They’re incredibly OP 1v1, at least. We ran some tests in guild one day for this, and no one could get to the Guardian, who could just stand there doing nothing if he so chose. No stability, nothing. The only real counter is to run away or bring a friend, because that hammer will ensure you can’t do much of anything. (And when you actually bring this build into team fights you do tend to go down quickly.) Spirit weapon builds are also damage-based most of the time (WHYYYYY was this not a tanking spec build), so you tend to take massive amounts of damage in the process. It’s silly.
Personally, I think when making the game you should have made amulets affect just one stat, and that’s it. I know it’s compensating for balling up all of PvE’s accessories, although there are way too many there, too. If you wanted to avoid complications you should never have even added an accessory slot to the game, at all. There was never any need to have one, especially when you can’t even see the items. It was just an excuse to stretch the gold required to outfit yourself even more than normal.
The game doesn’t need a new class. It really needs more skills and traits added to the existing ones. Quite a few, actually. Have a couple expansions of that before you start worrying about making a new profession.
Unfortunately I don’t think most players from other MMOs are going to “get it,” since most other MMOs are absolutely terrible about these sorts of things, so the low cost is something they naturally will lay down and accept.
I think they should. They assigned gold costs to waypoints “because everyone will use them all the time.” The result? People never use them unless they absolutely have to. All that money adds up very easily. They assigned gold costs to rerolls “because most MMOs do it, and everyone will do it all the time.” The result? People come up with a build that can use as many trait variations as possible while losing as little as possible, min-max it and then never change it again.
The worst thing about it is that these are key features of the game. Waypoints are the gateway to enjoying as much of the world as possible, which is high on the list of ANet’s goals for the game; you don’t want people locked to Orr, using the HotM trick all the time to avoid losing money constantly. Locking attributes prevents people from trying out new kinds of builds all the time. Considering all the complaints about combat being dull over time, this especially needs to go, as the game already has a very low amount of build variety, and locking players to one build for long stretches (unless they want to warp back to a city EVERY time they want a reroll, regardless of the money cost), simply is not cutting it. Both are terrible ideas I hope the developers understand better than most of the players will. Again, it’s impacting the way the game is played far more than it’s serving as a minor gold sink. No cost reductions. Just get rid of it entirely. Judging from how hard it is to make money already, GW2 doesn’t need it.
So I could make a giant woman, basically. That’s it. I actually detest the Norn. I just like the way the women look, especially in comparison to the dainty, perm-infested flowers humans offer.
In GW1 both players got to see what the other was giving them at the same time, and both had to confirm it again if any changes were made. I think they intentionally didn’t include that to force people to use the TP instead, which is rather… yeah. People still got scammed in GW1 if they were in a hurry and didn’t check what was being exchanged, but it was their own fault, in that case.
Game modes is most what plagues my life, followed closely behind by build stagnation, which stems mainly from the extremely small array of skills to choose from mixed with the need to use one or two of them on all my builds because of the preponderance of CCs. But mainly game modes. I spent most of my GW1 time in RA. I hated hero battles with a passion because it wasn’t about fighting. Unfortunately, that’s the only PvP in GW2 – that dreadful Conquest mode.
I kind of hated PvE in GW1 most days. Heaven knows I hate GW2 endgame. I’d spend all my time in PvP if it actually had a real RA. It depresses me a little, since I’m pretty sure whoever is in charge thinks such a thing has no place in GW2, ever. :-/
A Random Arena style game type pitting four teams of two partied people against one another would be interesting. Just, you know… no Conquest.
Yes or No only? What are you, a lawyer? No, you’ll get my answers as they are and LIKE IT mister.
1) Mostly. I forsaw a lot of problems I had anticipated from beta, but enjoyed it, mostly. (“Yes.”)
2) Yes, about very specific things. In all other areas, no. (So “No.”)
3) No. Fun till late game; quickly loses its appeal.
4) Absolutely not.
5) No. It ended up being what I thought it’d be, though, to my own disappointment.
Didn’t say it was the most fun. Just that it was the “best,” and that I’m quantifying best as being the profession that can perform the most roles in the most interesting ways possible. I have one, but haven’t bothered with sPvP, which I hear involves using one of two, maybe three builds. All professions seem to have that problem though.
I play mainly my Warrior (or played; haven’t bothered in a while since I’m not having fun), but I don’t really enjoy its gameplay as much as other professions. I invest in it because I feel more connected to that character and the overall aesthetic of being a Warrior, even if it doesn’t play how I’d want it to play. People have all sorts of reasons for enjoying and/or preferring one thing over another, after all.
May be server. Of course, some DE nodes are so competitive that you can’t waste time reviving someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing. You have to be on your toes to tag every enemy that spawns in the mob, or you won’t get anything from them, since the game doesn’t reward support of any kind, or any participation other than doing 10% or whatever damage to an enemy. As a result, when in these DEs, mobs live literally for one second before dying, there’s no time to rez. Sure it’s okay XP, but so is tagging 10 enemies at the same time + getting about 5 silver in loot.
