Guild Wars 2

Man, I am so glad for some of the folks in this thread.

I’d always heard such good things about GW1’s competitive scene, but looking at this zergy GvG stuff in GW2 I just couldn’t get where people were coming from. But now that this thread’s come along, I can totally understand why people seem to have such respect and fond nostalgia for the format, now that I know the GW1 version was an entirely different thing.

Are you guys sure you don’t wanna’ call what you’re doing here something else, for clarity’s sake?

Less opportunity for finishers, yet faster ticks.
Ehhhh. Mostly it just seems like Healing Spring is going to inch a bit closer to the middle on the sliding spectrum between mobility and bunkering.

…you’re winding down from a handful of Dungeons hot on the heels of a deathtastic visit from Tequila the Sunrise, and you come to realize that because the game lets you dodge anything would clue you in to the fact your defenses are more tissue paper than usual, you legitimately have no idea how long you’ve been gallivanting around in your virtual underwear. Or that broken armor even did that.

Have you ever had one of those moments, subform?
Where you find yourself having done something that is arguably somewhat skillful and yet still pretty inexcusably stupid? What’s your best n00b Dungeon Master moment?

Ogre Pet Whistle, maybe?

Are there actually people who hate other people playing in berserker gear?

I haven’t heard much of that.
I do hear people complain about the game’s skew towards direct damage, which is a pretty legitimate hate considering having a variety of options to choose from for character building is kind the whole friggin’ point of an RPG. But what I tend to hear is people pinning the blame squarely on the game, not holding it against other players. How would that even happen anyway? People don’t know what you’re wearing unless you awkwardly supply the information for no apparent reason, so how would they single someone out enough to make these kinds of disparaging remarks?

Body-language-leading is a legitimately weird thing.
But give it a try, and see how it works for you. I’ve always found just being in front of ‘the pack’ and plopping down SR at the mouth of whatever section you’re about to traverse does the trick.

You don’t have to go out of your way to herd people into doing things they already want to do. People are excellent at looking out for their own interests, especially on clear simple things. It seems like you don’t have to explicitly direct people when the game has a visual cue broadcasting an opportunity people are likely to take.

But I think this goes both ways.
If you find yourself endlessly yammering on in an effort to get people to cooperate with an overarching strategy, you should really pause a moment and ask yourself if people are on-board or if you’re just mistaking silent incomprehension or grudging semi-obedience as a vote of confidence. Somebody whose 100% on-board and somebody whose malcontent or misinformed going through the motions are virtually identical from your perspective. Things seem to work out for the better if you take the initiative to sort people out. Less by telling people what to do, and more by getting everyone’s self-interest aligned by telling them why they should want to and being receptive to trying alternatives when they don’t agree.

I’ve found the more you talk and listen, the less you order by virtue of not having to.

@OnlyFate
Personally, I tend to think skipping and stacking (without abusing the z-axis) is small potatoes compared to the really egregious stuff you can pull off.

But, you can spend all day trying to paint a dividing line somewhere, and it’s all pretty academic in the end. It’s not any one behavior the community does that makes the dungeon experience in this game so depressingly lame, it’s the whole horrible package.

There’s no point trying to separate out your lesser evils when the whole the lot of it needs to be tossed into the fire and built again from the ground up.

Well…
I respect you, Guang.
…but, while I never would have kicked somebody who was only trying to be helpful and think that’s a bit over-the-top, I’ve got to admit I read #4 and rolled my eyes at my computer.

As someone whose a bit of a know-it-all herself on a good day, and who frankly plunges headlong into the far worse territory of an authoritative female dog on a bad one. Let me say, us forumites can have a sense of helpful that can be a bit misaligned with the sensibilities of other people. What we see as just general good leadership and speaking clearly can come off as Drill Sergant-y and Overbearing. And worse, it can come off that way even if people never muster the courage to voice their complaint against you.

I’ve found you can downplay this effect a bit if you learn to take your victories where you can get them, even if it’s slow and sloppy. If they can get through Lupicus by plinking away with ranged weapons and kiting instead of reflection tactics, then that’s great. And, get people to do what you want by virtue of setting the ‘pace’ of the group by having them follow your character, instead of typing out actual commands. It’s the same basic effect, but people don’t react as though you’re talking down to them. I know that’s not exactly the holy grail of advice right there, but, I’m still learning too.

