Guild Wars 2

Cleansing or causing conditions? If it’s the second, forget about it for now (It may change or not with the expansion).

Jana.6831:

No, sorry but you’re mistaken. Usually the right skills used in the right moment are enough to conquer any content.

It can’t be applied to PvP where your enemy plays too.
As a berserker medi guard, my chances of beating a skilled cele elementalist 1 on 1 are close to zero. I can still be a great asset for my team on berserkers (specially focusing down other berserkers), but that’s a fight I should completely avoid most of the time and should be dealt with on a different way.
A good PvP composition requires a lot of sinergies involving quite different builds and gear to work properly. I would never put my money on a full berserker comp defeating a top team.

Jana.6831:

Vargamonth.2047:

I completely disagree with your analysis.
The offensive approach shines (on top of the main obvious reason of finishing the content faster) because of SMALL enemy HP pools.

If you look at content where HP pools are actually high, like some high level fractals encounters, things like having a guardian mixing in some Knight pieces are usually accepted. Why? Because it helps with aggro control and provides a small safety net, a safety net that becomes much more useful and reasoable when the whole group can’t stack on top of the boss and fights involve things like kiting at max melee range, something that requires MUCH more finesse and which a lot of people are incapable of (which explains why you will see a lot more ranged weapons on this content).
Even dedicated tank builds are analyzed as an option and far from mocked at.

I’m still doing everything in this game in full zerker.
I run dungeons, do pvp, do high level fractals, run solo in wvw, run with the zerg in wvw in full zerkers – it works and it works fine, otherwise I wouldn’t be doing it as I also have soldier’s and my beloved valk character and also some condi geared characters, zerker just suits me best.
So: If some people need clerics or knights or whatever, that’s fine with me, but don’t say that zerker doesn’t work in this or that content as it does. And no, at least 3 people I usually run with are also full zerker, so it’s not that I need to be saved by a tanky geared player.

I don’t mean tanky gear, or any passive defense stat at all, is anywhere NEEDED. That wouldn’t make sense for an action based combat game.

What I’m trying to say is that there are some content pieces where tanky gear actually brings something to the table and can act like a difficulty slider, either by allowing the use of a different tactic or just by providing a safety net.
That’s just not the case of low level regular dungeons, which is the most played instanced content and probably the one most of these anti berserker threads are based on.

Going a bit off-topic, I don’t think it’s a good idea to bring things like WvW or sPvP to the discussion. It’s a completely different scenario where there’s hardly any inherently superior choice.

Akusokuzan.6790:

Ok, so most of us playing the game know that if you want significant DPS you use equips with berserker stats. On top of that people can trait build to get some ridiculous damage as opposed to say somebody who uses carrion or knight equips. That isn’t to say you can’t do any acceptable damage with any other build, berserker just happens to be the most effective due to many bosses and dungeon enemies having really large HP pools that can take forever to kill without some high stable DPS. The longer you take to kill a powerful enemy/dangerous player, the more at risk you are of dying yourself.

…

I completely disagree with your analysis.
The offensive approach shines (on top of the main obvious reason of finishing the content faster) because of SMALL enemy HP pools.

If you look at content where HP pools are actually high, like some high level fractals encounters, things like having a guardian mixing in some Knight pieces are usually accepted. Why? Because it helps with aggro control and provides a small safety net, a safety net that becomes much more useful and reasoable when the whole group can’t stack on top of the boss and fights involve things like kiting at max melee range, something that requires MUCH more finesse and which a lot of people are incapable of (which explains why you will see a lot more ranged weapons on this content).
Even dedicated tank builds are analyzed as an option and far from mocked at.

That’s not the case with regular dungeons because, in those places, that kind of builds just don’t make any sense.
On the lowest level dungeons (and a special mention to Ascalonian Catacombs) you can easily play the “kill before get killed” card. With a damge oriented approach, most bossfights should’t last over 15-20 seconds … with a CC opening, a couple of aegis sources, a couple of baseline dodges (if needed), reflects, blinds (for trash), … enemies have no time to pose a real threat.
They also don’t deal as much damage as people like to claim. Outside of some specific and usually well telegraphed big attacks, you probably can survive (at least) a couple of hits even with the squishiest build … and (unless used for other means like pre might stacking) you still have a healing skill to replenish a good chunk of your health.
On top of all this, not every boss fully cleaves, so even if someone gets downed, they’re high chances on the boss still being defeated by the remaining players during the next few seconds.
Why are warrior groups still a thing if it has been repeated over and over how unefficient that comp is? Because their baseline passive survivability is high enough to often succeed on a “trading blows” game even if player performance and overall strategy are pure crap.

