Guild Wars 2

Chrispy.5641:

How is a physical arrow going to knock someone down/back if it pierces right through them?

Momentum transfer is what knocks things down. If you have enough momentum you can pass through something and still have enough left over to keep on going…

But physics aside, I really do prefer the short bow to the longbow on my ranger. Outside of standing at the top/bottom of a wall in WvW, I just cannot find a space the LB feels comfortable to me. The auto-attack just pulses so slow (compared to SB) and its so reliant on a range that nothing interesting to fight is going to let me maintain.

ANet isn’t ignoring the thread – the game speaks for itself.

The recipe is RARE. The most plausible speculative rarity I’ve seen (about 1/2000) ain’t “Precursor rare” by about 3-4 orders of magnitude.

RoyalPredator.9163:

I’m with Lilith Ajit.6173.
It is simply not possible to have bad luck for 7 years in GW1 and nearly 2 in GW2.

More “bad luck” stems from grossly optimistic expectations about the norm than it does from actually performing steadily below the average…

Dark Catalyst.1028:

I would like to see these two things in game.

Nothing wrong with wanting it. The real question is do they want you as a customer, or me? Because what you’re asking for puts a chasm between those two outcomes.

You want to inspect me, I want to get on with doing the content rather than standing around posturing. And I carry a set of ‘zerker around with me I DON’T ACTUALLY WEAR that I can ping for you any time you’d like. Because I know my build, how to play it, and what my exact requirements are to not bring the team down by my being face-planted. Oh yeah, and zealot/keeper didn’t just take a big ol nerf bat to the face.

Really I’m more convinced people who want to inspect PUGs are double checking that some one will carry them. Reading my character sheet is the privilege of being in a guild with me… where’s your guildies?

Dee Jay.2460:

What does that have to do with anything? Is Burst a problem? No! Do many builds run perma-Fury? No! So who cares?

((Looks at crit mag %-to-Ferocity))

I dunno know how you’re reading the direction the wind is blowing, but that stupid metal chicken-thing on top of my barn says those Devs (you know, the ones who can pull summaries of how matches are playing out in terms of circles being flipped vs. being captured once and held by a bunker undefeated ’til game over…) seem a lot more concerned about reining in Burst than they do about knocking the legs out from under Bunkers.

LordByron.8369:

I wonder how much will take for anet to understand the “economy” is not good and a TP centric game is only a fail.

I’m gonna say that based on their earning they’ve already learned you’re flat-out wrong.

Ashadow.6874:

I am not sure if they realize. But there are only three huge reasons anyone plays a video game:

Loot. (Fun for people who loves shinies, and gives them something to do.)
PvE/PvP. (Fun for the people who just want to kill everything. And be challenged.)
Story. (Fun for the people who love immersion and suspension of reality.)

And here I was playing games because I enjoy the gameplay.

Even if what you say is true for you, what kind of a masochist would you have to be to play this game for loot and loot alone? The only time a dev has ever revealed the details of a drop table that I’m aware of, it was to let us know the chances of Final Rest dropping from its then undisclosed/bugged boss were so low that a single player would on average get theirs first one from farming it 3 times a day some time in the late 2020s. It was in not-so-subtle terms: “DON’T TRY TO FARM IT. YOU WILL NOT SUCCEED.” Trading your bits of luck for someone else’s coin and then swapping that for a third person’s bits of good fortune is the fundamental acquisition model of this entire game – and some people seem bound and determined to be the grease in those grindy, grindy gears by doing their dammedest to pump the economy full of mud-coin.

They don’t “nerf loot”, they enforce a fiercely Spartan/sparse model and go around wiping out aberrations. They don’t want you to stop farming… they want you to never have done it in the first place, because farming/grinding sucks the joy out of play.

Trice.4598:

The fact that this is not a rich people controlling the market doesn’t change the fact that something is wrong, it’s been over a year since we’ve been promise precursor crafting and right we need more than ever.

