Guild Wars 2

Best mouse for me:
http://www.amazon.com/SteelSeries-World-Warcraft-Cataclysm-Gaming/dp/B004GZ2RCY%3FSubscriptionId%3D19BAZMZQFZJ6G2QYGCG2%26tag%3Dsquid915750-20%26linkCode%3Dxm2%26camp%3D2025%26creative%3D165953%26creativeASIN%3DB004GZ2RCY
5 buttons on left are your heal, utilities and elite all together.

As for Keyboard I prefer an ultra flat one: http://www.wimitech.it/it/in_pro.asp?id=731
Do not buy the Logitech one it makes a lot of noise and buttons move a lot, bad for gaming.

DreamyAbaddon.3265:

The Combat in this game is very intensed.
It has a lot of depth for Solo and Team Play.

If you disagree with me then you probably don’t know the basics of GW2’s Combat system and dont exactly know how to execute them properly.

I wrote a thread called GW2 Combat System 101 to help people learn how the mechanics function. Please check it out:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/GW2-Combat-system-101/first

This 100 times.

Seriously anyone claiming combat lacks depth is still in the very very very low-end ranks of sPvP/WvW and extremely far from knowing the basics of GW2’s combat.
That or he is playing a class that has yet to be given combat depth (I’m looking at you Warrior).

Loco.4561:

You mean that “split” second that’s additionally mitigated by culling/rendering? So in fact you have WAY more time to keep DPSing your target because they can’t even see you. And what reflexes are required to press 3 buttons (Steal, C&D, BS) followed by 222222. Honestly thieves have more room for error than other professions and to claim it takes some degree of skill to slap on a full zerker set, and press no more than 5 buttons to be effective is borderline ludicrous.

I got chatting to a player yesterday who was bragging about his skill on thief, he was running your typical instagib build, was bragging about nuking players in seconds and he’d been playing a thief for…30 minutes :P Guess what his rotation was….(see above)

I love how your logic works against you.

95% of Eles in WvW now just do this: RTL, Updraft, BS, RoF, FG and get a kill.
That combo is just as easy and effective as C&D, Mug, BS, HS, HS.
According to your own logic this makes both Thief and Ele easy classes.
Breaking news: a cheesy gimmick inside a class does not define the entire class, nor says anything of its depth or difficulty in mastering it.

Back to the topic.

I happen to PvP a lot with Eles lately because everyone and their mother made one now.
Here is my review:
They get high burst/DPS like Thieves, and this is fine as a melee build needs high dmg.
They get mobility on par with Thieves, and this is also fine because melee needs mobility.
They get high damage resistance through Earth buffs, and that is fine too because otherwise they would last nothing (Thief for instance has stealth to make up for squishiness).
What is not fine is the ability to recover crazy amounts of health on top of all the above.
Against Eles, the fight is pretty even and we both get close to death, at which point they heal up for tons of amounts – and this is unacceptable.

Long story short, I don’t want to see your damage gone (Anet seems to want that with all the AoE nerfing claims), nor mobility nor resistance – but I’m tired that you can reset a fight completely.
That sort of thing reminds me of WoW.
In GW2 the rule of thumb is that we get one heal, and other heals are just minor things – there will not be any sort of healer they said – and they need to fix this.
Once you use your heal skill and your health is depleted you escape or die – you don’t magically refill your healthpool like a WoW Paladin.

This is basically the Unicorn build that has been around since BWEs or so.
The major issue is that the build is weak to AoE and condition removal.

I’m not scared of Anet nerfs because they are extremely good at that job.

The only fail I’ve seen so far was the 50% dmg reduction overnerf on Dancing Dagger with no compensation to its cost/cripple duration/projectile speed whatsoever, which ended up making the skill useless.

TwoBit.5903:

I like the idea behind this suggestion, but what’s to stop bots from moving around and avoiding DR altogether?

The fact they are bots.
A bot is an automated program, it cannot move around maps; it stays in one spot to automatically kill mobs – and since this makes DR-obtained items unsellable they would generate zero gold by doing that.
Even if the RMT was to order his employees to play bots manually, his employees would still only be able to get loots like a normal player would before incurring in DR.

The effectiveness of botting revolves around leaving a very large amount of automated chars in the same zone for hours/days to gather maths, this prevents the whole system from being effective altogether.

