Guild Wars 2

Took both tests that were linked above – both with similar results and I can definitely recognize myself.

Your BrainHex Class is Conqueror.
Your BrainHex Class Your BrainHex Sub-Class is Conqueror-Achiever.
You like defeating impossibly difficult foes, struggling until you eventually achieve victory, and beating other players as well as collecting anything you can collect or doing everything you possibly can.
According to your results, there are few play experiences that you strongly dislike.

Your result for The Four Player Types Test …
The Ace

50% Ace, 22% Effector, 44% Innovator and 50% Strategist!

Aces are players that like to gain mastery and prestige, i.e. they tend to be achievement hunter types. Aces are self-oriented in that their experience and achievements matter most to them, regardless of group experience or involvement. This isn’t to say that Aces are selfish, but rather that an Ace is motivated largely by extrinsic rewards and might not see the benefits of group participation if no rewards exist, depending on their secondary nature. The definition of “reward” is different for every Ace— it might be loot, social recognition, badges/titles, or simply having complete control over their skills.

Whatever the reward, Aces are willing to put in the time and dedication necessary to achieve it. As such, they tend to be highly skilled at whatever is necessary to meet their goals, be it knowledge, combat skills, strategy, or other. This can sometimes result in Aces being generally uninterested in or unknowledgeable about subjects that do not serve their needs. On the field Aces tend to be highly offensive players, since generally a high offense is the quickest way to achieving their goal. If they wield any type of specialized skill, they will aim to be complete masters of it so that they can use it in precisely the best, most effective way possible. They also tend to be highly skilled in some form of fighting or weapon.

With the raids being split into multiple wings and as far as I understood even multiple bosses (with your progress being saved), I think it’s fair to assume that the raids as such won’t take a huge amount of hours. However, getting to know them will. That’s no bad thing as such and I’m confident that Anet can balance the time-investment to be in line with the rest of their content (fractals are even being “shortened” to be more accommodating for the average player).

Raiding is such a broad term and different people will have made different experiences in different MMO’s. Obviously, there will be disappointment on either side of the fence: For some they will be too easy/fast, for others too hard/long. For a game like GW2, I feel that it should likely be somewhere in the middle of either extreme.

That said, while I appreciate the initiative to have guilds play-test those raids, I hope their feedback will be taken as just one narrow perspective out of many. While I only know one of the two guilds currently selected, I do not feel overly confident in their ability to capture the essence of the GW2-community and represent them for balancing matters.

As I have always greatly enjoyed dungeons and count them as one of my main (if not the main) activities, I would like to throw in my two cents:

First of all, if you want me to play your new content, make it fun and worthwhile on its own. Making the current alternatives less desirable instead is setting the wrong kind of signals in my opinion. One has to question if you are not that much confident in raids and/or the fractal rework.

Secondly, in the light of f2p, shifting the focus to content behind the HoT pay-wall leaves me with the bad feeling that dungeons are being sacrificed for the sake of the expansion as well as turning f2p into paid accounts. As dungeons happen to be a favourite activity of mine, I do not feel overly valued as a veteran player who “grew up” with this kind of content.

Lastly, as John Smith answers the question about the intention to disincentivize dungeons with a simple “yes”, let me point out that you also disincentivize customers like me who have supported you from the very beginning. It is my understanding that raids are for a far smaller group of players compared to dungeoneers, so one has to ask the question of how exactly are you going to compensate for this? I know that the answer is supposed to be reworked fractals and no I highly doubt they will cut it for me personally.

If you are indeed cutting the gold rewards in dungeons, I would at the very least expect to be compensated with a token-increase or other kind of material drops. A grand “nothing” is indeed just a deep disappointment.

Rash.6514:

Calcifire.1864:

all in all, it was fun, mechanics were somewhat obscure, but once they were figured out the mobs melted (except the red one, because we didn’t figure it out :/)

Satenia.9025:

1. Explain the mechanics: In my opinion, the challenge should be in executing a counter to a certain mechanic, not having to figure it out through try-and-error. In case of the three guardians, how to combat them wasn’t intuitive in my opinion. Giving or leaving hints through NPC’s or something like that would speed up the learning-process.

With all due respect (and I mean it, no disrespect to you), I believe you are not so used to raiding in other games. Part of the fun is actually discovering what to do. GW2 is kind enough not to charge for repairs (anymore), think of other games with raids that didn’t explain the mechanics and you still had to pay for repairs. WoW (just to give a popular example, not to compare) lived with no boss explanation for a very long time. It just worked. There were videos on the internet, different strategies. I fear that if ANet gives away too much of the mechanics, everybody would simply execute the bosses the same way, no creativity. Tequatl has no in-game explanation and people figured it out. The Marionette was temporary with no in-game explanation and people figured it out. The final boss at Silverwastes has no in-game explanation and people figured it out.

