Guild Wars 2

I’m disappointed this thread was moved. I was looking for a wide range of feedback from many different perspectives and was very pleased both with the quality of arguments being made and the breadth of differing opinions. That is the exact reason why I chose to post this in the Heart of Thorns section rather than the Raids sub-forum. If I were going to make a topic titled, “Do you think cake was a good idea,” I also wouldn’t post it in a cake specific sub-forum since the specific nature of the audience is highly likely to skew the direction of the responses.

With that out of the way, I would like to thank everybody who has taken the time to respond and offer feedback here. It’s been excellent hearing all of your opinions and perspectives on this. I would especially like to thank the people who called me out on not having a strong depth of knowledge regarding Wildstar’s many and varied problems. It was an accurate assessment, while I did try Wildstar for a while it didn’t hook me and I never picked it up again which left my understanding of its failings mostly secondhand and superficial. As such, I appreciated the additional information and the breakdown of what went wrong with Wildstar. I’ve learned a lot from the thread.

Wildstar have recently announced that they’re letting staff go and are canceling their plans to expand into the Chinese market citing Wildstar’s performance since launch.

This is interesting in relation to Guild Wars 2 because Wildstar was built around the concept of hardcore raiding as its endgame and has experienced nothing but problems because of it. Wildstar started out as a buy and sub game but quickly converted to a free to play model once its playerbase started to collapse. This is because while a vocal contingent of players insisted that hardcore raiding was the best thing ever and the game was designed around that, the reality is that not only was it not enough to carry the game, but the difficulty itself drove players away.

Considering that GW2 and Wildstar are both made by NCSoft subsidiaries it’s highly unlikely that Anet were unaware of what was happening with Wildstar but decided to not only push ahead with raids but coupled them directly into the core story arc so you either have to raid or miss out on core game story unless you really like watching Youtube videos of other people playing the game. The entire situation here just strikes me as curious.

Do you think that Anet made the right call here? Either in regards to the development of raids at all or by tying them in so closely to the core story arc? I’d like to hear your thoughts.

zenleto.6179:

Looks like its time for an NNPE.

Aw yeah, NPE 2.0! Now with even more restrictions, content gating and hand holding. I can’t wait.

Seriously though, new characters should just start with one of the scrolls that level you up to 30. The early levels of this game used to be the best thing it had and now it’s close to the worst. I leveled up a new Ranger recently and did it normally instead of just scrolling and it was ridiculous. You can’t tame or swap pets immediately, basic profession functions like commanding your pet are also restricted, your weapon skills are level locked so you’re stuck with a hamstrung skill bar until you level up. It’s just horrendous. We all know that the NPE was terrible but every now and then I forget just how bad it is until I dip my toe back in the water.

I wouldn’t even care if just dropped a tome of knowledge in my inventory once the bar was full so that even playing a max mastery character could make levelling an alt easier. But mostly I just want anything that isn’t the fat stack of absolutely nothing we currently have.

Profession viability in dungeons isn’t quite what I was referring to there. Dungeon rewards were nerfed into the ground so hard that it’s exceptionally difficult to find groups that still run them. And the people who still do run them are generally people trying to farm tokens for legendary gifts so they want experienced level 80s who can get them done quickly and without fuss. Just an entire segment of gameplay content essentially nerfed out of the game because Anet wanted to move its rewards to their new and shiny content.

I’m still a little dirty about the entire way that panned out and I wasn’t an enthusiastic dungeon runner at the best of times. In any event, if you’re interested in doing dungeons your best bet is to find a guild that’s either close-knit or dedicated to teaching players how to run content rather than, say, trying to find a pick-up group. If you join a large, disparate guild it’s highly likely that most of its members will be focused on their own, more profitable interests. Smaller, close-knit guilds tend to be more actively social and are more likely to do less rewarding content because one person wants to experience it. Even beyond dungeons, finding a guild you like will positively affect your entire perception of the game. This has generally been my experience in any case.

It’s excellent you’re enjoying yourself. The main thing that interests me here though is your belief that Necromancers and Grenth are evil. Because neither are in the Guild Wars lore. There’s nothing stopping you from roleplaying as an evil Necromancer but unlike other games it’s not really the default assumption.

As for doing dungeons…

Will the next expansion pack have the new complete sets of legendary weapons that we’ve been waiting on since 2013?

Reinate.7594:

Have we had any news or hints when this is going to start up?
I finished my Pre-cursor scavanger hunt on Monday (sunday for you guys)
and now im sorta just milling about wondering what to do.

