Guild Wars 2

Trinity is the most basic, simplistic and now very obsolete concept of teamplay, that is very restrictive and forces everyone into a role.
GW1 lived 8 years without it, save for healers but GW2 removed those too (about time!) and just gave us self heals and abilities to avoid damage.
Better can be done for sure, but it’s already a major step forward for teamplay as now classes don’t matter as much as the player.
If the healer or tank leaves you wipe in traditional MMOs, but in GW2 all it matters is the skill of the people in party – if a baddie leaves you can continue, but if a skilled player leaves you definitely feel the difference.

Skill-based > passive calculated mechanics and pidgeon-holing.

80 Ele, and I can say for a fact we’re in a very good state right now thanks to D/D.
We can pretty much spike like a Theif and tank enough to survive most stuff.
Some will say otherwise simply because they still need to learn the class yet (specifically D/D build), but I think everyone is noticing that Eles are on a high spot right now in the sPvP meta and WvW as well.

Though I think the Ele does not need a nerf of any sort.
All classes are in a good spot now beside Necros (if DoTs are fixed or power necro buffed they’ll climb up too).
It’s much easier to buff the weaker class to the level of the others rather than nerfing all classes to the level of Necro.
Simple Ockam’s razor logic.

Thief requires infinitely more skill than Rogue.
Thief is not a simplistic rotation-based classs, you need to think quickly and use skills exactly when they are needed.
Against anyone with a brain you will need to use skills according to both the general situation, the enemy class and the enemy setup.

For instance, against a poor Staff Ele you could try the CnDSteal trick but not against a DD Ele as he will kill you if he’s any decent.
Some Warrior builds can be spiked, others need to be evasion-stalled, .others need to be kited.
Guardians depending on the build could outlast everything you have or spike you in 2s with 9k whirl+6k mighty blow.
Necros could be condition-based (easy) or Power Necros (hard).

Depending on the enemy you need to act very differently, use very different tactics and setups.
If you’re looking for an easy class like WoW rogue you should try the Warrior, it’s pretty straight-forward and somewhat simple.

Ah, if it was for me there would be a permaban for such a thing.
Why? Because If you name a character with such words it means you’re far from being mature or intelligent enough to be of any contribution to the community anyways.
You’re just a waste of database space and server player slots.

This last week I’ve been a bit inactive due to wanting to replay Skyrim for some reason.

But aside from that I got 1200 hours in and usually spend my time WvWing, Fractaling and that’s about it.
These two alone can take up hours so they’re enough for a playing session – but I would like to see a more “open” PvE (i.e. very very hard zone that requires 5 people to just struggle through) or at least a BIG instanced map that you have to clear a la GW1 rather than dungeons.

GW2 is still the only real MMO game out there.
Other MMOs are just money-grabs to leech cash off poor kids by turning them into carrot-chasing donkeys, ruinig their sense of reality, and giving them very wrong ideas on what fun and reward are in life.
I feel bad for those kids knowing they might grow up into working like zombies just for money, “grinding” relationships and “leveling” kids while living completely outside reality.

TsukasaHiiragi.9730:

It is ‘barely’ puggable, it requires such a finely tuned team with plenty of reflection skills and awesome survivability skills against the onslaught of the elementals.

That means Anet has succeeded.

Encounters don’t need to be all pug-friendly. There is a lot of people asking for hard content for organized groups/guilds, and high level fractals are tuned for them.
If you want to pug, do lower level fractals.
Enforcing easymode is very bad.

It’s ok for me that people finally learned to play an Ele, it was quite boring to kill them so easily and hear all the crying on the forums.
Ele isn’t OP or UP nor has ever been, there are just good and bad players.
Not that Ele requires any particular skill that is.

Not sure why to some people it’s always about the reward, why can’t you just have fun? Who ruined your childhood so bad that you can’t play for entartainment anymore?

plasmacutter.2709:

You suffer from bounded rationality.

The point of fractal — hence the name — is to provide an infinite difficulty curve — apparently gated by gear with AR (I hear they are revisiting this concept, ad gear-gating breaks the manifesto, but I’m not holding my breath)

Congratulations, you are nearly at the hard cap of your own gear and skill. You have accomplished the point of fractal.

