I have a healing warrior that goes back and forth between healing banners and healing shouts depending on the content I’m doing. Healing banners is frankly OP in PvE stuff and healing shouts is a great boon to groups in WvW. just my quick 2 cents.
High-five, Pookie!
I originally went banner-heals to raise my swiftness buff uptime, but I found healing banners was a solid way to keep a regular dungeon team upright while putting out damage buffs. And for those big boss situations, shouts help there too.
My best success in being a ‘healer’ comes from staff Elementalist. They’re particularly easy to spec for it, and their water skills always have at least one heal on them, and they’re really good for condition cleansing.
I also have a mace/shield Guardian that’s done pretty well on the front lines. Not quite power healing, but he can throw enough Protection and regen around to add survivability to those around him.
At end-game, look for sigils and runes that will help with healing power, as they’ll be utterly cheap on the trading post. …Mostly because healing is undervalued due to the nature of most of the content.
I’d still take ya, though. It’s less rare in GW2, but I’ve been in situations in the zerg where I get chunked in half, and within two seconds, I’m full again. As melee, it’s often appreciated. Just remember to find a good way to do damage, as that will always be necessary.
It is beyond debate that those who question the price of Precursors deserve naught but the severest Ridicule, as they are Entitled, they despise Hard Work, and they are undoubtedly Communists or Socialists (perhaps Both!). Therefore, it is the duty of the benevolent Rich to expose their Flawed logic. An Unpleasant task, perhaps, but those who have succeeded— through Skill, Cunning, and Superiority of Birth— to amass significant amounts of pixelated Wealth should view the Education of their lesser brethren not as a Burden, but rather as their God-Given Responsibility.
(How’d I do?)
Wow, for a moment, I hated you. Grats.
Reminds me of the faux-conversations I have with my ’bandmate.
/golfclap
Excellent perspective, barefootstep. A lot of people noticed the dissonance between the stated “make it easier to experiment” goal and the reality. What you just said adds to some hard questions that should be asked of dev/management teams.
Meanwhile, the warband hit 80 today. In between fishing around for exotics/runes/sigils, I still have lots of traits to hunt down for my build to be complete.
…This is not helping with my experimentation. I don’t feel ready for end-game content.
Trait system is still bad. :\
September Release brought with it this new NPC and mini-“event” in starting zones, where players are supposed to learn dodge-rolls. There are AoE-knockback-circles and a chest in the middle. And an NPC next to it explaining what to do. And a popup-text in the upper left corner of the screen explaining what to do, too.
Do yourself a favour and position yourself next to one of these spots and wait and watch. I once did. There were players (downscaled and in guilds, so they might not be all that new to the game) who ran in and were bumped back 5, 8, 10 times in a row without even considering what might be the cause. I first thought that they were on auto-run, but they really attempted this chest from different angles, completely ignoring the main reason for this event to even exist.
I do it because it’s fun to get batted around like a ragdoll.
Also, dodgerolling tangential to the chest is an easy daily when it comes up.
Longbow 4 is probably the main reason “bearbow” gets so much hate.
I’ve also had to “Dude, c’mon…” to my Engi buddy as we’ve been running around when I swap to greatsword for my ranger. He’s since learned to apologize for it, so.. progress!
Really though, kids, knockback should be a last resort in most group situations, or if your party is heavily ranged, like my ranger/engi duo team. And if you’re a longbow ranger, use #3’s stealth and wait a few seconds to get the heat off, if your dodge is charging. Pet/someone else should pull aggro somewhere in the 2-3 second mark, and you’re clear to 2/1/1/1/1/1 after that.
But if you play certain dungeon enough times, and gather enough of tokens/relics, you can just get it off of vendor, for 10000, 100000, 100000000000 tokens or whatever.
This sounds way too grindy. No one enjoys playing a dungeon that often.
Repetition isn’t fun if the content is always the same. Some random events (which aren’t very common in GW2’s dungeons) won’t make a dungeon indefinitely replayable.
Corollary: Use random events to give steady rewards.
And I don’t mean fractals. Those are set events in a random order.
If the content is engaging enough, the rewards matter less. Though, we should still have a way to get better rewards.
As a lot of people stated, RNG is fine for things that occur regularly. Someone even detailed when it is/is not okay to have it, based on regularity and trade status. Uncommon but sellable (foxfire clusters) isn’t so terrible, incredibly rare and sellable (precursors) leads to a submarket driven by gold grind, and incredibly rare and soulbound is just unforgivable.
But we have lots of tools on how we can introduce loot/rewards. Drops, daily chests, token rewards, salvaging, crafting, search/skill content, etc. Maudry’s a step in the right direction, at least. A little overpainful, but at least it’s a plausible goal for those who want it. (I just need to run some fractals. Grr. :P)
(edited by Rauderi.8706)
(edited by Rauderi.8706)
I want cookies now.
Thanks a lot, Gaile!
/cry
Nah, I’m kiddin’. =P Great to have such a pleasant (and apparently brave) staffer on the forums.
Ya know, I was thinking about this a bit and keep coming back to the same spot. I (and others) get out the torches and Storm the Castle shouting “They owe us < Insert here > because…” and I kinda get stuck. Then I noticed "What was the Quid Pro Quo? Uh… I give you $60 for a couple of gig of binaries and game server access. “But but I have an emotional investment in this!” Well, that’s on me. Yeah, they could do better than have two random devs kinda smirk and say SAB is on the shelf via some weird web interview. As an aside, that was a really really bad way to let that news out and I don’t even like SAB. But, life is hard, wear a helmet.
