Sorry Vayne but you are arguing something completely different from what is being discussed.
The OP is asking for one of the LS updates to instead focus completely on polish, and you come into the thread talking about quality of life changes that have happened in the past. Those may be loosely connected, at a stretch, but they certainly don’t preclude each other.
You are correct that there probably aren’t 1000’s of threads, however I bet if you read the LS collaborative development thread you can find ~1000 posts that ask for the content to either be slowed down, polished, or both.
QoL also isn’t really polish… polish would be fixing the DE’s that still bug since launch… look at JQ… currently just taking from world bosses:
Dwayna
Golem
foulbear
eye of zhaitanAll bugged, most of the week.
Or the 100’s of clipping issues that exist. Or the lack of dyes on recent armors. Or the still numerous tooltip bugs. The list goes on, but I would be here all night.
A patch that focused 100% on polish would be a great thing for everyone. Plus it would give us 2 weeks without scarlet, it’s really a win, win for everyone.
First of all, two weeks is still nothing and I did say that. Two weeks would fix like six bugs. The rate of stuff coming out has nothing to do with the speed bugs get fixed, which was also part of my point.
And you ignore the point about dynamic events being bugged after they’ve been fixed. Most dynamic events were fixed. Changes are made to code and some bug again. I’m pretty sure there’s no a single dynamic event that’s been bugged since launch that needs to be fixed. What you have is the same dynamic event bugged again, maybe with a completely different bug.
See saying someone isn’t fixing bugs means ignoring every patch note that comes out with the bug fixes listed (and many bugs get fixed that aren’t listed. I know because I’ve found some myself).
I am on record as saying I want the living story to slow down too…but it’s not because I think slowing it down will fix bugs more or faster, so these things don’t even necessarily relate.
Quality of life fixes aside, there are tons of bug fixes that has been happened. And you know, throwing more people at a programming problem doesn’t guarantee the problem will be fixed sooner. Sometimes, throwing more people at a problem will slow down the coming of a resolution to a problem.
If you hired someone to paint your house and when you asked when it will be done, they told you a vague timeframe loaded with qualifiers, you wouldn’t hire them.
If you hired someone to paint your house and they said the job would be done by the end of the week, you’d be pretty upset when 6 months had gone by.
I think what OP is trying to communicate is that it is annoying to have Anet talk up all the goodies they have planned for the year and then miss deadlines and alter the end product. Remember precursor scavenger hunt? Of course you don’t, that idea that they wanted to make sure the “got just right” turned into crafting, which is now pushed back.
I think that they’ve done a great job putting stuff out this year. That said, if the stuff they put out wasn’t the thing you were excited for, it’s understandable you’d be miffed. The need to either manage expectations better or step up their delivery process. That would quell a lot of the forum outrage I’m sure.
Except that painting your house is completely different from programming a game. The odds are painting your house won’t throw up quite so many unknown issues. It’s less complex.
Building an office build, for example, often goes over budget and over schedule, because it’s more complex.
Progamming tasks, even with the best intentions can take a whole lot longer than you want them to. So here’s the choice.
Say nothing at all when everyone is bugging you to say something because they want to know the direction of the game…they want transparency…or say something and put a likely date on it and move it back if it runs over time.
I suppose they could say we’re going to do this but we can’t say when but people complain about that too.
What would you suggest Anet do in these circumstances?
for guild wars 2, they need to attract more players though.
lets see todays players
http://store.steampowered.com/stats/Current Players | Peak Today – Game
203,864 | 574,079 – Dota 2
29,967 | 76,213 – Team Fortress 2
18,591 | 51,656 – Counter-Strike: Global Offensive
6,340 | 29,229 – Counter-Strike: Sourcecome on, guild wars 2 can do better!
by the way, DOTA2 has such a steep learning curve, yet it still have so many players. O_O
Do you know how many players log into Guild Wars 2 every day? Cause I don’t think anyone does.
i dunno.
cos they were never transparent with the numbers of players unlike steam.
i do recall they say they have 17k sPvP players.
that 17k were peak at one point or current average players, i have no idea also.
But steam isn’t technically a developer, steam is a delivery platform. They can only tell you the number of people who log in the game for games that have contracted with them…and their contracts aren’t necessarily a good deal for gamers. They can be transparent. What does it mean to them? They don’t own most of those games you listed.
for guild wars 2, they need to attract more players though.
lets see todays players
http://store.steampowered.com/stats/Current Players | Peak Today – Game
203,864 | 574,079 – Dota 2
29,967 | 76,213 – Team Fortress 2
18,591 | 51,656 – Counter-Strike: Global Offensive
6,340 | 29,229 – Counter-Strike: Sourcecome on, guild wars 2 can do better!
by the way, DOTA2 has such a steep learning curve, yet it still have so many players. O_O
Do you know how many players log into Guild Wars 2 every day? Cause I don’t think anyone does.
I’d wager an expansion will be announced closer to the release of some of the competing games that are coming out. It seems like good business sense. You want to rekindle interest in your game, you save the expansion for when it’s release will do you the most good.
Fans would want new expansions far more often than they’re financially feasible but expansions offer a potential to grow your business.
Anet knows nothing new and big coming out soon. Wildstar won’t count because NcSoft isn’t going to want to compete with itself. But other big games are coming and when they come, Anet is going to want to have an answer to them. That’s when you’ll see an expansion.
I also think that there is a separate team of people working on the living story versus the team who does these QoL updates/upgrades.
