Guild Wars 2

Sun : Farm, stories, PvP during afternoon. Guild missions, Meta Map (SW, DT or HOT) evening
Mon : Fractals/Meta
Tue: Raid/Fractal
Wed : PvP /Fractal
Thu: Raid/ Fractal or PvP
Fri: Achievement (leads to PvP or Stories or open World)
Sat : WB tour, removing dusts from alts, Key farm

If there is down time, most of the time I try to catch WB train.

Chances are it will be on April 19th, end of PvP league 2. They did so on 26 th January when season1 ended on the 25th.
As for the content, they said they mostly focused on HoT maps reward flow. They also talk about a first part of WvW revamp going beta and some WvW specific balance but I’m not sure if target was this update or the next one.

The expansion is a finished product… but it is not an awesome one. Compared to original game the global quality has decreased.
The problem is we got a lot with the original game, and especially all those free updates.

Any other company wouldn’t have done LS2 and would have bundled it with the expansion … there we would have gotten the 6 maps everyone think as standard for expansion, as well as an additional armor set and a weapon set. We would have a total of 24 story steps, almost as long as personal story but contained on the 6 maps.

On top of that, it is difficult to make a game like GW2 grow because the game is meant to not become obsolete.
Look at other games’ expansion : You have a new region where you do quests to gain a level and then you leave the zone forever until you find the last zone where everything will happen for the entire life of the expansion. If you are lucky, one patch will introduce a new map and everybody will go there again, leaving the former one as a desert. In GW2 they have to design maps so that we have to go back … that is what most people claim as being grindier than anything on earth.

So they tried to build an expansion and while it was not great, it is far from being a disaster. Desert BL are a good chunk of work… but players did not like it. Stronghold is kinda interesting… but players did not like it. There has been beta tests, a lot of them were positive, but in the end players turned really negative towards the entire additions. I am not sure if the devs understand why, nor if we as players understand why.

Ashen.2907:

Desiring a refund for a product that fails to meet consumer expectations by not delivering advertised features has little (or no) bearing on a willingness to lose a previously paid for product, without refund, that did meet the consumer’s epectations.

If I purchase a computer from a company and it delivers on advertised features. I am satisfied. If a year later I purchase a RAM upgrade listed at 8gb, but what is provided is only 4gb I might very well want my money back for the upgrade without losing the entire computer.

I am no lawyer and hence may be wrong but I think that what we bought is access to a service. When you click the “accept” button you sign a contract where you say " take my money so that I can log in the game" and Anet say " I take your money and grant you access to the game server, so long you behave properly. And since it is our product we have all rights to do any change we want".

We don’t really pay for features and somehow I doubt the legislation on games would change because what you buy is no material.

I just want to raise this point because I think it is ok to be kittened by the news and to express disappointment or whatever feeling but the discussion won’t go far if people try to overthink the situation to end up with arguments that they are robbers or incompetent people.
I don’t think we have any right to discuss company organisation, we can only comment if we like the product or not. Hell I hope nobody here feels he can teach me my job. Unless you own your video game company, I think you lack too much knowledge to comment on how the company is managed, how easy or not it is to implement feature A or B. We are customers, players, end users… so we should stick to comments about the end product : do we like what we have? Do we like the direction? Why… but pulling the discussion further than this (like “NCsfot decided this” or “they have money trouble” or “I’m sure they fired Colin”) is not bringing it anywhere.
I mean, I like french fries but it doesn’t give me the right to teach farmers how they should grow potatoes.

In the present case, they acknowledge they broke a promise about implementing 16 legendaries and apologize for it. From this point we can say that we don’t care or that we actually do and then explain why. The reason can totally be “I feel cheated”, “it spoils the game for me, I quit”, “I won’t trust your promises anymore and won’t pre order next expansion”… all of this is fine. But more than that is pure speculations and trap ourselves in thought circles where we get even more upset just by restating the same speculations over and over again.
And to finish about those who say they are too silent : what should they say now? The game director come and say he scrapped a feature that was promised, that he is sorry and that he understands we are upset. Now what, because one guy says it is robbery or calls the entire company incompetent, does anyone reasonably think he will post again and say " yeah whip me, I am bad, I do bad things since ten years and you all buy these…. I have no clue how to develop game and all I want is your money so that I can retire on a desert island "

Spira.4578:

Yea, did you also not pay for the fractal leaderboards that were canceled?
Or for the guild anthem that was heavily talked about in one of their blog posts?
Or how about the masteries like bark cutting?
It’s not just the legendary crafting that got scrapped.

That is why they always say that things are subject to change before release. And while I admit that too many things were planned for after release (which doesn’t make it half an expansion but a rushed expansion) this has been the case in every MMO since ever.
Bark cutting removed is really not a good example because there is no bark to cut anymore…
If you think this is a good example then you should have known that such promises are often taken away : engineer shield absorb, mine kit, skills that were supposed to change when jumping or when we climb in trees (back in 2007 !), dragons attacking the village as part of dynamic events, environmental bundles giving different skills for every professions, racial traits, traits on weapons, free distribution of statistic points, energy potions, energy cost of skills, necro DS back travel and as downed state…..

In fact they cancelled much more “promises” before they launched the core game as for this expansion.

