GW2 is designed for no vertical progression
- What gives you that idea? Ascended gear, WXP ranks and 500 crafting was added because there wasn’t enough vertical progression. The game engine is so poor that even AoE damage goes through walls. Where do you think the player retention lies?
I don’t know mutch about coding and how that stuff works but what I know is that every peice of information takes up space on Anet server… So by having infinite ammount of crafting on so many players that is playing the game would take alot of space.
- Byte is the smallest accessible piece of information that computer holds. It consists of eight bits and can have 2^8 = 256 different states. Number of onions in your bank can be expressed in the value of one byte. The size of modern games is often expressed in gigabytes. One gigabyte is 1 073 741 824 bytes. I hope this gives you a perspective just how much space your bank is consuming.
Would you rather never have the option to get bigger stacks?
- Alright, so you’ve resigned yourself to the idea that whatever Anet does is the necessary and good action to take. When they ease the burden they themselves have caused on you, you feel happy. Sounds like a recipe of abusive relationship.
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I think you are pretty unfair to blame Anet from making stupid decisions.
Stacksize limit of 250 has been in the game since the release, it is nothing they put in later on. The limit is there for a reason and for a few months ago they let us pay a few gems (wich you still can get for gold) to up this limit for those who collect more crafting materials.
- So you’re paying for something that’s completely artificial limitation. Value given to variables in the code. It’s not content or experiences. Is this what gaming has become?
We can’t do that, but would you like a new minipet in the gem store instead?
People asked for them to be account bound, they did that. Now it is account wide. If they do that what will be next? Not need any at all and just harvest by looking at the node?
- Have you ever seen a tool that only one person is able to use?
Neither have I.
Could we at least pretend for a second that the overall direction a game should take would be towards what is ‘fun’ rather than speculated effect on player ‘metrics’.
Nah, screw fun, that’s for other games. Instead let’s think of ways how gathering would be the most boring and tedious task ever. I know, let’s make it so that gathering tools can only be used for limited time! And you must change the gathering tool depending what quality stuff you’re harvesting! Then let’s limit stack sizes! Then, as an insult to injury, let’s raise a paywall to lessen these handicaps.
Oh wait they already did all of that.
People took the narrow definition that he specifically used, expanded it to the other definitions, and then complained that they broke their word. That is the point I was making. Whether or not grind has more than one meaning is irrelevant.
- To me it looked more like attempt to make the game seem way more engaging and innovative than it turned out to be. Create your own strawman and slay it; become the champion for gamers. Typical marketing talk.
Now, in context, what he is talking about is killing mobs repeatedly in order to level. This is the old definition of grinding. The key defining sentence is, “We want to change the way that people view combat”. What people did then Is take that single sentence, ignore the surrounding sentences which define and give it meaning, then made threads and posts, ad nauseum, about how grindy the game is because they have to repeat content to get their rewards.
- That’s a very narrow definition of grind. Grind is repeating same (boring) actions for copious amount of time in order to get a reward. One example of grinding is killing hundreds of monsters to gain a new character level. Another example is completing a short dungeon path multiple times for finishing reward. Guild Wars 2 uses grind as means to extend the length of content to a great degree.
If you think all MMO’s are dull, then what in the heck are you doing posting in an MMO forum? Why do you even have an account for that matter? For crying out loud, go find something else to do!
- And if you hate MMOs then you REALLY wanna check out Guild Wars 2 !
compare GW2 to other MMOs
- Why do people keep saying this? Tobacco is a mild drug if you compare it to heroin, but still wrecks your health and doesn’t improve your life in any way. What does it prove to compare one dull thing to another dull thing? MMO is the worst genre of gaming there is, no matter if you’re casual or hardcore player, no matter if you prefer to experience story or play against other players, no matter if you prefer using reflexes or thinking to succeed. There’s always a genre that serves your needs better.
I don’t know if you remember ~19 months ago, when forums were chock-full of threads begging, nay demanding ArenaNet release the game. Threads upon threads upon threads.
