Guild Wars 2

Gaudrath.6725:

Twill.6217:

btw, i’m female. could it be that all this hate is just male testosterone hitting the brains for they can’t stomach seeing what they perceive to be a “inferior” male in a leading role? is this all just male ego speaking? that’s my theory…

No, not at all. I have no problem with a “reluctant hero” – Aragorn (LOTR) is one, and is one of my favourite characters.

It’s just the way he delivers. His speeches lack proper vigour. He doesn’t sound like he’s about to inspire warriors of all races to do great battle to save the world, he sounds like a schoolteacher explaining the task at hand.

Also, he’s dropped on us too fast. You really don’t have the time to get to know his character at all. So you don’t care what he has to say, you don’t really care about his wyld hunt etc.

His character is a classic one. The hero who has the responsibility thrust upon him by events bigger then himself. But usually there is a transformation from whatever the hero was at first, to something else entirely, the hidden self that springs forth in the face of challenge and inspires everyone around them.
Unfortunately, Trahearne doesn’t really show anything like that. He goes from being a scholar and expert on Orr to being a scholar and expert on Orr with a big magical sword.

Actually, this nails it precisely.

Trahearne is trying to fill that same role as Aragorn: A reluctant hero with an important destiny that he feels is unattainable, wielding a legendary blade who leads the people to victory against an unambiguously evil foe who seeks to poison all of the land and destroy all that is good for no other reason than because it can.

Unfortunately, this sort of character is sort of a marathon of character development, taking him from this simple loner who has abandoned his destiny all the way to a major leader and moral figure. And Trahearne trips and falls face-first right out of the starting gate.

The key problem is that characters like Aragorn always start out with a natural charisma that makes them feel like a true leader and someone worth following, even if they don’t show it right away (in fact, Aragorn’s leadership qualities don’t start to show until after Gandalf’s fall in Moria). And Trahearne doesn’t have that quality. He’s not charismatic, he’s whiny. I don’t feel like I want to follow him, I feel like I want to punch him.

And he doesn’t even make his own decisions as a leader, I make them for him. I know that me making the decisions is part of it being “my story”, but the problem with that is that you’re making your “leader” seem totally incompetent. Why not just put me in the leadership role, and have Trahearne be the second-in-command. We can still achieve his goal of purifying Orr or whatever the hell it is he does, but just make it so that I’m actually the leader. That means it makes sense to follow my decisions because I’m in charge. When the second-in-command is always the one deciding what to do and where to go, that makes the “leader” not much of one.

The NPCs are the ones who basically never move tactically while in combat, and thus get destroyed without much effort.

Or to be less mean, players typically have names that are a bit more “blue” than green when you click on them, whereas NPCs will always be green when you click on them

Now let’s make a visual demonstration for GW2’s progression system!

Legendary
<future expansion equipment>
Ascended
Exotic
Rare
Masterwork
Fine
Basic

Hrm, no, wait. Something must be wrong….it doesn’t look horizontal at all. :/

helladoom.4317:

Actually GW2 does have a built in LFG tool.

But
1) it’s a bit hidden
2) it is just as disfunctional as lfg tools in most other RPGs ever since the mmorpg genre was conceived. *mumbles something about lack of innovation..

I think calling that….thing….a LFG tool is a disgrace to LFG tools, honestly. It’s even worse than GW1’s shouting match LFGs.

Mirta.5029:

So you would rather invest unbelievable amounts of time or money into obtaining an item that would effectively allow you to quit playing the game? This game tends to have very slow gear progression if any at all, getting new and new powerful weapons seem to be far far more easy than getting legendaries for all of your characters. It’s a vanity item, because it’s only a skin, it will never have stats ABOVE the strongest weapon in game and the next strongest weapon will always be easier to obtain than a legendary.

No, I would rather invest unbelievable amounts of time or money once so that I don’t have to do it every single time the game devs decide to add new tiers of gear (which will likely be at least frequent enough to be in every new expansion).

Yes, it’s a massive grind and will always be larger than the grind for new gear. On the other hand, eventually the grind for the 3-4 tiers of new gear will surpass the grind for a Legendary, so why would I be motivated to do anything other than grind out a Legendary if it means that I get to hop off the gear treadmill and actually enjoy the game?

Why do you think people have been asking specifically for Legendary-tier armor? You think it’s just because it would look pretty? It’s because they can see the upcoming treadmill of gear grind (as the devs have already said they believe in vertical progression) and they want to be able to hop off of it before it gets rolling.

