Guild Wars 2

Galen Grey.4709:

Not just that but certainly not bashing the engineering profession in WoW, I’d love for something like that to exist in Gw2 for sure!

Engineering~ <3

But yes, gold sinks are everywhere. Even in a game where you can farm/make every single item from scratch, like FF14. Very elaborate crafting system, but you’d still end up blowing tons of gil on teleports to get those places where the materials are. Or buying them from guild vendors or the marketplace. A savvy crafter can turn that around into decent money, but even then, there’s a 5% tax on sales plus the possibility of a tariff on the purchasing player.

Of course, now I’m reminded that GW2 crafting makes me sad. :\

JustTrogdor.7892:

………….15

Beating a dead mount. ;_;
But anyway..

I can see where a mount would be desirable. Not every class gets a good swiftness/speed-boost combo, and it’s well known Warriors are superior in this regard. Between Discipline trait and warhorn, I’m pretty much always max speed buffed. Buuut, that’s not fair to other classes.

So, thoughts on how it could work:
Starting a mount should take time. A 1-second call plus the mount’s approach animation. (In essence, a 2-3 second cast.)
They cannot be summoned in combat. If you get hit, the mount throws you and runs off, leaving with Knockdown status for a second.
The benefit is the +25% movement speed bonus that appears in some classes. Attacks are replaced with “spur” skills that can give swiftness buffs, maybe even to a small area. It’d be kinda cool to have a little “battle commander” presence and giving swiftness to others while riding a mount. That also leaves room for cosmetic skills for gem-store mounts.
Mounts are large. Larger than Charr. Larger than Norn. And Charr already have notoriously bad footing. Mounts will be very bad for jumping puzzles, slipping off spots they can’t stand on. No Skyrim horses here, yo. When a mount is summoned, if it can’t follow your path in a straight line (no jumping) for range X (1500? 2000?) the summon will fail.
Mounts are unusable in PvP. WvW is debatable in my mind, but it would make purchasable mounts feel like pay-to-win, which could be eased with a high-gold-cost generic Riding Dolyak mount or something, making it available to everyone. Or having a time-limited WvW-only item available for free from a headquarters vendor.

Is it going to happen? Nope. We might see more non-utility toys in the shop, but that’s about it.

If they were going to do a new race, they would hype the kitten out of it, attending E3 and screaming from the rooftops.

So… nope, no new races, just yet.

TheDaiBish.9735:

I think the main problem is that content doesn’t require people to do anything other than damage.

Look at a game with defined class roles a la the Trinity. If the content in that game didn’t require someone to constantly be healing, or for someone to draw aggro and soak damage, then it could have all the class roles in the world, people wouldn’t bother playing the roles that aren’t needed.

What content needs to do is replace the class roles by adding roles unique to that encounter. With an open system like GW2, the content needs to get people to think “What can I bring to this fight that will get us past it?”. Content designed as such adds much more depth than having defined, required roles.

Imagine the Lover’s basic mechanic of needing to keep them away from each other (forget the actual implementation).

One group might decide to take one heavy control + sustain to keep the one busy, another with control and damage to join 3 other DPS to burst the other down as quick as possible. Another group might split into 2 equal groups and tackle both of them at the same time, while another is dedicated to taking down adds.

Even a fight as basic as the Effigy in CoF can have roles, even if everyone is DPS. One person’s role is to wipe the crystals out, while the others attack the Effigy. Tweak the crystals slightly that add a stacking debuff (say, a DoT that can’t be cleansed. Increases in intensity), and then you have a fight where a small amount of co-ordination is needed (swapping from the role of damaging the boss to crystal-clearing duty).

Can ANet hire you?

I’ve said in other threads roughly the same thing. If GW2 is going to blossom as a non-Trinity game, it needs to design encounters around the many facets of its active gameplay. Its reliance on monolithic bosses actually hurts their encounter design.

You could always have an Equipment bag/box in your inventory. That would prioritize the dagger dropped into your inventory to that specific bag.

I understand the cutesy reason behind it, but… blagh. I’d love to use it, but it being undyeable is pretty bad. :\

(Tip for those trying to match the color, try Shylac.)