And i think i saw somewhere that LS-S3 is at least a couple of months away june or july at the earliest i think i saw.

At my best guess, probably nine months from now? LS3 won’t come out until the raid is fully released and that’s progressing at glacial speed. So expect a content drought until that bottleneck is cleared.

I appreciate that the costs of the guild hall upgrades are meant to be distributed even though at this point it doesn’t seem to be working that way since the cost of the upgrade greatly exceeds its actual benefits. The point of comparing the cost of this one requirement to a precursor was to give the value a frame of reference. We all know that 644 gold is a good chunk of change, but as an abstract figure it can be difficult to conceptualise. Saying a precursor’s worth of gold is just a useful frame of reference to demonstrate how expensive this requirement is, even if the costs are paid in a distributed way.

Not course sand, piles of sand. I ended up with somewhere around 150 course sand but I likely already had some in my mat bank before I started. Considering that, the 17 mug results is even worse in retrospect.

While I’m back here though, let’s also talk about empty kegs. You need 200 empty kegs for Tavern Restoration 2. The market value of an empty keg is about 3g 22s. That means the total market value for this one requirement is 644 gold. This is more than I paid for my precursor. The costs are just completely out of whack. And for what reward? The tavern looks a little nicer and that’s really about it. If the cost of the upgrade is comparable to the cost of making a legendary when all market values are factored in, then it should be nicest upgrade in the game. I don’t know what, add some particle effects or something? Call it a legendary tavern? Failing that, the costs should seriously be looked at.

Can we please begin to address the ridiculous requirements for some of the recipes introduced in Heart of Thorns? Specifically at this point glass and linseed oil pop to mind.

I headed into Silverwastes today to finish off my Core Tyria masteries when I noticed I had several thousand bandit crests. I didn’t have much use for them anymore so I dumped them all into sandy bags. I ended up with over 300 bags and from those I got a bit over six stacks of sand. From that sand I got enough materials to make an amazing SEVENTEEN glass mugs. Can we just stop for a moment to gaze in amazement at that 17 and contemplate what a ridiculous conversion rate this is?

I’m in a decently sized guild and we’ve been able to knock out most of the guild upgrades we’ve focused on, but we’ve made remarkably little progress on Tavern Restoration 2. Because why would you ever bother? I know I have no further desire to fill my inventory with sand to maybe walk away with a handful of glass mugs.

Heart of Thorns has been out for close to four months now and I know that the cost of Scribing is being examined. Can we extrapolate a little bit and consider the costs of all the HoT recipes and crafting now that the economy has settled? I know I can’t be the only one who got sticker shock when playing HoT because everything felt like a giant gold or resource sink. So in that regard I also doubt I’m the only one who would like to see costs re-examined so it doesn’t feel like I’m throwing time and resources into a blackhole with very little to show for it.

Glider skins that aren’t bought from the gemstore.

Daddicus.6128:

ddoi.9264:

Er…what? There are 50 pages of complaints on that thread because you gated specialisations behind hero points for every single character we have. Not once have I heard anyone complain they couldn’t progress their story. This change solves nothing.

Then you are simply not reading.

On the subject of not reading, the post you just replied to is from three months ago and is referring to a problem that Anet have subsequently fixed. Almost everything in this thread has been dealt with close to a quarter of a year ago. It only got necroed because the recent patch undid something relating to this subject that it ought not have.

draxynnic.3719:

To be fair, Rytlock is also Blood Legion, and the Blood Legion personal story chapter is about replacing a bad leader… violently. Given that we were told in development that Bangar was also against the treaty, I could see ArenaNet progressing from the Blood Legion characters rebelling against their legionnaire to rebelling against their Imperator.

How would this work given that, unlikely every other position in Charr society, Imperators are bloodline based. As far as we know, Rytlock isn’t a descendant of the Khan-Ur.

Town clothes don’t exist anymore. It’s now just outfits and tonics.

The issue with new animations is the same with new armour sets. If they make a new animation, it’s not a case of making ONE new animation since it has to be adapted for every racial choice. This is a situation that bloats out quickly. Let’s say you want to port over ten of the emotes from Guild Wars 1 that already have code hooks in Guild Wars 2 but which weren’t ported across. Instead of it being a case of having to tweak ten animations, it becomes a question of having create and adjust fifty animations.

The amount of work required to make animations for every single race quickly calls into question the worth of doing it at all. Emotes are the kind of thing that have greatest value in bulk. Nobody would be impressed if Anet turned around and said “Oh hey, here is a single new emote” in the patch notes. As such it raises the question of opportunity cost, instead of spending the time on a handful of situational emotes, what else could the team spend their time on? Could that time be spent making new monsters, new attack animations or new mobility animations like sandboarding for when we enter the Crystal Desert to kill Kralkatorrik?

