Guild Wars 2

Curious: I see lots of posts here saying to use rune of the eagle for rangers. I can’t see anyway that eagle is better then rune of the ranger. Is there a reason so many recommend Eagle? Did it use to be cheaper then Ranger or something in the past?

Disclaimer: This is just opinion people are welcome to have their own personal goals apart from mine this is merely a suggestion.

I see here lots of forum posts originated around the random luck involved with getting holiday pets and other things mixed into the game world. Example:

“I spent $950 dollars on magical gifts and I’m furious that I only got 9 out of 10 magic pets”

Personally I find a good strat is to separate your inner completionist and focus purely on game commitment and not cash investment.

By game commitment I refer to accomplishments that are earned through playing the game itself. All MMOs are purely a mix in one way or the other of time investment combined with some level of skill also.

I come from an era I guess where all MMOs were sub or free without any microtransaction. Any identifiable real life money spent on account was a disgrace and word would spread through the community “ebay” was the unfavorable term for players like that.

For example in WoW you could have an impressive “completionist” account without any money spent on the pet store or card game.

I understand the argument in that it’s people’s money and they can do what they want but really it’s a game and competition based on real life money spent is truly out of the spirit and exists only to fund corporations. With all the problems in the world today, when I see people with insane amounts of real life cash decked out accounts or see the disgusting sums of money talked about on forums gambled away, no matter how you justify it there is a large degree of decadence in context to the real life world.

I have much more gamer to gamer respect to someone that puts the game time in, or puts the game skill in to accomplish their completionist needs and in a lot of ways I look down on the person that has to spend grotesque amounts of money to stand in a city and show off.

GW2 is a ftp so I acknowledge supporting them where it’s been earned but I think my topic here is about something different then that.

As a side note to stir the pot I don’t consider playing wallstreet on an auction house “playing the game” either, and it really is just an exploit of an uncontrollable system that is completely outside the spirit of a fantasy game.

Thanks for your help in advance!

Recent Edit: Despite the previous experience of weeks, I wanted to say that this problem was addressed in less then 8 hours through the ticket service on the day after Christmas mind you. Thank you for the fast customer service an incredibly better experience then my last attempt a few months ago.

A Friend of mine just bought the game at the store. They set up their account tonight and was able to log in but my server was full so they logged out and waited. They were unable to log back in later and received the message saying “Account Name or Password is invalid” When looking at their e-mails they received 2 emails from Arena net at the exact same time each 11:06pm about 30 minutes after the account was registered.

Confirm new e-mail address for your Guild Wars account
The e-mail address for your Guild Wars account has been changed

Those were the 2 emails subject lines however no attempt was made to change the email (and when looking on my own account I can’t find any way to even change the email associated with it so no idea how this could happen.)

No characters were created on the account yet so they can’t use the recovery option with the serial number. The ticket number they received when using that option is: #121226-000882

Please help! The last time i used the ticket service i waited 2 weeks to recover a password never received a reply and then wound up just scrapping that game and having to buy a new one.

Thanks !

Are you the big norn/char type, the human male pretending you are your avatar type, or the scant clad female type, or asuran?

Most classes more tank~ish builds tend to also be the support build and usually raise the groups damage as a whole far more then glass cannon would while being much m roe survivable. There’s just a couple wings in the game where you can get away with being glass cannon and usually you’re still lowering the total damage of your group depending on class by not taking advantage of support abilities.

There’s a lot of trash packs in this game where no amount of grace will help you survive. There’s also a very high chance a glass cannon warrior will not be able to stand toe to toe with a medium amount of trash, being able to stay in combat, take a few hits and cleave multiple enemies will increase a warrior’s dps overall through might stacks on crit in a lot of situations

Sarcasmic.6741:

I personally don’t mind the encounter all that much. It was a major pain in the rear the first time through, but honestly not that bad.

With one exception; it’s buggy. The sparks don’t leash into their homes as well as they should. If I walk directly through the center of an open space, and the spark follows me directly through the center of that same open space, it should lock in place. It doesn’t always. Then there’s the sparks randomly deciding, after they’ve been leashed, that they want to congregate in a single circle while you bring the last spark(s) in.

It could be argued she heals a bit too quickly now that she can’t be at all damaged while stealthed (which was a rather cheesy tactic to be fair). Anet didn’t need to make her invulnerable and increase her heal rate to circumvent that. One or the other would’ve served fine.

Agree a bit more control over the sparks and a little less heal would be more forgiving of all builds. Most likely it would be more in the spirit of what a lot of people believe GW2 is also to do that.

Where do you draw the line though: There should just be one spark and heal reduced by 90%, like a warm bottle of milk so every baby can get their Dungeon Master with minimal effort.

It’s also a wing many people have very little practice with and are mad when they can’t get it the first time. All the crying about Lupicus but for anyone that’s done a fair amount of Arah he’s not a threat at all, soloable even I guess. When FoTM came out many people were furious about the coordination required in swamp fractal.

