Guild Wars 2

Leo G.4501:

Wouldn’t it be cool to go out with a bang before the release of HoT with a whole week of testing and tweeking?

Grind a whole week of stuff/exp/masteries I won’t get to keep?
Sure sounds like a blast -.-
(not really)

Here’s the thing, yes lots of stuff is broken and out of whack.

But I am so. freaking. tired. of playing, doing, exploring, unlocking stuff that’s going to get wiped in a week.
I’m done with betas, the grind is bad enough without having it all taken away over and over.

I have a couple games I made the mistake of playing the early access betas for, after the 3rd total wipe I couldn’t bear to log back in. I’ve literally never played the game after launch because I lost so much progress.

True, its not the raid that hates and excludes people.
That would be the raiders.

But yeah, keep on excluding and pushing people away from it, the faster you push everyone else to go away the faster ArenaNet will realize the extremely vocal but otherwise tiny raider minority doesn’t pay the bills and abandon raids like they did dungeons.

You know, I was upset for maybe 5 minutes, good map space wasted on that crap!

But I thought about it, and one of my complaints has been new content that never appears on the map, its imaginary space. I want new content to be part of the world map, I want to feel like we’re exploring the world, even if parts of it are raids that I’ll never be able to play containing rewards I’ll never get because its all locked gear checks and casual filth hating elitists.
But even so, I’m glad its on the world map, even if the raid’s map looks horribly hokey in a cheesy “I’m a video game zone layout!” kind of way, that’s actually the only thing that bothers me.

So no, aside from looking incredibly lame as an area its presence on the world map doesn’t bother me. And in fact, its absence would have bothered me far more.

It’s perfectly relevant.
RoseofGilead.8907 made a comment stating ArenaNet would never raise the level cap.

I pointed out a post in which they specifically stated they always expected to someday raise that cap.

Just because you don’t like it doesn’t make it irrelevant.

Most things come back eventually, they consider a lot of them “seasonal”.

I got tired of missing things because I always waited to the last few hours to buy stuff, so now I tend to buy them as soon as they get discounted.

Mike O’Brian:
" In GW1 we never advanced the level cap through four campaigns/expansions. The game design didn’t allow for it. But GW2 was designed without those restrictions, and we’ve always expected that we will someday raise the level cap in GW2."

Source:https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/13tuac/im_the_studio_design_director_on_guild_wars_2_ama/c7762pk

That’s the last concrete thing they’ve said in general (that I can find anyway). There were comments about there not being a level cap increase In HoT, so there isn’t one inbound, but it’s not outside the realm of possibility in the future.

Also of note is another comment in the same post.
“I think it’s important for GW2 to be able to have this kind of gradual progression. Of course we made some mistakes with the way we introduced ascended gear. (See ChrisW’s answers for details.) But those are addressable issues. I don’t think they invalidate the fundamental concept that GW2 can have gradual stat progression without being a gear treadmill game.”

He generally seems of the opinion that as long as the treadmill is slow enough they can get away with saying its not a treadmill.
Thus why the “totally optional” ascended is now not as optional, and by the time the last wing of this raid is introduced it won’t be optional at all.
I expect by the time the second raid drops they’ll introduce a new not-a-tier-but-really-a-tier. Possibly something like infusions (it’s not a new tier of gear its not a treadmill, no matter how much grind or how often you need to regrind it) as yet another gear check/lockout.

Ayrilana.1396:

latinkuro.7304:

Nike.2631:

They’re increasing the spread between Exotic and Ascended stats to 10% with HoT. Anyone who thought “Challenging Content” meant it would be designed so you can do it comfortably while missing the top 10% of available effectiveness was fooling themselves.

didn’t they retract from this increase after the lash out from the “casual” community ?

It was never planned.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Ascended-Gear-Anet-please-fix-this/first#post5173842

You will notice, if you read it again, that he never actually says it was never planned, just that they hadn’t released the “official” patch notes, and that it was staying at 5%.

They could have planned to go to 10% and leaked the early patch notes as a way of testing the waters and everything he said would still be factual.

RoseofGilead.8907:

There isn’t going to be a level cap increase. Ever.

On the contrary, they very specifically said early on that they built the system to accommodate level cap increases, and that they planned to eventually.
While “eventually” may never come, they never said they wouldn’t ever.

