Guild Wars 2

You kind of answered this yourself but events scale in a really weird way, in a full zone they re-trigger really frequently, partly due to they way they are basically offered to someone else in the zone in a place they can’t do them themselves. If you’re the only person in a zone they pretty much never happen.

Anyway since people are moving up the levels these aren’t triggering so often. Fewer events means less xp and slower xp gain. I think Anet in their infinite wisdom also decided to add an xp penalty to alts by making achievements give xp and that xp be account bound.

Oh and the Charr zone is easily the worse for xp gain, though I found the Norn zone pretty densely packed.

You can zone hop to make up the shortfall, or only play when you’re getting daily xp bonuses.

My advice? Don’t.

The game pretty much ends at 25. All the dynamic events? Gone. The beautiful intricately designed zones? Gone. You’ve unlocked all the best skills and utilities by then, elites are generally just a panic button. The dungeons are awful, and cost scaling plus massively increased enemy aggro radius means that getting around becomes a colossal chore. Because of the dramatically increased time it takes to level up story missions get really sparse and have generally moved on from interesting personal stories to sadistic jumping puzzles. You can level faster by crafting, but the xp there scales so you’re far better off leaving that till you hit the higher levels.

If you’re in the Charr zones or adjacent to them its probably better to go elsewhere as those are the most barren zones you’ll find below level 25. Other zones will level you faster but it’s worth it for a much better experience. Just be ready with an alt when you realise how much worse the game gets.

True, it has the downsides of a very heavy cooldown and being easy to avoid but you have to remember it’s an elementalist skill. Quite frankly I suspect the fact they introduced an elite underwater skill for us at all is probably a bug. They’ll probably change it so it does zero damage but is very useful as threatening to deal damage. We can’t expect more, after all, we have 20 skills!

To be honest I’ve managed to get to the point where I don’t feel I especially need it, with Scepter/Dagger and a Glypho of Elemental Power I can manage ranged, close and area combat well enough.

But I very rarely use staff or dagger/dagger or dagger/focus or scepter/focus. I’d like to for varieties sake but if I’m running towards an event with dagger/dagger going to the menu to equip a staff is really cumbersome. It’s just not a good interface. The ideal would be a weapon swap that activates whenever we are out of combat or all our skills are off cooldown.

Though really it’s a bit weird that this should be an issue at all. I mean if elemental swap is supposed to replace weapon swap why don’t daggers have any ranged abilities? If the abilities were spaced around so that the elements mixed up ranged and close, aoe and single target it would make some sense (though it’s still frustrating we have so little control over what our toolset holds).

I don’t know about the Warrior but the Elementalist is practically useless underwater. If you’re always in a group then underwater you’re going to be about half strength. Guardians are great though, this is a class balance issue more than anything.

Okay I just hve to say this.

I HATE the trinity. Is there any way to capitalise it more than that? Because I HATE it. Hate hate hate. I hate being a tank and waiting 4 hours for a healer to show up. I hate when devs try and defend it by saying they’re adding dual specs and flexible roles so anyone can be a healer, while missing the fundamental problem that no-one wants to be a healer. I hate the way that combat becomes insanely homogonous, get all the aggro, get all the aggro. There’s no dynamism to it, no flavour or strategy. You just do the samekittenthing every fight. I hate the way that people think its the only way you can develop class roles.

This is all off-topic of course because the Trinity has nothing to do with why people complain about their classes. I’m not even going to dignify that claim with a rebuttal. But I can’t let a topic stand as “people are clamouring for the Trinity”

What I’d like to see is alternate 1-5 skills for different weapons. For example you might find a Longbow that changes warrior 4 to be a cripple rather than a blind. Or a staff that changes elementalist Water 2 to be a blast with a self heal component.

Not sure if it’s practical, it would mean adding a huge extra number of weapon skills and the balancing would be really tricky but it would add a lot of excitement to looting and bringa bit more to the levelling once you hit 30.

My end game is getting 100% map completion and getting all professions to 80 and playing all of them effectively in WvW.

For me , the content is there, the rewards are there. It just needs to ease up on the punishments, fix the bugs and make the balance tweaks.

The design of the classes is excellent, there’s not single one that isn’t interesting or desirable one way or another. Unfortunately only the Warrior and Thief can really be considered finished. The Guardian is close but the others feel like they really need to go back to the drawing board.

