Guild Wars 2

Some sort of heavy class that specializes in minions (a knight-commander who summons soldiers), conditions (grimdark knight, er, I mean death knight), melee kits (golem pilot who sports pneumatic/rocket/drill/etc. fists), or ranged AoE (a cannoneer or somesuch).

Rather than introduce another recolored version of the same model, I would like to see back pieces have dye options.

Allisa Wonderland.8192:

I am still stuck on this one because i can’t see the meat. When I do notice Strugar throwing a piece, it turns out that there are two other pieces already laying around that Chomper is more than happy to eat, instead.

Add a checkbox for “show yellow item descriptions” along with the show player, enemy, NPC, etc. text in the control panel? Please? I don’t have enough fingers to how do the ctrl key all the time, and doing so also disables some of my other commands.

Something that sorta helps is to have a friend (or complete stranger) join your party and ctrl-click the meat to call target on it; you’ll get the alert in the chat window and a giant red target icon above the meat, so all you need to do is focus on Chomper and try to keep him crippled as you make a run for the meat.

And I’m sure you’ve already heard this, but to reiterate: always, always kill Chomper first. Strugar gets a buff to damage when Chomper dies, but Chomper gets a buff to damage and speed – and people who focus on Strugar first seem to always miss the meat, so Chomper’s going to have five stacks of meat and the dead-Strugar buff, which makes his attacks instant-KOs.

Pre-patch: 15 chances resulted in 15 tokens
Post-patch: 2000 chances resulted in 2000 tokens and 3 favors of the pavilion

Just going to go back to dungeons where I can will be rewarded for my efforts. What a waste of time.

Morsus.5106:

Pandaman.4758:

Harper.4173:

In the second you can unbind your dodge button because you won’t need it.

That’s patently false.

Source: every person who has ever played anything other than zerk.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2VhmwLwvrM

No dodges in Arah Path 2. I thought we were past this argument?

We were. 13 hours ago.

I’ve just finished murdering Halmi for the 400th time and opened my 2000th chance bag since the patch, total haul: 2000 tokens, 3 favors of the pavilion.

My hat’s off to the people who have been able to grind more bags than that, you have far more patience and focus that I do.

Harper.4173:

Pandaman.4758:

Harper.4173:

In the second you can unbind your dodge button because you won’t need it.

That’s patently false.

Source: every person who has ever played anything other than zerk.

You must have missed the party doing Arah P4 with unbinded dodge buttons. I’ll link it later.

It might not be entirely as easy, but it’s faceroll/afk easy.

And in solo play Cleric’s gear means you can basically afk and most open world mobs can’t / won’t kill you.

Conversation regarding the Arah run has already been had

I’m not so sure on the solo aspect though, but to clarify I’m completely disregarding anything that’s veteran or below – unless you have a terrible build (low DPS and low survivability), you shouldn’t have to dodge those ranks of mobs; so if you’re including those class of mobs, then sure, a high-toughness/heal build can facetank most of them, but so can pretty much any class traited to have a bit of survivability. Some better than others.

Lunacy Solacio.6514:

That change from great jungle wurm is Unrelated to the feedback issue with malrona, etc., as I know I’ve said a couple times already. The Malrona, etc, only started the last few days from a different patch.

Strange, I could swear I haven’t been able to reflect her attack since the wurm patch, not just a couple days ago, but I see someone updated the wiki do say as much only a couple days ago.

How does ANet expect to encourage build diversity if they start littering anything that isn’t a zerk build with landmines? “Play how you want, but expect to feel really useless in random situations.”

I never really saw the point of having those kind of 4-stat trinkets, if you wanted to dip a little into vitality, wouldn’t it be more flexible to throw a couple valkyrie trinkets into your berserker set? With that you can swap the valkyrie out with berserker for the times you don’t need the extra vitality.

Same goes for armor as well.

FenrirSlakt.3692:

Here you go!
They facetank some, block some others and heal through the rest.

http://youtu.be/b2VhmwLwvrM?t=6m44s

Okay, that clears up another misunderstanding I had from the start, which was the argument was applied to solo play; completely forgot about group synergy, which I agree can compensate for not dodging.

cranos.5913:

These are people wearing clerics gear obviously, “zerkers” most definitely need to dodge. Please show me how you complete Arah in berserker gear without dodging.

