Guild Wars 2

Mackdose.6504:

You could not raid in greens, raids in WoW were the definition of PvE content. You absolutely could not see all content in greens. QED.

I contend that your interpretation of the design manifesto is off-base, because in my opinion the game has kept the manifesto intact.

really his opinion is wrong because your opinion is correct that’s your argument?

while the green- blue rarity is backwards comparing wow to GW2 you may have forgotten in wow you could do this: http://greedygoblin.blogspot.co.uk/2009/08/ungeared.html
at the time yogg was the end boss.

Can you do even mid end fractals in comparative gear?

Shadow Dragon.9874:

^Not really if you’re playing Fractals at high level. As now you are abandoning possible extra agony resistance with magic find.

For other parts of the game, I don’t see that big of a problem with these new infusions. Especially when they take so long to earn

they make ascended gear mandatory outside of fractals, unless you want to earn less than half the gold/karma /whatever your stacking than other people do for the same time.

i can see how they went in with good intentions to give a useful infusion to people who didn’t want to do fractals, but i was expecting some thing like +10 vit 0 AR vs +5 vit +5 AR so you sacrifice a bit of useful stat for AR to be better at fractals at the cost of being better outside of fractals not big boosts to income generation. so if you were wanting to skip it and do content without ascended your kind of screwed cause the economy and future pricing will take this into account.

hope you like watching inflation when people start rocking + gold % across four infusion slots, not including the rest of the gear they add and this is only the FINE rarity of infusion, how much can we expect master-work or rare infusions to increase this by when they are implemented

seriously devs need to explain this

ascended gear lets you slot for more gold / karma/ exp / mf now…. by like +30% per infusion slot
not sure i even have words for how bad this is.

Jski.6180:

That a very backwards way of thinking please keep this about how you use to like it and not about all the doom YOU see today.

expecting people to stay true to a vision they spent years telling you about, and not implementing sweeping changes with 3 days notice before they are patched in is backwards thinking?

edit to include screen; from a time before heros, before henchmen even had decent ai all the way back in 2005

so if were not going to get the approximate time can you at least hint if we should do our daily achievement today or not ie if i do my daily in x hours the patch wont be in x hours +1 where x +1 is still before reset thus missing out on a days worth of laurels compared to people who wait an extra hour

DarksunG.9537:

Shadow Blade.1324:

disparity in eve is not strength its wealth and versatility,

It’s wealth & political & Military power. Which is the entire fabric of the game. You’re just pretending its not. Guild Wars has no political power (becoming a GM? really? that allows you to control corporations & resources on a global scale & have paramilitary forces that can hunt down & kill players & take all their possessions? really?) & wealth just makes gearing faster. But when I can get max level & gear in 2.5 weeks it’s meaningless. The idea that EVE could be even considered AVERAGE in terms of player disparity among all MMOs is laughable. And GW2 being probably the most accessible, even MMOs (to the point where players complained that people were TOO even) make the GW2 EVE comparison even more hilarious.

Magiofdeath.2745:

I wonder if lodestones will be on the laurels vendor

agreed. people will definitely want those.

its not i play eve and mine and do industry/ trading and run some missions 0 military / political power involved, the fabric of the game is a sandbox so you do whatever you want.

in this case the military/ political power is being able to influence geared people to join you in pvp, while GW2 isn’t the best comparison due to no open world pvp/ item loss, it would be like taking your 100 man guild or whatever and calling up as many friendly guilds as you can and going into WvW and greifing someone.

in most games you cant take ALL someones possessions unless you actively scam them and they are foolish enough to let you have it all in which case its their own fault, as a result of pvp at most they will lose their current ship/ fitting and implants. and the attacker will lose their ship etc if in highsec, if in low sec risk reward is part of the game, every tutorial tells you not to fly ships you cant afford to lose.

wealth also lets you gear faster here too, any game with any form of trade/ currency will have a wealth disparity, if you weren’t aware there have already been players posting topics about forming guilds with the aim to control prices on a variety of goods on the marketplace.

so lets compare disparity in both games both have wealth disparity, the scale of which assuming your comparing a regular player for years to a new player is for all purposes the same as the new player has no way of catching up. people are already complaining here that they have no way of catching precursor prices etc due to wealth disparity and its been a few months since launch.

strength disparity in eve is mitigated by targeting and specialisation ie weaker ships can kill stronger ones through use of ecm/vamps /transversal tanking etc. in guild wars specialisation doesn’t really allow you to kill someone with twice your hp dmg etc and doesn’t have the same depth as eve

in both games military/ political power is the same, if you run a large guild/corp you can call on more people to attack/ defend objectives or control the market through arranged price fixing, but need to do the necessary recruitment and logistics to make it happen and coordinate with other guilds to set up really big operations.

anyway we seem to be getting off topic as this thread is about the prelude. which sounds good on paper but might end up terrible in implementation and they need to go into more detail about it, specifically how they’re fleshing out the rest of the world down the line

no we got new free hats each year, you could still make candy cane weps etc every year, the sensible thing to do would be re-release all content sans hats (which were free and you could get from anywhere in the world) and add a new hat and one or two other new things for people to go for so people can for example get the minipets they didn’t this year and have something new to go for… but yeah given their history with this game anything could happen.