So to be quite honest, I don’t think ANet is wrong or faulty here. Besides maybe explaining things like: this boss has these boons and throws these conditions, but not telling how it uses them.

Thanks for bringing this up. To clarify, it’s not about (the lack of) raiding experience (personally, I know raiding since before WoW was even released), but rather about consistency and intuitiveness.

To give two examples based on this raid:
First of all, the red guardian has a direct damage immunity. The game promotes a soft-trinity of damage/control/support, yet at no point prior to this raid encounter you needed to specifically spec for condi damage to fill the damage role. There are some mobs/bosses with damage immunities, but they all require you to interact with your actual environment in order to combat them rather than simply specing for condis. Given how the current NPE works, I consider it an inconsistency to not cover this somehow.

Secondly, the blue guardian features an icon that doesn’t match the current one used for boons. Personally, I consider this a sign to look for a new kind of counter-mechanism (again, through the actual environment) rather than simple boon-stripping through existing skills. Again, consistency as well as intuitiveness.

Now, I understand you think that figuring out such a base mechanic is fun or someone else even said that doing this as a group is part of why they are playing the content. In light of a MMO and replay value (see my initial feedback point 2), I ask to consider how the discovery part is that much relevant. To understand a direct-dps immunity or a boon-stripping mechanism is a one-time occurrence in your first (few) attempt(s). For any attempts past that, your focus will be on the actual execution/counter.

Therefore, when I said “explain the mechanics”, I didn’t mean to say that a player should get served everything on the silver platter with the whole raid strategy being laid out. On the contrary, properly balancing your group composition and builds is what I consider a key element of replay value for raids. However, personally I felt that never before seen stuff like direct-damage immunity or the green boon icon could/should have been hinted at better. To me, it was unnecessary downtime.

Dahkeus.8243:

Satenia.9025:

3. Builds/skills being mandatory: I’m thinking of boon-stripping here for the blue guardian or again the condi-damage for the red guardian. I have no doubts that other raid encounters will feature similar or even extended variants for this. This will make some classes preferable over others, maybe even the elite spec of some. Meaning that a player will likely want to have several classes available for raids, depending on what is being asked for. These characters may require anything from enough % of world completion (elite spec?) to multiple sets of ascended equipment (see point 1).

I don’t think this is really something to worry about at this point. The blue boss only has a single boon that doesn’t reapply very often. It’s not going to be hard for a group of 10 people to have at least 1 necro, thief, engineer, or mesmer. Last night I got in and was just messing around against the bosses with a friend and I was able to keep the boon stripped by myself as an engi just by using throw mine.

I expect there will be some complaining about groups that require X profession, but more than likely those groups don’t really need that one exact profession and are just asking for it because they don’t know the other ways to deal with a certain mechanic.

Well, as I initially stated, such matters may not seem like much when you look at them individually. However, I ask to consider the overall picture:

First of all, there is going to be a meta for this. This means that for each raid there will be a selection of classes, builds and stats that are being considered optimal. Since there is no official lfg-system support for raids, rest assured that any random team attempting to do this will absolutely want to ensure that the meta-requirements are met. What you currently see in dungeons pales in comparison to this (… and consider how many tears are cried over it already).

Secondly, if you are playing with regulars (guildies, friends), you have a far smaller pool of potential players available. Suddenly, having to come up with a combination of X classes fully decked in (multiple) ascended gear might become an issue. This puts you precisely into the position where you will want to have 2-3 characters available to pick from each. That is quite an investment…

Luckily, I got to play the raid content with a guild-group before it got shut-down. Like many others, we made it to the vale guardian boss and got thrown out of the instance because of a wipe. I would like to give some feedback on the encounter:

Raid encounter
First of all, it is my understanding that raids are being designed in ways that attempt to combat the current trivialization of content through the zerker-meta. From what I’ve seen in this raid encounter, this is being done through positioning as well as countering (break-bar, boon-stripping, etc.). That these mechanics are being introduced through the three coloured guardians contrary to just let people bash their heads in against the actual boss is something I personally appreciate and hope that this will continue throughout other encounters. However, there are still a few things that I feel could be improved:

1. Explain the mechanics: In my opinion, the challenge should be in executing a counter to a certain mechanic, not having to figure it out through try-and-error. In case of the three guardians, how to combat them wasn’t intuitive in my opinion. Giving or leaving hints through NPC’s or something like that would speed up the learning-process.

2. Design the mechanics to include frequenters: Basically, after one initial raid a player knows how things work. If that player does some reading on community-sites/wikis before the actual raid, it’s even before that. As such, the encounters should be built around that (see point 1: the challenge should be about executing). In case of the three guardians, I’m afraid they will just be meat-shields with too much HP and no meaningful attacks past the gimmick-nature of their specific mechanism. Therefore, I would give them like half the HP but some stronger attacks instead (maybe even make the attacks stronger once they are at like 50% health, ensuring that newcomers get some practise first).

