I see a lot saying go DPS, but I would recommend a 100% Fear/Terror build with Reaper’s Protection. Though I recently switched out of it, that trait saved my bacon many many times when roaming.
I remember one thief coming up toward me when I was taking out a yak, apparently didn’t realize that the 20 bleeds on the Yak would be on him if he got too close. After those hit him, he tried to open with a stun, got hit with the Reaper’s Protection and was dead in about 2 seconds, it was the one of the funniest things I’d ever seen.
The 90 sec cooldown on RP is too long for me in the bigger fights I’m in, but just for roaming its almost always going to be up when you run into other roamers. 4 Seconds of Fear should be over 4000 damage with good condition damage, and if they blow a stun breaker to get out of it, fine, you have two more fears to CC them with.
Long fears are also great for sending people over the many cliffs and drop offs in WvW. Likewise, taking Spectral Walk is good for roaming as you can drop off cliffs if you need to get away double tap it right before you hit the ground, no damage.
Toughest thing is not necessarily winning most lone encounters, but rather avoiding ones you have no hope for, 3 on up to a zerg. But if you switch on your Speed Signet while out of combat, you can get away from most groups, or at least have enough time to port if a big group is chasing you. Golem charge is also good if you have to run, but also offensively as an opener to load up a lot of conditions and make someone blow a cleanse right away.
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I don’t know about the Hinterlands in specific, does seem like a decent choice, but I like the idea in principle a lot of using an existing map for a new WvW map. Since they said making a new map is the most time consuming thing.
Well here you have maps already done in the world, and thus all the hard pathing and positional hurdles for characters and mobs already all figured out. Just yank out the NPC’s, find a few spots for towers and such and you are ready to go.
Only thing is they would have to get over the idea of a map being perfectly symmetrical, as the Borderlands are, and EB is still kind of made in that way to a degree. This map might have much stronger advantages to starting on one side or the other. Maybe some minor tweaks could be done to the terrain if necessary to make any more restricted starting regions a bit more open or accessible.
Kinda long but interesting to hear some back and forth Necro talk.
I can’t believe no one liked Corrupt Boon in WvW, I love it. Then again I roam fairly often and its wonderful for 1v1s. Because most opponents pop their buffs at critical moments, and when you instantly corrupt them they are in even more trouble, and often start panicking or running.
BiP is 4 bleeds but if they get cleared all you get is the might. Someone mentioned BiP extending a 30 second bleed for great damage, but the increase to damage only lasts as long as the buff, as soon as the might drops so does your bleed damage.
I also found the talk of cleansing to be over emphasized. Last week a well timed Corrupt Boon helped the group I was in take down a very organized AoN roaming group, who love to pile buffs. Sure their next rotation might get rid of the debuffs, but if you have an equal sized force piling damage as soon as that corrupt hits, the lead target will be dead long before the next rotation. Wrecking spearheading Guardians, Ele’s or Thieves, often messes up an entire team’s plan. And reality is most groups are not that coordinated, maybe in tier 1 or 2 it would be a more consistent problem, but in T3/4 I find most groups don’t counter it quickly at all.
Also feel you guys let Anet off the hook a bit saying just don’t be alone if you are a Necro. Why not, certain professions shouldn’t have a built in advantage all the time for a specific situation. Especially not when Anet’s philosophy on the Necro read as them claiming that as an attrition class, Necro’s are very hard to escape. No we really aren’t that hard to escape from and this area should be shored up to help us counter-act those mobility classes. We should be the hard counter to their mobility, or at least be on 50/50 footing to stop them from getting away. Right now there aren’t enough tools for that, if they are competent at all. If we had one stun (other than golem knockdown, who is always dead in WvW) or immobilize beside on the melee dagger, it would go a long way toward helping their vision be true.
I tend to agree that a lot of belly aching about the Necro is overblown. But at the same time, we aren’t quite there yet. We need a few small minor tweaks (and still lots of bug fixes) to put us in an ideal place.