This is true. The living story teams (there are four of them) are only a third of the teams working on the game. There are roughly a dozen teams, so eight or so teams are working on other longer term features, including bigger updates (Tequatl was one of them) and the QOL type stuff.
You may have missed the part in Guild Wars 1 where it started to shift from a mostly PvP game to a mostly PvE game…and it did happen. After Factions there were precious few PvP updates…Nightfall and Eye of the North, the next two expansions were purely PvE, including PvE only skills, and new stories but no new PvP formats.
I’d say that those who love to be competitive in PvP were at that point the minority of the player base. Why? Because if the were the majority Anet would have focused on them.
The PvP community, in my opinion, is there own worst enemy. In Guild Wars 1, if you weren’t there from the beginning, it became harder and harder to approach PvP. People were driven away by the ridicule, the negativity, the nastiness of the general player base.
So the PvP playerbase didn’t renew itself that fast, and as a result, it became “inbred” for lack of a better word. The game guys playing but no new blood. Anything like that that doesn’t self renew is likely to die.
From my point of view, the PvP in Guild Wars 2 is better, because it has a lower entry threshold. The only way to make it more competitive is to field a team of people, and learn to work together and play against other premade teams. Those are the guys at the top end of the food chain in my opinion.
There’s casual PvP for guys like me and there’s team based tournament PvP for people who want more of what you want.
That will likely keep PvP going for a longer time, even if it doesn’t give you the same feeling Guild Wars 1 did.
Great point! Ground targeting is a massive improvement! Oh, and getting rid of the verification on salvaging greens!
Earlier there were other ones everyone forgot already, like being able to craft from stuff in your bank without having it in your inventory, or the preview on the auction house. Even the LFG tool.
We’ve been getting quality of life upgrades all along…and bug fixes with every patch. I’m not sure what the OP thinks could be done in two weeks that isn’t already being worked on to be honest.
There are quite literally thousands of posts on the forums BEGGING them not to bother with more living story updates, but rather focus on bugfixes and QoL (quality of life) changes. They’d rather just add more of the same, over and over, and pretend the issues don’t exist. Meh.
Actually I doubt seriously there are literally thousands of posts that are begging for them not to bother with living story updates. There probably aren’t even literally hundreds. I’m sure there’s not 1000.
I’m not sure why people ignore the quality of life stuff that has been added.
I don’t always agree with you, Vayne, and I’m not sure I can speak toward the number of requests Anet has had about abandoning LS for just a bit to focus on polishing the game, but I do agree that many of the positive changes are frequently overlooked. I love how the daily has evolved into being much more flexible, and how they kept some activities on rotation (though I wish they’d just rotate which one awards karma each day, and have all of them accessible), and more than anything else- the wallet feature.
There’s also the new AOE targetting which makes ground targeting a whole lot better for me, and the end to culling which was huge for WvW. And the account bound magic find solution. And though it’s not quality of life per se, the achievement chests are another cool thing to look forward to.
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It is my belief there are more people who solo these games and want unstructured solo content, than there are people who want challenging group content. I can’t prove it, but it’s what I believe.
There’s no real evidence for either side at the moment, but WoW is the single most successful MMO in existence and pretty much every MMO that comes out apart from GW2 has raids. So there must be a substantial demand for them.
Yes I know most WoW players don’t raid, but it’s an iconic feature of the game.
Also, wouldn’t having a MMO based mostly in solo content defeat the purpose of it being a MMO? The 2 Ms ate what makes ESO different from Skyrim.
Okay so WoW has raids and WoW is successful. Baseball stadiums have hot dogs, but hot dogs aren’t why people go to the ball park. The fact is, before you can get to raids in WoW you have to do a whole lot of other stuff and people who do that often don’t go any further.
But there’s another bit of information here that can also mislead. How popular WoW is is completely irrelevant to traditional end game. First, WoW came out at a time when there was almost no competition. They were piggybacking off the mad success of an RTS with the same name. The company had a ton of money to advertise their product that didn’t come from that product.
I think it’s a mistake to look at WoW as a winning game combination based on any single factor of it. If I had to guess, I’d say timing was the biggest factor of WoW’s success. Certainly the MMO field when it came out wasn’t rife with competition and there were absolutely no free MMOs.
EQ1 came before WoW, so did UO. EQ even made a sequel. Coming at a time when there was no competition or riding on a good brand doesn’t ensure your MMO will last, nor having a lot of money. Just look to the failure of a game that was FF14 1.0 can tell you that, because I would think Final Fantasy’s IP is bigger than Warcraft’s, and I’m not sure which of Square Enix or Blizzard has more cash.
Heck, some (by which I mean a lot) argue that GW1 was better than GW2, despite GW2 having a much bigger production team and much higher of a budget.
Also, raids to WoW is nothing like hotdogs to the ball park. Its a staple and iconic feature of the game. You mention WoW and a lot of people instantly think raids, you mention baseball and I doubt many people think of hotdogs.
The argument was the fact that pretty much every MMO coming out and having raids must mean there is some demand for them, otherwise why would the devs spend so much effort making them. Raids are some of the hardest-to-create content you can have in a game.
Actually you mention baseball and a lot of people do think about hotdogs. They go together which is sort of my point. If the majority of the playerbase doesn’t do raids, I don’t believe that raids are necessary.
EQ 1 had a tiny population compared to WoW. All those games did. To play EQ 1, and start it, you had to almost dedicate your life to it. There were very few casual EQ 1 players. It wasn’t called Evercrack for nothing. UO had even less people playing it than EQ 1.
