Guild Wars 2

I’ve been playing my engi more lately—even made a rifle for him!—but I was getting a little tired of the magitech chest + rubicon everything else I’d thrown on a while back. I haven’t been able to find a look I really like, though, so I just put on a robe and wizard hat (okay, witch’s hat). Plus an absurd collar. Once I finish an infused ascended back for him, I guess I’ll put the complete mad memories on, too.

Maybe one day I’ll find medium armor I actually like. But for now, this is something, I guess. At least silliness isn’t entirely out of place, given his namesake (character name: Arnold Judas Rimmer).

Yeah, that’s probably true. Well, I could imagine them thinking, “We don’t want to mess fragment the player base more, so we shouldn’t add any new dungeons!” But I hope they didn’t.

Two suggestions that I think would be really easy to implement:

• Reinstate Fyonna’s path.
• Rebalance gold rewards (and fractal drop rates). I started a thread on this because I figured that whatever numbers I came up with on my own wouldn’t be ideal, but I could just put the suggestion here if that’s better.

I could see reducing AC. It would make all the other increases to 1.5g make more sense, too, since AC is shorter/easier than they are. I’m not sure if it should be 1.25g or 1g, though. And I think CM is similarly tricky, especially compared to something like CoE, which can also destroy pugs. (But maybe CoE gets a pass because of the charged cores/lodestones?)

I guess one question is what’s going to be taken as the baseline for 1g, since there’s so much variation.

Some immediate thoughts:

• Maybe some of the 1.5g suggestions should be 2g? Or 1.75g? I’m not sure.
• AC is a little weird at 1.5g, but I don’t know if it should be reduced.
• I’m pretty sure Aetherpath is longer than Arah p1/2/3 for every group—if you can get Aetherpath done quickly, I think you can get Arah done even more quickly. But I’m hesitant to go too high because of the chance for a skin.
• 5g for Arah p4 could be abused a little if they don’t fix the skip.
• Suggested fractal coin reward may be too generous.
• Some of these suggestions would probably have to change if the dungeons got changed. If, for instance, HotW bosses lost hp, maybe we’d want to keep the rewards lower.

My hope is that rewards adjustments could get more people playing more paths with very little developer time required.

I’ll try to keep this updated with a consensus from the thread if people have other numbers to suggest. To start, here are some not entirely random ideas:

• AC: No change
• CM: No change
• TA: Aetherpath 3.5g, nightmare court paths no change
• SE: P2 1.5g
• CoF: P3 1.5g
• HotW: All paths 1.5g
• CoE: No change
• Arah: p3 2g, p4 5g

Fractals:

• Increase coin reward to 10s per reward level.
• 31+: Stop dropping uninfused rings.
• 41-50: Increase fractal weapon drop rate so it’s the same as in 31-40. Do not decrease ascended weapon and armor drop rates.

Nokaru.7831:

Regina Buenaobra.6193:

I’d like to clarify a few points.

Their definitive answer toward hard modes was the most disappointing thing to hear.

Well, we’ve known that for almost a year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jy7CcwnfUdU&t=16m18s

Boneheart.3561:

One Note Chord.5031:

And also, it’s not changes to dungeons we want. It’s more dungeons.

Do not presume to speak for me.

Yeah, you’re right, sorry. Edited.

I know I’ve been one of the negative ones, so I just want to clarify:

I would be less negative if Regina hadn’t come in with the same “tell us how to fix our current content” message we’ve gotten before. Again, existing dungeons aren’t the problem. The lack of new ones is.

Edit: Oh yeah, except the cliffside hammer bug. Please fix that!

Lilith Ajit.6173:

One Note Chord.5031:

IvanTheGrey.2941:

Guys, I know we’re all burnt out from disappointment, but the distinct possibility that we could enact real change is something to be carefully examined. As much as I’ve been a negative nancy these past few weeks, this is a GOOD THING. Bring out everything we know. We need to show them the we understand the content and we CAN make it better!!

People said the same thing for the fractal CDI. Fool me once and all that (except we’re well past twice by now).

We got our dredge revamp from the CDI.

Stop. Think. Type.

Yes, we did. And, iirc, an increased ascended box drop rate and a little gold. …Yay?

I guess in the grand scheme of things, that’s about as much as any of the CDIs have resulted in. But that was a ton of wasted energy from a ton of players writing about rings and skins and other crap rewards. Why should I think this will be different?

