Guild Wars 2

There were also a lot of players who bought the game with the expectation that it would offer content they found challenging. While dungeons did fill that role at first, that did not last long.

Sure, but most of those players left pretty fast, and good riddance. They were corrosive tot he culture of the game.

I also happen to believe that the best thing for the game is for players in general to accept that every aspect of the game may not be for them.

And that’s fine. I can get 100% behind that, so long as two conditions are met:

1. Said “not for everyone” content cannot block progression towards earning rewards that “maybe everyone” players might want. Rewards are “for” anyone who wants them.

2. That no story is locked behind completion of any of this content, not even to the point of requiring someone else to “clear” the content for you and invite you in. This condition was clearly violated by the HoT 1 raids, no matter how much ANET and raiders might protest otherwise.

So long as those conditions are met, fine, “not all content is for everyone,” and there’s plenty of content I don’t do. But so long as that content is used as a gate between me and things that I definitely, 100% do want, then I’m sorry, but “not for everyone” no longer applies.

At all.

Other than party size and needing to know mechanics, which was not always true in dungeons, raids are very much like explorable dungeons.

Raids are about as much like GW2 Dungeons as rebuilt Tequatl was like Shadow Behemoth. Similar in theory, MUCH more complicated and failure prone, which makes them completely different experiences.

ANet planned to cater to that demographic from launch. Explorable dungeons were supposed to be raid equivalents. The reason raids may seem to be a departure is that explorable dungeons did not work out that way for the most part.

This may be true, but is completely irrelevant. What ANet intended with the launch dungeons is beside the point, they launched how they launched, and people who came to the game liked what they were, and played for several years under the expectation that this was how the game should be, that this was the best possible state for the game. Then raids were added and were something else entirely, meant for a completely different audience of players.

“Harmful to the game” is an easy accusation to bandy about, but a hard one to prove. What it boils down to is that you and some other people want to do raids but choose to believe you can’t unless there’s an easy tier. Some other people don’t want to fail because failing is not fun, so they want an easy tier. Still others want the ease and convenience of, “log in, open LFG, join raid squad, complete raid, collect loot, log out.” Those peoples’ intentions are thwarted because they want something that raids are not. That does not mean raids are harming the game.

If those players exist, and they do, in some number, then it is harming the game. Now, that said, it also is clearly benefiting the game, in players who like raids just how they are. So the only unknown question is, how many are there of each group, what is the balance of benefit vs. harm, and how much should ANet care?

I mean I can tell you as a fact that the introduction of raiding caused fairly catastrophic damage to my guild at the time, and that it has severely eroded my enjoyment of the game, because it set whole portions of the story, rewards, and mastery process out of my reach. I still enjoy the game, but I’ve definitely been far less invested in it over the year since raids came out than I was in the several years previously.

“Have you tried to do any of the easier raid bosses with your guild members? If not, what stops you?”

Yes, and Vale Guardian stopped us.

Yeah true. Although many players don’t want to be social enough to worry about things such as “starting a guild” or “recruiting like-minded players” or “getting to know players”.

Exactly, that’s why the game needs to adapt to suit those players’ needs.

The timer doesn’t make the raids difficult.
90% (just an estimation based on my own raid training experience) of all attempts fail long before the enrage timer.

True, although part of that is that the raid team is trying hard to beat that timer. If a raid group was forming with no pressure to beat the timer, built to be tanky rather than max DPS, playing slow but steady rather than trying to do as much damage as possible, then they might do a lot better.

I don’t mind having to dismount, so long as we can mount while on the run. If they make us stop, mount, and then start moving again then I will find any forced unmounting intolerable.

There is no reason why you should get both types of rewards from fractals and raids UNLESS you get both type of rewards from PvP/WvW/PvE.

Sure.

Yes.

All the types of reward from all the types of content. Rewards should not be dictating the content you’re doing, content should dictate the content you’re doing.

However you want to try and spin this, you are asking for more loot. Even if you reduce certain drops (presumably you already have that type of drop which you are happy to have reduced) – you are still asking for more loot whether it be the amount or variety of loot.

Again, no. You are not reading at all. You are just making massive assumptions.

No more loot, just more flexibility in the composition of that loot.

If you are not asking for more loot are you asking for less loot? What you are asking for is not having to run certain content (that you don’t like) and still be able to access the reward for that content. I.e not run LS3 content and still get the rewards for it.