Spira.4578:

Now, reducing the features even further “so they can work on the core game” – while they
1.) Had the money from the core game sale when we first bought it to use on fixing the core game but apparently rather used it on something else.

I think you read “core game” wrong in the post. I believed they mean global living world like LS3 for example or revamping maps (including some HoT maps) or improving some mechanisms that were released with the expansion. “core game” is here opposed to side feature like new legendaries are. Having them or not will not break the game, other things can. And we also paid for this. That is one reason why after just 6 months they will change the reward flows of the new maps (we still have to wait to see what they mean by this).
Also don’t forget that there were a lot of complains about the precursors crafting. So imagine that you put a lot of effort on a feature, you release a part of it and people are not happy with it. Either you block some people on improving the feature for months (like fractal leaderboards with which they were never happy with, even before releasing it) or you decide that those people can be more useful right away on a different tasks that don’t require an entire revamp.
They chose the second alternative. Maybe it will be a disaster for the game, or maybe it will help a bigger part of the game to be more like what players expected… right now we don’t know but at least they warned us before. Just to follow the example of Fractals, when did we know that leaderboards were once again dropped ? It was during the AMA on reddit, last news before this was that they were still polishing it.

At least this time I do appreciate that they tell us rather than ignoring forum topics like " only 4 legendaries, where are the others?" for the next 2 years and suddenly come in a messiah way : “oh be happy players, we have new legendaries for you… don’t we deserve a hug ?”

Heibi.4251:

Here are some of the ideas and suggestions that have been lost in all the screaming and yelling:
1. Make the HoT precursors drop from mobs in the HoT areas like the old versions did in Tyria. RNG baby. – Creating the legendary adventure is one of the primary things delaying them. Everything must work and be there.

2. Create Skin Recipes for the new legendaries. Sell them at vendors in the HoT area for a large sum in the zone currency. Then make and old legendary and skin it.

3. Unlock Legendary Armor from the Raid and make them obtainable outside of raids. That’s 18 legendaries available to make. See #1 for how to get them. Though they still have to create the legendary armor. Also make the recipe simple, like old legendaries. No adventure involved, except for dungeons and such.

4. Hire 6 new people so that you don’t have to scrap the project. Borrow against a bankable asset if you have to.

That’s 4 now.

My number 5 : put one precursor as reward of entering legendary division during a PvP season (ofc still non-tradable). Legendary people deserve legendary weapons

If one does not want to be mainstream, he/she can quit the game… silently. Like if nobody cared. It is not so usual these days, but full of style.

(on a side note it is most of the time really true that nobody cares… at all !!!)

Ticky.5831:

BrotherBelial.3094:

You wouldn’t buy a car, and the guy show you one and say, this care is great it can do allsorts of things. You can buy it right now, but the wheels will not be ready for awhile, and we don’t have a time frame. Would you buy that car?

Bad analogy. HoT was the product; Legendary Journeys were a service packaged with it. People buy services packaged with cars all the time(roadside assistance, warrantys, event invites, vehicle service, coupons etc) and those company’s are expected to make good on their services.

And yet we signed a contract stating that they are allowed to discontinue these services without any warning or refunds…. and it happened to many people who tried to call the assistance service while in need

Somehow that is how Fractals work : you do 3 of them ( a 3 page guide) for a reward and you can play them “hard mode” (level 75 +) while there is still no real reward for playing on harder level.
The first set of dungeon will likely not be touched again because they would have to re design the encounters because since release everything in the game evolved and just adjusting stats would still not be enough to make it hard. They apparently chose to design brand new mini dungeons in the form of new fractals where the encounters are designed with actual gameplay, stats, specializations, AI….

I agree that real dungeon are more immersive than Fractals from their atmosphere, lore and rewards but Anet has been quite clear since launch about the fact that 5-man content is Fractals now…

Spira.4578:

Tha main issue people are annoyed here is that anet is willig to work on new moneymilking content while they are willing to cut the features that we already paid for.

Again : HoT was promoted as giving a new BL maps for WvW, nothing more. We got it, it was even beta tested by players and many feedbacks here were really positive. Now release went through and suddenly WvW was the worst experience most players ever had.
We never paid for the big WvW update, it was never promoted with a product… so should they drop the work on that and put WvW designer on precursor collections instead, for the sole reason we paid for it ?
The issue is much more complex than “we pay for it so give it to us now!”. It is always really hard to know in advance how players will react to every release or how many people are concerned by one thing. For example, how many people are actually affected by the delay of legendaries? It costs a lot to craft the precursors and even more to transform it into a legendary weapon. On the other hand, “repairing” WvW will affect much more people so better do this even though it was not something we paid for.
Of course this is only theoretical because devs involved in the WvW 2.0 are probably not the same as the one involved in Pre collections but the argument of “we paid for this and I want it” should also go with the " I didn’t pay for that so I don’t deserve it". Ideally we should get everything but this world is far from ideal….

The fact that few things are rendered totally obsolete after a new one is released (like still being rewarded for doing events in Orr even after HoT release).

Spira.4578:

the only thing the seller has to do, is deliver the product in the same exact state as it was promoted.