If these features are 19 months too late, just think how people would have felt waiting another 19 months for the game to release. Having already waited ~5 years.
- So why not make it right the first time around? It’s harder to cure than to prevent, you know.
It starts with the concept that traits can’t be re-assigned at will, but have to be refunded at cost. At this point a smart developer would have stood up from his chair and said: “wait a minute, that’s not fun for the player.” but onwards the foolish plan went. Next there has to be NPC who refunds your traits? Again a smart developer would have stood up from his chair and inquired: “what does this NPC have to do with the hero’s traits?”, but onwards they went with trait reallocation being made generic service.
Well at least know they’ve heard the player perspective that we really don’t get our kicks from being restricted and denied – thus the changes.
True… I don’t really understand why it’s going away, to be honest. They mentioned something about the economic value of them plummeting. But why can they not still be a means of unlocking dyes? So what the value changed? Now you get a dye for cheaper. It’s not like the lousy ones were expensive, and the high end ones were rare anyways. They’ll drop in price, but I don’t think it matters that much…?
- They’re not interested in how you experience the game. The current model of developing games (especially MMOs) is all about metrics. They see you like the dyes and they want to get your money for it. In order to make that happen there has to be some changes in the system, which they communicated in advance.
Errr account bound dyes is ‘the feature’? That’s something should have been there from the start lol.
- Well duh! Their strategy is to have small trickle of essential features and bug fixes coming every few months to give the impression that the game is moving forward.
Black Lion Keys are 125 gems, or $1.56.
If you can farm 3 keys in an hour, that means you are paying yourself $4.68 per hour. Had you instead worked an hour of overtime at a minimum wage job you would have earned $10.88 for your hour and could have purchased those 3 keys with the same amount of time spent (1 hour) and had $6.20 left over to do anything you wanted with.
If people want to farm the keys, it’s really their loss.
You mean… that our time… has value?
and playing this game… cuts the value short… below that of… minimum wage job?
The despair is real.
Player housing is the ability to create – from scratch – a virtual dwelling customized to our own tastes. It’s about the freedom to creatively express one’s self in the game in a way that the home instance does not allow.
- There’s a game just for you. It’s called Sims.
What’s more is, if you add in the ability for groups of players to collaborate together in the construction of an outpost, village, or town, you’ve now created a powerful community building tool.
- Simcity.
You’re asking for Anet to hand you over the whole developing environment so you a) can make a house for yourself b) add that house as part of the game world. You can make this happen if you spend some millions of dollars to buy majority share of Anet from NCsoft. Other than this way, it’s never going to happen.
I myself would be more interested in player housing then guild halls aka guild housing.
- You have your house already. That’s your home instance. When was the last time you visited it?
No, this instance of Living Story didn’t work as well as was hoped. It can work, with some reworking and refocus on actually expanding on the game and/or altering things so it actually has impact.
- The biggest problem with living story is that it’s not living or organic. It’s created and released every two weeks. They did make permanent change related to living story in Lion’s Arch with that lighthouse. Nobody cares about it because it’s just a prop with no interactivity.
What makes games worth playing is gameplay – number of decisions player can make that are not mutually exclusive. If there was no jumping ability in this game it would be duller, because jumping is one thing that gives player decision. On the other hand if 3 explorable zones suddenly went missing it wouldn’t necessarily make the game any worse, because choosing which zone to explore is mutually exclusive decision. Same with race-specific personal storylines which is biggest waste of development resources imaginable.
Once you’ve burned through the unique content you’re left with the core system of few player decisions, which causes the boredom players experience.
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there is one big problem with most argument here. You’re assuming that developers are sacrificing game play for monotization but those two are intertwined. who is going to pay if they’re not playing? and who is going to play just cause they have stuff to buy? simply speaking if a sizeable amount of players do not enjoy game play choices they made they wouldnt be making the dollar amounts they’re making.
