Guild Wars 2

Tradewind.6913:

I’m curious what the expectation is of players these days when stepping into a brand new MMO such as GW2. What their prior experience is with other new MMO’s and the learning curve and complexity of the boss encounters in those games were when they too were first released.

If you’re curious about other MMO’s, I will show you a few videos of Vindictus since I mentioned it in the OP.

This is a pretty standard boss, Titan. He’s big and he has big attacks.

Here’s a “Raid” of 8 people (contrary to popular belief, you don’t need 24 other players to make a fight interesting). At 1:07 – 1:15, Titan does a series of attacks that two players fail to avoid (they are marked with red signs indicating they’re dead on the ground). Our main player has avoided these attacks through good use of the “slip dash” (dodge) mechanic. You note how he avoids all of Titan’s attacks while fitting in his DPS instead of just hacking away mindlessly: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5lUxDuLGeg&feature=player_detailpage#t=56s

Here is an example of the immense skill ceiling in the game. This player has managed to solo Titan without taking a single hit. He has 1 HP for almost the entire fight due to a mechanic that spends HP for stamina (think life tap from WoW). Everything he does… every little move is for positioning to stay alive. This player is an expert and clearly demonstrates his skill. This is a true dodge mechanic. GW2’s is somewhat of a joke. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WL70fEQj8XY

Big, fatal, well telegraphed attacks.

Some more videos of the same player from the 2nd one. Every attack he does skillfully positions him in a way to avoid the boss’s attacks. These bosses hit hard, very hard.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Faqru14NoE&feature=plcp
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AY8oinpmipE&feature=plcp
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0sM-OZawiQ&feature=plcp

To anyone who’s curious about Vindictus. Download the game for free from Steam. Play the first “boat” until the Gnoll Chieftain boss (takes a couple of hours). He’s one of the most rudimentary bosses but he’s harder, more well designed, and more deep than any GW2 boss.

Something that has been bothering me about (most of) the boss encounters in GW2 is that they’re simply designed poorly.

On one hand, we have the ridiculous auto-attack snooze fests where I’ve literally went afk to browse the internet as I left my character on auto-attack. The “challenging” part seems to be adding a few too many zeros to the boss’s HP.

Then we have a few bosses that will one shot (or close to) the player with very little warning or poorly telegraphed skills (due to tons of flashy particle effects or just poor design in general).

Honestly, the thing that has bothered me the most is that for the vast majority of bosses, I honestly simply have no idea or don’t remember what their skills were. This is quite an issue. Fights are not memorable because they’re frankly designed poorly.

I think in general, there needs to be a massive design philosophy overhaul of just about every single boss in the game from your everyday champions/veterans to the big dragons. They are just not fun to fight and if/when they are “challenging”, they are “challenging” in all the wrong ways.

I think if I were to describe things in detail, it would take far too long and my point would probably be lost. I believe a good example of what bosses should be like is a game called Vindictus. This is a pure action MMO (F2P on Steam if you want to check it out).

In Vindictus, when I walk into a boss room, my first impulse is to figure out how to survive. I must first figure out how to avoid the boss attacks effectively before I do ANY real dps. The fights typically play out in a way such that avoidance is greatly emphasized and dps happens during windows of opportunity. This I believe is how “challenging” and “skill based” boss fights need to be designed in GW2.

Right now, people are rushing in head first. If something does happen to kill you, the easy res system or even just graveyard zerging is sort of a crutch for players to fall back on. You really don’t need to “learn” a boss at all. Everyone just DPS’s. Some people die, no one knows why… and call it a day.

Boss auto attacks need to be removed (especially ranged ones). An auto attack implies damage soaking on the player’s part which just reeks of the MMO’s that GW2 tries so hard to not become. There needs to be emphasis on well designed / telegraphed fatal special attacks that really put your dodge to good use. I can only dodge a boss’s auto attack for so long.

No, it’s not a bug.

No, it’s not designed well at all.

I really don’t want my 1 skill to root me in place. Regardless of if you have it on auto-cast, it WILL ROOT YOU IN PLACE while executing the 2nd chain and forcibly lunge you (whether you want to or not) while executing the 3rd chain. I don’t understand how anyone could think this is a good idea. I want control of my character please.

Sell back makes the most sense. Sometimes I like to preview the armors I can’t use.

I think it’s been expressed multiple times. I’m not sure if there’s an official Anet response about it. Either way, grouping is fairly laborious right now unless all you want to do is run CoF.