New emotes are time intensive to develop and they don’t add a lot to the game. I appreciate that you like them, I like them too. However, emotes are a minor quality of life addition rather than a core addition like a new monster would be.

Oh, absolutely. Anet have stated that we can look forward to seeing new types of legendary weapons as soon as 2013: https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/looking-ahead-guild-wars-2-in-2013/ So you could expect a new legendary longbow basically any day now, really.

I have Kudzu and I adore it. Even if the new legendary longbow is the loveliest bow in the world I think I’d still be reluctant to make it. I just have no interest in spending the time, effort nor resources to acquire the inevitable six million Spiritwood Planks that it will require to craft its precursor.

Aaron Ansari.1604:

Blech. Not ’til April at the earliest? I was expecting a break, but given how small HoT was, six months seems… excessive. Especially given the nine month lull preceding it.

Anyway, while I am put out by the total absence of any sylvari plot threads from that list, I’m still a little pleased to see a broad range being promised. From its conception the LS has suffered from being too narrow, focusing on tiny points in the world and a single plot arc while putting everything else on hold. Even at its best, S2 never tried to go beyond two parallel arcs at a time. HoT, in its own way, had a similar shortcoming. I doubt they’ll hit the sweet spot on their first try, but the fact that they are willing to try advancing multiple plots at once is encouraging.

Since the raid is the story lead in to LS3, it’s to be expected that it has to be finished before they can actually release LS3. Given everything else, April seems like an overly rosy expectation to me. Anet does have a history of promising content and deadlines that they can’t live up to.

Technically speaking, Zhaitan did die when it came into contact with its shadow. To be fair, I am sure being shot out of the sky and the massive plummet to the ground played some minor part in Zhaitan’s death. However, we can factually state that Zhaitan fell, hit the ground and made contact with its shadow, and then died.

This thread is amazing for all the wrong reasons.

Why would you ever throw out foundational, uncontested lore on the basis of glib flavour text? However, if we go down the route of discarding primary history sources from the games on the basis of NPC chatter it does open up so many interesting avenues of thought.

Consider the following: Is the secret to defeating the Elder Dragons and bringing peace to Tyria actually found in flowers? Does the ancient Sylvari axiom not state, “More violets, I say. Less violence!” From this we can infer that there is a strong negative correlation between quantity of violets and violence. Is the evidence presented here strong enough for us to conclude that there is a causal relationship between these two factors? No, of course not. However, I am going to say that there is, simply because you cannot ever disprove the contention because all contradictory evidence you could bring forth is able to be summarily dismissed by stating, “History never lies. Historians, however…”

In conclusion, violets should be renamed to dragonsbane as they are the superweapon of peace that Tyria desperately needs.

There are several factors to consider. Firstly, the dragons will likely increase in power due to the released magic from each dragon killed prior. There’s also no guarantee that the dragons will continue to line up to be killed one at a time.

Secondly, the Pact has more or less spent what power it could muster in the fight against Mordremoth. Since the Pact has been the primary force opposing the dragons its removal from the field makes the continued fight ever more of an uphill battle than it was before.

Finally, Tyria is something of a powder keg, politically speaking. Every major race has malign factions causing internal political issues that could blow up at any time. Events like this could rob the fight against the dragons of vital national support, or worse, actively aid the dragons themselves. Think what would happen if Jennah died or was deposed or if Primordus shows up in the middle of the Blazeridge with a horde of Destroyers and the Flame Legion decide they’ve found their new god?

By increasing the scope and power of the forces arrayed against the player while undercutting their support you can guarantee escalating intensity with the coming conflicts.

Yeah.

Sylvari player characters hear Mordremoth and it actively tries to corrupt you.

Transmutation was never free. The old system required either a level 1-79 transmutation stone, and they were handed out like candy on Halloween, or a level 80 transmutation stone which were, more or less, gem store exclusive.

The new system is so much better. Please also note that you can get transmutation charges from SPvP and your daily log in rewards. If you do your SPvP dailies every time you play you’ll have more transmutation charges than you know what to do with.

With that being said, I don’t mind your idea but I likely wouldn’t use it. Transmutation charges are super easy to get and I’d more often than not just slavage equipment for the mats since you can unlock the skins to your wardrobe doing that anyway.

I log on, collect my daily log in chest, craft a meaty plant food, throw that up on the TP then I log out.

