Guild Wars 2

Switch it to caithe, and I’m with you.

wauwi.9162:

That’s why i’m looking for that post right now.
At least something to do to pass the time.

I shall focus the power of google within the palms of my hands now…might not returning alive.

I salute you sir! I admit I’m too lazy (also I’m technically working)

Thanks, I’m curious

wauwi.9162:

Windsagio.1340:

honestly, I think you’re misremembering.

I assure you, that i’m remembering it correctly.
I even remember ranger pets used to be manually revivable. (they actually died)
2012 isn’t that long ago.

It’s pretty long :p

I’m not trying to be kittenly about it, but that’s not how I remember it, so without a reference I’m gonna be a skeptic.

wauwi.9162:

Windsagio.1340:

It’s actually, what was intended. Every dungeon and path, according the the designers, requires a very specific strategy, class and build composition for optimal results.

They even tested this pre-release, to balance the dungeons for the compositions, they’ve had in mind.

Source: Dig all the old news from 2012 yourself on the mainpage. Gotta be there somewhere, or here on the forums – somewhere.

Or in the “making-of book”, i’ve got. You may have it too, so dig there if you can’t find it here or on the mainpage.

I hope someone finds that statement. It’s hilarious in retrospective.

honestly, I think you’re misremembering.

1-time application is a massive suggested buff to symbols.

The tradeoff of symbols has always been (on both sides) that you need to stay in them to get the benefit.

Random, but probably relevant to this thread, if you have elite spec skills on cooldown, are out of combat, and unslot the elite spec… what happens?

I dunno, the GW2 forums are pretty soft targets as far as such things go.

People are ready to flip over anything and everything.

EcoRI.9273:

maha.7902:

i hope that was a joke because that actually sounds like a terrible idea

Thats your opinion.

I… I’ve gotta agree with Maha.

I hate that kitten dragonhunter trap too, “yay pick up pieces of aegis!”

such… a… silly… idea.

To be terrible and pedantic, ‘not a skill’

phys.7689:

MelGT.8326:

Elite specializations are ArenaNet’s answer to increasing the level cap, and advancing character progression, in an expansion. Of course they’re going to be an upgrade to a profession. They wouldn’t be called an “elite” specialization otherwise. But calling it “pay-to-win” is just ridiculous. You could say the same about any MMO releasing an expansion that increases the level cap too.

no, they arent supposed to be stronger, If elite specs are stronger the whole game balance/variability will go in the garbage

Again, it depends, there’s 2 models they might be going with.

“Choose between elite Specs” and “choose between specs”

If it’s the former, balance will be a little fubar until they get at least 1 more elite spec out per class. —- well in a sense, in another sense it will just be like how it is now for people that have HoT, but with a different label.

maha.7902:

i’m still adamant that the problem is with old content, not with team compositions and strategies.

nuking ice bow from orbit to make it less stupid will be nice though.

I think it’s 2 different issues.

Old content is core to the ‘difficulty’ question.

Relatively static party make-ups is an issue for sure, but doesn’t relate to difficulty per se’.

With the former, it seems to me that it’s a known-known, that’s why we’re all on pins and needles over what the new HoT content will be.

The latter is hard, really hard. reworking skills to force roles is entirely against everything GW2 stands for. As the man says, fixing the clearly out of scale skills is a different issue.

Roxhemar.6039:

Let’s be honest, why is this thread EVEN a thing? You’re all going to buy Heart of Thorns. Let’s face it. We all are. Gather up your pennies and put threads like this aside.

I always think it’s some kind of deep psychological need to try to guilt trip Anet into changing something they’re not going to change.

except it’s not,

When did buying a MMO expansion become an unreasonable burden?

isn’kitten is one of those things that always makes me laugh.

spoj.9672:

Yeah because destroying fgs changed things. FGS was risky on harder fights like fractals. But since we now resort to icebow. Its become easier. Funny that.

Fixing broken skills is good. But it hardly solves anything other than a single skills overwhelming dominance in the meta.

Sure, but that’s something that needs to be fixed.

I totally agree that changing Icebow (or changing stability) won’t change everything, but fixing these things (as with FGS) should be an ongoing process.

Fixing broken skills will give them a lot more leeway for making challenging content in the future though.

man you guys are salty about that name thing.

wauwi.9162:

Windsagio.1340:

Ranger: Frost Spirit (for what it’s worth lol)

A banner, that can die. What an OP skill, indeed.

The ranger got downed #3, tho.

Doin’ the best I can, man!