I don’t know much, but I do know this.
At the end of the day, you’re not going to level up your people skills and relatability by coming to the forum for a circlejerk. It doesn’t matter what we think, if you’re typing on a forum chances are you’re a part of the same 10% superfan demographic everyone else here is. But the vast majority of other players aren’t, and by sheer force of numbers it’s far more important you can play the game with them than any of us.

I don’t know, I might be overstepping my boundaries a bit with that.
I’m sorry if it’s offensive, but I think it’s something worth saying.

Guard needs to go back to the drawing board entirely.
With the leash range it’s just kind of silly. It’s like, exactly how often do I want a pet to start it’s pathing ever so slightly to the left of me?

I know what you mean by the self-centered-ness of Ranger Utilities, and I think Shouts are a good candidate to get a revision pass toward that end.

These are interesting ideas, but I kind of wish they were more unique to a pet class and not just boons. Like, Guard temporarily turns my pet into a minion-class entity for another player and it can follow them well beyond the leash until I press Guard again to recall or time on the skill runs out.

I just wonder what is the actual reason for these arguments about dungeon. There is always a simple method to solve this. If you want to play with a group that like to skip, post in lfg.com and include “quick run”. If you want to play with a group that like to challenge, find similar people to play with. If you don’t even do the above and simply find a PUG to join, don’t complain here and sounds like there is only one way to play the game. If you cannot find people like those challenge (which seems not possible based on how many people in this thread said they like it), you join or open a guild to gather this type of players together. Now problem solved. Is there any reason to blame the community when your playing style is not the majority or should you do something more before complain?

Let’s get something straight here:
Exploiting isn’t a playstyle, it’s cheating.

Just because you do it with other people doesn’t make it a freedom of expression that should be protected or some kind of sacrosanct sub-culture we need to respect and preserve. That just means there happens to be alot of people cheating right now.

Exploitations like the ones we’re discussing in this thread get fixed, not accommodated.

I’m going to be honest with you, Stx.

There are more positions in chess than there are atoms in the universe, and far more possibilities of execution in GW2 than kittens anyone has ever given something people play an hour at night to unwind.

What the Meta explores isn’t the actual truth of how something will pan out in practical play, but the potential of what you have to work with on a strictly mechanical level as far as people currently know. The reason it does this is because creating an actual mathematical model including all those messy human factors isn’t something a group of people can do. These things that you feel you know so well, is the very noble very human effort of fans to use the power of collective intelligence to try to organize literally unfathomable possibility space.

Additionally, skill is not some unified lump that gets filled like a progress bar the more you play a game, but rather learning to apply a collection of smaller skills like reflexes and multitasking that different mechanics can favor or not use at all. You have all these things in certain proficiencies with leg-ups due to factors you never put any effort towards like natural disposition, and hard caps you can never overcome due to totally unfair factors like age.

So here’s your choices.
You either get on board and take this common consensus summary of potential to heart, and use it to create a sense of certainty in your actions dealing with the criticism it entails. Or quit looking to mutually accepted hypothesis for your sense of self worth and put way more time and effort than most people find rationally investable in a videogame discovering what works best for you.

Or you can screw both those things and just play the game, as the vast majority of people have opted to do.

Like, seriously.
Who are these people?

I hear people say they’ve felt some form of class discrimination at one time or another on forums. But in the actual game proper, I have never had anyone say anything disparaging about my class choices. Not once. As a Ranger main. In a year.

You’re agonizing over things most normal people don’t give two actual kittens about.

It true that sPvP concerns likely lit a fire under somebody to change spirits, but the solution they cooked up is actually a bit of a compromise between the two formats. So it makes sense it would appear in the both of them.

It’s pretty obvious the mandatory downtime is there to create a window of opportunity for a human opponent, but lowered cooldowns is not something the sPvP crowd would be in favor of (Especially when it comes to Spirit of Nature).

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not about to load a bunch of Spirits on my bar.
But the problems with them are the same problems all summonable NPC allies have, not something specific to these revisions in particular.

They said they changed the length and behavior of the cooldown, they didn’t say anything about changing the duration.

Any way you slice it, though, the boon does have a mandatory downtime.

No, I don’t think it’s outright problematic, but, mobs in general need to quit being such brainless cattle and start navigating the playing field aside from following a player around. This game’s mechanics are really at their best when player and enemy are both in motion.