So yeah, I can say I love the way the Mesmer makes clones of himself to tank for him, that the Elementalist has a huge range of skills available at any time, or the way my Engineer can prep the battlefield in advance. In reality though I play my Warrior because I love the way she’s finished and has a range of abilities that actually work. I always prefer to play magic classes in MMOs but none of them are functional.

People keep saying that Anet need to add a treadmill or people will leave, they need to add this to keep people addicted.

I’m struggling to see why people want to be addicted themselves, but I’m REALLY struggling to see how its Anets problem. They aren’t charging a monthly fee here, people taking a break, or only playing occasionally is hardly going to bankrupt them. If after playing for a hundred plus hours and having seen every bit of content in the game you still aren’t going to buy the expansions then I think you might be too demanding an audience to be worth courting.

If it’s not worth doing for the intrinsic rewards you should stop doing it. And if you would have done it for the loot then you should thank Anet for breaking you out of that cycle. Go do something that offers an actual reward rather than an illusion. Because if you think that getting epic loot for your time means you aren’t wasting it you absolutely could not be more wrong.

They’re a real hodge podge in reality. For example fire field plus blast is 3 stacks of area might lasting 20 seconds, pretty worthwhile. Ice field plus blast is Frost Armour that lasts less than 1 second. Somewhat less so.

How about 2 non-useless skills to replace 2 and 3? I suppose they could be tweaked so 2 doesn’t take 10 minutes to activate and 3 moves you more than an inch and a half, but both are pretty fundamentally pointless.

At the end of the quest you are instructed to talk to Rytlock. This mission is already a hive of impenetrable layout and poorly designed map makers, but to really rub the salt in you have to speak to Rytlock at the end of the quest. Except his door is closed, and non-interactive. I spent nearly 2 hours trying to get through before I spotted him, and realised there was literally no way to get into him. What looked like a wall was actually a door. I couldn’t open it, but I could walk straight through it.

I took several screens and attached the clearest demonstration.

Good point, well made.

Hmm, this is a little ambiguous then. In theory hearts should be soloable but in practise maybe not? I guess constant streams of mobs in these places is pushing the boundaries, but I might still be better swapping characters.

Oh and I agree that standing still is rarely the right choice, but I can’t kite ranged mobs and in densely packed areas the slightest movement can get 3-4 adds. In those situations standing still does generally seem to be better than trying to dodge attacks. Large quantities of Dredge is the worst possible situation because all my blinds are worthless, my static defence is weak and kiting is no help.

Oh and make it known to devs? That makes sense if these aren’t designed to be group only content. I guess I’ll drop something in suggestions.

So far I’ve got an Elementalist to 40 and it’s been slow frustrating work. Aside from one truly ridiculous mission I’ve gotten to the point where I can do story content dying only occasionally. I can handle 3-4 mobs reasonably well and 6-8 if I pop my Elite.

Thing is there are still areas in the game where I’m getting absolutely savaged. For example the Heart “Help the Priory stop the dredge encroachment” in Lornar’s Pass ends up with my being attacked by a truly staggering amount of enemies, even if I stand stock still in an attempt to avoid picking up aggro. The respawn rate is so fast that I can’t possibly use caution and creep on the edges, pulling them to me.

Are these zones designed to be handled by groups of players, or do I need to up my game? I’m starting to feel I’m absolutely at the limit of what I can do with an Elementalist and my income is really struggling to keep up with repair and waypoint costs in attempting this kind of scenario.

I’d say so, either 2012 or 2013 anyway. It’s lacking in some areas and there are some big frustrations but the core is so good I really think it can get there.

It’s a simple trick, but I find it hugely affects my impact with an Elementalist. Use Scepter/Dagger (other weaponsets are available) and use Burning Field, followed up by a quick Phoenix and Dragons Tooth. In tough situations you can swap to Earth and drop an Earthquake and (situationally) Churning Earth. Optionally you can also use the utility skill Arcane Blast right at the start.

