Guild Wars 2

Yes. I actually reinstalled GW1, but deinstalled again after cause it was pretty much dead now. (even kamadan america had only 1 district o.O)

If anyone would release another GW1 with modern graphics, I would never play GW2.

if they added subscription AND removed gem to gold exchange… now that would be a plus

I agree with pretty much everything he said, but…

this WvW solution is great imo, in fact if that was implemented… I might just reinstall the same day

There should then be some sort of interface where you can see how long each tower/keep has been under control of whoever is occupying it. Then certain places would become high priority. Suddenly, you could see the whole population flow towards these points, creating huge epic battles, where the offenders want to take it no matter what and the defenders want to keep it no matter what. That would be the best WvW change possible imo.

People are always saying on every MMO forum that the game is dying, seems to be some trend of recent years.

I’m not a fanboy and quit GW2 myself for now, but I don’t think this game will die in the next few years.

I love GW2 because it cleared a few things up for me:

1) perfect MMO will never exist
2) a game with cash shop currency convertible to ingame currency isn’t worth playing
3) don’t believe everything that’s said in a pre launch hype, in fact, don’t believe anything of it

Fuz.5621:

…because there’s no vertical progression and no grind like every other mmo.

lol’d

when you drive into a traffic jam on purpose cause you’re better off joining the zerg

Godmoney.2048:

Peetee.9406:

Good players leave bad guilds and bad players leave good guilds, however, good players do not leave good guilds.

Its a player issue, not a system issue.

So essentially you’re saying “Do nothing” about the problem?

It’s like climate change then. Just ignore it and maybe it will go away.

This is one of GW2’s biggest issues. MMORPG.com and now Gamespy.com have both run articles about this issue. Numerous people in this thread have noticed the problem.

I don’t expect people with less than 500 hours in GW2 to realize it is even a issue but to those of us who are well over 500 hours it’s become apparent there is a pretty big problem with guilds in this game.

Say it’s a player issue all you want. Any economist would argue that it’s a system issue. Are you going to ask people to interact more in Guild chat? Stop guild hopping as much? Good luck with that approach.

Maybe we should just ask people to stop whaling, elephant tusk hunting, insider trading……….yeah, that will work. Maybe we should just ask people to get along instead of having laws next. 10,000 years of human history would disagree that works.

Argue all you want about human nature, it won’t change human nature.

I fully agree. To people who disagree, look at it this way:

quite some problems, including all the guild hopping, can be fixed by one of these two things

1) change in player mentality
2) change in game mechanics

The first point isn’t going to happen. So if the problem is to be solved, it has to be the second. It’s as simple as that.

FrizzFreston.5290:

So have a nice GW2-vacation :p

thanks, I will ^.^

Galen Grey.4709

Its a tricky proposition. As for Arenanet anticipating this… I honestly don’t know! I was genuinely surprised by the reaction to Ascended armor as well as how people just refused to leave Orr just cause it was more profitable!

Turns out there are two kinds of Horizontal progression players and before Gw2 I could have swore there was just one! I though everyone who loved Horizontal game play loved it because of the freedom it offered, because they didnt want to care about having the best gear, they cared about the wide variety of content they had to play and the many different ways you could go about that! So I cant really blame if arenanet though the same thing can I ?

For the sake of this argument, let’s go back to before the Lost Shores patch. A lot of people hit max level, and wanted some form of progress. Legendary was the main option there. Now legendaries did not have a stat increase, nor was it known that they were going to get one, so they were truly horizontal progression. You say that you thought most people who loved horizontal progression, loved it because of the freedom it offered. I think this is true, but proves exactly my point. You may like this random zone, say, Kessex Hills. Now if you play here, you will never (realistically) get your legendary, because the mobs in Kessex Hills will give you a lot less money income, and have 0% chance to drop the T6 materials and lodestones that legendary needs.

So yes horizontal progression players may love freedom, but if you actually want the progression it turns out this freedom is very limited. I think that’s the problem.

To everyone: thanks for all the replies people, they are appreciated.