And all of this is made irrelevant by the TP.

There might be mild reasons to use it in WvW. There are some big ’ol cliffs in there.

Have you tried WvW?

Campana.9216:

I’m not aware of level scaling the way you describe it. It was my understanding that Level 10 gear will add exactly the same stats to a level 11 character as it would to a level 10 character.

According to the wiki the only level scaling is the environmental version, which reduces you to the effective level based on the mobs surrounding you (source).

Can you explain more about how this level scaling you refer to is supposed to work?

The wiki is probably just flat out wrong or intentionally vague.

The most obvious downscaling of gear to me was when I hit 80 and went back to do AC with a friend. His stats were 100-200 points ahead of me in my downleveled state due to the fact that I was still using level 65-75 blues/greens on my 80.

Axe/Torch seem made for each other. Using the Torch “5” skill on yourself and then “2” from Axe sends out 5 blazing axes of burning. The torch field also lasts quite a while.

What’s your condition damage?

Why in the world did you buy vendor gear when there’s a TP.

It’s not the # of skills on your bar that I don’t like, it’s the # of options for customizing my skills.

Ideally what I would like to see is 8-10 skills per weapon and 5 to load out into your 1-5.

zerospin.8604:

If each message costs them 60$ (to buy a new account) how are they making any money?

Each message cost them $0 because it’s from hacked accounts.

One big issue with the current scaling is that mobs follow very VERY predictable waypoint paths and they ALWAYS clump when doing so. It’s no wonder AOE is king.

Tallenn.9218:

There are tons of MMOs around that use the holy trinity. There is ONE that doesn’t. Why is it so important for you to “fix” the only game that does things differently?

If it’s not for you, we all understand. I LIKE it this way.

There are tons of MMOs that in fact do not use the trinity.

The perfect example of an action-MMO (which GW2 claims to be) that has no trinity system which focuses on individual skill as well as group cooperation is Vindictus.

GW2 could learn A LOT from the way bosses and encounters are designed in that game.

The current guild system is somewhat lacking in terms of multiple guilds.

If someone were to tell me that you could be in more than one guild in GW2, I wouldn’t take it to mean “Really only one guild, but you could kinda sorta be in others.”

Anet shouldn’t have gone half way with this system. Two things need to change about guilds:

1) Influence and benefits shouldn’t be server specific. I get the idea of having different branches of your guild on different servers, but even then I think those guilds would rather it be a large pool.

2) You should still have access to Gchat for guilds you aren’t representing. This is the essential social medium for joining a guild. Right now it’s just a list of people with no interaction as a group unless you’re representing.

The simple answer is that cultural armor is poorly designed on a stat level. You were never meant to get it at the “right time”. By the time you did enough things to get the gold, you’ve out classed it stat wise. If like the looks, go for it at any level.

Rad.6937:

ZannX.4058:

I’m a slave to the speed buff from the warhorn. I must have it…

Switch it out on the character screen while not in combat to get your boost Then switch back.

I use it in combat A LOT to kite or just get away from something. It’s also quite a hefty combat boost to you and your allies. A quick swap to it every 30 seconds is pretty significant for the buff.

Switching out of combat manually in my inventory is annoying anyway.

Dragons to me are not enjoyable on a repeatable level. Once I’ve killed one, I find little reason to kill it again unless you want the DE rewards (which by the way – why is it simply a normal DE? I’d like to see “super” DE rewards like taking a fortress in WvW).

Shanaeri Rynale.6897:

Actually they’re not.

Functionally… no of course not. Practically, it’s just a way of players identifying with which “world” they belong to.

A few things off the top of my head of GW1 lessons learned that weren’t implemented or changed in GW2:

- Decoupling of stats from the base armor. Essentially GW1 armor worked something like sPvP armor. GW2 PvE suffers from stat design issues with the “end game” reward system and the lack of comprehensive / consistent reward through each “end game” avenue. GW1 actually did this later in its life and it was akittengood thing.

- Free waypoints. They displaced the 15k vanity sink into a waypoint sink. Conceptually this was a mistake. Generally a game should never overly punish the player for actually playing the game. The current waypoint gold sink system punishes the player for actually going to various places in the world for no good reason aside from a “gold sink” which should have been accomplished in other ways. Never make it annoying to actually play the game.

sonicwhip.9052:

I think it is only in the beginning starter areas that events repeat often and does not feel very dynamic they keep it like that for a reason I do not know, but the higher level the area the more dynamic and world changing things will get, but imo I think it would be good if the starter areas are made just as dynamic as the level 70+ and 80 zones.

