Guild Wars 2

Malchior.5732:

So essentially:
- Perma Fury
- More Quickness out of Chronos
- +150 Ferocity for team
- Decent damage

Protection is mostly covered by Hammer Guard and the Revenant drops a good chunk of DPS to CC (Staff is the only really good access of CC). Regardless, I don’t think Rev is trash, but these team comps wouldn’t fall apart if the Revenant was missing or replaced(this group DID kill Sabetha with 6 people after all).

Now, if Herald didn’t exist, THEN I’d say Revenant was trash. No permanent team-wide boons, no facet of nature, and the DPS simply isn’t high enough compared to Thief and Ele, of which the latter can also provide a ton of support (and pull off a better healer too…) while doing a ton of damage.

The thing is, you don’t bring both a hammer guard and a revenant in the same group.
Unless the fight makes really good use of some of the guardian “exclusive” tools, protection is the main reason to bring a hammer guard (otherwise you could just swap it for another top DPS class like a tempest).
Once you have one of these characters to provide protection, the other one feels far less useful and can easily be replaced.

About the 6-man Sabetha kill, you have to notice that the main source of fury is the druid’s tiger, which is not in the main group. That’s next to impossible to reliably accomplish with another 4 players around.
You could remove a tempest to fit the druid in, and then copy the exact same composition for the second subgroup and it would be fine. Replacing a tempest with a thief and slotting FGJ on the PS could probably work too.
Replacing the DH with a Herald and keeping everything else untouched, however, is also a perfectly viable solution.

Herald is definitely not mandatory (which I don’t think is a bad thing), and core revenant is absolutely trash tier (most core specs are tbh, this one just sucks a lot more), that’s something I agree with you.

Malchior.5732:

Vargamonth.2047:

It’s all about Fury. It’s not such a common boon for long fights as it might seem.
Outside of Facet of Darkness, tiger pets are probably the only reliable source of long lasting AoE Fury so, for a 10 man setup, unless you run a Druid or a combination of classes that can provide enough small doses of Fury (PS running FGJ instead of signet + DH with FMW + trickery DD, for example) in the actual subgroup, Fury upkeep might easily become a serious problem.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Persisting_Flames

That used to be more than enough for 5 people.
Now, I’m not saying being a Furybot isn’t a fine job for a Herald, but it’s not irreplaceable, it’s just an easier (aka braindead) job for us.

The problem with persisting flames is that eles dont run the blast finisher heal anymore, and even if it could be possible to slot arcane wave instead of something else, a hammer guardian is a real pain to realibly blast fire fields instead of light ones.

I wouldn’t call Heralds fury bots, they do quite a lot more things than that. They help with the quickness uptime (also might allow the PS to build slightly more offensively), they have a party wide ferocity boost, they can provide really high uptime of protection, they have good CC capabilities if needed, and the damage output isn’t THAT bad.
Hammer DHs just share some of these capabilites, and that’s when the fury makes the difference. A DH just doesn’t fit as many group composition as a Rev does.

It’s all about Fury. It’s not such a common boon for long fights as it might seem.
Outside of Facet of Darkness, tiger pets are probably the only reliable source of long lasting AoE Fury so, for a 10 man setup, unless you run a Druid or a combination of classes that can provide enough small doses of Fury (PS running FGJ instead of signet + DH with FMW + trickery DD, for example) in the actual subgroup, Fury upkeep might easily become a serious problem.

Rauderi.8706:

What matters is execution, and that’s where ANet dropped the ball. I actually consider it a shame, since what we’ll likely find is that Adventures don’t get metrics needed to continue supporting them. Not because players didn’t like them, but because players were so frustrated by the conditions in which they exist that it taints any future development.

Could you elaborate a bit?

There are a few adventures which stay in locked state for too long, Shooting Gallery being the most obvious cause, but outside of that I don’t know what exactly would frustrate the playerbase.
Adventures are mostly ignored because players don’t like them, and even for those, like me, who actually do like them, rewards are far from impressive.

Manasa Devi.7958:

Twitchcom? I don’t even know what that is.

I meant TwitchCon, which was a videogame convention (like E3 or PAX) hosted by Twitch, so with special focus on Esports and/or games that provide good streaming material.
It took place around a month before HoT release and loads of info about the expansion were revealed.

Obviously, you’re not required to watch those streams if you don’t want to. I think, however, that looking for some kind of summary is always a healthy approach (the info provided included things as little as the balance preview or the druid specialization).

There was also quite a bit of talk and specific footage from Masks of the Fallen and Floor is Lava during Twitchcom.

Manasa Devi.7958:

Vargamonth.2047:

I can hardly see how that’s supposed to be a win for those who like adventures, as I see no difference to what we have right now.

If you like adventures, you’ve already won. There’s 15 of them.

Which is about an adventure for each outpost and its associated event chain(s). Looks fairly well balanced for me.
It’s not like I bought the game and found these adventures as a welcomed surprise either. Getting what I had advertised is not exactly what I would call “a win” but, I don’t know, there are so many disappointing releases these days that maybe I should feel extremely happy just about this.

Hyper Cutter.9376:

Vargamonth.2047:

In any case, I wouldn’t mind ANet moving the mastery points to bronze/silver or readjusting gold thresholds if the current state is making so many people upset.
I would also appreciate some replayability improvements for those of us who like them.

Mastery points should be at bronze and silver, and collection items at bronze. That takes most of the sting out of the adventures, and everyone wins: people who hate the adventures get their mastery points and collection items and then never need to worry about them again while people who like them can compete with each other on the leaderboards in peace.