Seras.5702:

Not only that, but I have to participate in my personal story (even if it is my 7th alt) to unlock traits from Claw Island, Forging the Pact, Source of Orr, etc. Not to mention that when I choose which lesser race to help in my personal story, oops! now you’re locked out of 2 traits. Your story doesn’t have the option to help the ogres? Can’t unlock that trait…gotta pay for it.

Wait, WHAT? o_O

It’s pitchfork and torches time.

Lobo Dela Noche.5127:

Scientia.8924:

With over 1200+ posts, this thread should be stickied by now

With over 1200+ posts, they should have done a roll back by now

Y’know, normally, I would say ‘suck it up, princess’ when it comes to “bad” things in patches.
This is not one of those times. They need to rollback the trait hunt so hard that WalMart sues them for copyright infringement.

tl;dr – Trait unlocks need to go back to the drawing board.

DeWolfe.2174:

Which, I don’t recall ever seeing a player ask for such a change.

It’s a side effect of some players saying “GW2 isn’t enough like GW1!” and wanting skill hunts like the good old days. So, I understand the intent.

The execution, as seems to be ANet’s modus operandi of late, is flummoxed. Even after an update a few weeks ago, the trait hunts are laborious, boring, random, and poorly paced with the leveling experience.

We managed to make it to page 2 (about a feature in game since launch), and not bring up the “need for mounts”? Yay.

…Yeah, seeing no need for this thread, since goldsinks gonna sink, on way or the other.

I’d rather have boss timers than not, because going to an API tracking site and waiting a half hour for a spawn is utter garbage.

BUT, the schedule needs a huge fix. A 3 hour rotation would fit many more people for their actual play periods. And there’s no need to have “the one featured boss of this 15-minute period.”

One of the reasons we get such huge zergs on these bosses is that the boss of the quarter-hour is the only interesting thing going on at the time. If they spawned parallel to each other, that would split the players between boss runs and provide a little choice. (The other way is to lower the population cap. Because 75-100 people don’t need to gangkitten Ulgoth. Seriously.)

Dusty Moon.4382:

I will be blunt in my response because I have seen this in many other MMO’s. Players want the developer to nerf a profession because they are ‘assumed’ OP. Most times they are not. Rift had this issue with the Saboteur profession at the beginning and Trion listened to the whiney players and nerfed that profession into oblivion. It was unplayable and it was originally a glass cannon but people wanted a nerf rather than learn how to play against it.

Same thing in this game. You can drop both like a hot potato, but YOU have to know your own profession well. This is something that people are not talking about. You can have an OP profession but if you know how to play against it, you can take it down. Neither are OP but they need to be in melee range for spike damage – CC them and condi them into oblivion.

Just gonna leave this Extra Credits link here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EitZRLt2G3w Balancing for Skill

Are Warriors OP? Nope. But they are low skill / high reward as a class. And we need that in a game.
What we also need are high skill /higher reward classes. Classes that perform better but survive less. Those classes reward a skilled player, but not so much in a way that utterly dominates. (Well, usually. I tip my hat to the Engi that trucked me in WvW months ago.)

I’ve seen quite a few people recommend giving Adept trait unlocks for free.

From a development standpoint, this is a great idea. Not only does this give characters something to start with at level 36 (for dungeons), but this frees up a bunch of tasks that were unwieldly to begin with and weren’t suited to the character level they open in. (100% Harathi completion from level 35… when the zone ends at 45. And that’s not even the most egregious offense.)

Without having to spread out assigned tasks through Adept tier, those tasks could be laced into Master tier, when characters have a bit more freedom to explore zones without running into excessive level caps. So, even if they don’t change the level/point schema, they can run Master tier traits from 25-60 zones, which covers a lot of ground. It also gives them more design space for introducing new traits.

1. Not closing the “coverage gap” in WvW.
If there aren’t players on a map section, there should be NPCs spawning and battling it out. While a few veterans isn’t going to stop a zerg train, having something other than the buyable defenses would help even out things. As it is, the server matchups have been horrid.
2. Uninspired boss encounters.
Between Defiant, Immune-condition, and one-hit-KO mechanics, the devs are supporting complaints about “the zerker meta” and frustrating players who want better build/gear diversity.
3. Storytelling
Because latter half Personal Story and Living Story Season 1 were both disappointing.
4. The RNG loot grind
Legendaries, Precursors, Ascended crafting (SILK), Black Lion Tickets, etc. We’re not getting rewarded for our time in ways that don’t insult us.
5. Lack of time-sinks
And, therefore, money-sinks. Instead of having this slap-in-the-face Ascended crafting, they could have done something else to remove inventory from the trading post. As it is, endgame is dungeon running, fractals, exploration completion, PvP/WvW. Where are the hobbies and time-sinks to pull money from the economy?

