There are some grinds in GW2 but generally you can see what’s coming and easily avoid it if you want to. Some cosmetics are bad grinds but they are just cosmetics that nobody actually needs. Achievements are only as important as you choose to make them. Fractals require grind but anyone can stop grinding upwards at any time their patience is exhausted.
I’m guessing there is a tagging limit. I’m pretty sure I’ve been at events where I’ve done sizable damage to the boss, not got the champion loot, but have got gold event completion for hitting only that boss. These were big zerg events.
Do you mean story mode?
Players always used to complain that nothing ever changed, the world was at war but nobody died, and so on. Nothing ever changed because it would louse up the personal story of course. Nonetheless, players kept complaining and kept pressing for the world to change and now you have it, in your personal story. You can’t blame Anet for not wanting to rewrite, recode, and retest the personal story just to put in a near identical personal story that would be thrown away again after a month.
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I wouldn’t be surprised if the Marionette came back with some proper story around it in a future living story section. Perhaps Tiami will reverse engineer it and make a weapon to fight the dragon. It’s a typical plot hole that nobody wants it at the moment, not even the grawl and skritt.
I think we used to be able to view/set our utilities for underwater combat while on land, and visa versa. It would be useful to have this back. It would also be useful to have a separate set of traits for underwater combat and again be able to set these from land.
Prevent ambient creatures from being in combat with a player after a fear, blind, freeze, or any other effect.
Prevent neutral creatures from putting a player into combat when the creature is not in combat and they also don’t have the player as a target (as the player was in stealth, etc).
Give a better on screen indication that a player is in combat. At the moment we know we are in combat since we can’t see the mini triangle that let us change skills, but that’s the tail wagging the dog.
Instead of giving one players one option to cover talk, interact, pick up, revive, etc, give players two different options. These can be above each other on the screen and have different keyboard shortcuts. Alternatively, give players keyboard shortcuts that only revive, only talk, only interact with objects, etc.
The description of the action key should to be improved to name the target. Instead of just ‘revive’ it should be ‘revive Lionguard Soldier’.
When equipping a two handed weapon, put the former main hand weapon into the bag slot of the two handed weapon, and put the former off hand weapon into the same bag. Whatever sort of bag the players are using to order their weapons, this makes the best effort at keeping the weapons together.
Anything could be true for the origins of the elder dragons. There is still very little known about the elder dragons at the end of the personal story. It’s quite possible that the dragons are trying to hide their history as it would diminish their god-like status. We even see Zaitan trying to destroy some dwarven records in the personal story.
“To me personally I think there needs to be more randomness in these events. They are way too linear in their current formulaic layout.”
In terms of time, a random time for each event isn’t necessarily good. It only works if players are in the zone doing stuff and they can join events as they happen. Waiting for an event just because it has a random time is bad game play.
I think you are right in describing the linear event chains. Some of them are just one directional with stage 1-2-3-win with potential failure at each stage. Even the more complex chains are just two directions, forwards or backwards along states 1-2-3-4. However I don’t think the problems you mentioned are the ones that need solving.
“Yes, you can be successful in defeating the centaurs for the millionth of time, but they should learn as well. "
You seem to be assuming that the same players are there each time. They shouldn’t be. They should be moving through the zone or to different zones rather than playing an event through more than twice, say. There’s no point freshening up an event for players who are seeing it for the first time. There’s no point changing the difficulty and rewards for players who have already left. There’s no point punishing new players for events failed by people who have since logged off.
Cursed Shore is the main repeatable end game event zone and it would be interesting to have some new random events coming through. However as soon as you do something like add an extra champion to a risen invasion if a waypoint is contested, players will just rig the system and make sure it is always contested. Simpler design can avoid those complications.
Condition damage in PvP is strong, even with players cleansing conditions often. That suggests that condition damage itself isn’t weak. If condition damage was applied fully against PvE mobs that do not cleanse then it would probably be too strong. The limit of condition stacking on PvE mobs seems unfit for purpose as it does not scale with the number of players, does not scale at all. There needs to be something to balance the fact that PvE mobs don’t cleanse but it needs to be better than the existing condition limits.
These megaservers have left me a bit confused. Today I played for a while on my ranger, collecting and events in Cursed Shore, then logged to my elementalist to get the Gates of Arah trait. The elementalist went into a different megaserver, presumably, and the event for the trait was not active. Not good. I did notice some new ori nodes so I mined those and logged back to the ranger.
The ranger logged into the same megaserver I was just in with the elementalist (same players standing afk) and I could immediately see one of those new ori nodes again. I went to look for the rest, that I hadn’t mined before with the ranger, and they weren’t there. How did that happen?
