Agree.
Everything about GW2 is nice, till Dreamer’s sounds appear. While you are at it, hey why not make a new legendary with sheep, tiger, cat, dog, sounds as well?
The horse sound ISHHH annoying as hell!
I really want a pair of sheep daggers.
Not like daggers with sheep on them. Just sheep. With handles and appropriate sound effects.
This is the best idea.
People don’t really need any more incentives to rez. People that die need to stop expecting to be rezzed as if it’s the highest priority of everyone around them.
You’re not losing events because people aren’t getting rezzed. You’re losing events because the people playing the events are bad at the game and dying in large numbers
This isn’t a systems problem with rez incentives. It’s a social problem with player behavior more likely to place blame outside oneself than owning one’s mistakes.
I second this. I’m all for having to turn in the materials at a treasurer or other NPC, but at least give us the ability to double check the needs list from the guild panel or something.
Even solo players can gain Favor; it’s just slow-going. Thus, you can create a personal guild bank, if you so desire.
Good luck.
How can a solo player gain favor?
Supposedly hardcore “1337” players can solo bounties or some other missions.
You neither have to be hardcore nor “l337” to solo easy tier races or treks. You just need a little free time, or a wiki respectively. It’s actually easier than farming silverwastes.
On the other hand, seeing HoT-owning people gliding around central Tyria would be like a giant glowing neon sign saying “buy HoT and you can do this too!” to holdouts and F2P players.
If I were Arenanet, that’s not really a message I’d want to send. “look, that guy is immune to fall damage, but you, silly free to play player, just died”
That’s a negative reinforcement method, rather than a positive reinforcement method, which isn’t a great way to sell stuff.
Currently, what a f2p guy that might be on the fence sees is people around him using cool skills or skins, but those people aren’t really in posession of some kind of huge advantage he doesn’t have in the content he has access to. Making people want things is a much better way to sell than making people need things.
It’s to make the system less rigid.
You need level X to do upgrade Y, which basically says “you need 2 tier 2 buildings before you can upgrade a building to tier 3”
This is in contrast to a purely tiered system that puts out in a situation where the entire system works like the beginning bits, telling you specifically what to upgrade, or a system where you can completely ignore certain upgrades and max out just one.
They don’t want you upgrading, say, the mine to max level without having to have some other upgrades spread around, but they also don’t want to tell you specifically what upgrades to do. The guild level system exists to add choice to the process while still requiring some sense of overall advancement requirements rather than fully freeform “let’s completely ignore this one building”
in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns
Posted by: PopeUrban.2578
Quick and dirty Verdant brink survival guide:
When you arrive, figure out what time it is, day or night.
Night
If it is night time, look for events near you, as these will either be supply or defense related. Supplies are boxes you can pick up and take to a camp, and using the 2 skill while holding supply will guide you to the nearest camp. Camps are upgraded as more players turn in supplies there, gaining walls and turrets to help defend them. If the event nearest you is a camp, go there! The flow of verdant brink requires camps to be contrlled by players to spawn a helicopter, once you learn gliding, you can use that helicopter to fight bosses in the canopy. The defense events have tons of mobs and award good XP, so hanging around and doing defenses will get you that glider in no time.
Day
In the day time, each outpost (the towers on the maps) spawns an event chain, and this is a feature of the other maps as well. Outposts can be thought of as “quest hubs” Outposts will start with one or more problems, and events will happen to help you solve these problems. The event chains are long, and each tells a specifikittentle story, as well as leads you around the zone. I highly reccommend starting these chains at daybreak, as you’ll find yourself participating in a pretty long narrative almost akin to an open world story mission, and it can be confusing if you start in the middle.
Completing these chains, and progressing the outposts fortifies those positions, similar to supplies, so that they’re better prepared when night falls.
The full cycle
Thus, the full “cycle” of verdant brink (which you will get scaling loot and xp depending on how much you participated in) beings in daytime, with the fleet freshly crashed. You do outpost events to build up bases, and defend them at night until your support helicopters show up. Once they do, some people need to continue to defend the camps while others take the helicopters up to the canopy to kill the bosses there.
The Reward
If the map successfully builds up all the outposts in daytime, defends all the camps at night, and kills all the canopy bosses, the entire map will be rewarded with a bladed armor box. This is an exotic chest that can not be acquired in any other way.