Honestly, the only serious alternative gear that could be considered for these dungeons is valkyrie, and just for the squishiest classes like ele or thief (which may also pick invigorating precision instead).
Toughness and Healing Power are sustain related stats that don’t make any sense for short fights. You can still build a group around these and enjoy the content at a lower pace, with longer fights, while being pretty much immortal.
If players are having a troubles surviving basic dungeons with a balanced/defensive build, either they should take a serious look at their builds or they’re joining the wrong groups.
Most PuGs run these dungeons with quite straightforward tactics (the kill before get killed one more often than not) and mixing completely different approaches doesn’t work well for the most part (that’s why Berserker only groups are usually labeled as that).

Honestly, there’s no such a big problem with the current itemization. I won’t say it could not have been better, but the prevalence of Berserker/Assassin for dungeons (which is just a small, and quite unatended, part of the game) is caused mostly by the content itself.

You miss easily half of the information about the class itself on top of pretty much everything about any new content. Be patient.

Leo G.4501:

My method is to let people witness the game for themselves. If they really want answers, I can give hints but I’m also not anal about ‘winning’ in the game. Failures are as much a part of learning as success, especially in a game. Not to mention many (I’d even go so far as to say everyone) enjoys success more when they obtain it through their own skill and observation, even it if was tougher than just being told what to do to win. The point you start using a wiki as a crutch, is the point you’ve become dependent on it.

While I can agree with you to some extent, there are many things out there which probably most people (myself included) would prefer to not be learnt by experience.
For example, some new guy killing the bubbles during Silver and Gold Teragriff fight, trying to figure what they are for, is probably not the kind of thing I would want to see often.

Aggro in GW2 is quite a mistery. I wouldn’t be surpirsed if different enemies have different aggro behaviours.

Being closer to the boss doesn’t make you automatically the aggro bearer, but it definitely helps at holding it.
Just make sure that you get in the fight first to get the initial aggro and then try to stand your ground. Also bring a way higher armor value than your teammates.
Be careful with the dodges. Unless you have a wall to roll in place, dodging equals moving.

In any case, there are for sure some players around here with much more valuable information than me.

If you don’t move out of close melee range (next to the target colored circle), most enemies will usually stick to you.

alex.1428:

and how can u do that? it works with meteorshower and icebow?

It works with Ice Bow, Meteor Shower and Lightning Storm.

I don’t know exactly how it works so I can only provide a small example.

If you cast one of these skills into a wall or roof, you’ll realize that all the hits land exactly in the middle of the AoE area.
Now, if you stand close to the range limit and you evade backwards, casting the skill as soon as the roll animation starts, it will be queued. The spell will be used at your new position, and since you’re probably out of reach of the wall/roof you selected, it will land at maximum range, at floor level and with the hits concentrated towards the middle.
It also works if you blink away with Lightning Flash during the channel.

In any case, I would suggest to completely ignore this glitch and kill the Spider by normal means. The fight is far from difficult and the glitch is clearly an unintended behaviour.

The fastest kills you’ve seen probably used the glitch that allows to concentrate this kind of scattered AoEs into a smaller area.

Blaeys.3102:

I think at least some of the challenging content will come toward the end of the mastery lines. Things like this -

“You’ve become honored among the Exalted. You can now challenge their champion each day and unlock their finest treasures within the Forgotten City.”

I suspect we will see similar mechanics/encounters associated with the guild progression system they mentioned.

I do believe these things will be open world, but will be soft gated in ways that make sense and discourage zerging. At least that is my hope. I also hope people give them a chance and dont just go with the shortsighted “its not instance so it must suck” attitude.

And, it does look like fractals are in for some real love.

Since access is unlocked individually, I’m expecting those mastery champion challenges to be more like Queen Gauntlet fights, where you face a somewhat complex enemy on your own.

Thaddeus.4891:

Bubi the thing is when people talk about how Dungeon are easy they talk how you can explode a boss in second leaving him no time to attack back and that’s speed run.

So use that fact + the fact that most of us only speed run and you can see how we respond that way. But I get your point and you are right. But I rarely see people arguing that dungeon are easy without using the argument that you can kill a boss in second.

Both ideas are related but far from being the same.

