Guild Wars 2

A bit odd that you find the SB the most exciting…but it’s by far the strongest option we have as a secondary set. Depending on what you were doing with it, you could use it as your main I suppose, it just won’t be anywhere near as effective as anything else…aside for P/P really.

Could you post a link to a skill builder with your setup Archonis? Interested in taking a look at what traits you take in each line.

Also curious what sort of stats you go for on your gear. Do you feel your traits give you enough vita and toughness that you can focus primarily on Condition or Power on your gear?

I’ve had pretty substantial problems with dungeons as well. I run a S/P and SB and find I have to stay back almost always with the SB if I don’t want to die almost instantly. It’s incredibly frustrating. I too am hoping to figure out a way to be more survivable and remain useful to my party without just staying at ranged the entire time.

sachiel.8051:

So, let’s use our story-telling imagination here: You’re bleeding like a stuck pig and turn yourself invisible. Does the blood that hits the ground and separates from you remain invisible? How about your vomit from the poisoning? What about the fire burning your invisible body? Sorry, that first tick on a dot should pop you out of stealth. Maybe we could see the effects of the burning, the trail of blood or if they don’t want to leave a trail of sick on the ground, a trail of green puffs. If a thief were to cleanse themself before stealth, problem solved and I know they can trait for cleanse on stealth as well.

So…you attempt to use realism in your argument, but start said argument with ‘turn yourself invisible’?

Raine.1394:

OK, let me answer you. You ask what you can buy with cash that you can’t obtain by playing the game. Nothing, beyond any gem store only items and they don’t increase your power level. But, that has nothing to do with pay to win. Pay to win is using cash to avoid the effort involved in playing the game. It is precisely to arrive at the highest power level by using cash to avoid the in-game path. Your distinction about time/effort saved by using cash is the pay-to-win everyone is talking about. It’s using cash to acquire gear rather than playing the game to acquire gear. It’s a pretty straightforward concept.

That has never been the definition of Pay-to-win. Ever. You can’t make it so by simply saying that’s what it is.

Pay-to-win has always been where a game offers you things that you cannot obtain through other means that has a statistical advantage over the non-paying populace.

Until you can buy weapons or armor that surpasses what you can get in the game, it is not pay-to-win.

Paul.4081:

Guild Halls to me were a place to meet up with some of the big cheeses and rub shoulders with them. In GW2, with multiple guild representation, how will that work?

Just because the system is there doesn’t mean everyone uses it. I’m in one guild with no plan to join any others at the moment.

If it’s optional, go for it. Otherwise I want nothing to do with it. I’m on Tarnished Coast(RP server) and it’s very, very full. There are people everywhere in the open world. And a lot of them are roleplaying while they quest. We don’t need a bunch of people from other servers harassing our community.

Previewing was disabled while they worked out some issues they were having with the system and servers. One of their developers posted about it back when previews first got disabled for armors that aren’t usable by your class.

From a roleplayer’s point of view, we want guild housing/player housing very very badly. In the meantime we have to basically take over taverns that are scattered throughout the world, but there are only so many to go around. Not only that, but they don’t allow for any privacy.

For a large chunk of the population, they likely don’t care…but I always feel that the more customization and options given to the players, the better. If you don’t think non-RPers have any use for these things, do some searches for EQ2’s housing, SWG’s old housing, or even LotRO’s housing. All of them are(were) widely used. In the case of EQ2 and SWG, housing was a strong way to experiment, show off, and waste away spare time to make the most creative settings you could. In SWG, players build fully-scaled X-Wings in their guild halls with nothing but items.

Think about that. Every item in the game could be put anywhere in a house you wanted. Every little item could be used to deck out your house. Want to show off armor and weapons? Feel free! You could put them on the walls, make your own mannequins/displays, or create exhibits. It was like having minecraft in your house.

Things like that appeal to a large populace(once again, just look at the success of minecraft). Some folks(like myself) look for customization to our characters and houses as a primary reason to play these games over single-player options.

