Too much over-reaction and many things taken for granted without still having seen the whole balance notes.
Raids are going to use a mirror comp, autoattack heavy classes will be left out because the increased alacrity, druids will have to regear to healing power, …
If mirror comp is the answer, what prevents a mesmer from dropping the chrono runes (since they are not that useful anymore once SoI has a fixed duration for quickness), getting rid of a few wells and building on a completely different way?
Wouldn’t be possible to make some kind of chrono-tank-healer using minstrels and, lets say, runes of water and some mantras? Wouldn’t this allow the druid on that subgroup to keep playing vipers or zerkers without any issue?
Once chrono runes and a bar full of wells are out, and considering you only have to worry about buffing 5 people, wouldn’t be easier to build a more damage oriented chrono for the other subgroup? Would the alacrity applied by shield phantasms over certain classes result in more damage than just getting rid of the shield and using more offensive phantasms and more autoattack heavy DPSers?
Wouldn’t a condi chrono (maybe not even chrono, since sigil of agility seems enough as SoI fodder) be much more viable on this situation, maybe with the support of a revenant (for boon duration, even if it’s nerfed) and/or a guardian (for additional party wide quickness generation)?
Yes, switching to a standard mirror comp will be probably the first move to handle these changes, specially by PUG groups, and, who knows, it could easily become the new stablished meta, but it’s definitely too soon to take so many things for granted.
I don’t get the point. In the end, it’s all about how viable the approach is.
- If staggering and stomping allowed players to beat content on a reasonable time while being much safer thanks to an overload of defensive tools, then it could easily become the norm for PUGs and just replace the previous meta.
- If the approach would still feel inferior, then this kind of builds would still get kicked.
- If a mix would produce the best results, then support classes (druid, warrior, chrono, rev) would be the ones adapting their builds and handling most the stagger damage. Necros might end using Trailblazers instead of Vipers.
Some would say “use defiant stance” as if it would function the same on a Berserker as Facet of Light/Infuse Light does on a Herald. Let’s not forget that Facet of Light/Infuse Light is basically Healing Signet and Defiant Stance combined.
While I do agree on Facet/Infuse Light being better than Defiant Stance, this statement is far from true.
Facet of Light provides the basic regeneration boon, which at zero healing power heals for about 1/3rd of what Healing Signet does. It doesn’t overlap either with other regeneration sources like those from druids and eles.the regen part actually heals for more than healing signet does per tick. according to his post i havnt fact checked it myself.
Healing Signet heals for 382 every second, while Facet of Light applies 3 seconds of regen every 3 seconds, which heal for 390 over those 3 seconds (for 130 HP/second).
Some would say “use defiant stance” as if it would function the same on a Berserker as Facet of Light/Infuse Light does on a Herald. Let’s not forget that Facet of Light/Infuse Light is basically Healing Signet and Defiant Stance combined.
While I do agree on Facet/Infuse Light being better than Defiant Stance, this statement is far from true.
Facet of Light provides the basic regeneration boon, which at zero healing power heals for about 1/3rd of what Healing Signet does. It doesn’t overlap either with other regeneration sources like those from druids and eles.
Personally it should have 2 leagues a solo/duo league and a 3/4/5 man league. Exclusively doing one or the other is not a good idea. As mentioned above it discriminates against full teams.
yeah yeah queue times blah blah
Thre’s no such a thing like a 3/4/5 man league. If solo/duo play on their own league, the second league can only consist on full premades.
I was also expecting the league to end at 00:00 UTC and somewhat kittened off from losing those 2 hours, but it’s not like we can really schedule our division crossings. Leaving this kind of things which are far from under our control for the last minutes usually yields this kind of results :P
I find wing 2 the easiest one of all three. Sloth is probably the hardest among first bosses (since pretty much everyone knows VG mechanics by now and escort on wing 3 is a joke), but then trio is really easy and Matthias can be done just by stacking obscene amounts of sustain.
I wouldn’t call it evil, but it definitely involves too many “unreadable” geometry.
Between this and several faith leaps, it becomes some kind of sadistic “exploration” puzzle (in the sense that most difficulty comes from figuring out the next jump, not from executing it) which gets incredibly easier on a second run or just by following a video guide.