They were niche games. EQ 1 was a hard game with a ton of grind. People waiting for and camping bosses in open world dungeons that would show up like every fortnight or even longer. The masses were never going to look at EQ 1.
WoW piggybacked off the success of Warcraft, a popular computer game. They had a ton of money as already said and what they did was dumb down the genre. They made it more accessible for casuals. Raids almost certainly had nothing to do with it, whether or not raids are an iconic part of WoW or not.
Simply put, there is no actual way to deduce from history whether or not raids were a necessary part of WoW’s success. You can believe it is, if you want, and that’s fine. But there’s no actual way to prove it.
I believe WoW would have been a different game without raids and that would have become the standard.
Because most players are sheep. They don’t question their gaming experience. The tiny percent of players who post on forums don’t represent the biggest percentage of the playerbase.
Particularly at the beginning, the number of people who raided in WoW was tiny. In my opinion it would have done just as well if raiding had never been introduced. It would have been a different game, but no one can know if it would have been as successful.
The problem is, WoW success is what DEFINED the end game. And everyone just bought into it. Well a lot of people did.
I wasn’t one of them.
There are quite literally thousands of posts on the forums BEGGING them not to bother with more living story updates, but rather focus on bugfixes and QoL (quality of life) changes. They’d rather just add more of the same, over and over, and pretend the issues don’t exist. Meh.
Actually I doubt seriously there are literally thousands of posts that are begging for them not to bother with living story updates. There probably aren’t even literally hundreds. I’m sure there’s not 1000.
I’m not sure why people ignore the quality of life stuff that has been added.
See, I don’t need a final boss…which is my point. I could care less about a final boss. It’s what makes it more of a game and less of a world to me. That’s why I like zones like Hirathi and Straits of Devastation better than other zones. Because it’s less about a big boss and more about an ongoing war.
But other people do and you should acknowledge it. Does Anet want to lose those people or will it give them a proverbial carrot?
I for one like some of the temple events but only under one condition – at most five participating players. Wish they would just swap temple priests with arah priests, that would mean more fun for zergs and for dungeons crawlers!
That’s an interesting comment…that I should acknowledge it. I’ve lost count of how many times that I’ve said that the game I want and my point of view probably doesn’t represent the majority.
However, I do believe that most people thinking dungeon runners and raiders and people who want end game are a huge majority…and that I don’t think is the case.
It is my belief there are more people who solo these games and want unstructured solo content, than there are people who want challenging group content. I can’t prove it, but it’s what I believe.
There’s no real evidence for either side at the moment, but WoW is the single most successful MMO in existence and pretty much every MMO that comes out apart from GW2 has raids. So there must be a substantial demand for them.
Yes I know most WoW players don’t raid, but it’s an iconic feature of the game.
Also, wouldn’t having a MMO based mostly in solo content defeat the purpose of it being a MMO? The 2 Ms ate what makes ESO different from Skyrim.
Okay so WoW has raids and WoW is successful. Baseball stadiums have hot dogs, but hot dogs aren’t why people go to the ball park. The fact is, before you can get to raids in WoW you have to do a whole lot of other stuff and people who do that often don’t go any further.
But there’s another bit of information here that can also mislead. How popular WoW is is completely irrelevant to traditional end game. First, WoW came out at a time when there was almost no competition. They were piggybacking off the mad success of an RTS with the same name. The company had a ton of money to advertise their product that didn’t come from that product.
So it’s popularity is partly based on timing, and partly based on the deepness of its pockets as well as what actually is in the game.
I think it’s a mistake to look at WoW as a winning game combination based on any single factor of it. If I had to guess, I’d say timing was the biggest factor of WoW’s success. Certainly the MMO field when it came out wasn’t rife with competition and there were absolutely no free MMOs.
Who buys the game for story? I think you’d be surprised. lol
Welcome back. Hope you find your niche.
See, I don’t need a final boss…which is my point. I could care less about a final boss. It’s what makes it more of a game and less of a world to me. That’s why I like zones like Hirathi and Straits of Devastation better than other zones. Because it’s less about a big boss and more about an ongoing war.
But other people do and you should acknowledge it. Does Anet want to lose those people or will it give them a proverbial carrot?
I for one like some of the temple events but only under one condition – at most five participating players. Wish they would just swap temple priests with arah priests, that would mean more fun for zergs and for dungeons crawlers!
That’s an interesting comment…that I should acknowledge it. I’ve lost count of how many times that I’ve said that the game I want and my point of view probably doesn’t represent the majority.
However, I do believe that most people thinking dungeon runners and raiders and people who want end game are a huge majority…and that I don’t think is the case.
It is my belief there are more people who solo these games and want unstructured solo content, than there are people who want challenging group content. I can’t prove it, but it’s what I believe.
You guys are awesome. I can’t even solo the character creation screen.
Whilst I understand that, it inevitably will happen anyway. If we speculate that one day Elona and Cantha are added to a fully mapped Tyria…the population will spread out anyway. It’s extremely difficult to manage traffic – players don’t generally like being managed. They want the feeling of being able to go where and do what they want.
I’m not 100% sure this is true. A certain type of player doesn’t want to be told where to go and what to do, but in my experience, far more players want to be told exactly where to go and what to do. Think of it in terms of sandbox vs. theme park. Sandbox gives you more freedom, but generally has a lower player base. You need more time/energy/focus/intelligence to really participate in a sandbox. Many people get home from work, have a couple of hours to kill and really have to be told where is the best place to kill them.
