Guild Wars 2

I would have understood the lack of armor in HoT as a production time limitation, but the amount of gem store items that came out directly afterward paints a pretty obvious picture of where the effort has gone.

They obviously had the art budget to do more armor, but in stead chose to spend it making more outfits, skins, and weapons for the gem store to squeeze HoT purchasers for even more money.

This is not a good way to conduct business. If you’re selling a 50 dollar expansion, maybe lay off the gem store for a few months and direct that art budget in to adding rewards in to the expansion’s content

It’s pretty obvious that you designed mistward heavy and light, then said “well we could design medium mistward, or two sets of gem store skins” and went for the skins, then said “you know what? Lets just make the light mistward a gem store skin since we ran out of time to make medium”

If its a question of cost for racial conversions, why not just add more racial sets? I don’t think anyone would particularly care as long as there was an equal amount for everyone.

I originally had the same thought about mastry points, but having played with the system in HoT for a while I see what they’re going after.

Mastry points are there to ensure you have to broaden your content spectrum and “master” various pieces of content.

I don’t have a problem with having mastry points tied to adventures, but i think, like the change they made to hero points, having more varied sources of mastry points would be a good way to go about things. Requiring people to do various content for mastry points is cool, but having a few more options on how to get those mastry points so people can better avoid certain content they really don’t like might be good?

Hi hendrix! if you’re looking for how you can obtain a specific stat set for PvE/WvW gear, try this wiki page:

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Equipment_acquisition_by_stats

It breaks down every stat combination and tells you where to obtain each piece. Good luck!

JediYoda.1275:

PopeUrban.2578:

JediYoda.1275:

Focus on Vinetenders so bring plenty of CC

You don’t need any cc to kill vinetenders. You need at least three people who don’t die instantly to the surrounding mordrem and are capable of attacking a called target.

There’s actually nothing mechanically complex about it. The vinetenders spawn 3 per head and do not respawn. Bring damage, don’t die, ignore anything that’s not a vinetender, kill the head, then disengage and move on to the next, cross your fingers for the next head to spawn close by.

Bringing up to 8 people lessens the chance of failure, but that failure is only ever due to how far the head spawns from the last one, and the mission allows you to fail a few anyway. With a few retries you can do it all with 3 good players if the heads all spawn close.

Oh great another lecture I didn’t ask for and yes CC does and will help to speed things up.

PS. Please don’t reply to anymore of my post thanks.

Why are you so hostile? Apperantly I have replied to some of your posts in the past? I don’t know who you are or what those other posts were, but I apologise if you’re upset about whatever they were. We’re talking about guild hall claims in this thread. if you have some sort of personal issue with me a PM is the proper place to have that conversation.

Your one line comment seems to indicate you need CC to kill vinetenders. You don’t. You don’t actually need any CC at all. I just don’t want people somehow mistakenly getting the impression that CC is needed to make the attempt.

My idea map is the new desert borderlands, only with people in them. The new mechanics are fun and make for interesting fights in stead of the same boring tactics everywhere on the map.

Using the terrain appropriately is half the fun the siege style pvp. The desert BLs have far more opportunities for creative tactical terrain use.

Oh, also, any map that actually adequately awards people for taking, holding, and defending objectives and stops rewarding people for flipping stuff and walking away. if people got rewarded for what their team owns in stead of what their team captures, there would still be plenty of reasons to capture stuff, but objectives would in general be better defended and create more fun objective based fights and less boring pointless fights in the middle of random fields over nothing.

JediYoda.1275:

Focus on Vinetenders so bring plenty of CC

You don’t need any cc to kill vinetenders. You need at least three people who don’t die instantly to the surrounding mordrem and are capable of attacking a called target.

There’s actually nothing mechanically complex about it. The vinetenders spawn 3 per head and do not respawn. Bring damage, don’t die, ignore anything that’s not a vinetender, kill the head, then disengage and move on to the next, cross your fingers for the next head to spawn close by.

Bringing up to 8 people lessens the chance of failure, but that failure is only ever due to how far the head spawns from the last one, and the mission allows you to fail a few anyway. With a few retries you can do it all with 3 good players if the heads all spawn close.

sephiroth.4217:

Riku.4821:

People prefer you to be ascended. You’ll find some groups that don’t expect to have ascended.
Personally if you aren’t up for the hurdle of ascended crafting raids might not be for you?
But yes there will be some groups who want purely Ascended Gear. As it does give a nice benefit when you finish it.

So you’re saying even if we pay $50 for the content, we might not even be able to play it?

Yeah. Just like when you paid 50 bucks for level 80 zones you can’t play them until you put forth the effort to level to 80 and acquire level 80 gear. or How paying 50 bucks and gaining access to fractals does not immediately allow you to not die horribly in a l30+ fractal to gear check agony.

Buying the game or expansion does not automatically grant you gear, levels, or skills you may need to conquer all content. It never has.

Easier fix:

Give the bosses fulcrum shifting stolen items. if, for instance, you could steal an item from the guardians that give a shield against seekers, thieves would be instantly viable.

Stolen items are hands down the easiest way to balance/implement thief balance for raid encounters as unlike other professions its actually natural to give thieves a different skill in different encounters through steal.

You know how easy having a thief makes mai trin? It’s because thieves can steal 3s invuln on a 20s cooldown and just facetank her in the lightning fields. Similar design should have been the first idea for thieves in raid encounters. It’s literally our class mechanic.

I’m all for chill/slow/quickness/alacrity to affect init, but they have to be adequately balanced around init.

The speed/slow of these effects at their base values in applied directly to init regen would be OP in the case of quick/alac, and class destroying in the case of slow/chill.

In the past I’d have said that slow/chill were’nt appropriate for init simply on the basis of thief’s poor condi cleanse, but we actually have adequate access to cleanses now so I think its a good time to have this conversation.

These effects should totally effect init, but need to be individually balanced against init since it’s quite different than weapon colldowns in terms of its effects on survivability and DPS.

1: The extra set can be used to get a free transmute (it won’t cost transmute charges) but it can’t really be refunded. I had a similar sad day with double fused dagger skins a while back. Used them both days before the wardrobe update, naturally.

2: The extra outfit items are useless. once you have all your stuff converted to outfits/potions, chuck ’em

3: In general karma is slightly more valuable. You may want to look in to chef crafted dyes, as they are quite valuable now that dyes are salvaged in to pigments that scribes need a lot of. I get a lot of mileage out of my karma for things like nutmeg. In addition, the pact commander mastry gives access to roving karma merchants that sell a daily inventory of rare or unique crafting recipies as well as items you can use to accelerate map rewards on all core tyria maps. There’s also a collection that will provide you with an item that allows you to trade karma each day for some semi-valuable stuff. Basically, Karma is a bit more valuable, but to get the value out of it you’re going to have to put in some work to unlock the converter or new merchants.

4: Sadly, those are completely outdated. before they removed glory they made sure to tell everyone to eat up all their boosters and glory items, but they don’t convert in to anything

I never stated glint designed the ascension trials. The trials were designed by the forgotten, and utilized by Glint and her forgotten allies. At not point did I state that the forgotten were wholesale slaves or agents of glint. However, it is clear that a large number of them were in fact both complicit in and aware of her agenda.

