Warrior should be fine for skips. I typically have
- greatsword – skill 3 and skill 5 help if you turn off auto-targeting on attacks
- run speed increase when holding melee weapons
- some stun breaks, stability, cleanse, swiftness from balanced stance, shake it off, etc
You can get dogged march and a reactive balanced stance from the toughness traits if you need them. If you’re really struggling then perhaps you’re not dodging/evading at the right time, maybe not relying enough on sound instead visuals. Perhaps you’re not selecting the right choice of stability/cleanse/stun break for your skips.
“It would be a great way to give lore to players and let them learn about a zone and it’s history.”
GW2 zones are not about history and the lineage of elves and dwarves. The zones and events show the current game world as it is today. GW2 doesn’t assume that you know that skritt are stealing from harpies and krait are taking quaggan slaves so it shows it to you in the events. You do get some history but only when it really does meet the current day GW2, such as the Charr fighting off the ascalonian ghosts.
Events and hearts could show the history just as much as the “collect 10 helmets from undead warriors who fought a battle here 800 years ago” quests. The game designers chose to showcase the current world instead. If you stop and talk to the NPCs you can get lore but it needs searching out.
“What about a well thought story with an intended disturbed delivery. The first living story showed a lot disconnected places, but they seem to provide to the whole plot.”
Not really. I’m guessing that the Dead End investigation explained the season 1 plot and that’s all the explanation we’re going to get (for anything that isn’t going to be in season 2). Unfortunately there were massive gaps. More gap than plot. A lot of it was implausible even when the ‘evidence’ was presented. If you were to start asking “why didn’t that happen?” I’m afraid you’d never be able to stop.
I’d suggest taking your thief past fractal 30 and see how you fare. It’s easier to get groups with a heavy class and it’s more forgiving as a heavy class, but thieves can do ok. The point where you really need to make a commitment to a class is fractal 40+ since you’ll have to put some effort into ascended crafting, possibly a lot of effort into ascended crafting, to get AR 55. If you’re having problems with a thief getting to fractal 39 then it’s time to try out a heavy.
Ok this thread has come up again. It always seems to come back but …
- Block/parry on an initiative skill is a bad idea. The underwater block is sort of broken.
- Most ‘real’ world fighters use off hand long daggers/short swords. GW2 swords are massive. The longer the lever the more power you need when parrying etc. Thrusting is easier with two weapons than swinging in two big arcs, so that means a dagger.
- The body mechanics for off hand swords need muscle and momentum. They would look wrong, REALLY wrong, on a nimble, balanced thief. You’d know it if you saw it.
- The dagger/sword combination is nonsense anyway with the big weapon in the off hand.
I know people who like off hand swords won’t let reason get in the way. They won’t play a warrior who has these skills either, which is really what you should do if you want a muscled weapon swinging machine. I’d really like sword+open hand to be a proper thief weapon pairing, with off-hand stats coming from somewhere. The open hand could offer up some stealing and deception skills and would feel more thief-like than remorselessly chopping people up with swinging swords.
“So, WildStar from soup to nuts is catering to the most intense, hardcore, high skill gamer — that’s it’s own niche.”
So why is it’s advertising targeted at 8 year olds?
“The ORIGINAL pirate council was a long while ago… I think of the current lionguard/council as less pirates and more simply captains and leaders.”
No they do still seem to talk like they want to be pirates. Even Kiel and Gnashblade acted like pirates with their own crews when it came to the election events. Mai Trin thought she could get onto the Captains Council as a pirate captain.
It is also possible that the uncategorized fractal has a stronger connection to Dessa’s lab than it does to a known asura city. We still don’t know how Dessa’s lab came to be in the mists and the uncategorized fractal could have come the same way. We don’t know if the raving asura is aware that he is in a fractal or not.
The problem with only a monthly release is that people lose interest in the story. Who reads a book, finds an interesting chapter, then puts it down for a month? There will be more continuity by sticking to an update schedule with a month long main event and a story update in the second fortnight. That’s broadly what they’ve been delivering so far.
There are so many gaps in the living story that there’s no point speculating on anything that isn’t there. All we can do is work with what is there, and in this case there is the explanation from the Dead End. That’s all we are ever likely to have.