(I also suspect the point of fractals is to provide a LOT of hard data to determine the proper difficulty balance for explorable tuning going forward)

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

The point of unlimited Fractals is that you will hit a wall at some point, where you will need a properly geared and coordinated team to get through.

I don’t roleplay but I can see your point.
I personally don’t believe the server system is a good thing, it’s an obsolete system with many flaws – but I could see a district for roleplayers one day.
Maybe even a FFA district for those who want to gank lowbies (but my guess is that no lowbies would enter and gankers would kill each other then quit due to no easy kills).

Tulisin.6945:

Still far less DPS than melee equivalents.

Otherwise it would be terribly OP. :p
As a ranged weapon P/P is definitely one of the best single target bursters I’ve seen these days.
Due to multi-critting nature of Unload you get the init through Opportunist to get off 3 of them and that’s 12k-18k dmg in a matter of 3s or so from 900 range, plus the free Sneak attack.

It’s very good to finish off people that are running toward their allies and heartseeking would be dangerous.
Allows you to down a Warrior/Guardian without riskying to get 8k blows in your face.

Might not be the end of the world, but it’s a much better switch for your melee setup than the nerfed SB (and to think SB used to be the “mandatory” secondary before the nerfs).

From what you said in the review it’s clear you barely scratched the surface of GW2 and still need to understand how many mechanics work and especially why they are made that way.

The focus of GW2 combat is not on buttons but on player’s skills.
There will be more weapons and skills in the future but the combat is based on reaction/reflexes rather than “mash 12 hotbars” traditional MMO combat; against anyone decent a fight never lasts enough to push more than a dozen of buttons anyways.
GW2 classes have more or less the same skill pool compared to other vanilla MMOs so it’s pretty fine for now; variety and deck-building will come with time.

Legendaries are meant to be a long-term goal that you slowly save for in the course of months.
They are not meant as somthing to grind (infact they don’t give you any advantage), but as a far away goal that you save for.
This has been stated by Anet several times as well.

Finally, a game doesn’t need to force players to be social, it only has to give them the means to interact and then the choice is theirs. Sociality is a right not a duty.
There is already a lot of content that requires tight-knit, coordinated socialization (think high-end WvW, tPvP or even high-end fractals) in order to be done efficiently so GW2 already requires teamwork – but whether you want to befriend those people or just play alongside them is your choice.

Hope I’ve cleared some of those misconceptions

Agree with LFG system but that’s it.

In regards of Guilds.
1) If a leader is not able to fill the roster with loyal people then his leadership failed and he shouldn’t be running a guild to begin with. Good leaders never needed any automatic recruiting system to get members, only an uninspiring leader with bad communication skills would need such a system.
Such a system would make guilds even more of a gimmicky thing than they already are.
2) Good Guilds don’t need an in-game calendar either, they have a forum for that; if members aren’t even bothering with the forums/guild facebook they don’t really care about the guild anyways.

While PuGging requires automatic tools, Guilds require commitment and dedication.
Taking out these requirements defeat the core purpose of a guild.

“Ugh we’re dying, Logan do somet-”

“BRB Queen”

Ele deals tremendous amount of damage with the right spec.
Right now it’s the flavor of the month with the D/D spike build, and staff is great for massive AoE damage – and it’s pretty easy to deal said burst (it’s a rotation).

A good portion of people haven’t gotten to understand the class yet (they think fireball spamming or hitting random skills while swapping attunements at random = playing Ele correctly) so you will hear it’s weak, but go check youtube videos.
You will not be disappointed with Ele.

I don’t play Ele myself but I find it the most challenging opponent if the player knows the trick.

Isn’t there an internal CD to the life steal?

Sacrificed my vitality trait for 10% pistol dmg and geez.
4k to 6k dmg consistently per unload, autoattack crits for 1.1k, Sneak hits decently too.
I also hit someone for 9k but probably sidekicked/green geared.
I’m on glass cannon gear + 30/30/10 so it might be just me but still.
Other Pistol skills still suck terribly in PvP (not so in PvE tho), but would you waste init on them if they were good? Unload would still deal more damage.