Kain Francois.4328:

How will this update get people into lower level zones and have it be worth our time though?

And cursed shore changes?

presumably itll be something like (kill X/Y/Z ) zone specific mob like branded creatures

also since it seems i didn’t comment on achievements giving rewards in that other thread ill do so here:
Do not roll back achievements, if you want to cap the gain from infinite ones at a certain amount then something along the lines of: the first X times you complete this achievement will award Y, this leaves people who want to continue progressing them able to do so. and functions as soft cap that you can extend/alter to control the rewards as needed without reducing peoples legitimately gained achievement points and effectively removing the wealth/ effort they put into that part of the game with no compensation.

rolling back is generally a last resort and mostly used for bugs/exploits because it leaves people wondering what’s the point if everything they do/ achieve may just be rolled back later. then they stop playing, you’ve made some bad decisions in the past please don’t make this one of them.

while i have no real preference if this is used with laurels as rewards or another currency/system, i think there’s quite enough tokens atm as it is unless the token storage tab is coming soon

DreamOfACure.4382:

If they would just increase the Charged Lodestone drop rate until it fell below 2gold each, I would be the happiest GW2 player ever.

That one item is discouraging many players from working towards a Legendary.
We have to settle for fancy exotic weapons instead, which is greatly disappointing.

you said 1.5 moments ago tell me o great one how you accrue 33% more wealth so rapidly :P

i think lodestones are going to be included in the dungeon revamps whenever they hit so its likely price will fall then if you cant just outright buy them for tokens

FateZero.8536:

Alright, let me get this straight. You want Agony Resistance to be available via the infusion which could be bought using Laurels. You want Ascended gears to be available outside Fractals.

im not sure if were on the same page or not, would also help if they didnt call multiple things infusion :/ see the prelude link the infusions that slot into gear are purchasable
https://www.guildwars2.com/en/the-game/releases/january-2013 the other infused gear also drops from higher level fractals

So what about Fractals players who spent hours saving up just to get our first Agony Resistance infusion? First you guys complained that it isn’t fair that PVE players do not have the options to get BiS ascended gears. Now that it is available with stats, you want an easy way to obtain Agony Resistance via Laurels. Really??

Comparing daily/monthly achievement to Fractals run, daily/monthly is a cakewalk but you want the same reward as players who painstakingly save up for Agony Resistance infusion via Fractal runs. For once, run the Fractals. Earn your Agony Resistance. Stop being self-entitled.

Could argue the exact same for people who went and got mjolnir etc, to paraphrase what they were told “suck it up and deal with it”

actually i would have preferred if they weren’t linked to daily /monthly. (due to time gating) You can see earlier posts if you’d like to see my preferred methods. if you upgraded your ring via the forge that was your choice, you could have waited for an upgraded one to drop from the higher levels of fractals, here ill quote you back to yourself so your familiar with the analogy im going to use

FateZero.8536:

It’s a way of life. You can’t expect compensation just because you had the best item. It’s the same in life, you want a computer with the latest graphic card, go buy one. You can’t expect Nvidia or AMD to say “Hey, you guys who had our previous best graphic card, here take this latest and most powerful graphic card which we just launched for just a top-up of $50”. Yea right.

as we all know over time graphic cards aka ascended gear becomes cheaper and easier to obtain, they’re not going to stop putting it in the game just because you want everyone to pay the same price you did.

FateZero.8536:

You’re missing my point here. Players who does not want to do fractals, hate to do fractals or refuses to do fractals to get ascended items when it was first introduce shouldn’t be insisting/demanding for agony resistance infusion to be available outside fractals. Why? Simple, because it’s redundant.

What I understand from your earlier post (not the one which I quoted in this post) is that you want ANet to implement some new recipe for Agony Resistance via the Mystic Forge/slotting. Why did I say new recipe? because currently to infuse any kind of agony resistance into ascended accessories, you’ll need vial of condensed mists essence/glob of coagulated mists essence/shard of crystallized mists essence/fractal relics. All of which aren’t available outside of Fractals.

Therefore, why do you want Agony Resistance when in the first place you do not enter Fractals? ANet has announced that they will make Ascended gears available outside Fractals and the stats will be the same except the absence of Agony Resistance which non-fractals players do not need.

