Your face is funny.
No thanks. I don’t want to see GW2 as Pay to win nor I want to see the books useless.
Absolutely no reason to see them in gemstore.
Boosting to L80 is no more pay2win than buying xp boosters. It’s just faster.
That people defend Elite specs being stupidly easier to play and stronger than base specs when they explicitly stated they wouldn’t be tells me everything I need to know about why the GW2 PvP scene deserves its permanent fate in the realms of mediocrity.
Their business practice has nothing to do with how much of a mess GW2’s “GUYS ESPORTS PLEASE” PvP system is.
PvP’s problems stem from the design of the combat system being extremely poorly built for PvP in the first place, and their default competitive game mode’s focus on static control points being completely at odds with a combat system designed around constant movement, low TTK, and massive number of high im[pact abilities with extremely similar and short duration tells.
The business practice is fair. If you want to complain about PvP, there’s a whole laundry list of problems with it, but “pay to win” isn’t one of them.
Not the worst idea. Since they’re giving away the L80 boost to new players now it really wouldn’t be imbalanced, and it’s a good option for people who don’t want to take the time to level alts or wait to build up a stack of tomes.
I’ve got all the 80s I want, but if I didn’t I could see myself paying maybe 200 gems for such an item.
Be even better if you could gift/trade them. Sometimes we figure we might want someone to roll a new char for raid or things like that so it would be awesome to be like “here, since we asked you to switch to ele, here’s a L80 boost and some gear in your mail”
I can easily kill those npcs, but it’s the fact that I saw my health bar draining to somewhere mid-way which shocked me. It just shouldn’t be allowed.
I’m level 80, the monster is level 15!
You’ve played this game long enough to get at least one character to 80, and so I assume you must know how to dodge. Or how to use your class to absorb/evade/mitigate the damage from the hit. If you’re an 80 in exotics, you won’t have any trouble against a level 15 mob (assuming you’re in a zone that downlevels you to within a level of 15) as long as you actively participate in the combat.
As for “it shouldn’t be allowed”, it’s Anet’s game. It should be allowed in their game because they want it to be allowed. And that choice of Anet’s appeals to many of us.
No GW2 customer should be expected to absorb/evade/mitigate the damage from an enemy npc if they are nearly 4 times above their level.
Why not? No, seriously … why would I want to WASTE my time in a zone doing something where there is no value playing there? Does one-shotting mobs with your auto attack challenge you?
So what exactly do you get from killing an enemy npc in a low level region?
You get drops scaled up to your level, but crafting resources appropriate for the level of the area.
That greatsaw is from years ago when “skin” items didn’t exist. back then, all the “skins” the game handed out for various events were real items, with real stats, and often the stats on them sucked. It was rare that they were tradable, but some were.
Skin items have existed since launch. The Hall of Monuments skins and the gem store armour skins are the earliest examples I remember.
I’m not sure but I think these items are what you would get if you applied the skin to a weapon and then used a Transmutation Splitter – instead of giving the original skin item back the splitter would give you it applied to a random, low level weapon.
I thought those were supposed to be account bound, but it wouldn’t surprise me if there were exceptions.
You know what, you’re right. I seem to remember the first round of haloween skins dropping as real weapons though, but the shoulders dropped as skins IIRC.
IDK, it was a long time ago, lol.
I think the person talking about the weird time in histroy when they added transmutation splitters might be on to something?
What’s especially hysterical is this guy is talking about core Tyria maps. Er, ya. Level 80 maps are a joke in core Tyria and this guy can’t handle Wayfarer Foothills.
I hate it when people cry troll to anyone with a dissenting opinion, but I think that’s what this is.
How am I cry trolling?
I have my own beliefs about what type of progression system an MMORPG (and especially gw – since I’m a fan of the first instalment) should follow.
And, frankly, your beliefs are not in line with either the developers nor vast majority of the player base’s… and frankly, looking at how other RPGs are going, especially tabletop, it’s starting to look like the whole genre is moving away from “Nothing but bigger numbers” to a more horizontal progression system.
Unfortunately, you must be right – regarding the horizontal progression.
But where you mentioned the vast majority of the player base – I think you might be stretching it quite a bit. I believe the current fan-base are those who dissented against true MMO’s, or who haven’t played the original GW, or who haven’t played any MMO at all before this instalment. Those who “ran away” from gw2 after first spying it were not going to be led in the new direction.
:)
You’re entitled you your opinion of course Cedric, but the level scaling and “whole game is relevant at max level” were major advertised features of GW2 before even launch, and leveling just plain doesn’t confer power on that scale in this franchise.
However, keep in mind it goes both ways. You scale down to the area, but the area’s loot scales up to you. You can go kill that L15 ice elemental and get L70-80 drops because of that same system. Leveling only exists in GW2 as a training and tutorial mechanism. This isn’t like many other MMOs where the whole point of the game is endlessly stacking stats, then having your stats suck again after the next expansion. When you reach top tier level and gear in GW2, that’s it. You’re done in terms of power.