This sounds harsh, people need to give up on the old dungeon content for these kinds of discussions.

They’re meant to be accessible first, challenging second, and that’s not going to change, especially now.

To the OP:

Ranger: Frost Spirit (for what it’s worth lol)
Engi: Probably Grenade 1
Necro: kitten ed if I know. Epidemic gets my ‘most fun’ vote!

They’re probably not melting them, but I’ve never seen a 49 or 50 fractal have serious trouble with any of the bosses (except sometimes the ice source and that one in ten thousand molten duos that decides to suck for some reason)

EcoRI.9273:

Well I’ve been singing the same tune in the forums for over a month; Nerf icebow plz. :-D And honestly i feel ice bow is the true carry, not a guardian. Look at the trio tourney there were more eles than guardians.

Just switch it’s slot with FGS >< All the ele elites are lame anyways, and IB has the zing an elite should have.

Ele and Guard are different kind of carries in a way that’s interesting to me.

Ele means if you play absolutely perfectly you probably don’t have to dodge more than once or twice.

Guard means you can miss a dodge here and there and not die.

The interesting thing is that I think icebow(s) is/are more likely to fail a carry at lower skill levels.

EcoRI.9273:

Jerus.4350:

EcoRI.9273:

So I have been doing fotm lately with LOD and I have to say, the berserker team comp meta is seriously trivializing the content. Mossman gets nuked past 50% with 1 icebow freeze combo. Archdiviner’s daze with meteor shower precast followed by icebow freeze combo trivialized him. Svanir in snowblind gets nuked and literally die before teleporting up. Imbued grawl shaman icebow freeze after his bubble pops is a little too OP. Mai trin stealth icebow nuke is OP if the warrior or guard can face tank mai.

Yes, but, just putting on zerk gear doesn’t get this to happen. Bringing the correct team comp and doing everything right does. As you mention, precasting meteor before hitting the seal. And Facetanking Mai/Archie/Mossman aren’t necessarily the easiest things to do.

So yes, it’s a little silly how fast you can burn some of these guys, but it does hinge on doing everything right and not bringing any safety nets for when you make mistakes. I don’t really see it as a problem because of that fact, that you slip up and you’re going down.

It brings back the notion of kill before you get killed. This strategy is so strong that if you know how to execute it, it just makes playing berserker builds so much safer simply because you dodge less due to the fact that the boss is disabled for 50+% of it HP. I am willing to wager that for teams that know these strategies and they do fotm without icebow, they will wipe/die/down a lot more.

The group I run with kind of intentionally mix up our parties (when we have the luxury, its not a full group) for that reason.

Running without that protection engine is of similar effect.

There’s actually a kind of interesting background to this; It started as a sort of (not very good) shorthand for ‘they probably know what they’re doing’. Now, with all the arguing, it’s become solidified into a think on its own right.

I’m glad they didn’t go even more fantasy Cliche’ with the name myself.

Yeah P2W doesn’t really apply.

My big question is that they have a pretty clear choice here;

Numbers are all provisional, and they can nerf the numbers on the elite specs.

The real question is a ‘which do they want?’ —

A game where you choose your spec, including an elite spec, or

A game where you choose amongst (eventually) multiple elite specs?