The vision in Omadd’s machine is not simply image manipulation. The dispersion of the remaining orbs is not merely a lens effect, they are seen physically moving away from the center.

Though all of GW1 was a combination of Abbaddon’s various plots to return, and foiling those plots was the primary journey of the PCs, Glint, in the very first release of prophecies, is taking part in that plot for a very different reason.

Many of your rebuttals rely on strictly literal interpretations of text and dialogue spoken or written by entities who have demonstrated a willingness to deliberately mislead from or obfuscate the truth.

As early as eye of the north we already see the formation of an Exalted-like organization charged with the protection of Glint’s egg. EOTN marks the epilogue of the battle against abbaddon, and sets the stage for the waking of the elder dragons.

This responsibility can not be left with the dwarves, however, as more and more of them find themselves pulled away by the rite of the great dwarf, and so Glint requires new agents.

As the gods (whom the majority of the forgotten serve) exit, presumably taking many of their forgotten servants with them, those complicit in glint’s greater plan (for whatever reason. Compassion for humans, loyalty to their ally glint, who knows? They are by all accounts free willed creatures.) begin to prepare these crystal sanctuaries and, just as they did in the crystal desert, shepard a and instruct a new group of pilgrims on a new path.

These pilgrims build the crystal sanctuaries alongside the forgotten, learn from the forgotten, and some among them are tested by the forgotten. Those that succeed their tests become exalted.

Those that fail the tests continue to tend the crystals in these sanctuaries until they are driven out by the rise of the elder dragons and the death of glint. Without glint, the crystals that protect them cease to do so, and the sanctuaries are overrun.

Those that remain flee to cantha, build a kite city, and will later be known as the zephyrites. Over time and without any more direct contact with the forgotten or glint, their histories become muddled or willfully distorted to protect the secret of Glint’s egg.

It is entirely possible that the egg that now sits in Tarir is the last such egg (we know Glint birthed an entire brood, not simply one egg) , and that each such outpost held its own egg and its own group of proto-zephyrites and forgotten, caring for their respectiv eggs and training to deicde who among them was worthy to become exalted.

In fact, the entire reasoning bechind establishing her sanctuary may have been for that very reason. Stop and consider what little we know about dragon reproduction. How many eggs could Glint have laid, and might her passive non-involvement for so long have been not an intentional one, but one of necessity, as birthing the eggs was a central part of her strategy.

Glint may have potentially become more powerful and active as a participant in the fight against the elder dragons earlier, but she still had work to do, and that work involved having a LOT of eggs. It understandable, if this is the case, why she would not have joined the fight herself any earlier. If she truly posesses the gift of prophecy then such a long term strategy may have had benefits only she could forsee.

I think separating the forgotten from glint’s agenda isn’t really a valid assumption. Glint didn’t open a portal to her lair for us because we ascended. Becoming ascended was the prerequisite. This was unbeknownst to us, but there was literally no other reason to do so. The ancient elonians may have attempted ascension for different reasons, and the forgotten may have initially designed the asecnsion trials for different reasons, but by the time prophecies rolls around, it is made quite clear that the reason we are seeking ascension is specifically to gain audience with glint.

Glint foresaw that a group of chosen would fulfill the flameseeker prophecies. Glint actively hid herself away from those not fit to persue her agenda. Ascending has no other narrative purpose.

Khilbron tells us to go to the desert and ascend, which is obviously against his own interests. We do so under the false impression that we are obtaining power to return and fight the white mantle. Khilbron has the scepter of Orr already. He believes (rightly) he can take on the Mursaat alone. He’s attempting to dispose of us without showing his hand. Only after we ascend are we immediately whisked away (by the forgotten) to speak with glint and have our true purpose revealed. The only reason for ascension is to find those worthy to carry out glint’s agenda, an agenda the forgotten are quite obviously complicit with.

In the time of prophecies that agenda was to close the door of Komali, because then, as 200 years later, Glint has in mind the best interests of the peoples of tyria.

Only after these events did glint establish the forgotten and their mission. After the flameseeker prophecies were fulfilled, and the immediate threat of the titans was dealt with.

Whatever they may have served originally, it’s quite clear that well before the events of GW1, many of the forgotten aligned themselves with glint’s agenda.

There’s really not a distinction between the forgotten and glint’s agenda. The forgotten have always served forces of balance. They may not serve glint, but they are obviously aligned with glint’s agenda, and it is quite obvious in both prophecies and in Tarir that the forgotten and glint do not serve unrelated goals. The forgotten are deeply linked with glint’s agenda any time we encounter them in tyria. In fact the only other place we find them is as wardens in the domain of anguish, which is a conflict not entirely unrelated to closing the gate of komali and ansuring tyria isn’t overrun by the titans.

Think about this for a moment.

The Titans are being of extreme magical power. Letting them run roughshod over Tyria would look pretty attractive to a bunch of sleeping elder dragons would it not?

What we could not have known then, but what glint (as a former minion of kralkatorrik) already knew was that stopping the titans was paramount if she was to have time to prepare the rest of her grand design.

The flameseeker prophecies weren’t a vision of the future. They were a series of meticulous manipulations of many of the key players in tyria by both glint and the forgotten to prevent the rise of the elder dragons.

The forgotten care for glint’s sanctuary in prophecies, and are her oldest allies. They are the gatekeepers and the administrators of trials, but untimately all such trials lead right back to glint, glint’s agents, glint’s egg, etc.

The forgotten are absolutely related to glint’s agenda, as are their tests. Their alliance with glint goes back further than recorded history. Though the forgotten seem to have a larger mandate (as we see them as the gatekeepers of the domain of anguish) for the preservation and balance of tyria, it is impossible to deny that they are both complicit and willfully involved in glint’s agenda. They literally guard her sanctuary. They literally designed the tests in tarir, a city built specifically to house her egg. Though the forgotten may not be subservient to glint, they are (were) functionally her agents (or allies if the semantics bother you)

I will concede, after reviewing the tablets again that the guild hall ruins are of forgotten rather than exalted origin, but their purpose remains unchanged. They were built to nuture those crystals, and those crystals were created by glint specifically to extend her power, or that of her offspring, ot protect tyria from the elder dragons.

As for the visions, I respectfully disagree with your interpretations. Given what we know, and what I’ve seen I offer the following interpretations:

There are multiple points of light in the tree’s vision, emanating from magumma itself. We see her represent the jungle as the dragon (as evidenced by the dragon eye motif in the branches) and the shadow of the dragon as its agent. I believe these additional points of light represent glint’s crystals.

We see a warning from the egg about what may become of civilization is Mordy is allowed to succeed, yes, but the end of that vision isn’t merely about Moredremoth. It represents both mordy and dragons in general, and the shining city represents both Tarir and tyrian civilization.

