You know what would be awesome? since you crafted the legendary yourself?

If you got to type in the flavor text.

Probably not worth it from a database management standpoint. I mean, you’d have to treat each legendary as a unique item ID, and that’s not how the GW2 item database is set up since there aren’t any custom attribute crafting systems, but it would be super cool.

Oh man, it’s almost like they wanted a cosmetic prestige item to be difficult or time consuming to obtain. Imagine that.

Hannibal.5739:

Thank you guys for the advice and i do realize not taking sb can hinder my potential. When i was typing i can honestly say i totally forgot about the initiative system and i’m glad ya’ll pointed it out.

I was wondering can venom skills be used with the sb skills?

Venoms work with any attack, yes.

Generally though, venoms are underwhelming because they’re balanced around venomshare. basically, venoms are really good team support of venomshare builds, and generally not enough charges/too long cooldowns if you’re just running them for individual use.

Maybe you’ll find a use for them, but they’re generally not favored unless you are specifically building a venomshare build for team support.

Honestly they should just make WvW team selection randomized per season, stop calling them servers, and treating them like servers.

If you’re in a guild, the guild is assigned a team at the beginning of each season, if you’re in multiple guilds, the system asks you which guild you’d like to join for the wvw season (without telling you the team name the guild is going to) if you’re not in any guilds at all, it simply assigns you as an individual.

The system can then load balance it using collected wvw metrics like wvw ranks, average login times, etc. to ensure an even distribution across all teams at the start of each season, and thus each season would be competitive, with high ranking teams naturally rising to the top and low ranked teams naturally dropping to the bottom, and generally better and more competitive distribution overall.

You know, use matchmaking to make WvW more fun and competitive, and ditch the server model that causes so much stagnation and server hopping problems.

It really comes down to how big HoT really is. We know how big central tyria is, there’s a lot of content you can do for mastry xp, same for fractals, the perception of HoT is based only upon the tiny slivers of it we got to play, one story mission and a small section of an open world map.

The success of failure of HoT mastries is going to have a lot to do with how much actual content is packed in to the new maps and most importantly the adventure system. They’re banking on adventure leaderboards to be highly replayable things like arcade games that you want to keep doing and better your score. Challenge missions worked like this in GW1, and some were really fun that way (like the pacman solo mission in nightfall) and paid out cool loot. If the ongoing content continues this path, in addition to fractal and raid updates for those types of players I think masteries are in good shape and work with the core strength of GW2 being “about the journey.”

As long as the stuff you’re doing to get all that mastry XP is fun, then mastries are a great system. I can already see the pact tyria mastries being a fun system simply because core tyria has a lot of fun and diverse content. HoT masteries depend on the HoT content being diverse and fun really.

Two ways thieves generally run PvE.

S/P for blind spam, or running d/d unicorn builds. The evasion on deathblossom is actually usable in PvE since mobs don’t make any attempt to time attacks around it. These builds excel at taking down masses of hard hitting enemies, surviving, and still putting down nice dps through sword cleaves or deathblossom bleed/poison stacks. These thief “trash bunker” builds are among the best at “room tanking” when you build them properly, but these builds tend to rely on scaling life on hit, cleave damage, and blinds which are not generally as effective in boss fights. You can still survive boss fights on these builds, but your DPS won’t be as good. Usually not a problem if your group already has many high single target DPS builds.

If you’re going all in for boss DPS though, d/d backstab is the way to be, but you’ll want to load your utilities with mitigation. Start with valk gear, and as you learn encounters you can skew more glassy as you get a better feel for where to prioritize your dodges/use utils to survive boss fights. This build is pretty flimsy in multitarget situations though, and its DPS suffers as dagger auto can only clease two targets, its other main dps attacks are single target, and you’ll be relying much more on your group to clear out big groups of mobs while you pick out any individual targets you think you can get away with. This build is a better choice in groups that already have a high number of AoE and group support builds so your aoe dps isn’t as needed, but your boss DPS helps the group out a lot more.

babazhook.6805:

Maugetarr.6823:

babazhook.6805:

Guarded Initiation becomes

On shadowstep to target transfer weakness, vulnerability and slow to target. Gain XXX health for each stack transferred. (thus if you transfer 23 stacks vuln 1 slow one weakness you gain 25*xxx health)

I really would like to see some shadowstep modifiers.

Yes. A Thief has about 8 shadowsteps in the kitten nal. These are begging to be modified and would create a very unique flavor of theif and different style of play.

I actually wrote up a whole trait line about this!

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/thief/Mobility-Arts-A-replacement-for-Acrobatics/first#post5569628

Honed Reflexes
Acrobatics Grandmaster
Gain 1 initiative when you take damage. This trait has not internal cooldown because you are squishy.

Nike.2631:

…along with whipping a staff around wukong-style I really want to be yelling “your martial-arts are pig-dung!” at the screen…

SUPERIOR RUNES OF THE DAREDEVIL

(1) +25 Condition Damage
(2) +10% weakness duration
(3) +50 Condition Damage
(4) 25% chance when struck to inflict weakness for 5 seconds. (Cooldown: 20 seconds)
(5) +100 Condition Damage
(6) 7% of Condition Damage is converted to Toughness.

I dunno if condition damage would be good for a daredevil rune. I mean, the “official” daredevil weapon is staff, right? Wouldn’t +power be more fitting?

That said I really would want the set as you have it with condition damage, just dunno if calling it daredevil runes would seem right.

You’ve got the right mindset hannibal, but as others have said, the shortbow swap isn’t really a case of “weapon you use” as the thief doesn’t use swaps to fight with, but for utility.

I’m not trying to tell you how to play here, I’m explaining the logic behind why people say pretty much every build take shortbow. You of course don’t have to, but let me attempt to tell you why.

Unlike every other class in GW2m swapping weapons doesn’t generally give you access to more attacks. When a warrior, ranger, or anyone else swaps, they have a fresh set of cooldowns, meaning that in a fight they are expected and generally encouraged to use both weapon sets in combat.

Thief, however, is different. Since our abilities use initiative rather than cooldown, swapping weapons doesn’t really come in to play in fights because if you’re out of init, and you swap weapons, you’re still out of init and can’t use any abilities on the second set.

Because of the initiative mechanic, thieves are designed primarily around sticking with a single weapon set for the duration of most fights.

So, the reason most people take shortbow as a swap is because it is the only thief weapon that lets you do something useful with that initiative outside of combat, shortbow 5 is a spammable, ground targeted, short range shadowstep.

This allows you to get to fights faster, escape situations that you don’t think you can stand up to, and generally increases your mobility and survivability.

Now, next week when HoT hits you might find p/p is a decent utility swap from d/d as if you take bound you can use the leap combo on dodge to stealth with, while maintaining a kind of okay ranged burst from unload. You’d lose the shortbow mobility, but you’d have a way to stealth on demand without having to land a melee strike.

