Guild Wars 2

assasin oates.3018:

I’m mixed.

I like Legendary armor, titles and Guild Hall items buut

I am worried about enrage timers (which ok fair enough it stops players cheesing out the boss for an hour) and bosses being locked behind masteries. I can see it being “LFG Ursanbearboway 10k AP 10/8 LB/norn mastery titles”

For sure recognize that certain people will insist that there is only one be-all-end-all way to do the content. Just like in GW1, there was an established PUG meta for all the hard instances.

And that’s fine. PUG meta is usually based around minimal interaction and teamwork to minimize risk of a slip up. If you have two characters that when combined provide the same amount of support and DPS as one specialized support and one specialized DPS, the end result is the same, but the more teamwork intensive comp isn’t going to make the PUG meta because it’s harder to ensure you can find his sympathetic match.

That doesn’t mean meta is the only way. it just means that meta is the easies way to fill a PUG with a good chance of success.

In GW1 you could also complete hard instances without that meta as long as you were willing to be creative and use the full realm of builds avaliable to everyone present, and made sure everyone had a total group comp that complimented one another.

For instance, in my guild we don’t really have anyone that likes guardian, so we do content without them. We don’t blast water for heals, and in stead use necro wells and whirl finishers, etc. I tank the AC swarms on a thief built for the purpose, etc.

GW2’s systems, especially with the new elite specs to add options, are sufficiently diverse that content should be achievable with build alterations rather than kicking out players. It’ll mean getting gear for your group spec probably, just as it did in GW1, but I doubt it’ll be as rigid as “guardian tank and ele water heals with thief blast or you fail”

I’m curious about the enrage timers, but as long as they recognize the clear difference between condition DPS and a white DPS and design enrage timers or encounter mechanics to not massively favor one over the other (e.g. condi and white DPS is interchangable and still viable to get the boss down)

This is really the only sticking point as every class has decent support and control options, but not every class has equally good white and condition DPS options. Having enemies with strengths/weaknesses against either is great, but if the boss enrage timers are so short as to require mostly white DPS it’s gonna be a bad time.

They already fixed condition stacking soit’s obvious they have conditions in mind, I just hope they keep them in mind when designing raids so that DPS elements of a raid group are encouraged to bring both condi and white damage to the fights.

MiniEquine.6014:

Only if they didn’t carry over to PvE, sure.

That’s silly.

WvW is now, and always has been the “little bit of both” mode.

They’re not going to change that.

Heck, they completely removed the glory system from sPvP for the same reason. They realized some people actually play multiple types of content and wanted their progress to be more universal. They realized pvp skins you can only wear in pvp were less compelling rewards than skins you can take with you anywhere.

WvW isn’t about fair fights. It’s about massively unfair fights. They even added WxP to make it even MORE unfair because it’s a hybrid game mode that praises both PvP skill and PvE style acquisition of wealth.

Auto-Unlocking anything in WvW only would be counter to what the game mode is all about.

Avster.1935:

Ohoni.6057:

Yeah that pretty much addresses most of my concerns. I don’t understand why they would abandon dungeons, though. That’s a lot of PvE content right there for players.

It’s because most players don’t care about dungeons. Open world content is where it’s at. Time spent updating dungeons would largely be time wasted.

What? Don’t mix opinion with fact. There are dungeon LFG posts every day out there, that get’s insta-full. Granted that they are 80s only party most of the time. Try checking the LFG posts right after Tequatl fight – that’s the prime time since everyone hops on to get their daily dungeon runs done.

ANet just abandoned them, but they’ve taken different approaches to address this. mainly high level fractal and raids, where “skill” plays a very important role in your success. And with a game such as GW2 with such amazing combat mechanics, it’s a shame if you don’t put the effort to utilize it.

This. They didn’t abandon dungeons. They just figured out that it takes less time to build mini-dungeons than it does to build fully voiced 3-path dungeons.

Dungeon content isn’t abandoned. The current dungeons are because they decided it would take as much work to fix their old broken content as it would to add a new fractal or two in stead.

Plus, you know, they already nerfed dungeon rewards in to the ground because zerk meta skip speedrunners pitched a massive fit when they attempted to fix AC, then again when aetherpath was actually kinda hard.

basically, Anet knows they can’t make the open world or non-fractal dungeons remarkably challenging because large parts of their community aren’t here for challenge. They’re here to insert sword, get loot, and socialize and drink a soda or whatever while doing so. People like that don’t really care about the content in the first place, only the speed of acquisition and number of people to chill out with.

They’d be dumb to lose those players as GW2 has fostered a large community with that mindset, and they want to provide a service that appeals to as many people as possible.