No,
But not because I don’t recognize the massive positives to resolving an issue with a year’s worth of negative feedback. Rather I think they should go about it by constructing new content that removes all the clumsy ambiguity of a GW2 dungeon run, as opposed to trying to retrofit a large sweeping solution onto older content.

For one, as others have said, it probably wouldn’t work out so hot. For two, this is just another checkbox on quite the laundry list of things they need to tackle. Less HP sponges, a means to mitigate control skills without trivializing them completely, expanding viable building options beyond berserker; there’s so much they need to revise that they’d basically be starting over from scratch anyway. May as well handle it all in one big lump.

I think that’s a valid concern worth voicing in light of previous updates, and one I personally share.

To be fair, though, Colin did jump at danged near every opportunity to slide the word ‘permanent’ into conversation I linked.

I know, it’s been 2 months and it’s perfectly normal to feel a bit anxious after that length of time.

Truthfully, though, they would’ve had to of been nearly completed with something by the time they mentioned that design direction shift in order for you to see something on live before now. MMO Builds get locked down at least a week in advance, things get tested and refined for weeks before that, things take weeks to build initially, and then things get discussed before they even start building… The turn-around on anything worth doing is agggggeeesssss.

If they’re really sticking to transparency, we’ll have a lot of time to twiddle our thumbs between the moment something is said and when you start seeing it appear.

Living Story Team = Dungeon Team

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/What-happened-with-phase-2-of-dungeons/page/2#post2276423

Oh, you’ll never get that kind of finality from something like that.

The Designer’s intentions doesn’t amount to much at the end of the day. What people are really looking for when they go sussing out word of god like that is whether or not something will be changed. That just depends on whether or not something is actually working out in practice, not what some sub-paragraph blurb rotting on a design document somewhere says.

I thought this was common knowledge?

There are encounters built entirely around the notion of using mobs to create tension and pressure as opposed to forces you’re meant to fight, which is why they’re so skiddish about removing leashes. For example; Infinitely re-spawning oozes when you’re escorting Magg across the Lava.

That said, try not too read too much into it.
There are ‘obstacle’ mobs. But, with a handful of exceptions, you see them during scripted events that give you an overarching objective unrelated or tangentially related to clearing the area. What’s going on in the hallways between said events is a whole different discussion entirely.

I know what you’re getting at, OP.

Yeah, this sort of…I don’t know….ennui?…is kind of unusual. It’s not just how quickly and fiercely older players get to that point of ‘been there done that’. Everyone reaches that feeling eventually, although better designed encounters can prolong the journey. The real dazzlingly bizarre part of this is how new players are sauntering out of the gate and behaving like haggard and jaded veterans. They’re sick to death of things they’ve never even really bothered to try.

I’m familiar with simple good old fashioned lazy, I’ve played games with far worse exploitation potential, but I’ve never seen an MMO culture with such a widespread epidemic of complete disinterest in the content.

How the blazes did a thread about crappy group dynamics devolve into a build discussion? Way to undermine the message, guys.

I’m sorry you had such a rough time.

In the future, if you don’t want to make your own groups but find yourself in one of those rare situations where you’re probably in a better position to be coordinating the group; just go ahead and coordinate the group.

You’d be surprised how malleable and unofficial that position really is. So much so, it’s entirely possible to just sort of step-up to the plate and socially bruteforce your way into it. I don’t recommend actually going about it that way, because it’s kind of dodgy etiquette-wise and there’s really no need for that sort of duplicitousness when frank honesty gets you there in half the headache. It’s astounding how receptive people are to a chnaging of the guard if you just take the time to ask.

Just send the party starter a little /tell and let them know you have some experience with the place and you’d like to coordinate the group. Chances are if things are going that badly, the party leader may themselves be new to the place, new to the game, or isn’t really the leadership type and started a group because they just didn’t want to wait around for a path they needed.

Be polite, keep it tasteful, and you never have to suffer through hopeless leadership again.

It does?
It does. Good catch. How did I miss that?

….Cod sarn it!
Curse you Asura female armor and your crossdressing ways!

….that is pretty classy, actually. Pulls off a clean casual look really well.

Man, I am going to go crazy trying to figure out that body piece. Those non trenchcoat medium armor pieces are pretty hard to come by.

Well, that is a glass cannon build.
Squishy kind of comes with the territory. But I get your meaning.

Because survivability is on such a case-by-case basis depending on your allies and the fight, the best way to get the most bang or your buck in the damage/survivability tradeoff is not to stick to one balanced build but rather to have a sidebar strategy of some kind.