Since it’s offhand pistol, you could also go d/p or s/p in your offhand for the same utility.

D/D can be somewhat viable for +1s, but in order to really pull it off you’ve got to be willing to go pretty glassy. I’d reccommend dropping DA and in stead going for CS for a D/D build if you’re looking to do a stealth backstab style build. DA is really a more condition oriented line better suited for “unicorn” D/D builds that don’t build for direct damage, but in stead focus on conditions and evasion by using death blossom and staying visible in stead of using the majority of initiative on cloak&dagger>backstab chains. Since the evasion playstyle doesn’t seem like what you’re after, the Critical Strikes tree is much better suited for the stealth d/d thief. You could also look in to daredevil on friday, as some of the physical skills (bandit’s defense, distracting daggers, palm strike) synergize well with the stealth backstab style, and the two of the dodges will help you. Bound lets you deal some damage on dodge, as well as permanently increasing your damage by 10% giving you more burst in your gank, and dash makes you basically immune to CCs, incrases your dodge distance, lets you stack basically perma-swiftness and gives you damage resistance, increasing your survivability by a flat 10% which might be a better option if you are really hardcore about not taking a shortbow for escapes.

I think Traherne (and the pact) are a done deal story wise, but I assume we will get to see Traherne go out in a blaze of glory.

I don’t think he has enough left in him as a character to stay relevant for much longer. He completed his wild hunt, he helped lead the pact to kill zhaitan.

The Pact is problematic from a storytelling perspective (which is why they blew it up before the HoT story) and Traherne is only relevant as our buddy without it.

I think the best sendoff would really be having Traherne die to save us in an epic fashion (not the lazy fashion those other characters died) Something gandalf-and-balrgo level epic, so we can go “yeah man, Traherne, I didn’t like him that much, but he had my back, and that was cool”

Traherne needs to leave the story, permanently, but he needs to do so in a way that virtually forces people to remember him fondly, as that’s how everyone NPC is going to treat the situation and it’s just not effective storytelling when the player can’t empathize with the other actors.

Flippers don’t control the economy in the slightest. At most they make temporary inconveniences in certain low throughput markets, and find themselves unable to maintain control of any market once it becomes lucrative.

You can push it back a week. My monthly D&D game is that saturday and I fear I will have a nerd implosion due to overstimulation and lack of sleep.

Chyanne Waters.8719:

I would like one major armor piece that went on any character in guild wars and always looked awesome.

http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Chaos_Gloves

Oh and dyeable weapons, HINT HINT

Oh the EOTN gloves. Worst armor decision in GW1, like ever. They all looked so ridiculous.

Of course, GW2 is already loaded with ridiculous glowy stuff so it would actually be more fitting.

Dont hold your breath for dyable weapons either. I forget the exact quote, but it was something along the lines of weapons not being dyable being a design decision specifically aimed at making weapons more collectable or something like that. They didn’t leave out weapon dyes because of technical hurdles.

They already announced on the guild week streams that they got rid of the membership requirement to get the skin sets. You don’t actually need to switch halls to get the other set, you just need to visit the other hall to get the mats now. The vendor, once unlocked, will let you get both from either hall.

zero, the same as everyone else.

You will however still have the guild bank, banners, vault transports, and whatever else that carries over, as well as a sweet legacy trophy that no new guilds will ever be able to get for your guild hall.

How do pugs play with no thumbs anyway?

Leamas.5803:

All I can say is the RNG in GW2 has always been a little flakey. It gets “stuck” on certain things, or at least it used to, at least on my account.
snipped for brevity

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clustering_illusion

The RNG is in fact random, and we’ve been told multiple times that the seed values it uses don’t use any character or account relevant data.

Basically, because the human brain is wired to look for patterns, you chose to see a pattern when a series of random events produced something like a pattern.

The RNG didn’t get stuck. it just happenned to roll a bunch of staves randomly, you saw those staves and mistakenly interpreted them as a pattern since you, unlike the RNG system, recognize that they have a relationship to one another.

I don’t want to pay attention to this thread any more. I don’t deserve less of Ohoni’s posts, however, as it’s just a forum and everyone deserves his posts equally, so I’m sure he will fairly distrubte them amongst the next three or five hundred threads even remotely close to the topic.

You know, it’s unfair to limit Ohoni’s masterful exclusivity nonsequiters to threads about raids. I believe all threads, in all forums, should have equal access to these posts. They signed up for the forums, so they obviously deserve to read more beautiful posts, and shouldn’t be excluded from them by not specifically opening a raid related thread.

Maybe we could invent some kind of volume or token system to ensure fair access, and award those tokens based on a measurement of average time spent to read one page of forum posts or something?

Lord Kuru.3685:

PopeUrban.2578:

Lord Kuru.3685:

You can see in all of OP’s examples that the way Anet works is they have a vision for how their game is supposed to be played, deviation from that vision is not supported — and in fact sometimes actively discouraged (remember the “you’re violating my game mode” dev?).

They’ve been operating like this for three years and it’s probably too much to expect them to change now.

That particular dev was completely right, and anet handled the problem of conflict between GvG and WvW in the best way possible. They created a space people could GvG without interfering with WvW ques and gameplay.

How is that not listening to to community?

That was damage control. There was ENORMOUS outrage after that incident and that forced Anet’s hand. Same thing with the multi-colored commander tags, by the way.

I don’t think the outrage was as enormous as you think it was tbh, or that it in any way “forced” anyone’s hand.

Certain GvGers got a thing they wanted, and like to think they got it because they made it happen. It’s cooler and edgier than saying “Ah, yeah, Anet was pretty decent about that.”

Anet was extremely cool about that. It would have been super valid of them to say “This is disruptive to WvW and we are going to start kicking people from WvW for it.” And they chose to support that community rather than squashing them.

I’m not saying everything Anet does is good and right and just, but this particular thing? They were being pretty good and just about it until they finished a “final solution”

First, as this is a partnership with ESL, I doubt all 400k is anet’s money.

Second, this partnership sets a precedent that arenanet can’t ignore balance any longer. They want to compete in the big esports market, and thus they can’t let balance languish like they have in the past.

In order to maintain this partnership, they’ve got to adhere to a certain standard of upkeep to make the game continually relevant, and not only that, since every ranked guild team is now, effectively, competing in to pro league to one degree or another they can’t ignore competitive player feedback as if a “competitive” team remains so by exploiting some strange balancing loophole, they’re stuck with that loophole on full display to the public for an entire season.

The down side is, of course, that even though it guarantees a balance update cadence, it severely hampers their ability to make minor adjustments mid season. Unless they become far more willing to do PvE/PvP slits this could potentially be harmful for PvE balance mid-season.

It’s pretty simple really.

• They felt that the gold faucet from dungeon running was detrimental to the economy.