The way the game plays also doesn’t help. There’s no need to help one another, as everyone is a one man army. Blame ANet, I guess. They’re the ones who designed the reward systems.
Unfortunately there’s no sustained healing in this game, no healer class, so it’s a lot more unforgiving. They’ve also made combat favor damage over damage resistance, so the result is a very Quake-like combat where you can easily die in a couple of seconds if you come across certain enemy builds.
Personally, I prefer very slow, methodical games that involve outthinking your opponent, and find GW2 very frantic, spastic and twitchy in comparison to the first game. That’s obviously not going to change, though.
It may not be GW1, but it’d be a better game if it was more like it.
Guardian. It’s probably not even close. Other professions might have one or two things about them that make them very annoying, but Guardians have the most versatility in the game combined with some of the most interesting skills in the game.
Take a look at ANet’s twitch videos. What class are they always playing? Guardians. Who do you think gets the most attention and love from them? When someone in chat asks them to play another profession, there’s always a reluctant sigh followed by “Well, I don’t know it very well…” It’s obvious what class is daddy’s favorite.
All the gold came from prior to the rare fix. People were making the precursors easily, and making hundreds of gold off of them. When this was fixed, the rate that precursors appear from the forge was also reduced, to the point that it’s now nearly impossible to get one legitimately, using the forge. The people who exploited this were not punished, nor were their goods deleted. As a result, there are now players who have over 1,000 gold or more that can set the prices on these items at a whim, as they can easily buy up lower priced versions and place them back on the TP for a profit.
Takes money to make money. The initial capital has allowed some people to instantly become GW2’s version of real life billionaires, who have the financial leverage to control the economy with relative ease, allowing them to make even more money.
I’ve probably spent about… almost 100 gold myself, although all of it has been from farming Risen. Needless to say, I’m not playing for a while. I still need a lot more gold to finish my armor set, superior runes and accessories and all, so… yeah.
But that’s where it’s coming from. That small handful of people. ANet actually made them richer by making the items harder to get (supposedly dropping from a 25% (maybe 33%) rate to something like 12%), as now there’s no competition, and these people with literally a bank full of precursors now have complete control over the market. It goes without saying that using the forge to try to roll for a precursor is a tremendously bad idea right now, unless you get super lucky. You’ll be wasting a LOT of gold trying, if you’re playing like a normal person. I’m curious how they’ll fix it, or if they even will.
Running a support build, 30 D, 30 T, my bladetrail is lucky to do about 1200 damage. My rifle burst, for another example, does about 5k, max. My hundred blades usually does around 5-6k, too.
It’s funny how extreme the number variations get with Warriors. Considering most of our traits are just damage modifiers for min-maxing builds, I guess it’s not surprising.
Jon, ANet has always been too paranoid about things like this. I would much rather have a “ruined” economy where everything is dirt cheap and I’m free to enjoy the game, rather than having to “bump” into safety nets all the time. Just remove it. It’s not a big deal. You’re ruining the game for 95% of your players just because you don’t want the other 5% to maybe do something that you might not like.
A lot of this is caused by the insane pricing and ridiculous grind for some very basic items (not even touching on t3 culturals and legendaries), resulting in a NEED to grind. That needs to be addressed. I don’t even want to farm. But I have to. Things like how unprofitable it is to do fun things like returning to zones or doing jumping puzzles for literally 1/20th of the value of doing an Orr run. These are very problematic in your design model, and adjusting the DR will never fix them.
(edited by Plague.5329)
In Guild Wars I tended to change my entire build and attribute setup about three or four times a day. In Guild Wars 2 I’ve rerolled my stats only once. Three point whatever silver isn’t that much, but it adds up if you keep repeating “it isn’t much” over time. It’s also why I never use waypoints. Basic things like that should have no gold sinks attached to them at all. They put them there because they thought “since people will use these all the time, it’s a good way for us to take their money back.” It has the opposite effect, of people just not using the system. When new games come out, it’ll be one of the things they ridicule about GW2, much the same way we can look back on the things other games have done that were foolish, in hindsight.
I don’t think it’d matter much anyway, playing a Warrior. You can’t save builds yet, and quite honestly, the build system is a bit of a joke already, since you can only really use three interchangeable skills. Your primary skills never change, your choice with healing is insignificant and most elites are worthless afterthoughts. On my Warrior, most of the traits don’t change how you play anyway, unless you’re investing only in Defense and Tactics, so it’s mostly irrelevant. Of the three skills that DO matter, I usually am relegated to using specific ones because of a single trait, necessity of playstyle or just the lack of native counters in the game. It’s just terrible, poorly thought out design, overall.