But beyond that, if people aren’t given a place to gather, they’ll often make a place to gather themselves. I’ve seen this again and again in MMOs. If there is no where where people congregate, they’ll pick a place and congregate there.
Particularly in MMOs, people love to see other people.
Guardians aren’t the only class that can solo the game, it was just an example. Although I personally feel they have a much easier time with it than others.
I have tried WvW, it’s quite dead a majority of the time for me it seems, I will wait for the next rotation to try it again though. sPvP… meh, I tried it once and a necromancer 1 v 5’d my team and won the game for them. We just couldn’t bring it down =/
I guess I could be burned out, but I’m not 100% on that, I still -really- want to play the game. I feel like I’m more frustrated that I can’t do MORE of the content because I don’t really have anyone to play with. Most of the friends that bought the game with me have quit due to no content to do at the time of release (they didn’t give any chance for content through updates.) and now they out right refuse to even log back in. The one friend that does still play has an incredibly demanding job it seems and only gets on for a few hours a week. So all in all I don’t think it’s an issue with being burned out, or I wouldn’t want to play at all.
So why not find a guild of like minded players and play with them?
10/10. I’m a terrible raider but there needs to be something at the end.
MMOs are about progression. You need a ‘final boss’, an ultimate challenge, something that makes you look forwards to finally beating.
See, I don’t need a final boss…which is my point. I could care less about a final boss. It’s what makes it more of a game and less of a world to me. That’s why I like zones like Hirathi and Straits of Devastation better than other zones. Because it’s less about a big boss and more about an ongoing war.
Surely you guys realize that these current things being worked on were planned months ago, before the collaborative development started.
It takes four months to make a part of the living story, so what we’re seeing now is back in time four months.
You’d have to go 2-3 months in the future to see some of the collaborative stuff getting worked on.
OP, I’d just turn off emotes altogether after I blocked someone. Then you won’t see their emotes.
I realize that that’s an easy fix to it but of course there’s also a large amount of people who participate in roleplay on this game as an activity. But it would be nice if everything was just blocked.
I’m not saying I’m disagreeing with you and you don’t even have to leave it off. If someone is bothering me, right in front of me and I block them, and they’re emoting I either WP (he can’t follow me) or I turn off emotes. He’ll get tired sooner or later and I’ll turn them back on.
A lot has been made of the Guild Wars 2 end game (or lack of it). I’m inclined to believe that the standard end game concept is craved by some people and disliked but a group as large or larger. Frankly, if there were no end game, I couldn’t be happier.
So the question is, how important is end game to you on a scale of 1-10.
For me, I’d put it at about a 4. All I really want is stuff to do. It doesn’t have to be challenging (though I don’t mind some challenge…I just want it at on my schedule, not someone else’s).
I don’t care about ultra hard dungeons, and I don’t really want to grind for better weapons. I just want to enjoy the world Anet created for me. I want to spend time in Tyria. I don’t want to “play a game”.
Edit: Can a mod change the typo in the title to Importance?…thanks
OP, I’d just turn off emotes altogether after I blocked someone. Then you won’t see their emotes.
blocking is only meant for gold selling bots
No idea where you got this idea, but I’m sure it’s not the case. Blocking exists for many reasons. Gold selling bots is just one of them.
Time should matter, but the problem with GW2 is that time is pretty much the only thing that matters in PvE. An MMO should reward both time and skill, with the latter being something that a casual player could have as much of as someone who plays ten hours a day.
There have been rewards for skill but not enough of them. Certainly the Liadri mini at least required some level of skill. Some of the jumping titles or the weapon skins for completing Tribulation mode of SAB also required skill.
True, but I’m talking about core items like armor and weapons and core gameplay. As much as I like SAB and its skins, it’s a minigame. ANet had a chance to fix this with Ascended weapons. Maybe put them in high-level Fractals and new/revamped, difficult dungeon paths. However, they chose not to.
There are still fractal skins and Arah armor. Not everyone is going to be able to get them. It’s not as barren as you’re making out, is all I’m saying.
Could there be more. Always. But stuff takes time to design and most of the playerbase isn’t hard core.
So if you were a developer would you make more armor sets for the small percentage or the greater percentage?
Time should matter, but the problem with GW2 is that time is pretty much the only thing that matters in PvE. An MMO should reward both time and skill, with the latter being something that a casual player could have as much of as someone who plays ten hours a day.
There have been rewards for skill but not enough of them. Certainly the Liadri mini at least required some level of skill. Some of the jumping titles or the weapon skins for completing Tribulation mode of SAB also required skill.
And if you had no time and it was a long grind you couldn’t do it. In most MMOs the best stuff requires the longest grind. Guild Wars 2 changed things up so you can get some of the skins for cash. People who work a lot and don’t have time can buy gems, sell gems and get the skin.
What you’re complaining about, paraphrased is this.
I don’t have time to play the game, so all rewards should be geared to people who only have as much time to play the game as I have.
Which would kill the game completely.
I believe most people need stuff to work for. It’s that simple. If someone gets everything they want, they stop playing the game…not everyone, but many people if not most. It happened to my son. He got his legendary and stopped playing. He came back for ascended weapons, got that and stopped playing again.
People who have lots of time need stuff to do in game too.
So maybe you can’t have everything in game? Is that fair?