However, the biggest problem IMHO is on the reward structure. The puzzle gates too many or too important one time rewards (mastery points, several achievements that count towards the meta) and then offers laughable rewards for further runs.
It’s the same problem adventures have over again. Players who don’t like this kind of content get annoyed and/or frustrated, while those who like it get little replay value.
It probably depends on luck if you happen on the wrong people who only slavishly adhere to the “recommended” section of Metabattle.
While I can see the problems of both “n00bs” and “elitists” (exaggerating both extremes), I think the problem mostly stems from the conflicting design goals of ANET.Most “elitists” would probably take more people along if there wasn’t a hard cap on time.
I do remember the mic drop thing in the HoT developers’ video announcing “the berserker meta to be dead”. But then they design encounters where you are pressed for time and thus HAVE to bring the party compositions which crank out the most ye olde DPS or fail.
What do these guys want really? Unless they’re sure what direction they want to build in, I guess the controversy like this will never be able to be resolved.
I dont’ really know what people expected when ANet announced the end of the berserker meta.
IMHO, they’ve dealed unexpectedly fine with the main problem.
Between the boon precast, the initial CC and a couple of Aegis effects, most bosses were melting before even had the chance to become a threat, so the offensive approach was better in terms of both clearing speed and survival.
That’s not the case anymore for most new instanced content. Fights are more or less lengthy, so a lack of defensive capabilities comes at some risk, and boss design has improved enough to not make several minutes fight a complete borefest.
The main reason for a PvE meta to exist is to put players on the same page in terms of group composition, roles and general strategy.
It’s mostly a case of resource management,
For example, you want several boons to be raid wide covered. A general purpose build might use specific traits or gear to get them for itself and work wonders, but when it comes to group play, it makes no sense for every character to bring self buffing capabilities when that can be handled by “specialized” builds at much less effective cost.
Meta builds and raid comps are designed so group buffing, healing, CC and other utlities which could be needed to deal with specific mechanics, are all handled at minimal DPS cost.
That being said, the most common meta approach is not necessarily the “best” approach. It’s usually designed with quite skilled players in mind and tends to give up loads of defense and safety nets in favor of a DPS potential which is far from needed to beat most of the timers (that’s why Matthias keeps topping those “most difficult boss” threads that appear from time to time).
However, even if plenty of groups could benefit from more fail-safe compositions, the basics of most builds remain pretty much the same. There aren’t really that many options when trying to design an efficient raid build so, when a custom build differs too much from the metabattle ones, it’s PROBABLY going to be suboptimal on its role without bringing too much new to the table.
The thing is more about wether AP is a feature aimed at completionists or a daily reward track. If there’s no daily AP cap, then there are a lot of collections and different permanenet achievements which are not worth the effort AP wise.
MMR provides relative indication of a players skill.
If you want you playerbase to have challenging matches, then MMR is used for matchmaking.
PIPs indicate a players progression thru a league/ladder/season.
If tyou want to run a “league/season”, then you need something to show progression through the league/season.
Its just a question on “how do you want run your league/ladder”. And how do you incorporate these “PIP’s” for that particular league.
But once you have the MMR rating to measure skill and create challenging and balanced matches, what “progression” are pips supposed to measure?
On a perfect scenario, where the odds of winning should settle at around 50% for every single players and game, the only “progression” we can truly measure is the amount of games played, so it’s basically a reward track.
/fifteencharacters
Because after several iterations you still haven’t figured nor even get close to how to do it (Just an opinion. If you feel satisfied with this last S4 system, it would be good to know it so we get an idea on what we should expect in the future).
If you try to make divisions to mirror player skill level (which you can only measure through MMR), as you did for S2 and S3, you produce overall bad quality matches, introduce a dangerous bias on MMR ratings and, since many players just quit once they reach the top division and the seasons are really long, you don’t really get a good final skill spread.
On the other hand, if you use MMR to produce quality matches, as you did for S1 and S4, you end up with a painful grind based system (for SoloQers, at least) where everybody plays on his own “bracket” and advancing through divisions is mostly about spamming games, with little correlation to skill (we might think that players who play a lot are likely going to be better, so there’s probably some slight relation). The funniest part of this systems is that, since similar MMR playerbase segments are segregated through division based on the amount of games they play and league placement is still used for matchmaking purposes, the quality of the games isn’t even good.