Not saying you are wrong but there are two sides for this coin : I never bought the original game for Fractals, PvP reward tracks, Living story (S1 and S2), EotM….. they were never promoted to be in the game during development.
If they are not allowed to change their priority because of the respect they owe to their customers then they should charge for any addition or change they did since the game launch.
So I think you can’t just conclude a seller-customer relationship, especially when the product is an MMO, by saying "the only thing the seller has to do, is deliver the product in the same exact state as it was promoted. "

Try to play at different times in a day. Last Friday (was holiday here) afternoon it was a nightmare for me : people fighting away from points, obsessed by taking far without having close or mid, never regrouping after defeated (always going 1 Vs 4)…. I got really annoyed and was on losing streak (like 9 to 10 games). I even rolled a thief (never played before in PvP) just because I thought I also was allowed to do some training in ranked like others seemed to do.
Then I played Saturday night, it was better, Sunday night was even better and yesterday afternoon was really enjoyable : wins streak, one loss, another win etc
MMR is not responsible of everything, sometimes you need luck : on the people trying to join a party, on your teammates, on the enemy team, on this moment where you are not sure why you used that skill but it was one of the best action of the game….

People tend to overestimate the role of single persons. A game director will take the final decisions on what is being worked on or not but this guy is not someone in an ivory tower ! It takes a lot of discussions with the designers, with community managers, with players …. to decide in which direction a project in general is going or what are the priorities at any given time. I can’t really imagine that when Colin took a decision it was totally against MO’s opinions or against all the devs in the building. In a similar manner Mike’s decisions won’t be only his own but it will be a sum of discussion about feasibility, player’s feedback, artists’ offer… I don’t think any game director is foolish enough to think that only him knows what the game will be and decide every single details.
And about the cut of legendary weapons, no one will ever know if Colin wouldn’t have taken the same decision so I’m not sure it’s worth to speculate about the people themselves.

I don’t care too much about new legendaries being postponed/cancelled. I don’t have enough playtime or in game resources to craft all pre and legendary weapons. I chose one or two and started the collections, and in the same time I started to gather materials in order to be ready for the day I’ll have the precursors.
On the other hand, I also don’t feel any content drought right now and I still have a lot of achievements, collections to do… not to mention PvP leagues which entertain me much more than expected.
But if switching 6 people from a content I am not even sure to start (precursor collections) helps to bring faster some piece of content that I will experience (living world) then I am totally fine with the decision.
But I keep on wondering one thing : since the hardest part of the new legendary weapons seems to not be art and modeling but the collection part, why not make the precursors as PvP or WvW rewards? It is less design for the collection and gives some exclusive rewards to those modes other than another backpack….. after all nothing says that only PvE activities are legendary.

Ravenmoon.5318:

What you asking is impossible.
If they buff the old traitlines to make old builds viable, people would simply include teh elite traitline AND the buffed traitline.
Every elite specs provides vital utility to every class.

On my D/P thief, I can’t imagine picking up shadow arts instead of daredevil.
I could consider dropping daredevil for acrobatics if it gets overhaul and makes S/D viable again but it’s not going to happen. The build is dead and burried like the pistol whip thief.

No I was talking about making buffed Trickery an elite spec with a better defined role (or not) so that your thief either becomes a daredevil or a trickster. One could be more bruiser oriented (DD) and the other one either support or condi oriented. What I find bad with elite specs right now is that it is not specialized since they can buff every aspect of your toon. The grandmaster coice od DD for example is specializing you either in direct damage, condi damage or defense. I just thought from the first description that the elite specs should buff one aspect (if you split archetypes between, melee DD, range, condi, tank, support and heal) not offer the choice of buffing all of them.

I can be wrong but my impression so far is that they had a fair idea where elite specs should be while doing the 23rd June update. The problem came when the especs were beta tested and everyone was just rioting about how almost all of them were underpowered. They then made all of them stronger without revising what they have done before which ended up as making them mandatory.
Take tempest as example : the first version was announced as close range support. People complained a lot that it was not playable in any area. Now Tempest has never been excluded from the meta in sPvP (was dealing more damage, today is a healer) and there is no PvE build that won’t take the line (melee DD, Range DD, Condi, healer… even tanky). The same goes with almost all of the elite.

Eventually there will be more diversity when a second elite will be available (in 2-3 years) or if they transform and buff a core line (like the former fifth) to an elite one (which won’t happen).

The biggest problem with preventing class stacks is that no player will be allowed to change class. This limits a bit the preparation of the game.
Say there is no healer in your team. If you want to reroll with your ele (sure you can change your build to become a healer… on a thief xD) then you can’t anymore. If you authorize rerolling then why wouldn’t two people reroll the same class at the same moment….

BloodyNine.7504:

This is something people actually care about? Really? I have been hearing about DnT since Molten Core in WoW. I mean how does them testing something in anyway alter your gaming experience? Even if they come out with a warehouse full of salt and a giant banner that says “Mission Accomplished.” What does it really matter?

In theory it would matter if the raids were so bad that we could complain that the beta testers are not good enough to provide a real feedback that will have an impact on product quality. But since it is not the case and the raids are fun I’d say that any testers of the encounters so far have done a good job and that is the only thing that actually matters.