• They felt that based on the reception of the AC revamp that it was not worth the cost and effort ro revamp other dungeons to fix their bugs and exploits.

• They felt that dungeons, unlike fractals, had a large amount of expensive expectations (cutscenes, lots of voice work, multiple paths, unique skin set per dungeon) that make them problematic as ongoing content.

• They felt that they could serve small group instanced content better by focusing on smaller, less expensive chunks of content in the fractal system that scale better for more difficulty tiers of players.

• They felt they could save the big showy content costs for raids, which people are societally much more tolerant of being released piecemeal, and which have a difficulty scale, and thus longevity, that makes them more comfortable with creating lots of custom reward assets for.

It’s not all that suprising that they went this direction if you look at it from a long term business standpoint, and everything in HoT is all about defining the extendable systems that will define GW2 throughout the life of game now that they’ve got 3 years of experimentation out of their systems.

rockenrampage.9251:

Shiren.9532:

I agree I would love to see a wyvern pet or something as unique as that although I highly doubt arena net would make a pet so intense as a wyvern the main reason being I would assume that most rangers would evidently pick this pet over all existing pets.
Although a pet that I could be seen added would be a raptor or a smoke scale or something very amazing looking indeed but at the same time still rather reasonable and that would not make people look strait past all the other pets.

Never the less I would love to see arena net either rework the old pets or add some new pets or both and make them a little more exciting.

As of the last BWE, two wyverns, a smokescale, and a ranged dinosaur thornback were avaliable to rangers. The fire wyvern was especially cool, its ability makes it invuln and fly in a wide circle, crating a massive area of burning for a little while.

Muchacho.2390:

Gliding has a big problem… and that is that you only will be able to glide in the HoT maps…

I hope that sums up well what i think about gliding…

To be fair, they couldn’t really add it in to core maps without significantly changing them. A lot of those maps have many places that don’t actually have roof geometry, or places where the danger of falling to your death is core to the design, or just map borders that you could see beyond if gliding. This is similar to when WoW implemented flying mounts. It would simply take too much work to update old maps which aren’t designed for it for little to no gameplay value, and a whole lot of extra QA.

However, all expansions and live maps going forward assume ownership of HoT, and thus the gliding system, so It’s a safe bet to assume the maps you can’t glide on now (and possibly new fractals, since fractals are a “core” system) are the only maps you will ever not be able to glide on.

Also assume that going forward in to the next expansion, they’ll start to design more things around assumption of certain maxed masteries, like the glider mastry that removes the time limit from gliding.

Shiren.9532:

Seth Chadwick.5317:

You can get into the Guild Hall map if you do not have Heart of Thorns and hang out with people, but most of the HoT guild features in there will be disabled for you. For example you will not be able to enter the Arena. I’m not going to go into detail on which specific things will be accessible and which are not because I’ll probably get it wrong

Are you concerned about the likelihood of guild halls becoming a tool which segregates some guilds instead of enabling them to play together?

A guild with a mixture of players who own HoT or players who don’t will be divided down that line with every guild activity which uses HoT exclusive guild hall features. Is that the experience that guild halls are intended to create?

I understand guild halls are a HoT feature, but guilds are communities and communities are strongest when they aren’t divided by barriers. Guild halls as a tool for supporting guild communities are self-sabotaging when they exclude members of the guild based on their expansion status.

I can only speak specifically to the arena because it’s the only detail you’ve confirmed, but any guild activity taking place in the arena will segregate the guild into players who do or don’t own HoT. Only HoT owners can play in the arena jumping puzzle or participate in the guild’s arena PvP tournament. Doesn’t it go against the spirit of a guild hall to exclude people like this? It feels like it competes with the goal of a guild hall – to bring in ways for guilds to spend time together.

Locking the scribe profession, the new guild equipment cosmetics or even the ability to acquire and customize a guild hall behind HoT has minimal impact on guild communities, but wouldn’t guild activities within the guild hall be universally more fun (for the whole guild) if the entire guild could participate? Do you think they could be less fun when the whole guild can’t participate in a guild activity because some don’t own HoT?

It’s kind of intended. Remember that, despite now having a F2P element, GW2 is not designed as a F2P game.

They simply felt it was an opportune time to implement “permanent trial” accounts like many other MMOs do, and that it was unfair to ask new players to fork over increasingly large sums of money as new expansion are released. This was a problem in the GW1 model. Getting someone to start playing after two addon campaigns was often far more expensive than getting them to paly at release.

“Free to play” was very clearly defined by Mo when the announcement was made. They consider GW2 a buy-to-play game with an optional cash shop rather than a free to play game with a cash shop they rely on to make all of their revenue.

Thus, they want people to feel like the cash shop is optional, but the core game is the primary expense of the game, and they felt it was a good move to always have new accounts pay the same price over the life of the game so it’s always easy for new players to pick up.

Unless they start pushing a 50 dollar expansion every two months, the amount of content included with each expansion release (the core, and all live content updates until the next expansion) is a pretty solid value for existing players, with the additional option that those players, if they’re not active, can choose to in stead recieve all but the most recent paid expansion for free if they’re willing to wait it out.

They probably should have referred to the F2P thing as a trial, as with the limitations that’s what it amounts to. I probably would have eliminated a lot of confusion.

Lord Kuru.3685:

You can see in all of OP’s examples that the way Anet works is they have a vision for how their game is supposed to be played, deviation from that vision is not supported — and in fact sometimes actively discouraged (remember the “you’re violating my game mode” dev?).

They’ve been operating like this for three years and it’s probably too much to expect them to change now.

That particular dev was completely right, and anet handled the problem of conflict between GvG and WvW in the best way possible. They created a space people could GvG without interfering with WvW ques and gameplay.

How is that not listening to to community?

The problem with people’s perception of “listening to the community” is that, in most cases, people think they want something that, if they got it, they’d complain about once they got it due to long term consequences.

When you’re developing a game, you always listen to the community, but you can not always capitulate to the community as the desires of parts of your community often directly conflict the desries of other portions of your community, or would actively damage the long term health of your game.

Anet is now, and has always tried to hit a middle of the road approach, attempting to keep a compromise between various viewpoints and facets of its player base. When the player base overwhelmingly agrees on something that doesn’t have the potential to damage the long term health of the game (a good example being moving living story to repeatable and world zone content, or guild halls, or precursor crafting) but rather improve it, they tend to move in that direction. When players desire something that isn’t good for the long term future of the game (like the liquid currency faucet from dungeon farming, or the overly expensive 4-path dungeons versus less expensive fractal mini-dungeons that all go in to the same big pile) then they tend to keep their own counsel.

You can not make a game simply be doing everything your community wants. What you end up with is a soulless product that is so focused on accessibility that it loses any sense of charm, accomplishment, or identity amongst its competitors.