The 70-80 zones are the same. Nothing changes.

Gopher.4562:

But hey, play how you want to play. Just don’t come crying in the forums when you are broke and can’t afford things because you skipped tons of events while leveling.

I’m not broke. I guarantee you I have much more net worth than you. But that’s beside the point.

The issue is a fundamental issue with game design, which you ignored and did not address. But alas, this is the internet and intelligent discourse is frowned upon apparently.

I’m a slave to the speed buff from the warhorn. I must have it…

Gopher.4562:

Why do I not want way points to be free? Because that would get rid of one of the gold sinks that are a necessity for the economy.

What reason do you have to believe that it’s a necessary gold sink? GW1 did not have this gold sink. They displaced it from vanity sinks like 15k armors into waypointing.

This is a fundamental flaw by design. A game designer’s philosophy when designing anything like this is to never hinder a player’s enjoyment of the game by actually playing the game. One example is games that have very high repair costs. Yes repair costs are one form of gold sink, but incredibly high costs and even worse – needing repair even without dying, by just walking around, makes the game much less enjoyable.

So no, you can’t just use “gold sink” as a blanket justification for something. There are good ways to design gold sinks without sapping the enjoyment of the game out of a player.

And no, you are not playing smart by not waypointing. Just because someone waypointed somewhere doesn’t mean he’s twiddling his thumbs at that waypoint while you do stuff along the way. He’s now moving on to other content, exploring new areas (by definition you aren’t exploring if you’re just backtracking content you’ve already done trying to get to a waypoint) and quite frankly he’s much more efficient than you are despite what you may think about yourself being so “smart”.

Aven.7295:

Well then rather than haveing such a negative attitude about it, why not try coming up with some suggestions or possibly known methods to fix the issue. I can tell you right now that farming in low level zones is possibly more efficient due to the abillity to kill quicker and get more loot and karma from quanity rather than quality.

I mean… I pointed out what was poorly designed so the solution is to design them better. I.E. instead of restrictive stat options, make more stat combinations available. There’s a reason everyone is farming gold. Berserker = crafted = gold and mats from higher level mobs. I think it’s pretty obvious.

Farming Karma is pointless unless you’re one of the few who actually want Orr Karma gear. For a lot of players, Karma is worthless. Again, redesigning the currently poorly designed rewards would alleviate this.

And I think the Dungeon fix is again, Obvious. Make Dungeon tokens universal. They should never have been dungeon specific. Even WoW didn’t make this mistake with heroic tokens.

Thypari.9043:

I use longbow warrior with focus on the burst skill and I farm 10+ monsters at once with the burning condition on this burst skill. So the burning is applied to everyone in the aoe.

But I wasn’t checking for 2 weeks, maybe they changed it because longbow warrior was so strong?

I feel like my traps on my ranger definitely apply to more than 5 mobs…

Aven.7295:

My first thought that came to mind is Drops, money, and karma for the most part scale to your level, but why then is everyone still in Orr?

No they don’t. You flat out get more in the higher level zones. The illusion that the entire world is available for your level 80 is a crappy one at best once you realize the simple act of waypointing somewhere is prohibitive by design.

Gold is king. Karma buys crappy gear. Dungeon grinding is well grinding one dungeon repeatedly (ugh).

Dungeon tokens are poorly designed.

Karma rewards are poorly designed.

WvWvW rewards are poorly designed, but the queue is too long anyway for most people.

Gold farming is what everyone then does. And farming in lower level zones is frankly terribly inefficient.

Coming from Vindictus, GW2 is much closer to a “standard MMO” than I liked to venture combat wise.

Leiloni.7951:

ZannX.4058:

Leiloni.7951:

I tend to stick to one guild so I can get to know them and form a community there. I find it odd that people would want to have multiple guilds and it seems to me like you’re just making life harder for yourself. If you have friends elsewhere, you can still talk to them if you’re in a different guild. But being in one guild gives you a place to belong in a game – I wouldn’t want to be a “floater” going between guilds, it wouldn’t work for me.

Maybe… just possibly… people already have friends before they started playing GW2?

I for example have friends from other games I used to play. I also have RL friends. I also have work friends that made their own guild.

Yea I know, mind blowing stuff.

So do I and every one in every MMO has had friends outside their guild. What is preventing you from chatting with them in game via PM, or in vent, or grouping with them, or chatting in Skype, or whatever else? There is a world outside your guild and you’re free to socialize with all of them.