Yes, seems to have been cloned when I made my first beta toon for the weekend.

Sorry bout that Gaile, but you did have to know we were going to make a break for it as soon as you said something, and while some of us don’t agree with every decision going into it we are pretty freaking psyched about it in general

I guess we all jumped on it a little faster than they expected XD
I see mine now.

PSA remember to put stuff in your bank first!!
It seems to get copied upon first char creation

Nooooooo, someone forgot to flip the switch

Wooooooo! XD

?15 chars :O

Losing gold in the process is kind of the point, runes and sigils need that sink.
The market demand is why some runes are so expensive, but that demand doesn’t (and shouldn’t) entitle anyone to avoiding the cost just because its expensive.
Want to keep it? Do the same thing anyone with a super expensive infusion is required to do.
Buy an upgrade extractor.

Or make it so I can keybind a key on my keyboard? Just bam hit the key that’s key’d to deposit all and save a few mouseclicks.
This is a key feature!

Runes and sigils aren’t meant to be kept forever, they are intended to be destroyed when you change them. This functions as both a sink for runes/sigils keeping the valuable ones valuable, and a sink for gold as people have to buy more.
Sheer demand is the only reason stuff like Strength runes are so expensive.

Runes in legendary should work no differently than any other armor.
No more non cosmetic advantages
None. The stat swapping is already far beyond what legendaries were promised to stay as. In fact I’d argue the stat swapping needs to go, and legendary be returned to what it is supposed to be, a cosmetic only grind.

It’s a nice feature, and an important one.

But lets make no mistake, the block feature is not the end all be all solution.
Much like the profanity filter is not a license to swear, the block feature is not carte blanche to be offensive as you like
“anyone who doesn’t want to hear it can just block me” to quote one particularly nasty player, spewing some of the worst hatred I’ve ever seen in a game.
He argue that the block feature gave him the right to say ANYTHING he wanted because anyone who didn’t want to hear it could just block him.

Each player, when they agree to the ToS, signs a contract saying they agree to follow the rules
For anyone who refuses to follow those rules ArenaNet is fully within their right to ban them, for any duration they see fit.

Your right to free speech does not apply here. That right is a legal protection from government censure, any owner of private property still has the right to tell you to leave, and owners of “private property” online (such as forums) have the right to delete any content they feel like, or declare any content they see fit as verboten.

So yes, block people when they are offensive.
But always make a point to report the incident.
Every time you turn a blind eye, you condone their actions, every time they get away with it it reinforces their belief that what they do is acceptable.

ArenaNet will investigate and evaluate whether the person was truly being offensive or whether the reporter was being overly sensitive (because that does happen as well) and take action or not accordingly.
They may not take action on one iffy report, but if each time the person says horrible things someone reports them its much more likely something will be done.
Maybe getting banned will teach them being nasty isn’t okay, maybe not, but doing nothing and condoning their actions sure isn’t going to help.

I will add, Kevin’s definition does fit horizontal progression better, like masteries.

However, if I have a staircase consisting of 5 steps, and tell people that the 5th step is “at the top”, but they can choose to add a 6th if they really want to for the lulz.
And then later tell people they kind of actually need to be on the 6th step to be “at the top”, that is the very definition of vertical progression.

Coulter.2315:

Kevan.8912:

vertical progression doesn’t mean new tier of gear.
Means that your char become in some way more powerful than in the past.
And if a player who has played XXhrs has access to something that another with Xhrs can’t access, imho is a vertical progression.

You have made up a false definition of vertical progression to back up your weak position – its not flying.

Vertical progression is tiers of Gear and Max Level increases. Things which put you above current players – since we have the same level after HoT and the best stats available are same as now THERE IS NO VERTICAL PROGRESSION.

Stop making up nonsense…

Oh but there is.

See, we were told, over and over, that ascended was not needed outside high level fractals, and was a totally optional thing for those who wanted to grind it out.
As in, we were told it was okay to stick with exotics.

So we did.
And now we’re being told we need to upgrade to another tier.
This is vertical progression

Just because they wheedled that tier in 2 years ago and are only now making it necessary does not absolve them of the fact it is no longer totally optional and is now a needed vertical improvement.

A single vertical step is still a vertical step.
Ascended now represents vertical progression and is in absolute violation of one of the founding principles of the game, one of the principles that attracted many of us to it in the first place.