Jairlyn.1429:

One thing I will disagree with you on is instanced endgame. Unfortunately its required to be challenging. The more players you get the more the power ramps up so devs can control that by instancing and then they know roughly what power levels the party brings. Otherwise you get the dragon events which are a joke as are most of the cathedral events in orr. Because we do not have a currency to manage in combat (mana or rage etc) then it comes down to a question of just getting everyone up who dies faster then the monsters kill us. I get annoyed sometimes if there are too many people around an event because then its just too easy.
The only other option is to give the NPCs a ridiculous hit point pool (cathedral of balthazar fight, or the ancient karka) and then the test is the players endurance to put up with it, not their skills.

I also get annoyed when events are too easy because of a high number of players. But I don’t think this means open world endgame is impossible. For example lets look at the Claw of Jormag. This event pretty much never fails. But what if the devs decided that it should be more challenging? What if they added a champion elemental to the first phase, and placed 3 champion icebrood wolves in the second phase instead of 1? What if the corrupted ground damage would affect anyone in the area all the way up to the camp, rather than only the people right under the dragon? There are many ways to make these fights more challenging. I think Arenanet simply did not try, because the challenge was meant to be dungeons and not events.

Galen Grey.4709:

Cant comment on sPvP not much of a PvP player myself but I feel some of the stuff you mention are issues with the players rather then with the game!

Nice post, yes there is truth in what you said. Player mentality does indeed decide how WvW and endgame are handled. But does this mean Arenanet didn’t do anything wrong? Do you suggest that Arenanet had no way of knowing that the average player goes for the easiest reward, or that with the current WvW mechanics zergs are a lot more likely to roam around than to sit in a castle? If they put any thought into this, they simply must have known. And they can’t change player mentality, but they can change game mechanics. That’s why I think that in the end, it’s still a game issue, even though you were not wrong.

mapokl.3167

You are guaranteed to get ascended ring after finishing last boss in fractal lvl 10. It’s not the chest drop but additional one in your right corner similar to daily rewards. Likewise you are guaranteed to get infused ring in fractal 20. So you don’t need luck and getting your first ascended ring is not RNG dependent.

This is simply not true. I completed the lvl 10 fractals twice myself, both of the time it completed the daily but I did not get a ring. I asked about it the first time, and two out of five people got one. A guildie of mine who was active in fractals got the ascended ring on his 19th daily in the 10-18 bracket.

5. Classes

Of all MMOs I played, GW2 has the least interesting classes. There is no class I really like. I think this has something to do with the general active combat, skill and build mechanics. While I like the lore and general design of some classes, I don’t really like any of them in game. Compare to for example GW1, where I played every class because I found them all awesome to play. I was the biggest elementalist fan around. Then came GW2, and I didn’t even hit lvl 10 before I got so tired of it that I rerolled to warrior. Which wasn’t any more fun, but at least stronger.

6. culling/rendering issue

This just ruins every large scale battle for me. I’d rather have a 1 FPS slideshow than only see 10% of what’s going on. I’m so sick of wondering in every battle, “is that spot over there empty, or is it filled with enemies that haven’t loaded yet?”. It happens in Orr, it happens in WvW, it happened really bad in the karka event (champions oneshotting you before they are even rendered). It’s a game breaking issue at the core of GW2, and it’s taking them way too long to fix.

7. Minor but obvious MMO features missing

Stuff like an LFG tool, PvP rankings, a stat window at the end of a PvP match, item preview in the trade post, the ability to sort light/medium/heavy armor… all sorts of small convenient features are just missing. Arenanet are gamers, they know the MMO world… they have to know every one of these features. So why are they not in the game?

Conclusion

GW2 may have done a lot of things right, but it did at least as much wrong, and it seems Arenanet didn’t learn from the success of GW1 at all, since all its important features were left out. The Manifesto trailer was hope giving, but everything in there was a lie. I listened to it again while writing this post, and not a single thing they said in there was actually fully true.

Now I understand that Arenanet is working on changes, fixes and other updates on a lot of these issues, but it’s simply too late. The game has been 5 years in development. There is no excuse for taking 5 years and then saying after a month of release “oh we didn’t think of that… but we’re working on it now!!”. So I will leave this game, and if they really do improve I may return somewhere in the future…

I’m thinking about quitting GW2 atm. I wanted to give some last feedback to Arenanet. This is gonna be a big post, respect to anyone who actually bothers to read it if nobody does then well… I at least tried.