As long as it’s not giving you numerical advantage, I don’t see the problem. There are a lot of skins in the game. If you’re going to attach yourself to a specific skin, either buy it with cash, or take your time getting it.
Either way, the game can’t cater to a single play style, or demographic.
The game was clearly rushed. It had to be released. That’s a business decision just about every MMO has to come to terms with. The first year was all about fixing the game. Implementing guesting, a looking for group tool, dealing with culling and fixing a myriad of bugs (which they have). People claim bugs haven’t been fixed since launch but the list of bugs that have been fixed is a long one.
Regarding the bugs, you are right. But then again we know that it’s been rushed, so that long list of bug doesn’t matter that much.
That’s like saying “they fixed a lot of bugs since Alpha”. Of course they did, they had to if they wanted to make this game playable. Now some bugs aren’t really annoying, they just randomly happen and barely affect the game play. They can take some time to fix it.
However, when a year after the game has been released, I still encounter DE that are stuck, that’s utterly unbelievable. We should be past the stage where things aren’t working at all.And that is what’s annoying with Anet : they barely touch old content and prefer to create more and more stuff. The stuff they create gets better with each new release, but the old stuff stays the same.
But is it the same DE’s that are stuck or are they stuck at different points for different reasons? There where dozens and dozens of bugged events, and now there are far far less. Most have been fixed. It’s entirely possible the event bugs that you’re experiencing now HAVE been fixed and then a later update breaks them again. That counts as a new bug (and in fact could have a new cause), not an old one.
I strongly suspect just about all the original DE bugs were fixed.
I’m assuming you didn’t use a toolkit skill after creating the engie, so you could wait for the game to prompt you. Because if you use the skill, I’m pretty sure the game won’t prompt you.
The best karma farm is still WvW, because it never gets hit by diminishing returns.
Having played both Guild Wars, I feel that by buffing monsters/bosses to ridiculous health pools, Anet pretty much killed the necromancer in GW2.
The necro in GW1 was one of the most powerful classes. With pretty much any good curse/death magic build, a necro could significantly reduce the pressure on the team.
It is not possible to do the same with a necro in GW2 because conditions and minions don’t do jack on bosses. Therefore, no one wants a low DPS necro in the team. Even after speccing with all berserker gear, a necro can only dream of out damaging a poorly specced warrior.
I feel that the necromancer and the other weak classes should be removed entirely, and they should just focus on warrior, guardian and mesmer. They don’t have the attention span to balance all the classes.
The suggestion of removing the necro because they don’t do as much damage to bosses in dungeons is a bad one in my opinion.
Admittedly there are people who want to run run run through dungeons. I don’t now, and never have believed they’re the majority. I have a bunch of necros in my guild and we run dungeons with them all the time and everyone has a good time.
Removing a profession because a few people focus on efficiency above all else isn’t sufficient reason.
And in Guild Wars 1, for years, eles in PvE were much worse than most professions, so much so that Anet to to almost rewrite the profession. This isn’t something that just happened in Guild Wars 2. It’s not even something that isn’t a problem in most games.
There are always going to be more and less powerful professions, and that’s why buffs and nerfs happen.
I’d be pretty annoyed if Anet removed the necromancer from the game, because I have a lot of fun playing mine.
As I said, you stack on the bosses, but it isnt a case of spam the heck out of them. The 2 bosses in CoE where you stack on (the ice guy does really count because the stacking is just to lure him) are Alpha and the advanced golem.
Alpha you need to watch your dodges and health management very carefully. The amount of PUGs I’ve been in that ends up with every one but 2 guys dead says this isn’t ‘easy’.
The golem you stack yes. It’s a terribly boring boss, unlike it’s HotW counterpart where that guy can kill you so quick you’re constantly dodging around the room.
In CoE submarine path, you don’t have to dodge, because Alpha has different skills. The other two paths you do need to dodge. But you have to stack on alpha three times in each path, which means a whole lot of stacking occurs in that dungeon.
I apologise if I sound rude but, please can you reread my post? :I
I said there was stacking and the main point was most of the dungeon bosses in the game doesn’t involve stacking.
I don’t mean to be rude either. I just did CoE tonight and it seemed like I spent the whole dungeon stacked. It might not have actually been that way, but it sure seemed like it.
And part of that was because we had to stack on alpha 3 times. He’s like half the bosses in the dungeon.
I haven’t gone through things on a dungeon by dungeon case, because my memory isn’t all that great for recent events (I remember older stuff quite well for some reason). And while I agree most bosses you don’t stack on, I can think of a few we do stack on, even in Arah.
Its quite sad how the MMO state of mind has evolved in to:
We do whatever gives the most rewards/is the most efficient farming method.
Even if that means:
- We have to repeat the same content over and over.
- That content isnt the most enjoyable content in the game.Are these bots?
People use their timers and jump from 1 major event to the other. Ignoring the rest of the content in the zone.
Some people do use timers…but what percentage of the playerbase is it? I’d really like to know.
I suspect more people don’t do that than do…but it looks like everyone does, because events are where people gather. There might be as many or more people wandering around doing other things, but they’re not all together, so how could we know?
As I said, you stack on the bosses, but it isnt a case of spam the heck out of them. The 2 bosses in CoE where you stack on (the ice guy does really count because the stacking is just to lure him) are Alpha and the advanced golem.
Alpha you need to watch your dodges and health management very carefully. The amount of PUGs I’ve been in that ends up with every one but 2 guys dead says this isn’t ‘easy’.