IvanTheGrey.2941:

Guys, I know we’re all burnt out from disappointment, but the distinct possibility that we could enact real change is something to be carefully examined. As much as I’ve been a negative nancy these past few weeks, this is a GOOD THING. Bring out everything we know. We need to show them the we understand the content and we CAN make it better!!

People said the same thing for the fractal CDI. Fool me once and all that (except we’re well past twice by now).

Zelyhn Lekovitch.2867:

But sure let’s write pages of feedback so at least you have something more organised to ignore!

It worked really well with the fractal CDI, after all.

Sorry, Regina. We’ve heard this before.

And also, changes to dungeons aren’t the most important thing. More dungeons are. This is the biggest problem with all these conversations. You folks at Anet keep thinking you can solve the problem by revisiting old content. Lots of us, at least, don’t think the problem can be solved that way.

I guess you could increase gold rewards on the ones people don’t do. At least maybe we could get more people willing to do more of the paths that way.

Jandopo.2107:

One more thing: I remeber a CDI on the commander system a year ago. Many people wrote passionately their ideas and spent time giving long suggestions.
And you guys come out with 3 new colors? Nothing else?

That’s… depressing. And offensive.

Yeah, the CDIs have been a waste of everybody’s time. Lots of energy spent for too few results.

CETheLucid.3964:

Lendruil.9061:

Yargesh.4965:

Lendruil.9061:

A single dungeon with the depth and the difficulty of underworld/ fow or doa from GW1 would be enough to keep many players busy for months. But instead of we get some living story that you finish in one hour, and thats it.
The combat-system of GW2 is the best i ever played, and i dont understand why they waste it with their living story instead of giving us a challenging dungeon.

A dungeon along the lines of the Aetherblade path that is not done by people because you can do several other dungeons in the same length of time it takes to run this one path?

In my guild we do aetherpath almost every day.

But of course a dungeon that is longer and more difficult should give better rewards. In GW1 you got the obsidian armor and tormented weapons in these dungeons, rewards that were unique to them.

BrotherBelial.3094:

The best rewards came from the UW/FoW/DoA. If ANet did something that made it worth peoples while. Then they’ll do it. Clearly what ever you get from there is not worth the time/effort.

The weapons you can get from the aetherpath are worth 100’s of gold.

But it’s faster to run other stuff for the gold than to cross your fingers. It doesn’t take all that long to make 100s of gold just through daily dungeon tours anyway.

It feels like they have very limited resources, and for better or for worse have decided that living world updates are the place to put them all. All these comments they keep making amount to “no new content outside the living world.”

ipan.4356:

But my prediction is that none of that will bring in NEW players, and it won’t keep the majority from leaving.

I’m not actually so sure of that. I think GW2 really is a good game until you do everything that appeals to you. It’s just that once we’ve done that, the stuff that a lot of us like to do isn’t getting added to.

Iason Evan.3806:

As a side note, I really felt like Fractal Armor needed to be added into the game. I was told that it was too focused a thing and that it wasn’t going to be added, but Tournament armor was added.

Fractals aren’t esports, though (even though the player-run fractal tournament got more viewers than some of the ToL qualifiers iirc).

Dramen Maidria.1034:

but they are only just now getting to changes in other areas that really should have been done a long time ago.

Yes, but I also think the bigger problem is that the other areas don’t need changes; they need additions. But they don’t have the resources to spend on those additions. And now, even though they’re finally trying to add new, permanent content, they’re insisting on it all being living world stuff.

phys.7689:

What exactly is the future of the content of GW2 going to be mostly about? I think the overall vision and direction of GW2 is really the big question everyone has.

To be honest, I think they’ve made that pretty clear now, too. Any new content they add will be living world content. Beyond that, their focus is “extending the life of all there is in the game” (http://youtube.com/watch?v=umpR6LhBhW4&t=5m39s).

Makes sense, I guess, after spending a year and a half adding relatively little new content. They won’t give up on the living world, so they’re using that to add content, and they’re putting new coats of paint on everything else.

I mean, to be clear, I’m not happy about it—all the content I play for has been shelved indefinitely. But at least now I know it.

(Also, before this latest video, I was a little puzzled by the talk of a new CDI. They still haven’t done much with the last one they did. But now we have confirmation of why that is: that one was about fractals, and fractals aren’t a priority. Kind of a shame they did the CDI at all, though. A lot people spent a lot of time on it, and not much has come of it.)