Thus, they’re keeping the challenging stuff off the main path, in specific doors you have to go to and open if you want a challenge. For 5 mans that’s fractals. For solo players it’s challenge achievements. And now for larger groups it’s raids. They’re simply expanding the user base this way, creating a type of content that the game was lacking to better appeal to people that may have found the game lacking.

I seriously doubt it’s going to get in the way of the status quo. They’re still going to let you cheese old dungeons for chump change. They’re still going to let you zerg the open world one handed. They’re still going to support those playstyles.

However, they’re moving forward to support some other playstyles too. That’s not a bad thing.

Inverse.2967:

In Final Fantasy 11 they had a raid boss that was designed to last for a whole 48h fight… One group almost did that one but had to stop, or someone might fallen dead out of his desk chair.
I hope it’ll be more about excitment and challenge not so much about dragged out time until win or reset/retry.

Okay, I think I can definately say 48 hours for a single encounter is probably slightly too long.

I mean, I have to take a break every 40 hours or so.

Astralporing.1957:

phys.7689:

nope working at a steady pace towards your goals is not actually the highest motivating rewards system

It’s way better than rewards you know you won’t get because they are intentionally kept out of your reach.

phys.7689:

also, exclusive rewards actually doesnt mess up your paradigm of working at a steady pace towards your goals being the best answer.

Well, if i can’t work at a steady pace towards those rewards, they definitely do.

They’re not out of your reach. You’re choosing not to do the required content. Some people didn’t bother with legendary weapons because they chose not to grind obscene amounts of clovers, or didn’t want to go to WvW for the gift of battle, or whatever.

I don’t own any PvP skins because I find arena based PvP boring and can’t be bothered to do the reward track.

Luckily, GW2 is well designed enough that I’m not forced to do any content to remain on the same power level as everyone else. I retain my option to try that content at any time.

Masteries are the system that forces content for mechanical power. I don’t hear anyone complaining about those.

Test a deathblossom d/d daredevil for potential pve tanking applications to see how it stacks up against the d/d lifesteal evade tank I use in live with the same party.

I fully expect better damage and overall tanking capacity.

Probably check out the new events as well.

Might test dragonhunter a bit to see if I want to level a guardian now that its gone through a balance pass since I didn’t like vanilla guardian’s playstyle. Maybe the fact guardians hate it will mean I like it.

Elite specs are intended to be a form of advancement, just like WvW ranks are a form of advancement.

What they need to do is let you pay badges for hero points, problem solved. You can advance by normal WvW play.

Dungeons can not be both challenging and have an “easy mode” that hands out the same reward.

That leads to the lackluster rewards they have now, which were nerfed in to the ground because you have to balance rewards around the most efficient method of completion.

That’s not working perfectly. That’s the definition of broken content. it was just made less rewarding in stead of being fixed to offer a challenge that is appropriate for the reward because it takes less effort to tweak a loot table than it does to alter encounter mechanics.

runeblade.7514:

How about instead, if players get stronger when stacked. So do mobs.

Each mob brings their own boons to share and/or their own CC. If they stack with one of mob, they use it.

A enemy Ascalon Monk can give boons to every mob. A warrior can give block effects to everyone. A Necromancer can drop a well of darkness.

I really like this idea. Seems logical, counterable, and if it’s confined to instances it wouldn’t break open world zergfest content.

At no point did they ever promise they wouldn’t add raids.

They promised they wouldn’t add a gear treadmill.

They’re not adding a gear treadmill.

Ascended is still, and will remain, BiS equipment.

No thank you on dancing dagger getting a dash. It’s an escape skill too you know, even though it’s kitten at it. Also, you can spam it in dark fields for emergency heals (heals quite a bit on SoM builds actually) or in other fields for some pretty spammy other projectile finishers (it applies the proj finisher to all targets hit)

Giving it a charge would remove all of its situational combo abilities, and would make it useless as an escape tool.

Immob on it would be nice though, and wouldn’t change the skill much at all. You could still finisher spam with it, and it would be better for escape/chase usage.

Jester.1236:

I’ve tried the trap thief, i just cannot go without some kind of speed in WvW

Trap runes give you crazy superspeed whenever you lay a trap.

Not all of it was referred to as living story

The terms “feature pack” and “event” were also used for mechanical and seasonal updates respectively.