Stepping for the first time into a completely unknown content and beating it without too much trouble, sometimes without even suffering a single wipe, fits perfectly under my definition of easy. It wasn’t until meeting Lupicus, so after 8 story and 21 explorable paths, that I had my first wipefest experience.
There were, truth be said, many defensive trait and gear choices back then, and most of the runs were done on already exotic geared lvl80 characters. On the other side, there was also a notorious lack of understanding on game mechanics, like blinding bosses during AC story and wondering why was I being smashed in the face.

As we got more familiar with both the content and the game mechanics, dungeons went from easy to a complete faceroll. We eventually had to shift most of the defense to damage, not because it resulted in faster runs, which was a nice side effect, but cause it was mandatory in order to have an enjoyable and meaningful combat experience.

Without passive defense stats and/or sustain related traits and utilities every mistake is punished harder, so it could be said that the game becomes more difficult.
As someone who has performed the whole trip, I won’t dare to say that the game became easier, but it definitely didn’t get much harder.
Experience and knowledge surely played an important role for that, but there’s an inherent survival advantage tied to a high damage spec, something you notice almost instantly when fighting open world foes and dungeon thrash mob packs … a dead enemy does no harm.
Killing things faster makes many fights easier on its own way, sometimes up to a point where a shift towards damage can create a safer enviroment and/or allow for a much more straightforward tactic than the opposite, and this is something that becomes more and more true the shorter those fights are.

So being able to kill a boss extremely fast is not what makes the game easy. That’s a general (and totally subjective) perception about the game, specially about the content that we have had since release.
It allows more often than not, however, to circumvent many of the risks of what could be understood as the most high-risk-high-reward approach, and probably makes the usage of full offensive gear much more widespread than what IMHO should be.

Jerus.4350:

Vargamonth.2047:

cthaeh.2168:

Ha! Try sending 5 new players into a dungeon in full zerk and see how well they do. It is skill based, it’s just that everyone has spent the past 3 years honing said skills.

Maybe it’s time then to develop something that plays slightly different.
Something where, even if knowledge, experience and muscle memory still help in the long run, it’s not enough to completely dominate the content.

So you want AI that learns your tactics and constantly adjust to maintain a certain level of difficulty? If you can come up with how to do that for a video game, props, people have been trying… of course if anyone were ever successful it might also just flop because people don’t always like getting punched in the face. It’s generally not the punches people enjoy, but learning how to do better each time and the success of finally beating it.

We all know that expecting some kind of amazing AI is ridiculous, specially for a MMO where all the CPU load is server side.
It’s possible, however, to spice things up a little bit using just the current features.

As an introduction. imagine the Silverwastes Vinewrath event during escort phases.
You can go north lane (usually the least populated one) and stay around the ammunition trying to defend it. Most players will be either AFK or constantly chasing the commander tag (or the carrier, if there’s no commander), so you’ll have to fight alone, for the most part, against a constant stream of mordrem foes.
You know every mob moveset and weakness, and that’s indeed helpful, but you still don’t know how the whole fight is going to flow.
You have no control or knowledge of what exactly will come with the next spawn or where will it appear. You can get a Mordrem Wolf next to you or a Leeching Thrasher far away behind.
You can find yourself burning a gamechanging CD, like an Ice Bow, only to get a much more dangerous foe a few seconds later. Or you could save it waiting for a prey that won’t ever appear.

This isolated fight can hardly be treated as meaningful content, but it still delivers the feeling of the kind fo experience I’m suggesting. A fight you can get better at, you can build better for, but still never completely dominate due the random nature of a good part of it.

Grab this random add idea, throw it into a Lupicus fight and you’ll get something completely different.
Suddenly you can reduce the damage output of the boss itself (the so called 1HKOs, even if they aren’t, some people like to complain about) while still making the whole fight more difficult.
You hit the effectivity of some active defenses (like dodges), not by increasing the attacks speed of the boss itself (as it has been suggested several times) on a completely melee unfriendly way, but by increasing the amount of damage sources.
Multiple damage sources that encourage a level of awareness hardly needed when facing a single boss and which can still be actively fought through control (something that is not currently at its best shape for PvE), positioning, focus fire, … keeping defenseless gear perfectly viable.
Multiple damage sources which, with spawn timers properly adjusted, can also result on swarming and prevent extremely tanky setups from easily beating a content meant to be challenging.
And what IMHO is the best of all, you get content that doesn’t get old so fast, that keeps some replay value for a much longer time (even better if Lupicus would randomly select its phases from a pool of 5 or 6 :P).