The vision in Omadd’s machine specifically references the fact that we killed zhaitan. The central orb represents tyria, and the others orbit it. One orb (zhaitan) crashes in to tyria, at which point the balance of the other obs in orbit is disrupted, all but the pink orb which remains in place, but is quickly covered by the disruption that emanates from the center. I believe the pink orb represents kralkatorrik, and thus glint’s, and her offspring’s sphere of influence. I believe the disruption specifically shows the displacement of zhaitan’s sphere of influence. That vision is a warning that the other dragons (orbs) are becoming untethered by the absence of zhaitan, but that one orb (the pink one) is choosing to remain in place. This orb is Kralk, Glint, her offspring, and if her plan comes to fruition, us.

Honestly, they already built a far better system in GW1.

Instance selections to find map instances. Player find tool with sections for trade, recruiting, and LFG.

I understand why they don’t want to add a trade section, as player-to-player trading is not a supported activity, but a “miscellaneous ads” section for people to use for recruiting and other purposes would be nice. I’d much rather have a completely ignorable tab than have to constantly see “GUILD RECRUITING BLAHBLAH” taking up five lines in map chat all the time.

The forum section is not enough, it lumps together EU and NA guilds, and has no way to guarantee that you can talk to a recruiter when you see the ad. not to mention its on the forums, where many players never actually visit.

The moment they added a trade section to LFG… people stopped posting trades in the improper spot.

The problem is that currently, open world is the ‘default position’ and thus that’s where you’re going to find people posting other types of ads that don’t fit in to other content.

As for taxis, open world is absolutely the right place to post taxi groups. You’re actively looking for other players to do specific content with, in the open world.

If they’d simply add a “player advertisements” section to LFG, the problem would fix itself.

Same reason to collect the leftover hero points before HoT came out, they give you a jump start on the next spec.

Red Mistress Denna.9804:

PopeUrban.2578:

Red Mistress Denna.9804:

-I really really really miss the mechanic where questing together (with other guild mates) produced guild currency. I don’t see why this side of Influence needed to be taken out. Why not let us earn some influence that we can use for that little boost? Let us by Guild Upgrade mats with commendations? In general, the upgrade has forced guilds to work together, but has stopped rewarding having FUN together.

This still exists in the form of resonance.

Basically, resonance is a very limited version of the old influence system than can only be used to speed up production at the fabricator.

When doing any content with tagged guild members, resonance crystals go on your drop table. If you get them as loot you can donate them to an NPC in the guild hall to provide the guild 100 resonance. The same NPC also sells 100 resonance for 25s.

The time required to construct consumables/furniture is pretty drastic, and in many cases you have prerequisites that you have to wait to craft (for example, you need both a 5% xp banner and a 5% karma banner to craft a 10% karma/xp banner) so resonance helps you get through your massive fabrication backlog and pump out banners faster.

On average, a dedicated scribe with a guild feeding him weekly crystals from guild missions (and harvesting a few plants to craft dyes to break down for pigments) can pretty easily generate more banners/furniture per week than the fabricator can actually produce without really spending any money on them (normal mats income for everything other than pigments/shards is pretty sufficient from one character, and trivial if multiple members are kicking over a few dust or logs your way) so resonance, as an optional currency fills the gap by helping speed up that production. Guild members can either kick in gold or toss in the crystals to provide resonance so that production can actually meet the speed of scribing.

In my experience resonance seems a little too rare as a drop, however, often I’ve been grouped and playing all day with a full party of guild members and among the whole party only see 2-3 resonance crystals, which is only worth 2-3 hours acceleration on the fabricator. It’d be nice if resonance dropped more frequently as it doesn’t actually change anything from an economic standpoint, just from a production time standpoint.

That’s pretty cool and I didn’t know it was added to Loot tables (I’ve only received the resonance crystals during Guild Missions (Also, yes i know the crystals and slivers are different)). Personally though, I’ve found resonance to be the least difficult guild currency or material to get and use.

Yep, got them from random dungeon and fractal drops in fact.

For those that don’t understand the distinction:

Resonating slivers are the scribing material (scribes can turn these in to higher tier versions for higher tier scribing recipies) and are blue in color.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Resonating_Sliver

Resonance crystals (called shards) are the ones that you tun in to the guild to speed up production times at the fabricator and are black with red flecks.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Shard_of_Crystallized_Resonance

You can’t get the crafting material slivers outside of guild missions, but you can get the shards to turn in for resonance. The drop rate just sucks. According to the blog post, however, this seems to be unintentional? That may explain the extremely low drop rate outside of guild missions.

Raids aren’t really intended to be good for the money. You do them mostly for the skins, just like dungeons.

Read up on the upcoming december buffs to fractals. If you’re running instances for money, fractals is where they want you to be (and they expect you to get the masteries if you’re going to be running them this way) since that’s the instance area they are supporting going forward in terms of PUGs and lots of repeat runs.

Dungeons, like raids, are there for skins now.

I do it with just SoM in pve. On a d/d condition build with lotus dodge you have generally enough built in evade and passive healing to kill most stuff as long as you keep an eye on your init and end and try to save a dodge or DB for emergency evades.

I actually built a “bunker” variant on my spvp build with carrion ammy and scrapper runes. I went for trickery in stead of acro since the buff to deathblossom lets you use it pretty effectively as a dodge, stealing gives you effectively two evades, one from the init, and one from endurance thief.

I went for withdraw on heal for yet another evade and just loaded up with shadowstep, bandit’s defense, shadow refuge (for stomps) and thieve’s guild (for pressure) and can 1v1 or 1v2 on points for quite some time.

The scrapper runes really help to bump up the EHP of withdraw and offset the lack of armor, and the daze on steal gives you a nice interrupt that you can pop even when you’re locked in a deathblossom animation to cancel a heal or whatever if you’re fighting roamers.

Taking a purity sigil alongside daredevil condi cleanse lets you shrug off most condition pressure, and when you’re bombed heavy you’ve got shadowstep to fall back on.

The damage suffers, but when you play it purely defensively rather than offensively it is very difficult to remove you from a point, usually requiring the other team to send a second guy over to run you off, or letting you just deadlock one of their roamers in a never ending fight on point. Ideally you do normal thief back capping, and bunker the point to force them in to weird splits if you see their roamer coming to recap.

You won’t top the kill chart, but if you time interrupts from steal and bandit’s defense right you can force people to leave points to reset and kill with condition pressure against builds with weak cleanse, and the ability to quickly back cap and then bunker a point against their roamer can seriously mess up their roaming game.

Red Mistress Denna.9804:

-I really really really miss the mechanic where questing together (with other guild mates) produced guild currency. I don’t see why this side of Influence needed to be taken out. Why not let us earn some influence that we can use for that little boost? Let us by Guild Upgrade mats with commendations? In general, the upgrade has forced guilds to work together, but has stopped rewarding having FUN together.

This still exists in the form of resonance.

Basically, resonance is a very limited version of the old influence system than can only be used to speed up production at the fabricator.

When doing any content with tagged guild members, resonance crystals go on your drop table. If you get them as loot you can donate them to an NPC in the guild hall to provide the guild 100 resonance. The same NPC also sells 100 resonance for 25s.