Exploration
It is highly reccommended (in all HoT) maps to explore during the “prep phase” of the zone meta event. In Verdant Brink that means daytime. Since the mordrem mostly come at night, mostly, and come in large numbers, you’ll find it much easier to explore and go after map completion in the day, and easy to get some completion xp at night. because most of the XP in HoT comes from meta participation, this gives you decent amounts of xp during times where exploring the map might be more difficult or hazardous.
Good luck!
People already get to places they shouldn’t be. And i can’t imagine why it would be that difficult to disable it near a JP. This really isn’t that far fetched. lol
It may be easier said than done to disable it on certain parts of a map but have it enabled on other parts.
Rework all the maps. Give all objects collision. When you’re next to a JP you get a “Grounded” boon…..keeps the wings from being deployed…..it really can’t be that hard to make a boon like that….it would operate no different then costumes not allowing combat.
It’s possible that was never the question.
The question is whether its worth the time (and thus money) that it would take to implement for zones that can be traversed just fine without gliding, and that gliding wouldn’t really add much to?
I’d wager that from Arenanet’s perspective it is not. Not only that, they may actually want to maintain the “wow factor” for new players of not seeing anyone gliding around in the core maps. I know when I did my first HoT BWE, just walking in to verdant brink test and watching a guy jump off a cliff I was like “nooooo, dummy” and then he winged on outta there and I was like “woah, cool, that’s different”
Nah, they’re fine. You can easily melee them as long as you don’t stand directly on the line, and a damage from the ground lines is perfectly reasonable for a highly visible effect.
I hate to say it as it’s pretty cliche by this point, but it really is a learn to play issue. When I first encountered snipers they ate my lunch. Then I learned their timing and mechanics. Now they’re not so hard.
in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns
Posted by: PopeUrban.2578
Can’t you just turn off the tag? I mean, if swiftness is damaging to your RP, is’nt a giant apple floating over your head like a lot more damaging to immersion in a visual sense?
I want a double jump while we’re suggesting dream features.
Double jump is coming in the next expansion, you can bet on it. Probably with the dodge button. people will complain about anet nerfing jumpdodge. Expect a grappling hook after that.
No other losses.
If you change guild halls, you bring all of your upgrades, bank, and everything else to the new hall, and all your decorations are placed back in the guild’s inventory so you can place them wherever you like in the new hall.
You can get around this by doing what I did. Create a rank called guest with no permissions, and place it below your lowest rank. Make it your default new member rank. Now give all the members of your guild invite permissions.
You don’t have to represent a guild to walk in to its guild hall, and thus, that guest rank functions as a whitelist for letting people in to your hall
They also should be yellow mobs. :P
MGS5 base soldiers all over again.
“Train with me boss!”
“Thanks boss!”
So wait… you’re saying you’ve been playing a game without mounts since beta, and that you also feel that some sort of mass exodus will happen because some mobs use mounted models?
Uh. Dude. If mounts were that important to people they would have left a long time ago. There is no mass exodus happenning over a few mounted enemies (that are mounted for gameplay design purposes, not for travel)
I hate to break it to you, but “immersive travel” has never been a staple of the guild wars franchise. We had fast travel between every town and outpost in the first game as well (and it was free) because the game isn’t designed around wasting people’s time. Running isn’t a plus in GW2. It’s a death penalty, and it has always been that way.
The idea of someone that won’t play a game because there aren’t “beast races” is strange to me. You’re missing out on a huge number of fantastic games for reasons that I don’t quite understand.
The ballad of Mac Twinsong
Come and listen to a story about a man named Mac
A poor pact commander, tryin’ to keep the war on tack,
And then one day he was rasing mastry tracks,
And there on the ground was a plant they call flax.
Linseed that is, growin’ gold, Tarir tea.
Well the first thing you know ol Mac’s a millionaire,
Guildmates said “Mac, that stuff’s not that rare”
Mac Said “Lets make a map of all the nodes that we have found”
So they took their bags of flax seeds and they moved them underground.
Gilded Hollow that is. Gold plated caves, Norn bartenders.
Well now its time to say good by to Mac and all his Crew.
And they would like to sell all of their excess flax to you.
So check the marketplace for all the sell orders you can
we’ll let you pay our bar tabs while we all go get a tan.
Y’all buy flax now, y’hear!