For Integrity sake there is a line somewhere and if Dwayna is passed that line she’s not to far past it, unless everything should be mindless faceroll (2nd boss of CoE p2, last boss of CoF path 1, 80% of other bosses in the game etc. etc.)

Dwayna is fine from an MMO perspective in terms of difficulty. She’s been done with questionable tactics and also completely legit. You don’t need all warrior and a mesmer. She’s a very hard coordination check and a DPS check however the complaint should really be: “Dwayna is to hard for me” or “Dwayna is to serious for what an acceptable majority of GW2 players can handle.”

A lot of posts here claim the Dwayna forces people out of a play style: I don’t think “my playstyle” should be rigid enough to involve me never changing my 10 point traits for an encounter (or respecing even for the hardest dungeon boss) not switching utilities not swapping weapons not bringing good food and potions if you plan on clearing the hardest dungeon wing in the game.

Be flexible it takes a bit of learning and also a good attempt. I don’t think Dungeon Master should be handed out for free and just because some dungeons are easy doesn’t mean they all have to be.

Also as of the last time i checked (about a week or two ago) The petrify is 100% dodge rollable, I saw numerous replies in this thread claiming it wasn’t.

It’s a 100% completely optional wing of a dungeon that is acclaimed as being the hardest. Nothing is being blocked besides a prestige title that should be earn imo. Any nerfs will just lessen the victory when it’s finally achieved as it’s very possible now.

If it’s not dying in 2 hours of attempts doing the 4-1 wisp trick with 3 warriors and a timewarp regardless of gear the problem isn’t the difficulty. 4-1 makes it relatively straight forward and pretty much any class composition could manage it if they knew what they were doing. Swapping any of these slots or combination of : chest pants weapon will vastly relocate a majority of your stat points, albeit it won’t make much difference but it’s pretty much a whole stat overhaul. I don’t think carrying around a different weapon or a chest is so insanely difficult, it would cost just a couple of hours of farming straight from the TP.

I could really use some naughty corner right now, can you tell me your guild name and an officer i can contact to join?

An official statement from a Dev would by very much appreciated (not from a mod). There’s a huge difference in this case.

Actual Multiboxing does not violate any of these principles at all, and in any vague way people say that it might it doesn’t offer any more advantages then using gw2lfg, dragontimers, or getting strategies by chatting in forums.

• “Does this program allow someone to play faster, better, longer, or more accurately than someone who doesn’t use it?”

(Multiboxing tends to be clunky and it’s always more effective to have 2 humans playing 2 accounts then having 1 human play 2 accounts. None of these apply as it is a disadvantage in many ways.)

• “Does this program allow someone to ‘play’ when he/she is not at the computer?”

(No, not at all)

• “Does this program allow the user to gain undeserved rewards?”

(No, if rewards are “deserved” simply by melleeing a dragon once then standing around for 20 minutes, if someone can meet this criterea on both accounts then they have earned the rewards they aquired)

Multiboxing at it’s most basic level is having 2 accounts logged in at once. It doesn’t imply that key strokes are being sent to all clients, it doesn’t imply that a bot is controlling some of the accounts. All multiboxing is, is signing in with 2 accounts at the same time, there are many additional things you can do (which don’t even need 2 accounts to do) bot, script etc. which are obviously cheating but this has nothing to do with what multiboxing is.

Infact there is no cheat you could really do as a multiboxer that a person on one account couldn’t do also and benefit from.

MrNobody.4357:

I’m remembering post by mods clearing the fact that multiboxing is NOT allowed, but don’t have any link at hand at the moment and i’m getting out, sorry.

He linked it in his post, try reading? I think what you suffered from is what many believe happened to the mod that made this one single comment on Multiboxing. It sounds like he wasn’t paying attention made a a pretty broad assumption and most likely was confused by the question The wording in itself is very vague and does seem like the mod did not fully understand the subject.

Epistemic.8013:

TsukasaHiiragi.9730:

Trust me, the best ascended items are ‘roughly’ about 40% better than regular exotics.

This pic is one of the lower quality rings, look at the difference in stats. There are ascended items that have been linked that have had vendor values of 6g

Exotic Berserker Ring total stats combined 155 +6% CTD
That low end Ascended RIng total stats combined 222 + 5% CTD + Agony Resis + MF

You’re comparing apples to oranges. You need to look at items with similar stat distributions. If I remember correctly in WoW each additional point toward a particular stat would have a higher cost against the total stat budget of the item. I’m not sure how the system works in GW2 but I imagine it’s roughly the same.

You imagined wrong. In GW2 all items with 3 stats have 1 Major stat and 2 Minor stats. The # example precision or power is always the same only the Major one has slightly more. For example an exotic chest has 101 Major stats 72 minor stats regardless of what stat it is (crit damage% and MF% are the only exceptions but they are roughly equally balanced point per point also to that formula.) Basically I wouldn’t be telling people they are comparing apples and oranges if I were you. And I think ascended are speculated at close to a 40% increase in stats (including armor as toughness also?) so this whole topic makes it seem like the OP needs to research more.

