The idea was GW2 is supposed to be a game which is relatively free from looking at your UI.
In most MMOs, it becomes more about UI management than actually playing the game, which was something the wider gaming community hated about MMOs. So Anet tried to stay away from that.
It’s often stated that classes serve three purposes in MMOs.
1. Allows you to feel unique, because you can do things other players can’t.
2. Makes balancing the game easier.
3. Gives making alts a purpose.
But does it really serve any of those purposes?
1. In games where the class systems ate very relaxed or non-existent, build-crafting can become so diverse and deep that people effectively create their own classes. That to me lets you feel a lot more unique than having classes.
2. I wanna give an example for this. I think when devs talk about balance is pretty much alwats about PvP. The Secret World has a pretty tiny dev team compared to GW2 after Funcom laid off half their staff, and certainly doesn’t have a balancing team (the last balance patch was like a year ago).
Yet PvP in TSW is a lot more balanced and diverse than GW2. How? Because TSW has an extremely open build crafting system with no class restrictions at all, so the complexity of it means that there’s a lot more options open for many different play styles so you don’t end up having a few metabuilds that’s better than everything else. You can have a lot of skills in every class, but each class will still have a pretty much pre-defined play style and attributes, so you end up with a small pool of builds which synergises with that best.
3. I tend to think alts are a solution to a problem instead of a benefit. Other than to just play the game from the start or RPing (which you will still do without classes) you create alts do you can experience the play style of other classes, if there were no classes, then you won’t need to create alts to experience other plays toes because it’s all accessible from a single toon.
What do you guys think?
Sorry to necro this thread but, seriously, what’s the verdict on this?
Just looking at the price of Eternity now, it’s a real issue, so why all the silence over it?
^ then it’s very likely he’s just a lot better skill-wise than you three or you’re using very inefficient builds.
Or like a lot of people say the warrior is OP.
If you lost to anyone 3 on one, then there’s something more than them being OP.
Champ farming wasn’t even good money to begin with and it certainly isn’t fun.
Apart from the glitches, I don’t really see what’s bad about what happened to world bosses. I mean, it’s not like you would specifically camp for a world boss other than Teq/Wurm anyways, and guild boss calling should remove camping from those 2.
You would still use zerker on anything that you can zerker in PvE. You might need some sturdier stuff in FotM if you can’t handle zerker.
- New traits: some of them are nice but for PvE at least, there really isn’t enough good traits to create new builds for efficient players. It’s a two-sided problem between so few choices in skills and traits and PvE offering mostly very little need other than damage.
It’s a bit far-fetched but I think having a dual-profession system might actually benefit the game by a lot.
Fractal backs x4. It was a lot of grind and money. Now anyone with 1 back can have the skin across all their characters. I’m having fun looking at my “dual” wielding legendaries but at the same time can’t seem to stop thinking about all those who grinded for their gear only now left to wonder who really did and didn’t do what. Mixed emotions.
The skin may be unlocked account wide, but stats aren’t. Are you saying you’re characters aren’t benefiting from the stats that the fractal back pieces give?
The final upgrade which costs 500 relics and 250 ectos is purely cosmetic
^ then it’s very likely he’s just a lot better skill-wise than you three or you’re using very inefficient builds.
And I don’t think it’s just carebear tendencies. What looks good on paper often just doesn’t work out. Either because you don’t have the skills to pull it off or reality (like dredge in an average pug) doesn’t let you.
You can’t trait-check in pugs and you don’t know how well the other players can play anyways. You certainly can’t just kick guildies from your party and tell them ‘sorry, you aren’t good enough’ when you call for guild runs (cos that’ll make them really appreciate being part of the guild). So I don’t think an organised party is really an assumption you can just without question assume in general build-making.
(edited by Xae Isareth.1364)
^ yes, you can kill him in one pour, but realistically you won’t have a group that can all the time. It takes so long gathering a group for 40+ without rangers and necros I just take anyone that comes along.
I don’t think you need to retrait for Lupi. You can’t go near him when he’s casting that attack anyways.
^ wait. Empower triggers this as well?
Does that mean you can have 2 warriors setting up a might chain?
I havn’t done the maths for it but I wonder if rotating out to GS to HB/WWA on a wall/ then rush would be a DPS increase against faceroll bosses once they fix the rush bug.
Cos rush’s damage is quite eye-catching.