1. sPvP

sPvP has been one big disappointment to me. 5 years of development and all they could come up with is 4 capture point maps? Without even ranking, guild versus guild, spectator mode, or a stat panel at the end of a match? GW1 had the best PvP I ever saw, and the only game I had hope for getting close to that was GW2. That hope got smashed in the first 2 days of release. I did continue to play it for weeks, because friends were playing it, and with them it was at least some fun. (They all quit the game though). But in the end, I hate the 5 man capture point matches. I hate the downed state for sPvP too. It’s required in PvE, but has no place in competitive PvP.

2. WvW

WvW started out as a promising feature. Siege weapons and supply mechanics are pretty cool. 3 faction battles are great, and in that regard they did something right that many games before GW2 did wrong. (I was getting tired of the number imbalance in 2 faction battles, elyos/asmodian, guardian/defiant, sith/jedi etc) However, they made two fundamental flaws in WvW imo. The first is that nothing really matters. No matter what you achieve, even if it’s taking the huge Stonemist Castle in the middle of the Eternal Battlegrounds, 5 minutes later your zerg will be gone and an enemy zerg will arrive and take it back. This makes everything feel like you haven’t really achieved anything. In Aion (just an example), if you took a fortress your side would be happy. The fortress would only be up for taking again a day later. You took the fortress for at least one day, not 5 minutes. Also, every fortress was used to gain access to an instance or a zone, and finally, taking a fortress gave you medals which were needed for gear with PvP defense. Because of these 3 things, people felt like they achieved something, taking a fortress was a big thing. Now in GW2 none of this will ever be implemented, but they could at least add more rewards for defending, so defense actually happens and fortresses aren’t flipped back 5 minutes after they’re taken. Which leads me to the second fundamental flaw: WvW has no significant reward anywhere. Taking even the biggest keep won’t get you anything more than a dynamic event reward, which you could get in 2 mins outside WvW.

3. PvE

PvE is getting boring to me. Regular dungeons are either easy, then people want to run them, or hard and/or long, and then nobody wants to do them. This is simply because the harder paths have no extra reward, and people will always choose the easiest way to their reward. Dungeons also give nothing I personally want and/or need, so I have no reason to play them. General PvE is nearly pointless at the level cap. You are forced to play in Cursed Shore, because every other zone in the game has less good rewards. Arenanet made a huge world, but failed at placing interesting content in that huge world, so GW2 ended up like every other MMO where everyone 90% of the PvE people play instances and the other 10% play in a single max lvl zone. This really disappointed me. Why every game developer seems to think that instances are the only way for end game MMO content, I’ll never understand. This leaves one aspect of PvE undiscussed: fractals. Ignoring the fact that it’s again an instance, I think they set a step in the right direction with fractal mechanics and difficulty. However, yesterday I asked myself: would you keep playing GW2 just for fractals? The answer came quickly to me: absolutely not. RNG and bad luck made me quit a few other MMOs. GW2 didn’t learn from this and made the most important drop currently available (ascended ring) an RNG dependent drop from a single boss in fractals. This alone is enough reason for a lot of people not to bother with them, and I’ve already seen some frustrated players in game who couldn’t progress further because they didn’t get their drop yet.

All these problems would still be fine, if the overall gameplay would be very fun and interesting. To me, it couldn’t have been further from that. Main issues:

4. Builds

With GW2, Arenanet chose to give players a small skillbar, like GW1 rather than other MMOs, but then they removed the customizability that GW1 had. This results in boring, always-the-same builds, and boring gameplay. When I play GW2 I am 90% of the time using skill 1. I’m pretty sure I could do any content in the game by using only skill 1, heal and dodge. How Arenanet thought that was good game design, I will never understand. I found GW1’s skill system the best, but I would still prefer a generic 100 button MMO skill system over GW2’s .

Sola.7250:

Why would anyone design a game where 80% can be completed solo but, not the last 20%?

Could turn this around too… why not? Seems fine to me.

Hydrophidian.4319:

The social experience of an MMO is not limited to the idea of teaming.

- Sometimes I want to solo, sometimes I want to team. A good MMO provides both options, as well as easy transition between the two. That way, a player can remain vested, regardless of mood.

Does GW2 not do this? You have both options and the easy transition, as far as I can see.

- I generally enjoy chatting with folks, no matter how I’m playing.

But would the chat be enough reason to make a game online instead of offline? I thought not….