Listening to your community is not the same thing as doing everything they want all the time.

Kal Spiro.9745:

Ghost Bear.5280:

xadine.7069:

I agree, BUT GW1 was NOT an MMO…

Yes it was. It was non traditional, but definitely a Massively Multiplayer Online game.

No, Guild Wars was an Online game with Minor Multiplayer capability and Massively Multiplayer Graphically Intense Chat Rooms.

Arenanet specifically marketed GW1 as a Competitive/Cooperative Online RPG. They were very explicit in early marketing about using the term “CORPG” and that they were not building an MMO, and didn’t want GW1 to be an MMO.

They were also very explicit in early GW2 interviews and marketing that one of the main reasons they made GW2 was because they now felt they wanted to make an MMO, and the entire concept was not compatible with the GW1 systems as they were.

GW2 owes a lot of its systemic differences, better or worse, to the fact that they intended to build it as a different type of game than GW1. They thought they could “fix” the MMO genre in a lot of ways. Some of those ways worked, some did not. Some are still being iterated and experimented on.

They learned lot in the last three years about where limits have to be placed, where accessibility conflicts with fun, how players do and no not like to experience their vision of an ever-evolving world story, and most importantly that the number of players who want reasons to make and play with friends are far higher when you market the game as a game you play with friends, and a game that makes it easier to make friends through its cooperative nature than any other MMO on the market.

Even a 100% buff to a statistically insignificant drop rate means you still have a statistically insignificant chance of getting a key as a drop.

They’re not going to just start handing them out like candy after specifically nerfing the most reliable way to circumvent the gem store. The fact that they even drop is so they can say that they drop, not as a means to provide a reliable source of them.

As far as I’m aware there aren’t any time limited HoT launch things, so you’re not really missing out on anything by just playing Halloween stuff and enjoying the holiday. once halloween is over all the HoT stuff will still be there to enjoy.

Or, you know, if you achieve all of your self-imposed halloween goals you can jump right in to new fun content immediately rather than waiting for the next release.

I rather like this release setup actually. Nothing makes me more sad during an event that going “okay, I did all the holiday things I wanted to, now it’s back to the same old”

Now it’s more like “Halloween was fun, now on to more new fun!”

I have never understood why people go out of their way to solo in MMOs. There are far more gratifying single player experiences in the form of single player games, largely because most single player games don’t need to balance your time and reward acquisition against a massive economy filled with other players, make story concessions to ensure you completing a task doesn’t interfere with another player doing so, and a number of other reasons.

Designing around soloing as a “primary play” type rather than a supplementary activity people can do before they make friends or during off hours is just silly.

They learned from that mistake with Nightfall’s heroes. As soon as “filler” npcs were as good as actualy players… nobody played the multiplayer game together any more.

I’d just be happy that the personal story (which is getting a massive amount of new content with HoT) is still soloable and personal. I don’t really see a point to enabling solo players past that.

Why would you play a game solo when you can play much better single player games solo with less grind, less exterior market fluctuations, and more personal impact on the game?

Ohoni.6057:

Sure. As we have demonstrated that if they are new players, it takes them about 3-4 months to get ascended if they are really that slow.

You keep trying to diminish players that don’t have ascended. You insist on portraying them as “new” or in “needing to learn to play” better. Why do you do this? Why do you not except that you can be a fully established and knowledgeable player, and not have Ascended armor?

because if you’re established, you can afford it. If you’re knowledgable you know that it’s better than the exotics you bought when you hit 80 and you should probably be working on it.

The only excuse not to go after ascended really is just plain stubborn adherance to a definition of “top tier” that ended in 2012. Nobody that started playing after that point even bats an eye at ascended, and most are happy it’s a crafting thing they can do by playing whatever in stead of some super-rare drop they have to farm a specific dungeon over and over for.

So many tinfoil hats.

“They’re devaluing the base game to increase sales of HoT”

If that were truly the case…. why would they have bothered with the map rewards system?

Why would they have bumped up fractals as the dungeon alternative, which is core, not HoT, content?

It seems that they’re moving farming out of dungeons, and for the most part that farming is being left right there in the core game.

This theory doesn’t really fly, but it’s a convenient way to say “me too, I hate arenanet like all the other cool kids!”

You guys are so edgy.

zaced.7948:

PopeUrban.2578:

zaced.7948:

PopeUrban.2578:

zaced.7948:

PopeUrban.2578:

I think you missed the part where fractals are no longer 3 and 4 chain sets, but you can do one at a time and log out and still make progress to your next boss chest.

you’re talking about that chest with some blue and green items in it? sorry, i’d have have the ensured amount of gold. even then i still need infusions to play higher fractals which actually might give me a reward that actually makes a dent.

You’re aware you get infusions out of every single fractal chest now right? And you can craft them together with only 100 in artificer and no other materials required.

By the time you get to the point you need AR in fractals, since the agony infusion patch, you actually already have the AR. You get a ring guaranteed at 10. Don’t like it? You can salvage it now in addition to just running 10 a couple more times to buy the exact ring you want

Of course now you have to actually play harder content to get better rewards

That’s a buff, not a nerf, to GW2 in general.

I’m calling it like I see it. The people mad about the dungeon reward change were simply people that didn’t want to play dungeons. They wanted to farm dungeons.

They moved the farms out of instances so you don’t have to find a group in order to farm. They want instances to be challenging and fun and pay out appropriate rewards for difficulty.

i don’t need rings, i have two bank tabs full of them. what i will need will be tons of gold in infusions i will need to farm in order to be geared for fractals i already unlocked. this was already the case with lvl 50 (when i reached level 50 i had about 1/2 of the infusions i needed for that level, obviously i had to buy the rest since i can’t be bothered with grinding) and this will be even more a case with lvl 100 since the amount of infusions needed rises exponentially. if the formula stays the same we’ll need more than 120 ar for lvl 100 fractals. don’t tell me it’s possible to get those infusions through playing fractals in a reasonable time. even if the new consumables and masteries will get us 20 ar we’ll still need 2 +10 ones to get there. that’S 2050 +1 infusions. you get … i dunno … 1-2 of them per fractal? that’s ONLY MORE THAN 1500 kittenING FRACTALS TO PLAY ON AVERAGE. 7.5 times as much as needed to get to lvl 100. i don’t care about the difficulty level, i’m a very good player. i can run 50s in my sleep and i will be able to run 100s while at least half awake. my skill is irrelevant tho because i have to grind (or buy) enough infusions to be even ABLE to do that content. i could be the best player in the world but the mandatory ar at the beginning of a boss fractal will kill me.
come on, tell me that has nothing to do with grind. have you actually thought about it even for a minute?
and what your confused mind thinks about what is farming or not is irrelevant. running dungeons nets you less gold than most other farming options which anet seems to wholeheartedly support.
even a tryhard white knight like you has to accept the facts. otherwise you’re just delusional.

