Guild Wars 2

Algreg.3629:

Xae Isareth.1364:

I very rarely say this but in this particular case, if you don’t like the way the endgame plays out, then this game just isn’t for you sadly.

Anet has always said, even before launch, that the endgame starts at level 1. There is no ‘endgame’, just ‘the game’. The whole game is the endgame, what you want to do is up to you, and you set goals for yourself, the game doesn’t do that for you.

It’s like asking what the endgame in Skyrim was.

Whether goals are ‘meaningful’ is a very subjective thing. For example, on TSW, my guild leader played the game since launch, and he has never sat foot in a single dungeon, and is still geared with what’s basically that game’s equivalent of greens. Was he wasting his time? Who’s me or you to judge that.

Personally, a game is meaningful as long as you are having fun. Anet has stated that this is the way the game works, its very open, its super casual, and the endgame is just doing whatever you want. Well, if you don’t like that, then, I guess its just not the game for you :L

The MMO market is full to the brim with games where you get pulled around on a leash and where most of the content is irrelevant after level cap, can’t we just have 1 game where you can do what you want, instead of the game nudging you constantly towards a goal it set for you?

first of all, I don´t want GW2 to change, but point out the obvious observations. Whether that is ok for you or not is completely down to personal preferences. And indeed, though I enjoyed the game immensely for quite some time, I am already on my way out.

not sure, a GW2 scenario would work in a sandbox MMORPG that gave you a world where your actions would actually matter and options to define your own goals. But a theme park game without any incentive to do anything, I don´t know. There is a world of difference between being “on a leash” and having options to do something that will affect your game. GW2 is worse than this, you either are taunted by shinies you will only aquire by a mix of sheer luck and endless, repetitive, unexciting chores (and which will have barely any effect for you once acquired) or, if you are not into that, it offers nothing to do at all, save pvp and wvw as playing against other people is its own fun. MMORPG are just not good games when it comes to the pure joy of playing. Substandard graphics, substandard storytelling, substandard gameplay – compared to other types of games. That is not due to negligence, but various limiting factors that come with the genre. So the “just play for the playing” aspect simply doesn´t cut it for me.

wasting time – well, every game is wasting time. But knowing TSW myself, I cannot help but wonder what this guy is actually doing (and dungeons are certainly not endgame there, but are done at all stages of the game).

To me, GW2 is like Skyrim. If you were to ask me why I did anything on Skyrim or what my goals were, you won’t get a straight up answer. That’s what a sandbox element of a game does. A themepark game has very defined and clear goals, but any game with some sort of a sandbox element to them has those clear defined goals, but also has goals which aren’t perfectly describable or even physical, because they mirror real life.

On GW2, I don’t have a particular goal or any particular reason to do anything. What the game is for me is a second, fantasy life. I have goals like finishing Frostfang, getting my ele to 80, etc, but just like real life, they’re side mechanisms which drive an overall narrative. What GW2 offer me is a persisting, living world which I can immersively carry out that second life.

Just like in real life, you are taunted by shinies. Cars, good grades, good jobs, or whatever. Some of those are fun to achieve, some involve repetitive and mundane tasks, but they aren’t exactly the entire point of your existence.

On the subject of MMOs as a whole. It’s true that they often have substandard graphics (but I have to say that the artstyle of GW2 more than makes up for that) and substandard gameplay, but there’s one thing which massively compensates for that and allow you to be immersed often far more than a single player game: the world persists, it has other people in it, and it evolves. As good as Skyrim was, you know the developers aren’t going to keep making more DLCs, you know that you’re alone, and you know that it’s really a ‘dead’ world that will never change.

phys.7689:

Xae Isareth.1364:

I very rarely say this but in this particular case, if you don’t like the way the endgame plays out, then this game just isn’t for you sadly.

Anet has always said, even before launch, that the endgame starts at level 1. There is no ‘endgame’, just ‘the game’. The whole game is the endgame, what you want to do is up to you, and you set goals for yourself, the game doesn’t do that for you.

It’s like asking what the endgame in Skyrim was.