“I’m asking why there isn’t enough in a zone to get you through the appropriate range in the zone. "
Most people here on the forum are not giving you a satisfactory answer since they haven’t come across the problem. Generally by doing the personal story and completing the zones the story goes through, you would finish above zone level. So they are not advising you to do anything different from what they have done themselves. You are in fact claiming that there is big problem of experience within the game, except that it isn’t a problem for anyone else.
To get more xp you can:
- Do dungeons
- Do low level fractals
- Do personal story
- Do living story (when it returns)
- Adventure in more zones, there are about 3 zones at every level range
- Use xp boosters and xp food
- Collect resources
- Craft
- Explore cities
- Explore WvW, and PvP maps
- Do dailies
- Do events
- Do activities
- Complete jumping puzzles
- Follow the living story
- Do guild missions
- Play WvW
That’s not by any means an exhaustive list since achievements and other stuff probably give xp too. There’s no point claiming there is nothing to do in game to get xp.
For working your way upwards you probably want 1 guardian, 1 warrior, plus 3 from second guardian, second warrior, thief, mesmer, elementalist.
Zerging isn’t actively encouraged. There is just nothing to stop it.
Other games with open access, large scaling events also have zergs. GW2 has open world events as a feature so it should really find some solution to scaling and zergs.
If you want to know what happens to content that forces people to fight all the trash mobs then you only need to look at the Aetherblade path in Twilight Arbor. It’s a perfectly good dungeon path but it is long. Therefore almost nobody does it. It is not popular.
The newer dungeons do seem to prevent skipping. That design is likely to continue in new releases. That’s fine for the living story temporary dungeons. If any permanent dungeons are added then they will be as unpopular as TA Atherblade if they also take three times as long as the popular skipable dungeons.
“No failure should get you more than a success, yet GW2 encourages that in many events. People are getting heat for completing stuff all over the place. And no, nerfing champs and events even further is not the answer – this whole madness is actually a result of the horrid reward system in the first place.”
I think you need to be even more specific in your complaint. Your original post isn’t going to get noticed if it is seen as “It’s all rubbish so fix it all, now!” I think a lot of your ire surrounds loot changes in the past that were uneven and unbalancing. These problems were not there in the first place! Making more knee jerk changes now are going to cause even more problems. Let’s be specific:
- Players complained that they didn’t get karma for a wide range of activities. It was then given away (in bottles) for all activities and players amassed millions of karma. People complain that gold is too important and that is partly due to karma getting broken as a currency.
- Players complained that champions had poor loot so purses were added to champions. Because champions were already in the game world with no balance for this type of loot, rewards were immediately imbalanced. Raid groups killed unscaled group mobs (champions) rapidly for loot. The players who shouted abuse at each other for killing champion mobs were always outside the design intent. It’s much better for the game to rebalance with players returning to an Orrian event/champion train, with scaling, in end game war zones.
- Players complained that world bosses gave no real loot so rares were added to world boss events. This meant that players watched for event times and went from one event to the next in sequence and killed them with auto-shot. This wasn’t good gaming but players always seem happy with bad gaming and good loot.
- Players complained about overflow problems so megaservers were introduced to equalize gameplay and add more population to zones. This meant event times were standardized and new problems are arising all the time.
Anyway, I’m sure you’re getting the theme here. The more that GW2 drifts away from the original design the more complications and problems are introduced. The rewards system has been broken, is broken, will still be broken, but just asking for a blanket rewrite with no offered solutions isn’t going to get us anywhere. The basic reward principle, that anyone who participates gets a full reward, still holds true and it is players who push this to the limits and then complain when other players cause them problems.
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Either add it automatically or give a right click option to do it all from that menu.
Elite groups who have looked for optimum classes have their own ideas about the best classes to suit their narrow requirements. For PUGs it’s pretty obvious that heavies are the best. They can miss a dodge and live, or can get unlucky and live. Lots of buffs. PuG tactics were designed by heavies for heavies. Warriors are simple to play and bring dps. Other classes need skilled play to match them.
I agree that the community is generally intolerant when it comes to dungeon runs. However, the speed running players are looking for a 15 minute run compared to a 150 minute run. That’s the genuine difference you can get between experienced players and inexperienced players in your group. From one perspective that’s good, as dungeons are hard for beginners and easy for experts, but it does push speed groups towards experienced players.
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This is entirely as intended and I’ll explain why, assuming that you’re talking about channeled skills.
