Guild Wars 2

Yeah, I read your question as a general one and replied accordingly. Obviously, I didn’t mean to speak on his behalf as I have no idea in what category he falls

Kordash.2197:

I don’t know guys, i more than often see : “pugs are jerks”, “pugs are stupid”…

Yeah, i often get pugs that don’t play very well. Doesn’t mean they are stupid or jerks, and when i teach them, i almost always get good results, and intantly the run get smoother. So why my experience differs so much than yours ? (and you know i’m a MetaLitistZerkBurger too)

Let me start by saying that I agree with your statement and share your puging experience. With that said, to answer your question:

In my opinion, the “bad/stupid pug” attitude is unjustly promoted by a bunch of frequent/popular forums users and/or streamers. They intentionally join “all welcome”, “inexperienced” and similar sorts of groups – or even start their own with similar snowflake-requirements. Then they come glee about it on the forums after it – obviously – didn’t go as smooth as it would have in an experienced and coordinated group. I cringe every time I get to read one of these “gems”.

On the other hand, there are players who know what to look for and what to avoid when dealing with the lfg-system and they make us of this knowledge in order to get mostly smooth runs. Honestly, there are plenty of very capable players out there pugging, you just have to ensure you can get them to group which each others, which takes a bit of an extra effort and good intentions of doing so.

Obviously, there are always random factors involved when it comes to pugging, but this has nothing to do with being bad or stupid. Any experienced player can quite easily deal with these sort of challenges.

Vetlie.9350:

I have been playing GW2 on and off since launch, and every time I come back there is one thing that really annoys me: Stacking in dungeons and fractals.
It makes everything very hard for some classes, and it locks down the meta (imo).

I feel like the meta is all evolved around stacking, wich I find too easy (and very cheesy). It takes a way a lot of the fun from the excellent mechanics you have made and all the awesome bosses.

As always with these kind of threads, please be very specific about what you mean with “stacking”, otherwise it gets confusing fast. By stacking, do you mean:

1.) Simply fighting in melee range (environment is irrelevant)
2.) Pulling into a corner and fighting there in melee range (environment is relevant)
3.) Pulling somewhere where a mob mechanism is circumvented and fighting there in melee range (environment is relevant and potentially game-breaking)
4.) Something else entirely.

Point 3 is something you can bug-report and that Anet even infrequently fixes. As a matter of fact, it is also something that most experienced dungeon/fractal runners consider as unsuitable behaviour. I don’t really see the issue there.

Point 2 has been rendered obsolete with the changes to FGS and similar skills a few months ago and is actually counter-productive (aka slower) at this point for experienced groups. Again, I don’t really see the issue there. If your group needs the extra safety-line, go for it, but you’re not actually at and advantage here.

Finally, point 1 is precisely how the game should be in my opinion: If I’m taking the extra risk going full melee, I should be rewarded with more damage / faster kill times for being experienced/coordinated enough to pull it off. If you are inexperienced and want to range, by all means, but since you got the range and safety advantage, it should go slower.

Eirdyne.9843:

YOU (Anet) have made a great game, but your players are forcing unnecessary and unwarranted restrictions upon how that game may be played. This severely enough that many simply won’t do dungeons now.

In my opinion, the problem is that the game itself has too few “restrictions” when it comes to grouping, therefore forcing the playerbase to make their own (some more questionable than others). Restrictions is sort of a negative term though, I prefer filtering myself, in a way of creating more options.

To elaborate this further:
As a veteran player with hundreds of dungeon runs, my goals likely differ from newer players. Yet the game makes no distinction between the two. The lfg-system as such offers no support for this other than setting a description.

What I personally would like to see is something along the lines of (good) match-making in a PvP-game: The game should consider how much time I invested into dungeons, how many paths completed, etc. and incorporate this into the lfg-system as some (completely optional) sort of filtering. Maybe similar to the fractal tiers, there could be some sort of dungeon-tiers which unlock for the lfg-interface after x-amount of runs. They don’t change the dungeons as such, just the kind of groups/players you see. I believe this would go a long way in helping to make better groups for all players involved.