Honestly, this is the best thing I can imagine to promote player skill based build/gear diversity without having to rely on fresh content additions every few months (which we all know it’s not going to happen).

cthaeh.2168:

Ha! Try sending 5 new players into a dungeon in full zerk and see how well they do. It is skill based, it’s just that everyone has spent the past 3 years honing said skills.

Maybe it’s time then to develop something that plays slightly different.
Something where, even if knowledge, experience and muscle memory still help in the long run, it’s not enough to completely dominate the content.

Because they’re completely different games, mostly because enemies play too :P

A PvE meta build is designed so it brings no more than the support you ALREADY KNOW you’re going to need and puts everything else in raw offense.
For the guardian, those Zeal and Radiance points are mostly Power and Precision stats, damage multipliers and a bit of vulnerability. The only true additional mechanic is VoJ recharge on kill, which is obviously more useful for fighting packed trashmobs than for PvP.

In PvP there’s nothing like enough utility or survival. It changes depending on what you’re facing and how it plays, so builds need to be much more balanced and well rounded, not just for Guardian but mostly for any class (except maybe for power necro, where PvP and PvE builds are quite similar).
On top of that, enemy health pools are WAY smaller and fast kills are much more related to a good CC and burst combination (which the enemy will actively try to avoid) than to steady deplenting a huge bar. You can still be a serious threat with far less raw offense and that damage loss, while noticeable, is far better than being easily focused down by the enemy team.
Finally, the meditation skillset (condi removal, instant damage and mobility) is just much, much more useful for PvP.

In the current state of the content, most bosses just explode against a meta-ish setup. The long CC effect from Deep Freeze (which can easily be used twice on a short window if the group is somewhat organized) plus at least two party wide aegis from a Guardian are usually more than enough to render the enemy barely threatening for the whole duration of the fight.
For a single player or cooperative game, where there are no global implications, this is perfectly fine. It’s up to us to chose our tactics and nobody really cares if a spiky approach finishes fights faster than a more sustained one.
For an MMO, where there’s a global economy and the same content will be played over and over on a farm status, this isn’t true anymore. Faster runs will result on a higher gold income over time and we should expect players to gravitate towards them as much as they can, eventually creating at least one “meta” approach to ensure everybody is on the same page tactic wise.
Against what seems to be popular belief, meta builds and tactics won’t settle around the fastest approach, but around the most rewarding PuG friendly and easy to execute one. The problem arises when this easy approach is totally biased towards the most offensive options of the build spectrum.

We need to step into the arguably most challenging content of the game (several fights on high level fractals and a few specific encounters outside of them) for things to change. For the execution of a not-so-difficult tactic to not be enough and begin to feel the action combat system and the real risks of wearing glass for 5-man groups.
This is the point where players may start considering toher options. Where a slower but safer approach might be prefered over the risk of a neverending cycle of wipes. Where completely different and diverse approaches could eventually earn the “meta” label.

Unfortunately, the crappy reward distribution across the whole game makes this content incredibly easy to ignore. The gear gating of fractals doesn’t help either.
If there’s no carrot, no reason for a player to run a more balanced or even defensive build through a challenging enviroment over facerrolling most other content (the majority of it) on full offensive gear, we will hardly ever see any healthy gear diversity.

If a broader gear and build diversity is the main goal, we need:
a) Content that truly challenges a pure active approach and still retains a decent level of threat for defensive setups.
b) A proper reward for it, something ANet has shown to be terrible at.

The “same build” thing is rather confusing assuming they are two completely different classes and both have a few viable Berserker amulet variations for a conquest setup.
If both are playing a conquest match and use conquest meta-ish builds, a 1vs1 fight on some lone point will usually favor guardian by A LOT (the thief can easily avoid that situation though).
For a different situation, I guess we would need a more precise description.

The whole downed state mechanic can behave as a huge safety net.
Removing or tweaking it for the so called “challenging group content” would nor attack directly or exclusively offensive setups, but it could increase the risk on building that way and produce a meaningful shift on what the community perceives as best approach (on top of geting rid of a quite annoying consideration for content designers).

