Guild Wars 2

No reason to add a new ranged weapon instead of making existing ones not terrible.

It’s fine if racial skills aren’t better than profession skills.

It’s bad if racial skills are literally useless.

They should be niche utility skills. If they do 90% of things worse than a similar profession skill, they need to so something that little bit better to justify their existence.

Honestly the member of destiny’s edge that irks me the most is Zoija. Her hatred of Eir is quite incredibly random, forced, and irrational.

Caithe is too depressed, Eir too I guess, but the two of them are both fairly mature about things.

Rytlock and Logan are both extremely egotistical and immature about handling their disagreement, which stems from I think their different cultures.

In human culture, you absolutely would go save a defenseless loved one and let a hardened amazing warrior who was a friend of yours take care of himself for a bit (as he is fully capable of doing so). Family comes first.

Logan’s action is even more necessary in that jennah wasn’t some random person but the guiding force behind the Charr/Ascalon treaty.

In Charr terms, Rytlock viewed that as betraying the warband, which actually IS their family. For them too, family comes first, but they define family differently.

It’s kway, sen-tar, and go-lem (as in goal-lemon) .

If you’re doing it differently, you’re doing it wrong (Or are British)

Sounds like the voice actors are correct!

Always remember, the pronunciation which is most phonetically accurate wins in a dispute.

It’s a needed gold sink to balance out the rewards you get from it.

I’ve already bought 3-4 bank expansions.

I definitely agree that all ingredients need to go to the ingredients tab.

I don’t care if I have to pay extra $$ to make cooking sub ingredients and yellow crafting mats, etc, all go to collectibles, that’s fine, I just want them there for purposes of neatness.

No, it happens even when I have only one guild wars 2 forum tab open.

Or if you mean it happens when I have multiple tabs for any site open, you may be correct, but that’s not an acceptable work around to me.

I don’t care about the diminished rewards for repeatedly running dungeons (although it is obvious in their haste to rush out a patch to harm players they didn’t test it and it has kicked in diminishing rewards all the time) as I was in it solely for the tokens and not the exp/silver.

There are other ways to gain exp and silver. I wanted to finish the armor set whose look I liked – their ridiculous buff in difficulty is completely unwarranted given the absurd number of times they want us to run the dungeon.

If they are going to make the dungeon 4x as hard, fine, just please lower the token requirements as well.

Robert Hrouda.1327:

3. I made the fireballs hurt more. Not greatly more – they’ll do about 3-4k damage to a DPS focused player, but you should have anywhere between 15k-25k HP, so there’s a bit of wiggle room for error.

They hit for 12k, not 4k.

I’m utterly amazed that you think this is encounter is resaonably tuned for the players to kill the huge number of incredibly high health high damage monsters that spawn very fast out of thin air right on top of you.

People kite because killing is pretty much impossible.
The kiting actually sucks because if you get downed, you will almost certainly be finished off and take a repair hit.

In normal fights, when you get downed, someone can rezz you. No repair costs. Kiting is sub optimal to fighting these guys in every way, the only reason people were kiting is because they cannot win by fighting I found that kiting encounter the most obnoxious and hardest part of cof #2. It was the step you were most likely to wipe on. It didn’t need to be made even more so.

Like..we’ve tried focusing down the monsters. We would kill most of one mob of 3 by the time the next wave of 3 spawned.

All indications are that mob parameters in this room are THREE TIMES what you think they are. Please investigate.

This is also why most game companies test things like this before throwing them out there.

Robert Hrouda.1327:

Hey folks, I’ve been reading this thread for a bit and figured I’d come weigh in on things. I built this dungeon, and fixed the problem, so I’m going to come at you from the designer perspective on things to try and illuminate why I did what I did, and what exactly I did. It wasn’t made clear, and I apologize for that.
The main thing I am seeing, is that people are upset that I took away their super profitable low risk, fast, token grind.

