Guild Wars 2

The “Master of Trade” one is the only component that’s actually difficult. Coincidentally it’s the least important, in terms of proving you actually deserve one.

So:

• Don’t enjoy money.
• Grind every day, the same three areas to make money you will not enjoy.
• Keep in mind prices are so high it doesn’t matter how much money you make by grinding.
• Keep grinding.

A solid plan. I remember in Guild Wars 1 having a personal goal of having every profession to 80 in PvE, with three 15k sets on each, with rare weapon skins for all of them. With all of their profession skills across all campaigns unlocked and purchased. And I did it. In Guild Wars 2, it’s unlikely you’ll ever get one such accomplish, much less several across all characters. They started with a blank sheet of paper; it’s not like their hands were tied in making this ridiculous grind-centric, elitist system. Especially when their mantra was dismantling the worst aspects of MMOs and transforming the genre into a type of game that’s more about choice than painstaking time investments. In that respect, GW2 has been a colossal failure, especially compared to the first game, which is still miles ahead of where GW2 should have started.

If there was a rolling eyes emoticon on this board I’d be using it.

Yes, devote the next three years to repeating the same grind-task every day. Such devotion is obvious testimony to the measure of genius instilled in this game.

Actually, your post may be sarcastic, but I honestly can’t tell anymore. There are too many players that don’t “get it,” and there’s no helping them.

Tom Gore.4035:

They wouldn’t be legendary if you could get one for yourself by playing 1-2 hours a day for a month or two.

What’s legendary if everyone and their dog are wielding it?

No one is saying that, necessarily. Just that it shouldn’t be tied to gold, so only the super wealthy can get them. Even a play who plays GW2 every day for the next five years may never get one, because they aren’t obsessed with grinding money. Someone with enough credit cards who doesn’t even know how to play the game can get a legendary, whereas the best player in the world may never get one. The quality of the appearance should reflect the quality of the player, not their time investment or cleverness on the stock market. Hence why people are saying it should be tied to legendary accomplishments.

Personally, I think the concept of a Legendary should have never existed, and their models should have just been normal weapons you can purchase from rare vendors, after completing certain tasks. They would be normal Exotics, and their use would be based only on whether people think they look good or not. Red names would be limited it transmuted items and boss weapons (when those get added). Get rid of those stupid “sort of orange” colored titles while we’re at it. The whole concept of the legendary system was asinine to begin with, and should never have been in the game at all. It’s just a hand-holding system for witless MMO players from other games that don’t know what to do with their time, and need some disappointing looking item undeservingly set upon a pedestal, to shoot for.

Update for me. Technically I wanted the t3 cultural norn pauldrons, but ascalonian also looks good.

I never really thought much of them, and so never really wanted one. If I did, I don’t think I’d ever be able to get one. There’s too much money tied to it, and I’m not a Guild Wars stock broker like some people. I try to play normally, and there’s no possible way I’d make that much money over time without actively refusing to use any of the money I make. Even then it’d take one or two years. And certainly, there’s no way to currently get one without obscene amounts of money or exploits, since the mystic forge apparently is run by the mafia.

Consequently, I have a low opinion of legendary users. I don’t see them as prestigious, but rather, as people who have cheated their way to them, or who make a living in-game off manipulating the economy. These are not legendary players. They’re just the game equivalent of the 0.5% in real life.

You never tie prestige weapons to money, in any game. Ever. Else, you get situations like this.

But no, to answer the question directly, I don’t think legendaries are realistic for any player unless they are manipulating the trading post in some way, as a career in-game. Obviously the system they have now is broken. It was a bad idea to begin with, and reeks of standard MMO conventions that ANet promised they were trying to avoid. It wasn’t in GW1 – not this bad by a longshot – but it’s in the sequel. That tells me they’re trying to cater to the worst portion of the genre’s fanbase, because they feel they have to.

I don’t really see a point with token drops, necessarily, so long as they’re pretty random and rare but come in somewhat large stacks (about 20). This way they’re satisfying to get but impossible to farm.

Across the game I’d put a high priority on increasing the rarity of all chest, champion, veteran rewards. This is probably one of the bigger problems across the board, not just in dungeons. Dungeon bosses should have good drops, though. Eventually, I’d really like to see them have unique exotics they can drop, ala GW1. Just don’t make them insanely rare, like you have with so many other things in GW2. In GW1, it wasn’t such a big deal.

Plenty of choices for white. For black, you go up to a mid level gray, and then suddenly jump to an extreme black. There’s some very dark reds, blues, and so on, but they’re still obvious hues.

There’s no reason to go back. It’ll stay this way until ANet actually starts making going back to old zones more profitable than dinking around Orr all day (which few people want to do anyway.)

They really need to reexamine their entire reward system in this game.

You’d think wild animals would be terrified of people, and would stick to heavily crowded woods, caves, and so on. When a player approached, they would run, and maybe just vanish into the woodland thick. And most aggressive animals would stick near their nests, and do a threatening display, warning you not to come near their homes, and would attack only when necessary.

