Guild Wars 2

BurrTheKing.8571:

Xae Isareth.1364:

They really need to split PvE and PvP and cone to accept that they are very different game modes. Until they do this, you never reach a state were everything is useful in every game mode because what’s useful and what’s powerful are just so different between them.

I actually agree with the devs that doing so isn’t necessarily the best idea. More splits means more ways to break something. It would be better in the long run to fix the mechanics and design of PvE. For example, instead of almost every boss being “avoid the red spot or die” have some that do consistent small damage so having someone heal is actually needed. Designing content so that you can’t just bring the same builds to every encounter might actually get me interested in PvE again.

The problem is that it’s too late. If this was alpha then that would be ok, since you’d expect a lot of major changes.

But we’re in live, if they do what you suggested it would either take years and years of small updates or them pretty much remaking every encounter from scratch. The firts option would be pointless as the game would have spent most of its lifecycle by the time it’s finished, and the second just isn’t viable.

Besides that, it was a design decision to make PvE like that. If you look at the NPC guards in WvW, they do just that. They use player skills, hits softer than normal high-end PvE mobs but attacks fast. If they wanted PvE to be like that they would’ve just put mobs like those into PvE.

So in summary, PvE and PvP are very different by design. So it just makes no sense to balance them under the same umbrella because they’re almost 2 different games.

Doesn’t the fire #1 do better damage than it by a good 20% or more? You do need all 3 claws to hit but that’s not hard most of the time. I suppose it could be useful if you were stuck in fire in a multi- mob situation.

^ I think what they care too much about is eSports and balance. Looking at the new costume brawl skills that were on Halloween items, adding new skills certainly isn’t out of their capabilities.

But why don’t they do it? Who knows.

Well, it’s not like you threw all that money down the drain.

You end up with 3 full sets of ascended armour. If you had to sacrifice the sets for the achievement, that might be a different story.

The kind of progression I wanna see is new skills. With PvE the way it is, we’ve been doing the same thing over and over and over for the last 2 years.

RyuDragnier.9476:

kitten .9460:

Einlanzer.1627:

No thank you.

Frankly, making DB a power skill wouldn’t make sense, since D/D is already fully functional as a power set and the only other melee option is power-only.

It doesn’t need to be changed, except for maybe tuning the evade a bit. It functions very effectively as a bleed stacker and allows D/D to have a little versatility. It’s also very flavorful. Anyone who thinks it’s weak or useless doesn’t know what they’re talking about and is just stuck in myopic perpetual backstab mode.

DB is a terrible skill I’ve mained thief since day 1… it is just bad, glad you can find some joy in 3 spamming on immobile AI though.

Try using it against another player in yolo or team queue or even a dungeon and watch as the group laughs at you and expect a swift kick.

Doesn’t make sense to have it condi based on an obvious power set.

Ironic, I keep killing other players with it in sPvP and WvW. They don’t really expect it to be used on them immediately after a backstab, and it has some nice bleeding on it. You could call them bads or whatever, I call it the art of surprise, because would YOU expect another thief to use DB on you?

I wouldn’t because I’d be questioning what the heck is he doing. The idea of a d/d build is to kill quick and get out quick, because you hit hard and get hit hard.

If I got back stabbed, I’m heavily damaged and a few more autos would both poison me and leave me to be very vulnerable to get KOed by heartseeker. I’m expecting that.

If you then instead self-CC yourself and let me heal instead of finishing me off, be my guest, I’m happy to take that.

They really need to split PvE and PvP and cone to accept that they are very different game modes. Until they do this, you never reach a state were everything is useful in every game mode because what’s useful and what’s powerful are just so different between them.

Engis ate fine in terms of balance. They just need cosmetic upgrades, QoL, and a loooooooot of bug fixes.

Rocket boots killing you cos it does a 90 turn off a cliff
Flamethrower’s #2 can’t blast #4 cos it’s too low to be blasted whilst targeting.
A lot of traits bugged.
Hobo sacks making you look stupid
Turrets looking like they are made on a budget
Etc

I was honestly expecting some sort of a change to the flamethrower Napalm skill, as it is, trying to blast it with #2 (which was clearly changed into a blast to synergises with it) is just downright impossible in PvP without getting yourself killed and just awkward in PvE because of how low the field is.

