If it took up inventory space, I would say put a cap on it. The currencies like Karma, Laurels, Fractal Relics don’t take up space though so no cap is necessary.
But the currencies that take up inventory space, like geodes, bandit crests or pristine fractal relics, effectively are already capped. Only it’s not a hard cap, where the game says "you may store 3 stacks of that currency, and not a single bit more), but instead a soft cap, where you decide yourself where to put the cap. You are free to dedicate a full bank tab to one currency (at the expense of not being able to store other stuff in there), or only keep a single stack and spend it all as soon as your stack is full.
While inventory management can sometimes be a nuisance this way (personally I am often so indecisive about what to spend my currency on first, that I end up not spending it at all and dealing with the hassle of not enough bank space instead
), to me it is still infinitely preferable to a hard cap that doesn’t leave any room for each person’s priorities concerning whether to save or spend their loot.
Besides, one of the technical advantages of new currency is that it gives people incentive to play different areas of the game. Take dungeon tokens as an example: Let’s say they unify tokens from different dungeons to all be the same kind of currency. New dungeons are added, that also give unified dungeon tokens and offer rewards for that. Even with currency cap, how many people do you think will go through the process of truly learning and running the new dungeons compared with people just running CoF1 and SE1 daily to grab the new rewards?
New rewards for old currency are nice to have every now and then, but let’s face it: they also take away incentive from diving deeper into new content if you can just collect the currency needed by running old stuff brain-afk. As such, I don’t see currency caps as nothing but an artificial barrier to different playstyles and priorities. We already have soft caps on all the inventory-based currencies (due to limits on available inventory space), no need to make it more of a nuisance by adding hard caps.
Uhm… aren’t dungeons stack in the corner mash 1? With like little to no chance of dying, ever? Or glitching through stuff, or skipping half the dungeon with invis, or always going for the cheap-o semi-exploits (eg.: lupicus half health gone with 1 reflect)? I do not want to offend dungeon running people or anything, but “knowledge” mostly boils down to 1 guy saying “stack here”.
Dungeons are what you make of them, just like pvp or wvw. You can corner stack and mash 1, just like you can advance pvp rank and reward tracks by going into farming maps and taking turns standing in circles (or join unranked queue and loose every match by not contributing), or advance wvw rank by joining the EotM zerg and karma training around that map, again mashing 1.
All of these playstyles are viable to advance in the respective part of the game, and can be done by a lot of people without investing much brain power, attention or practicing. None of them are anywhere near optimal.
Being able to run dungeons optimally, with people that understand their own abilities as well as the dungeon mechanics, requires a bit more thought and effort, just like getting a decent win rate at ranked pvp requires though and effort.
Once you are at the point where you are the one that has enough understanding and experience to make the dungeon run look easy for others, are able to deal with unexpected situations on the fly (ice bow 5 not hitting due to unexpected early defiance stacks? you’d be surprised how many people have problems dealing with that on certain bosses ), and know the mechanics well enough to duo or even solo most dungeons, that’s when you’ll realize that stacking in a corner spamming 1 is not much different from jumping into unranked queue without a clue. You’ll get your advancement without effort, but it’s far from optimal.
People don’t play MMOs for “fun”, its all about the carrot at the end.
Oh no, why didn’t you tell me this before? I’ve been playing this game for all the wrong reasons for 2.5 years and didn’t notice it
.
It’s hard for me to believe that someone running the same path for the 35th time still finds it enjoyable.
It depends on why you play the game, and more specific the dungeon. Personally, the big draw dungeons have for me is playing with people who’s company I enjoy. The most memorable dungeon runs I’ve had (and I have been running plenty of dungeons) are mostly not the ones that just breezed through flawlessly. They’re the ones where the team faced unexpected challenges and recovered from unpredicted mess-ups. I don’t care about what dungeon I run as much as the people I run it with, and they never get “old” .
(edited by Rasimir.6239)
Basically what was said was
" you don’t need to grind, you can do fun stuff for gold."…
The only sufficient gold reward I see in game, comes from dungeons or meta events and unfortunately, I’m not a big fan.