I can hardly see how that’s supposed to be a win for those who like adventures, as I see no difference to what we have right now.
For most adventures, we get a piece of rare gear on the first run without even trying, and then any more time spent perfecting the run and “competing” on the leaderboards (where we usually have no other reference but our own time) is pretty much wasted reward wise (we get, at least, some of the meta progress chests like everyone in the map).

As I said, I’ve no problem with moving those mastery points to bronze/silver if that’s going to improve the game experience for some people.
On the other hand and since the thread has become a general complaint against having anything locked by adventures , I think is appropriate to point out that we are the ones who got the shorter end of the stick with almost no replay value for the content we like.

Playing with high ping is surely a problem, but it’s not like the timer is so tight for every single adventure.
I would expect issues with “Masks of the Fallen”, “Floor is Lava”, obviously “Shooting Gallery” (as it is painful for pretty much everyone), and maybe “A fungus among us” (depending on how #2 behaves with high ping).

In any case, I wouldn’t mind ANet moving the mastery points to bronze/silver or readjusting gold thresholds if the current state is making so many people upset.
I would also appreciate some replayability improvements for those of us who like them.

Raizen.7981:

Pandabro.8743:

Biggest issue here is the huge cost on Condi gear. If it wasn’t such a huge commitment to gear a class for condi we’d have a lot less issues when balance patches drop and one build gets nerfed “into the ground”.

zerker costs twice as much as condi

talking from a pro perpsective of course. Talking infusions, where you need around 2300 t6 mats for a full set, you can’t really claim condi is so hard to get, when condi items go for 6 silver each, while zerk go 26/49 silver each.

Source: got 10 versatile and 4 normal malign infusions just waiting…something. I hope we will be able to break then down someday

If you try to get BiS gear then yes, berserker is far more expensive than condition gear.
BiS gear is, however, far from needed.
Ascended armor and its versatile infusions can be replaced with an exotic and infusion-less version without experincing a significant damage loss. That’s usually the first move when you try something new, and that’s where the price of condition gear becomes obscene, mostly because condition build performance is extremely tied to a new stat combination with ridiculous crafting costs.
Even if it’s not THAT much money, spending around 20 gold for each armor piece while knowing it will be all lost if/whenever you upgrade it to ascended still hurts quite a bit and pushes people right towards ascended gear (which is account bound and can, at least, be re-stated if neccesary).

A revenant will still be highly desirable for the chrono group.
Achieving that 50% boon duration by different means would cause a quite big DPS loss for the mesmer, and the revenant is also handling the fury and providing decent DPS.
On top of that, Jalis is way less energy dependant than Shiro. In order to fill in the precision strikes, we are looking at 2 seconds at most without vengeful hammers.
Since precision strike is currently situational (seekers close to the VG, ghosts or a wall near Gorseval), it’s hard to say wether the class will see its damage cut down or experience a damage increase. In any case, the difference will be too small to worry about losing the spot.

The whole thing may be different for the second subgroup.
Since the 50% boon duration boost is not really that interesting there, Revenant is far from mandatory. It helps at covering might and fury, but this can also be achieved with other classes.
If the mesmer doesn’t hop between subgroups (so the 2nd subgroup lacks quickness the majority of time), which I guess is the most common scenario, then the revenant will still be a good damage choice (even if the change probably hurts shiro more than the other legends) on top of a boon/ferocity source.
If the chrono hops, then this second revenant, which is already expendable, could have indeed a harder time getting a raid spot.

Aomine.5012:

Vargamonth.2047:

Not really sure if a build that gets soft countered by just not allowing it to have 1 on 1 fights can ever be competitive, specially when the arguably best overall 1 on 1 skirmisher is a pet class that you don’t single out by default (no nerfs announced so far, although it might be hit hard by amulet changes).

Add to this the insane corruption capabilities necromancers seem to be getting plus a mercenary amulet which fits them like a glove, and we might easily be saying goodbye to power revenants for a while.

Guess someone play too few games to know that Mallyx/Shiro Revenant can 1v 1 any class, and can eat Druid easily with the OP Banish Enchantment.

AFAIK Mallyx/Shiro builds usually run Vipers and are more focused on condition damage than on direct one, with Sword/Shield being the “defensive” weapon set.
Those are going to be hit far less than power builds, which use the sword as their main damage tool (which is kinda ridiculous btw, since Viper rev is much more present it the meta than power one).

Not really sure if a build that gets soft countered by just not allowing it to have 1 on 1 fights can ever be competitive, specially when the arguably best overall 1 on 1 skirmisher is a pet class that you don’t single out by default (no nerfs announced so far, although it might be hit hard by amulet changes).

Add to this the insane corruption capabilities necromancers seem to be getting plus a mercenary amulet which fits them like a glove, and we might easily be saying goodbye to power revenants for a while.

Harper.4173:

I think what people are trying to express when they call themselves casual is “I can’t play a lot” or “I can’t play often” or “I don’t want to bother to stay up-to-date with my strategies, comps and builds”.
I don’t think they mean they’re taking a casual carefree “i don’t care about those rewards I’m here to have fun” approach – at least not most of them.

That’s exactly the problem.

I’ve been too on a farm status plenty of time (currently trying to fill the hit or miss AP on wintersday activities, which is a horrible experience I hoped to not repeat a second time) and I’ve also sold filler slots for instanced content (I just prefer to underman content even when I won’t).
It’s not my natural mindset, but I just happen to have plenty of time to play (and I can rely on single player games because I devour them in few days) and too little truly interesting things to do (this was at least the case before the expansion arrived), so I let the little completionist inside me to lead.

The thing is, if for some reason I’d find myself with a lot less time to play, I would completely change the way I do it, trying to focus on those things I find more fun instead of setting and pursuing tangible goals (which are not necessarily mutually exclusive, but often are).