But nope. Deer just wander into explosions then get all mad about it when they catch on fire. And will fight you to the death rather than running away. And aggressive mobs should be all rights go extinct within a few months, as they foolishly attack anything that comes near them.

Ahh, Guild Wars, Guild Wars…

I envisioned dragon battles as being battles that move across the entire map. The Shatterer would literally attack south and move north, swooping around and breathing fire on players. Ever so often he’d land, stomp people and walk around before lifting up and flying off again. The final battle would be him landing, doing long tail swipes, causing big exploding gashes in the earth, and finally being driven off.

Maybe it’s too resource heavy. I don’t know. But having them show up at 6 pm to scream at me while I plink at them for ten minutes, to me, smacks of the developers being more concerned with just having him sit around long enough for new players to show up, rather than having a cool fight that literally will drag players from all around the map to a final battleground, where you will actually have to move around, dodge and avoid real attacks. Minions in boss battles have always been a pet peeve of mine. They’re a nuisance, especially when it’s you versus the big bad guy. You want to fight HIM, not deal with rock dogs doing knockdown lunge attacks on you over and over. It really diminishes the emotional impact of a fight when you realize you’re just fighting the same mobs you always fight, and the boss is just a health bar you slap at between waves.

So you’ll have a reason to buy transmutation stones.

There’s not much reason. I guess the one benefit is that there aren’t a dozen different stat set versions of the same armor littered inside the npc’s vendor screen.

It’d be nice if everything was ordered by dropdowns, so we could close out medium and light armor choices if we only wear heavy, and similar. With dividers setting a visual distinction between sets.

I think a lot of the skills were very early development abilities. They sound a lot like GW1 skills, but without the one or two extra effects. The impression I got during development was that all the skills would affect the environment in some way, and would focus a lot on positioning and changing what the skills do based on where you are, how you built yourself, and so on. The combat system ended up being very simple-minded compared to that; a lot of abilities are no better than anything you’d find in any other game, and have no depth outside of their recharge.

I think the limited skill selection wouldn’t be so bad if the skills themselves had more depth. Most do not. Hopefully now that a lot of us have 300-400 hours of gameplay under our belt we can say that without it being immediately excused as just not understanding the system yet.

Champions should all drop rares or above only, relative to your level. And always drop something.

The economy, combat, profession balance, rewards that do not reflect content, etc. All are usually governed by very safe, tiny increments meant to ensure nothing unforeseen can happen, and that everything is under as much control as possible. Erring on the side of the system instead of the player. Function first, fun later. Without becoming long-winded, I’m sure you can think of your own examples.

What do you think? Is ANet more concerned about trying to keep their numbers in order, to the point it’s actually making aspects of the game unrewarding or just unenjoyable? Or is it necessary in MMOs to prioritize systems over the individual, for the sake of the whole?

Durzlla.6295:

Plague.5329:

Noting the problems with everyone sticking to Orr, as it is the most profitable, and not going back to previously played areas, I came up with this idea:

Like existing daily achievements, give every map its own daily achievement, with a reward of about 20 silver for completing it. The time required to complete them should be about the same as running a dungeon for the first time per day, after all.

The required achievements per zone could be the same as the actual daily: a certain number of completed DEs, gathered nodes, total kills, enemy variety.

This would encourage returning to old zones, reexploring areas while at the same time making returning to lower level zones as profitable as farming Orr, while at the same time encouraging people to move across as many zones as possible.

I would be fully behind this IF and only IF they made it so there was a cap of how many zones you can do per day so then you don’t have people with tons and tons of time shooting ahead of those who don’t have much time, and for obvious reasons Orr is completely excluded from these dailies.

If you put a cap i believe it’ll make it so people go and visit the zones they really want to visit that day instead of just mindlessly going to every zone and doing the dailies

You could also set it to region, rather than zone, if you wanted. Kryta, Old Ascalon, Maguuma, Orr, without specifying the zones themselves.

I don’t really have a problem with people “shooting ahead” based on time spent, as most of the richest people in the game are rich from the TP, which they can manage, buy/sell in a few minutes anyway.

Noting the problems with everyone sticking to Orr, as it is the most profitable, and not going back to previously played areas, I came up with this idea:

Like existing daily achievements, give every map its own daily achievement, with a reward of about 20 silver for completing it. The time required to complete them should be about the same as running a dungeon for the first time per day, after all.

The required achievements per zone could be the same as the actual daily: a certain number of completed DEs, gathered nodes, total kills, enemy variety.

This would encourage returning to old zones, reexploring areas while at the same time making returning to lower level zones as profitable as farming Orr, while at the same time encouraging people to move across as many zones as possible.

Obviously the downleveling system is not working, although I’m sure ANet will write a positive, heartwarming article about how players are enjoying it. There’s no reason to go back, as the only thing there is less profit, and the same DEs we’ve all seen before.

I have two pieces of it. It’s far too expensive. I don’t care if it’s available to everyone; how I feel about how I look is not predicated upon whether other people can look the same way. There should be enough choices that all look interesting enough that any of them are viable.

