Guild Wars 2

I think this is an excellent list for the first iteration. All I am asking is not to stop at this and keep close look, iterating as necessary. I am also sure that the majority of FDR (ha) community will appreciate more communication on the discussion board.

Story, while interesting and engaging part of gameplay is expensive and resource heavy to develop while having a very limited replay value.

Look at SWTOR. They put so much emphasis on story during development, that when game ran out of the limited non-story content people quit in droves. So in later patches development of more personalized story content was shelved in favor of making other, less resource demanding content.

Well they do (did?) have champion risen chicken. And those things hurt. A lot.

Also, I still say rangers should get a pocket raptor swarm as a tamable pet. Summon half a dozen of those for pure awesome.

Give this a couple of months. The reduction of gold influx should get balanced by the corresponding drop in prices. Of course this will likely separate haves and have-nots even more, as people who sit on thousands of gold made before HoT will see the value of their stash skyrocket whereas the new players and those entering HoT without a large stash will struggle.

Carrot here isn’t gold. Its unique skins and legendary armor precursors. And probably ascended drops. Also, since when is ‘fun playing’ has to equal monetary reward?

The amount of gold entering the system from dungeons was silly. The whole point of the change was to rebalance the economy with lower gold influx. If raids were showering us with gold, it would have simply shifted the source of gold influx, not reduced it.

The key question is: how fun the encounters will be, how good are non monetary rewards and how long will the raids take to complete. If the raids will take 10+ hours for 10g and 5% chance at ascended with 0.1% chance at unique skins, they’ll die quicker than high level fractals.

Alphard.6529:

So I guess selling raids won’t be possible?

I think that in a month people will be able to optimize the raid composition and strategy to 9 man it. 10th slot will be sold for silly amount of money. No participation required™.

I am ok with 3 pre-selected fractals on the condition that they fix scaling and rewards first. Currently there are some fractals I am simply not willing to do with a PuG, not because they are difficult, but because a single fractal can take more time than a full level 50 run pre-HoT for a much lower reward.

First, don’t panic quite yet. As people have noted, we know very little about the raids past the first fight.

Second, the problem is currently in the design of encounters. In order to promote condition damage, it seems that parts of raid encounter will require the use of conditions. Currently condition damage is lopsided across different classes with engineers being quite a bit above others for sustained condition dps.

This takes up a good 30-40% of raid makeup for condition engineers alone. The remainder is there to provide power based damage and buffs. Neither is truly forte of necromancer.

There are two possible spots where necros might shine. One is the raids tank. Due to incredible self-sustain, you can stick necro on the boss and not need any additional investment in keeping them alive, even in zerk gear (with 1 +toughness item). Another one is add control. Necro is pretty amazing at controlling multiple, fast hitting targets. So future encounters can easily require people gathering up and keeping adds busy while the main raid kills the boss.

Finally one can hope that either condition damage will get evened out across the board or that the raids will be tuned to non-ideal groups, which would allow necros to fill some other spots.

Can someone tell me how this is challenging? On what level is a person who is required to do some fairly involved timed or challenge motes challenges is going to be challenged by repeatedly completing low tier daily? This is really just feels like ‘we want our players to have time investment in this back item’ gone with ‘we can’t figure out how so we’ll stick a time gate on it’.

Runiir.6425:

I have a different idea actually. You can only get credit for ONE event at any time…no timer. So if you tag an event and run off, then tag another, your last tag gets dropped off and you will receive no credit.

That alone will stop those escorts from failing, which makes it misery to escort guards at night right now as you know you will get a failed event but you have to do it to get supplies to the camps.

While I certainly do not claim to be able to read developers minds, I suspect that they did not want people tagging a single mob in a long event and going AFK, then collecting full rewards. That is what has been happening during Vinewrath event and it caused a lot of complaining.

Alright, I fully understand why it’s in place. Yes, people should not tag event and run off. So to prevent them from doing it, an inactivity timer is added. Great on paper, except I have found at least a few instances where it is completely unreasonable.

1) Doing an event far from uncontested WP and dying. Respawning, running back (through entirety of the new area, which takes forever), getting back to event to find that it finished, and you got no credit because you took too long getting back. Well there is a minimum travel time across the map and IMO the timeout timer should not be shorter than that.

