Guild Wars 2

Orpheal.8263:

I hope, that this will lead also to the point, that all enemies in the future will get more Skills and become through this far more interesting to fight.

Its sad to see, that all enemies in the game mostly have only like 1-3 skills…
All enemies should have at least so much skills, like we players.
10

Increase of the skill number of enemies requires also naturally better AI.

And give enemies very strong healing abilities, so poison can have a place in the game other than a really bad DoT.

dominik.9721:

Until you have traited the 15% damage boost, you shouldn’t make use of your burst abilities.
You will gain lower damage output than keeping your adrenalin.
It doesn’t really matter if it’s a lazy gameplay or not. You’ll withdraw much more potential.
Furthermore, those kind of builds are very venturous and harder to play than many other builds.
And let’s be serious, spamming eviscerate with a 20/30/0/20 axe build isn’t that more exciting.

The pure Axe EA can actually be higher DPS for your party overall than pure GS, because it stacks more vulnerability.

The idea is that if this thing works, I get a build which has a similar DPS and vul stacking as the Axe build, but

- Twice as many weapon swaps than the axe build
- Less reliance on one skill (100B) going off compared to the GS build

This is without accounting for Destruction of the Empowered.

o.o

O.O

frothing at the mouth

Eh, probably nothing good will come of it.

Highchu.3806:

In PvE you don’t need more than your base armor. Just be aware of attack animations, strafe, and dodge and you should have no problem. For PvE you want be running full dps (Berserker Armor/Trinkets/Weapons) as soon as possible. You can use a couple “tanky” pieces (Soldiers/Knights) in the beginning to help get the feel for it, but you don’t want to get too comfortable with it. Its only in WvW/PvP where you want to spec into Defense for extra survivability and condition removal (Dogged March+Cleansing Ire).

It really depends. For example, I prefer to use Cleansing Ire+Dog for Mai Trin, because damage doesn’t matter that much during the fight and Cleansing Ire helps a lot in dealing with her condi spam so you can stay in the electric zone more.

Warlord.9074:

Sitting on adrenaline is bad game design period. It rewards players for not using burst skills their class mechanic then penalizes them for doing so. Its just bad game design.

And if you PVE than thats how you play also without faster weapon swaps most of the time.

Making threads like this is pointless. I agree with most of what u are saying but then insert name here ______ PVE elitists come in here and try to tell you are bad and that you don’t know how to play when they play the most lazyest passive builds and all they do is kill AI and they think they are good.

Conclusions:

If you use burst skills like how warrior is supposed to be played berserks power and heightened focus are terrible traits. Regardless of a DPS nerf that DPS is only helpful to you if you don’t use burst skills. So no reason to get it if you plan on using them. In which case they only help you for the use of the burst skill most of the time.

Thats why no serious PVP builds use them.

BP works fine in PvP. Its actually a very well-designed trait: for Eviscerate it’s a choice between holding unto a large DPS increase or spiking an enemy to kingdom come with one of the strongest burst skills in the game but giving up that damage for a while.

For whatever reason that’s beyond me, Anet seems to think everything will translate between PvP and PvE very well, and so lo and behold, we got this mess of a trait which makes next to no bloody sense in the current PvE situation.

It would work if enemies had the AI of GW1 or ESO (sometimes) so PvE would be a replicated version of PvP to an extent, but that’s clearly not the case here.

But on the topic:

The point of this is that it actually might not be a DPS loss using this, but so far all I did was scale the old metabuild DPS by the change in stats and traits, assuming rotation doesn’t differ enough to warrant any significant changes, so I would love it if someone more experienced than me at theorycrafting can give me some advice.

If Anet still cared about dungeons, I would say that the current dungeons are fine as they are. They’re basically the ‘normal’ mode of dungeons in other MMOs.

What needs to happen is a hard mode with much better AI, revamped mechanics, and better rewards.

Just curious, if Berserker’s Power (the worst thing to ever come to PvE for the warrior class) didn’t exist, how much DPS would an Eviscerate every 10 seconds add to the old 6/5/0/0/3 metabuild?

Reason I’m asking is I’m playing around with the idea of a 0/6/0/4/4 a/m-GS, because it’s kitten and awesome to play with, and wanted to know how viable this is as a competitive build.

Just from rough preliminary calculations done by scaling the DPS from both halves of the old metabuild (should be more or less the same rotation, except you add in Eviscerate), if I assume Eviscerate would be a 10% DPS increase, the build ends up about the same DPS as the current EA axe/mace/sword build.

So, before investigating into this any further I was wondering if anyone can tell me if 10% is wildly off.

Besides that, I just don’t understand why the heck would you abuse this in the first place. If this was PvE, bigger wallets, good reason. But what are you trying to accomplish in PvP?