I’m not sure what you’re doing outside of dungeons and meta events, but I do have a steady cash flow while having fun in game.
While I’m exploring the world (either on leveling alts or on those 80s still into map exploration), I can harvest a good amount of crafting material, especially on the mid-level maps, gather lots of different equipment (for salvaging) and loot bags from the foes I meet, gain a handfull of skillpoints (that will give me something worthwhile at the mystic forge once I’ve got all of that character’s utilities unlocked), get story rewards from personal story that have a good chance of containing dyes or other interesting resources, and so on.
I’ve easily gathered all the materials and most of the gold for my legendary of choice (including buying the precursor on the tp) while having fun. No grind involved. The only thing actually keeping me from crafting that legendary is my habit of wasting my gold on gems to unlock even more character slots every time I really get close to buying the precursor .
What are the areas of the game that you find fun? I’m having a hard time of thinking of anything that doesn’t let you gather gold on the side.
Anyone who is defending these traits has never leveled an alt and wanted to play around with it.
I have created and leveled my 2nd guardian, 2nd ranger, 3rd ele and 3rd mesmer after the trait system change (ele and mesmer after npe, too), so not only have I leveled under the new system, but also have the direct comparison of leveling the class before and after. Personally, I find the new system nowhere near as bad as people make it out.
Each class has a couple of traits, especially in the mid-range tier, that are a bit of a nuisance to get. For example, I wanted deceptive evasion (for world exploration and wvw) and warden’s feedback (for dungeons) on my mesmer. While the corresponding trait tier opens at level 60, the traits are actually locked behind lvl 70 content (de hard-locked behind personal story, wf soft-locked behind a frostgorge sound explorer achievement). I was lucky to find a friend that carried me through the explorer one so I would actually get the trait at lvl 60 after all (involving lots of deaths due to the sheer amount of lvl 70+ veterans in the area ).
Some of the trait unlocks are unbalanced, and going out and doing the same unlocks again and again for each character does get tiresome if they follow each other closely (I’m currently leveling a necromancer, but taking it very slowly since I’ve started her a bit too quickly after the latest mesmer). Overall though, I still enjoy the new system more than the old one were traits just appeared out of thin air.
Plus, I’m very much a big fan of an aspect of the trait change that is overlooked by many these days: changing trait points on the fly as long as you’re out of combat, no trainer nor any charge involved. This way, I can actually experiment with what traits and trait lines I have while exploring, instead of being restricted to a certain trait line until I get back to the city and pay my fee to change points around. Trait experimentation wasn’t quite as unrestricted before as some make it out to be.
Agreed, Current leveling Trait and skill system very sux.
Explorer dungeons mods well show this problem, attempt to run these dungeon mod by character < 80 lvl is pain.
Actually it’s still fairly easy if you know what you’re doing. I just recently leveled a mesmer (my 3rd to 80, mesmer being my favourite class to play in dungeons), and actually found dungeoning while leveling a lot more satisfying, because you have to know your class and encounter mechanics at least to a certain extent. You can’t just “freeze and burn” most low-level bosses when you’re leveling yourself, but dungeons on low levels are still very doable.
You will still play the game exactly the same way as before, except now you can deviate into using certain skills specifically.
For most traits I agree, but there are a few that can really change the way you play, like elementalist’s evasive arcana or mesmer’s deceptive evasion. Still, I never used those on my first charcters of the class until well past level 80, because the whole trait system was just so complex, things were changing up so quickly during leveling, and respeccing trait points needed a trainer an some silver coins. Playing around with traits and stuff hardly ever happened. I did use those traits during leveling later characters of those classes, but by then I knew very well what I was doing and how traits and playstyle went together.
In my opinion, traits and the trait system matter so much that it is hampering my willingness to consider buying the expansion. Should the traits be fixed before the expansion, I know I will buy it. Should they not, then no way. I will be uninstalling this game instead.
As far as I know, Colin said that the changes to the trait system will come with the expansion, not before it, so I guess that means you may as well uninstall now .
I just returned to GW2 after being gone for over a year. I tried a few 5 mans and noticed people just run through until they find a certain corner and AOE. Are pretty much all dungeons like this now?