The golem you stack yes. It’s a terribly boring boss, unlike it’s HotW counterpart where that guy can kill you so quick you’re constantly dodging around the room.
In CoE submarine path, you don’t have to dodge, because Alpha has different skills. The other two paths you do need to dodge. But you have to stack on alpha three times in each path, which means a whole lot of stacking occurs in that dungeon.
When I first played the Guild Wars 2 necromancer, I couldn’t stand it. Since that time, many improvements had been made. No, it’s not identical to the Guild Wars 1 necromancer, but I think what makes the biggest difference is nothing you listed.
In Guild Wars 1, necromancers could only wear necromancer armor. Not light armor. Only profession specific. That made each profession feel unique. I don’t personally have problems without how minions work, or how life steal works. In fact, I don’t have a problem with the profession specific armor not being in game either, but yeah this IS a different game.
And if people come into it expecting a carbon copy of what existed in the first game, for any profession, I’m guessing they’re going to be disappointed.
It took me a long time to come to terms with the necromancers of Guild Wars 2…but currently it’s my favorite profession.
Running around in circles smashing some hp-bags, so thats their great vision of an MMO in 2013?
And a year after release Anet is still trying to figure out how to design their game.Seems everyone can call himself a ‘Game Designer’ nowadays.
Please remind me, why is this game called “Guild Wars 2” again?
It’s 2013, you’re right. For the last X number of years, the entire genre has basically revolved around the trinity. That’s changed. As with all changes of this type, it takes time to learn what you can and can’t do.
The game was clearly rushed. It had to be released. That’s a business decision just about every MMO has to come to terms with. The first year was all about fixing the game. Implementing guesting, a looking for group tool, dealing with culling and fixing a myriad of bugs (which they have). People claim bugs haven’t been fixed since launch but the list of bugs that have been fixed is a long one.
Now, they’re working on making encounters better. It’s business as usual in the MMO world. You either launch with a tiny game with nothing to do, or a big game with lots of bugs which you have to fix. Then you work on improving stuff.
Because very few companies can afford five years of development on a major project without seeing some return on it.
Guild Wars 1 had necros that did curses that did conditions. Guild Wars 1 had necros that life steal.
And in Guild Wars 1, there was a skill that was redone called Aura of the Lich which conjured a minion, even if there was no corpse to conjure from.
Obviously, necromancers were able to do it in Guild Wars 1, so it evolved.
From a game perspective, it’s easy to see why this was necessary though. In an open world environment, the last thing Anet wanted was for 20 necros in a zerg to all be competing for corpses. Let’s say 5 things die and there are 20 necros. That means 15 necros get nothing. There’s no percentage in that.
Some of the changes that were made in Guild Wars 1 were made to compensate for the open world. Instances are far more easily controlled than the open world, which is why necros now don’t have to compete for corpses. In my opinion, this was the right decision.
The lifesteal and the condition builds…they existed in Guild Wars 1 too. I know because I used them.
Southsun is a terrible zone. It shows that Anet doesn’t know how to make difficult content. They only know how to make bigger numbers: more mobs, bigger damage numbers, longer condition durations.
I thought Queen’s gauntlet’s silver bosses (including the ones in the open world) were a step in the right direction as they had mechanics rather than just bigger numbers, but alas it seems Anet’s not really creating that kind of content anymore.
They’re not? How about the bosses in the new path of Twilght Arbor which aren’t just bags of health and have mechanics.
We’ve only scraped the beginnings of what they’re creating. Saying that they brought out something that was only like a month or two ago and they’re not doing that since (when they have) seems to be a misinterpretation to me.
If something like that came out two months ago, and then TA new path came out, it seems they are creating better thought out encounters and we have to wait for them, because creating that stuff takes time.
I strongly suspect we’ll see a lot more of that in the future.
When the ranged weapons are the least efficient/useful on an ideologically archer-based class – ranger – you know there is something wrong with this game. Enough said.
People keep saying the ranger is an archer based profession and it’s just not so. It has BECOME an archer based profession but rangers are based on D&D which in itself was based on Lord of the Rings. In Lord of the Rings Aragorn was a ranger. He prodominantly fought with a sword.
The misconception comes from the word range in ranger, but that has nothing to do with weapons. It was to do with the fact that rangers live in the wilds instead of cities. They have a range (as in home on the range or park ranger). They range. That’s what makes a ranger.
Not using a ranged weapon.
I’m bored, so I’m going to attack this misconception about Rangers in LotR.
Aragorn was A ranger, not the mold for all rangers in the LotR universe. He was a ranger by luck of birth. Rangers of the North, which Aragorn was a member of and led for time before becoming part of the Fellowship, were made up of the remnants of the Dunedain. Rangers of the North used bows as their primary weapon as a general rule, and were generally trained by the elves in combat tactics used to fight foes more numerous than themselves using stealth, traps, and misdirection.
Rangers of Ithilien, of which Faramir was a part and leader. This set of Rangers also used bows as their primary weapon, and used stealth and guerrilla tactics against foes who were much more numerous. These Rangers could also trace their heritage back to the Dunedain.
So….
1. Rangers in LotR did in fact use ranged weapons as their primary weapon set.
2. This isn’t LotR regardless.
3. Anet has described and reinforces the idea of the GW2 Ranger class as a primary ranged weapon user.
4. The GW2 Ranger class, as is, is not performing as it should as set out by the developers.
5. People should complain till this is rectified, OR, Anet should change the description of the class and stop reinforcing the idea of the Ranger class as a primary ranged weapon set class.Lastly…stop using Aragorn to say Rangers are not a ranged weapon class…it’s ridiculous.