Ahh, misunderstood what you meant.

Still, how does one fight Lupi without dodging? Kill the grubs and use movement skills to get away from the AoEs?

cranos.5913:

Pandaman.4758:

That’s patently false.

Source: every person who has ever played anything other than zerk.

Actually there are numerous videos of people completing arah and fractals with unbound dodge buttons. Ofc these are people that usually play with berserker gear and know their class and encounters well.

I’m sure they will pop up sooner or later, posted by someone less lazy than me.

Amusingly enough that wouldn’t contradict what I said, since it would be people showing zerkers not needing dodge buttons

Harper.4173:

In the second you can unbind your dodge button because you won’t need it.

That’s patently false.

Source: every person who has ever played anything other than zerk.

tolunart.2095:

Smooth Penguin.5294:

Because without RNG, rewards would all become common as dirt. No prestige. No desire to have. So once you take away the desire to have the reward, you take away the desire to do the content that gives the reward.

Along with the desire to log in, the desire to buy things from the gem shop, and the desire to provide Anet employees with a paycheck. Then Anet loses the desire to keep the servers running.

Is there anything that actually supports that theory? I’m not arguing that there aren’t a lot of people who chase after rewards simply because they’re rare, but are there any examples of MMOs with fixed loot rewards that have failed (and had the failure blamed on the lack of RNG)?

Is RNG loot in an MMO something necessary to maintain player interest, or is it like the Holy Trinity where developers (and many players) assume it’s the only viable model because no other mainstream developer has ever tried something else?

Safari.3021:

Lishtenbird.2814:

• “Some projectiles at Jungle Wurm no longer reflectable.” edit: apparently it happens with eggs at Evolved Wurm as well

Is it known if this was intended for evolved wurm? or just jungle wurm and happened to effect evolved too?

Its taken some element of skill (timed swirling winds to destroy eggs) and replaced it with the need for more numbers and higher dps on mob killing teams.

When 99% of this game is facerolled by dps, removing more varied mechanics is a dissapointing move.

Also the ledge behind crimson wurm that got fixed and became traversable between yellow and blue is now broken and impassable again.

Also when picking up items, the dialogue just says “pick up” now and not “pick up X weapon”

From the May 20th patch notes:

The Great Jungle Wurm in Caledon Forest no longer does full damage to itself from reflected projectile attacks. A certain number of the projectiles are no longer reflectable.

It sounds like they were trying to reduce the effectiveness of reflects in that particular fight, but failed to realize their change affected all wurms across the whole game.

Ends July 1st, you have plenty of time.

sMihaly.1492:

So… I play Ele. When i know some boss uses projectiles… and i can’t rely on defenses like Whirling Wind or Magnetic Aura… Should i pick the downed trait, melee the boss with only fire attunement, die, and run again from waypoint? Is that the right mechanic?

Pick the downed trait, melee the boss with only fire attunement, dodge twice, die, and run again from waypoint.

Wow, I’m amazed at how terribly short-sighted this idea is.

You seem to fail to realize that people actually use gear to supplement or compensate for low stats due to non-zerk builds, not just to further enhance zerk stats; your idea would basically cripple every person who wants to try to make a non-zerk build, but dip into zerk gear so they still have some DPS. It would also murder PUGs, because people will stick to guilds/friends list to ensure some random idiot doesn’t ignore LFG descriptions (“capped on zerk, need other builds” or something) and ruin a run.

notebene.3190:

With respect to the OP and Jungle Wurm. No sympathy there. You should not get to one shot a world boss, whether it’s one that has to be killed by the Lambda Lambda Lambda frat house or an easy PUG one. It was something that could be used to disrupt others’ play, and I’m glad it’s gone. There were some Mesmers that were good about waiting until everyone got settled in and used it at about 50%, and that was very nice of them, but at the end of the day, there are too many people that get their satisfaction in life solely out of seeing others’ misery while being immune to the misery inflicted.

But with respect to things like wurm spits and such on normal mobs, I feel bad that you lost a lot of that, especially if it didn’t hurt anyone else.