Even if by some change of mind that you intend to do fractals, you’ll have to start from FotM level 1 which Agony Resistance is not needed till level 10 onwards. You’ll have more than enough time to save up for the Versatile Simple Infusion.

i think this is getting confused, as per the prelude you can buy infusions for laurels, what i was arguing for was that the base infusion included on infused ascended items be on the items you can purchase as well as the non infused version, like infused rings drop from higher levels of fractals infused whatever can be sold for more laurels.

with the changes to fractals, if i understand them correctly i will be able to join higher level fractals as long as someone in the party has done them, thus agony will be present, ill still be progressing from lvl 1 to lvl 2 and so on, but if my friends are on lvl 113 ill still need lvl 113 agony resist to be able to play with them, if i dont want to just be a burden dieing all the time due to not enough AR (exploit strategies aside) and the longer i dont join the fractals grind, the farther behind the average level ill get, how likely will it be for me to find a lvl 1 fractals pug exactly 11 months from now to start gearing up? cause im not betting its high

cesmode.4257:

Kind of my point earlier about the whole..“Why do you need agony resistance if you arent running fractals. And if you want to run fractals, why are you complaining about running fractals to get the agony infused ascended gear?” My whole stance was that some folks want to almost sidestep grinding in fractals for agony infused ascended gear, AND then run high level fractals. Have their cake and eat it too.

this is a cyclic argument, I don’t want AR to run fractals I want AR so I’m not prevented from playing with my friends in part of the game should I wish to because I’m gated out of progression. if I just wanted to farm fractals id be doing it right now, what I want is to be able to play any part of the game I feel like dipping into on any given day with my friends and not be segregated from them because of poor design. someone mentioned earlier if infused items were available outside of fractals people wouldn’t do fractals to get them, they’d just do the other activity and fractals groups would die out, isn’t that a problem with fractals itself not being fun enough to merit player attention without forcing people into it due to being the only current location of BIS offering superior rewards to every other part of the game ( hope DR is getting fixed in the upcoming patches )

Lord Ryoka.4572:

You’re not alone. I’ve been waiting (probably in vain) for ANet to announce a way that Exotics can be upgraded to Ascended tier items. The introduction of Ascended items basically kills the Crafting disciplines because there is no way that crafters can make items that are as powerful as Ascended items. Weapons and Armor still have a place in that their skins are still visible and players might buy items just to transmute their appearance, but Jewelers are completely out of luck. Why would you even bother levelling Jeweler to 400 (outside of crafting Legendary Gifts) and amassing crafting materials when you can just save up your Laurels and buy an Ascended ring or amulet instead?

tbh i think at the least everything in http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Mystic_Forge/Other_Items should be upgradable don’t see why someone who spent the effort for a BIS infinite light etc shouldn’t be able to upgrade it to the new BIS fairly cheaply compared to grinding an infused item or legendary to transmute it onto

DarksunG.9537:

What?.. wait.. WHAT? “nothing in Eve makes you unreservedly stronger than newer players.” No other game in the history of MMOs has a higher disparity between a starting player & one that has, by luck & manipulation, become the center of the universe. I don’t give 2 quaggans if it’s your body’s physical stats or your planet-sized space craft that “makes you more powerful” but EVE is the absolute pinnacle of player power separation.

its called transversal tanking. if your flying a titan, you probably cant hit the frigate or whatever flying rings around you, also actually shooting at it will cost more than the the other players whole ship + fittings. meaning you lose money. becoming the centre of the universe as you put it is just politics, you can do the same on any GW2 server by being a GM and building a big / influential guild, the disparity in eve is not strength its wealth and versatility, but wealth disparity is present in every game with money due to players stockpiling over time and for versatility / time you can look at GW1

and yes Grend.6251 your triforge amulet will become obsolete when they decide to introduce an ascended version, but that’s not coming in this patch so you’ll probably still have more stats than more specialised players, but that gap will be narrower

@ FateZero.8536 you seem to be missing the point, BIS gear allows you to do ALL content, if you dont have it you need to get it, then your completion of that content is only dependant on personal skill/ teamwork and you can play whatever you want. Looking at it another way would you like it if after getting your fractals gear, you couldn’t use it in any other areas of the game and had to go grind each of those areas to get JP / WvW /other dungeons/ DE etc specific gear with no other way to get it? sound fun? so if you were interested in that content you’d have no problem farming lower levels of that content for the +% light gear to combat the % heavy debuff in JP or so on? cause that’s your argument

cesmode.4257:

So what you’re saying is, you want to be able to purchase already infused ascended gear via a nice, easy, calm, no pressure way via daily and monthlys. You want to be able to sleepwalk through these dailys, which they most likely will be if current dailys and monthlys are any indication, in order to SIDESTEP a fractal grind for infusions that are only relevant to fractals.

I dont see your logic.

All I see is:
I want to be able to get BiS gear without grinding fractals so that I can join high level fractal groups.
I dont want to fractal grind. This means, I dont want to spend 1.5 hr per day to grind out fractals against RNG. This is too hard because fractals CAN be difficult at times, and RNG does suck.
I want to walk through the green fields of Kessex hills, kill some centaurs, and complete the monthly achievement. Then I can get the infused ascended, to go do those high end fractals.

Sounds like you want the easy way out. Not trying to be rude or insulting, but that is pretty much how I see this.