In fact I’d more likely thank every player who have been part of the testing phase, whatever their guild is, to have put some of their time for the community to enjoy this content.

The one to Rule.2593:

Amurond.4590:

wat

You realise they tested parts of all 3 wings before they were removed?

That’s the complaint.

Do you really think that testing of wing 3 only started yesterday and that between November and yesterday devs and testers only worked on wing 2?

Exciton.8942:

Swapping phantasmal fury and master fencer is a very solid idea. I would second this.

If the fight is long enough, if you cap bleed duration and have high enough crit chance, you can easily maintain 50 stack of bleed from your duelist. That is when the third pop (after 16 sec without alacrity), every 7 sec, the three duelists apply on average 9 stacks of 12 sec bleed each so yes, around 50 stacks of bleed all the time after something like 20 sec of ramp up. There was a post on reddit where the guy said this single target condi build was like 20 k dps on VG… so not so powerful but quite good though.

I think the buff of the duelist trait was intended to not move the fury trait.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

• Rytlock or Laranthir are my bets on the new Pact Marshal. Despite the vocal playerbase’s outcry to be leader and hatred of Trahearne which no doubt led to his death and the Pact’s (probably earlier than originally intended) destruction, at least in my mind, I hope they don’t make the PC the Pact Marshal. The PC wouldn’t make a logical or realistic organization leader.

While I totally agree with the bad reasons for Trahearne’s death, I’d still like the PC to be the Pact Marshal… for a short time. My dream would be that for LS3, we, as Pact leader, have to go in different places over Tyria due to official task. But each time there would be a dragon minion attack. In fact, by having a prominent role in the defeat of two of them, the remaining ones would see us as a primary target. It would lead to the attack of the new Pact HQ. After that everyone in Tyria would be scared of our presence anywhere. We would be forced to transmit the lead to somebody else (Laranthir being my first choice but I’d like a new vote in game) and only DE 2.0 would stay with us. From there our role in the fight against the dragons should be less in the heart of the action… until of course the very last fight against the next one.

It would give a more dramatic feeling on our character, the fact that you can’t be a hero for ever and that when you fail (even if it is not directly your fault, then other will rapidly reject you as if nothing you did before counted).

Yeah it could be a good idea but the issue here is that DPS in actual fights is modified by so many factors (ancestral grace, EA, might, frost spirit, banners….) which have such a huge impact that the result from a solo test wouldn’t be really reflective of what actually happens in the fight.
Seeing the number of threads suggesting such a feature, at least in the raid sub, and the fact that there has been no firm “NO”, I would think that this is definitely not out of the table from Anet’s end..

Daewind.1072:

Astralporing.1957:

On the contrary, none of the HoT maps are designed for people that “have a life”.

I agree. Too much grinding and waiting for enough others to do some events.

While I think the “grind” part is mostly bearable (well because there are no real reason to rush every rewards of every maps) I however play less and less HoT maps because of timers, taxis requirements and this annoying megaserver.
I mean if you go in SW and don’t mind to do a full cycle, you can still hold a fort for a time, make the counter rise, then advertise in LFG and things go faster and faster. The timer of maps in HoT make it so you have to be at the right moment. Since there is no resource in game you always have to alt tab to dulfy’s timer or the wiki to know where you have a chance to be able to play. Once you know then you have to fight to find a good map where you will not be alone. If you are lucky enough then there won’t be a megaserver message to tell you that you should go on an emptier map because apparently it prefers to have 5 people on a map than 10…..

While I am not a huge fan of WB timers (because if you play everytime in the same time frame you never experience other encounters) at least once you catch the train, there is always someone to tell where the next boss is and most of the time you won’t be alone on the map. And even if this happens, 20 people can beat almost every WB… but no HoT meta event. So the choice is to spend a lot of time searching for a reliable way to gain the new rewards or just hop on an old map and have fun immediately, earning former rewards…..

While I can’t comment on the actual Meta, it would be nice to hear devs speak about what actually happen in the game from time to time. Not in metaphorical ways about design and their overall vision but rather small details, and build that are played in reality, skills that are not played and why. Even if they say something like " well we do think these particular skill type is more adapted to PvE so we don’t want to make them better in PvP"…. at least it will give the impression that players and devs are playing the same game.
But, well, this could be true for every aspect of the game….

GLaDOS.5897:

A good way to understand the importance of condition duration is to imagine your condition to be an instant damage skill which would remove (damage per second)*duration HP.

If your opponent has an infinite amount of HP (meaning, several order of magnitude more HP than your skill is going to remove), your bleeding stack which will remove 100HP per second during 12 seconds is similar to an instant skill that would deal 1200 damage. Your bleeding stack of 120 HP removed per second during 6 seconds is similar to an instant skill that would deal 720 damage.

You would say, since condition damage and duration are multiplicative while calculating the real damage, increasing one by 10% or the other by the same amount is the same. Which is false, because of the condition factor applied to the condition damage modifier (bleeding: 0.06, burning: 0.155, poison: 0.06, etc., see the wiki) plus the constant damage (bleeding: 22, burning: 131.5, poison: 33.5). A 10% increase in condition damage is lower than a 10% increase in actual damage. A 10% increase in condition duration, however, is a direct 10% increase in actual damage (if it allows another tick).