The Papacy [POPE]
We’re making a return to GW2 for the exciting additions in heart of thorns, and have added some new friends to our ranks from connections we’ve made in other games. In truth, we’d like to change the guild name at this point to reflect that, but until then, it remains [POPE]

Our GW2 players are primarily PvE oriented, though we’ll occasionally blitz WvW and a few individuals enjoy some sPvP now and then, the core interest of the group is PvE. We tend to get our PvP fix in other games. We’re a fairly laid back bunch of old people looking for some solid new members to help and be helped by for achievement hunting, dungeons, fractals, and the new HoT raids! We like to foster a community of social assistance, and are more interested in fun than efficiency. We tend toward full clears and “make it work” party compositions in stead of rigid meta builds, as we use that rigidity in pvp elsewhere and like to come to GW2 for a break from all that hard work, as it has thusfar just allowed us to play what we like and still complete content. If you have a character you just plain like to play, rest assured he or she will always find a spot in a group with us

The guild is headquartered on Tarnished Coast, but that shouldn’t prevent you from applying if you’re on a different home server. The only thing you’ll be left out of is our random WvW yolo, so if you’re a PvE head you’ve got nothing to worry about, as you’ll be perfectly fine to adventure with your fellow members for the vast majority of our GW2 play time!

We usually have members present in the late evening/early AM EST, so this should be a perfect fit for you night owls that may have had trouble finding groups in other guilds with a slightly earlier schedule. We also keep in contact on our teamspeak and many of us have been playing games together for years, so if you’re looking for a group to play not only GW2, but other types of games with from time to time you’ll find sympathetic souls in our ranks.

You can mail or whisper Mac Twinsong in game, or hop by our site at http://foeguild.enjin.com and fill out the membership application!

I’m aware the site reads flames of exile. I’d like to change our guild name to reflect the new membership as soon as GW2 provides an option to do so. I just don’t want to lose our R6 research in guild ranks!

Until the release of HoT, we’ll be using every last ounce of our influence to run buffs for new and returning players, so if you’re new to the game, or just need to level just ask for a guild buff and it’ll be flicked on ASAP!

Thanks for your time, and welcome to GW2!

Hook up with another small guild! Remember that there are two sets of guild armor and weapons so to get it all you have to make at least 1 friend (or subguild) if you want it all.

Our small guild used to host public bounties and just created an “event runner” rank with no permissions that we added people to so they could get the rewards. It gave solo players and other small guilds a chance to do bigger content, and it gave us a way to fill in our numbers for guild content that was bigger than our guild, so it was a win/win for everyone.

In fact, shoot me an ingame mail and let’s have a chat. Maybe we can help one another out and make some new friends in the process.

Ayrilana.1396:

You referring to something like Slaver’s Exile?

Yeah, or the Mallyx reward chain, or completing a campaign story for the unique skin.

Even though technically the story wasn’t repeatable, it used the same kind of format. (not the same level of challenge obviously) You had to reset your progress if you wanted the reward again by making another character.

As to raids being hard. Absolutely! Although hard doesn’t always mean long. Liadri was hard, but it wasn’t a long fight. Length is not difficulty, but length does help tell a story and teach mechanics.

In my perfect world a fully released raid, with all wings and a boss, would be a 6-12 hour piece of content broken in to 1 hour chunks that you could leave and return to using a similar sort of checkpoint system.

I like this approach because it keeps it from feeling grindy. In stead of encouraging players to complete wing 1 40 times, then wing 2 40 times, and so on, it encourages you to complete each wing once, then the boss. You’re still repeating content, but depending on how often your raid group gets together you’re probably only repeating each wing maybe once a week, so it’s not as much of a grind.

It also keeps the earlier wings from becoming deserted content, which makes it easier to get new raiders in to the swing. In stead of telling them “oh, well good luck clearing wings 1 and 2, we’re on 3” you can say “awesome! we’ll add you to wing 1 for the next cycle and show you how it works!”

In addition the method of longer content with checkpoints has a much better feeling of progression than repeating small sections for tokens or gear to unlock the next section. Completing a wing has an intrinsic value in that it’s one step closer to the big boss every time you do it, so in stead of getting bored with a wing because you had to repeat it for a gear set or progress bar, you’re always happy to tackle it because it means you get to move to the next wing, and thus closer to the big fat boss loot, and the boss always feels like more of an epic accomplishment because it took such a journey to get to him.

This also lets you put tons more loot in the boss chest obviously, and there’s nothing better than having mad loot for killing a really hard boss at the end of an epic instance.

They’re creating optional difficult content with optional prestige rewards. It’s not any different than the dungeons we already have, and won’t impact the rest of the game any more than the dungeons we have already do.

Yes, legendary armor will have stat swapping.

No, that doesn’t make it more powerful than run of the mill ascended.

It just makes it cheaper to swap builds.

I’m sure there will be several open world-centric masteries that have equally unique rewards, though possibly not with the word ‘Legendary’ slapped on to them, and grinding those masteries will be the only way to achieve those rewards.

Some of those will have the word ‘Legendary’ slapped on them actually! The new set of legendary weapons!

Seems to me they want to make sure that if you want a full set of legendary items, you have to undertake the legendary task of mastering every type of content Open world for weapons, fractals for a backpack, raids for armor and… WvW for jewelry?