And I know arenanet said ascended gear has always been planned. Just making a point that the vocal minority/majority that wanted gear progression got their way, and these are now probably the same people whining that its too grindy and too RNG based.

you see it wrong and seem to be falling back on the entitled/ wants the reward without the effort argument.

what im asking for isnt to get the gear with less effort, its to get more challenging world content with equivalent rewards to fractals so we can play what we want and then dip in to whatever other area of the game we want any time without having to grind a load in that area to do it, using your own argument we could argue for WvW specific gear and JP specific gear and DE specific gear, wearing anything else while doing that content would make you less than optimal or prevent you from doing it entirely, i don’t really want to carry around multiple sets of gear or have to grind them out for 8 characters and the different builds I want to experiment with.

Id have preferred 0 vertical progression at all ever, its just lazy design adding +1% dmg + 1% dmg resist rather than making interesting new abilities that combo with current ones or more tactical use of builds/ interrupts etc. as a result i don’t really care to join fractals at all, that may change in the future which brings us back to my point; they said you could get BIS from any playstyle and you cant regardless of whether AR continues to apply to just fractals or if its elsewhere in future content if i dont play fractals for say the next 11 months (likely) then decide to try it i then have to grind through it to get the actual BIS gear to enjoy all content with the people who did essentially having to grind the content now or later to catch up.

Your right in that i want to sidestep the fractal grind but i don’t want to sleepwalk through dailies /monthlies / dungeons to get this. id prefer them to drop off champions at the end of some events and jumping puzzles and WvW , provided the activity is long enough to be on par with a dungeon run, whether they are hard or not depends on the player, ie i breeze through jumping puzzles(more challenging JP would be nice combo goemms lab with clocktower or something) and solo champions (better AI please), and some people find that impossible, difficulty is relative, imo dungeons aren’t really challenging after the first 3 or so times you complete them as you’ll have the timings down, after that its just farming.

cesmode.4257:

Again,
If you want ascended gear with built in infusion, then youre sights are aimed at high fractal levels. So go run fractals.

They are making ascended gear, without built in infusions, available via laurels so people are STATTED on equal footing, even if they dont run fractals. The infusion part of ascended gear is specific to fractals ONLY. So if you want ascended with built in infusion, then that tells me you are someone who wants to run fractals because that “upgrade” is specific to fractals.

If you do not run fractals, you do not need ascended with built in infusion.

I see no problem here.

Can people please calm down about this?

you don’t seem to understand the point, this was supposed to allow players to get BIS outside of farming fractals, if it doesn’t have the inherent AR then its not BIS its that simple and creates a sub teir if it cant be upgraded, as you will still have to grind lower level fractals and fight rng to get the stats you want if you want to dip into later fractals for a challenge or because guildies need +1

it does nothing to mend the fracturing of the player base people will still have trouble finding geared players to attempt the dungeon with since there is no AR on the gear, (infusions will help to some extent) youll still only have 50% of the infusion at most as someone who farms fractals, less when higher rarity infusions are released. then you have to grind lower level fractals (if you can find anyone to play them) to get a new set of gear with 100% AR.

ColinJohanson.2394:

(Please note, the ascended gear purchased for laurels will not have agony resistance built in, since that mechanic is currently unique to progression in the fractal dungeons. They are however statistically the same as any other ascended gear.)

are the amulets available outside the laurel tokens? if not doesn’t this just add more gating to get them, ie you must do X days of dailies before you will have one, increasing the gap between players who do dailies every day and those with other comment’s, but who might be able to play lots at the weekend, even if they play the exact same amount of hours the latter will never catch the former as this is linked directly to daily achievements.

additionally people will still have to farm fractals for BIS as this laurel ascended gear will never have the + agony resist inherent in higher lvl fractals drops (not including slotted infusions)… so how does this make ascended gear more available for players wanting to experience all of the content including that which requires agony resist?

also when can we expect legendary gear for every slot so those of us who don’t want to keep running on the treadmill can play the game where we don’t have to keep farming the new bis? also legendaries will still be upgraded to BIS when lvl 81 comes out right?

1) Yes though i would have preferred it not been introduced at all ever
2) Yes the problem of resistance gating aside, this would have made them have a lower impact on other areas of the game ( assuming the better loot aquisition from only fractals was nerfed)
3) Yes
4) Yes
5) i dont know it depends greatly on functionality and how its implemented etc
6) Yes
7) No then we would have LFM MF mascot 200% min
8) yes in BWE and a while after launch it was fine then DR and more RNG was implemented atm grinding to get gear capped is stupid
9) Yes rng is a poor crutch to get people to keep playing content that they dont enjoy
10) No while they seem to have been trying to emulate eve, the functionality isnt there that would make it as stable/useful as the eve market, its also less global, so you have people doing pump and dumps etc
11)No to all, the game seems to be lacking vision atm because and the company seems more keen on pumping out broken half thought out content than producing a quality lasting virtual world
which is a far cry from the prelaunch manifesto
12) No i dont think any of my concerns will be addressed in early 2013, some of them possibly ever tbh i dont think the devs really know what they are doing half the time.

i endorse this statement

also /respect that is a very nice collection.

critickitten.1498:

existing Ascended gear is approximately 10% stronger than Exotic gear. Why would I “assume” that future Ascended gear would be any less powerful?