2) Even more fun one – escorts. You begin the escort (either a night time soldier supply run, or daytime rescue at central Pact camp). You clear the creatures around the objective prompting it to thank you and run/limp to the rally point. Except if the objective gets held up on the way by local wildlife which is NOT a part of event…your participation times out. No credit even if you were escorting the soldier entire way clearing all the trash. Simply because it was too busy fighting something that’s not flagged as part of the event.

In order to address the first one, please increase the timer to about 1.5x the minimum time it would take to get from the nearest uncontested waypoint to the event. To address the second one, please add any creature attacking the escortee to the ‘event’ creature list, so killing it counts as participation.

People know what beta is. I see very few people complaining. Most people are either praising the client, or posting encountered bugs so ANet can fix them before the client moves out of beta stage. If they don’t, ANet won’t know what to fix. Overall the discussion in the thread is polite, helpful and informative.

I fully support the idea.

Also the thought of a keyring with 90+ prybars hanging from it amuses me.

I think this post has value. It gives a glance at the damage outputs on a non min-maxer with un-optimized builds/gear/consumables/rotations. Which is to say, pretty much an average person you pick up in an open world and honestly trying to do their best.

It’s on crit not on hit. I suspect the idea was to have people run PVT or dire and slowly work your way without landing a more than occasional crit. However as people have pointed out in this thread, not many people have a full second set of armor, and even fewer and willing to use it.

For a non – maxed crit rate party, boon strip/corruption works fine. However if all 5 players are sitting at 100% crit rate, boon strip will not be able to keep the targets clean unless your entire group is composed of GS camping reapers.

Simple solution to make the tier more strategy oriented is adding an ICD on boon generation. About 0.25-0.5 seconds would suffice to keep the boon stripping viable.

Personal opinion – excellent thread. A lot of good discussion with very clear and well supported points of view.

Balance – high tier fractal bosses have insane hp values pushing meta even farther towards damage. At the same time they also have extremely high toughness automatically setting meta for high condition damage. Condition damage is extremely uneven across classes making this change prioritize certain classes in certain equipment far more than the previous system did.

Rewards – simply not there. Poor scaling with difficulty. No effort into unique skins (recolor of existing with no effects). Poor monetary rewards.

Replay factor – simply not there. We were told that there will be some ways to make people do all fractals. Well there is. The achievement. After that, you will never step your foot in some of them ever again (colossus at 56/69 I am looking at you).

Communication – can we please get a dev to post something on the official forums directly? I mean interviews that mention you are reading these is great, but (I think) it would make community feel a lot better if we got some communication here too.

Hrm, wiki needs updating/splitting then. Sorry for outdated info!

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Trick-or-Treat_Bag/research

Know your chances before you open!

Armor 6 x7 =42
Weapon 2 x7 =14
Trinkets 6 x7 =42
Infused (Rings, back w +10 infusions) 3 x10 =30
Attuned (Rings w +11 infusions) 2 x11 =22
=150

Thankfully +1s drop like candy, unfortunately they still cost a hefty sum to convert into higher tier. Pretty massive gold sink not even counting the creation of ascended weapons/armor/accessories

Judging by the statistics on large number of opened bags on wiki, this doesn’t even mean your luck is bad. The drop rate is THAT bad. 4 drops in 320k bags puts it about 1 drop per 80k bags. (http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Trick-or-Treat_Bag/research)

IMO this is the worst RNG gate on time-limited content item ANet has developed yet. Please introduce another method of acquiring the brew or alternative item that can be acquired outside of ToT bag RNG for the recipe.

In the first sentence you praise old FotM’s challenge level. In the next you complain about new FotM’s rewards and duration.

How does either duration or rewards relate to challenge? True, you are no longer required to spend as much time, but this does not change the difficulty of the content – it merely makes it more convenient for people who have less time on their hand. Reward changes have nothing to do with challenge or uniqueness at all.

My biggest gripes are:
-Blocking portion of FotM rewards behind mastery track
-Relatively low overall rewards even with masteries
-Ascended ring salvaging being too expensive / not rewarding enough
-Forcing a condition meta at higher fractal levels (have not gotten to 70+ yet, but have no reason not to believe respected posters on this board)

So, I agree that current FotM is far from perfect, but I think that challenge and uniqueness are not the main issues.