Except ANet’s solution to the problem was idiotic (yes, my apologies to the dev team, but there is no other word for it).

The problem was the jungle wurm was taking lethal damage from its own reflected attacks. There’s two ways to resolve this: either make the projectiles immune to reflection, or make the wurm immune to the reflected attack. The former renders an entire skill mechanic useless (no damage mitigation, no damage to mob), while the latter merely reduces the effectiveness of a skill mechanic (yes damage mitigation, no or reduced damage to mob).

The “fix” that ANet went with doesn’t just break a skill mechanic for certain fights, it introduces an inconsistency to game design that isn’t explained anywhere in the tooltips; for new players coming into the game they won’t know it was a sloppy fix to address an exploit, they’re just going to see it as a bug that ANet refuses to discuss, much less fix. Furthermore it feeds the growing impression (right or wrong) that anything other than direct-damage and dodge builds are the wrong way to play the game.

So, yeah, it’s great that the exploit was fixed, they just fixed it in a way that disrupts other people’s play in regular PvE, not just during one boss event.

Welp, I’m glad the increase in drop rate has dropped the recipe price to reasonable levels. I can work toward 150g in four weeks, but it would be impossible to work toward 1500g in four weeks (after which point the price can only go up); I’ll still try my luck since I have a thousand tickets left, but it’s good to have options now.

Options that aren’t limited to “spend a few hundred real dollars buying gems to convert to gold to afford the ludicrous price” or “spend an undefinable amount of time grinding gauntlet tickets, then grinding fights for chance bags”, that is.

Teon.5168:

I did around 3 bronze runs last night, and went from 1 to 4 out of 5 done for my dailies without even paying attention what it was doing to my dailies…..so the bb does contribute somewhat to the dailies….at least it did for me last night.

It’s daily kills that doesn’t register in the BB. Almost none the trash mobs and none of the Queen’s Gauntlet bosses count toward that daily; only a rare few trash mobs and the blitz bosses count.

None of the trash mobs count toward “regain health on kill” and “regen endurance on kill” sigils either, so it really shafts some builds that rely on them as well.

Repair NPC’s/stations: 800 gems/$10
Trading Post: 800 gems/$10
Bank: 800 gems/$10
General Goods Merchant: 800 gems/$10
Mystic Forge: 800 gems/$10
Crafting stations: 6400 gems/$80 (800 gems/$10 each station)
Guild Bank, Activity, Laurel Merchant, Weapon/Armor NPC: 4000gems/$50 (800 gems/$10 each)

That feeling as Anet rolls naked in a mountain of hundred dollar bills: Priceless.

There are some things money can’t buy. For everything else there’s Mastercard.

Sadly that’s the norm for games these days, even games that major (can’t say anything about indie developers, haven’t really tried out too many indie games) developers try to sell as “art” have cliched stories with one-dimensional villains and weak character development.

The popular belief is that story doesn’t sell: cool special effects, pretty graphics, brief moments of brilliance (often poorly strung together because writers think the average gamer doesn’t have the attention span to recognize the disconnects), and copious T&A are what “sell”. It’s not always the developer’s fault, the publishers have far too much influence over content and marketing these days – and publishers are often filled with business majors who haven’t played anything more than golf when sleazing their way up the corporate ladder.

If you want well written stories that don’t follow a formula, you’ll need to look toward self-published developers who aren’t looking to make major hits.

Hjorje.9453:

HotW troll has the same skills as the AC troll along with the same mechanics. When they did the change, the troll was dropping AC tokens the first few hours till they fixed it. Got quiet a laugh out of that since it just seems they did a copy and paste for him.

They must have undone that fix soon after then, because I started doing dungeons a couple weeks after the troll was buffed (when people were still insisting on melee stacking him) and he dropped AC tokens for at least the month I was doing HotW.

Any decent flipper/speculator wouldn’t have used all their gold to flip the recipe; when speculating on anything, you always assume the price will eventually crash, so typical strategy is to try and make more than your going to lose in the end.

Flippers had two weeks to make something like 500~700g per flip, so unless they only just started a couple days before the patch, they made their money back and more. Nothing to feel bad about.

mtpelion.4562:

You want rare loot to be rare. If you have 4 people playing a game then 1/20 is rare.