I’m basing my “assumptions” on existing data.

you dont need to assume devs back you up 10% is accurate

“the sum total of new progression rewards we added to go with it provided a 5-10% stat increase in 2 of 12 slots.”

source = mike o brien reddit AMA about a month ago

so if you guys want to dispute these numbers i suggest you take it up with the studio design director + the other devs.

also notice how he says 12 slots when there are 14, im guessing its a bigger gap for weapons

Quiznos.4296:

John Smith.4610:

Gambling would be fun for some people, but it has a lot of negatives to it, I think we’ll probably stay away from it.

Mystic Forge?
I guess it’s not gambling; when I gamble I know what the odds are.

don’t forget the lockbox gambling thats been in every content patch since release!

or the karka event precursor lottery.

the focus of this of this game increasingly seems to be gambling time/opportunity for a rng roll for rewards or even nothing at all

shame we cant go back to a system where you put in the time for something and then you get it

phlemhacker.1372:

As it stands, the only people likely to get elected are people who yell the loudest on the forums and perhaps some commanders that spend and inordinate amount of time in WvW. May be something that becomes a more viable option down the road.

I don’t know about you but id nominate/vote for dulfy right off and look into other members of the community that are helpful and know what they are talking about

Ned Stark.9356:

for the CSM to actually be a functional entity Anet would have to listen first which going by they’re current forum record isn’t happening.

^unfortunately this is how it is, if there was a CSM, we would get more than 3 days notice before they pushed out bad content, and a chance to influence future design/implementation, but they don’t seem to want that, at the moment it looks like they are trying to make the best Skinner box possible with what they have.

every time ive seen them talk about “progression” its been to obfuscate undesirable changes, having a involved CSM means they cant mask whatever they are trying to pull with PR BS, so in addition to being gagged under an NDA , they probably wouldn’t get any input till just prior to the general population, with the CSM reaction used as a means to judge how best to spin the developments.

agree with OP, in fact people were asking for this in the three days prior to the patch

Koga.7215:

if we put this into its own hub like sPvP it would just move most of the population there, still keeping the main world empty

so the world was empty of players before fractals because everyone was doing spvp….

Koga.7215:

I could argue that exotics are no more needed in the open world than ascended gear,

why not commit to this line of reasoning, all the way down to whites?
the game is balanced around exotic gear, you can play naked with no weapons but the game isn’t balanced around that

Koga.7215:

if you only do one aspect of the game you shouldnt be as good as everyone who does all aspects.

you seem to contradict yourself with this, perhaps consider another way of explaining what you mean

“This is an advertisement sponsored by Greenman gaming and touted as an article.”

the top comment on the article sums it up.

if you check the top sellers today it actually has the only mmo im currently playing in it.

Wizardauz.3761:

Legendary Items will always be Top Tier.

Finished my Sunrise this weekend. Never have to worry ever again

uh you did see the statement in the AMA where he said there would be tiers within rarities right, cause that means you’ll get legendary 2 which will be bis tier 2 then normal legendaries would be top tier 1

Baron of Winters.5697:

Saying that ascended is the final tier on one hand but having stat inflation through future releases of higher power infusions is fundamentally dishonest.

they never said ascended was the final tier, they said it was the final rarity, they even said there will be tiers within raritys in the future so you’ll get double ascended gear, still pink but with twice the stats…

if you don’t like rng skinner boxes then you clearly aren’t a dedicated player.

holska.4127:

It’s very ignorant / stubborn (sorry no native english speaker, looking for right word without offense :P) to still compare the vertical progression to WoW after the provided answers. Adding a tier over the course of a year and no plans to add a new tier for at least a looooong period of time isn’t really “ala WoW” where each patch contains a new gear set.

actually comparing to Wow is apt this is pretty much exactly the same as the rollout of ICC where they released the raid, but you could only do the first area and 4 bosses, then a month later they let you do 3 more, then 3 more, then the end ones with the loot at the end better than the loot at the beginning so at the end you have more stats than when you started and than people who only went part way

thus in guild wars its do fotm for first 3 ascended , a few months later do new instance for 3 more ascended etc till your in full ascended, this is basically not only gear gating due to the stated planned increase in prevalence of agony its also time gating by dragging the deployment out, thus you are prevented from getting it all at once and must do the piece you have been drip fed again and again till they drip feed you a new piece. combined with rng this just drags content out over much longer than it would normally take to complete.

mulch.2586:

What’s the damage formula?
Bunch of multipliers (weapon damage + power) / (target’s armor + toughness)

actually its
Damage done = (weapon damage) * Power * (skill-specific coefficient) / (target’s Armor)

armour is the sum of defence +toughness, you might know that if you read the wiki rather than accusing other people of not doing so.