Not “less” either, equal. It would be less from the base sources, and then more from the tracks, so that when combined they balance out to an equal total amount.

I don’t mind if you do that but I don’t enjoy raiding and Fractals so to make it fair lets have raid loot and fractal loot accessible in PvP/WvW? You can have the PvP wings in raids I don’t mind. You can even reduce the drops of other types of items in the reward tracks its okay.

EXACTLY.

What incentive should ArenaNet use, instead, to lure players to content such as the Living World maps? Would there be enough population in new content after the first week or so (I think I read there is a population issue in WvW and PvP) if players never leave their preferred PvE comfort zones? Or would PvE Reward Tracks cause population issues just like WvW and PvP have?

Four things:

1. The content should sell itself. It should offer fun and interesting gameplay experiences that people will enjoy playing, and which people will play for the novelty alone. If it cannot provide that, then it doesn’t deserve to have people playing it.

2. They can offer some items exclusive to the new content, which cannot be earned elsewhere and are cool, but these rewards should be shallowly buried, something players of all skill levels can earn in only a few hours or less of play, enough to entice people into the map, to get them to try it out, but then respect their decision to enjoy it or not. If a player does not enjoy this content, then earning these few unique rewards would be a minimal burden on their time, nothing like having to farm for weeks.

3. Farming the original content should always be the most efficient method. If you’re looking for Pearls, farming Siren’s Landing should always be the fastest way to do so, the most time and effort efficient, there should just be other options. Players interested in efficiency would use the original method.

4. Time gating. When new content is released, they could have a period of time, a few weeks, maybe even a few months in some cases, in which the rewards are exclusive to that sort of content. Only after this initial period does it open up for reward tracks. That way, patient players can still earn the rewards via tracks, but it does give incentive for early adopters to rush the new content and give it a shot.

They could if they wanted to, and it’d be fairly simple, but I’m guessing they’ll try to avoid anything that looks like HoT.

Well, theoretically they could do anything they wanted. They could give everyone who doesn’t have a Legendary weapon a full set of them, and take away all Legendary weapons from people who already have them, it just wouldn’t be a good idea. My point was that they would get beat about the head if they tried it.

Healix.5819:

It depends on how they’re planning to fix the mess they created with HoT. The original change to hero points was to remove the excess, but after some very poor decisions with HoT, they ended up doubling it. If they try again, elite specs will need to be back to 400+ points, with hero challenges in PoF worth 10+ points each. If they do nothing, people will unlock their elite specs the minute the expansion is launched. Alternatively, they may drop generic hero points and go with expansion-specific points or simply drop them entirely and unlock elites through the story.

They can’t go back to their original plan.

I think the core flaw with their original plan is that everything unlocks linearly, you were forced to max out your core traits (at that point I actually had hundreds of spare skillpoints because I’d hadn’t bothered to pick up traits and skills I didn’t need, and had intended to spend those on the HoT spec), and that you couldn’t get any Master traits until you’d purchased all the adept and several utilities, and none of the GM until you’d purchased all the Master and several more utilities, etc. This meant that until you had nearly completed the spec line, you were running half a class or less. That’s no fun at all.

What they should have done is allowed you to purchase each utility or trait ala carte, each with varying costs, so that you could prioritize the build you wanted most, choosing one adept, one master, and one GM trait, maybe a couple utilities you really wanted, and get going with a fully functional build when only 1/4-1/3 of the way through the total line. Then the goal becomes filling out that build, picking up the other abilities so that you have some flexibility in composition. That’s how players should have progressed. But with the way the system is designed, there was absolutely no way they could have forced players to get almost every HP available in HoT before they’d have that spec unlocked.

Ashen.2907:

Vyriis.6258:

Manimarco Devil.1790:

PvErs asking for more ways to get stuff easily. Why am I not surprised?

Not sure why people are looking at this as an “I want more rewards” thread. This is a “PvP and WvW receive items from content they don’t want to play, why should PvE be forced to play the content we don’t want to for the same rewards”, thread.

If it’s easy for us to obtain the season 3 map items and dungeon items (which is not true for all players while being able to play what they want for the day as well [or at all in some cases]) why should PvP/WvW? Why are we the only ones who have to forgo our content to obtain rewards outside of our content while PvP and WvW can remain in theirs and receive the same rewards? Not asking for more rewards quicker; asking for ways to play the way we want while receiving rewards from areas we don’t want to play. No different from PvP and WvW.