3. Please don’t overdo it on the gimmicks: Like I initially said, I’m aware that this is an attempt to combat the current zerker-meta to some degree, but I would really hate to see those raid-encounters turn into quick-time-events. Step in this circle here, then move over to there, then use skill type X, then step into that circle over there again… fail to do so and restart. To me personally, that would kill any kind of fun for an encounter. I didn’t get enough play-time with the actual boss to make my final opinion on this specific raid, so this is more of a general request.

Raid attunement
While we have been told that there won’t be a raid attunement for GW2 raids, I would like to point out that there is a combination of requirements that I feel come pretty close (if not to say meet my personal view on what a raid attunement is):

1. Ascended gear being mandatory/recommended: I think this was said in a tweet or something. I don’t have a problem with this as such, but add stuff like the red guardian that can only be damaged with condition-specs and we’re facing a situation where a player would have to bring multiple sets of ascended gear on a single character, which I think is completely over the top in terms of grinding.

2. Masteries being mandatory/recommended: If timed encounters (like the vale guardian) are balanced around having those fully available, then we can no longer speak of recommended, but mandatory – with all the grinding that comes with maxing them.

3. Builds/skills being mandatory: I’m thinking of boon-stripping here for the blue guardian or again the condi-damage for the red guardian. I have no doubts that other raid encounters will feature similar or even extended variants for this. This will make some classes preferable over others, maybe even the elite spec of some. Meaning that a player will likely want to have several classes available for raids, depending on what is being asked for. These characters may require anything from enough % of world completion (elite spec?) to multiple sets of ascended equipment (see point 1).

To conclude, if you look at these three points individually, they may not seem like much to some players. However, when you look at all of them combined, I personally think that this qualifies easily as the sort of raid attunement that was claimed won’t be in HoT. In order to lessen these requirements, I think it would be nice if for example the damage role could be filled by either direct-dps or condi (aka no red guardian kind of immunities), while boss timers could be balanced around having an low/average level of masteries and not requiring them to be grinded out completely.

Initially, I was 15 blooms short of getting both toxic skins. Thanks to the compensation, I could easily get them now with even a scarlet box to spare.

Thanks a lot!

Well, in case the other feedback thread gets missed somehow, here is the full version of my post:. For this thread, in short:

Advertisement: Why exactly has this event been advertised as a guild kind of thing, going as far as asking guilds to post their recruitment messages and the sorts? This zerg-fest and auto-attack spaming has absolutely no relation to guilds.

Gameplay: Encouraging to abandon events in order to get credit for as many as possible is not what I consider healthy gameplay.

Rewards: Time spent and rewards are completely out of balance. A half an hour long event for a handful of tokens just doesn’t cut it. Add the time-gating to that and basically a player would have to grind throughout the whole weekend in order to get rewards such as skins or tonics.

Agreed. Even getting the 35 blooms (20 daily + 15 from max stacks) seems hardly worth spending 30 minutes on these rather boring events. Without the daily, it’s just ridiculous.

In addition to that, there is that scarlet box usually giving me 5 blade shards and a handful of mats, this is just so not worth the time investment.

Well, after having completed an invasion or two, I would also like to throw in my two cents.

First of all, about advertising: If my memory serves me right, this event was advertised as a big “this is a good time to be in a guild now” kind of thing with guilds being asked to recruit people and so on and so forth. Could anyone please elaborate how the hell this event has any kind of relevance to guilds? This is a big open-world zerg-fest, nothing else. There is no point to be in a guild for this.

Secondly, the events itself: You spam auto-attack and aoe-heavy skills in order to tag as many mobs as possible. Together with the questionable reward system (I’ll come to that later), a player is even encouraged to hop from event to event without finishing them in order to get credit for as many as possible. There is an absolute minimum of coordination required that kinda sorts itself out due to the nature of the zerg. All this makes the invasion incredibly boring after a couple of minutes. However, the things lasts for a whole 30 minutes, testing my patience rather than my gaming abilities.

Lastly, the rewards: While I consider it a great idea to bring some old LS1 rewards back (personally I don’t need them anymore, luckily), the cost of these compared to the actual rewards of a single invasion – daily aside – is completely off. A max of 15 tokens for a half an hour event? Time-gated, nevertheless. I’ll leave the calcs to those more seasoned with maths than me, but it should be quite obvious nevertheless that you’d have to put a sick amount of hours grinding those events if you wanted to get anything past a reward item or two. Considering how boring these events actually are, no thank you.

To conclude: Poor advertising, poor gameplay and even worse rewards. That’s not the kind of things I overly enjoy.

Kordash.2197:

Because asking for a particular setup is poisining. Yeah, sure. So, you’d prefer a LFG without any description ? So that people with different mindset and objectives are mixed together ? And you think that it will end well ?