They’re 2 very different directions to go, and both are viable imo.

~~~

As a subpoint, I’m not too worried about difficulty. Dungeons are a joke, and if they keep the linear scaling on fractals post-50, we’ll need some special specs to continue to perform anyways.

That powercreep is starting to be the story here ><

TheRandomGuy.7246:

lLobo.7960:

Boss fight against the dragon champion?
Fractal in Glynts lair?

This. But only if difficulty will be adjusted and annoying hitbox bug fixed.

yeah glint, both shadow of the dragon fights.
Possibly the one with the crazy guy, although the final battle there is like superannoying.

Jerus.4350:

ehh, I use my virtues quite often, the Aegis one is one of the biggest strengths of the guard. Justice blind spam can be amazing, And cure from resolve can be huge against things like Arahp4 Lyssa or even AC’s RUmbles if your team sucks at dodging/bursting.

But, yes it’ll be interesting to see and play around with, just looking at what we’ve seen I doubt it’ll make a play for PVE content, but that’s fine.

Sicne you can slot in and out, the extra block/reflect field will be nice for smoe fights.

Thinks of it this way:

Guardians aren’t meant to be xciting, they’re just meant to be

I’d be ok with seeing LB as replacing staff in ‘weapons to eyeroll to’.

Kyban.4031:

Windsagio.1340:

in the guardian case, as far as I can tell the new ones are just the old ones but better;

They keep their passives, but while taking a bit more work, have much more effective actives.

mesmer is similar.

The dragonhunter’s actives are more offensive and no longer spread the boons and such around so support builds that depend on them won’t work with the specialization.

That’s a mistake;

f1 is more focused, but still hits multiple, and has increased effect and range
f2 is the old f2 + an optional leap (no evidence you can’t point blank it)
f3 is the one case, it depends on the nature of the ‘shield’. The description implies it works similarly to aegis to people under its coverage as compared to working like a reflect wall.

in the guardian case, as far as I can tell the new ones are just the old ones but better;

They keep their passives, but while taking a bit more work, have much more effective actives.

mesmer is similar.

seems like they only enhance your class traits instead of changing them, and the increase in power is pretty meaningful.

Trying to think of a case of why not to use one so far.

(I checked to see if there was a thread on this, surprisingly I can’t find one!)

my problem is more, you take hte elite spec, all normal skills, and use a hammer or GS, and you’re guardian+ no matter what.

So far (and yeah others have said it), there’s an ongoing problem where the elite specs seem just better than the standard.

God, no.

Fractal encounters, as a rule, are about 5.6 billion times more interesting than dungeon encounters. Don’t poison the well.

LS2 encounters if upscaled would work though (the adjusted the LS1 ones, sometimes a lot, to make them work)

“compensation” is silly. You still have the item, find a use for it.

The point bonus are meaningless anyways unless you’re doing level 50 fractals, and in that case, who does level 50 fractals as a healing elixirs engineer?

zengara.8301:

IrishPotato.6327:

Like Windsagio said there’s no way to really determine which party system would be best without a highly structured summary or collection of data. Anet’s stance is that they don’t really care about selling paths as long as no exploits are involved, and similar to scams via mail and player-player trading they’ll move to take action against scammers based on evidence from an agent but that’s about it.

Dont think it requires a highly structured summary to see which one of the systems that ended with having bigger scams in it, just looking at the forum/in game based on the evolvement of scams in the game. Besides, I requested different parties in a game like this, it is not like you could steal and sell paths in other MMO´s since end dungeon is not that important as in Guild Wars………

I requested a dynamic system, based on the same as commander tag, that you could give each party system a color based on what you are doing (as an example, if you wvw the kick needs to be fast if 1 logs off, and you don’t rely on them in any way, and in dungeons, it is important to rely on people you dont know, which is rather hard.)

Here’s a thought:

. They absolutely and exactly know the scale and extent of complaints under each system. We do not, but they do.

. They also have no idealogical connection to any given system.

. This the system we’ve ended up with

The dots aren’t hard to connect.

Vinceman.4572:

Sorry OP, but in your case nothing is frustrating. You were immediately kicked after joining so you lost nothing.
Besides that, if you really need to play necro in a dungeon, you will be able to open your own LFG.
You’ll also notice then that it’ll usually take longer to fill the group than with another class. Blame the balancing team not the players.
I would appreciate more options in the LFG system but it’s not its main problem at the moment like “instance hijacking”.

The frustrating thing at this point I’d imagine would be people thinking that smoebody running a necro is going to make a meaningful difference in their clear speed as a pug.

So there are 3 systems in question (funny as we think about it how the thread has mutated)

1) Owner with instance destruction
2) Second to Kick.
3) Majority to kick.

I’m as a general rule against ‘owner’ systems because they’re prone to abuse, giving too much power to the ‘owner’. Still let’s try to work out what can be abused in each system.

1) (owner)
Owner has pretty great leeway to kick others and generally cannot be kicked. Owner has a very large amount of abusable power, and there’s no recourse outside of GM intervention.

2) (second)
Any 2 people working in concert can kick anyone and seize control of the instance. No single person can wreak havok (as in version 1), but 2 people working in concert can do whatever they want (if they’re fast enough)

3) (majority)
It’s extremely difficult in the case of a full group to seize an instance. You need to get enough people in all at once, and in such a way that the balance doesn’t shift to keep them from kicking. Parties of 2 or less are vulnerable to a concentrated attack, but there realistically has to be a line somewehre, and you’re only gonna get your party reduced to 2 in some pretty unusual circumstances.

~~~

This doesn’t of course address the question of how prevalent problems with the issue are, but we don’t have any real numbers to look at.

spoj.9672:

So you missed the multiple threads a day in this subforum when they first removed ownership? All of them were just regular pugs complaining about getting their instance stolen after trying to replace party members that had to leave due to various reasons. Eventually it slowed down because for once anet started to crack down a bit on griefers. They kind of had to with the shear amount of them abusing the system right after the change. Faulty systems like this are always abused by players and this was no exception. Things have just settled down a bit (atleast publicly).