Perhaps I have missed it, but have you suggested lowering rewards for PvE, fractals etc in particular, so that adding reward tracks for those players does not increase the already significant gap between rewards in PvE and those in WvW/Pvp?

Yes.

You should probably read the words that others have written, and then
post a response of some kind.

Manimarco Devil.1790:

PvErs asking for more ways to get stuff easily. Why am I not surprised?

Probably because you aren’t reading, but that’d just be my guess.

WvW is a PvPvE mode, making it different from sPvP.

sPvP also includes PvE. Stronghold maps involve significant numbers of NPC mobs. Even Foefire and Niflhel include NPC mobs that can have a significant impact on the outcome, but in both cases the primary focus is on the PvP engagement. Again, while we agree that there are differences between WvW and sPvP, those differences are nowhere NEAR as large as between open world PvE and raiding.

ANet started the game with three distinct game modes in mind, and has consistently treated the game as though it had 3 modes — not 4 or more.

Anet started the game with no raids, or Fractals, for that matter. ANet started the game with sPvP not sharing any reward structures with other modes. ANet started the game without the Edge of the Mist maps that now define the WvW experience. The game has evolved a lot over the past four years, perhaps ANet should reconsider how they delineate the core activities of their game.

It’s a neat idea, but I think it takes away from the content. Why would you do dungeons if you can farm the rewards easier/faster in fractals?

You shouldn’t be able to farm them easier faster in fractals. But you should be able to farm them in fractals if you enjoy fractals more. And if you enjoy fractals more then you shouldn’t be doing dungeons instead.

Who would go to bloodstone fen anymore if fractals is just as fast or faster? (as reward tracks give a bit more control over the rate of farming that blood stone fen lacks.)

People that prefer Bloodstone Fen to fractals, and they should be the only people who should be there.

And keep in mind, if people do enjoy Bloodstone Fen, then they could run Bloodstone Fen with the Bloodstone Fen track active, and have the exact same “control” as someone running fractals with that track on.

Also to make it equal you’don’t have to remove most of the current rewards and put them behind their own track so you can’t get both at once, otherwise it’s just a flat buff to some of the most rewarding content in game.

Yes. I imagine it would tend to be a sort of 60/40 split, current activities would keep 60% of their default rewards, the track would provide 40% of the current rewards, and you could use that to either get 100% of the current reward of the current map, or 60% of the current map and 40% of something else entirely.

No you are asking for more rewards. That is precisely what you are asking. You don’t want to leave the content you like to obtain items you want.
It most definitely is not in any way easier/faster/better to obtain items through reward tracks in WvW. It takes 5.5 hours at max participation with boosters to fill a track. The amount of dungeons you can do in that amount of times pales when compared to the rewards you get from the track. Same for gathering from nodes. It is way faster to just farm nodes than the track.

But again, if you enjoy WvW, then you can do any WvW actions you like while advancing any track you like, whereas in PvE if you want Dungeon stuff, then you have to do that specific dungeon whether you enjoy that particular dungeon or not.

Again, nobody is asking for more loot. If you’re making $8 an hour now, you’d be making $8 an hour after, it would just be balanced differently, so that instead of getting $8 in wages and $0 in tips, you’d be getting say $5 in wages and $3 in tips, and that $3 could be in ones, fives, quarters, dimes, any denomination you like!

Technically nobody needs a longbow when the max range in the game is like 20m anyway.

The reason I’m not asking for that is because it would trivialize the rewards of the content. See, I can understand why Season map materials are a reward for PvP and WvW. It takes a good deal of time to go into those maps and farm those nodes and hearts every day. This is not fun for people who don’t like that content.

It takes a LOT less time to farm for Bloodstone Rubies than it takes to farm for Legendary Insights, and it’s MUCH more fun, so that argument doesn’t really apply.

It makes little sense for those to be crossed over as rewards and give reason to actually go to those areas of the game if you want them.

If players need something to show off that they’ve spent a lot of time doing something, then it should be in the form of a title, or something else that would have no intrinsic value beyond showing off that you’d done that thing. It’s like how if you win an Olympic activity you get a medal, a token, you don’t get exclusive access to owning a specific brand of car.