One of the achievements of GW2 is making the stats and their effects on your damage very transparent and not require intense math whatsoever to calculate benefits. A good portion of everything stat wise in the game can be calculated with simple formula.

I’d say the most populated zones are 1. Lion’s arch by a lot then Queensdale Cursed Shore, Norn Starting area and the other starting areas following minus the grove. None of the starting area seem to exceed 20-30 people total even at peak.

Most other zone most likely have around 5-10 players in it at any given time.

The servers population is rigged on the world select screen. They were listed as high full when all zones were packed at launch and many forcing people into overflow. They are still listed the same with all zones empty. Despite people that disagree, having leveled 5+ toons I can say all zones are dead most events cannot be completed, unless you are on a geared 80 downscaled. Thanksgiving has nothing to do with it. Servers need to be merged or underflow servers made it’s a huge problem.

To make matters worse they added gear progression in a single dungeon in Lion’s Arch so no one has any reason to be anywhere but LA.

They can make a living easily without the kinds of manipulations that all MMOs today seem to have in place. They could make games with integrity that people are happy to spend money on because of the overall high quality. They don’t need to milk every penny they can out of their fans.

Honestly there is a huge difference between milking things for money and making things out of passion while still profiting. MMOs pre 2006-2007 were obviously made by people passionate about gaming who designed what they felt was interesting. This is called integrity in terms of a gaming company.

A game company that milks micro transactions and turns the genre into a system to generate cash and not a system that people enjoy and are happy to pay money for is something very different.

A good example is Diablo 2 compared to Diablo 3. Diablo 2 is possibly the most acclaimed online games of all time, it needed no cash shop, no 10% cuts off an auction house based on real money, it functioned it existed and people enjoyed it free of these things yet the 2010 era version brought these things at the customers expense for no gain. If it survived before how come that kind of integrity cannot exist anymore?

I feel pressured to partake in fractals for fear of getting left behind, I also worry that none of my alts will have an easy time with it in the future. It seems as the fractal LFG range gets wider it becomes harder and harder to find groups. a 1-20 spread is demanding 100 players in lion’s arch online and interested to make specific groups at a minimum.

I don’t see players motivated to do any fractal except the level they are on, will they be very hard to rank up in the future? I feel with most of the previous content not even getting cleared anymore and most dungeon’s almost impossible to make groups for that ANET doesn’t have a good track record with me about not bottle necking their own content.

I don’t enjoy the pressure and one week in the difficulty of making groups is already frustrating. It took me over 2 hours each to build a lvl 3 and a lvl 4 group for an alt on Tuesday and Wednesday evening.

When new content comes out will this get worse? Also Overflow seems absolutely vital to making these groups, if Lion’s Arch goes out of overflow I also see making specific fractal groups hopeless.

Any speculation for the future of these things? should I be worried?

It seems like allowing a spread would be a fix for now like fractal level 5 will give +1 difficulty to progress for anyone that is on fractal level 2-7 for example, to have a much wider invite range.

2nd solution would be to just have auto que (FractalFinder) where you get dumped in automatically with random people on the same difficulty, don’t love this idea but seems harmless since people had to clear the previous versions to learn etc.

Thanks for the help in advance!

I’ve encountered a few poi’s in dungeons that appear to be unreachable, mainly 2 in CoE (one right at the start when you zone in for exp mode) and one in Arah at the very end of story mode under the tower Zhaitan is clinging to. There are others but those are the 2 I can remember off the top of my head, for the CoE pois I’m mentioning I have completed all wings in exp and story mode multiple times.

I’ve tried extensive google searching and can’t find anything on it. Are these p.o.i’s unachievable? If they are can someone tell me how to reach the two listed above please?

Hey, I think it’s just a reality of warrior in dungeons to feel that way. A lot of posters claim that a majority of dangerous attacks can be rolled through, but really this is far from the case especially with trash. The difference in damage output enemies can do in a specific dungeon is huge (trash packs and bosses). The is no way to be ready for every situation even in a single dungeon.

The frustrating thing is no matter how tank or support oriented you become, certain things will still crush you (especially a lot of trash packs). Guardians will outshine in terms of damage and survival and group support in a similar defensive spec. Warrior damage takes a huge hit when going into defense but I agree with the poster above that damage is irrelevant in most dungeons outside of the regularly farmed ones.

I’d say if you want to stick with GS / Rifle 10/20/0/30/10 with Knights armor, and soldier runes (or war horn instead of rifle if you want to use different runes.) You’d be focusing on might generation and not worrying about the bleeds on crits.

If you are not interested in support shouts 20/25/15/0/10 in Knights Prefix to be a sturdier GS dungeon warrior.

There are other builds that focus on keeping up weakness with mace main hand, but mace is a huge hit to damage and weakness doesn’t seem to change incoming damage much, I havn’t tried it that much however.

