Guild Wars 2

Somewhat agree OP, I hate when people draws comparisons with WoW.
I don’t hear people making tricycles comparison when we talk about cars, same should apply to WoW and GW2.

Give up guys, this will come in 1-2 years minimum.
It’s not remotely a priority, they said it already, posting it more won’t change this.

The problem with making valuable things farmable is that bots will farm them 24/7 and screw up the economy and sell illegal gold.
Since there is no way to make both things farmable and bots unable to farm them, it’s best to have DR.

Also, when an item/task requires a lot of materials it means said item/task is not meant to be rushed.
High amounts of mats means they mean for it to be a longer term goal.
Allowing you to make it a short term goal by farming would go against the whole point of it.

I’m not sure what you guys think of it, but I for one don’t enjoy it so much.

Did you ever go hunting in real life?
Imagine you shoot a turkey, rush to recover the body just to find a ticket in its place that says “Collect 743 of these to exchange with a real Turkey at your local market”.
Now imagine the reaction of the hunter.

Similarly, I get more enjoyment to hunt mobs for the hope of rare loot (good old req8 golds?), rare skins, rare materials.
The shift nowadays seems to be that you need to complete X a specific number of times to get an item, there is no real epicness about this.

Why can’t the Ice Elemental boss drop a rare Ascended Icy Dragon Sword/Staff with an unique built-in mod, or the colossus boss drop his Ascended Cultist Hammer with his own mod?
Nah, they’re just things to kill fast so you get the tokens.

“Hey look, I looted this Shaman Staff off the Grawl Shaman himself! Very rare!”
“Hey look, I got this Shaman Staff from the vendor for 837 token I gained by rushing fractals”
There’s a big difference imo.

TL;DR Please add a minimal chance for bosses to drop epic unique gear.

GW2 is not gear-treadmill-based so the endgame is mostly PvP.
Even if they released 10man content it wouldn’t be farmed unless people got superior stats out of it.

GW2 has no PvE guild content because that is a thing of geargrinding MMOs.

There are many skills like FS that have bad tracking and don’t land, Anet didn’t fix any and I doubt they will ever do – if there was a solution it would be done by now.
The fact they never commented on this issue is proof enough for me.

I for one don’t use stealth a lot, I mainly use it for stealth skills; my playstyle revolves around evasiveness and mobility so I thought what if they turned stealth into shadow form?
Works similarly (ends on attack, enables stealth skills), except that when in Shadow Form we are semi-visible (transparent like we see it) but evade all melee/ranged attacks and gain stability during it.
Mobs still wouldn’t see a shadowed character so we could continue to stealth our friends in dungeons etc.

The reason people complain about Thief is most MMO gamers can’t play without target locking, and they will never stop crying until they can see/target us.
This way we get (imo) a better tool than stealth which complies with evasive playstyle, and at the same time we get rid of the haters.

There are 2 guaranteed things in life: one is death and the other is people lie about their loots.

Non-consensual PvP will never happen in PvE zones.
Duels would be nice to train up, but Anet is prolly stickying to custom server thing for that.

We had some mounts in GW1, but I don’t see it fitting in GW2.

I suggest you get 15k health 2400 armor (mix beryl gear/orbs with zerk).
That’s what I run, it saves your life and you still keep 3200 attack / 50% crit / 90 critdmg.
Going overboard with offense will not give the same benefits as having both a solid offense and defense imo.

I honestly believe that -any- skill that removes control of your character from you is bad.
This game is completely based on action and movement – locking yourself into a channeled thing that also controls your movement is the worst thing you can do.
Warrior’s Rush is another great example of failed skill idea.

Players are funnier to kill than mobs.
Mobs will not try to blame their failure on their class/yours, on Anet or on lag – they just die.
There is no fun in killing something that just dies without making up some ridiculous excuses to not admit he’s inferior to you.

If we had “killcams” like Skyrim maybe… nah GW2 will prolly never have blood spurts and beheading.

It’s random. Sometimes you get less, some more.

If it was for me I’d have made Ectos and Obsidians back to where they belong, aka random drops in FoW and UW.
They used to be the endgame materials… Back then when you looted an ecto you were happy because it was worth a lot and rare, now it’s everyday stuff.

Here is me and my girl in Pirates of Caribbean style!

There is no better MMO for a couple to play than a FUN-based one with no boring limitations.

GTAoE stalling is possibly one of the unique features that make GW2 stand out from the other boring MMOs where you can’t do this which makes the environment a non-factor in PvP.
Lack of GTAoE stalling means you can’t use a chokepoint to stall an army (i.e. the gate near ogrewatch), it will be really all about jumping on each other and unloading skills.