(edited by PopeUrban.2578)
Also note that you can save up the tomes if you don’t need them. If you’re in a guild your guild will need them for some late tier upgrades.
Should probably make an official post about this for people that don’t check reddit!
I’ve done a claim with 3 people. You just have to get lucky on the wurm spawns doing small group claims. Wurms can spawn very close to each other, so you’ll just have to keep trying until you get a good spawn pattern. 5 is more than enough to claim successfully, so keep on trucking!
Revnant skill bar brainstorming
Jora
Had to invent more skills here. I liked the idea of Jora being largely about powerful energy drain defensive toggles as a more selfish tank than Jalis. Jora’s Legendary stance is much more about being able to dump energy quickly in extreme ways than camping it.
Call Owl – Cooldown removed. Costs energy. Can summon owls quickly this way, stacking lots of bleeds.
Call Wurm – Cooldown removed. Costs Energy. Can summon multiple wurms this way.
“I am Unstoppable” (new Utility) – Energy drain toggle. While active, gain 1 stack of stability and 1 second of protection once a second.
Become the Bear – Energy Drain Toggle. Ability 2-5 cooldowns removed. Abilities 2-5 all cost energy in stead.
Feel no Pain (New Heal) – Heavy Energy Drain Toggle – Heal and gain Aegis once per second. Unlike the similar guardian heal, this isn’t a channel. It’s designed to cover you with aegis while healing, but leave you in the fight.
I like this idea. Just cap the npcs and randomly select them whenever an instance is generated from among offline characters representing the guild. Seeing as representing a guild tag is stored on a per character basis, you could even control which of your alts was displayed.
Indeed. If I could build banners as a micro guild before HoT, I should still be able to build banners. Using the old mechanic, I spent time and effort to do so, and that ability has been taken away.
You still can build banners if you had those unlocks in the old system. Walk in to the guild initiative. Walk forward from the entrance. You’ll see a bunch of NPCs. The one at the end of the hall sells every consumable unloack you acquired in the old system with the exception of things that have been completely retired.
The difference is, like everyone else, you are going to need favor to do it.
This isn’t a change that only hits small guilds. It hits every guild.
Banners were made much more expensive and difficult to obtain for everyone regardless if you pay favor for them in the guild initiative, or if you use a scribe to build them in a guild hall.
You only have a leg to stand on on this point if you’re a new guild in which case, yes, you need a scribe, or you need to spend commendations
if, however, like so many posters, you’re an old guild complaining about unlocks being removed they were not removed, and you can still use them in the new system
What you can’t do and no size guild at all can do this Is expect people just logging in or not getting together to do guild specific content to give you guild rewards
The new system closed the gold to inf loophole, and removed influence as a passive gain for a very good reason. It was far more detrimental to the balance of large to small guilds than the new system
Large guilds, could run every since buff 24/7 simply by having people log in while small guilds could barely afford a few banners.
Under the new system you can do a single guild mission, and get a banner and that favor gain is capped. The large guild can’t make more banners from a guild mission than you can.
There’s a fantastic amount of misunderstanding and misinformation from small guilds on this subject. I run a small guild. I am aware of how it works, and it is overall a more fair system that has allowed my guild to complete more missions and make advancement faster than we could in the old influence system.
The difference is that the system requires guilds to play content together and pool resources to advance now, in stead of passively handing out large chunks of guild rewards for people simply existing and playing the game.
That’s a good thing. It creates an environment where people are incentivized to do content where their guild is at the forefront. Where your logos are displayed and your name is on the screen and it says “hey, you guys are a team” it ensures that when you roll missions for the week there are other guilds doing them frequently enough that you don’t have to bring a group. In many cases you can just show up and get credit for your guild just as if you were participating in an event because they’re populated, and the favor system ensures they will remain populated in perpetuity.
Asking for a return to a system that made running guild missions a chore, didn’t provide options for pvp and wvw guilds, and made failure prohibitively expensive just so you can build a few more banners while bigger guilds have effectively infinite banners just from logins is flawed reasoning.
As for concerned parents. Really? If you have issues with lessons or methods of thought a form of entertainment is instilling in your child, stop allowing them to access that entertainment. That’s your responsibility as a parent, not Arenanet’s responsibility as a video game developer.
And that is where you are wrong concerning gambling. There are actually age limits and laws governing who can be exposed to gambling. Let me guess, you’ve not had children of your own yet?