- The argument that gameplay and revenue are intertwined doesn’t hold if you look at another example: slot machines. They have no gameplay value yet they bring revenue to casinos and gas stations. The key is to hook players in a manner that makes them spend money on your game.
GW2 has stopped being about players playing because it’s fun to play. It’s all about chasing carrots. New, yummy, shiny carrots, each available for a limited time and each requiring a specific list of hoops to jump through before getting the pat on the head and your special dog treat!
- I think there’s some actual studies saying that external rewards are a great way to make any activity seem like work. It sure feels that way now that everything is presented in terms of external rewards. Kill centaur and it drops item for reward. Kill ten centaurs and you complete quest for rewards. Complete five quests and you get daily for another external reward. Complete dailies for achievement points and get rewarded at regular intervals. It’s like the player is treated like some junkie for constant gratification.
I’m an old school gamer. There was a time when games didn’t feature any external rewards. The game presented the player a challenge, which the player could choose to overcome. If the challenge was well-made the player would naturally feel rewarded at the end.
But, ArenaNet has let WvW and PvP flounder. If they invested the time and energy into WvW and PvP instead of PVE and LW, they’d have the best world and team-based PvP in any MMO, ever. It had so much potential – and it’s simply being squandered.
- Sure thing. There’s a market for such large-scale siege/roaming type gameplay that WvW is, but here it comes as side dish on engine that wasn’t quite made for it. It’s not easy to fix the fundamental problems in WvW. Anet is just about getting the game mode to a point where it’s playable without culling and skill lag.
There sure is a lot of rosy retrospection going on in this thread. I enjoyed GW1, and I’m sure many of you enjoyed it and played it more than I did, but my goodness this thread would have you think copies of it belong in the Smithsonian.
- I genuinely enjoyed GW1. I remember what it was like to get the 100% world cartography, vanquishing zones and capturing elite skills. Guild battles where death penalty made every kill so satisfying. You were always part of a party playing a role (I was Monk). You could on one character play so many different builds it was a game on its own to design and tweak them. Weapon sets came with trade-off if you wanted more health or ability effectiveness.
I have seen everything this game has to offer. It’s a WoW clone with a twist and I couldn’t care less about MMOs. I wanted to re-experience the excitement when I first started the game in pre-searing. Alas those were the days of quality gaming which are now gone.
I’m fully aware why they introduced dailies. Dailies are bad game design because it punishes people for not logging in every day. It would be far superior design to change them to weeklies. It would accomplish the same goal, just better and more convenient for the players.
- “Convenience”, really? Think of it like this: if the threat of torture makes the criminal confess the crimes he has committed, then torture is effective interrogation method. If dailies make you log in every day, then dailies are effective means to modify your behavior.
This wasn’t always the case. Loot used to be bound the area but than people complained so not long after launch it got bound the level of your character. Before you could only get silk and other material from Orr (only lvl80 place) which is why it was farmed so much. Only exception was chests which dropped loot based on your level.
- Yes. Still, there’s something very sad about one source (Anet development team) having complete monopoly about what’s valuable and desirable about game, which makes it pretty lousy economy simulator.
You may not have any use for that loot, but other people do.
The beauty of a free market.
- This economy is brilliant for the diverse world we live in. But GW2 world with its loot tables is not so diverse. If you’re playing level 80 character, you get the kind of loot every person playing level 80 character gets. What you value is pretty much the same every player who is playing the game values, which is why the economy is so dull.
Let me illustrate this with an example:
Bolts of Silk (BoS). Every ascended armor requires lots of Bolts of Silk to craft. Tailor 3.6k BoS, Leatherworker 2.4k BoS and armorsmith 2.5k BoS. So everyone places high value on Bolts of Silk, which then affects the value of items that salvage into Bolts of Silk. Suppose you didn’t care about ascended armor. What logically follows is that wouldn’t care about the whole item system in the first place. It’s not like you pick up some piece of equipment to wear it. There’s nothing in the item system but the single-minded purpose of affecting the killing speed and survival of your character. It’s not about resource management.