Besides that, #2 missing the blast if you target anything because it just goes over the field is clearly not intended. I was expecting one if two things to happen (or both):

1. Make #2 a TAoE that detonates automatically on landing, with an option to detonate it early. This would make it a lot more useful as a blast in PvP.

2. Just make the Napalm field higher.

Where would you use this skill and why?

I’m just struggling to come up with ideas.

RyuDragnier.9476:

Xae Isareth.1364:

RyuDragnier.9476:

Xae Isareth.1364:

Gudy.3607:

evilapprentice.6379:

Except it’s still a kittenty condition damage based move in a power/crit damage based set.

D/D is clearly not a hybrid set – it has exactly 1 skill that can do damage with conditions (no, poison on lotus strike is not a viable damage source for condition builds). That is not a hybrid set.

sigh There we go again. Yes, most of the D/D skills are direct damage. Death Blossom, though, provides some of the strongest bleed stacks in the game and an easy way to stack them so they do significant damage. I don’t think that this is an accident like some other skills in this game which provide bleeding as something of an afterthought. Which, yes, makes D/D a hybrid set, whether you want it to or not.

With the poison to reduce healing, the Heart Seeker as a (admittedly somewhat short-ranged) gap closer, Dancing Dagger helping both with getting close and getting away, and Cloak and Dagger for stealth access, that makes it a decent hybrid set, as far as these things go. Is it competitive in PvP? Probably not, from what I’m hearing, and something should perhaps be done about that. Changing the character of the whole set, especially when the Thief already has a bunch of pure power sets (S/P, S/D, D/P), does not strike me as the way to do so, though.

I don’t really see how a hybrid set would work with d/d. I can see it happening if db costs 0 initiative but, with the way it is atm, after you finish spamming DB to stack bleeds, you’re gonna be too low to do anything else.

Then as the bleeds come off, you’re gonna need to kittenain to maintain the pressure. That basically leads to a build in which you just spam DB 90% of the time.

That’s why condi-builds are mostly defensive and have an offset like P/D. Because once you’re out of ini, you need to keep pressure on either with more conditions, or you need to dodge/stealth while they do their work.

Also, you could change DB into a purely power attack and nobody would use it when you could just CnD and then backstab and trounce whatever damage DB would do then. That’s why a change is not needed…you’re only screwing over the condi players, the power players will never play with the move no matter what because you either burst or condi with D/D, there is nothing else.

Or they could make DB into an utility skill. A teleport, longer/more reliable evades that interrupts your attack animation, or something more complex like, say

Chain skill: Pain Weaver>Death Blossom

Pain Weaver: marks the target. For each further hit you damage the target with, it gains 1 stack of Pain. Each stack of Pain increases the damage the target takes by 0.5%.

Death Blossom: dash into the target, and if you successfully strike the target, remove all stacks of Pain from the target, dealing x damage per stack removed. Target loses all stacks of Pain and takes no damage if you fail to hit the target with this attack.

Combined ini cost would probably the be the equivalent of a CnD…and would probably do less damage. Again, it wouldn’t replace CnD and Backstab. And if anything, would pigeonhole all the condition users exclusively into P/D (a set I personally find boring). And again, WHY do we need another power set other than S/D, S/P, and D/P anyway? Nobody has explained that part to me yet…because it would be like changing LB on Ranger into a condition weapon when they already have SB, mainhand axe, offhand axe, and offhand torch.

Why would it do the same damage? It requires more build up, and thus can be more punishing on the target.

You also get a damage bonus on the target which benefits the entire group, that’s especially useful for PvE.

I don’t disagree with the idea of a thief condition weapon. D/D is not a condition weapon, it’s designed to be a hybrid weapon but that’s just doesn’t work.

The thing I don’t get is why does it always have to be this idea that it’s gotta do damage. Why can’t it be an utility skill?

Rune of the Hybrid

1)35 power
2)35 precision
3) +65 power
4) Gain 10% (25% in PvE) of your power as condition damage
5) +65 precision
6) Gain 20% (45% in PvE) of your power as condition damage

AndRec.3496:

Gaile Gray.6029:

dace — I wouldn’t want you to think that this has been a static thing, that there’s been no movement on this. There’s been assessment, analysis, and discussion. The devs have considered changes and some they’ve outright rejected where others are still in the running and need assessing in relation to the bigger picture that I mentioned earlier. If there aren’t details to provide overtly — and right now there are not — there is activity happening covertly. So I would say that progress has been made.