I’ll add the whole idea of “cheesing” (which I take it to mean you do enough damage for gold, then leave) is something the developers advertised as a feature. People were complaining about the length of DEs becoming insane as more players showed up. The developers’ answer was that you were free to leave at any time, knowing you’d done your part for a gold reward.
It isn’t one of those topics, no.
I was playing another game today, which has pretty good melee, and started thinking about GW2’s melee. Obviously, you can’t stay in melee long in this game. In a place like WvW, often it’s not an option at all. Some classes can grant themselves a few seconds of invincibility in the process of entering forward lines, but in general, it’s just a bad idea in most cases.
One of the things I was thinking about is that GW2 doesn’t have DR systems for things that most other games use to make it so that one mechanic can’t be abused. For example, in another game, if you’re crippled, and crippled again by another player, it either won’t count or the effect will be reduced. If you’re crippled by many players at the same time, they just stop working, so the attackers can’t just chain the same thing over and over again, abusing the system against one target that can’t really do anything about it.
As well, some games implement a DR on damage received from multiple sources. This way, someone whose job it is to break up an enemy formation, when specced for it, can run into a crowd of fifty people, not only survive for more than three seconds, but shrug off most of the damage if all fifty people start bombing him, and actually manage to move around for quite a while in the enemy lines, to help clear them out. Again, assuming they are specced for this specific role.
GW2 doesn’t really have DR systems like this for combat. This has resulted in some stagnation in sPvP builds, as there are certain skills you absolutely must bring on some professions if you want to even participate, because CCs can be abused with such ease. WvW has a similar problem with large zergs basically just kiting one another at max range, spamming every AoE field they have at this range, hoping they’ll catch a couple people that wander a step or two too close. Melee in these situations are not impossible, but certainly next to it, and generally a bad idea. The combat in general in these situations doesn’t require much thought, and usually just resorts to spamming a skill or two, or even for people attempting to break a line, using something like Endure Pain, swinging around wildly at invisible enemies and then running away a couple seconds later, before the mass of ranged fire can kill you in a couple of seconds.
In GW1 and other MMOs this sort of system is usually supplemented or replaced by healers that ensure that melee classes can move around in enemy lines, break them up and generally harass players. You can’t die in two seconds while trying to do your job because there’s someone who won’t let that happen. Gameplay becomes less about spiking people down and more about wearing enemies down. Healing obviously does not work that way in this game, so when you do take enormous damage from a spike, there’s no healer to de-spike your health back up. You can’t restore that much health, much less over a sustained period, and there’s no DR system to keep these spikes from happening, either. Traits and skills will accomplish this, but only for about two or three seconds before it switches off and you’re dead.
I’m not saying this is a solution or even necessarily something that needs to happen in this game, but what’s your general opinion on DR systems for combat as a way of enabling some classes or build types to actually work in any situation in various degrees?
Playing another game with legit melee really makes it obvious where the OP is coming from. No, it’s not really where it should be. It probably never will be. In WvW in general, one step forward can bring you in range of about 50 people, and you’ll be splintered in a second. It’s not very good gameplay, when your melee players can’t do their job and rush in, swinging, breaking up ranged enemies because they can easily shrug off most of the damage. You’ve got a couple skills (Endure Pain, Shield Block), but after that, you’re toast. And most likely you haven’t done any damage to break up their formations in the process.
I’ve been able to do it using GS strike squads in WvW, but it relies a lot on load in problems and the enemy being balled up, and just wildly swinging like a fool, without a target. There are excuses, but stepping away from GW2 for a while, playing normal games and coming back really has sold me on how terrible the combat is. Good for a MMO, I suppose, but it’s nowhere where it should be, when you consider you don’t have the targeting advantages you would in a normal MMO, and you don’t have to worry about load-ins either.
It’s less about the Warrior, I think, and more about the game, in general. There’s no DR for damage from multiple sources, no intrinsic defense bonus to closing distance to a ranged target, and so on. It’s just not well thought out, and difficult to see for the trees, since we’re already working within the bounds of the game itself and no longer in development.
Yup, that’s the general theme of the Warrior. Simple to use, hard to play. A lot of what makes a Warrior build good or bad is completely out of your hands once you’re out of the hero panel. Weapon skills don’t do a lot in terms of utility, most of the time. The downside of losing control of yourself is never a satisfying one, when making a game. It is what it is, though.
Since I know ANet is actively tracking this thread:
I don’t farm karma, so I don’t normally notice DR until my loot dries up, which happens pretty quickly. I like to use one or two DEs that spawn big mobs of Risen to wade through them, chopping. It feels very good to slam the F key and pick up about fifteen items at once. Unfortunately, this lasts about ten minutes at most before the loot switches off.