A channeled skill needs to have a valid target when it is started and then deals damage at time intervals for the duration of the skill. This is immediately weaker than instant skills that have the same targeting requirement but deal all damage instantly. Moreover, the channel skill can be interrupted at any time, the user often needs to be static, and can’t use other attacks, change weapons, or get auto-attacks during the channel. That’s all much weaker than an instant skill that can do damage on the run, without interrupts, without delay and leaves the user free to do anything else afterwards. If you want to defend against a channeled skill then don’t use stealth, blind, aegis, or a short evade as these are not full counters. Use an interrupt (daze, knockdown, fear, stun), series of side dodges, or a big movement skill to exit range.
Stealth isn’t a counter to everything, any more than block, blind or an interrupt. Some skills need different counters to others. Use interrupts to counter a channeled skill.
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I use the middle mouse button (mouse wheel) for dodge and that works nicely.
“Well I read about Berserker gear and lots of people said why it is the best gear for dungeons and I couldn’t disagree with them .”
Let’s correct your first statement. People can do dungeons in any armor and some stats may suit their play style better than others. Beserker is not best for anyone who can’t dodge, or even someone who can dodge in a group without tactics. Giving extra benefits to some stats is nice and will help people who want to a challenge finding their own way through dungeons, but it does nothing for speed runners. The speed runners will still use the highest dps gear regardless.
In general this game is well designed for shared rewards, but at any time the design falls short there are always players around who will make things miserable for everyone else. Normally, I’d say that if anyone sees an open world event they are entitled to start and finish it. Nobody (else) owns the event. However in this case the trait award seems badly designed and is a bug waiting to be fixed. Players should show courtesy to other players who want the trait and let the defense event fail. As soon as players work against each other and taunt each other they show the attitude of griefing even if they are technical not griefing.
In principle the OP is right. There are a number of problems here, one of which is the use of armor as the key item for most utilities when the armor is cheap and the runes and cosmetics are expensive. The problem that prevents the salvage of karma bought items is probably the massive karma pools that were built up when it was given away like confetti. It would be too generous a windfall if that could all be converted immediately to salvageable exotics and runes. Essentially karma items are still restricted because karma became a broken currency.
Land combat is essentially 2D with some 3D graphics for missiles. This allows for ground targeting in 2D. Underwater combat is fully 3D and all the ground targeted skills are missing as they make no sense.
There is a lot of other technical problems with water combat that also don’t have easy solutions so don’t expect a quick fix.
GW2 events tend to show the current state of the game and do not dwell too much on lore and history. I don’t think this is wrong, it’s just a different approach from games that give you endless fantasy history about every elf and dwarf that ever lived. With that in mind we get events about the skritt stealing from the asura, ogres finding pets, krait taking slaves, and so on. This gives GW2 an opportunity to add modern history through the Living Story.
Before the Karka Queen entered the recent rotation she wasn’t going down that easily. People didn’t know tactics. It usually required a guild to do the pre-events but they sometimes needed to call for some extra bodies from Lion’s Arch too. Even then she was only going down in the last minute. Lots of people don’t like karka at all.
As soon as everyone knows the eggs and the dodges, and where the adds come from, and not to run through Steampipe, it does look a lot easier yes.
“This would not be such a hot topic for me if players did not get personally offended by me wanting to actually play the game and kill a few enemies. Is there any solution for this?”
Playing the game is completing the mission. That’s what the other players want to do and they don’t want to kill things that are not required for the mission. I think your solution is to accept this or find like minded players.
Rather than blame other players, you can fairly blame the designers. Skipping some enemies could be good design but we all know that skipping everything is a bit ridiculous. The new living story dungeons have been better so we can expect any new dungeons to be better as well. Reworking the old dungeons, as with the AC revamp, seems a little pointless.
It might just be a me thing. I don’t care that your game experience is bad. I am not going to waste my time to improve it. If other people make the game good for me then I am happy. That is because it is all about me. I write the rules and everyone must follow my rules or I will kick you. I suggest you write your own rules but I’d never follow anyone else’s rules as that’s for losers. It’s your fault that I don’t think you’re good enough to spend time with me. Bye.
OK. Let’s restart. Bad runs take ten times as long as good runs so players like experienced fast running groups. Perfectly reasonable. Managing your time in game is very reasonable. Creating an elite that dismisses the rest of the player base isn’t so reasonable. Find some balance between helping yourself and helping fellow players ( and not just fellow speed runners).
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Why don’t you do something revolutionary and slot the skills you need for the upcoming fight? If you were always running with the same elite all the time in PvE you were underperforming.