Well, honestly, it feels like ArenaNet is trying to cut every connection this game had to original Guild Wars.
They are barely giving Guild Wars 2 any core features original Guild Wars had, and they are making it more and more similar to a traditional MMO.
- That’s because GW2 is korean style MMO, which is quite different from MTG style team co-op game the first Guild Wars was. They chose to call it “Guild Wars 2” because the name has brand value and a lot of the customers bought the game thinking it would be similar to Guild Wars.
Those that say Vertical Progression is necessary for a games longevity, then how do you explain successful games such as LoL, DOTA 2, GW1, DAY Z and TF2 (currently 10 x more popular than Planteside 2, even after over 6 years.) all thriving with little to no vertical progression?
- Well, would you play slot machine if there was no money involved? This is elaborate version of slot machine. Kill monster -> monster drops random loot -> player becomes motivated. Take away all loot drops, quests and items and you’ll soon realize killing endlessly respawning monsters is about as exciting as watching the paint dry.
There has to be the next thing. You won’t play the game anymore if there isn’t one. Call it new achivements, gear, character progression, loot, bragging rights, whatever. If you’re looking for strategy and intellectual challenge, this game is not for it.
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Now to the part about it not mattering. Imagine this: You are in full exotic and get hit by a player for 10k dmg and you have 20.5k health. You can take two of those hits and survive with 500 hp and possibly win the fight. Now said player receives his 5% dmg boost through ascended gear and procedes to kill you in two hits.
- This is a false comparison you’re making. In reality it takes something like 8 hits to kill the average target in WvW and the number of hits depend greatly on how many critical hits you get.
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Some people never have heard something about long term goals as it seems.
- Don’t you just hate it when “long term goal” is long just because devs decided to make it that way by changing one integer in the code? And that the getting there process doesn’t improve you as a person in any way. One of these days they’ll notice that not many players have these armor pieces so they add inflation to achievement points to make it more accessible.
Thieves are the hard counter for this build. The ranger has to use high ground and other ranged attackers’ support for dealing with them.
First of all I do love playing my ranger, but for the sake of honesty… Staff eles can do way more ranged/aoe damage than rangers can and have possibly the best support skills in the game on one weapon set. Almost every single ability on staff is good (if not fantastic) in a zerg setting. Oh yeah and the best aoe in the game.
- It’s true that staff elementalists have awesome raw damage output on their skills, because their coefficients are higher. However many of the skills are quite immobile, meaning either your team or enemy team should stay in place for them to have maximal effect. Elementalists are good at area-cleaning and area defending. Ranger’s job is single target damage and sniping.
I would still like to point out that even if you have a skill that deals big damage at 600 range, the short range itself brings all sorts of drawbacks. You can’t run full berserker gear without getting destroyed by AoE spells. You have to get close® to deal any damage. A lot of this is not reflected in numbers, yet numbers and comparisons are what players cite.
I’m not angry. I think it’s funny how different idea some players have what WvW is about. I think it’s a game of numbers and coordination. They think it’s closer to GvG in the first Guild Wars. There’s just way too many variables to consider when setting these raids. It would be reasonable to assume that the players probably understand the character they’ve spent hundreds of hours playing and have developed their own style of playing.
I personally think sales will continue to soften for a while if Anet continues to ignore many of GW2 major issues.
- Fixing the bugs won’t bring the company sales. Your want of competitive edge is what brings the sales. Repeated purchases and non-satiation is necessary. When you are satisfied you don’t need anything and company doesn’t get your money. These games work by constantly keeping the player chasing for the next thing. Have you done your daily yet?
I’ve been on a couple of guilds now that have this thing called “guild raid” on WvW borderlands.
“Everyone get on TS”, “Which TS?”, “Our own TS.”
“Everyone needs to have microphone to join and xxKIdxxx stop playing music on backround please.”