Awww, I guess that makes sense though.

I almost had this happen with a stack of ecto the other day.
Moved 2 stacks from guild bank to inventory, the second simply vanished when I dropped it into my bag.
I panicked, man, not going to lie, I’m like 90% done with Twilight and Sunrise for Eternity (still largely in parts) and I absolutely cannot spare a whole stack of ecto (grinding this thing by the skin of my teeth)
I remembered a guildy had had something like that happen a while back and moved the one stack I could see back into the guild bank, and the second stack appeared underneath the first.

I now know to never trust guild banks with anything that valuable, especially in multiple stacks. This kind of bug should never be brushed off as “beyond their control”

I thought I heard there actually were guild hall based resources/nodes planned already?

It was a full reset for BWE3

Coulter.2315:

Guys we’ve all been in full Ascended dungeon runs which go a lot slower/faster than others – the difference player skill and knowledge makes is the primary driver of damage.

If you still don’t have an Ascended character then you’re not really looking for the best performance and raids will need people with that desire (desire to pull the best effectiveness from equipment and play – yes people with Ascended don’t necessarily have this but I would say people that do have this drive won’t be running around without Ascended) .

They haven’t tested it against a very large spread of top level players and so the design is just a guess/aspiration at the moment.

You’ve had years to get Ascended I can’t believe suddenly now you’re upset you might not be doing your best in group content (cause you clearly haven’t been doing it up until now…).

Getting Ascended doesn’t mean you’ll be able to do the raid, but it shows a bit of commitment to doing the best you can in there – thats the mindset raids need.

I don’t have any, because for years I’ve been told I would never need it outside fractals
And now I’m expected to have it for content outside fractals.
How can anyone possibly be surprised that some of us feel lied to?

On that promise I’ve planned for years to make legendary instead of ascended if I was going to put in that kind of grind, and now that’s not going to be possible.
I’ll have to grind ascended, drop hundreds of gold and mats, to be able to work on legendary.
That’s starting to look an awful lot like a treadmill.
So we have to grind ascended if we want to get to legendary, whats next? The next raid will introduce a progressing Agony grind?
I’ve always been fine with needing to grind for some cosmetic stuff, like legendary weapons.
But would it make sense to have to grind out a full set of ascended weapons before you could work on a legendary?
I cannot fathom why people think it’s okay to have to grind out ascended stats before we can get legendary skins.

Am I the only one who’s noticed that the ascended gap bump to 10% they were going to do until the leak would have made this even worse?
Were would we be if we’d all just rolled over for them?

IndigoSundown.5419:

Am I pleased? No. Making Asc. armor/weapons is the dullest way to get top tier gear I’ve ever seen.

Am I surprised? No. If they tuned for Exotic, raids would be too easy for groups in full Asc.

Only if the difficulty is entirely artificial (i.e. bumping mobs HP up, making them all elites, making them hit harder, or knock down on all attacks, etc.) instead of requiring skill via mechanics.

The fact that they’re opting for the former isn’t surprising, but it’s just a gear check (gear check != skill check); not in any way something that makes the content more challenging, just harder/more tedious.

This is what raiding is all about, locking out large portions of the player base so the elite can get their ego fix.

Chobits.2430:

I don’t get the big deal with raids requiring ascended gear or even having multiple gear sets that you switch out during the raid.

People have had two and a half years to get ascended gear. The only people that don’t have them are the people that complained about it and never started working on it and those that are new to the game.

The people that didn’t complain and started working on getting them, after 2.5 years, likely have every single toon geared head to toe in ascendeds with leftovers in the bank.
I personally have gear sets for all 8 toons and have enough mats/gear in the bank to equip 3 more toons if required.

It isn’t like this stuff is out of reach for anyone. It is actually really easy to get, but just takes time.

Many people don’t have it because for 2.5 years we’ve been told and reassured that it was entirely optional outside of high level fractals.

Terra.8571:

Turamarth.3248:

Nike.2631:

They’re increasing the spread between Exotic and Ascended stats to 10% with HoT. Anyone who thought “Challenging Content” meant it would be designed so you can do it comfortably while missing the top 10% of available effectiveness was fooling themselves.

Source?

There is no source (and that Nike isn’t the DnT Nike just incase you got confused). Last official word was stat difference is staying at 5%.