Personally my sidebar is mostly based in weapons, my Power Ranger mostly runs with Sword+Warhorn but I have a Dagger and Axe in my sidebar that gets switched in frequently for the extra dodge and reflect respectively. I know some people that sidebar defensive gear like Solandri, traits, and even food. Your sidebar strategy can consist of prettymuch anything, as long as it works for you.

Sorry, I don’t mean to be attacking you either, Chopps.
It’s nothing personal, and I generally like you as a poster. The whole situation is just really irritating.

I’m firm believer in rolling an alt because you want to play the class, not for more efficient farming. But I hear and understand your desire for older players to have some way to distinguish themselves and stand out. I don’t think this should be financially based, because anything tied to gold is ultimately circumventable through the Gemstore.

Chopps.5047:

Vox Hollow.2736:

Well good. Scrap the lot of it then, and give us Utilities and Traits that are about creating gameplay instead of choosing how we want to patch our wonky AI today.

Specific questions about pets are valid and acknowledged. I don’t claim to be necessarily happy with how pets work, I just accept it and utilize them to the best of my ability. I just get sick of reading about how pets not hitting targets is a bug. It’s not a bug. That is all.

I get the overall style they’re going for. But it’s just not working. It has no functional compliment in PvE because mobs don’t move of their own volition and don’t participate in the Condition-Removal meta. Even in the gamemode it’s supposed to be working in it’s flow is awkward and inelegant because pet auto-attack and F2 use-age doesn’t neatly align with the windows of opportunity we create for the pet with snares.

You’re right that that’s not a bug. It’s just crappy design. That’s reason enough to jump down their throats about it.

If they were unkitable, you wouldn’t have to take agility training, you would just use pet prowess. You don’t need signet of the hunt or natures voice.

Well good. Scrap the lot of it then, and give us Utilities and Traits that are about creating gameplay instead of choosing how we want to patch our wonky AI today.

Even in the runs I did yesterday I saw a lot of new players (although they insist the know the dungeon their behavior speaks for itself). Also they all insist on killing all champions…

Heck, I insist we fight the Champions, too.
Only reason I’d have now to sacrifice my daily Kohler is if I was worried the group might not be able to handle it. Not that that’s been a problem so far. It’s not like people were previously avoiding these things because they were super duper challenging.

Generally speaking,
I get how this keeps alts from being an advantage, but I don’t get how it makes alts a disadvantage or how it would keep you from playing whatever the heck you want to play in a dungeon. Unless, of course, you rolled an alt specifically for said advantage and not out of any genuine desire to play the class.

Not everybody’s a sucker for the Meta, Chopps.

In fact I’d say the general populace is by and large completely ignorant of what people say on forums, much less know or care enough to derive any sense of overall well being from it. Having your profession mechanic get nuked from orbit for reasons entirely outside of your control, however, is something we can all identify with on an immediate visceral level. It’s frustrating on a good day, and it’s only going to get more and more frustrating if the living world dungeons are any indication of where the revamps are going.

I don’t think you need to worry too much about people not doing paths anymore.

Let’s be realistic, just because it’s objectively less doesn’t mean it immediately becomes completely outrageous. 2 weeks for a complete dungeon set really isn’t that bad in the grand scheme of things. That’s still pretty gosh darned casual.

Not that I necessarily agree that that’s a common enough scenario to serve as the alpha and omega of our evaluation of this change.

…or you could just cool your heels for 24 hours and do the same number of runs you’ve always done? If you’re just crushed for time most stat spreads have redundancies in availability, and from an aesthetic perspective hardly anyone is sauntering around in full sets of anything. How often is this actually a real progress blocking problem, outside of farming?

I know for my Ranger, at least, the concept was ultimately self-defeating.
It was possible to cycle through defiant every 20-odd seconds or so in practical play, but it only really came in handy on a handful of battles. And this is on a class whose primary defense is dodging and who has access to Moment of Clarity, which you’d think would do well with the concept of doing more damage by dodging less and getting a passive damage boost from stunning. Granted, I did this in pug play which is basically the equivalent of doing it alone or working around the habits of others, but it was enough of a case study to put me off the concept.

Ultimately the problems with it boils down to the fact interruption doesn’t put a boss’s attack on full cooldown, and enemy AI often tries to use an attack as soon as it’s off cooldown. So any defensive element of this is limited entirely to the duration of the stun itself, and stunning a boss for 1/4th of a second amounts to bloody nothing in the end. If you really want to scrape together any kind of decent defense at all, you need condition duration, which doesn’t always play well with direct damage building options.