That’s how it worked in GW1, and that’s how it works in GW2. Go kit yourself out in ascended gear with full +5 infusions and your gear is done. Not done until the next expansion, but actually done. The Challenge and reward systems in this franchise have always been about trophies rather than artifical roadblocks. The people that stick with the series like that. The people that hate the series often hate that as the first thing.
Its simply a matter of taste, but keep in mind you’re on a forum full of mostly people that stick around because they like that system.
Hi, it’s very difficult with the limited non-respawning shields, because often they are in impossible spots… also the 2(?) seconds it takes to pick up shields makes it ridiculous.
Please make shields insta-pickup and/or respawning at their initial areas every x seconds.
thx,
icy`Are you talking about Thaumanova?
If you are, it’s trivial to do that section without using the shields at all. The lasers are not targeted attacks. They aren’t shooting at you. They’re just shooting at the same spot on the wall over and over. Time it out and move between them like Catherine Zeta Jones.
Seasons were always a bad idea.
Players have zero control over who is on their team in WvW, so handing out personal rewards based upon long term performance is just going to result in players becoming less and less interested as the season progresses and more and more servers become mathematically incapable of moving up in rank.
The season rewards need to simply be rolled in to the new reward track mechanic, and world rank should remain a mechanism for matchmaking and bragging rights. making it more important than that only makes the problem of bandwagoning and population imbalance worse.
Dailies aren’t really a system designed to reward what you already felt like doing at that moment. They’re designed to give you something specific to do when you don’t have anything in mind.
The 2 gold thing is there as part of the overall rewards revamp, as daily rewards felt a little light for going out of your way to do them.
Basically, the whole point of dailies is that you’re supposed to go out of your way to do them rather than function as passive rewards for what you were already doing.
On thief support:
Due to initiative, thieves are especially good at exploiting combo fields, and many of our abilities have significantly more resource efficient finishers attached to them. What if this were turned up to eleven? The common reason people give for not choosing thieves is lack of synergy with the people around them.
Thieves, however, are the only class that can see a combo field and instantly chuck a long string of finishers at it. This could be extremely powerful group synergy if we had traits designed around it, and still ring true for the class as a largely self-enabling, opportunistic playstyle.
What are you having issues with? In most cases the thing you’re required to do for an event, part of a fractal, etc. with an event in the upper-right corner of your screen.
The NPCs in the lobby will explain things to you, but I don’t know, for new players, is there a help popup that explains daily achievements to you? I seem to recall, after hoT, the game somehow guiding me to the NPC that explains agony, but I agree that the process for acquiring/upgrading rings and backpacks is extremely convoluted and not well explained by the game, and you need those agony slots to meaningfully progress through fractal levels.
Also, does the game not point you to your hero panel, where you can mouse over the various stats to see what they do? If it doesn’t it should. That panel tells you the basics of what you need to know about stats, at least enough to make an informed decision on what gear to pick as you level up.
I’m wondering though, are you a new player using the L80 boost? You may have unwittingly skipped a pretty crucial learning experience by leveling (and all of the little help tips that pop up as you do so now) if you are.
People begged for an expansion rather than free updates. They got what they asked for.
The expansion model comes with certain expectations, chief among them is that to experience new content and systems you’re expected to buy the expansion.
Personally, I think the free update model was better, but I was outvoted.
There’s no incentive for Anet to cater to someone that isn’t interested in playing under their new monetization model, because they moved to this model due to a majority player desire.
As an MMO developer, they’re less interested in catering to individual players, and far more interested in catering to the majority of their player base. Sad fact is that the majority of their player base indicated they’d happily buy expansions. The limitations in non-HoT accounts exist because they’re designed to sell the game to free players. Be choosing not to conform to the majority opinion of existing players and pick up the expansion, in arenanet’s eyes, you have the same service priority as a free player, as you are no longer actively contributing financially to development.
It sucks, but that’s business.
There is no “manditory” gear in fractals, and there never really has been. They’re meant to get more challenging as you increase in level, and allow for pretty much any group composition to successfully complete them.
There aren’t really “required comps” in fractals. It’s not a raid. You can slap together pretty much any five random characters, and as long as they know their characters and the encounter and have enough AR they can succeed.
If you’re dying a lot, then a change in build, gear, or playstyle is in order based on your personal preference. Your problem seems to be survivability, so perhaps you should make some build changes to make yourself more survivable?
Don’t PUG.
In general, doing any group content in any game ever with a PUG is a less accessible experience than finding a group of like minded players with similar interests.
Your mistake is attempting to treat content designed for static groups of players as content designed for PUGs. The fact that people PUG raids doesn’t mean they were designed for it.