People have had a long time to get used to the dungeons, where mobs are placed/patrolling, and which of those can be easily passed by without much trouble. A lot of people are bored of fighting what is commonly called “trash mobs” (mobs that don’t require interesting fight mechanics and don’t drop special loot), thus they have figured out how to get around them.
Lower level dungeons and their mobs have also become easier to break/skip mechanics by full damage groups, thus the preference for getting enemies into one spot and aoe-ing them. If you go full damage, you don’t want to spread out nor want mobs spread out around you, since defence lies mainly in active use of skills (blinding enemies, reflecting projectiles, boons like aegis, …) that work best if both your party and the enemies you are fighting are close to each other.
That said, there are a lot of people around that prefer a playstyle that relies more on passive defenses (gear with defensive stats, group healing builds, …) and/or prefer not to skip past groups of mobs. For example, when I’m in TA forward with my guild, we usually clear the trash mobs along the path after the 2nd boss encounter, because the skip there can be pretty nasty and several of my guildies feel frustrated by not making it again and again.
It is rare to find groups like that on the lfg though, since the “pug meta” is mostly full damage (equipment with berserker or assassin traits), active defenses and lots of skipping. Don’t hesitate to open your own group with requirements like “no skipping”, “watching cutscenes”, “low levels welcome”, or whatever you feel like. You’ll be surprised how quickly those groups fill. I like to jump into them whenever I catch one of those up on lfg, because they usually are friendly, fun, and a welcome change of pace from my normal dungeon running.
For a class specific question. Do ele’s spec into support roles anymore? Seems like if i die people just continue to aoe and rez after.
As I said above, currently the majority of pugs works on the basis of maxing out damage and active defenses. As such, the ele plays a substantial part of support by bringing might and fury buffs, while traited heavily into the damage supporting trait lines (and of course bringing a ton of personal damage, too). Eles traiting deep into the support trait lines, bringing regeneration, protection and water fields, are more commonly found in WvW or non-lfg groups.
The price for a max-damage group set-up is that the group has to finish encounters before they run out of active defenses. A “traditional” support character (AH guardian, water ele, …) has a good chance of messing this up by not contributing enough to dps and not being able to out-heal/out-protect the incoming damage at the same time. In a group building with defensive stats and traits, you can still have a good spot as a water ele (or whatever support you wish to bring), just don’t expect a random group from lfg to make use of such a build.
Dont get me wrong, i like the short runs. It just feels a little strange.
You’ll get used to it. Just remember to open your own special-requirements lfg if you feel the need for a change, or find a casual guild with people still running dungeons with vastly different team compositions and strategies. But be prepared to not get the best of both worlds … the last CoE p1 run I did with my casual guildies took 50 minutes . I love my guildies for being who they are, but most of my dungeon runs take place outside of guilds, with friends or via lfg, because my guild just doesn’t do the kind of dungeon runs I enjoy most of the time.
I’d love for the SAB to come back. It’s the one thing I’ve been waiting for pretty much since it last closed a year and a half ago. Even my youngest (soon to be 9 years old) is still talking of it and has me periodically check the box in Rata Sum to see if the box has opened again. She’ll be thrilled when she can finally play it again, especially since she’s aquired much better jumping skills in the time since the box last opened.
That said, there is a lot of other stuff to do in game that will keep me busy for many months. I’m a bit torn, I’d love to explore new lands I haven’t been to before, and earn new skills and abilities (through masteries), but on the other hand it feels really good to have time to just mop up whatever goals are only half-way finished.
Disclaimer: Having a busy real life with family, job, house&garden and whatever else the world throws into my path to distract me from gaming, I’ve come to a playstyle that doesn’t really include any farming, but rather jumps from one part of the game to another purely depending on what I feel like at the time .
That said, what’s keeping me busy (and surely will for a while yet), in no particular order:
- Completing the luminescent skin collection that came as part of the second half of season two. I prefer to only jump into Silverwastes occasionally, to not get burnt out on it, so progression is slow, but steady.
- Completing the dungeoneer collection. I really enjoy running dungeons, especially with friends, so I’m slowly getting there. So far, I haven’t finished any of the individual dungeon skin collections necessary, but a few are getting close.