They keep talking about wanting more build diversity, but with this crit power nerf:
- It just pushes players more towards bunker and condi builds which were already very popular in WvW and especially sPvP.
- It won’t change a thing in PvE for what most players do every day. It might affect things a bit in very high FotM but the main problem wasn’t because zerk was so powerful, but because most PvE content either has no need of survivability (AC/CoF) or encourages an all or nothing attitude where damage comes in huge spikes so there was no point in having more defence cos you’ll die anyways.
In summary, the change brought no benefits whatsoever into the game.
This is all calculated based on you being able to stick to the boss and keep attacking though, and that the situation doesn’t favor any particular types of playstyle.
I’m still not convinced that holds true all the time. Having done FotM 40+ mainly in pugs, I think most people can’t. And if they can’t, it starts to weight on the side of you shouldn’t bother either, because as then fights last longer, things become more chaotic, and the benefits of you sticking vs the higher chance of you making mistake and getting downed start shifting towards the later end.
Plus, there’s quite a few fights that favor burst damage or mobility. An example being Lupi on P3, it really helps to have WWA to get out of the huge PBAoE, and since you’re already on GS, why not just throw HB at him?
Or the dredge final boss. You can melee him for a brief while before you gotta move, so it favours burst damage.
I don’t think anything is going to change in most PvE situations. If you don’t die in zerk before, you won’t die now. So why bother taking more toughness?
It might be different in Arah or FotM.
You still want to go full zerk in a perfect speedrun situation.
What’s the point of going tankyzerk if you can survive without going tanks anyways? You may as well pump all you can into damage.
However, if you were struggling to play full zerk, it might be worth pumping some survivability because you might not be getting enough returns to compensate for deaths etc now.
I’ll probably go a bit more tanky on all my classes if I do 40+ FotM. I’m just not focused enough after work to pull full zerk on that.
What’s the problem? You were never supposed to form giant champ trains and farm them this way from the start.
There’s plenty of other ways to get money.
Depends what people think really. It might just be a rush of Eternities coming in now, and once that’s gone (however long that takes), it might trinkle down and we see prices going back up, depending on what people feel like.
Whatever happens, it won’t end well.
I personally dont really see the logic behind this nerf either, at least for PvE. I mean, I get what they’re trying to do but…
The optimal setup in any game, even if you’re a tank is to take the bare minimal survival for your healer to not die from exhaustion, aggro generation (which could also mean DPS) such that the boss doesn’t peel off you and then pile whatever you got left to rack up DPS to make the runs shorter.
And that’s exactly what’s going on here. As long as you keep encounters the way they are, people who min-max will just pump much as they can into DPS no matter how hard you nerf it.
Crashed immediately following the update.
I have to admit, I didn’t expect this to happen lol, didn’t think enough people had the cash to try and pull that loophole off.
So, discussions on what’s going to happen? Will this continue, or its this a short-term blip caused by a influx of Eternities made to get the skins.
And also very importantly, is this a problem?
I’ll second this rant, but we should be careful:
The Secret world had/has this problem too and people complained about it. So what did funcom do? release “Gender Equality” which was a swimsuit set.
Women got a full covering wetsuit with rebreather… The snark comes in when males got a lime green body thong.
Admittedly, it’s hilarious.
It was an April Fools joke.
Not even a single dev response on this for months. Wonderful.
Guys, they said it.
Thanks to the mega server system helping population disparity, they’re adding NEW MAPS!
REJOICE!
I would rather them make more stuff to do in the current maps. Half the existing maps serve no purpose in the game other than just being there.
With things as they are, what’s a new map going to do?
More maps people spend 5 mins on before going back to do other things because there’s nothing there?
Have more DEs which gives junk all so no one bothers with them?
Have more dungeons like TA Aetherpath where you really question what’s the point of doing it because facerolling AC gives better rewards?
There’s a lot that needs to be fixed before we need new maps.
So has this been addressed or are we all gonna go farm Twilights and Sunrises for the free skins?
Let me know how you farm those items and I’ll be the first one to buy your newsletter. If you mean farm for gold to buy those items. Then….yea. People already do that. It’s how many have gotten legendaries. Buy gold, buy legendaries.
Except now there’s an extra step of sell legendary, get skin for next to free.