My concern isn’t that I can’t farm. My concern is that I have to farm. You said “we hate grind in MMORPGs.” Yet, look at what you’ve done here. Take a look at Guild Wars 1, which was a much better game in terms of progression and breaking conventions. Head to Droknar’s, talk to Morgren or Siegfried, buy your (very cheap) max level armor. No rarities, no list of extra accessories that can’t seem to be found on NPCs. And there’s actually a reason to use minor runes over superior ones, so that isn’t even expensive. I don’t know what notions you invented for yourselves during board meetings about why this sort of grind is necessary, but I hope you see it’s obvious now how foolish these decisions have been. What concerns me is that I don’t think you do; I think you’re still confident in your choices and that things will just work out over the months. They won’t. You need to actively fix the immense problems your game has with rewards feeling like a slap in the face, gold grinds being present in all actions, and the cost of basic needs like exotic armor/weapons (and these are needs, not desires; skins are the unimportant point, remember?) being difficult at all to get.
We don’t want to farm. But we are forced to in order to do anything because you keep attaching these insane costs to everything. You’ve actually made MMO endgames worse because at least in other MMOs, sure, there’s a long, long grind, but getting massive amounts of loot and rare items of actual worth feels very good, on the road of that grind. In your game, the grind is there, but you’re so paranoid about the economy that you’re denying players their sense of achievement in the process. This is the worst combination possible.
Get rid of attribute reroll costs, introduce new skills, fix the worthless skills and traits that are already atrophying build creativity, remove waypoint gold costs entirely (players just don’t use them at all unless forced to, because of this), remove DR, reduce the cost of basic equipment, make all basic equipment available from one source in one place without a convoluted song and dance required for it, introduce more skins to choose from, make all chests drop rares or above only, make low level zones drop level 80 gear only and bags containing zone-specific materials, make repeating completion of zones around the world grant special items or rewards, change enemy types in Orr, hire new writers and stop putting Kormir’s into our kitten stories. This game, is a mess.
Here’s my biggest advice: the player’s everyday experience with the game is paramount – far more important than the global game economy will ever be. If you are actively making the player’s experience worse because you’re afraid of what bots will do, or that some items will be too common, or whatever, you’re making your game worse, and you’re making our experiences with your product an unenjoyable one. Stop putting the burden of your internal systems on us and start making the game all about the way we have fun. No DRs. No gold sinks. No grinding. Just stop it. I stopped playing because when I logged in, I can only think about all the things I have to do just to finish my first set of “perfect” armor (just in terms of stats), how this will inevitably involve doing the same DE chain in Orr for hours across several weeks, avoiding the massive gold sinks throughout the game, and I just get depressed and give up. Maybe I’m “playing wrong.” Maybe. But I bought every GW1 expansion there was, and used your cash shop in the process; I won’t be buying anything GW2-related until you return to the ideals that you were preaching on before release, and the theories that made GW1 a MMO that was fun to play, with MMO conventions as an afterthought.
Adding levels and more content isn’t going to change much, although having more armor skins to choose from (that don’t cost millions of gold anyway) would go a long way.
I mainly want them to release enough skills and traits (and fix what they have) to make the game more like GW1’s combat system. I honestly don’t have any desire to buy any expansions if the game is honestly going to be designed like this, for good.
Eleplant in the room made me think this was a topic about Trahearne for a second.
My opinion on the matter is this was obviously intentional, so the nightmarish grind is probably not going to change. We aren’t getting GW1’s wonderfully easy and satisfying gearing system back, so it’s best to accept it and play, or play another game. I want to like this game, but it’s obvious that the people in charge of making GW1 a game without MMO conventions either don’t work with ANet anymore, or have stepped back and let worse people take the reins. Personally, I decided I just wasn’t having fun, and am now playing other games.
GW2’s skills aren’t of “higher quality” than GW1’s. Many do nothing other than add a boon or deal straight damage. Even if they were – and they aren’t – then adding more skills allows people to try new things and change how they play. If your argument is just that many skills weren’t used (and some were, but many were), then look at current GW2 meta. Some professions basically run one of two builds in sPvP, one of three in WvW, and so on. GW2 is not a game of quality skills OR quantity.
The last patch made it so you can’t transmute armor if you’re wearing it. May want to check that too.
Well it’s not about the amount of skills available (although that could be much better too), it’s about the skill setup being so restrictive.. Like your entire left bar is a preset depending on your weapon, why is that? Why not give people a couple of different skills they could choose from that’s relevant to the weapon.
On the right side you’re forced to have 1 healing, 3 utility and 1 elite.. Why not let people have 5 utility if they want? or 3 healing, 1 elite and 1 utility?That would allow people to play and set up their skills the way they want to, not the way that somewhat best resembles what they want, given the few options they have to do with. I really hate how they forced everyone to have that particular setup.. It’s the direct opposite of what GW1 was/is famous for.
It also doesn’t help that some of these skills aren’t even useful most of the time, or aren’t unique from one another. Also, that a lot of the “elite” skills are next to worthless. Even GW1 elites were more effective, and they didn’t have two minute long cooldowns.
