If melee pets had a passive cripple to keep foes in range, and some sort of inherent super toughness to reflect how much avoidable damage there is in this game, I think they could be a pretty darn desirable party member to have.
I really like the pokemon aspect of rangers, and have an alt I’m not motivated to level but keep around for the sake of occasionally collecting new pets.
Stuck up players that don’t know any better think the only thing good at pve is a warrior.
I generally can kill stuff at the same rate on my zerker gaurd as a zerker warrior when in a dungeon and attacking different mobs. Yes they have a higher auto attack thats a bit faster. but we have about the same overall dps, not the same burst though. Its not uncommon for my whirling wrath to hit up to 12k, 18k to 20k with a mesmer buff. and my 3rd gs auto is around 4.5k-5.5k on crit.
But heres the difference I bring much more to the group than a warrior. My dps might be slightly behind but I pull out more for a group than a warrior does and the speed difference isn’t much. especially on big pulls like COF p3 where you have to light the torches…. watching a zerker warrior trying to survive all the oozes or tar is a bit funny. I run in pull them all too me and burst the whole group down be for the warrior can kill 3 lol, if he doesn’t get downed in the process from burning conditions first.
SO no Warriors are not the the be all end all pve god in this game.
Guardians are in good place right now PvEwise. I don’t know who wouldn’t take a guardian as soon as a warrior aside from speedrunners. They’re just about king of the five man PUG, really.
Warriors are no slouch for support, either. FGJ and banners are incredibly powerful.
It’s engineers and necromancers that need help, I think. Traits like HGH, borderline necessary for competitive damage output, have nowhere near the synergy with their profession’s support methods, as stuff like banners or Altruistic Healing do with their profession’s damage dealing methods.
They have distinct advantages in DPS over other professions, yes, but those professions could be buffed to their level, rather than the other way around.
Warriors still have to jump through hoops like the badly disguised QTE known as “dodging”. They still have to throw boulders at ghosts. They’re not godmode.
Greatsword Warriors are very fun for their damage output. You have two abilities that require some timing but pay off wonderfully. The infamous Hundred Blades, which roots you in one spot facing the same direction, which I feel nailed the risk/reward factor better than most abilities in the game. And a whirling attack on 3 that, if you aim it at a wall near your target, can hit them on every swing.
If they changed it so that trash packs didn’t have so much HP and DPS in dungeons, people would enjoy fighting them. In City of Heroes, I would always set instances to be scaled to the size of an eight man party, even if I was soloing, because huge packs in that game were that much fun to fight.
I really liked how it worked in GW1. The cooler you looked, the more expensive the mats tended to be, while stats were mostly all the same.
Which is a strange thing about how GW2 materials worked. In GW1 you had things like “feather farms” because some professions had cool, tribal-looking appearances that required feathers, and so on. Here, you have “trophies” which are used to make the prefix, which does not affect the appearance at all.
These things would help the situation a lot, in my view
1) Alliances. Guild Wars 1 had them as a fairly important feature, as does EVE, and did City of Heroes. At the very least, if it allowed several guilds to share a chat channel, this would allow small and big guilds to band together for things like bounties, dungeons, and other organized content. Fleshed out, we could have GW1’s AvA, but that’s a bit much to ask right now.
2) Custom chat channels. People who just want to chat with an organization, without playing the influence game, would be well served by these. They’d also provide an excellent LFG and roleplaying resource.
The event chat is the tamest part of Tarnished Coast Queensdale. Remove that, and what you have left is Barrens Chat circa Vanilla. No Chuck Norris these days, but plenty of arrows getting lodged in crucial ambulatory joints.
The Big Mistake that Anet made was removing Energy/Mana for all classes at Launch.
There is a main reason for some classes to have Mana.
Energy Management.
I think this is a big part of why some professions have ended up at the top of the PvE food chain, while others are boring but competitive at best, and a laughing stock at worst.
Attrition was always a big part of the wargame, and the original Gary Gygax vision of a dungeon crawl. And Guild Wars 1 knew this. Elementalists were your Vancian magicians, having a deep reserve of spells that eventually petered out. Necromancers fed off death, combatting attrition with dark sorcery. Melee fighters had adrenaline, keeping them going even when energy was expended. Assassins saved on energy by focusing their strength on vital blows.