I am actually mostly ok with these shoulders. Everything (except one item which I’ll touch on in a bit) can be slowly but surely acquired by the player at his own pace (you can farm the tattered wings even with horrid luck. Took me ~60 runs of Ascent to get 4, most people seemed to get them a lot faster. I had only 1 at 37 runs.).

However. Unopened batwing brew is not reasonable. Considering it’s a RNG item with extremely low drop rate it effectively gates the shoulders behind either extreme luck or deep pockets. Please consider introducing a recipe to make the said item using regular batwing brews and other materials. I am ok with trying to farm up a stack of regular batwing brews if needed – at least the drop rate is sufficiently reasonable that bad streaks are not as noticeable.

Luclinraider.2317:

This expansion has brought SO MUCH to do to the game.

Debatable, let’s see.

Luclinraider.2317:

Massive new maps with TONS of events, bosses to kill, and exploration to be done.

4 maps total. Yes, large. But the total amount of content is reasonably limited. Still bigger than any of the original maps, but mostly stretched by having to revisit them to get the mastery-locked content.

Luclinraider.2317:

A new story, that imo, is their best story yet. (Except how Mordremoth looked -.-)

Can not comment as I have not finished it. Heard it’s relatively short. I highly doubt it compares in size to PS. But based on LS1 and LS2 I do expect writing to be better.

Luclinraider.2317:

A MASSIVE new WvW map that imo, is better than the old one.

On first inspection I tend to disagree. On anything other than tier 1, and/or prime-time these map are beautiful, giant, empty landscapes.

Luclinraider.2317:

New Fractal levels to achieve.

This is honestly NOT new content. Yes work has been put into it that gave the old content a bit more energy, but this is simply recycled old content. Minimal time investment to produce.

Luclinraider.2317:

And ontop of all of this, they found a unique way to continue progression without just upping the level cap as other games do. Their mastery system doesn’t make all our previous work obsolete, but still gives us something to work torwards.

Later in the post says you’ve played EQ1. I’ll base this on you playing during PoP or earlier. Remember Alternative Advancement there? That’s masteries in the nutshell. Yes, in EQ1 they were more impactful to the actual combat instead of being content locks. However this is really not exactly a unique or even new progression system.

Luclinraider.2317:

We have so much new content and all I hear is people complaining that we have so much new content…..

Literally….that’s all I see. There’s so much to do and get done that I cant’ do it all in 2 days WAAAAAAAA.

Most people are not complaining about too much content. They are complaining about pointless grinds that are used to gate the said content. As I’ve said before, giving you one dungeon and making you grind 200 exp levels worth of exp is not a lot of content. Giving you 100 dungeons is.

Luclinraider.2317:

What happened to good MMO players back in EQ1 days where the fact that it took 6 months of playing 6 hours a day to get one weapon was a good thing. And being given all the best gear in the game from 2 days of easy mode dungeons was a bad thing. Everything has flipped around….

Remember the EQ sub rates? Remember why they tanked? WoW was far more casual and appealed to portion of EQ population AND a large number of non-EQ players. People whined WoW was too casual on the release. Yet it showed that a ‘casual’ game can attract customers better than a ‘hardcore’ game. I remember 8 hour CRs in a failed PoF break. I remember camping pieces of my class weapon. I remember 12+ hours 72 man raid PoP clears. I have neither time nor desire to participate in those activities anymore. That’s why I am in GW2 and not in EQ.

Luclinraider.2317:

So it takes a while to get your elite spec…..I still only have about half of mine because I’ve focused on Mastery and the story line. But my friend fully unlocked his DH 2 days ago….because he focused all his time around. Another friend is already into the 60’s in Fractals, because he focused all his time around it……this is how it should be. Your time is put into a certain thing and you are ahead of your friends because of it. That way when we group, we all have our own things that we know, and are good at. The way you guys seem to want it, everyone finishes everything day 2 and then we can spend 8 months killing Teq over and over again……

People are complaining about the fact that the available content is being artificially stretched by the use of gates. They are also complaining about locking the especs behind completing the new content, implying that you will unlock your espec just on time to stand around and look pretty in LA as you’ve done all HoT content already.