But you didn’t need to make any changes to CoF to take that away: the reduction in rewards for doing the same run two times or more combined with the reduction in rewards for doing them quickly already removes the super profitable fast money grind.

The only reason to do explorables, in the end, is for the tokens for your armor. I thought CoF #2 was about right for that. 70 runs? 30 minutes per run is about 35 hours. Add in the time you spend clearing the event to get the gate open and that’s 40 hours. That’s a not insignificant amount of time.

Your entire token system is poorly designed. It’s a repetitious grind. If you want the encounters to be long and hard, you need to require people to do less than 70 of them.

Additionally it is obvious that your fixes have over compensated, which irks players, and also irksome is the fact you worked very quickly to harm players my making the easiest path harder, but apparently didn’t find it pressing to work to help players by making the two other bugged paths work correctly.

I don’t think you should be surprised that people find your priorities are somewhat backwards here.

How long do you think an explorable dungeon run for 15 tokens should take, generally?

I think it’s important to answer that question.

I think 30 minutes is about right. That’s about 40 hours for your full set. An hour means 80 hours, which is two full time work weeks of time. This game isn’t supposed to be a second job. But maybe you do think it should be an hour. It’s important that everyone be on the same page here.

When one path takes 20 minutes and the other takes 2 and a half hours, there’s obviously been a huge failure here somewhere.

All bosses should drop an unidentified dye.

You get a guaranteed drop that might be something cool and interesting.

Well the problem is that he’s supposed to be a calm, cool, collected, level headed sylvari. The spock of Tyria.

This is of course boring, so I think they should have made the main character be someone more prone to emotion. Maybe someone who really, really wants revenge on zhaitan and is gleeful at the thought of killing him. I think the personal story would have been much more interesting if a fat, vengeful, norn necromancer were leading the charge.

I got 100% completion in all WvW maps and in each case, rewards were level 46 greens, and crafting materials of that range. Such a horrid let-down, if only it were the only one.

Given the difficulty of completing the WuvWuv zones, I would definitely expect much better rewards. Is this being looked into as well?

It seems like only one page in a thread will have these options enabled. On a multi page thread the lucky thread seems to be chosen randomly on refresh.

It’s irritating when I want to quote or report a post, but cannot.

I have no problem being upstaged by an NPC. In fact I find this more interesting than the usual “you are the awesome chosen hero” routine.

I just wish that NPC to be interesting and well developed.

I was enjoying my vigil storyline up to claw island. I quite liked my mad eyed norn bro and how he cheered up the angry quaggan by telling him it was ok he was ugly, what counts is how well you fight!

Then on claw island trahearne gets introduced and it seems like kind of a big deal but I’ve never even heard of this guy before and nothing he did wowed me. He isn’t even visually interesting: all green and gray. I kept losing him into the scenery in orr (which is also all green and gray). His voice acting is a little… meh

I would have expected the leader of my order to have played a part at that point, but no…it’s like the vigil ceased to exist, I became a generic member of a generic order following trahearne around, who wasn’t even interesting.

Trahearne could be more interesting. He’s a necromancer that studied in orr right? Why couldn’t he be somewhat dangerously eager for the power and knowledge of the ancient orrians – yes he’s using this knowledge to defeat them now, but is it all going to be smooth sailing?

Having him be Mr Green Spock is also somewhat deadening on the storyline.

“I think they’re almost fine… sure, other offhands are more offensive oriented, but that’s the point of the shield, playing defensively.”

Except the shield is pretty bad for defense.

Focus is much better.

I’ve done a lot more than CoF. I just used this one as it is the one most people are familiar with. Plus some dungeons ( AC, CM or HoW) have literally no fights I would describe as fun or good.

Diminishing returns on same dungeon more than twice: 10/10
Penalties on doing dungeons in less than 30 minutes: 0/10
Ridiculous buffs to CoF 2 while leaving Cof1 and 3 bugged: -1/ 10

I want the armor skins from CoF. I’m not particularly interested in speed running it for money. Now I don’t know that any path in CoF is really doable at this point.