Pristine Fractal Relics are essentially another broken currency now. They have been left in the game just accumulating for too long . As soon as anything can be bought with pristine relics either (a) old players will be able to buy everything instantly or (b) new players will be unable to meet the high prices. There is very little in between. This probably limits their use to conversions or convenience, and the conversion I’d suggest would be : Dropped fractal skin + pristine relics for fractal skin of your choice.
It is worth pointing out that pristine relics do fulfill their original purpose still. After ten runs you can get an ascended ring of your choice instead of relying on drops. That’s their purpose. Of course this seems worthless as soon as you progress onto infused jewelry.
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The whole idea of a pirate council running a free trade town was a bit silly anyway so I don’t think you can use scientific logic to explain what goes next. It’s not very pirate like to look after refugees and rebuild cities from scratch but lets ignore that and assume that someone will rebuild this prime port location and the pirates will do it.
In terms of game design we’ll still see the personal story played out there in the same way as before. This means the Pact will not be running the city where every character goes and, um, founds the Pact. Remember that all of China will be founding the Pact in Lion’s Arch soon. There will still be the asura gates to the other cities. The pirates will put their boat houses back on the hills where they belong. The old jumping puzzles will still be there and there might be something new in Scarlet’s wreckage . I’m guessing a lot of the merchants will change and there will be new characters and new politics, with story lines coming from those.
New professions are not as good as giving new abilities to old professions. In other words, if you want a shadowknight then why not let warriors pack some traits and abilities that give them a shadowknight type feel. Nobody has to create a new character at level 1. Everyone with a warrior, which seems to be everyone in the game, is happy about their new warrior skills. Anyone who wants to feel like a shadowknight can do it.
Also, class balancing in games with many classes is a pain in the neck. In most MMOs there was one preferred tank class, one preferred healer, and a couple of preferred dps. All the other classes were mostly redundant and if the game had 12 classes then that was a lot of redundancy.
GW2 works on different levels to some older MMOs. First of all, you don’t have time to type stuff in combat, or at least I don’t. If I try I miss a dodge and die. Even if you type stuff out of combat the group will start skipping mobs before you’ve finished. In the older MMOs it wasn’t a problem to type since the game play was simpler so people chatted a lot more.
The game is also designed for open access so people co-operate and do stuff easily. They can do it so easily they don’t actually need to chat so they don’t chat. Is that a problem? Does the game have to be made less open just so people have to chat together and organize before they do anything?
The Jungle Wurm in Caledon Forest and the Avatars of Blight are likely to be dragon
minions. I seem to remember an NPC saying that they came from a malign force that was much worse than the Nightmare Court, and the most obvious malign force with that power would be an Elder Dragon.
Introduce a subscription and I stop playing. I won’t be the only one. I don’t like other people deciding that I want a better product by paying for it.
To the OP : You seem to be just saying that something is bad (because you personally aren’t happy) and must change without saying how anything new will work. This is always going to get you into an argument on a forum. What you want this healing build to do is seemingly heal bad players who haven’t the skill to defend themselves, while applying as much dps as you like. This isn’t going to be good game play. It isn’t going to vary with the content. It’s just a crutch for bad players.
You have not come to grips with the group healing in GW2 which necessarily works differently from the single target healing of other MMOs. A group heal for 2000 on five players is 10000 healing, a big number, but it will not save a specific player from going down. Scaling the healing upwards to be 5000 each or 8000 each is just going to get silly. Targeting players for direct heals is not going to happen.
There is an suggestion that healing does not scale at all in more difficult content, whilst protection and aegis type skills will protect more as mobs hit harder. If you want to make a suggestion how healing could scale upwards with content difficulty then people might be willing to listen.
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The events generally seem to be running as well as they have ever done. There needs to be a solution for the contested state of waypoints/events on megaservers but other than that it seems to be business as usual.
Yes they should rework the Zaitan fight before China release but I’m guessing it is more technically complex than it looks. The mix of airships, guns, and flying dragons was too ambitious.
Also, do players want the developers to spend time building new living story content that’s fun for everyone, or to spend time fixing Zaitan for someone who repeats the personal story?
All MMOs lack end game content. Even the good ones eventually run out of stuff you can do. GW2 doesn’t enforce a gear treadmill, and doesn’t restrict access to content, so you have to make your own goals and that can be a problem for some players.
When you’re saying that healing doesn’t work, what problem are you looking at?
1) Good play means you don’t need healing because boons, conditions, and dodges will negate damage.