Edited to add:

Judging by the undertone of a lot of comments here and in other threads, there is a fairly ingrained feeling that there is more talk and less substance from ANET

I agree with everything you said, but I just wanted to add to this and what Anymras said: My own favorite example of this is from 13 months ago. “We aren’t quite ready to go into all the details here, but what I can say is you will see [in 2013] a specific way to build precursor items on your way to a legendary. On top of this, you’ll also see new legendary weapons and new types of legendary gear in 2013.”

I can understand why they don’t state their plans when they’ve been unable to follow through on them in the past.

lordkrall.7241:

Can someone please quote me the exact line that says that there will be no new dungeons?

5:45 has already been mentioned, so I just want to quote it here in case anyone’s not watching the video. “[W]hat you’ve seen from dungeons is … the place that they’re gonna be at for a while, but like I said, … we’re always looking for … smaller changes we can make, little tweaks that we can make to improve quality of life…”

The only part even the most optimistic dungeon runner could read anything into is “a while”—“Hey, maybe that means that after a while, we’ll get a new dungeon!” But imo that’s not just extremely optimistic, it’s delusional.

data.4093:

Anet seems to have taken the path of least resistance, instead of doing something interesting

Well, yeah. It’s Anet working on mesmers.

Fay.2357:

Sethren.8472:

Disagreed. PU Mesmers might have been powerful in PvP, but regular PvE condi mesmers were not. We needed that bit of love. If you play a power mes (Sw/Sw, or whatever combination of Sword), then you wouldn’t realize how nice/needed this is.

PvE condition mesmer builds have never even flirted with the concept of viability. Using one is basically saying that you want your team to carry you through every encounter ever. These buffs do not change that.

Yeah. Really, I don’t think these changes do much for any kind of mesmer in pve, especially in dungeons, but at any rate they don’t do anything for conditions.

frifox.5283:

Phantasms gaining evade on summon… does that mean I will finally be able to summon wardens for arah p1 last boss??

Ooh, that would be nice. (But you can already get two up, so it’s not a huge deal as long as they don’t get blown up by his other attack.)

Arewn.2368:

DuckDuckBOOM.4097:

I’m pretty sure that the distortion for phantasms is really just for the berserker in wvw so Mesmers can get a tag in before it dies 1 second later. Or maybe using a different phantasm to shatter in a zerg. If going 6 dueling then 3 mantra charges will be the PvE choice.

How are you going to get a phantasm tag in with this skill if this skill requires that you already tagged something and it died?

It grants distortion to phantasms on summon, not on kill.

Jong.5742:

i just rewatch and i notice the that Triumphant Distortion Tooltip said “Your Phantasm gain distortion briefly on creation” does it mean we always get 1s distort on phantasm every time we summon??

Yes, that’s how it’s shown in the video.

Also, the video says only that they fixed a bug with iWarden that caused it to sometimes not attack when it was attached to a melee target. This is not the only problem with iWarden, though.

Martin Kerstein.3071:

One Note Chord.5031:

I might take the under for a day, until we discover the new bugs.

It’s probably too optimistic to think the feature patch will actually address any of these, though.

On the contrary! I talked to one of our developers, and there are a lot of Mesmer bug fixes that will be deployed with the Feature Pack. I do not have the full list yet, keep an eye out for the update notes once the Feature Pack goes live.

I really appreciate the response. Thanks! It’s great to see. Since some of the bugs seem like they should be easy fixes, I’m a little more inclined to take the under!

I’d also like to clarify, though: for most of these bugs, the main problem is not that we think they’re not getting attention. It’s that we believe that the developers aren’t actually able to fix them. We don’t have faith in the development team’s ability here. Or at least, I don’t, anyway. As others have said, this could very well just be because phantasms and clones and teleports are hard to fix—I certainly like to think it’s not a matter of competence!—but whatever the reason, the bugs have persisted (in some cases despite repeated developer attempts to fix them).

Sovngarde.7502:

wazzaabii.7863:

Hi, here is my mesmer…
… before

… and today

Which one do you prefer ?

What shoulders are you using in the “Before” picture?

Trickster.

Hey, remember when they did that CDI and we all told them fractal rewards sucked? I’m sure glad we put so much time into that thread.

