Hello build diversity.
Im having loads of fun with this patch. they can change the town clothes stuff but power builds needed to be nerfed, they give more diversity to builds in PVE for once, and no one really uses zerk for wvw anyway because that would make you a rally bot.
Wardrobe
New traits
Crit nerf
Town clothes in combat
Megaservers
Guilds can activate world bosses
Sigils/Runes
Account Bound Wxp
These are all great things, its def one of the best patches theyve had in a long time. People just getting all teary for no real reason except town clothes being one whole item.
mm im having quite an enjoyable time reading these roleplaying rants. please go on.
Im not upset with this, because everyoen is nerfed. Zerk got nerfed pretty badly though, my friend also lost close to 40% crit damage.
lol you guys are embarrassingly cheap. 10 gold is so easy to come by these days, and only the new ones cost 10 gold, not all of them. people here are losing there minds screaming PAY TO WIN because of some silly trait and amulet costs. The traits are 3 gold…3 GOLDDDD, THREE, NUMBER 3. It takes like 10 minutes to make that much gold in this game.
Recently in the dungeon subforum someone complained about the difficuluty of TA Aetherpath. The puzzles are distinct and the mechanics are strictly enforced. All the mobs must be fought and it’s pretty hard to just shrug off the mechanics of every enemy since they all hit fairly hard. The path itself is decently challenging.
Also, no one runs it.
The thing is, people hardly run dungeons at all. And the dungeons that do have uniquely hard mechanics or are challenging in any discernable way are just never run by the general community.
ANet has no incentive to create interestig enemies at a small-scale level because players have proven by their own play habits that by and large they prefer easy, grindy, mindless content, whether that is open world champ training or getting to fight in a huge zerg in WvW and run over people and call yourself a great PvPer. The entire system of GW2, for all of its great possibilities of small, precisely timed and skillfully played combat, truly encourages people to play at the lowest common denominator, and their attempts to make small content that is difficult has been spurned by the community in favor of more zerg farming and easy path farming if they actually DO dungeons. Sorrow’s Embrace might as well only have Path 1 and Path 3.
Anet can make unique and hard content like you said but why would they do that when most people would rather just do the easy and straightforward? Remember when AC2 used to be the most run path in the game. Now people hardly ever play it because the final boss actually requires a bit of effort, and people don’t want to put that in. ANet wants to make content people will play, not content that they won’t. There’s a reason they’ve abandoned dungeons.
It’s Anet’s fault.
TA aetherblade isn’t hard, you just need voice communication, or a group full or vets who know what to do. And the final boss is one of the easiest bosses in the game, its way too easy to res dead people in the fight due to the size of the room and how slow the boss moves.
The problem is why run that path when it takes 3x longer, and requires a good group when the rewards are exactly the same as F/U?
What we need is extremely hard dungeons/raid content that rewards ascended gear with it’s tokens.
^ this
Recently in the dungeon subforum someone complained about the difficuluty of TA Aetherpath. The puzzles are distinct and the mechanics are strictly enforced. All the mobs must be fought and it’s pretty hard to just shrug off the mechanics of every enemy since they all hit fairly hard. The path itself is decently challenging.
Also, no one runs it.
The thing is, people hardly run dungeons at all. And the dungeons that do have uniquely hard mechanics or are challenging in any discernable way are just never run by the general community.
ANet has no incentive to create interestig enemies at a small-scale level because players have proven by their own play habits that by and large they prefer easy, grindy, mindless content, whether that is open world champ training or getting to fight in a huge zerg in WvW and run over people and call yourself a great PvPer. The entire system of GW2, for all of its great possibilities of small, precisely timed and skillfully played combat, truly encourages people to play at the lowest common denominator, and their attempts to make small content that is difficult has been spurned by the community in favor of more zerg farming and easy path farming if they actually DO dungeons. Sorrow’s Embrace might as well only have Path 1 and Path 3.
ANet can make unique and hard content like you said but why would they do that when most people would rather just do the easy and straightforward? Remember when AC2 used to be the most run path in the game. Now people hardly ever play it because the final boss actually requires a bit of effort, and people don’t want to put that in. ANet wants to make content people will play, not content that they won’t. There’s a reason they’ve abandoned dungeons.
I saw that and it was a pretty pathetic post along with everyone who +1’ed him lol. The reason they feel its hard is because they are used to easy content they can use the same strategy on. I mean anyone who regularily runs dungeons in some sort of speed running guild will go do TA aether for the first time and be confused as to why they cant fiery greatsword their way through the first part.
Its a fun path, I could agree that there is too much emphasis on puzzles, but I certainly appreciated the first one. I thought the first boss fight was also interesting, its not really kittence you know what to do but still fun mechanics. I appreciate any boss now that requires you to do more than sit in one place and press 1.
Try Arah. Those trash mobs can be extremely tough to ignore. Dead eyes, I’m looking at you!
I also don’t think it’s fair to judge the whole of dungeon encounters on the second easiest path in the game.
Well unfortunately almost everyone skips these mobs because they are such a short aggro chain.
Well I mean. 1 hit kills from some of these trash mobs can make that point pretty moot. It’s all RNG.
I don’t understand the no skipping crowd, but I respect your right to play how you want. So I recommend just killing them all…. rather than attempting to stifle the options when running dungeons. Full clears of Arah need to be done and streamed…. please. I’m far too lazy to do it myself.