At this point, and based on what it seems you’re trying to achieve, you could just ignore pips and leagues and try to produce quality games around MMR using the whole pool of active players. Then throw in some insanely grindy reward track, introduce some kind of MMR based multiplier so better players advance faster, and you’re done.
You can go with 1 Chrono, 1 PS, 1 Druid and 1 Rev and do it perfectly fine.
Each one of ‘em still buffs 5 people so what’s the point.
It depends on the group setup you use.
If you go 2/7/1, for example, rev using dumplings (plus chrono share) + PS is enough to keep 25 might on every character. EA form the PS will never get Healer, Chrono an Rev, but can still affect all your 7 man group as long as there’s some little movement since it applies to 5 people every 3 seconds and lasts for 9. Banner spread would be worse as it applies every 6 seconds.
The Druid won’t be able to buff as much as a double druid config, but that’s obviously the coste of using another DPS class over a support one: less support but more base damage. You can also play 2-8 to ensure ranger buffs hit the DPS group at the cost of healing priority over the 2 man subgroup and the druid competing for the warrior buffs.
DPS requeriments are low enough to allow many different compositions. Some of them might be better than others on paper, but in the end is up to you to choose the one you prefer based on the classes you have or want to play.
Making support affect 10 people doesn’t change anything at all. You’ll ALWAYS get a PS, a Chrono, a Rev and a Druid because it would be stupid to not use them, then the DPSers whose utility seems good for the specific fight mechanic (condi ones for VG, eles for things like shard/orb clearing, …) and finally N characters on whatever seems to be the best DPS for the encounter. So, instead of seeing things like double druid or double PS we’d see things like 6 eles or 4 thieves.
(edited by Vargamonth.2047)
You can go with 1 Chrono, 1 PS, 1 Druid and 1 Rev and do it perfectly fine.
Also, the lack of a zerg to progress the map is absent. All things spotlighted within Heart of Thorns.
If you’re comparing it to DS, then yes, Bloodstone Fen seems definitely less zerg reliant (we “can’t” even attempt to low man DS). It feels, however, like it’s designed for half of the map population to gather and zerg (and probably call for more people thorugh taxis) whatever “interesting” thing that happens.
Honestly, I find VB, AB and TD ( excluding final meta events, maybe) way less zerg oriented than BF.
1. Gorseval
2. Escort
3. Trio (I could put this one higher :P)
4. VG
5. KC
6. Sloth
7. Matthias
8. Sabetha
9. Xera
(edited by Vargamonth.2047)
The Ordnance Corps chain is barely done on maps that are not somewhat organized or highly populated, and this event is probably the main culprit. I’ve seen people, even commanders, playing through most of the chain and vanishing away at this point due how atrocious the event is. The whole chain is already annoying enough with the initial multi location events (which are usually done sequentially, taking too long, when the amount of players is very low, quite usual when the day cycle just started).
I’m not sure if tweaking the scaling would be enough (as I don’t know how random people teleporting to the zone affects it), but there are definitely some other changes that would help a lot.
- Make airship parts quest items which, like in many other events, we can collect and deliver in bulk. This alone would be a HUGE improvement. If not possible, make the spontaneously generated airship parts not global but player based (just like with the recent ley line events) or make them appear much faster, so we don’t find ourselves soloing nuhoch vets so often.
- Fix the “bug” where Beigarth gets lost on his own thoughts and stops accepting airship parts for a while. It’s an incredibly annoying behaviour for an already incredibly annoying event.
If you don’t raid, the comeback of Lazarus comes with little ceremony and is literally dumped on your head, with some backup cinematics from Benett and other suporting characters, giving you the Scarlet Wars treatment of “oh, you should know this, if you missed it, sucks to be you”.
It’s not really that different from what you get inside the raid. The cinematic is exactly the same one we got at the end of the second wing, if I’m not mistaken, and any reference to Lazarus comes exactly the same way, scrap papers and some small dialogue entries. There’s probably much more lore about what the white mantle has been doing on those three diaries than in the whole raid.
What adventures need, if anything, is some kind of decent competitive reward to encourage the ones who like them, like myself, to play them more often.