I, too, would like to see a first-person view available. One of the first things I did in the game was to zoom all the way in, expecting to go into first-person view so that I could look around the environment. Without it, I have to mess around with the camera to try and see things I would like to see. Looking at other players is annoying because of this as well. Instead of just walking up to them and looking in first-person, I have to get behind them and try to get my camera in the right locations, from the right angles.

It’s really just a QoL issue and I’d love to see it.

Heinel.6548:

If you think there’s no tanks or healers in GW2. You are not exploring the game fully. Before you denounce GW2’s combat as unstructured and chaotic, think back to your CoH/V experience, apply the same framework to GW2. The two systems are very similar.

You can build tanky or build to do some healing, yes. Can that be your ultimate focus? Not really. You can’t do either to the level required to be labeled as a tank or a healer. In fact, if you even so much as suggest that you are either of those, you’ll immediately be torn to shreds by trolls and fanboys who will very aggressively tell you that those don’t exist.

Thinking back to my CoH/V experience, I could build a character to be a tank. I could tank on a Tanker, Scrapper, or Brute quite readily. I could also build an illusion Controller to tank things for my group. I built characters whose entire focus was support, not damage(like an illusion/ForceField Controller who speciallized in buffing defense and controlling enemies with confusion and soft CC).

But, by that same virtue, I could build any archetype as a damage dealer. I could also pick up some little extra tools to supplement my damage, healing, or control through the power pools everyone gets to select from. In the end, I could build however I want but I could ALSO build to serve a role.

And it’s not just that I could provide a role, but the group noticed that I was. If I let my Force Fields drop off of my team, they would suddenly go from handling a situation quite handedly to dropping like flies. If I didn’t keep my confusions up, the same thing applies. But if I don’t ‘tank’ here, what happens? Someone else gets the ‘aggro’(which the aggro system seems to illusive and mysterious to everyone on the forums or in-game) and simply kites around and dodges. If I don’t ‘heal’, someone just kites around and dodges. If I don’t dps things enough, someone just kites around and dodges some more.

Roles allow dungeons to feel like an effort in teamwork. The current state is a nasty clusterkitten of people swarming targets, dpsing and dodging around like they are pumped full of redbull, and dying a lot. And if they die, so what? They can run right back to the fight while the others dodge and kite around in circles. It’s flat-out, boring.

As I said before, I don’t care whether they have the trinity or not, but roles are needed to have teamwork and synergy.

Vasham.2408:

Nurse.1085:

I realize Anet must have done something to increase the cap or filtered it out or something, since the other week they all went from Full to Very High.

However, now they’re filling up again and I can’t get on the server my husband and Guild transferred to (which is Tarnished Coast). Neither can my sister-in-law.

Are these servers stuck at Full? Every time I look, it never moves from Full. Any Tarnished Coast members know what times I should be aiming for to camp the World Select screen?

Server status is based on the number of accounts tied to a server, not the number of players actively online. Even if Tarnished Coast was completely empty of players it would still read full. Shame Arenanet chose to lie about their subscriber numbers like that. : /

Absolutely false. I and many others have gotten on Tarnished Coast as well. The server status fluctuates from full to very high to high and back again based on how many people are currently online.

Start roleplaying with detailed emotes instead of two-word sentences and it’ll fix that problem.

Zeldain.5710:

As for the AoE, that’s part of it… if you’re truly playing as a team, and being tactical about it, you will have to avoid that kind of thing. Just as the opposing team would. You’d be forced into switching to weapons that focus on single-target combat more frequently, and that to me is a good thing.

I have no general disagreement with the concept of adding a FFA server. I’ve no interest in it whatsoever, but hey, to each his own.

But you can’t just gloss over this AOE component. Why? Because almost every ability that grants boons also grants conditions or does damage. Guardian’s have a heal, for example, that also does damage to enemies standing within it. So…which does it do other players? The current system doesn’t care whether you are grouped or not, so that very least they would have to change some code to make the game recognize whether you are grouped with someone or not as it can’t just apply teams to players like in sPvP or WvW.