Back to your exemple : 1 bleeding stack, 6s, 100 damage per second for a total of 600 HP removed
If you up the condition duration by 100% to make it last 12s : 1200 HP remove, as stated above.
To remove the same amount of HP only by increasing the condition damage, you need to increase your condition damage by 128%.

Of course, this calcul is only worth “during” the fight, not taking in account the border cases. A building sacrificing condition duration for condition damage reaches its full damage potential faster, and has less damage loss when the boss dies with several condition stack still active. In other words : long fights, i.e. high level fractals and raids.

Note : as far as I have seen, only a couple of traits actually increase the final damage applied by a condition (such as Hidden Barb or Poison Master for the ranger). All other damage modifier increase the condition damage base stat.

===
Now, another exercise : if we keep our beloved exemple (1 bleeding stack, {6s ; 120dps} versus {12s; 100dps}, with another stack applied each second), how does fight duration influences the damage ?

Show Spoiler

hide spoiler

Condition damage-based build
Timer — DPS — Total
1 — 120 — 120
2 — 240 — 360
3 — 360 — 720
4 — 480 — 1200
5 — 600 — 1800
6 — 720 — 2520
7 — 720 — 3240
8 — 720 — 3960
9 — 720 — 4680
10 — 720 — 5400
11 — 720 — 6120
12 — 720 — 6840
13 — 720 — 7560
14 — 720 — 8280
15 — 720 — 9000
16 — 720 — 9720
17 — 720 — 10440
18 — 720 — 11160
19 — 720 — 11880

Condition duration-based build
Timer — DPS — Total
1 — 100 — 100
2 — 200 — 300
3 — 300 — 600
4 — 400 — 1000
5 — 500 — 1500
6 — 600 — 2100
7 — 700 — 2800
8 — 800 — 3600
9 — 900 — 4500
10 — 1000 — 5500
11 — 1100 — 6600
12 — 1200 — 7800
13 — 1200 — 9000
14 — 1200 — 10200
15 — 1200 — 11400
16 — 1200 — 12600
17 — 1200 — 13800
18 — 1200 — 15000
19 — 1200 — 16200

As expected, and stated by people earlier, each build reaches its damage peak when the first stack ticks for its last time (for the lulz, try and say that aloud), which is respectively 6s and 12s.
When the damage build reaches its peak, the duration build is 320 total damage late, equivalent to slightly more than 3 of its ticks. It starts being more powerful at the 10s mark (4 ticks later).
On a side note, the damage per tick becomes better for the duration build at the 8s mark.

Conclusion : same as above, the longer the fight, the better condition duration is.

I won’t contradict the conclusion of the debate but just be careful with the examples given, in term of stats:
a bleeding stack of 6 s at 120 means 1633 condi damage, 0 expertise
the same bleeding stack of 12 s at 100 requires 1300 condi damage, so -333 but +1500 expertise, so it is not a simple exchange of 1 stat to the other.

On the other hand, food gives generally a 100/70 stat bonus but the veggie pizza gives 300/70. The same goes with build bonuses where +33% condi duration increase is a 495 bonus stat, compared to the classic +150 for other stats. Also it’s worth to note that Sinister → is not an exchange of condi damage to expertise but rather an slight decrease in one for a totally new one.

All in all I think that expertise is not the key factor here but rather its total availability and it’s scaling. If condi duration bonus were in the same order of magnitude than other stats, traits would only give 10% condi duration and pizza would not be 20 % but 6 %…. the story would be slightly different.

Yeah who wouldn’t get a party wide bonus of 750 in concentration ? In term of stat number (not effectiveness) it is 5 times worth the usual spotter, assassin presence, EA… for 2 energy pip upkeep. For you personally, with Envoy of sustenance it represents a 975 concentration attribute bonus !

I think they could use Guild Chat for such things.
I for example would love to have a Guild chat with Raid team to have their feedback on how the players have handled with the first wing. Did they expect so many (or so few depending on the point of view) people to beat it by now? Did they foresee the meta builds that are out now… and are they happy with this ? Have they other builds that are valid but that surprisingly nobody uses?
I’d like to have pvp team talking about the actual metas and their view of the game. Why would they (or not) like the idea of 2v2 arena? Why do they want a more aggressive gameplay ?
It could be nice to also hear the “itemization” team to explain a bit more about the new 4 stats gear : why 4? Why those ratios? Why having higher stat budget? Why always link toughness and concentration ?…..
Artists could give some insight about their inspiration for new weapon/armor sets….

All in all I think the Guild Chat could be made more interactive, like they did last week. Having the announcement of the theme and guest on Monday and taking question till Wednesday. Sometimes I must admit that Guild Chat, though being a nice thing to watch, is a bit disconnected of what we experience in game. I don’t say it is not interesting to hear designers speak about how they work for the game but sometimes having more concrete discussion about the in game side would be nice.