Whether goals are ‘meaningful’ is a very subjective thing. For example, on TSW, my guild leader played the game since launch, and he has never sat foot in a single dungeon, and is still geared with what’s basically that game’s equivalent of greens. Was he wasting his time? Who’s me or you to judge that.

Personally, a game is meaningful as long as you are having fun. Anet has stated that this is the way the game works, its very open, its super casual, and the endgame is just doing whatever you want. Well, if you don’t like that, then, I guess its just not the game for you :L

The MMO market is full to the brim with games where you get pulled around on a leash and where most of the content is irrelevant after level cap, can’t we just have 1 game where you can do what you want, instead of the game nudging you constantly towards a goal it set for you?

you can do whatever you want, you just get way less out of it. You could do a jumping puzzle, but you will get less than if you kill level 10 monsters in queensdale.

you could do a fractal, but your time is better spent following an ustoppable zerg in EOTM.

So really you are incorrect, you cant do anything you want, most things dont pay, the harder things pay even less.

But even regardless of paying well, they dont even have the type of content im talking about at all. Whether it pays well or not, there really isnt much content at all that requires any mastery at all in PVE.

Now hey, if thats the path they go, and thats what everyone wants thats fine, i will play less, but no big deal, i am only one dude. But the thread is asking what people want from endgame, so ill tell him what im looking for

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a MMO where all the rewards are balanced. Now I do agree that the rewards aren’t but I don’t think its an unique problem with the game, and its a work in progress for all MMOs.

If you look at jumping puzzles for example. The idea was that they gave you fragments as an alternative to dungeons. But of course, it turns out that those fragments were utterly worthless to most people so, the rewards turned out to be trash. The idea is there, but the the reality isn’t.

This is especially true when you put PvP into it. EotM, whether you can call it an exploit or not, is not working as intended. It wasn’t ever made to be a giant zerg farm, and the rewards were balanced to be around people actually fighting each other.

(Off on a tangent, personally, it’s why I still think PvP shouldn’t have PvE-associated rewards tied with it. Players were asking for it, for WvW to be more rewarding. Then the devs were like, ok, we’ll make it more rewarding, then before you know it, it was being exploited the heck out of.)

Also, it really depends on what you want in terms of rewards. Take your fractal vs EotM for example. I’m making Frostfang at the moment, I need Obsidian Shards and ectos. 1 level 37 FotM run nets me about 12k karma (with a 15% karma infusion), enough relics to buy 10 shards (converting the pristine), and about 5-8 rares on average, takes my guild a hour to beat. That’s a lot more than I can get running around EotM for a hour.

On your final point. The problem with ‘mastery’ is thats a very subjective thing. What one person finds hard is what another considers a joke. I want raids as well, but I can understand why it isn’t there. The game is sold to casuals and more importantly, people who don’t normally like MMOs, and you make content for who selling it to.

Wildstar sells to the hardcores, so its focused on raids and hardcore stuff as a main priority. GW2 sells to casuals, so it focuses on stuff casuals would like as a main priority.

I think the TBC raid population of WoW was, what 5% of the total player population? That was back in the day when MMOs was hardcore and had a very focused gamer group playing them. So you can imagine what the raid coverage in this game would be like. Most people can’t even handle Tequatl or FotM, so if you wanna make stuff even harder than that, you’re basically making content for a non-existent population.

maha.7902:

For example: If there is a mob that likes to attack at range, give this mob a flag where they will always try to be at least 600 units away from any player, and treat this as a hard line that mob will refuse to cross. That way, when they come upon enemies stacking in a corner, they will orbit at a distance to get in range, instead of just running up to the players.

Chasing a mob around in circles is not “interesting”, and if that’s “diverse mob AI” then I want my mob AI as boring as possible. That would turn dungeons in to even more of a chore. It would just mean removing a DPS utility and chaining immobilises.

So… you’re saying have to bring different utilities other than DPS ones is a bad thing? I don’t mean to sound rude, but that’s the way I perceived your response to that.