Since every one of these skills is a blast finisher every one of them will add Area Might if you cast it in the 8 seconds of that initial Burning Field. That’s up to 12 stacks of might. Or in other words, a puppy ton of might. While levelling that’s 20 seconds where you’re actually doing comparable damage, or even slightly more if you hit them all, to the other classes. The best thing about it is the cooldown on all of the fire skills is 20 seconds or under. You can’t always drop to earth, you can’t always drop the arcane wave, but you can have 6 stacks of might near constantly.

Your topic includes the words “best” and “profession” from this I can discern the answer is Warrior.

In all seriousness I would go with Warrior, Guardians are fairly strong at this too but Warriors have an aoe leap attack that stuns for 2 seconds on a 10 second cooldown. They’re easily the most fun in this situation and at least among the most effective. They can perma swiftness at level 30 too.

1 a day. It’s quite fast in some of the starter zones, but by the time you hit 25 about 95% of your xp comes from daily achievements. I tend to swap to a new character to get the event ones though because if I wanted to get 5 events for my main it would take about 6-7 hours.

Altitis here. This discounts quality of life issues such as the insane scaling of teleport costs and dramatic drop in the number and quality of the zones as you go up in levels. It’s just about how I’m getting on with the class. Some of it is down to imbalances (Elementalist comically underpowered, Mesmer unsuited to freeform PVE gameplay) others just down to personal preferences (Warrior has functional but not exciting utilities, Guardian frontloaded into a few very powerful skills making minute to minute gameplay less interesting to me)

Level 10 Thief 7/10
Level 26 Guardian 5/10
Level 37 Elementalist 3/10
Level 12 Mesmer 8/10
Level 11 Warrior 9/10
Level 11 Engineer 6/10

There’s a lot of fun in the playstyle to be had. Dropping a churning Earth as I see enemies running towards me en masse, timing it so they all get hit as they enter the circle. Coming across a big tough slow brute and hitting him with 3 successive blinds in different elements and utility skills. Swapping around the different effects of glyphs giving me some insane kiting abilities when my rapid firing air attacks continually apply cripples. Dropping mass AoEs into dynamic events for great contribution rates.

Pretty much everything up until I go into a dense cave, spend minutes dancing around continually respawning enemies, gradually beating them down before dying and being sent to the most useless downed state in the history of gaming, as I watch a warrior clear the entire thing in 2 seconds flat just spamming his auto attack.

It’s pretty clear the cash shop is meant as a major source of income, which means they need to keep us playing. That alone means we aren’t getting a game, we’re getting obligations.

And well, that’s only going to get worse, over time Anet will get better at making the experience lss enjoyable and more compelling.

It’s a totally nonsensical consideration that only exists to fuel the cash shop. That’s just what it is. You can mitigate the amount it makes the game worse without spending real money, but you can’t exclude it totally.

When it comes to suggesting changes the only sensible ones are to abolish the fee entirely or to have an alternate gem item that mitigates it in some other way. The concepts of making money and making the game better are wholly at odds.

Ashes.6418:

Solaria.2840:

Also,

If a player has been report for “Gold Selling” by X amount of players – they automatically get banned until a Dev can look into the situation and confirm it.

Example: If at least 20 players report a person for ‘Gold Selling’ or ‘Botting’, they get an automatic ban. That way, a situation can be handled fast and efficiently.

No, power like this should never be given to the players. While the intentions of the function are pure, people tend to be jerks on the internet. Something like this is far too easily abused.

All the player needs is a report function and an ignore function, nothing more, nothing less.

Agreed, kind of. It seems reasonable to add a messaging block on people who have been marked as spamming until it can be investigated. The ideal would be to secretly hide any of their messages that contained the words cheap, www, gold and more than 3 misspellings.

This is tied into the lower waypoint costs, but I’d like to see a much wider alert radius of dynamic events. When the system was announced I was imagining having to choose between defending a bridge that I might need to use, stopping a raiding party making off with vendors or making a raid on an enemy base to reduce the difficulty of future events. As it happens events all happen at random times and I seldom hear of multiple going on at the same time. When I do they are so close I usually get to do both.

Replay story missions. With some striking exceptions these are really good, but the pacing is all wrong to replay them on alts. An option to replay the arc would be great.

No scaling of dungeons if you enter alone. Not mine but I really like it, the scaling system is great, but sometimes you just want to flex the muscles you’ve grown over time. Stomping over those really difficult early enemies would be satisfying.