Also, the gameplay itself is pretty rotten. It’s some serious UI-staring business that just isn’t very much fun.

You should be deriving your challenges from the content, not the control scheme.
If the content needs to take it up a notch, that’s a separate issue.

You don’t have a weapon complained about for months on end and consider it a successful product. How mechanics feel on the user-end is as important as what they accomplish mechanically.

Sword does not need it’s core concept changed, it does need it’s feel changed.

Average players who ask for pings? Gearcheck as routine?
I have never since beta pinged my gear nor have been asked to ping my gear. Hate to tell this to you guys, but average people just don’t fixate on this kind of stuff. In fact they don’t fixate on much of anything. At all.

@OP
I think it goes without saying dungeons are in need of a revision, but that’s really got nothing to do with restructuring the rewards system. The risk/reward dynamic was being horribly undermined, and that needed to be fixed. Harder content should reward you more and easier content should reward you less, or you start to lose a sense of value for your effort.

If it makes you feel any better, supposedly dungeons are on the docket to be revised through Living Story updates. We just don’t know when.

There’s also the 30 second refresh timer, if you ever find yourself in need of a frenzy reset.
Lots of ways to approach that guy, really.

Not not sure if satire or serious….

We found it hard to get past the slave driver……

What? Oh come on. Are you serious?
That has never happened to me in any configuration of any classes with any builds.
I’ve wandered there with newbies, because I genuinely like doing that, and we still didn’t have problems with that loot pinata.

Would sort of depend on the x-number, wouldn’t it?

Oh yeah. I completely forgot about wondrous goods. I guess that would technically be one of the cash-based rewards from bosses, wouldn’t it? I kind of hope those get left in.

I don’t think there’s word of god on the subject either way, but I’m kind of hoping this is functionally a DR replacement.
Like, instead of dungeons having an account-based reward of 60 token reward that gets progressively lowered by all these funky increments in certain timeframes, a dungeon’s base reward is x-number of tokens and once a day you get an account-based token bonus and some gold. That’s way less confusing, and it puts the rewards in line with other reward systems in the game.

Not the give you the impression I’m just super duper A-Ok with the rest of it.

But, let’s not etcetera etcetera some of the more disturbing parts of that. That list includes; the daily guesting limit, an upfront threat, and teacher having to write you a hall pass to go take a bathroom break.

If that’s not registering a 4.GTFO on your crazyometer, I just don’t what to say.

so before you act outraged at all of these requirements, just realise that they’re mostly things you should be doing anyway, are cheap or easy to get (sigils, zerker gear) and don’t actually take that much effort to do. but sure, you sit there mad because we won’t take players running unoptimised builds.

I think you’re misreading the tone a bit.

Absolutely nobody’s sitting there stewing in angry jealously over the fact they don’t get the vaunted privilege of spending the next 2 solid hours in a monotonous grind with Fuhrer Fastidious. It’s more like the sort of thing you greet by raising both eyebrows and a ‘yeah, you go have fun with that’ before moving right along.

If that sort of thing is the subject of ridicule, it’s not because of some ulterior motive to abate hurt feelings of rejection, it’s because it’s genuinely ridiculous.

What’s being introduced is a bonus that happens to reset every 24 hours, much like the loot of World Bosses. How frequently you engage in general dungeon play should still be the same as it always was. If you want to run some dungeons once every day like clockwork, that’s something entirely self-driven.

Running CoF was a daily, if you did it every day.

Oh, I see what you mean.
Don’t worry about that. If the speedrun meta was capable of controlling the pugger meta, the whole playerbase would have been converted to warriors and mesmers months ago.

I have no idea what you’re trying to say.
How did build choices get mixed in a comment about normal and crazy people? Crazy is a state of mind, Zerk is a state of pixels and numbers.

@Vashroom
Hahaha.
Oh my god. You’re spot on, it sounds so over the top you’d think that would be parody, but I’ve seen stuff like that. I almost have half a mind to whisper them and ask if they’re kidding.

If it makes you feel any better, the community’s going to get bowled over both ways. As much as normal folks would hate to have to rub elbows with that special sort of crazy, that special sort of crazy is going to hate rubbing elbows with normal folk too. It’s going to be an uncomfortable eye-opening experience for the both of us.