The time required to construct consumables/furniture is pretty drastic, and in many cases you have prerequisites that you have to wait to craft (for example, you need both a 5% xp banner and a 5% karma banner to craft a 10% karma/xp banner) so resonance helps you get through your massive fabrication backlog and pump out banners faster.

On average, a dedicated scribe with a guild feeding him weekly crystals from guild missions (and harvesting a few plants to craft dyes to break down for pigments) can pretty easily generate more banners/furniture per week than the fabricator can actually produce without really spending any money on them (normal mats income for everything other than pigments/shards is pretty sufficient from one character, and trivial if multiple members are kicking over a few dust or logs your way) so resonance, as an optional currency fills the gap by helping speed up that production. Guild members can either kick in gold or toss in the crystals to provide resonance so that production can actually meet the speed of scribing.

In my experience resonance seems a little too rare as a drop, however, often I’ve been grouped and playing all day with a full party of guild members and among the whole party only see 2-3 resonance crystals, which is only worth 2-3 hours acceleration on the fabricator. It’d be nice if resonance dropped more frequently as it doesn’t actually change anything from an economic standpoint, just from a production time standpoint.

My guess is they’re testing the waters with these for jeweler 500.

The trick here is that they don’t want to undermine the existing acquisition methods of ascended jewelry, so they can’t just add ascended crafting to jeweler and call it a day. Nobody would bother to level it to 500 and spend the time and mats just to make something they can get in a week with guild missions or, few weeks with laurels, or just be doing some low end fractals.

So they have to sweeten the pot to make people want to level jeweler to 500, but they have to do it without creating stat creep since they have firmly planted their foot down at this point and said “no more stats”

So, what’s the primary reward mechanism for the game? Cosmetics!

How do we get people to want to level jeweler to 500? Cosmetics!

Mark my words: Jeweler 500 will craft items like these, which go in to a specific cosmetic infusion slot which can only be found in jeweler 500 crafted jewelry.

At that point I wouldn’t be suprised if they added a quick upgrade for the existing items to convert them to the new system.

nobleroar.2078:

Yup just read that even the new legendaries cost almost the same or even more than the old ones…

Looks like fun is gated behind gold…

Before anyone else popping out and say legendary aren’t suppose to be cheap:

1. The precursor is account bound.
2. Crafting the legendary still need the new gifts which still need gold/time
3. Legendary != Expensive
Legendary == Achievement

However currently, when one mentioned legendary, people will go " wow, so rich"

Look at Liadri the concealing dark, that I consider an achievement (it took me countless tries to defeat her) and legendary crafting can consist of such achievements but nope, it comes with a pricey tag.

Imagine an epic journey where a hero/heroine is off seeking to craft his or her legendary but first, let them prepare their gold first… err okay… I would then imagine epic fights for the loots, or for the rare loots but nope, you need to carry a harvest axe and chop trees for days for the planks ~_~

The reason why they make the ‘challenge’ of legendaries rooted in riches rather than content is that they have a lot of pressure from their user base to ensure that legendaries are accessible to the whole community.

We see them breaking with this model for armor and backpacks, at least to start the collection, so it may be possible that in the future we’ll see more diverse legendary acquisition methods. Right now we have series 1 legendaries, which can be literally bought off the auction house, Series 2 legendaries which must be crafted, a backpack which requires fractals, and armor which requires raids.

We may see a future where series 3 weapons come from a raid, and series 2 armor and backpacks which are more crafting centric.

Legendaries are literally the end all and be all. That’s the entire point. When new stats are added by any means, they’re added to legendaries. When ascended was added, legendaries were buffed to that point.

Furthermore, ascended is literally the top statistical tier forever

The only reason it was added post release is that anet mistakenly thought exotic acquisition was going to be more difficult and time consuming for its players. Players acquired ther ’endgame" gear so rapidly that they hit the “legendary wall” and became frustrated by the sharp cliff of cost and RNG associated with legendaries.

Ascended was designed to bridge that gap, and to dovetail with fractals, which were given an encapsulated fractal-only gear progression system to appeal to people that like gear progression without keeping those that do not from experiencing all of the fractal content.

It’s a pretty neat system that works a lot like an action RPG. You can “just play” through fractals, get some rewards, and say “that was fun, let’s do other stuff” or you can hop on the ever-increasing difficulty and gear treadmill to get the epic-shiny-whatsit-of-legend.

The difference is that unlike most MMOs, you don’t actually need any of the epic-shiny-whatsits-of-legend to get in to other content. They’re there as goals, but they aren’t required as gates to simply experience other content. You don’t need the gear from raid 1 to play raid 2. You don’t need to get to fractal level 100 to try a raid.

That progression is in masteries and hero points, which are, like xp, largely passive and “free” systems that reward content completion rather than repetition. Masteries reward you for completing whatever content in their area you want. Hero points are rewarded for completing specific challenges one time. Your gear rewards are left up to you.

Don’t like that elite spec ascended skin? Fine! You don’t actually need it to do anything! Don’t want that legendary armor? Fine! you don’t actually need it to do anything! Your top tier, ascended is easily accessible by any player through the simple act of crafting, which requires no special skills but the ability to spend your gold on it and click buttons at a crafting station. From there you are allowed and encouraged to define whatever goals are interesting to you personally, in stead of going down a strictly ordered checklist predefined by the developers of ten instances you hate just to have a chance at survivng in an open world map you actually like.

I really don’t see them invalidating these systems they designed specifically to use for further progression design for the lifetime of GW2. They said many times that all the new HoT systems were done specifically for extendability.

The entire design of masteries and elite specs was done specifically to avoid adding more tiers of gear. Arenanet has made it very clear that at some time in the past they considered vertical stat progression, but decided due to community feedback that it was something they wouldn’t do again, and devoted a considerable amount of time and resources to developing elite specs and masteries as progression systems in place of the much cheaper and easier to implement option of more character levels and stat tiers.

As for content, the vast majority of content in HoT was of the accessible and map related bent. No new instances were added with the exception of one raid, and they purposely retooled all 5-man instances in the game in to the fractal system specifically so that they have a framework within which they can spend less time and effort on those instances for more content longevity due to the size and general scaling nature of fractals.

The game needed challenging endgame instances just as much as it will continue to need regular drops of maps and living story updates, and they already developed a methodology and development schedule to roll those out with LS2 that was extremely well recieved and quite popular so there is no reason to assume they won’t follow suit with LS3.

The game has always had content exclusive rewards, and HoT is no different. There are many rewards you can only get from playing a lot of specific map content, many rewards you can only get through their respective instances, and even a few you can only get through wvw or spvp.

GW2 has never kept the most valued skins out of specific content. Legendaries require very specific content to craft, including a combination of instances and PvP. I don’t know where you got the idea that GW2 ever practiced some idea of preferential treatment toward open map rewards. They’ve always tried to ensure there are compelling content specific rewards for various content, and have done so with varying degrees of success.