Terrible thread. It’s predicated on the belief that kids are stupid.

Why couldn’t a 9 year old be a gaming genius?

Do grandparents assume their teenage grandkids are too stupid to operate VCR’s? Or is the reverse more likely to be true?

Dungeons need to be fun and challenging at the same time. This means they need to not be too easy, and not too tedious. The overall dungeon length itself cannot be too long. (Nothing absurd like WOW’s 2 hour clears).

There are a LOT of dungeon encounters in GW2 that are terrible : pointless hit point bag bosses that never endanger your party that you must hack away through for 10-15 minutes at a time. Bullkitten bosses like the godforged greatsword that just run around insta gibbing players that you slowly wear down by graveyard rushing (terrible mechanic that I wish would be removed. if players fail, they fail).

But I thought I’d highlight some encounters that I think are done right. They all share common elements:

1) Fairly shot
2) Requires communication and planning ahead of time
3) Not just a single tank and spank monster.
4) Everyone has to be alert and pull their own weight – no one can afford to be dead weight and just die pointlessly/early

These are all from everyone’s favorite dungone, CoF #2! I wish we would see more events like these.

1) The bomb running event for Magg. This is a good event because it is fairly short: in fact, the short timer is the primary limiter for this event. It also requires coordination: you must specify who is going to go where and get each orb first, the next orb targets, who will start the encounter, where speed/healing boosts will be needed, how to handle the godforged, etc. If someone dies, you probably don’t have enough bodies running around collecting bombs to make it. Everyone needs to stay alive and stay on point. If you screw up and fail, the room explodes. Good event.

2) The final fight in CoF. Again, communication and timing are key. You must specify who is to fight each of the acolytes, when to start burning them down, and so on. I think this event may be a tad too easy, as you can more or less take as many tries at the acolytes as you need to take, but the basic idea is sound. If the ghost boss kills or fears someone trying to take out down acolytes at the wrong time, you are going to miss out on most of a cycle. Everyone needs to be alert and pull their own weight.

3) The kiting event where magg blows up the door to the final chamber. First of all, I can’t imagine this event is supposed to be a kiting event, but I imagine the devs think you will kill all those monsters. Given the absurd spawn numbers and times this is of course impossible for undergeared level 75 players, so a kiting event it is. I like that this is different and requires individual skill at staying alive, as well as making judgement calls on if it is safe to rezz a downed ally or if you need to keep running. It is also fairly short.

We need more events like this, frankly. These are the fights where the communication happens. The rest of the run passes in grim and bored silence for all the typical straight forward fights.

All environmental objects are extremely hard to hit as melee.

Generally if you stand still you will always miss, but if you strafe back and forth in front of the object your swings will hit.

This was a horrible horrible change. And completely unneeded with the anti-speed run code they put in. Putting in diminishing returns on doing more than 2 runs per day is a perfect solution. No need to make the entirety of CoF impossible to complete.

CoF 1 is still bugged, CoF 3 is still bugged.

How interesting that they can ‘speed patch’ in something that HURTS players but the same skill points have been bugged for weeks.

I don’t like the idea of universal tokens. I want people to run the dungeons for the gear from that dungeon, not run whichever dungeon happens to be easiest 100 times.

Hell they should take this one step further and give you a first time of the day bonus for each path to encourage you to branch out and see as much dungeon content as possible instead of doing one run over and over.

I appreciate your attempts at good communication here, but I really wish you could just sit in our TS for a while.

The disconnect between what we as players think of dungeons, and what you think we think about dungeons, is incredibly massive.

You say you don’t intend for them to be a grind: whereas everyone in my guild is talking about what an incredibly absurd grind they are and wondering if they are the biggest grind in any MMO.

70+ runs of the same dungeon? And mind you, you’re not getting any gear upgrades during this process. I rather agree with the decision to have max stat gear easily available but then make people do something special for the vanity looks – I just think there is a much better way to do that than a repetitious grind that would make WOW blush in shame.

