Guild Wars 2

For everyone looking for groups that aren’t asking for Legendary Insight Pings and are looking to learn and the beat raids, I highly suggest looking into Raid Teaching guilds. A good one that I’m part of is Very OK Guild [KK]. You may not succeed immediately, and don’t expect to be carried, but everyone is active and raiding, and everyone takes part in teaching runs.

Fair warning; if you aren’t willing to change your build/gear to be more effective, then you can’t expect as many people to run with you, since the less you try to optimize the more of a burden you are on your party members. All anyone in a learning run asks is that you try to contribute as much as possible, the same as anyone else.

I’d actually like to mention taking something out of the gemstore (per se). After a year or more, for Black lion Ticket Weapons that have been out of circulation for long enough, I think a good way to address the lack of new weapon skins being added to the game would be to add those as items for the Champ Bag loot tables.

It’s not like people are buying skins that cost 10 Black Lion Tickets, and I hate to see skins that were so lovingly designed be ignored because they are basically unobtainable.

I’m not sure you know what a fresh air setup is, as no fresh air setup for damage uses earth. I don’t WvW so if you are talking about that you should specify, because I am talking about PvE.

Additionally, most fresh air builds skip the Aura-on-overload in favor of stability and protection, neither of which are auras. Frankly, the only aura I ever use as a fresh air tempest in any pve situation is from Feel the Burn and that’s only fire and must be triggered rather than being passive.

Seriously? 3 rings is your regular? And this is your worst RNG ever? Check out some of the other ones. Your loot is just fine. Frankly, I’d be willing to trade you for whatever loot table you are drawing from.

But back to your actual question, it’s inconsistent in the short term but is consistent with the % chance from the loot table Anet put together for fractal boxes. No worries.

reikken.4961:

Tempest is already super aura focused. There’s so much more to ele than auras.

Staff tempest and auramancer, yes. Dagger, scepter, warhorn? Not even a little bit of auras

It’s RNG. You can’t expect consistently good or bad loot. Also, 1 asc weapon and 2 asc armor? You are comparing poor RNG vs fantastic RNG so of course it won’t seem consistent

STIHL.2489:

Miellyn.6847:

We’re willing to take our time.

This is the difference between casuals and ‘casuals’. The complainers want instant results/satisfaction. Raids are casual and accessible, they just don’t provide instant satisfaction as you need to learn the encounters.

This is laughable, Lets get a few thing clear here, you’re little static group, that bails if not enough people show up, means you won’t pug, which is an elitist approach to game playing, not a casual one. Not to mention you have made it clear that your members also raid with other groups/guilds. So All of the people in the guild are serious about being raiders, which makes all the individuals hardcore players.

Thus, you’re not casual players, in fact, If you want to say you’re guild does a “casual raid Night”, you can, but that in no way makes any of you actual casual players, or affiliated to the casual demographic in any way.

Anyway, back to the topic at hand.

Yes, Anet Abandoned their Casual Demographic, not only with HOT, (which include raids) but also other little things, like the Fractal Reward Revamp.

It’s not about not having anything to do, it’s about not having anything to look forward to, since the end game is now all about static groups, and optimized builds, there is really, no reason to even bother making an effort to get there for most Casual players.

So rewarding higher difficulty play is abandoning casual players? Man, you have a serious victim complex. You may want to seek some help for that. But not to make the subject about your health, back to the topic at hand.

Have you even tried to pug a raid? I’ve pugged every successful raid I’ve been in and there are so many groups asking for people to join them and learn/eventually beat within a pug environment. You just aren’t looking hard enough because God forbid you do something that contradicts your “I’m so ignored” mentality.

Additionally, high level fractals are not hard if you bothered to get enough AR to not get instakilled, and if you feel as if the difficulty level is a deterrent for casual players in raids and fractals then I’d love for you to explain why refusing to learn how to play is anything but obstinate and unhelpful. No wonder people like that get kicked from raids…I’d rather have a full group of “casuals” who try than a group of people who refuse to learn even basic skills and mechanics.

lucadiro.4519:

UnbentMars.9126:

reikken.4961:

UnbentMars.9126:

aura-centered

no more auras!