Please don’t kill the importance of environment control.
Every class has one or more ways to get through AoEs anyways; if this is a sPvP issue then nerf sPvP alone but don’t destroy the rest of the world.

There are at least 2 zones for each lvl range.
It’s physically impossible to be underleveled if you complete both.

My girlfriend has recently lost interest in the Ele because it keeps getting power to its “battlemage” build but nothing to the “ranged magic caster” playstyle.
She feels that the class is currently somewhat weak with staff and a lot more efficient with D/D.
I somewhat agree as in my experience I’ve never once died to a staff Ele but melee Eles are actually quite challenging, even after you learn all their tricks.

So how do other Eles feel about this?
Would you enjoy the class more if it was better off ranged (say, getting more snares and damage to staff) but somewhat worse in melee?
Or maybe Ele should stay like this, and a new future class should fit the ranged magic caster archetype?
She also thinks Ele should be king of AoE (which is currently a hot subject), what’s your take on this?
We believe that if Staff needs to be weak 1vs1 it needs to at least make up for it with AoE.

Please post your opinion and elaborate if you wish.

I’m super tired of hearing Thief complaints.
The hate toward the class from baddies who can’t counter the easy dagger gimmick (really? how bad can one be…) really drove me away from the game.
I’m not even sure this will ever go away unless Anet pretty much removes stealth and any damage from the class – basically make it killable 100% of the times by any mouse clicker out there.

On topic, I think Warriors need a good look.
The inner clunkiness and predictability of the class can’t be overcome by skill; you reach a point where your skill is limited by the class’ flaws and you can’t progress beyond, your skill is limited to the hard limits of the class.
It’s the only class I played that felt like this; I always found a way to get even better with other classes but not with Warrior really, its simplicity and skills that take control out of you limit my skills incredibily.

Looks like a very stretched texture to me, usually applied to edges and looks very bad.
Skyrim has a few of those too (look at wall connectors in Whiterun for instance), all games do.

But yeah it looks ugly nonetheless.

That video is a stellar example of how little numers matter in WvW when individual skill is low, which is what I’m saying since the beginning.
That video is nothing new really.
With my guild we’ve repel 25 with 5 people too when we are against baddies.
WvW isn’t “zerg” like some people claim, skill and coordination are king – that’s for good servers at least, I know perfectly that noob servers play it zerg vs zerg but noob playgrounds have nothing to do with the real GW2.

To break those Eles they just needed to have a couple GC Thieves or a couple GC MB/WA Guards teleport in and spike a couple of them, then blast the other 2.

But that zerg was probably made of average joes that don’t use melee in wvw but sit ranged and spam things. Yeah, walking free badges got what they deserved.

Every class can have a lore-fitting version of portals:

Thief: Shadow Portal (teleports people through shadows just like shadowstep)
Ele: Black Hole (generated by unstable elements)
Necro: Dark Vortex (uses an underworld passage)
Engineer: Teleport Machine (new engineer technology, gets bugged and destroys self after X uses)
Ranger: Quicksand (self-explanatory)
Guardian: Door of Dwayna (the power of Dwayna allows to create a passage through dimensions)
Warrior: ??? Too simple minded to create a portal perhaps.

But honestly, I see portals as a cheap gimmick and easymode ways of dealing with walls.
People should learn to use siege correctly instead of trying to “bypass” walls.
I wonder why Anet finds something gimmicky and decides to give cheese to everyone instead of removing it. Meh.

Zeldain.5710:

How can you call doing something a thousand times a “journey” and not a grind? There’s nothing different or unique about doing that vs. everything else in the game. There is nothing about it that makes it “legendary” by any stretch of the definition.

Then point me to all those MMOs where you feel legendary for having gotten an item.
Every single long-term goal in the world requires some degree of repetition.

Every day of our life we repeat some actions; I get up, make coffee and light a cig every morning yet I don’t think my life is a grind – nor I feel the taste of coffee and tobacco in the morning is less legendary because I do so every morning.
I also don’t believe having a good time more than once with my girl is a grind.
Variety is ok but there is nothing wrong with repeating actions that are fun and satisfying.

Dee Jay.2460:

I’d still much rather have a Thief spaming Clusterbomb than a Thief spaming Unload. Both do similar damage but one is AoE and triggers combo fields….and the other is just damage.

Talk about a boring play-style too. You’re literally not bringing anything aside from damage. And the fact that you pigeon-hole yourself into a Single Weapon set and prefer utilities with little/no group support is a sign of a bad Thief.

Hope you’re kidding, CB spamming deals a ton less dmg than a proper UL build.

