The bad thing about switching characters is that you’re wasting four other people’s time to save yourself time (or effort). Ask them first. If they don’t like it then don’t do it.
Potions were bugged so that you took extra incoming damage instead of less. It would be nice to know if that had been fixed yet, presumably not.
And at the same time, please make it target the nearest enemy (more often). It still picks distant targets while ignoring things that you can hit in front of you in melee range.
Ignore venom sharing. Get the poison skills balanced without needing a grandmaster trait to make them worth a slot.
Yeah you’re essentially right but if players didn’t use corners they should still be using cripples and pulls to bunch mobs up for aoe damage. Anything you might consider good play (blinds, crowd control, cleave dps, combo fields, defensive walls) is best applied on closely bunched enemies. It’s probably worth remembering that skills only have a limited number of targets though, whereas you can use line-of-sight to move/control any number of enemies.
There is still the mysterious “Mr E” from the Dragon Bash storyline who has been largely forgotten. Evon is probably the best candidate. This mystery person is likely to reappear again at some point, that time can’t be too far off or else everyone will stop caring, and it is presumably someone we have seen already in the story.
Still broken imho. It’s like riding a bicycle without a saddle. Sure you can be really skilful and do it but it’s still not fit for purpose and you sure don’t want to give it to a beginner. All you lazy ‘pro’ players who want to chase enemies with sword 1 skills in PvP should just be more skilful and get in range. You shouldn’t be push all the animation difficulty onto every other ranger.
Pistol/pistol does single target dps at range with no defenses. That’s the wrong weapon profile for most dungeons and world events. Shortbow gives you an evade skill and aoe damage, plus a blast finisher when you’re in a group. Melee weapons give you more damage, evades, and blinds.
You do have to relearn your thief in dungeons and play smarter. Heavy classes can get more done for less effort but if you enjoy your thief you can still get everything done.
“The only option I have now is to farm Jormag as that is the only time I have collected any dragonite at all.”
Get the dragonite from the temples in Orr. If you see one of the temples contested just head over and see if it is under way.
At the moment I’m getting plenty of ranged hits from NPC mobs with no graphics showing me the missiles. I am guessing that these are multi-hit missiles or bouncing/splitting missiles that are aimed at one target but hit a number of nearby targets as well (including me). ‘Trick shot’ is one attack I’ve repeatedly seen listed in my combat log when the missiles have not been shown on my screen.
If infiltrator’s return has a cast time, will it still be usable when knocked down?
Arah is the most difficult dungeon, but nothing more than that. CoE is also a difficult dungeon for a group that goes in without tactics, but because so many pick up groups share common knowledge tactics CoE plays easily nowadays. Arah tactics were never shared that widely and there is massive gulf in capability between experienced Arah runners and new players. This has led to the path selling. Path buyers typically learn no tactics.
The best way to learn the dungeon fully is to go through it all with a guild group and learn from mistakes. After doing that once you’ll appreciate what the skipping and PUG tactics actually deliver and how many problems they negate.
Scarlet is actually the person most likely to have access to obelisk fragments. The dredge could find them when mining underground or underwater. The aetherblades could find clues from the air. The Inquest may also have been exploring underwater or taken one for research. The nightmare court might find clues about the obelisks within nightmare. If her allies have any knowledge they could pass it on to Scarlet.
In fact she has used her “I am a genius so I can do anything” ability so often that she now has an array of allies that can do anything. She has an air force, undersea and underground forces, and 100% loyal mechanical troops. Yet still nobody knows why or how.
Stealth does not break aggro. Getting out of the roaming area of a mob breaks aggro. You use stealth to get out of the roaming area of the mobs safely.
Yeah trinity sucks dude. Since you asked.
Next time you feel like a trinity group just sit in Lion’s Arch for half an hour first, reminding yourself what it’s like to be waiting for a healer.
No thank you to finishing in PvE. Just annoying and time consuming. Gives more targeting problems. Gives players another way to exploit mob behavior. Puts even more weight onto aoe skills. Leaves pets and summoned allies looking even more stupid.
I think it is easy to criticize the gem store but it is full of non-essential items. Other MMOs would have put the wallet into the gem shop as a purchasable item, or made the wallet part of a purchased expansion. We got the wallet for free.
(It doesn’t matter that the wallet only solves banking issues created in game, other MMOs would still have charged us real money for it).
When I see the name Toxic Alliance, it always reminds me of the low budget horror/comedy Troma film, the Toxic Avenger. I’m sure that’s not what the developers intended.
Lets get rid of this term Mary Sue. It is inappropriate for GW2.
In GW2 the player characters do not drive the living story. Any player character can replace another at any time, as a principle of the design. This means that a character cannot be an expert in anything, needs not to have done anything, need no friends, and needs no reputation. So how is the story driven? It is driven through non-player characters that have expertise, have friends, have deeds, have a reputation, etc. These non-player characters need to be capable or else the story goes nowhere. It does not make every single character into a ‘Mary Sue’!