So, okay maybe you do that. You apply a grouping system to fix that problem. Fine. But what happens when a group is running around trouncing on randoms? Do these random players that just happen to get attacked by this group have to basically fight FFA against them? A grouped team can buff each other and has no fears of AOEing one another anymore, affectively removing friendly fire for one group while the other still has it.

In the end, those are things that would have to be figured out and I’m not sure that there is really an adequate way of doing so. At least not with the current game mechanics.

Hydrophidian.4319:

Jeffrey Vaughn.1793:

Again, I really need specifics. I’ve never into this issue on the live server, or while testing, so I’d need to look at the exact spawn to see if anything odd is going on.

Hi, Jeffrey.

Thanks for actually checking in on this.

A place that seemed very broken to me was the camp in Brisban Wildlands, Hidden Lake region, just west of the Seraph Observers waypoint. The spawn rate there just didn’t seem right at all. Every time I went through there, all the NPCs—merchants and such—would be dead due to the bandits constantly overrunning the area.

Trying to keep up with them, and keep the NPCs alive, was impossible alone, and even a party of 5 (in the zone’s level range) was hard pressed.

This was not due to an event. This was normal spawn that I dealt with many times over the course of several weeks. Haven’t been there lately, but last time I was there it was still crazy, and way out of line with the rest of the zone.

FYI. Thanks for looking into it.

I can confirm this one. I ran into the exact thing yesterday when I was playing. You’d think it was some sort of event due to the sheer overwhelming amounts of never-ending bandits that run into the camp…but it’s not. It’s just a constant barrage.

I think this comes entirely down to a server by server basis. I got myself onto the unofficial RP server and I see people everywhere. Doesn’t matter where I choose to quest/explore/DE or whatever, there are plenty of people to go around.

I’m still rather new to GW2, but I gave sPvP a shot. I sank ridiculous amounts of hours into battlegrounds in WoW and WAR so I should be right at home in the sPvP here, right? Well…not so much. For one, it’s very strange to have an entire mode where nothing I’ve done on my character matters. I can’t do sPvP to level my character and I gain nothing in return for when I leave the matches. Conversely, the time I spend in PvE does nothing to help me with the PvP aspect.

In short, there’s just no real satisfaction to the system. Nothing I do seems to really have any real benefit to me in the grand scheme of the game. At least in WvW(when I upgrade my processor and my computer can better handle it), I can progress my characters and level up. If sPvP gave me that option, I’d probably do a ton of it just to take a break from questing/exploring/crafting.

Ron.4920:

In every video game where invisibility is involved, the invisible player will have an unfair advantage.

Lets just imagine this hypothetical situation. You are pretty low on money at the moment, and you have to gamble to make ends meet. There is a gym right near where you live that has boxing matches on the weekends. There is a guy who sits at a table in the back room, you can place bets with him. You go up to place your very first bet, it is your last few dollars. You know nothing about either fighters at the moment, so you say to the bookie. Can you tell me about the fighters? The bookie says well one of the fighters is invisible. Which do you choose the visible fighter, or the invisible one?

That depends. Is the visible boxer clad in heavy armor and wielding a giant 2-handed sword? Is he spinning around so he can hit that invisible guy in the ring where ever he goes? Is he also healing himself?

Yeah, I’ll take the visible guy.

It really is a terrible system. Even those of us that roleplay have almost no use for the current implementation of ‘town clothes’. They are annoying and a complete waste of possibilities. Instead, we should have real outfit/costume slots like LotRO or EQ2. Give us tons of cosmetic options to buy from the cash shop as well as letting us choose whatever armor we want to place in there as well. As it stands, I see no reason to ever use town clothes and just carry some extra clothing in my bank for RP purposes. During any sort of PVE content, I just try to ignore how ridiculous I look most of the time.

While I have no problems with some servers getting merged together, please leave my server out of it. I play on the unofficial RP server ‘Tarnished Coast’. We have no shortage of players in the PVE world and merging servers in any way would be detrimental to the community and gameplay of those folks on the server.

Honestly, I think the Thief appearance is pretty much dead on. There really isn’t a period in history where thieves dressed up like ninjas or samurai(lolwut?). A real thief doesn’t want to be conspicuous. They want to blend in and most would have big coats with deep pockets.