Having played dungeons basically since launch, I understand how frustrating the initial learning curve can be. This only gets worse over time as inexperienced players get mixed with veterans who only care about completion time at this point. In my opinion, the only answer to this is separation. None should be excluded, but instead placed in the kind of group environment they fit it. Restrictions/filtering are required for this, but they need to be offered through the game and not through the playerbase.

Flyinghotpocket.5201:

At a particular point when we needed 3 other people to fill our slots for running a dungeon we put out a LFG saying ‘full clear dungeon, no speed running’ or something to that effect. We started clearing the dungeon and soon enough our public players got impatient and started to run to the next sections leaving 2 of us to fight off the whole dungeon.

First of all, it is important to understand that skipping mobs and speed-running are not the same. Speed-running does include skipping mobs, but it goes far beyond that, for example by including build/class compositions and generally minimizing time as much as possible.

Skipping mobs on the other hand is simply the community’s reaction to unrewarding (trash) mobs found in dungeons. Killing them is not required for path completion and they drop nothing worth the extra time investment. Add to this the fact that dungeon content has remained largely stale since launch. As such, “skipping” is pretty much an established standard approach you will find even in the most average of PUG’s.

LFG-advertisement or not, it will be quite difficult to get random players to kill ALL mobs. I think you would have to explain this explicitly at the beginning of the run and will have to expect leavers over it.

As a final note: You mentioned the limited time available to you and your friends. Personally, I believe that once you ran the dungeons a few times and are done looking at the scenery, you will come to understand the benefits of minimizing completion times. Till then, good luck with finding like-minded players, you’ll need it.

Block and move on. Obviously, there is no point arguing. But by keeping track of your block-list, you can avoid them in the future.

SacredNightshine.4270:

That is a shame. There goes my incentive to try revenant out for dungeons ;(

Precisely my thoughts. There is no way I’m going to play dungeons (or any other content for that matter) without the corresponding rewards. But hey, I’m sure that all the newcomers auto-attacking a bunch of mobs in the starter areas will give them just as valuable test-data to properly balance the class

ColinJohanson.2394:

You’ll have a beta character slot you can use to create a Revenant. When playing with a beta character: all progress, items, etc. you get will not be saved once the event is completed.

Am I correctly assuming that the beta character slot creates some sort of copy of my account state? Meaning that my Revenant will have access to all my account funds and so on, but anything I add or remove won’t make it to my “live” account?

To give a more practical example: I use 6 transmutation stones to adjust my gear, then I go play dungeons and earn a handful of gold and tokens. Once I log back to my “live” characters, none of these changes will be visible?

Benty.7140:

So I’ve got 46 tomes of knowledge sitting in my bank right now along with a birthday booster to get any character to level 20. The plan is to use them on a new revenant but I wonder if I’m going to destroy the experience in using them and being a instant-max char? I usually dont learn a class well until I’m max level(I’m still clueless on a lot of stuff on my engi and he’s been 80 forever), so does anyone who’s played a bit in the beta think its going to hurt the experience or won’t it matter?

In my opinion, the one thing destroying the experience is the NPE itself. As such, I’m very happy about the leveling scrolls and tomes offering a shortcut. I don’t see much of a learning potential when half your stuff is still locked out. Therefore, I believe the time you safe by using leveling items is far better spent with some theory-crafting/reading and then testing builds at level 80 (in the mists for example).

phys.7689:

and what do you do when you are 80?

Well, I start playing the game.

thrag.9740:

My (possibly biased) experience is that once I started putting ap requirements I started having a lot less wipes, and a lot more team oriented behavior. I’ve pugged every path of every dungeon. People are blasting stealth, stacking might/vuln/fury, blinding, deep freezing, etc. I get rangers with good pet management and necros running power builds. All of this is common in my groups. Rarely are mobs knocked out of stacks. We frequently don’t even bother los pulling. We often stack right on bosses. Mesmer’s using focus pulls. People help carry banners.

I see people always complaining about pugs, but my pugs usually go pretty well, and they always have ap requirements.

This is precisely my experience as well. Once I started looking for lvl 80 and a few k of AP groups, the overall quality really improved – these runs work perfectly fine something like 8 out of 10 times. Perfectly fine as in they do precisely what you described above and those runs aren’t much slower than what you can get in organized runs.