If you have 1,000,000 people playing a game, 1/20 is no longer rare.

This is primarily due to the difference in samples. With 4 loot rolls in total on a 1/20 chance item, it most likely won’t drop. With 1,000,000 loot rolls in total on a 1/20 chance item, you’re going to have approximately 50,000 items dropping.

tolunart.2095:

When there are five players, a 1/100,000 chance per hour of an item dropping means you’ll probably never see one in the game. When there are a million players, the same chance means there are 10 per hour dropping. With hundreds of precursors entering the game every day, it’s not a matter of whether you’ll even see one, it’s a matter of how to get one of the hundreds you know are in circulation.

Well, that is reasonable, but only as far as permanent content goes. It really shouldn’t be applied to a temporary event (even one that’s two months long) and hidden behind two layers of grinding (farming for tickets, then farming for chance bags).

But it is what it is. I’ll just hope they put it in the next Wintersday box like the Dwayna and Grenth pieces and pick up the recipe for 10g.

tolunart.2095:

Pandaman.4758:

That is true for in-game drops, though I would argue any tabletop game that asks players to roll a d100000 and only gives out loot on a 100000 would find itself being used as a coaster in other, more enjoyable games. It’s not just about the element of randomness, but scale as well, which is what everybody’s grouching about.

If the tabletop game consisted of hundreds of thousands of players sitting at the same table, trading with each other… yeah, scale.

Think I missed the point, but how does having more players justify a borderline-punitive drop rate? Regardless of how many people are around you, it doesn’t change how you – as an individual player – would perceive a 1/20 chance versus a 1/100000 chance for a good reward.

tolunart.2095:

Many types of games, especially RPGs, have always had this element of randomness. This goes back to Dungeons and Dragons and the random treasure tables.

You might not like it, personally, but casinos and lotteries are a huge profit-generating industry that goes way beyond Las Vegas. I don’t know of any MMO that doesn’t reward random loot, GW2 gives each player his own loot roll instead of making him fight the other members of his group for a rare drop, so I see it as better than most.

That is true for in-game drops, though I would argue any tabletop game that asks players to roll a d100000 and only gives out loot on a 100000 would find itself being used as a coaster in other, more enjoyable games. It’s not just about the element of randomness, but scale as well, which is what everybody’s grouching about.

That being said, I don’t think the same applies to BL keys and dye packs; those are items that can be (and presumably have been, else ANet would not continue feeding the model) paid for with real money yet frequently give nothing of value back. I can understand randomness in loot dropped by something the player was going to kill anyway, but in something they paid money for? That’s about as much a one-arm bandit as it could be without being literally depicted as a one-arm bandit.

tolunart.2095:

If you could get a precursor with 8000 dungeon tokens, the hardcore players would have all gotten their by November 2012 and no one would care about them any more because they aren’t special.

And that is the point. It’s the chase that drives people, not the item iteself.

To be fair, being successful business model doesn’t automatically mean that people like it. Nobody likes having their time and effort rewarded with nothing (unless they’re massive masochists who are into neglect play), but due to whatever psychological quirk a lot of people seem to be particularly weak to gambling.

Hell, it works for Las Vegas, it’ll work for GW2.

I don’t think any game should be proud of sharing a business model with Vegas though.

Anet really should have put in a reverse-diminishing returns mechanic into the chance bags: each time you open one and get nothing (aside from one lousy token), it increases the chance to get something, and once you do get something, the chance resets back to the base chance.

That way people who actually grind thousands of chance bags actually get something for their effort while still letting people get incredibly lucky.

Hate and love are two sides of the same coin, the fact that people “hate” on a game indicates that they are still emotionally invested in it and are still playing; they may grouch a lot, but they’re still here, spending time and (hopefully) money while impatiently expecting things to go their way.

There is no such thing as a universally-liked game, so there’s only two reasons why you wouldn’t see hate threads on a gaming forum: it’s either overzealous/abusive moderation or nobody is playing it and the community is dead. Either reason is enough to turn around and run away from a game.