Playing on a hardcore achiever mindset when you lack the most basic capabilities (like time) to fulfill your own goals can bring nothing but frustration. It might work for a while if your goals are reasonable, but it’s just a matter of time until you put your eyes on something that’s completely out of your reach (which is when the complaints and the entitlement arises).
For their own mental health, casual players should make the effort of bringing themselves into a casual mindset.

Harper.4173:

The reason dynamic combat received a negative reaction is obvious – everyone who does PvE does it because they want stuff – that’s what PvE does – you trade time for stuff – and that’s the case for the majority of players.

If someone truly wants dynamic combat against a worth opponent – well those people already have it – it’s called PvP. Against a human opponent you’re never quite sure what’s going to happen and thus the combat is fresh and fun and truly “dynamic”.

In PvE however most people just want to find the optimal way to get most of the encounters “on farm” – and since GW2’s high-end cosmetics are so highly driven by the necessity of huge sums of money you can’t really blame the players for wanting to just farm it out without giving a kitten about the “dynamic combat”.

Nobody does dungeons for “dynamic combat” in GW2 – and I doubt very many are doing raids because they enjoy “raid-tier difficulty” and “tough encounters”.
I’m willing to bet you the vast majority of players doing raids now are only doing them because of the exclusive rewards and legendary armor that are gated behind them.

I can assure you there’s people playing the game because of the combat.
The many times I’ve undermanned dungeons or fractals without any intention to sell the remaining slots, it has pretty much always been about making the fights more fun.
I’m also partaking in raids while I have zero interest on a legendary armor.

But you’re right. The majority doesn’t, the majority goes for rewards, and that’s exactly what bothers me about all these complaints about casualness.
A good portion (maybe even a majority) of the GW2 playerbase doesn’t have a casual mindset, but a hardcore achiever one. They just lack the will, time or skill to fulfill some of their goals.

Daddicus.6128:

Lalainnia.3598:

Curious why are casuals always considered to be people that don’t want any sort of challenge from a game. I always thought casuals were just people that only got to play a certain/specific amount of time for the day/week???? I am confuzzled…..

I would say casuals are people who want to be able to play at their own pace, without being forced into a box. Difficult or easy content is irrelevant. Even impossible or nearly impossible (to them) content isn’t a game-breaker.

Casuals also TEND towards solo play. Perhaps casuals could be thought of as anything other than killers on Bartle’s Gamer Psychology grid.

I myself am an achiever, but both explorers and socializers, it seems to me, would be considered “casual”. Being an achiever, not being able to finish the story is a game-breaker. Now, I’m not talking about the difficulties of combat. One expects those every so often. But, when you can’t find your way through the maze even after you’ve been through it, or you’re repeatedly gated, or you are dependent upon someone else, that’s not casual.

Explorers and Socializers probably have different definitions of casual. But, Killers aren’t casual.

NOTE: Not all gamers are going to fit neatly into any scheme of partitioning. So, my comments on achievers are really mostly about me, and my comments on the other three should be taken with a heavy grain of salt.

I completely disagree. Under my understanding of “casual”, any of the Bartle’s categories is perfectly possible.
In fact, a casual achiever is probably the wierdest one (as he will find himself all the time fighting an uphill battle) and casual killers are not only possible, but extremely common (they just don’t favor MMOs because they’re time consuming).

Tigaseye.2047:

Vargamonth.2047:

In fact, GW2 combat has always been marketed as a fast paced action based one (“Combat in Guild Wars 2 is flexible, fast-paced, and dynamic. You’ll achieve victory through timing, dodging, and quick thinking, not immobile number-crunching”, directly copied from the web) which doesn’t exactly sound like a warm welcome for mechanically unskilled players.

…and yet, what did we actually end up with?

Berserker>skip>stack>melee and (most) people dropping ridiculously, like flies, if any of that attempt to avoid playing dynamically went “wrong”…

Showing most of them were either asleep, or had no talent for “dynamic” gameplay, at all.

I, honestly, don’t know which is worse?

A, supposedly, dynamic game, which ends in people just standing still, on top of each other, hitting 111111?

Or a game where the casuals are (still) funding the hardcore, while not having much to do, themselves?

Both seem wrong, to me.

What is interesting, though, is that some of the people, who like the new direction, also liked the old cheesing?

I don’t get why the same person would like both, as they seem contradictory?

Unless they just claim to like everything Anet produces and everything the players end up doing with it, regardless.

I’m just trying to point how the game was (and still is) advertised in an attempt to make clear which features brought the community to indentify this game as “casual friendly”.

What we finally got delivered is a different topic but, yes, I can fully agree with you on vanilla content being quite terrible at delivering the advertised dynamic combat.
Even worse, almost any single attempt from developers to shake up things got a negative community reaction so they eventually gave up on changing anything.

In this sense, I think HoT is a huge step forward for both new open world and new instanced content (although I feel like they somewhat ruined fractals in the porcess).
Unfortunately, they’ve also make new content far less casual friendly, and it’s not like both things were in direct competition.

I don’t recall GW2 being explicitly marketed as “casual friendly”.
The term was mostly community driven based on plenty of announcements like “no grind”, “no gear treadmill” or “no need for explicit grouping in open world”, and never about the difficulty.
In fact, GW2 combat has always been marketed as a fast paced action based one (“Combat in Guild Wars 2 is flexible, fast-paced, and dynamic. You’ll achieve victory through timing, dodging, and quick thinking, not immobile number-crunching”, directly copied from the web) which doesn’t exactly sound like a warm welcome for mechanically unskilled players.