I think the biggest sin is the primary skills, though. You use them every day. If you prefer a weapon type, you are out of luck, forever, because those skills are there to stay. I loved running one or two specific hammer builds in GW1, but I tired of them and moved on to something else all the time, because it was easy, and there were a lot of good (and bad) choices. …Plus it didn’t take half a year to outfit yourself with exotics and superior runes…
How am I years late if the game just came out
It was an early development thing. Obviously new people to the genre won’t really know or care about it. GW1 fans understand what a central mechanic it was to the game and why it remained fresh for years after release, even with some of the problems it caused from time to time. Back on the old GWG, I guess mainly, it was hotly debated for a long time. It came and went, because it became obvious that it was going to happen, even if no one liked it. Blame ANet, I guess.
It does remind me of all those topics on energy potions, though. Remember that? Can you imagine if ANet had kept energy potions in the game to refill your dodge bar? What a foolish idea that was. It’s frightening to think they actually tried to include something like that, especially in hindsight. Very concerning.
Nothing, really. Frankly, most of the things it does better than most MMOs, GW1 did far better. It attempts to package itself in a different way, and it succeeds in some ways, and fails miserably in others.
I think GW2 will be remembered primarily for being able to pick up and play without effort. No need to party, no huge list of quests to do, no need to have dedicated healers, etc. I guess that’s the one thing it really solved in the genre. Unfortunately it created a new problems, where everyone plays separately because there’s no need to play together. Quests do run seamlessly, but as a result, they feel very empty and lifeless, especially when they repeat literally several times per hour. DEs were marketed as world-changing events, which I think led many to imagine their impact would be felt for days, if not weeks. Obviously this isn’t the case. Maybe after they start adding new ones they’ll reduce the rate? Who knows.
GW2 feels very manufactured to me. I’d even call it soulless. It’s very beautiful, but it’s also incredibly mechanical and dominated by systems. The story is terrible by Guild Wars standards (which were never that high), which doesn’t help.
GW2 suffers from an in-between syndrome in genre evolution. It definitely feels different, but it’s riddled with hundreds of smaller problems and some major ones that the designers either can’t address at this point or seem unwilling to address.
But, as far as changes go, GW2 feels like what would happen if you took GW1 and tried to make it worse by polluting it with staples of the genre. It at least somewhat successfully got rid of the holy trinity and reduced the bulk of MMO interfaces. Hopefully future, better MMOs will imitate that, but with more content, less repetition and more freedom.
(edited by Plague.5329)
I don’t really have a problem with the secondary professions. That was more trouble than it was worth in most cases. One too many warriors using life siphon.
They reduced the number of skills because “it was hard.” They marketed the skills as all being unique, although obviously that wasn’t true. They also marketed the traits as altering skill behaviors dramatically so that GW2 would have “even more skills than GW1 did!” Which is a hilarious fabrication.
GW2 has builds, but it’s build A, build B, build C. You can actually refer to something as “the shout build” or “the hammer build” and people know exactly what you’re talking about. Basically ANet this time didn’t want players using builds unless they’re the ones who made them, signed off on them and released them into the public. They know the players will eventually outsmart them, so it’s just playing it safe on that part. Unfortunately it’s made GW2’s combat stale in comparison.
My issue has never been with DE rewards (who cares? it’s 1 silver), but rather, the speed at which mobs stop dropping items, which is where the actual money comes from.
I guess DE rewards are important to people farming karma, which I don’t care a single thing about.
Well, you’re not alone. I personally feel Guild Wars 1 was a much better game, especially in terms of breaking conventions of the genre. ANet introduced a lot of bad MMO conventions into GW2 that were not present in the first game, supposedly out of some sense of necessity? I’m not sure. But as you can see, a lot of people complain about these problems.
I kept playing GW1 for years because of the vast array of skills and the number of ways you could build a skillbar to do so many things. ANet took the stance that it made it too hard for them to balance (yet they won an award for “most balanced pvp”), so we ended up with this mockery of a build system. I was offended when they ridiculed GW1’s skills as being dull and lacking in uniqueness. Not true at all. Now, in GW2, operating with some very generic, uninspired traits and some weapons that are stale to say the least, I’m even moreso offended.
It’s hard to believe that a game like GW1 ended up becoming the disappointment that is GW2’s combat system and endgame. All because ANet wanted to play it safe and reduce their workload. I play GW2 quite a lot, but I always think back to GW1, and wish GW2 could have been different. I’m already hoping for a new, more interesting game, because quite honestly, GW2 just doesn’t have what it takes. In between the massive gold sinks, terrible rewards, the ever-present feeling of slogging through level 80 content while being trapped in Orr, and the pathetic sPvP with the ineffectively dull combat design, GW2 is just the prettier, stupider relation of a much better game.