- Unlock traits on my post-April characters, as well as XIII traits on the older characters. I currently have 4 80s that were created after April ‘14, that, while all having functioning builds for pve and wvw, could use some more trait variety, so I’ll take them out into the world whenever I feel like it to check on the events/areas that give those traits.
- Leveling characters. Personally, I’ve got a necro I finally want to get to 80 (the last class I haven’t gotten to 80 yet), plus a few other class/race combinations I’d like to have access to.
- World exploration is always an option. There’s fun in going through areas again if you haven’t been there in a while.
- Gain more experience with classes/builds. There’s quite a few classes/builds out there that I’d like to learn how to play better in specific areas of the game, e.g. guardian in high-level fractals or necro in wvw.
- Crafting (if you haven’t done so before). While I have crafting maxed on my main account, I have hardly developed any crafting skills on my second account, and am getting to the point where I’m feeling the need to change that (fractals past lvl 30, crafting the cultivated vine and Mawdrey). One of these days, I’ll start hoarding materials to finally get those crafters anywhere in their trades.
- PvP ranks (for specific finishers like phoenix and dragon) and WvW ranks (for wvw abilities) are always tasty do gather, too. While I don’t play either regularly, I enjoy it every now and then and am always pleasantly surprised when a new finisher or ability unlocks.
I’ll trade you your snow for our sideways rain … it’s +5 around here, again, with enough wind to make the rain seemingly coming from any direction at the same time . We’ve maybe had 2 proper snow days this winter .
The worst part about it: as long as the weather is just rainy and unpleasant, I can’t even send the kids outside on the weekends, so they’re constantly whining about needing computer time and taking over my gaming pc!
I was dabbling around in pvp on my (seldom-played) thief today, remarking to a friend how I totally suck on playing thief. He said “bring your thief and we’ll do some dungeons together”. Well, why not, sounded fun …
Next he said “let’s do Arah p2”. A quick check of the world map revealed that the closest my thief had ever been to Arah was Pagga (?) waypoint in the very east of Malchor’s Leap. 15 minutes of running later, I got to Cursed Shore … to find that I needed two XIII traits for what he wanted to show me, which of course I didn’t have (seeing as the thief had been nowhere near the necessary events before), so with 9 pre-trait-revamp and 4 post-trait-revamp lvl 80s, I bought traits from the trainers for the first time .
Anyway, we went on to duo p2, him on guard (and occasionally warrior), and me on a thief I have never before seriously played. Surprisingly, it was not only a lot of fun, but much easier than on my mesmer, the other class I had done that path duo before. We had to try a few times at Lupi (for some reason, I always see the tell for the p1 kick, but never get my evades off in time, so I down on that one pretty regularly on any class), but the rest of the path was fine. I never thought I’d bring the thief to dungeons at all (it’s one of the classes I like least so far). I guess I’ll have to play her more often in the future .
Blacktide certainly isn’t the easiest server for map completion right now, but it’s possible to do it nevertheless.
I did my first map completion on this account on Vabbi, back when they were in the position Blacktide is now, always last and with such a big difference to the other two servers that there was maybe a 5% chance of us being blue (I actually think it was less), and no mathematical chance at all to be green.
I did a lot of map completion at off-times, weekend mornings were great for that. Every now and then you’d find a couple of people, too, and be able to group up for a tower or two. Eventually one evening I found a random 3-man-zerg on the virtually empty green borderlands and took the green keeps with them, the last spots missing.
To be honest, it did take me several weeks (probably a few months even, I don’t really remember) to get WvW completion done on that character, but it was worth it. My suggestion would be to look for a build that isn’t too squishy (not easy on an ele I admit ) and take as much swiftness and as many stunbreakers as you possibly can. And, of course, a huge bucket of patience!
Other than that, as others have mentioned, DPS Meters are a bad idea and should be avoided like the plague. They discourage friendliness , accessibility, and co-operation, and encourage negative playstyles, limit build creativity and originality, and train players in all the wrong things when it comes to actually learning the game and becoming good at it.
Please, enlighten me as to how DPS meters do any of these things.