Probably not WvW for jewelry as they like to keep PvP/PvE stuff separate with only a tiny bit of overlap for legendary crafting. Maybe they’ll put the legendary jewelry in fractals as well?

I’d like to see the raids formatted like the EOTN dungeons, Mallyx or the GW1 main storylines.

A fully successful “cycle” of the raid would take many hours, but the content is broken up in to chunks that can be done in thirty minutes to an hour each.

So, basically, you have “completion checkpoints” for each wing, with a reward chest or account based switch that says ‘complete’ with a waypoint or key or whatever that lets you come back to that point later.

So, for instance, to fully complete a raid and get the end reward, you need to complete all of its “wings” either in sequential order, or in whatever order you choose depending on how the story and structure of the raid is set up. Completing all the wings grants entry to the final boss wing, and defeating that boss gives you the ultimate master reward (I guess an armor precursor?)

Thus, you have a long and involved raid, but you can do a wing today, come back in a few days for another wing, and so on until you’ve checked all the boxes for your party to have access to try the final boss wing. When you complete that boss wing, progress is reset, so to open that boss chest again you’d also need to complete all the wings again.

So, basically, I think fully completing a raid should be a long and involved process lasting many hours, but that the experience should be broken up in to discreet checkpoints with their own mini-rewards so that you don’t have to do the entire raid in one sitting or small timeframe and still come away from each of those sessions with some sort of possibly non-unique but valuable reward, while keeping the boss rewards unique so as to discourage farming the sub-wings and encourage doing the entire set of diverse content.

EdgarMTanaka.7291:

Why not just make the guild logo a texture that you can place wherever you want on each body part?

Nice topic as I want this too.

That would likely require a significant amount of programming to achieve, depending on how GW2’s engine is set up, or a significant amount of work as all armor skins for a given armor weight don’t follow the same exact form factor.

The shoulders/back examples are generally areas that are extremely similar if not identical for most armor weights, and implementing that functionality as armor pieces would be a lot simpler (as would creating a few reskins of existing armor with guild logo support)

As an interactive software developer myself (Game-ish things, mostly for museums) I’m just asking for the lowest hanging (meaning easiest to implement without extra work) fruit I guess.

I’m kind of unclear what AP has to do with fitness to complete a dungeon.

Gear linking I can see (I think it’s stupid, but I can see how statistically it could plausibly matter to speed runners and other such folk)

AP doesn’t really indicate anything. I can get tons of AP having done nothing but pressing 1 and f in the open world. I’d say at least 10k if I’d done every single daily every day since release.

Uh. You don’t have enough crafting skills on a single character to craft everything.

Unless of course you were silly enough to buy the crafting extender.

I fail to see how this is a problem. Level the craft if you want the item, just like everything else.

“Live releases” is a catch-all term that encompasses living world releases, feature patches, and pretty much any additional content.

“Living world” is a type of “live release” content specifically focused at extending the personal story experience and advancing the lore-based narrative of the world.

djsarcher.9263:

PopeUrban.2578:

penalized for not wanting to try to play something that’s more difficult than pressing 1.

Seriously? I have encountered a few 1 spammers, but there’s no need to label all non-raid players. It makes it much harder to listen to anything else you’ve said.

My apologies. I really didn’t mean to offend anyone. It’s simply that the most adamant “RAIDS ARE DOOM” posters tend to fall in to that mold.

It’s cool to not like certain content. For instance I find GW2’s PvP to be boring and without a sense of risk. I also don’t demand pvp and wvw skins be given to me for PvE, or demand that the gift of battle be removed from legendary crafting.

It’s not cool to demand types of content you don’t like be made a simply more tedious method for requiring the exact same rewards you could obtain by spamming 1.

Unfortunately there’s a very vocal subset of the community that seems to think “play the way you want to” also means “gain every single item in the game by playing only the content you want to” despite a clear and deliberate pattern of implementation by arenanet that rewards specific prestige skins or ease of use legendaries for specific required content.

I’m not implying that not liking raids makes you somehow less. I’m implying that attempting to persecute players that want unique rewards for unique challenges does.

Agemnon.4608:

PopeUrban.2578:

You know, when left 4 Dead had this same problem, they responded in l4d2 by creating the charger and spitter. Those mobs are effective at splitting a camp without being annoyingly OP. The charger just nabs a guy and CCs him in a way that often requires other members to leave the stack and the spitter drops an aoe that’s easy to avoid without taking much damage, but suicide to camp in.

Neither of these prevent stacking (which is still important in that game, and a valid strategy) but they prevent camping in one place for extended periods

Maybe we need some charge/spitter style mobs here and there or something. You know, like the chargers and spitters in the new mordrem army.