On the list: Black Lion chests that actually have gasp ticket scraps. That’d be grand.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

So, in response, I made a couple of video guides on youtube detailing how to go through each of the trials. You can still find them on youtube, what with their low presentation and somewhat clunky cuts between sections (I got better…). This encountered another problem: No one watched the videos. Sure, I got a few hundred views on each, but this was only a small portion of the population.

Tangential to this, we all know resources like Dulfy’s site are out there. And it’s a great tool, but some people want something different. They don’t want the hint guide, necessarily. Some people do want to figure it out on their own.
Worse, some people, instead of learning the mechanics to where they can explain it (or they simply get tired of doing so), just say “go to Dulfy/etc.” That involves going externally for the information, and builds resentment against the “jerkface elitist” who obviously doesn’t seem to care.
And that’s hurtful to the community. GW2 really should focus on putting facts and guides into the game where players can access them properly rather than depending on third-party sites and wikis.

LanfearShadowflame.3189:

Cloth needs to have a gathering function, similar to ore and wood. It’s really that simple. Since most cloth sources come from either an animal or plant, it wouldn’t be too unrealistic to use the sickle as it’s gathering tool.

Edit: (Had to grab this from my other post a few months back)

Examples:

Jute – Is made from a vegetable fiber. Add some plant nodes to the world, which can be harvested with the existing scythes, which give us jute scraps when harvested.

Wool – Comes from various animals. Technically ‘wool’ is from sheep, but goats and rabbits would suffice too. This might require an additional harvesting tool (sheers), although the scythe might work, but sheep and rabbits exist in the game already. Maybe make some of them into harvest-able ‘nodes’ and let us sheer some wool scraps from them.

Cotton – Also a plant. Would work similarly to jute.

Linen – Again, also a plant. Comes from the flax plant, so again could work like jute.

Silk – Comes from insect cocoons, typically the best known comes from a moth, but fro game purposes there are any number of furflies, and such which could potentially offer ‘cocoons’ for collecting.

Gossamer – The definition of this is ‘a spider’s web’ or ‘a very light, delicate material,’ so let us harvest it from certain spider’s webs.

Ohgods yes. Being able to actually harvest cloth would be fantastic. Even if it were 2-3 “fibers” per scrap, then the usual scrap-to-bolt rate.

FF14 had one of the better craft setups available. With the right training and levels, you could scrounge and harvest for just about everything in the game (except endgame gear, which used dungeon drops).

That we have to rely on drops for cloth is an antiquated notion and really unbalanced considering how prevalent cloth is in crafting.

Heh, good or bad writing isn’t in the “what” but the “how.”

If the dwarves come back by some off-screen machination, it would feel cheap. If the dwarves came back via a player-included Living Story that spanned months of effort, leading to an epic final battle… I could accept that.

But then there’d be dwarves. Boring, short dwarves. We already have boring, tall dwarves. We call them Norn. =P

IndigoSundown.5419:

I believe both that increased difficulty can be a better teacher and that GW2 could do a better job of providing information about the game. This issue is not a dichotomy.
…
There most certainly is a dichotomy with regard to players who want greater difficulty and those who don’t. I used the word can rather than will for precisely that reason. Some people will react to difficulty by figuring out a better way to do things. Others post on forums about the game being “too hard.” Still others quit. Similarly, better conveyance of information about the game will not teach those who don’t want to learn, either.

These conversations do repeatedly come back to “GW2 needs better encounter design.” Build diversity? Better encounter design. Zerg mentality? Better encounter design. And so on.

Part of that encounter design is making sure that players have information. To be effective, there need to be multiple channels that occur simultaneously, or nearly so; enough to establish cause and effect. So, better encounter design includes not just numerical balancing of abilities, but an element of transparency.

But that’s not even what the OP is talking about. Simplistic design is part of the problem, but it doesn’t address how the devs are dealing with information. It’s about a pedagogical philosophy that has evolved as MMOs have advanced.

