How many FPS game servers can handle more than 64 players? As far as I know, most FPS for the past 12-15 years have set the stable limit at 32, with 64 being configurable and not guaranteed. You would think that after that many years we would have games that could handle more players (more bandwidth, better hardware) but we don’t. Why? Because as time goes by more powerful games introduces more powerful gameplay mechanics which then add more load to the servers.
How much security and anti-cheat code existed in these older X more players games? How much projectile path and collision detection did they have? Skills and rules enforcement? Data transmission rate? Multi-system data collection and processing synchronizations?
You cannot seriously compare an FPS server to an MMO server. I can’t pretend I know how much work a single GW2 server does, but I imagine it’s doing a lot more than just sending updates for 64-128 players and their gun calculations like an FPS server would.
If you have a solid bunker to keep focus and tank, the other people can bring a single utility to the group; damage. The way the game currently stands, there is very little skill involved in any encounter. Learn a few dodges, have something that tanks and occasionally prevent healing. Nothing more is necessary.
You can’t soak a lot of the high difficulty Fractals. The best way to deal with it is to mitigate it as much as possible. Blind and Weakness are fantastic mitigation, especially when combined with Protection and Regeneration.
A thief in a dungeon is generally not being ‘useful’, regardless of their build. You just bring them for damage, much like you bring the typical warrior or elementalist for damage. Their build and utilities are most irrelevant, so long as they don’t constantly die and dish out a good portion of damage. In some situations, it is beneficial if the thief switches to particular utilities, such as poison on healing bosses. For the rest, upping precision and power with signets is a good thing. So long as they keep at least the stealth/heal skill on the healing slot, instead of the healing signet, they can get out of bad situations with that.
No one can do perma AoE weakness / blind like a Thief. Those alone, combined with their high damage, make them quite useful in a group. On top of that, they have the best blast finisher (spammable), and bring some pretty good secondary utility, like smoke screen and shadow refuge ressing.
Every time I hear about Spy Kits and Portal Guns, I cringe.
You should really get them out of dungeons, they’re doing a lot of harm to the game.
Portal gun allowed myself and a guildie to get a chest in fractals – we’d gotten locked in a cage and unlike the other cages, there was nothing to target inside or out to ‘break out’ of it. Someone luckily had a portal gun (we’d only found them the day before) and was able to port us out so we could claim end chest before moving onto next Fractal.
I’m glad they are there myself (I got a nice reward that chest!)
I should have been more clear, I’m not too concerned with portal gun, just spy kits, and combat stealth in general. Fire elemental powder is pushing the line a bit too, but at least they die quickly.
Are you bloody joking? That’s like saying consets shouldn’t be used in GW1. They were there for a purpose: to make things less tedious. In GW2, consumables are here to make things less tedious and a bit more entertaining. Same principle. They exist to inspire player ingenuity in getting around tough situations, rather than being railroaded into a certain playstyle. If a content designer believes that there should be only one way to get through an obstacle(his way), then he’s not doing a very good job at being a content designer. Doing so makes the content have zero entertainment and is a sign that the person in question is not particularly innovative. Tedium does not equal fun.
In a game about combat, having the most efficient way to reap the most rewards being “avoid combat”, something is seriously wrong.
You can’t compare GW1 to this. In GW1, you actually fought mobs. In GW2, you skip everything. I’m not saying that you should be forced to fight all the trash in a dungeon, because it is currently not worth the effort. In the future, the trash should be worth the effort.
Sorry you are too short-sighted to see anything past the current situation. I want this game to gradually increase in difficulty as GW1 did. I don’t want spy kits or other gamebreaking consumables to trivialize the efforts of the developers.
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It’s not about your PC, it’s about their servers. DAoC likely had to do two things: send out player information and calculate combat. GW2 has projectiles that can hit targets they’re not intended for. That means the servers now have to do collision detection as well. I won’t begin to speculate on the other things they probably have to do, but you have to give them some credit; there is likely a lot more to it than you think.
Personally, I’ve never experienced lag in live WvW. In BWE1, when three teams were attacking Stonemist, there were 10 second delays constantly. The culling, while annoying, fixes this problem temporarily while they work on a bigger solution. I think the alternative (lag) is much worse.
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You get them starting at 10.