Seriously, I wish people had to link to actual red name posts/interviews/blogs with the words “we promise” or eat a ten day ban every time they claim they were promised something.

“Looking in to” does not mean an infallible DESTINY of delivery.

Look at your Rune of Rage.
Now look at my Rune of Strength.
Now look back at your Rune of Rage.
Now back at my Rune of Strength.

Is there any question that the Rune of Strength (6/6) bonus should be 5%?

Not a difficult fix.

High uptime on Protection… As compared to say… perma-Fury?

Uninspired? Drab? Repetitive? Limp? Bland?

I don’t know. I haven’t looked at them yet. Try me again in about an hour. I’m hoping I don’t have to actually pick one of those words for my reaction.

olleandersson.9408:

The fact that devs are taking the time to answer on posts like this but not more ‘’important ones’’ (no offense OP, this is sick, congratulations!) makes me rather worried really…

The fact you’re trailing around red-marked posts pouring over up every letter that drops from their saintly keyboards like its some sort of lost gospel instead of recognizing that Devs do sometimes just post to say “hey, that’s neat” makes me more worried.

There is nothing wrong with mega-bosses as a concept.

There is EVERYTHING wrong with any content that doesn’t scale to the number of players present.

Bots don’t just exist… they occasionally go crazy. Scan back through potato histories and you’ll see a spike that’s mind boggling. And was blatantly bot-driven.

Not cleaving is a ranged/melee issue, not a power/condi issue.

What bosses clear conditions?

Bleeds scale off buffs, they just don’t scale off of Might or Fury (actually, they do scale off fury since crits give you more bleeds…). And food buffs tend to be way more potent in the hands of condition damage dealers than power-based folk.

Condition damage dealers aren’t that common in dungeon groups which means you generally don’t step on each other’s toes and hybrid damage dealers don’t generally take up the full stack limit by themselves so you have some room for the occasional condition that falls off of power-damage dealers.

Basically I’m constantly seeing Rangers asking the Devs for some love for power-based ranger builds… which sort of suggests that while people like the play-style, the performance just ain’t top-tier.

linuxotaku.4731:

I have an irrational belief that the RNG is seeded or set up so that you have a higher chance of a “lucky” roll on your first N tries — based on stories like this and my own experiences. I don’t well-controlled data to support this, but it does match their motivation (I don’t think it has anything to do with getting players to buy gold via gems — I don’t think Aidenwolf’s argument there makes sense).

Its called “superstition” and human brains have been doing it in the absence of real knowledge for a long, long time.

TurtleDragon.3108:

There’s a pretty distinct difference between “works fine” for completing content, and being optimal/effecient at completing content.

Usually that’s an argument leveled against rangers as a whole . In this case I meant works fine as in “It doesn’t suffer from deliberate sabotage by the Dev’s vision for the class.”

Condition damage suffers from both bad game mechanics, and lower theoretical damage.

What bad mechanics? If you’re the only condition class present in the dungeon team you’re not fighting to fill the cap and condition damage per-cast is substantially HIGHER than power-based damage in many cases. NPCs don’t cleanse.

It also has much higher ramp up time than power builds to the point where a power focused team/player would kill things before you stack up a lot of conditions.

Now that I’ll agree is a problem if you’re downing the boss in 20 seconds or less. You just described why crit damage got nerfed in the features patch while condition damage didn’t.

So, how are pure-power build folks spending their trait points? it seems like if you go marksman, you’d want some condition to leverage the +30% condition duration.

Or are your power builds mostly invested in the skirmish line?

TurtleDragon.3108:

Nike.2631:

I don’t understand the fascination with power builds for Rangers.

Condition and hybrid builds are lackluster in PvE.

Hmm. In my experience, against world bosses there are so many players nobody is really doing anything special (other than bludgeoning it with raw damage). In dungeons condi-damage works fine as long as there isn’t another player working the exact same condition. And hybrids don’t necessarily stack all the way to cap by themselves anyway so they’re more forgiving a little splash by teammates in groups of 5.