That you can’t win without exploits? This reminds me of those people that shoots their ping to stupid on online FPS games….

Rosenakahara.8512:

Customizable ui…………..

They should do this. So I can like, put my skill squares so that they spell out words on my screen.

Or draw a smiley face with them.

Yeah….

So many possibilities. We can get metaUI builds and argue for hours on end with each other on how fast we can click the skill icon, only to realise we keybound them.

This needs to be done.

Beldin.5498:

The classes ARE balanced.

Wow .. i’ve fixed it for you .. now that was really easy

at least for PvE, I wouldn’t say its balanced (ie, who the heck would want a necro anywhere, the class is just useless from every angle possible), but this thread, lol.

Clap clap clap.

Thats data space well used!

SkiTz.4590:

Xae Isareth.1364:

SkiTz.4590:

If you are looking for MEANINGFUL progression, this game ain’t for you.

This is the type of game where you hit max lvl in a week or less and bam, you already in endgame gear. Exotic gear is more than enough to do every content this game has to offer (outside High lvl fractals)

The only progression from there on out is just PvP/WvW ranks, Gemstore skins and ascended/legendary farm. Also Achievement Point farm but thats ridiculous. Thats it. If you haven’t figured that out by now, you need to re-think life lol.

You could have quit 1 year ago and logged back in today and you would still find that you can do 100% of the content in this game. This is a casual players dream land. Nothing hardcore, grind it out , real progression wise will be added to the game (ascended is a joke, and half the player population is running around in sparkling legendaries so they aren’t that big of a deal. Some exotic skins are even better than legendaries)
Nothing skillful required to do the very easy PvE this game has to offer. Hop on a zerg and win. Or if you want, just buy w/e you want from the gemstore with cash and win.

You want progression, go play 07runescape, WildStar/ESO/WoW. You are not gonna find a TRUE MMO progression in this game.

I wouldn’t quite call running in circles in a never ending treadmill ‘true’ progression…..

Aye I wouldn’t either, but its progress nonetheless.
You hit 80 here and you can pretty much accomplish anything you want to do outside high lvl fracs or super dedicated WvW roaming groups/ tpvp teams. Those are the only things in this game that require you to actually think and work hard as group.

You can’t do endgame things just because you hit the max lvl in those other MMOs.
Here you can hop a zerg in wvw anytime and win, farm a champ train and win, do any dungs, etc etc

Well, you see, when Anet tries to make open world ‘hard’, it turns out we can;t do it cos the average player has the organisational capabilities of a bag of peanuts.

SkiTz.4590:

If you are looking for MEANINGFUL progression, this game ain’t for you.

This is the type of game where you hit max lvl in a week or less and bam, you already in endgame gear. Exotic gear is more than enough to do every content this game has to offer (outside High lvl fractals)

The only progression from there on out is just PvP/WvW ranks, Gemstore skins and ascended/legendary farm. Also Achievement Point farm but thats ridiculous. Thats it. If you haven’t figured that out by now, you need to re-think life lol.

You could have quit 1 year ago and logged back in today and you would still find that you can do 100% of the content in this game. This is a casual players dream land. Nothing hardcore, grind it out , real progression wise will be added to the game (ascended is a joke, and half the player population is running around in sparkling legendaries so they aren’t that big of a deal. Some exotic skins are even better than legendaries)
Nothing skillful required to do the very easy PvE this game has to offer. Hop on a zerg and win. Or if you want, just buy w/e you want from the gemstore with cash and win.

You want progression, go play 07runescape, WildStar/ESO/WoW. You are not gonna find a TRUE MMO progression in this game.

I wouldn’t quite call running in circles in a never ending treadmill ‘true’ progression…..

At this point, I’d settle for just more existing weapons to be made viable in PvE, like warrior offhand Axe, and existing systems to be fixed, like mesmer sword #3 being still bugged and how warriors basically have no useful class mechanics whatsoever for PvE.

Lambent.6375:

Xae Isareth.1364:

Then you’d just get people afking for 30mins for free loot.

Not if no loot is rewarded upon failure.

Then we did get even people raging that there’s no loot, and blah blah blah.

GW2 in PvE is like playing Monster Hunter or Dark Souls…sort of. Take only defence which you would absolutely need (full glass cannon gear is best if you can handle it) and put everything else in offensive power.

In sPvP there’s no tanks, but bunkers are a huge thing. Your job as a bunker in sPvP is to either capture a point or delay the enemy from capturing a point until your backup arrives. As for how to do that, someone else would have to answer because I’m not too good at sPvP and miiggght end up misleading you.