Voltaic Spear in GW1 was a vanity item. A GW2 Legendary not a vanity item as it serves a distinct function (anti-grind protection), and that function should only be available to the most skillful players in the game, the ones willing to trek the entire globe searching for chunks of these artifacts and fighting off the terrible bosses who guard them. There should be story behind these things, actual tangible lore.

The fact that WoW’s equivalent of Legendaries have more story and a better mix of grind-and-quest than GW2’s Legendaries is frankly rather embarrassing, considering that GW2’s devs were toting it as the next step forward in MMO design. Yet in this category it’s clearly several steps backwards.

Toxyn.9608:

I disagree that there is nothing Legendary about these items. I also disagree that they can be “grinded out”. How difficult it is depends on the player for the most part, so that bit must be ignored.

No, there is nothing difficult about gathering 250 of several items that are literally sitting in a vendor shop or out in a field. They can be grinded out (or just bought if you’re lazy) and in fact the developers expect you to.

Obsidian Shards, for example, are also available in the Fractals and can be easily grinded out with numerous Fractals runs. Dungeon tokens require grinding of a dungeon. Badges of Honor require that a player subject himself/herself to WvW or (gods forbid) sPvP and grind out kills there.

The only thing on your list that isn’t a grind is the Gift of Exploration, which is by far the easiest item on the list to finish.

As to the notion that they’re deserving of this “Legendary” title, I ask you a simple question….the same one that GW2’s original game videos asked us all the time: What is their story?

I guarantee that you can’t answer that one simple question. Which is precisely the problem. Only one Legendary (The Flameseeker Prophecies) has any degree of story behind it, and that story doesn’t explain why someone fused a book into their shield. Every other Legendary in the game is an amazing-looking item meant to be extremely powerful and rare, and yet….there’s literally nothing about any of them in existing Guild Wars lore. And there should be. There should be a huge story about how these items were made, what their purpose was, and how they fit into the world at large. That would make them far more epic than they are right now, and would bring them up to a level that goes beyond WoW’s own version of Legendaries.

But right now? Yakkington’s Ring, an Ascended ring in the Fractals vendor shop, has more story than every other Legendary in the game. So does Khilbron’s Phylactery. And Adelbern’s/Rurik’s rings. Do you know how shameful it is that a simple ring only tangentially related to a historical figure has more story behind it than a beautifully crafted sword like Twilight?

There is one problem though. They can be purchased on the TP. I think removing the option to sell Legendary items would go a long way in giving these items the status they deserve. The four participation factors I mentioned should not be able to be bypassed by people willing to purchase large sums of gold with real money.

The developers (allegedly) have no intention of changing this, because “the achievement only works if you equip a Legendary, not if you make one” so it’s apparently not considered a problem.

FourTwenty.4268:

the person i quoted used MADE UP stats to prove a point when there is no confirmation on what the new stats on ascended gear will be. he assumed, and as much as i hate the saying, it made himself look like an kitten

You’re right, there is no confirmation on what those stats will look like.

However, I’ve already proven that existing Ascended gear is approximately 10% stronger than Exotic gear. Why would I “assume” that future Ascended gear would be any less powerful?

I’m basing my “assumptions” on existing data. You’re throwing out accusations that my math is wrong, but refusing to provide any proof for it. So I must respectfully disagree with this notion that my argument is weaker than yours.

And I will expect a public apology from you, should I turn out to be right. I will call you out on it. Because I don’t appreciate someone trying to attack my character (which, btw, is ad hominem and only weakens your own argument) instead of actually trying to prove my math incorrect.

I’ll ask you again: either provide actual, tangible proof that my math is incorrect, assuming a 10% increase in power for Ascended gear. If you can’t do that, you shouldn’t be posting here any more.

Mirta.5029:

critickitten.1498:

There is no hard work involved in crafting a Legendary.

I’m sorry that you disagree with me, but I would point out that if someone as unskilled as myself is already well on my way towards a Legendary, then it’s rather obvious that there’s not much skill involved.

Skill =/= Work

If you want skill based items, then maybe it would be ascended for you? I’m not sure really but Legendaries are for players that put the effort into acquiring them, not the elite.

As I established in another thread, Legendaries serve a secondary purpose: they’re effectively anti-grind protection.

Ascended has no such protection.

Why would I actively pursue grinding for an item that I know will become obsolete with the coming expansions and level cap hikes when I can grind out the gold necessary to have protection against any grinding ever again?

And this is partially why Legendaries are a problem as they are right now. That sort of anti-grind protection should be under lock and key, granted only to the very best players in the game….protection from future grind shouldn’t boil down to whoever’s wallet is biggest. That’s a design philosophy that will bite ANet in the butt eventually.