Of course not – these are entirely your own conclusions. When using the lfg-system, a proper description is fundamental to team-building. Personally, I fancy a whole lot of requirements regarding level, experience and gear. However, class-discrimination – the thing I was actually talking about – has no room there.

This whole meta-group-composition (1x guard, 1x thief, 1x warr, 2x ele) disaster results in unnecessary exclusion of viable classes as much as it forces players into roles they poorly fill in order to get a group. This is the kind of information worth spreading, so players know and understand that these limitations are a result of the community and not actually a game-related requirement.

Regarding the OP, I don’t feel that this is strictly related to the zerk meta, but rather a lack of experience and/or competence. When things go wrong, people are quick to blame it on something other than admitting their own mistakes. In regards to class composition, this means that those suffering from a lot of prejudice (such as ranger and necro) will likely get blamed before one that is considered “meta” (ele or guard).

In your specific case, you gave them the opening (excuse) they needed through your lb-setup. The effectiveness of that setup has been covered elsewhere and is nothing I wish to address in my post as such.

That said, I wholeheartedly agree with Miku’s post about not joining those “meta-zerk-composition” groups. While I understand the desire for smooth PUG-runs, I do not wish to participate in such a level of class discrimination. Luckily, I have no problems finding competent groups through other ways. I can only add that the mentioned group-composition is by no means required to complete the current instanced content and we often take different picks in our organized guild-runs, which I’m sure make for a better completion time compared to the average tryhard pug run.

Tarasicodissa.7084:

Yup. I too usually ask for a specific class and kick anyone not meeting the criteria. This has nothing to do with tryharding, I’m simply testing people’s basic perceptive abilities. While it’s true that pretty much every dungeon can be completed with any class composition (and when people are competent, the time difference is not even that big), I don’t really wanna run with someone who can’t be even bothered to read and instantly joins random parties in the lfg. Bad people with good builds are still better than bad people with bad builds, hence why I ask for meta setups.
In the end class obviously doesn’t matter much, what matters is people’s abilities to read and do what you say.

Convenient excuse, considering you could add something as simple as pinging a certain part of equipment or whatever in order to check for a players basic perceptive ability. In my experience, a bad player with a good build (aka a meta-build he blindly copied) offers zero advantages, on the contrary, the class-canon nature of many such builds heavily punish lack of skill or coordination in a group. Personally, I would take an average player with an average build who follows directions over a wannabe meta-zerk anytime. But most important of all, I wish people would stop poisoning the lfg-system with class-discrimination.

Miporin.3529:

There is no need to prolong the fight for zerkers, they can stay the same as now, they have just to boost the condition damage and healing power, so people can make different builds and be effective.
Atm only the zerker is effective.

As far as I’m aware, condition damage has been largely boosted and is on par with direct damage for various classes already (with there being meta-builds, etc.).

Tanking and healing stats on the other hand would still have a long way to go. This isn’t “just” a matter of boosting though – why would you prolong a fight through healing when you can dps instead? The only solution is to not make it optional, but a requirement instead.

As a result, for certain raids/fractals you’ll now mandatory need a healing or a tanking build, which means instead of “zerker only” it’ll be “clerics only”. And if we’re really really (un)lucky, they’ll manage to enforce a proper mixture of these stats, then you’ll have “meta group: 2x zerker, 2x clerics, 1x sinisters” instead of “meta group: all zerker”. I don’t really see how that changes anything for the better…

Personally, I have a feeling that all these anti-zerker threads will create an overreaction on Anets side, resulting in absurd stats-combos being promoted for both higher fractals as well as raids (has been hinted at). As a result, fights will not only become overlong and unfun, but players will also be required to grind out multiple stats-sets (the account-bound ones say hi) or even grind for legendary armor in order to adjust.

That said, I expect the players who created the anti-zerker threads to be the first ones to cry. Will quote my post accordingly once it happens in a few weeks – stay tuned.

Precisely what BunjiKugashira said. When talking about stacking, please always clearly elaborate what you actually mean.

Using safe-spots is considered a bug and can be reported as such (it even frequently gets fixed). There is no need to change any gameplay in that case.

Stacking in a corner in order to bunch up mobs maximizes cleaving and debuffs. It comes with the additional risk of being attacked from multiple sources at once in return. That’s why this is combined with blocks/blinds and similar cc in order to work successfully. So it does indeed take a minimum amount of skill. Again, no gameplay change required.

Lastly, stacking on the boss simply ensures that the party is sharing boons and whatever else. Again, no gameplay change required. On the contrary, if you are intentionally staying out of my boon-range, there is obviously a learn-to-play issue involved.

Initially, I got the wings for a raven-inspired character of mine. While I did like the looks, I turned it off rather quickly because it disturbed me during my actual gameplay.

