this in GW2.

I personally prefer a game strikes a balance between the two, but that’s hard to do. You inevitably get one or both sides complaining about the other. At the moment, I think GW2 lies heavily on the skill-less (for lack of better wording) spectrum. It’s not a bad thing, but people need to realize that’s their approach.

Players who love games like Dark Souls or Ninja Gaiden types or I Wanna Be the Guy / spinoffs are in the minority in MMOs. Unfortunately, there really are very few options in the genre for skill reliant PvE.

Money is the problem with skill based rewards in MMOs. Gamers are entitled. Many people simply cannot accept that there is some sort of reward locked behind content they cannot complete. They will complain of bugs, bad mechanics, cheap designs… but rarely will they admit they simply are not good enough to do it. This creates an unhappy, unstable player base.

And thus, we get content pushed out and designed for the masses. Everyone can do everything, so the game can have maximum retention and make that $$$. It’s not unlike little league soccer back when we were 10. Everyone plays, and everyone gets a trophy at the end of the season. Can’t hurt anyone’s feelings.

I greatly enjoy intrinsic rewards, but unfortunately I think it’s a dying aspect of this genre. 10-12 years ago I would log on to an MMO, group up with some friends, and we’d just go explore and dungeon crawl for the fun of it.

Nowadays, it’s an extrinsic gamers playground. One only needs to look at all the people checking off that 2 week achievement list, or the mass of gold farming Orr zergs, or guides that come out a mere hour after patches detailing how to do everything to see it.

Still waiting for the MMO that offers some challenge and sense of exploration, sense of the unknown, and actual adventure. Doubt I’m ever going to see it though.

MithranArkanere.8957:

I want them to become Adventure-tron & his sidekick, ultimately becoming something like Nicholas the Traveler all over the world.

That would be fantastically hilarious.

Every LS update. Never once the story focus, but always hanging around somewhere nearby. Watch them evolve from bitter street performing rivals to comically begrudged friends.

I’d be perfectly ok with a Hobo-Tron mini that occasionally spit out witty lines.

I agree with the OP and others on pretty much everything.

I believe the big problem is that Anet is trying to keep the story simple and easy to digest for the masses. What Anet fails to realize is that the majority of the masses probably don’t even pay attention to the story. They log on, rush the cutscene instance, and start in on that achievement checklist or zerg farming.

The people that do follow lore, however, expect better quality and depth. One only has to look at these threads, or watch a woodenpotatoes video to see this.

BobbyStein.2315:

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Mm, no, the problem might be that the LS writers are trying to have it be “fun and entertaining” as opposed to “stirring and exquisite writing”. Which is good, because people shooting for “stirring and exquisite writing” sometimes risk missing the mark and moving right on into “boring and pretentious” or too far into “just plain boring”. Like shooting for Inception and instead getting Minority Report.

This is true.

I could easily write a massive post of constructive story criticism, but instead I’ll sum it down to this.

Bobby, please realize that the people who actually follow the lore are typically intelligent enough to handle a story with depth, and would actually enjoy it. Please don’t try to cater the story side of things to a facet of players who don’t even pay attention to it. You can still have “fun and entertaining” content for the masses while providing a stirring plot for the lore buffs.

As is, I feel like the story thus far has been shallow and unsurprising. Ineffective villian build up, lack of antagonistic motivation, lack of plot twists, etc.

Living “Story” needs more depth, for sure. I’m not expecting Game of Thrones, but come on….

• Scarlet is a bad villian. She came out of nowhere for someone so apparently gifted (multiple colleges, studied under multiple races? come on). She has no build up. A line about her in 1 or 2 updates is not buildup. I could easily rant more about her. Feel free to read the villian sue thread for that.
• There is no motivation or explanation for WHY the attacks happen. Bad guys doing bad things because that’s what bad guys do.
• There are no surprises or twists. Think what the most straight forward thing to do could be, and that’s what happens. The community that follows lore had these great theories about how things tie together and who Scarlet could be, all of which would have been more stirring than what we actually got.

Anet states they want to keep things simple so people can have fun with it, but let’s be serious. The type of player who actually follows lore is intelligent and involved enough to want a story with depth. The people they are trying to keep things simple for probably don’t even care about what’s going on, so why try to cater story to a facet that doesn’t even really follow it?