I didn’t say dungeons were a better farm, I said dungeons were broken content that people are abusing as a farm

That’s not white knighting. That’s a fact.

As for your fractal woes, yes. The intent is that you repeat revolving content to level it up. it sucks that you, like many of us, started fractals before the agony infusion handouts, but let’s be real here.

Fractals were always designed to be repeated in the pursuit of more AR. That’s why there are more than 4 fractals, so you’re not mindlessly farming the same content over and over trying to move from L30 to L31.

How is that more of a grind than running COF1 over and over and over?

If you consider repeating content a grind, then fractals are, by their very nature the least grindy content in the game because you’re virtually guaranteed to have a different set every time you run them. Will you be repeating fractals a fair bit? Yes.

But then you’re repeating a far larger amount of content than if you farm dungeon paths. And you’re actually gaing progress toward better loot every time you progress.

How you could find that less fun than repeating broken paths for gold over and over is beyond me.

You can toss around wordy like “tryhard” and “white knight” all you like, but it is obvious that you’re not interested in playing, it seems, any content that isn’t completely faceroll, or you’re just bored with the game in general.

You’re mad, specifically, because they’re taking the wheels off your gravy train, and now you might actually have to play the game to make some gold.

Cry me a river.

i do not find that more or less fun than dungeons. i actually play fractals when i have the time. the thing is that fractals don’t offer me any kind of reward except for a few grren and blue items and some cores for the boss fractals. for a dungeons path i get at least 1 gold. that’s the topic here, rewards. fractals don’t give any monetary gain.
also there are more dungeon paths than fractals. i have seen every single fractal more often than cof 1 or cof in general. how is this less repetitive in my case then? also we’re talking about the system after the patch, i guess you haven’t noticed. how is farming swamp on several levels not a farm, hmh? and seriously, you call 14 fractals a larger amount of content than 25 dungeon paths? get your head fixed, mate.

you don’t take every factor into account. cof i can do for a fix reward without the necessity to grind grind beforehand. for fractals i have to grind an INSANE amount of infusions to have a slightly higher rng on craploot. i don’t like gearchecks, that’s not what this game was supposed to be about. there’s also the requirement of time.
i don’t have time to run a whole lvl 50 (100 in the near future) fractal just to be rewarded with trashloot i could have gotten from killing 20 random mobs. i might have only 30 min and that way i can do 2 dungeon paths for a reasonable reward. it’s not that the rewards from dungeons are over the top, the rewards from fractals are just utter crap.
and you seem weirdly stuck on that cof 1 even after i told you i don’t do cof. and even if, what’s wrong with getting one gold from cof 1 a day? to which extent does this break the economy more than sw chest farming? chest farming seems to be fine according to anet. you make way more gold doing that than running dungeons btw.

and here we are again. how are dungeons broken? what are those “broken paths”? how are they more broken than the fractals? explain that to me. as far as i can see everything is fine with them. why should anet nerf the dungeon farm if they are not nerfing other kinds of farms that are even more lucrative? why not put a cd on bandit chests? or a 24h timer on the breach rewards? as others have said before flooding players with items is as bad as flooding it with gold. also the chests contain gold themselves and getting the 20 chests you need to make up for one dungeon path takes less time than than any dungeon path except for perhaps 2 or 3.
i guess someone took a beginner course in economics, didn’t completely understand it but is still a bit full of himself (this is not directed towards you but the other idiot).
just do the math, numbers don’t lie.

and taking the wheels off of what? come on you made that gravy train up. as you might have not read i actually do run max lvl fractals. to me there’s not really a difference between a dungeon path and a lvl 50 fractal. both easy af. fractals just take longer. if i want to have a challenge i play something else than gw2. gw2 is a dress up simulator for weird looking humanoids and that’s it. if you really find ANY content in gw2 difficult i question your skills. how is playing an easy game not playing the game?
you just state that dungeons are broken yet you won’t tell my why. the reason is because you have no compelling arguments and just talk out of your kitten .
get lost, troll, i have no more time for you.

So what you’re saying is you don’t “have the time” to run a single fractal under the new system, but you somehow have the time to run every single path of every single dungeon every day?

But of course you only run the kittenes, except that none of them are hard.

You’re swamped in contradictions here.

Should fractals be more rewarding and more challenging? Absolutely. That’s why they’re adding 50 more levels and retuning the old instabilities that were complete easy mode. It remains to be seen what they’re doing about the rewards at scale.

Dungeons are broken. Period. Go do CM 3 and laugh as you fight zero mobs and only one boss while you cheese the other two. Solo. Or completely skipping Kohler in AC, or stacking and reflecting literally everything to complete cof1 in mere minutes… the list goes on. Every single dungeon path allows you to outright skip or effortlessly burst most of it down.

Compare this with fractals. You are not skipping 80% of a given path, and you’re not speedrunning it in 5 minutes. The only exploit I can think of off the top of my head is the safe spot in the rotating laser room of the aether fractal. The other stuff, like the skip in dredge? Fixed within a month. Grawl? It’s a trash fight and two boss fights. You can skip the bats if you want. Catbot? You can skip like seven harpies.

The fact remains that _dungeons reward extremely well for content that is extremely short/easy compared to fractals.

This has nothing to do with how good you are personally, but rather the relative challenge level of the content. Even though you personally find all of it easy, you can’t deny than standing on a little stick to kill frost risk free, or bursting down the spider queen before she can do anything are significantly easier than killing Mai Trin, either of the grawl bosses, either of the dredge bosses, etc. etc. based simply on greater mechanical complexity of the fight.

On top of that, fractals are built around instabilities, and I seriously doubt that the easy mode L40 and L50 agony instabilities are going to stick around if they’re going so far as to change L38 in to full on reflection immunity. This means that even in repetition there is challenge. It might be old hat once you hit 50, since you can just sit on agony resists and forget the instabilities you had to go through to get there, but you can’t deny that instabilities that aren’t just “and also there’s some agony dots” significantly change the experience of running through a fractal.

I’ll say again, you’re upset that they’re removing imbalanced rewards from easy and broken content.

This is separate from fractal rewards, which are an issue in and of themselves. However, the fact you wieght this content in terms of the end chests rather than the overall loot acquired during a run says something about how you’re playing the content.

I walk out of L50 fractals with significantly more loot than any dungeon path.

I’d think a person like yourself, who is so good at the game that they literally find no challenge in any of the content would be excited that there are 50 new instabilities to conquer and a nice legendary backpack to go after so you’re not stuck farming the same old dungeons.

But it sounds to me like you’d rather farm old, broken, and by your own words extremely easy content than move up to the new top of the line.