GW1 had a lot of problems, but I felt like that’s what GW2 was going to be – refining things from the first game into a better experience. Monks, ineffective skills ANet refused to buff, and so on. For every step forward GW2 takes with combat, it took two backwards.
(edited by Plague.5329)
I mentioned karma because it’s the only that you mentioned, as part of your “it only takes a few minutes” speech. If you want to get into other sources, those take even longer. Crafting alone costs an enormous amount of gold to fully level (grind), and buying off the TP, while probably the cheapest way of getting outfitted, is still a long and tiring process if your goal is to play normally.
Across ALL methods, all are convoluted and have large gold sinks tied to simply getting the outfitting done, not even touching looks. None are as simple as entering Droknar’s Forge and buying a 1.5k set.
@ Plague: i have one of the rarest stat groups for gear and didn’t “grind” a single piece of it. Pow/Tough/Vit armor and weapons, bought with the tokens i have been accumulating since level 35 and the money/karma i had been building up since lvl 1.
most instances of grinding in the game are self imposed, and pitiful. like most people simply have a berserker/traveler/rampager stat set, and you can get full exotic EVERYTHING of such items in 7 minutes time after you hit lvl 80. travel to the right karma vendors, oh and press O to buy it.
in fact, the only reason to grind out anything, just like in guild wars is for the looks.
Assuming you want to grind karma for those (252,000 for a set alone, ignoring accessories or weapons). You also have to beat the respective DEs, which can take a long time if they are bugged, or you’re trying to match the stats (since they are scattered across all the karma vendors instead of one being limited to one stat line.) This also doesn’t include superior armor runes, which cost anywhere from 1 gold to almost 4 gold per rune. Unless you want to equip a worthless rune like Superior Krait, of course. And as far as I know, there are no max exotic accessories available via karma, just level 80 masterworks. So either way, no, not “seven minutes.”
The real problem is that they introduced grind into a game that should not be about grinding. If you want a perfect set of armor, there should be a merchant that sells it at an affordable price. There isn’t, because rarity suddenly gets involved, and if you want to outfit yourself, ignoring aesthetics completely, it’s still a nightmarishly long grind to get full exotic armor, full exotic accessories, exotic weapons, outfitted with the correct runes. In GW1 this process would take about half a day at most.
I find the “entitlement” defenders are the actual problem, as they’re so used to bad MMOs that they think this system is somehow better. It isn’t. GW1 did it right. GW2 is a step backwards. The grind (and “entitlement”) should only stem from looks, not stats.
To be fair most of the profession updates are just bug fixes. I imagine they won’t be doing any real balancing until several months from now, once they feel things have settled into a definite meta. They stated they were “most happy with the Warrior’s current state,” across professions, so look to be disappointed for a very long time.
I keep hoping to one day wake up and see in the patch notes, “Warrior traits now actually do something, instead of just increasing damage.” or “Integrated stability into more trait behaviors to make Balanced Stance not a mandatory skill in sPvP,” or one of a hundred other minor problems Warriors have. Unfortunately, I don’t think they even understand most of these problems yet. In their mind, our profession is now perfect. Which is depressing.
Arcing Shot and Greatsword. Look for DEs in Orr that spawn large masses of enemies in small packs. Sit on their spawns and auto attack. (Yes, it’s stupid. Welcome to Guild Wars 2.)
Yup. I used to use it to spam Combustive before I realized that combo fields don’t actually do a whole lot, and the burning condition wasn’t tagging enemies in Orr. Arcing is now my best friend, and unfortunately the only real tagging tool Warriors have, other than trying to chase undead that have the tendency to scatter in all directions and zip around like bees (or just evaporate as soon as their spawn invulnerability stops working). Sigh.
There are technically only two. Sunrise and Twilight. Eternity is the combination of the two swords. It has the same stats, but I believe its graphic alternates between the two swords as day becomes night and so forth.
Technically there’s only one. Eternity. Sunrise and Twilight are just the “precursor legendaries” for it. And it’s not exactly like they’re different from one another. It’s just a sword that uses the sky texture instead of a blade model.
Personally, I’m not overly impressed by it, or any of the so-called legendaries, but that’s me. The one I have wanted to see is the hammer’s effect, although from previewing it in-game, it apparently still has no model, so I guess it doesn’t even exist yet. Or it has no model and it’s just an effect you can’t preview, which would be very disappointing.
I hope you’re not ridiculing a shout build in dungeons. It’s one of the best kinds of builds for Warriors to run there. The sustained healing won’t save anyone’s life but it does make the moments between evasions less stressful. Combined with adrenal shouts, you can upkeep quite a lot of damage in the process.
“Warriors are supposed to do damage” is a very simplistic and uneducated way of looking at any profession, much less Warriors.
It’s more of a PvE skill. It can be kind of annoying in sPvP, though.
Kill Shot doesn’t even do as much damage as the rifle #3. Do you have literally only 10,000 health or something?