Dakota.4591:

I don’t get why so many people want Largos. Largos would be a terrible idea.

Not because of the whole ‘They would lose all the mystery reason’.
More for the ’They’re primarily an underwater race, so their city and all their zone areas should be underwater zones.’

Because we all know what an awesome job that ANet did with underwater combat.

…Better than every other MMO I’ve seen?

It’s not fantastic, and the differences in class utility underwater are terribly huge gaps, but for raw combat’s sake, it’s actually decent.

It still doesn’t make me want to put up with it for extended periods of time. So, no. No to kitten whales and Seadrow.

DarkWasp.7291:

OP, you are one boss-monster of a poster. Epic.

I agree with a lot of the stuff you wrote, and on the stuff I don’t, it still gets the mind ticking.

I do think your parting suggestion is valid, and here’s why:

Daily Skill Interrupter – Ever try to do this on any old class just out in the open world?

You soon notice that enemies don’t just have poor conveyance, they have anti-conveyance. They don’t attack intruders ruthlessly, they throw out a swing randomly every once and a while. In the only way they are challenging is trying to predict when they are going to use their next skill so you can interrupt it.

Argh argh argh. I knoooow.

And as far as the original post(s), I agree with this a lot. GW2 has a severe lack of information in a lot of things, and the punishments for trying to determine minute differences in attack tells is very frequently unwarranted.
And there’s very little reward for paying attention to what your allies are doing. Aside from might-stacking, most of the combo effects are just.. blah, nor do they last very long to make it worth it, unless you’re on TeamSpeak/Ventrilo actively calling it out in a guild.

I’m not sure how much of a tutorial the game needs, but good game development states that a useful tutorial is vital to the intro-game experience. I certainly wouldn’t turn down a better training area. …That’s actually an idea. Those areas that have training dummies and such? Why not have NPCs performing various attacks on a few (whirl, leap, element fields, etc), and give players a chance to time them and see what their effects are? That way, it’s there, it’s in the game properly, and you don’t need a friend or guildie nearby to learn them.

Still, GW2 also relies very much on /wiki. I’m glad it’s there, but it’s not teaching anything in a convenient space in the game itself.

A bitz.3825:

Oh deer…..

Bwahaha. Like the outfit, by the way.

Ark Bladesteele.2943:

Centaurs.. jumping puzzles..

OH GOD

Oh good, I wasn’t the only one thinking that. >.>

William Bradley Knight.2609:

That the pick and other gathering tools are convenience items is why I haven’t bought any of them. I’m a bit of an alt-aholic with 10 toons and I play 6-8 of them regularly. Even with the tools being account bound, it’s inconvenient to have to toss them back into the bank when switching characters. It’s also not worth it (to me) to buy tools for each character. But if ANet offered an account-based package/contract that allowed tools for each character on the account, I’d snap it up even at a 5000 gem price. The convenience of that would be worth it.

Now that the tools are account bound, I wonder why they don’t just set them up in the same way as the reward skins from the achievement chests. That way, you just add them to your inventory from the netherspace and never have to get another tool again.

1 silver for the event credit.
Not another dime outta me. Nope. Doesn’t make sense to give money when I’m trying to get money.

Maliel.8362:

Speaking of largos, do they need rebreathers?

Yes. Those rebreathers would be filled with xylyl bromide. Er, I mean, magic personality enhancers~

Looking forward to Tengu for another reason. They might finally fix clipping on Charr, once there are two races with similar models.

I like the idea! It wouldn’t take too much effort to do. (Would it? I’ve no idea. o_O)

Worst parts of jumping puzzles with non-Asura:

Bumping your head on ceilings obviously not well-conceived.
Charr stance not matching their actual position, then slipping off a ledge. Many of the puzzles have very tiny platforms that are wildly inappropriate for larger characters.

Quaggan walks like human, fight like human, and talk like human.
…
They don’t look like human, but they are humanoid creatures with intelligence.

I take issue with the highlighted assumption. =P

After some of the recent patch notes, I can tell they were trying to pay attention to some of the more egregious concerns, but… their execution of this system is still really flawed.