Power necro is kinda good but needs some further love.
Condition necro is kinda weak mostly because conditions themselves need a buff in general.

i5 3750k OC 4.0
670 GTX
8gb corsair RAM.

50 solid FPS in LA or any other place.

LA has some slow rendering when you first pop in, but once you rendered everything it’s smooth.

Again with this?

There is no such thing as a legendary “grind” because you’re not meant to grind them, you’re meant to save for them in the very long run – infact, legendaries are merely aesthetic so I don’t see why one would want to grind them.
Also, if they didn’t require a lot of time to aquire they would lose the point of being legendaries.

If you decide to grind 25 hours a day for something that’s just aesthetic you’re really messed up.

Huh? Since when is AoE an issue? This is new to me.
I have little AoEs on my classes, the only strong AoE combo that comes to my mind is teleport+churning earth, but it is balanced due to the long cast time, infact most times I’m able to avoid it.
Shatter AoE is quite strong but very counterable.
I’m mostly a WvW player tho so maybe you noticed something in sPvP/PvE that I didn’t see.

Sadly some people cannot understand GW2 combat and will try to “zerg” things to death and cannot see beyond “role-based combat”; I believe this is due to the general easiness of the endgame that doesn’t force players to set up a proper combat team or to learn combat itself – maybe this is in order to allow casuals to access that content.

GW2 is teaching people to actually “play the battlefield” freely instead pidgeon-holing a player into a specific, focused, easily manageable task.
To make a metaphor, if a MMO was a restaurant, the traditional MMO would be the one telling you “decide: be the waiter, barman or chef”, while GW2 would be telling you “manage the whole restaurant freely”.
Combat not only involves playing a part but all parts of it.

As a Thief I can take care of people’s aggro and life through stealths, managing enemy damage through blinds, debuffs and fields, tanking through dodging and evading manually, controlling enemies through various forms of stuns, interrupting, impairing movement and effectiveness of enemies, etc.
In another MMO my role would be just “deal damage”.

If combat was the weakest part of GW2, then I wonder what the combat of other MMOs should be called considering they only allow a minor part of what GW2 allows to be managed at one time.

I blame this partly on MMOs using people to believe that trinity easymode gimmick is depth, and partly on Anet making the game really too easy which doesn’t take advantage of the new combat system.

The problem with this is that if there wasn’t a gear progression a lot of people would say there is no endgame.
If there is, a lot of people will cry about it.
That’s why they found a middle ground, they give us a tier between Exo and Lege that needs to be aquired by doing content (while exotic can be merely bought).

This will not be reverted or they would incur again into the “no endgame” critic, nor will be extended or they will incur in the opposite critic.
Anet found a good spot to be, it ain’t going to change guys. It won’t change.
If you can’t bear it play another game.

Yes it officially is.

Most classes have these “spike combos” anyways.
Warrior: Frenzy>Bull>HB
Guardian: JI>MB>WA
Mesmer: Clone spam>Shatter
Ele: RTL+Updraft>BS>FB

But they are mostly cheese combos that work only on unaware targets or noobs.
Decent people and above just dodge or CD them.

Sinifair.1026:

It is a question which I would like answered.
- First of all: My personal and overall experience of Guild Wars 2 has been quite good. That being said, I can’t help but feel that it is a grind and here is why:
Each zone has a number of tasks, vistas, points of interest, skill point challenges and waypoints. Find all of these in each zone and you’re done with that particular zone, rendering it, well, useless afterwards.

- There is very little to catch my interest in the zones, because I never really got acquainted with them. By that I mean that in Guild Wars 2 I am always on the go. There is one task in the different areas of the zone, so you’re not spending much time in a village and getting to know the people there or the village itself.

- This basically means that I spend more time trying to locate every task, vista, Skill point challenge, PoI and waypoint in each area, than just enjoying the scenery, because GW2 is fast paced when it comes to world exploration. The player is always on the go, always grinding for something, always working towards a goal.
- I would like to see the game giving players the option of taking it slow and try to relax a little.

- What do you guys think about this? If you take into account what I’ve just said, is there then some things you recognize from it?

I got 1200 hours in without grinding, and I can say for a fact that GW2 never -requires- you to grind at least for your “needs”, as for “wants” mine didn’t require any (most of them were karma rewards) but that depends on the player and his approach to gaming.

You are free to decide if you want to slowly work toward a “want” through playing the game normally for fun and accumulating the required wealth over time, or be an OCD person and play 25 hours a day the same content.
GW2 allows both (although it rewards more a varied and healthy gameplay over obsessive unhealthy behaviors, infact the more you repeat content the less rewards you get), but the player has the final say on whether he wants to grind or not.

mjharrison.3209:

This is not an FPS, players should not be near-insta-gibbing each other.