Flintbrow.7985:

I enjoy a power build as well. I have zero interest in seeing dot’s work their magic…I want to see big crits as much as possible with might stacks jumping up and sigil of fire proccing as soon as it’s able again and again…weeeeeeee! Big white numbers on a splashy red backdrop happening back to back to back until death puts a stop to all the fun.

And the dev’s have flat-out said that their vision for the class is sustained attrition – meaning they quite deliberately kick you in the teeth for trying to get those things on a Ranger.

ArchonWing.9480:

The only ranger weapons that interest me are power dominant. Funny how that works.

Which would be what, exactly?

I want one thing and one thing only in dealing with stealth – I want it to not drop my target focus.

I don’t mind them moving and I can’t see it.
I don’t mind not being able to sling targeted attacks while they’re hidden.
I don’t mind them hitting like a truck as they come out of it.

I &#^@ing HATE having to endure possibly the worst auto-target selection behavior I’ve seen in 12 years of playing MMOs.

I came to fight the player not the crap UI.

That does precisely nothing for me, but I’m glad it’s still making ANet money from those who do like it.

I’m pretty sure you did it right.

Very right.

Shpongle.6025:

Simon.3794:

Lol dude nah, chinese gw2 is already effed up.

tons of people got hacked for no reason and hackers traded every single gem they got to gold

and gold gem convert rate got skyrocketed, gold become kitten cheap in one single night. and now hackers are controlling the TP with gold they hacked, you can see dusk with 5000 gold and every other precursors.

and the company is trying to deny it, they don’t want to admit that their economy just crashed and failed.

watch the graphic. insane. all in one single day.

It didn’t crash and fail, quite the opposite, it’s working exactly as intended. Everyone is buying gems with RL money and exchanging it for gold. Arena makes dollah dollah bills, yo $ _ $

Erm… You guys know that turning gems into gold drives the ratio DOWN, not up?

That graph shows people buying gems with gold.

I don’t understand the fascination with power builds for Rangers. The ranger weapons that interest me are all blatantly hybrid damage weapons. Trying to force a power build is just swimming against the riptide on a class that already has very little slack in it’s performance curve.

My Norn Necromancer Ivory Phoenix in her fancy gear.

“if I go crazy with marks and wells”

I can’t even imagine trying to fight a thief with a slow long-range stand-off weapon like staff. What’s in your other weapon slots?

And while I usually run wells on my not-a-condimancer necro, understand that “going crazy” with them is the LAST thing you want to do – you want to drop them one at a time in tempo with the thief disappearing so that they are looking at those big red circles and maybe hesitating to close with you inside them.

But as others have said, the big issue is a thief can leave any time they want to and as a necromancer you are NOT going to chase them down. If you’re in sPvP that may work out for you because there’s fixed locations to fight over, but in an open field encounter understand that you’re not going to kill them unless they are full-on inept.

Personally, I’ve had good results using the axe for what it’s obviously designed for.

Button 1 does some damage but it also applies 2 stacks of vulnerability. With increased vulnerability duration you can pile it on pretty deep with nothing but auto-attack – setting up both yourself and allies for big hits. Grinding someone to death with auto-attack is a long job and pretty much the wrong way to use it. Let it tick 6-8 times before unloading your big hits. Pairs nicely with other vulnerability inflicting tools.

Button 2 is how you cash-in on the prep-work you’ve down putting 12-18 stacks of vulnerability on a target. Also builds life force.

Button 3 – a point blank AoE with some retaliation. Pairs with wells utilities — get into the middle of the fray, hit everything, drop wells (hitting everything), switch to death-shroud (hit everything some more…).

Power-based, axe-wielding necros are in-fighters. Button 3 demands it, so build accordingly if you’re going to use an axe at all.

Faowri.4159:

Sets a nasty precedent, though e.g. don’t get comfortable thinking you can work toward cosmetic rewards at your own pace because we might remove them whenever we think we need a blc sales boost.