Raids really are designed for players that take the same or nearly the same group of ten individuals, learn the encounters together, and progress on to the next encounter. They were designed that way because its a subset of the community (progression/mechanics endgame PvE) that GW2 was previously not creating content for.
The redesign for fractals and subsequent removal of plans for future dungeons is the PvE content they have designed around PUGs. They’re short, bite-sized instances where you’re not overly inconvenienced be someone leaving or needing to kick people.
It’s hard to PUG raid simply because the entire concept of raiding as a style of PvE play is about as anti-PUG as you can get.
(edited by PopeUrban.2578)
GW1: WHY CAN WE NOT JUMP?
Arenanet adds jumping to GW2, and attaches gameplay to it so it’s actually more useful than the /jump emote
GW2: WHAT DO YOU MEAN WE HAVE TO JUMP?
Just because there’s a reward at the end doesn’t make it required content. You can safely ignore content you don’t find fun in GW2 are never going to suffer a stat penalty for doing so. If you don’t like the content, then learn to live without the rewards from it. You don’t NEED them in a mechanical sense. You just WANT them.
This is not true.
There are several story missions/fractals and other numerous activities which require the technique of jumping around and walking on very thin floor spaces. I’ve done some of them myself, without having a choice.
Again, you don’t need the rewards from that content. You WANT those rewards. In terms of “needs” to finish a character, you can easily buy everything from the TP without jumping even once.
In this case you want content designed in a certain way adjusted so that its a bit easier for you personally. Those sections are minor inconveniences the same way fighting dredge as a p/d thief is inconvenient. Part of playing a thing designed for a wide audience is that, occasionally, things aren’t designed specifically to cater to our personal sets of likes and dislikes.
It’d be a different story if that core content had massive and challenging jumping sections on par with, say, the steam geyser JP. If you don’t like uncategorized fractal, don’t do it.
At the end of the day its about whether you think the reward for a task is worth undertaking the task. There are a lot of things in this game I don’t want to do, and thus it follows I’ve determined the rewards don’t make up for my dislike of that particular content.
I think you’re playing a different game, because we clearly don’t have the same experiences.
We have the exact same experiences, the difference is our lens on those experiences.
No, because you’re making statements which aren’t true to my experience.
Which ones?
About the puzzles being optional in all cases. That’s not true.
Where have you encountered a puzzle that you’re required to complete to progress your character? I can’t think of one.
You need to do a few light jumping sections to finish certain optional paths in the PS (if you pick certain story steps. you can finish a complete PS without doing any such sections) and a couple for map completion, but neither of these activites is required to reach the exact same mechanical power as every other character in the game.
What those sections prevent you from achieving is skins and titles.
You have to be kittenting me. Patch notes say a lot of words. "Err, they must have put some great effort in this… ".
It’s missing a lot of stuff and with all the HoT changes (long overdue, I might add) it’s basically yet another kitten-you to all core players. ANet treats GW2 as if it’s something separate and inferior to HoT, whereas in reality it’s the other way around. How cheap can you get…
Dungeon update was a pretty big boon to people that don’t own HoT.
What are you expecting, reams of free content for people that have basically said “No arenanet, I don’t want to pay you to develop new content”
If you’re not interested in supporting them financially because you don’t see HoT as a good value, they’re much more interested in making sure you DO see HoT as a good value by fixing the problems preventing you from choosing to buy it than giving you even more reasons to avoid buying it.
Why would they actively incentivize you to not buy their expansion?
That greatsaw is from years ago when “skin” items didn’t exist. back then, all the “skins” the game handed out for various events were real items, with real stats, and often the stats on them sucked. It was rare that they were tradable, but some were.
Scribing costs were significantly lowered to the point that people are actually willing to drop hundreds of gold on materials for it that weren’t before.
Basically, where before you’d drop 200 gold on mats (most of which were not logs) and get maybe two decorations out of it, you can now drop the same 200g and get 20 out of it.
All tiers of wood are ingredients in every scribing recipe, as they’re used to make pulp, which is used to make paper. Even though the amount of pulp was cut from 5 to 1 per kit, the cost reduction on scribing was so drastic that a huge number of people are buying up the mats.
In the case of wood, there isn’t a corresponding increase in supply to meet the increased demand, where as other things like sand, pigments, and shards already had a huge supply surplus, they are only used in scribing, and their reduced cost balanced them out with increased demand.
There was no corresponding increase in wood supply, and a massively increased demand due to the lower costs of previously expensive other scribing materials.
Combined with all the other new uses added for wood (legendaries) and a lot of people burning through or using their supplies rather than selling them (leveling scribing without buying the wood) production is down because people see real progress from using it as being more valuable than selling it to people, as previously only the buyers were really leveling or using scribing.
They might come as skins to current weapons but I can’t see them coming in as new weapons as such. Also you forgot crossbow. :P
I think crossbows could easily work as just shortbow skins using rifle animations.