Now I much prefer P/P as backup instead of now-poor SB, having a lot of fun with PP (now it makes sense to swap at least).

Anyone else having fun with it?

I love these amateur “graphics mods” these days.
They increase constrast to hilariously exaggerated levels, to the point the game looks like a cartoon, and call it “The Ultimate Super Mega P00nzor Hax of L33tskillz Graphix skillzors!”.

TurtleofPower.5641:

I agree with the OP. ANet is even more on the ball, faster, and definitely more equipped to handle their challenges than they were with GW1. It’s wild. They’re awesome at their jobs is all I can say.

Eventually we’ll get an expansion, but right now making the game even better is a really good goal, and we’ll benefit.

Well in GW1 they were 30 people, now they are 300+
So far Anet updates have never disappointed me, so I can safely be hyped for the ones coming these months.

Reading the post from Colin it seems he has mind-reading skills because what he listed was exactly what I wanted from the next update, word by word. Scary.
The only thing he missed from my wishes is to create a “common district” for maps in the world so that we can all play together with people from other servers (thus eliminating the “empty maps” issue), but perhaps they’ll find another way around it.

The large majority of updates so far were PvE-oriented (to the face of those who say GW2 is a “pvp game”).
Jan/Feb updates are still containing a lot of PvE, in fact Colin said they are planning to improve and add content to the existing world.
Note that “new content” doesn’t mean “adding new maps everyone will ignore”, it just means new stories/events/dungeons/mobs/etc.

Currently GW2 has 26 large, detailed PvE zones, 49 dungeon zones and hundreds of events, let alone the storyline.
I can hardly remember any MMO that had more PvE than GW2 at 4 months from release.

So maybe you guys won’t mind if we get -some- PvP updates along with the PvE ones this year, especially considering WvW has been barely touched and sPvP has little to no content with few maps and only one mechanic.

Applies to every single MMO’s forum.

Gamers of the new gen use this logic:
- If the game has no stat treadmills then it “has no endgame”.
- If the game has stat treadmills then it’s a “grindy wow clone”.
- If the game has any form of pvp that includes more than 3-5 people it’s a “zerg”.
- If the game fast rewards, then it’s “there is nothing to do”.
- If the game has slow rewards, then “the game isn’t rewarding”.
- If the game is hard then “the game is gimmicky”.
- If the game is easy then “lol game is too easy”.
- If the game has trinity/DPS meters it’s a “wow clone”.
- If the game has unique team mechanics and no meters then “game lacks identity/roles”.

Read some threads and you’ll find all of the above and more contradictions.
Whatever path a game takes, there is some derogatory term (usually used improperly) to completely dismiss it.

I ultimately believe that there is a part of people that is done with MMOs but won’t accept it so keeps wandering them all and complaining every single thing.
They want a copy of WoW to feel familiar, but the opposite of WoW to not feel bored.

Just give up with requesting raids, meters, trinity and other autopilot ezmode WoW stuff, they made it pretty clear that it will never happen.

There are already about 15 raid bosses in the world.
They could use improvement and whatnot, but they are there already.

And no, you won’t see raids done the Blizzard way, this is Arena Net and thanks for that.

Exterminans.9723:

However, it does fail again in WvW when it all is about zerging again. It rarely is 1vs1, and even when it is, your enemy is more likely to flee than to fight. So most times it is just zerg vs zerg.

Oh my, I’m starting to get seriously tired of these statements.

WvW is mass PvP. It isn’t meant to be 1vs1.
You’re meant to group with others and kill other groups of people.
Dozen thousands of people love large scale PvP and play it daily.

The whole thing of dismissing WvW as “zerg” is as baseless as dismissing PvE as grind.
I can’t count the times we’ve beaten 30 people with 5 people, equally geared but with very different degrees of skills and coordination/tactic.
We’ve repelled hordes of 80 players with 10 as well.
Skill and coordination matters a lot in high-end WvW; yes there is a low-end there too, aka zergs of uncoordinated, unskilled players vs a similar zerg – but that is not what all WvW is about.
Else explain why medium population servers such as SFR got in tier1 by winning against people with thrice the population and activity: the reality of fact dismisses all these baseless critics – doing those baseless critics itself dismisses yourself as completely clueless of WvW and its mechanics.