100% zone completion? That’s far too much work for one trait. 100% zone reputation completion isn’t nearly so nitpicky, is still a time investment, but a much less painful one. (It’s still boring, by the way. Heart quests, while useful, aren’t very fun most of the time.)

What trait thresholds should be:
1. Bring our traits points back in line to what they used to be. First point at 15, progress 1 every 5 levels. This gives us something to focus on besides leveling to 30 as we progress. It also avoids the arbitrary stacking of traits at 60+.
2. If you want us to “experiment” with builds, open them up sooner. Adept at 15, then next tier every 25-30 (Master/Grandmaster at 40/65 or 45/75).
3. Every task should be achievable as soon as the character opens that tier. Level 40-50 zone completion for adept traits is uneven (and feels insulting) in comparison to a 25-35 zone for the same tier of reward.
By the current system:
Adept tasks should be in roughly level 35 zones.
Master tasks should be in zones no higher than level 65.
Grandmaster tasks should be in level 70-80 zones.

Concession: I get that the new trait tier unlocks are based on using non-starter zones for tasks, so maybe it’s not necessary to revert entirely. Start with level 28 (yeah, yeah, people don’t like odd numbers, but get over it, starting at 11 old-school was still odd), then give us trait points every 4 levels. This puts the first Adept trait at level 32, still usable in dungeons (though a few levels late), and our last trait point hits at 80.
Open up Master at 50 (or 48 if you’re being precise about it), and open up Grandmaster at 70 (or 72 if you’re still being precise).

tl;dr Proposal:

Open traits at 28+1 per 4 levels, Master at 50, Grandmaster at 70.
Adept tasks from 25-35 only
Master tasks around level 50, no higher than 55.
Grandmaster tasks from 70-80.

Premise: Pay gems for better loot.

Solution:
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Gathering_Booster
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Magic_Find_Booster

Victory.2879:

He needs to level a guardian to 69 for some protection!

Bwahahaha!

A Massive Headache.1879:

Actually the Largos are friendly, they’re just rare and avoid other races whenever possible

Edit, I mean there are literally only 2 encounters of Largos we actively have to stop, one in brisbane and one in snowden drifts, and the way they set up who they are set to kill is pretty specific, so they may have actually had a reason to attack the sylvari/kodan claw.

Out of maybe 3 appearances total, two are kittenface’d assassins killing innocents. The other is Trahearne’s “associate”. The sin of being Trahearne’s anything is weight enough. =P But after that, she’s all “debt paid, gg, l8r” and was never anything interesting as a character. So.. nope on the Largos.

I’d buy another slot for Tengu or Skritt. How great would it be if Skritt had a racial that gave them Might stacks based on the number of adjacent players?

-20 for Largos. I haven’t seen one positive representation of them in GW2. Say no to evil waterdrow. Even the Ettins and Ogres occasionally are friendly and need help. (Ogres with “pet” racials? They’re all basically rangers anyway.)

I’d like to see Kodan, but they have no racial home at the moment, and they’re too proximal to Norn. Out of the entire wishlist, Tengu look incredibly likely.

The game needs something that exists as an in-game hobby. Not just a useless minipet or a stray title. Those are nifty, in the moment, but then quickly shrugged off. Just looking at various toys that exist around the MMO circuit:

In-game housing (that involves crafting)
A Pokemon knockoff
Scavenger hunts
Super Adventure Box

Basically, anything that can act as a gold sink, be pretty/entertaining, but otherwise useless for actual combat.

Wait, so if the speculation holds weight, we might see more Sylvari in important Living Story updates?

/cry
#NoPlantDrow2014

Still, the theory is very intriguing! I’ll shelve my curiosity so it’s ready for the big reveal.

Geez, so much useless bitter in this thread. :\ I understand the rage, but yeesh, be productive about it.

Like Desthin. Hat-tip to you for your Designer threads. As an aspiring designer myself, I appreciate the thoughtfulness of your posts.

As an added thought to your earlier, linked post, I do have to add that, while the megaserver does help with the typically dead zones, anything that’s predictable gets mobbed by the 70+ zerg of the entire zone.

In light of that, I support lowering the caps for ‘strays’ who wander into the zone. Maybe 50. Then, keep a large, guild-sized buffer of ‘taxi’ players that can be brought in. Maybe 100. Actual numbers are fuzzy and exemplary.