I’m not too familiar with how WvW works because I get headaches from playing it.

chronus.1326:

Dafomen.7892:

Stevizard.4926:

Sorry guys, but any customer-centered business must care about what causes customers to quit buying (or playing) their product.

[…]

Sincerely,
Stevizard

+1

When I was working for another MMO running studio, that company was ignorant for insights light these.
They basically didnt care about what anyone said if he wasnt a high paid suit, where most of them hadnt even a clue about the product itself, but had some fancy job titles and nice boards in theirs offices with some monetization statistics on it.

Trying to explain or convince them to listen to what their customers had to say even it wasnt a lawsuit was, despite all the internal and external smoke screen PR (where most of the revenue vanished in to anyway), like talking to a brick wall.
It was really weird because to me it seemed most of them just didnt want to understand whats going on, because they would have to step ‘out of line’.
They preferred to stay in their office ‘doing their job’, watching the ship sink and grabbing on what they can get.
I dont know, but thats the impression I got. And I saw the numbers, every working day.

Well, the best description about what happened next would be….a crash landing with many casualties beginning of course on the “lower end”….poor buggers.

If a company reaches a certain size, loosing touch with the basics is its biggest treat.

Anet seems to have reached that tipping point somewhere in between GW and GW2 with an integrated accelerator it seems.

To be fair, I probably should swap Anet with NCsoft.

Basically the same thing can be read at the Glassdoor page of ArenaNet too, which is what makes me so indifferent.

I’ve never seen a company come out of this. The world is changing. Customers are more self-aware, the smoke screens are becoming smaller and smaller relative to the size of the internet. There isn’t really enough money out there to lie so effectively anymore. For a while, maybe, but its becoming increasingly inefficient. Maybe that’s why a lot of companies just don’t care anymore and just want to grab as much money as they can while they still can. Nobody actually wants to provide a service anymore. It’s too much of a hassle.

I read lately a quote from somewhere, I don’t know what it was. It was that the first company which comes out and starts behaving like a normal person will become incredibly rich and well received.

Customers are growing tired of BS.
They see the BS better, and that sight isn’t going anywhere. And their mouths are not as open yet as they could be, but their wallets are closing sooner.

The first person who realizes that and gambles on honesty becomes incredibly rich.

First dev who comes here and says “You know what? You are right. Here’s what’s going on in the company now:” and lay out everything will be revered by the community and everyone will fight for him. The gamer community would kickstarter fund a guy like that up to buying up the entire company. And that’s probably not even a joke.

First of all. I don’t know what’s happening inside ANet, but you’re talking about GlassDoor. That site is to be taken with a huge grain of salt. I go read stuff on there about the company I work for sometimes, and it’s just hilarious.

Kickstarter? Buying up an entire company? To buy up companies like ArenaNet, even if you could grab them off NCSoft, would take tens of millions, if not hundreds.

That dev would lose his job for a start. No one will do that unless they plan to quit the company, and even if they quit, burning bridges in the games industry is not a wise choice. In other words, no one will do that.

And what do you mean behaving like a normal person? Do I tell you everything about myself? Do you know everything about all your friends? No, you don’t.

What do they gain by telling you if something is wrong? Let;s say Chris one day goes on the forums and says ‘Guys, we’re screwed. Financial guys form NCSoft is in the office glaring at us all day, development plans are in a mess, we really don’t know what to do anymore and frankly, I think the game’s gonna shut down very soon.’

What has he accomplished? He would simply make most players quit and destroy any hopes in saving the game if it was like that.

You heard of what happened in the background of LA Noir? That was a class-A mess, but the game was a success. If they told you about all that stuff that we know about it now, a lot of people would not have bought the game.

The bottom line is, information is a dangerous thing, you don;t just give it away.

Sartharina.3542:

… is there any defensive difference between Blocking and Evading, other than some attacks being able to go through Blocks? Being able to block for the same cost as an evade wouldn’t imbalance the game, and make shield users look cooler.

Anyway – I approve the idea of having shields function as backpacks as well, because shields look awesome.

It would cost less, but you would take some of the damage.

Then you’d just get people afking for 30mins for free loot.

Blackwyn.8127:

The funny thing is, Marionette didn’t even need Commanders. It was all automated and anything in that event could be explained directly via map chat.

You could here as well. Only 3 sentences are actually needed.

‘Split into 6 groups’
‘Kill turret’
‘Throw seed to distract birds’

The last 2 could be summed up with ‘read the boss description’

sorudo.9054:

not every prof can use a shield, adding an option to block outside skills is giving some profs an advantage over others.
only if every single profession can block, however they do it, then it’s a good idea, otherwise it becomes something of a huge advantage.