Mastery points and collection requeriments can go away as far as I’m concerned. They offer no replayability for those who like adventures and are nothing but annoying, even painful, for those who dislike them.
You don’t start reading a book 20 pages in or starting a movie at the 15 minute mark – even if one of the characters roughly recaps the story at that point.
It is bad storytelling and a significant misstep by the developers and the narrative team.
100% agree.
It is possible that raids introduces our new main villain. (Lazarus) and anet want to tell that to majority of the players in recap? That just dont feel good.
Yeah, it’s not like he was introduced to raiders on a cinematic or something like that :P
Sure, that’s why I say leagues should be shorter (as long as ANet wants to have a more exclusive legend rank).
ok, fair enough there we differ in opinion, i am more for a system were people stay at their appropriate division over the seasons, which will give less blown out matches and keep more people in pvp as their matches are appealing even for the low ranked. Which does not exclude a privileged legend rank for the very best.
I’d be more than OK with that. It would be far better than what we have now. I just can’t figure how to do it while keeping the carrot that progression based rewards are supposed to be, since there’s no progression on a system like that.
I don’t mind having little, or even zero, progession over the course of a season, but I don’t really know how other segments of the playerbase would react to that.
So are you also going to say, because your team is a zerg of 70 players omni blob that curb stomps all of the 10 and 15 man groups is winning because yall have higher skilled players? Because that’s basically what I’m hearing from you right now. The fact that you are still under the illusion that their is skill in winning in the current form of the sPvP leagues, just proves my early point that GW2’s Ranked PvP is now a Special Olympics league, since you are consider to be one of the “better players”.
The matchmaker creates both teams from the pool of available players around some ladder position, and stacks those with higher MMR, which is the oly measure of “skill” they have, on the same team. There are definitely other factors, like class compisitions and such, but it’s fairly basic to expect players wiht higher MMR to statistically advance faster.
Which will happen again and again and everyone ends in legend.
Sure, that’s why I say leagues should be shorter (as long as ANet wants to have a more exclusive legend rank).
So are you also going to say, because your team is a zerg of 70 players omni blob that curb stomps all of the 10 and 15 man groups is winning because yall have higher skilled players? Because that’s basically what I’m hearing from you right now. The fact that you are still under the illusion that their is skill in winning in the current form of the sPvP leagues, just proves my early point that GW2’s Ranked PvP is now a Special Olympics league, since you are consider to be one of the “better players”.
The matchmaker creates both teams from the pool of available players around some ladder position, and stacks those with higher MMR, which is the oly measure of “skill” they have, on the same team. There are definitely other factors, like class compisitions and such, but it’s fairly basic to expect players wiht higher MMR to statistically advance faster.
S2 and S3 have probably been slightly better at correlating skill and league position, while worse at producing quality matches. The balance is far better than it was for S1, but the game is still too spammy and passive proc filled (overall worse, IMHO) compared to what we had prior to HoT.
There’s still a lot of work to do to achieve a decent system:
- Safety nets at amber, emerald and sapphire need to go. They allow players to advance by pure game spam (with no toher purpose but allow to grind the legendary backpack) and, since everyone doesn’t play at the same rate, negatively affects any MMR spread til Ruby.
- Seasons need to be shorter or there should be incentives to play beyond legendary. As time passes, the average skill level goes down for every ladder position. There’s usually a huge skill gap between the players who reach legendary at the beginning of a season and those who do it at the end, which results on a terrible MMR spread at the beginning of the next season. Shorter seasons would reduce this skill gap (and the number of players who reach legendary, which could be or not a good thing). Incentives to play on legendary division (where A LOT of players just quit) would produce an effective spread inside that division, allowing for a better initial spread at the beginning of the next one.
Vargamonth you say and I quote “What you see as an improvement, it’s actually only an improvement for YOU and might be perceived as negative by others”
That is an unfair statement because you don’t allow for the possibility that those improvements could ALSO be perceived as positive by others.
You’re right. They can (and almost surely will) be perceived as postitive by many other people. I was trying to explain that whatever is a good change for some people, could easily be a bad one for others. My apologies.
really? So the end game can’t be new dungeons AND new raids? New dungeons giving better looking exotic gear and raids continuing with Ascended? In a game all about horizontal progression this would probably make more people happy.