EDIT: I am not saying expansion is horrible or that all the doom and gloom is warranted. I am simply trying to look at the good and bad of the expansion. I feel that while it adds a lot of fun things to do, it is poorly structured and often uses mastery as an unnecessary gating mechanism.

Amberley is correct – they are locked by completion of the entire event chain. Which is (IMO) unfortunate because on the majority of the maps certain event chains are not done at all. I’ve tried soloing the event chains, and while it is possible, it is very slow. I understand that events are meant as group content, but why would one lock solo content behind group one?

Thank you for the correction. As I do have HoT, I misunderstood what exactly was locked behind the expansion.

EDIT: I am really not horribly surprised by this. There were plenty of speculations as to how the 50+ content will be gated past HoT with most people agreeing it would be through masteries. Which is kinda is.

ANet is really walking a fine line here. In their fractal redesign they restructured the fractal progression, and now are claiming that fractals over level 50 are the ‘new’ content (as higher levels weren’t there before) and therefore can be locked by HoT purchase. Of course most people are well aware that it’s the same old content with higher number tucked on to it, but technically, ANet’s claim is valid.

IMO they should have not locked 50+ fractals behind the expansion. Backpiece, sure. New vendor, fine. Even better rewards from masteries I am kinda ok with (not really, but it’s acceptable). But hard locking basic progression (already hindered by the lack of the merchant/masteries) is a step too far.

The current issue is an overlap of a design flaws (in both, masteries and the dungeon) with normal human behavior. If you gate loot/features by exp, there will always be the fastest way to get that exp, which a portion of population will use. If not CoF, it’ll be something else.

The other thing that puzzled me about the salvage is the huge range in returns on materials. I think it varied from 2 to 20. On infused rings you got 2x the amount (as in, you got 2 different salvage rolls). I simply don’t understand why this is this way.

The latter observation also implies that people with too many rings but not a lot of gold might consider salvaging infused (since they return more) and vending/trashing the rest.

On a personal level, was there really not enough randomness already? The rewards for keys you can get with these also has a layer of RNG. Is JS that in love with watching statistical distributions? I mean I like statistics too, but I don’t like ending up at the 3 standard deviations below mean and having to spend a whole lot more gold than average to get the same reward.

Few things:

1) Vine attack from Thrashers is a massive ring AE (with medium minimum and large maximum radii). Everyone in the attack ring of this attack will get attacked, regardless of whether they have the aggro or not. If other players are within the minimum range, the attack will not hit them. If you are getting hit, either get in melee range of thrasher, or move really far away (fairly certain outer radius is at least 1500)

2) Toughness most certainly contributes to aggro. Which is one of the very few ways to control aggro in group environment.

3) If you are constantly dying, the only thing I can suggest is to pick your battles more carefully, and approach them more strategically. Or switch to one of the lower risk classes. Staff elementalist is amazing damage but squishy. Pick your fights. Stay out of easy reach, have defensive abilities up. Or switch to d/x and go crazy, that’s certainly won’t be a low mobility weapon set!

4) Overall GW2 aggro system is not as clear cut as some other games, but it’s something you get used to eventually. I am personally quite ok with the way it currently works.

Vihar.5780:

You can have a Monty Hall expansion that you can rush through and get all of the new stuff in a very short time, maybe days.
This option lets you complain about lack of content and no end game.

If you create a single dungeon and call it an expansion, I have every right to complain about lack of content.

Vihar.5780:

You can have an expansion that gives a LOT of content that will require weeks, or even months to get all of the new stuff.
This option lets you complain about “grind”.

Now we need to be clear, are we talking about 100 dungeons or are we talking about that same one dungeon but locked by having to grind 500 levels and doing all jumping puzzles in the old world? If its the first, then complaining is not justified, if it’s the second then it is. First provides a lot of content. Second provides very little content locked behind a meaningless grind.

Vihar.5780:

There are still a lot of old school gamers around that laugh at this generation of gamers when they use the word “grind”, because some of us actually played legitimate Korean grinders and know the origin of the term….and today’s players use the term to describe anything that requires playtime.