This build looks interesting to if you want to get fancy:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/warrior/Yojack-s-Min-Max-home-of-the-Yojack-Build-2012-for-GW2/first.

I have not been able to accumulate the condition damage pieces to attempt it myself so I can’t say for sure. It seems to have high damage potential and decent survival. It might be better with Apothecary for something defensive/support if you are into that(instead of the power precision condition recommended). I’m not sure about healing power however as healing stat to me doesn’t seem as powerful as a lot of people make it out to be (even in 5 mans) from my testing.

Last thing I can think of would be a full out Soldier build. 30 Defense and 30 Tactics with some combination of axe shield mace warhorn or hammer. There would be a lot of situations where you would still get crushed however trying to stay toe to toe and a Guardian would outshine you completely on this front.

I think the first 10/20/0/30/10 I talked about is your best bet for an all around dungeon spec. You’ll still get downed, but the difference is very noticeable and the group buffs shout heals brings and condition removal even without healing gear will make a difference. Generally “most” things that will down this will down a full tank warrior also give or take a couple of seconds.

Absolute best advice I can give is:

1. Don’t be afraid to swap to rifle and kite. Lots of mechanics and encounters and trash packs seem to demand and be balanced around the whole group switching to range and kiting. I’d say get the mentality that it’s a very viable weapon to stay on for harder dungeons and don’t feel pressured to stay in melee if the damage is not manageable.

2. A lot of the harder paths are just not balanced well for pugs (possibly organized groups also), they suffer from design issues instead of challenge issues. I think this is partly why FotM is so praised in comparison to the original ones as the damage going out seems to have been much tighter tuned. This is generally why in all pug groups there is some tight wound spaz yelling that you have to run through half the instance glitch up a wall have everyone afk in a spot, then go to a bugged area off the map then skip 5 bosses, then stand behind a box to attack a boss etc. A lot of paths have the potential to annihilate most pugs and most classes/specs, if done without exploit.

wintermute.4096:

Fenrir.4915:

Hi hornet, i got a full exotics set of Power, Vit and Toug ( AC one).
I run with exotic GS, Rifle and Longbow.
My trait line is 10/10/25/25.
And i can tell you, im a BEAST.
I can deal really BIG damage with GS, and with rifle and LG conditions damage ( i use the sigils to my conditions last 10% more ).
And i can survive SO much.
Most of time i use some banners, wich makes me and my party even stronger.

I recomend you start using a LG, amazing AOE´s damage, and he deals more damage than Rifle.

Some comments:
If you go 25 in tactics, it’s probably better to go 30 and get either shout healing or regen on banners.
Axe actually does slightly better dps then gs, longbow is usually better at range then rifle. If you try to boost condition duration, make sure you always end up at full second intervals, because damage only tics once every second. 10% condition duration does nothing for you if you end up at 6.6s bleed per rifle shot.

Could be thinking about something else maybe how it handles condition damage itself, but I did some testing and I remember it seemed to add an additional tick accurately based on the decimal like if you had a 6.6s bleed it would get 7 ticks 6/10ths of the time instead of 6. Could be totally wrong sorry if I am.

Hey thanks in advance,
On a Warrior I’ve only focus on 30 Strength/30 Arms greatsword/rifle. I got side tracked on my Guardian and i was missing the reaction and survival abilities it had when i revisited Warrior. I want to try to spec something more sturdy with more survival abilities, very inexperienced with this warrior play style and weapons and I was hoping for feedback or critique.

http://www.gw2build.com/builds/simulator.php#1.2.4.5.19.16.0.0.0.0.29.38.37.39.50.0.0.0.80.85.0.93.0.0.107.114.116.0.0.0.140.0.0.20.10.30.0.10

This is 100% for Dungeons, I’m looking to do decent damage while being able to stand toe to toe longer and keep enemy packs tight together on me. I been switching a weapon set to a rifle on range fights. Plan on not using Burst and just sitting at full adren. for the stat bonuses unless I really need endurance.

Using mostly Knights with some Soldier and Valk. Planning on Divinity runes but might go Soldier keeping up with condition removal on some fights seems to be a problem

In the last hour or two I’ve seen about 8 different groups still posting not seeming to put it together seeking slight differences in difficulty when really they could all just play together and everything could be fine if it wasn’t for this horrible system, this is linked in some way to the “Ascended Fiasco” also I guess? As you are forced to participate, no idea how it will play out when high pop servers could barely put things together besides AC and COF as it was before, let alone 20 identical versions of one dungeon.

I’d say lupus giant dog guy, maybe some versions of subject alpha, last boss of CoF path 3? are as close as it gets, I agree with you though it falls way short even of Putricide who’s not my favorite but still legit.

Not sure it’s so much because of the constraints of no tank and healer could be partial, I don’t think they care about visual ques so much, a lot of things are unpredictable and buggy, regardless of skill things not being tank build get dropped in one mistake usually and some bosses health pools are insane for most groups. I think this is one reason FotM is so popular due to the lower damage and health pools at low difficulty.