Are you telling me that anyone with a DPS meter instantly turns into someone who thinks that other players’s respective worths are defined solely by the holy numberz? Because funnily enough, that’s a load of horse crap.
DPS meters show one thing: DPS. They tell you nothing about the other contributions people brought to the fight, like sharing buffs for additional group damage (might, fury, banners, spotter, …) or extra defences (aegis, protection, …) that allow group members to keep up their damage rather than spend the time dodging, healing or whatever. They don’t show that you “lost” dps because a group member messed up the mob positioning.
There is a ton of contributions to a really good group fight that won’t show up on a dps meter. My own experience in other games is that especially in pugs people use them to concentrate almost exclusively on those numbers and try to get the best on the expense of other, sometimes much more helpful, contributions to the fight. Just because one build does more damage than another doesn’t automatically mean it’s the better build for the “job”.
In a previous MMO I played, my main was a healer. I regularly played her successfully in endgame raids. My preferred set-up, that I felt most comfortable with and that worked best with my raid group, had a strong component of group buffing for damage prevention and regeneration. My max healing per fight was not nearly that of a healer concentrating on maximizing healing and playing whack-a-mole with healthbars to the max, but my group was always comfortably healthy, with much less fluctuation in health levels than that of a “max healing” healer. Still, I knew people (and quite a few of them, although, of course, outside the raid I was part of ), that judged “good” healers only by the numbers they could bring to the table.
Judging from the experiences I have made, I would also expect a wide-spread use of dps meters to lead to a narrowing down of build variety and a lot of people neglecting support and control (even more) to just go for their personal biggest numbers. I know there are people who enjoy just that, big numbers, but personally I enjoy playing with other people, getting teams to work even if they may not be optimal on paper, and getting a group that works well together, with each person’s skills meshing with the rest and contributing to the whole, instead of individual numbers. A good group really is much more than the sum of parts, but concentrating on just one individual score without taking the synergies into account it unfortunately a good way to limit variety and complexity of build and group composition.
And yes, in case you haven’t noticed: I’m not a fan of dps meters .
Chef? Come on, we know Bloodstone Dust has absolutely no culinary applications.
None.
So what about those piles and piles of dragonite ore that’s piling up in my storage?
What do you have as your end game content
GW2
and why?
Because there’s always nice people around to play with
To be honest, I’ve tried to think about what my “end game” is in this game, and there’s really no activity I can single out as being the go-to content for me. Some days I go on dungeon tours with friends. Other days, I enjoy a good fractal or two. Again at other times you’ll find me in WvW for whole evenings at a time, or playing around in pvp (although I have to admit that I’m a lousy pvp-er ). I love leveling characters (13 at 80 at the last count), and exploring the world (6 to 100% so far). I like to jump into Dry Top or Silverwastes occasionally (just one more achievement missing for the luminescent collection), and even do a world boss or two most weeks (although that’s probably my least favourite content in game).
I guess I’m probably not the right person to ask this in the first place. I love a good dungeon run as well as a high-level fractal, as long as I’m with the right people that play together. I don’t enjoy either dungeon or fractal with people that get upset by little hick-ups or just try to force their strategy on content and party, regardless of whether the strategy fits the current party or not.
I enjoy learning about and getting better at all the dungeons and fractals, and the people that help me with tips or back-up for when I mess up. I don’t enjoy it when I bring my mesmer to a dungeon because I feel it’s the best contribution I can bring to the group, and get told in the face “ele or gtfo”.
I guess I’m more of a puzzle than a reward person here … I enjoy making dungeon (or fractal) runs work (and work good), even (and sometimes especially) if the party isn’t the cookie cutter perfect set-up where each player can be replaced by another, identical-acting one. I enjoy beating the encounters with the resources (aka players and classes) at hand. I don’t enjoy rushing through a dungeon with a set of pre-defined classes that behave in a predictable way and get nasty as soon as one little cog in the machine doesn’t quite work as it’s “supposed to”.