It should probably be around 60 gold for a full set. Paying 30 gold for a single chest piece is ridiculous, especially if you aren’t a career TP trade broker.

On twitch they almost always are playing Guardians, and usually seem depressed when forced to play something else.

467 hours across all characters. 0 exotics. One time I got a rare traveler’s focus from a Jormag chest.

It really amazes me, coming from GW1, that chests don’t drop rares exclusively, with exotics being a 15% or so drop. ANet developers played too much WoW in between the two games, I guess. Actually, I don’t even think even WoW is this punishing about rewards; just upper tier items with small number variations. GW2 is literally the most unrewarding game I’ve ever played, in terms of items representing the investment you’ve put into gameplay. It’s shameful.

Still no Random Arenas, still no deathmatch gametype. Still don’t care.

I don’t like Conquest at all. I don’t care how many frilly dresses you pile on top of it; I don’t like it, and am not going to play it. If that doesn’t concern you, then so be it. Nowhere in that article of “we’re listening to the players” do they even mention this, which tells me they have no plans of ever developing anything else, and are completely ignoring what is one of the most common complaints you see about sPvP.

I’ve heard “friends of friends” type stories about how someone watched a guy kill a mob, flip out and then show it off on his back. I’ve never seen an exotic of any kind drop myself, though. I do know you can get them from dragon chests, though. Unless, of course, guildies are just lying about that, too. Which I would not put past some people.

A far cry from GW1, where most drops at level 20 would be level 20, and next to perfect if not perfect. Opening a chest, your only worry would be “I hope this rare item is req 9 and not req 10.” Blue items, blue items…

As I’ve said elsewhere, MF doesn’t do much to begin with. You’ll probably never make back the money you spent outfitting yourself with MF gear, so you’re better off not bothering. The increase in drop rate is far too low for that sort of investment – as it should be. Imagine if it was effective; everyone would have to use it to “normalize” drop rates.

Things like magic find should never be added to games. Ever. I was surprised to even see it in GW2. Adding gold bonus items of any kind just make the game a mess, as people question the worth of not using it vs actually being able to use the rest of the options in the game. Is it detrimental to NOT wear it? Yes. Is it really that beneficial? Maybe not. You end up wearing other gear only “to have fun,” yet since it’s just an invisible number with barely any visible consequences, you find it’s just unsatisfying enough to go back to boosting gold rates. Very poor decision on ANet’s part. One of many in this game. It’s not a big deal, but it was still not a good move.

If MF must be in the game, it should be limited to either consumables (although I hate having to carry stacks of magical Kit Kats in my bag) or a single accessory item that does something unrelated to combat, and is related only to increasing drop rates, either with increased rare discovery, increased gold drops, increased xp gain, minor karma gain from killed enemies, and so on. But again, it’s too late for that.

I don’t see why it has to be RNG. I think they just need a more complex and satisfying crafting system. Whenever I think of the most satisfying crafting I’ve ever done, I actually think of Vagrant Story. A game with flaws, but I loved its crafting and upgrading system. Each item could be made using lesser items, but they had to be specific, and of certain material types. Starting with higher quality versions of those items resulted in better versions of the resulting equipment. It took a long time to make a Damascus weapon (best material weapon), and you ended up having to spend a lot of time collecting or crafting precursors to precursors to precursors in order to eventually get the two final pieces you combined to get a legendary weapon. It was very satisfying.

I personally think there doesn’t need to be a RNG, but there does need to be a tier of precursor items, even if they’re all exotics. It’d probably be best to have a few named rares you always get from combining certain weapon skins from four different areas of the world, and then having those combine into a named exotic, with the weapon type depending on which you added into the forge first or last (or whichever type was most present in the formula). Combining four of those exotics (of the same weapon type this time) results in a named precursor to the precursor, with an obvious naming convention. Say, Dusk’s four precursory items are called Fading Day, Rising Night, Day’s End, Night’s Beginning, or what have you. Combining those always results in Dusk.

All except the named rares would be just as good as the others. The amount of time and money required to collect them all would spread the money around on the Trading Post so it’s not all packaged into a single item. It would require less time, although a similar investment and would be more reliable. In addition, people with enough time and effort could eventually collect the necessary starting components from all around the world, over time, if they wanted to avoid spending money at all. And of course, this is all for a precursor item; not the legendary. These items could even share the same skin, for all I care. As long as they’re serving their function, it’s fine.

There’s always ways around RNG. They just require more effort than chucking an item value in the forge and assigning it a drop percentage.

“As a quick note, the higher the level and rarity of the things you are throwing into the forge, the better your chances of getting a Legendary Precursor.”

I saw a youtube video of a guy that started with sixteen, I believe it was, level 80 exotics, and after combining them all, and then combining the four it gave him back (junk), he just ended up with an even more worthless weapon.

The forge needs more consistency. I’m certainly never going to use it when people are burning through that much gold. In the few times I tried to use it, I regretted bothering, especially since I knew beforehand I’d probably be throwing my money away.