It is my theory that there are plenty of capable players that simply get put off by the try-hard requirements along the lines of “meta-zerG (love that one), ping gear, full asc, bla bla only”, which essentially proofs nothing, except that you can copy a build from a wiki. On the other hand, joining groups with no requirements at all is too risky and potentially invites disaster. As such, the AP req is some sort of compromise. While it doesn’t directly translate into knowledge of dungeons, it filters out complete beginners and overly toxic try-hards, while potentially attracting like-minded players. Until I get to read a better suggestion, I definitely stick to this solution.

Attempted Golem Mark 2 twice… crash and roll-back both times.

Attempted Great Jungle Wurm… crash and roll-back.

Attempted Claw of Jormag… crash and roll-back.

I guess you get the idea

P3 is also soloable by whatever classes able to do the orb-running part. Not sure if that changed for some with the recent trait rework, but it’s still perfectly doable on a Guardian.

Why even add the “in arah” part to the thread title?

Here is mine from a BWE back in April 2012. Not sure why I took it, maybe I thought that I can actually enter the UW through that portal.

(Also note the awesome dodge-bar )

… we made sport of warriors placing banner of discipline at world bosses.

What now… what now

To me personally, the mandatory ground-targeting also feels like a downgrade – if not to say a major inconvenience (exclusively talking PvE content here).

When I use the WoR, I kinda need it asap and not after wasting precious seconds trying to re-arrange the sometimes absurd default direction. Fast targeting with range indicators definitely gave me the best results so far, but it’s still not as fast as before.

For most of the content I play, having it precisely where I’m standing and oriented exactly at 90 degrees to my character was perfectly fine. In the very few instances I actually needed ground targeting, I switched it on. As such, I would very much love to see an option to use consecrations without ground-targeting again…

Would be nice if someone official could confirm if this is working as intended or not.

A handful of attempts have indeed given me quite a few gold and ectos in return. But before I try anything more, I would kinda love to know if I’ve just gotten really lucky or if something is indeed broken.

Now, with all this fuss about the new LA and specializations going on, let’s not forget about this gem:

The permanent versions of the Royal Terrace Pass and Captain’s Airship Pass will no longer cause the player to be kicked out of the VIP area when logging in as long as the pass is still in their inventory.

My virtual pride says thank you Anet <3

Agreed. Clear communication and an overall good move.

Thanks for the extra char slot, Anet

This is great news indeed. Storing all those boxes with undesired stats in my bank finally seems to pay off.

But not only that, personally I also see this as an extra motivation to play fractals again. With this change, the whole matter of the reward system and it’s RNG-nature is somewhat being addressed: From now on, getting any ascended gear drop is actually useful, some just need some additional work through the MF.

Interesting. My two bank tabs of spare ascended rings are eagerly waiting…

Erskine.5206:

Atherakhia.4086:

Sigh… I used an item for an alt I never play simply because the stat combo was useless for every other character I play. Wish I knew this 3 months ago as I’d have held onto the item so I could have used it on my main.

Ascended items are account-bound. So feel free to switch it to your main

Was gonna say the same, however, in case it’s armor and the main char doesn’t have the same armor type, it’s indeed bad luck

As already mentioned in the other thread, completely awesome change! Also very happy to hear that there won’t be an additional stats increase.

Now I wonder where that all came from…

ColinJohanson.2394:

To more directly answer some of your point….We are adding a system that lets you change the stats for your ascended gear (weapons and armor) next Tuesday – which will cost a combination of 10 spirit shards, piece you don’t want anymore, 5 ectos, and an exotic insignia of the stats you want to convert to. Legendary Gear will remain the gear that can freely change stats any time.

-CJ
(Edited to clarify weapons and armor)

This is completely awesome <3

And hopefully, there will be some kind of system available sometime in the future where something similar can be done for trinkets. I’m thinking of all those spare ascended rings from fractals that are collecting dust in my bank…

What you get from your order is a CD-Key. As such, you could simply gift that key to someone.