I really want to pay for exactly what we’re getting, with a more frequent rollout of new guild missions and fractals. I’d happily take an open map chunk every other living stroy update if the ones that didn’t introduce new map content in stead introduce a fractal or raid wing, and they keep the wvw and spvp patches on their own schedules that actually turn up content more often. I’ll gladly keep buying expansions if we get in total what we’re promised to eventually see out of this one with a little extra love for fractals. Some extremely stong open world maps. A decent story release with a good follow-up living story season, a new elite spec or two, and some new pvp/wvw maps or modes.

I will happily continue to play with skins as the primary reward mechanism, with the secondary reward/progression mechanism being a primarily content driven rather than economic driven progression of masteries and hero points. I did it for seven years in GW1 and it was effective, and it worked. Top tier gear was easy. From there you collected skills (elite specs in GW2) and worked on title tracks (masteries in GW2)

There is literally no reason to assume GW2 is moving toward a gear grind when arenanet worked so much harder to create progression systems that remove the need to implement a much easier and cheaper to develop gear grind.

We’ve done these with 3 people and gained credit when the yak isn’t attacked. We didn’t buff the yak at all, just walked alongside. Just stick close to it, have 3 members tagged, and stay with the yak until it gets to its destination.

I’m fairly certain the EDs sis not “come to be” because of the consumption of magic. The consume magic because of what they are.

Though, If you have evidence to the contrary I’d love to see it!

As to Konig, the apex predator theory is one I’ve heard before, but given the longevity of these beings, and their apparent intelligence I can’t accept a largely instinctual “and then we ate all the magic and hibernated” explanation from a standpoint of logic.

While its true that what we learn from the apostate indicated we don’t know the exact balancing mechanisms, it would be foolish to assume the EDs are not intrinsically linked with it given the vision we experienced in Omadd’s machine, or the one passed to us by the pale tree, or the tail end of the one passed to use by the egg. Omadd’s device is more abstract, but clearly represents that balance being thrown out of whack, and the tree’s vision clearly warns of a representation of rays of energy as dragons through multiple dragon images. Again, at the tail end of the egg’s vision we see what is presumably tarir, or a representation of the civilised world in danger of consumption by a dragon (likely mordremoth).

These are all of course puzzles designed by the lore team, but given what we know and even the generous corrections provided by your encyclopedic historical knowledge, I think if I were to return to the original theory regarding Glint’s agenda, it still seems sound.

We can easily assume that even if the dragons themselves are not the six elements, they are extremely closely linked to them. We can also assume that Glint’s agenda was in the interest of the people of tyria, and that the egg, the exalted, tarir, and thus the guild halls (which are abandoned exalted settlements according to notes in tarir) are also part of that plan.

And finally, the crystals in those guild halls only react to certain people. Guild officers for the purpose of gameplay, but for purposes of lore to conncetion between crystals, and the egg of the crystal dragon seem to close to be mere coincidences. Passing the Forgotten’s test chamber allows us to activate and bond with these crystals, and they feed of of us. As we invest ourselves in to the guilds, they grow.

Think back to prophecies, where another set of Forgotten trials had to be passed. In that time the trials were to gain entrance to glint’s domain, and glint again forced another set of trials.

Any time we deal with Glint or her agents, we are tested. Why?

It could just be random trope invocation, but I really do believe that Glint’s endgame, the egg, the crystals, the tests, all of it is to leave us with the only force capable of containing or controlling whatever aspect of the All the EDs exist to balance: Another ED.

And Elder dragon raised by, dependant upon, and in a symbiotic relationship with the free peoples of tyria. Just as every other ED can not sustain itself without agents to see to its needs, so too would this younger and much more vulnerable ED be unable to withstand the sure and swift wrath of its opponents.

Glint knows the mind of at least kralkatorrik, and can infer from that knowledge the mind of the others. They view the existance of the free willed minor races of tyria as an abomination, and would easily crush her fledgeling offspring. She knows it needs us to get started, and we need it to get finished.

The crystals, the tests, everything leads to the likely outcome that we and the dragon in that egg are part of that agenda. Those found worthy to feed it, protect it, and care for it until it can do the same for us, and only then, together, can we end the cycle of the EDs and claim a harmonious world in which we and the one remaining ED, usurper of the vast power of the All, lives in harmony with us, as a guide and guardian, just as Glint was before she failed.

That plan was Glint’s failsafe in case she fell, and she obviously invested a lot of time and effort in to setting it all up.

Katre.1084:

I know that your company does not put much into keeping a professional demeanor(every piece of footage I see from events has anet people in t-shirts and ratty jeans), but at least you dont have to seem like amateur game designers.

Having worked in the games industry for five years, I regret to inform you that I have never worked for, interviewed with, attended a meeting at, or visited a single game development, visual effects studio, or publisher that has a business dress code.

Some people prefer to be a little dressier, but it is generally left up to employee preference.

It is a cultural norm in the games industry, and most of the tech industry, to have moved past the false assumption that dressing in suits or shirts and ties actually makes people more productive or better at their jobs.

Evidence has actually suggested the opposite. The more freedom people have in terms of personal expression in the work place, the more comfortable and thus productive they are likely to be.

More beards and non-european facial bone structures and hairstyles for humans please.

We have clearly established that humans have largely gravitated to the “melting pot” of modern kryta, yet there are very few canthan facial designs, and no elonian ones at all, not to mention the only elonian hairstyles are “afro” and “well if you squint a little maybe these braids and buzzcuts”

It’s especially disappointing considering how extremely well they handled elonian faces and hair in nightfall. There was an amazing and beautiful diversity of african facial structure and hair textures there.

I mean all the other races have these wild options like tattoos, horns, glowy bits, cool ears, guess I just assumed what was to be unique about humans was how diverse just their faces are coming from such varied cultural and ethnic backgrounds. In stead we got MMO standard white people with a few asian faces and some sliders and skin tones thrown in so you can try and fake it because anet was too lazy to build real options.

You built a whole race of plant people. You couldn’t design a few believable black people?

Odyssey.6523:

Palador.2170:

I expect the horror stories of “Scribe detachment” to start coming in soon. Stories where either a guild supported someone learning to be a scribe only to have them leave or stop playing, or stories where some poor soul had to level the skill without help, only to be thrown from the guild or see someone else appointed as official scribe out of left field.

Don’t say it won’t happen, because we all know it will sooner or later. Real Life events and guild politics can do nasty things to people even without this burdensome investment to consider. It needs to be dealt with now, before it becomes a huge mess.

These are best case scenarios. Worst case scenario is the guild helps the scribe level all the way to 400, dedicating thousands of gold to it, and helping him to unlock recipes. Then, when the person reaches 400, they have instantly become one of the most valuable players in the game who can go to ANY guild because what guild wouldn’t want a free level 400 scribe? So they simply leave for another guild.

My recommendations from another thread are to split the scribe levels. Have a guild level and a player level. You need to meet the level requirement on both to craft a recipe. The guild level lowers much slower but gains xp every time ANY player uses the scribing station. The player gains XP much faster but because of the guild level, can’t out run/out pace his guild.