Looking ahead, I’ll be thrilled if HoT does indeed come up with new fractals and dungeons for me to play and enjoy the company of whatever party I’m with, because that’s a kind of content I enjoy much more than world bosses and zerg events. The more (variety), the better. But I’ll certainly spend a good part of my time exploring the maps and the possibilities of specializations and masteries even if they don’t place any of the new story in 5-man instances of any kind.
I’m all out of bloodstone now, actually.
I figure they’ll add something for dragonite. One day I’ll play my Engineer…
This looks just like my engineer’s backpack, right down to the 100 dyes and 77 clovers . Could they be related?
I just wish items like Mawdrey II didn’t give garbage, it’s barely worth using them over just trashing the stuff. Instead they should have made it so that you could refine a few items with a lower or no additional cost per day. (I.E. With 2 obsidian shards and 10 reagents, Mawdrey could eat 500 dust and poop out 5 bricks a day)
Oh, I’m happy with the trash it gives … actually I’ve got several of the trash collection items on my second account out of it .
Other than that, by now I’ve gotten three lesser vision crystals, a giant eye, some lemon grass, maybe a dozend unidentified dyes, a good selection of other useful items, and a large stock of basic t4 materials like linen, leather or wood (by opening all the gifts on a lvl50-ish alt and salvaging the equipment). I certainly wouldn’t call all of that garbage.
Most of the collections aren’t even worth doing as a long term goal, because if you get some of the items needed for them you’re better off selling them for the 100g+ they sell for.
Have you considered that the items are that expensive precisely because of people trying to force-finish the collections? Without the collections, or once the “I must have it now” people are mostly done, a lot of collection items will be relatively worthless again.
To me, collections look like they are working as intended. It’s fun to every now and then find an item that goes into one of the collections. It’s not a “do it, and do it now” checklist, but rather a kind of trophy case displaying shinies you’ve aquired in the course of regular play. I like how collection items accumulate slowly but steadily, and if I finish a collection, it’s a pleasant bonus .
Well, I guess my eles go very much against the meta … no human t3 for them, ever . But I really like how they turned out.
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I’ve leveled a new character over the last couple of weeks, that I did all story dungeons (except Arah) and quite a few low-level explorable dungeons on while leveling, in whatever gear and traits I had available at the time. It certainly is doable and lots of fun (at times more fun than just breezing through with fully equipped 80s ), with the small catch that you will encounter a bunch of people who won’t care to play with a low-level.
For example, I did SE p1+3 with a good friend. Both of us are very experienced in the dungeon as well as the classes we played (it was actually my 3rd mesmer to 80), but we’ve had several people join the party from lfg, see a lvl 6x mesmer in the roster, and quite the party again immediately, without even saying “hi”. Their loss .
Easiest way to jump in is to post your own lfgs, stating that you’re new to dungeons and below level 80. I’m sure you’ll have a lot of fun exploring and learning all the paths, probably even a good bit more than waiting until you are lvl 80 and fully equipped just to race through with a bunch of non-talkative pugs. You may even learn the paths better, since at lvl 80 there are quite a few mechanics simply ignored in the lower level dungeons thanks to the sheer damage the group puts out.
I really don’t think that it would be too much of a stretch for all races to gain access to Golemancy, and I see specializations as the route in.
Equip a full set of superior runes of the Golemancer , a Ho-Ho-Tron backpack, any golem mini you like, and (if asura) one of the elite golem skills (preferably the defensive one, as it looks great next to the rune one ), get a stack each of Inquest golem arms and Mini golem bombs , and you’re well on your way to being a golemancer. My own is just missing his full set of Ho-Ho-Tron gathering tools . It’s awesome fun to play (more fun on Asura obviously).
Progeny: Ha! I’m the dragon again, and Destiny’s Edge is too busy fighting each other to fight me. Die!
Cub: Scorch it all, the dragon got us! If only Logan didn’t run away and Eir was a better leader.
Child: Yeah? Well…if only Rytlock had stuck to the plan and Zojja wasn’t so cranky!
Progeny: Mmm, Destiny’s Edge tastes delicious. Now I shall conquer the world! Ah-ha-ha-ha!
I don’t know how often I’ve played that story step , but I still have to stop and watch the children play every time .
edit: although Zojja saying “Who are you two and what have you done with Logan and Rytlock?” in CoE story runs a close second in my list of favourites. editend
(edited by Rasimir.6239)
Where is the best place to farm keys?