BlaqueFyre.5678:

A few points to hit on Janx is accurate but not as accurate as a dos meter that reads actual server information, instead of trying to recognize numbers in a screenshot of the game. In a raid your dps should be a lot higher than your dos in Hotm in Hotm you don’t have the same stats, food buffs utilities and you said you and another rev tested the dps, might isn’t the only contributing damage increasing boon, in a raid you should have perma quickness, as well as vulnerability on the target which all increase your damage more. It would be very simple for Anet to implement a personal dps meter, they have the resources and should know the coding of their own game to implement a small QoL feature such as this.

But my point is that a “simple dps meter” would be more misleading than anything. I know HotM is level 78 exotic and that you are lacking stats but being in a real situation can double or more your dps… but not every build will scale in the same manner so you can’t really compare them out of the real situation. If they’d add a DPS meter in the game, I really can’t see it as simple, unless it is just a comparison for all raid members of the total amount of damage they did during the last encounter… so more a performance tool than a theorycrafting one.

reapex.8546:

That would be nice but that is when the finger pointing would start to guess who did the least amount of damage but I guess that is more of a player issue.

The thing is there is a point when you reach enrage where you know that at least one guy is not doing enough damage. Before that you will see if somebody dies too much, don’t follow the mechanics, if health bar don’t refill fast enough, if you lack boons throughout the encounter…
But when you hit enrage, you know it is a lack of DPS, and everybody will tell you that they are doing their rotation correctly.

If you see someone playing the meta build who does far less damage than the others or less than what is expected at least then you know this person has not understood how his build work. Actually with the dominance of metabattle it is often the case.

People just open the window to select the trait and then go on fight, many don’t even take time to read which trait they have. Last week, a condi warrior told me “but warriors don’t have trait that proc bleed on crit”… actually someone playing war since release apparently…..I also had a discussion with a condi engi who said he didn’t understand why I said that he need to go melee to get the best out of his pistol 4….

So after playing a bit with JaxnX I’m quite sure that we won’t see any official dps meter for long in the game.

The first reason for this is that there is no proper test environment in-game (Bloomhunger 2 is maybe the most real case but just to run a test..).

My second conclusion is that buffs and debuffs in the game are so huge that running a test of any sort would need a “tunable” zone where you can add might, vuln on the target, make it move or do some action to test torment and confusion.

As a new user of the tool, I directly went to HotM with a guildmate. Both of us Rev in raid. We got 25 might quite easily but couldn’t go higher than 5 to 7 k DPS on the indestructible golem. The day after, just for fun, I tried a condi build (without might) and got the same DPS. I could then have said that condi rev does as much dps as Glint/Shiro herald. Moreover, VG has a DPS req of something like 7k (8 damage dealers over 6 minutes for 22M HP), so I could also have conclude that I didn’t reach the DPS check…. and well it’s not like Rev rotation is hard.

But then I went on VG and measured the DPS. As herald I was doing about 13k DPS on P1 (ended the fight at 9). Then I changed to Air sigil and it increased of about 1k5. Now I have yet to try my brand new ascended sword.

So for me the biggest problem for Anet to implement a DPS meter is to do it right and in a manner that can reflect what you actually do in real fights. I think the design of such a tool is kinda ressource consuming.
That said, if they simply add a window at the end of an encounter where you see at least the amount of damage of the entire team it would be really helpful to see if someone has a problem.

The alacrity nerf may eventually reduce the quickness uptime, hence reduce Rev auto. Now the question is: will the damage transfer towards precision strike compensate the loss of quickness ?

Ok it is a kind of grumpy post but from this post : https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Communicating-with-you/first#post4318087 there was a good sentence which said

A lot of the questions I’ve seen posted this week are as simple as this: does ArenaNet have an agenda to never do something? That’s almost never the case, and if it is the case you deserve to know and we’ll make sure we get more clear.

So I was wondering if this Q1 road map wouldn’t have been a great occasion to honestly tell us that the dungeons are dead. I know it is a bit old but I still find the way it has been done (the two lines in the economy blogpost) lacked of manners…

I’m a bit sad to see that LS3 is pushed later this year, especially since there were a lot inconsistencies in the story (nightmare court, timing issues, sylvari hates …. ) but I think the goal is to finish the story of the raid first so it makes sense.
Generally I think it is good to give this kind of sneak peek of the development for the next months, I just wish that in between there would be some High end philosophy blog post about development of the new things.
Just to give an example, players were surprised to discover the 4 stats combos in HoT but sadly I didn’t see anything about the philosophy of it. Why 4 ? Why did you choose those stats? Why is there a higher stat budget? Why concentration minor and associated with toughness? Why having a full offensive stat combo…. Well so many questions that were never addressed. I know it wouldn’t change the result but it is interesting for some of us to know how the design for new gameplay

How to say if wanted or not if we don’t know what is the base of the ranking and if there is something to earn from that.

Honestly I could totally imagine a week/month challenge of a preset lvl 100 path of Fractals (like before HOT) where teams competing should be the quickest to create a ranking and have rewards according to that.
Or the same Fractals repeating and becoming harder and harder where you don’t have the possibility to rez a fully dead guy.