Then about 7 people show up on borderlands and start afk’ing at spawn for good part of hour waiting for their buddies to show up. Once the number is about 15 it’s time to get inventory of professions and what equipment everyone is wearing. There’s debates about builds and what order every skill is used. The guild may have commander in it, but he doesn’t turn the tag on because some smelly PUGs might join the guild raid and that would diminish the glory.
“Alright, looks like we’re set.”
The 15-man guild group ventures out and meets enemy 25-35 man PUG group with commander leading it. The wipe is real.
“OMG you guys suck! Didn’t I just tell you what field you need to put down! Why don’t you stick up with me?”
2 players kicked from guild.
Raid over.
I for one would like player housing
- For a thread complaining about pointless projects this is quite a surprise to see coming from OP. They did this housing thing and it was called home instance. How excited were you visiting your home instance? Go play Sims, it’s a game made just for you.
Based on how the crit damage and rune changes go, I was thinking about Divinity runes.
- Divity runes are effective if you can utilize all of the stats. That is a mixed condition build on a character that gets into close range. Necromancer is prime example. On longbow ranger the damage you’re receiving comes mostly from retaliation procs and doesn’t warrant sacrificing damage for defense.
A ranger with a bear is next to useless. How do u want to deal “high singel target dps” with a bear?
- Use the bow.
From my experiences pets are next to useless. The bear just stays nearby whenever I’m attacking cannons and won’t go past obstacles. Pet skills have horrible lag and downed pet won’t revive for the rest of the fight. Should it hit anything at any point I consider it a bonus. I just listed it there for the sake of being comprehensive.
Not sure why you have a bear pet.
- Bear has most attribute points and best tankiness. I’m not expert on pets. Do you have better suggestion?
I used the scroll which turned my level 11 elementalist into level 20 elementalist. Much to my dismay I found out that developers forgot to add weapon swapping option for this profession. What would be the point of this? Do I have to carry around spare set of weapons to manually swap every time I want to change between staff and dagger builds?
A lot of players seem to have trouble dealing damage with longbow, so I decided to share my build for WvW. It’s very straight-forward: take every possible damage-increasing trait and piece of gear. Ranger longbow has the biggest range in game (1500) so you don’t need to get close. Stay on top of elevated positions. Enemies won’t chase you as long as there’s closer targets.
Some options and alterations:
- Signet of Stone can be changed to anything. If your character is Charr, I recommend taking Battle Roar for damage buff. Muddy terrain is also excellent crowd control ability.
- Piercing arrows trait can be swapped to Spotter. I’m not sure if there’s a limit how many targets it affects, but most characters benefit from increased critical chance.
- Swap longbow sigil to +5% damage and put bloodlust sigil on secondary weapon set. This will give you the maximum damage on longbow but can be harder to stack.
Note that the build is not yet complete. This is the stuff I have and what I’m using to satisfying playing experience. It’s possible to reach over 3000 power with equipment and food. Maximum I counted is 3153 with food and wxp buffs:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fMAQNBjODbkoqwOySwi1OAsesXg9xeYoiM6KgaJ2SL-jUCBYfAYLKy4MYEEAZmFRjt4qIas6aYKXER1WzFRrWKgIGDA-w
Tips and playstyle:
- Think of yourself as the army’s sniper. High single-target damage from long range.
- Always utilize high ground when possible. Your arrows fill fly farther and melee professions can’t get to you.
- Stay at the edge of fights as your autoattacks deal more damage from there.
- Long Range Shot deals more DPS than Rapid Fire.
- Accept that you won’t win any short range 1v1 fights. That’s not your role with this build. If you opt to take defensive items and skills it’ll water down your primary role as damage dealer. Defense comes from range and positioning.
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why this class is called RANGER?
Until now what i have seen the only good dmg that “rangers” do is with melee weapons.
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/ranger
rang·er
n.