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First I’ve heard of toughness not affecting LF. Pretty sure I remember previous tests others did that said they did find toughness affected it.
I do remember seeing that conditions might do more damage against you in LF due to damage being rounded to a percentage or some such. But just because LF is displayed as a percentage, probably for the sake of making the decay easier to manage, doesn’t mean behind the scenes it can’t be working just like normal health.
This isn’t specific to well builds, which I can’t speak on, but Rangers were especially tough opponents because of their condition clearing and regen. BM rangers that were running Empathic Bond were pretty much hard counters to condition builds because their pet took all conditions off them every 10 seconds and the conditions just disappeared.
However in the recent patch this skill was brought back in line, only takes 3 conditions and I believe the pet actually gets the conditions now. One thing you can do is stack conditions on the pet, where they are more likely to stick, then epidemic them to the ranger.
If they are running the heal aoe that lasts 15 seconds, regens and clears conditions, best to just leave the area or make them chase. Otherwise, obviously you want to cc, chill and immobilize them as best as possible if they are trying to keep distance.
Try not to let them flank while the pet is distracting you or turn your back.
I don’t like when its tossed around casually as a 2nd life bar or as above, people saying ‘now you have 69k heatlth’. No you don’t really because of the constant attrition on life force. It’s a second life bar as if there were invisible mobs beating on you constantly.
The natural decay rate strongly encourages you to use LF as a bounce in and out mechanic, which is much different than just having an alternate mode you can hang around in for defense. Of course you can do that, but then its going to drain extremly fast.
How much HP of every Necro LF bar is lost in a fight just due to attrition, well that depends how good you are at absorbing damage, as well as timing battles such that you don’t have to use it as a sponge too often. But no matter how good you are you are always going to lose a not insignificant amount of LF to decay.
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From what I have read Poison once stacked in intensity in one of the early betas. That would have made it a real strong dot affect, that could have made our conditions a lot more dangerous more quickly.
However once they changed it to duration, I don’t understand why the durations are so short on most of the abilities. If the idea was for it to actually diminish healing it needs to be on more than 2 seconds, from the last chain in the scepter which you dont always even get to in a fight, or not many times if so.
Chillblains is better at 6 seconds, but its still not going to be on an enemy for that much of a combat. Unless you trait very heavily for duration, but I think that should be part of the design inherently, instead of sacrificing a lot of other areas which you need to do for extra duration. Food will help a lot too, but you are giving up other options like the OP healing foods that were just recently (finally) reduced in strength.
Where a lot of companies are skimping nowadays is writing. They don’t hire writers instead they just have devs (like those that design quests) write all the dialogue and story stuff.
Not saying this is or is not the case here, but I tend to agree the game is pretty heavily tilted toward the silliness side.
I’ve been messing with some settings and just discovered something very interesting. When I unchecked “Depth Blur” in the post processing options, this problem seemed greatly alleviated, if not gone.
For some reason this option seems to be bugged in some areas and cause everything to become blurry not just distant objects. Here is a thread on it in the bugs forum
Anyone who has blurred characters up close (esp big ones it seems) I would encourage to uncheck this option and see if it helps. All this time I’ve had this on and just assumed it was poor rendering.
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Professions built around more conditional and attrition playstyles get hammered by the CC immune and resistant buffs the most. Seems they want everything just to grow toward most DPS burst strategies which is a simplistic way of playing.
Max settings help, but even on highest, armors still look better on small characters than large.
And less than max, the difference is stark. Most people cannot max out everything especially with the new bosses/guesting creating zergs all over the place, as well as in WvW where they still haven’t figured out culling and systems grind to a crawl once big battles erupt.
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That skins get stretched so far over Charr and Norn characters (even big humans) it really detracts from the overall look of characters and the art I think.
Players that have chosen to make their characters larger than average suffer especially, I think they look ridiculous, like low quality blurred messes actually.