Sadly, they were never going to be able to do justice to GW1 mesmers. Mesmers interacted primarily with energy bars and skill bars. They took out energy. In PvE, interacting with skill bars would trivialize too much, because enemies only have a few attacks at most. In PvP, they wanted to get away from interrupts because they rely too much on ping, and they wanted to get rid of hexes (which were mesmers’ punishes and disables) because they required new players to learn too many different skills and abilities.

Mckeone.9804:

Thanks, One Note Chord. Interesting that 31-40 is the best range for fractal weapon skin drops. How big was the sample size?

Not huge, but not completely awful either.

11-20: 147
21-30: 266
31-40: 368
41-49: 526
50: 135

Mckeone.9804:

Can’t access reddit or google docs. Could you post it in text? Sorry for not being specific.

11-20: ring 61%, fotm weapon 0.68%, ascended weapon 0.68%, armor 2.04%
21-30: ring 67%, fotm weapon 4.14%, ascended weapon 0.75%, armor 3.76%
31-40: ring 51%, fotm weapon 7.34%, ascended weapon 2.99%, armor 3.53%
41-49: ring 53%, fotm weapon 3.43%, ascended weapon 3.81%, armor 9.14%
50: ring 49%, fotm weapon 4.58%, ascended weapon 5.34%, armor 9.16%
41-50 combined: ring 52%, fotm weapon 3.66%, ascended weapon 4.12%, armor 9.15%

I might take the under for a day, until we discover the new bugs.

It’s probably too optimistic to think the feature patch will actually address any of these, though.

This is why I want first person: http://bloogum.net/guildwars/

(Not my site.)

Noah.9654:

the best pet system in the game, great aesthetics, and Portal

Wow, I don’t think those of us who are being negative about the profession could do a better job than this. Talk about kitten ing with faint praise.

Arlee.7038:

Personally I don’t see why people want an expansion at all. I mean what do you think we’d get out of it?

Something on a par with GW1 campaigns, maybe? New continent, new professions, new story and missions, loads of new skills for existing professions, new elite pve areas, multiple new pvp modes.

Even something on a par with the lone GW1 expansion would be decent, at least for the pve side of things. New skills, new kinds of pve, new areas to explore, new quests.

Is that a lot to hope for? Of course. Is it unrealistic, given the differences between GW1 and GW2? Very possibly. But even half of a GW1 campaign would be fantastic. And it’s been two years!

And that’s part of the problem. They’ve spent two years getting better at living story stuff, yes, but that doesn’t give you much permanent content. Meanwhile, players have gotten better. Builds, groups, large-scale organization, etc. have improved. All of that makes the original content not just old, but laughable.

I only really play dungeons/fractals, so I can’t comment directly on other parts of the game. But one of the problems I face is that we’re stuck playing 2-year-old content that is not only stale, but is laughably simple. We’re better at the game than we were two years ago. Give us new stuff to be bad at so we have something new to learn and work on.

phirefox.2568:

One Note Chord.5031:

Navi.7142:

The question is: Will they fix the existing bugs?

Of course not. They will, however, break iwarden further.

wait – is that even physically possible!?

Absolutely! Right now it still attacks sometimes.

Navi.7142:

The question is: Will they fix the existing bugs?

Of course not. They will, however, break iwarden further.

World 2 was definitely not perfect, but that doesn’t mean we don’t want more SAB.

(And while the skins weren’t the main reason I played SAB, if I’d known it wasn’t coming back, I definitely would have grinded some more. I also maybe would’ve bought something, instead of waiting to decide what I wanted. Who knows when we’ll be able to buy Moto’s weapon designs again.)

Wow, super disappointing.

Edit:

Well, he only says that the SAB wont appear during the living world. And if I recall correctly, the living world is taking a break now…

I think he said a little more than that:

“as to whether or not we come back to it, whether or not in some other form, you know, I can’t really say, I don’t know how likely that is and that is really all I can say about it.”

“There are lots of systems that we have and we want to focus first on getting those to a state where we’re really happy with them and we’re fully supporting them and then we could look into… ‘All right, now that we have those up to a quality that we’re really happy with and fans are really happy with, what other projects can we take on, and what things can we look at doing?”

Of course, they could just be tricking everyone and trying to make an upcoming release a surprise. But the tone of the answer, from start to finish, is “we know this is going to disappoint people, but we’re ignoring SAB for the foreseeable future to focus on other things.”