I had a blast with HoT during the first days after launch just by exploring the maps and experiencing every single DE chain for the first time. While it didn’t last for long in my own case, just this one time experience could have provided several weeks of fun to a truly casual player.
In the meanwhile, however, these forums were on burn with lots of complaints about both the skill challenge and the mastery XP grind. The first one is somewhat understandable; the second one, however, is something I NEVER faced.
Just exploring the map and experiencing different content once, maybe twice, was providing me enough XP to keep a good mastery progression, which leads to an obvious conclusion: those players were rushing towards something.
It could be the story, it could be the specialization, it could be just about reaching the last map because they had heard it was an epic and awesome zergfest with good lootz … but many of them were definitely not taking their time to enjoy the exploration and discovery.
This somewhat reminded me my first days with the core GW2, with plenty of players complaining about the lack of XP and being underleved (rarely related to real issues caused by bugs, like being stuck at some personal story mission) and/or asking advice about how to level up faster, when I was most of the time several levels ahead of the zones I was playing in (naturally brought by my personal sotryline).

There are, of course, plenty of truly casual players with completely legit complaints (like every single new map being an scheduled and quite long meta-event), but the truth is, the average GW2 player, the so called “casual” player, doesn’t have a “casual” mindset at all, not at least by the same definition which brought the community to call this game “casual friendly”.
For someone suposed to dislike the grind, they show and incredible tolerance to repeat the same effortless content over and over (you can find them playing the Tarir/DS meta for the Nth time, just like you could find them before spamming vinewraths or following some world boss train commander) on top of some kind of skritt syndrome which forces them to go after the shiniest of shinies (when they could capitalize on more hardcore players going after it and easily and almost grind freely accomplish plenty of much more reasonable goals).

The ongoing complaints are usually about difficulty (specially for new content. Once the community get used to beat it and it becomes completely uninteresting gameplay wise, then all the complaints seem to disappear), platforming (which seems to be unacceptable since it requires a completely different skillset than the advertised fast paced action combat … oh wait) and, of course, how much grind is required for the new jewel of the vanity crown (ignoring the positive implications for those who know their own limits and set reasonable goals).

Honestly, some “casual” players should learn to enjoy being a “casual” player. The way I see it, many of them are just hardcore/grinder mindset players who lack either the time to fulfill their goals and/or the will to adapt to what those goals demand.

My biggest concern about Winter’s Presence is about it being somewhat, and without further information, time limited.
IMHO both the candy and spirit ahievements (the most grindy ones by far) should be moved to the Community achievement tab, so they won’t disappear by the end of the Wintersday event and could be eventually completed through several years (in fact, I would like to see the festival tab becoming permanent instead of getting a new one every year while the previous ones go to the historical tab).

The quantity itself isn’t really that bad.
Yes, it definitely prevents some people from getting the item, but at the same time it also ensures Wintersday Gifts retain some value, which allows players which might not be so interested in the shoulders to get some gold and buy something they truly like.
If the quantity was low enough so every player could get it though a moderate investment, then gifts would worth next to nothing and we would have another subset of players complaining about what a waste of time the festival is.

I can’t really agree with the disability part.
While making these festivals more inclusive than usual makes total sense to me, we need to be careful about how low we set the bar.
There are still some of us for whom beating a challenge is an important part of gaming and being able to fail something is absolutely necessary to make it fun.
Not a big problem for single player games since those usually come with a difficulty bar (the difficulty standards seems to have drop A LOT in these modern days though) and, since they are isolated enviroments, it’s usually possible to handycap oneself or set ones own challenges if further difficulty is needed.
MMOs, however, are a different kind of beast. There’s a standard difficulty and a shared economy for everyone (which makes handycaping oneself something you might do once or twice for fun but which you will avoid most of the time), so there needs to be a middle ground. Some players need to accept that some activities may be too difficult, frustrating or unfun for them, while others have to do the same with content so easy that’s not even worth playing.
I don’t find the JP difficult at all and I can hardly believe there’s a significant amount of people which finds impossible to completre it just three times in a reasonable amount of time.
That being said, I’ve no problems with having it nerfed for Christmas shake. However, I hope you can also understand that if you give me a straight clear road instead, I’m going to find it far less appealing (and I’m not exactly having a blast farming it).

The change to distortion so it prevents point capture was totally needed.
The cast time increase for an active defensive utility, however, looks a terrible design choice (unless “precognition” is meant to indicate that a player should be able to see the future to use it properly). The skill could have got a CD increase or a decrease in duration if further nerfs were needed.

Silverkey.2078:

Menaka.5092:

Levetty.1279:

Delete PvP please.

I would rather have it but not have the whole game balanced around a 5v5 conquest mode.

You do realize that if the shield block was OP for PvP, it was also OP for PvE? From what I understood, chrono was considered one of the best tank for raids… now that does sound familiar to someone playing PvP…

Being the best tank for raids doesn’t necessarily mean being the most survivable build, just having enough survivability to get the job done without giving up too much.

Chrono doesn’t have high personal sustained DPS, but it’s a beast at boosting ally damage. Since this mechanics are not related to offensive/defensive stats, your best bet is to use it in the tank role (whihc is also well suited for) so there’s room for another full offensive build in the raid group.

For PvE, the change on block duration is a buff if anything. As long as the player can time the blocks properly, it means less valueable time sitting down waiting for the phantasm to pop.

AoE Aegis and Stability.
If encounter mechanics do not make at least one of these to shine, then Guardian is probably going to be a subpar choice.

If you have a quartz node at your home instance, you can fast travel to Dry Top at around X:50 and also gather all the quartz there (including the rich one if the map is t4 or higher, which usually is).
This allows you to create a Charged Quartz about every day, which you can use to craft and sell a ley line infused tool. It’s just like 4 gold of profit, but better than nothing.
If you need to hoard most of the materials you get, making gold is going be to somewhat complicated unless you’re lucky or rely on playing the TP.