There’s already mechanics in game to stop stacking, but they either just aren’t strong enough or you can just dodge to avoid them. For example, one of the bosses in SE has an attack where he puts fire AoEs beneath every party member’s feet, but it’s just nowhere near strong enough and the fight inst long enough with full zerkers to stop people just soaking the damage and burn him up.

I very rarely say this but in this particular case, if you don’t like the way the endgame plays out, then this game just isn’t for you sadly.

Anet has always said, even before launch, that the endgame starts at level 1. There is no ‘endgame’, just ‘the game’. The whole game is the endgame, what you want to do is up to you, and you set goals for yourself, the game doesn’t do that for you.

It’s like asking what the endgame in Skyrim was.

Whether goals are ‘meaningful’ is a very subjective thing. For example, on TSW, my guild leader played the game since launch, and he has never sat foot in a single dungeon, and is still geared with what’s basically that game’s equivalent of greens. Was he wasting his time? Who’s me or you to judge that.

Personally, a game is meaningful as long as you are having fun. Anet has stated that this is the way the game works, its very open, its super casual, and the endgame is just doing whatever you want. Well, if you don’t like that, then, I guess its just not the game for you :L

The MMO market is full to the brim with games where you get pulled around on a leash and where most of the content is irrelevant after level cap, can’t we just have 1 game where you can do what you want, instead of the game nudging you constantly towards a goal it set for you?

Its because Anet experiments way too much. The core game is already a pretty massive experiment, trying to fuse old school traditional MMOs and new school action MMOs, getting rid of the trinity, etc. Then they try to layer more experimental features like the Living Story unto it. So unsurprisingly, it’s a mess sometimes.

Kaizer.7135:

It’s because the dungeons are mind-numbingly boring and people just want the rewards at the end. Skipping it makes the run more gold per hour.

You say nobody wants to enjoy the fights? Well PvE consists of literally no strategy or skill, just mash buttons and you win.

I find it hilarious that people actually boast about clearing a dungeon the “proper” way like it’s some kind of godly feat.

You can say every game in existence consists of mash buttons and win. And judging by how many PUGs everyone rage quits out of, I don’t think your idea of mashing is the right way to mash those buttons.

Also, Im quite sure in every MMO in existence, if you go to a player saying: you can have the loot in either 3 mins with barely any effort, or 2 hours of intense fighting, they’ll choose the former.

If they didn’t add diversity, at least they added a bit of variety. It isn’t just a problem of diversity, it’s simply an age old truth that doing the same thing over and over again gets boring no matter how cool that thing might be.

Where do skills come from? Well, they need to design them. That’s what MMOs are, games in constant progression. You could ask where do new combat mechanics in TSW came from, where new skills in GW1 came from, where do new raids in WoW came from: the developers designed them.

Balance? First of all, you can never perfectly balance a game. Even MOBAs have balance problems. If you want perfect balance in a MMO, then you got a dead game that never gets updates, because adding anything screws the balance up in some way.

In fact, I tend to think the only way to actually create perfect balance is through chaos. If you look at TSW, that game has a skeletal dev crew, but it’s probably more balanced than most MMOs I’ve played in PvP. Why? Because the combat system has so much choice that you get a whole load of ‘overpowered’ builds that they end up balancing things out and achieving diversity at the same time.

I don’t really see how moving balance down to a skill choice level changes anything anyways. The devs are already tweaking balance on a skill by skill level.

I don’t think a solution to that problem is to have 10 times less skills to choose from, because isn’t that just causing the problem which having over a thousand skills was trying to solve in the first place and going back to square 0?

So…..any chance of this happening?

Has much fun as your favourite (and actually viable) weapon is, it gets a bit old using the same skills over and over, which really doesn’t help on the replayability and thus longevity side of things for the game.

Any chance for this happening?

Also, on this topic, a whole back the developers said that they aim to make every weapon usable on every class, we’ve still yet to see 1 weapon restriction removed since launch, how’s this going?

Megabosses are a great idea really, as long as there’s also instanced stuff for people who don’t want to run them.

You can’t really put lag as an argument. You could make a similar argument about having high-end graphics. Also, having X, Y, Z on your PC doesn’t nessecarily mean its going to run well if it’s not optimised. You could have the best GPU, CPU, everything but a absolutely terrible cooling system, and your PC would just not function under stress at all.