Edit: If LotR Rangers were modeled using GW2 game classes, they would most closely resemble the Thief. Add some woodslore/ tracking/ and knowledge of animals and they would be a close fit.
Okay…let’s do it this way then. I can’t disagree with your interpretation because it’s been ages since I read Lord of the Rings. However, I can say this.
Anet, despite what everyone here is saying, created a game that is supposed to turn the genre a bit on its ear. What’s the first weapon a ranger gets? Not a bow, but an axe. Much closer range than a bow.
What does a ranger in Guild Wars 2 do the most damage with? Not a bow.
So you’re right. This isn’t Lord of the Rings. This isn’t D&D. This is Guild Wars 2.
And in Guild Wars 2, rangers are most effective damage wise with sword, not bow.
Again, you can argue with me all you want, but what you really need to do is take it up with the meta.
Not arguing. They are better at melee. The question is…should they be?
Currently the “ranged” class sucks more at range than they do at melee. The players are not the ones who described the class as a heavy ranged class, Development team did that. The meta is based of how the quirks of development land in game.
They just need to adjust the class so A (description of the class) equals out to B (how the class plays). I don’t care which they do.
I’m 100% in favor of them adjusting the profession description. And I’m mostly in favor of giving more ranged damage, too. I’m not against that.
But I play a ranger and I know for a fact that seeing the ranger as a ranged only profession is gimping yourself.
The only dungeons where you stack and spam the heck out of bosses are AC3 and CoF1. Although AC3 is due to abusing a glitch with the boss mechanics. CoE is a stack (you werrnt supposed to but hey) but it certainly isn’t spam the heck out of Alpha.
Having said that, AC3 and CoF1 are basically the 2 dungeons everyone runs. I’d be surprised if half the playerbase has ever sat foot in Arah.
I stack on most of the bosses on CoE.
When the ranged weapons are the least efficient/useful on an ideologically archer-based class – ranger – you know there is something wrong with this game. Enough said.
People keep saying the ranger is an archer based profession and it’s just not so. It has BECOME an archer based profession but rangers are based on D&D which in itself was based on Lord of the Rings. In Lord of the Rings Aragorn was a ranger. He prodominantly fought with a sword.
The misconception comes from the word range in ranger, but that has nothing to do with weapons. It was to do with the fact that rangers live in the wilds instead of cities. They have a range (as in home on the range or park ranger). They range. That’s what makes a ranger.
Not using a ranged weapon.
I’m bored, so I’m going to attack this misconception about Rangers in LotR.
Aragorn was A ranger, not the mold for all rangers in the LotR universe. He was a ranger by luck of birth. Rangers of the North, which Aragorn was a member of and led for time before becoming part of the Fellowship, were made up of the remnants of the Dunedain. Rangers of the North used bows as their primary weapon as a general rule, and were generally trained by the elves in combat tactics used to fight foes more numerous than themselves using stealth, traps, and misdirection.
Rangers of Ithilien, of which Faramir was a part and leader. This set of Rangers also used bows as their primary weapon, and used stealth and guerrilla tactics against foes who were much more numerous. These Rangers could also trace their heritage back to the Dunedain.
So….
1. Rangers in LotR did in fact use ranged weapons as their primary weapon set.
2. This isn’t LotR regardless.
3. Anet has described and reinforces the idea of the GW2 Ranger class as a primary ranged weapon user.
4. The GW2 Ranger class, as is, is not performing as it should as set out by the developers.
5. People should complain till this is rectified, OR, Anet should change the description of the class and stop reinforcing the idea of the Ranger class as a primary ranged weapon set class.Lastly…stop using Aragorn to say Rangers are not a ranged weapon class…it’s ridiculous.
Edit: If LotR Rangers were modeled using GW2 game classes, they would most closely resemble the Thief. Add some woodslore/ tracking/ and knowledge of animals and they would be a close fit.
Okay…let’s do it this way then. I can’t disagree with your interpretation because it’s been ages since I read Lord of the Rings. However, I can say this.
Anet, despite what everyone here is saying, created a game that is supposed to turn the genre a bit on its ear. What’s the first weapon a ranger gets? Not a bow, but an axe. Much closer range than a bow.
What does a ranger in Guild Wars 2 do the most damage with? Not a bow.
So you’re right. This isn’t Lord of the Rings. This isn’t D&D. This is Guild Wars 2.
And in Guild Wars 2, rangers are most effective damage wise with sword, not bow.
Again, you can argue with me all you want, but what you really need to do is take it up with the meta.
Anet has never said they would establish an Oceanic data center.
Love it when people claim that rangers are not a ranged class when anet clearly says they are. The fact that people are still repeating that tired nonsense is nothing short of amazing.
I tried to be polite to Vayne… but I do get your anger. It couldn’t be put more bluntly by Anet. But well, some people like to “bend reality”.;)
Best regards
Anet also stated there wouldn’t be vertical progression. I’m not sure what your point is. You mean the book that came out before the game launched had some stuff written in it that’s been clearly disproved by actual game play? Because that’s the case.
Rangers who want to be competitive with damage use melee weapons. Bear/bow rangers aren’t usually the first guys welcome in speed runs. And because most rangers don’t realize how badly they’re actually gimping themselves, most rangers won’t be welcome. Rangers can output some pretty good damage if they abandon their preconceptions.