from a target dummy you can easily see what % of your damage gear contributes, just take everything off apart from a weapon and spam 1, note the range and then compare to the range with full gear

personally my base damage contribution from armour is about 1/3rd

Going to have to disagree with swtor

there is a complete lack of choice/ consequence for choices even the illusion of choice is also pretty shallow given how linear the story is. which is vastly different to the vision they were pushing prior to launch, this is very easy to see by hitting esc during conversations and seeing how all the different permutations play out, personally reasons it fails:

1. many npcs react the exact same way regardless of what conversation option you picked, they just used ambiguous wording in the begining of the response/ ending of your choice
2. regardless of any choice you actually make, the story is rigidly set, most people you have the option to kill /spare you will never see again anyway. there are no major branches in narrative outside of flashpoints.
3. companions don’t actually do anything if you go negative affection (hard to get as most everything gives you positive in some measure), they just become worse at crafting, and there are no “bad affection stories” (i still want the ability to kill one as an example to the others)
4. pretty much ever character that wasn’t in your personal story or a worlds bonus series quest giver was throwaway
5. really bad generic dialogue, when your choices aren’t representative of you actual response, it gets very annoying having your character repeat “its an honour to serve” or similar drivel

the best moment personally in swtor for me was realising i could do a betrayal on an npc
(early bounty hunter, the woman in the enemy hutts palace, get her to bribe you then kill her)
but it really pales in comparison to kotor such as the mission where you infiltrate a gangs base and have the options of how to do so, decrypting the security pass/sneaking in etc and then having what you chose affect the outcome at the end (my maths was fail so i didn’t decrypt the security pass, and got caught when i lied about it XD)

despite peoples complaints about the VO etc (seems fine to me) i much prefer the GW2 story where when you make a choice it actually affects how you play for the next arc ie picking priory/vigil/whispers or quaggan/skritt/hylek etc

i would also add

CCP – changing development direction when the player base doesn’t like where they are going

tbh tho they never should have released a tech demo +expensive cosmetic avatar shop as an expansion

Whomever added jumping puzzles to the genre, my first experience of them was in SWTOR grabbing datacrons, but they were mostly static, and im sure they must have lifted it from somewhere else.

edit: WOW- toys my favourite thing about that mmo was the various toys and gizmos i could make as an engineer or get in the world, not much beats rocket boots + parachute cloak and jumping off teldrasil seeing if you can make it past the death zone and swim to the mainland

Creslin.1758:

Not necessarily.

There are many players out there that just love one part of the game and will do that to the exclusion of others. For example, I love WvW…dungeons are okay, but they aren’t typically my first choice.

If I could get Ascended items in WvW…even if it was more inefficient than dungeons…I would probably still just do WvW.

this is true of some players, however my point was more specifically towards areas mentioned such as personal story / map completion as these are easier to obtain than a repeatable grind of fractals and hoping rng is kind, when they are released through other sources such as WvW, the grind to obtain them will be equivalent/ greater than the fractals grind. otherwise it skews the reward balance kind like fractals does atm

“When optional content has too good a reward it ceases to be optional and simply becomes the way people play the game "

this is a good answer, we need more answers like this

“Right i am back. Thanks for being so patient. I intend to answer questions well into the night so please bear with me.
E1: Can we get a direct, on-the-record answer on where vertical progression will be headed? Specifically as it applies to gear-checks, gated content, and the addition of gear tiers? Will there be an amendment to the manifesto, or plans to retro-actively align with the manifesto again?
First of all in retrospect it would have been better to have included Ascended Gear at launch. It is designed to give users a progression path that is between Exotic and Legendary (Legendary Items will be at the same power level as Ascended) and the gap between them in terms of time is very large.
So to the question of vertical progression. So as we know there is already vertical progression in the game and we do intend to keep moving forward with this philosophy. However we have no intention of adding a new Rarity of Gear such as Ascended. Instead and as we evolve the game existing Rarity’s will evolve over time. However these will not be common occurrences, for example full Ascended gear will be introduced over a long period of time and will be earn able through lots of different parts/activities of the game. We had intended for example for the first release of acsended items come from other parts of the game but sadly it did not work out this way. Moving forward this is how it will work however.
In regard to gear checks specifically all increases in the power curve will be minimal and therefore there should be no straying from the intended power curve that you see in the game now, in terms of trajectory.
In regard to gated content via gear then i think that this is something we are going to give more thought to. Specifically if the reward at the end of the activity applies to players that are not just looking to do a specific type of content. Note that this statement is somewhat contradictory to the philosophy laid out above if the required items do not drop elsewhere or the ultimate rewards don’t either. This is something we are going to fix.
Personally i do not feel that the latest changes are against what we said in the manifesto. I do however feel that we do have to be very careful in regard to progression design turning into grind and i believe there are some instances of this kind of grind that predate the launch of the game. It is for this reason that we are looking to revamp some aspects of the game whilst connecting other parts increase the overall experience of fun in our progression mechanics.
ok so there is one answer (-: I am going to head over to another question and then come back. Thanks for your patience and any typos.
Chris "

MisterEction.9382:

I’m hoping one of those various ways to get ascended gear will be completing personal story events and world completion. I’m hoping even more that the ascended gear from world completion, if any, will be tuned to the player character rather than the staff and light armor piece my ranger got the other day.

this is unfortunately unlikely as players will always got for the most efficient method to obtain the maximum reward for time spent, if you can get ascended gear through methods easier than farming fractals etc, players would just do that, and that ruins the RNG reliant Skinner box they are building.