Thankfully I chose a human and didn’t maximize size either, actually decreased it, so most of the skins look detailed and sharp on my character (occasionally still notice it on some animations even there), but this stretching effect really turns me off from playing Charrs or Norn on any future alts.
I don’t know how possible this is, but in the future perhaps if armor was first designed to be sharp at larger sizes, it would be easier to scale it down than to scale small armor up. Whatever the solution, one should be sought and considered for future skin releases.
The champion armor is great for the female characters but I think they totally dropped the ball for the male, and it needs a re-design.
I wish Rodgort scepter glowed fire red instead of more a weak sickly pink.
Anet claims they don’t want to play ‘whack-a-mole’ with good professions and builds, and instead do incremental changes.
But these changes are too long and too incremental in the opposite direction of being hasty, and we have several professions and builds ( most mentioned in the OP) that have now been neglected for months and months. Each new patch comes and goes and they make one tiny step in the right direction but which still does not balance these professions nor make new builds on the scene become as viable as the very few that are most effective.
At the rate they are going we aren’t going to have balance for another 6 months. How long does it take to analyze the data and trends and realize things that are obvious to the majority of the playerbase. The same few professions and builds within them are just becoming more and more popular while others from less favorable characters quit and re-roll to those seen as most effective or OP.
Stack limit and speed run desires cap condition potential in dungeons. And too much removal limits it in PVP.
Condition damage is the weak link in the game’s balance right now and needs a significant buff.
You should never get placed in a queue from your own server due to people from other servers.
My server has overflow up for 3 different events in 3 different zones, one as far as 30 minutes away. It’s getting ridiculous.
Guesting is going to have to be severely restricted on how often you can do it.
Excellent. Seems like they listened to feedback, assuming its not completely random. No forced dungeons. Kudos to the dev team on this one then.
Can you imagine if the first Ascended weapons and or Armor is released in WvW. Dem PvEers will lose their kitten! Hahaha
Do it!
The backlash on the general forums would be popcorn worthy indeed.
But I’d be happy with just fairness of acquisition across the board for all modes.
Glad to hear more skins though.
Where is the ascended gear acquisition methods? It’s just incredibly ironic they only want to give passive benefits via WvW progression that don’t affect combat on a 1 to 1 basis, yet its perfectly fine for PVE based reward players to come in WvW and affect combat with better stats, and no way to get them in WvW.
Submitted in game yesterday and I added a thread about it in the bugs forum.
Runes with Condition Duration bonuses (Lich, Lyssa, Mad King, etc) are not working and having no effect on condition duration since the latest patch.
Also Rune of the Necromancer 6 piece bonus (20% Fear Duration) is also no longer working.
Tested numerous times in the Mists and normal game world, taking armor on/off and logging out, nothing fixes it.
Here is a thread with further info from the Necromancer Forum.
For any type of group fighting or mob farming I can’t let go of Dagger, that #5 is a AoE is a big factor since you can tag up to five people with 2 more bleeds, and usually long bleeds (mine would be 20 seconds, well if the runes weren’t bugged now), and then double all those people up again once epidemic is used. The Focus 5 seems more of something you bring just to deal with a guardian, elementalist or someone spearheading a fight with lots of buffs.
The chill is nice but most will already have access to a similar one from Chillblains that can be spread.
You are also losing access to weakness unless you always use the 3 —> 4 combo on staff, but that isn’t always ideal since Putrid Mark you don’t really want to waste all the time. more conditions are always good to help bury bleeds and such so they don’t get removed as easily.
So they fixed the bug then on nightmare and lich runes to give only 10% total duration (instead of the old 20%) I assume or they give nothing now?
They just do nothing, like the Giver’s stuff. As noted above its easy to test with Blood is Power since its so long, even 10% should give you 3 more seconds soon as you look on the debuff under the mob, but nope nothing.
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Tested some more and found Bleed Runes are still ok, as well as Might ones, though that doesn’t really concern us usually.