PvE thieves should always have two signets on their bars (Malice & Agility), and there are very few exceptions where you wouldn’t (Hide in Shadows has situational use). Infiltrator’s is useful as a stunbreak with a decent passive. The others aren’t that great compared to Smoke Screen / Caltrops / Shadow Refuge.
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You can infuse an uninfused ring in the forge with fractal mats. I guess that means it’s still RNG, but you’ll probably have the materials you need by the time you need an infused ring.
Example 1; You can just corpse run, light the bonfire, die, repeat and accomplish the same thing can’t you?
Example 2; You can just die on the pressure plates and they will stay activated, can you not?
Example 3; The only thing this does is save time.
Spy Kits are great when you wish to save time. They do not let you do incredible amazing things that no one without spy kits would be able to do.
Corpse runs at least diminish your income. In Fractals, it has the added punishment of making your gear break, so if you’re dying a lot, you know you’re probably in over your head.
Regarding the dredge fractal, if you had corpses holding down the buttons, the player triggering the control panel would aggro the veteran, which would cause you to get hit and interrupted. The intended way is surely for someone to be alive and aggro the veteran so the control panel player does not get hit.
I don’t see stealth ressing as “saving time”, I see it as an easy way out of a potential wipe because you’re not playing well enough to survive normally.
I’ve never thought of it as “taking the skill out of” or “trivializing” the game, I think of it as an item for people (like me) who would rather not spend 2 hours in dungeons killing trash mobs. I don’t know about you but besides from being a waste of time, killing everything becomes annoying and boring after a while.
I don’t care about people skipping trash mobs, that will exist as long as combat stealth exists. I care about completely avoiding events with non-combat objectives, where you can skip the combat part because of spy kits.
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You should really get them out of dungeons, they’re doing a lot of harm to the game.
Um, no.
You can avoid every non-combat event in the game with a spy kit. Do you think it is skillful and adds to the game by being allowed to get past content that your group might not be capable of doing?
Example 1: Snowblind fractal. The Svanir waves at the first big bonfire are actually quite dangerous when you get to high difficulties, but it doesn’t matter, because you can just spy kit and do it without killing anything.
Example 2: Dredge. The button cage event is also pretty difficult when you get higher up, but same thing, spy kit and don’t kill a thing.
Example 3: Stealth ressing. You are almost never threatened by a party wipe when you can just stealth res anyone that dies.
And who knows what else it will trivialize in the future.
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Every time I hear about Spy Kits and Portal Guns, I cringe.
You should really get them out of dungeons, they’re doing a lot of harm to the game.
Warriors still bring more offense buffs to a party, I’m not going to argue that. A single warrior is all you need for perma fury with discipline banner, and you can get pretty close to the might cap as well.
The difference the high armor makes is honestly not that much. Warriors will take 7.4% less damage than a Thief (2127 / 1980). The health is the only big difference with survivability, and like I said, an Acrobatics spec can dodge much more often than a Warrior.
Shortbow’s AoE radius is much higher than a melee weapon. You can’t always clump things up tighly all the time, but Shortbows don’t need them clumped up, only kinda near each other.
In the time between Hundred Blade’s CD, I’ve done 4 6-9k Cluster Bombs (which hit 5 targets, as opposed to a Warrior’s 3), and probably 4 autoattacks, each dealing around 1.5k-2k a hit (to 3 targets). This is all from ranged too. On top of that, the Cluster Bombs are blast finishers, which is nice if you’re playing with an Ele.
For a single target, I’ll have dealt 3 C&D’s (8k each), 3 Backstabs (14k each), and a few autoattacks (probably another 10-15k~).
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Thieves don’t do double the damage of anyone else.
Thieves and Warriors both do similar damage. The difference between the two is that Thieves can easily do high DPS from range (Shortbow, and now dual Pistol), whereas Warriors only really do good DPS with Axe MH or Greatsword. Thieves are also less forgiving, due to their lower HP. They make up for this with the ability to dodge a lot more frequently than Warriors with an Crit/Acrobatics spec. 15k unloads / 8-9k cluster bombs are pretty common for me, and they’re both spammable almost indefinitely.