IMHO they should just give you a token to trade one of your legendaries in for any other one. They’re all roughly the same amount of work to build.
Okay, I’ll just make 6 Frenzies with a portion of my money right now then, and then swap them for 6 Twilight’s when the patch goes live and make about 4800g profit. I like your idea.
Anet could take the average tp price of legendaries over the last 3 months and allow us to pick one of lesser value than our duplicate. Crisis averted.
Or just unbind any duplicate legendaries so they can be sold….
Both the bosses you gave as an example you can stick to them in melee no problem, the dredge boss (both versions) are not that hard to melee, just need to dodge their respective attacks and just keep DPSing, and the golem boss (old tom iirc) you just stand behind a guardian (or use untraited wardens or an earth elemental) and and DPS, sure the guardian might down but even when down he will block for you so the other 4 party members can safely stack behind him and DPS him down no problem.
Dredge isn’t hard to dodge at all, the ice ele’s adds are a bit of a problem but its still managable, the problem is him aggroing you and screwing up the pull.
A zerk Guardian will go down very very fast, at least on 40+, and will also then die rather fast unless you res him, which nets you 2 players doing nothing and possibly a dead guy at the end.
We are talking about old tom right? Since it isnt a problem.. before the guardian is full dead old tom is already dead so there is no real issue with this evne with zerker guardian at 40+
In a fully optimised group, perhaps (I’ve yet to actually run 40+ with one because it’s a struggle to find a full group for 40+ as it is), but in reality, you probably won’t run with optimised groups all the time, even if you’re a part of a huge guild.
If I face tank the guy on my zerk guardian point blank without an ele doing heals I’m down in about 5-10 seconds, depending on where the lasers come from. You’re gonna need a lot of DPS to pull it off.
Until I see games without the trinity offering complex fights such as vashj, sunstrider, alar, hydross, gorefiend, Council, firefighter mimiron, etc I will conclude that the trinity offers far more opportunity for complex fight mechanics than a pure “everyone is dps” approach.
What would really help the tank/healer shortage would be allowing everyone to be a tank healer or Dps whenever they felt like it without rerolling or regearing.
Those fights aren’t actually complex. They’re like playing a new piece on a piano, it’s hard the first few times but once you done it, you can pretty much do it on auto drive. There’s actually relatively little thought process to them because you’re just following the fight script.
We don’t need more fights like those in my opinion. Do you actually feel like you’re fighting in those fights? I don’t, it’s not that they aren’t fun but I feel more like I’m playing a piano than actually fighting something.
This is why Aetherpath failed. It wasn’t because no one liked it, you got a lot of people who loved it. It failed because there’s just no point doing it.
In other words, people want rewards more than they want challenge. The lifespan of Challenge in MMO PvE is precisely as long as it takes for those who want it to master the content, after which it is no longer challenging. The lifespan of reward-based content is as long as the rewards are worth it. Given that (per-launch) the entire game was supposed to have been about fun, I’d say that the masses have spoken.
Its not that at its core. A decade of MMORPGs has conditioned MMO gamers to expect rewards for doing anything in the game. Even if its the first time you run a raid, you still expect raid drops.
You can’t make a MMO purely based on ‘fun’, because the masses wouldn’t bother with it.
The problem is with pve design. If mobs weren’t so pants on head dumb you’d see our burst skills being regarded as important just like in PvP, where every burst skill other than GS is great. As it is generally all you need is dps, why bother using immobilizes or stuns?
You can never get AI to be as good as players, at least not yet.
Both the bosses you gave as an example you can stick to them in melee no problem, the dredge boss (both versions) are not that hard to melee, just need to dodge their respective attacks and just keep DPSing, and the golem boss (old tom iirc) you just stand behind a guardian (or use untraited wardens or an earth elemental) and and DPS, sure the guardian might down but even when down he will block for you so the other 4 party members can safely stack behind him and DPS him down no problem.
Dredge isn’t hard to dodge at all, the ice ele’s adds are a bit of a problem but its still managable, the problem is him aggroing you and screwing up the pull.
A zerk Guardian will go down very very fast, at least on 40+, and will also then die rather fast unless you res him, which nets you 2 players doing nothing and possibly a dead guy at the end.
They’re talking about having 2, which was an exclusive right of people with actually 2 legendaries.