The Condition Duration and Fear Duration are the bugged ones at the moment, and until they are fixed I’ll have to swap to something else, but its ridiculous because when they fix this I don’t want to go buy new Lyssa runes, they are not cheap. Maybe I’ll just spend tons of saved karma on a second set of Rabid Stuff instead.
Condition damage and builds already have enough disadvantages in this game for them not to allow silly bugs like this to slip through the cracks and screw us even more.
Anyway, I’ve submitted both of them via the bug report.
My testing seems to indicate the rune set bonuses for condition duration are no longer doing anything.
Doing some routine tests in the mists, I noticed by Barbed Precision no longer ticking twice on procs (at 100% bleed duration) and my scepter auto attack only ticking 8 times when it used to tick 10 (5 seconds + 100%)
I messed around some more with traits and armor and everything affecting duration and noticed if I took all my armor off, my scepter still bled for the exact same duration 8 ticks. Which was just the remaining 40% from food and 10% from spite.
Would appreciate if some of the other necros out there with these armor runes could test this out.
I had heard that Giver weapons were supposedly bugged for giving their duration bonus, I really hope this hasn’t happened to runes as well, as it would be a big damage nerf for a lot of us, and overall effectiveness nerf for all conditions affected by these.
Edit: Necromancer Runes x6 also appear to be broken. Putting them on top of Master of Terror and 30% Spite, they will not give the last 20% to make Fear last 2 seconds and for Terror to hit twice.
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Not much to add other than those (cond based) who do try focus for extended period please come back and continue to share your opinions after a while vs dagger off hand. I haven’t been convinced enough to give it a real trial yet.
Patience, communication and perseverance.
Goes without saying that intelligence and understanding of WvW is essential but even there sometimes dogged determination wins out over the better strategist that gets mad the first time he feels his team messes up, and quits the map.
Scouting over glorifies it a bit, its more sentry duty to be honest. Sure you can run circles around your assigned tower if you want, but you really can’t afford to let a zerg slip on a door or wall at all. Once 3 or 4 rams are down, without being interrupted, the place is likely gonna fall before reinforcements show up anyway, espeically if WPs aren’t established. Not like those are hard to contest ahead of time either.
It could be helpful if I presume you mean this is only available to greatly undermanned sides.
You can sort of use the quaggans like this already. Go take the node and follow their little team to a camp, and let them help you take it out much faster. Not that camps are hard to solo, but it could work something like that to buff a small attacking force a bit vs a tower or keep.
People don’t want to upgrade as much because if no one is going to sit and camp on it and sentry for the place, it can be gone in 2 minutes virtually unnoticed.
Game is becoming more like musical keeps, failed Warhammer style.
I have to agree. There’s too many now, and there’s no place to store them all. It’s going to start occupying a lot of space in inventories and banks if they keep this up.
Not only that, its downright confusing. Even for us forum readers that probably have a good handle on the game. Just think how overwhelming all these systems are to a new gamer.
And Colin was just talking in a recent interview about how they are surprised starting players have been saying the game is hard to learn, and they are looking at ways for helping that along as it rolls out in new regions.
Well duh, each content patch introduces whole new systems, when they have perfectly good existing ones to just build upon.
I thought the Krait seemed a lot more powerful. Encountered them in WvW, on the center BL island where its usually easy to solo upwards of 10 of them if you have to, and they knocked my health down so fast I had to run. I don’t remember them having stacks of 5 and 10 might before.
I think it will have the reverse affect. Now 25people can accomplish something. Before with 25people against a blob, you might as well pack it. If you’re remotely successful against the blob, they just treb you to death with swirling wind protection. Now 25people can make some dent in the map and encourage other people to come out and fight.
It will have the reverse affect when the blob is 50 people – yes.
But on smaller maps, 25 people are the blob, and now smaller populations have no idea where that blob is at. That 25 man blob which is the preeminent zerg on many maps at many times, especially off hours, just got way harder to defend. And its these tiers and time periods where it is that much harder to scout, because one, you don’t have enough people for it, and two, its even more boring and thankless because literal hours can go buy with nothing happening due to the lower populations.