Which is more important? Using the forge as a big money trashcan as your personal solution to inflation? Or players enjoying themselves? Don’t treat the two as being mutually exclusive to one another.

A shame you can’t just drag skills around on your bar, like in Guild Wars 1. Another point for GW1.

To be fair, magic find doesn’t really do much of anything. You start with about a 1% chance to find anything of worth. Increasing that with a maximized near 200% magic find (or whatever) will bring you barely over 2%. Now consider how expensive making a magic find set IS. You will never, ever make all that money back.

Of course there’s always a story of “I equipped my MF gear and immediately got three rares!” That’s just sample size and statistics playing games with you. A coin has a 50% chance of flipping to tails, but could you flip it to tails 20 times in a row to win a million dollars? Sure. And some people will assure you that because they did it, that the rate is actually very favorable. It isn’t. It’s just the coincidence of working with limited empirical evidence.

Just make a normal set and use an omnomberry bar. You’re seriously not missing anything. It kind of annoys me, but then again, if a MF set was worth using, then everyone would use nothing but a MF set. I honestly think they should either have never included it at all, or made it limited to amulets – a single item you equip to change your build. But that’s ruined already with the unnecessary inclusion of so many unnecessary accessory slots that exist only to increase the amount of gold sinks in the game. I really hate this about MMOs, and it’s one of the things I hate about GW2.

Voqar.2349:

I wouldn’t mind this since I find some of the elite skills to be anything but elite. Most classes aren’t as well designed as warriors. :/

Warriors don’t exactly have it made in the shade, either. We have a lot of viability problems, although some of that could be from some competing classes just being way too good at performing certain roles.

If you’re talking about the elites, we’ve got Signet of Rage, which is one of the better elites in the game. It doesn’t really do anything, exactly. It’s just a passive stat boost you have to remember to keep turning on. I’d prefer my elites to be more active and responsive, but if it works, it works.
Battle Standard is rather mediocre (one stack of might, swiftness, fury – underwhelming), and cannot revive defeated players, only downed, which are usually defeated by the time the animation is completed. Other professions’ normal skills can revive defeated players, or even do the same AoE revive with a much lower recharge. The listed stability actually comes from one of the Warbanner’s skills – #2 Whirlwind Banner. You have to keep picking it up to use it. It’s still okay, but you’ll want to use SoR most of the time.
Rampage is, of course, 100% useless, just like all transformation skills. Transformation skills were handled in the most asinine way possible in this game. They were made to replace your whole skillbar so ANet wouldn’t have to worry about build synergy and potentially gamebreaking combinations. To top it off, you still take damage while you use them, and the skills themselves are situational and often weaker than your normal skills. But these kinds of skills are easy to make and require little thought. Of course, players just don’t use them as a result. Brilliant.

Elites in general kind of have to be made this way. In GW1 you could put the elite skill anywhere, and it was often a normal skill you used just as often (if not more) than your other skills. Imagine if some elites in GW2 were normal physical attacks with recharges of about five seconds. What a mess that would be. So, they generally have to be minute long, at the least, because they’re stuck on the end of the skillbar and not everyone has a multi-button MMO mouse. Maybe not worthless, but something you’d fire off as an emergency button or as some specialty tool.

It’d be nice if Elites instead overlapped with all skill slots, and could replace any of them, and we got four secondaries instead of three, but at level 30 you unlocked the fourth slot and HAD to bring an elite (the game gives you one). This would let the developers make some elites that were primary weapon elites, or healing skill elites, or so on. There’s so much potential being lost in this game.

DanteZero.3569:

The elite skills functionality that we have right now are far from the claimed “game changers” that Anet stated once in a video clip.

Anet claimed that testers were afraid to use their elites in pvp because the activation of an elite meant it would have changed the battlefield. At the same time, once 1 elite is on cooldown, that means there are less elite skills on standby for one team. This supposedly created tension (or something along the lines of that).

Yeah, non of that exists on launch (at least, from my observations). Perhaps it will be in the future, but at the moment, nope, nothing.

I remember that and often tell people in-game about it. They either don’t believe me or just laugh it off. Their testers must either be terrible players, or it was an extremely old build. In general, the problem with testing using your own developers is that the developers will play only in the way they expect to play. If they design the game for elites to be powerful, they’ll try to play and think that way, even if they’re completely wrong. It isn’t until the players get a hold of the game that they get actual useful feedback, because we’re not afraid to tell the guy in charge that he doesn’t know what he’s doing.

How ANet errs on the safe side is, in general, what’s wrong with combat in this game. From the limited skill selections, some underwhelming traits and the terrible elites, or whatever other major contention point players have right now – it all stems from ANet being afraid to make things good, because something might happen. Will it? Probably not. Could it? Maybe. So, better make sure it’s not fun to use! And since it’s a dedicated slot, you can’t say the elites aren’t viable, because you have to use them.