Back on topic:
Yes, Guardians are the best, but you only really need 1. Guardian damage doesn’t have the potential of others, so by stacking Guardians, you’re just making everything take longer than it needs to. I prefer balanced comps, but you don’t really need anything other than Guardians/Warriors/Thieves right now. With War/Thief/Guardian, you can get perma Regen, Protection, Weakness, and have a lot of access to blind if absolutely necessary. That’s all you really need, on top of projectile blocks.
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You probably get 1 of these tokens per tier, so you can get 4 a day (or more if you don’t care about exploiting).
About as impressive as a fart in a typhoon. You can do any encounter in fractals by just grinding at it – all the ‘hard’ encounters don’t reset (Blizzard Elemental, Dredge Doors, etc) on wipe.
Yeah, that certainly doesn’t help either. Also, everything that would be really hard if it reset properly, has a major exploit. Everything.
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No one thinks 60+ is impossible, you’re just not supposed to get past Jade Maw 50 without exploiting. It’s all the same after 40 anyways, agony damage on the normal bosses is capped at 72% hp/sec. The only thing that changes is mob levels.
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If you want to be super organized, you can all stack up on the Seal with the immunity bubble when the person with the hammer is breaking it, so you don’t get stunned.
This will different people to pick up the hammer each time, since everyone has a personal 2 minute cooldown on the immunity bubble.
As for the adds spawning nonstop, I don’t think it’s a bug. It just means you can’t hang out in that phase and kill all the adds before breaking the seal.
Necro will output good AoE damage while removing conditions, stripping boons, giving regeneration, and deliver good CC through cripple/chill/weakness.
What’s your definition of good?
A Thief can do 7-8k damage to 5 targets every 2 seconds indefinitely while blast finishing every time + 6k damage in autoattacks between clusters, and still have enough initiative to keep up AoE weakness. Necro doesn’t come anywhere close to that.
I have an 80 Necro and a Thief, and as far as damage is concerned, it really is incomparable. Necro utility is good, but you are doing damage 90% of the time, so damage means quite a bit.
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Thief:
- Does at least double the damage of a Necromancer, both AoE and single target
- Spammable AoE weakness
- Spammable blast finisher
- Spammable AoE blind if needed
- Stealth ressing
- Harder to play properly because of inherent low HP.
Necromancer:
- Can fear bosses to interrupt them
- Epidemic is good if you have a lot of conditions in your party
- Corrupt Boon is useful a lot of the time
- Can build towards good support (although not as good as Guardian).
- Easy to play properly with high HP and death shroud.
Depends on what you need exactly.
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You are making the dc issue sound like rocket science. But the fix doesn’t need to be hardcore. As long as there is a way for you to get back in, its ain’t that big of an issue:
The player is in a party— Yes
The player has finished all bosses the party finished in current instance — YesThen let the player rejoin the party in fractals.
There should be plenty of easy and quick ways to fix it. Again the problem is priority, and Anet just don’t see fixing the broken FTOM mechanism before removing the shortcut, increasing the difficulty, adding veteran mobs and reducing rare item drops is only logical. Their way of approaching the problem is beyond me.
Why don’t they hire you right now, you have all the answers! And you know the internals of their game better than they do!
Player with lower health will outlast high health player at agony check if they both heal the same. Does it make any sense in any mmo game? And defense is of course ignored.
The fact that agony is percentage based is not a problem, as the alternatives are worse. Agony itself is not a bad mechanic, considering how easy it is to avoid almost everything in this game with kiting / projectile blocks / dodge button, and how easy it is to mitigate damage with weakness / protection. Agony resist, however, is not a particularly exciting mechanic.
As for making sense, it’s familiar to Guild Wars players. 55 HP monks (when normal health was 500-600) were the best tanks for a long time, until Shadow Form Assassins started popping up.
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developers are not programmers?
So basically what you are saying is there is AnetD and AnetP. They have different priority list and isolated to each other. So when AnetD screw up big time, Anet really shouldn’t be taking the blame. Hmmm, sounds very logical to me.
The people who design the dungeons use scripting tools. They are not programmers. The programmers are the ones who program all the stuff they can do with the tools. The issues fixed seem to me like something that can be fixed using scripting tools. Therefore, the programmers can be working on fixing the disconnect issue, while the dungeon developers fix stuff inside the actual dungeon.
Those types of issues can be solved by the dungeon developers.
The disconnect issue is the kind of thing that would be solved by programmers.