Quit dismissing things you ignore with poor arguments.

I agree completely.

Whoever in ANet HQ understood that we have enough world space but not enough world depth has my full gratitude.
There is no need for new maps that everyone will ignore, we need a reason to visit the current world, more depth to it, more world bosses on every map, etc.

People who hate Orr do so because they hate to lose control of their character/being pulled – which isn’t the best mechanic imo.
I’d much prefer an harder zone with more Chill and Poison application than lose of control.

To many others, OP, this game’s combat and leveling is the best they’ve experienced in MMOs.
GW2 isn’t everyone’s cup of cake, some people want a more static/rotational combat that doesn’t require much quick-thinking or reflexes, and a more fetch-quest/grind based leveling.

It’s good for games to be diverse and unique, rather than all clones with the same mechanics.

Scootabuser.4915:

did you watch the video? we do a kittenload of jumping

Jumping alone is not parkour.
Parkour is spectacular, risky, to-the-edge jumps, backward dodge-jumps from a roof to a tiny handrail, etc.
Watching and doing parkour is thrilling, the video is just a Benny Hill sketch.

Not trying to rain on your parade just stating that what you show is not parkour.

These are very good news.

I was seriously hoping Anet was done releasing more and more world content rather than improving what’s already there.
The world is huge, you just need to give us reason to visit it… because even an exploration-lover gets bored after completing a map 3-4 times.

I vote for more and more frequent raid bosses in every zone, chest events, big war-like events with lots of loots…. and especially, make the endgame zones actually difficult and non-soloable a la GW1.
For WvW, Orbs need to come back with bonuses to loot/badge rates for the owners in place of stats – also, improved maps (season change? or at least LESS snow please).

Keep it up Anet you’re the best.

Permabans were only given to people who purposely abused of this, aka did this dozen of times.
If you did it dozens of times then you knew you were abusing a bug, and therefore you were flat-out exploiting.
Those who did not abuse this were not perma’d.

This already happened during release days with the karma things… at that time you could say “it’s all new, I didn’t know!” even if you bought 100s of those items, but now you get perma’d.

Make a new account and play LEGIT, or don’t come here ever again.

Parkour is a show of climbing and jump skills, in order to make a parkour video there would need to be jumpdodges from places to places etc.

This is just people exploiting places with lack of collision.

You easily make 20g+ from completion rewards of all 70+ maps.
That’s enough to get a lot of lvl 80 exotic stuff; quite the reward, when you consider all you did was exploring.

HEAL SKILL means your number 6 skill.
Healer’s Retri isn’t gonna trigger off everything that pops green numbers.

I can solo a Thief that means I’m better than your 12 people OP?
Or maybe I just L2P’d and learned to counter stealth very easily.

Erasculio.2914:

Genesis.5169:

“Too much stuff here is optional”

Yes.

The game gives you the option of talking to people, not when you are forced to, but rather when you want to.

Some people need games to force them to be social, or they will not talk to anyone.
It’s not GW2’s problem if some people is socially awkward.
MMOs are not made to force sociality, but to create an environment that allows it – normal people want freedom of choice in a game, not be forced to do anything.

So assume you come at my home and discover that by putting 1 euro in my vending machine you get 2.
You keep doing so until you rob me a ton of money. And then I discover it.
How many are the chances I let you in my house again? Zero.

Exploiters are to be permanently banned.
One thing is doing it while unware, but it’s impossible to not be aware you get 2 ectos with 1.

Nice, would be cool to see build/gear tho.

OP, anyone saying GW2 is grindy never really played GW2 as it’s meant to – they simply tried to work in GW2, which for the record isn’t really viable.
I’m nearing 1k hours in and I’ve yet to grind anything, that’s proof enough that there is no required grind.

Why play you ask? To have fun.
If you play with any other reason in mind you’ll hardly enjoy GW2.
Simply, you login and decide how to have fun.
None of what GW2 offers is fun to you? Play another game.