Why should every profession be able to block? Does every profession have 4 atunements every weapon type like the elementalist? Or have access to kits like the engineer?

It’s not even an advantage. By equipping a shield you are forgoing another weapon.

Yargesh.4965:

cygnus.8913:

GW2 needs Steam in my opinion. After the break into the Chinese market , it’s guaranteed long-term exposure to target markets. Never underestimate the power of Steam. Anyhow, waffle over.

I a curious about what Steam would give? They would take a cut of the profit. They would slow down releases since it would need to go through steam. They would not be exposed to any bigger market than they are already exposed to. Where is there any up side to going through Steam?

It would force you to use Valve’s annoying game portal which acts all like a medium to spam adverts on your screen, make payments for gems awkward, and also cause insane lag at the worst times through updating itself without even telling you.

It’s a great asset (to lose hair).

Kjeldoran.3849:

Guys what are you talking about?
i never received such a message … and i really woul have enjoyed it :<
The gem store isn’t the place where to “buy items to win” but simply the place where to “buy funny items and promote developers work”.
If you dont want to spend money use in-game golds, if you don’t want to farm use money… but if you don’t want to farm and spent money then… give me a good reason to sell you something that required hours of work?!
The game is Buy To Play; this means you pay 1 time for the game and then you can play all the time you want BUT developers aren’t 1 time paid to work on a game for their entire life… seriously stop with these flame.

For the guy above me, you can still farm, you just need to find new ways. “FARM” is against game rule only because this is the most “free time game” (-> “casual gamers”). Now if you want to farm you can still do it but you are only trying to play Gw2 how you where used to play WoW or free to play games. There is no need to farm in this game (except for leggendary and ascended, both non-essentials to get capped).

Also i want to encourage everyone to buy gems at least 2-3 times per years not because ANet paid me for this (XD) but just because buy gems is the only way we have to say thank you to developers. If you think that to develop a game, a world or a single weapon skin is easy and fast… please start to work at your own personal game (i did it… 1 month later i finished the first city XD then i stopped :<).

before to open another thread like this please think that you are only wasting moderator time and just flamming. That’s all for me, don’t get me wrong, i don’t want to attack you… simply be honest with yourselves.

The game is a business. I love Kellog’s cereals, I like what they did for my breakfast, but I don’t send money to Kellog’s regularly for no reason to thank them. I give them money when they incentivise me to give them money for a solid product in return.

If I enjoy the game and see a hope in me playing for a long time, and there’s something good in the cash shop, I’ll pay for it, if not, I won’t. Like with Kellog’s I won’t give them money regularly for no reason.

I understand its a MMO, there’s continued development costs, but this is the business model they have chosen. They could have chosen a P2P model, or a DLC/expansion model, that was their choice, so I don’t have any responsibilities to support that.

Aidan Savage.2078:

Xae Isareth.1364:

I’m just thinking. What if they made shields with a zero-CD skill that has a block mechanic that lowers the damage you take but drains endurance….

Blocking (aegis or by effect) entirely stops damage. Protection reduces damage taken. Both are not shield-exclusive states.

It’s not a state, its a way to add engaging gameplay. For an action-based MMO, the shields in GW2 just feels silly.

Thinking about this a bit more, what we could do is have an alternative to Berserker’s Power. For example, like I suggested in another thread:

Berserker’s Inspiration

On using Burst skills, nearby allies gain 1/2/3 stacks of Berserker’s Inspiration depending on the number of adrenaline bars used.

Berserker’s Inspiration (10 seconds)
Increases damage dealt by 2%, stacks in intensity, max 3 stacks.

Dark Catalyst.1028:

Xae Isareth.1364:

Dark Catalyst.1028:

Enjoying your no sub fee model? Lol. The entire game is designed around funneling as many players as possible into the cash shop by severely restricting loot and gold gained through simply playing the game.

$15 a month is worth NEVER seeing a “buy now” button on my UI or messages like in the OP in my chat box. Yeah, yeah, they have to make money so I’d rather just pay them a flat fee and hope they make a fun game with it.

It’s not really a question of ‘enjoying it’ not, P2P for everything simply isn’t viable for me.

I can’t stick to a single MMO. Right now, I’m playing GW2/TSW/(was playing)ESO/Defiance, choosing one on any particular day. So if I paid $15 a moth for all of them, that’s $60 a month on MMOs alone before other games, for something I spend, what 1-2 hours a day on average on?

That just won’t happen for me.

I can understand that since you seem to play several games. But GW2 has become so shameless with its cash shop, that I can barely stomach logging in or supporting them.

Until they stop spamming ‘buy gold here!’ on update messages, I won’t buy more gems either.

For me it was the Fused Gauntlets. I missed those and they are awesome.