Then whats the point of having mobs there in the first place. I mean the devs are pretty lazy and havent yet patched the fact that you can skip these mobs. Mobs shouldn’t be skippable, if they are, why were they put there in the first place. Granted Arah is pretty long if you do the mobs but then they should just make the mobs easier or increase the rewards a lot more.
The Megaserver in istelf sounds like a good idea to me. I’m from a very, very small server (Arborstone), and sometimes it feels really empty.
However, the world boss changes…. Well, to put it short: no more Tequatl, Karka queen and Wurm for me. I am never home before 8 pm, which means I’ll miss every event of the day. And since I’m not a member of a large guild, I can simply say goodbye to any “guild-started Tequatl” or similar. I am extremely disappointed in this. Why discriminate such a large part of your player base? Why prevent them from doing content? It’s not like there’s much to do once you’re 80. After removing a path from Twilight arbor, now you’re removing the possibility to do these events by limiting them to a certain class of players. Your feature pack is amazing, but this change is utterly disappointing to me.
You are not part of a large part of the playerbase though, tbh you are part of the smaller playerbase who can’t play as much. The respawn times are very long and it does suck, but the fact that guilds can now activate this helps immensely. I foresee a lot of new guilds being formed simply for the purpose of doing these world bosses.
Before with the Wurm, TTS/deso were the only ones who could really do this because they were so heavily populated with players who could come and do it. What woudl happen is you would go and do it, usually fail, then spend forever waiting for the next event. You’d fail agian, and then after 2 attemps you’d lose half your people and get newer people. Whats good about this new system is you wont have 2 attemps in 3 hours. You could have 8 or 10. Which is surely enough considering that the most difficult aspect of events like these are the respawn time and the fact that a guild can get in maybe 2-3 attempts in a day at most, which is so so few.
Try Arah. Those trash mobs can be extremely tough to ignore. Dead eyes, I’m looking at you!
I also don’t think it’s fair to judge the whole of dungeon encounters on the second easiest path in the game.
Well unfortunately almost everyone skips these mobs because they are such a short aggro chain.
GW2 PvE is a (failed?) experiment in no trinity gameplay.
All classes can survive any encounter without need of outside support, with base vitality, and base toughness…using only dodge and skills that actively mitigate damage. Meaning that all stats should be pumped into dps output.
Classes have roles, mesmers and guardians are “support” with reflections, condition removals, and skills only available to their class like time warp or virtues. Every class with the exception of necromancer and engineer also have support roles that need to be fulfilled. But just because they are “support” doesn’t mean they need stats in anything besides dps, all the things they use to support work just as good in zerker as they do in clerics, the difference is 2-4x more dps output (faster fights, less time to mess up, allows to ignore some mechanics compeltely… and lets face it faster is always better.)
Ranger must use spotter and frost spirit (those that don’t are a waste of space honestly, and there are A LOT of you out there)
warrior must use banners
ele must stack might via fire fields
etc…
To “fix” this the core game has to be completely redone from traits to stats to the encounters themselves. The crit dmg changes are not solving anything and is an extremely lazy response to terrible players crying about the “zerker” meta.
I think the combo fields are probably the replacement for the trinity tbh. I just don’t think Anet has expanded on them enough. They are a great way to reward teamwork in this game by giving you a lottt of heals or a lot of might. I think waterfield blasting really replacing the need for healers well. This is coming from the perspective of someone whose been in multiple skill groups. But wvw groups are the only ones who really take advantage of these combo fields, theres not much incentive in PVE besides might stacking I guess because there are a lot of zerkheads.
I have done almost every dungeon in this game, not just this one. One thing I remember about this game is that doing the dungeons at your level makes it feel much harder. Like when you first hit 30 and do story mode, then go onto 35, it feels much harder than when you are just 80. The more recent content we’ve seen Anet release from the living story (marionette, jungle wurm, hologram) definitely have more mechanics, but now they just need to do this on a smaller scale. 5 man fights, 10-20 man events. I’ll be keeping a very close eye on this sort of thing in LS season 2 and the next dungeon they release.
The megaserver is probably the best feature Anet has ever added to the game. Its absolutely necessary to bring liveliness to the game from drastically improving the population. The game is an MMO, and there should be a lot of people around you who give the game a community feeling.
Especially for gw2, a game that strives to have a living world, and has Dynamic events in each zone, having a lot of players is crucial. Because dynamic events alone dont give a world the living feeling, but the players actively participating in these events, through these chains, are what give it this feeling.
One thing I feel that gw2 needs to improve on before it can move on is mechanics in PVE. For a while I thought the game just had a very little mechanics to PVE, and thats why it was so easy and mindless, but now im starting to think its something else.
I was doing a dungeon recently, Hotw, and along the way I was keeping an eye on all the trash within the dungeon, along with the few bosses. One thing I noticed is that even though the creatures have mechanics to them, like CC, condi’s, cleave, none of these really matter at all, they are completely negligible. One reason for this is because all these abilities simply don’t scale enough in their impact on the players at all. If one mob has an ability that does CC, the CC frequency is so small, that players really don’t have to worry about keeping stability up. If one mob has condi abilities, it only applies a few stacks and they tick like they would for a player who has no condi damage. So in that case, condi’s are completely negligible again, and the player can just facebash his keyboard to kill the enemy.