There’s no such logistical strategy here. You have your autoattack damage, and a number of cooldowns, and generally the cooler ability, the longer the cooldown. This heavily favors classes who were given a notably high coolness:cooldown ratio on an ability, or a passive proc so good that it’s more important than what’s in your utility/elite slots.
None of the things you mention will matter if the player doesn’t enjoy the core game play, which is what you experience on your way to 80.
I don’t know. I enjoy several aspects of the “core gameplay”. I find Mesmers and Guardians to be fairly unique playstyles in the scope of online RPGs. I like seeing a centaur fortress becoming occupied by Seraph due to my actions. GW2 is probably the only buy2play game that offers something like WvWvW.
But, I hate doing a lot of the things associated with “the journey”, such as filling in renown hearts, wasting money on crafting, changing zones in order to find content my level, being at the whims of a zerg in WvWvW, and doing all of the above because the personal story doesn’t reward enough XP to keep at its level.
So I can see it being feasible that the OP becomes frustrated with the XP rate without it necessarily meaning they dislike the game itself.
I can’t say they’re worse than Champions, due to the small mercy that is they need a split second of time to rotate to face you, allowing you to circlestrafe behind them if you get close enough
When QuestHelper was created for World of Warcraft, Blizzard took notice. Imagine if they had not, and instead, when you said the quest system in WoW is an arbitrary inconvenience, you were directed to blue posts telling you to go download QuestHelper.
Why are we doing this in regards to a dungeon finder, and fan made products such as GW2LFG?
I’d be fine if replays got you the full XP reward. Why not? It takes the same amount of time. It’d alleviate the problem of having to run around doing the same boring hearts you did on your last alt.
All the puns and such are cute, until it turns out our post-launch content updates are going to be all about how they’re a serious threat to the world.
I really like their concrete-reinforced tunnels and such, however. And I find them important in that they’re a consequence of the Ascended’s victory over the Stone Summit.
I want more roles than just zerger and roamer. In Planetside 1, you could play logistical roles like AMS and ANT driver. And in DotA, you have the jungler, the guy securing resources for the team by himself, but not making himself vulnerable to ambush.
Tengu are the most important non-playable race, IMHO. They have a city (and a real one, not a crappy shantytown or a tiny village), are the last bastion of Canthan culture in Tyria, and the Tengu mercenary Talon Silverwing fought alongside the Weh no Su to stop Shiro from drowning the world in plague, and by association, the destructive machinations of Abaddon.
I have to disagree with people stating that the game does not significantly change at 80. There are several important reasons to knock out those levels, IMHO:
Level 70-80 rares drop, which are a notable source of income.
You can equip exotics, and wear them into WvWvW
Daily reward from world bosses
Low level friends will benefit greatly from your aid, as long as you make sure they’ve had a chance to tag something before you oneshot it. And you’ll be equally entitled to rewards, including the aforementioned rares.
This “slow down and enjoy the journey” tripe gets repeated every time this question gets asked, even for people who have an 80 already and just want to see different sides of the personal story, or try a different profession in WvWvW. I wish I had a better answer for you, but the advice given here is the same stuff I’ve already seen when trying to google the problem.
I have been talking about the mechanics of this game. And the time it takes to program content, which you keep ignoring. Sure time gated content isn’t “optimal” content. A new dungeon or new fractals would be better.
What are people supposed to be doing waiting around for that stuff? Time gated stuff is actually what keeps most MMOs alive, and I don’t think Guild Wars 2 is any exception. The actual mechanics are secondary to the need to find stuff for people to do while waiting for more content. Because no one can create content faster than people can consume it.
Well, one would hope that the content already available has a high level of repeat-ability outside the need for progression.
I agree, that if the “rides” that are in a themepark MMO aren’t fun to ride too many times, then time based progression is a way to artificially enhance the attractiveness of the ride while new ones are built. However, we still have a problem as to why the rides aren’t fun to ride as they are.
For example, why are many many dungeons largely ignored? Perhaps they aren’t fun. Perhaps, they don’t offer the same kind of rewards as other dungeons. But, those are also problems that need to be addressed.