Jugglemonkey.8741:

Pandaman.4758:

I propose we ban all classes from WvW. Instead, whenever someone goes into WvW, they will be turned into baby yaks.

And then we can have zergs of baby yaks swarming each other and using their heads to bash down/repair structures.

I second this, but only if the OP yak-ness is open to counterplay from strategic quaggan deployment.

Hmm, maybe everyone in blue gets turned into quaggans, green into yaks, and red into… kittens?

I propose we ban all classes from WvW. Instead, whenever someone goes into WvW, they will be turned into baby yaks.

And then we can have zergs of baby yaks swarming each other and using their heads to bash down/repair structures.

MikaHR.1978:

You dont say…need to attack the turret….faints…such complexitiy….whole fight is 111111111111111111…one person can optionally put poison (which is in no way requirement of any kind)
1 person needs to throw seed, not EVERYONE, another x people just need 11111111
You dont need reflects/feedback, those are perfectly avoidable….if done right….its 111111111111111

Are you seriously saying you’ve never been in a Boss Blitz where people have failed to kill Baines because everyone kept AA-spamming the boss and ignored the turret? Or the entire Shurrak group wiped after spamming themselves to death with retaliation because the only person throwing seeds got downed by Shurrak’s AoE attack and nobody noticed?

Pyroxis most certainly needs reflects, if you’re on the ground you run out of endurance very quickly dodging both his scythes and fireballs, so reflects are necessary to reduce your number of dodges; if you’re cheesing him from range you can’t dodge because that runs the risk of the person with aggro breaking LoS and resetting him, so reflects are needed again. I have no idea where you’re getting the idea you don’t need reflects for Pyro.

MikaHR.1978:

Its standard zerg bosses…

Maybe we have different definitions of “standard” here. To me a “standard” zerg boss/champ is something I can stand at the feet of, turn on autoattack, then go afk to do other stuff and only come back in every now and again to reacquire the target; no thought given to how many people are around me, any alternate objectives, or even worry about dying. Judging from the behavior of the average zerg, I can only assume that’s a definition shared by many.

So, by that definition, I don’t agree they’re standard. Except Sparc and possibly Pyro (but only if you don’t mind being carried by Mesmers and Guardians).

MikaHR.1978:

And i didnt see big neon disclaimer saying anything of this event being different than any other event in GW2? Can you point me to it so i can read it myself? Snce you imply that i “simply cant read”

Pandaman.4758:

if new players “learn” they’re not supposed to help people in other open-world content through this then it’s because they simply can’t read, not because of the event design itself.

Unless you’re saying you’re a new player who is learning not to help others because you’re not reading why people are saying not to zerg a boss, then I didn’t imply anything of the sort.

You’re right that the event did surprise everyone with the scaling in the beginning due to how vague the warning was (https://www.guildwars2.com/en/the-game/releases/may-20-2014/ under the “Boss Blitz” section), but that information is readily available in the form of other players now.

People literally have to ignore everything others are saying not to understand the Boss Blitz is different from other events; now to be fair that could be because they have map chat off (understandable), don’t understand English (lot of SEA players in my timezone, frustrating but still understandable), or aren’t used to the chat box (new players especially, default chat box is transparent, iirc, which makes things really hard to read).

Unless Anet was offering character transfers from NA/EU servers to the CN servers, I honestly doubt any SEA players here would have bought a new account just so they can start from scratch again to find out.

MikaHR.1978:

Nope, youre quite mistaken, bosses do not need anything else than spamming 11111111, just that now you have to do it with under 15 people while rest afk in the middle.

NOW, if the bosses are something super complex that actually NEEDS teamwork, yeah, but since the only thing that matter is NUMBER OF PLAYERS PRESENT and bosses are pretty much 1111111111 deal….no.

You dont think you can “zerg” in 10 man group….lol

The only thing that this can teach people is to say “GTFO” if someone wants to help and new/inexperienced players might actually think that this is how GW2 generally works.

Well, we’ll see the response from ANet, if this continues ill just go play something that actually provides real raiding (if i wanted that), not this, where people think just because they split to small groups and than 11111111111 boss they actually did something awesome….

I’m not saying all of those examples of coordination I mentioned are used in the Boss Blitz, I’m saying those are all examples of coordination that you don’t see in zergs. At all.