Big guilds can keep their guild halls, but no reason why small guilds couldn’t get less expensive huts for example.
A more mixture of zones with there being bigger reward in the harder ones, but easier ones existing for casual players, you sure that is impossible?
HoT completely alienated whole lot of players. Most MMOs don’t do this. They find balance instead. There’s not going to be balance without any outrage.
What you’re saying is that you don’t want anyone that left to get ANYTHING. Which is alienating a huge part of the player base. I’m saying that multiple types of content can coexist side by side.
Some of your suggestions are definitely possible, but only universally positive if they’re additions. It would be great to get several dungeons on top of raids (some new factals, which is the current foundation for dungeon content, are coming with LS3 afaik), but the truth is you would probably need to cut the raid development to produce those dungeons, and you would still get complaints about whatever difficulty you set for them.
Honestly, I find the xpac fairly well balanced in many aspects.
I got raids, which are great but still rather easy (balance, I guess), but I somehow lost fractals (which got extremely casualized) in the process. I got some great maps to explore, but still with very little appeal gameplay (not reward) wise to play them on daily basis. I got adventures, which I love, but no reward structure to replay them competitively. I got elite specs, which sound nice, but they also powercreeped many old content and brought a spammy and passive proc filled gameplay to PvP which I dislike A LOT.
I guess all the points I dislike are there for a reason, probably because there are other segments of the playerbase who enjoy things that way.
Without any critique, the next GW2 expansion can’t be better. Perhaps the next expansion pack
- small guilds will have their courner
- end game won’t have to be just raids
- zones won’t have to be on very strict timers
- there will be more balance between horizontal and vertical zones
- there will be more content for the price
- the developers won’t go back on their promises (the legendary fiasco)
- content won’t have to be easy versus hard
without critique, without people being unhappy or leaving, none of this will happen. Everyone knows that there are some good points to HoT, but if there’s no backlash, there’s no improving in the future.
You’re compeltely missing Vayne’s point. What you see as an improvement, it’s actually only an improvement for YOU and might be preceived as negative by other players.
For example, you talk about more balance between vertical and horizontal zones.
For me, TD and, to a lesser extent, VB have been, by far, the most fun to explore areas in the game. On the other hand, I find AB and DS to be too flat and offer very little regarding exploration.
You also talk about end game not being only about raids and content not having to be easy versus hard. This is something where any alternative you could figure out is going to get critiques from some part of the community. There’s no way you can satisfy everyone.
Of course, you have to deliver your own feedback, tell devs which things you liked and which you didn’t so the next xpac may be better for YOU. Just have clear that very few things are universal improvements.
Matthias is not a DPS demanding encounter, so I would go for the safest composition, which IMHO would be something like:
Chrono-Herald-Tempest-Necro
Chrono-Herald-X-Necro
Druid
Water staff camping Tempest
Where X could be any DPS class. A Condi PS + DH could be used instead of Herald + X although i dont find banners to be THAT powerful for this composition.
Chrono + Herald using Golden Dumplings handles might upkeep fine and without the drawbacks of short lasting PS might. They also provide easy fury and protection as needed.
Double Chrono makes easier to handle reflects on bad RNG situations and Herald can use Rite of the Great Dwarf instead of Vengeful Hammers if things get a little bit messy.
Healer tempest + Druid is clearly better than double Druid survival wise, usually but not necessarily at the cost of damage.
Achievement points are a feature which is aimed at completionists.
I thought they were aimed at people who want to brag about trivial things.
People will usually show whatever accomplishment they feel “proud” about, be it the AP score, a legendary weapon or some specific title, and probably only like minded people will appreciate it to some extent.
Achievement points are a feature which is aimed at completionists. They will prevent this kind of players from running out of content and contribute to player retention by extending the lifetime of the game.
Losing out a hit-or-miss achievement is a slap in the face for any true completionist and can lead to that player losing interest on AP hunting. Temporary AP also makes the feature a lot less valuable at retaining new completionist minded players.
So, basically, hit-or-miss AP should never be a thing. There are many other ways to reward players for partaking on temporary content.
Dailies also mitigate content droughts and contribute to player retention by preventing players from losing touch with the game even if it’s just for a few minutes a day.