With that said, I’d still love to have more options available.

There are so many people bashing this constructive criticism as WoW fanboyism and other nonsense. As someone who picked the game up about 5-6 days ago and is having a blast, I agree with pretty much all the points through my leveling experience.

Roles: I’m a huge fan of playing a tank, healer, or support class. DPS bores the snot out of me in games. Unfortunately, dps seems to be the main focus of every single class. I do like that everyone gets at least some sort of heals, boons, conditions, etc to help out with, but it’s lacking in terms of the direct contributions I would like to see. I want to play a healer or a tank. Or I want to play someone focused on boons and conditions to help my team. As it stands, you can’t really do those things as an actual role. For some, this is great, for others: not so much.

The biggest problem I see here in terms of the discussion is that some people have a mindset that having clear roles available means that you must have the trinity. But that just isn’t so. City of Heroes/Villains did things perfectly in this regard. While they had classes that were designed for tanking(Tankers), you didn’t need them. And while you had setups that were focused on heals(Empathy defenders), you did not need them either. Instead, you could work together to form any sort of team together and survive with buffs, debuffs, heals, tanking, damage, etc. Whatever it is your team makeup had, you could play to those strengths to form a competent group. Want to run with 8 Tankers? Go for it. Want to have 8 Defenders? Go for it. Want to have some weird mishmash of Melee and Ranged dps with no real tank or support? Go for it.

You can have clear roles for your classes without having the holy trinity style of gameplay. As it stands, with a lack of tanking/aggro control and a lack of healing/support, every fight I’ve been in has been just a mishmash of chaos.

Zone progression/Dynamic Events: I’m pretty much on the fence here, but I agree with the article writer on a few things. For once, Dynamic Events are required to level up. I know this because I’m new to the game and currently leveling multiple characters. I’ve found that I have to go back to previous zones to do Dynamic Events just so I can get my level to keep up with the zone I’m supposed to be in. I’ve completed every single thing on the map for the zones as I progress through, yet I always seem to be behind the level curve. I’m harvesting all materials and crafting to get that XP as well, yet still just flailing behind the curve of the heart quests and my own story quests.

Because of this, I’ve been doing the same DEs over and over and over again. Why? Because there really aren’t that many of them and there’s only a handful of those that other players want to do(The Overlord for example). It’s not a bad thing and I enjoy the DEs, but when you progress into zones with less population it is very difficult to find other players who want to actually complete those events.

And I’ve also been bothered by the lack of direction as to where to go. This isn’t because the game fails to hold my hand the whole way(I go back to the 2d era of MMOs where the trinity wasn’t even thought of yet, let alone the idea of questing and tutorials). It’s because the game fails to give you explanations of just about anything. It is only because I do a lot of research on forums and websites that I even know where my bank is. It’s only from reading the forums that I found out I could send my crafting mats to my collectibles stash from anywhere(and when I told my guildmates, some of them hadn’t a clue they could do that either, despite being here for months).

These are just basic game design flaws. Trying to say that it is part of the experience is only kidding yourselves. There is a reason games have transitioned away from novel-thick manuals and moved into in-game tutorials. They make the experience more engaging and rewarding for the player while allowing them to actually play the game. I should not have to read forums and search for information on google to figure out how something works.

Crafting: I’ve no real beef with the crafting system as a whole. It’s a little clunky and awkward, but this is again, a problem with no explanation being offered. It didn’t take me long to get it figured out though, so that’s not where my main issue is. As the author of the article said, there is a problem in how long it takes to increase your crafting as compared to how fast you level. Despite gathering and crafting everything I find, the leather working skill on my level 35 character is still only making level 5 items. Once I got past the initial starting areas, I stopped obtaining new materials to raise my crafting skill with. This is just flat-out bad game design. If the things you can craft cannot possibly keep up with your actual level, then there is no point to doing it outside of making things for your alts.