At every event, you have people on the map shouting ’don’t zerg, split up’. If they don’t want to listen to that, then why would they listen to NPCs?

Open world raids just don’t work. Period. Most people do not want to organise, do not want to listen to orders, and will not work with other people, especially in a game made for casuals.

Blizzard has tried it, Trion tried it, they both failed. They have a lot more experience at making raids than ANet.

chronus.1326:

Xae Isareth.1364:

If you’re a casual gamer who dislike gear treadmills, raids and only play the game lightly, would you go buy a game that embraces the treadmill, is focused on endgame raids, and asks you to pay $15 a month for it?

Depends on the marketing. Currently it is known that you will be able to buy one month game cards in Wildstar for ingame cash. But even with that, its possible that the game is gonna go b2p or f2p in half a year or so. So I think the ingame game card idea was thrown there to maximalize first week profits, in other words, they indeed are going for the casual, and the casual bought Guild Wars 2 too, despite it containing an inbuilt gold seller service in the sheep clothing of the black lion trading post.

P2P/B2P doesn’t define the game as casual or non-casual. TSW was P2P at the start as well, and that game was very casual.

The bottom line is that Carbine made it pretty clear in their marketing that their endgame was about raids, which basically says that if you don’t like them, well, the game isn’t for you. So if I don’t like raids, why would I go there?

Dark Catalyst.1028:

Enjoying your no sub fee model? Lol. The entire game is designed around funneling as many players as possible into the cash shop by severely restricting loot and gold gained through simply playing the game.

$15 a month is worth NEVER seeing a “buy now” button on my UI or messages like in the OP in my chat box. Yeah, yeah, they have to make money so I’d rather just pay them a flat fee and hope they make a fun game with it.

It’s not really a question of ‘enjoying it’ not, P2P for everything simply isn’t viable for me.

I can’t stick to a single MMO. Right now, I’m playing GW2/TSW/(was playing)ESO/Defiance, choosing one on any particular day. So if I paid $15 a moth for all of them, that’s $60 a month on MMOs alone before other games, for something I spend, what 1-2 hours a day on average on?

That just won’t happen for me.

chronus.1326:

Xae Isareth.1364:

The only thing similar is that they;re both MMOs, and that’s it.

It’s basically enough because the mmo community moves from game to game trying to find the holy grail of mmorpgs that is not an addictive snorefest. That’s why mostly all the pr for new mmos cumulate in “look how unlike everything else we are”.

Some leftovers who are more prone to post-purchase rationalization are always left in each new game, but the general market, the target costumer always moves.

If you’re talking about the content locusts, that’s not exactly competition, they’ll always move to new games.

If you’re a casual gamer who dislike gear treadmills, raids and only play the game lightly, would you go buy a game that embraces the treadmill, is focused on endgame raids, and asks you to pay $15 a month for it?

Carighan.6758:

I think one issue is that scaling usually means HP and to a degree damage. Not mechanics.

Boom-Boom, instead of having that much more HP, should have only slightly more for each player. But, at some point she gains more healing turrets, other turrets, her turrets get projectile shields, spawn with other adds, she gets more grenades per volles in a much wider area, more types of grenades, etc etc etc. Have 5-10 of such additions for a boss.

If ‘kill the turret’ is already beyond the capability of the general playerbase, having extra, more complex mechanics will just be absolute havoc.

chronus.1326:

Xae Isareth.1364:

then they’ll start thinking of DLCs and expansions.

NCsoft allowing Guild Wars 2 to compete with Wildstar?
I’d break the piggy bank and become my own publisher if I were Anet.

GW2 and Wildstar are non-competition. It’s like saying Skyrim and Mario Galaxy are in competition. The two are completely different games.

1. One is a P2P and the other B2P.
2. GW2 is part-sandbox whilst WS is pure themepark.
3. GW2 is focused at casuals, WS is focused at hardcore raiders.
4. Their art styles are worlds apart.

and the list can just go on.

The only thing similar is that they;re both MMOs, and that’s it.

I’m just thinking. What if they made shields with a zero-CD skill that has a block mechanic that lowers the damage you take but drains endurance….

Olba.5376:

Xae Isareth.1364:

Admiral Ursa.8391:

Hope Anet will come at its senses and bring the game to the steady state it was 2-3 months before, and CERTAINLY introduce the precursor scavenge hunt to return the prices to a logic level.

I don’t really see them introducing it any time soon to be honest.

If they mainly use stuff like T6 materials, then what’s the point? I’d just be same as it is now because the gold value of it wont be too far behind what’s on the TP at the moment.

You already need world completion to get a legendary, so they can’t use that.
The original plan I think was to use T7 materials, but look at how stuffed our banks are with them.