How about this?

1) Vanity helm of appropriate level given out upon completion of story mode
2) Vanity gloves given out upon completion of 1 explorable wing
3) Vanity boots given out upon completion 2 explorable wings
4) Vanity Legs given out upon completion of all 3 explorable wings

Then you earn tokens for the chest, shoulders, and weapons as before.

This would cut the absurd grind required, as well as make people go through all the diferrent paths you so painstakingly created, as well as prevent people from just speed running the easiest path a million times in a tedious, repetitive grind.

JonPeters.5630:

You should not see any diminished returns unless you.
1) Run the same exact chain over twice in a row
2) Complete multiple dungeons in 30 minutes or less each.

Point #1 is all right. #2 is batkitten insane and whoever thought it up needs to be shown the door.

You are punishing players for getting better at the game? What the hell? It’s like you took the worst grind in WOW, tripled it, removed all the gear upgrades, and then decided instead of rewarding people for completing dungeons faster, to punish them for it?

This makes no sense whatsoever.

Point #1 seems to encourage people to go run each dungeon once a day. Fine with me. #2 then punishes them for running it efficiently. Why? Why do you hate your players so much? Why would you even consider the need to punish players for being good?

Point #1 punishes players for being unimaginative and running the same thing over and over. #2 punishes them for having better gear, being more organized, and getting better at the game. I cannot understand how this proposal was considered for even a moment. I don’t know if you realize this, but the inescapable conclusion #2 gives is that someone at arena.net has a seething, boiling hatred for people who run dungeons well and quickly. There is absolutely no other way to look at this as other than a giant ‘screw you’ to people who do dungeons quickly. Doing dungeons quickly and efficiently should be something players strive TOWARDS, not shrink in fear from. Good god. How was this ever considered for even a moment?

JonPeters.5630:

Finally we reduced the value of repeating the story mode, because they are built to be easier

Whaaaat? In my experience story mode dungeons are way harder than most explorable modes (at least the ones people run) and give terrible rewards. You get a crappy helm with terrible stats and an absolutely boring skin. I’m amazed to discover you consider the problem with AC story that it gives too high a reward.

JonPeters.5630:

At this time, dungeons should one of the most efficient ways to level and get gold

Story mode dungeons seem like the least efficient way to level and get gold in the entire game. Explorable mode dungeons at level 80 with well geared people were a decent way to get gold before you nerfed it absurdly, but they need to be, because you don’t need experience at level 80 and you aren’t getting gear upgrades, so the gold is the only reason to run it.

JonPeters.5630:

and it is not our intention to make them feel like a grind.

…

Were you able to type that with a straight face?

Your dungeons are the grindiest grind in any MMO ever. They are worse than the grindiest dungeons in WOW, the king of grind. I never ran the same dungeon 70 times in WOW. And yet that’s the set up you have implemented here.

And in WOW I was not punished for doing dungeons quickly.

Symbol of Wrath turns off your auto attack.

I don’t know if this is intended or not, but I personally find it rather annoying.

They don’t need to give us rifles or lasers or anything like that.

Fixes are simple: increase the staff range to something not hilariously laughable (600 isn’t even enough to use the staff as a ranged weapon in some dungeon boss fights)

and make the scepters orbs travel more quickly.

I like that I can go back and look at what I have bought/sold recently, but I am wondering if there is a way to view everything in the past day/week/month rather than just the most recent 10?

I have had this happen to me: somehow if you type in ‘10’ into the buy #, you can do something to make the buy # read 1, but the price doesn’t update to reflect the new value of 1. Then you pay what it shows in ‘price’ and you get what it shows in the # box.

I did not spend all my money trying to investigate this, naturally.

Butter and chocolate are even cheaper and easier to obtain. I have more than 250 butter without even trying.

Eggs are much harder to obtain. As are oranges.