Drakonhammer.2148:

Not to mention how annoying it would be for regular players hitting diminishing returns and then not being able to sell rarer loot drops they do not want at all.

I can see this leading to players who either avoid crafting or are running out of inventory space throwing away a large number of loot drops, particularly since they are not only unsellable but also unsalvageable, making them utterly useless.

No offence meant, but in my opinion this seems like a rather heavy-handed approach to dealing with botting.

You did not understand the concept I explained.

Currently when a player hits DR he gets only trash items worth nothing, and therefore is forced to stop looting or he would get no gain.
With the new system they’d have two options when triggering DR:
1) move to another zone without DR.
2) continue looting normally and still get mats they can use (ores, lodestones etc), so all those players who like to farm for crafting are now allowed to do so.
Currently, only option 1 is available.
It’s pretty safe to say that any player would choose to have another option on top of what’s currently available over not having any choice but move away.

You don’t “come back” to GW2… it’s free so you simply turn up the client and login.

You make a plethora of gold in fractals currently, also in WvW if your guild caps keeps quickly and farms a lot of people.
You might consider you’re doing it wrong OP.

I once used to be a first-line, die-hard, combat-knife-in-mouth, waypoint-fee-hater.
But after replaying Skyrim with fast travel disabled it’s like a religion change for me on this topic.

Walking to a zone adds an important element that I always overlooked.
While on a trip you have the chance to stumble into unexpected things, such as:
- hitting random events you may have never seen before that reveal something important
- meeting a person that may change your game experience
- exploring an area you ignored the existence of
- remember things you had forgotten/overlooked which lead to new plans
- hear a quote from a NPC (or player) that makes you laugh or think

I know, in GW2 there is less chance to stumble on new random/radiant occurrences compared to Skyrim (quite strange btw, seeing that GW2 is “dynamic”), but it’s still worth a shot.
Fast travel is still available for those times you don’t feel like this, but trust me that sometimes the path to a zone might reveal to be more interesting than your initial goal.

Maybe Anet should add more random occurrences to endorse this behavior.

Premise
Note that this is a serious idea and might take a programmer to fully understand.
I’ll still try to explain it as easy as I can so everyone can get an idea of what I’m talking about.

The idea
This idea zapped into my mind when analyzing the properties of Karma items.
These interesting items are flagged with properties that make them completely unable to affect the economy.
These properties are: unsellable on TP, unsellable to NPC, unsalvageable, usable for crafting, deletable,
This is the concept I will apply to solve overgeneration of gold.

Currently, we have the standard loot table and then a diminished loot table (triggered by DR) that is used to limit overgeneration of gold, but it does not prevent it completely.
This is a great system, but it can be improved to make the second table use the same flags that karma items use, thus making any item obtained after DR not touch the economy but still have an use for players.

Basically, once a character hits DR, a clone of the standard loot table is triggered except all items in this table are flagged like Karma items; they are soulbound, cannot be sold to NPC, cannot be salvaged: they can only be deleted or used for crafting.
Of course, any item that is crafted using materials from the second table also needs to have the same flag.
This last part is the only thing so far mentioned that is not already part of Anet’s technology, at least to my knowledge.

All it needs to be done to implement this is cloning the current standard loot table, flag the items contained as karma (or a new flag bearing these same properties if you so decide) and use that as the table that DR triggers.
It might also be needed to create clones of the current recipes that allow “karma” mats to be used and result in an item flagged as “karma” as well.

Bottom line: What does this lead to?
1) When a bot incurs in DR, he completely stops generating any revenue as items have no value just like Karma items. A bot making zero gold is an useless bot.
2) When a player incurs in DR, he will not have impaired loot rates but will loot items normally that may be usable such as crafting materials or lodestones; since they are flagged as karma no money can be made out of them.
3) Players can then effectively farm their own materials to craft items if they so decide, and since items obtained this way are also flagged as karma they would only be able to use them and not generate any gold.

It seems a pretty final solution to these two major issues (bots and player vs DR), and would also allow Anet to be in much greater control of the generation of items – and therefore of the market fluctuations.

Things like these happen sir and yes they cause frustration but it’s inevitable.
Unload the rage in WvW so you do a favor to your server.