Aiobhan.9758:

Although it does explain the overuse of PR-approved key phrase “moving forward” and how long it’s taking to reply.

tbh i hate it when people use that and “going forward” its essentially just a dynamic sounding piece of nonsense, were always moving forward, we only have a linear perception of time…

other points

legendaries will be buffed to be on par with ascended, but
1. legendaries are obtainable now, this means there will be a gap in the time between when they patch in the new weapons and when they are attained when legendary weapons will give an advantage over anything anyone else has in the game
2. they’ve repeated that legendaries are supposed to be Bis and that they would be on par with the top tier, as a result when they introduce a new tier next year (they’ve confirmed more vertical progression after they drag out the ascended rollout) legendaries will presumably be buffed again, it future proofs you to new gear introduction and removes the repeated grind for the latest weapons when they add a new tier.

still 0 sign of when ascended gear becomes available outside of fractals, im guessing itll be when they release the next batch of item slots in fractals in around 3-4 months

“I believe there has been no change to our philosophy regarding end game gear”
i loled, shame we cant tell if he wrote it with a straight face

Ditton.3149:

He is answering the questions and not dodging even the more difficult ones though.

actually they are still dodging questions on the “gap” ignoring the points made about the named exotics available in the forge

asianyo.5132:

“if new items are introduced with better stats, will all mystic forge weapons be upgraded as well, or just the legendaries?”

its just the legendaries

what i used to do in guild wars 2:

work on map completion (finished)
do jumping puzzles
do some WvWvW
gather at the farms
level alts (have every class around lvl 20 apart from main and ele who is 40ish)
some crafting
kill dragons
do the occasional gathering run / penitent farm in orr

what i do now :
play eve online and log in for ~ 3min to see what the deals are and what lvl of fractals people are spamming for before logging out

Galen Grey.4709:

How is it critical? This weekend I did a little experiment I tried playing in the only place where ascended armor has any impact at all without any armor! so not 1 tier difference that ascended armor will provide but rather a whole 5 tier difference. Tried logging in early in the morning to get into small engagement as to not skew this as much as possible. Unfortunately people start playing quite early but I got a few small skirmishes. Ended up with 7 kills and just 2 deaths (weaning nothing no armor, no accessories) I also got 2 solo engagements in which when seeing me wearing no armor the opponents fled! I am not kidding! you’d expect that provided this believe that armor is everything I would have been a prime target yet not one but 2 players when coming one on one they just simply ran away! But dont take my word for it, try it yourself!

I wont take your word for it.
I’d like to see a video of this and where you solo events considering i get hit pretty hard by sentry’s on alts that are being upscaled. kindly show your hero panel just before you attack and during and mouse over any gear you do have equipped, not using lvl 1 white weapons? why not?

Some players dont attack naked people who are in WvW for exploration/jumping puzzles, why did you not chase and fight them with your gearless skills, or can you not get kills without other geared players backing you up, which seems to negate the point your trying to make

its intentional, best thing to do is throw it back into the forge

Kravick.4906:

I consider myself a dedicated player.

that doesn’t mean Anet consider you a dedicated player though.

currently their definition seems to be players who got to 80 and complained about lack of vertical progression…

technically you can do this by asking for a refund on your current key and using those funds purchase the new free upgrade.

no guarantee you’ll still have anything on your account when you apply the new key, but you got the upgrade free

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

“You have to grind the dungeons to get the gear to keep up.”

So is it the gear, or the dungeons?

pretty sure its the “You have to grind to keep up.”

Ditrah.5128:

Gear-check bosses does not exist in the same way in GW2.
The new items are a help it’s not a necessity, make what you want out of it but the only one forcing you are yourself.

actually agony is a gear check, if your taking 5% of your hp per second in unmitigated dmg even with heals your probably only going to live for 120-180 seconds due to heals being on cd and dmg from other attacks the only way to live longer is to get the +5% agony resist infusions that makes them necessary

anyway its page 200 so time for a recap of info from the devs

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/linsey-murdock-unveils-new-high-end-ascended-gear/

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/info/news/A-message-from-our-Studio-Design-Director-Chris-Whiteside/first#post721451

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/leah-rivera-on-the-new-fractals-of-the-mist-dungeon/

http://kotaku.com/5960951/the-lead-designer-of-guild-wars-2-is-answering-your-questions-right-now

Fractal weapons are obtained by farming and offering sacrifices to the rng gods

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/Fractal-weapons

you also have gear lists on fansites http://www.gw2db.com/items?filter-item-rarity=8