Gambling fake money and fake pink blobs is not covered by gambling laws for the same reason people aren’t arrested for assault when they stomp someone in PvP.
I actually professionally cared for children for seven years straight as a live in “manny”
If your children are gambling real money, that isn’t the game’s fault. That’s your fault and you are the one legally culpable.
Buying gems with real money to gamble away actually is dancing on a slippery slope, and making a couple of well placed phone calls could turn it into a PR nightmare.
No, it really couldn’t. Cash shop currency and gambling boxes were not invented by GW2. This issue has already been taken to the courts multiple times, in much more exploitative and predatory RNG lockbox models.
The real issue is you are wanting to twist the definition of guild. It has always been assumed that a guild would be at least the size of a standard party to begin with in just about every game that has a guild with it being normally larger than a standard party size. GW2 has always encouraged guilds to be larger than 2 or 3 or 4 because much of the guild content requires groups larger than even the standard party size to complete. It is not new to HoT as you insinuate that it is.
So we both agree that GW2/HOT is not compatible for those families that just wanted to group and play together. The Problem is this needs to be pointed out before purchase.
Common sense would dictate that playing a Massively MULTIPLAYER Online game would have some requirements to do some things with other people and not just be a single player game that required an internet connection.
Did you play GW1? Because it wasn’t that way.
GW1 was also never marketed as an MMORPG. Arenanet specificlly used the term “CORPG” for “Cooperative/Competitive Online Role Playing Game”
In fact one of the reasons they stated for cancelling utopia and moving on to GW2 was that they wanted to make an MMORPG and that that sort of play was not compatible with the GW1 design.
Core mastry points are all tied to achievements.
In HoT, mastery points can be found hanging around in maps, and you also get quite a few just for completing the story through the first time.
As for concerned parents. Really? If you have issues with lessons or methods of thought a form of entertainment is instilling in your child, stop allowing them to access that entertainment. That’s your responsibility as a parent, not Arenanet’s responsibility as a video game developer.
And that is where you are wrong concerning gambling. There are actually age limits and laws governing who can be exposed to gambling. Let me guess, you’ve not had children of your own yet?
Gambling fake money and fake pink blobs is not covered by gambling laws for the same reason people aren’t arrested for assault when they stomp someone in PvP.
I actually professionally cared for children for seven years straight as a live in “manny”
If your children are gambling real money, that isn’t the game’s fault. That’s your fault and you are the one legally culpable.
Complaining about being unable to solo something that isn’t meant to be solo’d.
Actually, I’m pretty sure some of them are soloable, but you almost need to have the right class for it and be geared really well.
I’d be curious to know how such people feel about the time limit… the ones who have solo’d hero challenges.
I’ve solo’d several on my heal specced guardian with pathetic DPS simply by swapping some traits. What I haven’t solo’d are one’s listed as group events as, y’know, healy guardian is generally more inclined to find a group for group events.
A good rule of thumb about anything Anet labels group events:
They don’t care if you can solo it, but they also don’t care if you can’t. That’s why they labeled it a group event, to tell you that the content was not designed to be soloable
Looks like you didnt read the entire post.
I specificaly mention that the mystic forge isnt used so much now that there is an alternative for precursors and is used as a secondary method.
Gambling in general is a trade for expectation for something better,when people are promised riches if they put 250globs or 50globs or 10 globs and gold in a vendor that “promises” riches,they go mental and sell everything just to play that particilar mechanic.
Works as intended imo,keeps the gambling addics hooked and creates new ones as well.Edit:Gambling habits and addictions carry over to real life behaviour, thats why i believe its important.
Really no concerned parents out there? Shame on you people.So bashing rabbits with a hammer or launching cows with a catapult doesnt carry over to real life but gambling does?
I just sprayed soda out of my nose. Thanks.
You even get rewarded (in gold) for launching cows, if you bet right where it lands.
That was disabled for the longest time. did they finally tun the cow cannon gambling back on? I’d totally forgotten about it.
From there micro guilds have the same options to progress at a slower rate than everyone.
facepalm
Elaborate. Did you somehow progress faster than everyone in the old system, or is it that you expected to progress at exactly the same pace as larger guilds?
Its a very cryptic response.
Looks like you didnt read the entire post.