That way, we get smaller groups at big bosses (so we can actually see them through the blizzard of particle effects), and guilds can taxi in a group when they need it.

Don’t agree on the weapon cooldowns. It’s meant to be a strategic choice in combat.

Don’t quite agree with the 4th utility, but I do agree that elite skills are incredibly underwhelming for their cooldown times. Especially the Transform abilities. They’re jerky and limited and don’t flow at all with GW2’s combat system. (Their primary attacks have cooldowns and they’re not auto-attack selected. Sad. :\)

I started out the same way, but it took so long for me to buy my first extra character slot with gold→gem conversion. I was chipping at the daunting 800 gem cost, a few silver at a time. By the time I bought the first one for gems, I’d gotten impatient and flat out bought another. :P

Is there a grape juice recipe? I never bothered to check. XD

Hm.. wine. Let’s see, you’d need grapes, naturally. I think yeast. And then some wood for the cask.

Duuude, that’d actually be great if you could make a cask of wine and then set it out for people to drink from.

Xhyros.1340:

Less costly? It pays for itself. It turns my 1.5g mining runs into 2g. If you are a hardcore miner, it could pay for itself in under a month. That’s at the current price. The sprockets were selling for more before the festival.

I certainly don’t regret buying mine! I already had a full sprocket stack from Living World, so all my extras over 500 were sold at the trading post for 2-3 silver. Just from general play, I was getting 20-50 silver per evening.

I accept the perk. I wasn’t trying for it. I didn’t even know about it when I bought it; I just wanted an unlimited pick. Serendipity.

Though, the argument that the items should be available to players who missed the content is a decent one, and one I pondered before. Right now, players who have the materials can make it available through the trading post. But if those players taper off and demand doesn’t change, those prices climb. It’s not necessarily fair to the players who can’t generate them on their own.

FrostSpectre.4198:

Well, I see that the problem in zerker being good in PvE, is because most mobs only sport low armor, medium HP and high damage.

There are very few enemies that have more defensive capabilities. So far only notable foes are “Partially digested husks”, who sport very heavy armor…

And since berserker gear works for fast, high damage bursts.

I hope update to mobs comes at one point, introducing us more variety than our common “zerker feed”, along with the desired more advanced and adaptive AI too.

Though I believe the variation might only affect foes with ranks veteran and higher, leaving the normal mobs as the “can be killed with any build” kind.

Making some enemies and bosses have higher armor would certainly help shake up the “zerker meta” (which only really exists on the ‘high end’ for speed runs anyway). And not even ALL enemies, as we still want ’zerk to have optimal value, but it would give more reason to have condition damage. Enemies with more rapid attacks that are harder to dodge (aka chainguns~) would create opportunities for support characters to shine via healing and protection. I would gladly take that over the “one-hit-KO, dodge-or-die” bullkitten we have in most of the encounters now.

Conclusion: We’re not going to see a change in the “zerker meta” until we see more variety in encounter design. To quote a previous thread “Zerk is fine.”

Simulator.4687:

another point with the Guild Hall and Home Instance. we wont have the problem you get when you go to cities where you have all the GOLD SELLERS $#$#$ waiting for you. they won’t be in your home and if the were in the guild then the guild masters could boot them. instead we have to wait for Areanet to do something about them. the cities look full. awesome but with the intro of the mega Server they made it easier for people to be harassed which really takes away from the game. A guild hall would be a better idea then home instance. you can meet other guild mates that way. and you can work as a guild for rewards.

I’m sensing some bitter. :P

Also, the goldsellers WILL find you. My friend got a gold-whisper IN A PERSONAL STORY INSTANCE. /rofl
Back on task…

@Tagus Eleuthera – Too right. I don’t mind earning extra skins and such, as the options are nice, but unless I have a spare level 80 to throw them on, it’s kinda worthless. Having a home space, a real home space, for trophies and comfort items (and even a reduced Asura gate fee?) would be great.

Easy mode: Buy high, sell low.

/sagenod

Apparently, there’s a thought that speedrun dungeons is where the condition stack problem is.

Hahahaha, false. If you’re getting 25 bleed stacks on a speedrun, you’re doing it wrong.
Stay on task.

The condition cap is most relevant in large-scale PvE and similar parts of WvW, when territory claims are involved. It’s not so relevant with player v player, since getting 25 stacks with no condition clearing is a death sentence anyway.