There’s never any sense to having rewards that encourage players to play content that they KNOW that they will not enjoy, whether that means PvPing, raiding, or harvesting materials from maps. Once a player has decided that they don’t enjoy a certain type of content, there’s no benefit to anyone to encouraging them to keep playing it. The only valid role for content-specific loot is stuff that is quick and easy to get, stuff that’s designed to entice you enough to TRY the new content, to give it a fair shot at winning you over, but that then accepts your decision and lets you go.

If you love someone, let them go. If they don’t return, then they were never yours to begin with.

I do remember a time once where I was playing WvW (which I rarely do) and encountered another player while swimming near their base, and ended up just dancing around him for like five minutes and he couldn’t get near me.

I think we all understand what “fantasy” means, the issue is that what the OP was asking was to turn EVERY hammer in the game into a ridiculous weapon.

Was he? I mean, clearly his focus was in getting more large hammers, but while his post didn’t specifically say that some hammers should be left at their current size, it didn’t exactly rule it out.

You people are seriously missing the point of what I’m asking for here. I’m not asking for some massive new reward that will give us way more loot and gold over PvP and WvW. I’m not asking to gain things only PvP and WvW are able to by playing their content.

Well, I am.

Not more loot than we’re getting now, but access to more variety in loot, to be able to earn PvP and WvW-specific loot just like they can earn PvE-specific loot. To be able to earn Raid and Fractal loot without having to do Raids or Fractals. I think that the type of content a player plays should be determined by the type of content he enjoys playing, rather than by the type of reward he’s chasing.

This would be the same as me saying “Give me the ability to get Warbringer without stepping into WvW” or “Give me Ascension without needing to PvP.”

Yup, make it so!

It will likely be like the HoT class, you won’t need to have mastered Daredevil to unlock Deadeye, but you will have to have mastered all the base traitlines first. You should also be able to skip right to the first new story chapter if you like, and you will probably need to do at least a few chapters of the story to unlock Mounts and the new maps, but if you want to save the new story until after you complete the HoT and LWs3 stuff then you could.

Well, if you want a big hammer, create a norn-warrior/guardian/revenant and use one of the following:

I want hammers that look Norn-large while on an Asura. I want them swinging human-scaled hammers, basically.

If they ever implement this please make sure all fractal and raid drops (including raid legendary skins) can be obtainable from PvP and WvW.

Yes, definitely, AND from PvE.

And it’s also important to learn Poe’s Law, “Without a blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of Fundamentalism that SOMEONE won’t mistake for the real thing.”

Why not argue it with realism? I like my chars to look like they could actually use the weapons they carry.

And that’s fine, not EVERY hammer needs to be large, so you should have options to choose from, but there should also be options for those who want comically large weapons. Right now there aren’t enough options for large hammers, especially not for Asura.

The problem is a lower tier mode wouldn’t help people like the OP find a group for the actual raid. It would help with more people to check the raids but not with access to the actual raids.

It would provide an alternative though. Players who only want to play the easy mode could just play the easy mode, and player that want the hard mode could play the easy mode until they get good at it, and then shift to the harder mode with a reasonable level of experience under their belt.

PvE player vs environment so no raids and fractals arent diffrent the open world your still playing against npcs and the areas they are in.

And PvP is player verses player, if we’re going to be pedantic, which is exactly what WvW is, so why would WvW be considered its own distinct move from sPvP and yet it’s just crazy talk to consider that wildly different types of PvE should be considered distinct from each other as well?

Its unfortunately but games will never stop having sex-oriented locks on customisation. Yes, it makes absolutely no sense that two people with the exact same head shape can’t have the exact same hairstyle because their sex differs, but we have to keep those gender roles separate right?

No, it’s because they have to tweak them to fit the different head models and while swapping them from the male to the female is not impossible, it’s not effortless either, or they would do it all the time. It’s not some deliberate insult to people who want those styles on their character.

That’s silly.

People using the “it’s realistic” defense.

It’s not about realism.

It’s never about realism.

We will get two beta weekends (both for free): on August 11 and August 18. And they will last 3 days. So we’ll have the time to check all of the specs and other contents.

Awesome!

No one has any tolerance for learning. They want to clear it as fast as possible with as little talking as possible. They want minimum human interaction and maximum loot. Noobs get in the way of that.