ANet had the amazing idea of mixing both concepts and created a mess which, in my opinion, is already far beyond salvation.
For non completionist players, achievement points are nothing but a reward track. For long term non completionist players, it’s actually close to a daily driven reward track, so when they reach the cap they suddenly find dailies a lot less appealing, and the daily feature loses value as a retention tool.
The removal of the cap, on the other hand, destroys the AP feature for most completionist players … well, for those who are left, as the ridiculous amount of “hit-or-miss” AP introduced over time plus a little 4 years worth of dailies barrier renders the feature mostly useless for any non veteran player.
This is a problem we would not be facing if we would just have had two independant reward tracks, one for regular AP, promoting completionism, and another one for daily/temporary AP or whatever they want to call it, encouraging regular play (although there are probably better solutions involving account bound currencies).
I just hope they’ve learnt for future releases.
Some of the items in the gemstore that seem to be expensive may be priced with the expectation that purchases will often involve a blend of gems attained through the gold exchange and some purchased with real money. The company may very well be assuming that many of their $10 items are actually being sold for $5 plus time spent farming for gold.
It doesn’t work that way.
Those gems that are purchased with gold come from another player who bought them with RL money and exchanged them for gold so, in the end, $10 items are always sold for $10, with the variation of the gem gold exchange ratio aims for an equilibrium between gold->gem and gem->gold conversions.
For many players to purchase a $10 item with $5 and some gold farming, there has to be several others being milked.
(edited by Vargamonth.2047)
A Revenant using either dumplings or sigil of strength procs Shared Empowerment much more frequently, specially on Jalis. Couple it with a Chrono using also dumplings and both active and passive Signets of Inspiration, and the might generation, while requiring some ramp up time at the start of the fight, becomes quite high and stable.
While it’s obvious that ANet wants as many RL money gem purchases as possible, they couldn’t care less about what those gems are used for. Both an ingame conversion to gold and the acquisition of some new fancy glider fill ANets pockets exactly the same way.
Gold-gem conversion ratios are totally controled by ANet as they have the ultimate decisions on where to allocate the next luxury items or wether if gold is cheap or scarce.
Right now they’re going for cheap gold. Time will tell if it’s a good decision or not.
Achievement Points are meant to show how much of the game you have played and completed.
Dailies have nothing to do with this. There might be some achievement gated behind daily progression, but that’s all they have in common.
IMHO ANet made a terrible mistake by merging two completely unrelated ideas. Dailies should have never been an AP source. The current cap is the least they could have done to fix the mess.
The small area I’m talking about is after checkpoint 5 and right before 6. It’s very small for the hop that 2 performs.
Just checked it. The platform is indeed to small for #2, but there’s no need to use the skill there unless you’re aiming for high scores far beyond gold.
Between 5 and 6 you should be more than fine just with a #1 after the checkpoint, which doesn’t need to be precise once you are not going to follow it with a #2, and regular run and jumping after that.
Achieving a good leaderboard score probably requires to execute extremely precise #1 and #2 moves. None of this is required, however, to get gold with a decent margin.
You don’t need to use #1 to jump over edges.
On a regular run, I use the skill exactly 6 times and only once, which doesn’t require precise positioning at all, to jump between platforms. I could do that jump without using any transformation skill and still get gold with some spare seconds left.
As for skill #2, I use it three times, none of them again on a platfporm small enough to require precise timing or positioning.
It really looks like you’re trying to get silver/gold by using advanced moves which are not even remotely required.
And the most important: to do this farm you will need do the events at the map during the pilons phase. You will not get enough currency by the chests alone, even with the keys earned by the daily chest. 30 keys per map to open everything.
You do not oppen every chest available: just open the big ones, ignoring the medium and small ones. That’s 5 keys per map and character, and every key guarantees a rare and a champion bag.
It’s the AB meta farming that is flooding the game with surplus gold. Inflation.
I don’t really think AB multiloot is producing any inflation. Most of the profit come from items which are traded to other players so, even if the champbags produce some gold our of thin air, the whole farm probably ends up destroying gold.
It’s perfectly possible, however, for some AB farmers to be earning so much gold these days that purchasing “expensive” things, like gemstore commodities, has actually become easier.