Best of both worlds. Don’t need to design as many new skins, and you have a reason to add shortbows to more classes. Kinda like how they made a bunch of melee staff options.
The idea that Arenanet would incentivize people to not buy their expansion when they’re giving away the core game for free is kind of silly.
Especially when they’re literally giving money to their top tier players at this point.
It’s not like they’re selling consumables that make you deal 50% more damage for an hour. They’re selling an expansion at a one time fee. The expectation is that people heavily invested enough in any ascpect of the game to care about new content, new specs, PvP rank, or any sort of progression is that they’ll care enough to support the developers financially.
It’s a pretty standard model for MMOs because it’s by and large the most fair model for running an online game. In stead of relying on a “whale tax” and expecting a small portion of the players to subsidize the majority by dropping unreasonable amounts of money, the implementation is a “toll road” where everyone ends up on even footing as long as they drop a reasonable and small amount of cash at a relatively infrequent interval.
Of course your HoT builds are going to be a little better. They result from a larger pool of options. When there’s only one apex predator (and there can ever be only one apex predator in the meta) its never in anet’s best interests to ensure that apex predator is the guy that never pays them a dime.
GW1: WHY CAN WE NOT JUMP?
Arenanet adds jumping to GW2, and attaches gameplay to it so it’s actually more useful than the /jump emote
GW2: WHAT DO YOU MEAN WE HAVE TO JUMP?
Just because there’s a reward at the end doesn’t make it required content. You can safely ignore content you don’t find fun in GW2 are never going to suffer a stat penalty for doing so. If you don’t like the content, then learn to live without the rewards from it. You don’t NEED them in a mechanical sense. You just WANT them.
This is not true.
There are several story missions/fractals and other numerous activities which require the technique of jumping around and walking on very thin floor spaces. I’ve done some of them myself, without having a choice.
Again, you don’t need the rewards from that content. You WANT those rewards. In terms of “needs” to finish a character, you can easily buy everything from the TP without jumping even once.
In this case you want content designed in a certain way adjusted so that its a bit easier for you personally. Those sections are minor inconveniences the same way fighting dredge as a p/d thief is inconvenient. Part of playing a thing designed for a wide audience is that, occasionally, things aren’t designed specifically to cater to our personal sets of likes and dislikes.
It’d be a different story if that core content had massive and challenging jumping sections on par with, say, the steam geyser JP. If you don’t like uncategorized fractal, don’t do it.
At the end of the day its about whether you think the reward for a task is worth undertaking the task. There are a lot of things in this game I don’t want to do, and thus it follows I’ve determined the rewards don’t make up for my dislike of that particular content.
I think you’re playing a different game, because we clearly don’t have the same experiences.
We have the exact same experiences, the difference is our lens on those experiences.
No, because you’re making statements which aren’t true to my experience.
Which ones?
We did want to add more ways to acquire accessories, and in fact added them as a rare drop to some of the daily chests. I’m not sure if we want to go all-in and make them directly purchasable for relics at this point, though.
How about adding them to higher tiers to the guild trader? The guild trader’s late upgrades are a little underwhelming since “more purchases per day” aren’t very compelling when most of the things you’d want to buy multiples of have been moved to the scribe vendor. Nobody really needs two ascended weapon recipies, or all that many trader-only decorations, etc.
Guild commendations are already the most efficient way to acquire many accessories, so it only makes sense that having put the effort in to the guild trader would up the efficiency by somewhat lowering the cost but having an RNG element.
So, currently, you need 12 commendations and some gold, but you can buy whatever you want.
What if a max level vendor has a rotating page of 4 random ones per day that she sold for 6 commendations and no gold? it seems like a logical upgrade from the commendation vendor in the initiative HQ the same way the weapon/armor recipies are a logical upgrade.
I honestly don’t see how you can see it as not forced? I can no longer access rewards I want unless I now play maps I have no desire to play. Before I could choose what I wanted to do to get the reward. Before if you personally didn’t want to do swamp, there was nothing forcing you to do it, you could’ve tried to make your own group, but the fact is you had a choice. Now there is zero choice. I spent 3 times as much time doing this new system for the same rewards as before. It was far more frustrating, I had to keep kicking people without AR since swamp was nearly the only one that AR didn’t matter, and I had to wait a lot longer to even get a group started. The entire time every single person in the group was complaining about being forced in to content we didn’t want to do. As I said before, if they wanted people to play other maps there are better ways of doing it than content locking rewards like this.
As an an after thought I had today, I also noticed nobody was doing the maps below t3 last night and this morning, so wouldn’t this also make it prohibitive for new players or casual players to actually get groups now since nobody is going to do “t1”, “t2”, and “t3” when they can just do t3?