People talk on these forums about specific builds with specific traits and skills because they play SPvP where you cannot change skills.
The designers would do better spending their time to make new content with fresh challenges. That has to be better than seeing the same old dungeons with the same old mobs but with more health and something extra to dodge. Despite all the forum talk, dungeons are not in such a bad place. Yes, some people find it so easy that they can solo the dungeon, but MMO designers can never keep up with those players anyway so there’s no need for them to try.
The economy is failing you because others players are willing to spend gold more for legendary weapons than you are. These players are probably collecting more gold than you are within game. No matter how much the reward rates for content are changed, those players are probably still going to collect more gold than you and spend more gold on legendary weapons than you.
My advice would be to enjoy your game time and if that brings you enough virtual coin to buy a legendary then fine. Otherwise, don’t commit yourself to spend more time in game than hardcore players just so you can get a shiny weapon.
The dredge also light all their caverns just so that they can read their stolen manuscripts.
There are widespread common knowledge tactics for most dungeons. Most people complain that these well known tactics remove a lot of the fun because most bosses have trivial solutions that are repeated on every run. This means we have dungeons that are hard without tactics but easy with tactics and good play. Surely that’s alright and dungeons shouldn’t be easy regardless of skill or tactics?
There is only a lack of diversity in speed running. Capable players can defeat the dungeons with any reasonable build, full diversity. Inexperienced players are no better with dps builds than survival builds if they don’t know tactics.
If speed runners have to use clerics gear to run the dungeons at half the speed just to survive, is the game going to be better for anyone? If the best can still use zerkers and the merely good players have to slow down, is that any better? What extra will the best players be doing when most players use same common knowledge tactics and shared builds already?
I think most players want better a variety of tactics in dungeon so that corners and stacking are not universal solutions. I’m not sure that playing the same game in different armor will make them feel better.
Thieves have pretty poor skills to handle champion mobs anyway, since all classes can dodge. Making the elite worthless in even more places isn’t going to help. Time to get out the warrior and stack.
“Thank you Anet for officially removing the last part of the game that I actually still enjoyed doing.”
It’s still there. Do it! Enjoy it! Do you really need virtual gold to enjoy your game?
The dungeon is fine. The only problem is that it is long and can’t be skipped as easily. This means players don’t go there. This means that common knowledge tactics never accumulate. This means players find it hard. All the other dungeons are just as hard without the common knowledge tactics but you rarely find a group without any tactics (except for Arah which is lost to the path sellers).
Winning streaks, losing streaks, long leads, etc are all features of random sequences. In fact, if everyone got equal results from a random sequence that would be an unlikely event.
It won’t be the living story, it would be the extension of the personal story. You’d then get people complaining that they don’t like the personal story, they’ve never done the personal story on any of their characters , and they’re being ‘forced’ to do all the personal story to do new content.
For your information, the ‘unknown’ damage type is usually an explosion from the risen plague mobs. They walk up to you, have a one second explosion animation, then explode and die. If you dodge the danger is gone permanently so in regular play they can be countered. They are particularly difficult to spot in the graphical mess of an event like Lyssa after they are summoned by risen acolytes.
There have been a number of requests to remove these mobs in the past and I would agree. It is unfair to ask players to spot the plague mobs, let alone their animation, in the temple events.
So that’s a whole 2% more than before and now it is broken?
Transmute it across to your new armor.
Split it from your old armor with a transmute splitter.
Buy new runes.
If you have money to burn on ascended crafting then you should have money to burn on runes as well. It’s too late to start counting the pennies.
If you transmute the gear you can take the runes and cosmetic from your old armor and just the stats from the ascended.
The contested state of temples across Orrian zones will be a problem under the megaservers. It is already a problem in Malchor’s. Please find a fix for this and don’t leave it as an afterthought.
It should already have a solution given that every player can take all their characters to do Lyssa to get them extra traits. Players need to see the contested state in Malchor’s right now.
The contested state of the temples in Malchor’s is a real problem for me. That seems to be a megaserver zone full of Germans and the waypoints always show as contested. This means I can never find out if can get the new grandmaster trait unlocked from Lyssa. I have lots of characters needing that trait since the patch. A series of small inconveniences put together to make a great deal of annoyance.
“Time completely wasted, months of playing & testing new builds gone.”
If you didn’t enjoy thinking out new builds and play testing them, why did you do it? All the time you put into an MMO just to min/max virtual gear is eventually wasted. You’ve found that out earlier rather than later. The way to avoid the bitterness is to enjoy the game progression while you are doing it. No regrets.