I don’t do the multi loot thing. I was just wondering why you think it’s unfair? I could care less if people do it. It doesn’t affect me in anyway. I agree it most likely isn’t what Anet intended. I just don’t understand why you’re upset with people making a little more gold. Jealousy? Investments going south?
Probably because it’s an obvious case of reward unbalance. There’s no reason for AB meta to have such a big reward.
For those who like it, it’s awesome. For those who don’t, it means either to spend a good amount of time on something you don’t like or getting behind economy wise.
Keys are not a problem. I rarely do any event other than the meta one and my amount of keys/aurilium seems to be going up.
You don’t need to find a 2nd map either. You join a multiloot squad, which will usually have over 4-5 succesful maps on it, and you cycle through all these maps at every big chest. Then swap character and repeat.
The thing is completely broken/unbalanced and should be nerfed but, well, at this point I don’t expect any kind of decent reward balance from ANet.
(edited by Vargamonth.2047)
Herald is definitely autoattack heavy, but not necessarily as simple as it might sound.
Once you factor in the right side if the skillbar, which is filled with high CD utilities on most other classes, the amount of skill usage becomes average-ish.
A raid PS Warrior, for example, has a much more interesting weapon skill rotation but an almost passive utility skillset.
Thief, which seems to be your current alternative to herald, is probably, along with DH, the most passive / autoattack heavy character you could use on a raid setting.Hmmm interesting, this is a tough choice then, its the first im hearing it about thieves though. Daredevil doesnt seem to be all about auto attack to be honest.
Quickness doesn’t affect some of the staff skills so, in a raid group where you have a high uptime of quickness, autoattacking plus a dodge roll from time to time is almost the best DPS you can get. On top of that, you might easily find yourself picking passiuve signets as utilities.
On a different scenario, like soing fractals without a chrono or just open world play, things can be completely different tough.
So what classes do beyond auto attack in raids?
Engineer is the most complicated one for sure. Unfortunately, after the slick shoes nerf it doens’t bring much more to the table and can’t compete with DD and Tempest damage even when played incredibly well.
Tempest uses several weapon skills and has some build variations between bosses. It’s also probably the most demanded class DPS wise.
Warrior, as I already said, has a decent weapon rotation and it’s also a demanded class for group damage boosting. On the other side, its utility bar usually consists on a couple of long lasting long CD banners and a signet.
Even if you’ll find yourself autoattacking (for crappy damage) most of the time, mesmer brings some come complexity too, although this time is more about knowing WHEN you should use your utilities. Also a demanded class.
Offensive druids, specially condition ones, have a nice weapon skill rotation plus the timing component of being a healer. On the other hand, many groups might prefer to use a dedicated healer which is far more simple on the weapon side.
Necromancer uses more than autoattack but it’s still fairly simple and straightforward. It doesn’t really get interesting until you bring several necros for some epidemic bounces or you reach the (currently) last boss where there’s some condition management.
Guardian is extremely autoattack heavy. A complete borefest in my opinion unless the fight requires some well timed utilities like reflection walls and such. Daredevil seems to be in this same spot.
Herald is definitely autoattack heavy, but not necessarily as simple as it might sound.
Once you factor in the right side if the skillbar, which is filled with high CD utilities on most other classes, the amount of skill usage becomes average-ish.
A raid PS Warrior, for example, has a much more interesting weapon skill rotation but an almost passive utility skillset.
Thief, which seems to be your current alternative to herald, is probably, along with DH, the most passive / autoattack heavy character you could use on a raid setting.Hmmm interesting, this is a tough choice then, its the first im hearing it about thieves though. Daredevil doesnt seem to be all about auto attack to be honest.
Quickness doesn’t affect some of the staff skills so, in a raid group where you have a high uptime of quickness, autoattacking plus a dodge roll from time to time is almost the best DPS you can get. On top of that, you might easily find yourself picking passiuve signets as utilities.
On a different scenario, like soing fractals without a chrono or just open world play, things can be completely different tough.
Herald is definitely autoattack heavy, but not necessarily as simple as it might sound.
Once you factor in the right side if the skillbar, which is filled with high CD utilities on most other classes, the amount of skill usage becomes average-ish.
A raid PS Warrior, for example, has a much more interesting weapon skill rotation but an almost passive utility skillset.