And they they enjoyed that right for however long they’ve had their legendary. How many hours of play did they get out of them? Will continue to get out of them. Its not like someone is suddenly taking them away. Hell, now they can duel wield on some other character if they so choose.
And your comment isn’t exactly true either. You can get the skins for Sunrise and Twilight at a small fraction of the costs of actually making one by a loophole in the system with Eternity.
You’re going to go into that again? What, you think people are suddenly going to whip out their CC and buy Eternity to unlock those skins tomorrow? Granted a few might, but you’re not going to see some massive influx of legendaries tomorrow. The masses do not have them, nor will they have them simply due to the update. Legendary wielders are still (for the time being) the ‘precious snowflakes’ they desire to be, to borrow from other’s terminology.
1. Achieving things, looking back and being proud about achieving those things, and seeing value in what you’ve achieved are a huge part of MMOs. This makes a lot of people feel lose that value and feel like they wasted their time.
2. I’ve never said there’s going to be a mass influx of SR/TL. I actually said in our precious debate that most people won’t be able to pull it off.
But that doesn’t mean the loophole/exploit shouldn’t be closed.
^ that’s completely your opinion, and by the looks of how most MMOs have raids (they must be there for a reason), you’re probably a minority.
And what’s so bad about them? If you don’t like them, then just dont join a raid.
I don’t like sPvP because I don’t particularly enjoy PvP based around bunkering in circles to win, but you don’t see me petitioning sPvP to be removed from GW2 :/
^ I’m talking about doing the seals, the boss is zerk material unless someone dodnt kill all his adds before hitting the seal. Mobs will constantly attack you and you really can’t dodge everything, and they hurt quite a bit on 40+.
And to elaborate, why would you want to zerk it anyways? Your damage is of minor importance there because adds just respawn and the only point of doing so is to charge up the hammer, which only 1 person can have at a time. You also want to control your damage, so that you leave mobs at low HP for the hammer guy to pick off.
They’re talking about having 2, which was an exclusive right of people with actually 2 legendaries.
And your comment isn’t exactly true either. You can get the skins for Sunrise and Twilight at a small fraction of the costs of actually making one by a loophole in the system with Eternity.
^ that’s not because people don’t want to run hard dungeons but because rewards are screwed up. AC3 takes 15 mins, faceroll. Arah P3 takes 30 on average, a hour with bad players, a lot harder.
…. yet they give the same rewards. No one ever plays MMO content just for laughs and giggles, players will always ask ’where’s the loot?‘. If there is no loot, people won’t do it.
This is why Aetherpath failed. It wasn’t because no one liked it, you got a lot of people who loved it. It failed because there’s just no point doing it.
You get 2g. Great, same as a AC run and gathering a few iron nodes, which takes a fraction of the time and effort of Aetherpath. The chances of you getting an Aether skin is so low it might as well not be there, meaning most people walk out after with a sour taste in their mouths, feeling like hey wasted their time, and swear to never do it again.
People want hard, interesting and challenging content, but it needs good loot to reward you. Look at raids in other games. They can take months of practice to nail down yet players still sign up in droves for them in guilds and everyone asks ‘how are the raids in this game?’ for every new MMO.
I don’t have dual legendaries, or dual of any skin but the problem seems to be going over my head. Legendaries are more than just a skin, and that’s all they can transmute over.
If you can compare legendaries to a real life product, it’s like an LV bag. Yeah sure, it’s probably sligggggghtttly better than a normal leather bag, but once you remove the fancy skin, it’s little more than an average Ascended.
Yeah, you can change stats but there’s really only a few sets of stats which you would use with any particular weapon anyways, and you can’t change the sigil at will, meaning that it doesn’t quite work out because the sigil’s rather important in most builds, so you need a new weapon anyways.
Plus, when I crafted my Ascended stuff, you can craft up to 40 Ascended weapons at the price of a legendary.
In short, the skin isnt everything, but it’s almost everything.
Not everything in PvE is zerk.
Take the collosus fractal for example. At 40+, you’re going to be taking serious unavoidable damage constantly, with vulnerability and poison bring stacked on you all the time, and damage isn’t really that important because the aim until the boss fight isn’t to kill things quickly as possible but to survive. In fact, you would even want to control your damage sometimes.
It’s just that we don’t have enough of content like that and all the stuff the average player does to get income everyday is just faceroll, so you may as well just go full zerk.