I would have liked a comb over of the old dungeons and making sub 80s scale up better, give them an average of the group stats or something.

monepipi.5160:

Stego.3148:

There’s one legendary item available and this is weapon currently. This is still at exotic level but it will become ascended level once ascended weapons are available I hear.

Karizee.8076:

Stego.3148:

small unimaginative dungeon

Fractals is amazing – 9 unique environments, EPIC raid worthy bosses – this is the experience I bought the game for

a boss that freezes you,
a Jelly fish that makes adds,
a giant face that you pick up an item to reflect his super lazer
a dude that vanishes and then throws an axe
a boss where you need to stand near a fire
a boss that’s tank and spank and randomly insta kills party members

3 of these mechanics are handled by one wow raid boss actually already Hodir.

to bad mmo’s in 2000 had better boss mechanics. NES ninja gaiden had better mechanics.

Environments are amazing guild wars 2 art direction, and animations in my opinion are top in the industry.

You are just hating for no reason. And your bullet points actually sounds like you’re selling FOTM. They sound awesome. FOTM is the most fun dungeon in GW2 by far.

They are pretty good, as far as guild wars 2 dungeons go I agree with you. They are more reasonable in a lot of ways, bosses have less health things do less damage at low difficulty compared to other dungeons. Having it be the only dungeon for progressions though makes things much less awesome. It’s almost impossible to do other dungeons now and I enjoyed the entirety of all the other dungeons doing whichever one I felt like compared to being funneled into just one dungeon that is ok.

There’s one legendary item available and this is weapon currently. This is still at exotic level but it will become ascended level once ascended weapons are available I hear.

Karizee.8076:

Stego.3148:

small unimaginative dungeon

Fractals is amazing – 9 unique environments, EPIC raid worthy bosses – this is the experience I bought the game for

a boss that freezes you,
a Jelly fish that makes adds,
a giant face that you pick up an item to reflect his super lazer
a dude that vanishes and then throws an axe
a boss where you need to stand near a fire
a boss that’s tank and spank and randomly insta kills party members

3 of these mechanics are handled by one wow raid boss actually already Hodir.

to bad mmo’s in 2000 had better boss mechanics. NES ninja gaiden had better mechanics.

Environments are amazing guild wars 2 art direction, and animations in my opinion are top in the industry.

Karizee.8076:

Pfft, they added 2 rings and mats for a back piece.

People are just looking to complain.

Oh and I LOVE that legendary weapons will never ever become obsolete – TYTY ANet!

yes contradicting everything they said this game was, making it an entire mix of pay real money or get left behind and requiring one specific small unimaginative dungeons to be run for more hours then a hard core wow raid schedule IS something to complain about.

Slippery slope is beyond your comprehension karizee, just do not worry about it.

They added a new tier of gear which is 8-14% better then exotics, that require at the moment a very intense grind and more gold then most players have prob earned playing in the last 3 months. Legendary is not buffed yet but when ascended weapons are out it will be, Anet said Legendary will maintain equal stats to the best items in the game.

The problem is also that they have a slot for “infusions” which is a kind of PVE resilience which many fear will be a segregating mechanic making everyone that doesn’t participate and do this intense grind lost and not able to take part in any future content due to not having enough infusions basically allowing them only to participate in new fluff holiday content.

I think it’s safe to assume they will be designing content from here on out around these infusions in the future so it might be the case all dungeons will be turned into requiring levels of this, gating and segregating many players from a lot of content to come in the future if they don’t want to devote their lives to 100s of runs of a handful of mini dungeons. or buy gems from the gem shop to afford the gear (pay to win model).

Most likely more and more content release in the future will be gated and unavailable to people that do not pay to win or grind 15+ hours a day, and it’s also likely more and more tiers of gear will come.

All these fears go directly against firm quotes of A-net’s agenda pre launch. A lot of people put these quotes in their signatures here out of irony if you want to read some.

I’ve been on a few worlds:

quick note: to be fair the way scaling works a level 80 character in full exotics can be upwards of 4x as survivable and 4x as much damage as sub 80 characters. To show the example level 80s can solo most champions up until Orr without even extensive kiting, and in damage spec will kill most enemies in one hit until at least the 40-50 zones. When leveling there on a non 80 most fights take 15-30 seconds.

Any server in any game can have an amazing guild community so I’m taking the guild experience out of the equation.

The only place I’ve noticed exceptional community is in WvWvW if there are trusted and tested officers helping people learn and understand what to do. I havn’t seen community achievements like this in any mmo in a long time (prob AO notum wars)

Other aspects of the game I’d say have the worst player community I’ve come in contact with on par with wow dungeon / raid finder/

Conversation wise: Most people want to endlessly rant about how they play the auction house to get Legendary weapons and brag about things legendary related. If you want to talk about anything but Legendary weapons it will be hard to find outside of a guild.