The last example id like to give is Ginva the Butcher. On the wiki, they go into quite a bit of detail on how to kill this. He is a boss that has one nasty aoe attack that you do have to dodge, but also a bunch of totems that boon him up. After going into this dungeon and doing this fight, I pretty much realized that these totems don’t mean anything, you can completely ignore him and kill the boss fine, the only real reason youd kill them is so you can kill the boss a tad quicker. This type of example is very good at summarizing a lot of the problems in difficulty in PVE in this game. If the devs want to make totems meaningful, it needs to work like this.
So there are 3 totems, 1 for protection, 1 for regen, 1 for retaliation. If protection is up, his damage intake should be reduced by about 90%. If his retaliation is up, it should hit you back for about 1k. If his regen is up, his health regen should be about 5-10% per second. This way, the players are pretty much forced to kill these totems to kill the boss. However this isnt the case, like I said, you can completely ignore them. The game designers of gw2 really need to take a hard look at situations like this and realize the grand faults. Personally, I think almost every dungeon is gw2, and champion open world, needs to have their mechanics revamped so they are actually meaningful. This doesn’t necessarily have to mean they need to change the mechanics of some mobs that applies condis, or cc, only scale those abilities so they are something you must pay attention too.
I know some people may say that this would make things too hard, but in reality I think it would set the game at a level it should have been a long time ago. I mean if the devs really want the game to be as easy as it is now, just remove the mechanics from all of the creatures, because they don’t really do anything in the first place. The only point of putting these text bars under the creatures name tag would just be artificial, to make the player think there is something they have to watch out for. Anyway thats just one of my thoughts after observing PVE in this game for 18-19 months compared to what ive seen in many other games.
One problem I feel with this game is the philosophy that it operates behind. “We want players to play the game the way they want to.” Its really nice for some aspects of the content but destructive for others. Legendaries are a perfect example of this.
Guild wars 2 is very much about aesthetics and a Legendary may be the ultimate aesthetic item. The only problem is having a legendary doesnt really mean anything. It really only means that you grinded your butt off or have a lot of money, and usually those two things mean the same thing. Seeing someone with a Legendary should make you think “Wow, that player is really good!” in some sort of way. Only until recently has this become partially true with legendaries being rewards for the spvp winning team in the upcoming tourney.
The reason Legendaries are not legendary is because of the philosophy I mentioned earlier. Anet wants people who play the game in all types of ways to have access to a Legendary. Whether they are more WvW oriented, or PVE oriented. So there has to be an underlying type of medium to obtain legendaries through all playstyles, and that pretty much comes down to gold or crafting materials which largely compose a Legendary. You can obtain crafting materials from laurels(dailies), GOLD GOLD GOLD GOLD GOLD, killing npc’s, killing players, champion chests from pve or wvw. So basically getting a legendary just means getting an enormous amount of crafting materials with a few exceptions to dungeon tokens and badges of honor.
This is why Legendaries cannot be legendary, its simply too grindy. Ideally a Legendary would start off with a series of difficult content youd have to do to get the precursor. Some content that has heavy references to lore hinting at the precursor and the final Legendary. Finally you get the precursor, it was a long task and very difficult but you finally have it. Now its time for the legendary, obtain certain crafting materials that are only obtainable through other specific forms of content, gifts that can only be obtained through fighting this NPC, or completing this dungeon, this very difficult world boss.
Honestly something along those lines would be much more epic. It just cant happen though because Anet would feel as if they are forcing people to do content and not letting them get a reward by playing the way they want to. This is very true about a lot of weapon skins in this game. After playing since launch, a big criticism I have of this game is the fact that very little armor/weapons that I get feel rewarding, mainly because I just bought them with gold lol. Besides dungeon skins I guess, a lot of the skins you get simply drop off random mobs in the world.
The relationship between content and rewards needs to be more strict in this game. You can ONLY get this skin from killing this Champion.
Regardless of whether or not its called guild wars for lore reasons, the game seriously needs GvG’s. Guilds have pretty much been whats kept wvw alive. Skill groups have exponentially increased in WvW. The scene in T4 at prime time is just guilds fighting each other. GvG’s are hard to accomplish because of griefing. Just give us an instanced place at least ;P I kind of think this may come around hte time guild halls does.
So you enjoy having no content? Theres really not much to do in this game to be honest in terms of endgame. Endgame in gw2 currently lies in wvw/spvp. Because there will always be endgame in any form of pvp because its players verse players, and players will get better meaning there will always be someone better than you so there is always a challenge. Im looking forward to LS season 2 very much and im very interested in seeing how Anet has adapted LS season 2 to the criticisms we gave the first season.
This restriction was put in place after previous player complaints of other players transferring to worlds who were winning or more likely to win during Season 1 last year. In addition to being explicitly stated in the blog post linked by players above, it was also messaged in the form of a warning when attempting to change worlds. This warning has been in place since the beginning of the tournament and reads as follows (emphasis mine):
Are you sure you want to transfer to <world>?
If yes, you’ll be logged out of your account, which may be inaccessible for a short period of time while the transaction completes. In addition, you cannot make another transfer for 7 days. Your WvW accessibility will be restricted to Edge of the Mists for the duration of the current match and until the end of your world’s next match.
The question I would have in resposne to is this: Are the lockouts starting as if players transferred today, or if I transferred a week ago does that start the time for my lockout?