Pears appear to have disappeared entirely.

I think all the rest of the store/karma bought ingredients I had already made huge stockpiles of so I couldn’t say there.

The single biggest problem with cooking is that there is no room in collections for the intermediate ingredients: no one is going to want to level cooking ‘properly’ but making lots of discoveries if they start drowning in dozens of bowls of frosting or loaves of bread or soup stocks. These things need their own collectibles tabs.

The current dungeon set up is horrible because probably the hardest dungeon in the entire game, AC story mode, is the very first dungeon people run into.

All non end game dungeons (any dungeons where you are downlevelled to something other than 80) need to not be a horrific shock to people stepping foot into them for the first time. This primarily has to do with story mode, of course.

You shouldn’t be comparing AC story mode to something like molten core, you should be comparing it to, say, the scarlet monastary or something.

5) Difficulty in dungeons is very spotty – there is no sense of progressing from easier to more difficult. It is such a regular occurence that the first two bosses or some of the early trash is by far the most difficult part of the dungeon that I have to wonder if it is a deliberate design mechanic. I can see a reason for it: putting a high initial bar keeps people from wasting their time. If the hardest fight is first and they can’t beat it, well, come back with better gear or a better group. It prevents the situation where a party gets to the last boss and cannot beat it.

But it sure seems backwards from what many players expect and only reinforces the idea that the dungeons are a random mess of encounters with random one shot deaths for players that are to be overcome with charging back from the grave yard.

Let’s take one example: CoF. The first boss is murderous, the second is pretty obnoxious, the others are fairly straightforward, and the final boss is a piece of cake.

And the first boss (godfordged greatsword) is murderous primarily because of poor dungeon design. You need to be able to see both greatswords AND the boss himself in order to get out of the way of the weapons. Even at level 80, if you don’t move out of the way, you are dead. So you need to dodge perpendicular to their path of travel. However, you cannot pull the camera out far enough to see everything you need to and the godforged greatswords have the same color palette as the floors and walls, as well as having pretty skinny models. This makes tracking the greatswords almost impossible, and players are constantly surprised by one charging through them at high speed and basically one shotting them.

CoF is probably the only dungeon in the game with the right length of explorable mode given how many runs it takes to obtain your items.

There is a lot of room for improvement in specific dungeons and specific encounters, but I thought I would first address several underlying issues that affect all dungeons and dungeon design in, I believe, an adverse manner.

1) Splitting dungeon runs into story and explorable was a mistake. Trying to find dungeon story groups is very difficult (lack of group finder does not help). Story modes are long, difficult, and completely unrewarding. You get one helm with terrible stats and and the same ugly texture shared across all dungeons the first time you do it, and really nothing at all the second and subsequent times. There is no motivation whatsover for someone who has done story mode to go back and do it a second time. Meanwhile, people who want to do exploration mode cannot because they have to do story mode first, but cannot find any story mode groups: they are limited to pairing up with other people at the exact same stage of progression they are – maybe 1% of the player base? People who have already done story mode and help their friends with story mode need to be rewarded appropriately.

2) Allowing people to graveyard rush down bosses is not very good – if players are failing at an encounter they need to know they are failing and they need to know why they are failing. The way people can keep rushing back from waypoints keeps them knowing they are doing it wrong. It replaces trying to study and learn the encounter with frenzied rushing back from the way point. It makes it seem like an intended mechanic – and they repair bills that pile up make them hate the dungeon. Additionally, the dungeons are absolutely rife with bugs and glitches, which makes players hate the dungeon even more. I go through entire story mode dungeons without seeing a single cinematic, because it’s bugged.