Dungeon groups people are obsessed with speed runs and are very unforgiving compared to most games, they expect you to instantly learn a strat where you run up a wall jump off a cliff kite through 90% of the instance then hug a thin wall and enter into a glitched part of the map where you bug out a boss then get a chest. If you don’t do this exactly with 0 instruction most people I’ve encountered become very rude. People are also very quick to leave groups or do spiteful things in pug dungeons. Most of the harder wings are absolutely impossible to build a group for and even if you do make one people will rage quit shortly into it (if it isn’t contested bugged to start already), all dungeons that become contested can not have lost members replaced if someone leaves when it becomes contested.

Jelle.2807:

/sign

Not going to stop playing over this, it’s still a very good game, just a slightly less good game.
It all depends wether this ascended gear is simply an attempt to fix the current design where your definitive gear is quite easy to obtain, or wether they intend to implement even more powerful gear down the road.
Personally I don’t mind a good grind to make that last bit of gear feel that more valuable, it’s only when it subsequently gets devaluated by the introduction of more powerful gear.
So what’ll it be Anet, a one time gear grind or a gear threadmill. Either take a step back or let us know with an official statement wether this is the last item quality you introduce.

What would be the point of infusions if they don’t design content for the upgraded infusions they plan to release? There is no way this can play out except they make content designed around infusions from here on out (besides fluffy holiday events) and you have to maintain and upgrade your infusions and gear to play the content they are devoting their resources to release.

In their vision all new dungeon content will revolve around a gated style of progression that you have to have the latest to engage in, and a stat gap will always exist in all forms of the game besides sPVP between you and the players that devote themselves to Ascended.

If they are devoting resources to this you will have far less resources devoted to other things, and it will make running anything else much harder. The game barely had the population to do dungeon runs outside of CoF and AC before this patch.

very well said and /signed.

I must say the blatant contradictions to headline quotes from ANet that pulled me to this game is very disrespectful to it’s player base, and not just in a game sense but a moral sense.

Generally people say the forums are a vocal minority but I’ve seen this happen a few times where forums absolutely light up with anger with thousands of posts topics. The most recent one I can remember was when Blizzard tried to force player’s real life names to be used on forums.

I think the window for this is very short, but a statement and reverting/replacing of content and rewards would go very far to rebuild trust and it also would demonstrate integrity as a company and would earn my respect.

My enthusiasm for GW2 has been destroyed by this.

I will start off with the only fix that I will be comfortable with:

ONLY FIX:

Remove Ascended or make an item which is obtainable in wvw and all forms of pve that upgrade any exotic to an Ascended and make it take about one evening of playing per piece upgrade at most.

If Ascended must remain (through the upgrade option above) Make the Infusion Slot do something other then segregate and gate players: Vanity glows, combat effects, slight change to visual appearance (corruption or something to make star wars people happy) slight stat increases since the upgrade process would be much more obtainable, or combat effects similar to rune combinations, perhaps closer to weak runewords, maybe the ability to achieve a couple combinations of sets of 3 since there would be quite a few slots to fill. I’d be ok with just slight raw stats similar to a gem, like wow enchants basicaly, if that’s the best i can get. I wouldn’t overdo it at all, in terms of character power, every little bit is just going to trivialize earlier content and dungeons. Ascended could be a quality of life thing instead: stats are the same and any exotic can be upgrade allowing for example ascended gear be transmuted for free ( the grind could be increased in this case since it’s purely an earned luxury that doesn’t effect balance.)

My rant to make myself feel better about these horrible decisions:

I had no problem with the longevity of the game before this change I loved it and could see myself playing for a long long time. I never once signed in and didn’t have a long list of things that I wanted to do.

There is no way to ease over the gear grind, increasing how easy they are to obtain wouldn’t change anything, increasing the ways to get them will not change anything.

There are many games that do the grind better that allow for much more competitive technical PVE that have a much more enjoyable grinding experience that are a much better environment for technical PVE communities to develop in. A decade ago there were mmo’s that handled these areas better then you do. This never bothered me because the highlights of this game were revolutionary and refreshing, they bother me very much now. I don’t miss having this and I don’t want it back. GW2 was the most refreshing MMO in the last 5 years by far and I loved signing in everyday,

Even raising the tier just once is not OK. I’m very angry you want to start me on my way running 7 average wings that accumulate to slightly over one dungeon worth of encounters endlessly, if you made it any closer to a hamster on a wheel it would be an absolute mockery of your players. The dungeons you had I enjoyed quite a bit and farming certain weapons and gears for my character’s aesthetics while experimenting with specs and different alts was engaging enough for me.

3 months in I will not do your gear grind, I wont ever do your gear grind beyond what was promised. There are many games that do it better and if you throw away everything all that you have going for you is the Beautiful animation work and environments which is amazing but not enough alone.