If the legendary you’re crafting is one of the new ones and you’re playing regularly on the new maps, you could also try to favor the map which has baubles included in the map reward.

If you have several characters and masteries leveled up, you can also visit both flax farms and make a decent money. The farm in tangled depths also includes a couple of chests which may reward you with a reclaimed yellow weapon or some expensive materials (like freshwater pearls or black diamonds) if you’re lucky.

Cyninja.2954:

I’m not moaning about you bringing up weapons. I’m questioning how you added weapons in to strength a weak point. Yes, ascended weapons are expensive IF you build them (no where near as armor) and are literally the ONLY expensive item you currently need for a decent setup. That’s not even considering alternative methods of getting them which will occur over time if you play the appropriate parts of the game.

I don’t even think ascended weapons are that expensive to craft.
There’s, of course, a good amount of gold involved that you won’t get because you’ll be using your crafting materials for a different purpose, but the amount of gathering needed to reach 400 is actually quite low and can be achieved naturally just by exploring maps while leveling.
Going from 400 to 500 is far from expensive as long as you take your time and don’t try to rush it (for Weaponsmith and Artificer, you can easily do it for free and even get a positive revenue).
Most of the materials for the ascended weapon itself can be obtained by regular gameplay. T2-T4 wood and ore are usually the ones causing the most trouble, and are really easy to gather as long as you know what you’re doing.

I would say that’s actually easier for low MMR soloQ players to advance through divisions by normal play (no MMR tanking or anything like that), mostly because low MMR premades won’t capitalize being a premade as much as high MMR ones (otherwise they are guaranteed to rise their MMR quite fast).

Low MMR premades are mostly groups of friends/guildies playing together the same way they would do on a SoloQ scenario, which makes them much more easily beatable by an equal skill level random soloQ group, often for more than a single pip (since the odds of victory are stacked against them because they face a premade).

In this league system, completely based on win streaks once the MMR settles, the ability to win matches you weren’t expected to is a HUGE difference.

EgyptRaider.3946:

I’m honestly wondering why people expect that they should be constantly progressing through the tiers. Tiers aren’t meant for that; reward tracks and rankpoints are. If you have a 50-50 win lose rate at a certain point, you’re at the right spot. If you want to improve, either get better at soloq or find buddies.

Yes, it can seem unfair if you’re in a unfair matchup, but then again it happens the other way around as well.

Except for the part where MMR plays a huge role on the matchmaking system and didn’t get reset for leagues.
If the system is not exploited, the right spot will be mostly that one where the MMR settles, with next to zero relation with tiers or divisions.

The MMR leaderboard didn’t work for several reasons, but all of them could have been fixed without giving up on the basic principle of the leaderboard (the best we have had so far).

It’s probably too early to draw conclusions.
I mean, divisions could hold a lot more weight than MMR for both the matchmaking and the amount of pips a player wins/loses from a match, which could eventually make leagues to resemble something close to a MMR ladder.

What’s definitely clear is that the system looks like an insane grind.
Even if a top team could count every match as a win, it will need over 100 matches to reach legendary league, which is where it belongs and where it must be for the system to work properly (and that’s assuming my first pharagaraph is true, when is probably no more than a delusional wish).
For more mundane players/teams, which will start losing pips and tiers more sooner than later, the grind would last for A LOT longer, moreso if top teams are not willing to devote themselves to that grind (which is not unlikely at all).

On the other hand, if MMR remains the driven force for matchmaking and “odds of winning” calculations, then the system is a complete nonsense.
Once the MMR is settled again (which shouldn’t take too long looking at the number of games that must be won to climb leagues), anyone but the top teams that can pull a really solid winrate could have serious problems to get past the third or fourth divison (since the system would try to balance the odds of wiining at 50%)
Even if the system is similar to what we saw on previous iterations, where a win would always award one pip while a somewhat close lose would have no negative effect, the grind we are looking at will still remain totally crazy, up to a point where, as happened before, time investment becomes far more important than skill.
In fact, it might easily be even worse. Since it doesn’t look like players can lose division status (just pips and tiers inside their current division), it could be possible (and probably better grind wise) to tank down MMR at the very beginning of every division and then, once the rating is low enough, strike back with a full premade.

In any case, even if we are talking about a team based game, this obsession with designing systems to favour full premades needs to stop.
We already have an ESL Pro League, which is the most competitive scene and what I guess holds most of the atention for the top teams.
Now we also have a Guild Challenger Cup, allowing any team to compete on a public ELO based leaderboard, which seems to be a much better skill indicator than leagues for any comparision.
Was really necessary to make the league system also completely dominated by premades and leave, once again, all those solo/duo/partial queuers (which I guess are A LOT) with no system to provide them even an illusion of fair competition?

Ohoni.6057:

An it reminds me of classic gold rush communities, in which miners rarely made much money, but shop owners typically made a killing. It is classic capitalism, but only in the very worst aspects. Pure communism is bad, pure capitalism is even worse, a balanced economy that works for the average citizen has to have both elements in balance, a system in which capitalist principles allow for innovation to profit, but that also ensures that hard work is fairly rewarded.

In this game there are no mine or shop owners who can enforce low wages or dirty cheap buy prices.
Every single worker has free access to its own mine, its own tools and its own shop, and absolutely zero resposabilites towards any capitalist associate other than the system natural sinks.

What there is, however, is a free market, and the completely ridiculous situation where miners happily sell their hard earned ore for much less than what smiths are willing to pay.
I don’t really think the system should be the one to blame for this.

The 15% tax should have been more than enough to prevent TP flipping from becoming a major source of income.
If some players ingame are making tons of gold through this system, that’s entirely other players’ fault. For most cases, I would even say that it has little to do with not knowing what the “fair” price is … tons of buy order fills are just plain stupid.