As an immersionist, having other players running around can add a great deal to the play experience, even if I’m not interacting with them directly. It contributes to the feeling of a living world.

funny, I found other players are actually one of the first things to destroy immersion, since they never behave as they would in reality (RP server may be an exception), where NPCs are usually a lot more “real” in that regard

Raine.1394:

Then perhaps you are unfamiliar with MMO’s. In every MMO I’ve played you were able to solo all content minus instances very easily. Not only solo in terms of leveling, but more importantly solo in terms of farming. The farming aspect is very important in an MMO as that is how you maintain yourself in the game. GW2, in terms of stated objectives supports the solo player as well as those who like to group with others. The problem is that as you cross the straits of devastation you find the content less and less solo-friendly. Karma farming depends on whole areas becoming non-contested; good luck doing this without a group of players. See, the problem is there aren’t always players around and the content was developed presupposing there would be other players around. This is an area GW2 needs work and it doesn’t have anything to do with the fact that it is an MMO. It needs work around being more solo-friendly because it is an MMO.

I still don’t see a problem. For example: why is there a need for the straits to be solo friendly? A few days ago, the whole straits were contested on my server. So what I did is invite a friend, then go to cursed shore and invite 3 random people. We told them to follow us to the straits, and they did. We then had fun doing the advance and camp capture event chains. This was definitely more fun together than solo. So why does it need to be soloable? Isn’t it fine if there are also a few areas where a group is required? Solo farming can still be done in zones like Frostgorge or Malchor’s.

TL;DR
1. grouping and/or playing with others is the most important part of MMOs and no MMO will be made without it
2. GW2 has solo friendly and non-solo friendly areas. You always have a choice. There is no need for 100% of the content to be solo friendly.

Why does everyone think they are entitled to get the monthly no matter what they play? If you don’t play WvW then the monthly isn’t for you.

I never understand these sort of threads…

if you don’t enjoy playing with others, why play an MMO? Pick something like skyrim instead, there you have all the fun of a big pretty explorable world without the need to group

GW2 takes everything you love about GW1…

… and removes it.

1. builds – ’nuf said

2. intelligent mobs – mobs in GW1 were sometimes as smart as players, they could spike, focus the healer, use all their skills on the right player at the right time… in GW2 they are all dumb, using their skills whenever off cooldown, and attacking closest target

3. nice pvp – GW1 pvp was awesome, GW2’s pvp is one big dissapointment to me, and I’m not talking about balance

4. complexity – why did they have to make GW2 the most simple game ever? Only one type of buff (boon) and only one type of debuff (condition), the ability to kill any mob in the game by just using skill 1, no different skill types like in GW1, not even attributes… yes we have traits but this is just a shadow of GW1’s character building

5. elite skills that you could build around, rather than okitten buttons with minutes of cooldown (ignoring the fact that over half the GW2 elites are useless anyway)

E Tan.7385:

Everything i loved from GW1 ? no, i dont think.
But, everything i hate from all other mmo, no doubt

sad, but yes, I agree (with one exception: at least in GW2 the best gear is obtainable by playing solo or in 5 ppl groups, we don’t have to do 20+ people raiding or kill world bosses or anything)

lol that was too funny

I want:

GW1 style snowball fight, where for once Arenanet decides not to remove all the good stuff GW1 had, and instead continue with it.

Sylvari look too human I agree… my guildies only noticed that my character was sylvari when I did /dance after 5 dungeons or so. The only noticable difference is appearently the dance animation… this should say enough

Lack of LFG system. Especially with the new fractals, it’s a real pain to find a group for anything. These days, an LFG system is something so basic that I really don’t get why GW2 wasn’t shipped with one. The game has no worldwide / serverwide chat functions, everyone is spread out. Shouting LFG reaches only a small % of the people online, even if you do it in multiple places. And if all else fails, couldn’t they have implemented GW1’s Party Search screen? It would be zone specific, but already a big improvement compared to nothing… (I know there is a LFG function, but it’s ridiculous, it can’t even show what you want a group for)

Culling Issues and bugs. Culling issue is really bad, enough said I think. About bugs: every MMO has bugs, that’s true. But GW2 has many, very many. The ones that annoy me most personally, are the Cursed Shore event bugs. Cursed Shore is the only viable alternative to going in instances at endgame. Yesterday I walked to Penitent Camp, only to find out that the Packheart event was broken and didn’t happen, Penitent defense was broken and didn’t happen, Fia’s gorilla events were broken and didn’t happen, and Jofast was broken and didn’t spawn. That’s 7 events not happening, in the small area that I like to play in.