CDI on this? I don’t know what Chris Whiteside’s schedule is for CDI’s, and I know his bandwidth is stretched thin. (He has a boatload of stuff on his plate, that for sure!) However, I’ll ping him about that and he can consider if it would fall into the CDI format, and if so, when.

Thanks for the suggestion.

GG Gaile! And Please let us know for future updates on the subject

Im not expecting things to do anywhere soon. On a PvE basis, conditions are pretty much designed for a single-player game in terms of doing damage.

It’d take a revamp from the ground up to make conditions competitive or even viable in the case of Burn. On the other hand, since they don’t want to separate PvP and PvE, they have to make this solution sensible there as well.

It’s a nightmare.

Things would be a lot easier if they let go of this PvE-PvP unity. Then you got a lot more wiggle room to solve problems.

Tao.5096:

Xae Isareth.1364:

It’s stuff like that which really lowers the skill ceiling of the game.

it’s only Warrior like that, not every other class.

Thanks to this, loads of people roll Warriors since they’re more of push 1-2-3-4-5 and it works.

The only problem occurs after this.

When a Warrior player log into forum and create a new thread called:
“Thief is OP – Nerf now!”

etc etc etc.

It’s all over the game. Burning Precision+10% burn on eles, Predator’s Onslaught + just perma cripple off autoattack on ranger sword, etc.

RyuDragnier.9476:

Xae Isareth.1364:

Gudy.3607:

evilapprentice.6379:

Except it’s still a kittenty condition damage based move in a power/crit damage based set.

D/D is clearly not a hybrid set – it has exactly 1 skill that can do damage with conditions (no, poison on lotus strike is not a viable damage source for condition builds). That is not a hybrid set.

sigh There we go again. Yes, most of the D/D skills are direct damage. Death Blossom, though, provides some of the strongest bleed stacks in the game and an easy way to stack them so they do significant damage. I don’t think that this is an accident like some other skills in this game which provide bleeding as something of an afterthought. Which, yes, makes D/D a hybrid set, whether you want it to or not.

With the poison to reduce healing, the Heart Seeker as a (admittedly somewhat short-ranged) gap closer, Dancing Dagger helping both with getting close and getting away, and Cloak and Dagger for stealth access, that makes it a decent hybrid set, as far as these things go. Is it competitive in PvP? Probably not, from what I’m hearing, and something should perhaps be done about that. Changing the character of the whole set, especially when the Thief already has a bunch of pure power sets (S/P, S/D, D/P), does not strike me as the way to do so, though.

I don’t really see how a hybrid set would work with d/d. I can see it happening if db costs 0 initiative but, with the way it is atm, after you finish spamming DB to stack bleeds, you’re gonna be too low to do anything else.

Then as the bleeds come off, you’re gonna need to kittenain to maintain the pressure. That basically leads to a build in which you just spam DB 90% of the time.

That’s why condi-builds are mostly defensive and have an offset like P/D. Because once you’re out of ini, you need to keep pressure on either with more conditions, or you need to dodge/stealth while they do their work.

Also, you could change DB into a purely power attack and nobody would use it when you could just CnD and then backstab and trounce whatever damage DB would do then. That’s why a change is not needed…you’re only screwing over the condi players, the power players will never play with the move no matter what because you either burst or condi with D/D, there is nothing else.

Or they could make DB into an utility skill. A teleport, longer/more reliable evades that interrupts your attack animation, or something more complex like, say

Chain skill: Pain Weaver>Death Blossom

Pain Weaver: marks the target. For each further hit you damage the target with, it gains 1 stack of Pain. Each stack of Pain increases the damage the target takes by 0.5%.

Death Blossom: dash into the target, and if you successfully strike the target, remove all stacks of Pain from the target, dealing x damage per stack removed. Target loses all stacks of Pain and takes no damage if you fail to hit the target with this attack.

draxynnic.3719:

Xae Isareth.1364:

And you already have mud field that does stuff. A thief’s stolen Gunk creates a field. Given that this thing is …well, gunk, I would imagine it does exactly what you just discribed.

The impression I get is that it’s magical gunk. Now, admittedly, earth manipulated by an earth skill becomes magical, but not chaos magic like the gunk creates.