As someone who dislikes blobs and prefers to play open world events alongside another 2-3 people at most, I’ve come to realize that, whenever I have the chance to enjoy the content this way, the map is probably rather empty and not going anywhere in terms of overall progession.
If the map is expected to reach T4, then there’s probably a tag with a quite big crowd on every single outpust and, if by any chance I still manage to find a niche non-zergy space, it’s just a matter of time for someone to raise a mentor/commander tag or start asking in map chat for more people to come (no matter if the event chain was going perfectly fine).

In this sense, I truly hope they’re not nerfing small group content in order to push us towards HoT maps. The game experience for small groups, even if potentially decent and rather enjoyable, ends up being quite disappointing and frustrating in most real cases.

This is a band-aid solution.

By reducing the full elite unlock to 250, some characters will be eventually stockpiling a quite big amount of hero points, so when (if) another elite spec is released in the (probably distant) future, developers might find themselves with some nasty problem.
If there are new zones/content involved, they’ll have to either make the new hero challenges to provide a ridiculously high amount of points (sort of what we have right now in HoT) or introduce a specific new type of hero points (which probably should have been the case).
If, on the other hand, elites are designed so they consume the excess of available hero points, players will complain again about the grind (of old content in this case, whihc is probably even worse).
Eventually, they will probably have to overhaul the system, again.

The 400 Hero Points weren’t the problem, the dumbed down and absolutely terrible skill/trait unlocking system is.

If there’s a finite amount of Hero Points with no other purpose but unlocking traits and utility skills, it would make total sense for a fully unlocked character to require most if not all of them (specially after providing an alternative unlock method for WvW players).
A complete character build, however, uses only a small subset of traits/utilities so, if it were possible to make selective purchases with the hero points, just a small subset of them would be needed to run most of the xpac content with a perfectly viable elite spec.
Any small tweak to that initial build would require just a few hero points and probably would not feel grindy at all.

Your BrainHex Class is Mastermind.

Your BrainHex Class Your BrainHex Sub-Class is Mastermind-Conqueror.

You like solving puzzles and devising strategies as well as defeating impossibly difficult foes, struggling until you eventually achieve victory, and beating other players.

Your scores for each of the classes in this test were as follows:

Mastermind: 20
Conqueror: 18
Achiever: 11
Socialiser: 10
Daredevil: 2
Seeker: 1
Survivor: 0

Each BrainHex Class also has an Exception, which describes what you dislike about playing games. Your Exceptions are:

» No Wonder: You dislike being asked to search for things, preferring clearly defined tasks.
» No Fear: You do not enjoy feeling afraid, preferring to feel safe or in control.

VoC passive is not just bad but unhealthy for the game, as every Aegis ouside of the first one (if VoC passive is up at the beginning of the fight) is going to produce a completely random result.
IMHO VoC passive could be changed to a straigth small damage reduction (5% could work) while the active could remain untouched but with a huge CD reduction (a 30s base CD could work).
As a tradeoff, the protection from inspired Virtue could be reduced to 3s while a beast like Undomitable Courage should probably double both the base CD of VoC and its passive damage reduction.

VoR active is great if you pick Absolute Resolution, and incredibly lackluster otherwise (even more if you pick traits boosting the passive effect, like Battle Presence, or just investing in Honor).
I guess it’s possible to save some lives from spike damage if running a supportive build with enough healing power, but even in this case the CD looks huge for the amount healed and the passive effect loss is still there.
I would also bring down the CD of this virtue to the 30s mark and, like I suggested for Undomitable Courage, make Absolute Resolution increase it as a tradeoff for such a powerful effect.
By having all three virtues on a much lower CD, it should also be possible to introduce interesting “on virtue activation” traits and increase build diversity by not pidgeinholing Guardians into virtues. Zeal (which is seriously lacking atm for PvP) could get a much needed redesign and include things like “gain Resistance (3s) and/or Swiftness (5s) / Superspeed (3s)”.
The Resistance part could also come by default as a selfish effect for VoR active tbh (although in this case 30s CD could be too low).

VoJ is probably the trickiest one.
The passive is great for condition/hybrid builds, adn since this kind of builds are probably going to invest into Radiance, the active part (which would be next to useless otherwise) also gains some alternative functionality. For organized PvE, where there’s usually a lot of might stacking, even power builds can get some benefit from it.

Supportive/Bunkerish specs don’t really get a lot of use for the passive (since they’re not damage oriented builds to begin with).
They can, however, make some use of the active. Since they are natural team fighters and usually bring some AoE might stacking potential, VoJ active can be used to increase the damage output during a coordinated spike.
I find this bonus spike damage a bit lackluster in the current state, so I would suggest changing the single 4s burning stack for a couple of 3s stacks. This allows for a quite higher burst if used properly.
I would also change the Might from Inspired Virtue to either 5 stacks for 5s or 3 stacks for 10s/15s.

Power based offensive builds are the ones who get less use from VoJ.
Since Guardians don’t really excel at self might stacking (specially after the changes on Might of the Protector) outside Staff, which belongs to supportive builds, those burn procs aren’t a great deal for offensive power builds.
The active doesn’t look great either since it’s about even more burning. Only if going into Radiance can a power based offguard truly benefit from VoJ, and if I have to be honest, that line looks extremely condition focused under the curretn trait system (just look at the grandmasters).
As a solution, I would insist on a Zeal rework, providing there some way for the Guardian to either stack might decently on himself or get a non burning related benefit from VoJ.

GoldenTruth.2853:

Due to these reasons I would like to ask Anet their current plans on how they plan to support their 5-man FotM content with regular updates.