Skimpy outfits eh?
Show some professionalism!

:p

IndigoSundown.5419:

In GW1, there was a very flat curve with regard to gear. Max gear was easily obtainable and no one had an advantage (at least once you’d unlocked runes and such). While GW2’s gear curve is flatter than some games, it is more pronounced than the one in GW1. Thus, the goal is to level the playing field by keeping PvE gear out of sPvP. If people just wore their PvE gear in sPvP you’d have some folks in exotics, others in greens, maybe even someone in blues. And imagine the outcry if people who want to only sPvP found out they had to grind fractals to get Ascended rings and backpiece to have BiS.

Yet GW1 required a lot more time than GW2 to build a character that is 100% effective.

Capping a ton of elites, farming grindy titles, buying all skills, unlock all secondary professions… this was required to be fully functional in all sectors and situations.
A title giving damage reduction and damage buff against enemies is no different than a gear upgrade.
While in GW2 all you have to do is get this is get max gear (which is pretty quick and easy in comparison).

The gimmick is that most people see gear and think of grind (and we thank traditional MMO for creating this bias), but if you disguise stat grinds inside titles or whatnot people won’t say a word, proof being that there is still people around who will say GW1 had horizontal progression even though it isn’t true.
Then again horizontal, vertical, grind, farm are all words people misuse or decontextualize just to make drama – no games lasts long without a sort of progression.

That being said, it’s still to see what methods to aquire gear Anet will introduce.
The cards they will play these months might be great indicators of what the future policy of Anet in regards of progression will be.

I used to be on this server and it’s true that some merit has to be given to these guys.
They are quite coordinated in offense and most players are individually good.
When Heghemon is on a killing spree you better be ready to push the red button.
The only flaw is that there is little emphasis on defense and defensive siege, therefore when against pressure it’s a bit frustrating to see people going to conquer forward bases when their territory is half-conquered by others – hopefully that behavior has been corrected a bit since last time I played.

I moved mostly due to guild reasons but still a good choice for PvPing nonetheless.
Hopefully I’ll get to play against this server, so for once it won’t be pure badge farming.

Warrior simply lacks deeper mechanics that other classes have and suffers from this.
Thief can rely on stealth, Mesmer on decoying, Eles on burst/healing, Guardian on defense/healing, etc…
Warrior can rely on a few, predictable, short-lived tools to let them survive a bit more, and that’s about it – you rely the most on luck that blowing out all your stuff correctly will kill him before he kills you.

Warrior skills are divided in 4 branches for me:
Gimmick skills → 100B and the like, predictable, easy to break out off/avoid, inefficient in any remotely serious setting.
Bugged skills → Rush, Bull, Bolas, Earthshaker and a few others that are bugged and can fail by default due to inner bugs. Sadly these also happen to be fundamental skill, if they worked.
Survival skills → Defy/Endure Pain predictable and too short duration, Shield block (this one is actually decent), and that’s about it really. Shout healing is a joke against anyone with a brain.
Control skills → There is some good stuff here, but again like survival skills they are nerfed in a way that they are simply not enough to do the job.

I won’t even talk about weapon skills, every weapon is a clone.
1. autoattack
2. vuln/block or some other rarely useful skill
3. cripple
4-5. some semi-useful CC (usually a tad bugged).

I find the Warrior’s innate bugginess, clunkiness and lack of depth to be just an impairment to my skills.

PS:
I’d really like all these elitists who claim the Warrior is fine and it’s a L2P issue to post their videos, tpvp position and ranks because it sounds like a whole lot of bull to me.
If you’re all that good and know all these things why don’t you show it then? I bet that you’re just another dual axe/rifle noobrior who thinks killing unaware people in WvW counts toward your leetness.
Or perhaps one of those mace/shield warriors who achieve nothing but finishing other people’s kills and think it’s their merit.

IIRC, Anet said a reconnect feature for fractals is on its way to live.
Don’t quote me on this tho, I’m not entirely sure.

Zephyr Lee.2491:

Okay so we are back again crying about “the grind”
This game has no grind.
Getting max gear takes no time to get.

The only “grind” comes from people who want the “cool” “flashy” weapons.

This.