You play GW2 if you find the combat and contents fun, if you don’t you quit.
If you want a long-term goal there are many – whether you want to grind them like a robot or get there by doing things for fun is up to you.

Sylv.5324:

I am a guild wars 1 vet. I like this game.

My only worry is that ANet will stop keeping us in mind, because we are quieter than the loud ‘we want trinity, we want raids!’ etc etc minority.

Nah I don’t think so, don’t worry, they never listened to haters so far and never will.
I’ve seen RB stating they know the large majority of the game are not rushers or traditional MMO mechanics addicts – infact you don’t see them talking about adding raids or trinities of any sort.
They know that listening to haters would mean losing trust of the other 95%.

The real issue with GW2 is that, since it’s free of monthly fee, people who quit can keep their forum account and troll the boards freely.
I would say that negativity in general should be punished – a mature person can write ten pages of criticism without a shadow of negativity, if one hates then he’s not mature so keeping him here is counterproductive.

GW2 is the very first game where I found a class that perfectly fits my playstyle.
Thief’s mobility and reaction-based playstyle is very entertaining and reflexes-challenging, especially on builds that focus on timely evasion and tricks.
Very satisfying.

I’m usually more into Warrior archetypes but sadly War in GW2 is very clunky, predictable and lacks depth.

I got 800 hours in, hit a wall, but then started playing again.
GW2 isn’t meant as a game you feel the need to play, it’s a game you play when you want.
I love that I can play other games too without feeling imprisoned in GW2, or that if I don’t play GW2 then I’m wasting money or I’m being left behind.

Honestly I believe those who are unhappy with the fundamental pillars of GW2 should just quit instead of infesting the forums.
I’m tired of reading people asking for things such as tanks/healers, DPS meters, raids, more skillbars, removal of unique features and whatnot.
GW2 was made to be a breath of fresh air for people who are done with those mechanics.
Things can be “adjusted” but you will never see a complete overhaul of the features that are reason for the majority of the playerbase to play GW2.

Bottom line, if you want improvements it’s ok but if you want drastic changes just change game.

Vasham.2408:

WoW is the industry standard, so there’s nothing wrong with using it for comparison. For all the zealots like to fling poo at it’s mention they have to accept that GW2 needs to stand up to WoW in terms of quality in order to stay afloat. Right now though GW2 has a one ton weight around it’s ankles dragging it deeper and deeper into irrelevance every day while WoW continues to recover and grow after an admittedly bad expansion pack.

That’s not even remotely true.
Soccer doesn’t need to “stand up” to basket, they’re different sports for different people.
Similarly, GW2 is a different game than WoW and needs to appeal to different people, it makes no sense to compare the two beside mentioning they’re both online games.

WoW is only the standard for theme park, grind-based, P2P MMOs.
Any game outside those standards won’t pick from the playerbase of Blizzard so they don’t need to care about any comparison with WoW.

GW2 itself got his playerbase from people that was unsatisfied with traditional MMOs – it would be pretty naive to say it needs to stand up to a game its userbase was tired of.

My family owns a restaurant and rest assured they don’t compare themselves to McDonald.
They cater to people who like healthy food, people who like trash food will always go to McDonalds anyways.

Kausion.9384:

Vasham has already shot down this argument that is used often by people like you. I don’t know what your 20 “years of experience” comprised of but it obviously was not serious endgame raiding. To seriously suggest that it is “autopilot easymode” is ludicrous. You are seriously suggesting that players could watch TV and eat while pushing for top kills of Yogg 0-light. Let’s be serious.

I did all serious endgame raiding of all sorts in the majority of MMOs.
As long as you have the gear it’s all about rotation and tank/healer doing their job correctly, with the sporadic “phase change”.
There’s nothing remotely “skill-based” in autopilot PvE of traditional MMOs, been there done that while eating chips and watching TV series.
When I hear “I’m a former wow raider yadda yadda” it really sounds like a McDonald employee trying to make his job sounds hard.

Anet stated a lot of times that they made GW2 for people who hates the trinity, hates passive, calculator-based, RNG-oriented combat, hates all these obsolete mechanics and wants action-reaction-movent based gameplay.