Example, say going from 75-100 requires crafting 100 banners to get the XP, totaling hundreds of Gold. Make it so that the guild needs to craft 100 banners to go from 75-100, but player scribes only need to craft 10-20 banners to level from 75-100. Now you’ve cheapened the cost to level scribe individually, allowed more players in a guild to work toward scribing, and created a better community effort by allowing 10-20 players to work toward the goal of leveling the guild’s scribe level.

I would also add a scribe materials storage to the bank upgrades and a “deposit to guild storage” drop down for collectibles from player inventory.

This is a good thing. GW2 tends to be a very antisocial game that doesn’t really encourage people to form strong bonds and connections with one another. The design of the open world, easy LFG, and the passive nature of the old influence system created an MMO that removed other players as barriers, but also never really introduced the concept of other players as long time friends and allies.

Scribing and the guild decoration system creates an evironment where guilds are important because investing in a guild or scribe is a declaration that you believe in what you’re doing enough to sacrifice, permanently, a nonerefundable amount of materials, furniture, or just plain trust.

The fact that making connections and needing to trust and engender the trust and good will of others is now an important part of these systems is a good change, and something the game has desparately lacked up until this point. Until now it has been a very selfish game where other player are at best tools to help you accomplish personal objectives rather than allies you might actually be able to form long term mutually beneficial associations with.

If interpersonal problems cause fallout between guilds and their scribes, that is a social problem, not a systemic problem, and it is no different than the possibility of someone rage quitting an instance. Group based systems exist to encourage and reward strong groups and tight social bonds. If your gaming experience is such that you can’t form those kinds of bonds with other players, then those systems are obviously not designed around you.

We don’t need incentives to level more scribes. We need more professions like scribes to create more important and varied jobs and roles in those social structures so that players have greater permanent rather than temporary value to one another.

Dvious.8126:

With the advent of craftable ascended weapons, legendary weapons are a complete joke. You are paying for a skin at this point and thats all. 100’s and at times 1000’s of gold and headaches for a skin. I’m all for fun appearance items. I’m a self professed appearance kitten myself but I’ll be kitten ed if I will help perpetuate the cost these skins require. Craft your ascended weapons and call it good.

You were always paying for a skin and stat swapping. Before ascended weapons existed, legendaries had exotic stats. They have never been, and will never be statistically better than their more easily obtainable alernatives. Getting a legendary was never about stats, and it never will be. They’re optional, they don’t enhance mechanical power, and it is for those two reasons that it’s okay that they’re so hard to acquire. making them more powerful than other tiers would simply turn the game in to a vertical gear grind, which is precisely what anet went to all this trouble with the mastry system and elite specs to avoid.

Having a legendary is simply about the looks, and the knowledge that it is the last <insert item type> you will ever need, as they are automatically updated when new stat sets are released. You craft a legendary greatsword, you own every current and future greatsword stat set in the game, at the highest statistical tier. Same for other legendary equipment.

Interesting facts there Konig. I’ll have to go run Arah through a few times.

It seems odd, though, if we assume that all tyrian magic is a natural resource, and that EDs are natural inhabitants of tyria, that they would be related in this way. Maybe it’s just poor writing, but if the EDs are indeed, as Mordremoth claims, the natural state of tyria, then why would tyria naturally spike and fall off in magic levels in such a way that makes them go all batkitten crazy?

I can accept that magic is a natural resource (and one attractive enough to draw all sorts of outside planar beings to tyria) but it seems unlikely that the rise and fall of its “release” or “potency” or whatever “power level” triggers an ED event is naturally occuring in this circumstance.

http://paragonwiki.com/w/images//3/3c/Ghost_Widow_Emote_Teabag.gif

They flat out told us that raids were npot designed to be PUG content, and that none of the design of the UI or LFG would be changed to help people PUG them.

The fact that you’re PUGging a raid in the first place is the problem, not the lack of LFG.

Raids are intended to encourage people to form regular groups that learn and progress through the encounters together.

VaLee.5102:

Frosty.5401:

The reason why they are expensive and time consuming is because they GUARANTEE you get a precursor. You pay extra (in both time and gold) for this guarantee in order to avoid having to get the precursor using ordinary methods (Mystic forge/drops).

Still don’t understand why people are complaining about precursor crafting, obviously it has to be challenging/expensive in order to maintain (or not affect at all) the prices of tp precursors.

Buying from TP is a GUARANTEE also, with less money and less time involved. Your point is null.

Not really. Someone has to be willing to sell it to you, which means somewhere in the game someone had to get a non-guaranteed super-lucky RNG drop.

It wouldn’t take much bad luck for any given series 1 precursor to become completely unavaliable from the TP.

Additionally, the point of precursor crafting is to allow a path that doesn’t require TP purchases in the first place, but rather one that allows players that wish to do so a reliable way to slowly progress toward it over time.

Before crafting, your options were either to get super lucky and have it drop, or rely on someone else’s super lucky drop and buy it from them. With crafting you have a third option: just save your own mats and build it slowly over time. The RNG in the various components is actually reasonable, and you can virtually guarantee that you’ll get all the required items just by playing the right content, unlike the abysmally low drop chance of those precursors in which you’re more likely to never see a precursor drop for years.

Tumult.2578:

Scribing is not crafting. It’s something locked behind absurd guild restrictions.
I’ve maxed all crafting, but this is something I and most players will never touch.
Period.

That’s kind of the point. The whole thing is designed to designate one or two people in a guild as scribes, as what scribes craft is for the benefit of an entire guild, not for personal use like other professions.

The costs are still out of whack from that lens, of course, but it isn’t a bad thing that it’s not designed to be something everyone can skill up as easily as personal gear or buff crafting professions. It’s not supposed to be used that way, and it isn’t designed that way.

It’s a guild-centric profession that requires guild missions and guild upgrades to fully function. It is designed to create a job in the guild for the person that does it, and to create a greater amount of interdependence and teamwork among guilds, just like the new upgrade system. If anything the game need more crafting professions like it that create valuable jobs for players in stead of things that have no social or trade value because every single other player has also fully skilled the profession. Professions that make stuff intended for use by groups of people with a crafting cost designed to be funded by the groups that use what it produces are a good thing.

The problem with scribe isn’t that it’s designed to be funded by a group and progressed by an individual. it’s that the cost is outrageously high even when being progressed and used in the intended manner.

Fascinating stuff, but I’ve been unable to corraborate your evidence for an alliance between the mursaat, seers, dwarves, and jotun. We know that the EDs rose in the past, and that at least the dwarves and seers were involved in a fight against them, but I’d love a link to the information about this alliance of races. As far as I can tell there’s no real evidence regarding why the mursaat/seers went to war in the first place, but the common assumption is that the mursaat were the agressors.

I’d also like to note that there’s no evidence that the mursaat ever actually had a tyrian civilization. A real possibility exists that the seers settled tyria in an effort to flee a mursaat controlled plane, and it worked for a time, until the mursaat found them in tyria. What they found in tyria (the elder dragons? sources of manufacturable magic? special plants?) may very well be the turning point that allowed them to find a counter to spectral agony by using the essence of those squid guys, but it was too little too late.