Having said that, warriors are a bit of a special class because even if you go full zerk, you still have quite a bit of survivability.
Why this obsession with killing a bunker guard that can’t kill you? Its like fighting a PVT P/D 30 SA thief, troll spec. Pure troll.
And I doubt you can kill them with condis, well it will take 2 hours
If its sPvP, then they can cap rather well, of it’s WvW, they mmmmmight be able to jump in and create havoc in your group and screw stuff up whilst their teammates kill you. Not sure how well guardians can do that though.
Ifs it’s a 1v1, I guess it’s just the fun of figuring out how to beat a build like that.
Lupi isn’t a fight that requires much movement in a perfect melee group. But I’d imagine you want GS on that for phase 3’s PBAoE
Let me give you and example then. That golem boss in the harpie fractal. I don’t know about you but whenever I fight that thing it tends to only stay still for 5 seconds at most before shooting out his meow lazers. And I don’t think you can just face tank the lazers in full zerker. So, it favors having a lot burst damage.
And to a lesser extent, the legendary archdiver in collosus. I say lesser because if you have lightning reflexes to dodge his split second hammer smash, you probably can stay on him, but if you don’t like me, then it’s better to not eat dirt half the fight.
Then you have bosses like the dredge end boss where you just have to constantly move, so you can quite easily HB/WWA it once it’s in position, but you certainly can’t just stick on him with melee.
^ I think it’s either nerf b. power or make burst skills more useful. Atm I think it’s a case if buff burst skills.
People say that burst skills are something that’s supposed to be very situational but given that they are the defining feature of warriors, shouldn’t gameplay as a warrior involve extensively using them?
Also, what’s a good build for someone else may not be a good build for you because you don’t play like them.
I’d also advise trying out to make your own buil because unlike PvE, just having a build doesn’t mean you’ll play that build well, because you stil need to understand how it works.
But I really think Adrenaline skills need an overhaul. The way it is right now, it does seem like a pretty terrible design decision because you got traits which basically tells you to not use your class mechanic, which doesn’t make any sense.
Perhaps they should change Discipline’s passive to be an increase in the rate of adrenaline gain and add a trait (like that guardian Virtue trait) which adds secondary effects to burst skills, eg (numbers need balancing):
- GS: also adds 3 stacks of 10s Might per bar used.
- Mace: adds 7 stacks of vulnerability
- Axe: now cleaves
- LB: allies in affected area gains fury.
- Sword: each hit increases the damage of the next hit
- Rifle: decreases casting time
- Hammer: grants protection per enemy hit
I’ve been so far just using GS F1 after HB/WWA/rush to keep fury up 100% then using that heal skill to top to 100% adrenaline.
It seems Eviscerate is worth using if you got that axe discipline trait, because if there’s multiple enemies, 1 axe no2 pretty much instantly fills your bar and otherwise it takes like 3 seconds to fill it back up. Or instantly with axe 5.
^ dual wield trait, not build. Can’t edit on my phone.
I really don’t think the dual world build is actually a 10- 14% DPS increase. It is if you can constantly stay on an enemy and DPS, which is true for faceroll dungeons like CoF, but for other actually challenging fights, that can’t really happen.
I haven’t played warr that much but even if I run a AH Knight guardian, I still have to peel of a lot in places like 40+ FotM, and look for openings to attack instead of just clinging onto the boss. So in that regard, big hits like HB or risk-free attacks like GS3 (or GS3 against a wall) has major place in combat.
All in all, you can’t really calculate DPS in GW2 like you can for games like WoW, simply because you can’t just run rotations over and over again in a lot if fights.
Just started a warrior and she’s now near 80. So I think I’m sort of getting a good idea of what’s good and what’s not so good.
Are burst skills worth using?
Reason I’m saying this is that because of Berserker’s Power and Heightened Focus, it just doesn’t seem like its worth it to use them and take a hefty DPS decrease. Eviscerate if you trailed for axe sea like the only one worth using.
Its a bit weird that Anet made traits which basically discourages you from using your class mechanic and thus making the game more boring (Double Dragon: Wander of the Dragons much?). Or is this just me being a noob?
^ inb4 crafting precursors finally implemented but you need a legendary to craft a precursor.
It probably also has something to do with speculative rises.
I don’t think the Eternity exploit/loophole has much to do with it because there’s still relatively few people who can afford to do it.