If you think that’s a precedent just being set now with this announcement you seriously haven’t been paying attention…

Given any sort of a choice between

The game’s first legendary being crafted after only 43 days despite what should have been a ~225 day time gate in the mystic coins (those should have been account locked like laurels since day 0)

and

Precursors costing in excess of 1,000 gold

I’ll actually take the situation we have now. The game’s premier show-off item class is still ludicrously EASY to produce and almost comically based on coin-earned rather than any sort of actual performance.

tolunart.2095:

And when they realize that this is the smallest and hardest to please niche in the MMO market, they’ll dumb down the content and make everything easier to attract the mainstream players, in much the same way that GW2 devs added ascended gear and fractal dungeons to appeal to the rush of hardcore gamers who complained that there was nothing to do when they hit the level cap after 10 days of play.

Ah, the fundamental perversity of the MMO-verse:

We want them to listen to players and yet we also want them to stick to their guns and uphold the vision we bought the game for in the first place.

While this topic will almost certainly be deleted, lets maybe direct it towards something they’ll at least print out and look over in a meeting after its gone:

What good qualities can GW2 absorb from Wildstar without falling off its own pillars?

I have to say I liked the idea of secondary role for content lines – being able to self-select for extra exploration, construction, puzzle solving, or killing-based content to be added in along the main plot path seemed like a nice way to play to preference on your first pass through the game and add replay value to alts (at least the first three will have something you haven’t seen yet).

If we get our personality choices back in GW2 it would be nice to see those used in some way to unlock content that matches your character’s outlook.

While Wildstar has standard trinity, and I personally despise the very notion of the “Tank” role, I think there is still room for a casual game like GW2 to have some roles at all, and maybe even the expectation that there will be 5-man content that requires more use of roles than “we’re all self-sufficient DPS”… especially now that we can reassign trait points in the field.

Lack of updates for a whole 24 days so far and you’re out of here?

Actually, the delay between the CDI and visible action generally runs 10-15 weeks depending on how big the change is (the upgradable back items are directly from the Horizontal Progression thread and they were introduce pretty darn fast…)

We’re still a few weeks shy of the average turn around time, and I think realistically we need to add another 3-4 weeks to that due to the distractions imposed by the China-Launch all-hands-on-deck behavior we’ve seen. If we’re still wondering about this come Independence Day, I’ll join you in a big round of “WTF?!?” but for now we’re largely on track.

Well, we have 2 cosmetic-only no-speed-buff mounts in game now. I don’t see it as having satisfied the majority of the pro-mounts camp: the majority of pro-mount voices want the speed for getting around, and clearly they aren’t satisfied with the options/costs for speed that exist now.

Gibson.4036:

It’s easy to dismiss anything with the idea that it begins a slippery slope into some tragic conclusion.

My slippery slope pretty much starts at where we are now and ends with all of the permanent 25% speed buffs in game now obsoleted/overshadowed by a piece of gear. I tend to think that’s pretty bad without having to sink into hysterics to try and convince others of that .

To reiterate an earlier comment – if mounts took up the elite skill slot, I’d be pretty content that a opportunity cost was being paid proportionate to the advantage gained.

Gibson.4036:

I’m not a programmer, but wouldn’t the option to hide all mounts for some players add to the complexity of what the game has to handle?

That aspect is pretty minor – it adds one bit to the packet describing each character (0 for normal, 1 for mounted). A filter to not see people as mounted is actually as simple as a client-side mask that always turns the mounted/on-foot bit to 0 before handing the packet on to the rendering engine.

Nerelith.7360:

So… 100 % cosmetic, zero speed boost and those that do not wish to see them, can “Hide mounts” at log in. Good for you guys?

While I agree that addresses most of the pressing issues, the problem is slippery slope. I think the ratio after introducing what you’re describing between people who want mounts saying a “Ok, good. I’m covered” and “SEE!?!? NOW FINISH GIVING US MOUNTS!” is so lopsided as to be comical.