They will probably create some new island from time to time and replace the most farmed ones with it :P

PopeUrban.2578:

Vargamonth.2047:

I was honestly expecting some XP nerf to prevent dungeons from being the obvious way to train tyrian masteries, probably resulting on a huge increase on path selling (which I’m not against btw in the current state of the game).
This reward nerf, however … While I can imagine a cut on spontaneous gold generation as something positive for the economy, I can hardly see how making some content next to useless reward wise can be an overall good move.

I think they’re trying to move in the “unique rewards for unique content” direction, with the fractal level system as the outliar “cash money dungeon” since when they update with a fractal, they update the whole system from 1-100

Of course, it remains to be seen if those next 50 fractal levels are a meaningful increase in difficulty or payout.

Dungeons are now about the stuff from the token vendors, so skins and legendary components, just like raids going forward are about their own set of unique rewards, skins and legendary precursors. Fractals are the “filler content” you can use to make money, as they’re a system designed to be infinitely expandable/scalable in a way the more static dungeons and raid aren’t. For that to work, though, fractals need to appropriately scale up the loot with the challenge level so getting good, spending the effort to get all that AR feels worth the time.

And of course the open world is still the go-to for solo farming, only they’re making it less about volume and more about targeted results, so more about farming for the thing you want and less about farming for gold to buy the thing you want, which should spread the player base out more and generally move people around maps so they aren’t all running the same map for months getting bored.

Now to see if they can actually pull this off.

The problem with this new direction (which I find positive for the most part) is that there’ll likely still be items we might need to purchase with raw gold (probably because they hide behing some terrible RNG).
If some content provides just account-bound items, like dungeons tokens (which can be converted into gold, but are not exactly great at this from a time/reward view), it becomes next to useless for this purpose.

If they were shifting a big chunk of raw gold for, lets say, T6 mats and/or lodestones (which could be dungeon specific so you can choose what dungeon to run based on your goals), it would be perfectly fine for me (I could still sell whatever those materials are if I just want gold).
If it’s mostly abount acount bound rewards, that’s pretty much a death sentence.

I was honestly expecting some XP nerf to prevent dungeons from being the obvious way to train tyrian masteries, probably resulting on a huge increase on path selling (which I’m not against btw in the current state of the game).
This reward nerf, however … While I can imagine a cut on spontaneous gold generation as something positive for the economy, I can hardly see how making some content next to useless reward wise can be an overall good move.

Darmikau.9413:

Virtues really need a huge rework.

Do you run the Virtues traitline at all? Traited virtues definitely pull their weight. Clearing three conditions from each party member with Resolve and granting AoE stability and stunbreak with Courage, both with no cast time, are no joke. The Radiance trait which refreshes VoJ on kill is also insane. In situations with a lot of trash mobs it’s basically a permablind.

I completely agree. Traited virtues are great, but that’s exactly the problem: They need to be traited to look any useful.

If I run Absolute Resolution, my F2 becomes a 3 AoE instant condi clear and I will hardly think on using that button for anything else. The added effect is just MUCH more powerful than the core functionallity.
I would say the same about Indomitable Courage. Even if a single AoE Aegis application may still be quite useful in PvE, in no way it deserves a 75s ICD (and it’s a far worse functionality for PvP).

If developers truly want to promote build diversity and active use of class mechanics, core active virtues need some big improvements (If things like AR and IC are too powerful to work on whatever those new active core ablities are, they could easily come with tradeoffs).

Virtues really need a huge rework.

Justice active feels incredibly underwhelming when compared to its passive counterpart.

It might be situationally useful if you’re surrounded by a decent number of allies which happen to be more condition oriented than yourself and/or want to deliver some coodinated burst, but for the most part you probably want to keep it passive (moreso if using traits like Zealous Scepter, Supreme Justice and Permeating Wrath).

Ironically, every single trait that enhances the active part of the virtue is located in Radiance (2 out of 3 being minors), a traitline which looks specially condition focused since the last trait system overhaul.
Needless to say that condition/hybrid builds are the most interested ones in keeping the passive running and won’t benefit from any of this outside of the usual instant blind to prevent being CCed during a stomp.
Power builds, on the other hand, might easily find themselves having to pick between some terrible choices (look at those grandmasters) just to get some decent use of their class mechanic. The fact that a power build could still be interested on picking Radiance over Zeal should also be a clear sign of how underwhelming Zeal can be fro PvP.

For PvE things are not much different. Condi/Hybrid builds will keep it passive even when running Radiance, while Power ones might use the Justice is Blind / Renewed Justice combo for blinding trash (if Renewed Justice works, since it still has problems with respawning foes, …) and keep it passive for bosses.

Resolve has always been underwhelming.
The passive is not exactly impressive once we realize we have to pay for it with some of the lowest HPS healing skills across the whole game, and the active is something we will rarely use unless someone is really close to death (and won’t be exactly amazing for a 50s CD) or we find ourselves channeling Renewed Focus.
2 our of 3 traits which improve Virtue of Resolve work on the passive (so less reasons to activate it), while the last one adds an AoE instant condition removal to the active part which is on its own far more valuable than the whole core mechanic.

Courage is the only virtue which active seems to outperform the passive, and that’s mostly because the passive is a RNG crap: Aegis pops out of nowhere and blocks something, be it a barely threatening attack or one of the most important enemy skills (which I guess can be really annoying).
The infinite duration Aegis should be applied only on Virtue Recharge, so those annoying RNG procs become less frequent and the passive should do something different, like a 5% direct damage reduction.
Just like with Absolute Resolution, Indomitable Courage makes the active quite a beast and completely outshines the core functionallity wich in no way deserves a 75s CD (I wonder on who’s mind a single attack block looked that powerful).