GW1 was very well balanced, although ANet seemed to mistakenly believe that it was horribly out of balance, all the time. I guess their whole office is obsessive-compulsive, because the game was considered the most well balanced PvP across the genre, at the time. GW2 suffers. A lot of the things they said about the old game weren’t true at all, and just came from one or two upper tier GvG-focused guilds that had their mouth in ANet’s ear, at all times. Only five out of fifty elites were viable? That’s not true in the least. You only used a handful of skills? Maybe that’s true for a loud minority on a GWG subforum that gets all their information from the PvX site. I found most elites did have a use, even if you had to get specific with your build. Some were worthless, and the community was very vocal about how to change them. ANet just never tried, because they only listened to certain people, and seemed to believe only they knew what would be balanced and fun. There was nothing wrong with that system, other than ANet’s meddling. So most of their attempts to “learn from the mistakes of the last game” are really mistakes they were making from the prior game that the players were covering up.

They really, really need to get away from erring on the side of the system and being obsessed with creating perfect, balanced environments instead of erring on the side of the players. Fun first. Balance later. If it’s game breaking, change it. If it’s not, look at it. You know it’s bad when players all agree that all the skills are not fun. I’d rather come to the forums to see people complaining about my skill than people mocking it.

In Guild Wars, elites were what you built your build around. Either you chose your skills to help deliver Elite damage, or used the Elite to accessorize skill use across your whole bar. It really changed the way you played more than anything else in the game.

In Guild Wars 2, most elites are… I don’t know. I don’t know what the intention was, other than “we should probably include this too, just because.” Most builds would be vastly improved if you could not bring an elite and just put another secondary skill in the slot. Elites in this game are balanced in very, very, very safe ways. A large portion of them are transformations of some kind that destroy your entire skillbar (to avoid having to deal with build synergizing entirely). When you use these, opponents never have “oh kitten my kitty kittens!” moments when you transform into a tornado, or a giant bear monster, or glow red and start awkwardly punching the air. They aren’t elites so much as they’re fairly worthless, extremely situational skills that exist mainly to pester people or impress new players.

I don’t think this is really going to change. Elites in GW2 will probably always be worthless or boring, and sometimes both. Personally, I think it’d be cool if when I used an elite, my character slowed to a halt, roared, became invincible during the transformation, then glowed like the sun until exploding into a gigantic lich monster that started flinging terrified enemies around in all directions, and remained invincible for about twenty seconds before returning to normal, for a five minute cooldown. But ANet always wonders, “But what if thirty players all did that at the same time? What would happen? I’m not sure… so we’d better make it worthless!” ANet knows players are smarter than they are, so their solution to most balancing problems is to not try.

The Warrior’s main problems lie with its traits, not necessarily its skills (although its skills are dull and two dimensional). Think about most of the builds you can make. What do they need? A way to remain mobile in melee, close distance and maintain pressure with the potential of a short spike, right? Or, if you’re ranged, a way to keep distance, keep up evasion, maintain condition pressure, etc. There are other examples. Feel free to imagine more.

Now, whatever example you have in your head, HOW do you make that a possibility? Odds are, the answer is one or two traits that almost all builds use, including one or two secondary skills that all builds use. Build stagnation is a problem for Warriors. We need things to help us stay in the fight, because our weapon skills don’t do this for us. Most other professions don’t need to worry about staying in melee, because they have innate mechanics that help them out. Warriors have to trait specifically to fix these problems, and use secondary skills to supplement them. As a result, you see a lot of posts declaring that someone has a brand new, unique build, and it looks 85% just like everyone else’s build, because the core limitations of the class always have to be addressed with the same tiny half-handful of skills.

The real solution is to change at least one or two traits in every line to help with mobility, closing and overall build viability. The Warrior has a lot of options that aren’t being explored because they can’t be explored.

3000 is basically the offset for when you start wasting investments you could be putting somewhere else. Of course, also keep in mind that having a lot of health or a lot of toughness doesn’t mean a whole lot. You can still get burned down to 0 very, very quickly, with very little effort. Most of your actual longevity will come from skill and trait utility (which your profession does not have much of), although you obviously still need both. Hence why bunker builds for Guardians, Engineers or similar are considered the actual tanks of the game, and why Warriors are usually a free, effortless kill you desperately chase across WvW, because you know if you catch it alone, it probably won’t be able to stop you, if you have half a brain.

The people saying only a few builds used in PvP in GW1 are usually just PvXers who couldn’t think up actual builds on their own, and just waited around for other people to think them up for them. I personally had an extremely long list of builds, all of which worked very well in various situations.

Now, once you get to GvG, you’ll run into more of a rut, since what you had to do there was so incredibly specific, but that was more a fault of the secondary objectives than it was the combat.

I’ll also point out that when it came to physical weapons (axes, swords, etc), skills were tied to weapons. You couldn’t use Hamstring with an axe, or Eviscerate with a sword. It’s basically the same system, and even in Prophecies the array of choices for even one weapon line were still pretty good.