Server transfers have nothing to do with anything. It’s just the boogeyman for some players.
Most of the problems in WvW stem from population. Obviously having more people to work with than the other side have a big influence on the outcome of a battle. You can (and I have) beaten much larger forces with much smaller ones, but these are individual battles. You can’t be everywhere, at all times, and you most certainly are not going to stop a huge zerg of fifty people, all on TS, with your group of five. No matter how many NPCs you add to a tower, they aren’t going to stop a zerg at all. You need players manning cannons/siege for that. Unfortunately, unlike real life, the barracks don’t always hold sleeping guards at night.
On one hand you want to make sure that whoever is playing is as legitimate a player as anyone else. If you’re Oceanic and it’s your primetime, you shouldn’t be punished for that by locking out towers from being capturable once the east coast goes to bed, or similar. On the other hand, you also don’t want to punish the other side of the world for their hard work, colliding against the enemy during “real” prime time, earning a hard fought victory, and then waking up the next day to find a single guild has taken your entire side of the map, just because there are no Australians or whoever on your side.
I think the solution – as good as one as you’d want without destroying game balance for one hand or the other – is going to be related to boons and upgrades that are based on population figures, both map-wide and local. This way, if both sides are active, fights are interesting. If the sides are uneven, fights are still interesting.
For example, if you are globally outmanned, you receive a buff that increases your stats. This should be what the Orb bonus is now, or similar. (The Orb bonus itself should only be related to point-gains or player loot, never stats, but that’s another topic.) When you are locally outmanned, participating in a fight against far superior numbers, you receive another buff that makes it easier to escape the situation (actually beating them should be left up to the players involved). Swiftness duration buffs, stance durations, stealth duration – that sort of thing. This is necessary as zergs always have infinite swiftness, tons of CCs waiting for you, and usually won’t be rendered anyway.
For locations, being globally outmanned may increase the amount of supplies an outpost receives when a dolyak arrives, and increase worker build speed and reduce repair costs a little. Perhaps the worst outmanned state (and best improvement) could be the addition of emergency waypoints to every held area, allowing small populations to move across the map quickly enough to respond to situations, with their limited numbers. As the population increases, the waypoints are lost. In general, mobility is a big part of the problem with late night fights, as there’s no way to be everywhere at once, even if you can anticipate the need to be somewhere, and it’s very easy for oceanics in their prime time to cap off your spawn exits while your one external waypoint on the map remains contested.
Of course, all this has to also be offset by point totals. There has to be a correlation between how well a server is doing, being outmanned, and the actual need for the map to be balanced. After all, if you’re blue, oceanic time slot, and your guild arrives to a map held entirely by, say, red, you don’t want to also have to fight evenly with a handful of people with insane buff totals and fully tiered fortifications when you literally have nothing on the map to help you. So, ownership of territories should also influence the frequency of these kinds of improvements and boons to individual players.
It’s a complicated balancing system. The three side idea works sometimes, but not too often. There are some cases when all the servers end up spawncamping one other server on either side of a borderland exit, just because out of circumstance, that’s where the fighting is, and upon death, everyone will just flock their way back there. It’s my opinion that the solution is having several kinds of tiered buffs to both players and held areas, and not just one or two that do little other than help you win one or two minor skirmishes, in what is ultimately a futile battle in the middle of the night against the entire other side of the planet, who just woke up.
(edited by Plague.5329)
Well, in PvE the main issue is that since you can play alone, everyone has individual goals. DEs draw people together, then once it’s over, everyone disperses in every direction. Being in a party just slows you down in a game where you have to stay active constantly if your goal is to get something that hinges on some currency, due to the low income and high gold sinks.
In something like WvW, I think parties should hold about 7 people, and squads should not hold 30 people, but rather, 7 parties, all collapsed under one title, totaling to almost 50 people per squad (which is the amount of people usually in a big mob anyway).
Also, a traited banner grants AoE regen.
I’d advise against any regen-based builds. Healing in general is very weak across the game (aside from Guardians. jeez.), and especially so on Warriors. Regen is even less effective, and would make more sense on a class that is actively mitigating damage for long stretches (like a Thief or Mesmer might).
In PvE, healing signet is more than enough, as you can avoid damage for the most part. You won’t need an armor set for it. Most of the time, a solid basic defense combined with a focus on offense is all you need. Killing your target is the best form of mitigation.
My initial impression is that they wanted to start with a very small skill total, so that once they started adding them in expansions, people wouldn’t expect 100 new skills per profession like they did in GW1, meaning it won’t bloat so easily over time. (Although when Factions came out it surprised a lot of people, including me, that they were adding so many, when only a few were really necessary.)
The idea that they will never increase the amount of weapon skills or secondaries in GW2 does frighten me, not only because of GW1, but just because GW2 really needs a better selection in a big way.