Mordrems are cheap enough as they are, you have the chargers that knock down and have tracking distance attacks, others with homing bugs, heals, cripples that last too long, and lifesteal fields.

You may want to re-read that post. Especially the part where I said chargers(teragriffs) and spitters (trolls) were already in the mordrem army.

djsarcher.9263:

Wasabi Kitty.8247:

20 slot bags from fractals are incredibly easy to get. Most people have more relics than they know what to do with.

Maybe most regular fractal runners, I highly doubt that group is a significant portion of the GW2 population.

I like how people assume instance runners aren’t a significant portion of the population because they can’t see them around.

You know.

Because they commonly hang out in instances.

And don’t use LFG.

I’m confident in Anet’s ability to deliver challenging content, having played a lot of GW1.

I’m also confident in their ability to release that content alongside more accessible content so that non-raiders aren’t left in some sort of content desert and feel penalized for not wanting to try to play something that’s more difficult than pressing 1.

I’m certain the map updates and LS will charge forward, but I like that raid wing releases are not on their content release plan for a regular basis. I really enjoy all of GW2s content, as a whole, but after Liadri and the LS2 master achievements I was sorely missing something difficult, and one of the primary complaints I heard from guild member who have left GW2 was that there’s just not enough challenge.

@jone

I don’t think it’s bad to want more group content. heck, I’d love it if every zone from here on had a big fat “5 man group zone” slapped on it and nothing was soloable any more.

However, I think Anet’s design for GW2 is pretty clear. Open world is meant to be soloable with little pockets of clearly labeled group play (which you can walk around to get wherever you need to go) Instances are built for groups, or built for soloing with optional (pointless) group scaling.

They tried to make orr more group-centric at release, and it was such a massive departure from the rest of the game that people complained and they nerfed it in to the ground, and now you can cruise around Orr solo without breaking a sweat.

There’s not really a way to recreate the henchmen dynamic in GW2 because of the persistant maps. It’d be impossible to keep groups of five players from just following commander tags and everyone always running in huge henchie zergs.

I’d love to see a more group oriented open world, but I seriously doubt it’s something Anet wants to do with their game, as it would alienate a large portion of the solo players that they want that portion of the game to cater to.

redcomyn.4651:

So the first step to WoW-ification has occurred. I wonder how long it will take for the next “oh so reasonable” step, and exactly what that step will be.

Implying that raids somehow “wow-ify” the game is a little harsh. WoW’s raids were a problem because of their gear base progression, and the fact that raid gear was just plain leaps and bounds better than any other alternative, making them required content for maximizing a character, and requiring excessive repetition of one raid to move on to another, which bred dissatisfaction and rampant elitism because when people have done something 400 times with little to no reward to show for it they tend to have little patience with any random element (or player) that slows down getting through content they already got bored of but somehow are forced to keep playing to move to something more interesting.

You should look at the “raid content” in GW1 as a better example. Urgoz, Kanaxi, UW, Mallyx, and FoW. These were the top tier of top tier instances, offered unique rewards for completion, but were self contained and entirely optional. You didn’t need items from the instances to be just as statistically powerful as someone who never did them, and you didn’t need to grind one instance just to start trying another.

Believe it or not that content was extremely popular for that reason. It was approachable by anyone with a reasonably geared character/build, and was rewarding enough without requiring crazy grind that you didn’t get sick of running it because you felt like you “had to”

The people in GW1 that didn’t run those instances never got in to these weird raider vs. non-raider fights that you see in WoW because there was plenty of equally fun content outside those instances, and they never had a reason to feel cheated out of content because they “had to raid” to get the best gear.

Spin to win

15char

Guild logos are great. They’ll probably be more great with HoT expanding the icon and background selection.

They do have one fatal flaw though:
Your ability to display your guild logo is extremely limited!

Currently you can opt in to weapon skins, backpacks, or chestpieces. The backpacks are semi-unique and have some options, and the chestpieces are generally functional, yet bland.

While it’s great that you’re adding new sets of weapons and armor to the new guild hall system, It’s disheartening to see so few of those pieces actually displaying a guild logo!

In stead, why can’t our guild armor and weapon sets have two versions, one with logo, and one without? This would allow for far more customization of your look while still allowing you to rep that sweet, sweet logo action. I’d like to see logo-ready pieces avaliable for each armor slot, so that everyone can more easily maintain a look they like while still slotting in a logo piece.

Logo shoulders, gloves, boots, pants, etc. would be a lot more flexible and encourage more people to proudly display their awesome guild logos, and thus have a much stronger visual connection with all the awesome banners, siege weapons, guild hall decorations, and other features, and be able to feel more like a “team uniform” without requiring everyone to give up space on the largest visual sections of their armor and give up quite so much individuality.