XP bonus for playing in zones you have completed as an alt. Maybe only activate this when you have a character hit 80 but you do have to do an awful lot of the content to hit level 80 and it would be nice if you could smooth the process to alts. I think the cash shop will put pay to this though, why offer people a substantial xp bonus for playing the game when you can offer a totally menial one for money?

Difficulty modes on dungeons and story missions. Some of these make Dark Souls look like Fable. This is kind of obvious from the multitude of posts already made on the subject but not everyone likes that level of challenge.

Real autolooting.

We’re close on this one but it’s still a kind of niggling annoyance that you have to run around jabbing f and talking to people. Maybe just go that one step further and pick up all loot as long as you have space in your inventory? If you wanted to be more awesome you could add auto send crafting items to bank.

I can’t say my experience matches yours. In WoW I’d go to the quest hub and I’d get reams and reams of awful writing conjuring up a thin justification as to why I needed to kill 400 badgers to get 10 badger ears. Then I’d go and get some more awful writing explaining why I needed to kill 200 badgers. Then I’d get some flimsy pretext to kill some rabbits. Once I’d done all this I’d make a shopping list comprised of the places I’d need to go and the helpless animals I’d need to slaughter and I’d wander round the map doing what I essentially realised were chores. I had no idea why I was doing any of this, even if I could stomach the writing it would have long since jumbled together into a confused mess. in the intervening period.

Guild Wars 2 actually brings it back to the narrative. Without quest hubs the explanations for what I am doing happen at the same time as the events I am doing so the connection is maintained. I’m not flooded with it all at once so I have a chance to digest it. I could have the same experience in a traditional MMO structure but I am heavily discouraged by the radically increased travel time and inability to double dip quest objectives. All Guild Wars 2 offers is the option of disregarding it entirely.

I would say the dialog for dynamic events should probably be back-loaded rather than front-loaded. There are times when the narrative in these are extremely disjointed.

How about nerfing story mode? Or running the two parallel? I mean it’s great you guys enjoy and can handle a brutal challenge but it seems unfair and unwise to have no alternatives to this brutal treadmill. You must have noticed how generally popular it is.

Should there be a mode which requires intimate knowledge of all the games systems, razor fast reactions and a highly coordinated team that has planned its build in advance? Sure why not seems like a good thing and gives people who have a lot of experience something to do. Throw in some non-essential rewards and cut price repairs though to make it feel worthwhile.

Should that be the ONLY group content in the game?

Of course not.

Hmm, I’d say, it will last until Arenanet decide you should suffer.

I played this as a level 30 elementalist and suffered horrific torments, battered and naked I cast myself into the fire again and again finally succeeding in dredging through by the skin of my teeth only to be cast back into the pit as the game, laughing at my torment, judged me unworthy of receiving a completion.

Red zones appear as if to mock my hubris, alerting me to a demise I can do nothing to prevent; enemies that take thousands of hits to kill swipe me down easily with barely telegraphed blows. As though to torment me with a sliver of hope the enemies can be injured by the death traps within, but while this offers a means to injure them it involves stepping into a zone of death my character has only the meagerest hope of surviving. By sheer fluke I managed to lure him in once successfully, but on my second attempt I have not the will to do this, if I were to attempt this a second time I would die myself before I had the least hope of success.

Is there more to this than a sadistic right of passage? Is there a pattern within the maze of madness that a mere human can perceive? Or instead does it seek only to separate those with spirits that can be broken from those with the wills of iron deemed necessary to proceed?

Woah, I need to check this out, because that’s an insane exchange rate. Last time I checked a gold would get you 4 gems… If I liquidate my stock I can probably buy 3 character slots…

I have chronic altitis so I’ve been playing with a few different characters to get the feel of them. One of the things I’ve noticed as a result though is Plains of Ashford and Diessa Plateau seem to be cripplingly short of dynamic events. When I’m trying to get the daily event achievement I’ll play for 3 or 4 hours in these zones and run into 1 or 2 events, then swap over to my other character in Kessex Hills and do 3 events over the period of about 10 minutes.

Has anyone noticed this affecting other zones? I don’t particularly want to do Kessex Hills again as I was forced to 100% it to get enough xp to move on but at the same time it’s preferable to turging around Diessa Plateau or Snowdon Drifts for hours and hours grinding boars for xp.