Personally, I see two problems with the idea of earth fields:

First it’s, well, earth. Maybe it’s earth that’s doing something funky, but why would hitting, say, a Muddy Terrain have more of an effect than hitting ordinary mud, or even just plain ordinary topsoil that you walk on all the time?

Second, it seems to be the general trend with the elementalist that while other elements provide them with fields, it’s earth that provides the finishers. Fire scepter is an exception, of course, but otherwise the fields and finishers are mostly separated in this fashion.

It’s under the same logic of why can’t you just fire through normal ice in Frostgorge to achieve a ice finisher. I don’t know.

Gaile Gray.6029:

I talked to a couple of the devs just now, and they told me this is a subject they’re still reviewing and considering how best to address. It’s part of a larger discussion, as you can imagine, and changes would necessarily involve a few elements, not just condition caps alone.

While there aren’t details on changes or a timeframe in which they would be done, you can be sure that this is being reviewed by the devs and considered as part of the big picture and potential adjustments in the future.

Would you be able to twist their elbow to have a CDI on it :V?

AndRec.3496:

Easy fix for condition problem, LET THE MOST DAMAGING ( more condi damage ) OVERWRITE THE LESS DAMAGING , fast fix, easy to implement ( even i could program this) , condition spec are now at least usefull in open world content and dungeon, and Not much more stress for the server than now…
Ooooook now you can hire me anet?! Is it even possible this isnt came out of any develeper mind in this year? Im Not the only one supporting and promoting this feature

It’s not that simple. Take Burning for example, the Guardian’s only damaging condition.

If there’s more than 1 person using a guardian condition build in a group, it just doesn’t work for the second person. The way burning is designed just doesn’t work for a MMORPG because there’s going to be other people playing with you.

mulch.2586:

The moral of the story is good players don’t condition-build.

Was the same way before launch.

Go ahead and make one. Play a Mantra Mesmer. Play a Signet Ranger. For most of the game, you’ll be fine, cuz the game’s just not that dependent on dps. Your choice.

But it’s absurd to complain about your choice. Cuz you’re the one wot made it.

I don’t even know what to say at this comment. I really don’t.

nerovergil.5408:

dude. get another alt for 80 then more alt, full space? farm gems. buy slots. make alt 80. repeat. endgame

I don’t think repeatedly going though 80 levels of stuff you just went through, and then dump the new character to do it all over again is most people’s idea of ‘stuff to do’.

Palador.2170:

Xae Isareth.1364:

Palador.2170:

I’d be a bit upset for a while, but in the end I wouldn’t really care.

I’d see it as an admission that they’ve taken a great game and messed it up so bad that most people simply don’t want to play most of it. Hardly the “improving as we go” that an MMO is supposed to do.

It’s what I thought when EQ (it was EQ, right?) made servers where you started out at a higher level. It speaks of a gross failure to make the entire game fun.

Well, just like any game, it is fun the first time you do it, but doing it for the 10 th time? Not so fun and you just want to get it over with.

That’s the failure though, is it not? It SHOULD be fun, and if it’s not then what do you get from the level 80 character that you can’t get on the way to 80? Take that, and spread it around more.

Take the Living Story, for example. When Flame and Frost started, I was thrilled that they’d avoided the trap of making it high levels only, and put it in lower level areas. This let EVERYONE play it, with any character they wanted to.

Then the added the two instanced missions, Cragstead and the Hatchery. Those were level 80, but at least they up-leveled you if you weren’t 80 already. Running those with a level 15 was painful, but doable.

After that, however, much of it’s been aimed at level 80s and ONLY level 80s. This means that if you want to use a specific character in the LS and they’re not level 80, you have two choices. Just forget it, and use someone else (if you have a level 80, not everyone playing the game does), or rush to level 80 so you can do what you want to do.

I can understand why the second season is level 80, it’s supposed to come after the Personal Story. But that leaves nothing new to do unless you’re level 80. There’s no real change to the game until then, and it gets old. They need a second LS team making other stories (smaller ones, yes) at lower levels.

This is part of the reason why pushing traits back 20 levels was a bad idea. It’s yet another reason to push for level 80 as fast as you can, so you can “finish” the character. I’m sure there’s other reasons to rush to 80, they’ll change from person to person. ANet needs to take those reasons and spread them out throughout the whole game, so there’s more fun to be had before 80, and less reason to rush for levels.