I’m getting the idea that this system is not inherently good or bad but all depends on it accurately depicting the size of forces on a map. Perhaps Anet can come up with a way to adjust the orange swords to kick off only when a certain percentage of the enemies force is at a location. Then for what one server is a small group, and another is a ‘blob’ can be balanced to always mean the same thing relative to forces fighting on a map at the time.
Great more badges. I already have lots of badges, but can always use even more (I think?).
Please give us something good to buy with them now, Ascended, and/or more cosmetic skins!
It will take more work to hold onto a keep/tower. You can’t just blob and win. Small group of 20 people are now a force to be reckoned with.
It’s all relative though. In the lower tiers and off hours its now even easier to blob up and win.
Say you have 25 people per side, the defending side is not going to have enough men to cover their map in scouting and still hold off that attacking zerg. The attackers send a few thieves to contest 2 fake points, hit their real target with 20 people, its almost a sure ninja.
Eventually you probably get a 50/50 map. And maybe this is a way from Anet to purposely give disadvantage to the winning teams, to make defending harder (as if it isn’t thankless enough already), but seems like a lazy way out, excuse way of balancing.
In most tiers this is going to lead to less actual player vs player fighting, less ‘WvW’ and more PvDoor, more musical keep trading.
When they announced karma as the game was being developed, it sounded like an amazing step forward. Truly next gen MMO thinking.
Whatever you do in the world, whatever quest, you get this currency called karma and it piles up as you play. Use it now for something at level, or save it down the road for a rainy day. But no matter which direction I went, or what quest types I picked, I would get this same currency that at the end, had the same value as what someone else got by doing something totally different than me, that they liked instead.
Now its practically worthless.
When the game launched think of all the ways you could get Best in Slot gear, playing the way you chose.
- Via Drops
- Via Crafting (now ruined thanks to Ascended)
- Via Dungeon Tokens
- Via Trade Post
- Via WvW Badges
- Via Karma Vendors (that could not be bought with real money via gems)
Play the way you want! And still gear up!
Why didn’t they stick with this? They traded in this awesome system that did everything they initially claimed as their philosophy, for a grindy, and in many parts ‘not fun’ treadmill, that makes you jump through hoops and frequently do things you don’t prefer in the game, just to progress along with everyone else.
Even if they did feel it necessary for a new tier of gear, there was no reason it could not have followed the same currencies, just taking many more of those currencies to set up the proper timetable they wanted. And still allowed the player to play the game the way they liked and not fall behind or miss out, for not liking this or that specific game mode.
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I want to contrast this new system with exotics at launch. Since most people are going to be doing dailies for laurels and to use them to gear up to ascended.
At launch think about all the ways you could acquire BiS exotics when you hit 80, and as well as all items prior to 80. You could get them in drops, you could craft them (awesome), you could buy them via tokens from completing dungeons, you could purchase them via karma which you gained from every quest you did in the game, or you could even buy them off the trade post if you simply liked gaining gold the most. Heck you could stand in one spot and kill the same mobs over and over and still progress if that is what you loved doing.
This was great and a breath of fresh air compared to previous games that set you in lockstep path toward certain rewards. Some might say well exotics were too easy to get, they had to make the next thing harder. Fine, but it could have been harder and still achievable in all the same methods that exotics were. Just set the rarity on drops such that the low number would cause finding them or buying them to be very expensive and take a lot of gameplay. Set the mats to craft the next level stuff at 3x as difficult. Up the karma price drastically. That’s all fine, at least it would be gameplay of the type you choose in playing toward these things (notice I said playing and not working).
Heck look at crafting now, there is hardly any reason to even max out most trade crafts and Anet has admitted this themselves, and its because they released something much better than what you can craft and partially ruined its purpose.