With any luck they will have decided not to add ascended armor and are using this change as a one off fix for supply/demand. These items are effectively worthless and a market correction is needed. However if the demand is being adjusted just to make endgame crafting more expensive then yes, it does translate into making the game more of a grind.
Orr has three endgame zones. Players are meant to be playing there and completing events. It’s easy to say that nobody is doing events in Orr so they won’t be missed but in fact the rewards should be fixed so that events are worth completing by interested players as a staple end game activity . If Orr is cleaned up then the events and challenges from those end game zones will be removed and that would be bad for players, worse than the personal story looking unfinished.
Putting zerg sized content into a mix with solo content and group content is just not going to work. It will always drive people into the zerg for safety or rewards. As soon as the zerg forms, all the solo and group content just becomes trivial. The only challenge is a race to tag mobs for loot. Group events still scale in the wrong manner when tackled by a zergs, actually encouraging players to overrun group content for faster rewards. The Pavillion and Scarlet’s invasions worked better as they were essentially a series of group/zerg events with no pretense of solo content.
I’m one of the people who wants to see the open world event system work, but at the moment it is running into horrible problems. No solutions are on the horizon and it is holding back the living world. In the mean time, mixing zerg and solo content is clearly going to fail.
There are probably a lot of events in the game where the scaling is largely unknown/untested. When the living story takes 50 players into their areas we’ll probably see some other champ hotspots too.
You didn’t need to make a long mathematical post about this. It’s a well known problem in many MMOs and most rangers were resigned to this when ascended jewelry came out. If we could get all the classes balanced with exotic gear we could then start seeing what happens with ascended, but even the first stage of balance (SPvP) is missing.
The merchants are always there. They only offer the settlers gear when all four settlements are cleared. It then takes about 5 minutes for the queen to spawn and that’s the time you should buy your gear. The NE settlement is usually the last one cleared and you should buy your stuff there. Steampipe steading gets really dangerous.
You probably need to say where your servers are located. I know that Gandara (EU) sees the queen taken down on an irregular basis when a guild feels like giving it a go. You probably need to find a guild on a different server that takes the queen down more regularly.
In SE1 you have the first golem boss after the first barrier, a rarely seen wave of ordinary golems if you are very slow through the barriers, the line of golems beside the mines, and the three champion golems in the room with the final chest (the room where you fight Kudu with the three golems in story mode). Anything else sounds like a bug.
To me the living world does not feel alive. A bit of the game world is dressed up differently for a month or so but it always tends to return to how it was before. I know that the personal story has to remain in perfect shape for new players, and I know living story update has to accommodate a player with a newly created account, but these two constraints seem to have shackled the living world.
The best example would be Scarlet’s invasions. The timberline falls seem like the old timberline falls, then there’s an invasion for 45 minutes, then it’s the same old timberline falls again. Nobody in the zone talks about the invasions at all. It is as if the invasion never happened, which might as well be the case as there are no consequences whatsoever. It leaves no footprint.
Here are some suggestions:
- better attention to detail – eg more NPCs changing their conversations and activity
- heralds to give better information on current activities
- a way to see the history of the living story from within game
- provide rewards through the game world rather than abstracting them into dancing chests and achievements
- let progress through the personal story change a character’s game world, their timeline, and how they view the living story – this is conspicuously absent
- let players enter alternate versions of old zones so they can see an active living story, even whilst other players can still run through the old zones as before.
- move away from 2-state events and give some variation in event chains
- get stories and teasers off the web and into the game world
I don’t mind content being temporary. I think the living story is poor and uninteresting as a story. Artwork, animations, voice acting etc is fine. The living world dungeons are ok. I don’t mind experimentation with living world updates but it is a shame to see obvious problems occurring (like Tequatl as an open access event). I accept that the a fair portion of the world updates will not interest me (activity games, minis). Balancing rewards for time/effort is a big game wide problem and it still hampers all permanent content in a living world update.
(edited by Stooperdale.3560)
If you are in a zerg the skills can lag, particularly if your graphics card is struggling too.
I don’t think there is a single meta build unless you are one the elite speed runners who worry about whether they finish CoF five seconds faster. You can usually gain advantage by changing your weapons/utilities for each PVE fight, so in the long run your traits are determining which of those fights you are stronger/weaker for.
The two stories are separate so that a player can pursue either, neither, or both at any speed they like. The living story also has no requirement for any character to have done anything so it is immediately a bad fit for the personal story that has stages of progress. By design, a player can create a new account tomorrow and play the latest living story update.
These are zerg sized groups tackling group content (open world champions) for fast loot. Something will be rescaled to fix this eventually.
The Largos will probably be coming with the deep sea dragon and I’m guessing that the deep sea dragon isn’t coming any time soon. All the other dragons, even the yet unseen jungle dragon, are likely to come first.
Rangers have a few specific traits and skills that can maximize group damage and this allows exactly one range to be part of elite speed clearance groups. Other than that, rangers are poor in dungeons.
Summoned thieves, traps, and caltrops can all deliver indirect damage. If it is just a matter of proximity you might be able to kite the enemy with pistol/dagger.