3) ALL DUNGEONS HATE MELEE PLAYERS. I haven’t yet seen an encounter where I would rather melee the boss than used ranged. I’ve lost track of how many encounters trying to melee will get you absolutely smashed and so you are reduced to using ranged. I understand that almost all classes have strong ranged options – however I am a guardian, which has the weakest ranged options in the game. I don’t particularly enjoy them. Speaking of ranged, it seems almost all bosses in a dungeon can be beaten by the same mechanic: every boss in CoF is pretty easy if you just keep running around the boss in circles firing with ranged weapons. This is not a particularly engaging mechanic. Likewise, all bosses in AC are easy if you just throw boulders at everything. Again, not particularly fun or interesting.

4) The number of runs necessary combined with the different paths means everyone will always run the most optimal path a million times. When you have to run the dungeon such an ungodly amount of times to get your armor set (more grind than in WOW, which is a feat) you don’t have time to waste doing the other paths. You will do the optimal path the 70 times or whatever it takes to get your set. This is a shame and wastes all the effort the developers and artists put into those parts of the dungeon. Plus you don’t get any tokens for helping out friends do their story mode. I don’t mind the tokens being dungeon specific: if you let the tokens be accrued in any dungeon, the playerbase would quickly just figure out the most optimal path in the most optimal dungeon and run that one forever.

The one place you can always see this happen is the ‘defend the bridge from centaurs’ dynamic event in kessex hills. It doesn’t seem to matter how few players are there, the vast majority of the attacking centaurs don’t draw – only a few in a tight bubble around you draw. you’ll move over a few feet and a new legion of centaurs will be drawn, most of whom will fall over in the death animation and be dead. Meanwhile the ones you COULD see a now gone.

this problem seems to go away once all the players are no longer fighting and flinging spell effects everywhere.

I have an nvdia geforce 560ti so it’s not like I have a terrible video card.

BrunoBRS.5178:

it also happens with mobs. that bridge event in kessex hills is the worst offender. every time i pass by it, i see an entire squad of centaurs materialize in front of me, scream and die.

This bridge in kessex hills is by far the most common occurrence of the bug. It seems to stop once all the effects are no longer going off. I have a pretty good video card I think I can handle it. But as it is you can be getting blasted by centaurs that are just a couple hundred units away but don’t render on your screen.

Does your character by any chance have the ‘safe’ bags? Those are ignored when doing deposit all collectibles.

The new prices are absurd and totally out of reason.

Anyone who bought the items before the uncalled for price hike make out like bandits – they will have been able to buy a full set for less than what the rest of us will have to pay for a single item.

I don’t know if it’s a bug, but the jagged horror is indeed, useless, weak, dies immediately, and most insulting of all, shares the same texture as the little bone fiends.

I completed AC story mode, and CM story mode a couple days ago.

Not only do the helmets I received not have the nice dungeon specific texture they were supposed to have, they share the EXACT SAME really boring texture (and terrible stats).

It felt bad to go through all that and be rewarded with essentially a junk item.

Additionally, the current costs for armor in tokens is clearly bugged. We were told it would take a run or two to get each armor piece – current prices would mean you’d need to run EACH DUNGEON more than SEVENTY TIMES to collect all the pieces – as this would be insane masochistic raiding repetition even worse than that in World of Warcraft, the prices clearly cannot be intended.

Destroyers are immune to burning which completely screws over some builds.

and cannot be interacted with.

The ones in the cities I have found are all fine. But I have run into 3 or 4 out in the ‘wild’ that will not talk to you, cannot be right clicked on. The one in the trading post in Queensland is one, one in a centaur camp in arathi highlands is another. I think there’s also one in a cave in gendaran fields who is also broken.

The guardian greatsword skill #2 is bugged in two ways:

1) It turns off auto attack
2) It doesn’t actually set foes on fire as the description claims

It does give you regeneration, however.

To elaborate, if players can buy a cloth armor from NPC’s for 12c and salvage it for 2 jute scraps, then sell the jute, that creates an effective price ceiling on jute – it will never sell for more on the trading post than 6c each, because NPC’s have an unlimited supply of the stuff.

Usually if a game wants a wholly player driven economy, they try to shy away from NPC price ceilings and let it be determined by the player.