That’s a perfectly reasonable desire to have though, for both the experts AND the newbs. That is the sort of game that GW2 is, outside of raiding. The problem is that the sort of culture that raids inspire by their design is 100% antithetical to the culture that GW2 thrives on.

I’d definitely like hammers to be bigger. Really with Asura all the big weapons seem way too small, like you’re running around with croquet mallets or something. I want my Asura to be running around with a mallet the size of his torso.

The problem is, raids are unfriendly by design. You have to be reasonably skilled to complete a raid, so a team forming a raid MUST either A: exclude people who are not already good at the raid, or B: commit several hours of their lives to an activity that could be completed in twenty minutes, with no guarantee of success even after that. I can’t at all blame people for choosing A under the current design.

That’s why the design needs to change, there need to be ways for a true pick-up group to go in, first attempt, and within a half hour or so clear the raid encounter. Once everyone has the gist of what’s going on they should be able to clear it, even if a few of the are bad at the game. I understand that this is not the raiding experience that some people want, but it’s the raiding experience that the game needs, at least as a companion to the existing option.

I really can’t judge without playing them. They ALL have elements that appeal to me in terms of visuals and theoretical impact, but it all comes down to “feel,” do they seem to have as much impact as they could, do I seem to die too quickly, or not deal damage fast enough? I can’t really tell from descriptions alone.

Weaver’s the biggest risk to me, because it seems very interesting, but also very complicated, and my enjoyment of the class will come down to how simply I can play it while still being impactful. If it requires players to flawlessly dance from ele to ele in the correct patterns, then I probably wouldn’t be able to have fun with it, but if it’s balanced so that a player can just shift to the elements that his whim takes him to and still find fun things to do there, then I think it could be great.

Spellbreaker and Scourge sound cool, but have a lot of anti-boon stuff, and enemies don’t typically rely on boons, so unless the mob meta in PoF changes drastically, they seem like beautiful wastes of time.

The Soulbeast sounds like a nifty concept, but given that they won’t have pets to tank for them, their internalized defense and offense will need to shoot way up.

Deadeye is what I was looking for in a sniper, but it will be a lot less mobile than a DD, and it’s unclear whether it’s strong enough to make up for that.

Mirage seems kinda cool, but a movement-less dodge doesn’t seem to work with GW2’s “Always Be Moving” combat system, where ground AoE circles are all over the place, and the Mesmer is already a slow class. They’ll need to be immune to ground targeted AoE AND “un-evadable attacks” if they aren’t going to be able to move out of the way.

Firebrand, I love the theme and the visuals, but there’s a lot to it, and it really depends on whether any of it is actually useful. I’m not sure how they’re meant to be played. Like are you meant to use a Tome as a primary weapon kit?

Renegade I think is cool, but the Herald is an indispensable element of the core Revenant class. I’ll have a hard time swapping it out just to be able to fire flaming death ponies at my enemies. If they would let us swap out Ventari instead of Glint it would be a much easier choice.

Holosmith. . . ok. I mean what I’ve seen looks interesting, but I have absolutely no idea what it does, and I don’t know how annoying the heat factor will be to manage, whether it will be tolerable.

I definitely want to try them all out, and we’ll see how it goes.

I do hope that they will have more than just the one beta weekend, because I can’t really make this one, and want to be able to try everything out a bit before I start working on my existing characters to get them into shape.

No raids have been announced yet, but I kind of doubt that there won’t be more at some point, perhaps even within this year. I do think that they need to work to make the existing raids more accessible though, with easy mode versions where anyone can jump in and learn the mechanics without wading through hours of pointless failure first.

Pve is considered a single mode by ArenaNet, these rewards are already available in pve, but just not the way that you may like.

ANet may consider PvE to be a single mode, but if so, I utterly reject that opinion and hope that they change their mind on that. Things like raids and fractals have no more in common with open world PvE than sPvP does with WvW, and yet hose are considered two separate modes. They need to do more to balance out the rewards earned by PvEers who do not enjoy group oriented, instanced PvE content, just as they’ve made efforts to balance WvW rewards with sPvP’s.

There are only 3 officially recognised game modes though – PvE, WvW and sPvP. I understand what you are asking, but it’s asking a lot for Anet to cater for every niche player.

Nobody’s asking that they cater to every niche player, just that they cater to some fairly large groups of players that they currently are undervaluing.