If you add everything people want from a 80 to a level 1, then there’s no point having levels at all.

Kuldebar.1897:

Xae Isareth.1364:

^ Fun is a very ….fickle thing. Often what’s fun is drilled into you. The last decade pretty much associated fun in MMOs with the ‘endgame’.

Meh, so is porn, but supposedly we can all recognize it when we see it. Yes, humans are trained animals and once enveloped in the vast milieu of the echo chamber are very hard to extract.

Xae Isareth.1364:

Devs always talk about the endgame, players always worry about the endgame. Everyone focuses on the endgame. We’ve conditioned to try and reach the endgame ASAP, for years, in every MMO. So of course when you play a MMO, you just automatically go for the endgame.

Well, the ANets actually indicated that the whole game was “end-game”:

“When we looked at the concept of “endgame” for Guild Wars 2, we designed it the same way. We didn’t want the endgame to be something you could only experience after a hundred hours of gameplay or after you reached some arbitrary number. We wanted it to be something that players got to experience every step along the way, spread out across the entire world of Tyria, so we’ve introduced game elements that you’d normally associate with “endgame” at every level and every possible opportunity.”

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/the-endgame-reimagined/

---

So, my point is that they could have stuck to their plan, but instead went off the reservation and tried to cobble on the standard MMO style progression experience.

Because their vision just didn’t work out. You got a vision, but you also have 300 people and their families’ mouths to feed, with a few million dollars stuck in the project.

At that point you have to make a rational decision.

^ Fun is a very ….fickle thing. Often what’s fun is drilled into you. The last decade pretty much associated fun in MMOs with the ‘endgame’. Devs always talk about the endgame, players always worry about the endgame. Everyone focuses on the endgame. We’ve conditioned to try and reach the endgame ASAP, for years, in every MMO. So of course when you play a MMO, you just automatically go for the endgame.

It’s the same with the carrot. The devs design things with the carrot in mind, the players do things for the carrot. For years and years it’s been like this.

The roots are too deep to pull out. When there’s no endgame or no loot, players don’t like it. It;s almost like an addiction to drugs. It hurts to try to pull the roots out. It;s not something you can fix, because it’s become a part of the genre.

Besides, even if it can be fixed, who’s going to take the first step? MMOs take tens of millions, or hundreds of milllions in some cases to make. Who’s going to dump all that money into something that’s most likely to fail? The investors won’t.

Gudy.3607:

evilapprentice.6379:

Except it’s still a kittenty condition damage based move in a power/crit damage based set.

D/D is clearly not a hybrid set – it has exactly 1 skill that can do damage with conditions (no, poison on lotus strike is not a viable damage source for condition builds). That is not a hybrid set.

sigh There we go again. Yes, most of the D/D skills are direct damage. Death Blossom, though, provides some of the strongest bleed stacks in the game and an easy way to stack them so they do significant damage. I don’t think that this is an accident like some other skills in this game which provide bleeding as something of an afterthought. Which, yes, makes D/D a hybrid set, whether you want it to or not.

With the poison to reduce healing, the Heart Seeker as a (admittedly somewhat short-ranged) gap closer, Dancing Dagger helping both with getting close and getting away, and Cloak and Dagger for stealth access, that makes it a decent hybrid set, as far as these things go. Is it competitive in PvP? Probably not, from what I’m hearing, and something should perhaps be done about that. Changing the character of the whole set, especially when the Thief already has a bunch of pure power sets (S/P, S/D, D/P), does not strike me as the way to do so, though.

I don’t really see how a hybrid set would work with d/d. I can see it happening if db costs 0 initiative but, with the way it is atm, after you finish spamming DB to stack bleeds, you’re gonna be too low to do anything else.

Then as the bleeds come off, you’re gonna need to kittenain to maintain the pressure. That basically leads to a build in which you just spam DB 90% of the time.

Kuldebar.1897:

Xae Isareth.1364:

If Anet one day put a instant level 80 item on the gem store for 1000 gems. Would you throw your copy of GW2 out of the window or would you go ’that’s cool, saves me a lot of time.’?

It’s a deplorable idea and would serve as a death knell for the game.

It’s bad enough we have the level tomes already in the game, but instant 80’s would basically be an admission by ANet that they have screwed up the leveling progression so badly that skipping it entirely is an attractive thing to do even if it costs cash.

