Guild Wars 2

Lasur Arkinshade.4107:

This makes the dungeon gear’s status as ‘prestige gear’ completely meaningless.

Exotic armor != exclusive. Legendary weapons require legendary amounts of everything but skill, too. “Elite” armor in Guild Wars required no eliteness (if you had the crafting materials, you could roll new and have a set of “exotic” armor yet do exactly zero content). This was addressed in future content with a reputation system, which took time and persistence, difficulty was not a factor.

CoF paths one and two are ridiculously easy and offered practically no challenge to my PuG group. I would advise increasing enemy damage across the board there.

No, no and a corrosive, planet-shaking NO. You misunderstand the very complaint you have. It’s not that dungeons are too easy, it’s level 80s being extremely powerful. Why bring up the difficulty because of them? This is how power creep begins. You start raising the bar with mob hp/damage/skills to appease the minority, yet it won’t be hard enough for some and will disenfranchise builds/professions which are not as capable as others. With time, players get new power to make them competitive again. Rinse, repeat and you have Guild Wars, which was utterly ruined by extreme PvE power creep brought on by…

Hard Mode. Which, honestly, if a level 80 team wants a challenge, this is the simplest way to go. Add the option to dungeon entrances, required level 80, pop in some extra rewards and better drop rates, then throw the kitchen sink of difficulty at them. However don’t be surprised after a month when players (I’d guess mostly light/med) complain of brutality, 1-shots and LFM guardian/warrior only meta runs.

I don’t want any of that. I’d like to see a cap on trait levels and levies on utility, and a return of environmental effects (similar from Guild Wars).

Keep player power in-check, do NOT buff mobs/bosses or otherwise make dungeons more annoying. No matter how “extreme” or “elite” you can make content, there will be people who think it’s too easy and no way to make it harder without starting a trend toward runaway power creep.

I’ll just give my two coppers on weapons:

1h sword seems ideal for single engagements, but is flashy without payoff.

Other than CotW, offhands are oversimplified and forgettable.

GS is effective, but #4 could use AoE power. #5 is nice, but 30s cooldown has a “one-and-done” feel, leaving you high and dry through critical points in battle (though lack of utility options is partly to blame).

SB is the go-to but feels weak and relies on stacking bleed, forcing you to the rear 180* of your target, which can often send you away from your team or is simply not possible.

The warrior has a proper LB, not the ranger. I don’t get it. A LB has distance and payload, it should work to rain hell down on an enemy from a safe distance. #1 is slow and without impact. #2-3 miss this point entirely and #5 needs to come like a storm When an elementalist conjures a better bow for me, that says it all.

Key note: synergy! Start drawing lines between traits, utility, weapons and pets. There should be a near-solid mesh of payoff between combining skills, pets and weapons that give everything meaning and provide depth to each build.

Ending with I do like: Axes! I certainly welcome improvement (not bouncing into non-hostile creatures like Veteran Oakhearts, please!) but they’re the most pure fun (at least in PvE).

Duplicated.4715:

There’s a reason the thing is called legendary you know. As flawed as the RNG system is, if the precursor is widely available to everyone, then what’s the point of having legendary items to set yourself apart from the crowd

As a norn, this ‘Legendary’ item is symbolically meaningless to me. Legends are not made by accident in a magic pot, they are forged from mighty deeds, earned by the bravest heroes to live on forever in our history.

In Guild Wars, we had a thing called GWAMM. It wasn’t a perfect system, but you had to go near and far, serve great and dull challenges alike in order to seize it. Though there were a healthy amount of people that belittled such an accomplishment, no one could argue that there was an achievement one truly earned the right to have under their name.

I honor those that would sacrifice everything to reach their goals, but I will not regard any hero with these weapons as a legend.

Some people are very good at platforming under pressure and not swayed by distraction. Others can bite through it with enough determination. To many others, it’s a futile exercise in frustration, as seen by the reactions across Tyria.

I consider myself pretty quick on the keys with good coordination, yet was put in my place by the demanding pace and a lack of knowing the path. Strong negative feedback reinforces the assessment that this is not a test of mental aptitude, as a puzzle demands, but rather one of speed, timing, memory and determination.

In other words, it’s a challenge, not a puzzle, and that is legitimately deceptive. I recall difficult jumping puzzles across Tyria; they give you pause and make you use powers of observation, critical thinking and ultimately lead to discovery. By contrast, the Tower can be described as a spiral of death and misery with an unforgiving pace designed to cause panic and force mistakes.