I will keep playing GW2 for now, but the game did dissapoint me in many areas and if it had a sub I’d already be gone.

Ok, this might be a bit of a big post, I took this opportunity to provide some feedback as well instead of starting another thread. Like the OP, I followed GW2 for a while, and was very excited about it before launch, and also during the first weeks of launch. I will list what I think is really good, and really bad about GW2.

The good stuff

Jumping Puzzles and mini dungeons this content is really awesome! The WvW jumping puzzle, Mad King’s Clocktower and Skipping Stones are probably the most fun content I played in GW2. I think jumping puzzles are the strongest part on GW2, something that’s better than it was in any other game that had something comparable. Mini dungeons are great fun too, though I haven’t done many yet cause it’s not always easy to get people together for one.

WvW I have to say, WvW is awesome too, especially the siege weapons. Being able to set up a little base where you want, and then defend it with ballistas and arrow carts while your trebs shoot a distant castle… amazing gameplay.

The world, and its looks Tyria is definitely the most pretty world I have seen in all the MMOs I played. I can’t stop making screenshots!

Now, it’s time to continue to The really bad stuff :

The world is pointless. Like in every other MMO, once people reach max level, they play in the one max level zone (Cursed Shore in GW2), and in dungeons. The huge, beautiful world of GW2 is rapidly becoming less populated, because there is no point in being there. As long as the rewards are significantly better in Cursed Shore and dungeons, nobody will play in all those nice zones again, and the whole downscaling system is pretty much pointless. Why every MMO developer team thinks that the only way for PvE endgame is to put people in dungeons/instances, is also something I’ll never understand. Something related, but still different:

The main cities are pointless. Everyone uses Lion’s Arch. The reasons for this are that 1) it has a free teleport (the Heart of the Mists asura gate), 2) Arenanet encourages Lion’s Arch by putting the major events there (Halloween, Karkas), and 3) people need a central place to shout “LFG” because the game has no LFG tool/system. If Arenanet should succeed in at least countering issue 1) and 3), I think we’d see a significant increase of population in the main cities.

WvW rewards. Now, I have seen that they are working on this, but I wanted to say it anyway. WvW is great fun, but the rewards are horrible. Badge drops are rare, and taking a big castle only gives you a regular Dynamic Event reward. This does not motivate people to play more.

sPvP. I started GW2 with the intention of playing only sPvP, because the PvP of the original Guild Wars was so much fun. I have never been more dissapointed. I played sPvP a lot for 3 weeks or so, and now I intend to never play it again. I won’t go into detail, but a comparison with GW1 should say enough for anyone that knows both games.

Grind Let me first say, grind in itself is not a bad thing. I like to farm every now and then, and without any grind people feel without a goal. Legendary was fine, because it provided a long term goal without more power. Then came ascended gear. I first was not very much against this. I like the new dungeons, and I like having a higher gear tier that offers only minor stat increases, just as an additional goal and incentive to play. Then I saw two dissapointing things: 1) the ascended gear can be crafted. This makes the game essentially pay-to-win, because you can put real life money into the game via Gem conversion, and then buy material sets to craft ascended items. 2) the tokens will only give you a backpiece, the rings are a drop. This makes people rely on RNG to get a stat increasing gear upgrade, and this is the reason I quit a few other MMOs (as you might guess, I was not very lucky).

General reward chests. These are horrible. Jumping Puzzles and Mini Dungeons are great fun, but the chests in them may as well be removed. I really don’t care about 3 blues, if I want those I’ll go kill a few mobs, that would be a lot faster than doing a Jumping Puzzle or Mini Dungeon. Another issue, linked to this:

Champion Drops. These are horrible too. Champions are the most difficult mob type that wanders around in the world. Why is their reward so bad? I saw in a patch note that they tried to adress this, but they must have failed, because I did not see a difference. Champions still drop 1 blue often, and sometimes no drop at all.