It’s crap like this that happens because gamers and developers fail to understand that either you have a common vertical progression MMO or you make a horizontal progression MMO, you do not try to do BOTH…you will fail because they are opposing systems.

Idk, most players will spend most of their time being max leveled. So the leveling process is always just going to be that, a process. A journey with a destination.

No matter how great the scenery on that journey is, the same road gets boring eventually.

d/d for sure. It’s original, it uses the least tab-targeting out of all the sets, your weaving in and out of every element (well, maybe not so much earth), and combat is just so involving.

Unlike staff where you just sit there spamming 1 and 2 all day or scepter where you’re just spamming the hammer autoattack most of the time.

Deikun.6409:

8. The original intention was to make silk worth more, since it was so bloody common. I remember myself just throwing it out every time I got some. But you know what else I also do that with? Leather. Why they thought it needed to drive silk up but not leather confounds me to no end. The fact that Damask (which is so needed by all armor professions) is what, 20 gold, and Elonian leather is like 2 is a little silly and incredibly disproportionate. But I don’t expect them to back peddle on this anytime soon, they think it’s wonderful a T5 mat is more expensive than it’s T6 counterpart.

Inb4 new ascended tier 2 gear requires more leather than silk :V

Leo G.4501:

Earth fields don’t make sense. How does jumping through mud give you an aura of anything but grimeiness? Of shooting through a line of rocks on the ground do anything but force you to miss?

To be honest, a lot of things don’t make sense in this game. I mean, where’s the logic of not only setting yourself and your team on fire with a fire field but then adding to the hurt by blowing up a ball of napalm on yourself as well?

And, what is a light field exactly?

And you already have mud field that does stuff. A thief’s stolen Gunk creates a field. Given that this thing is …well, gunk, I would imagine it does exactly what you just discribed.

I’ve been playing Neverwinter recently, and one of the classes, the control wizard, has a class mechanic where they can place one of their normal skills into the mechanic slot to add extra effects/improve it.

I think that would be quite cool for the elementalist, allowing an elite skill where it takes on some sort of a supercharged form of one of your normal utilities, but increases the cooldown by 300%.

Palador.2170:

I’d be a bit upset for a while, but in the end I wouldn’t really care.

I’d see it as an admission that they’ve taken a great game and messed it up so bad that most people simply don’t want to play most of it. Hardly the “improving as we go” that an MMO is supposed to do.

It’s what I thought when EQ (it was EQ, right?) made servers where you started out at a higher level. It speaks of a gross failure to make the entire game fun.

Well, just like any game, it is fun the first time you do it, but doing it for the 10 th time? Not so fun and you just want to get it over with.

Stiofan.6720:

Things I would love to see:

1. Remove Megaserver.
2. Add Friend Request System.
3. Add Hard Mode.
4. Add Guild Halls.
5. Add Build Templates.
6. More CPU Optimization.

I’m not really convinced that removing mega servers is a good option. What would it achieve?

If Anet one day put a instant level 80 item on the gem store for 1000 gems. Would you throw your copy of GW2 out of the window or would you go ’that’s cool, saves me a lot of time.’?

Vayne.8563:

Giving more XP for map completion, when you consider every vista, POI and heart gives you XP already would make map completion over-rewarding.

There are people who really don’t like map completing who would feel pressured to if you made the rewards so vast.

If you don’t like it, don’t do it. If you do like it do it. That’s pretty much the way the whole game is set up.

That’s why the rewards are set the way they’re set.

By the same logic, we should nerf dungeon rewards. Some of the best ways to earn gold, a whooping 70% exp on completion, per path. Plus the unique untradable skins you can buy for tokens.

Some people don’t like dungeons, should we nerf them so those people aren’t pressured to complete them?

Also, the game isn’t set up in a way of you just do stuff for the fun of it. Anet being MMO veterans are very aware that MMOs are highly reward driven.

As far as I’m aware of, the PS between all races are similarly structured. So they can alter your journal to the corresponding choices for your new race.

Personally, I got a few asuras and norns I would want to change to humans because of the ridiculous clipping issues.

I really don’t think they’ve prove their point. We got 2 healing skills and 1 extra grandmaster trait for line for each class after 2 years. I mean, I don’t know about you but that’s really not much in terms of actual character development.

What’s really missing for me personally is an endgame character progression system that’s not gear based.

Your character only has 1 body and 1 head so once you got the look you wanted, that’s pretty much it for that character.