So I ask you, are you interested in the content, or the farm?

phys.7689:

PopeUrban.2578:

Arenanet:
Dungeons are so full of exploitable loopholes for speedrun farming that it would take virtually the same effort as designing new fractals to fix them. So we’re making farming them non-viable but leaving the skins and old legendary recipies there so they have a purpose.

OP:
WHAT DO YOU MEAN I CAN’T FARM BROKEN CONTENT? I WANT TO PLAY MY WAY!

Dude. They’re moving to fractals specifically because fractals are content with more longevity and are a quicker development turnaround. They didn’t design dungeons so people could speedrun CoF1. They don’t see the value in fixing the dungeons when it’s as much work as adding whole new fractals.

On top of that, the new fractal system eliminates the ability to reroll for the exact fractal you want, so they’re comfortable with placing rewards in a system that is, at the very basic level of its design, unfarmable.

On top of that they’re moving the farm to the open world, where it should have always been in the first place. Facerolling through instances which are supposed to be challenging content wasn’t intended play like ever. It was smart players exploiting a broken system.

what are you talking about, the new fractal system lets you select any fractal you want to do.
Also fractals were just as exploitable, the main defense was the random nature of fractals.
expect COF p1 fractal farms now that they removed the randomized nature.

Also the numbering system on fractals is ungainly and will probably have to be redesigned before they start adding any new fractals.

mostly anet economy team just wanted to kill a gold faucet, decent gold earning should actually be in all content, with more earning the more skilled you are, though i dont enjoy dungeon meta, it best fits those ideas.

also dungeons was not the most effecient farm, and was also time gated

“One of the core changes we’re making is that each fractal run will only consist of one island from a static list instead of the current rotation of three random islands with a random boss fractal. This change to “1 fractal = 1 island” means that you’ll be able to run a fractal over your lunch break but still have the flexibility of running three or four fractals in the evening with your friends just like before. It also means that there will be a lot less pressure to find a group of people who can commit to 30–60 minutes in a single sitting or over 90 minutes on longer runs.

The new static schedule will allow you to practice a given fractal and learn its challenges with your friends, removing the necessity of rerolling fractals in order to find the fractal of your choice. This will also give you common ground to share similar experiences when you’re talking about a given fractal scale with other players. The lower scales will be adjusted to help make them more approachable to players to aid them in learning the mechanics of individual fractals before they scale up and become too difficult."

I read this as “You can not reroll fractals. Your fractal is statikittenil you complete it, and every 4th fractal will be a boss”

I think maybe the both of us need some clarification on exactly how the static list works. I agree it would be a bad idea to allow people to endlessly farm swamp or jellyish.

Astralporing.1957:

PopeUrban.2578:

No, they know dungeons are so broken that it would take as much effort as designing new content to revamp them.

And you assume that any new content won’t be broken in the beginning? Looking at some things they have shown us during last year, i’d say that yes, the new content will require at least the same amount of fixing, on top of designing it.
And (looking at the previous examples of content that anet left bugged because they’d rather make new content than fix older one) that new content will remain equally bugged.

Nah, it had nothing to do with it. It was simply the case of Anet wanting to buff up metrics for their new pet project because they knew it’d be a failure without it.

Your (continued) bias is showing.

phys.7689:

munki.6402:

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Sw chest farming is good for the economy. Dungeon farming is very bad for the economy.

Unless you know why this is the case you aren’t really qualified to talk about what is good and what is bad for the economy. Maybe take a few more economics classes before trying to tell everyone what is good and what is bad for the game.

+1

Cannot be said enough amongst the deluge of qq’ing dungeon farmers.

this is a false statement.
unless you define good for the economy as item inflation and money deflation, which is just a different set of problems.

True. It becomes a larger problem for hoarders, and a lesser problem for those who want to earn rewards directly.

Market speculation and trade pvp is and will always be a thing, but it’s impossible to deny that easy dungeon farming introduced far too much liquid currency in to the system, directly inflating all material rewards gained from other sources in comparison to gold.

With this new market, after all the stockpiles are sold and the speculation buying/selling calms down, you end up in an economy where it’s just as financially viable option to personally go out get get cloth as it is to farm <insert content> for random drops and sell off material.

It’s deflating currency, sure, but it’s doing so by encouraging and providing avenues to skip the market entirely, meaning and overall corresponding drop in market supply as well.

If they do it right, this hits a point of equilibrium, and, hopefully, lessens the wide fluctuations in cost between stuff like cloth, leather, and metal while still allowing good money to be made by salvaging random drops.

We’re looking at an economy where, at an individual level, supply and demand aren’t assumed realities but choices. You’re not assumed to always have a market supply of materials, nor are you assumed to always have a market demand because you can opt to simply skip the whole deal, or go all in on demand or supply.

If they do it right.

Rashagar.8349:

Joopy.6547:

That short paragraph certainly made it sound like they’re removing certain incentives to play through dungeons.
It must be a small minority but not everyone has the expansion and can do raids so I hope they will improve dungeon rewards another way. I have yet to unlock all the skins (I understand it can also be done in sPvP but not everyone enjoys that game mode).

Yeah I think this would be the ideal. I do think that, fair enough shifting the “liquid rewards” away from dungeons to other parts of the game, but they should replace those rewards with something more… solid… Re-kerjiggering the token quantity/item prices would be a good start. They made sense when the only end-game pve content was repeated dungeon runs, they don’t make much sense now.

Agreed. If the only function of dungeons is skins, legendary gifts, and specific rune sets, they should really cut down on the number of runs required. A “full run” should IMO be enough to grab a chestpiece.

If the easier acquisition of exotics would be an economic issue, they could easily turn the dungeon skins in to actual free-application skins like the HOTN ones.

LanfearShadowflame.3189:

PopeUrban.2578:

You know what needs to happen with these? More drops for winning in higher ranked games in sPvP, or higher ranked server win bonus chests in WvW. Thus, the players that are regularly winning, and in higher ranked play would potentially be getting rich, which the newbies are making a little money, and the guys in the middle are basically just money shuffling around the average income of non-insanity farm PvE.

I’d give way more of a kitten about the score if my server winning meant my participation chest could buy me more shinies, or more of a kitten about my sPvP rank if ranking up and winning meant making substantially more money.

I can agree with getting more for winning high ranked pvp matches. Sort of. There is a personal skill component there, which does in itself deserve rewarding.

I can’t necessarily agree with the WvW example though. There is too much outside of one’s personal control there, and it would encourage further server stacking in order to get those rewards. We need to find a better way to implement things for that game mode. Something that rewards individual skilled play, while still encouraging the group play. However we don’t want it to encourage the server stacking which just results in screwing over people that don’t server jump, nor do we want to encourage servers to intentionally throw matches. I don’t have any suggestions, but I’m still mulling it over.

They might need to rebalance the chests somehow. Maybe tie the reward scales in to individual events completed, including defences, and maybe even have guild claiming mechanics be part of that calculation?