Erasculio.2914:

Actually, the DR system is needed to stop farmers as much as it was needed to stop bots. Farmers add a huge amount of inflation to the game and thus increase the price of items for the real players (those playing the game to have fun, as opposed to those grinding the game to farm).

funny, Arenanet disagrees. Quoting them: “we have no desire to stop farming. Farmers are a part every online economy and when they are doing normal game activity they do not cause any harm.”

http://www.guildwars2junkies.com/2012/10/05/john-peters-tackles-reward-diminishing-return-issues/

or on the official forums:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Let-s-Start-the-Karma-DR-Dialogue/page/5

Safe to say they agree that farmers should never run into the DR, now they just have to implement some fix so that we actually don’t…

Warrior:

Style – 3, picked a random low number here, all the animations are just boring and basic. I also hate the triple chop animation.
Strength – 10, anything that can be beaten, can be beaten by a warrior
Variability – 10, warrior is useful anywhere
Feel – 6, it seems to be the all rounder class, which is fine, but they could have made it less boring

Rpgtabbycat.5869:

You win the internets for the day.

+1 to that

Yes this game has tons of invisible walls and they’re the worst thing that can happen to any explorer type of player. Because of invisible walls, you can’t get on top of anything in this game, only if it’s a vista and even then you have to follow the exact path that the devs intended you to run on, or you hit another impenetrable piece of air.

None. It took me roughly two days of “for great justice!” and “I can outrun a centaur!” to set my dialogue volume to 0 .

It would be really nice if there was a way to disable the volume of all the “spammy” talk, while keeping real dialogue enabled.

Anything related to bots isn’t really a good argument anymore since Arenanet is succesful in banning bots, I haven’t seen any in at least a week now

I found one stalking the Lion’s Arch bank!

Erasculio.2914:

Veldan.4637:

To me, farming requires a lot more skill than stuff like playing a dungeon.

A bot can farm.

That’s how much skill farming needs. If you simply stay there using your auto-attack, you will get gold.

Doesn’t really matter if you like to farm the Karka Champion, the fact remains that using farming to get gold is so mindless that you don’t even need a human being in order to do it.

how is this saying anything at all? A bot can be very smart, bots could do a lot more than attack closest target. You could make a team of bots run a dungeon too. Or do any content at all.

Erasculio.2914:

Cod Eye.1632:

Actually its the DR driving prices up, supply and demand, the less supply the likely the price rises, so at the end of the day it effects everyone.

To make it short, no, farmers don’t help the game by adding rare items to the market. Their bigger impact is adding gold to the market and thus causing inflation. If anything, Mystic Forge gamblers help the game by adding more supply to the game at the expense of gold.

I think you are wrong, because the current prices of rare materials are far higher than anything you can sell to the vendor. When I farm I get the majority of my money out of selling mats on the TP, not from vendoring trash. Therefore I think the supply argument is actually outweighing your gold argument.

Erasculio.2914:

I like it.

It’s in place in order to avoid having players with no life farming tons of gold and thus driving all prices up in the TP for everyone else. Farming is one of the most skill-less things in the game, it doesn’t deserve to be rewarded.

This is BS imo. To me, farming requires a lot more skill than stuff like playing a dungeon. Fractals aside, the dungeons are really easy to me, I can run through them without problems and even if you go down a few times it’s all pretty forgiving, you get your chests and your end reward anyway. In the big farms you have to be at the max of your awareness and reflexes, because

1. if you are too late you can’t hit any mobs and don’t get loot
2. if you get downed you can’t hit any mobs and don’t get loot, and lose all your luck stacks, giving you a temporary worse drop rate
3. there is the culling issue which makes mobs visible very late, meaning you have to react even faster

Where in dungeons I just target a mob and DPS away, with the occasional dodge roll when an obvious red circle appears, in farming (pen/shelt for example) I’m often playing at the max. It deserves a better reward than easy dungeons imo.

Really… what’s the point on the farming DR? I haven’t seen a single player who actually liked this stupid system. Players who don’t farm, don’t care, and players who do farm are bothered by it because after a while you barely get any loot. If the current droprates are too high for longer periods of farming, then lower the droprates, but remove the DR.

You kept saying that players can do what they want in Guild Wars 2, play in the way they like. A lot of people, including me, like to farm for their items, and they should not be punished by a DR system when they do this. Especially since the current prices of high end gear pretty much require you to farm.

Healing should simply scale as a % of the outgoing heal, always. I found out that on my warrior, each point of healing power simply does +1 to every heal. This is terrible at high heals like Healing Surge. For example, going for +300 trait healing power gives you roughly 300/8400 = 3,6% increase in your heal. Which is a ridiculously low amount. I think a 10% increase should be achievable with traits, at the least.