It doesn’t MATTER what Anet says on the matter, and never did. It matters what the meta says on the matter. The meta says that rangers are not best served using ranged weapons.
Actually, OP, just because one group is most visible, doesn’t mean one group is the majority. Farmers are easy to see. And I have run the Queensdale train, just to see what it was. There were 20-30 people there, and I’m on the busiest server. That’s not a huge number of people. Of course there are also people running other trains.
The thing is, the other people, like me, are scattered all over the place. We’re not that easy to see, but it doesn’t mean we’re not there.
It’s entirely possible that the solution to your problem is to join a guild of like minded players who play to enjoy the open world and run the ocassional dungeon.
Today I did two guild events (a rush and a bounty), did a dungeon and before that, some of my guild were working on zone completion in one of the zones.
The other day we took a field trip to get some giants, because giants are hard to come by and we wanted to see if we could scale up the number of giants in an event.
Sometimes we just roam around checking stuff out. It’s fun.
It doesn’t stop the train from being there…but that doesn’t really affect me personally at all.
Housing will keep you busy for what? A few hours at most. Then back to the AMUSE ME bandwagon.
That’s completely up to the player. It will obviously keep you busy for a few hours, but you are not me thanks.
yes, thank goodness that is true.
The most extensive housing system I’ve seen in a gane is RuneScape’s. There’s multiple types of rooms, you can build mini games, trophies, dungeons, portals, servants and basically everything you’d possibly want.
Yet no one gives a kitten about housing there even after countless updates and revamps to the extent the devs just gave up and decided the construction skill should be used for something else.
That’s probably due to the fact that the game is full of 10 year olds that just want to be better than other 10 year olds. Therefore, they spend 90% of their time leveling, obtaining new gear, and improving skills. The other 10% is used for stuff like housing, guilds, and friends. I honestly don’t know what the devs were thinking when they implemented that… because I could smell failure from the beginning of its existence.
Last I checked I wasn’t ten years old nor are any of the people in my guild. I don’t think that 10 year olds have a monopoly on trying to be better than their peers in any case. I think you’ll find many in their 20s and 30s fall into this category as well. In fact, there’s an entire thread saying this game is aimed at older players, not younger players.
Actually, I was talking about Runescape, not guild wars 2 in this case. I’m also speaking from personal experience when I talk about kids on Runescape. And you’d be surprised… When I was 10 years old the only things I cared about were exploring, looking better, and being better than other people. That’s where my fun was located
I need to read more carefully. Also, maybe it’s a generational thing, but I was nothing like that at ten years old…or ever, for that matter.
Though it would kill me to have only one, I’d have to go with a necro. The question now is which one. I have a human, charr and asuran necro and I’d probably have to keep the Asuran or Charr. I don’t really like the human story that much (though I love the character).
Probably the charr necro, with the asuran coming a close second. That would have been an easier choice if Asuras didn’t have a huge advantage in jumping puzzles.
Housing will keep you busy for what? A few hours at most. Then back to the AMUSE ME bandwagon.
That’s completely up to the player. It will obviously keep you busy for a few hours, but you are not me thanks.
yes, thank goodness that is true.
The most extensive housing system I’ve seen in a gane is RuneScape’s. There’s multiple types of rooms, you can build mini games, trophies, dungeons, portals, servants and basically everything you’d possibly want.
Yet no one gives a kitten about housing there even after countless updates and revamps to the extent the devs just gave up and decided the construction skill should be used for something else.
That’s probably due to the fact that the game is full of 10 year olds that just want to be better than other 10 year olds. Therefore, they spend 90% of their time leveling, obtaining new gear, and improving skills. The other 10% is used for stuff like housing, guilds, and friends. I honestly don’t know what the devs were thinking when they implemented that… because I could smell failure from the beginning of its existence.
Last I checked I wasn’t ten years old nor are any of the people in my guild. I don’t think that 10 year olds have a monopoly on trying to be better than their peers in any case. I think you’ll find many in their 20s and 30s fall into this category as well. In fact, there’s an entire thread saying this game is aimed at older players, not younger players.
When the ranged weapons are the least efficient/useful on an ideologically archer-based class – ranger – you know there is something wrong with this game. Enough said.
People keep saying the ranger is an archer based profession and it’s just not so. It has BECOME an archer based profession but rangers are based on D&D which in itself was based on Lord of the Rings. In Lord of the Rings Aragorn was a ranger. He prodominantly fought with a sword.
The misconception comes from the word range in ranger, but that has nothing to do with weapons. It was to do with the fact that rangers live in the wilds instead of cities. They have a range (as in home on the range or park ranger). They range. That’s what makes a ranger.
Not using a ranged weapon.
To those who are saying always open your own instance…there are five people in each party. Clearly all five can’t open their own instance. So what do you do if you get invited and people are already at the dungeon and while you’re porting someone goes in. Or someone goes in and then adds an LFG ad.
If all five people are trying to start the instance, then four people are going to miss out. That’s not the answer.
Anet needs to fix this so that if someone leaves the instance, ownership is tranferred to someone else. This is a problem that shouldn’t need a player made solution.
I personally find the guardian more interesting than the warrior. I find the warrior to be more boring to play. Not less effective by any means, just more boring. I guess if you just like to burn stuff down fast, the warrior is a good choice, but that gets dull for me.
The guardian allows me to mix some magic into my melee which is far more interesting.