Anet is never going to dumb down the game with a trinity, get over it.

kidbs.8920:

sPvP isn’t a skills-based game either. It’s all about bunker builds and who can turtle on a point the longest.

This.

At least in WvW you can prove your skills by winning outnumbered, there is a lot more skill involved in WvW than there is in bunker-the-point s"PvP".

1. Reintroduce Orbs, make them give +chance to loot Badges/gold to owners instead of stats.
2. Make guild claiming more important, introduce guild boons.
3. The hidden nicknames concept was a failure, remove it altogether.

Kausion.9384:

Vasham you are correct on all fronts, although from what I have read few seem to understand. The simple fact is that GW2’s PVE is egregiously inferior to WoW, Rift, etc. I know it is blasphemous to say this because GW2 “revolutionized MMO’s” and we no longer have to be “subjected to the grindfest gear treadmills that are all other MMO’s,” but let’s look at the facts. PVE is a mess. The trinity was replaced by no real substitute as has been discussed on numerous threads on this forum, and the mechanics of the fights are laughable when compared to Blizzard’s fights. Call WoW a gear treadmill all you want but you are either a fool or someone with no serious endgame PVE experience if you seriously suggests ANet’s PVE meets the bar. Vasham has covered the implications of this as well. The player base is defined by PVE players and I do not see anything sustainable right now. This game could be great but ANet did not have to abandon what WORKED in other MMO’s.

Disclaimer: I am a former WoW raider with realm first world top 50-100 kills for 6 straight tiers. You can hate on Blizzard all you want but you can not deny that they masterfully design amazing encounters, something ANet has not come remotely close to.

Interesting.

As an old person with a certain degree of skill and 20 years of MMO experience, I found WoW PvE -especially the trinity- to be the pinnacle of autopilot easymode watch-tv-while-raiding mess.
GW2 PvE at least require you to dodge and block manually (which is automatic in WoW), requires position/warding/BB to block mobs whereas in WoW it’s a mere calculation (threat) that you build by using threat buttons, is reaction-based while WOW is as easy as “memorize this rotation and do it”.

Blizzard’s simple-minded design of encounters and simplistic, brain-dead combat system that requires no skill makes it seem they are directing their game to kids in the ages 8-12.
I ran all WoW had to offer and everything was terribly easy and straight-forward, whereas in GW2 I found some challenges even in PvE.

See, this is my opinion (like yours) and I didn’t even need to put it down as a fact as you did which gives it more value and credibility.

You want Blizzard trinity and dungeon design? Go play WoW.
GW2 would not gain any benefit in dumbing down its mechanics to the level of WoW – it would actually lose the largest chunk of the playerbase.

The greatest selling point of GW2 is the huge step forward in the mechanics of combat – some people will evolve and learn it, others will not understand it and go back to games with autopiloted gameplay.

I play WvW daily still, even after 800 hours.
The gameplay is great, it just needs some depth.

- New title every 1000 kills / siege usage and whatnot.
- New maps. Snow+Grass only is boring.
- Reintroduce Orbs and make them increase the drop rate of badges and gold, so we’re fighting over something valuable.
- Towers/keeps need to be A LOT harder to conquer. I don’t mind camps to be easy but anything walled should be more heavily defended by a lot more NPCs.
- More items that can be only gotten in WvW. Unique WvW weapons and armors.
- Movable siege; all siege should be able to be pushed and/or carried.
- Siege towers that work like movable rams but more health and can be filled with players that shoot from inside, immune to damage until the tower is destroyed.

As a Thief mainly into PvP I don’t think we need many changes, we’re almost in final state.
Some things that need fix:
- The bug where you are stealthed but your character remain visible needs to go.
- Culling needs to go.
- Dancing Dagger damage was grossly overnerfed.
- Body Shot needs a rework.
- Flanking strike needs to be fixed.

I have 3 classes I’m afraid of: good Mesmers being nigh unkillable and spamming more clones than I can kill, good D/D Eles with all their CC and massive damage and good Warriors nullifying all your damage, stunlocking and channeling stuff at me when I stealth.
I also once met one good Ranger that put up a great fight, but those are very very rare.