The subset of players who never run anything other than raids/fractals is probably so low, that it wouldn’t be worth the time/resources to invest in producing tracks.

But what about the subset of players who never run raids or fractals? A proposal like this would benefit both, by allowing both groups to pick up on the content that they are missing. Furthermore, it’s not like this is an entirely new system, they already have it in two of the three recognized game modes, all they need to do is expand it to the third.

Because reward tracks are there specifically to boost sPvP and WvW “toward” the same wealth accumulation as PvE. It just doesn’t do enough to even come close to the gold conversion rate of even casual event trains.

But again, if it were just about balancing reward quantities, then they wouldn’t need to have the high variety and player customization of the reward tracks, they could just have a system more like the current PvP tournament reward brackets, dumping out generic loot based on performance.

Again, I do not ask for MORE loot from PvE than we’re getting now, they can balance it out however they like. All I want is more VARIETY from loot, divorced from playing specific content to get it.

If you want to argue that the rewards in PvP are still not enough, that’s fine, that’s not in conflict with our position in any way.

PvE players have dungeons as an option. if they exlcude a particular area of PvE, but still want those rewards, then they will lose out and it is absolutely right that they should.

PvPers and WvWer have dungeons as an option too. Nothing is stopping them from running dungeons. But you would argue that they don’t want to run dungeons, and that is true, but it can be equally as true of a PvE player. There is no more reason that a PvE player should be fine with having to run a dungeon than that a PvP player should have to run the dungeon. If you don’t want to run the dungeon, you don’t want to run the dungeon.

Instead of giving PvE reward tracks in the same way as PvP and WvW, allow us to switch out our gain of spirit shards per level to another reward, such as blood rubies, petrified wood, etc, or dungeon tokens of your choice.

That would be nice, IF the Spirit Shard system still worked. It hasn’t worked since HoT came out unless you unlock every available mastery first, including raiding ones. If you don’t raid, you don’t get any spirit shards.

Tell us what you’ve heard ryn. Everyone is in the dark here. Kinda kittenty that the streamers only cared about pretty skill animations and didn’t even bother to mouse over the traits. The first trait was hovered over but even that looked like it was an accident.

From what WP was saying in his Q&A, it sounds like the streamers weren’t really sure what the context of their footage would be, and they kind of expected that all the information would be out through other channels anyway.

Kind of true, Herald is way too good to put away. They should let us trade this one for Ventari instead.

This guy has it, the reward tracks are there to compensate for the fact that those games modes give terrible loot. Fractals and Raids give good loot they don’t need to be topped up with more loot.

But the point is not to provide more loot, the point is to allow more convenient VARIETY of loot, to allow player enjoyment to dictate what you play, rather than desired reward to dictate how you play. If “better loot” were the only reason behind PvP reward tracks then they wouldn’t need to allow you to pick the track available, they could just force you into one track at a time, and maybe remove all variety from it and just have them dump generic items. Clearly part of the premise of the PvP reward tracks is to give those players a variety of options. The point of a PvE reward track is to allow them that same variety of loot even if they prefer certain activities over others.

As I noted above, this doesn’t need to involve MORE loot, they could rebalance the content so that it averages out the same. Just make it so that Content A delivers less loot than it currently does, but such that if you run Content A while also working on PvE Track A then you’d get the same amount of Content A loot as you get doing it now, while if you did Content A while working on Track B, then you’d get a little of both.

On the other hand I’d be all for it if they add reward tracks to open world pve, wvw and pvp that give fractal and raid loot, legendary insights, for example, make it so you’d have to fill a bunch of reward tracks but you could get your legendary armour without setting foot in raids.

Exactly.

Why do you even need Legendary Armor if all you do is world bosses?

Nobody needs anything. It’s a game. Everything that takes place within the client is about want, not need, and players are as entitled to want Legendary armor for fighting world bosses as they are for fighting raid bosses.

Ascended, even Exotic, is just fine for you.

Then if it doesn’t make any difference, why not let them have Legendary?

I’m saying that Rifle will probably be bad for group PvE. It looks like a burst/utility based weapon, not pure DPS like Staff. It’s also not condi based, which is the direction Anet seems to be moving towards. Deadeye itself will probably be meta in PvE because of the traits.

Ok, I guess we’ll see how that plays out.