I personally don’t like the way new megabosses are made, but I like the concept itself. I think megabosses bring out the massive in a MMO, which is something the genre has hugely lacked since WoW came along. But I don’t think thy should be ‘hardcore’ or. Dry challenging. They should be purely based on fun. They should be fights that aren’t hard to eat but you come out going ‘boy that was kitten’.

Theres a lot if content added, but they’re all temporary. As much as I like innovation, I don’t think this is working out. The recent dry spell of content really displayed how rapid updates isn’t a selling point of the game, but that GW2 needs it to have as much longevity as other games.

For example, if you look at TSW, that game gets content at a snail’s rate. Yet there’s still a healthy playerbase. Why? Because the core game has a lot of replayability in terms of trying different builds.

GW2 massively lacks that. Every class at least in PvE plays very similarly, and without many meaningful traits and no interchangeable weapon skills, the core game gets old. So it needs very fast updates to keep players engaged.

Going back to the first point, I think ANet really needs to focus on the problems which plagues the core game before trying stuff that’s completely new.

Having said that, I don’t think you can actually make a themepark MMO that’s free from grinding. In fact, you need a bit (note: a bit) of grind to make a MMO work. You will have to repeat content, because 1000+ hours of content is just basically impossible to create given that most single player games are what, 10-20 hours?

So then given you need to repeat content, you need that carrot for MMO gamers of today to repeat your content, because they expect loot. And thus, you inevitably get grinding.

Asgaeroth.6427:

Just thank whatever you believe in that you aren’t suffering through ESO. Compared to ESO, GW2’s armor designs are absolute perfection. It could be much, much worse. It could look like the armor designing was outsourced to a middle school HTML class doing volunteer work AKA how Zenimax does everything.

Thats the easy way out I’m talking about. What they seemed to have done is basically what TSW did, have your armor/clothing as a body texture, and only use the most basic of clothing templates so that it avoids clipping issues.

People keep complaining about clipping but from what I’ve seen, it’s either have clipping or mundane designs and non-existent clothing physics, pick your poison.

Having says that, personally, I wouldn’t find clothing in ESO to be amazing even of they did it perfectly, because simply, apart from a couple of sets, I personally thought clothing design in TES as a whole to be just terrible, and they can’t exactly change that because ESO is set 1000 years before Skyrim, not after.

They need to put up a fireworks display at night in DR, it would be fabulous.

The most beautiful area in the game for me is the cliffside fractal. On the run up the ramps up to the double seal where you have to run back and forth between the two, look sideways off the cliff and into the sun. Sight took my breath away.

Personally for me, GW1’s design just massively lacked detail in most cases and, possibly because of the age of the techology, almost every armor skin looked either like it’s meshed into your character’s body or like as if it’s some sort of a skinsuit.

What I like about GW2’s armour is that they have a sense of solidness and weight, with a great amount of detail, and despite all the clipping, I’m glad they decided to take a gamble and put a good amount of clothing physics and armor variety into the game instead of taking the easy way out and say, like TSW, just make clothing stick to your body.

Personally, if I had to rank MMOs purely on how cool armor skins look, GW2 would come second (Vindictus would take first place, take that as what you will), and I’ve played MMOs for a decade, so I’ve seen them all.

I think it’s just a matter of personal taste really.

^ no, we need a whole train of Queen Jennahs can-caning through the pavilion.

^ PvP is also the most exploitable game mode of all.

I like how this thread has derailed into a mess of props insulting each other just like most theorycraft threads.

I don’t think a pure condo build is optimal, but what about a hybrid build?

Ayakaru.6583:

The good thought is that if the game hits in China. Theyll have almost double budget. I do hope this bigger budget will allow for more updates and stuff.

More than double if its a hit in China. The east is the epicenter of gaming and expenditure in gaming, not the west.

Its kind of like gear rating in other games. Its not a very good measure, but it’s the best we’ve got. Someone who played the game longer is likely to be better than someone who played less.