ANet: “Dear player, grinding is not how you achieve this vanity item. It’s a long-term goal you save a bit everyday for while you play for fun.”
Player: “But I don’t want to have fun! I want to grind those long-term goals very quickly, then pretend you made me do this and call your game a grind! Ha!”

It’s like working 20 hours a day for a big diamond ring and complain to the jeweler that their rings require a ton of work to buy.
Police is totally cuffing that criminal for forcing you to ruin your health after their rings, word.

Yes, what you ask can be enabled in the game options.
Refer to the image for the how-to.

I agree completely that GW1 music was epic and I still hope for a comeback.

I run this with major success: 25/30/15/0/0
Unbuffed Stats:
14k health (15k if vitality trait)
3200 atk
50% crit
90 crit dmg
2400 armor

You need to get a mix of zerk, beryl and knight armors/jewels/orbs to obtain this result.
It has no real weakness, very versatile and fun as hell.

Yeah because a zerg of people will not notice the animation of shadow refuge.
Infact, you see everyone using this strategy in game, and towers being insta-recapped all the time due to those perma stealthers. Yeah.

Just say “Guys I got owned bad teach me to counter your class”, you will feel better and most of all: it’s the truth.

cero.1209:

So I have played my ele for over 300+hr to get to a level of skill that I am comfortable with. The elementalist is a class that you just dont walk into and are magically good. The thief was like that for me.

Funny, I found the Ele terribly easy to play and took me little to master it being that it’s a class based on rotations/fields, while I found a lot more depth in the Thief as the skill ceiling is your reaction/reflex ceiling, in that have you split the second to achieve perfection.

But hey, some people spam Heartseeker and think they can play the Thief so really.

Avatar.1923:

watch out TESO.
everything else dont stand much of a chance imo.

Looks like you haven’t seen gameplay yet.
TESO’s combat is something so terrible there are no words to describe.
FF11’s combat is way more action than that of TESO, just to give you a heads up.

TESO is just the new SWTOR, using a famous brand as a name for a terrible MMO in order to make a big money-grab, cash-in and then run away with the money.

Have fun being one of the baited ones.

Thief class.
I played “rogues” and “thieves” and “assassins” and “ninjas” on other MMOs too but nothing comes close to how the class should play like GW2’s Thief imo.
Mobility, evasiveness, distractions, decoys, smoke bombs, stealing, saving other people by hiding them, and also the ability to choose what skill you use when you want to use it through a resource system instead of the obsolete, boring and creativity-restricting cooldown system.

Jasher.6580:

Why do you think so? I strongly disagree with this sentiment. Unique skins would be enough.

That’s you. And me too, for that matter.
The majority already proved to not care for new content unless rewards are better than other content.

Yes all skills for each wep seem to be clones for the most part, and all skills are also pretty simple-minded.
Imo Warrior lacks a ton of depth that other classes have, I have abandoned it due to this.
I feel the simplicity and predictability of the class, not to mention the bugged skills which are pratically auto-CC (Rush, really?), limit my player skills a lot.
You get up to a point where what you can do with the class ends and you can’t progress beyond.
You can’t get better as your tools have a limit, and sadly that limit is very quickly reached, at least for me.

When you play another class and see it has tenfold the amount of mechanics and variety you wonder why the Warrior is so basic, it almost seems like the class was done quickly and then abandoned.

To sum up in one sentence, playing a Warrior is like going to a running contest wearing fins.

I’m not seeing a single reason to go offhand axe in any setting.
WA might be half-acceptable on a zerg but it’s not like it achieves anything; I’d rather 100B into a zerg or even Axe auto.
Tremors and Shield Block are also much overall better skills than Axe’s.

Sure one might go for “kitten double axe looks” but from a gameplay perspective it isn’t a good setup imo.

I never did dailies after lvl 80.
Honestly I have no use for the rewards it gives so it would be pointless to do it every day.

Nappychappy.7046:

Raiding doesn’t have to be linked to a treadmill. Pretty armor would be more than enough and if you don’t want to raid, don’t.

No one is complaining about the legendary treadmill, it is completely optional. Since we don’t have GvG, and WvW is limited, what is the point of these massive guilds?

GW2 is like XBL, there is thousands of players online, but you can only play with a handful of people at once… I am almost positive GW2 was designed with consoles in mind.