As someone who is currently leveling a Thief(level 35 now), I’m going to suggest Sword/Pistol. The reason being is that D/D is so very, very squishy. Focusing fully on condition build and gear, yes, it does a lot of damage to a lot of enemies at once. But I found myself dying a ton. Kiting works well until you run into ranged enemies.

Sword/pistol is just way safer and seems to kill just as quickly in the end. Not only that, but it’s far more useful to anyone else doing events as you are leveling since you can blind the really tough guys.

Anyway, that’s just my two cents since I’m currently leveling.

fellyn.5083:

Class identity. There’s no reason why every class needs to be able to wear every armor type.

Sure there is. It’s called ‘Fun’. Maybe you’ve heard of it?

Zeldain.5710:

Bastion.2457:

Zeldain.5710:

Bastion.2457:

Don’t try and force what? I love this game, and it gives me everything I want from an MMo and a single player game.

It is you that seems to have incorrect expectations of a game you don’t seem to like.

No issues here

No, you don’t like MMOs. If you don’t like people, and MMOs were designed to be played with people, then you don’t like MMOs.

If fails as an MMO precisely BECAUSE of the things you like about it, and that’s why player engagement has tumbled.

So based on the game that actually exists and is real, and loved by loads of people, and I love too, I am wrong, based on your opinion of a game that does not exist, isn’t real, and isn’t at all available?

What you are saying is I am wrong for liking the game as it was designed, and you are right for hating it because it wasn’t designed how you expect games to work?

I’m not telling yo that you don’t like the game. You like the game.

Others like the game.

But it is not liked as an MMO by players that love MMOs. That is where it is failing.

The Fractals, Ascended gear, etc… why you think they did that? They are trying to remedy it.

It’s not liked by players that love MMOs…really? I happen to love it as an MMO AND I love MMOs. I’ve been playing them since my first back with NexusTK(and old 2d sprite mmo). You name it, I’ve likely played it. EQ, EQ Online Adventures, EQ2, WoW, AoC, WAR, STO, MxO, CoX, Planetside, Vanguard, DDO, LotRO, Rift, Aion, SWG, Auto Assault, Tabula Rasa, TOR, etc etc.

This game is a great MMO. I’m having a blast and it offers something different and unique. If I want a generic fantasy MMO that’s setup like every other MMO these days, I can go play WoW, LotRO, Rift, Aion, EQ, EQ2, TOR, etc. Why on earth do you think Guild Wars 2 needs to be the same exact game as all of those? If you don’t like it, then go play something else.

Dinny.5310:

Can I just step in for a second about the WvW issue?

It’s… meant to be “zergy”, guys. It’s supposed to be full-scale, almost military-like combat between competing servers. When was the last time you saw a battle/war scene in a film or described in a book where it was 1v1 or small groups against one another? I’m pretty willing to bet the answer is never.

Like, to you guys moaning about WvW… instead of rolling your faces on your keyboards and chanting “zerg zerg zerg zerg” repeatedly as though that’s a valid form of criticism (it isn’t)

Do you even know what zerg means?

Zerging originated in Starcraft. The tactic was to produce zerglings(a relatively useless unit) in mass scale and assault your enemy with nothing but sheer numbers. No skill was needed, no coordination required. Nothing but overwhelming numbers to crush anything in their path.

Zerging is not something you should be cheering for as a valid means of gameplay. Why? Because it isn’t rewarding for the players doing the zerging, nor is it rewarding for those getting zerged. You have one side that just washes over the other with no actual skill requirements. If you rush 100 people at 5 people, is that skirmish going to be any fun? No. It’s going to be like a bug just hit your windshield while you are driving down the freeway.

THAT’S why zerging is a terrible thing. If the gameplay was designed for that to be the end-goal, then wow…they really screwed things up. Designing the entire meat of the game around something that provides no fun to either side of the equation just doesn’t seem like a winning strategy.

There is no official RP server. But there really doesn’t need to be another one. It doesn’t take that long to get into Tarnished Coast. I just bought the game late weds night and was in the server in less than 12 hours. My friend bought it thursday and got in around 10pm est. Just try often and you’ll get right in.