I specificaly mention that the mystic forge isnt used so much now that there is an alternative for precursors and is used as a secondary method.
Gambling in general is a trade for expectation for something better,when people are promised riches if they put 250globs or 50globs or 10 globs and gold in a vendor that “promises” riches,they go mental and sell everything just to play that particilar mechanic.
Works as intended imo,keeps the gambling addics hooked and creates new ones as well.Edit:Gambling habits and addictions carry over to real life behaviour, thats why i believe its important.
Really no concerned parents out there? Shame on you people.So bashing rabbits with a hammer or launching cows with a catapult doesnt carry over to real life but gambling does?
I just sprayed soda out of my nose. Thanks.
I fail to see how the new system removed anything. It changed the means of progression while leaving intact access to anything you already unlocked, and in the case of guild missions actually granted several things you didn’t unlock.
Any consumables you could build in the old system, you can still build in the new system by paying favor. You can’t build a bunch of banners and whatever without doing guild missions, and that is also true of the new system. Consumables have simply been made harder to come by across the board, for everyone.
Guild banks you had before are still available.
The only “hard lock” on the system for what you call “micro guilds” is the guild hall claim, a thing you only have to do one time. You can do this, as we did, by just teaming up with a few other guilds for one day. You literally only need four people to complete it, and you never have to do it ever again. From there micro guilds have the same options to progress at a slower rate than everyone.
In fact, the new system is actually better for such guilds as guild missions have been made easier to complete across the board now that they’re not all locked behind bounties, don’t cost anything to run, and are commonly full of other guilds doing them.
“Micro guilds” were not treated more unfairly. They can actually advance faster relative to huge guilds than before due to the caps on favor and aetherium, and more reliably complete guild missions since it costs nothing to fail and retry them now.
Looks like you didnt read the entire post.
I specificaly mention that the mystic forge isnt used so much now that there is an alternative for precursors and is used as a secondary method.
Gambling in general is a trade for expectation for something better,when people are promised riches if they put 250globs or 50globs or 10 globs and gold in a vendor that “promises” riches,they go mental and sell everything just to play that particilar mechanic.
Works as intended imo,keeps the gambling addics hooked and creates new ones as well.Edit:Gambling habits and addictions carry over to real life behaviour, thats why i believe its important.
Really no concerned parents out there? Shame on you people.
At no point do those vendors promise anything.
Gambling is perfectly fine and healthy for the game as long as there’s nothing essential locked behind it. People with gambling addictions condition themselves to avoid temptations until they’re strong enough. It’s not anyone else’s responsibility to addiction-proof the world. It’s the responsibility of the addict and his loved ones to police that behavior.
As for concerned parents. Really? If you have issues with lessons or methods of thought a form of entertainment is instilling in your child, stop allowing them to access that entertainment. That’s your responsibility as a parent, not Arenanet’s responsibility as a video game developer. if you can’t teach a child to gamble responsibly, or simply not to gamble at all, then perhaps you shouldn’t be allowing them access to forms of entertainment that include gambling. Given the global gambling economy in the real world and the ease of access the internet provides to losing real money doing it, I highly reccommend the first two options rather than the last, and counter that allowing them to experience the effects of gambling and basic economics in a virtual space where no real assets are lost may actually be useful in teaching those lessons. Your mileage as a parent may vary, as may your desires for what lessons you teach.
I think Anet is only leaving CoF farm in to burn through people’s backlogged tyrian mastery points so that when they release the real good stuff people will have to go out and earn the mastery points all over again.
That’s distinctly possible. If you’re not going to make a legendary or if you don’t do high level fractals, then the Tyrian mastery lines are very short of content. Just one that offers something that everyone would want.
Yeah. The major weakness of the core mastry unlike the HoT ones is that there doesn’t seem to be any choice in it really. The whole point of mastries was, if I remember correctly, supposed to be a very lengthy progression system, but one with multiple paths so players got to make choices about how they’d like to progress in stead of, like levels, being simply told “now you do this”
The problem with the core masteries is really that lack of options that makes it feel like “my” progression in stead of the progression the game told me to do.
Actually, all of the new ones require you to either play PvP, or buy new pvp only materials from people that play pvp. The paper is pretty much the same thing. Either be in a guild with a scribing station, or buy from someone that has one. Right now there just aren’t a lot of scribes, so the market hasn’t picked up for the item. Give it time.