All the things you’re listing as plusses (people with not enough AR being able to farm higher dailies, being able to blow through all the dailies with minimal effort, people being rewarded for playing easier fractals more frequently than playing more difficult ones) were the parts of that system that were broken.
Just like people rolling fractals in the old 3 island system, the intent was never to disproportionately incentivize people to do a handful of fractals at the expense of all others. The intent was to make fractals a shorter overall time commitment.
The original HoT patch where we moved to single islands achieved that goal. You could do just one fractal, get a reward, and be on your way. The daily system, however went in the other direction by making the ‘rolling for swamp’ problem even worse than it was.
When it comes to fractals, you have the same choice as always. When it comes to dailies, however, you’re now rewarded more for actually getting more AR and becoming proficient at the entire system in stead of farming two islands every single day until your eyes bleed.
The most efficient path to rewards should never be the easiest path. It should be the path with the largest amount of risk and required skill involved.
The new daily system accomplishes that goal. Greater risk incurs greater reward. You’re encouraged to do three specific fractals each day at the highest level you’re capable of, and there are two numbered fractals to ensure even high AR players have a reason to go back and help lower AR players so they, too, can progress to higher levels.
You don’t want to play fractals. You want to farm fractals. Fractals were supposed to be the anti-farm that scaled challenge and progression and gave scaled up rewards for that challenge and progression. Doing swamp swamp swamp every day simply resulted in progression being undervalued, and challenge being nearly nonexistant. It wasn’t good for fractals as a mode of content, and left as it was would have seriously hurt the mode in the long term.
You still have the option to grind swamp. It’s simply not the most efficient way to gain rewards because grinding should never be the most most rewarding activity in an MMO, that’s why we invented the term grinding, because it makes the game feel like a chore rather than like a fun game
The new system spits out a different set of challenges each day and says “If you’re good, you can get lots more stuff.” and that parity between risk and reward is actually fun game design.
Yeah, I run the d/d vs thief on raids. It’s not the world’s worst rotation to run, and the lifesteal DPS+sustain as well as the easy CC spike from shared BV fills a lot of group comp holes. I especially like it on VG since you can swap to SB at a moment’s notice to cover if someone in the green circle squad goes down, or to res someone up (since you’re traited to auto-stealth on res) then steal right back to your target for very little lost DPS.
So what you’re saying is that you really don’t need one of them, right? Like, you’d just give the other one to someone less fortunate.
I’m pretty less fortunate!
GW1: WHY CAN WE NOT JUMP?
Arenanet adds jumping to GW2, and attaches gameplay to it so it’s actually more useful than the /jump emote
GW2: WHAT DO YOU MEAN WE HAVE TO JUMP?
Just because there’s a reward at the end doesn’t make it required content. You can safely ignore content you don’t find fun in GW2 are never going to suffer a stat penalty for doing so. If you don’t like the content, then learn to live without the rewards from it. You don’t NEED them in a mechanical sense. You just WANT them.
This is not true.
There are several story missions/fractals and other numerous activities which require the technique of jumping around and walking on very thin floor spaces. I’ve done some of them myself, without having a choice.
Again, you don’t need the rewards from that content. You WANT those rewards. In terms of “needs” to finish a character, you can easily buy everything from the TP without jumping even once.
In this case you want content designed in a certain way adjusted so that its a bit easier for you personally. Those sections are minor inconveniences the same way fighting dredge as a p/d thief is inconvenient. Part of playing a thing designed for a wide audience is that, occasionally, things aren’t designed specifically to cater to our personal sets of likes and dislikes.
It’d be a different story if that core content had massive and challenging jumping sections on par with, say, the steam geyser JP. If you don’t like uncategorized fractal, don’t do it.
At the end of the day its about whether you think the reward for a task is worth undertaking the task. There are a lot of things in this game I don’t want to do, and thus it follows I’ve determined the rewards don’t make up for my dislike of that particular content.
I think you’re playing a different game, because we clearly don’t have the same experiences.
We have the exact same experiences, the difference is our lens on those experiences.
Have taken a huge break from GW2 forums because of things, started reading this thread because I love JPs and I was like “wait a second, I don’t remember saying these things”, realize now this is a huge necro thread, holy smokes!
Cedric, I don’t think you realize you can skip specific fractals now—which means you never have to worry about the oh, so complicated small jumps from one platform to the next in the harpy fractal.
Why should a player have to skip an entire fractal experience just because we are forced to jump to get around?
Why do you want to do a fractal specifically designed around jumping in the first place?
Your logic is backwards. You don’t have to skip it. You can, however, choose to skip it because you find the content not to your liking. Lots of people hate pvp, so they never step foot in pvp. They don’t have to skip pvp, and the resulting pvp locked skins. They choose to skip pvp because their dislike of the content is stronger than their desire for the reward.
That’s a completely fair system that caters to everyone equally.
GW1: WHY CAN WE NOT JUMP?