Generally speaking, every kid seems to run around with one now, but personally I think that there are very very few characters where it actually looks decent on. Most of the time, it feels totally out of place. But I’m sure that hype will pass eventually…

Maybe you would have to gear-check the contestants. If they wear berserker, they are excluded from the contest.

(Jest aside, wouldn’t you have to organize EU and NA separately? I’d always show up on the former for moral support)

Here we go again, another daily episode of the anti-zerker-meta… sigh.

horvgab.4879:

I’m sick from this. What is this, why am I forced to a not even fun build and gear setup.?ArenaNet have to end this madness. We have to kill this mentality in game. Enemies needs more dmg to kill the zerkers instanly, or at least need some tank to the team who mitigate the dmg, and kind of healers as well. I’m not saying making another wow, just don’t do like this. Make sure about not the berserker the fastest way to go through a dungeon and pls SAY IT TO THE PLAYER BASE, communicate to them, explain it, make a post about it. Because they are still in a belive about zerker zerker zerker. They can’t make a build alone, just using ugly meta and blaming us for not using it.

And what exactly would that accomplish? If berserker stats are no longer the fastest way to go through a dungeon, the meta will simply shift to the one stat that will be – most likely sinister, which has already started to make its way into meta-builds. Funny enough, with its creation being an account-bound matter, you’ll have to go a long way then in order to obtain the “required” gear contrary to the current availability of berserker gear.

The same applies for your “solution” to re-introduce the trinity: In that case, there will simply be a meta-build for the tank, the healer and so on. Maybe one has sinister, the other clerics, it doesn’t really matter since the same gearing limitations apply.

Fortunately for you (and for us all), there are two easy solutions for you that do not involve changes to the game:

First of all, learn to properly use the lfg-interface. No one forces you into meta/berserker parties if you carefully read what the group-requirements are or – even better – start your own group.

Secondly, try to improve your own gaming abilities instead of blaming this matter on zerker gear. The way your post and solutions read to me, you are not very experienced with both dungeon-content as well as some game mechanics in general. It helps to catch up on these first before you blame everyone and everything else instead. There are wikis and sites dedicated to dungeon content, corresponding builds and so on.

In my opinion, there is no issue for the community at large. There are vocal minorities on either side of the spectrum (meta and anti-meta), which are trying to enforce their limited view of how the game should be played on everyone else.

However, the rest of us are perfectly capable to enjoy the game by playing in like-minded groups. So really, the only question is one you should ask yourself: Why can’t you let this rest?

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

I encountered this problem years ago when I pointed out that skipping is insulting to the devs and bad for the game. What I received in response was the most dismissive, arrogant, deceitful, condescending, selfish dribble I had ever seen in an internet community. The only reason elitists have adopted that false “make your own group” argument is because they got tired of being yelled down by other players. Were it not for that, they would still rampage into every thread in the forum to personally insult people who don’t play to their liking. When the forums were more active, it was saddening to see which thread with legitimate complaints will be shouted down as “not a problem” next.

Sounds like you’re very much part of the problem. Judging from your post, what exactly are you doing if not insulting people who don’t play to your liking? The whole “make your own group” argument is not an excuse, it is applying common sense as in grouping like-minded people together and respecting each others preferences.

Unfortunately for this community, for every meta-elitist there is at least one anti-meta-elitist displaying the exact same kind of dismissive behaviour.

Well, you said it yourself further down in your post, you don’t know yourself where your rant is going and it shows. In my opinion, a more compact and better structured post would have helped you bring your points across more easily and invite for a civil discussion.

That said, there are two things I would like to point out:

First, arguing against meta-builds with something entirely subjective such as “fun” is tricky. Meta-builds are proven concepts based on numbers. Fun isn’t. Back when I did my initial dungeon path completions, I didn’t really care about the time and amount of wipes either. I had fun with the (to me) new content. However, after a couple hundred runs or so, completion times and efficiency do matter to me.

Fortunately, there is a very easy solution to this: It’s called using the lfg-interface appropriately. Meaning people should look for like-minded players of similar skill-level, just like we got it with the different leagues in sport. Reading and respecting the “description” of the lfg-interface is essential for this. Looking for a sub lvl-80 yolo fun-run? Looking for the meta-elitist-zerker-SC-run? That’s all fine, but make sure you say so. All of these groups can happily co-exist.

Secondly, please try not to generalize the dungeon community as angry ragers. There has been this recent trend developing on the lfg-interface where uninformed tryhards are putting unnecessarily harsh “meta-group-restrictions” in place. Many of us dungeon veterans just shake our heads over this as well. It really boils down to my first point: Know how to use the lfg-interface appropriately.