Huh, I wasn’t aware of the PvP materials thing. When you say the new ones, you mean the brand new legendaries? That also strikes me as odd (the PvP seems really divorced from the rest of the game, at least to me. I’ve played some of it and enjoy it but it does feel very separate). In either case, if I could just wait it out until the market picks up and buy the paper from a scribe that would be fine. Actually, increasing demand for things made with crafting so that they are a little more profitable in general would be nice. As it stands though the paper is account bound, which means you have to craft it yourself. In fact from what I can see, most scribe items are.
Yeah, the account bound nature was pointed out to me by another poster.
They added the pvp materials, presumably, to help PvP players make a bit more money, but also to provide some clear options. Despite any reasons why it might be appropriate, Anet is pretty hardcore about not forcing people to play a sphere of the game they don’t like in most cases, but they also are trying really hard to give compelling and unique reasons for people to try and play all of those parts.
The fact these are tradable, and that you can’t actually learn or progress scribing without some hefty investment in a guild hall seems to put the paper thing in a weird place. It would be more consistant if the paper were tradable. Seems odd to let people opt out of PvP, but require them to opt in to guild halls.
Completed on my thief yesterday, and yep, no reward. Just the little popup you get whenever advancing completion.
We need elite specs because the alternative of just tacking stuff on to the base class over and over leads to a base class that becomes harder and harder to balance. Elites, since you can only have one active at a time, only ever need to balance against the base class.
As for the meta change, it’s unsuprising. Meta is always disrupted by new abilities and build options. If anet sees the game becoming something they didn’t intend they’ll adjust stuff accordingly before the pre-season balance freeze.
Revnant skill bar brainstorming
Snaff
Pain Inverter – Way lower cooldown and significant energy cost. Basically a spammable energy dump that allows rev to use it similar to GW1 pain inverter if he’s willing to dump all his energy in order to stack lots of retal/confusion. Good synergy with either mallyx or jalis.
Radiation Field – Toggle. Places the field and the field remains active and degens energy as long as it is active.
Technobabble – large energy cost, no cooldown. A good, but expensive, interrupt.
7-Series Golem – Rename for snaff’s golem, perhaps use the mr. sparkles model? Duration = Cooldown, but reduces energy regen (does not completely stop it) while active.
Maintainence(New heal) – Operates similarly to ranger’s heal as one. Heals both the revnant and the golem. Lowered energy cost if the revnant is close to the golem.
(edited by PopeUrban.2578)
Yeah but raids/dungeons/fractals are all PvE and suddenly reviving other players faster? To make challenging content they will have to balance against it atleast in end room raids and higher fractals.
And doubling boon duration sorta will break things…like extreme protection durations.
No, what I’m saying is that it wouldn’t work on players. You’d only get the boons/heals/revive effect when used on NPCs, and it would obviously be nonfunctional in places it would break content. However it could be designed around from content built with these masteries in mind. For example a hero point challenge the involved reviving X people before a time bomb goes off or something.
I think that these would make for a solid batch of Masteries to work on. Giving the option to run any racial skills balances things out since anyone would be able to run any skills after investing some effort. I like the idea, but ANet would have to be careful to avoid repeating the issues with PvE skills in the first GW. There are a lot of things that could be made into masteries, and some people have cleared the full set of masteries for the jungle already.
Racial relations seems like a simple thing to invest points into for small benefits, and it has a precedent both in the jungle and even in the first game, interestingly. Perhaps something like this could be introduced over a Living World season (assuming we are still doing those?) to work on maintaining racial alliances while we plan out our next moves.
I think GW2’s system is much more tolerant of something like this than the GW1 system. There’s already a lot of overlap in terms of class skills that do very similar things, and racial skills, with mostly just cooldown adjustments, and generally very simple yet flavorful effects. In addition, GW2’s systems don’t rely on or reward skill interactions as much as the GW1 model, so skills that work “in a bubble” are much easier to design and balance.
The champion level is for NPC’s only right? Otherwise this’ll become mandatory for any progress pushing and especially for WvW.
I do love the idea though cause…yeah…no one uses those skills.
Racial skills are generally PvE only skills, and as such these would be a lot more like the pve version of WvW ranks.
Champion rank is specifically in relation to npcs, not players. It would be a bit broken if it applied to players given their much faster attack speeds and much better durability.