The number of people it satisfies is low, and the ammunition it provides to the full-service mounts camp is very, very high.

Given the line they seem to wish to draw, it’s a can of worms not worth opening.

joneb.5679:

Theres no reasons not to have mounts permanent.

…Other than that mounts BREAK certain cost/benefit options already in the game. Speed buffs without cost is pure power creep. Doubly so in a game where speed is already available and priced pretty high on the utility/benefit scale.

As long as bonus speed exists through signets, weapon skills, and 6/6 rune sets, click inventory for speed without combat-ability costs is very unlikely to happen.

There is NOTHING that including mounts would break or hold back from development if just a little thought is put into it.

You can say it, but that doesn’t make it true.

Talked about this at some length in the Fractals CDI. Just waiting to see the results of the discussion.

I believe if a new race or class is on the way we will receive more than enough advance warning/pre-hype that we don’t really need to sit here wondering, daydreaming, or deluding ourselves that one’s just around the corner.

There are a few targeted direct heals – but the targeting is target the ground where its needed, or point the cone the right direction. Not click the party interface.

If anything, healing in this game takes more situational awareness than the usual MMO. It also calls for staying where you’re needed and managing the same risks as the frontline face-smashers. And you dang well better be dishing some DPS too.

It’s a little like playing Ginger Rogers to all the Fred Astaire’s — you have to do everything the “leading man” does, only backwards and in high heels.

CuRtoKy.8576:

Also, how is healing any more fun? Look at LoL as a great example nobody in their mind really wants to play support really. The only thing that healing has the potential to do is to make you feel heroic for a short period of time which iono why that is needed anyhow.

That YOU don’t happen to be part of the gaming population that enjoys Support gameplay doesn’t mean I’m crazy . Some of us measure victory by ‘did the team win?’ While this game full-on panders to the DPS crowd there are plenty out there where other roles than damage make or break those efforts.

zaw.6741:

Nike.2631:

There are 8 “pure support” classes. All of them can do it. That’s what trait line 4 is in every class. A few can go a little further because they get some support effects in line 5 and some get a tiny bit of support in their stock, un-traited weapons.

actually there are 7 support classes and necromancer (in pve that is)

I’ve done Heals/Support with a necro. Its whacky as all heck (popping in and out of “Heal Shroud”…) but you can build it and it’s fun to play. I have two level 80 necros and one of them is a group-minded well-o-mancer: you can put some nice group-wide protection on the floor with wells.

Mounts have to not obsolete the effort/expense people have put in to get permanent speed bonuses within the game that exists now.

My usual suggestion is IF mounts were introduced they should occupy the Elite Skill slot. So that having the advantage of mounted travel comes at a commiserate cost.

There are 8 “pure support” classes. All of them can do it. That’s what trait line 4 is in every class. A few can go a little further because they get some support effects in line 5 and some get a tiny bit of support in their stock, un-traited weapons.

I enjoy zerg content occasionally.

Mostly its funny to see how easily the devs can herd us to whatever location they want.

I’m made healers out of every class except thief (and I haven’t tried since the introduction of the healing venom which you can share so thieves might actually be pretty decent healers these days…). You don’t need healers for speed runs but they can go a long way towards stabilizing a more casual dungeon/fractal party. You hear a lot about elementalists as healers, but I’ve found Mantra-Mesmers to push bigger numbers as needed. Warrior (banner perma-regen + horn cleanse) and Guardian (Battle Presence + Empowering Might) both provide a good mix of steady heals and decent damage contribution. Great players don’t need it. Many good players don’t need it either, but newer folks still learning the content get a lot bigger window to see what’s happening with some Support in their party. And healer builds can be obnoxiously effective in WvW zergs where there is always someone to catch the waves of green numbers you give off and the enemy can’t be dodged in their entirety like most dungeon bosses. My WvW commander runs around with constant AoE healing and it toughens the militia up nicely.