The furthest distance from ground to an area you can reach is probably in Rata Sum. The actual highest elevation, I imagine, is in the Shiverpeaks. It doesn’t necessarily mean it will LOOK tall from your own perspective in that zone, though. Actually, considering the real height variations in the terrain from Kryta into the Deldrimor areas, you don’t go uphill very often, which is strange.

Can you imagine if they increased the level cap? A lot of worthless gear you have to buy alllllllll over again.

Considering the considerable cost of outfitting yourself in GW2 (yes, yes, I know other MMOs are worse. I don’t care), I think raising the level cap will just be a disaster.

I for one hate MMOs, which is why I liked GW1. ANet said about GW2, “If you hate MMOs, you’ll definitely love GW2.” Well, no, I don’t. And most of the problems I have with the game are that they turned the game series into even more of a MMO, with standard conventions that were never needed to begin with. Endgame materials and equipment are unnecessarily rare compared to GW1. I really do not want to see a hike in levels just because most MMO players need their hand held and something to do on release, resulting in a new giant hike in prices across new tiers of everything in the game, that no one asked for.

John Smith.4610:

Everyone should keep in mind that the value of gold is mostly defined by its scarcity.

Well, no… it’s defined by its relativity to an existing base and the rarity of the items it represents, too.

Guild Wars 2 doesn’t have a problem with gold rarity. It has a problem with most thing’s expense being fine, and then there being another tier above that that skyrockets in price because the drops or method of creation is too rare or infrequent.

Well, the attitude here is actually better than the attitude in the Warrior forums, where the opposition’s stance is that everything is just fine and everyone but them is an idiot.

Obviously, long term this will be a problem. It’s cute to have a profession be the jack of all trades, master of none in PvE, but in PvP, where people need to perform roles, this just doesn’t work. You need defined classes. You can’t lazily poop one out and call it Mister Average. Otherwise, there’s no reason to bring it other than not having access to the professions that are better at that role; in this game, you can role a max level whatever-you-need in seconds, so that’s not going to be a legitimate method of balancing in GW2.

If you want to look at the profession objectively, consider the roles performed in sPvP (whether current or potential), then look at which professions meet those criteria, how they overlap, why one is chosen over the others in what situation, and in what niche the Warrior should fall amongst those roles. Is it disruption? Burst damage? Sustained? Bunkering?

Any way you view the Warrior, it will eventually need to settle into at least one niche where it can prove itself superior to every other profession, in some way. Otherwise, it’ll always be the bench warmer, regardless of how close it comes to being 2nd best at something.

As the Warrior is the vanilla profession, I imagine it will always be the second choice to any role. Unlike GW1, though, you don’t have UAS to worry about, so there’s no excuse for not having a better option available. They’re obviously not going to change the Warrior’s active utility to compete with other classes, as that’s not the point of the class, so it will always have this problem for as long as it exists. Just as well, there will always be people saying “you just don’t know how to play it, unlike me, as I am great.” Just gotta deal with it.

One thing I will mention is that since Warriors are considered to be easy targets, not just by Warrior players, they are often primary targets, as they are seen as easy kills. As a result, any problems that Warriors actually DO have are, as a result, highlighted because they’re always being burned down, just because it’s considered quick and easy.

GW1 had a very similar problem with Warriors, in that they were dumb, sustained pressure classes that had mild burst abilities. Alone, they were practically worthless because every class in the game could counter them very easily with often only one skill. Unfortunately in GW2, there’s no monk to ride on your back to help you do your job; you’re on your own. As a result, the problems that never got fixed in GW1 because they weren’t exactly “problems” are easier to see in GW2. When you make a class that tries to compensate for a lack of active utility with passive utility skills (vulnerability, bleeding, etc), you end up with either a very overpowered class that other players have to try too hard to beat, or a mediocre class that doesn’t do anything particularly well and has a low skill ceiling, to boot. More importantly, it’s just not very fun.

I’ve read a lot of counter arguments in this thread, but they’re all to major problems, and usually hinge on a single trait as the solution to a class-wide problem (Mobile Strikes being the usual culprit, no doubt), or suggest that the player in question is using only one build type, as it’s the only one that can actually integrate all these countermeasures at once. Sure, you can make a build that allows you to actually perform a role in tPvP, but it’s probably not going to be very efficient, and it’s probably incredibly specific, after hours of trying to squeeze every ounce of utility you can possibly get out of the profession into one build, as the profession as a whole is so devoid of it that it stagnates our own meta.

More isn’t necessarily better when it comes to skills, which ANet understood. They didn’t really follow through, though. I wouldn’t want a fifty slot skillbar if all the slots were filled with “do X damage, apply X condition” skills. Those are very easy and lazy to make, and honestly are all the same skill with very minor differences. ANet liked to advertise a lot of their more unique skills in videos prior to release, although most of those ended up not working in the way they were depicted. The rest obviously weren’t going to be exciting enough to make a video about, because they simply are not unique or interesting. Imagine ANet talking about “better skills, not more skills,” and then releasing a video showcasing something like “For Great Justice!” It’d just leave people wondering what it is they just saw, if anything.