Worst idea ever, I had so much faith but this is a shocking change and now that I see it’s implementation I assure you that you are 100% out of touch with your game, what it’s strong points are and how you should be devoting your resources.

0/10 had so much love for gw2 takes some horrible decisions to turn it around like this. I’d put this in the realm of how fail D3 was and how hard it must have been to ruin such a great franchise.

I was curious when an item says 2% critical damage is that a flat +2% to the 150% base critical damage or is it a different number just being rounded up at the tool tip to an integer ?

If it is flat would not boots gloves and shoulders always be best for a crit damage % item where as other slots be worse since they give you less stats point per point?

Thank you for your help in advance!

Thanks to those that were able to discuss things in any way without digressing on a condescending tangent. I didn’t realize that 90% of the GW forum community was consultants on exactly what MMOs need to thrive, the main ingredient: a huge dose of complaining and over reaching whining, anything else is not allowed. I would go so far as to blame this mentality on the dumbing down and decay of the MMO genre which started basically when WoW opened the Genre up to many people that had never played it before.

What do you want me to suggest exactly? I like their vision I have no qualms with the polish and quality of their release product and I’m looking forward to what will come next, the sky is the limit. The bots, lack of content, bugs, pvp inbalance, difficulty to make money, difficulty to get a precursor, gear not being vertical, (someone in this thread said they “hate” that WvW ends on Sunday? ;p ) dungeon bosses have to much HP (really?) ,are non issues and are not close to being broken to warrant so much negativity, it’s actually refreshingly polished for anything that has been released in a long long time. If you have a problem with this game as an initial launch product you will never enjoy anything released in the MMO genre forever, as even the most subscribed and acclaimed MMOs today I’d say are at a much lower level of polish and quality then GW2 was for it’s first day on the shelves.

The dungeons do have lots of mechanics, the lowest level ones are pretty light but the higher level one’s are as complicated and more demanding then most MMO encounters in any game. To the person that claims one person has to tank, this isn’t the case in any way whatsoever and i can say you haven’t done many dungeons , the same goes for claims that there are no mechanics. A few fights are tank and spank but lots are not. I can list 10 at least right now on par with the complexity and challenge of wow heroic raids which is well on it’s way to only being playable by sub 5% of the MMO playerbase. Anything more complicated with mechanics and a much bigger majority would start getting very upset.

Sorry if my title offended some, surely it’s a review which is opinion and you can spare having to come and troll me? I would possibly rethink the title if I could go back in time.

Thanks for the replies that were not borg internet trend jargon. I see the benefit of criticism but I think that belongs in a suggestion format and not a review. Most of the reviews did seem so foreign I couldn’t relate in the slightest bit to them. To me it seems like slander and hurtful to what is most likely the most exciting MMO in the last five years. Especially taking into account how vast and polished it is at it’s initial release. Support can lead to improvements along with criticism I believe neither extreme is the best.

I been 80 a while have a big to do list still, between a few different alts. Getting a lot more sPvP and WvW in. Farming some different sets of gear for transmute or for stats, possibly letting my gold total get close to a precursor ( seems unlikely with the inflation going on but not to worried about it). 2 Months around today I think and still got a lot of stuff on my list. I understand that others experience may vary in terms of entertainment longevity, I’m into PvE, PvP, I’m a completionist, I’m into alts, I got a lot of internet friends to roll with for fun, I know this isn’t the case for everyone and mileage would be a lot lower.

Fiddlestyx.9714:

See what I did there?

wow did you learn to speak like that on the internet?

page 2:

PvP
WvWvW is an interesting pvp experience with a focus on siege and big picture strategy. I’m not in an established guild so I have to run around with random squads that I find. I do find it hard to participate in a more large scale way and that everything is outside of my control, I think that’s my own fault however due to personal initiative, it seems like something that could really develop as the player base makes friends and creates social networks. I think lowbies scaled up are a little too squishy though and it would be more fun if they scaled better so it could be a nice leveling alternative without feeling like to big a leech on your team.

sPvP is perfect, matches are fast, and not demoralizing. Removing the gear grind changes the focus and puts it on purely playing and practicing and enjoying. Knowing I’m always on equal footing in terms of gear is a nice change, and if I feel underpowered on a class having the ability to roll a level 1 and pvp on it with equal footing helps learn the other classes and see why something that seemed overpowered was generally just my lack of knowledge of the class.

In terms of the common complaints I’ve seen:

Outside of the first week I’ve experienced 0 issue with the trading post. I’ve encountered a handful of broken skill points and events which have all been fixed by a restart the next time I visited them (generally in a few days). I’ve encountered a few bot trains and I use to recieve gold seller spam (1~ a day) but that stopped a little over a week ago. Gear for aesthetic and not for stats worried me at first, but I’ve come to enjoy it. I feel it’s a huge stress relief and it shifts my mentality just to having fun with friends and makes the game less of a chore and more of an escape.