The fun factor never really carries MMOs that far because ultimately, a MMO has only so much content and thus inevitably, things will end up being repetitive eventually.

^thats a problem with the whole game really. Take Warrior’s bleed 10% damage trait.

10% is a pretty significant damage boost, so on its own, you would think that’s pretty cool as it encourages management of bleed uptime. But no, there’s a trait before that which automatically applies bleeds for you, meaning that 10% basically becomes a free 10% DPS.

It’s stuff like that which really lowers the skill ceiling of the game.

I’m sorry but the first rule of MMORPGs is never, I mean never have RNG on interrupts. If you’re playing WoW and your raid wipes cos RNG screwed over your interrupt, how would that feel?

If I’m interrupting something, I’m relying on that interrupt to work to stay alive.

@dancingmonley tbh, throwing grenades further than rifle shots doesn’t even make sense from a balancing perspective.

It makes about as much sense as giving FT a blast-fire field synergy and then make the fire field so short that the blast can’t hit it…oh wait.

Well, look at it this way. Burning Speed and Firegrab is a very strong synergy but the 2 skills by themselves are also individually useful.

Churning Earth has precisely one way to be used against a competent player.

Anyways, this is very much deviating off the point of this discussion. The point was that CE is just useless in PvE in any situation apart from the initial might stack.

In terms of a condition revamp, the one thing which is absolutely nessecary is to get rid of the condition cap. There has been all sorts of suggestions made on how this could. E done without just having unlimited stacks.

Like boons, thy had to make it such that stronger conditions arent bring overwritten by weaker ones.

That’s the two main things really. Theres a lot of other issues such as how to address burning in a group, and the lack of synergy in stats (make power scale condtion damage as well?) and effects (vulnerability increasing condition ticks?) in condition builds vs direct builds be those two are the major things wrecking condition builds in a group setting.

You cut off his food supply and spies, you wiped out vast amounts of his army and his top commanders, but you didn’t weaken the dragon himself. When you fought him, it was implied he was still at his full power. That’s why there was all the talk before that final confrontation.

Vayne.8563:

phys.7689:

Vayne.8563:

KarlaGrey.5903:

/threadwin

Just because you say threadwin, doesn’t mean anything’s been won. Do you see the game getting much harder. I don’t. Do you want to know why? Because Anet knows what side the bread is buttered on.

The thread was lost the moment someone tried to convince the rest of us that the MMORPG playerbase largely consists of people who want hard/challenging content.

Maybe they should take the words RPG out of it, and just make it a fighting game. Yeah, that’s the ticket.

Wait rpg means easy/casual? When did this occur.
Also you do realize the game was and is advertised as having action combat? Don’t say fighting game like its a dirty word. They have some of the most balanced finrly tuned responsive action systems out there.
There are things to be learned from fighting games.
Also some fighting games are fairly accessible, ever play powerstone?

You miss my point. What made a lot of RPGs hard where thinking challenges, not fighting challenges. The problem is that people who want hard stuff, they’re really looking for boss fights. Since when did RPGs become all about boss fights. I remember older RPGs we didn’t even know what a boss fight was. It was about story, and lore.

My point is all sorts of people play these games and not all of them are after challenge. In fact many aren’t after challenge. They’re after immersion, collecting, achievement point hunting (even if there’s no achievement to it), getting rich by playing the market.

You should look at the people I’m responding to, instead of taking my text out of context. Because it is a response.

Since when does everyone who plays RPGs or even most people play them for the challenge. Most people that I knew didn’t. They played the for the story.

Guild Wars 2 needs help in that department too, but that doesn’t mean that’s not why a lot of people play the game. Or to explore an fantasy world with cool stuff.

The question is do most people want challenge? I don’t think so. Did most people play RPGs to be challenged? Not in the same sense of challenge a lot of people in this thread are asking for.

I feel that some sort of challenge is needed for the immersion. Did you feel like the Hero of Shaemore when you got that title in the PS? I sure didn’t. Did you really believe that Zhaitan was this all-powerful and nearly unbeatable foe when you fought him? I sure didnt.