EQ1, FFXI. I’ve had my share of grind. I came to GW2 because I didn’t have to grind and only major timesinks were optional and did not impact character progression. HoT gates character progression by exploration – something that really wasn’t there before.

Vihar.5780:

Stop complaining! You paid $50 or more for new content. Do you REALLY want to be able to complete it in a week? Seriously? How many of you complaining about the “grind” for Hero Points right now, would be asking for a refund if you blew through the $50 content in 3 days, complaining that you got ripped off?

No I don’t want to complete expansion in a week. I want it to take months, maybe years. Filled with doing new and unique content and not grinding the same kitten HPs over and over on all my characters just to make them competitive. Once again, this is not a Korean MMO. I hope it’ll never become one.

Morfedel.4165:

Gated content with expansions isn’t new to gw2, it exists in very nearly every mmorpg in existence. There may be an exception or two, but it is by far the norm.

So is trinity, gear grinds and expansions invalidating the entirety of previous progress. I did have a hope that GW2 was trying to break the mold. Original GW2 had very little gated content. Explorable dungeon modes are gated by story and fractals are gated by progress (can be bypassed by other party member) and soft gated by agony. Original design for utilities and traits provided a very easy way of bypassing bad traits and utilities, allowing you to concentrate on playing your class how you wanted. It also showered you with skill points. NPE fixed it by making bad skills mandatory and progression linear, however it still gave you all necessary HPs by leveling + a bit extra as a bonus.

Note, all I have said in this thread is simply my opinion where I am trying to explain why I am disagreeing with the stated design decision. The original design of GW2 is evolving in the direction I do not enjoy, so I feel that I should voice my opinion. Even if it doesn’t change anything.

Ranael.6423:

Masteries are like new weapons in Zelda. You know there is this rock you can see from the whole beginning but can’t get through till you get the bombs to explode it. Your first toon won’t have the bombs at start so there will be some gated locations in the first zone you can’t access. When you get the right mastery then all your account will get it so when you enter the first zone with the second toon, the number of HP available will be much bigger because there will be no gates anymore. So in the end the more your account masteries grow, the quicker it will be to unlock Espec on alts.

When you leveled your first character in the game there were no tomes available, no lvl 20 scrolls. You may have seen nice lvl 80 builds on the web, they were simply not available until you were lvl 80. So to rephrase other complains, you had to “finish” the content before playing your dream build. There is still no way to discover the tutorial zone with the build you want to play. And if you level in an old fashion way, you are still gated until level 71 minimum to play the exact build you want. Chances are you won’t reclaim Claw Island with this build. The difference in the expansion is that you’ll be able to replay the story missions…

Maybe the number of tomes in the game is too high so people now don’t understand character progression anymore, they just want to double click.

Gated content is a way of saying : we don’t really have that much content, so we have to make you jump through all these hoops to get to whatever little we have.

What about WvW? If a WvW player has multiple characters should they grind 200 ranks per character just to fully unlock espec for it?

With regards to tomes – I have leveled all my characters from scratch. Level 20 scroll was used a couple of times mainly to get rid of them (until I realized that that’s not feasible and started piling them up again). Most often I level my characters without buying them a single piece of equipment (they do get 15 slot bags) until 80. I enjoy doing this. But I am a minority, and even I will not enjoy grinding out HPs for especs. How many people will enjoy grinding out same content 3 times in a row (to make their characters competitive)? How about 5? 10? 20? 60? Some people do have a lot of alts and especs are often too good not to have.

Few more random thoughts:

1) I don’t like hard gated content. This is the reason why I do not like certain masteries, which are required to experience HoT content. But I can mostly live with that.
2) People don’t seem to realize that some of the HPs in HoT might easily be gated by masteries – it has already been stated that parts of the maps are not accessible without high tiers of gliding mastery, so you will end up having to grind masteries before you can get HPs that you’ll need to unlock especs.
3) Having to redo this on multiple characters is simply not fun. I have world completion on all of my 80s (10+1 that got deleted), so I like exploring. But I DON’T LIKE BEING FORCED TO EXPLORE to play my class to it’s fullest.