2) There is no targeted healing, only area/group healing. A single player cannot be kept alive by a single other player even though the total group healing is large.
If you change #1 then you actually make the game less skilful. If you change #2 then you change the design (targeted heals) or you make the healing numbers massive across the group. Neither is going to happen.
“I guess if Arena would share your point of view, they would made from the very start personal node locations for every single character – its not hard, they would be just like personal story or hearts markers. But they didn’t! We could do this before, share maps with a friends and so on, and I really doubt ANet is gonna change their point of view on this after 1,5 years.”
My argument would be that they didn’t really have a point of view about alts mining maps, and probably still don’t. If it happens then it is a feature. If is doesn’t happen then it is not a feature. To make it really convenient they could just let players press one F button in their home instance to gather all their materials for the day, but where’s the fun in that? Walking repeatedly to known destinations and pressing F for each one must be much more fun surely?
Gathering is about exploring a map and finding nodes. By logging a second character into the same map you were taking a minor short cut and not exploring a new map. Players always seem annoyed when advantages/short cuts from having a second character are removed but there is often no good game reason why these advantages should exist (or not).
There’s also a point of view, that the OP presumably doesn’t share, that there isn’t much fun from following map of ore just to press the F key in the right places, then repeating the operation on another character. It does seem like personal time is being invested purely for virtual reward.
The dungeons are hard without tactics. Really hard. They do eat up players who have experience only of other MMOs, who struggle to work it out one encounter at a time. You need different skills in dungeons compared to the open world.
So why do people say the dungeons are easy? It’s because they are using common knowledge tactics that are tried and tested over millions of runs and they do work. Lots of players know the tactics but don’t know why they work and can’t explain them to anyone else. The way to pick up common knowledge tactics is to see them in action and learn them as you go.
Take one of them with you in a high dps group and see if they have a revelation.
This is a badly implemented grindy system. Players have to do the maths (rather than playing the game) to sort out a gear check problem. If you don’t have the gear you can’t do the content. The maths offers players bad choices between grinding more resources, cheap solutions (7s + 8s) that will be unrecoverable if you need better later, and loss of capability (stat infusions vs agony infusions). With the agony levels forming a system, the system gives you AR 55 as the maximum benefit for cost. You don’t find out the AR levels by playing, you have to come to the web to find out.
As others have said, stick to level 29-30 or stick to 49. Only go for 50 if you have all the resources at your disposal already.
Since the patch I’ve generally found the dailies more reasonable and they generally get completed by doing a dungeon and some events in Cursed Shore. I’m not missing many of the really pointless dailies such as killing 20 underwater ambient creatures.
I’m guessing the dailies only seem hard if you are trying to grind them out every day. If you don’t mind missing an odd one then they don’t seem so bad.
GW2 isn’t necessarily that good, but it does make other MMOs look bad.
I hope you can still score for last seasons card with “fractal level reset”.
" from what I’ve read they each provide their own specific stats"
Not important at all. Exotic armor is not difficult to get once you are level 80. You will be using the stats from that exotic armor. You can use transmutation charges to make that exotic armor look like any skin you’ve unlocked, including armor from your Order.
I’m guessing that the old crit damage was only based on the attacker’s crit damage stat. I’m guessing that ferocity is modified the relative levels of the attacker and the defender, then converted into the critical damage bonus. The result would be bigger crits against lower level targets and lower crits against higher level targets.
The mystic forge is a gamble. When you gamble you should be prepared to lose everything and not care. Any logic that concerns winning back the lost money, or making the lost money worthwhile, is false. The lost money is gone. You can only make more gambles or decide not to gamble again.
I expect the OP is angry because a lot of time spent chasing a virtual reward in a computer turned out to be worthless. That is only result the ever happens though, and the OP found it out sooner rather than later.
They really ought to make these major events fully reset if they’re not activated after 24 hours. The most likely cause is always going to be a bug. GW2 doesn’t have support staff to manually reset the events.
“Asking people to “save up 1000G” is insane.”
The price is only 1000 gold because some people will pay 1000 gold. You are not competing against the trading post to buy any item. You are competing against what other players will pay. One implication is that any casual player who wants to buy an item after a moderate time is probably competing against many hardcore players who want to buy the item after investing an awful lot of time. Is it insane to spend a lot of time farming virtual coin for virtual rewards? Ask yourself that before you spend your time doing it.