Nerfing the dodge functionality (or tweaking some of the current active defenses to act as damage reduction tools instead of the current full avoidance, as other people have suggested) would definitely shift the meta, but not exactly for free.
A change like this basically scraps a good part of the action combat design, where the human factor can be extremely relevant, in favor of a more classic RPG-ish approach, which is far more build and number oriented.
Not only would this screw all the people that are here precisely for the action combat component (which I understand is something that the people posting this ideas couldn’t care less about), but it would probably produce a far more static, set in stone meta.

While I agree with the OP to some extent, I find disturbing the levity with which the oneshot term is used.

Behellagh.1468:

Vargamonth.2047:

They need to make this kind of moves to limit the profitability of speculation. If we could take some safety timeframe for granted, risk would be pretty much nonexistant.

Adding Shadow Dye Kits to BL chests while they’re still in the gem store, THAT’s the truly ridiculous thing.

Why? Chest have always been Gem Shop samplers. Dye kit is 125 gems for one. Keys are 125 gems for one. Drop rate for one of these dye kits is under 2% per chest. ANet certainly isn’t losing anything here.

Most of these dyes start losing value when they’re made available through BL chests (which are not directly related to the gemstore in many, probably most, cases).
On top of the direct decrease in value, it becomes much more common for sellers to find their listings buried under several other cheaper ones and to rely on buy orders, which is another profit cut.

With this change, they achieve nothing but make one of their gem products less interesting. I can’t imagine how ANet would benefit from that.

They need to make this kind of moves to limit the profitability of speculation. If we could take some safety timeframe for granted, risk would be pretty much nonexistant.

Adding Shadow Dye Kits to BL chests while they’re still in the gem store, THAT’s the truly ridiculous thing.

I’ve read something about a second type of add that starts appearing at 20% and delivers some minor direct healing instead of regeneration.
I don’t know neither it’s true or not (I never go against husk) nor if the amount of healing is large enough for players to avoid using AoE attacks at that point.

Pretty much everything is much more interesting with less (not necessarily solo) people.

Honestly, I hope we don’t.

Current GW2 encounters hardly play to its combat system strengths. Importing encounters from a completely different system would achieve nothing but push it further from the state in which it could really shine.
On the other hand, there seems to be a lot of people trying to push the game towards a generic RPG game so I wouldn’t be surprised with fights like this one becoming an absolute success.

Lexiceta.4156:

Your MMR is not static if you can not carry you will lose your MMR will adjust down to place where your “high” MMR can carry, I mean if you are that good. So much QQing. All these examples of high MMR losing because of this and that, let it happen lose your MMR will adjust to something more accurate.

This assumption absolutely depends on how the Glicko2 system has been extrapolated to a 5 on 5 game and might easily be flawed.
I wouldn’t be surprised if MMR variations were minimum for the outliers of any given match.

They can’t allow burn/poison stacking.

Hybrid/Condition builds already offer really good results on enviroments where condi caps are not reached and things do not melt in seconds (like solos, for example).
Since conditions require less investment on offensive stats, getting rid of every single cap would result on condition builds outclassing pretty much anything that’s not full offense.

Berserker staff elementalist.
I might swap the armor in favor of a soldier one if I expect things to get nasty (like when l’m on an underpopulated lane 3 and lane 2 fails to take down Mangler).

As much as I think there are a lot of things wrong with current trait system, the most confusing change I’ve encountered so far is with the Personal Story.

Prior to the NPE, we used to get a single piece of story every few levels (In fact, those story steps were unlocked by default even if we had not reached the recommended level). This missions could lead us around the world, bringing us to new zones to explore and, once finished, we automatically knew where we should be heading.

With the current system, we receive the story on batches every 10 levels. This might not seem bad at all, but I can easily see it becoming a serious problem for many new players.
The story steps we currently unlock at, lets say, lvl30 are the ones we used to play between lvl20 and lvl30, so they send us to zones that we outlevel and, more often than not, have already explored.
On top of that, once those missions are finished we get no clue of where the story is heading. We find ourselves in the middle of nowehere, left to explore the world on our own until we are required again.
Many players could argue that this kind of freedom is something positive and I could actually agree with that to some extent. It’s, however, definitely unconsistent with the whole NPE idea.
Spoonfeeding, carefully measuring out the introduction of every feature and character progresion step to not overwhelm new players just doesn’t make any sense if you expect this kind of free exploration spirit from them.

BlackBeard.2873:

It seems the old system rewarded players too much for not playing (playing when ranked highly was more likely to just hurt your MMR/ranking, while you could consistently gain rating by playing 1 game every 3 days), while the new system is just a numbers game. How do you think a system should work that isn’t either of these?