The lockouts start the moment you transfer. If you transferred a week ago – meaning last Wed. then you were banned for the remainder of that match and this match. So you can play on reset this Friday.
If you transfer today you are banned from WvW for this match and next match.
People are making this way harder than it needs to be.
No thats a lie. I transferred last thursday and only got my penalty today. Ive been actively playing in WvW since then. Thats why people are complaining, because the penalty randomly comes up, not when its supposed to happen like when you transfer.
Im gonna bump this thread because I want an answer from Anet. I also transferred about 5 days ago, have been able to play wvw fine, and wake up today seeing that I cant join and have a penalty. This is silly. I transferred to join a guild and now I cant attend this weeks gvg/raids because of this. Why the sudden penalty? I read on the blogpost the penalty isnt 2 weeks but for the remainder of the matchup. Id flip if it was for 2 weeks, there is no reason whatsoever, thats ridiculous, its like they wouldnt want people to play their game then.
This is literally one of the best and smartest features Anet could add, heres why. People have suggested underflow servers for a long time and im glad were getting a solution to the same problem.
One thing a lot of games suffer from when adding new content, especially zones, is that it separates out the community, making people split, and usually not evenly. If this game got a new continent immediately, on most servers it wouldn’t be surprising to see two or 3 new zones very globbed up and like 8 or 9 with only 5 people in them. This way, this is much less likely to happen.
No.
Your more or less asking for ppl to play the way you want and not let them have the freedom to chose how they play.
The philosophy behind play the way you want is really poor tbh because it is a game design that is secretly behind a lot of problems in gw2. Boss encounters cannot be too difficult because then it may force certain players in a group to spec differently to beat them.
Anet can’t make really cool looking skins feel rewarding because they want people to obtain them through playing the game the way they want aka pve/wvw/spvp. How do you do that? Well you make these skins obtainable through a universal currency that underlies each of the gameplay styles(pve/wvw/spvp) and that is gold or crafting materials.
If you combined those two points, you’ll realize that Anet can’t make the average pve content even remotely difficulty because there is no trinity or incentive for players to change their style, and then even if there was, Anet can’t make the rewards super good cuz if they were like a series of unique skins, then spvp/wvw people would complain cuz then they can’t get that skin without playing the game in a way thats out of their playstyle. So you have to make skins obtainable through gold or crafting materials which leads to grind, which then leads to people finding the best possible way to get gold/materials which is through grinding which currently sits at speed running dungeons that are already easy enough, or champ farming for 8 hours.
Ive always sorta felt this way and I think part of it is that the content in this game doesnt completely connect you to the world. Dynamic events are one reason for this. Dynamic events do give a feel of an alive world but don’t directly connect you to it. Its because dynamic events don’t have unique npc’s and unique stories to tell that you can be immersed into. Thats not really the nature of DE’s.
Questing typically does that in games, it connects you to a zone itself, the lore of it, the npcs. I think heart quests in this game have that potential but havent really been expanded on sadly. So what were left with are generic NPC’s in zones that may need help fending off bandits, or perhaps you must fight off a generic champion that respawn.
I think it should also be noted that a game that has questing alone doesn’t completely make the world feel alive. A game that has both quests that can tie you to unique storylines/npcs in the same way personal stories do, along with dynamic events used to create the ambience of liveliness and activity in a zone, would make for a very good game in my opinion.
There really is no reason too. You just have to be smarter than an enemy balled up. Its quite easy to wipe a melee train. Just have all your guys spread out in different directions. Don’t zerg up in any one spot. That way the melee train is surrounded and they can only hit 1 spot at a time and when you are so spread out, any spot they attack doesn’t have more than 3 or so people, so they can try to attack 3 who could escape while being hit by +20 others ranging them.
You can pretty much wipe any guild this way if you are smart enough. The core of most skills groups is their melee ball whose driver is directing where the damage goes. I’ve literally taken pugs in ts and wiped guild groups with similar numbers to ours by doing this, its not super hard just requires people to be on their feet in case they draw aggro from the melee train.
The thing is zerkers are barely getting nerfed by this. If you want to zerk nerfer in pve, make the content different and the AI smarter. Make it so people cant wall hug their way through a dungeon. Make it so conditions are viable and so support is as well along with making it rewarding. This is kind of a band-aid over a much bigger problem in pve which happens to be the content Anet has put out.
It has to do with the design of much pve in this game. Its a type of design caters to zerker because the objective is to kill the enemy so that means you need damage and yet thats pretty much about it, there is no need for support or even players running mildly tanky for survivability because the content doesnt push you to do that.
I just Anet had done this sooner. I honestly figured that last year Anet was done with revamping core systems. Its obvious a few still needed editing. The entire feature build isnt just core features obviously; the wardrobe system is not. I just hope to see more new systems added to the game. Maybe im just thinking of content. I still think WvW has not gotten the love it deserves and I feel bad for the WvW community even though the mode is still great.
For the rest of 2014 Id like to see GvG honestly(would be rather surprised and upset if we didn’t see it after 2 years wouldn’t you agree?). A new form of pve that is something similar to raids. Right now we only have a few very large raid like DE’s that are the Wurm and Teq. The Marionette was also like this to some extent. There are pretty extensive issues with these though, like griefing. I believe the last series of blog posts will address these and im rather excited.