Thief, which seems to be your current alternative to herald, is probably, along with DH, the most passive / autoattack heavy character you could use on a raid setting.
When a MMORPG launches it will attract and retain players with its advertised features and core philosophy. In this case, some people played GW2 because they could progress in any content – a thing not true with the expansion.
Even if you tie progression to certain activities the playerbase might not be upset. The problem arises when the new mandatory content has a new type of gameplay – which was not advertised at all. Not to mention they’re lore and immersion breaking.
If jumping puzzles were a mandatory part of the core game, maybe people wouldn’t have been as upset.
Jumping puzzles have been there since the very beginning as something we could play if we wanted, just like any other piece of content, and they have been part of the permanent, daily and living story achievement systems since like forever.
There’s an important subset of the playerbase who hates them, who have always avoided them or skipped them with a portal when possible, and that’s probably enough reason to untie similar content from character progression.
Not being mandatory in the core game, however, is something that can be applied to pretty much every single type of content. By that logic, we should get rid of the whole mastery system.
If you have to “force” people into the content youve created, you might have created bad content.
If you know that you have to “force” people into content that they paid for, then it certainly seems as if you are knowingly selling bad content.
This. The forums taught ANet that they could ignore “fun” as a metric and instead could use rewards to lead players to whatever they produce, whether it be something mainstream like the story or niche stuff like adventures.
And then, if you look a few posts above, you’ll find there are players who tag story as random crap too.
No content can satisfy everyone’s tastes so, what’s the solution then?
The only reasonable one seems to be about not gating absolutely anything behind any kind of content for a really bland progression system, and even then we would still have a problem with each player’s preferences: Getting some skin or mini might be more relevant than capping masteries for a lot of players so maybe those shouldn’t be locked behind specific content either.
I wouldn’t expect the end result of this to be any good.
I’m perfectly aware that, as someone who likes adventures, I belong to a minority, so I don’t really have any problem with ANet unlinking masteries from them or making them easier to get.
Some people have proposed to award minis, skins or some other “not progression related” items instead. The truth is, that would still upset a lot of players. In fact, already happened with some collections, and those never required anything beyond silver.
In the end, it looks like the only way to satisfy some people would be by making adventures completely irrelevant or, even better, removing them from the game altogether, and that’s a really dangerous approach.
(edited by Vargamonth.2047)
It depends on how much time you’re putting into.
Every HoT map meta repeats itself every couple of hours, so if you can afford to follow this schedule, I would say a reasonable way to play the expansion could consist on playing every outpost chain once (for five times total) and using any daytime remaining time to explore a little bit, complete hero points and toy with whichever adventure you could have found.
You should get a fresh experience every single time and by the time you’ve seen most of the events you should be ready to move on onto the next map mastery wise.
Changing things like mechanics, cooldowns, … can be confusing when jumping between game modes and I totally get why they avoid it.
Tweaking some damage numbers and scaling coefficients between game modes, however, allows for a much better overall balance without barely causing any problem.
I feel too many people are looking at the change froma worng perspective. The problem is not about hybrid builds or 4 stat amulets, it’s about packing too much defense on a condition amulet.
Unlike power damage, which rarely works outside of some very specific builds, condition damage is usually dangerous enough with a single stat investment, so Condi/Thoughness/Vitality and Condi/Thoughness/Healing combos can easily create monsters.
Balanced condition amulets need to have points asigned into “filler” stats or offer combinations which are far from ideal, basically because they need less total stat points to work.
If Dire were available in PvP, many of the classes which have been using Mercenary would be using that instead at the cost of some stat points. I wouldn’t be surprised eitherabout Mercenary remaining popular if it would lose half of its Power, maybe even the whole 1050 stat points.
For every hybrid build to remain somewhat viable, all we need is a new amulet with Ferocity instead of Vitality, which should cover the needs, maybe even be a buff, for those builds relying on sigil of intelligence for big direct damage spikes.
A Condition Damage/Power/Precision/Vitality amulet wouldn’t probably hurt at all either.
Obviously, there needs to be some additional balance changes on classes too. Mercenary removal is a hit for pretty much any condition build, most of them not being top tier picks, and definitely puts Power Herald on an even more dominant position.
The removal, however, is by itself a step in the good direction.