Still, conditions relative to skill speed is an important topic. Should we have fewer stacks capable per player but make them significantly more potent? Get rid of condition duration entirely in favor of potency? What stat would we put in its place if we did?

Honestly, the main problem with condition damage is that bleeding is the primary method of it. Torment happens a little, burning does bigger damage but is harder to stack, and confusion is almost solely the domain of mesmers and doesn’t usually last long enough to stack to 25.

So, when we grouse about condition damage stacks, we mostly mean Bleeding. I’m sure burning and poison duration caps are an issue as well, but continuing to extend the time on an already full queue doesn’t mean as much, though it’s still a DPS loss for the individual player.

Honestly, the cleanest way I’m seeing this work with respect to server load is to grant automatic damage if the stack is full. It’s a quick calculation and it respects the originator of the damage.

Harper.4173:

People don’t hate hard content – that’s false.

People hate hard and unrewarding content.
[/b]People don’t repeat hard content if it’s not worth it.
People hate being forced to play harder content when previously it was easier.

Hard mode for dungeons would be a good thing if it was implemented together with new titles, maybe unique skins and better loot. [/b]

People who would want the challenge and the thrill could do it. Pugs could still do regular dungeons.

But if you change all content to satisfy the few that want it hard you’re going to turn the game into a ghost town.

One of the most heard complaints at the start of this game was that it was too hard to farm gold. People, and a lot of them quit because they couldn’t get good enough rewards in a time frame that would keep them satisfied.

Beyond this being yet another anti-zerker thread, I’ve seen a really good idea for a direction to take dungeons in. While I’m sure Explorable mode is supposed to be “hard mode” for dungeons, it wouldn’t be a bad thing to have a Hard mode (call it what you will) with more mechanics that put stress on the usual high-damage groups.

Tweak the usual rewards for the current (and often speedrun) Explorables, give some good loot in Hard mode, and see if that coaxes well-practiced players into the harder content, since the criticism is that the current content is too easy. Then we’ll see where the meta ends up.

Cringe-worthy commentary aside, the rise of gem prices comes from general gold inflation.

Accepting certain things as fact:
Farmers farm, generating gold out of nothing.
The gold sinks in the game aren’t sufficient to remove money and items from inventory.
People with sufficient gold buy gems to get premium in-game content for free.
Gem prices rise as a result.

The only way gem costs go down is if other players invest in the gem supply AND exchange them for gold. Gold is relatively easy to earn, so unless someone gets impatient AND finds value in the gold offering from the gem market, a person with gems isn’t likely to invest that way.

Mystic.5934:

give it time. If they change nothing about unid dyes, they will eventually cost 1g each. they are only cheap right now because of the huge surplus

I own part of that surplus. ;_; I was at work when the market boomed.

So, c’mon, ANet, make those precursors more available so people will rush to buy dye!

Xenon.4537:

Eh I wouldn’t call that watchwork node worth it, personally, but I get the idea. Now the fused gauntlets I would definitely pay to get access, although they already gave me that for free in this latest release (thank you so much Anet!). If the reward is a cool looking backpiece, glove, helmet, w/e skin I’d probably go for it. The jet pack skin… I can dream…

Before I made those superior runes of perplexity, I was selling off the extra sprockets. 2-3 silver a piece. Getting 8-10 from a node was pretty hot. Though, might be some confound because I have the pick, too. That pick has earned its cost. Hee.

But yeah, the point is still there. They wouldn’t even have to do like they did with the recent festival and add all the old missable content to vendors. Just plop 200 gems, finish the event, and bam, done.

Xenon.4537:

Now that is a perspective I like. Quality content is best incentivised when the creator has to make it and then sell it. For Anet to make money off of this, each episode has to be good enough for new players to purchase it. It has to be good enough for old players (who got it for free) to say “Yeah, that episode was good, you should buy it.” If old players don’t recommend an episode, then Anet makes no money off of it.

And even if the content isn’t so sterling, nothing will sell those old, missed episodes like the words “I want that” out of a reward.

Theoretical example: If the watchwork node were a Living Story reward from a given episode, and you were real keen on getting it, would 200 gems and a little effort be worth a permanent addition to your home instance? I’d say yes.