I’d also imagine the “let’s hire friends” mechanics of the mastries wouldn’t apply to key npcs like merchants, bosses, and other important people. basically, if they already have dialogues or some purpose other than as background NPCs you wouldn’t have the “recruit” options with writs as thy’re obviously too important/busy to drop what they’re doing and adventure with you.
The basic idea is that they’re not usable in WvW, as WvW already has a pretty killer advancement system more appropriate to that mode, and racials have always been kept out of PvP for esports balance reasons.
(edited by PopeUrban.2578)
So, We’re at a point in GW2 where we have this mastry system for horizontal progress. It’s pretty cool.
However, something has been bugging me for a long time about GW2, and that something is racial skills. On the one hand, it’s great that they’re inferior to class skills so that people don’t feel pressured to make specific race/class combinations for the sake of efficiency. On the other hand, it’s kind of sad that all these neat skills see so little play, as they’re very flavorful for characters.
So, how about solving those problems? Let’s make racial skills worth taking, and lets make them avaliable.
This is no small undertaking, but in some pretty important ways it adds a lot of horizontal progression to the game in the specific place that masteries are supposed to address. Since racials are PvE-only skills, and are not locked to specific classes, they’re a perfect fit for masteries.
The basic Idea
Buff racial skills up to a usable level, largely by reducing their cooldowns, and add a mastry track for each race that allows you to learn racial skills from other races. You will always start play with your race’s set unlocked, but they exist at the current power level, and to advance them to useful you’ll still have to progress the mastery to 5, the same level used to unlock the useful balance versions you’d learn from other races.
The Revnant Problem, and solution
Revnants are in an odd position with racial skills already. Their class mechanics revolve around legend channels, and as such it doesn’t make sense to give them normal racial skills. In stead, how about implementing those skills as selectable legends for the revnant in packages? For example, a Snaff channel that gives him a preselected golem summon elite, all three utilities, and invent a heal to round out the set. Rev’s costs and cooldowns will thus be adjusted to give him a unique spin on the racial sets. For instance, you could make radiation field on the rev an energy toggle, and give him a much more spammable golem summon. In this manner, rev gets some much needed additional customization, and you can even play with his effects for a set of pve-only legends that might not be balance appropriate for pvp. Revs would begin play without the weaker versions of racial skills as they do now, and would thus have to earn the mastry to access these legends.
A basic layout
Interim step to unlock rank 5 – Complete a trial solo instance that varies per race. You must complete this trial to begin training rank 5.
Revnant racial legends
Asura – Snaff
Norn – Jora
Charr – Pyre Fierceshot
Human – Melonni (Dervish is an obvious choice for the “grab bag of the gods” human skills.)
Sylvari – Wynne
(edited by PopeUrban.2578)
It makes me sad that they implemented mistward really well, but made it a heavy armor only set. Every other set has light, med, and heavy versions. It would have been nice to have light and med mistward versions as well. You know, like the light mistward they called an outfit and sold in the gem store in stead.
I understand it was a thing for revnants, but, hey, it’s useful to three out of nine classes. it just seems inconsistant to add a set of armor that only had one weight.
Considering that they plan on adding more and more elite specs, and those specs presumably come with new utility types, some sort of decision needs to be made with improvisation.
If they do indeed actually have physicals on their rolling list even if you’re not using daredevil, that’s a huge problem that will only get worse as more elite specs are added.
I agree that meld with shadow should effect those runes, bringing them up to 3s when traited.
The reasoning is pretty simple. A thief who has that trait is running SA, and thus relies on stealth for much of his survivability, and thief traps don’t really do burst damage. Not only that, he’s giving up a lot of potential spike damage by not taking some of the more bursty runes which are uniquely valuable to thieves with the CS line in ways they aren’t to other classes, and not gaining much in terms of sustain or killing power by doing so.
This in turn makes taking traps (even a single trap) worthwhile for thieves if they run the runes as those traps when enhanced in this manner add excatly the kind of survivability that thieves rely on in the absence of the passive defenses rangers and guardians have access to.
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my only problem with staff is that it being melee I can’t do much with it with canopy bosses that usually have a lot of fire near them, so I usually use shortbow or p/p for those. but I’m doing relatively good with it so far.