Scholars fine when you can consistently hit rotations on your target, but in a lot of cases, that just isn’t possible, so strength helps a lot in those.

The other reason is that for a lot of people (like me), they can’t keep their HP above 90% anywhere near enough for scholar to be really useful, so you may as well take strength.

I went in a zerker speedrun party and popped out my staff on my guardian.

It seems ‘you shall not pass’ doesn’t work on kicks. Anet needs to nerf kicks.

I don’t think being casual automatically means they’ll like housing. In fact, you could argue it the other way.

1. They won’t be able to get a lot of the stuff they can put in their house, so it won’t look as cool as a hardcore player’s house, meaning they are potentially less interested.
2. They typically won’t have that long to play, so potentially they wouldn’t want to ‘waste’ time sitting in a virtual house.

^ source please?

I don’t remember them ever saying they’ll have housing, the only thing I remember them saying is that they’ll do stuff with your home instance. I could be wrong though.

Even of they did, I think it would be perfectly legitimate to abandon it if it turns out that it’s nowhere near the priority if most people and that there’s actually very little interest for it.

thaooo.5320:

Xae Isareth.1364:

I really question if people actually use the housing system in most games. I think the game with the most extensive housing system ive ever played was RuneScape. You can build everything from throne rooms to a personalised public dungeon in your house, and there even an entire instances map to serve as a guild hall/citadel/mapthing.

No one ever bothered with any of it after a couple of years. The developers actually tried to get people back in there by adding more and more features, but it still pretty much went ignored by most of the player base.

I heard about the Runescape incarnation of player housing/guild hall, but never cared to witness it. But if you say it had a couple of years of player interest, I call that a success in their design books.

But then you look at stuff like bosses and farming areas in the sane game which people still visit a decade later, it becomes harder to argue why should developers spend resources developing housing.

Especially in GW2, where there’s a massive lack of core content to start with.

I really question if people actually use the housing system in most games. I think the game with the most extensive housing system ive ever played was RuneScape. You can build everything from throne rooms to a personalised public dungeon in your house, and there even an entire instances map to serve as a guild hall/citadel/mapthing.

No one ever bothered with any of it after a couple of years. The developers actually tried to get people back in there by adding more and more features, but it still pretty much went ignored by most of the player base.

Idk, I don’t really see the point of it either. If I wanted to hang out or chat, I’ll just pop to LA/Vigil Keep, where there’s a lot of people to chat to. If I wanted to hang out with just friends, we do a dungeon.

Could be just me but I never really understood the concept of playing a virtual toon sitting on his sofa whilst sitting on your sofa :/

I think the gaming industry is really kind of past that ‘hardcore’ stage. People always talk about vanilla WoW and how good it was, and how the new WoW us catered to casuals and carebears, but WoW didn’t change so it could screw itself over, it changed because the gaming scene has changed from people who’s games are their lives to people with jobs, with families, who plays seldomly, so it adapted so it can stay big.

WS will probably get at least some sort if a niche audience, but I just don’t see it being a big thing. And it’s Facebook likes count seems to agree with that.

^ WS I’d say is for people who missed the old days of vanilla WoW, where fights were tough as nails, failure is a rite of passage, and good players can really make a name for themselves.

Personally, I think I’m past my raiding days. If I was back in uni, I probably would enjoy that somewhat (I’m still a raid tank in TSW in a guild who raids very casually), but now, with a job and an increasing amount of real life responsibilities, I just don’t have the time or the effort to spare to be a hardcore raider.

From the look of things, wildstar’s dungeons are very scripted, meaning that if everyone does their stuff right, it goes all smooth. It’s kind of the same challenge as FF14, injury gotta learn the dance, but after you learn the dance, you’re golden.

But learning the dance is one tough job.

I can actually see GW2 being a lot more difficult than Wildstar, because one, GW2 on a personally level seems less forgiving than WS in terms of screwing up in higher-tier dungeons (although every hit being a 1HKO is not exactly good game design), and it’s not as scripted, with fights like the first miniboss in the harpies fractal being quite chaotic (that isn’t a hard fight at all, but represents what I’m talking about).

Fun is rather subjective really.