On the weekend I shake things up a bit by doing guild missions before I log out.

Check your sales history. You may have sold something for more than that but it will give you less once you factor in the exchange fee.

I think Anet checked out for the holidays somewhere around November. I wouldn’t expect anything of value to happen before January.

Just kill the guy without killing any wolves. You don’t have to CC him.

Go ranged, aggro the wolves, kite them around, kill the guy, steal his pedestal, kill the wolves.

Omne.4603:

Honestly thought this was going to be a Trump troll thread.

I’m disappointed it wasn’t.

The sad thing is that hero points do scale already. Try doing a hero point by yourself and then come back later with a hero point train. Huge amount of adds. So scaling hero points is already a thing, what you’d be more interested in is for the baseline encounters with champs to be dropped to something more soloable.

The way the economy is at the moment, it’s very much a seller’s market. Mats are crazy expensive, even your basic T1 mats will fetch good gold, and the T2 mats even moreso. I haven’t seen iron this expensive since the game launched and almost everybody was crafting and hitting the iron bottleneck. Soft wood planks were also running around 20s a pop last time I checked. Every time you run past a soft wood tree you’re essentially costing yourself 20s.

Rummage through your mat banks and look at what you can spare and sell. In the past week I’ve made roughly 900g? The lion’s share of that was from liquidating mats that I don’t need but a good chunk of it was from harvesting, selling and running events. Do Teq every day, harvest everything you can, sell what you don’t need and don’t spend your money on things that don’t further your goal.

#TeamRanger #UnderwaterScumbag

I do miss Raid on the Capricorn a little. It was balanced poorly but it was variety at least. Even if they’d pulled it out of official rotation for tournaments or ranked play, it would have been nice to leave in as an option. God knows we could use more PvP maps rather than fewer.

Oh, the fix is up? Thanks for the heads up, guys. I would have missed it if you hadn’t said anything since I still hadn’t headed over to Reddit.

We don’t need the casuals, OP. We can solely pursue the hardcore audience and be as successful as Wildstar was when they tried to do this. It makes perfect sense to lock core content like the story arc leading into LS3 behind a raid that a fraction of the playerbase will clear.

Sarcasm toggled off, and I agree with you. Anet have been displaying particularly poor design decisions lately and I’m at a loss to explain why.

Boysenberry.1869:

Anet official response on reddit: “We are aware of the patching issues with the 64 bit client and are working on it. For now, the 32 bit client is able to be patched.”

And, of course, their official response is posted first on Reddit and not here. At this point Reddit really is the new official forum.

Yuiii.1278:

How to switch back 32bit client? I’ve deleted mine since the 64bit released. It’s a pain to watching 2kb/s for downloading the patch.

The same way you downloaded the 64bit client. Scroll up to the top of the screen, click the MY ACCOUNT button, login when it askes you to, click Download Client in the box on the right hand side or click Game Content on the header bar, both will take you to the page where you can download the client.

Joke title aside, are they?

This is a question that’s been nagging at me increasingly lately. We know that Primordus corrupts fire and stone and the Dwarves apparently thought the best way to fight the Destroyers was to… turn themselves into stone? Which, in retrospect, seems like trying to fight Mordremoth by turning yourself into a ficus or Zhaitan by killing yourself. Just strikes me as a bad idea all over.

The one thing that sticks out though is that the Rite of the Great Dwarf was a legacy from the previous rise of the dragons, so it wouldn’t make much sense for the Dwarves to retain a ritual that made them vulnerable to dragon corruption, especially when it’s noted to be a weapon against the Destroyers. So was the Rite more than just a means to make the Dwarves more physically resilient against Destroyers, but also a way to safeguard against corruption by Primordus? Because if the Rite confers no protection against corruption, then I’m not seeing how turning yourself to stone and going to fight Primordus ends in extinction, rather than corruption.

At this rate my client will have updated in time for the next expansion.

You can always do a smash and grab into the Druid trait line for the entire two traits that aren’t related to healing or CAF. It’s what I’m doing. I think of myself less as a Druid and more of a Natural Stride And Ancient Seeder. Those two traits are strong enough that it’s worth the dip just for them. At least until the development team notice that Ranger has something nice that doesn’t revolve around being a healbot and correct the situation.

You can see the border of the tapestry in the screenshot. It is possible he’s in account mode view and not personal view. Which would explain why you can see the edge of the tapestry but why he can’t add anything. If this is the case, all he’d need to do is log onto the character with the tapestry there and add MOX with them.