I think you’re not on the right track there.

There is no reason to claim that the scavenger hunt needs to lower the prices of the Precursors. The only reason people are complaining about the Precursors is because they are both expensive and there is no guaranteed way to get them. The fact that people are buying them even at the current prices is proof enough that it’s not too expensive.

It’s a difficult balance, and something which will take time to think of a good solution which isn’t affected by update. For example, back before EotM, you could argue Dragonite Ore was a good material for it, because it was relatively uncommon, but now with EotM, they’re basically as common as any other T7.

I personally think they’ll probably resort to fractal relics: it’s endgame content, it’s not very easy to get, people have been demanding a fractal reward revamp, it fits in with logic (reforge legendary weapons using relics from the past) and you can’t just buy your way to it like with dungeon tokens. It makes a lot of sense.

What I think is going to happen is that they’ll do a first round of fractal rewards updates to empty the huge stacks of relics vets are sitting on at the moment, then add precursors later.

I have to say that tying precursors to any single dungeon in the game, except something new that they’d make specifically for that purpose, would be a very dumb move. This is a playerbase that flips the table when Gift of Battle requires a few WvW levels (which you can totally buy with Badges of Honor) or when they put Living Story monsters in WvW. Or when those Living Story monsters require stomping.

The problem with precursors being “scavengable” or craftable is that either they need to put a time cap on it like they did on Ascended stuff or it needs to require absurd feats or absurd quantities of materials.

Because let’s be honest, without some kind of forced gating, you’ll be guaranteed to have people who have gotten those precursors within the first two days. That has happened with every single piece of content that was not time gated. Heck, even when they announced Ascended crafting, there were people posting pictures on the forums with stacks of materials that would be far, far more than enough to craft all Ascended pieces for a character.

Well, there is a guaranteed way to get them: off the TP. Sure, prices fluctuate but if you tie them to T6 mats, I’m not sure how much it would change because the prices of those also fluctuate, and you’ll probably increase their prices if you tie it to precursors.

Aegis.9724:

FlamingFoxx.1305:

I read your complaint that they havent “added” to professions and stopped reading. One of the chief problems with GW1 was that they continually added skills, it was a balancing nightmare and they were doing MASSIVE balance patches 5 years into the game. They aren’t going wild with additions to professions because their focus is on getting them into a good place where they don’t have huge problems.

Also, bye bye to your thread – there’s no way a mod isn’t going to lock/delete this.

TBH, while that was alot of work for the devs and balance team, it was also the main reason that made me, and probably 80% of my guild stick to gw1 pvp for 5 years.

Every time new skills were added, or nerfed/buffed the whole meta shifted, cookie-cutter builds fell out of favor and new builds started to shine. Sure, there were moments of total imbalance, but those didnt last too long due to how dynamic and frequent the balancing was.

I still remember how after each patch it was like a gold rush, everyone in my guild gathering in TS to discuss how the meta would change in each of the pvp modes, and what we could do to stay one step ahead. Creativity and theorycrafting were king.

While i don’t hate gw2 skill system, i do feel it sacrificed alot of that excitement just to be more accessibile and easy to manage, for both players and devs.
The result is a more stable but stale and grey meta, where most classes have the same couple viable builds (that everyone runs) for a MUCH longer time.

For me, I think it actually might be easier to balance a game with a butt-load of skills. I havn’t played GW1 enough to know how that went but I’ve played TSW inside out, and in terms of how skill-setting works, those two seem to be in the same ball-park.

TSW was a flop, Funcom has a very small crew working on it and balance updates come once a year at best. Yet TSW’s PvP is extremely balanced and diverse and unless you’re a dungeon DPS, PvE has a lot of top-tier builds as well.

The reason behind it is that in a ‘chaotic’ and open system, there’s a lot more different possible combinations of set-ups so:

1. It’s harder to determine what are the best builds and you only need to change something slightly to trigger a domino effect and keep players guessing again.

2. There’s simply a lot more builds possible, so there are a lot of ‘overpowered’ metabuilds competing with each other instead of a few dominating everything.

3. The players have a lot more tools at their disposal to counter each and every build. With a limited and restricted system like ours, there’s a lot of builds that are simply very overpowered because there’s very little or sometimes nothing you can do to counter it.

In other words, in a very complex system, its players who set the metabuilds, not the developers, you simply need to give them the tools to do it instead of do all the work yourself.

I started to think if the pure GS build is really better than the old metabuild lately. Just from theorycrafting, it’s about 5% or thereabouts (depending on what you assume) worse than the pure GS metabuild.