Last year, 2013, Anets bi-annual blogposts made it clear they wanted to solidify core features of the game that they felt weren’t up to par. Its almost as if gw2 was rushed and a lot of simple features weren’t included or already included features/systems weren’t adequate. Now, 2014, even though I love the changes coming so far in the feature build, I think its somewhat disappointing to still see Anet going on about a solid foundation for the game. They are still trying to mold the game into what it should have been at launch.
Obviously, they couldn’t have foreseen how their vision of gw2 would have been received and had to make some changes along the way. I really hope that after this feature build, for the rest of 2014, we see new systems added too the game, instead of revamping older ones because they were poorly designed(perhaps rushed I don’t know). A lot about this feature build seems spvp related which I think is great, I dont do spvp much, but they need love too. Something like this needs to be done for wvw I think at some point because WvW has so much potential.
I suspect that after this feature build, some time from then(april 15th), we will get a content only patch, then sometime after that, another feature build, since Anet(Colin Johanson) said they wanted to separate the two types of releases. I hope the second feature build of 2014 is newer systems added to the game, building upon the ones they have solidified now.
Our first video, kinda.
The fact that you are upset is your own fault. Anet never said wxp accountbound was coming this patch. So don’t whine on the forums about it please. This is so silly.
CD def could use more NA skill groups. What you will be promised is an enormous amount of bags. The fights from our rivals like HOD who have had a huge amount of transfers will be running at least 2 queued maps on their bl’s. If you like outnumbered fights, 1 to 3, 1 to 4, this server is def for you.
Bumping this. We currently run 14 on average, things have gotten more stable in our core. However, with massive transfers going onto our rival servers, we seek more experienced players to reach 15-20 consistently to take on large numbers. Again we are based on Crystal Desert, you can expect to be lead into fights where we are outmanned at least 2 to 1. Being a smaller sized guild, we do tend to fight guilds twice our size but still we go for it anyway and sometimes win.
What we desire are players experienced in wvw skill groups who are either necro/ele/warr/guard. Someone who has all of those alts geared and ready to go are the most ideal. A guild video will be up soon demonstrating some fights over the last few weeks.
“Blood, Mild Language, Use of Alcohol, Violence” is what the content descriptor says from ESRB. They forgot to include the kitten scene as well I guess. Thats probably partially true though, which is sad, because some of the most dramatic events in the LS, like the beginning where villagers homes were destroyed and they were forced out of their land, or brought into molten facilities where they were tortured, are not captivating at all. I and im sure many other players felt very little emotion, if any at all, to the refugees in the F&F chapter. You could tell that the dialogue tried to embrace this idea of horror but it somewhat failed. Perhaps Anet was too cartoonish on some of the content they created. I think one thing they can do is make the mobs feel more lethal. Were being told of these horrifying enemies ravaging peoples homes, and it ends up being a bunch of 2 hittable dredge who couldn’t tap us below 90%.
I don’t really think there is a problem removing the holy-trinity, there are always alternatives for how players can cooperate with each other to beat a certain boss. I think combos are an ingenius step in this direction which Anet have sadly not expanded on. The thing is though, Anet had this mindset in the beginning of the game that “you can play the game you want” which means they want you to run into a dungeon as whatever class in whatever spec doing whatever. This is and will always be a fantasy, an unhealthy fantasy. Because even if you could have this, it doesn’t encourage players to use teamwork and strategy to kill a boss. Thats why so many bosses in the beginning of this game had 1 silly mechanic that they do, while the other 90% of the time they just sit in one place waiting to be killed. I think they are slowly leaning to make other builds viable after they realized that the other build to use that makes sense for dungeons is berserker. Because getting through every fight requires nothing but dps. There are really no fight mechanics that counter this.
I read one of the short stories that Anet released recently and made impossible to find. Anyway its from the perspective from another character taking place in the most recent update when we take back LA. Whoever writes these stories does a really good job, and in the literature, there is an atmosphere cast that is very dark and rightly so since LA is torn to pieces and is basically a warzone.
However in game, because of the structure of the content, you don’t really feel any trauma in the environment. You may see things torn to rubble and NPC dialogue that is rather dim, but from the players perspective, you feel no threat whatsoever. Looking back at the last LS, where we take back LA. It was kind of a joke in some situations because there are loads of people farming their hearts out at this event, while the devs tried to convey this war-torn atmosphere of LA that didn’t completely get across.
I think this has been a pretty consistent trend with the LS. Its not that the story is bad or the writers are bad, I think its that there is trouble in taking that story and portraying it in every aspect to its fullest extent. With the LA events, I think players could have felt more threatened by being in the zone with all these villains of Scarlet. She has champions lurking around, along with other mobs, but they never really feel that dangerous. One reason is that you can pretty much skip all of them(this is an enormous problem with PVE content in this game that subtracts from the threat players feel from dungeons/fractals/pve content). You can pretty much put auto-walk on and stroll through the zone if you please. The only times i’ve really tread carefully in zones, are in Southsun Cove, and the Older version of Orr where there was a stupid amount of mobs around, with a high respawn rate.
I think for LS season 2, the devs need to work more on creating the atmosphere that the writers are doing when they write this story.