As for Steal and D/P, you use Steal to land pre-cased backstabs, BP+HS+backstab combo, HS+steal to quickly finish somebody off and possibly follow with autoattacks, steal+cluster bomb for a quick burst if you’re stuck in shortbow. Thief’s really only dangerous when he has Steal up because he can chain it into devastating combos, which is pretty much impossible with the new steal.

I can see how you couldn’t use the character in the exact same way, but couldn’t players adapt to new tactics where the advantages of the Deadeye could make them equally as strong? I mean, they couldn’t do all that “teleport-combo” stuff, but the DE package seems to be based on making the Thief’s raw power against a single foe higher, so couldn’t strategies be built around marking foes, trolling them for about ten seconds, and then laying into them with significant bursts? I think it’ll come down to how the math on their abilities works out, on how much tankier you are verses marked targets, and how much more damage you can eek out.

This kind of reminds me about when Daredevils were announced and people were like “there’s no use for any of that!” because it wasn’t as built around sneaky backstabs.

Should there be Reward Tracks for every part of PvE preference? One for Jumping Puzzles? One for underwater combat? One for World Bosses? One for Story Instances? One for Gathering? One for Activities?

One for players made entirely out of straw?

Particularly those trapped on precariously tilted surfaces?

Maybe.

Can we get confirmation that Renegades with The Dreamer will be opening portals that unleash armies of flaming death ponies upon our foes?

Asking for a track in which PvP and WvW could gain Magnetite, fractal skins, and stabilizing matrices, goes against what I’m asking for. That would be the same as me asking for this track to include triumphant and glorious sets and the Hero weapon sets along with proof of heroics, shards of glory, and memories of battle.

All that sounds great. Let’s do all of those things.

Game types don’t need unique rewards to “draw in” players. Or, if they do, they only need to be shallowly buried ones that can be earned relatively quickly. Once a player has spent a few hours at an activity, he can decide for himself whether he wants to stick around, and at that point any reward still being locked off is just encouraging him to not have fun.

Nobody benefits from encouraging players to not have fun.

So certain game modes can have rewards that are easier to earn in that mode, but it should all be available to gain elsewhere, in whichever mode the player most prefers, so that the only thing the game encourages to do is enjoy his experience.

YuiRS.8129:

Rifle will obviously be terrible for sPvP and probably terrible for group PvE, so it will be a meme WvW weapon and maybe used for solo PvE or something? That’s a shame.

Deadeye has some neat stuff, but the fact that Steal no longer brings you to your target makes it a lot weaker for D/P. The utilities are… okay? At least some of them are, but they have some heavy competition. There’s a real possibility that Deadeye is a dud by design, just because Thief needs very specific tools to succeed in PvP and no amount of tweaking numbers will change that.

Why do you believe the Deadeye will be bad for group PvE? It doesn’t look ideal for highly mobile combat, but it seems like it would be good for anything where the Thief can remain reasonably stationary. The third trail line seems based around group play, passing boons to allies.

Why do you believe that Steal not teleporting you is a huge concern for D/P when they already have #3 to work with on no CD? Just on paper, it looks like Deadeye brings a lot of punishment to the Thief class, high damage attacks and debuffs.

WvW & PvP are fundamentally different game modes from PvE. Raids and Fractals are instanced versions of PvE.

You can do 100% raids & fractals and get good loot; that didn’t used to be true for WvW or PvP, which is why they have reward tracks. So again, in my opinion, the reason there’s no such thing as a track for those playing FotM or Raids is that it isn’t necessary.

This is all subjective, “the things I care about matter, the things you care about don’t.” Yeah, PvP didn’t used to offer great rewards, but PvP doesn’t need any rewards, since a day-one account player can do PvP just as well as a five year vet account can, player skill is all that matters. WvW also makes little difference what quality of gear you have. I think it’s fine for them to have rewards, but they don’t need them, so if we’re making arguments based on necessity rather than desire, then they’re both out too.

The simple fact is that plenty of people do not enjoy the game modes that you single out as “PvE for people who want nice things.” These players want nice things too, without having to do those modes. For those that argue that a PvE reward track would be "double dipping, " there are ways around that, like reducing the base rewards for these activities a bit, but in a way that would not harm the overall gain.