There’s a solution that has already been porposed several times.
You use whatever “grind” based point system (like the current one, for example), but you also introduce an additional multiplier which value decreases the closer to the MMR the total score is.
If the amount of games required to converge onto the MMR is large enough, the deviation/volatility of the MMR itself should be minimum. Also, since the amount of points per game is really small when close to the MMR, it should be quite hard to capitalize on a MMR boost caused by a lucky win streak, even harder if some kind of decay would be applied to the LB score as long as it changes faster than the MMR deviation (In fact, under this kind of seasonal scoring, the deviation increase caused by inactivity isn’t even necessary).

In any case, prior to any LB refinement, I would trash the current MMR Glicko2 system and try to develop an specific system for GW2 and its particularities.

GhOst.4019:

I understand there is flaws. People on here only want the skilled players to be rewarded. They also complain about Q times and matchmaking. You know what a huge fix for those 2 are? Player base. If the game only rewarded top players, do you honestly think more players would want to come in from other parts of the game with 0 rewards? You have to have a way to reward everyone. YES a ladder system would do that; but as you can see, that is not the direction they are taking right now. Maybe in the future, but for now, that is how it is. You just have to deal with it.

End game. Get more players involved. Can’t do that with 0 incentive.

Yes, there needs to be an incentive for players from other parts of the game to spent time in PvP, but there also needs to be an incentive for players to improve and get better, specially on a competitive game mode (although it can be applied to any part of the whole game).
PvP base rewards not being laughable when compared to some braindead activity like, lets say, Silverwastes chest farm, could be a nice start.

The funny thing is that we don’t even need to rely on statistics to know who’s better between Man U and the 13 year old kid team. The skill gap makes them play on completely different and unrelated leagues

GW2 is not that different in this sense. It has its own way to measure player skill level and, even if it often fails because of the lack of population, tries to use it in order to create fair and interesting matches.
When it comes to leaderboards, however, it seems none of this matters anymore and it’s totally fine to rate the 13 years old kids over Man U.
Pure nonsense.

Even if there might be a small shift (I’ve still won 1 LB point from a 500-3xx loss) on the scoring charts, making it easier to lose points when losing matches, leaderboards still look absolutely grind based.

The introduction of the new ranking system looks extremely vague for something that’s going to start tomorrow.

Both types of teragriffs have some kind of hard counters.
The melee one gets knocked down if it’s affected by some kind of movement impairment condition whenever it tries to rush or jump. For the ranged one, log channels make it quite vulnerable to interrupts.

Unlike all the BLTC dye kits up to now, there are 10 of these dyes so, while the gemstore kit idea can still be possible, a completely different acquisition method shouldn’t be a surprise.
For example, exactly 10 BLTC dye kits have been released, so they could collection rewards around them. They could also be collection rewards around regular dyes based on hue and not strictly related to the BLTC, or pretty much anything we could imagine :P

Siphaed.9235:

Vargamonth.2047:

lordkrall.7241:

Vargamonth.2047:

Closed beta tests were announced to start shortly after Rezzed (which is already over) and to be free of NDA, so I expected to have loads of information by now.
Either I have a completely different idea about the meaning of “shortly”, or the amount of content on those beta tests is going to be ridiculously small at best.

Rezzed ended yesterday.
Shortly doesn’t mean 2 seconds after.
It means a couple of days or possibly a week.

I don’t expect the beta tests to start rigth now, but if people are expecting to have specializations introduced on a weekly basis, that would mean a 2 month dealy at least, which I wouldn’t call “shortly” at all.
It’s either that, or beta testers not having access to specializations (which is definitely something that should receive extensive testing and feedback) and some other relevant features for quite a long time.

What if that’s not what they’re “beta testing” at all? What if they’re only testing new zone dynamic events, player capacity on server loads, and a few tweaks like that? I really think that they should be holding back features from the Beta client, because revealing it all means that those that play -instead of test- it all have no purpose or reason to purchase it when it launches. It also cause things like Dulfy to push every known aspect of the expansion on it’s site, spoiling and ruining it all.

Take a look at FFXIV’s expansion. I don’t see a Beta test for it, yet they have the whole expansion dated, priced, and rearing to go. They don’t want the content ruined by min-maxers trying to ‘play’ a Beta to get ahead of everyone else. It ruins the game’s experience.