Anet already had a ‘directed gameplay’ option prior to FoTM even, which became the first big directed play, and they are called legendaries. This was for the hardcore gamers to have to go and do specific tasks all over the game world and quite lengthy and arduous tasks. But that was fine, the rewards were cosmetic, extremely rare, but still befitting of showing someone that did them had achieved something that really stood out and marked them. It’s ok to have directed gameplay for such an upper echelon type of quest or reward.
But now we are down to where just the basic new content being pushed out, and progressing along what Anet expects virtually every player to do, is becoming ‘directed gameplay’ itself. The theme park has suddenly gone from this expansive fun world where you went and did what you want, picked your own rides, to a guided tour, where someone is leading you along telling you to go do this or do that if you want your next pass.
Until enough don’t like it and complain and it gets changed again.
Every change Anet has made since the day they’ve announced GW2 has had haters.
Could probably count the amount of times they’ve actually reverted a change on one hand.They are well aware of the concept of a Vocal Minority.
Other players in this game don’t seem to realize though, that the people complaining on the forums represent less than 1% of their playerbase (I’m estimating, if the only argument against me you have is demanding proof for this number I will assume you’ve forfeit the actual conversation) and primarily most people only come to the forums if they have a problem.
This change has been in effect for one day, I think its a bit early to be declaring what side is the minority. The problems were easy to see coming when it was announced, certainly for lower tiers, which maybe you don’t care about, but we’ll see how its greeted as more time passes.
Maybe you will be right and a whole generation of selfless server loving sentries will pop up all over WvW.
The whole idea behind GW2 is to have fun. Being forced to sit in your own tower or keep because some thieves are putting white X’s on everything you own so you never know where to look… that isn’t fun. With 5 people required for orange you had a little bit of time luxury to check something out, but 20 – 25 can melt a door faster than you can run from “X” to “X”.
Yeah it might work if one person could no longer contest. 3 would probably be a good minimum number since it takes that many to put up a ram. If 2 want to make runs and keep the guards busy more power to them. Or maybe pop the silver if a combat or gate is being hit for over a minute in that case of less than 3.
White swords are usually a sign of enemy activity (even the darn thief hitting the door). If you look at the map a see a lot of white swords and assume there is no activity, well my friend, i think you’re ninja’ed a lot…
Think the swords had actually dropped for a while, but even if they were there, they were on garrison, and a player just coming in spawning at the citadel has to make a choice. If he choose the wrong direction he just wasted several minutes to port back and go the right way. Thus every single player having to ask when they entered the map.
The majority of the tiers simply cannot support the 25 man limit except for a few hours in primetime.
I offered another solution if they think the orange swords are too easy, make it part of the upgrade system, to have to pay for better alerts. The NPCs need to serve a purpose, it certainly isn’t fighting or defending. If everything should be up to the players, then there should not even be silver swords.
Strange… I recall EBay being alive at least until they got a beating once they reached T4 two weeks ago… People on there already gave up?
OP is either looking for large zerg fights or plays at an off hour timezone.
Looks more like his team is in 3rd place, and probably experiencing the usual fairfeather flight from the match when it looks decided.
I think its a common problem anywhere past tier 1 or 2. Matches are probably too long.
It would be interesting, and I think make for more compelling matches, if they had 2 matchups each week. One 3 day one for the weekend, and one 5 day one for the weekdays.
Until enough don’t like it and complain and it gets changed again.
Half the players roaming aren’t out there to scout, but to fight 1v1s, gank people, or find small scale engagements, they could care less where the zerg is going, what the score is either, and probably aren’t going to call out every time they see more than 5 people, let alone follow them.
It’s bad. This morning my server had about 20 people on the map, trying to retake garrison from maybe 15 defending. No commander on the map. For 30 minutes every person that came into WvW had no idea where the fight was and asked the same darn question about where to go, what is going on (probably more didn’t bother to ask and just left because it looked dead, no markers on the map). Got really old after about the 10th time in 10 minutes to repeat to each new person where to go.