The Monument of Fellowship is generally more about hero armour than the hero themself. Do you have heroes upgraded with their alternate armour sets? Because that’s what you need, but I’m getting the impression you think you just need the hero by itself to get the points.

Wait, there are people who get more than just spoons for killing Teq?

pepsis.5384:

Lol at you people.

The op is long and tangled thats for sure but difficult? I read it just fine and the points it made are quite clear. Mayhap you folks are simply used to easy posts? Hey, we’ve had years of casual, easy posting on the GW2 forums, we need harder, time-gated, meta posts now. Maybe you folks should just ltp(ost)

It’s primarily that giant wall of text paragraph that shoots off on a completely irrelevant tangent and effectively derails the post. The way that Eirdyne tends to interrupt himself so he can violently veer off into something unrelated also doesn’t help. The final problem is the overwrought language that makes the writing feel unnatural. In the industry we refer to it as purple prose and it’s generally frowned upon.

As to the points raised here, I agree with much of what’s being said. HoT is definitely poor on content, the timegates are frustrating and Anet’s attempt to create an endgame has created widescale dissatisfaction in the playerbase. None of these are particularly contentious points, it’s just that the points themselves are buried in a poorly structured post. A third of the post should not be devoted to irrelevant meta-rambling about vertices. That’s poor communication at best and a self-indulgence at worst.

That post is outrageously difficult to read. Eirdyne, if you ever want tips on how to communicate more effectively send me a PM and I’ll be happy to help.

The snipers shoot me even when I’m stealth gliding. The mini-game is irritating enough without the snipers going all Nuhoch Stealth Detection on me.

No, to every single question you asked.

He’s inside the Guild Initiative. He’s running the joint. Talk to him and he’ll have new dialogue.

Manasa Devi.7958:

I mentioned it before somewhere.

The original Guild Wars gives a warning when you’ve played for 2 hours straight.

Now, in HoT, 2 hours straight is the bare minimum for full participation in a meta event cycle.

It boggles the mind that these were produced by the same company.

What I love is that they broke up Fractals on the rationale that the former structure required too much time investment and that wasn’t okay. Then they throw out the two hour long meta-event cycles. Why does it feel like Anet’s development team is never on the same page?

All those single person LFR slots in the LFG tool strike me as the weirdest thing. Do none of them think to look through the list themselves and start merging parties to get a raid team up? If there are thirty of you all searching for a raid, chances are you can find what you’re looking for.

The major issue that I have with raids as currently implemented is that the current raid has been stated to be the story leading in to LS3. That makes this raid core content, and core content that will only be completed by a fraction of the playerbase is a terrible design decision.

There are also points to be made about whether the degree of development resources required for raids is worth it in contrast to how few players the content is for and the possible negative effects that the introduction of raids will have on the community. However, for me, those points are interesting but not as much of a concern as the initially mentioned issue.

The original Guild Wars also had content that was designed to be of a higher difficulty level to challenge people who wanted it, but, with one notable exception, it was always optional side content, rather than core content. The exception mentioned here was the gating of access to the last Ritualist Hero behind Winds of Change Hard Mode. This was a move that wasn’t taken well by the community, and probably would have been a larger point of contention if it hadn’t arrived right on the tail end of GW’s life cycle. I still view it as a mistake as it represented a clear break between difficult content for cosmetics and rewards and difficult content locking out core content.

I hold a similar view in regards to certain items like Ascended Viper trinkets being accessible solely from raids since the statsets for your character are clearly core content. I don’t object to the raid having an exclusive story that can only be experienced by raiding, but it shouldn’t be the lead in story for LS3. That’s content that should never be behind an exclusivity wall and it was a mistake on Anet’s part to make it so.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

#4: Less than stellar community. The dungeon community is the source of a lot of hostility in the PVE game. Arguably most of it. Working on the dungeons is empowering the more destructive sides of the community. The way dungeons are being run now is not how they were designed to be, and there is a resentment between players and devs there.

If this were the case, what do you think the rationale behind adding raids was? The raiding community is more toxic than the dungeon community ever was and I’ll happily admit that segments of the dungeon community were plenty toxic. While I agree with most of your other points, I don’t think this one is credible. There are plenty of reasons why Anet is trying to socially engineer players out of Dungeons but I don’t think dislike for the community is one of them.

I stumbled across a group of Charr roleplaying in Tangled Depth and it was hands down, the weirdest kitten thing I have ever seen in the game.

I didn’t bother them or try to disrupt what they were doing because they have every right to play whatever way they enjoy as long as it doesn’t break any rules, but it was so odd to turn a corner and run into like eight Charr acting out this very serious plot.