Calcanius.5048:

Here is a little challange to all you fanboys/white knight and others

The BOB Exampel
Two people go into same shop to buy a bundle made out of 2 items, lets call the item BOB, Person 1 already have a BOB and person 2 dont.

Bundle contains: BOB and a expansion for BOB.

The Problem is when you leave the store, a store clerk come running after you and say to person 1: Sorry Sir, but i see that you already have BOB at home and takes your BOB away.

Both payed the same amount, How do you think person 1 feels now ?

Justify how person 1 gets same value for money as person 2

EDIT: BOB is everylasting, does not break or gets old

Well, to me personally, a challenge implies a minimum degree of difficulty in order to be able to solve it. This is absent in your case, but I will let that slip, seeing that you could do well with a little education:

First of all, let me point you to the EULA , which you are required to agree with in order to play the game.

Paragraph 2, mostly the first part, talks about a service. This is were your BOB example becomes irrelevant, because we are not dealing with items here, but with services.

In addition to that, paragraph 4B quite clearly states that NCSOFT may, in its sole and absolute discretion, require You to pay to establish or maintain any Account, to use any Service or to use any Content..

With HoT, a new kind of service is being offered. In order to make use of that service, you pay the expansion price. Your old service is still being maintained, even though they wouldn’t even have to do that according to the EULA. There are no items being taken away from you, because you never had any to begin with.

Lessons for you to learn from this:
1. Understand what you are actually paying for, reading the EULA helps.
2. Pick an example which actually applies
3. Install a spell-checker for your browser.

Ardenwolfe.8590:

Hope this doesn’t get my in trouble, but I can recommend Marvel Heroes. It’s pretty fun and distracting while you decide. I’m loving me some Iceman.

“Ten-thousand futures have I witnessed and Doom rules them all!”

(Just here seconding your recommendation since the OP apparently doesn’t want to hand out his stuff )

Uriel.6310:

It might not matter to most of those who cross this thread..

On the contrary, it matters greatly to me.

If you’re on EU, feel free to send me some stuff before you quit

You can. After ordering, you will get a Game-Key which you add to your existing account.

Baldrick.8967:

Yet. As you have purchased something without actually knowing the full content, which may disappoint you so much you quit playing it after a week or a month.

It’s good to see 10+ players jumping in and throwing money at Anet, compared to the many many posts saying ‘no thanks’, will be interesting to see how it all works out.

Personally, I’m already happy with what we currently have. Should the new content – which I will attempt to play at least once – not turn out to my satisfaction, the additional class and specialization changes will be enough for me to return to the existing stuff I currently like.

That’s the thing with new stuff, you may end up liking it or not. The journey and experience is what’s important to me. Some games I end up playing for only a few hours, others for several hundreds of them (like GW2). If each time I had to first waste my time with consulting others reviews and gaming experiences, I would have stopped gaming altogether a long long time ago.

Very happy with my ultimate version. Was in need of some gems anyway and got my revenant character slot along with it.

Have been enjoying the game since launch, looking forward to next weeks specialization changes, upcoming beta events and then the HoT release of course. The price has never really been an issue for me considering all the hours I got out of the game and still will get out of the game in the future.

All I see are a lot of entitled kids.

Anyway, I am indeed a satisfied customer and buying the expansion once the shop actually lets me do so.

I would very much love to hear that explanation as well.

There won’t be a raised level cap with HoT, yet there will be mastery levels.

There won’t be a tier above ascended, yet they widen the stats gap as well as largely redesigning condition damage and traits.

Clever marketing aside, the result is grinding levels and gear. Not so different from those other MMO’s after all…

It is also my understanding that ascended gets an extra 5% on top of any other kind of compensation that gear gets in general in order to compensate for the trait adjustments.

This starts to look like a rather noticeable (mandatory?) advantage over exotic gear…

How accurate is this list? Does this include all the baseline changes and such? There seem to be a few previous traits missing, so can we assume that those have been discontinued?

Lastly, just a small thing, but made me wonder:

Brawler’s Recovery: Remove 1 condition whenever you swap weapons (combat only).

I was under the impression that receiving a condition automatically puts you into combat? As such, the combat requirement/information is kinda redundant?