Proposed solution:

1) Make HPs an account wide currency similar to WvW rank – it can be gained by any character, but all characters benefit.
2) Increment the said currency when a new HP is explored, regardless by which character.
3) Exploring HP that has already been used by one of your character gives you nothing (or some experience) other than progress toward world completion.

This will preserve the current costs and exploration requirements, but will make it much alt-friendlier.

Ok, based on the screenshot earlier in the post and icons for utility skills posted on Wiki, as well as previous posts by developers we have:

Unlocking elite specialization:
1) 400 HP total.
2) Unlocking order is ? – Utility 1 – Healing skill – Adept minor – 3 adept traits – ? – Utility 2 – master minor – 3 master traits – ? – Utility 3 – GM minor – 3 GM traits – Elite skill – ? – ? – ?
3) It has been stated that last unlock is elite-locked weapon skin. I am extrapolating this to state that next-to-last is elite specific armor skin.
4) In the past the higher tier unlocks took more points than earlier unlocks
5) The bottom line will be the weight assigned to the last skins
6) On a personal level I am disappointed at the unlock setup. I have no problems in requiring 400 HPs, but let me pick what to unlock first. At least split the line into trait and utility lines with one skin being locked behind each line.

Challenge =/= timesink. Raids were promised to be challenging content. I’ve had my share of 8+ hour raid runs back in EQ1.

Before passing final judgment on the elite spec cost I’d like to see just how much of those 400 points are needed for ‘core’ things. That is if I only want the trait line and ignore the skills/skins/whatever else they put behind the HP gate.

Of course, a necromancer can’t be useful. Nope, have to cry nerf immediately. Note that even in the current state, Reaper is likely not going to be part of the meta – just closer to it, and not as likely to be kicked out of PuGs in group content.

Some people simply can’t get over the ‘large numbers = awesome’ train of thought. Nevermind the large cast time (making it mostly useless in anything other than PvE or really low MMR PvP). Nevermind the full cooldown if the ability is blocked/dodged/misses due to blind. Neeeeeeeeeeeerf! Must neeeeeeeeeeeeerf!!

With that aside, base necro needs a buff. Perhaps that way ANet would not need to try balancing a whole class by using elite spec.

If by sexy/good you mean ‘shows skin’, then yes, leather does have only a few choices – Krytan top, Viper skirt + a number of racial armors. However if you think that ‘good and sexy’ can mean other things, then leather has a number of choices. With that said, trench coats ARE overabundant.

Fun fact – while wielding dagger/offhand killing things with DS4 actually counts for weapon master achievement for the said offhand. Since its relatively low cooldown and decent AE damage, it’s great for achievement farming for focus/wh.

That’s probably the only good thing I found about not having DS weapon calculations using 2 hander base.

One of the big selling points for GW2 was the lack of treadmill to obtain best ‘stat’ equipment, thus making most effort go towards obtaining shiny, but not statistically significant skins.

This is the reason why release of ascended items caused such an uproar – it changed the power curve from being flat to being…less flat.

Most other MMOs run with following system

Level > obtain tier 1 items > do dungeons > obtain tier 2 items > do entry raids > obtain tier 3 items > do higher tier raids > obtain tier 4+ items > roll out expansion making all your previous work useless > go to step 1

GW2 promised something different
Level > gain exotic armor (dungeons, crafting, drops, tp)> do anything you want in the game

With the introduction of ascended and now raids, the system is slowly shifting towards the ‘standard’ MMO model

Level > gain exotics > grind crafting and/or do fractals/missions whatever > gain ascended > do raids

Simply put, original GW2 model emphasized your ability to play your character(even level field with everyone in exotics). The outcry comes from not wanting that to change to emphasize the equipment and using it as soft gating for content.

After the announcement of massive re-balancing, people immediately ran off to speculate. The fun part is that for every person who’ll walk away from the changes rich, there will likely be 10 who will end up losing hundreds of gold. Really good market players will likely make a fortune on the price changes even before HoT hits just from people trying to speculate.

Personally? I am going to spend the limited time I have online before HoT to get a bit more gold + dungeon tokens. Tokens will be significantly harder to get, and as JS said, he is planning to keep gold valuable. Currently I don’t have enough capital to try playing the HoT market lottery since I bought a few items I expect to go up in price for personal use, so I won’t worry too much about it.