Warrior plays more like a character from an action-MMO, whilst elementalist feels more traditional-MMO. In PvE anyways.

Elementalist has a higher damage potential, but is also a lot squishier. Parties will want both, since you need both elementalist and warrior to be optimised for a speedrun.

I’d say I spend 50% of my time logged on playing dress-up with my character as a casual player c:

To me, casual isn’t really dependent on how much you play, but on your attitude. Hardcore players will carefully plan out their play, and goal-seek a hefty focus in the game (creating legendaries, getting full ascended, becoming x rank in sPvP etc), whilst a casual player just does whatever they feel like doing, even if (like me) that’s hanging around town chatting to guildies and other players.

However, with the content the way they are, the game became very dependent on a fast release schedule.

Just look at what the game is like at the moment. Due to most of the past updates being temporary, the core game is pretty much unchanged since Lost Shores, and so in an absence of updates even long as a month, people get bored doing the same thing over and over.

What I would like is the old dual profession mechanic back. I never saw the point of having classes in the first place to be honest, it’s basically a reduction to build diversity and restriction of content to those who likes to focus on 1 character.

A Char riding a horse, can you imagine that? I’d be like a horse riding a horse.

No, I don’t think we are ready for more professions yet, or races.

Currently, racial skills have next to zero actual use, so other than cosmetic features and only half of the personal story, your choice of race has next to zero impact on your gameplay. Even on the cosmetic front, we got so many problems with armor clipping and awkward animations that all should be fixed before getting a new race.

Regarding professions, we are not ready on that front either. Currently, professions are extremely shallow, with non-interchangable weapon skills, and a very limited set (and an even more limited set within that set which are useful and not bugged) of utility skills. Our characters really often seem more like characters in a beat-em-up rather than the deep and costumisable characters expected of an AAA MMO.

Putting the above aside, we also have severe balancing problems. How can you balance more classes when you can’t even balance the existing ones to an acceptable level? You can’t, it’ll be a mess.

In summary, fix and finish what you started before making new stuff.

ghost.3208:

Corian.4068:

Well, let’s run with the idea.

Why not take a fortress similar to a tower found in WvW and make a survival mode where a party of players have to hold it against increasingly larger numbers of enemies? Siege can be placed, gates and walls repaired and a lord that must be kept alive to keep the game going?

Maybe make a fractal of it, maybe make an activity of it.

Iunno musing over it while I nom a bagel.

That would actually be fun, have some mode like tower defense and we have a limited number of supplies. We earn more past each round (getting less and less) with some tough boss fights that we might actually participate in.

MMO Tower Defense… would be a funny concept not sure how it will work.

It actually is in the game… sort of.

If you remember Toypocalypse.

The biggest thing I miss from GW1 was interchangeable skills.

It’s not even for the sake of build diversity, but using the same 5 skills over and over and over gets very dry after a while.

I would make the most inefficient builds sometimes in GW1 (and now TSW) for PvE for the sake of being a badman and just go on a massacre across Tyria for the sake of it. And it was awesome.

Zhaitan is very much dead I’m afraid. Before the wallet came along, the flavor text on Arah tokens would say ‘A piece of Zhaitan, now forever dead.’

I do hope they bring him back as a raid somehow though, even if its just like the hardmode Altima Weapon fight from FF14:ARR, where its just a really exaggerated story told by a bard that you play a part of (literally).

I don’t really know why, maybe its just the way the language is pronounced but every Chinese voiceover I’d ever heard in anything sounds like they’re reading off a piece of paper (well, they are, but you get the point).

That’s a nice remix of Fear Not This Night though.

If they really want people to stop playing full zerker, I can see two options:

1. Massively reduce the effectiveness of dodges. It would have to be rendered down to something like how dodging works in ESO (consumes a lot of stamina) or like it is in TSW (a 10 second CD or so), so it becomes more of a panic button than a standard form of migitation.

This would require them to pretty much completely re-stat and even redesign every fight in the game.

2. Give a method of DPSing which requires or favors having other stats. An example could be like how blood magic in TSW works, it has probably the highest DPS in the game, but will constantly drain your HP.