Obviously the intent should be that if you are a regular, active, and successful participant on a high tier WvW server it should pay out better. How exactly to calculate that is something I don’t have enough background information about exactly what goes in to season boxes to postulate.

After all, my giving a crap if my server wins ended when they removed PvE server buffs from the system and gave me the ability to get all the best buffs through wxp. I think I’d almost prefer it if WvW were switched to a seasonal team select in stead of a “you are on this team with all these people, you have no choice” system.

In this manner people would have to choose a team at the start of each season, or even just randomly assign people (with guilds being considered people so guilds always end up in the same WvW team) and anet could control stacking much better by creating a max population lockout . I mean servers are a non-concept everywhere but WvW at this point. Why not close the loop and make WvW better rounded and more competitive as a result?

Vargamonth.2047:

I was honestly expecting some XP nerf to prevent dungeons from being the obvious way to train tyrian masteries, probably resulting on a huge increase on path selling (which I’m not against btw in the current state of the game).
This reward nerf, however … While I can imagine a cut on spontaneous gold generation as something positive for the economy, I can hardly see how making some content next to useless reward wise can be an overall good move.

I think they’re trying to move in the “unique rewards for unique content” direction, with the fractal level system as the outliar “cash money dungeon” since when they update with a fractal, they update the whole system from 1-100

Of course, it remains to be seen if those next 50 fractal levels are a meaningful increase in difficulty or payout.

Dungeons are now about the stuff from the token vendors, so skins and legendary components, just like raids going forward are about their own set of unique rewards, skins and legendary precursors. Fractals are the “filler content” you can use to make money, as they’re a system designed to be infinitely expandable/scalable in a way the more static dungeons and raid aren’t. For that to work, though, fractals need to appropriately scale up the loot with the challenge level so getting good, spending the effort to get all that AR feels worth the time.

And of course the open world is still the go-to for solo farming, only they’re making it less about volume and more about targeted results, so more about farming for the thing you want and less about farming for gold to buy the thing you want, which should spread the player base out more and generally move people around maps so they aren’t all running the same map for months getting bored.

Now to see if they can actually pull this off.

LanfearShadowflame.3189:

PopeUrban.2578:

Celtic Lady.3729:

PopeUrban.2578:

Dawdler.8521:

PopeUrban.2578:

Calm down.

They are nerfing salvage because they are moving resources to a less RNG system: Map rewards.

Need silk? In stead of doing whatever it is you do to get 5000 worthless greens and hoping some of them are cloth, and getting frustrated when they are not, you in stead open your map and go “okay, today there’s cloth in brisban wildlands”

And tomorrow, you play a different zone for cloth, and the next day yet another different zone.

On top of that you’re still getting some RNG drops for stuff you’re not specifically after, and selling that for profit.

It will sell for less profit because people can farm for it themselves, but you also need less money because you can reliably farm for stuff yourself.

In the end the change is that in stead of finding the one best farm in terms of loot quantity and doing it for months on end coughsilverwastesandbalmcough you get to determine your objective, and do different content every day in pursuit of it.

How is that not an improvement?

Well its not an improvement if you play sPvP or WvW… but then again that’s buisness as usual, we already know Anet only care about PvE.

Did you miss the bit where sPvP and WvW have shiny new drops that they can sell to PvE heads, because the PvE heads need those drops to build their legendaries?

Cool. Then those of us that pvp and wvw can get rich. Oh, wait…

Maybe?

Maybe.

Might end up just being a big money shuffle for those people as they sell their mode specific items in order to have enough gold to purchase other components they need. Just depends on how the prices balance out.

You know what needs to happen with these? More drops for winning in higher ranked games in sPvP, or higher ranked server win bonus chests in WvW. Thus, the players that are regularly winning, and in higher ranked play would potentially be getting rich, which the newbies are making a little money, and the guys in the middle are basically just money shuffling around the average income of non-insanity farm PvE.

I’d give way more of a kitten about the score if my server winning meant my participation chest could buy me more shinies, or more of a kitten about my sPvP rank if ranking up and winning meant making substantially more money.

Lévis.5489:

PopeUrban.2578:

Calm down.

They are nerfing salvage because they are moving resources to a less RNG system: Map rewards.

Need silk? In stead of doing whatever it is you do to get 5000 worthless greens and hoping some of them are cloth, and getting frustrated when they are not, you in stead open your map and go “okay, today there’s cloth in brisban wildlands”

And tomorrow, you play a different zone for cloth, and the next day yet another different zone.

On top of that you’re still getting some RNG drops for stuff you’re not specifically after, and selling that for profit.

It will sell for less profit because people can farm for it themselves, but you also need less money because you can reliably farm for stuff yourself.

In the end the change is that in stead of finding the one best farm in terms of loot quantity and doing it for months on end coughsilverwastesandbalmcough you get to determine your objective, and do different content every day in pursuit of it.

How is that not an improvement?

No, they are nerfing salvage, because of all the naughty people salvaging and opening bags with their lvl 53 characters. Because god forbid them to get money with linen scraps.

Except for that part where you can go to a level 50 map and, you know get the scraps from map rewards

They’re moving in the direction of Earning>Trading.

Up to this point it’s been a seller’s market. You don’t reliably acquire all the mats you need for thing X, so you sell most of your acquisitions, and buy them from the aggregate farming power of the entire player base, and they do the same from you.

That sucks. It means the only way to get practically anything is from the market.

The system they’re moving toward is, basically, allowing you to choose whether you focus on farming for the thing you need, OR buying it.

Options are good. Right?

Celtic Lady.3729:

PopeUrban.2578:

Dawdler.8521:

PopeUrban.2578:

Calm down.

They are nerfing salvage because they are moving resources to a less RNG system: Map rewards.

Need silk? In stead of doing whatever it is you do to get 5000 worthless greens and hoping some of them are cloth, and getting frustrated when they are not, you in stead open your map and go “okay, today there’s cloth in brisban wildlands”

And tomorrow, you play a different zone for cloth, and the next day yet another different zone.

On top of that you’re still getting some RNG drops for stuff you’re not specifically after, and selling that for profit.

It will sell for less profit because people can farm for it themselves, but you also need less money because you can reliably farm for stuff yourself.

In the end the change is that in stead of finding the one best farm in terms of loot quantity and doing it for months on end coughsilverwastesandbalmcough you get to determine your objective, and do different content every day in pursuit of it.

How is that not an improvement?

Well its not an improvement if you play sPvP or WvW… but then again that’s buisness as usual, we already know Anet only care about PvE.

Did you miss the bit where sPvP and WvW have shiny new drops that they can sell to PvE heads, because the PvE heads need those drops to build their legendaries?

Cool. Then those of us that pvp and wvw can get rich. Oh, wait…

Maybe?

Dawdler.8521:

PopeUrban.2578:

Calm down.