Most posters are not seeing the main problem with dungeons. The problem is that the dungeons were developed by people who no longer work at ANet. The new developers who work on group content (fractals and raids) would require a very large time investment to be able to maintain, nevermind improve dungeons. It is much simpler for the new devs to simply work on new content or upgrade content that they themselves have created. At this point dungeons are like windows ’95. It might still work, but noone in MS probably has any clue as to how. So why encourage people to use it?

Thus, ANet is slowly moving players away from content they no longer have developers familiar with. To do so, they decrease monetary rewards (let’s face it, most people run the dungeons for the gold). This will accomplish two things – reduce the amount of money coming into the economy and move players to playing new, supported content.

It is likely just a way to prevent everyone from rushing to HoT areas at the same time. Spreading the population between Halloween content and HoT will work – while people are very excited about HoT, a lot of them will do Halloween content instead as it is time limited.

SirMoogie.9263:

Zania.8461:

3) From maintenance standpoint I understand them as well – they no longer have a dungeon team, so it makes sense to switch players to the content they have people familiar with instead of trying to patch content they really have no in-depth knowledge on.

They have a dungeon team, they are just focusing on ten man dungeons (called “raids” in this game). I’m sure Crystal Reid’s abilities don’t suddenly become useless because you asked her to design a dungeon for five people instead of ten.

Certainly. But if you have ever gone through a piece of code written by another person, you know that there are a lot of subtleties, and without the original person telling you why have certain things been done the way they have been done, it’s very hard to do more than simplest changes, and even those take fairly large time investment.

Since the departure of Robert Hrouda, ANet has lost the original dungeon designer. For new team it’s simply far easier to start from scratch. All the new ‘dungeons’ that have been created by the new team are ‘fractals’ and now ‘raids’. It is a simple matter of spending excessive development resources on maintaining what is now legacy content that ANet is not willing to do.

I am sure that some of the gold will be used to beef up fractal rewards. The main question is how it’ll be done, and in which amounts.

Possible ways:
1) Once per day per unique fractal you get a bonus reward, similar to dungeon path. That is doing Swamp for the first time each day will give a bonus reward.

2) The daily rewards (3 tiers) will have significant gold boost, once again, once per day.

3) Flat buff to monetary rewards for doing a fractal.

I suspect it will be either 1 or 2 (or a combination of both) to prevent people from farming the fastest fractal for gold.

Also the gold nerf from dungeons is very much meaningful from a number of standpoints as I’ve outlines here https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/Dungeons-less-gold-less-people-for-LFG/first#post5605156

Few thoughts:

1) From economy standpoint I can see exactly why the nerf is coming – dungeons are likely the fastest way to put gold into the system.

2) From developers standpoint I also understand why they nerf it – it is such a good money making area that people will rather farm dungeons than go into, say, fractals that take longer and result in worse rewards (which they can’t buff before nerfing the dungeon rewards without overloading system with even MORE gold).

3) From maintenance standpoint I understand them as well – they no longer have a dungeon team, so it makes sense to switch players to the content they have people familiar with instead of trying to patch content they really have no in-depth knowledge on.

4) What I don’t understand is why after HoT most new ‘dungeoneers’ will likely get their titles by PvPing instead of…running the dungeons.

sicsempertyrannis.3510:

It’s fairly obvious

It’s really not. There are a multitude of ways they can handle 50→100 transition that do not require infusing ascended armors.

Tokens drop from PvP reward tracks for corresponding dungeons. Guess what ANet is trying to phase out and what they are trying to push players into doing.

Also, strangely enough you can often grind out dungeon skins faster* in PvP than doing actual dungeons.

*In this case faster means by putting in more consecutive hours and not ‘total time spent in dungeon/pvp’.

We were already shown one of the new heavy armor sets – it’s the armor used by Revenants in beta. According to developers will be acquired through a collection.

At least one set of weapon skins are makeshift weapons that you could obtain randomly in beta as well (I think dulfy has those somewhere)

On one hand it would be nice to see all the other ones…on the other, I wouldn’t mind at least something left to be discovered in the expansion itself.

Shrieking plants you say? But what causes the shrieking?

http://dilbert.com/strip/1997-05-12