Delete them. Forget about them. Once you do that the game works fine. There are no problems with a high value commodity being worthless to some people. It’s only a problem if people decide to see it as a problem.
Having said that, bloodstone dust is still in such abundant supply, even after one fix to the drop rate, that it’s an embarrassment to the game economy. It should be removed entirely since the dragonite and empyreal are providing the necessary time and gold sinks already.
Dragonite isn’t better or worse now. It’s just different. I found it particularly bad before the last update as I don’t like outside software telling me how to play. I’d go to Orr, there was nobody about and there was no point waiting around. Now I can go to Orr, get the daily events done, and a temple will probably start while I’m there. The Karka Queen is popular now on Southsun too. I’m getting the dragonite as I’m playing, which is presumably how it is meant to work.
Have you forgotten what PvE and PvP mean? Player vs Environment is not Plaver vs Player and trying the make Player vs Environment vs Player vs Environment isn’t going to catch on.
If you really want a PvE test of player insight, organization, gear, builds, etc. then you are really looking at the raiding provided by other games. These require large amounts of time effort to succeed and Anet don’t want to necessitate that time commitment from its players. Although the OP wants high skill to predominate, any contest would ultimately be test of a time commitment, organization, and maybe gear grind.
Everyone is entitled to the best item in the game. That’s what makes them special.
New skill and traits are being slowly introduced that can be bought with various currencies. I expect that will continue slowly. Naming them as assassin skills doesn’t make them any better.
There could be a big PvE solo quest to get the assassin package but that could eventually be seen as a chore rather than a bonus. It won’t suit WvW and SPvP players. It would mean that the developers are creating a lot of content that will only be seen by some of the players of each class. They prefer the majority of their players to have open access to all new content.
You can decide that ascended armor isn’t worth the grind. It is there to combat agony resistance in high level fractals. You can cruise through all other PvE content without it.
Exotic armor itself is pretty cheap in the big scheme of things. The runes and cosmetics can be much more expensive and require more consideration. Exotic armor from karma vendors cannot be salvaged so those are a bad place to put expensive runes.
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Players will only ever play about 8 of the 25 dungeons paths as repeatable content. The rest will be too slow, not rewarding enough, etc, even if they are good paths. TA aetherblade is a decent dungeon but it is not run because it is longer than the others with fewer skips. Any new dungeons would also have fewer skips, also be long, and also be ignored. The game isn’t any better if players run 8 of 28 available dungeon paths.
The living story is the place to introduce new dungeons with some means to revisit them later. Players don’t need another way to get exotic armor barter tokens. If new dungeons come with unique new rewards then they will have a purpose and they would be a good update.
The forgotten ritual might explain it, but then a character who was only possible after the ritual was discovered would be able to go into a dungeon path and discover it.
There’s an attitude amongst many players, not the hardcore MMO players usually, that the game is there to be experienced. Challenges are there to be faced. Some sort of skill and capability brings success and fun. This is quite different from an attitude that believes the game is there for virtual gold and the challenge and experience is boring. Selling dungeons relies on the second attitude and it offends people with the first attitude. The natural question is why people would spend their real life time buying a path for virtual gain and virtual rewards if they don’t actually enjoy playing the game themselves.
“At least now that people know that there’s a safe spot by the old JP flower people wiping in the first half is much more rare.”
A safe spot behind those dangerous puppies that could be cleared very quickly and easily if anyone gave it a second thought.
If you’re an artificer then you don’t want rifle stocks and armor plates from salvage. It isn’t as useful as the ore and wood that you get now. It would just be clumsy design for people to salvage their salvage results to get what they really want.
In most places where you could sensibly use pistol/pistol there’s usually a better alternative. The interrupt on skill #4 can be useful, maybe for the dredge fractal final boss.
I think that players can manage this problem themselves in game. It’s not an insurmountable problem.
Making players wear vitality seems pointless. It will just slow down runs. If you still expect the best players to use full dps then surely aren’t most players with optimum builds and trusted tactics already at that level?
There are 4 damage stats and one of those, condition damage is generally ruled out by PvE condition caps. So that’s the first thing that has to change. If some weapon skills were then changed to give conditions on crits rather than extra direct damage, maybe precision/condition would become more interesting. The hybrid damage/condition weapons are unpopular at the moment as hybrid builds don’t exist.
I’ve suggested this before and it still makes sense now. It shouldn’t have to wait for any other water combat changes as it seems stunningly simple.