We had proof enough in GW2 that the majority of people wants better rewards out of new content.
Yes you can find 100 people who don’t need it, but GW2 is played by millions and the majority of those millions already proved to not touch content that is not more rewarding than previous content.

The majority plays for the loots, therefore adding raids would mean adding better rewards, emptying previous content, etc.

Also, I’m pretty tired of MMOs who lock you into instances.
Anet was wise to decide to expand on open world content with these patches, because seriously this is a Massively multiplayer game not a 5/10 man game.

Next profession will be Ritualist imo.
A Ritualist was in the screenshots of the last blog post.

The class was somewhat boring to me in GW1 but others love it so be it.

I hear Mesmer’s clang clang clang trademark sound IRL sometimes.
Even in GW1 Mesmers had those unique sounds that made you feel bad just for hearing them.

Can’t say Anet hasn’t gotten Mesmers down correctly, even their sounds make you feel mesmerized.

I personally believe Magic Find is not a stat that should be on gear.
Gear is supposed to determine your ability to fight.
MF should be something for Sigils/Runes and the like, not base stats for gear.

It’s funny that GW2 is “extremely grindy” yet somehow I managed to pull of 5 lvl 80s with max gear without grinding once nor buying gems.

People ignore things, play wrong, blame the game. Oh well.

Intellectually honest answer: Yes, we do, for the most part.

All classes have a very effective spike build and a stall build, and are all pretty balanced with each other.

Generally speaking though, bad people tend to play “easy” classes more and therefore you won’t see many good players playing say a Ranger.
But that doesn’t mean Ranger itself is bad, a well-played one is something to fear.

Luckily Anet does not listen to complaints but look at facts and do changes based on them so I don’t really feel worried about class balance issues.

Simply magical projectiles/axes etc.
GW2 is very unrealistic as it’s a fantasy RPG.

I too have a feel that I’m “cheating” on my main when I play others, but it goes away as you play the other class more.

felivear.1536:

I play videogames at an unhealthy level.

Then GW2 is not for you.

Then again, you mentioned that you want a “need” to level, etc.
You sound a lot like a very standard traditional MMO player, you want carrots to chase, you want invisible walls that lock certain content out until you grind X enough, etc.

Seriously, go play some traditional MMO until the sole thought of playing a traditional MMO makes you puke in your mouth a little.
Then, and only then, you are ready to play a game based on fun.

The problem is players don’t give a kitten if centaurs take over farms because it has no real consequences on them.
Centaurs could take over Tyria completely that players would not be affected and would only bother to liberate LA.

I say that what happens in the world should affect players in some negative ways so they go solve that event (but the reward should be scaled).
For instance, if Cents take over a farm all human characters get 10% less gold from loots (pve only); if they liberate the farm, the malus goes away for 24 hours.

Do any of you remember when Warrior were deemed OP due to 100b?
Hasn’t been nerfed yet, but the accuse has disappeared.

Answer this riddle.
Hint: 3 letters, starts with L ends with P.

Let’s be talk the truth, people.

Fact: Nobody will play a zone if there is no better rewards than others.
You know it, I know it, Anet knows it.
Lost shores map was proof enough of this.
So raids would have to be bound to better gear or we all know for a fact the majority would not do them and cry to the end for better rewards than non-raids until Anet does it.
If Anet was to introduce better rewards to raids tho, people would cry to the end about Anet lying, omgwowclone, geartreadmill grindfest, yadda yadda doomsayer copypasta.

It takes a very naive person to claim this is not what would happen.
So since however Anet creates raids there will be major tears around here, I’d rather them not doing them until the majority of the drama kids permanently quit GW2 and the community is in a stable state.

Here rests Red Falcon
Last words “1123222335555wwwwwwwww”

I’ve been suggesting that too.

It’s very simple and a technology that is already present and used in the game, except it’s only used to deal with overpopulation and not with underpopulation – so there is no excuse not to use it for this.
Simply allow people to join a map shared between all servers just like we do with overflow – and the whole underpop problem is automatically resolved to its root.

I wish Anet forwarded this to the coders and discussed it intensely – I hope they don’t believe the game can live the long run without such a feature.
You chose the server-based system which come with the flaw of creating underpopulation issues, you have a solution in your hand, use it.