For all we know they may have been responsible for that rise accidentally as a result of conjuring/using essences in and effort to infuse themselves against the mursaat’s agony attacks? This puts the bloodstones in to perspective. They needed that magic (which they perhaps brought or somehow manufactured) in order to fight the mursaat, which caused, unexpectedly, the EDs to rise. Thus they create the bloodstone to safeguard it, but in the end it becomes their undoing, as without that magic they can’t do enough infusions to combat the mursaat effectively?

Honestly, when they made the jump from instanced party limited pve to open world persistant pve, they should have also axed the notion of instanced, party limited pvp.

GW2s systems work well in their intended place. In WvW and PvE. They’re a massive mess in spvp. Conquest IS a step in the right direction, but GW2 isn’t ever going to catch on simply because it’s too hard for spectators to follow, and the combination of extreme twitch-reflexes reliant combat and statistical and ability knowledge depth makes it extremely difficult for newcomers to pick up and play a L80 build and do anything meaningful with it.

Without that ease of entry, and ease to follow for spectators, you don’t have something likely to draw a lot of fans. You’ve made a good PvP game, but not an accessible PvP game, and making it accessible is core to mass market appeal for the esports market.

Let’s stop wasting money on esports promotion, just support sPvP as a game for the people that play it in stead of the people that watch or broadcast it on twitch nad maybe seriously invest some effort in to WvW, where the mechanics are actually designed around GW2’s core gameplay.

Too many studios are attempting to ride the twitch/esports money train at the expense of the people they should be catering to: the every day players of their game.

Stop developing video games to be watched. Develop them to be fun, and support your esports community if it develops, but stop trying to manufacture one when it doesn’t actually exist.

Straegen.2938:

PopeUrban.2578:

Old stability was awful. It was significantly stronger than stunbreaks, and scaled infinitely against any number of foes.

It was still a boon and could be stripped/inverted hence the need for good Necros in a group. The problem we have now is that CC abilities are significantly more plentiful than Stability application.

The end result of the stability changes are what we have today… a big ole circle kitten where backliners die of boredom sooner than they die of melee damage.

That was the problem. Not every profession had comparable access to stability or stripping. Every profession does, however, have comparable access to stunbreaks and some hard CC.

Old stability treated stability and boon stripping as a required element of pvp, like HP and damage, but the problem was that only a select few builds had access to it. The new method treats stability like other boons. Using them properly helps you win fights, but they are not required to attempt fighting in the first place.

The problem with melee versus ranged isn’t the stability. It’s the tired and lazy tactics people got used to using as a result of old stability. Simply stacking everyone up in one huge zerg and running headfirst in to the other zerg is a horrible combat strategy and makes for extremely boring fights. If you want to insert melee in to the back line, actually develop a plan that isn’t “run directly forward in to enemy fire in full view of the enemy without any supporting elements, cover, or stealth.”

That’s not a strategy in any decent pvp game. It’s suicide.

They flat out said that influence conversions would have very low rates of return before launch, and they highly reccommended using remaining influence to stock up on consumables that were becoming more expensive to produce. They reccommended, both on stream and on these forums, that everyone spend their influence before launch because having tons of inf for not much effort was the primary reason they did away with the influence system and transitioned to a materials cost and hard time gate system.

Having a bunch of influence in the bank wasn’t intended to give you huge buffs. It was simply intended to have a way to spend maxxive overflows of influence for guilds that had so much of it they couldn’t turn it all in to consumables before launch.

There are two primary gates on scribing.

Pigment, which is needed in large amounts to make anything and have an extremely low drop rate, and shards, which are only avaliable from guild missions.

The shards are a great example of a good gate. You’re guaranteed to get 1-5 shards per member, per guild mission. Guilds that want to benefit from scribes can effortlessly provide the scribe with 50+ shards per week. it isn’t enough to spam levels, but its enough to make roughly the same number of banners/consumables as you did in the old system with some left over for a few decorations. Just like the old system, large and more active guilds will generate more shards, but will likely consume the things they make with them at a faster rate. Shards reard scribe mats needed for guild items be doing guild content. It’s a good system. The fact you can trade them if you want to is icing on the cake. It gives guilds that don’t care about scribe stuff a way to profit off of guilds that don’t generate enough shards themselves. However, the market having stabilized on most other things, the shards are still valued higher than one would expect for a common time gated item with no other crafting ingredients.

The second gate is pigments, and this is the spot where we have a fundamental rarity problem. For each rank of a scribing recipie, you need 10 pigments, AND you need pigments of a specific color, AND certain recipies require additional pigments on top of those used to make inks. The problem here is that pigemtns are extremely rare items from plant harvesting or quite low yield salvages from dye. The system is designed in increments of ten, while the actual drop and salvage rates for pigments seem to be balances around increments of one.

All other material requirements have varying degrees of sanity. I’ve got not problem with some of the furniture being particularly expensive/rare, or the base materials cost of most of the banners, but I agree that the WvW stuff needs a serious cost overhaul (and wvw needs a serious rewards overhaul) to even be worth crafting at all.

Guild missions should pay out 3x the shards as they do currently, and all pigment costs in recipies should be divided by ten. This would fix the two primary hard gates in the system. Furthermore, WvW cost/benefit is seriously out of whack, and the costs and rewards of WvW need a total overhaul if you expect anyone to actually bother with the war room.

“Casual” is a descriptor of averge play time, not player skill.

I have several “casuals” in my guild that have no problem with the new content. The same people that make up a large portion of our raid squad. The weekly cooldown on raids is actually extremely casual friendly.

The HoT content is moderately more challenging specifically because it is designed for people with a lot of practice playing characters in the easier core content. This is no different than how GW1 did things. Later content releases were significantly more challenging than earlier ones (and GW1 as a whole was generally more challenging than GW2 as a whole, even on normal mode)

lonegreywolf.4760:

Wanted to buy the new expansion using Paypal credit, but not sure if GW2 allows it. I know you can use Paypal, but usually before you hit submit you have to confirm the Paypal method, it doesn’t seem as though I will be able to do that.

Has anyone else used Paypal credit before with GW2?

I use paypal for most of my GW2 transactions. After you confirm paypal as the payment method it takes you to the paypal website to confirm the payment and select which paypal option you want to use (linked bank accounts, paypal balance, credit, etc.)

Just select paypal and you can set it to paypal credit from the paypal website before confirming the trasnaction.

That is the best organized fight against a door I’ve ever seen.

Simplest raid fix ever for thieves:

Add a unique stolen item to the bosses that grants some kinda raid wide buff.

It’s not even that hard arenanet. The stolen item system is almost tailor made to give thieves different tools in different encounters.

The game’s classes and abilities are not balanced around 1v1 fights, and thus there is no competitive ranking format for them. You can make/join custom maps for this, or use a guild arena. There are many 1v1 custom arenas in the browser people have made specifically to do 1v1 fights.

dragonfighter.4098:

Baamoink.4281:

Then change your guilds preference to PvE Missions, so you only get them.

why should i have too. thats the point we do pvp and wvw for legendary craftng why should we have to do more we want to play our way we paid for the game and should have that right.