Smaller logos aren’t necessarily a bad thing. I’d be perfectly happy to wear a pair of guild logo greaves, or a stylish guild logo headband, or guild pants with a nice logo emblazoned pocket watch attached, or some guild logo bracers that paid tribute to my awesome logo but didn’t scream it out with a giant flag or t-shirt.

The smaller pieces are often less look-defining for a character, and are much easier to work in to an existing custom look so your character still feels unique but has a little guild flair.

You could even just make them re-skins of existing armor with appropriately large sections of empty space. I mean that’s what the first set of guild armor was anyway.

While we’re at it, how about a “logo only” backpack and shoulder option? you know, just a close form fitting transparent alpha plane with the guild logo one it that would allow people to add the logo biker jacket style to the back or military-style to the shoulders of pretty much any armor without forcing them in to a bulky armor piece? I’d happily give up my backpack slot just for that, and I know a lot of people that hide their shoulders and would easily opt for shoulder icons.

Basically, what I’m saying is that it seems like not too much effort to make some very simply reskins/empty alpha planes to allow us to more easily and attractively display our awesome guild logos. Who’s with me?

Test.8734:

Ayrilana.1396:

Since you consider them to be incredibly similar gameplay wise, I’d say that you’ve never played Guild Wars 1.

Since you consider them to be incredibly different gameplay wise, I’d say that you’ve never played Guild Wars 1. If you’re going to go off about GW1, please please have played it before.

Besides…

Ayrilana.1396:

GW doesn’t have 150+ different armor unless you count the differences between professions. If you do that then you can do the same in GW2 versus the five races so you have 90+ armor from GW2.

…It takes someone with no knowledge about either game to say that Warrior Elite Canthan armor is the same thing as Elementalist Elite Canthan armor, but that human Embroidered armor is oh “so” different from sylvari Embroidered armor.

Ayrilana.1396:

Also, F2P does not mean the game failed

Really? Because which MMORPG has changed its business model to free to play because its previous business model was a big success?

The Old Republic? Even its parent company admitted it was a failure.

ESO? They are still suffering layofs.

Wildstar? LOOOOOOOOOOOL!

But hey, you can continue to ignore everything related to facts and evidence and assume that everything is fine. It will make it much funnier when reality comes crashing down around you.

PopeUrban.2578:

Assuming datamined material is 100% of the armor avaliable in GW2 is fallacy.

Also, it’s not completely silly to assume more skins will exist from ambient drops.

Really? Where have you read anyone in this topic assuming that datamined material is 100% of the armor available in GW2?

Because you may not be aware of it, but ArenaNet itself has said how many armor sets we will find in HoT’s open world. Who is the one making assumptions here?

FrizzFreston.5290:

Also i don’t remember 150 armors in gw1. Armor pieces perhaps, but not armors. But that maybe my memory.

You can see by yourself.

They said “sets”

The same page also says “60 unique additional item skins”

This very likely means a lot of those are armor skins that don’t comprise a full set. We’ve seen them do a lot of partial sets lately because certain armor pieces take less work to implement than others.

Expecting 4 full sets of armor and 30-60 pieces that may or may not make up a full 6 piece set is probably the more logical option.

You know, when left 4 Dead had this same problem, they responded in l4d2 by creating the charger and spitter. Those mobs are effective at splitting a camp without being annoyingly OP. The charger just nabs a guy and CCs him in a way that often requires other members to leave the stack and the spitter drops an aoe that’s easy to avoid without taking much damage, but suicide to camp in.

Neither of these prevent stacking (which is still important in that game, and a valid strategy) but they prevent camping in one place for extended periods

Maybe we need some charge/spitter style mobs here and there or something. You know, like the chargers and spitters in the new mordrem army.

Selling group spots to turn your skill at an instance in to gold is fine and has a long history going all the way back to GW1. Anet knows it is going on, and is cool with it, but doesn’t officially support it (so if you get kicked by someone you were buying a group spot from you’re not getting your gold back, even though the scammer might get infracted/banned.)

This guy is just upset because he expects a free ride and probably can’t do the achievement himself.

Completely unnecessary.

In stead, how about just fixing the dungeons so that it isn’t the default most effective way to fight most mobs?

It’s a cool strategy, but it’s way too useful in almost every encounter with very little effort required on the part of those using it.

I know people complain about instadeath aoes, but really, how bad would it be if just plain more mobs had abilities designed to scatter or move people around so they can’t camp a corner spot long enough to clear a room?

People stack because it’s effective, but it’s not very much fun. I’d like dungeons to be more fun and better leverage gw2’s highly kinetic combat system.

Yeah, they have it this way because outfits aren’t “items” any more, unlike armor. They’re just ephemeral things that live in the outfits panel.