Arenanet adds jumping to GW2, and attaches gameplay to it so it’s actually more useful than the /jump emote
GW2: WHAT DO YOU MEAN WE HAVE TO JUMP?
Just because there’s a reward at the end doesn’t make it required content. You can safely ignore content you don’t find fun in GW2 are never going to suffer a stat penalty for doing so. If you don’t like the content, then learn to live without the rewards from it. You don’t NEED them in a mechanical sense. You just WANT them.
This is not true.
There are several story missions/fractals and other numerous activities which require the technique of jumping around and walking on very thin floor spaces. I’ve done some of them myself, without having a choice.
Again, you don’t need the rewards from that content. You WANT those rewards. In terms of “needs” to finish a character, you can easily buy everything from the TP without jumping even once.
In this case you want content designed in a certain way adjusted so that its a bit easier for you personally. Those sections are minor inconveniences the same way fighting dredge as a p/d thief is inconvenient. Part of playing a thing designed for a wide audience is that, occasionally, things aren’t designed specifically to cater to our personal sets of likes and dislikes.
It’d be a different story if that core content had massive and challenging jumping sections on par with, say, the steam geyser JP. If you don’t like uncategorized fractal, don’t do it.
At the end of the day its about whether you think the reward for a task is worth undertaking the task. There are a lot of things in this game I don’t want to do, and thus it follows I’ve determined the rewards don’t make up for my dislike of that particular content.
GW1: WHY CAN WE NOT JUMP?
Arenanet adds jumping to GW2, and attaches gameplay to it so it’s actually more useful than the /jump emote
GW2: WHAT DO YOU MEAN WE HAVE TO JUMP?
Just because there’s a reward at the end doesn’t make it required content. You can safely ignore content you don’t find fun in GW2 are never going to suffer a stat penalty for doing so. If you don’t like the content, then learn to live without the rewards from it. You don’t NEED them in a mechanical sense. You just WANT them.
Level has really never mattered in GW2 in the first place. It was an arbitrary mechanism to limit progression through maps. Level adjustments in maps and loot means you’re not really ever ‘wasting time’ on an old map anyway. That same progression mechanism has been replaced with mastries now.
Leveling doesn’t really make you more powerful in GW2, it just makes you able to choose more maps to go to. The type of player that comes to GW2 comes here for the content as it exists. It’s a fantastic exploration game early on with a lot of ground to cover and unique things to see.
The original idea, that ‘the whole game is endgame’ is pretty much true. If you’re a new player, and you insta-80 a character, you’re not going to NOT want to go to those core tyria zones if you were already interested in that content, doing your story, etc. Those zones are still reqarding for a max level character, as much (or even more due to higher level rares/exo drops that actually salvage in to useful stuff) than if they’d done them while leveling.
However, if all you really want to do is instances and new content with a friend that invited you to the game, now you can.
Cant you change the dimensions of the items? (Sorry, I don’t have decorations permits so I don’t know how it works)
No. You can’t change the scale or XZ rotation of the decorations. You can place them and rotate them on Y (left/right) and you can only delete them with a highly imprecise aoe based tool (no selecting individual items to move/delete)
It’s a functional, but not all that robust decoration system compared to what you may have experienced in games like SWG, EQ, CoH, or ArcheAge, or Black Desert.
Hopefully, improving that system is something that’s on Arenanet’s list of QoL after more pressing matters are attended to. It’s extremely bare bones right now.
Halls I’d like to see:
Lion’s Arch Sewers (Secret base underneath LA, from fighting destroyers maybe?)
Main city ‘special district’ (Like the home instances, but as guild halls with vendor buildings etc.)
Priory/Whispers/Vigil “Special Projects division” (GH section of all three order bases)
Isolated Manor (ala Caudecus’ Manor, a giant XMEN style mansion)
The Wellspring (A recovering Orr Map)
Fractal Lab (In the mists/floating islands, like the FOTM lobby on steroids)
Tomb of the Primeval Kings (A place with massive amounts of history, from PvP lobby, to dungeon, it would be cool if it eventually transitioned to a guild hall, with a claim event similar to the Abby corrupted PvE instance it turned in to just before NF to “cleanse” it one and for all!)
They should remove crystalline ore requirement for guild vendors. Crystalline ore has 0% in common with guilds
Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised is crystalline ore was simply the new ‘boss level’ currency drop going forward. Newer zones should probably have it rolled in to their meta rewards, etc.
What would be nice, if its intended to become a standard currency rather than a map limited one, is if it were added to daily world boss chests so its more avaliable, and to some level of the guild trader for commendations in a ration of about 10 per commendation.
DS is the only map that is still designed mostly around the cycle and contribution bars, so I wouldn’t expect that to change.
DS is kind of the only map that it makes sense to do this way, since it’s an actual progression style map where you have to push to the boss and have enough people to do so to “win” whereas the other HoT maps have always been sort of “peace phase” and “boss phase” designs.