Lunaria, Circle of the Moon
+32 Power
+32 Healing
+32 Precision
+32 Toughness
+4% Critcal Damage
+32 Condition Damage
+32 Vitality
Ring
Required Level: 80

+8 Condition Damage +8 Precision +8 Toughness +8 Power +8 Vitality +8 Healing +1% Critical Damage +1% Magic Find

that seems to be between 200% and 300% better than the 80 ring im wearing atm bear in mind this isnt even infused which is more + stats especially when they release the higher rarity types

http://www.gw2db.com/search?search=infusion#t1:items

also quoting CC Ivonne.6782 from

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Why-shoulkittenep-playing-GW2/first#post768721

“Hello everybody,
thanks for your feedback and please remember there are already 2 threads, one to discuss new content: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Thoughts-on-Ascended-Gear-Merged-threads/page/178#post736894
and one to give feedback: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Patch-Feedback-merged-1/page/13#post755001
Please use those threads for anything related to the new content.”

this apparently isn’t the feedback thread, this is the discuss amongst yourselves thread, looks like we should be making our views known in the actual feedback thread as well as discussing here

Regizer.1763:

Yes, in that example stats don’t matter either because you are dead either way.

actually they matter more, that extra +vitality could keep you alive long enough to pop mistform and swap to air to out run the the group if you are an ele or use similar skills as another class

Its odd that they say this is due to player feedback yet from what i saw during and right after Halloween was that players did not like the RNG chests and would rather have bought the items they wanted outright from the store, now having presumably taken that feedback on board the only new item you can buy from the store is the chests, which contain all the other items, but whose loot table is skewed so that you’ll mostly get crafting materials you can gather in the world…

but I guess its more profitable and money > player happiness and retention

I am actually surprised that the new dungeon drops tokens, I was fully expecting it to only have drops from RNG to complete the Skinner box they seem to be going for.
Personally I’m happy to grind for things, but it has to be things I WANT to grind for not things I NEED to be on an equal playing field with others so that we are only differentiated by skill. if I lose to someone because of skill that is fine, if I lose to them cause they had the +100 mace of killing from a dungeon and I didn’t that’s not fine

Right now most people are about the same place in regards to infused gear, some people will be near getting their first piece in a few months that gap they wanted to fill that didn’t exist will exist, when they roll out new content that needs +100 agony resist players that haven’t been farming Fotm or wherever else they decide to eventually release it over time (because you have to give the dungeon grinders that period of exclusivity over everyone else.) players will not be able to do that content, to combat this they’ll have to do what games like wow do when they introduce a new raid and release a easy mode way for people to gear up while skipping the other content so that they too can do the new content otherwise the player base stratifies into players who are geared for the latest high end content and those that aren’t and cant do it.

I’m curious as to when spvp will be seeing ascended gear as well, given in this thread players have pointed out the higher stats = higher number of possible combinations ie you can cap vitality/ crit for your build then decide to put more stats into a range of areas, does spvp not also deserve progression?, this might trash your goals for Esport, but don’t spvp players need something to fill the gap between rabbit and dragon ranks, exotics are so easy to get in spvp shouldn’t it also have some sense of progression that’s not just skins just like pve or does the new progression initiative not include spvp?

guess this is as good a time as any to get back to working on gwamm and my obby set, at least that’s not going to get further away the closer i get to it

you have an extra 0 on the low end price of precursors, some are ~20g

“Are there any plans to add more skill tiers, or any other meaningful progression of a character up until 80?
A: Yes we are always working to improve character progression. There are a number of things you do get after level 40 though: unlocking traits, trait tiers, gear with 3 stat combinations, exotic items and new leveling areas, but like I said we always want to add new and interesting things for people to do as they reach higher levels.”

^my favourite part of the interview

basically states the various ways other than +stats you can progress your character while implementing +stats grind

iirc its 100 t6 crafting material ie bones makes a blue infusion with +5 agony resist and +5 other stat

Booning.5476:

managed to miss the event – oh dear, how sad, never mind.

don’t worry you didn’t miss anything good, it seems to have been in line with their new progression initiative:

progress till your almost finished the event, then the client crashes and you rejoin into a new overflow with 0 progress , get near the end again and you crash to rejoin on another fresh overflow, almost complete it and nope, and now your back in your realms normal shard where the event is over

this is besides your exciting rewards that consist of mostly trophies that the npcs dont even need due to the event being over and a hefty repair bill due to the constant knock-down and lag + a few blue /green items and karka shells you also get close to 200 kills for the monthly

GADefence.5634:

I’m still waiting for you people to get a fraction the memory of a goldfish.

pretty sure its just trolling at this point, the info has been posted multiple times, and its not hard to find.

Minos.5168:

It’s generally better to just sell the exotics on the TP than to salvage them into ecto… I’d imagine the same would be true of Ascended gear.

prices will probably drop now that they are sub par so salvaging for ectos might be all exotics are worth once a decent range of ascended gear is out.

DEs will be easier, not sure if anyone will even bother running old dungeons if they have already seen them as it looks like fractals will be the greatest reward/time spent