Basically, armor is “real” so it keeps track of the dyes applied to it as a physical object with a database ID, while outfits are “skins” that don’t have a physical item counterpart, and thus don’t have inventory item IDs once they’re actually displayed on your character, so there’s nowhere to keep the data.

They’d basically have to rewrite the system again to support it, or turn the outfits in to actual gear items, which would then require more work to make sure you could clone the outfits for different characters.

Scorpion’s sounds cool too!

@Castigator

Rabid is a set that’s more condition damage and resistanc to white damage, like a rabid animal that shrugs off blows due to its insanity while infecting its prey with a septic bite, right?

Vit is more useful for resisting conditions than white damage, so the con+pre+vit would be more like a small, highly venomous creature that’s not exactly resistant to massive trauma, but is pretty resistant to other toxins. Like a snake or lizard or something. How about “Reptilian” or “Serpentine” or simply “Toxic”

Better option:

Have arenanet fix the dungeons so they can’t be cheesed so easily, and scale the rewards so the dungeons are worth doing if you’re not haxploit speedrunning them. The fact that the stacking spots and skipping over 80% of most dungeons has been allowed to go on for so long is the problem, not the players looking for the most efficient way to clear them.

Anet’s mistake was balancing rewards around basically exploiting unintended quirks in dungeon design in stead of actually, you know, fixing the dungeons in the first place. They made legit runs so unrewarding they’re practically not worth doing in stead of just fixing the content and making full runs played as intended appropriately rewarding for the time and difficulty.

Multiple platform battle. Boss begins on the second top platform with the players, and a mass of elite+adds with ranged attacks are on the bottom.

The boss runs a fairly standard rotation of aoe dodging and DPS phases, and during the aoe phases the aoes that hit break the platform. The boss won’t directly engage anyone who doesn’t deal damage to him during the DPS phases, but has several cone and line attacks with long ranges (similar to the final shadow fight in LS2)

Players have boxes of hammers spread about which they must use to fix the platforms, and they must do so quickly, as beneath every hole in the platform, the adds at the bottom will grow vines/towers, and if these grow high enough to poke through, the adds at the bottom can climb them to enter the boss platform, and that hole can not be fixed again.

Thus, group 1 would be primarily responsible for DPSing the boss and keeping its attention away from group 2, and group 2 would be resonsible for supressing the ranged adds at the bottom and using the hammers to fix the floor so that the raid isn’t overwhelmed by adds from the bottom.

A perfect run wouldn’t allow any adds to enter the main platform, but the timing of adds coming up on the towers wouldn’t be so fast that allowing one or two to get through would be necessarily raid breaking, they’d just require group 2 to be ever-more split up as members owuld have to split off from protecting the hammer runners to keep the numbers of adds down.

At HP breakpoints the boss moves up a floor, firing a constant stream of floor breaking AoE attacks. During this phase the players must quickly build their own tower to climb up the hole in the next floor made by the boss when he climbed to avoid being overwhelmed by adds, as there’s no way to fix the floor fast enough under the never ending aoe barrage.

At the top floor, the boss no longer fires the floor breaking aoes, but gains invulnerability while the mass of adds from the previous floors crawl up nonstop through the holes. In this final phase the players must fight off the add swarms while avoiding the boss’s attacks, and deliver and deploy knockback charges delivered by an airship to knock the otherwise immobile boss further and further toward the edge of the tower they climbed up the inside of during the battle. Victory is achieved once the players knock the boss off the edge of the tower, and are treated to a cinematic of him falling to his doom, igniting in flames that creep up the tower burning all the structures. Then they get to glide off the top of the tower and escape the inferno and go collect loot.

DA – I’m too addicted to improv’s double stolen item use and random craziness from lucky recharge procs.

The stuff I use acro for (condi cleanse, end, and extra passive healing) will be done massively better by DD, and all I lose is a reactive stun counter, which I don’t need any more since I’ve got a much lower CD stunbreak avaliable from DD.

No thanks.

Running d/d hybrid (and hybrid is the damage setup that actually works for deathblossom) means using deathblossom until you’ve hit the heartseeker threshold, then using the bonus heartseeker damage to offset the power/crit you lost by investing in to condition damage, ur using it as a mobility tool to close on targets for another deathblossom whirl so you can ensure your deathblossom hits all three times.

P/D needs shadow strike to keep its stealth chains going, as the playstyle of p/d is about getting close to stealth, then getting far while unstealthed to pull off all the shots from sneak attack, then getting close again to stealth without getting smashed by melee attacks. Losing shadow strike would mean all someone would have to do to completely counter P/D was just run away or smash face. With shadow strike they can still do that, but it just makes the thief burn more init rather than make him completely unable to run his stealth chain.