Some map completions provide keys as well..dont know by heart which ones but that could be googled
It’s random. Each map completion (outside of cities) has a chance at either a transmutation charge or a key. Check the Wiki for further info.
(edited by Rasimir.6239)
Why this pickyness even if you do not look for a speed run?
My suspicion is because it takes a lot of knowlede of your own class/character, the abilities of other classes, and the mechanics of the dungeon to be able to adjust your playstyle to the party at hand. Some people don’t care to invest time (even what little of it a non-perfect group adds to the regular run time) or effort into this, while a lot more simply can’t do it, as their own knowledge and experience is not enough to comfortably deal with non-perfect conditions.
I’ve been pugging story modes on my leveling mesmer lately, at (or slightly above) level, and usually ended up with groups of people around my level and below 1.5k AP (it’s a bit embarassing when you find yourself having about 3x the AP of the rest of the group combined ). I actually had a lot of fun doing so, but I did it purely because it looked like a fun activity, not because of whatever was to be gained at the end (most traits I unlocked will probably never be used … for some reason all the traits I really want seem to be locked behind personal story and map completions).
There are a lot of people out there who play dungeons not (primarily) because it’s the kind of content they find fun right now, but for the rewards (gold, tokens, exp, whatever) at the end, and those people tend to not be willing to invest more effort than absolutely necessary in a run. There’s not just black and white, speed-run and non-speed run, but there’s a large gray area inbetween of more or less “painful” kinds of run, and for many people a group composition they are comfortable with, with people going for the same kinds of strategies, is desirable.
From my personal experience, it’s actually not that many people that are all that picky on the lfg, it’s just that groups without requirements fill up much faster and thus don’t stay on the lfg long enough to be noticed. So LFGers in general aren’t picky at all. I’d guess that the majority of lfgs actually are along the line of “p1” without requirements (beyond those enforced by the lfg tool), the picky ones just stay up so much longer that they seem to be much more than they really are.
(<3k AP usually means complete newbie and most people >15k AP don’t need their hand held).
I wouldn’t count on the 2nd part. Most of my guildies have more AP than I do (and I already have above 15k on my main account), and many of them consider themselves dungeon and fractal regulars, but running with them is often more painful (and a lot slower) than your average lfg pug . They do, however, rarely pug, so maybe the high-ap pugs you meet via lfg are just a specific sub-section of the general player base.
I guess I’m really getting old, my attention span isn’t what it used to be …
I went on a (overall very enjoyable ) dungeon tour with some forum members on Wednesday evening. Brought my favourite asura mesmer to AC to start off. I did wonder at one point why her damage seemed to be rather meh, but at the speed we were going, I didn’t get to think about it any more. For reasons unrelated to this (at least on my side ), I changed characters for the next dungeon, so didn’t come back to wondering about it.
Last night, logging into the same asura mesmer, I checked her equipment and noticed that she wasn’t wearing her regular berserker/scholar armor but her wvw outfit (rabid with traveler runes) instead. I had used that a couple of days ago trying to help some guildies through living story instances, and forgot to change back.
Sorry about that … next time you see me in a dungeon, please remind me to check my equipment and make sure I’m wearing the right stuff. An old lady and her memory aren’t always the quickest .
To me this sounds a lot like the current trait unlock system. The improvement is that it will be account wide. The dis-improvement is that it will now affect even more than just traits.
What would be your method of choice for character progression in HoT? Personally, I prefer the “complete specific encounters/achievements/collections for progression” way to the generic “gain x amount of generic points for each action you do”, the later being the leveling/experience system we have for lvl 1-80, and in a slightly different variation for WvW and PvP ranks, too .
The way I read the announcement and interviews, several of the mastery point unlocks may in fact be similar to what we have for traits now: Do a specific event once to get a point. Find the chest at the end of some jp or exploartion achievement once for another. Fully map explore a part of the world (once ) for a third. To max out your character progression, you have to do all these things – once.
