Guild Wars 2

Well, from a population standpoint, there are many servers that are full most of the day. I still hit overflow in LA all the time, and I have to wait in WvW queue even on week nights. Financially, the game is a huge success. Anet has been able to hire a lot of additional staff and increase their production. That’s why we’re seeing major content updates every two weeks, they are rolling in dough. Now, you say they “need” to add a gear treadmill to make money. They are already making money. Fractals and ascended gear were the compromise they made for players of your mindset, but you haven’t even touched those yet because you just hit 80 and already decided there is nothing to do in the game. I’m willing to bet you’ve barely touched dungeons and have little experience in WvW. This game will never be the power creep and gear grind that you seem to want. That was one of the core philosophies of the game, and they are making a ton of money with it. If you can’t enjoy a game that doesn’t let you become so powerful that all the content is trivial and you can stomp newer players without any effort, then you will never enjoy this game. They don’t want power creep in this game because they want all their content to remain relevant forever, and they want PvP and WvW to be more about skill than having superior gear that makes you invincible.

It’s going to take you a lot longer than a week to get full ascended trinkets. The best way to get the rings is by running Fractals, you can get them without needing laurels that way. So you have to run 10 fractals before you can even get a RNG chance to get a ring. Once you’ve reached fotm level 10, you will get a pristine fractal relic every day by doing a 10+ even fractal level. You need 10 pristine relics to buy an ascended ring, so that’s 10 days per ring, or 20 total. You might get lucky and get a ring you want as a drop, but I’ve done over 500 fractals and never gotten one of the zerker rings, so good luck. But you’re looking at 30 days to get 2 rings if you do a fractal every day. And this is faster than doing the laurel + WvW badges.

Now for the amulet you need 20 laurels and 250 badges. You say you can get the 250 badges in a couple days, ok. You can get a total of 40 laurels per month, so that part will take you at least 10 days if you keep doing your daily and do your monthly.

For the accessories the best way to get them is guild commendations. You need 24 total for 2 accessories, and you can get 6 per week. So it will take you a month to get 2 accessories if you have a guild that does all the guild missions. If your guild only does bounties, it will take you 3 months. Oh, and it will also cost you 10 gold total, there’s that too.

For the backpiece, you will need at least 1850 fractal relics, or 2850 if you want the fully upgraded one with particle effects. You’ll also need some rare drops from fractals, items that are acquired by skill points, and 500 ectoplasms for the fully upgraded version, which is going to cost you about 91 gold.

So for your full ascended trinkets, it’s time gated to at least a month and over 100g, and you’ll have to grind Fractals every day along with WvW for badges, do your daily every day, do your monthly, and do guild missions every week.

But beyond how wrong you were with your “I’ll have ascended trinkets in a week” statement, that isn’t what this game is about. The ascended stuff is the closest to a gear grind there is in this game, and a lot of people weren’t happy with that much. This game is not for people who want to grind to get superior gear to all the casuals. It’s relatively easy to get the best gear. What you can grind for, besides the ascended stuff, is better looking gear. Besides that, you play the game because it’s fun and you enjoy it. Tell me, how much did you really enjoy the gear treadmills in other games? I’m sure you told yourself you enjoyed it, but that was just you trying to justify to yourself spending so much time doing something that wasn’t fun. I played FFXI, and I spend hours, HOURS, every day standing around doing absolutely nothing with my guild waiting for a mob to spawn that had like a 1% chance to drop some super ring of awesomeness that I wasn’t even going to get even if we got the claim on the mob and the item did drop because I went to school and had a job, so I didn’t have the same DKP as people who literally spent their life playing the game. I sure told myself I was having fun. I was F’ing lying to myself. It was terrible. I would play other games while “playing” FFXI. That should tell you something.

GW2 is a fun game to play. It’s beautiful, the combat is engaging, dungeons are fun, WvW is fun, and some of the new Living Story stuff is pretty fun too. I’m not on my android playing some other game while “playing” GW2. Your mindset on this game and MMOs in general is wrong, so you either need to realize that this game is for playing to have fun, not playing to be more superior to those who play less, or just go find a game that has that for you. I’d suggest WoW, you can grind gear all you want in that game.

Agreed. I made another post about this earlier when I realized they made this change. I really hope it’s just a bug, because as a person with 6 characters leveled, it was really disappointing.

SteepledHat.1345:

I straight up won’t run a path more than once a day now. Anyone with a brain who’s done the dungeon enough for the novelty to wear off won’t either.

This. I’m going to actually end up running dungeons less because of this change. There’s no reason to run a path more than once a day, you’re just doing 3x the work. Before, if I wanted something faster, I could run a dungeon on all its paths on all my alts, so I was doing a lot of dungeons. I’m not going to grind out 20 tokens at a time.

It’s not really about when I would “need” to know the difference or not, it’s mainly about how the shape for each class should be something iconic to that class, but Ele and Engi are too similar to tell apart at times. Besides that, if I get a couple in my party then I need to mouse over them to see which they are so I have a better idea of how the party dynamic will go and what other classes we might need to be a balanced group. It’s just an annoyance that I have to manually check for those two classes, where with every other class I can tell right away what they are.