But what it does do is let you swap weapons and thus trigger sigils twice as often, and also perhaps more importantly, it also stacks vulnerability better. Now, I havn’t gotten around to work out all the kinks yet, buuuuut…

In an ideal party (in a not ideal party everything including the validity of using a GS as a whole just goes straight out of the window) your DPS as the second Warrior should be somewhere in the low-average spectrum of the party. So, if your party isn’t sitting on 25 vulnerability, if you can manage to generate even 1 extra stack of might on average over the GS build, wouldn’t the old metabuild outshine the new pure GS build?

The thing is, when you start talking about min-maxing in this game down to below 10%, I kind of feel it gets a bit sketchy because in any encounter that’s not complete faceroll, you won’t be doing perfect rotations and a lot of what’s assumed often goes out of the window (e.g a party which under perfect rotations that can generate constant 25 stacks of vul, and thus making any extra useless might not be able to), and you really have to start moving from theorycraft to a ‘real world’ situation.

Like for example, missing/interrupting 100B or delaying it is DPS loss on a pure GS setup, with interrupting it being a huge DPS loss. You might have to factor that in, and then other alternatives might start looking more favorable.

Admiral Ursa.8391:

Hope Anet will come at its senses and bring the game to the steady state it was 2-3 months before, and CERTAINLY introduce the precursor scavenge hunt to return the prices to a logic level.

I don’t really see them introducing it any time soon to be honest.

If they mainly use stuff like T6 materials, then what’s the point? I’d just be same as it is now because the gold value of it wont be too far behind what’s on the TP at the moment.

You already need world completion to get a legendary, so they can’t use that.
The original plan I think was to use T7 materials, but look at how stuffed our banks are with them.

It’s a difficult balance, and something which will take time to think of a good solution which isn’t affected by update. For example, back before EotM, you could argue Dragonite Ore was a good material for it, because it was relatively uncommon, but now with EotM, they’re basically as common as any other T7.

I personally think they’ll probably resort to fractal relics: it’s endgame content, it’s not very easy to get, people have been demanding a fractal reward revamp, it fits in with logic (reforge legendary weapons using relics from the past) and you can’t just buy your way to it like with dungeon tokens. It makes a lot of sense.

What I think is going to happen is that they’ll do a first round of fractal rewards updates to empty the huge stacks of relics vets are sitting on at the moment, then add precursors later.

Devata.6589:

Maxite.6102:

I appreciated the message. I don’t constantly watch the gemstore, so a heads up was nice.

You are taking on like they repeatedly sent out a "Buy gems now, pls!!!’ spam. Thats silly. When it gets to that point, sure complain. But acting like this simple message spoiled your evening makes you look goofy.

Yeah very goofy if you forget for a moment that most of the negative stuff in the game is because the cash-shop focus. So no that sort of advertisement I do not like to see in a B2P game.

It’s the same with the giveaways to gem-buyers. The ‘we love you more’ don’t mind this game is sold as B2P not F2P still we love you gem-buyers more. And good job helping to destroy the game.. Keep up the good work because you know, we love your more. And now advertisements in your face in a B2P game. Extremely rude.

Anyway lets hope it’s indeed desperation and that the cash-shop sales are going even more down. That could result in a better game in the long run.

Knowing NCSoft, they’ll just shut the game down.

The problem isn’t with this one advert. If they read the forums at all, which they do, they’ll know that tension on the gem store at the moment is at an all-time high.

Yet what dot hey do? Oh that’s right! Let’s put an in-game advert at the players just to see how vexed they can reaaally be!

But hopefully, if the gem shop is indeed becoming unsustainable, then they’ll start thinking of DLCs and expansions.

Carighan.6758:

Boom-Boom takes so long because noticing the beam of purple flying around, the giant crossed swords and the icon on the boss is hard.

I think at this point ANet needs to forcibly change everyone’s target to the turret and prevent them from switching off it, or it just won’t work. People can’t seem to make the connection. Healing Turret. Boss heals. HEALING TURRET. Difficult stuff.

It’s not even that. Both the boss description AND the turret description tells you to basically, kill the turret.

I really can’t see more ways they can communicate KILL THE TURRET to you other than there being a zone-wide message on your screen saying ‘KILL THAT TURRET’, which would be just patronising.

Lishtenbird.2814:

So, no change in blade shard vendor? Would make sense since they added other things to other merchants.

They can’t at this point. They’ve basically screwed it up very very hard and cannot correct it.

If they do introduce better stuff, they’ll have to reimburse everyone for their blade shards. That’ll be a CS nightmare.

I just couldn’t imagine developer reviewing the content that actually plays the game looking at this and going ‘yep, 5 star, 10.5/10, its perfect, players will love this!’.