You don’t have to you change your guild’s mission preferences because you only want to run a specific type of content for guild missions. Since you want to run pve missions for favor, why would’nt you want to click the button that says “please only give us pve missions from now on”?

It takes two mouse clicks and costs literally nothing.

If it’s that easy, move to north america and pay your rent with all that easy money. problem solved, you’re now a successful E-Athlete and the envy of the twelve spectators in the world that care about GW2 pro leagues.

We had one. They removed it because underwater PvP is broken and unbalanced in a huge way, and they don’t intend to fix it any time soon.

I wouldn’t expect to see another underwater map until a full revamp of underwater combat with some sort of underwater expansion.

Ghostwind.4380:

It’s too bad they couldn’t do something kinda like kotor, where your choices affect you visually. It would be cool to see a visual indicator of your choices, but keep it subtle. Based on how many times you choose an option others could see what type of temperament you have at a glance.

Brute = Your hands have a faint red aura. The color deepens the more times you choose brute.

Honorable = Your head gains a faint golden halo. The color brightens the more times you choose honorable.

Charming = Your feet and shoes gain a faint light green color. The color deepens and leaves a little trail the more you choose charming.

Just something to add flavor to your decisions. The effects should of course not over shadow the particle effects of armor or items however.

If I wanted particle effects I’d play a spellcaster or equip armor with particle effects.

Also, it’s silly that personality would create particle effects. It isn’t really part of the world’s lore that people’s personalities are on display like that.

Old stability was awful. It was significantly stronger than stunbreaks, and scaled infinitely against any number of foes.

New stability scales linearly and is a valuable defense, but doesn’t require such specific tricks to get rid of. it is a good thig that it can be overwhelmed as being completely CC immune to infinity number of opponents was a horrible gameplay experience for professions without stability, and teams without stripping. That setup make both stability and stripping required rather than optional and helpful like every other boon and mechanic in the game, and that was really bad for the ongoing design and balance of the game

Look at the length and frequency of stability stacks for stuff that feels underpowered, but old style stability is not the answer.

Lobo Dela Noche.5127:

PopeUrban.2578:

Guild rewards for holding things aren’t really appropriate since it adds an element of competition within your team. WvW at its core hold a simple assumption that all the guys on your team are, like all players in a PvE server, working toward the same goal.

Guilds should be employing their buffs and tactics in support of the team, not at the expense of team members not in their guild.

I believe the following changes would reward all current modes of play, for havok to zerg scale play, while encouraging and rewarding teamwork and playing to win rather than encouraging metgaming and flipping. This system incentivizes helping your team hold and upgrade objectives as the primary reward activity, and uses an overall participation metric to administer rewards, ensuring that no matter if you’re killing yaks, flipping sentries, or simply solo roaming, if you’re helping, you’re getting loot, and the better your team does, the better you do as well.

• Remove all loot gained by killing other players and for completing events. Retain the wxp rewards for these activities.

• In stead, use the HoT map meta system, with a twist. It has 5 tiers. Tiers 1 and 2 represent ownership of assets in SM, and tiers 3-5 represent owning all assets in all borderlands. Thus, taking assets from an enemy raises your team’s WvW meta level, and lowers theirs. Basically, owning more stuff, now matter what map it is one, means more loot for your entire team, in the same manner as owning more stuff increases your score.

• Grant participation for defend, escort, and attack events, as well as for player kills and building/destroying siege.

• Participation is account, not map based.

• Participation decays at a rate of 10% every 15 minutes.

• Every 15 minutes (when the score ticks over) grant all players with 100% or more participation a loot chest containing resources, badges, etc. You do not gain additional loot for percentages over 100%, this simply serves as a buffer so you can “overfill” participation, creating a buffer to keep people legitimately participating in wvw from losing out on rewards if they were doing recon or defense for a bit without any action.

• Upgraded objectives add bonus loot/materials to the reward chests for the entire team, as do claiming guild’s bonuses (ex. the magic find buff applies to the reward chests, and stacks for every objective.) This means that holding a large number of objectives and upgrading them results in more and more loot for your team.

• WvW loot chests should grant all materials required for hall upgrades and tactics in addition to normal loot. This means that playing WvW well, supporting your team, and playing to win also means being rewarded for it and allowing you to upgrade and deploy tactics effectively.

NO

Adding the Silverwaste system or the HoT system would be good for additional incentive but all of the old rewards need to stay or people will just say screw it completely. Not everyone can play for long enough periods of time to get those earned rewards and what happens if they DC right before a tick after they were just on an awesome killing spree? I’ll tell you what happens, they lose the reward because you get booted out of the mist and back to Tyria from a DC. Which is a surefire way to guarantee players in this buggy, laggy, game never participate in WvW again.

So I repeat NO. Its a bad idea to remove the current rewards. WvW needs the rewards boosted anyways so an additional reward system based on PPT and participation would be very well accepted. Believe me I think adding a PPT/participation system is great idea but it has to be in addition to and not as a replacement to existing rewards.

Design decisions should not revolve around users that have connection problems. That is a software engineering or user issue, not a game design issue. It’s like saying dishonor shouldn’t exist in sPvP because it can inconvenience people with crashes and crap connections, despite the fact that the vast majority of players don’t have these issues. Yes. Dishonor sucks if you DC. however the positive effect (encouraging people to not cheese and play against the objective design of the content) far outweighs the negative effect. I believe this is also true of an objectives and teamplay focused wvw loot rewards revamp like what I’ve listed.

The proper response to technical issues is to fixes anything in the client or server achitecture that causes crashes and disconnections, not just go “welp, people are going to crash and DC all the time, let’s not fix it and in stead design the game around that”

As for the “long enough time” argument, it’s fair, but the current system encourages metagaming and generally unhelpful play. How about in stead of a hard lockout at 100%, the 0-100% is just a scalar. At most you’d be “required” to play for 15 minutes, and in that time you could reasonably assume earning a participation of at least 25% which is far shorter than the average wvw session, and would pay out about what it does now.

Expecting to get top end rewards for playing extremely short sessions in a game mode not built around short session play is the wrong way to think about it. WvW is not now nor has it ever been a mode designed for short play sessions. All of its siege and supply mechanics are designed around longer play sessions.

Solid Gold.9310:

Wish.5832:

Heroes ruined GW1, why bring them into GW2 and ruin this too?

Nope, heroes extended the life of GW1, it was a very wise move by ArenaNet.

Without heroes GW1 would have died a slow painful death, and because of heroes it’s still very playable even today.

The contrary is true. Before nightfall, people in towns in GW1 were actively looking for parties, making friends, and generally were more invested in the game. After nightfall people used towns almost exclusively for trade. Every single person I know that tried the game after the nightfall release that didn’t like it told me the same thing:

I wish there were people that actually wanted to party in this game.

Heroes didn’t save GW1. They were responsible for the lack of longevity in its pve content.

Yes, you can still solo stuff in GW1 to this day. You wouldn’t have to solo stuff were it not for the inclusion of heroes and the detailed ai command interface update. These two things fundamentally changed the direction and focus of pve in the game.