My issue with with this thread is that the OP mentions “stacking” without further elaborating it and as a result gets all sorts of replies which I believe talk about completely different things at times.

1. As far as I’m aware, stacking got its extreme popularity when FGS fiery rush and similar skills triggered all their “charges” on top of each other for a huge damage-spike. This has been resolved months ago. Some players still stick to those tactics out of habit.

2. Luring/LOS-ing a boss somewhere to disable or cheapen some of its mechanics should in my opinion not be referred to as “stacking”, because that is incredibly misleading. Stacking is simply standing on top of each others (I will get to that in point 3), it needs further environmental conditions in order to become cheesy. Please be absolutely clear about cause and effect.

3. On the actual “stacking” as in the team clustering together: Melee weapons cleave, blinds, blocks, boons, fields and so on all have limited range. When playing a character making use of those (like, my guardian), I would kinda appreciate when my team-mates stick close to me so I can use my characters toolset to its maximum abilities. I absolutely do not want you to Leeroy around the room. I consider this basics of game-play anyone past beginner level should be aware of and well in line with how I imagine the devs intended this game to be played.

So, @ OP, with which of these three points is your actual issue? Or in case I have not covered it fully, feel free to provide additional ones.

With the current state of dungeons *, you can also just AFK and they will still succeed without your contribution?

But nah, my point is that you are always replaceable. It’s more obvious the higher the encounter scales, but I just don’t see why you would make such a fuss over it that it somehow affects your enjoyment.

Edit: lol @ Wethospu, maybe I should have written “current state of necromancers in dungeons”.

spoj.9672:

Satenia.9025:

As to your actual question: You can contribute to any kind of content no matter its scale. As I’m assuming you are referring to the higher potential impact the individual has on a smaller group, I’m going to answer with this: If you are playing dungeons, you are one group out of many doing the same content. As an individual player, you can always be replaced by someone else.

What? Are you trolling?

No, but I am curious as to why you would think so.

Personally, I wanted to see each dungeon path at least once. Happens that I ended up mostly doing dungeons, but that’s just coincidence. I have put a similar effort of exploring content into all aspects of the game, even those I don’t overly like or play much (like PvP).

spoj.9672:

Didnt really fully enjoy the game until i started trying dungeons with guild members. Its not just about the content. Its the enclosed environment of a small group of friends in a social gametype. Theres nothing social about being in a 100 man zerg.

…

Question. Who actually enjoys being 1 insignificant player out of 100 in a huge zerg?

No idea what kind of zergs you had in mind there, but touring world bosses for example is what I consider a very social experience. You have the regulars (though to be fair, this was much much better before the megaservers), you can go with guildies/friends and there is always plenty of chatter going on. Personally, I also like going there to look at other players characters and armor combinations.

Back when I did my share of WvW, it was a similar kind of experience: You got the regulars, you got server affiliation, you can go with your guildies/friends and so on.

As to your actual question: You can contribute to any kind of content no matter its scale. As I’m assuming you are referring to the higher potential impact the individual has on a smaller group, I’m going to answer with this: If you are playing dungeons, you are one group out of many doing the same content. As an individual player, you can always be replaced by someone else.

As such, I don’t let the scale of something decide whether I’m supposed to enjoy it or not. If I like it, I play it, otherwise I won’t.

Palador.2170:

Take a look at the armors that came out with the Silverwastes, and you’ll get your answer.

It takes a lot of work, grinding, and even some luck to get the full Lumi version of all three sets. That reward keeps people playing and doing events they might otherwise have stopped doing. It stretches out the life of the zone and events.

That is, I expect, how future armor sets will be used.

Couldn’t agree more. The lumi version was stretched over months with some parts boiling down to terrible RNG in order to continue milking the last bit out of otherwise abandoned content. Not exactly what I would like to see continued in the future.

What I did like however was how they handed out skins as achievement meta-rewards during LS episode one. More of that would be what I consider a good alternative to simply offering them through the gemstore.

Tyria’s greatest charrist reporting in…

In my experience, there are rotten apples in every game mode. However, through appropriate use of the lfg-feature, they are more easily avoided in dungeons compared to pvp or wvw.