DS is all “boss phase” all the time, except for the brief period after you win.
Lead attacks does nothing for sustain. However, I think you’re talking about sustained damage which isn’t really the issue since thieves typically can’t survive in a fight long enough to do sustained damage anyways.
In the meantime, it’s just a hit to one of the few things thieves do well.
That’s the problem they seem to be trying to fix. The inability to survive/deal sustained damage.
I’m not saying its perfect, but the last two patches seems to be trying to move in this direction of “good burst and okay sustain” rather than “all burst and no sustain”
This change uses a mechanic that has a broader use, in that it can be pre-charged for burst or left alone for a slower ramped damage. Maybe the numbers could be adjusted (more per stack, smaller cap stack?) but the meat of it is pretty solid in terms of build diversity on a trait line that can theoretically be viable on multiple kinds of builds.
Initiative is build around giving thieves the ability to spam one button if they want to. The design of thief skills is built around initiative, usually with one “main DPS” skill and 4 “situational so you may want to conserve initiative” skills on the bar.
That said, the ability to spam a button 2 or 3 times is part of the design of the class and its skills. Don’t be suprised when people that haven’t grasped the concept of initiative conservation, or people playing builds where the other initiative uses aren’t designed in a compelling manner never hit any other buttons. They’re doing what the design of the class encourages them to do.
The whole point of the change is to make thieves less kitten when they’re not bursting, kind of like the upgrades they did to autoattacks.
All burst no sustain has been a thief problem for a while, and the current balance trend is to table that out by giving us the option of a really good burst, but not forcing thieves to take nothing but all burst builds.
I like the way it functions now, but I do feel like they should have changed the name of the trait from “lead attacks” to something else since “lead attacks” isn’t really representative of what it does any more. Should be called something like “momentum” or “fluid strikes” or something with the way it works now.
1000 map decoration limit is less of an issue than the radius limit IMO.
1000 decorations is a lot, but when you can only get like 10 decorations, regardless of size, within a 30 foor area it makes a lot of the small decos like cushions, candles, etc. nearly useless. You can’t decorate a room with furniture and also put a couple candles and cushions in logical places, etc.
Ow, that looks painful. Maybe you could “tile” it with cushions to make a mattress and then put another cushion one tier up as the pillow? Or would the item limit get in the way?
Item limit. I tried that already. you’ll get maybe 5 or 6 cushions on there and be stuck with a half finishes bed and also no way to add furniture in a ten mile radius around it.
So, you decided to gamble, and you didn’t win the jackpot?
It’s like they don’t even know how to run a casino.
They wanted to nerf 2/10/x because it was mostly fast and easy. Now we gotta slog through the longer ones multiple times.
^ from a novice fractal player perspective.
No you don’t.
You can get all 4 tiers of a named daily by doing the highest tier one time. Do 3 fractals, you just completed 12 dailies.
I will say that with all the new scribes, those decoration caps should be a much higher priority to fix now. They are abysmally restrictive.
The caps are performance-driven. Unless you want to buy everyone new computers, it’s not likely to be easy to fix (if it’s even possible with the current engine). I’m not sure that GH decorations should be prioritized over any of the 100s of other things the community wants tweaked|fixed|overhauled.
Those caps are performance driven based upon extremely low estimates for performance. In fact, the basic maps in the game are nearly twice as object dense per meter, they load those objects in nearly an identical manner, and for the most part have much longer view distances for said objects.
It’s not a matter of possibility. It’s a matter of idiot-proofing the system so people who already struggle to run the game don’t run in to an object loading quagmire.
Those caps exist in private player owned spaces. If everyone in my guild can literally run twice the decoration cap because nobody’s playing on a laptop, it doesn’t have performance impacts for other people. It should be up to the owners of those private spaces to find appropriate client performance targets for object density, as it is in nearly every other game with a similar decoration system. The caps need only exist where it’s an actual server side database load issue.
If your guild scribes makes the guild hall unworkable for you and refuse to alter it to accomodate you, that’s a guild issue, not a systemic issue. The current system is like forcing everyone to run at 1024×768 with all graphical settings on low just because some players can only run the game at those settings.
Increase the caps, allow the “remove all decorations” button to function from outside the hall, and let players determine performance targets for the clients of the people that visit them.
As it is not the caps aren’t logically restrictive, they’re overly restrictive compared to every other decoration system on the market, and even the density of the same dynamically populated objects in the base game.
On the one hand, it would make a lot of sense from the mechanics side of things if the “core mechanic” line was a specialization.
This would allow massive changes in the resource mechanics of professions through elite specs, imagine completely replacing thief initiative or warrior rage. This could only work if only one trait line directly influenced that system. You’d have Trickery for thieves being the only line that modified/addressed initiative for instance, so that you could swap it out with another mechanic with, say, “gunslinger” and “ammo” in stead.