Two very different sets of people.
Of course 50+ agony demolishes you when there are only 2 rings and a backpack in the game… this dungeon was designed as a long-term dungeon that you can progress further as they add more ascended gear and as they introduce more variety through new fractals. It’s not a dungeon you’re suppose to “beat”, especially with only 3 ascended slots currently available.
It’s easy to think that way if you haven’t done Jade Maw 50, however, the dungeon isn’t actually working like that.
Here are some numbers for you to think about
40-49 bosses with 0 agony resist – 72% hp/sec
Jade Maw 40-49 with 0 agony resist – 72% hp/sec
40-49 bosses with 25 agony resist – 45% hp/sec
Jade Maw 40-49 with 25 agony resist – 45% hp/sec
Now, get ready to have your mind blown
50-59 bosses with 0 agony resist – 72% hp/sec
Jade Maw 50-59 with 0 agony resist – 1172% hp/sec
50-59 bosses with 25 agony resist – 45% hp/sec
Jade Maw 50-59 with 25 agony resist – 1050%~ hp/sec (I didn’t bother figuring out the exact number on this one)
Do you see where it all falls apart? It’s obvious they don’t want you to get past 50, but the way it has been implemented makes no sense at all. It should continue scaling up gradually like it had been, but it doesn’t.
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Steam has to take a cut of microtransactions, or something. I don’t remember the specifics. So, it’s unlikely that you’ll see it on Steam.
Difficulty 50 should follow a natural progression, like the other 4 tiers with agony before it.
I thought the point of Fractals was that it would get harder and harder until you didn’t have enough agony resistance to feasibly get any farther. That’s certainly not the case right now. 50 feels the same as 40-49, except Jade Maw goes from hitting you for 40% hp/sec to well over 1000% hp/sec.
Are you sure
I won’t deny what I’ve done. My group has pretty much stopped at 53 though, there’s no point, and it’s obvious that they don’t want you to be there.
This probably deserves a topic of its own, since I kinda derailed this thread pretty hard earlier.
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Sounds like The Deep, and it will probably happen sometime.
Agony with base HP would just be a flat damage amount that goes up with difficulty, meaning that vitality is now a way to mitigate it. That would make vitality better, rather than making healing power better the way it is now. I don’t see a difference, really, and I prefer it the way it is so that it affects everyone equally, since base HP is quite different between professions.
I think the real issue is the lack of gear choices, where you can’t get certain combos without vitality, or certain combos with healing power.
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highly doubtful. If anything if ANet was smart they would increase the price. Or make a sale of them to rake in the cash.
As fun as it is to throw around conspiracy theories, can you imagine the negative reaction they would face if that was the only way to get past an unbeatable barrier? That would cross the “pay2win” line. You should give ANet more credit than that.
Even then, when more people catch on to the current situation (Jade Maw 50 killing your entire party in 2 seconds when the agony from the other d50 bosses hit for d40 values), there is probably going to be a big negative reaction about it being bad game design to literally block your players from progress, especially when you can see that there are levels after 50.
At 50+, the agony ticks are so great you need things that can res you from dead state, like revive orbs or I believe the ranger pet might work if it hasn’t been fixed.
I strongly believe that any way to get you out of defeated state while on the Jade Maw platform is the kind of thing deemed an exploit, and will be removed/fixed/whatever.
FWIW, I believe that keeping one person alive through agony on the drop down is legitimate (barely), as that does require some coordination. If they wanted to make it so you had to actually keep at least one person alive on the transition during the fight, then the boss should fully reset HP/phases between attempts, like other typical MMO encounters. I don’t believe they have the capability of doing this yet, however.
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Dont get hit? Or if jade maw, I assume 1 person can probably just not be on the final platform, I dont think the maws agony hits the entire level.
I was talking about Jade Maw. Your idea will probably end will the person jumping down to res and getting agony applied.
You dont need exploits for it, just the reviving orb from the gem shop.
That will probably get fixed too.
please also look into upping the cap of fractal relics as well. currently at lvl 55 it is capped at 15 per boss which is the same as it was in the fotm 4x level.
Have you considered that it doesn’t go up because you’re not supposed to be able to complete 50?
It doesn’t matter if your not “suppose to” be able to beat 50, his group did, so reward them for it.