Why not? It’s unique to ele’s and offers many opportunities for unique gameplay

For more passive gameplay you mean. That kind of passive gameplay that made tempest only good for be a boring healbot

Try a fresh air tempest. Nothing passive about that. Also, the problem with auras being passive is why I said a revisit of auras would be useful, which my suggested Elite Spec would allow

honestly, Verdant Brink Day/Night Cycle gets so much experience I didnt even try to grind it and still have everything capped.

The first question to answer is “What have you enjoyed so far?”
The second is “What haven’t you tried yet?”

ShortnCurly.9018:

Gear up
Personal story
HoT story
Make some gold
Craft an ascended weapon
Level up your masteries
World completion
Complete dungeon paths
Acheivement point hunting
Learn new content, WvW or PvP
Silverwatses
Dry top
HoT meta event chains

The list goes on, there’s never nothing to do

With these in mind as options, some others:
Craft a Legendary (the adventure to get the collection can be a lot of fun if you approach it as a goal rather than a grind)
Find the right guild(s) for you
Become a mentor to newer players
Make another character to level up
Get to high level fractals
Try out different builds for different things
RAIDS – the barrier to entry may seem high but it’s really not. Find a group/guild that teaches the runs (check out Very OK Guild as an example). They are a ton of fun even if you don’t succeed immediately, and the challenge is wonderful.
Try to get rare skins to make your character look how you want them to

reikken.4961:

UnbentMars.9126:

aura-centered

no more auras!

Why not? It’s unique to ele’s and offers many opportunities for unique gameplay

Oldirtbeard.9834:

Get rid of Raids, make new maps, make new challenging map metas, make new 5 mans, oh and in case you didnt see it the first time stop wasting resources on raids.

PS Stop making Raids

Keep raids, make new maps., make new challenging map metas, make new 5 mans, make more raids.

PS Raids are awesome and don’t detract from any other part of the game considering 6 people have made all 3 raids while everyone else is doing other things.

Fixed it for you.

IndigoSundown.5419:

STIHL.2489:

One answer would be to build more content geared towards casual players, that has equal rewards to raids, and feels “end game”, right now the ‘end game’ is all about raids, where at one time there is a vibrant “Choose your own end game” where you could do all kinds of things, now there is only raids. So if they somehow (No idea how) manage to bring back that original lateral end game that they once had, that might fix the problem, but lets get real, doing that would take a ton of time and resources.

Raids as endgame content drop rewards that seem to take a lot of repetition. Afaik, no one has made L. Armor yet. There is a skill gate, and a time gate associated with those rewards.

HoT dropped a ton of “endgame” open world content. This came in the form of multiple goals, many boss battles, and several zone meta events. However, when ANet attempts to make the repetition of such content anything even in the same ballpark as they did for raids, they get lambasted for making content not geared towards “casuals.” People post hate for time gates. Others post hate for skill gates.

The raid came split into three parts. Raiders are still doing all three, religiously, afaik. Open PvE aficionados, on the other hand, are already treating HoT as old content not worth doing. There’s plenty of “endgame” content for open PvE players, but they turn their backs on it because they browbeat ANet into making it easier to get the carrots. So, they’re done with it and ready for something else. The problem is, that isn’t how MMO’s work.

There are times I think the complaining casuals are their own worst enemies.

I wish more people would understand this. If you are truly a ‘casual’ and have spent enough time in the game to have done every single part of every meta event in just HOT alone, you can’t possibly have spent so little time in the game that you can’t be skilled enough to do raids, unless you are just bad at games.

Frankly, the actual casual people who don’t spend much time on the game have literally so much to do if they just went and did it instead of not branching out. Set a goal for yourself (like a legendary weapon), don’t expect the game to do it for you.

I think a battlemage would make more sense using a sword (similar to Arcane Warrior in Dragon Age 1). This could synergize well with existing abilities and expand on them, creating an aura-centered tank character that could dive into melee and use Earth to become the unbreakable wall that a tank needs to be while still staying true to the elementalist spirit.

Yes I know Auramancer tanks can already do a lot of these things, but I think that a Battlemage Elite Spec would be a great way to expand on those items.