However!
The classes aren’t really designed this way. Most classes have their core mechanic altered or modified by multiple lines. in order to really get a good, balanced version of “core line as an elite spec” you’d have to massively rework almost every trait line in the game to support that system.
Not only that, but it wouldn’t make balancing elite specs that much different, and it would actively hurt build diversity by giving people less overall combinations in total.
I think the elite spec system is good and a nice way to easily balance adding “subclass” mechanics compared to the nightmare balance of the GW1 dual class system, but I don’t think there’s much to be gained by adding this restriction when the plan is that all elite specs are balanced with potential access to all of the core lines anyway.
Cliffside fractal.
Everything that was fun about cliffside is still there, but without all the boring/cheesy parts.
We did the revamp under the exploding bad guys instability and it was an amazingly fun experience start to finish.
I do have one request though: I wish we had the option of walking the old, slower paths somehow. Some of the crumbling tunnels there were fun to look at and good for screenshots and junk.
It was the best fractal joke, but alas, everyone has to graduate some day before their parents cut them off.
Good luck cultist fanatic class of 2016.
I’m one of those broke scribes whos entire bank tab went empty scribing. It would have been nice if they’d compensated existing scribes for the massive price discrepancy, but the time for doing so is over.
At this point there’s no equitable solution after a day of the new economy. I’m ecstatic that scribing is so much cheaper now. Would it have been cool to get a title or some bonus mats? Sure. Not like it ruins scribing for me. I had plans, big plans, for big decorations, and not those plans are much more affordable to complete the last 50% of then what the first 50% cost me.
I will say that with all the new scribes, those decoration caps should be a much higher priority to fix now. They are abysmally restrictive.
(edited by PopeUrban.2578)
They just turned fractals into annoying content forcing players to run specific stages… that’s what this update did.
Before the update you could rush a full daily run 77-67-56-40-32-x-x-10-2 in less then a hour and get some decent daily rewards out of it. Now, you need to run at least 3 fractals in Tier3 to get about the same rewards while being much, much longer/harder/annyoing content.So, gj Anet, you’ve been failing since HoT, and you keep on doing so…
Been playing this game for well over 3 years and it has been nothing but dissapointment for the last year…
The old system was failure. It incentivized, through its design, ignoring most of the content. It incentivized REPEATING the same content multiple times a day, every. single. day.
It made actually achieving higher fractal difficulties and attempting them a chore by still requiring you to run all the low tiers for their individual achievements.
The nes system is better by a mile. if you want to do a full daily run, you will only ever have to do 5 islands, total. Those islands will all rotate every day, which means if you actually want to, you know, play fractals efficiently, you have to actually not suck at all the fractals, because you’ll have to be prepared to run them all at t4 for the best time/reward. As in Risk actually equals reward
Contrast this with swamps of the mists, where you did two braindead fractals, maybe three, and only two rotated. then you repeated them two or three times each. There was literally no incentive to do higher tier content oustide of the swamp daily. You were stuck doing low tier content in your expensive high AR gear because that was the bulk of the rewards. It rewarded repetition rather than mastry of the content, or efficiency at that specific type of content.
At maximum you’re doing 5 islands daily now, doing them at higher levels is both more profitable AND more efficient. You’re not stuck doing literally the same thing every single day.
The game now rewards you for doing what the fractal system is designed around: getting better AR, doing higher tiers, and learning the mechanics of every fractal to efficiently complete it.
There’s nothing STOPPING you from grinding swamp, but the most boring way to play the game should never be the most rewarding. If you don’t like fractals, don’t complain that they actually reward people who actually play fractals rather than grind them as quickly as possible because they hate them now.
It’s the same deal they made with the new dungeon system. These systems reward a range of content now so that those the like 5 man instances actually have a wide range of content to do and get decent rewards from. If you want to grind the same thing over and over, head to the open world. They made it easier to grind because it’s the part of the game actually built and intended for grinding.
(edited by PopeUrban.2578)
+1
More glorious beards for human males.
Maybe some plant beards for sylvari as well?
Oh man, you’d be really upset with the number of bow types in the first game.
If I remember, in the first game every class could use almost any weapon (Even if it requires subclassing), making my complaint against the distinction between bows (Identical skins until Legendary) irrelevant.
Good news then. Apperantly, elite specs replaced subclassing, so at some point in the future every class will be able to use every weapon in this game too. You’ll have to take it on faith the game will be around for 10+ expansions though.
On a serious note, shotbow/longbow is a distinction in range, and the lack of difference between skins is down to arenanet getting lazy on weapon skins after launch. I don’t see any more reason to merge shrtbow and longbow than to merge mace and sword. They have varying skillsets and avaliability. I’d in stead wonder why there are so many lazy shortbow skins that look identical to longbow skins.
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