I have a thief, I would much rather they nerfed BS and gave the class better support and utility.

GW2 (like GW1) has spike builds to test the player’s reaction time skills.
Removing this would pretty much remove the action element from GW2; we don’t need another boring MMO where the surprise effect, knowing the surroundings and the environment have no effect and one can play half-afk without worrying too much.

I love GW2, but there are 3 things I really really miss from GW1.

1) Customization.
We had the chance to put 3 different mods to weapons (now 1, the sigil), insignas on armors, large skill pool (GW2 traits/weps/skills are very limited in variety), “customizing” weapons for damage and class combos (it can be done without unbalancing if implemented correctly).

2) Difficulty.
In GW1 the end-zones were almost impossible to solo and much more rewarding.
In GW2 everything non-instanced is easily soloable and unrewarding which makes people abandon PvE zones and crowd dungeons.

3) Boss hunting to get uniques.
Little to no uniques in GW2, bosses are missing the unique feeling that makes you want to kill them for their trademark weapon.
Everything is available through AH or Karma merchs – what isn’t needs a ton of materials (time/money) rather than dedication to farming a boss.

I still got 1200 hours in, but without the above I feel like playing less than I used to play GW1 after 1200 hours.

Generally all classes have a tool to completely negate burst – once you know how to do it, it’s pretty simple to stall a Thief or anyone else on a spike build.
Of course if you don’t see it coming, any burst build (including those of Ele, Engi, Warrior, Ranger, Mesmer and Guardian) will most likely kill you or put you in a sticky situation.

Nothing is OP 1vs1 if you see it coming and you know how to negate a burst.
Everything is OP 1vs1 if you don’t see it coming or you don’t know how to negate a burst.

That’s how GW2 works, the spike builds are great against people with lazy reaction times or poor understanding of the game.

The combat is miles ahead of any other MMO.
It’s not purely action tho, it’s a hybrid, and a hell of a good one at that.

Agreed OP.

If it was any less time/money-consuming to get legendaries everyone would have one.
The good thing about FoW armor in GW1 was that the majority didn’t have one (at least not until GW1 started to be 6-7 years old).

Agreed completely.

Even though I found a build that is perfect for both, dual speccing is needed.
It’s a good feature like LFG system, it needs to exist.

Problem is, those skills are hard to balance. They need to be gauged etc.
As a Thief main I know my traps are very meh, but that doesn’t prevent me from enjoying the rest of the fun.

Just report the issues of your class in the proper forum, get support, and eventually devs will do something.
It has nothing to do with “anti-fun”, it’s skill balance progress. It’s a job that takes time.
You’ll prolly live another 60 years minimum so what’s the hurry?
We paid 50 bucks for this gem, give them time. You can tell they’re working a lot, just make sure they know what’s wrong so they’ll fix it.

There is nothing in this game that kills you inevitably.
You just haven’t learned the game yet.
Admittedly the game is very reflex-based so if you’re a slow type you’ll suffer spiking.
But spiking can be easily and efficiently countered by any class.

Sorry but to many people fights that don’t put you at high risk are the opposite of fun.
To many people, preventing a spike is the pinnacle of fun.
Spiking was fundamental of GW1 too even though there were less ways to counter it.

I’d hate if GW2 was yet another MMOs where time to kill is long to cater to baddies, this game is very skill based and the weak either succombs or learns.

Yeah, GW2 kind of takes everything you knew about MMOs and blast it right away by tossing much better and refreshing mechanics at you.
It actually takes a lot of dedication to learn a class, rather than just learn the current meta rotation and apply it.

Munkee.3542:

Just add it to the list.

Designing and programming are diffent things.
I.E. you may design a new car but not yet start its production; I believe that is what Colin meant, the feature may be under theoretical construction but not code production yet.

No sorry OP that is simply false.
Drop rates depend simply on loot tables with percentages; MF increases the chance that your next loots will be of rare tier but that’s about it.

I’m not sure why this speculation comes up in every game, I’ve yet to see any game with this implementation.

Desamos.1836:

So people constantly need to get new gear to satisfy their needs? Why can’t someone just buy one Ferrari, and take good care of it : /

You can.
If you buy a Ferrari (aka Legendary weapon) it will always have the best stats of any previous gear tier.
You -can- get your “ultimate” weapon in GW2 if you so want, else you need to get the Ascended tier which is the “bridge” tier between exotics (way easy to get) and legendaries (hard to get).