They are nerfing salvage because they are moving resources to a less RNG system: Map rewards.

Need silk? In stead of doing whatever it is you do to get 5000 worthless greens and hoping some of them are cloth, and getting frustrated when they are not, you in stead open your map and go “okay, today there’s cloth in brisban wildlands”

And tomorrow, you play a different zone for cloth, and the next day yet another different zone.

On top of that you’re still getting some RNG drops for stuff you’re not specifically after, and selling that for profit.

It will sell for less profit because people can farm for it themselves, but you also need less money because you can reliably farm for stuff yourself.

In the end the change is that in stead of finding the one best farm in terms of loot quantity and doing it for months on end coughsilverwastesandbalmcough you get to determine your objective, and do different content every day in pursuit of it.

How is that not an improvement?

Well its not an improvement if you play sPvP or WvW… but then again that’s buisness as usual, we already know Anet only care about PvE.

Did you miss the bit where sPvP and WvW have shiny new drops that they can sell to PvE heads, because the PvE heads need those drops to build their legendaries?

Calm down.

They are nerfing salvage because they are moving resources to a less RNG system: Map rewards.

Need silk? In stead of doing whatever it is you do to get 5000 worthless greens and hoping some of them are cloth, and getting frustrated when they are not, you in stead open your map and go “okay, today there’s cloth in brisban wildlands”

And tomorrow, you play a different zone for cloth, and the next day yet another different zone.

On top of that you’re still getting some RNG drops for stuff you’re not specifically after, and selling that for profit.

It will sell for less profit because people can farm for it themselves, but you also need less money because you can reliably farm for stuff yourself.

In the end the change is that in stead of finding the one best farm in terms of loot quantity and doing it for months on end coughsilverwastesandbalmcough you get to determine your objective, and do different content every day in pursuit of it.

How is that not an improvement?

Daralii.8940:

Celtic Lady.3729:

I don’t really get why the developers for this game have more or less failed at making dungeons, if what people are saying is true and that they are minimizing dungeons because they’re so imbalanced.

Isn’t dungeon making and dungeons in general a staple of MMO play? Shouldn’t they be able to make good ones and balance them?

The dungeon team was disbanded after the AC remake. For whatever reason, they have an active disinterest in dungeons being a thing.

This wouldn’t be so bad if they had actually carried through with new fractals being periodically added every few months because they were easy to churn out instead of adding a grand total of 4(three of which are recycled from dungeons that were timed content) since the feature was implemented.

ANet’s track record with instanced PvE content in GW2 is absolutely horrendous, which is a big part of why I’m so skeptical of raids past Spirit Vale.

My reading of this is that fractals are actually easier to push through to production since they are always only one “path” with minimal voice work, and the fractal levels system means there’s far more content for the development buck for each fractal, as players from complete novices to seasoned pros will have continued reasons to run each fractal.

That’s no excuse for being so lax on fractals for so long. At minimum they should really be pushing out either a fractal or a raid wing every other LS release or so. That’s a cadence of once a month. Given the smaller nature of fractals I think this is totally doable.

The question is, can Anet do a complete 180 now that they don’t have HoT development eating up so many resources, and more importantly, will we suffer another long content drought when they get heavy in to development of the next expansion.

You know a blog I’d like to see? “What we learned over three years, and how we restructured our development process to service all of the styles of play we are attempting to cater to.”

There have been improvements. Fractals were a massive improvement over dungeons. LS2 was a massive improvement over LS1. It’s just a question of whether or not they can keep up the pace with the post-HoT content. After three months or so we will have mostly consumed HoT, and I think people are expecting fairly regular raid wings, fractals, and living story given all the massaging and PR surrounding these three pillars of GW2 PvE.

zaced.7948:

PopeUrban.2578:

I think you missed the part where fractals are no longer 3 and 4 chain sets, but you can do one at a time and log out and still make progress to your next boss chest.

you’re talking about that chest with some blue and green items in it? sorry, i’d have have the ensured amount of gold. even then i still need infusions to play higher fractals which actually might give me a reward that actually makes a dent.

You’re aware you get infusions out of every single fractal chest now right? And you can craft them together with only 100 in artificer and no other materials required.

By the time you get to the point you need AR in fractals, since the agony infusion patch, you actually already have the AR. You get a ring guaranteed at 10. Don’t like it? You can salvage it now in addition to just running 10 a couple more times to buy the exact ring you want

Of course now you have to actually play harder content to get better rewards

That’s a buff, not a nerf, to GW2 in general.

I’m calling it like I see it. The people mad about the dungeon reward change were simply people that didn’t want to play dungeons. They wanted to farm dungeons.

They moved the farms out of instances so you don’t have to find a group in order to farm. They want instances to be challenging and fun and pay out appropriate rewards for difficulty.

zaced.7948:

this is the biggest bullkitten they could have come up with. i have no time (and therefore need) for raids that are several hours long. dungeons are the only way to actually make some gold (>some<, not that’s it’s an insane amount or anything, and it’s also timegated) in a way that’s at least somehow interesting. take that away and i don’t really have any reason to play this game at all.
i know they want to direct everybody towards raids and fractals so dungeons just aren’t played any more at some point because they don’t want to deal with them but that’s a cheap and obviously manipulative approach that’s very upsetting.
i guess it was a big mistake to preorder hot as it seems they’re gonna make my preferable content into some oddity that’s not worthwhile the time. i could compensate by just buying gold with cash but i don’t respond well to those kind of business tactics. i will throw my money at some other company in the future.
well, at least i have learned something from that.
in the end discussing it is pointless since it seems to already be set in stone. not many people will care about this anyway since anet did a good job at overplaying it with hype. i guess target audience has shifted. better look for a game that suits me better.

I think you missed the part where fractals are no longer 3 and 4 chain sets, but you can do one at a time and log out and still make progress to your next boss chest.

You can actually get something done in fractals much faster than dungeons after the change. You run one fractal at a time, 4th fractal is always a boss. Doing bosses raises fractal level.

Unless, you know, you mean you liked farming the broken dungeon paths like CoF1, CM3, etc. In which case you should have assumed that the broken content you were abusing for more rewards than intended would be nerfed eventually

The amount of overhaul required to make underwater combat balanced and fun is befitting no less than an expansion.

And I suspect, one day, we shall have that expansion, and until that day underwater content will remain blissfully scarce.

After all, why add new legendary spearguns when you have no intention of adding new content that requires spearguns for quite some time?

Celtic Lady.3729:

You didn’t honestly think there would never be a gear treadmill in this game, did you?

There still isn’t…

No, they know dungeons are so broken that it would take as much effort as designing new content to revamp them. Thus, they’re leaving them broken and removing the incentive to farm the broken content long term.

You know, so you have to go play the game that they’ve designed after watching people break their previous instanced content.