Oh, you’re asking for a lot.

Free waypoints.
Free, unlimited attribute rerolls.
A huge array of skills to mix and match, for every slot.
Mostly realistic looking armors. (With some horrifying exceptions.)
Tormentor armor. Whoever it was that ruined it in GW2 should be beaten.
Fast leveling that required you to complete very little content.
A coherent story.
Named bosses (champions) with unique drops.
Easily accessible merchants that sell max stat armor at a very low price, even if it looks terrible.
This isn’t “missing” exactly, but no forge, no convoluted process to get items, no ridiculously complicated anything. If you wanted something, you went and got it from one place.
Often excellent rewards that did not insult the player’s experience by insinuating it was not worth the effort. When you opened a chest, your only worry would be that the item inside wasn’t 100% perfect, not that it would almost certainly be junk.
Random Arena. Team Arena. PvP that had nothing to do with secondary objectives.
Pet evolutions. Not requiring a pet for Rangers. (Do not miss charm animal, though.)
Elite skills that you could build several entire builds around, that you used all the time as normal skills. Elites in general that aren’t awful. Elites that don’t replace your whole skillbar and destroy your build synergy. Capturing elites, too.
The ability to move your skills, your UI, resize it all and put it wherever you wanted.
The superb target tracking interface. When you targeted something, you actually knew where it was.
Secondary resources. Adrenaline, energy in general.
Defense-oriented combat that often only ended when you outsmarted the enemy (in organized games). Forgiving, paced combat with obvious skill usage (bars that list what they’re doing) that was never clouded with fX.
Showing someone’s profession by their name.
The entire Hall of Heroes, GvG and upper tier PvP set, which is completely absent in a game about wars between guilds.

I have more, but I have Risen grinding to do. :-p

I’ll add that GW1 was a very similar game in that levels were never important. Getting to 20 was easy, and even mandatory after Ascension. The purpose of levels 1-19 were in teaching the player basic mechanics. It lasted only long enough for new players to fully grasp everything in the game. A long tutorial.

The world was laid out linearly, mostly, so you had to keep seeing new challenges to train you as you progressed. You could circumvent this if you were not a new player, either by paying enough gold for a run or just by knowing the map well enough to get around it. It was a fairly convenient system.

In GW2, content is not linear, but you still get bottlenecked to starter zones for quite a long time. This can make repeated playthroughs very tiresome, as you have to do the same content to 100% or near 100% to level up. On my Warrior, I actually would complete 100% of the zones around the Norn starter areas but still would be underleveled for the nearby areas, forcing me to clear other starter areas. I have no desire whatsoever to clear these areas on new characters, as a result. (GW1 had a similar problem with new characters getting bogged down with repeating the same handful of quests constantly, although not as badly.) My solution has been to level in WvW, which is much faster and obviously is only as repetitive as players allow it to be.

I get the feeling they stretched leveling out in GW2 to unnecessary lengths from GW1 just because they knew a lot of MMO players from worse games were going to be joining the existing player base, and they wouldn’t really grasp the concept of “tutorial leveling.” The result is level drag without the reward that naturally comes from leveling in other games.

@Edge
I could easily come up with other ideas that are just single target only. That’s not the point. The point is that the skills we have in-game are just “point at something, do damage to it + condition,” whereas it could do the same thing in a more interesting way, which is what they advertised the game, in development, as being.

If you’re satisfied enough with this lack of imagination to describe the weapon as “favoring support tactics,” then more power to you. But certainly you can understand why some of us can easily ridicule such skills as being lazy and boring to use over time. Whether you agree for your own experience isn’t relevant; just that it can be understood why this is a problem for others.

^ I think his point is that your own expectations for the skills are way too low. The rifle skillbar is one of the worst in the game, as all of the skills (aside from #5) are just damage + a condition, or just damage. They have no active use utility, just passive utility in the form of some generic condition application. The issue here isn’t him not utilizing their utility, but you not realizing how little they really have.

[edit]: And no one is saying the rifle is a bad weapon. It compensates for its terrible utility by just having a lot of damage.

GW2 is a game without levels, except for when there are. This is why I was so glad to get to level 80, as I could then do whatever I wanted. You get downleveled, but never upleveled, after all. Mobs will sometimes get a huge advantage over you, but you are never allowed to have an advantage over them. Rushing to 80 and then backtracking resolves all of this.

I agree, although I don’t think this is really going to change. GW1’s combat makes GW2’s look like it was thought up by a much lesser studio. GW2’s is just prettier, with the obvious improved movement.

In GW1 some skills were referred to as “Flares.” Flare being an Ele fire spell that you get in pre-Searing (tutorial). It’s a repeatable attack with low damage and no utility other than triggering fire damage. When a skill was boring, had low cooldown (or none), offered no utility but technically was balanced because its damage was acceptable, it was often called a “Flare skill.” GW2 has a LOT of these skills. In fact, a very sizeable portion of the “1” abilities are flare skills. Little to no utility, median damage, constant spam. People never used flare skills intentionally in GW1 because it destroyed build synergy. The fact that they are mandatory and prevalent in GW2 says something about the entire system.