Anyways, I can’t see why so many people are surprised. They said the hardest endgame content in PvE will be raids. The explicitly said it will be harder than fractals and dungeons. We all know fractals 100 is coming and so this was going to be harder.

Even though fractals require agony, the encounter’s are all based off players having ascended stats. Also, probably only 10% of the player base have actually done fractal 50’s. These raids to me, and AN as well, always seemed the next step up.

Whether or not ascended is mandatory (i.e. there will be masteries which increase damage/ decrease damage), we’ll have to see. But simply basing the encounter’s so that the bosses/ mobs do damage against players assuming they had the BiS gear available, for the hardest content in game, seems logical.

Harder doesn’t automatically mean it should require another tier of gear, that’s a cheap freaking cop-out method of making content harder.
It’s entirely possible to balance the content around exotics and still make it good challenging content.

By using a lame, but standard wow-fare, gear check instead of using actual mechanics they significantly undermine the actual challenge of the content.
Just hearing them say that I’ve lost most of my hope for what the raids could have been.

Can’t say I’m terribly surprised, we’ve seen for years the only way they know how to make stuff “harder” is giving mobs more HP and making them hit harder (i.e. artificial difficulty).

None of it should require ascended.
Ever.
EVER.

Ascended is a totally optional only needed for high level fractals stat level.
The instant it becomes required for anything else, ever, outside fractals, and we’re back to them violating the promises about stat tiers and ascended being totally optional.
Requirement creep is just as bad as power creep.

There are usually multiple areas around the same level that you can go to.
And you can always go to other lower zones, the game scales you down to the right level so you’re not badly OP, basically any zone at your level or lower (world map shows zone levels)

But Brisban Wildlands is a 15-25 zone, as is Snowden Drifts and Diessa Plateau.
You don’t have to grind monsters the whole time to level, although you certainly can.

You could always hop into WvW or EotM (it scales you up to 80, but it can more training)

The earmuffs are actually held together by the Quantum Quaggan Qompression field.
It’s the principle that due to the probability that in some dimension somewhere a Quaggan might be holding them to your head they stay in place.

Vink.6453:

:(
This is really annoying. My guild does missions on Saturday nights

And you still can, you’ll miss ONE night of rewards for saturday missions, then guess what, the following saturday you do missions, and get the same rewards you get every other saturday but one!!!111oneone

Rhyse.8179:

This is really short sighted. I urge Anet to change this plan slightly.

Many guilds, including mine, do guild mission nights every Saturday after reset. Some people in my guild (including my wife, who is a guild officer and runs these events) plan their entire day around “Saturday is Guild Night.” By pushing this back, you are making it impossible to do our biggest weekly event. Kicking the game’s social community in the shins is not going to go over well.

Instead, it would be better do do a double reset, on Satruday as normal, then at the new time on Monday. This will result in more rewards for some people, but that is a very small price to pay for allowing guilds to keep their current schedules.

It’s one night, you miss one weekend of missions and then you can continue to do it every saturday just like you do now, the time of the actual reset is largely irrelevant aside from the single extended week.

There is no “debate”
And it is entirely a marketing and psychology thing.
This is what’s known as “reality”

They take things away to create artificial scarcity, something isn’t available for a while and some people who otherwise wouldn’t want it start to want it. Also generates a sense of urgency, buy now or you never know how long you might have to wait, and some people who were on the fence (but would never have purchased if the item stayed available forever) are nudged to buy.
It’s psychology, and it makes them (more) money, that’s why they do it
To make money, there really is no other Machiavellian scheme going on, just the bottom line.

Be patient, very few things are “forever” around here, except maybe bunny ears.

Alright, lets look at this for a second.

Inventory first, makes sense.

Bank second, this makes zero sense what so ever in any universe ever. ever.
Let me explain.
Bank space is storage (you know, like a bank)
Collections, is potential inventory space as I’m out and about, being able to deposit materials directly.
When a collection is full I can no longer deposit, and must go manually open collections, scroll to the mat in question, move it to inventory, go to bank tab, scroll to mat section, move mats to bank.
If I have mats in the bank I want to move to collections, right click, deposit.
No brainer really which direction is easier to accomplish.