Jay.1085:

I stay clear from the super elitist you see there dumb AP requirements LOL. whoever taught that was a good way to measure skill is in need of some help.

Personally, I find this a rather odd requirement to single out as elitism. Obviously, just like any kind of requirement, it depends on how it is being used in a given context. But you can for example quite easily tell a complete beginner from a veteran player through it. This can potentially be helpful when you form a PUG.

On the other hand, I find requirements such as “class xy, meta-build” far more questionable. Copying a build from a wiki and buying gear off the TP doesn’t measure your skill with dungeon content either. The degree this limits participation is what I would consider a much better example of being a “super-elitist”, as you called it.

But I guess where one draws the line is entirely subjective

Been wondering about that as well… still holding my breath till I get to see the warrior spec

(… and please no “monsterhunter” :> )

Stompy.1387:

Kimi Chaika.9862:

Stompy.1387:

When I’m bored, sometimes I will join a group of complete first timers and carry them through Arah. To make it more fun, I limit myself to no chat, only emotes. (/e emotes aren’t allowed) I usually do this with path 4, but today I was only able to find a p1/2 group, but it was still pretty interesting..

For starters, they didn’t even know about the detonator to blow up the mobs. In path 1, when I killed them they thought I did some crazy move to kill them all (this is after soloing Ooze/Champs after they all wiped). They didn’t learn about the button until path 2…

Also, somewhere along the way, I picked up the nickname “Legendary Mime Unicorn Thief.” I like it.

That was me in that group! It was my first time on any Arah paths and I still can’t believe all the champs the LMUT killed, us four noobs really only helped at the giant for like 30 seconds before getting trashed and watching as it was solo’d… I still bow to you, oh great Legendary Mime Unicorn Thief.

=)
This really makes me so happy haha

Awwww that’s so sweet

Wish more stories like this one made it into this thread.

Well, I felt right at home: Meleeing, stacking and blasting might, while the casuals safely hammered from 1200 range.

Unfortunately, I was lacking swiftness, so I couldn’t properly speed-clear

Compared to the last beta event, I’ve noticed the following:

While the map is much larger this time, the events feel slow and not very appealing to play:

• I’m not sure at what rate the “security level” is supposed to fill, but it just simply doesn’t fill much at all.
• A single escort-event taking something like 15 minutes (and feels like it’s an hour) is definitely too long.
• Some of the large rooted in place enemies take a long time to take down due to an endless hp bar, yet they do not offer an interesting fight at all.

Some fast-paced boss-battle like the wyvern is definitely missing… also to gain XP at a reasonable rate to unlock some masteries. In the 75 minutes or so I was playing, I didn’t even manage to unlock the gliding mastery, while I had this easily done within like 15 minutes during the last beta. This is really a shame, as I would think the beta benefits more from players actually testing this stuff instead of grinding xp (or trying to).

I’ve also noticed skill-activation lag (mostly heal-skill and swapping legends on revenant), which didn’t happen last time.

What I did like however are the improvements and overall polished parts of the story-quest.

Spending the remaining minutes of this first beta-slot typing this post simply because there is nothing interesting left to do. For a next beta, please generally shorten the event-durations, add more of them and bring back something like the wyvern-fight. Even though the map was much smaller, I preferred the previous beta over this one

For some strange reason this just didn’t fill up…

Just a flesh wound.3589:

He certainly did analyze the situation, and then stayed many steps ahead of the enemy.
(Analyze situation, Grab loot) ZOOOM!

This leaked image of Evon and his loot-bag seems to confirm your theory.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

I found several possibilities for a statue. The first is of him going through the portal, two are of him at work and the last one is of him relaxing at home. Any one of these will do nicely.

Definitely the one with him going through the portal. Hilarious

The only thing that greedy bugger deserves is a shooting-range named after him… with the target dummies being made in his image.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

Heck, we could even have a Braham and Taimi storyline too, seeing how much they care for each other. The sky’s the limit!

What do you guys think? Does the upcoming Chapel sound like a great idea or what???

Uh… I think we’ll have a legal problem here.