Right now there is nothing to rank players on, no other score than Fractal level… which eventually will be the same for everyone. So far we have no clue of what they would like to do… and in fact they don’t have either. Tbh they had ambitious plans for HoT but the result was poor and they barely acknowledged it…

The worst thing for me in DS is by far the timer. How many times did we end up with our guild by being split in different maps without any possibilities to join others’ map… That kills the fun. I don’t really see why the SW rules can’t apply here, especially since there is a requirements of player number for the first event to start. I could imagine they don’t want the boss to be farmed by map hoping, but normally to finish blighted trees you need a map that is almost full. And if this is too much of an issue there could always be a debuff that forbid to join a Mordy fight for one hour after defeating one..

And for the Mordy fight, yes, it ends up being a bit boring. The main problem is that the regular attack phases (on head and body) contribute for nothing in term of damage compared to the chopper phase. And this last phase is so RNG, sometimes you just don’t have enough time to go from the chopper to the dragon. There should be a better balance between damages in normal attack phase and chopper phase…

Pepsi.8907:

Kuya.6495:

This could easily be fixed by changing the blur on well of precog to distortion which does prevent point capture. Making alacrity a buff you can corrupt/strip seems like a good idea, but first i would wait to see what happens with chronobunker when you change blur to distortion on well of precog. We shouldn’t over nerf.

Exactly my point, I especially wanted to emphasis that I was aware that Chronobunker had problems that needed to be seen, not that they all needed to be adressed.
WoP not preventing point cap is THE major one initiating the flame however.

The problem here is that WoP applies to others and the chrono will be then hated by his team if he uses the well on a point because everyone will be afffected without wanting it. It is the same philosophy as when they changed Mallyx to not be countered by people in your team.

Take your pink glasses off! During the golden age of GW1, people were complaining a lot about balance as well.
Ok now more people use forums and over exaggeration has become a way of life but it is not really different.
Honestly when they started to split everything it was just the lazy way to either kill something in PvP (not balance, simply kill) or to give OP skills in PvE so that some carebears would be sure that they never have to learn to play because there was always a brain-dead solution. In term of design it was a way to create the easiest slope in every situation.
If they must split thing I hope it won’t be a skill to skill thing because the game will loose a lot of interest in term of challenge and build diversity.
General rules like retaliation or condi numbers (previously confusion) should be enough.

ChrizZcE.5981:

I´d have no problem with raids if it wasn´t for the massive ascended gear grind that new players are facing and having to play a specific class/build.

Ascended gear is by far the worst thing to ever happen to GW2.

Why keeping on saying this when plenty of people have posted vids where they actually beat the first raid in full exo or the ones in ascended finish it with 2 min left on timer (2 min out of 8 left = 25% of “over-dps” and asc is less than 25 % dps increase !)?
The thing is you beat the first boss and get a chance at finding ascended stuff… so the more you beat the raid the more ascended stuff you have.

Junkpile.7439:

Dude using some weird magi gear and telling that he is casual. Something is wrong if you need to make new gear just to clear content. Would be nice if gaming skills would mean more than class and gear.

Since when is magi weird ? it cost 500 k karma for a full exo set… nothing really hard to get.
Gear is obviously important in the game, else we would all play naked. But it is the same in every MMO.
Class is important in the synergy but there is no mandatory comp to beat the raid. Sure if you only have 3 mesmer as condi dealer you may face some troubles but almost every class can have a condi build that does enough damage … with the right gear ofc. Conversely there are several builds for every class to fit in a raid but again your gear has to reflect your role : offensive stat for dps, Toughness as main for tank and healing as main for healer. Well there is space for some adjustments but it is a good start which seems not so hard to achieve. You may not be THE OPTIMAL META TEAM but before being faster than the others one has to focus on beating the encounter first.

Reading this topic I first thought I never got this bug but thanks to screenshots I realised I somehow got it but I sorted out.
What worked for me was to go backwrads, up the slope, after the first chak wave. It went to next phase immediately.
Now I remember that the first time I actually made a huge tour of the instance without anything happening.
Try the trick, it may help you.

I really fell they didn’t put the effort they first wanted into the new Fractals. Basically they should have had a specific insta for each island depending on its level.
For example swamp is a short one and having the really punishing (and a bit stupid) insta for this one makes sense but those that are intrinsically harder should get a balanced instability to compensate.
Before Hot I was dreaming about having path that were pre determined like rolling swamp first would give you a higher chance to get Cliffside and Mai Trin. It is a matter of balancing content.
Globally the blogposts they made about Fractals since 2012 are always full of promises but since it is the only small group content they want to continuously develop there should be more work force on it, able to react quickly. The islands are already made, so now they “only” have to tweak numbers for instabilities, damage, health pools and rewards but this can’t be a side-job.

What I find a bit sad is that all maps have more or less the same timing of 2 to 2.5 hours. For VB it is totally fine and makes sense since the day/night cycle is the same everywhere in the game but the other don’t seem to have a real reason.
What annoys me more is that there is no “play well and it goes faster” map like SW is. Some timers are ok but DS for example doesn’t need one and could work like SW : a new map opens and fills slowly until at least 15 people are in to start the event. When more people enter they spread in different lanes. Once the map is full, a new one open in which people have to wait to be 15 and so on.
Like SW people would want to fill the map when the three lines approach the commander fight by lfg’ing.
AB could have the octovine pop only when all towers are freed.