As an example of why collections should empty first (or heck maybe for once make something a toggle?) I was recently doing a dungeon run.
In salvaging a few things to try to keep space open I ended up with silk scraps, gossamer scraps, mithril ore, ori ore, thick leather, and cured leather bits in my inventory that I couldn’t deposit because the collections were full.
Could I just craft a couple things to free up space?
No, I have to craft a few items, go to collections, move stacks to inventory, go to bank, scroll to partial stacks left after crafting, click and drag full stacks onto partial stacks to replenish them, then go back to my inventory and redeposit the now partial stacks back to collections.
All to be able to keep inventory slots free by depositing mats.
This is asinine

Space available in collections is 1000x more valuable than space in the bank.
Why bother even having a deposit feature if you’re just going to make a point of keeping the collection full?!
And I’m sorry but it’s just sooo much effort to right click deposit vs the reverse if that’s really how you want to use it.

Yeah so I’m looking at fields of ruin, the one map I see so far with the doubloons, and they show up at 1000, 3000, 5000, and 7000 events.
If as people are saying its 100 points per event that’s at the 10/30/50 and 70 event marks.
70 events for 4 doubloons.

Yeah not going to help in the slightest as is.

In ze gem store.
Along with Primeval, Profane, and Krytan
And the frost wasp logging tool.

And sailor’s beanie and wintersday earmuffs

Agreed! Needs some tweaking.

Windu The Forbidden One.6045:

Loving the outfit

Nice! I was struggling to find a good look for my warrior, and them bam!
It’s perfection.

Sorry, I’d show you exactly how big the increase was but I left my electron microscope at home today.

Doam.8305:

snipsnip

Not so much but they did say it will be enough to keep the existing prices thus the materials should equal about the same in the end. They mentioned time is calculated as well but then again farming gold is time consuming as well so who knows how it will be in the end. If people start to craft Pre’s then the existing pre’s will eventually come down in price maybe to the point that simply buying it will be cheaper since crafting requires timegated items.

http://dulfy.net/2015/09/26/gw2-twitchcon-legendary-journey-in-hot/

“The second collection ensures that there is a proper gold and time value to each of the precursors to maintain their value in the game.” – Cited from that Link

And the problem a lot of us see, is that they typically can’t see more than two inches in front of their nose.
Yeah, we expected them to design it not to crash precursers.
But the amounts required “gold cost” is almost certainly balanced around current market conditions. When the demand for those mats skyrockets prices are going to go up. If they go up high enough that it really is cheaper to buy the pre, then that’s what people are going to do.
The buying and crafting of pres will balance, and depending on what and how much (especially as people speculate on large quantities of it) I could just as easily see this pushing the price of pres up instead of down.
Thus some concerns about this making it worse.

Seconded. Would like them a little bit farther apart thank you.

mtpelion.4562:

So our Elite spec will be designed for raids, which are participated in by about 5% of a game’s playerbase (based on stats from other MMOs).

I knew bringing raids to GW2 was a bad idea, but I didn’t realize it was going to be this bad.

Its to be expected, imo, this is ranger we’re talking about.

I just love watching health bars go up and down!

Soooo, the Trinity lives again, long live the Trinity?

Nah, they’re adamant about staying away from dedicated tanks/healers, so the heals will be as crappy as everything else about Rangers, and we’ll continue to be, as always, a shunned footnote.

I imagine the HoT areas will have HoT specific completion stuff for making the HoT based legendaries, and what we have will remain static(ish).

I’m not sure how I feel about it either. On the one hand world completion is already pretty tedious so the thought of adding a bunch of new much harder maps just to get the old gift for an old legendary makes me cringe.

But at the same time, a “World (exploration) completion” achievement that doesn’t include a large part of the world map bothers me in a CDO kinda fashion.
Sort of the inverse of my old argument that WvW maps weren’t “on the world map” and thus should not be part of an achievement for exploring the world map completely.

My hope, will be that they rename it Pact Tyria Completion, and add maybe Maguuma Completion, as long as it doesn’t have hearts -.-
Just so things make more sense, and can be expanded upon as they add more regions….like Elona….and Cantha…nudge nudge

I almost always get at least 1, I’d say 90% of the time.
Much faster to stick a few toons in the aetherblade JP in Gendarren Fields.
2 per day minimum with a rare chance of 12.

So many good ways they could improve the preview pane.
Stances
Your own dye catalog
Lighting options