In the old system, they’d simply have seen the orange swords denoting the back and forth skirmish that was going on in the field north of the garrison, and naturally gravitated over there.
It was a major hassle and hindrance and detracted from the gamemode and from getting players engaged and fighting each other.
Let’s take this example :
High tier and 70 people in map, put 10-15 people as scouts, you have sitll 55-60 left, you can make 3 zerg of 25 or less or just make 1 big blob, and defending with them is not a problem if 70 enemies attack
Middle tier: 40 people in map: put 10 as scouts, 30 left for zerg , 40-50 people attack, still bearable
Lower tier: 20-25 people: put 10 as scouts, 15 left for zerg. now if 25-30 people attack, thos e15 people will relaly have to be strong to be able to kill the enemiesNow who do you think it will affect more and who will it affect less ?
Indeed. Top tier you can easily find 10 out of 75 people to scout. You also probably have a lot more organization.
But even as far down as middle tier (where you don’t even have 40 on a map at many hours of the day) you aren’t going to find 1 out of 4 people that want to scout, or even have the right profession to scout.
Have to remember in lower tiers at low map population times, scouting could very well mean sitting in a keep or around it, for hours at a time. It’s not so bad higher up because there are more constant fights on all maps. At the least you’ll see small teams moving around and be able to call out information. Lower down, you might see no one for hours.
In tier 3 right now, there is one borderland that has not seen virtually any fighting since the weekend. But technically they should really have 5-10 scouts there just in case the other two factions decide to abandon their own defense and rush a zerg over there. But no one wants to do this. If you only have 2 hours to play WvW, are you going to spend it sitting on a tower watching the rabbits jump in a circle? That means no loot, no rewards, not even defending rewards. This is not exciting gameplay.
OP is totally on the mark. These are no longer things achieved just by playing the game as you would if you had no mind to a reward at the end or getting a carrot for spinning on a hamster wheel.
I don’t understand why GW2 needs these undesirable timesinks when this is not a subscription based game. This was why they claimed they wouldn’t need to put in grindy un-fun gameplay, because they didn’t need you to tip the register every month.
You would play the way you wanted, and naturally out of doing the things you enjoyed you would spend here or there on gems and push the game along that way.
There is just no reason I should have to go out to a field where I know NPC’s are going to die, and fight with a dozen other players to rez them, for what takes probably 15 minutes total round trip, because I need 10 revives. Or else not do it and have no path to what is now standing as a major part of progression in the game, which is gear treadmill.
For the specific example. it’s not that I don’t revive anyone in the course of a normal session. I may revive a few in WvW, I may revive a few in events, but often its not going to be 10. And by fact of knowing I will often fail to meet that goal, its easier (but not fun) to just go and get it out of the way separately. And such is the case for most of the dailies, they become a daily checklist, many a chore, that you have to do before you can go do the things in the game you really enjoy.
As the original post talked about, these should have been made much more generic. Kill 100 enemies. Complete 5 events. These are things that almost all players should trip over just by playing. But these more specific things like keg brawl and kill 25 underwater enemies, its just not necessary. So what if less people enjoy fighting underwater, it should not be foisted on everyone to have to experience that part of the game to progress.
Speaking as PvPer/WvWer I think you have a legitimate gripe. I actually don’t want players in WvW that don’t want to be there, aren’t contributing to the fight and are just trying to reach a vista or PoI. However players on my side are just as screwed, as they have to do dungeons / PVE grinds that they don’t like in order to gear up, or else face disadvantages against other players who are stronger.
So I don’t think either type of player should be forced to do things they don’t want to. WvW could have its own separate zone completion, and it should also have all its own unique ways to earn the things you can earn in PVE, including variety armor sets, gear, etc.
Anet advertised this game as play the way you want, no grinds, and that whatever style or mode you preferred, would be equally rewarded. But this has turned out not to be the case, and the farther we go, more content that comes out, the more they are dictating what you have to do to progress.