Ive learned that the wvw forums are the most harsh section of the gw2 forums. Forums of all games are already bad enough, this one can get pretty bad, especially this subforum. People could make more constructive criticisms. WvW is not as bad as people say it is, it has been the same for a very long time but I don’t think much needs to change about it to be honest. Its definitely not broken. Ive learned that skills groups in wvw have barely changed in the last 18 months, which means new traits/skills need to be added that can change the meta of the gameplay.
Learn to dodge, time stability well, you’ll be fine. If you think you can run into a hammer train by yourself, no party, and think you can live, you are probably a warrior with a decent amount of boon duration(warriors have a stupid amount of access to stability in this game). Otherwise stop complaining its really not hard to counter. 3 guards in a party with 50% boon duration means constant stability as well.
Correct me if i;m wrong but the term “Meta” in the context of gaming means the most optimal/best right? it is not about how many people adapt the build or strategy, it’s about the ideal best.
So if less people do not use the meta, yet it is still the best in the hands of good gamers, then the meta stays the same.
Btw if you create a dark souls type feel and difficulty to the bosses (which im all for it), the meta will still be full zerk and nothing will change except more casuals complaining about difficulty.
—april 25 ds2 PC here i come lol
It wouldn’t. Zerk is optimal now because its the fastest way to get through dungeons, but mainly because of the bad design, poor mechanics, and certain holes in the game design(like corner stacking). If that was gone then zerk wouldn’t be optimal because it would be too difficult. The thing is there is nothing difficult baout running zerk now hen you can skip mobs or corner stack them in dungeons.
It’s not that difficult to run zerk even if you don;t corner LoS or skip.
Stacking is just full melee, people still need to dodge block reflect etc.
Being able to run 5 zerks – there is nothing wrong with that. From the point of view of a dark souls player (or any legit action game player) there REALLY isn’t anything wrong with that unless one is a crappy DS player.
Only thing i agree on is AI overhaul for more interesting bosses, 5-man zerk should still be as effective.
Most effective? Maybe, but not nearly as easy. Zerk for having very high dps by forcing the player to be more skilled on timing their skills, positioning, and dodges.
Easy? Tanky sets are the easy ones. Haven’t you seen the vids of Clerics tanking Alpha or running full Arah paths without dodging? Zerkers can’t do that, they have to use active mitigation to avoid damage. You’re watching speed runs, seeing big numbers and things dying fast and not realizing there’s more going on than that. It’s insanely easy for Clerics to finish any dungeon. Zerker will finish it faster obviously, but they have to work for it.
Tanky sets are obviously easier, they also take longer. However for most instances, not all, but most, there is reason to use them because they are not put at any less risk than melee when people are exploiting it. I call LOSing exploiting and I also think corner-stacking lies somewhere between exploiting and bad game design, its kind of a hole in the game id say. A hole that gw2 pve is fallin down for the time being.
1) The Shaman on 49-50, i want to have a full DPS team there to kill the grubs as fast as possible and not getting overrun by them. Most people that did level 79-80 use to run DPS build there too. So your point is false.
2) You say the shaman is a good fight because it push people to dodge? That exactly what the full DPS build do. You can’t survive if you don’t dodge at the right time and manage well enough your endurance, block, evade, etc.
3) Cornerstack, FGS, bug etc. All those help, but even if they would not exist anymore, full DPS would still be better.
4) The game punish full DPS build. Its hard to play full DPS, why people are always saying its so easy. Its easy if you have the skill and the knowledge of what you are doing. But its harder than any other build. When me and my friend play with our tankier toons, we have no problem at all, we don’t really need to pay attention and complete all content with ease. But when you go full DPS (the party as a whole, where nobody is there to revive you if you make a mistake) then its whole new situation. I really wonder how many of these people really tried a full DPS team (not full zerker, full DPS) in another path than CoF path 1 and still complain in the forum how its so easy.
In response to your third comment, of course it would still be better but significantly less popular because right now its a technique that gets you through most of the pve instances in this game. Clearing most of the mobs in dungeons/fractals comes through this method which just leaves you which a boss. For the most part, if you run a full zerker party with 25 stacks of might, 25 stacks of vulnerability, and 2 eles with fgs, and timewarp, you can pretty much kill the boss in 5-10 seconds. Anet has said stuff like this is just clever game mechanics at work. The first problem with this is that you literally have to toggle an option in the games menu to get like 1000% more dps from the fgs, thats laughable in the first place. Secondly, getting 25 might, 25 vulnerabiliity, isn’t super hard to do, which is why all together killing the bosses and mobs is pretty easy.
I hope this stupid adventure box never returns. And if it does, for those who like it, enjoy.
lol. SAB may be one of the most successful pieces of content gw2 has ever released. The funny thing it is also completely random, so random that it almost doesn’t belong in game, because of how much it diverges from the lore. But the game design and philosophy behind so much of it is what makes it a huge success. Of course they will bring it back, for the 3rd and 4th world, and then perhaps permanently keep it there.
Anet originally said this not long after launch, that gw2’s endgame was the entire game because of scaling. Sadly this ended up being very wrong. I think scaling is great though. Its just not an excuse for endgame.
Correct me if i;m wrong but the term “Meta” in the context of gaming means the most optimal/best right? it is not about how many people adapt the build or strategy, it’s about the ideal best.
So if less people do not use the meta, yet it is still the best in the hands of good gamers, then the meta stays the same.
Btw if you create a dark souls type feel and difficulty to the bosses (which im all for it), the meta will still be full zerk and nothing will change except more casuals complaining about difficulty.