Well, the fractals are quite liked but you can still only play your favorite song so many times, eat your favorite food so many times, etc. Unlike most games which can be finished in 20 hours, MMOs ask people to play for hundreds of hours…or people do whether asked to or not.
So yeah, its’ great to say content should be fun, but there will NEVER be enough fun content that’s infinitely repeatable. No matter how much I liked some missions in Prophecies, and I did, I couldn’t do them dozens of times in a month.
I don’t disagree with you about this.
Personally, I would love to see dungeons be less “linear” and more like the old MUD style dungeons that you can just get lost in. Unfortunately, in this day of Wiki, it would be a much harder task.
Balancing the loot system in this game would go a long way to fixing some of this too.
It would be doable in this game, I think, with normal zones. Get rid of the hearts and waypoints, and you have an EverQuest dungeon.
Having to get ressed, or otherwise get sent back to the beginning, would encourage people to play in parties that aren’t necessarily 5 man, and add an element of attrition that’s sorely lacking from GW2’s PvE.
Here’s what I think a new player needs to know to make money:
TP loot bags (unless they potentially contain Crystalline Dust, which they won’t if you’re new)
TP salvage items unless there’s a daily or monthly for Recycler
When selling anything where there’s a significant margin between the top buy order and bottom sell order (25 copper or so), undercut the bottom sell order by 1c.
If the required level on a looted piece of gear is divisible by 5, see if it sells for a decent amount on the TP (about double the vendor value is “decent”).
Good prefixes on gear to bother checking the sell price on are Mighty, Strong, Knight’s, and Berserker’s. These will be good for other people leveling.
When gearing up off the TP, you can buy blue gear, and then sell it back to the TP when it’s obsolete. If you only paid 1c over the vendor price, just vendor it when you’re done with it, it’s not worth the TP tax in that case.
Don’t ID dyes. Sell the unidentified dye, and use http://argos-soft.net/GW2DyeList/ to identify the specific colors you want (you can get 16 common colors for what an unidentified dye goes for). Set a sell order, people sell them for as low as 12s when they go for as high as 18.75s, typically.
Don’t craft if you’re short on funds. There is no bind on pickup gear in Guild Wars 2 that comes from crafting. When you have the money, you can use crafting to powerlevel. Use http://www.gw2crafts.net/ and make sure that’s really the amount you want to invest. Those collectibles you’ll use to craft, could be sold instead, depending on your goals. Remember, you didn’t “farm them for free”, they cost you time.
I’m not sitting on CoF money, but I’m fairly comfortable from using these tips, and my account has every laurel I’ve ever earned still on it.
Time is money. If a superior piece of equipment can make a boss who has an annoying to dodge ability that does a lot of damage go faster, or clear an unskippable trash pack faster, then it is a basic human survival instinct to acquire that gear. If having that instinct makes you a spoiled child, then I’ll play with the spoiled children, rather than someone who meanders aimlessly instead of filling his belly.
Not only that, but MMO’s haven’t really changed much in the last 10 years. GW2 certainly hasn’t done anything game changing that we can’t find pieces of in other games.
Hearts and world events which you don’t need a party to participate. In fact, I don’t see many MMOs where any characters’ effects would apply to eveyone else who is not in their party.
Hearts are very much like those NPCs we know so well from previous games that have ! over their head, and once that ! is gone, that is the game designers to move on to the next ride on the theme park, even if we like where we are better. Except now, this concept is represented by a filled in heart.
Did anyone ever do the Incarnate Enhancement system in City of Heroes? I thought that was a great system, it was more vertical than horizontal, but the clever thing about it was, the further behind you were from the BiS, the faster you progressed. When a new enhancement slot came out, you could have it filled very quickly, and then improvements came more and more gradually.
The problem is making dungeons require five players, whereas in this game’s predecessor, five human players, along with properly built heroes would steamroll just about anything.
That personal story is the only content for duos/trios, and that even then, only people doing that step of the story get rewards, is a constant enigma to me.
I was lead to believe the game would be like GW1, with a wide variety of game modes like Jade Quarry, Fort Aspenwood, Alliance Battles, Codex Arena, Heroes Ascent, with all sorts of mixed objectives that encouraged a wide variety of playstyles. I fondly remember Monk/Paragons capping shrines and speed buffing turtles, who wanted to avoid direct confrontation whenever possible.