I agree that mesmer portals should be disabled, simply because nobody should get an achievement for something they did not do.

Stuff like swiftness can stay imo, after all you are still doing the puzzle and making the jumps, even if you run a bit faster.

I think judging people by gear is perfectly fine. If you are a newer player with greens/rares instead of exotics, you should join either with other players who have that (there’s still loads around) or with guildies who know you have rares but like to help you out. Either way shouldn’t be too hard to do atm.

In fact I would like to see a way to inspect gear, even though that’s mainly to prevent people from running Magic Find (happened to me in fractals already, found out after 2 hours or so that 2 members had full MF sets).

The wiki is a great source of information, for example:

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Fractals_of_the_Mists

If you are ingame and wonder about what something is or how something works, type this

/wiki something

It will automatically open a browser with the wiki page.

edit: munkiman beat me to it

Diminishing returns need to go, on that much I agree. It’s a terrible mechanic that does not have any benefit whatsoever for players. You either don’t farm and don’t care, or do farm and get screwed by it.

Yes it sucks that drop rate was ninja nerfed. They could have at least said “we nerfed the drop rate so don’t bother farming anymore” in patch notes and then I wouldn’t have wasted another 4+ hours on it. Seems like everyone has to run dungeons to make money now. Bye open world play, bye MMO feeling.

I am definitely getting A LOT less rare drops now than before the patch.

Before the patch:

If I went to penitent/shelter farm right after logging in, I used to always get 3+ rares in the first event. Once I even got 9 rares in the first two events I did. Rares got less frequent as DR kicked in, but were always dropping every now and then.

After the patch:

I went to penitent/shelter farm several times, and got 0 rares and 1 rare in the fist 2 events. After that, it’s pretty much done, no more rares. Once I got lucky and got another rare after 30 mins of farm, but this is still barely worth even doing the farm for.

All this farming was done with max MF armor/weapons/jewel/food and in a group.

And of course, as with everything that’s not super easy, there is a QQ thread for this.

I personally do not see a problem, had more fun while failing and trying this swamp running than doing anything else. Finally something that takes practice and coordination. Yes walls can spawn “randomly”, but most of the times there is a way around, so that if you didn’t lose too much time already you can still make it. The key to beating this thing is movement, like condition removal, stun breakers, stability and charges. Once you got that set up right, and know which people will support which runners, you should always be able to get it within a few tries. At least my groups were.

lotharic.9513:

Here’s what sucks about the dungeons:

• Bugs, bugs, bugs.

funny, I did about 10 hours of fractal play, and didn’t see a single bug

lotharic.9513:

• They are long. It was supposed to be 15-30 minutes per fractal, but even on “easy” ones, it’s about an hour per. I know some people can play GW for 5+ hrs straight, but many of us can’t.

then you have a really slow group, my groups were averaging 30 minutes even though we made mistakes like falling down

yes this jumping puzzle is absolutely awesome

first the fractals and now this… some quality stuff being released

Thank you arenanet! The fractals:

- are the most awesome content I saw so far
- provide a challenge to all
- instantly got back the interest of a lot of people who were getting bored with the game

Had epic fun running fractals today. If this is an example of what’s to come, this game will beat any other game for me

showatt.9413:

Tyr.1965:

showatt.9413:

Tyr.1965:

showatt.9413:

Accept the reality; Gw2 was dying slowly when they thought this up.

It is WAY too early in the game’s life to say it was dying slowly. How do we know that people werent just taking a break and waiting for the new content to come out? There is no subscription fee. People will come and go. So now we should come to expect major overhauls to the game’s design philosophy everytime ANet gets nervous that activity is starting to dip?

Compare the amount of people that’s playing this game to the launch.

Swtor actually lasted for 5 or 6 month before it starts struggling for breath.

Gw2 is struggling in 2 month, and since this is a game that has no sub….

So yeah. Expect major changes whenever the popularity of this game crushes.

How is it struggling? How do you know it’s struggling? Are you judging this by the constantly high/full population on EVERY SINGLE SERVER??

Lol do you actually believe the server status reflect the actual population of a server?
There was a time when the server is full on tarnish coast and the entire orr map is contested.