—april 25 ds2 PC here i come lol
It wouldn’t. Zerk is optimal now because its the fastest way to get through dungeons, but mainly because of the bad design, poor mechanics, and certain holes in the game design(like corner stacking). If that was gone then zerk wouldn’t be optimal because it would be too difficult. The thing is there is nothing difficult baout running zerk now hen you can skip mobs or corner stack them in dungeons.
It’s not that difficult to run zerk even if you don;t corner LoS or skip.
Stacking is just full melee, people still need to dodge block reflect etc.
Being able to run 5 zerks – there is nothing wrong with that. From the point of view of a dark souls player (or any legit action game player) there REALLY isn’t anything wrong with that unless one is a crappy DS player.
Only thing i agree on is AI overhaul for more interesting bosses, 5-man zerk should still be as effective.
Most effective? Maybe, but not nearly as easy. Zerk for having very high dps by forcing the player to be more skilled on timing their skills, positioning, and dodges.
Correct me if i;m wrong but the term “Meta” in the context of gaming means the most optimal/best right? it is not about how many people adapt the build or strategy, it’s about the ideal best.
So if less people do not use the meta, yet it is still the best in the hands of good gamers, then the meta stays the same.
Btw if you create a dark souls type feel and difficulty to the bosses (which im all for it), the meta will still be full zerk and nothing will change except more casuals complaining about difficulty.
—april 25 ds2 PC here i come lol
It wouldn’t. Zerk is optimal now because its the fastest way to get through dungeons, but mainly because of the bad design, poor mechanics, and certain holes in the game design(like corner stacking). If that was gone then zerk wouldn’t be optimal because it would be too difficult. The thing is there is nothing difficult baout running zerk now hen you can skip mobs or corner stack them in dungeons.
I agree with you about zergs in pve, especially open world Dynamic events where zerging just gets old. But not in wvw. The bigger zerg doesn’t always win in wvw, its usually coverage.
If you are fighting open field. A group of 30 ranged classes that fights a guild who has a balanced make up of 30(so like 18 melee? 23 if you wanna go very heavy melee). The ranged group will almost always win if you dodge when you need to and kite when you need to. This is because from a zergs perspective, there are multiple targets, and they can only hit one. From the ranged perspective, there is only one target that all of them need to hit.
For ppt, a giant blob definitely doesn’t win for pretty much the same reason you don’t in spvp. You can only go to one point(or tower) at a time when the other players(smaller groups) can split up and go to each point(tower).
- berserker meta is a speedrun meta, not overall dungeon meta
- there’s more speedruns because there is no new content to beat. It gets easier on your 50th run you know, not to mention there’s nothing else to aim for than efficiency without new content
- you can’t balance dungeons around experienced people only. There are new players who have trouble beating the same dungeons we run in 5 minutes.
- ease of running a dungeon depends on the class you play, your team and your personal skill. I find meleeing stuff significantly easier with my mesmer/war than with my thief (on d/d) or LH ele when I PUG. Some classes simply have it easier than others by default.
- stacking requiring no strategy is a misconception. Stacking is a strategy that doesn’t work without specific skills and team setup. Try running cliffside 2nd seal (the fire ring one) by stacking on the far side without a thief or guardian to keep blinding the enemies and you will find out that it doesn’t turn out that well. Or fighting groups of dredge without reflects ect.
- I fail to see how holy trinity dungeon running from other games requires any more effort or skill than running a proper speedrun in gw2. I’ve played Lineage 2, WoW and several other MMOs and it all came down to paying attention to what you should be doing rather than skill. Although there is less variety in the employment of strategies in gw2, the amount itself is not any lower.Why do I get the feeling that everybody who comes to complain on these forums about berserker gear is some godly entity who has reached the enlightened state in this game where he can effortlessly breeze through any dungeon no matter which party they end up with just by stacking in any random corner and spamming their auto attack. It seems more likely to me that those same people have simply grown tired of the game and are looking for something completely different, yet don’t feel like grinding their way through another MMO. Am I the only noob on this forum who still runs into problems from time to time? Am I the only one who dies here and there when they make a mistake? Am I the only one who thinks that berserker is not nearly as forgiving as these threads might imply? It could all come down to me just being horrible, but what does that make the sizable rest of this game’s population who don’t do as well as I do?
It doesn’t even have to do with speedruns. The runs happen to be fast yes but thats simply because of the zerk+poormechanics/ai/design in general. The majority of players go into fractals or dungeons just to get it done, meaning they want to get it done the most efficent way possible. This just happens to be combining zerker meta’s with the exploitation of stupid AI that allows them to clear mobs and bosses extremely quickly, or just skip the mobs all together. This is the problem. It gives no other reason to use anything but zerker. There are very few boss fights in this game that actually punish zerker. One would be shaman, because you can’t bug it, LOS it, corner stack, or all 3. Doing shaman on low levels is easy but on 49-50 its not with zerker builds. Its a good fight because it pressures people indivudually to dodge and have the correct positioning. If you don’t do either of these things you are likely going to get 2 hit, and when the mobs come up.
not sure we need more gimmicky mechanix like the new TA path.
we need the existing bosses to react to players..
using boons and blocks.
players are stacking? use cleaves and/or blowout.
players use LOS? use AOE.
players reach certain amount of condition variety /condition stacks? use cleanses.
players use 100b, pistolwhip, FGS ? use block.