Actually interesting skills, in the OP’s example for a Warrior’s rifle skillset might be:

1 – Autoattack skill. When held down, aims the rifle, resulting in more damage and one of three random conditions (bleeding, burning, vulnerability) applied. Has a short maximum time limit on this “charge up” attack.

2 – Does no base damage. Fires a targettable AoE shell that cripples around it and leaves a small burning AoE circle that deals its damage over three seconds.

3 – “Spray” attack that lands more hits the closer you are, but applies a bonus condition (or damage, would have to math this one) the further away you are from the target. (Best used at range on mobs of tightly bound enemies, with option to close distance or stay at range and try your luck against one opponent.)

4 – Fires a shot that leaves a poisonous trail behind it. Opponents crossing the trail are poisoned. Allies that fire through it cause a short duration poison. Can be ignited as a secondary skill effect that causes a half second stun, in a line.

5 – “Stamps” the ground with a short duration trap that explodes after five seconds, but can be triggered immediately, causing knockback.

Most of these examples are either the same thing or next to the same thing as what we have now, except they are more than “damage + condition” or “more damage.” They allow the user to use the skills in more ways than one, many creatively, and in response to various kinds of situations. That’s how you design a skill, when you’re working with a system in which you only want to give players 5 per weapon, and never any more than that.

I’ll do a bonus:

F1 attack – Reticule skill. Fire at the targeted area. Penetrates through multiple targets. Enemies in the small explosive AoE receive multiple short duration conditions.

You can balance numbers, but you can’t alter skill behavior, which is why it’s important to start with an idea that can be used with a lot of variety.

[edit]: BTW, GW1 never had much of a problem with skill balance, compared to most games. It actually won an award for most well balanced PvP. It was a very, very well balanced game compared to what you normally see on the market. ANet just didn’t want to put the money or effort into doing it anymore, resulting in the comparatively mediocre and uninspired combat we have in GW2.

Personally, I think Quickness should never have existed, and should have instead been a buff that causes you to attack half as slow, but deal twice the damage, or similar. This way, there’s a native means to see it in progress and dodge it. It becomes an interesting gameplay mechanic that doesn’t require these ridiculous attempts to “balance” them by making you take double damage or removing all your endurance, or similar.

As always, GW2, the stupider sibling, should look to GW1 for guidance. GW1 had various kinds of IAS moves. In fact, it had a LOT of them.
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Attack_speed#Skills_that_affect_attack_speed
Frenzy, for example, you could cancel out of using another stance (as you could only use one at a time, which is not true in GW2). There was a lot more depth and choices there, with various drawbacks that GW2 is just too dumb and straight-forward-thinking to utilize.

Technically there’s a rollback system in GW1. Although I think it’s more they just save your character info into backups ever so often.

The lessons of GW1 repeating themselves, it seems. There is much to learn from the original game that seems to have been lost in time.

Will it be like GW1 in that they’ll be unique looking with max stats, or are we doing a GW2 thing where it’s only a rare with a normal skin, or…?

Jon, leave it to the players. If they want lower performance, just have a notification in the slider that tells them they may experience issues. Otherwise, players WILL start developing third party methods of addressing this, as it IS a problem that you should be addressing, not the players.

I don’t think anyone is taking your excuses on the matter seriously, especially when playing the game makes them feel sick, and the obstruction to this is “it makes our pretty art look less pretty.” Somehow, I don’t think they care. Performance? Just have a warning about it.

For the players: try widening and constricting your GW2 window. This will expand the area you can see around your character, at the cost of (obviously) losing some resolution. This should at least keep you from wanting to vomit as often.

Guardian, Mesmer, Thief, maybe.

I rank based on utility, for the most part. A lot of people will just look at a damage value or a health number and freak out based on that, but what your skills DO is way more important, as that determines the skill ceiling for your class (not your armor rating or health pool). Guardians are the best in this dept, hands down. No argument. Mesmers can be very problematic, as well. Thieves can make certain builds that are more about whether they know how to play, and negate much of any say you have in the matter. They have a lot less versatility than Mesmers or Guardians, though.

Warriors are pretty versatile but have a low skill ceiling, as they have some of the worst build utility in the game. Most of their traits are just number modifiers, and their skills are usually just closers or more boons and bonuses abilities. They aren’t going to use their skills in more ways than one, which can make them very easy to counter, outthink and anticipate for an equally experienced player. So, while you may see them listed, it’s usually just because “omg guys they’re so strong and have high hp and armor.” They’re actually fairly easy kills in most circumstances, barring one or two very, very specialized builds that are either easy to counter if you see them coming or do very little damage in the process of being very annoying (disruption builds.)

The only other fringe class I might include is Engineer, although just because of the game mode sPvP is predicated upon. If the game was just kill or be killed, I don’t think you’d ever see them on the list.