You can’t skill your way past 1172% hp/sec. You’re saying that exploits should be rewarded.
please also look into upping the cap of fractal relics as well. currently at lvl 55 it is capped at 15 per boss which is the same as it was in the fotm 4x level.
Have you considered that it doesn’t go up because you’re not supposed to be able to complete 50?
I wish the other Fractal final bosses scaled with difficulty as well as Cliffside and Volcano. Those two bosses actually require a semblance of strategy and some player skill. A few bosses require a bit of strategy (Uncategorized, Jade Maw, Dredge) , some don’t require anything (Snowblind, Underwater, Ascalon, Swamp), even at 50.
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You can do 40-49 fine with the gear available. Agony there is 72% a tick with no resist. With 25 resist, it’s down to around 40-something (I haven’t tested this one extensively, but I know I can take 3 hits).
The funny thing is, even the 50 Fractals bosses’ agony hits for 72% per second. It didn’t go up at all. Jade Maw, however, kills your entire party in 2 seconds flat.
50 is a brick wall, you’re not supposed to get past it (I realize there are questionable methods to get past it).
To be fair, Cliffside final boss was always the hardest at higher difficulties, but not many people saw him since they likely exploited.
Quite frankly, more bosses need to be at his level when you’re doing difficulty 30+. Only Volcano/Cliffside scale properly with difficulty, since they involve large numbers of dangerous adds.
The sheer lag from about 70 vets on the screen doing their attack animation was enough to kill us alone.
That means you are hitting the seal too slow.
Yep, Jade Maw is a gating mechanism.
Fun fact: Jade Maw 50 hits for 1172% of your health every second.
Currently lvl 30 and lvl40 daily chests do not reward infused rings \ weapons skins – only non-infused rings, which can as well be obtained from lvl10 chest.
I’ve received two infused rings from 30 dailies.
offtopic. get a ranger in your group
Regarding Fractals, I hope you know how silly of a request that is for groups of players who play amongst themselves.
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This includes alot of items, food, and gem shop items. Multiple gear sets.
If you say you res orb on Jade Maw, I will not be impressed
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T3 and T4 can drop ascended infused rings in the daily, as well as fractals skins. T3 drops shards for mystic forging. I haven’t seen any special drops from T4 yet (only at 31).
Loot overall does seem worse the higher level you get, which is really weird. I definitely remember getting more yellows/oranges at low levels :/
Guardian. No one else can bring over a minute of projectile blocking by themselves.
I know already that I need 15 resistance to agony in lvl 20 fractals to not die from Jade Maw completly
You can do it with no agony resist if your group uses their skills intelligently. You need 10 and a self heal to beat downstate otherwise.
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your a little wrong, considering i got a ring in a level 10, with offensive slot.
I meant the 20+ ones have agony resistance on them. I realize that what I wrote was wrong.
Dailies? You mean the bonus jade sea dungeon?
Yes. The first time you kill Jade Maw each day, you get a bonus. The quality of this bonus scales with your difficulty tier. 1-10 gives tokens/money, 11-20 gives tokens and has a chance of giving ascended rings. 21-30 can give ascended rings with agony resist on them. I’m not sure on anything past that.
And yes, Pinch clearly is clearly theorising with not much prior experience with all the classes in high-end PvE.
I’m at Fractal 23, and I’ve played most professions at the cap in serious groups. This topic is about Fractals anyways, where projectile blocking, mitigation, and AoE debuffing is far more important than what an Elementalist can bring after evasive arcana was nerfed.
Rangers or necros really aren’t too bad..
Necros are fine, they have a lot of utility, and epidemic is fantastic. It’s just Rangers that aren’t as good as the rest, since they lack good group oriented traits, and they don’t have good single target damage and no sustained 5 target AoE.
Starting yesterday I’ve probably spent 10+ hours doing these, and finally got my first essence today. Word is better drops the higher you go, but honestly I don’t buy that. Add in the fact you need 250 of the tier 6 crafting mats for an item and I’m seriously not going to waste my time.
How do you know that’s the only way to get Ascended back items? I’m pretty sure there will be a dungeon-only way of getting them, considering how hard it gets at higher levels. If I were to guess, you can probably dump some vials/globs + gift + exotic token item for one.
It doesn’t, dev responded in another thread.