Im not saying they should all be like TA aether but I just liked that path because it was refreshing from other dungeons. And I agree with you on the AI changes. I perosnally think this should be done for almost all the mobs in the game right now. Almost as base mechanics that apply to enemies, because these are all simple maneuvers to pull off. Blocking/aoe/cleave.
Logic disconnect:
“haven’t had any new dungeons in the history of gw2 besides fotm”.
Rest of text talks about TA Aether.
lol ye sorry my fault.
There isn’t anything wrong with TA Aether. People who say its too long say so because it takes more than 10 minutes to complete because you can’t actually skip mobs in the dungeon, and the boss fights can’t be bugged the same way most can in this game. The playerbase has gotten too comfortable with corner stacking and mob skipping, anything that divulges from this style of mechanic will be considered a poor dungeon.
Nahh, for the experienced dungeoneer it’s unskippable cinematics and most of all the kitten puzzles. All trash mobs can be LOSed easy in a corner and killed in seconds and all bosses are melee friendly.
As for casuals, it’s just too difficult for them, making them apparently spend up to 3 hours in there. I mean, I’ve heard stories of people spending an hour on the ooze puzzle alone before rage quitting.
The puzzles arn’t hard at all though if you are so called experienced dungeoneers.
If we keep talking about gw1 some moderator is going to shut down my thread lol. So lets just talk about why gw2 instances don’t seem up to par.
I think one problem is that we haven’t had any new dungeons in the history of gw2 besides fotm and TA aether if you want to say that but most of the instances were created back during the beginning of middle of the LS. This was a time(especially during the beginning of the game) where perhaps Anet didn’t know how the community would react to the difficulty of the current dungeons. After 18 months I think Anet has a pretty good idea of whats going on and the skill level of their community. I think by now they should have learned much more about dungeon design. Looking at TA path one, I really enjoy it because it is more difficult and I don’t know of any bosses there that I think are particularily poor besides the Charr chief guy who doesn’t really do much and still feels like a tank n’ spank fight. The first duo boss is really cool, the mechanics are fun, but its extremely easy once you get it down, I don’t think they can be corner stacked either(gj anet). The last boss can be difficult because of the watchwork gears sitting all over the place, and if you kill the hologram too soon you are kind of screwed. Its nothing insane though, just more difficult than other dungeon paths we see in gw2. I really hope to see more dungeons or dungeon paths this year!
(edited by SkylightMoon.1980)
This is the point…….but aren t you giving too much credit to small minorities non representing “the fractal community” just because their ideas are more in line with yours?
(see lore)
IF once again you will come up with a fractured 2.0 (that reduced fractal playerbase), you could understand what went wrong…..
‘This is the point…….but aren t you giving too much credit to small minorities non representing “the fractal community” just because their ideas are more in line with yours?’
No i am not. And those that like GW story, variety of gameplay and challenge therein are not in the minority.
Chris
Hey mr. whiteside I had a question/suggestion regarding fractal rewards. Is there any possibility that the devs could implement features in fractals that acknowledge solo, 3 man fractals. I saw earlier suggestions for it relating to people not being able to find groups. But what I wanted to ask if would Anet be willing to implement modes for solo or 3 man fractals where the fractals have the same difficulty as perhaps a 5 man, but give better rewards? Recently I have been running 3 man groups with my guildies in fractals 39-49. Its extremely difficult at higher levels, especially on dredge or shaman. We do it because we haven’t really felt any challenge from 5 manning high level fractals, and 3 manning it, even soloing if thats possible, is very very fun and challenging. It has sent us to put much more effort into our builds, even changing our skills/traits/utilities multiple times during a specific fractal depending on what boss or mob pull we are on. Is there any possibility that we could receive better rewards for 3 manning, 2 manning, or even soloing it(also those who do it with 4 people)?
Because buffing AI’s HP will make them better AI.
I said that buffing AI in certain instances(like if they are pinned between a wall or next to multiple enemies) would be a replacement compared to making AI able to avoid corner stacking situation which seems like an endeavor for the devs. One way or another, corner stacking is probably at the very very core of whats ruined PVE and made berserker builds extremely prevalent, because once a mob is in a corner, for the most part, youve won when you run a berserker build.
I keep hearing people say: GW2 has bad AI. But I have no idea what people mean by that. Do you mean the variety of abilities that a enemy has? Cause that’s not AI. Do you mean stacking? Since that seem more to be a dungeon design issue than an AI issue.
Really I’d like to add to the conversation but I think the vocabulary needs some refinement.
If the enemy has no challenging abilities Id think that is just poor mechanics and not AI. I think that the AI getting stuck in a corner which eventually contributes to extremely high and quick dps from the players without punishment, id think thats bad AI and bad game mechanics. Bad AI because they should be able to move out of this corner(even though I could see this being more difficult than it sounds to do as a dev) and bad mechanics because even if you can’t counter this with AI, you can give mobs more powerful abilities to counter this. If Anet made it so mobs stacked in a corner or stacked really tightly against anywall, had much higher outgoing damage, and much higher defense, buffing each other, there is no way anyone would do that. Its a much easier change to make, compared to nerfing zerk with ferocity. I don’t understand if Anet is nerfing zerk by taking this approach(Which I think is a lazy approach) or they are nerfing zerk to affect areas of spvp as well.