Sorry, but I’m pretty sure Anet twink with the sever status to stop people from fotm server rolling.

fotm server rolling

this made my day

Korrigan.4837:

IonicBlaze.7948:

In my eyes A-net will lose more than win with this bullkitten

It’s pretty obvious when you look at the reactions. Only a tiny minority like the change, the vast majority dislikes it.

Not really. The amount of QQers on the forums is always higher than the amount of people who are happy with everything. That’s because people who are happy, and like the new changes, have no real reason to post on the forums, while the negative people make huge QQ threads like this one to show how unhappy they are.

A thread like this one doesn’t say a thing about the people who like it / people who don’t like it ratio.

Gehenna.3625:

Anet already said they are working on this issue but it’s not easy to resolve.

It’s actually very easy to resolve. Up bleed stack cap on PvE mobs to 100 and the major part of the problem is fixed, should be very easy and fast since only someone has to type 100 instead of 25 somewhere in a piece of code. They could have done this weeks if not months ago.

… Or am I thinking to easy / logical now?

I always hated this system. Today I did 2,5 hours of shelter/penitent farm. Not because I like it, I rly hate it. I do it because if you want to farm money in this game, you have to do some group-based zerg farm. It’s so far more effective that you’re really slowing yourself down if you choose to go solo farming in some nice spot far away from the zergs.

Imo the current mechanics therefore suck, and I honestly wish they’d make drop rates unaffected by group status.

I got tons of rares today, did 2-2,5 hours of farm and got at least 15 rares

so ye, you’re probably just unlucky… and the rise in ecto price is probably because of the bot bans

Corian.4068:

I got done saying this in another thread but they aren’t designed to be difficult. It’s designed to give just the average player running around in his normal course of gameplay an epic boss fight to take part in.

Basically it’s there for atmosphere.

There’s nothing epic about the shatterer or tequatl fights. The graphics are epic maybe, but the fights are just button mashing and it’s nearly impossible to die.

The only one I think is really well done is the Claw of Jormag. But then the difficulty needs to be higher even there because yea… I never saw it fail yet, not even in early mornings with 20 ppl online.

Perfect idea imo. Gives the people who have it something extra, without giving the weapon any extra power.

The people against it are probably just selfish and because they aren’t going for a legendary they want it to suck as much as possible, therefore they are against any new things for legendaries.

Thanks for the update! To me it was obvious that this was gonna happen, cause if I get 2-3 materials per hour in farming, then if they are going at minimum prices on the TP there is definitely something wrong :P

I have personally bought all the materials I still needed for gifts of might/magic right after I saw that prices started to rise, and will now enjoy that I can actually make some money with those rare drops, rather than 20 copper that it used to be

To all the people QQing about legendary prices: in GW1 you had rare materials too. Ectos, shards, rubies, sapphires… they were somewhat hard to obtain, rare, and expensive. That didn’t stop people from getting their obsidian / vabbian armors. The same thing you can see in GW2 already, people go for legendaries even though it’s expensive. The only difference seems to be that GW2 has official forums, and therefore people feel the need to whine about it all the time….

I’d like to see the orange swords gone. We can already see when something is contested, that should be enough…. I would really like if people would need to gather information on enemy movements by scouting and cummunication instead of just pressing “M”

Also, arenanet stated so often they wanted us to look at the game rather than the UI… atm the UI wins, but if they’d remove the orange swords then looking around would win, which would fit with their statement.

Siphaed.9235:

What about cultural gear? It’s roughly 120 gold per each T3 set. Now, if you’re doing every race (5 characters total), that’s 600 gold to get T3 (each Light, Medium, or Heavy). That’s progression for you. Also, there’s the dungeon gear to progress towards. Titles anyone? Achievements are a great thing to chase as well. We make our own game with what they give us, and they give us a lot.

My character is female warrior, and I don’t like any of the heavy armor dungeon sets on it. It’s sad but true, I’d rather run with the looks of a blue “reinforced scale” set than with a dungeon set. (some of the light / med armors do look awesome though).

I already commented on achievements, and cultural armor is in a way just an cheaper version of legendary weapons. The essence is the same, being items that don’t give you a stat advantage and are expensive, but you get them for looks and bragging rights.

Also, that you can do stuff on multiple characters has nothing to do with the rest of this thread or with what I said.