You’re kidding right… socializing out of the game is one thing, but organizing within the game is something else.

Let’s get back to my main point: there is no good reason why we don’t have gchat for multiple guilds. As it stands, we might as well not have the option to be in multiple guilds. A lot of things in this game seem half baked and over-presented. If someone told me I could be in “multiple guilds”, I don’t expect it to be half-assed “kind of” in one guild while really functionally only being in one.

Izithel.6853:

MadGelo.3869:

knightblaster.8027:

The options in the gear come from different … options. No one stop shopping for your favorite affixes.

lmao..where do you people come from….

Yeah, trying to ridicule everyone trying to answer your question is really going to help you.

WvWvW and Karma are just one way of getting gear and the gear from every source is different.
Maybe the Orders have the stats you want on their gear, otherwise check the dungeon sets.
If that’s not enough go craft some gear yourself, it’s not hard.

How hard it is to get the gear isn’t the point. The fact that you bring up Order sets for stats is quite frankly a joke for this conversation. At least figure out what’s going on first.

The point is that the various “things to do” at 80 are very disproportionately rewarded due to stat allocation on the reward pieces for seemingly no real rational reason. It’s just bad design period.

MadGelo.3869:

knightblaster.8027:

The options in the gear come from different … options. No one stop shopping for your favorite affixes.

lmao..where do you people come from….

I know right…

I see no reason why every “end game” activity has every stat combination available. It makes no sense to me.

Right now, WvW tokens = worthless for me (thank god, because currently the way you loot them is atrocious). Karma is also worthless for me. So the answer is… craft it with gold. Ok so this game has now become a gold farm for me because for no rational reason whatsoever, I’m not rewarded for doing WvW or getting Karma simply because of poor itemization.

Leiloni.7951:

I tend to stick to one guild so I can get to know them and form a community there. I find it odd that people would want to have multiple guilds and it seems to me like you’re just making life harder for yourself. If you have friends elsewhere, you can still talk to them if you’re in a different guild. But being in one guild gives you a place to belong in a game – I wouldn’t want to be a “floater” going between guilds, it wouldn’t work for me.

Maybe… just possibly… people already have friends before they started playing GW2?

I for example have friends from other games I used to play. I also have RL friends. I also have work friends that made their own guild.

Yea I know, mind blowing stuff.

Debsylvania.7396:

People make social decisions IRL, much like chosing multiple guilds, all the time. You have to decide how much effort, time, gchat communication, etc., you’re willing to commit to each guild you join, and you have to be honest with each group of people about your intentions within each guild. This is each individual’s responsiblity… and choice to join more than one guild.

Are you saying people can’t handle this? Why on earth not? And “handling it”, btw, includes declining multiple guild invitations if you find it’s too much effort to keep up.

What? There is no electronic social media that restricts my interaction with another group simply because I’m currently interacting with a different one. If I message friend A, I’m still able to receive messages from friend B, and similarly in a group chat fashion. Your analogy has failed.

ShadowGryphon.6257:

I fail to understand the point of joining multiple guilds.
Kind of defeats the point imo.

You must not have friends in different guilds.

It’s only because she’s a girl.

I’d like to at least G chat with a guild that I’m not representing.

I did the math and it’s actually prettykittensimple once you realize Anet designed it this way on purpose.

At 80, one point of precision is roughly equivalent to one point of power if you have +100% crit damage (a crit does 2x your normal damage). This makes a lot of sense because of the way Anet designed the precision formula and I suspect they worked backwards assuming that precision = power at 2x crit dmg.

The result then is if you do less than 2x crit dmg, power > precision on the optimal dps curve (keep in mind once you hit the apex of the curve, power is no longer better than precision and vice versa – it’s just that the optimal ratio is something like 2 power : 1 precision). And of course, if you do more than 2x crit dmg, precision > power.

Yes this happens to everyone because despite all the Personal Story claims that Anet made, the story is quite frankly not personal at all and mysteriously terrible later on.

It’s not too complicated.

RTS AI’s make real time decisions all the time, changing up where they attack and what they attack with as a response to the player.

I fail to see why the DE system couldn’t have been an active AI response to player actions vs. pre-scripted well everything.

Campana.9216:

- Am I right in thinking Orr is not the only level 80 zone? I see a lot of unexplored content on my map (38% right now) and I don’t think those bits are all levelling areas.