That’s the big difference to the current trait aquisition: You have to do all of that exactly once, not once for each character you want to play. Plus by the sound of it, you will no longer have specific tasks locked to one specific progression item (“kill the giant grub on eb to get the evasive arcana trait for your ele” … that one is still giving me nightmares ), but will gain points (one pool for all masteries or pooled into specific groups, I don’t know), allowing you to only choose a sub-set of the tasks if you don’t want every point (e.g. leaving out the “useless” traits when unlocking traits for your new character).
What they are trying to do is giving players character progression with HoT without falling back to the old, boring “get x points any way to advance an abstract counter (aka character level) that locks you out of content”. Will this appeal to every player? Probably not, just like leveling 1-80 does not appeal to every player. Will this feel grindy to some? Definitely, just like spending hours in EotM to bypass the “level grind” to 80 feels grindy for some now.
Will this appeal to me? Absolutely. I enjoy exploration and doing all kinds of different things to shake up the routine, but then I even enjoyed parts of the current trait system (although it absolutely does get repetative to unlock traits after the 3rd character through the system … but then, you only have to do it once for masteries ). I’m in no hurry to “finish” this game, and hope that masteries will give me lots of things to do and explore for a long while.
I’m still curious about your answer to the question I put up at the start of this post though: What kind of character progression would you prefer for HoT? Experience/levels that you can easily farm in EotM or similar if you don’t care for the new ways? Some totally different kind of progression I haven’t thought about? Or maybe no progression at all, to go into the new content already capped? The later sounds a bit boring to me … once you’ve explored the ways to the part of the maps you’re interested in, what will you do?
You know what, Laula? Last night, I would’ve traded you those pugs for my group without a second thought . I never thought I’d be so bored on a dungeon run in this game …
We need to run dungeons together more often again .
Taku, I’ll gladly take you up on that offer soon . I need to put you on my other account’s friend list, I haven’t run a lot of dungeons on this account for a while, still trying to complete the dungeoneer collections on the other one.
So, if I’m understanding this correctly, I can do pretty much anything in any order I want, as long as i don’t go into area too high for my current level?
Actually you can even go into areas way above your level if you feel like it. It’s probably not something to do on your first or second character, but later on it can become quite fun. For example, me and some friends once took a trio of lvl 20 asura down south from Hoelbrack to see how far we would get … we ended up opening waypoints and sneaking past enemies all the way down to Fort Trinity in the Straits of Devastation (which is a lvl 70-75 area). It was an interesting challenge (not the least because pretty much every enemy we would meet would one-shoot us ) and lots of fun.
So the game does not restrict you from going anywhere. Some game modes will even up-level you to level 80 (like WvW or the Fractals of the Mist instances) so you can already play them while leveling, although you will, due to lower rarity equipment, not be quite as powerful as a true, decently equiped level 80. Just pick a direction to go, and explore the world. You really can’t go wrong, the worst that can happen is that you’ll actually stumble upon enemies that feel too strong for you and you turn back and come back later.
I think I’m slowly loosing my place in dungeon running in this game . I don’t have the time nor energy to invest into becoming a really “serious” dungeon runner, but I’m enjoying casual outings less and less it seems .
Just last night, a promised a friend some CoE run (he’s got his hands on the scepter precursor and now needs the knowledge crystals to go with it). Unfortunately, at the last minute the “usual suspects” in our casual guild joined the group, people that have been running dungeons from the start of the game, that actually introduced me to dungeons in this game, and that are soooo incredibly phiw I can’t really describe it.
Contrary to some recent experiences I had with them (2+ hours for a lvl 9 fractal with lots of kittening about the “stupid” game rolleyes) we actually got through CoE path 1 without serious casualties. The only deaths were at the laser traps . Our “usual subjects” were congratulating each other about how great the run was in the end … and I was bored out of my mind. Would you believe that it took us all of 50 minutes for a single run of CoE p1 without any breaks? Just continuous (and sooo sloooow) fighting? It feels like a bad dream already …
I think I should go back to pugging after all. It can be unpleasant at times, but not as bad as running with my casual phiw guildies. Don’t get me wrong, I really like those people (most of the time ), but learning how to play more efficiently has effectively spoiled playing with them for me sigh.