Is this offer still good? I’d love to get in on this! I will definitely send an in-game mail

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Diminishing_returns

EXP is affected by DR in dungeons

The difficulty with that is that it would be very easy for people to create dungeons that are specifically for easy loot farming (which isn’t good for the obvious reasons) or impossible dungeons either through impossible gameplay or completely unaddressed bugs.

Logistically, they’d have to release their game engine and models with all of the game data to make that possible which opens up a HUGE can of worms.

If it were possible, I’d love it, but people would take major advantage of the system if it existed. Frankly, I think a good approach would be this:

Diablo 3 style dungeons built into an alternate mode of Fractals since they’ve stated that fractals are easiest to make. In this, there are preset tiles that are semi-randomly assorted with random mobs populating and a few randomly generated bosses, all from a larger pool. This would dramatically shake up the dungeon crawl because you’d have something new every time. Add in random instabilities and you’d have even more of an interesting time.

Since the Wintersday patch hit 2 days ago I have been experiencing extremely long load times. When I open the Task Manager in my computer I cannot even force quit GW2 even though it says the program is not responding.

Has anyone else had this issue?

So what we should have done is go back to the Shiverpeaks and go underground while wearing mordrem outfits and goad the destroyers into attacking thinking we are minions of Mordy, then get Primordus to attack Mordy and kill him off

Thanathos.2063:

You need 5 shards for the last tier (6, if you’re still missing the fractal condensator skin).

I did around 400 fractals according to my achievement counter and I don’t have that much vials/globs and not a single shard. I had to farm one or two globs for the tier 2 Ad Infinitum pre last week… worked quite okay in the grawl shaman fractal since there are quite many mobs (around 22-23 I think) at the start. I was nearly at 300% magic find with boosters and I still needed around 45 mins to get two globs. Could have been faster if I hadn’t farmed them solo, though.

Vials drop in 1-30, globs in 31-49, and shards in 50+ only

Argon.1563:

There aren’t really any sword users who currently suit Bolt.

Personally, im holding off on Bolt until Elementalist gets swords. (Provided a better looking sword doesn’t come out by then.)

Right? I think an Arcane Warrior tank-style duelist class would fit well with the mechanics that elementalists offer (sword/focus would offer a lot of flexibility and CC).

As for what classes currently use swords well, Guardians and Revenants use swords very well, Berserker Warriors make great use of sword/torch, and Rangers can do a lot with a sword as long as you are smart about it

I agree it would be a good raid boss with some additional mechanics, but the collective rage at re-using a boss for raids would be unfortunate.

Better to create a new boss with mechanics inspired by Lupicus (including some fixes and tweaks since Lupicus is rather easily soloable) than simply re-using old content

Do you have a link to that video? I can’t seem to find it

Thanks for the guide! Are you recommending zealot stats or what is the sta balance you go for?

I wonder if the body of Mordremoth became the Dragon’s Champion after we kill the the tree dragon in Season 2? That would explain how it keeps coming back similarly to Teqatl

TheFamster.7806:

UnbentMars.9126:

I think the issue is less that the raid is currently too difficult (for a variety of reasons, some not due to the actual difficulty of the raid) for many players, I think it’s the complete lack of a learning curve.

In the game at this moment, there is no real learning curve up to the mechanical difficulty of raid content as neither dungeons nor fractals have bosses that require the same level of execution.

I don’t think the raids should be lowered in difficulty; I do think that new instanced group content needs to be added that helps with that learning curve such as new fractals or dungeons with similarly difficult and varied mechanics but in a much more forgiving and LFG-supported environment.

Actually players who were in speed running guilds have experienced a bit of mechanical difficulty and there were fractal bosses that required high level of execution. The difference was that people have ran the same content over and over so that the execution most of the time went flawlessly, but there were lots of coordination before such demonstration of mastery of gw2 combat system in pve. Even before the HoT, good players were already sought out and recruited because it was easy to distinguish player performance based on those runs.

If you track down the guilds that have cleared the raid wing so far, almost all of them were speedrunning dungeon/fractal guilds. Basically if people were actually good and took interest in gw2 combat system in pve, they had very smooth transition to raid community. Its these people that contributed to toxic pug environment such as pinging gears that they don’t have, enforcing “play however I want” attitude in other people’s LFG, and crying out elitism for using meta builds/tactics and they are obviously shunned in raids now.