Testing things like player capacity and server loads is probably the main goal of the whole test.
Maps and DEs, which are completely necessary for this purpose, are, on the other hand, one of the biggest spoils that could be made. In this sense, I could easily agree with the test being limited to just a portion of the map.
I don’t think this is the case with specializations. They are more like some new tools we will have (I can’t imagine anyone skipping a bunch of unknown content just because he knows them), and they can easily include bugs and/or big imbalances which often pass the internal testing unnoticed.

lordkrall.7241:

Vargamonth.2047:

Closed beta tests were announced to start shortly after Rezzed (which is already over) and to be free of NDA, so I expected to have loads of information by now.
Either I have a completely different idea about the meaning of “shortly”, or the amount of content on those beta tests is going to be ridiculously small at best.

Rezzed ended yesterday.
Shortly doesn’t mean 2 seconds after.
It means a couple of days or possibly a week.

I don’t expect the beta tests to start rigth now, but if people are expecting to have specializations introduced on a weekly basis, that would mean a 2 month dealy at least, which I wouldn’t call “shortly” at all.
It’s either that, or beta testers not having access to specializations (which is definitely something that should receive extensive testing and feedback) and some other relevant features for quite a long time.

Closed beta tests were announced to start shortly after Rezzed (which is already over) and to be free of NDA, so I expected to have loads of information by now.
Either I have a completely different idea about the meaning of “shortly”, or the amount of content on those beta tests is going to be ridiculously small at best.

Event success reward brings some nice things to the table, like encouraging players to go after the main goal of the event over tagging as many mobs as possible and being able, even if it has not been extensively used yet, to provide bonus rewards if some not slaughter based special conditions are met (for Silverwastes, that could happen if a fortress is defended without losing walls and/or doors)
There are two major issues, however, with the Silverwastes model:

- Magic Find becomes useless.
I don’t like this kind of mechanic and would have prefered a game without MF, but truth is we have it and a lot of players have made investments around it. Nullifying it by rewarding some unaffected loot bags on event completion is quite a slap in the face for them.

- Event tagging
This is a major flaw. Achieving a minimum contribution is enough to be rewarded, so nothing prevents a player from jumping between active events and get more loot than those doing all the hard work on each one.
In order to prevent this, ANet should improve the event contribution system (the medal thing), which is in a quite bad state atm.
For timed defenses or wave based fights (like fort defenses or dolyak scorts), it shouldn’t be difficult to check player activity for different timeframes/stages and then assign different contribution rewards based on the combined activity. If the event success reward would depend on that contributuon level, that would be enough to solve the issue to some extent (it will always be a somewhat slacker friendly system).
For events that can’t be structured like this, like retaking a fortress from the mordrem, a reworked mob loot or mixed system could be better.

The biggest problem with the classic mob loot system is how dependant the loot is on scaling. There’s a world of difference between the loot you get by completing an event alone or with a couple of friends and what you can get by zerging it.
In order to make it fairier, all ANet needs to do is disable any loot from those additional enemies scaling creates. Since an upscaled event will usually promote some enemies to elites and/or even champions, they just need to make sure that the base enemies are prioritized so the biggest (and easier to tag) guys are the ones providing loot.
The sytem would still promote tagging over anything else but, in the positive side, would allows MF to work and punish slackers and AFK-ers much more than the event sucess one.

Needless to say that a mixed system, where you have both mob and event reward, is absolutely possible and might be the best system for a lot of events.

• Move away from the bossfight approach.

Some bossfights here and there are nice, but there’s hardly any need on making most relevant fights to consist on killing the big guy.
GW2 combat system is more suited for fighting several enemies at once or, at least, for bosses to have some serious add support. This opens up A LOT of possibilities for more challenging encounters.

• Make less predictable fights

So it becomes much more difficult to develop a fixed strategy.
For a fight against several enemy waves or against a boss that summons adds, this could be achieved by just randomizing the nature and spawning location of those waves/adds.

• Encourage more splitting

Some old GW1 content, like FoW or UW, consists on a quite large amount of quests, spread over a quite large map, that must be completed in any order.
While it’s possible to complete them sequentially while keeping the whole group together, splitting and having different players fulfilling different tasks at the same time often yields better results. There’s not enough of this in GW2.

I wonder if people actually theorycraft group compositions built around sustain before claiming how weak healing support is.
Crazy levels of survivability are attainable without losing THAT much damage.