Even console RPGs have challenging fights to materialise the sense of threat. I can be told this guy is powerful as nuts and ate worlds for breakfast, but if I feel that power, I’m not convinced, I just think the rest of the characters are idiots.

oscuro.9720:

YES! Backstab should have a cool down of 20 seconds as well as have it’s damaged reduced in half. Likewise, rapid fire should be able to target 3 enemies, and explode when each arrow hits, with 100% crit chance. Oh, and every arrow shot should cause daze. This would definitely put thief and ranger on an equal level.
In reality, revealed should be 1 second shorter and death blossom should be changed.

We need more than that. Barrage should have 20000 range and radius so you can sit on a tower and nuke the whole map.

That would finally balance rangers.

cheshirefox.7026:

won’t people just farm dynamic events? i’ve written a suggestion that encourages players to participate in game content which includes but isn’t limited to dynamic events.. it would be a slightly more complicated system than dailies but wouldn’t be an impossible waste of resources for arena net.. it’s in my signature if anyone is interested

That’s a good idea. The problem I see with it though, is that if you give people specific DEs to complete, they have to wait for it to spawn.

I think there’s nothing really wrong with farming. It’s kind of like a MMO staple really, and a lot of people enjoy that.

In terms of necromancers, it’s not that they don’t have supportive roles. They’re one of the best, if not the best classes at enemy boon stripping and condition management. It’s just that the game very rarely uses any of those mechanics in PvE.

I also think we need more active interaction between skills. At the moment in PvE, there’s very little thought process in using DPS skills. You just blow up your highest damaging skills when it goes off cooldown.

What would be interesting would be to make more skills like Firegrab, where there are conditions to draw out the skill’s full potential.

daimasei.4091:

Because the last game to focus on raids is doing great… oh wait!

Well at least the big guilds are going strong… oh wait!

OK, nvm.

Anyhow, if they introduce raids I will leave this game. I can’t event do teq or the wurm because people are beyond stupid so more “sorry, you can do this unless you find 100 players with an IQ above 0” is a total nope for me.

You don’t have to do the raid you know. I don’t like WvW much because it’s 90% running across a map and 5% fun, the last 5% being running across the map only to get ganked.

Should I go and threaten I will leave unless they remove WvW from the game?

joshc.3129:

When it comes to expansions, GW1 was easier to make for. You had one race, humans, all professions had their own armor that was made for one race. Skills were easier to make since they weren’t tied to a certain weapon and do to the double professions you could use every skill on just one character granted what professions you were running. New professions was easier to make because again it was only one race to design armor for and their new skills was easier to make. The new stories was easier to make because once again it only involved 1 race.

I’m not entirely convinced on that. If I recall right, the very reason why Anet abandoned GW1’s skill-picking and the ability to dual-class was to make the game easier to balance, so on this front, it should be actually easier to design new skills because there’s less possibilities and interactions to consider.

If a new profession comes out in GW2, we wouldn’t need new armor models. We don’t have profession-exclusive armor.

In terms of story, your personal storyline for each race was combined together at the second half of the PS, after the Pact arc, so any new storylines would most likely be the same for all races.

Yoroiookami.3485:

If you want challenge, you could always go to Southsun Cove and jump into a bunch of karkas. That is, unless, you feel like you’re so powerful you can defeat an army of those at a time. xD
For me, Southsun Cove is a place where I don’t feel safe, I don’t know about you guys.

It was similar for me in Orr when I was new to the game. If you go there unprepared – you will die. Learning monster’s abilities and patterns takes time, so…
Even on higher level, if you run into bandits in Queensdale(by their cave) – you will die. There’s your ‘careful dodging’ part.
I’m not sure what you expect from anet. Do they add new mobs or change their mechanics completely? Because I’m mostly happy with the way combat is, other than occassional lack of challenge.

What I agree on is that it would be nice to show some meaning to different builds. At the moment Berserker gear is the best in nearly every situation, as long as you can do some basic dodging. This could be improved.

The thing about SC is that the mobs there don’t behave differently or have mechanics which make you think differently to other areas. They just hit a lot harder.

If you look at the sparring partners in the Mists, I think that’s kind of what people are asking for. Personally, if they get that and then make them react to AoEs better (ie, don’t just sit in them), that’s perfect for me.

Xillllix.3485:

Ya it’s broken, noticed this also last time I used it. Sometimes it just doesn’t work, seems to be random.

It’s a pretty funny bug considering the blast is supposed to be the skill main feature. They must be too busy buffing the ranger.

They managed to break Frost Spirit for a while as well.