There is a whole forum section called “Suggestions” for those who want to share theirs btw.

critickitten.1498:

Red Falcon.8257:

Quit applying P2P logics to GW2, none apply.
GW1 was up for 8 years until GW2 which will be up for X years until GW3 which will be up for X years until GW4 etc.

Plenty of comparisons can and should be made.

The most important one is this: regardless of any given MMO’s choice of payment model, a new MMO in today’s world faces unprecedented competition from a massive number of MMOs already well established that would be happy to take those players off your hands.

An MMO in today’s market doesn’t have years to “prove itself”, it has a few months. GW2 has already had 4, and it’s already getting pretty bad word of mouth nowadays compared to when it released. If they haven’t nailed it by March, that’ll be the 7 month mark….much too late for the game to become a real contender ever again.

Or, to put it more clearly: yes, the game will survive. But it won’t be contending with WoW, or TERA, or Rift, or other big games like that. It may not even be a multi-million player game. It’ll end up fighting for scraps with the smaller games if it can’t turn itself around. And if it gets that bad, you can forget about GW3. NCSoft won’t fund it, they’re not doing so great as things stand even with GW2’s impressive numbers.

Clearly you weren’t alive back when Ultima 9 was released, a game which had major hype behind it….a game so terrible that it completely destroyed the franchise as a single-player property, and significantly weakened it elsewhere as well (outright killing Ultima Online 2, and weakening development on the original Ultima Online). Even now, a full 14 years later, EA still doesn’t have the courage to bring the single player games back, instead resorting to simple mobile games and downright tacky-looking F2P MMOs with the franchise label slapped on.

No major franchise is so well-insulated that it cannot die. Especially not Guild Wars.

Except that GW2 was a success and Anet made a ton of money out of it – a lot more than they made with vanilla GW1.
You can wonder if GW3 will be a success or not, but GW2 already accomplished that goal.

Also, ultima 9 is a very bad example as Ultima is still a successful franchise to today.
Origin studio changing has nothing to do with the success of the franchise itself – Anet could completely change the game or even sell it to another company but that wouldn’t make GW1 and 2 any less of successful games.

Miomooki.3812:

I don’t miss the healer role at all and I played a monk in GW1. This is a lot better system, period.

This.

If you miss spamming healz OP nothing prevents you from playing another game that has healers.
Why don’t you just do that?

That’s a very generalistic statement OP.
I and many of my friends played GW1 for 8 years straight yet we’re all enjoying GW2.
If you read on GW1Guru the majority of GW1 players that didn’t like GW2 name lack of point-and-click as the reason they didn’t like GW2.

Liking GW1 or not has nothing to do with liking GW2.
Of course, those who expected a clone of GW1 with better graphics or another Build Wars were disappointed to realize it isn’t, but Anet never promised either things.

Buying GW2 is like buying a new keyboard.
You will only know how good the keyboard really is after you mastered its keys and usage.
You need to adapt yourself to it in order to discover if it’s truly for you, because the keyboard won’t magically adapt to how you imagined it would play.

Yes, some people can’t get beyond the lack of “autopilot” features and therefore cannot play anything that isn’t very easy to understand and learn.
GW2 is simply a game that caters to people tired of autopilot easymode gimmicky mechanics that even my 8 years old nephew can master.
We wanted something that relied on player skills rather than some passive calculation and we got what we wanted.

I don’t want to sound critic (I hate complaining), but I have a suggestion for you, Colin.

Since GW2 relies on a loyal playerbase rather than selling the game to many people and money-grab (aka the P2P approach), you don’t need to talk about GW2 like Billy Mays would, you need to create a long-term relationship with the userbase.
It would be very nice to see marketing jargon gone and some good ol’ standard humanity appear in future Blog articles.
Marketing behaviors in general make you look like you aren’t estabilished yet and are trying to fool people.
In this time where people is sick of political slogans it would be the best idea to speak the language of the people.

I mean, when I want to pick up a random girl quickly I just go there show six pack and stimulate her curiosity/make her want me, but to build a lasting relationship I need to be sincere, honest, direct, straight-forward, sometimes humble or rude, caring, and speaking my mind and hearth out humanly.

Just some thoughts out the top of my head.

Quit applying P2P logics to GW2, none apply.
GW1 was up for 8 years until GW2 which will be up for X years until GW3 which will be up for X years until GW4 etc.
Think of it like the TES franchise, it’s not like there will be no more TES games after Skyrim, it will continue forever.

I think Anet did a mistake in making comparisons with traditional MMOs too much; while that was to prove the point that they’ll be different, it actually led people to compare GW2 with P2P MMOs like this.