Actually it’s not at all hard to melee canopy bosses. They don’t stand in their own fire, so to melee them you just have to get all up in their grill and dode toward their back then for the big hits/any mobility attacks.
Actually, all of the new ones require you to either play PvP, or buy new pvp only materials from people that play pvp. The paper is pretty much the same thing. Either be in a guild with a scribing station, or buy from someone that has one. Right now there just aren’t a lot of scribes, so the market hasn’t picked up for the item. Give it time.
You can’t buy/trade the paper, which is the problem.
Its account bound? That is indeed a problem, and kind of inconsistant from a content flow perspective.
While the wvw, dungeon tokens, etc. all assume you have to go do a thing, that thing is a case of immediate progress. You see “I need badges” or “I need tokens” and you can go get them. If you literally have to level scribe yourself to get paper that’s pushing it, as now you have to opt in to a guild system, claim a hall, and do a lot of expensive upgrades.
I don’t have a problem with that for scribe as a profession, as it’s supposed to be a guild-centric discipline, but requiring it for a non guild related and highly work intensive personal prestige item seems a little out of whack.
I mean, it isn’t a crafting backpack, which is a bonus to leveling the craft rather than the entire point from a design perspective, and scribes aren’t really about crafting personal equipment.
In addition this really hurts the flow of scribe itself, which is designed as a “guild position” more than a “personal crafting profession” and its requirements are all balanced around the idea that your guild contributes to a single scribe rather than the guild all leveling scribes. Requiring someone to level scribe takes away from that sense of guilds empowering scribes and benefitting from them by sucking up scribe resources.
I’m okay with it as a requirement, but it should be tradable. This would allow people to treat it as a gold cost, and help guilds offset the cost of leveling their scribes by selling a bit of paper.
(edited by PopeUrban.2578)
I honestly think they’re fine as they are. They’re solid leveling zones and the events are actually much better balanced for less populated maps than zerg pops.
I don’t really think every zone should have huge pops all the time you know? It’s really jarring to go to queensdale and see 50 people doing a single event, as the conflicts there are so much smaller in scope and don’t scale well. Watching half an army defend a farm from bandits is odd, but watching 5-10 players, or even just one seems appropriate.
I think if they just touched up the map rewards system (maybe some kind of hefty daily chest per zone tied to supply mastry in addition to the current system) itd would be just about perfect.
Contrast that with SW and all the new maps that were really designed around high pops, and specifically designed to spread that high pop around the map so that event scaling works better and there’s a better sense of the map zerg as an army rather than an unneccessarily huge blob of players.
Excellent point. From here on, really, any item that is “wings” should also be a glider skin.
I think wings look dumb on most characters, but they look appropriate when gliding. heck, I myself bought the batwing bundle specifically for the glider skin and don’t use the backpack.
I would care way more about ad infinitum if I could use it as a glider skin and just reskin the actual backpack.
Yes, it is akin to second life where you can make your title be anything you wanted (well, as long as you did not write something bannable in it). The excuse given for getting rid of the official mentor program was that some people were doing it just for the title. Completely ignoring the reality that the argument was a bit odd given anyone could say they were a mentor in their title.
Some sort of way to limit vanity tagging (of either tag) would be desirable. I just am not sure how to do that.
Without tying commander tags to some sort of larger organizational structure it isn’t really possible.
The only idea I have for the system would be to not show such tags on the map until they have successfully rasied a squad of X number of people, and that would have been a fine system at launch.
However, with mentor tags being specifically designed without squad funtions, and the way people use commander tags for a variety of things, the window to make that kind of change to the system is long past.
At this point they ust need to flip the implementation and have them hidden by default, with a UI similar to LFG that people on the map can open to “track” a specific commander or mentor, as well as a little text bosx when someone tags up to put in info about what they’re commanding/mentoring.
So, in other words, you’d enter a map, open the UI, and see a list of commanders and mentors on that map:
Commander Maklain – “Blue Keep Assault team”
Commander Colin – “Yak Destruction Squad”
Commander Trollicus – “Selling quip, 50 million gold”
BobTheMentor – “Answering questions for new players”
Mentor_Fred – “Map completion group”
TrollTheMentor – “LOL I HAS A TAG”
From there you can join a squad (for commanders) or just track the tag (for mentors or commanders) as well as right click interactions for whisper, etc. so people could tag up even if they don’t want to lead groups around the map just to answer questions or whatever.
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