Frostgorge is the other zone… level 70-80. However, it’s not on the same efficiency level as Orr in terms of spawning a ton of mobs. Frostgorge is mainly for farming the trolls and occasionally telling yourself that killing the dragon is worth it only to be disappointed.

I understand the need for gold sinks.

But right now, I’m discouraged from going out into the world.

My analysis for traveling somewhere is “how much will it cost me” vs. “what do I want to do”. This is just wrong.

I log into my 80 and farm the spots I know will make me gold and am actively discouraged from going to other zones or helping friends with a quick DE.

Yes, Orr is my least favorite part of the world.

The main issues with downleveling isn’t scaling. Here are my problems:

1) I have no incentive to actually go to a lower level area. The “world” is definitely not the end-game. It’s very obviously the 70-80 zones just due to the nature of rewards.

2) The opportunity cost of actually waypointing to a lower level zone and hoping to find something that’s fit for my higher level character is quite frankly depressing. After full completion, I have little reason to ever go back just because the waypoint cost discourages it. Heck, it even discourages me from quickly lending a hand to a friend. 10 silver round trip to help him with a DE… hmmm no TY.

3) Hearts are not repeatable. This issue came up when I was conceptualizing playing with a friend that was just starting. I see no reason why this isn’t already true. They can easily implement a diminished return on repeating a heart (that then goes away when you do other things). This will help curb botting of DE’s. Again, no idea why this system isn’t already in place.

I had thought about this long and hard as I too am not satisfied with what Anet has passed as “dynamic” events.

The issue really is what they rely on spawning these events and how they designed each one. They’re too ‘hand crafted’ if you must – as in, everything is already pre-designed by whoever made this specific event and that event can never change unless a human re-designed it.

I think the whole zone should behave a bit more fluidly and allow the AI to make decisions to respond to player actions. The best analogy I have is something like an RTS AI. Yes they have predictable behavior patterns, but they do respond differently to different things that players do.

This could add a whole lot to the later Orr zones where the struggle between Tyrians and the Risen is very similar to a large scale RTS battle.

Server transfer for now.

If you ever want 100% world completion, just get the WvW stuff out of the way while transfers are free. Transfer to low pop servers since they instantly queue.

I’m not a fan of Trahearne either.

When I chose an Order, it became clear to me that every “personal” story devolved into 3 paths. I felt a little slighted by this as my “personal” decisions for my “personal” story now no longer matter.

Fine, everyone does 1 of 3 paths.

When Trahearne showed up and it became increasingly clear to me that I do not enjoy his presence at all, I vowed to choose a different order on my alt.

When my friend told me he also had Trahearne in his story with a different order, my heart sank. The “personal” story concept is now destroyed. I find this to be the least enjoyable part of GW2 for me.

Spawn.7014:

Are you sure its a Queue for fire. when i autto attack and set some one on fire and then pop justice the timer resets and thats it. it doesnt count down then reapply.

And thank you for the info on bleed and posion

Yes I’m sure it’s a queue. You see the timer “reset” because the animation resets… the overall time has gone up.

If you have a friend, this is a simple test in the Mist.

Player 1 uses fire skill 1.
Player 2 uses fire skill 2 right after Player 1.

Player 1 will see his burning dot ticks. Player 2 will not see his own burning dot ticks until Player 1’s burning duration has run out. The total duration is the sum of the duration of the two skills.

If you just want to test duration, you can test it with two fire skills yourself (you can see that the total duration is the sum of the two). Although all burning that YOU apply will do the same damage (since the DPS of burning is always the same and your own condition damage is of course the same), so it’s harder to discern when one DoT ends and the other begins. Which is why the two player test is definitive.

Fire and Poison stack in duration. It’s actually a queue. This is very easy to test in the Mist.

Bleeds stack up to 25 times. I’m not certain if the 26th+ stack disappears or is queued.

Bleeding does 1/6 the damage of fire and Poison does 1/3 the damage of fire.

Condition damage increases the damage of each while keeping true to the 1:2:6 damage ratio normalized for duration.

Wow, the sheer lack of reading comprehension in this thread…

OP’s issue is that he doesn’t want to play his Ele and wants to know how the karma on his Ele can benefit his Warrior. He really doesn’t care that his Ele can buy Karma gear at 80 if his warrior can’t use it.

Karma really should be account bound, not character bound.

The level 80 Karma items are terribly designed anyway so they’re really not an answer at all.

First thing I did was get 100% world completion.

Then it’s farming for my exotic set(s) with WvW and alts.