Lux Dominatoris.3941:

It is good you have made this thread creating more awareness on the issue. I will personally dedicate a video rant about this meta zerk convention and its problems when it comes to applying it. Also let us bare in mind that even though they might have the proper gear, traits and theoretical knowledge, they might lack practice which would give the casual n00b impression.

In my opinion, the biggest issue is unnecessarily excluding perfectly viable classes. With the meta-composition (guard/thief/warr/2xele) being mindlessly spread across the lfg-system, it might leave the impression on dungeon-newcomers that this is somehow required and that classes such as mesmer, engi or ranger are not viable for dungeons.

I thought only Miku posts record runs that are one second faster. Just round these up as well, problem solved.

They still drop. In the past two weeks, we’ve had several drops throughout the guild, myself included (AC).

Anything but common though…

Sounds like an issue with handling the lfg-system properly to me. As a general advise, make sure to always read the group-description carefully before joining.

In addition to that, many players generally assume a couple of things when doing dungeons, being level 80 or bringing dps-oriented gear being amongst them. In order to play your lower-level characters in dungeons, you should look (or create) groups that mention “all levels, all welcome” or similar.

If you’re planning on switching before the final boss, I would consider it proper etiquette to announce so at the beginning of the run to ensure that everyone agrees on it as well as gets a chance to prepare for the boss fight accordingly. As an above poster mentions, if suddenly half your group disappears from the boss-fight, it might be ill-received by the remaining players.

theoutsider.7849:

I call her out on it and you come to her defense immediately, not answering to my ignored post or responding any reasoning why my post was blatantly ignored. Is this not the definition of white knighting?

No, in my opinion, it is the definition of an author failing to reach its audience. See, you (and bladex, for that matter) keep complaining about how your posts get ignored or at least don’t get the rightful attention you think they deserve, implying the readers are white-knighting, being illiterates and so on.

However, I believe it is your responsibility as an author to present your post in a suitable manner for its intended audience. Your average reader is not going to fish for your perceived gems in a post that lacks structure and is filled with hostile remarks. The post I believe you’re referring to suffers from these issues (if you want me to elaborate in more detail, feel free to PM).

To me, the point is not about obtaining karma and what to spend it on, but about the subjective value of the karma boost that can no longer be selected from the enchanted boost. Personally, I couldn’t care less about EXP or killstreak boosters, but I understand that they could be useful for other players. The same applies to karma boosters.

With this unannounced change, Anet cheated some players (like myself) of quite a few potential karma boosters without any chance to retrieve them beforehand. In my opinion, that’s not a nice thing to do. As stated before, how they handle karma gain in the future I don’t particularly care about, but the enchanted boosts I solely created in order to be able to retrieve a KARMA BOOSTER from them when I need one is something that really irks me.

Zypher.7609:

Really it is a shame, because I wonder if after the expansion was announced off they went to go play another game while waiting for it to be released. While the people that were having fun playing and enjoying the 2 week releases now get to play the same content months at a time waiting for it to be released.

Everything I have seen in this expansion so far I will enjoy. I only wished it was kept to the LS release method, but that model as been left behind for the come and go gamers that want expansions. I am sure after this expansion is released the forums will be plagued with “not enough content” or other such nonsense. This will be from the same people that complained LS was not enough content and for Arena-Net to release expansions.

I really enjoyed the LS release method and I hope that after the expansion is released they can find an equal balance to two week updates + larger update every few months. Maybe that will make the forum peoples happy?

I feel you, as I’m personally hoping for some kind of balance between the two as well.

To me, the bi-weekly (temporary) updates were sometimes hard to keep up with. On the other hand, I don’t necessarily require an expansions worth of content in one go, so the prolonged waiting sometimes disturbs me too.

Obviously, there will always be the kind of players that rush through new content as soon as possible and then cry for more, while they go off playing other games. Ideally, the ones that keep playing regularly would be supplied with a steady flow of updates. We got to experience both extremes by now, so as initially stated, a healthy mixture is something I would appreciate a lot.

Far too much assumption on your part then, Nike. Personally, I read nothing but good intentions and an attempt to recruit players from the thread in question.

In my opinion, the reason why there isn’t any kind of discussion to be had in this subforum is because there is this negative kind of base attitude present in a lot of (veteran, or at least vocal) players. Someone posts something not involving “zerker” and “dodge”, the replies are immediately “troll?”, “flame-bait?” “<insert lame picture”, “<create even more lame satire thread>” and so on and so forth.

I kinda gave up posting here, but the way Jerus spoke up in favour of the clerics guard really made me realize that not replying simply means that we’ll let this negative behaviour continue unchallenged. Props to you too, dlonie, I agree on all points.

arkealia.2713:

I’m pretty sure they didn’t expect it would take that long to get an expansion and that Anet would allocate all their people to it (except for the gemstore team), bringing no further content for nearly one year.

That part of the community got what they asked for – their lack of foresight does not change that fact.