But that’s going to be very very difficult to balance, and make sure people can’t just pull it off with zerker stats anyways.

In other words, full-zerker is probably here to stay for at least most of the current content. New stuff, they might be able to. Cliffside favors soldier/sentinel instead of zerker for most of the run because of how the fractal works, so it can happen.

^actually, the reason why there’s so many listed on TP is probably because of a loophole with the wardrobe system. People buy/craft Sunrise and Twilight, account bind them to get the skins, then make and sell Eternity whilst keeping both skins.

I don’t have any solid evidence for this but I don’t think its coincidence that the huge crash in Eternity’s price occured on the same day as the feature patch.

Stalvros.9217:

Titan Cronus.9216:

The second most annoying thing about under water combat is that things burn. Like why, lol. Surly they should Scald. A logical solution would be to have Scalding as the under water version of burning and have a new under water FX for it, like instead of flames, maybe bubbles or steam or even heat shimmer.

Logic?
This game allows the slaying of fire based enemy using a ‘fire’ elemental spells; same goes with other elemental enemies using the same kind of elemental spells.

- To kill ‘fire shaman’ using a ‘fire greatsword’

I pointed this out before in a mapchat and someone says;
- Fighting fire with fire
- Just firing out the fire within fire shaman -_-.

Its one of these things thats a balance between logic and game balance. If you look at Warrior’s GS #1, the last hit slams the sword down at the enemy, if did that in real life with a hugeass sword, the enemy would be knocked to the ground. But if every 3rd autoattack was a KD, then warriors would be the most overpowered profession in PvP.

Flissy.4093:

One of the worsts builds I’ve ever heard. Sure, if you’re not running meta use play how you want builds and avoid speedruns, but for the love of god actually use some good traits. You’ve gone 20 into Tactics but no Empowered Allies, you’ve gone 10 into Arms and not got Rending Strikes, you’ve specifically put MORE points into Discipline just for Warrior’s Sprint? Are you high?

If you’re intent on using “bad” weapons full time, at least build them around giving power to your allies and pick up Vuln wherever you can. a Phalanx Strength build would work with those weapons. You have Longbow for fire field & blast, then warhorn for another blast. Then you can drop 2 banners in and FGJ and BAM, quite a bit of Might.

But seriously, don’t try to “optimize” a bad weapon setup as you either run meta or run play how you want avoiding speedruns.

This is probably downright the most needlessly aggressive reply I’ve seen.

Waldir.2571:

So… Changing subject away from this fight… I saw a warrior get kicked last nigh for using gs, when I asked why he was kicked the leader told me because he wasn’t running Nikes build, I wonder how that jerk feels today.

Its quite saddening when things like that happen. People are just following others like sheep, not testing it out, not looking for answers themselves. I bet if Nike said tommorow that mace-shield is the new DPS build people will just blindly follow that as well.

If you’re going pure axe, I think Dual Wield agility is definitely something you want to take.

There’s a lot of cases in the game where you want to go pure axe really. Like the before-mentioned fotm fight in a pug, or Mossman in general at 40+, its a complete losing battle trying to land 100b in that mess, so GS DPS ends up on the bottom of the sea.

I don’t think the aim of the developers should be to change the meta. Heck, I hate the idea of a ‘metabuild’ which everyone should take. It should be different builds for different situations, you can never balance the game properly if you’re just going to put pretty much every build under the who-has-more-DPS game, because no matter what you do, there’s always a build which will have higher DPS.

LB is probably your best choice for ranged combat because of its utility. Its also very useful in conjecture with a GS in a Phalanx Strength might stacking build in some situations when might is hard to keep up with a GS alone, like some fractals where you can’t shoot off 100B constantly.

But I wouldn’t bother with conditions in PvE.

I think my biggest kitten with GS rotations is that you need to get HB off, which in a lot of fights can be quite troublesome. For example if your pugging fractals, that first set of minibosses in the harpie fractal is just dang impossible to use HB on constantly cos people will be running around, and the bosses move with them.

Out of all the bosses I’ve done so far, I think the most difficult was TA Aetherpath boss 1.