Raid difficulty is fine as it is, ping/connection issue is something that is out of our hands, and for those who can’t seem to find people, either make your own LFG/Guild, join a guild, or take a look at yourselves to see if you are qualified to raid as you think you are.

If you actually read my comment instead of giving a knee-jerk response, you’ll see that I said I DON’T want raids to be easier, I want there to be more opportunities to get to that level that are purposefully there for that reason.

softblackcarbon.1537:

Honestly, I think just the fact that groups are able to kill these bosses proves that there is currently ample room to master your profession in the game currently. The learning curve in the raids is more about learning specific boss fights, rather than learning how to play your class. Once you’ve mastered the fight, it becomes trivial, but the next fight still starts out quite difficult, even though you already have your profession mastered.

(PvP and WvW are already really good places to practice mechanics!)

To be fair, the mechanics present in PvP and WvW are vastly different than the ones present in raids. Players behave in manners very different from the way PvE creatures do.

And ample opportunity differs between people. I happen to be in favor of low barriers to entry and right now the barrier of success is fairly steep so I’d love to see some more opportunities for players to increase their skills in progressively more challenging content.

Also I want more dungeons and Fractals, and they are good ways to add such content

I think the issue is less that the raid is currently too difficult (for a variety of reasons, some not due to the actual difficulty of the raid) for many players, I think it’s the complete lack of a learning curve.

In the game at this moment, there is no real learning curve up to the mechanical difficulty of raid content as neither dungeons nor fractals have bosses that require the same level of execution.

I don’t think the raids should be lowered in difficulty; I do think that new instanced group content needs to be added that helps with that learning curve such as new fractals or dungeons with similarly difficult and varied mechanics but in a much more forgiving and LFG-supported environment.

Beyond the “dungens r ded, woe unto us” posts:

Nearly all dungeons are soloable, there are only a few that require multiple people. That said, soloing dungeons is a matter of skill and desire so some people like doing that and others do not. The quickest way is to join an active and friendly guild. I do dungeons frequently and every time I ask I always get a couple of people who are happy to do them with me.

Other than that, posting in map chat and in the lfg will get you some interest as well.

A male Ranger named John Hammond with a pet raptor named Clever Girl

loved the Jurassic Park reference

Adding Dungeon Dailies (with a small chance at an ascended box) would go MILES towards revitalizing dungeons, and the best part is that it wouldn’t even increase the liquid rewards so John Smith is happy! Dungeon Dailies in the same style as the Fractal Dailies (Do path 1 of W dungeon, path 2 of X dungeon, path 3 of Y dungeon, Story Mode of Z Dungeon maybe even with reward modifiers for difficulty of the dungeon/path) would revitalize dungeons with minimal effort on Anet’s part!

Please!

The overloads are not dependent on the weapon being used so idk, that said I didn’t pay that much attention when i watched them so I’ll have to go look at it

Nike.2631:

UnbentMars.9126:

Ever heard the saying that you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar? It’s accurate in regards to interacting with people too.

I have a variety of tools in my belt. Sometimes to shape wood you need sandpaper.

Good to see you’ve got several tools available to you. Have you considered management consulting?

Nike.2631:

I’m trying not to fall out of my chair laughing right now.

We’ve moved up from players cut-&-pasting from reddit to Gaile cut-&-pasting from reddit. I’m not even gonna speculate. It would be too cruel.

Then you’d be on par with many members of the community when Anet announced its response to y’all.

I recommend reading the post, it’s got even more information attached than the Reddit post.

EDIT: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Update-on-Legendary-Collections-More/first#post5826784

A handy-dandy link even

Thanks for the update, thanks for communicating with us, and thanks for being forthcoming and polite! It’s always a pleasure to see and we appreciate that you guys are working on these things!

Nike.2631:

You want a list of proposals I’ve made that’ve been added to this game? It’s not short.

I speak Dev very well. I’m also pretty decent at articulating to and for players.