Justdeifyme.9387:

Engineer: Bottle
Elementalist: Flame

How’s that hard to tell?

I’m talking about the white symbol when someone is in your party. The Engi and Ele ones are almost identical, very similar shapes.

Vox Hollow.2736:

…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?

It costs 2280 tokens to get a full set of gear and 3 weapons. Let’s say I actually do want a full set of gear for aesthetic reasons; if I “cool my heels” for 24 hours each time, it will take me 19 days to get it, assuming I’m doing 2 paths (since most dungeons have a path that nobody likes to do). Now, if I’m someone who has all 8 classes leveled, I could have done both paths on each class once every day, and I would have had the tokens I needed in 2.5 days.

You need to make these two more distinguishable from each other. I can never tell which is which, and I have to mouse over a person in party to see which class they are. I never have to do that with other classes, I can tell right away what their symbol is.

Weirwynn.2390:

The OP is talking about the 40-token daily reward for doing a unique dungeon path being per-account rather than per-character, not the tokens themselves being account bound or soulbound.

This, I’m talking about how you can only get 60 tokens for a dungeon path once per day for your entire account, regardless of which character you’re playing. Yesterday, you were able to get 60 tokens for your first run on each character.

I don’t know why you guys thought it was a good idea to make the 60 token reward account bound now, this was a terrible change. I have 6 level 80s, and I would play each of them in dungeons if I needed to farm tokens to get weapons, armor, or skins that I wanted. It was fun because it promoted class diversity, so it made me learn each class.

What incentive do I have now to ever play a class other than Warrior/Mesmer/Guardian? When I level a Necro, why would I ever take it into a dungeon? It doesn’t do as much damage as my other classes, and doesn’t have much for group support, so if I’m being rewarded the same regardless of which character I take, I’m not going to play the classes that are less optimal.

Things were just starting to head in the right direction in terms of class diversity for dungeons with the balancing you have done, but the classes are still not perfectly balanced, so with tokens being account bound now, there is no reason to play a class that is underpowered compared to other classes if you have multiple level 80 characters. This is also a punishment to those of us who have put in all that time to level multiple characters. One of the reasons I’ve worked so hard to level all these characters was to be able to farm tokens better. Why are you punishing people who put in all that work? People who take the time to level up and gear multiple characters should be rewarded for that.

Making the 60 token reward account bound was a really bad decision that punishes people with mutliple alts and discourages exploring new classes. This should be changed back to being character bound, the way it was before.

No, you only get 20 tokens even on other characters. Terrible change, I hate it.

I’ve never had this happen to me. The only times I see people kick others is when they are screwing things up by not listening, or obviously under-geared.

MF gear is one of the reasons people ask to ping gear in some dungeons. You are slowing everyone else down, and in turn lowering their gold/hour gains, in order to increase yours. So yes, you are basically stealing from everyone you group with when you wear magic find in dungeons. You’re stealing their time, which could have been spent earning more gold.

This is a terrible idea. They did increase revealed to 4 seconds for a while, and it broke Thieves in PvE. It screwed up everyone’s timing on when to use Cloak and Dagger, so people were screwing that up, and making revealed 4 seconds decreased our PvE dps by 20-30%.

You want to make it 5-8 seconds? Congratulations, you just ruined Thief. You probably just lowered Thief’s dps by about 50%, making D/D no longer viable in PvE. That is our highest dps set, so that means that Thief can no longer out-dps a Warrior against a single target, and we still have half the EHP. No one will take Thieves into dungeons anymore because their dps is awful and they are too squishy. Thieves in WvW and sPvP are also screwed now. Little did you know, but we are extremely vulnerable in those 3 seconds. Making revealed 5-8 seconds would guarantee that a Thief would lose almost every fight. Other classes have things like protection or blocks, or just naturally high health and armor to survive. We have none of that. Stealth and well timed evades are our only way to survive. Thief is by far the squishiest class in the game, since the only class with a lower EHP than us, Elementalist, has access to a variety of boons and skills that greatly improve their survival.

So yeah, your suggestion is bad because it would completely break the Thief class. Stealth is a powerful escape mechanic (which it’s meant to be, btw), and very nice in small skirmishes. It doesn’t make Thieves invincible, however. If you can’t figure out how to beat a Thief that stealths a lot, then go make a Thief and play it in WvW. You’ll see how other people are killing you, and then you’ll know how to deal with Thieves when you play your other classes.

darkace.8925:

As a PvE player, I HATE the change.

As a PvE player, you shouldn’t be sitting in longbow on Ranger all that often anyway. There are very few things in the game that require you to be at range, and for anything that doesn’t you should be using a melee weapon, Sword/warhorn or Sword/axe in Ranger’s case.

Longbow has its best use in WvW. That is clearly the situation where the weapon shines the most. Moving the vulnerability to the 2 skill and giving us a skill that gives stealth makes it even better for WvW. This change was a buff for Rangers in WvW, and shouldn’t really effect Rangers in PvE.