1. A wanderer; a rover.
2. A member of an armed troop employed in patrolling a specific region.
3. Ranger A member of a group of U.S. soldiers specially trained for making raids either on foot, in ground vehicles, or by airlift.
4.
a. A warden employed to maintain and protect a natural area, such as a forest or park.
b. Chiefly British The keeper of a royal forest or park.
with your logic ,we are a paper plane with water bombs.
- How much do you think the difference in damage is between, say, greatsword warrior and longbow ranger? Warrior deals more damage, but how much more? I’m talking just autoattacks here.
Range DPS is never better then or equal to meleedps in GW2.
- I should hope so! What if that dagger thief would do their burst but at range without risking anything? What if melee guys with their cleaving skills would just hit everything on top of keep walls while standing on bottom of it?
Range is a huge advantage. Warfare has been for ages about increasing range. Airplanes are powerful because they can reach far-away targets. So are intercontinental missiles. If one army can outrange the other that army is going to dominate battlefield.
Rangers have the longest range in the whole game at 1,500. If that range was 1,200 or something it would be quite mediocre profession indeed. Area of a circle with 1,500 radius is 56% bigger than area of circle with 1,200 radius. What does that mean? Rangers have a lot better effective dps than most professions because there’s more targets to attack. Go test thief shortbow. Sure it’s nice damage when you’re standing right next to enemies but if they’re far away you won’t see damage numbers but “out of range” messages instead. Kills are hard to get because enemies move out of your range. Once a ranger locks in target, that target is almost guaranteed to go down.
Sentry turrets have very short range of detection (1200), which makes them next to useless for actually detecting moving forces around the map. Very nice idea though.
Siege engines of badlands are great… for enemies trying to siege the badlands keep! Since the transformation makes the player slow and very weak for fighting enemy players, using them to get the nearest walled objective should be no-brainer. Same is true for Kodan hammer.
The light transformation of overgrowth looks very powerful. Invulnerability and faster movement speed should make long trips through the map pleasant. I’d like to try it sometime.
Bell guardians are just free experience for enemy players, since they can’t defeat even a single attacker. Not worth using.
The new edge of the mists map fills the void.
The things I like about it:
- It’s concrete and sustainable game mode, where players provide the fun instead of AI
- It’s permanent addition to the game, not temporary fluff
- Always full of players thanks to the overflow system, giving you the great raid experience not always possible in WvW
- Balanced matches. Not huge swarm vs. handful of players
- Beautiful and varied environment
- Great map design that is asymmetric
- Short matches, meaning you can play one from start to finish and feel like you’ve completed it.
- Innovations! No more fragile dolyaks to protect, monster characters can be keep guardians, objectives that grant buffs, can see enemy players on map…
This is exactly what I personally enjoy seeing in patches. I’ve been often dismissive of Anet’s actions but for once I can say: Well done Arenanet!
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To everyone complaining about Random Number Generator (RNG) and grind in Guild Wars 2 (GW2): You guys need to play more Massively Multiplayer Online Roly Playing Games (MMORPG).
- No, I recommend players who dislike manipulative mechanics to stay away from all MMORPG games.
What patch notes?
So about that damage spike. I just checked the wiki. Warrior greatsword chain lasts 2.4 seconds and the attack coefficients are (0.7+0.7+0.9) / 2.4 = 0.96
Long range shot’s coefficient is 0.9 and attack speed 1.0
Greatsword gives vulnerability and cleaves, but I guess that’s the compensation for being in melee range. Still it’s nowhere far above “useless” rangers as many of these posts suggest.
1. About 4-6 hits to down a typical target is damage spike in my book.
2. If the Ranger player knows his profession he won’t be in range to get killed.
1500 range is the highest available and arrows can hit even beyond that. Compare f.ex mesmer greatsword autoattacks. The beam stops at 1200 range but ranger’s arrows go beyond.
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It’s been explained a million times. Anything a ranger can do another class can do better.
- Do tell me what other class can comfortably go full offensive stats on gear and deliver damage spikes from 1500 range.