Articulation, sure, you can write sentences good. But are you communicating the most effectively? On this thread you’ve been nothing but abrasive and insulting and I think we all remember a not-so-long ago issue with the release of certain messages from DnT to the community that didn’t go over extraordinarily well. Whether or not you had anything to do with that is irrelevant if your statements about the chain of command in posting are true; what matters is the end result.

Ever heard the saying that you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar? It’s accurate in regards to interacting with people too.

They announced that Season 3 will be free to all who own HoT, and that HoT will be required in order to experience it

Nike.2631:

Neural.1824:

Nike.2631:

…snipped…

While a bit brash, your statements are dead on accurate.

Gaile knows I tend to wax poetic in the throes of passion .

She’ll never say it, but she’s gotta be furious a simple “Hi, I work at Anet and here’s what I do” post that should be core, prime content for these boards popped up on reddit and pretty much made a laughingstock of her domain. And I’m not saying the poster screwed up — the entire culture that lead him to doing that is at fault. There’s like three layers of management above the individual Developer who need a stern talking too.

Like I said: Next week. Meetings. Lots of them.

Because you and DnT are experts in speaking to the public…

Nike.2631:

Showing them how? Be forgiving the resounding silence? Show approval for failure? Ball’s been on their side of the net for a while now, and they keep expending their energy to rile people up here even worse with demonstrable examples on neglect for their own forums instead of improving the situation.

Then how would you get the devs to post on here? Cuz the complaining about it sure seems to be working /sarcasm

Nike.2631:

Because that makes it all better.

Or not.

And lo and behold, STILL no post here.

It’s an improvement, which I will take over the moratorium that appears to have been put on devs talking with us.

Other reasons its on Reddit and not here, whoever is running PR or Communications at Anet doesn’t have as much control over what is put on Reddit as they do over what is posted here. How about we discuss how much we enjoy this kind of communication instead of the rude bullkitten that Colin posted on Reddit? Or how we want this kind of communication with the rest of the Devs rather than the extremely limited responses?

Try showing them that it’s okay to talk with us and it might happen more.

Simple fix for both of those:

Add dungeon dailies (4 or 5) and each one has a small chance to drop an ascended box. Then we get dungeon dailies which I would love, other opportunities for ascended which everyone loves, a limited opportunity since you can’t get that reward more than the number of dungeons which Anet loves, and people having a reward reason to do dungeons again which the dungeoneers love.

There is literally no downside. Except to the people who don’t want anyone to have ascended armor, but they are full of kitten so we don’t care about that

If you scroll down he states that he’s going to post here too but chose Reddit first because he’s more comfortable with the format.

Nike.2631:

Well here’s hoping he learns to ‘be comfortable’ using his company’s own website for discussing his work.

He said he’d post here but he started with Reddit because he was more comfortable with the format. Don’t jump down devs throats when they are communicating with us, we want to reward this behavior

I am looking forward to his post on these forums so I can thank him for his clear and kind communication. This is what we want to see from the Devs! It’s great that this is good news and I’m super pleased he’s listened to the forums, but even if it were bad news it’s still fantastic that he’s communicating with us!

xbutcherx.3861:

UnbentMars.9126:

xbutcherx.3861:

Shen Slayer.3058:

What’s the definition of 1.5 mil monthly actives? Logging in for 2 minutes once a month?

Let’s do the math: 1.5m active players, let’s say 100k spend $20 on the gem store, that’s 2 millions a month, by the looks of how the game lack of everything I think is a lot less than that.
Conclusion: I do not think that not even 100k players are active, all lies!!
And I’m not including HoT pre and after sales.

Let’s see. Baseless conjecture not grounded in anything except your personal assumptions. Must be accurate, since you clearly have access to better data than the owners of the actual game.

Play the game and that is your best personal assumptions, when the taxes become public then you can see it at NCsoft website since they are the ones paying the taxes.

I just looked at the Q3 reports, and they appear to be doing just fine, well over 2 million dollars in sales/month.

http://global.ncsoft.com/global/ir/quarterly.aspx

You were saying?

EDIT: Oh, and also, not every consistent player buys something every month. So your “math” is quite literally just out of your kitten

xbutcherx.3861:

Shen Slayer.3058:

What’s the definition of 1.5 mil monthly actives? Logging in for 2 minutes once a month?