I’m really tired of the time-sensitive achievements being put into Obsidian Sanctum. I’m on Blackgate, and there are teams from JQ camping the puzzle pretty much 24/7. If I’m coming in there to get the achievement, I don’t want to PvP, I just want to do the puzzle.

I think it would cause too many problems. You’ll just have to make another character.

This would be such a nice quality of life improvement. When I’m looking for armor on the TP for a character, I don’t need to see the other two armor types. It gets annoying having to sift through the lists for armor my character can actually wear.

The damage on Pistol Whip needs to be brought to a comparable level with a Warrior’s Hundred Blades. Maybe not as high, but something close, maybe 75% of the damage. The evade during the animation kind of equalizes us having less health and armor than a Warrior, but we are able to spam this ability, which is why I would say it shouldn’t be equal damage to HB, but it should be more than it is now.

It’s not even that I’m trying to make crafting profitable, but I’m suggesting a way to make more money flow through the economy. As is, people can farm CoF and get a full set of exotic Berserker gear in almost no time for 0 gold, while actually making a substantial amount of gold. I’m saying that instead, they should just be skins that you have to apply to a set of gear that is crafted. In this way, the person either has to buy the finished product, or the materials, unless he’s willing to spend time farming the materials himself. So the person isn’t getting free exotics anymore, he has to pay something to apply those skins to a set of armor. Increased flow of money in an economy is always good. It’s not good when people get things they need for free, and have little reason to put their money into the economy.

Rewards and special skins in the game should be simply that: skins. What I mean is that the armor you get from things like dungeons, cultural vendors, or even rare drops should not have stats, they should just be skins that you apply to a piece of armor.

So this leaves where you get armor with stats to use as a base, and my answer is to leave it to crafting. This would make sure that crafting never becomes obsolete. Since people can’t just run dungeons to get quick exotics, people will be buying more crafted exotics. With a higher demand, there will be more gold flowing through the economy.

You can’t do this. You can get by the guards, but there is an invisible wall that if you go too far in, you get instantly teleported back outside.

Totally agree. Legendaries dissuade people from playing alts. If I have a Twilight on my Guardian, I’m probably going to play that character all the time. If they are account bound, then I’ll want to level the other classes that use Gsword so I can see how it looks with all of their abilities.

Even if I level alts anyway, what if I end up liking another class more than the one I made the legendary on? Now I would either be wasting the legendary, or feel compelled to play a class I don’t enjoy as much just because it has the legendary.

Obtaining a legendary is an achievement of the player as a whole, and not of just one character. All the ingredients are account bound already. The Legendaries should be account bound.

There is no reason to do this. Every class already has so many different play-style options. If you change weapon sets and traits, you’ve completely changed the class you are playing. There’s no need for sub-classes where you can be like, “Oh, if I sub this class, I’ll be more tanky, but if I sub this class I’ll have more burst.” This is already accomplished through traits and weapons sets.

I think Legendaries should be Account bound instead of soulbound. Obtaining a legendary is, for a legitimate player, a monumental task that will take a lot of time, gold, and effort. If I put all that effort into getting a Twilight for my Guardian, why shouldn’t I also be able to use it on my Mesmer? I don’t think it makes sense that a person should have to reacquire a legendary a second, third, or even fourth time to use it on other characters that they level up to 80. They should be a symbol of achievement for your entire account, not just one character on your account.

This would also encourage people to pursue multiple legendaries. If I already have a Twilight on my account and I now want to work towards another legendary for one of my other characters, maybe I’ll work on the dagger for my Thief, or maybe the sword for my Mesmer.

Another positive benefit to doing this is it would encourage people to try different classes and play which class they enjoy most. What I mean by this is say I level a Guardian first and get a Twilight on that character, but later on I level a Warrior and I actually end up enjoying that class more. A player might feel compelled to use their Guardian just because the Twilight is soulbound to that character instead of the class they enjoy more now. If the weapon was account bound, however, the player could feel free to play around with whatever class they want, and not feel tied down to whichever character they locked the legendary to.

I think it’s something you should definitely consider doing. Thank you for your time, and for making this awesome game!

Yeah, I had this happen. I was going to buy my T3 cultural shoulders, and accidentally bought the light armor version instead of the heavy armor ones because they were right next to the heavy armor. And just like that, I was out 18 gold.

Easy fix for this, Anet. Make the vendor price for items you can only buy from vendors (cultural gear, karma gear) exactly equal to what you bought them for. So those 20 gold Tier 3 shoulders I bought should have vendored back for 20 gold. There’s no reason for them to cost 20g, and then only vendor for 2 gold. For the karma gear, let us sell them back to vendors for karma.

Removing Quickness and Stealth from finishing opponents would completely unbalance Thief. Thieves CAN’T finish people reliably without those abilities. We are extremely squishy, and we have a hard time finishing people if they have teammates around even with these tools. If you took them away, then Thieves would not be able to finish people after downing them, which would not be balanced.