Yet here, all we have is this WoW Battleground/Team Fortress 2 style mess, where there are objectives, yes, but everyone ignores them unless they somehow lead to adding to their kill count, because that is the most effective way to play. What happened between now and then?
I’d like at least to be able to see the DPS of my autoattack, as an average of my weapon damage, power, and crits normalized over, say, 24 seconds or so. Diablo 3 did this, and as controversial as D3 is, that feature worked for what it was.
Unfortunately, diminishing returns, the heavy influence of RNG in mat acquisition in general, and the fact that no specialization is required to be a gatherer of lumber/ore/plants, are a part of WHY CoF is so optimal. The only thing as consistent as money drops from CoF, is the daily chest for world bosses giving a guaranteed rare.
“Want’ is a pretty important aspect of MMORPGs. There were no big bads to slay in Ultima Online, for example. If you didn’t “want” to own a huge house or to be the most detested ganker on your server or a boat with which to explore Sosaria’s vast oceans, or some other meta-goal, you ran out of stuff to do pretty quickly.
We were sold, by Arenanet marketing, a game of “want” as well. Grinding is out, they said, BiS items rain from the heavens, so you’re free to pursue goals like acquiring the gear skins you want. What a nice little bit of PR that was.
I’m not a child. I can decide when to stop eating chocolate.
Can you? Then stop.
Whining when you dont get what you want is childish. I dislike fractals so i have never done them. I dont stop people from doing them or insist to be rewarded by not participating (thus i will never get any ascended back item unless they release another method). You dislike dailies, dont do them.
I do the dailies, because the XP you get from them is the only "rested XP’ type mechanic this game provides for leveling alts, and the laurels are a bonus on top of that.
I don’t see why the OP’s legitimate criticism should be shouted down, though. Adults don’t need to be told by others how to ration their time.
Your semantics are bogus. It’s okay to want things. It’s an entertainment product for which I have paid Arenanet my hard-earned money.
Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures, the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge, has marked the upward surge of mankind and greed, you mark my words, will not only save Arenanet, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the U.S.A.
You are rewarded for playing the game.
What is the problem here??
Do you want to be rewarded for doing nothing??
Do you not want to be rewarded at all??
I just got back from not playing Gw2 for a week…
Did I lose anything?
No.
Am I going to be punished?
No.
Where in your diluted minds do you feel that the dailies MUST be done?
Why do you feel that doing a daily is “a chore?”
The word daily.
When x is given by doing x once a day and only once, it becomes a chore. Why not let people just get as many as they want in 1 sitting?
Oh here we go again. Dailies encourage people to play everyday without encouraging people to invest so much time per day. This rations people’s time and eventually, this is better for the game. Playing 10 hours in one instance can lead to burnout and eventually the player will play less and less of this 10-hour instances. Anet wants you to play the game for a long period of time, so they will ration the time it takes for you to get your stuff. Same principle why guild commendations are once a week only.
I’m not paying a monthly fee. Why does it matter if I burn myself out or not?
Square-Enix doesn’t care when I burn myself out after spending 100 hours completing Dragon Quest VII.
I’m not a child. I can decide when to stop eating chocolate.
I think the problem here is that many of you don’t actually enjoy MMO gameplay or RPG games.
I like them fine. MMORPGs don’t need levels, Ultima Online, Star Wars Galaxies, EVE, and Darkfall have all abandoned them. Even some games with levels would still be anathema to this model. Would anyone have enjoyed Planescape: Torment had it made you grind 1000 modrons for each piece of story you wanted to unfold?
I wish they’d supplement them with bonuses that don’t go away once you’ve done them.
Like, in addition to Dailies and Monthlies, you also have a persistent 10% XP bonus in something random that day, like, from Krytan events, or Ascalonian kills.
As it is, I start to get bored once I’ve gotten my pity laurel.
WoW had an unstable launch because more people were playing it AT LAUNCH, than what Ultima Online and EverQuest had at their peaks COMBINED. In the minds of many, World of Warcraft created the MMORPG genre. Including many suits at NCsoft and Nexon, shamefully.
. and my 3rd gs auto is around 4.5k-5.5k on crit.