Windsagio.1340:

Miku Lawrence.6329:

People fail to realise one simple thing IllegalChocolate mentioned : There will always be the most effective way.

I don’t care personnaly, have all classes and enough gold to rebuild their stat allocation for “new meta”.

Excepting the many many many people on all sides of the discussion who have said and acknowledged exactly that.

Yes there will be a meta that people come up with, there would be even if all play styles were actually even (an impossibility), because that’s how people work. There’s a fairly difficult design question here about expanding the range of styles in an encounter. There are people who are locked into the efficiency trip that both complain the dungeons are boring and also run them the same rote way every time, over and over. Right now it’s a somewhat self-inflicted issue, but it becomes serious if one way is TOO much more efficient, or even considered too much more efficient than the others.

The most efficient approach to complete some content and the player dirven meta are related, but still far from being the same thing.
There’s no way for the optimal strategy to become meta if most players can’t handle it.

Not working under NDA really baffles me. If closed betas are so close and testers will be able to freely provide us any sort of information, isn’t it like we should already had a much deeper insight on most of the things to come?

I also hope that some information that’s not relevant for testing, like new collections or legendary recipes that could be using already existing items, is properly hidden on the beta client.

Equilibriator.8741:

Blaeys.3102:

I am one of those people strongly against the idea of traditional instanced set-number raids we see from other games making its way in GW2. In those games, they only serve to split the community and act as a cornerstone for most of the elitist behavior.

That said, I think they could make raids work in GW2. They just need to take a strong look at all of the elements from those other games that encourage inter-community strife and hate and address them in their design.

So, yes, I would love to see raids, but not in the form we currently see in other games. They need to be Guild Wars 2 raids, with the emphasis on fun and friendly cooperative gameplay that brings the community together rather than tears it apart.

Again, however, I don’t expect to see raids in HOT nor do I think it would be a good use of developer time right now.

see you get it, it doesnt have to be like other games, all hardcore and elitist, it can just be another game mode for fun. it doesnt have to be a bad thing, just because its long and requires people.

(besides, in everymode there is elitists that will tell you to go away, doesnt matter where you go, dungeons, pvp, wvw. With raids you will just sometimes have 10 of them at once :P (like in wvw))

The very nature of challenging content leads to elitism. On the other hand, if the content barely presents any challenge, there’s little reason for making it instanced.
I guess some kind of instanced guild activity could be possible. It should allow, however, extremely different amounts of players to complete it, so I would hardly call it a raid.

Heal Skill
- Best: Healing Turret
- Worst: Well of Blood

Weapon
- Best: Temporal Curtain
- Worst: Fire Shield

Utility (not including Engineer kits)
- Best: Smoke Screen
- Worst: Viper’s Nest

Elite
- Best: Battle Standard
- Worst: Polymorph Moa

Unless they have something big planned, these months before the xpac arrives look like the best opportunity to bring SAB back.
Just the latest release, without any world addition, would be more than enough. Not only there are probably tons of new players that haven’t experinced it (including the whole Chinese community if I’m not mistaken), but it also can offer something for veterans (on top of a lot of fun for some of us) thanks to the wardrobe feature that didn’t exist the last time we played it.
In fact, holding the whole thing until the 3rd world is ready could deliver one of those “too much things to do in a limited amount of time” situations, which would be a shame since we’re not exactly receiving a lot of content these days.
A far better choice IMHO than a 2 week Dragon Ball arena or that last patch that just removed it :P

Not sure if I like it or not.
It sounds like a great improvement for zergy and/or uncoordinated content, but it also looks like it will negatively affect solo and small group play.

Definitely this is going to entertain me for a couple of weeks :P

It all depends on how these achievements are going to be handled in the future.

Dragon Ball achievements are listed under a new section called “Seasonal Activities”, so I wouldn’t be surprised at all if they are meant to remain there and save your progression for the next time Dragon Ball is available.
If that’s the case, 100 interrupts seem a fair amount to me. The problem would be about all the other achievements, which seem incredibly lackluster even for a hit-or-miss scenario (adding more tiers in the future shouldn’t be a big problem tough)

If these AP are hit-or-miss for 15/30 days, then the achievements is probably too grindy, just like Inquisiton and Mayhem were (After this “Seasonal Activities” tab I have some hope, however, for Hallowen/Wintersday activites to get listed under it and become lifetime achievements :P).

It looks even better if you’re in combat mode or running :P