I do not remember there being nearly as many complaints as there were before the change, no.

We’re also at a further refinement of the change now. The ‘majority’ system works better than the ‘second’ system, which was put in place because of the many many problems of the ‘owner’ system.

I’m trying to reform my forum persona, but I dunno guys.

I can’t think of a meaningful case of this I’ve sen reported that wasn’t involving a seller. -Well excepting wethospu’s bizarre example he brought up one of the previous times this issue came up.

segman.3560:

Griefing a path seller was always easier. However I can see people complaining being kicked from normal dungeon runs even though it was their instance. Party ownership system is a must, now we have anarchy.

Well not really, no.

Griefing a path seller who was instance owner was essentially impossible under the original system. What was possible was 2 people inviting pugs, running to the end, kicking the pugs, and selling the path.

The second system made this at least more equal, because any 2 players could kick anyone. It had the unfortunate side-effect that you could truly ‘steal’ a path from someone — but it was still better than the prior system. There was a certain sense of mutually assured destruction.

The newest version, which requires 3 votes to kick in a full party makes stealing pretty kitten hard, with the exception that you can still get nailed before the party is full by a 2 vote.

The point still holds though, the only situations where the old instance owner system was advantageous are for people doing solo/duo→sell and (as in an anecdotal story westhoptu (sp) brought up) people doing solo-for-fun → free instance. And the latter isn’t exactly common.

~~~

More to the point, these shenanigans focus around one particular mode of behavior, and it’s a behavior that Arenanet, while not explicitly banning, certainly doesnt’ support. They’re not going to adjust the system to help the people doing that at the cost of everyone else.

No, we might have seen a rise in griefing against path sellers. There are whole categories of abuse that are removed now… And I know it’s been a while, but there were plenty of complaints about it back then.

There are a lot more protections for a lot more people under the newer system, especially now that it takes 3 to kick in a 5man.

It takes a majority now you silly goose, they changed it.

And they had an instance owner system it was abused just as much (run > kick > sell) and also led to accidental problems like leaders crashing or raging out or whatever.

The owner system is many times worse.

HyVent.6072:

this new party kick system does not improve anything. in a party of 4, it still takes 2 to kick a person and then follow up with a quick kick on the last person.

Which is honestly part of my evidence that Anet doesn’t care to protect people doing this. They changed the system that protects the majority of players in a group, not a system that protects any single player regardless of their contribution.

Well it’s taste of course, I’m just complaining because it’s not to my taste;

Still let me leave everyone with this:

Guardian + ray of jugement + firearms = LASER GUN

Talyn.3295:

Derenek.8931:

Windsagio.1340:

The main reason, I’ve usually felt, is that people are aggressive and nasty about pushing min/max attitudes and are severely exclusionary.

It’s not necessarily rational, but nobody likes being excluded, and double nobody likes being insulted (being called bad, foolish, etc) for not playing to some Type-A personality’s version of the game.

Amen brother! Too much l33t attitude being shown by people. It scares away newer and more casual players and keeps the whole community from being friendly. If a player doesn’t play enough to have all ascended berserker gear, it doesn’t mean they should be shunned or insulted. They may actually have a life. Be welcoming to all players and support each other

You will find that the dungeon community as a whole is very friendly and cool. No one here joins a group that wishes to fully clear a dungeon and tells them they can’t or not to play the way they wish to. However on the other side there are nearly a dozen post in about how our game mode should be changed because people simply do not like it or it doesn’t fit their ideal or more commonly they do not understand it.

What happens is advice is offered, if ask. Which happens here alot: Case in point https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/Explorable-Mode-Dungeons-vs-a-noob-myself/first#post5031971

We live and let live. I won’t invade your group and tell you want to do or how to play. All I ask is that you give me the same treatment and we will be the best of friends.

A lot of different things happen, and people always remember the worst.

Vikkela.7261:

Windsagio.1340:

Going rifle and Pistol would have been a cool playing against type that is very in sync with the GW2 world.

Longbow is layering high fantasy on top of high fantasy.

Rifle and Pistol are like the least Guardian-like weapons available :/ Maybe play Warrior instead?

That’s the point, it’d be interesting to make a ‘not-guardianlike’ weapon fitting for a guardian. A longbow is dull and obvious and boring.