So, with all those devalued enchanted boosts remaining in my bank – any official word on this?

HwaRyun.1807:

Some of the ridiculous posts in this thread serve as a really good example as to why there aren’t more people both posting in this subforum, and why more people don’t take a crack at getting into the type of ‘elite’ play you guys often discuss here. This sort of crap just puts people off for good, which i think is sad.

Very true.

Thank you OP for posting the videos and extra information, it’s always nice to be aware of all the available options.

To me, the main advantage was to convert undesired boosters such as EXP or killstreak into desired ones such as karma. As such, the enchanted reward boosts I have accumulated over time have been devalued with this recent change.

Personally, I would have expected a warning prior to patch or some kind of grace-period. If karma gain is supposed to be more limited in the future, that’s fine, but give us a chance to convert our existing enchanted reward boosts into karma ones.

(Why someone would have done the double karma-booster trade is beyond me, but that’s not the point of my complaint)

Bring something else.

Very disappointed about this as well. I’ve spent plenty of powder as well as undesirable boosters in order to get the enchanted boost. I primarily did this to be able to pick the karma boost, but obviously never made a pick till I would actually use one. Now the option to pick a karma boost is gone, which devalues those boosts for me

Why didn’t we receive a warning well ahead of time?

My short answer to this thread is “start your own group”. However, there are a few things I feel like addressing in more detail:

Meta team composition
While the guard/thief/ele trinity is unarguably strong and highly beneficial for certain dungeon paths, they are not required in all paths, especially not the more pug-friendly ones. In addition to this, filling the remaining two slots with a warrior and a second ele is entirely optional and mostly a matter of convenience. Unfortunately, there are plenty of players with a closed mindset who want to know about the one and only (team-)build and strictly enforce this throughout the entire game.

Seeing stuff like “meta-group guard/thief/2xele/warr” for PUG-friendly dungeons such as CoF or AC means only one thing: The person who created it is either incompetent or unnecessarily elitist, most likely both. There is really no need to run that kind of composition there for efficient runs. The best advise I have on this matter is to simply ignore these groups. It is a bad trend that developed as of lately and is best left to die.

Role of the ranger and necro
In my opinion, these two classes mostly suffer from a bad reputation they obtained in the past. These days, ranger is perfectly viable in dungeons and even the necro got some PUG-friendly mechanics added with the specialization overhaul, such as life-steal for the group helping with maintaining scholar-rune-bonus. While especially the necro may not bring as much to a group as other classes, adding this class as a 4th or 5th slot won’t hurt the overall completion time of the dungeon in a competent group.

PUG-runs and completion times
When you’re using the lfg-interface, you’re PUG-ing. This means there are always more random elements involved over playing with your friends. These random players cannot read your mind, they cannot guess which out of the several viable tactics available you are planning to employ for a specific encounter. This doesn’t mean they are bad, it only means that the group as a whole is not as much coordinated, which results in lower overall performance. Enforcing build and class restrictions won’t change that. If you want to aim for record-runs cause you’ve seen the cool kids do it on youtube, stop PUGing and find some regulars instead. We’re all better off over it.

Elitism involving 3 year old stale content
Lastly, what is there even to be elitist about? Beating the same old content a handful of minutes faster than someone else? Being better after playing the same old content for three years than a newbie doing it for the first time? GW2 is a very casual game overall and so is its content. If you’re looking for bragging-rights, the lfg-interface is not the place you want to be. There are guilds dedicated to speedruns and the like. Instead of poisoning the groups forming through the help of the lfg-interface, I suggest you try to apply there instead – you might be in for a rather harsh reality-check

MetalGirl.2370:

It’s not elitism in my eyes. If you’re casual you wouldn’t mind if dungeon takes 20 minutes or whatever. Considering the fact that game is very repeatable and there are people doing dungeon runs on daily basis, they wanna just run what they do in an hour or so… and you cannot blame them. After working same job, of course you just wanna wake up and get on with it and come home asap. After all there is equal amount of LFGs that welcome anyone.

Not to single you out specifically, but on the matter of being done as fast as possible and playing exclusively for the rewards: Since you already draw the comparison to a job, if you are looking to maximize the rewards aka gold-gain, simply work overtime at your job instead of playing dungeons and use the extra income to buy gems/gold – this will be the most efficient way from a purely rewards-oriented point of view. Tongue in cheek of course, but when reading these kind of posts, I cannot help to wonder if these people are not mistaking the game for a second job or something.

Don’t get me wrong, I like efficient runs myself, but when we arrive at the point where players are forced into specific classes and builds in order to get three year old and stale content done on a PUG-level, who can still claim to actually enjoy themselves? I don’t.

In order to get progress, you have to buy six individual pieces of each tier of each race. To elaborate further:

For each of the three tiers, it doesn’t matter which armor class you buy, as long as you get all six individual armor pieces (head, chest, shoulders, pants, shoes, gloves). This means you can for example buy light head and chest, medium shoulders and pants, heavy shoes and gloves.