It’s quite surprising really. Splitting up into groups is something we’ve been doing since primary school. You would think that if the mechanics for bosses are so clear and simple they may as well be written on a neon sign above every boss’s head, and where the only ‘difficult’ mechanic is split up, we as I assume generally intelligent and socially competent people would be able to pull it off.

But nope. I terms of open world content difficulty, this is basically pushing your right tow slightly out of the 111111111win zone, how we screw this up I’ll never understand.

Dee Jay.2460:

I would like DPS meters in game but for a different reason. Not to promote (or justify) elitism, but rather to offer a practical look at theorycrafting, something tat is entirely done on spreadsheets.

Currently, if the spreadsheets says Runes of Strength > all then that’s hard to argue against even if it’s not so in practical game-play.

Runes of the Pack, Runes of Scholar etc. could all have their moments of Glory or situational advantages that currently simply aren’t reflected when just using spreadsheets.

But to be honest, Anet is pushing that elitism.

If you start putting DPS-checks on open world content, what else are you doing?

You can definitely have fun in GW2 with very little time, you don’t need to commit to a raiding schedule to progress, and you can get what’s basically BiS gear at level 80 (Ascended weapons are 5% better than Exotic, so…. maybe its worthwhile getting them, but Ascended armor is basically the same thing as Exotics).

But if you want to get some of the fanciest skins in the game, you need a lot of hours in.

Nerelith.7360:

People brag about making 10 to 15g in one hour or play with a level 80 In Gw2.

I started Playing a new character on a game that shall remain nameless… and although she is but level 20, after 20 hours of play she has 600 gold, and this without twinking.

The Biggest issue as far as I can tell is, that Anet sells Gold for gems. They have a vested Interest in keeping Gold production by mearly playing the game, as Low as they can, while still not having it so low that people leave.

It’s Not working. People are leaving.

For those that wish to give Anet the benefit of the doubt. A thought experiment.

Assume that my argument is 100 % true, Just for the sake of argument. What steps would Anet take, if their incentive is to make as many people as they can, resort to the gem store to purchase their gold…. Ask yourself this….

What would they do….to get as many players as possible to buy Gold of the gem store, without losing their player base?

Now ask a secnd question. How Much of what you imagine Anet would do…. coincides with the present state of the game?

Twinking for some reason makes me think of Anarchy Online… but anyways.

How much would 600g be worth in GW2 though? On GW1 for example, if my remember right, base currency is actually more or less worthless, so it’s all relative.

Sirendor.1394:

• Multiplayer in this game is the biggest trash I’ve ever seen: spam 1 skill with 50 or more other people and you win.

I should really make this my signature:

This mentality is exactly why Anet’s ‘multiplayer’ content doesn’t work in this game. Not because the mechanics are stupid, but because you got everyone thinking like this.

‘Oh, did that guy Xaei just spend 30 mins explaining why I shouldn’t just zerg and 11111 on Boss Blitz? Oh, he so silly!’

- This is why the QP is a mess
- This is why PUGs fail Teq
- This is why Wurm is unthinkable to do without a guild alliance backing you up

If you want to help a group, start listening to advice and instructions, if you want a meaningful multiplayer experience which doesn’t make everyone pull their hairs out, start having more organisational capabilities than sheep.

If people can get away from this mentality, maybe Anet can actually make open world raids actually a thing, until then, you can stop complaining about 111111 to win because that’s all that the playerbase is capable of at the moment.

(At least in the open world, Anet seems to be against instances for whatever reason I cannot imagine)

Trice.4598:

Einlanzer.1627:

Trice.4598:

Einlanzer.1627:

I was actually having a reasonably good time doing the crown pavilion even with the crappy loot. It’s nice they listened and buffed them!

They didn’t listen if they believe that’s what people were complaining for.

It was. Are you referring to the anti-zerg? It’s been getting more and more coordinated and it’s actually very refreshing to do small group coordinated assaults. People were hating on it at first because it took forever and gave garbage loot, but that’s less the case now.

coordinated open world is the worst thing Anet tried, it doesn’t work. People don’t listen, guild have to create overflow because they don’t want to deal with random people. 6 champions bag for 10-30 minutes? which will most likely be greens and blues.

Last year pavilion was much better, I remember farming destroyer and bandit and actually getting something decent and having more fun than those annoying bosses ( when people killed 5 bosses and are all scaling the last one with all the buffs.

Looks like the only decent way to make gold is still dungeons and selling arah.

Last year was completely out of whack. Pressing 111111 and following a giant zerg around earned more loot than anything else for 2 weeks, making you feel like unless you followed that zerg and 111111ed until the last bit of sanity you had left is gone, you’re wasting your time in the game.

/15 charrrrssssssssssssss

Aren’t you that guy that keeps posting quitting threads?