[…]
So, it’s settled: What we’ve got is what we have. Smile and be as happy as you can.
Simple point, ANet wouldn’t have to hide in shadows if people could be civil. There’s even posts in the sticky about how to be heard by the dev team. They amount to:
Don’t be a [bad word normally filtered by “kitten”].
And I kinda like “Smile and be as happy as you can.” That’s a good way to be.
Right now, Anet is kittening on the player base. Has been since April.
I want only to know the answer to ONE question:
Why on earth did they think that limiting trait acquisition would allow for improved build experimentation?
Certainly a dissonance between ideology and behavior, yeah?
So, I’m at the Master point with my ranger, 2 levels shy of 80. There’s some traits I want to get at, but they’re:
The story I’ll eventually get to. It’s bad design, but little trouble in the end.
The dungeon? A friggin’ mess. My options are to pester a guild to run/carry an underleveled (read as “non-80 exotic+ geared”) character, LFG, or buy the trait.
So, for the guild, one guild I’m in is a tad… busy. They might run dungeons, but overall, my times don’t mesh their times.
Soooo.. I had to go farming for guilds on the forums. Moderate success, perhaps, and at least the tools to find a guild were there. ( Thanks to everyone who contacted me. I was quite surprised, by the way. )
Still, this requires pestering someone. Bad design and highly inconvenient for someone with time limits.
LFG? Not while the 2-person vote-kick exists. I mean, seriously, ANet? But, if that’s changed in the past while, correct me for working on outdated info, so I can LFG with more confidence. But GW2-LFG is racing FF14’s dungeon community to the bottom right now. :\
Which means I’m probably going to waste time and money to buy at least one trait for the build I’m working on. And it’s just for that build, which is starting to wane in effectiveness due to what seems to be internal cooldowns on spirits.
tl;dr – Trait system still isn’t fun.
I used to think doing a roleplay would be fun, and have done so in one group, only to find out light ERP was involved. Also found out by word of mouth a lot of rpg groups are ERP. Needless to say I don’t roleplay online any longer… just happy to explore, do dungeons, world bosses and level. To be honest, going to Rata Sum and Black Citadel sickens me from hearing suggestive content being /me ‘stated’ or ‘emoted’. I avoid those areas now. I wish there was a way to remove such activity altogether.
Yeeeah. There’s some of this. Depending on what shard I get shunted to, my time in Rata Sum or Black Citadel gets really uncomfortable. Thank Six for blocking user emotes, as that was long overdue.
It’s nominally less awkward when I see RP coming out of non-lore-appropriate names. Like, why bother? >_>
And that’s really sad to me, because elsewhere, I’m a very active RPer (running a game tonight, even :P), but all I find because of Megaserver is awkward conversations where I need an adult, or a jug of chloroform.
Gems? Then you can use the gems to buy the Living Story chapters you miss.
Really though, I’ve seen gems do nothing but climb steady over time.
T6 materials are generally fairly stable, and if any shift comes in precursor acquisition, those will climb until the market corrects.
Consider, though, that any investment you make with gold and turn around to re-liquefy will be subject to some kind of 15% surcharge, so you’d actually lose gold in the long run, unless you’re counting on the investment to grow considerably in the time you’re gone.
I haven’t dropped below 68 transmutation charges since the system was implemented. I get so many from pvp I can change stuff all the time and never run out.
Oh yeah, I keep forgetting that’s an occasional PvP reward. Note to self, go suck at PvP at some point.
Hiding progress behind NRNG is likely to get frustrating, unless the player specifically knows it’s there. So, in a very basic sense, I’m leaning toward #2.
But there’s a lot to consider for token-based or incremental rewards.
Are the tokens sellable (like Mystic Coins, which really need another use), or would they be account bound/wallet materials? Are the token rewards account bound (like karma gear) or sellable (like precursors)?
Do the tokens guarantee a specific reward? The idea of 250 Precursor Tokens and some other ingredients making a specific precursor has hit the table more than once. Or would the tokens allow a player to buy a specific class of item?
One of the biggest questions, how many tokens would be needed? Are they earned once per day, to avoid the effect of farming? What content has them?
But yes, lots of questions.
Beside that, though, I don’t believe that un-rewarding lucky people is necessarily the way to go. A generic flattening of the reward curve just means that everyone has everything eventually, but we need want to continue having a healthy economy. Instead, allowing positive skew by bringing negative outliers in line keeps those ‘unlucky’ people participating in the economy with an element of impatience.
(Why yes, I did buy around 50 Foxfire Clusters in the past few weeks. =P)
Which leads me to think that #2 is better overall. It shows a sense of progression, a quantifiable amount of work both done and remaining. It maintains motivation more than a hidden RNG bonus. Even Magic Find boosts feel pale in loot when we still get a legion of greys and blues and greens. And when that yellow/rare item hits, it’s not worth enough to get excited about, unless it’s salvaged, which has a gambler’s chance of being a huge disappointment. (That was the most expensive 20 silver mithril ore chunk ever.)
lt;dr – Yes to bringing the back end of the luck curve up a little with incremental/token systems, preferably kept to the wallet to avoid clutter.
And John, thank you so much for not just listening, but actively engaging this topic.
I agree. This is a great champion fight – I hope we see a lot more with mechanics going forward.
Me and my hammer thank the designers for this one. I actually felt useful!