The Boss Blitz has at least some of those elements of cooperation. You need people on Baines to switch to DPSing the turret when it pops (also need someone to actually call it out and someone to keep her poisoned to reduce the healing); you need people on Shurrak to pick up those bird seeds and toss them to the side/back; you need people on Pyro to alternate their reflects/feedbacks to keep the entire team from getting wiped. Only Kuraii, Wiggins, and Sparc can be considered AA-spam fests, but even then you need everyone in the map to cooperate by holding damage and waiting for other teams to get their bosses down low enough to finish them all at the same time.

I’ve seen plenty of gold boss blitz turn silver because some lightbulbs refuse to pay attention and continue DPSing Kuraii to death (which usually causes the centaur stampede to prevent people from taking down Baines’ healing turret) or ignore the upscaling warning and zerging nearby bosses. You don’t get gold by just having 15 or fewer people at each boss spam autoattack, you’d be lucky to even get silver that way.

It’s an event that requires minimal teamwork that can be achieved through communication; if new players “learn” they’re not supposed to help people in other open-world content through this then it’s because they simply can’t read, not because of the event design itself.

That being said the event design isn’t flawless, it does punish large groups for the failures of a few and doesn’t have mechanisms to enforce splitting (other than the punishment) or communication.

Bias.4306:

In The Queen’s Pavillion scaling has made it so that people are encouraged to NOT work together.

This seems opposite to every other design decision made in GW2 where teamwork is encouraged. Was this a conscious design decision by ANET…? Or did they just mess up?

Working together implies that there’s some sort of communication going on between players to accomplish a goal; be it a coordinated effort to fire off combos, who will be reflecting first, when to attack, who to attack, etc. etc. There is no such communication in a zerg, it is quite simply a mass of players facerolling the number keys with everyone doing their own thing, which is more harmful to the concept of “working together” than the current incarnation of the pavilion because it teaches people everything can be won even if they ignore everybody else and focus on tagging for credit.

The zerg does not work in Teq, it does not work in Triple Trouble, and it doesn’t work in Boss Blitz for good reason: they are all content that require players to work together to beat, contrary to your mistaken assertion.

It’s like that to discourage zergs, just have to listen to map chat and find out which bosses need people; in all of the gold blitzes I’ve been in, there are always, always bosses that need more people, but there are people who just wander to whichever boss they’re comfortable with and ignore everything else.

Case in point:

Anton.1769:

In that case: Come to any boss hit him 20 sec and go afk to waipoint or go to arena

In the rare (and unlikely) case that all bosses are full, go to Pyroxis. When there’s a team of guardians and mesmers on him he always burns down too quickly, so he can actually take some extra upscaling.

You’ll notice that Charr and Asura female bodies are simply slimmer versions of their male counterparts, but with comparable proportions, that’s why they use the same armor models. Human, norn, and silvari would actually require male and female armors to have their meshes heavily tweaked to avoid really bad texture stretching/scrunching issues.

It’s about as unlikely to happen as all armor skins being made available for all weights; it’s too much work to go back and update all the meshes and doubles the number of meshes (and possibly textures) in game, which will make loading times even worse.

Beldin.5498:

Ok I Did It.2854:

Dungeon rewards are fine, if you take an average group say it takes them 10-15 mins per path, allowing for errors etc, you can run say, AC p1/2, hotw P1, CoF P1,2 in say 90 mins, this would get you about 5-7gold + drops

Thats however 5-7 new generated gold, thats the problem.

Do the FGS train, and you have maybe 1g as new generated gold in that time +drops, maybe even less now. The last time i did the train was before the last nerf, and there i had made 2g30s pure gold after 4 hours.

And there are also not 1000s of people do the train. In EU we have normally maybe 2-3 instances now of FGS .. all in all i would say there are maybe 100-200 people doing the train at the main time.

I would argue there are a lot more people on trains than there are in dungeons in the NA servers. The dungeon LFG is completely empty when it’s not US prime time, however there are trains in QD and FGS 24/7.

And, as I stated before, ArenaNet chose to nerf train loot instead of dungeon loot, so I see that as suggestive that dungeons are not the primary contributor to inflation.