Deathblossom doesn’t need to change significantly. it just needs animation and evade adjustments so it’s more useful as a positioning and evade tool for power/crit builds and condi hybrid builds all at the same time.

I run carrion armor/weps and ascended 6 stat crafted carrion + healing/tough/prec, toughness infusions on everything with assassin’s reward.

I also run mad king runes and signet of malice, as the mad king birds proc SoM, effectively turning BV in to a pretty good heal, or extending daggerstorm’s godmode healing after the end so you have some disengage. That ahs the added effect of basically making BV an untargeted ranged stun, but that stun becomes unreliable when more than one target is in range. I have used it to escape 1v1s, but you have to be hyper-aware of your environment as it’s just as likely to waste your stun on doors and rabbits, so it’s usually best to forget about the stun on BV and just treat it like a kitten cooldown heal with the occasional lucky stun.

I run a blight sigil on one dagger and a condi removal sigil on the other. Blight lets poison proc for weakness from deadly arts even without the auto, and helps keep the oison cover up over the bleeds. The prec from the jewelry puts crit at about 10%, which when combined with the multi-hits from deathblossom is generally enough to keep the sigil proccing around the 8s ICD. If it seems too low, you can swap out the ammy to get it up to around 14% Condi removal on hit helps keep you from getting too overloaded between clears from shadowstep, etc.

I run it in duo roaming with a necro usually, and in that setup it’s prety decent, as the necro buddy piles on more cover conditions and buffs up the life on hit even more, but it’s still not something I’ll call good for 1v1s.

It’s pretty beastly in pve though, generally outlives everyone else with the combination of evades and life on hit while slowly ticking all the bad guys to death with bleeds since mobs don’t condi clear like players do.

The daredevil’s extra dodge conditions for cover and 3x SoM hit procs from the daggers as well as the overall increased healing and condition removal should help it out a lot in wvw, but if I were going to the smaller arena game modes I’d still run something else due to the lack of the MK runes, which I feel are essential to making SoM worth putting on your bar, and I feel the build just isn’t viable without SoM due to the extra damage you’re going to take as a result of being locked in to deathblossom animations during the non-evade portion.

D/D condition isn’t a spec that’s going to give you alpha strike melt faces damage, and it’s probably not ever going to do that. It’s a bunker style spec more useful for wearing down opponents and limited small scale zerg diving or PvE tanking. if you want to kill people 1v1 with conditions as a thief I’d reccommend going for p/d stealth builds in stead, as you’re going to run a less risky and higher damage build. It’s going to be weaker in group fights due to the reliance on stealth chains, but overall better at 1v1.

I really like the build, which is why I play it, but it absolutely isn’t the best, or even a particularly good choice for 1v1 fighting compared to the thief’s other options.

Yeah, it’s supposed to be more mobility oriented than gap closery, which is why the damage works spread rather than at the end like the reaper charge. It would be less useful to the staff’s playstyle if it was target locked IMO. You know how annoying it is to use heartseeker for mobility rather than damage right?

Vault has a HUGE spin up animation and is highly visible and easy to dodge or interrupt. Sure, you could use it from stealth, but staff (on purpose) doesn’t have internal stealth access for this reason (and also to prevent easily chaining the 2s knockdown sneak attack) and you’d be leaving stealth at -5 init.

Its counterability does a lot to balance its damage, just like warrior’s killshot, hundred blades, and a number of other slow and big hitting attacks with easy to recognize animations.

Assuming datamined material is 100% of the armor avaliable in GW2 is fallacy.

Also, it’s not completely silly to assume more skins will exist from ambient drops.

Simply put, you can’t actually count the number of armor skins in HoT until HoT is actually released.

To be fair, No part of GW1 aside from quests marked “solo” was designed for solo play.

Those warbands were cool, but GW2’s open world is designed to be largely soloable with the exception of group events. You’d have to make them group events, or purposely design “group zones” that clearly tell people that the zone they’re about to enter isn’t intended to be soloable.

I did a lot of solo farming in GW1 as well, but remember that GW1 had built in henchies and heroes specifically because the game’s difficulty and mobs were designed under the assumption that every time you left town you did so with a full party. GW2 just isn’t built that way outside of instances.

Condition/Precision/Vit would be rad for a lot of builds that use proc traits or sigils but don’t want to have zero HP and still run conditions.

Did you just say “non-crafters” in reference to GW2?

Dude. The entire economy and top gear tier are built to require crafting. What you’re asking is like asking to never fight mobs.

Crafting isn’t optional in GW2, and never really was unless you just wanted to make the game harder for yourself.

Birthday boxes are to reward you for not constantly rerolling new characters. It’s the same system used in GW1 with different rewards.

(it also probably helps them sell character slots, so I doubt there’s any financial incentive to change it either)