To the OP, you’ve brought a lot of problems to the forum but no solutions. Are you suggesting ideas for better dungeon design? Are you telling players to play more slowly for the same rewards? Are you suggesting better loot balancing for dungeons?
The recent living story dungeons have seen very little skipping so the designers are probably making it harder. There have been fewer exploits too although there probably will be some if the players take time to find them. Are the designers going to back to the old paths and fix them up? They will probably do some occasional exploit fixing but it is just too big a task to completely restructure all the dungeons.
The torch would be fine as an offhand if the axe and sword were better designed. Lets suppose we went through all the weapon combinations (axe/axe, sword/torch, etc.) and tried to list the purpose of each combination. How many of them would actually be fit for purpose?
Rewards have always been unbalanced in GW2. They were unbalanced before the champ loot purses were added, before the fixed gold reward in dungeons was added, and before the rare items were added for the world bosses.
There is no bug here. Let’s suppose a mob has you targeted and attacks before you go into stealth. If it shoots at you instantly for 2000 damage then you’re thinking it is fair. If it uses a channeled skill to shoot you for 5×400 damage over 3 seconds then you’re thinking it should stop when you go into stealth. This is however very unfair on the user of the channeled skill since they have to be static, channel the attack, not be interrupted, have you targeted (out of stealth) when the attack starts, and take more time to deal the damage than the instant skill.
A dodge, aegis, blind etc will typically also just be a partial defense to part of the channel attack and will not stop all the damage. If you want to interrupt a channeled attack you have to use an interrupt skill. This is how the combat system works, with some advantages and disadvantages when different attacks match up to different defenses.
“To this topic. I would advise you, OP, to
Stop and use the search feature next time.
Every time one of these threads is created the OP just gets trolled.”
That really says more about the forum community than the OP.
Anything is viable for PvE until you get to high fractals. You can use sword/dagger with an acrobatics base or shadow arts, or both. Might be hard with neither. You can change your weapons before each fight so you’re handicapping yourself if you try to use sword/dagger for everything.
Rewards have always been unbalanced all across the game. World events were poor so they added dancing chests. Then dungeons were poor so they added guaranteed gold. Then champions were poor so they added champion purses. Now everything is poor compared to champions and …. they can’t keep adding more and more rewards to everything in a clumsy fashion. They need a complete revision of the reward system but I don’t see it coming unfortunately.
I think you’ve got to treat the living story like a song on the radio. You can listen to the song that’s on the radio right now. There’s no point worrying about the songs you missed on the radio yesterday. If you come back to the GW2 you can enjoy the current update and hopefully by the time you need something else to do there’s another update coming.
The living story doesn’t rely on any history at all for any character. The down side is that it feels impersonal. The up side is that a new character can come into the story at any point and participate fully.
Heartseeker is fine. Repeated heartseeker is ugly. Mechanics changes need to address the spamming of the skill rather than the damage, mobility, or anything else.
Offhand pistol works well on a tight group of veterans and normal mobs. It can be perfect defense for your group. Smokescreen is good too and works cuts out some ranged attacks as the mobs come in. The blind on stealth trait can work but this is the perfect situation for smoke.
The other option is to stand off from the group, sometimes peeling off after a pull, so you are not standing in the middle of aoe and channeled attacks. You can still be very close or even in behind the mobs in melee. You can still use caltrops or even traps. The import part is that the mobs are still grouped together and easy to kill. You’ll probably have better visibility this way too.
Remember that if you drift off the stack and get killed by the fight mechanics, which can happen in AC, then you’ve got to take the blame. Sometimes to learn the fights you’ve got to find out what bad things happen when you don’t follow tactics.
- The jungle dragon and the nightmare court
- Where did the human gods go?
- Primordius and the dwarves
I think the OP has picked up some issues but not identified all the causes. Thief defenses like blind do not scale up with the number of enemies. As more attacks come in it becomes harder to dodge and evade everything. Heavy armor class defenses (such as a big health pool, boons, invulnerability, and armor) are still be effective against any number of enemies. I don’t think sustainability is an issue since thief defenses can be very sustainable and highly effective provided they are appropriate in the first place.
(edited by Stooperdale.3560)
You can solo plenty of open world champions and group events if you want a challenge with some reward. The rewards just come along a lot faster in a zerg because players are using the (lack of) scaling to their benefit. The majority of game content is still solo but the end game content is group based because it is an MMO. Other MMOs that had highly rewarding solo content found that players ignored the group content and the game felt less social for everyone. For some reason people disbelieve that this happened but it did and there is no reason for guild wars to repeat mistakes.
The game could really do with some decent two player content though. A lot of casual players like to do something with a friend and a lot of solo content is less fun with two.
Scarlet is an engineer and weaponcrafter. A lot of those ‘mesmer connections’ are craftable (portals), weaponized (holograms), or other engineered items. They don’t need or imply a mesmer explanation. No further explanation is needed for a known mesmer like Queen Jenna using mesmer magic in her defense either.