I’m not saying nothing should be on timer but having everything is not good either and only make people stressed about LFG which in the end doesn’t ease guild life. For example if we want to do DS with the guild, we ungroup to each find a map and once one seems to have more people we invite each other and then taxi people in. If somebody arrives 5 minutes later, it is too late, map full… see you tomorrow my friend, tonight you are excluded.

Do you know how much resources they’ve put in raid? More than any other activities in the game ? How many people are working full time on raids ?
On top of that 1-10 % of player base can beat it… for now. When DOA was released in GW1 I don’t more people could beat it… after 3 years I think more then 50 % could. So after two days with no insider infos you think you can draw those conclusions that are so big that they deserve to open a new thread on the forum ?

Fair question : Can some DPS wear a mix stuff like Knight armor and weapon + Zerk Jewels ? Or Apothecary armor, giver weapon and sinister/viper jewel?
If yes then the diversity is achieved.

What I mean is that the minimal requirements is not just a prefix, but stats. The so-called berserker meta means you have to bring all offensive stats to kill as fast as possible. In the raid configuration, as long as you kill within the timer it is fine, no record required… at least for now.

If someone comes and say that a DPS players needs (maybe I’m way too far) 2200 Power, 60% crit (or less crit but more ferocity) then I guess it is up to the player to find the more suitable itemization for his character. If you want to bring HP, more damage, condis, toughness then you have the choice… hence diversity.

If someone has tried I’d be curious to hear about it.

Opc.4718:

The raid DIDN’T in fact get beaten within 15 minutes. That was just pure BS. Check out this twitter post by DnT attempting some backpedaling damage control:

http://i.imgur.com/suxl7xf.png

I understand there was a bad communication. Nike acknowledged this on reddit :
https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/3t8bxx/dnt_removed_from_raid_testing/cx429hy

But in those cases the first message is one of the most important, it was not done in a right manner. Add to this the salt banner, and other , let’s say, not too humble messages and you get this. Communication is important in any circumstances because it our way to interact. It shouldn’t be taken so lightly. After we all complain so much how Anet has some improvements to do in that field we have here a good example how players also lack some good way of communicating.
The worst is that this story is sad for everyone : Anet because they have to publicly take measures against players who’ve helped them a lot, DnT because their input in the content will never be recognized and for us because it will be more difficult to find high-end game guild to continue this work.

Zetsumei.4975:

Am I the only one hearing how salty anet is that the raid can be speed cleared in 15 mins. Also lol as little as people are gonna want to admit it, the future raids are only gonna be speed cleared even faster of there is only a world boss guild testing it.

I think they’re fine with raids being eventually on farm. During twitchcon Colin made a comparison between raids and Elite zone from GW1. Those zones were hard at the beginning but I remember having speed cleared The Deep 2 years after release. The farmable state is ok from their side I think.

Now the fact that a guild send a message towards the entire gaming community that the raid is done 15 minutes after release (some forum exploded saying how Anet was bad at Raid designing) while only GW2 community knew they were in the testing crew was a bad advertisement for the game hence their reaction. From what I’ve seen DnT had no intention to makes raids appear as bad since in all post I’ve read they claim it was fun.
On top of that I think the message saying that they got a 900 g reward thanks to their “insider” position was not clever and may have annoyed the company.

What is bad for DnT though is that Anet’s message states they were granted access to the three wings… so anything they will do in those three wings will be simply disregarded by the players…

Diovid.9506:

Don’t count on the devs responding. I haven’t seen any dev comments on the story (neither on the forums nor on reddit) since HoT and even before HoT devs didn’t post a lot in this subforum.

Well I saw some posts from Bobby Stein, Matthew Medina, Leah Hoyer (among others)… and they read the forum so maybe they will think about it. I somehow guess that the company is a bit busy for the second release date on Friday (China).
Sure if they don’t answer it simply means they won’t do it … but at least one can try.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

Here’s an unanswered question everyone seemed to have forgotten:

What happened to the three Priory scholars from Dry Top? The ones that went westward before the Pact?

Ah yes they were interestingly funny… maybe they simply died after eating that poor beast (Susie was her name iirc)

Now that HoT is almost one month old, I think a lot of people finished the main story. Seeing a lot of reaction towards the story, as well as my personal questions I think it would be nice if the writing team would organize some sort of AMA here or on other social media (twitch, reddit…). It could be done during a Guild Chat show but the format of the show is a bit tricky to have “live” interaction.
The goal would not be to give feedbacks about the story itself (well vs bad written) nor the story telling but really about the story and the lore itself. There are many unanswered (or badly answered) questions like Mallyck, Chrysanthea, E, the Dream and the Pale Tree, the golden cave in SW….
I know some mysteries will remain (and side stories told within the raids) but among the amount of questions that we have there must be some that can be answered. Either because we didn’t find the right place in the game, or because something that the devs thought as clear was not enough for us.

Well do you, lore lurkers, would like that to happen? And do you, story writers, could see such an event feasible in a close future?

The first time I heared the music in the POI I thought it reminded me too much of FF. Don’t know which one but I associated the music to the serie. Now that I discovered it in game, I totally fell it belongs to GW universe…. it is such nice music.
But more generally the HoT music is without any hesitation the best part of the extension.