Let’s do the math: 1.5m active players, let’s say 100k spend $20 on the gem store, that’s 2 millions a month, by the looks of how the game lack of everything I think is a lot less than that.
Conclusion: I do not think that not even 100k players are active, all lies!!
And I’m not including HoT pre and after sales.

Let’s see. Baseless conjecture not grounded in anything except your personal assumptions. Must be accurate, since you clearly have access to better data than the owners of the actual game.

To be honest, there are so few guaranteed damage sources in fractals that you could likely do all of the fractals without any AR at all if you were good enough. max AR required without singularities is 148, so you’d only need 143 by yourself

Sicarius.4639:

UnbentMars.9126:

Sicarius.4639:

DoctorDing.5890:

(Hands up anyone who thinks that this GW forum gives a true representation of player sentiment as a whole…)

Well given we went from 5m sold to 1.5m monthly actives, then I’d say the last few disgruntled players who wish the game wasn’t going this way are a fair representation as 3.5m buyers left.

We’ve seen the numbers doubled thanks to F2P, maybe those people are Anet’s next target audience.

Where are you getting those numbers?

Here: http://fortune.com/2015/11/24/areanet-investing-in-esports/?xid=soc_socialflow_twitter_FORTUNE

“Guild Wars 2 has proven pretty resilient historically, with about 1.5 million monthly actives,” SuperData Research CEO Joost van Dreunen says. “Since it switched to free-to-play in late August, Guild Wars 2’s monthly active user base has doubled to 3.1 million (October 2015)."

Thanks for the link! It’s always nice to see official announcements, and I’m actually pleased to see that the number is that high (it can seem a lot lower)

Sicarius.4639:

DoctorDing.5890:

(Hands up anyone who thinks that this GW forum gives a true representation of player sentiment as a whole…)

Well given we went from 5m sold to 1.5m monthly actives, then I’d say the last few disgruntled players who wish the game wasn’t going this way are a fair representation as 3.5m buyers left.

We’ve seen the numbers doubled thanks to F2P, maybe those people are Anet’s next target audience.

Where are you getting those numbers?

1. New dungeons. I don’t care about the monetary rewards, in fact I like where they are now. I just want new dungeons because they are so much fun and a great story-telling mechanism (instanced content for groups is great), and HoT has provided so many opportunities to tell more stories

2. SAB – seriously, we want the SAB! And don’t take it out in the interim’s between world releases, just leave it in!

3. Tiered raids with tiered loot. GW2 has always been about providing accessibility to the majority of players and right now raids are NOT accessible. Before anyone claims I want raids to be nerfed, I like where they are now but I also want a lower level with reduced rewards so that more people can experience it and learn the fights to eventually do the harder content – basically, institute a better opportunity for a learning curve

4. Communication between players and Anet employees. It appears as if there has been some kind of moratorium on most Anet employees speaking on the forums. This is not a good way to handle it as these are designed to be places that the devs can get feedback. When you have Colin go to Reddit and make sarcastic remarks about how people commenting their frustrations or providing negative feedback are desiring GW2’s failure, that’s just plain insulting and also completely wrong. Engage in dialogue with us and you will find that the angry people will stop being angry pretty quickly

5. No stealth fixes/nerfs. Don’t hide stuff from the patch notes! Don’t hide stuff from the patch notes! Don’t hide stuff from the patch notes! When we have to get the full list of changes from data miners, something is seriously wrong. This loops back into engaging with us and communication. As a player who has been with GW2 since original launch and a human being, it feels like (and is) being lied to and that is not an appreciated feeling.

6. Armor skins in-game instead of in-gemstore. You’ve made enough money off of a lot of those, instead of doing the piecemeal DLC crap that you know we all hate put some stuff into the game for us to work towards and find rather than simply buy. You are focusing all these efforts into short-term money grubbing and it’s very frustrating.

7. More fractals! Please! We love fractals, and the dailies added to them are great! You’ve got so much Season 1 content that could be put into fractals, and new ones would also be very very welcome!

8. Dungeon dailies in the same vein as fractal dailies