GW2 is still lacking some advanced character data, as seen in the image below.

Is this coming some day?

I kill Eles just fine on my Warrior, Thief, Guardian, Ranger and Necro.
Of course it must be that those classes I mentioned are terribly OP because there is simply no way I learned to counter Eles and you cannot – it must definitely be an inside issue of the game.

God forbid some people are more skilled than you! It’s the class, the lag, the ping, the hacks, the hardware, the weather, the politicians and aliens of course.

I have 5 80s and Thief has the best support by far.
Stealth-rezzing a player that would otherwise die & aggro removal to a player that would otherwise get downed are much more tide-turning effects than anything other classes have.
Let alone the ability to apply AoE weakness (2x if traited for weakening poison), AoE cripple, massive damage denial through blind fields, blocking/reflecting projectiles, team life leech and removing conditions/restoring endurance.

It’s just sad that most Thieves can’t see most of this and believe they are a DPS class, or again think Thief’s support is about healing team through refuge/regen.

oZii.2864:

See this wasn’t a good way to start at all. Who doesn’t use stealth for stealth skills?

D/D = Backstab
P/P= Sneak attack (no ini cost) followed by Unload
S/D = Daze
D/P= Backstab
SB= Surprise shot (immobilize)
S/P = daze
p/d = sneak attack

Who doesn’t use the stealth skills as a thief they are like the best skills pretty much.

You got it wrong, I use stealth only to use stealth skills not as a fundament of my playstyle.

You will find by experience that advanced players do not fall for stealth-cheesing, but you will need to rely on evasiveness and mobility to beat them (which is the real strength of the Thief, but again you’ll also realize this when playing against better opponents).

To recap, I don’t mind some changes to stealth in PvP if we get more evasiveness/mobility in return. It’d just be a buff for me.

Habib Loew.6239:

snip

Ah this is basically what other MMOs with mass pvp did, except this seems a lot better as you can tell the class immediately (in other MMOs they only show a “shadow”).

Great stuff indeed. Thumbs up Anet.

Ascended is not purchasable on purpose.

It was introduced solely to stop the “omg no endgame!” carebears from flooding the forums with tears and give them some PvE stuff to do, therefore making it buyable would completely defeat it’s sole reason of existence.

It’s not like you need Ascended gear for anything outside PvE anyways, so there is no need to make it easier to get.
I’m actually happy Anet can somehow keep the PvP crowd unaffected by the carebear crowd; the only other option was introducing new tiers over and over like a traditional MMO, and that would kitten off PvPers.

Kromica.2831:

Can’t give it up then they might start to think it is ok, when it is completely absurd in 2013 that we are stuck with Dx 9

The benefits from dx11 would be very slight performance and graphics improvements, but would require a large amount of work.
Lots of work + barely noticiable benefit = inefficient use of exployee working hours.

Especially when you consider the game is still far from complete and there are way more important and urgent matters to solve that also require large amounts of work.

Priorities.

Strikerjolt.5910:

Take out the dodge gimmick, and what’s the real difference between WoW combat, and GW2 combat?

Everything.

WoW combat…
- has long TTK to cater to noobs with reaction times of a dead goat, GW2 needs a you to be on your toes.
- is entirely about outDPSing heals, GW2 manages heal in a much more advanced and realistic way that doesn’t make the game a battle against healers.
- is terribly RNG-based (procs, chance on skill, triggers, chance to debuff), GW2 is reaction/skill based.
- is all about pre-calculated, passive dodges/blocks where the character plays for you instead of having the player dodge by reflexes like GW2.
- lacks GTAoE depth, GW2 goes very deep with them.
- has management of “aggro threat” for a lack of letting player skills decide if a player can survive a mob.
- has classes that cannot beat some other classes in a rock-paper-scissor system, in GW2 anyone can beat anyone if more skilled on any class.
- has a lot less condition removal, making players unable to counter them
- has very little CC prevention/removal, making combat revolve around removing control of people’s char to beat them
- has classes pidgeon-holed in one role.
- has no cross-class combo moves at all.
- has no downed state which removes death depth completely.
- only specific classes can resurrect.
…and I probably forgot a dozen more.

As I just showed you, if you genuinely state that GW2 combat is = WoW combat with dodge it means you completely ignore both games’ combat systems.