I also want to finish this post with some special thanks for the virtue radius reduction for which I can’t find any other explanation but making DH ones more interesting in comparison

Jayden Ennok.3687:

Vargamonth.2047:

On the other hand, I also dislike having a reward system that ignores if some content has been under-manned and rewards those who have beaten a greater challenge with the short end of the stick.
In this sense, I see dungein selling as a necessary evil.

This actually bothers me more than having to mentally filter sellers from other parties in lfg. Sometimes we can’t get a 5th if it’s too late so we 4 man the dungeon/fract but still get the same reward. On other hand, if the reward would scale with the number of people, we’d see a lot of kicking before final boss just to scale up rewards. So perhaps instead of reward scaling, they could scale the difficulty.

And/or have reward scaling applicable only at the start of the path, ie, enter with 3, scaled to 3 people and more can’t enter after that.

If the increased reward would be granted based on the amount of players at the end of the instance, then yes, we would see a lot of kicking and thus it would be a terrible design mistake.
It shouldn’t be hard, however, to scale the reward based on the highest amount of players at any point during the instance. With this system, kicking would not make any sense, not more than on the current one at least.

My problem with scaling is that it would still keep the content at the same difficulty level.
I can see it as a great feature for story paths, but for high replayability content I would absolutely prefer a way to tune up the challenge without having to give up rewards or rely on the always controversial path selling as the only solution.

I don’t like dungeon selling as a resource exchange system.
If players are insterested in some content specific reward, I think they should try to beat and maybe eventually master that content.

On the other hand, I also dislike having a reward system that ignores if some content has been under-manned and rewards those who have beaten a greater challenge with the short end of the stick.
In this sense, I see dungein selling as a necessary evil.

Seera.5916:

Rabe.2456:

Are we talking about Agony Resistance or what’s the big deal about Ascended Gear? I don’t get it. If you tell me 90 main stat points make a real difference then I wonder what’s going on with the design.

Well, 90 may not be a lot. But what about 900 when multiply that across the full group needed for raids? 900 may be a noticeable difference.

The whole party wide stat boost (excepting the increased weapon damage, which I can see as highly advised) could easily be lost by bringing a couple of thieves instead of elementalists.
Game classes are just not designed to be exposed to such a heavily number based challenge.

If full ascended is really NEEDED, it must be related to some new infusion. There’s no other logical explanation.

Unless there are some new infusions involved in the equation, I can’t even come close to understand the statement.
Having such highly noticeable disparities between classes, both in damage and survivability, it doesn’t make any sense for the ascended stat increase to be so important.

I never was a big fan of tomes but I really find astonishing how designers couldn’t find a betterr way to improve and make them competitive than a complete rework into much more simpler skills …
and then it’s perfectly fine for some other profession to get an improved version of our old tome courage, with an arguably better skillset, without the insane CD, without the huge cast time just to get into the skillset, without locking out regular utilities … all of this as an additional mechanic on top of what the core class could already offer,
I’m OK with rangers getting some love, they absolutely deserved it, but all this celestial form thing looks ridiculous.

It was already pointed out during early Silverwastes stages that jumping between events after achieving some minimal contribution was far better reward wise than fully committing to a single defense or escort.

It was also pointed out that this (along with being extremely AFK happy) was a core flaw on the event reward system and would likely carry over any other content designed around the same system.

There was quite a lot of feedback back then, including many interesting suggestions about how mob loot and event rewards could be combined to prevent AFKing or how the current medal contribution system (which is next to useless) could be overhauled to prevent tag-n-run.

It’s extremely disappointing to find that, several months later and so close to an expansion launch (which will likely introduce many similar scenarios), nothing has been done to fix this issues.

Those timers are likely being to be related to some sort of puzzle or mechanic that must be completed in order to fully damage the boss during a small time window.
If the mechanic goes too slow (like, for example, during the Claw of Jormag second phase when more than half of the players range an extremely resilient boss instead of helping with the mechanic to make it vulnerable), it won’t be possible to deal enough damage and the boss will enrage.

In terms of DPS, the check will probably be soft enough for “reasonable” setups to succeed (it makes sense to disallow the most tanky setups since they could ignore a lot of the pressure during the fight and focus much more easily on the puzzle).
On top of this, I wouldn’t be surprised if the effectivity of raw DPS would have a limit (by making the boss return to invulnerable state after losing some given health during a single burn phase, just like Tequatl does) so a high damage setup cannot succeed either while performing really bad at the puzzle.

I don`t think people should be worried about “enrage timers”.

It’s obviously going to be a DPS check of some sort, so a bunch of plain terrible builds might be doomed to fail.
However, since GW2 classes have quite different DPS capabilities and ANet probably doesn’t want every raid group to bring at least 5 berserker staff eles, enrage timers are likely going to be far, far away from the optimal case.

I expect the timers to be there mostly for two reasons:
So the content cannot be trivialized by extremely survivable setups (making succeeding just a matter of patience) and, specially, to enforce the right execution of the mechanics preceding a burn phase.

Just like weapons, I can’t see them as something but a fancy skin as long as fixed sigil / runes remain untouched.

Astralporing.1957:

I’m not sure this problem is even avoidable.

As long as the content is instanced and ANet tries to use a more classic reward system (one where the reward is divided between players), difficulty could be easily tuned for different groups, specially if the content is not limited to a single 5-man group.
This is probably one of the biggest problems with the current system. Unless you sell spots, which is always a controversial topic and also comes with several truly annoying issues, you get nothing but a time loss for low manning content (which is and will always be the easiest way to tune up the difficulty).

Weapon swap OOC just for Engis and Eles seems quite unfair.
I would love to see, however, some kind of sidebar for any character to link gear pieces (locked when in combat), consumables, …