For example, let’s say there is a CoF PvE path. You can advance it by doing anything in PvE, with different activities offering different amounts of progress. Consequently, the base rewards from clearing CoF would be reduced slightly, but if that’s your focus, if you’re just farming CoF, and you turn on the CoF path, then the combined loot gain would be comparable to what you’re used to, and a faster way to get all CoF rewards than doing other activities.

The benefit, however, is that it now gives you options, both the option to turn the CoF track on and farm other activities you enjoy more while still advancing towards CoF completion like a PvP player can, OR to farm CoF if you prefer and advance along the Bitterfrost Frontier track if that’s the reward structure you want.

I dont see the need for the pve ascended armors to be able to upgrade to legendary.
You already have raids for pve legendary armors, do spvp or wvw if you want it another way.

Raids are no more PvE than WvW is sPvP.

You always said you wanted legendary armors that was easier to get but took longer time well we got it now Wvw one is just that.

I always wanted Legendary armor earned through PvE means. It was never about “easier,” it was about being able to earn it without having to raid. WvW is no better.

The reason WvWers and PvPers need to get top level rewards is a matter of retention and the fundamentally different nature of WvWers/PvPers and PvEers. A WvWer and a PvPer are both actively providing content for other people to complete – themselves – while PvEers are not.

Why do you believe that PvP and WvW are worthy of top-level rewards, but not PvE?

The reward tracks are to allow PvPing and WvW to get PvE equivalents. Putting them in PvE would just end up double dipping.

But the point is that PvPers don’t have to go out of their way, they can just keep running the same content over and over again and unlock any items they want for doing so. PvE, on the other hand, has to run specific content, whether that’s the content they enjoy or not, if they want specific rewards. Shouldn’t they have the same flexibility as PvPers to run the content they enjoy most while still progressing towards the reward they want?

Agreed. PvE players need to have a method of working towards PvP and WvW-only rewards, just as PvPers and WvWers can work towards PvE rewards. There also needs to be a PvE way of converting Ascended armor into Legendary like PvPers have now.

Like Scorpion Wire?

A bit, but higher damage, lower CD, on the weapon itself.

Some interesting points, thanks. I hope things work out that way.

I like having leaps, although if I wanted to add a Dagger skill that was slightly different, what about a "rope dagger? Have you throw the dagger with a “beam” coming off it, and if it hits an enemy then it yanks them back into melee range.

The thing that interests me though is, how much added benefit will these bring? I mean, yes, the Ranger now gets these abilities, but the Ranger always had them, he just had to command a pet to use it. On the face of it, other than being “cool,” it’s actually a downside to shift these to the player character, because it means that while you’re doing them you can’t be doing other attacks, while on the pet they were fire-and-forget. Also, while you had a pet, it was drawing agro, taking hits, all that.

I’m interested to see what sort of benefits they are offering to make these abilities stronger than their pet versions, to make up for the various pet benefits we’re losing.

They would need to add at least some form of easily accessable boon stripping skills or traits to all classes. A lot of classes can’t even strip boons, let alone steal or corrupt them.

Again though, that would be fine. That would be balanced. The enemy would be balanced around having his various boons active, rather than being balanced without them and then having boons as a bonus on top.

If you’re just a power-spec hero with no boon-stripping at all, that’s a fair fight, you just punch the thing to death and it would be about as hard as any other fight. But if you can mess with boons, then you can make that fight easier.

No, they really don’t need to. You want them to (and to be fair, you’re hardly alone — I’d love to see more, too). You just aren’t prepared to accept that wanting things isn’t enough.

In an entertainment product, I absolutely consider the two words to be interchangeable. You don’t need anything, therefore everything you want is a need if you want it enough. But fair enough, if we’re being pedantic, they don’t need to do it, but the effort involved would inevitably be far outweighed by the benefits.

You don’t “get over” cost:benefit.

And I’m saying that if they still think that the cost:benefit is balancing out to “not worth it,” then they are way undervaluing the benefit side of the equation.

If they move Heaven & Earth to change the setup, then they’ll risk the disappointment of HoT, which was an expac that offered a lot of new underling mechanics, but not enough content for a lot of folks.

Really though, the sorts of people who would be working on a problem like this would tend to be very different people than the ones building content. Also, they added mounts, which seems like a decently heavy lift, yet in the grand scheme of things would be WAY low on the list of beneficial priorities below “fully interchangeable armor pieces.”