Crossposting this since it fits here, too. I’m not really looking for a change, but I wanted to try to come up with something without (long) skirts and bell sleeves just for fun. I’m not completely sold on the shoulders on the left, but I couldn’t find anything I liked better. And I’m not sure which gloves I like more.

The second image is the look I’ve had for something like 20 months (minus the back and the twice-told legend, which came a little later).

Crossposting this since it fits here, too. I’m not really looking for a change, but I wanted to try to come up with something without (long) skirts and bell sleeves just for fun. I’m not completely sold on the shoulders on the left, but I couldn’t find anything I liked better. And I’m not sure which gloves I like more.

Both: exalted head, t1 shoulders, t2 or hom gloves, t2 boots.
Left: whispers chest, embroidered legs
Right: t3 chest, t1 legs

I’m not really looking for a change, but I wanted to try to come up with something without (long) skirts and bell sleeves just for fun. I’m not completely sold on the shoulders on the left, but I couldn’t find anything I liked better. And I’m not sure which gloves I like more.

EnderzShadow.2506:

frifox.5283:

It’s actually the exact opposite. Precision > Power up to 100% crit. When fully buffed, Assassins will out dps Berserker both in direct damage and reflects. Berserker is better than assassins only when you have no offensive buffs like might/fury/banners/etc.

So Assassin with buffs > Berserkers without.

No, frifox was saying Assassin with buffs > Berserker with buffs. But yes for both without buffs. I imagine shatter’s the same, except that it can hit 100% crit chance earlier with precise wrack.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Tribal_armor

Tres Bien.2193:

Absconditus.6804:

Wrong game?—Wish this set was in Guild Wars 2 as well. I guess in ways we can somewhat mimic it, but it wouldn’t be the same. We need more classy looking armors.

Looks so nice. Is there any armor that looks like the first picture ? Or male FOW armor ?

I don’t think so. For the first picture, I think every set has either a skirt or loose pants, and no sets have a coat like that, especially with a collar like that. For male fow, no sets have a coat that length with that shape.

I definitely miss a lot of armors from GW.

Sounds like you need to talk to this person: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/mesmer/Show-us-your-Mesmer/page/18#post2468418

Rag.3258:

has this always been this way?

Probably. I’m pretty sure that’s how other reflected projectiles work, anyway (like mes pistol 5 and mes scepter autoattack clones).

Just for fun: interior of Dreamer’s Terrace with the door closed.

Boneheart.3561:

One Note Chord.5031:

Becka Williams.4978:

Boneheart.3561:

Substance E.4852:

Pretty sure the Tormented gear only got underwater weapons because it’s a set from GW1 that also featured a spear.

I wouldn’t be surprised if they tracked TP and vendor data and found that a very small group of people used tickets or bought water weps and decided it was enough to bother with the time it takes to design and model the gear.

There is no Dreamthistle Spear on the Trading Post.

There is a spear, and a harpoon gun in the wardrobe for Dreamthistle.

I think that Boneheart just meant that the spear seemed to be in high enough demand to exhaust the supply on the tp. (But that by itself doesn’t tell us much about how much demand there is for underwater skins, unfortunately.)

Maybe it was my pessimism, but I implied the demand was absent. Thus agreeing with the notion of ArenaNet not spending effort to construct future underwater weapons for Evon to sell.

Ah, my bad, I just thought you were being optimistic. I agree with the pessimistic view, sadly! (And I think the gw2spidy chart bears that pessimism out.)

(I do also think it’s within Anet’s power to increase demand. They just need to make more underwater content and make it consistently fun for every profession. But that’s a separate issue.)

Becka Williams.4978:

Boneheart.3561:

Substance E.4852:

Pretty sure the Tormented gear only got underwater weapons because it’s a set from GW1 that also featured a spear.

I wouldn’t be surprised if they tracked TP and vendor data and found that a very small group of people used tickets or bought water weps and decided it was enough to bother with the time it takes to design and model the gear.

There is no Dreamthistle Spear on the Trading Post.

There is a spear, and a harpoon gun in the wardrobe for Dreamthistle.

I think that Boneheart just meant that the spear seemed to be in high enough demand to exhaust the supply on the tp. (But that by itself doesn’t tell us much about how much demand there is for underwater skins, unfortunately.)