Halloween-spirited evil fun? Yes. For everyone? No-no.

Still, I don’t believe the Tower should be made easier or slapped into private instance. IMO, it was simply wrong to roll it out as a puzzle, and difficulty should have been emphasized given the game itself is very easy and such a challenge in a holiday event is highly unorthodox.

Nerfing the Tower isn’t right, but neither are those that think that, because success is attainable, complaining amounts to entitlement and whining. Both sides need to calm down, and hopefully ArenaNet has learned that our community needs one thing above all: clarity.

I personally expected a challenging puzzle with a few twists; I didn’t expect a mad dash with death hot on my heels.

Being a “casual” and investing zero real dollars into this game, other than the price of purchase, it’s my conclusion that these “What’s in this box?” gambling items in games are simply cancerous to the community. Why? Because we are gamers, not gamblers.

A gambler knows odds and knows the game well. More importantly, they do far more gambling and far less work earning that chance to gamble. In many forms, there is plenty of skill, not just luck. Addicts are addicted to gambling, the fun in gambling, and it has its ups and downs. They don’t even think of the money.

Gambling with game chests is a different beast. First of all, we are gamers, we expect our work to produce rewards. We aren’t in the right frame of mind to lose. This is incredibly compounded by the treadmill effect: farming, grinding and scraping together the keys (or “nickels”) to put into that “slot” takes significant effort, and is not something any gamer wants to repeat. It’s time they could be using to earn other, guaranteed game rewards. In sum, the trouble is simply not worth it. No matter how you look at it, there is one box, one key, and an overwhelming chance of losing time and money.

Imagine if the gamblers in Vegas had to craft their nickels or convert real money to a very diminished value of “Vegas money” used for gambling, and you could not win more money, only prizes. Think of the effort put in to merely have the ability to gamble.

Let’s look at it this way: in real-life, you can walk up and start gambling with the money in your pocket, and maybe double it. Now, would you rather have $50 with that in mind or $50 at a very tiny chance for your pixel character to hold a pixel chainsaw sword?

Gamers certainly make their own beds when they gamble with RNG boxes. However, it is an absolutely soul-crushing money pit that needs to be expelled from the school of quality game design. I’m all for donations and offering incentives to supporting a company, I just cannot support this poor implementation, mostly out of respect for the company and its pledge to set the bar for MMOs. Much like crafting, it has taken an extremely cheap design route and left a bitter taste in many mouths. A shame, really, because I know there is the talent on this dev team to be more innovative.

As a norn ranger, taking on a form comes with these great benefits: poor mobility, slow attacks, half the skill bar disabled, no pet and the joy of being knocked around like you are made of pillow and covered in bubble wrap.

I do believe they are strong and can be used effectively, but the vulnerability, sluggishness, skill duration and deabilitating cool downs are deal-breakers to me. I’d be far more forgivable if they were not strung up by a 30 second timer. Make them last until downed or simply balance power and skill recharges and just make them perma with the ability to change back.

And as someone pointed out, GW1 norn were clearly able to stay in bear form indefinitely and had control over it. This really isn’t that hard, Anet, you’ve got to make things consistent and give the norn some credit; they are spirit-revering, self-engineered, legend-seeking shape-shifters and deserve the utmost respect with epic forms.

I’ve encountered this and my norn is nearly max height. I believe one of the skins was actually the norn blade. How ironic. Will post screen shots if necessary.

Kuthos.9623:

Light and Heavy are fine, Medium gets shafted with too many trench coats, face masks, and the pirate hat.

Worth repeating. Feels like a very narrow, unfortunate mindset was used for medium armor. Coats and medium armor in general are too bulky. GW1 design was awesome. The pervasiveness of clipping is simply intolerable; said bulkiness is to blame.

Cue long version of feedback:

In my current set you can clearly see a shorter profile that would be a vast improvement; everything below that line is unnecessary. It’s sad, because I was excited to first wear it, after growing tired of the pirate gimmick (and believe me, I loved PotC).

Let’s compare to what I wore in Guild Wars

What are those things? Limbs! My GW1 chars could look stylish and lean, with a beautiful portrait that wasn’t weighed down with bulky clothing. That’s exactly the word I would use to underpin my complaint: bulky, bulky, bleeding bulky.