It’s just bugged, it’s a different version of the original back item and they simply forgot to add it to the recipe.

Nadha.6097:

Some mechanics seem to be bugged, like Deadeye Dunwell Oneshoting me in spite of feedback dome twice, but still got him in the end.

Yeah, Dunwell’s headshot isn’t considered a projectile, so reflects don’t work on it. You’ll need an invulnerability, evade, or interrupt skill, which is annoying.

On the other hand Struger’s meat tosses are considered projectiles, so you can reflect those. Thanks for the consistency, Anet.

It’s a problem with both design and players.

On one hand you have the mindless zerg who, for whatever reason, are unable to coordinate; on the other hand you have an event design that makes it easy for a mindless zerg to ruin coordinated efforts.

I’m assuming Anet is using some sort of sadistic Pavlovian technique to try and wean people away from zerging, but I think they’re overestimating the average zerger’s ability to adapt to new strategies.

Maxite.6102:

Anyway. Overall the rewards seem out of proportion given the challenge/length to other stuff in the game. Maybe the internal data shows otherwise, but that’s my take.

Well, the fact that Anet chose to nerf trains instead of dungeons does suggest that.

Dungeons may be the most individually rewarding, but you’re failing to consider what percentage of the population does dungeons vs. running trains. It doesn’t matter if a dungeon can make 100 people 1g in ten minutes if a train can make 1,000 people 20s in ten minutes (I don’t know the actual numbers, this is just for examples sake) – particularly when the former is limited to 1/day per path and the latter being repeatable until exhaustion.

Additionally, nerfing dungeons would do nothing but make dungeons friendlier; all it would do is reduce the number of people looking for speed run PUGs, make them less tolerant toward anyone who slows them down, and more prone to kicking at the slightest offense. Ultimately you would wind up running with the same people you’ve run with until now, except have an even worse experience when you try to join speed runners.

So bad idea overall.

Anyone else find it amusing that we’re rewarded with the Tier 1 boss’ title for beating the Tier 3 boss?

“Congratulations for reaching first place, here is your third place title!”

Don’t get me wrong, I like “The Blazing Light” and it makes thematic sense that your title is the opposite of Liadri’s title, but seems like a shame you don’t get to take the titles from your defeated foes. Well, except the Tier 2 boss fight, don’t know what title would be associated with them.

The Ravenous?
Crew of One?
Pirate Puncher?

BulletNG.7069:

So does this mean we should hold onto them in hopes they will come out with another vendor or should we just exchange them now?

Just hold onto them until the end, it’s not like they can possibly update the vendor to give worse rewards.

Golden Dragon.1785:

Do you think my lvl 60+ mesmer can do it?

Oof, I don’t know. I haven’t leveled a character to 80 after the patch, so I don’t know how big a difference that shift in traits impacts difficulty. I was running a condi build mesmer (normally zerk, but my alt build has more vitality) and I think the torment from the grandmaster trait helped burn down the captain and first mate a lot given how much chasing they did.

I managed to kill them with my mesmer, so I can’t really give any suggestions on how to do it with an elementalist, but I found that keeping Stiches for last actually helped a lot. She has a huge AoE heal every ten seconds or so, but when she dies they all gain regeneration every second, which is actually a far bigger pain to deal with when you can’t sustain DPS due to constant running/dodging.

I went Captain → First Mate → Gunner → Stitches. Captain first because I wanted to stop his buffing, first mate second because the melee was annoying and I could handle the poison, and gunner third… well, simply because I wanted to leave Stitches for last. Definitely don’t kill gunner first though, he gives them all pistols on death; just bear with his AoEs until you get the first two down.

The pavilion should either have enforced splitting like the Marionette or Tricolor Knights fights, or it should have enforced failure conditions.

10 minutes to get gold, 20 minutes to get silver, 30 minutes to get bronze, anything after that is a reset; given each boss takes at least ten minutes, this will encourage splitting to some degree and also discourage people from randomly donating for an early start.

New players get to enjoy something that you did before.

If you find yourself raging over something like that rather than being happy for them, then it’s time to put down the keyboard and re-evaluate your priorities in life.