If Guild Wars 1 were more a little more like Guild Wars 2…
All vanity armor sets would require the same grind as Obsidian armor, but they alone would have the best stats in the game. Obsidian armor would require ten times the amount of work to get and would cost the equivalent of almost 1000 USD.
Waypoint travel would cost gold. The Fire Island Chain would be the only viable source of income in the game. Mobs would somehow be even more annoying, and would cast Meteor Storm five times as often, along with every cripple, freezing and immobilizing spell in the game.
Collectors would now instead collect an imaginary currency instead of items; rewards costs several dozen times over what it should. Their rewards would still be worthless, though.
Farming code would make it impossible to farm an area. (Oh wait, they did that.)
Resurrection signets and spells would use a secondary resource: your gold. People wouldn’t bring them anyway.
Henchmen would cost money to use, and would “eat” all drops of any kind.
After getting a good looking armor set in PvE, when entering PvP, it would be removed and replaced with a coconut helmet set.
Instead of hundreds of skills with various combinations across all secondary professions with countless ways of interacting with another to create a rich combat system that will earn several critical awards, you instead get 2% of this selection. Your skillbar is locked to weapon skills and key slots so that you only get to choose three actual skills, some of which become mandatory due to the loss in build synergy.
Seven new armor types are added, and stats from your actual armor are split across them unnecessarily to increase the amount of gold sinks in the game.
Monks are rounded up by all the various races and executed in what will later be remembered as the greatest day in the history of Tyria. (No complaints here.)
All elite abilities will remove your skills and give you several worthless abilities that are barely ever of actual use.
Attributes are locked to create “permanence of character.” (Oh wait, they did that.) But it will never be removed, as it is a gold sink.
Upon completing a campaign, rather than receiving a token to grant yourself a free weapon of your choice with a unique skin, you instead receive a coconut helmet, feathers and three imperfect blue items. Togo greets you and then kicks your character in the balls before berating you for not enjoying the game properly.
The story somehow now makes even less sense, and is split into several chapters that do not actually integrate. Characters you do not care about die and you are expected to feel something. Villains who you rarely see appear only quickly enough for you to kill. (Wait… did GW1 do this too? It’s hard to tell.)
Upon winning in the Hall of Heroes, you open the golden chest and receive a common rarity Club of Troll Slaying, the equivalent of 50 copper and a single token, which you will need 50 of to purchase a single weapon. The Ghostly Hero kicks your character in the balls for not enjoying the experience and expecting a reward, whether you complained about it or not.
Zaishen Keys are earned through daily achievements. The chests drop common tonics and merchant summons.
Player to player trades are taxed once for sending, once more for receiving, and again for accepting the item, then again for receiving a tax notification notifying you that you have been taxed. Trades also now cannot be accepted and approved until after they have been sent, making private transactions using gold work entirely on the honor system.
The world is still entirely instanced with two exceptions: towns, and Chinese-made bots that plague every zone in the game.
Everything is soulbound. Everything.
Dungeons would cost more to complete than what they actually earn. Completing dungeons in a timely manner results in Dhuum being summoned to harshly beat your character, then steal any gold or items you earned, before berating you for not playing for the experience instead of the reward. Actually finding a group for a dungeon would be nearly impossible, even right after their introduction to the game, baffling ANet entirely.
No Guild vs Guild. No Fort Aspenwood, no PvP of any kind other than Random Arenas and Team Arenas. Random Arenas and Team Arenas now behave like Hero battles, and victory is achieved only through control of waypoints.
The battle against Abaddon consists now entirely of fighting waves of Margonites over the course of thirty minutes, followed by using a cannon to shoot him in the face for ten more minutes as he tries to slap you with tendrils. After defeating Abaddon, Kormir kicks your character in the balls and – oh wait, she did that.
[While I consider GW2 to be a big step backwards in many ways compared to GW1, a list detailing all the things GW2 fixed from GW1 would be equally long, but probably less entertaining.]
Warriors are just the generic class. No advantages, no disadvantages exactly. This makes them fairly easy to use (and easy to impress morons with), but also makes them extremely irritating to play for someone with a lot of experience with the game. It also makes it difficult to win a 1v1 fight with one when playing against someone of equal experience and equipment, if your enemy is playing most other professions.
The best way to play a Warrior is usually as damage support, roaming and buffing stats, causing AoE conditions and such. Unfortunately these are just invisible numbers and not actual ways of physically controlling areas, which can leave this sort of playstyle feeling very vacant of fun, especially since some fights, you won’t get much XP (and certainly no loot) if you’ve been focusing solely on buffs / debuffs.
So, low ceiling, no downside, no upside. Just a vanilla profession with no real tricks up its sleeve. Catching one 1v1 in WvW, for example, is usually a pretty easy kill. Hence why if you play one in WvW and try to get to the main group, you’ll almost always see a Thief desperately sprinting after you, practically salivating for the chance to “earn” a couple of easy medals. Unless he’s a fool. Which many are.