There’s another reason to want to take a sewing machine to these coats that goes so far beyond mere subjective taste it’s downright obscene: clipping.

Wolf’s blood! I thought it was bad that my massive norn looks way too small to be carrying many a greatsword (and some 1h extend into the ground, are you kidding me!? I’m 3 meters tall!) but the wide exterior garment makes for an absolute nightmare with things like torches, axes and daggers. Even on matching dungeon sets there’s ridiculous clipping, and it’s all because of the design that’s obsessed with skirt-length garments that puff up the hips and hang very low.

At this point, I will work toward one dungeon set that looks decent and research what karma vendors have to offer. The only consolation is that I won’t need extra storage and months of farming to win all of the gorgeous sets of pretty armor. :C

I have experienced event chains and they are interesting and fun. However…

Not all events are dynamic. They can be cyclical and repeat like clockwork, giving no sense of change in the world. While crafting in Wayfarer Hills I can set a watch to a boss and NPC escort event at one outpost. Craft, kill boss, back to crafting. This is not dynamic. Nothing appeared to cause this boss to spawn and killing him doesn’t alter anything when he’ll be back like clockwork. Similarly, the NPC makes routine trips to deliver his Mead. If you are spending any amount of time working in the town, the routine is obvious that your actions had no effect on the world.

To me, that is what needs addressing. I was expecting outcomes to matter. Additionally when players know where and when to pounce, as seen in a karma farming guide, it’s go-go tagging events. That said, bots, which generally works in a predetermined pattern, thrive in these conditions.

Oh I’ve waited to revisit this topic for so long, and now that I’ve played I can confirm everything I’ve said: they’re totally unnecessary and would separate players from adventuring together.

At best, they give a moment of immersion. The IMS is for lazy or broke players (which honestly is their fault for not managing their money, it’s cold but true, don’t waste it all and you will have toll money).

The immersion? I don’t see the point. Impassable terrain, resource nodes, hearts, events and being forbidden from using them in places.. (yes, that’s a huge no to combat/entering villages, etc.)

Spent the last two days pushing for the monthly salvage, wishing I would’ve just checked the wiki. Utterly useless rewards, and oh by the way Survivor is bugged. I’m level 45, don’t die often yet it’s been stuck around 33K XP, so I have to believe the wiki.

Even so, 100K XP without dying? How could they put that in? It’s not enough that you need to WvW even if you don’t want to, but this just completely changes how people play. Maybe I won’t go help those two players getting whipped by a Champion, I might die and reset! Ugh, please tell me monthlies will rotate or something, I’d prefer if that one is removed as it is skill-based and not something you normally work toward.

I hate to sound whiny, I always defended GW in my years of playing, but this is bad.

For years (goodness the anticipation train was long) I rolled my eyes at all the “X will be a big disappointment” discussions and the vast swamp of “I’m worried X won’t be as good as advertised” topics that seemed to spawn daily across forums while the game was being revealed piece of by piece. I reserved all final judgment until I played the game.

If the Crafting system deserves any grade it is a triple question mark in red ink across the top with a See Me underneath. See us, those that are speaking up. I’m not quite sure how this passed through testing, but basically the system is exactly what is wrong with other MMOs: grind, grind, grind, working behind the curve and tapping all creative time and energy for little to no benefit, when the alternatives (TP, drops) defeat the purpose.

As I understood, we wouldn’t be hammering umpteen (relatively) useless helmets to get to the next tier of helmets and so on until we prove we have invested enough resources in order to make wearable gear.

What bothers me the most is that you had this ingenious system from GW that kept things very simple and easy to manage, albeit the actual crafting was handled by a craftsman. Now let me point to all of these complaints above mine, because it was a mistake to remove NPC crafters that could be making our gear (and not the overpriced rubbish GW2 NPCs sell) while leaving players to discover and craft things of the same power but exceptional or unique aesthetics. Cosmetics is where players will happily invest hard time, yet having sufficient numbers to be competitive in the game should be baseline—it shouldn’t require that hard time.

I’m fit to level crafting as materials allow me, but as of hitting 100 leatherworking (and running my silver reserves nearly dry) I refuse to invest any more time figuring out the most efficient way to burn up everything I played for to produce zero benefit (I won’t count the XP from crafting when I could have been out, you know, playing the game and having the adventure I came for).

I guess you could say this system is salvageable, but it’s definitely a white name, common and not worth keeping.