The one and ONLY problem that has ever made me worry is that some of the later zones feel very underpopulated and certain events are more fun with an appropriate amount of people.

My Bio:

I am in no way a fanboy, I rarely post and have no allegiance to any company product or franchise outside of if I enjoy playing their product.

I played online D1 D2 UO AO FFXI WOW VINDICTUS AOC Warhammer (short time) rift (short) FFXIV D3. Highlights of my gaming career would be D2, FFXI sky <> sea era. WOW (vanilla > ulduar). And Anarchy Online pre expansion (although i did enjoy Shadowlands.) I’m a competitive gamer, far from casual. I’ve achieved almost all server first raiding achievement and gladiator and over 200k honorable kills in wow, I’m the world first Final Fantasy 11 Blue Mage 75 and a proud holder of the w. abj legs Matts hat and 1 Kraken Club farmed. I’m 29, live in my apartment, hold a degree from RISD, I’m the graphic/web designer for a gallery. I have a hot naughty girlfriend, and a high metabolism.

Hey, I check in here every few days, I post rarely on game forums.

With all the bad reviews and complaints I see here I can’t even believe we are playing the same game. GW2 has been the only MMO by a long shot worth mentioning in the last 5 years. It is amazing, unique and fresh, has a range of content from faceroll to very technically challenging, beautiful visuals and completely free of a monthly sub.

I’ve played since beta, leveled 2 classes to 80, and have various alts. One I leveled primarily by myself (and some wow guildies sometimes) and had to reroll a couple times for appearance reasons the other I leveled with my GF. Solo was fun and fluid but team play was a lot more fun and my experience wasn’t hindered. The ability to meet up regardless of level difference was incredible and made playing with my people easy.

Gameplay
The game play follows modern mmo philosophy of not a lot of moves equipable at once (I’m usually frustrated with the dumbing down of the MMO and action rpg genre.). Respecing partially is easy and can be done on the fly to give flexibility and lets knowledge and experience of certain fights empower you. GW2 handles this system very well. Combat is fun and active. The classes handle remarkably different. Each class is very flexible and certain fights demand that flexibility on the fly or in your rotation.

The World
The world is beautiful with amazing landmarks and structures. There are unique and intricate cave systems tunnels bridges and buildings, colossal structures amazing mountain and ruined city sky lines. The detail is truly amazing for an MMO. The cities are also the most visually impressive of any MMO I’ve played. The characters and animations are much more tolerable especially on the females then any other MMO I’ve played to date also.

There’s enough map to explore that it would take 3+ characters just from leveling to experience them all. You can farm in any zone for a change of scenery that you’re in the mood for. Most farm in Orr and for an end game zone it feels more end game then most MMOs have the balls to do. It’s tight packed with monsters very stressful and intense especially when first starting there. It’s visually amazing in a bleak and depressing apocalyptic kind of way. It’s more effective farming to stand at a few events all day but not by much, it does get repetitive but other zones are close to equally farmable and being mobile doesn’t slow your farm down to much.

Dungeons
I’ve completed all explorable dungeon paths minus one wing of Arah. The wings have enough variety that I feel like they can legit boast at least 25 unique 30 minute – 1+ hour dungeon experiences (there’s 34+ I know but considering the overlap I’ve come up with the number 25). Some of the fights are forgiving and tank and spank and others are very exciting technical and demanding on par with the more difficult heroic fights of wow, and can be a rush to complete correctly. (The ability to res people mid fight and run back from the waypoint makes them all very forgiving but it terms of perfection in player execution they can be immense challenges.)

/page1

I wanted to start saying I love every single thing about this game I’ve encountered so far and I’m having a blast! I do see this thread as addressing the only noticeable issue I’ve had. At launch and for weeks the game was very exciting and busy. Events made sense and were accessible. Fighting along side other players happened frequently and it was fun. I would much prefer to wait on overflow for a bit to get into a packed zone then have every zone be empty and most of the content unachievable.

On Blackgate which is the only US server listed as FULL atm 9:30AM (Monday Morning) est starting from around 10pm last night I worked on Iron Marches and Fireheart Rise. Almost every event and some skill points were unbeatable solo, I encountered 2 other players the entire night, and not a single word in map chat the entire night even after I tried to start a dialogue. A fair share of the few events that were possible felt very clumsy and I had to preform elite tactics such as jumping into the water and swimming back and forth until my heal came off cooldown praying the enemies would not reset, while dodging packs of 15 hyenas running around the map.

I dropped a few hits on some of the events in Fireheart to see if and when the credit would eventually go out (to see if they were being finished at all), after around 5 hours in the zone none of the 4-5 events that I fought in ever completed

Agree, it needs to be implemented. Yes FFXIV’s system was perfect for this, and it seems to make perfect sense in a game with a cash shop as great vanity items that will sell, Vindictus did this too and it seemed very popular. If you “preview” dye colors while naked it it does dye you undergarments but only in the preview dressing room, but still ;p the code in some sense is there or must be there for this to work.