However, buying a complete light, medium and heavy armor set of the same tier doesn’t give you any progress beyond the initial six.

You have to repeat this for all races.

Been fine for me till about an hour ago, now I get kicked out of the game at every map-change and it takes several attempts to log back in.

Given that people have been reporting these issues since yesterday, I would also like to hear some kind of official response on what’s going on at least…

As others have already pointed out, Anet has stated that legendaries will always be equal to the top tier, which I feel is exactly how it should be (owner of 5+ legendaries). These are cosmetic rewards with the additional convenience of freely exchangeable stats.

Jerus.4350:

Rag.3258:

Nah hes right, if you push a mes into a guardians role you end up with a kittenty guardian that doesn’t use any of the mesmers potential. Might as well just use a guard. If you replace the assassin however you can actually play mesmers strengths and outperform assa/engi in some regards.

What is this assassin?

Thief elite spec just got leaked

I hear you. While doing world completion for the first time around launch was great, every additional time just felt like a chore to me, mostly because of the awful hearts-grind.

This really has turned into the worst part for me when it comes to building a legendary, would sure love to buy it somehow (with doing world completion once being the requirement for it).

Didn’t they just recently adjust the Arah personal story mission (victory or death?) to be soloable. Personally, I would love to see the same happen to all story dungeons, though I’d prefer some actual scaling depending on the amount of players.

Maybe this would also help new players understand the difference between a story dungeon and an explorable path more clearly.

Aleth.9630:

I don’t think it’s because a wiki says so, do you really think most of the LFG players would read something like that?

It’s because they joined a “metazerk” party at some point and had a decent run, so they want to replicate that. Granted, even with all the proper meta builds, many players just suck at playing them anyway, so it’s no guarantee.

Well, that’s where it started before it went viral on the lfg-system. The problem here is that the average player just copies and never questions. As a result, classes get unnecessarily excluded from dungeons.

Sylent.3165:

I know this was brought up a long time ago. But I was curious am I the only one who really enjoyed heart quests and wish they were in the level 80 zones and in new hot maps?

Personally, I hated them from the very start and was one of the people who spoke against them even back at launch, when they were (unjustly) hyped as some kind of revolution to questing.

Not to beat a dead horse again, but essentially, they are still “kill 10 rats” or “collect 5 rat-tails” kind of quests with easy access and several (but still limited) choices when it comes to completing them. In case you didn’t notice, you’re still feeding cows and killing bandits in the higher level zones just as you did back in Queensdale.

Compared to other MMO’s, I actually find that I prefer picking up a quest at a NPC and having some kind of story behind it that is properly done/voiced/etc. With the hearts, I mostly just wander through and click/kill a few things. Nothing that really stands out.

With that said, I seriously hope that the HoT zones will be just like Orr – free of the awful hearts grind.

Unfortunately, this seems to have developed into the newest trend on the lfg. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for smooth runs, but excluding half the classes – perfectly viable ones amongst them – because some wiki says so is taking it a step too far for PUG’s in my opinion.

Personally, I can only see this as the inexperience (incompetence?) of the players listing such requirements. Reminds me a bit of the DoA ursan days back in GW1.

Can only hope that the trend will pass and stick to guildies/friends meantime.

Vordrax.5243:

Unfortunately, the Necromancer is a Charr.

This is unfortunate indeed and should warrant deletion by itself. #charrism

But on a more serious note, with the 3rd birthday coming up soon, I would keep the char(r ) till then if you have no other characters around that age available. This is to not miss out on any potentially good presents.

However, if you created other characters within a few weeks from the charr, I would delete the abomination without a second thought.

This got me quite excited, as it seems to address pretty much any concerns I currently have with the fractals: Less random runs, less random rewards and salvageable drops. Also, if I’m reading this correctly, you can sell the box reward, meaning this provides a more hassle-free way of making extra gold over selling slots or whatever.

Definitely looking forward to it.

Ludoflame.1463:

do you guys know if we get the mini dragon if we put sms authedication instead of the 2 steps one ?

SMS authentication IS one of the “2 steps” options. As a matter of fact, it’s even the one they recommend most.

So yes, you will get the mini dragon through enabling that.

So, after reading the patch notes, I was planning to say a big “thank you” for fixing the whole HoM/achievement/title thing.

However, now that I made the mistake and actually dared to log into the game, I couldn’t help to notice that you broke pretty much anything that can be broken: My daily got reset, pvp track got reset, LS2 is locked, tons of previously completed achievements aren’t completed anymore, all collections reset, etc.

Guess I’ll wait with the praise for a bit longer…

There should be a title “Most loyal player” for the people who got into the first beta. As we all well remember, those and only those got invited.