FourTwenty.4268:

how on earth do you know this? oh right, you’re just making things up so you can prove your point.

you may fool others in this thread with your made up math. since you’re in so good with the dev team and you know so much about what new gear is coming out, why dont you tell us some more stuff that we keep asking on the forums but the devs wont answer

reported for trying to spread a conspiracy

I’ve provided plenty of evidence. It’s not “made up math”, it’s math based on formulas and data provided on the GW2 Wiki, which anyone can access and use.

The formulas for damage calculation, the basics of how critical damage works in the game, and the stats for both Exotic and Ascended gear….it’s all in there, if you’re willing to take the time to read it. I maintain that unless the data in those wiki pages is wrong, my math should be quite accurate in regards to how powerful the Exotic gear is.

And the Ascended equipment stats were simply an assumption based on existing data. As you can clearly see in my last post, Ascended items have approximately 10% more stat points per item (except in the case of Critical Damage where it’s generally higher), so it’s fair to presume that all of the other Ascended gear will probably follow a similar trend.

As I stated earlier, I welcome any post providing tangible evidence that my math is “fake” or “made up” or “wrong”. Because right now, I’d wager that you’re making these assertions that I’m lying because you don’t understand the mathematics and where my numbers are coming from, rather than because you have actual physical proof of its invalidity. I strongly encourage you to look it all up in the wiki if you doubt the validity of my math. I think you’ll be quite surprised.

I’d also welcome a correction from a developer directly, if they have the time to do so. I would certainly not mind being proven wrong. In any case, once Ascended armor comes out, we’ll know the truth of the matter and we’ll be able to see whether I was right or not.

I will expect a formal public apology from both you and mulch.2586 if indeed I am proven right, of course, since you are actively attacking my character in a public manner rather than respectfully disagreeing with me in PM.

Aoshi.4785:

If you look at it from their side, the business side. Do they want to severely limit people getting legendaries? Or do they want people in the game, playing it, making the gold, getting the karma, doing the jp and world map completion?

The requirements as they are, steep as they may be, are attainable by most. A long grueling quest that involves some skill and would be, at the outset, daunting to this “casual” player base would keep many away (gonna put a note here stating that I am not downing the idea of something skill based as a requisite for a legendary, I am just stating my hypothesis)

The previous wins every time because more people are gunning for it, more people in game, and a chance at having those folks buy gems to trade for gold the legit (and very well less cost effective) way.

They once stated that they figured no more than 5% of the playerbase would be able to get a Legendary.

Yet, as you said, the requirements for a Legendary are attainable by almost anyone. And who wouldn’t go after them, when they’ve been guaranteed to remain BiS forever? They’d be anti-grind protection against future tiers of gear.

I strongly suspect that if we leave Legendaries as is, they will be far, far more frequent among players than just 5% a few years from now. And by that point it’ll be far, far too late to address the problem. This is something they need to fix now, before Legendaries become what everyone in this forum asserts them to be: just an expensive crafting skin attainable by anyone with enough time to grind out the cash, rather than something truly special and rare as they were supposed to be.

I don’t disagree with what you’ve pointed out. I just think that approaching it from the business side of “need to keep people playing NOW” is the wrong approach here. People are going to leave for one reason or another, the only ones who will stay with GW2 are those who are truly dedicated to it. The aim with an MMO should, therefore, be a focus on longevity….and the game won’t have any if everyone still playing the game has got a Legendary down the road, and the game’s non-PvE functionality remains as limited as it is right now.

Lutharr.1035:

Earning that much coin legit is as difficult as getting the legendary.

No it isn’t. It’s time-consuming, not difficult. Do not confuse the two.

If I wanted to, I could save my money and buy a fire-fighter outfit. But that wouldn’t make me a fire-fighter, years of extensive training would.

Getting a Legendary item is not at all challenging, it’s merely a matter of resources. Put the Legendary behind a long, very challenging quest though….and suddenly you’ll find a lot less people with Legendaries, not more. When something boils down to mere resource gathering, it’s guaranteed to eventually become over-saturated. You say things like “we don’t want everyone to have a Legendary”, yet I’ll note that I’ve seen them more and more often in WvW, and this game’s not even half a year old. A few years down the road, everyone who was trying to get one will have one, and then we’ll be complaining (far too late) about how they were too easy to obtain in the first place.

The legendary is just a massive time sink with zero skill involved, just like earning the gold to buy one. The part most people hate and cba with is the RNG for the precursor. Do away with that though and watch everyone wandering around with a legendary.

How do you figure that stripping out the heavily-purchased nature of legendaries (which you yourself admit involves no skill) and replacing it with a massive, heavily challenging quest system that requires skill and draws upon all of your knowledge and experience of the game….will result in everyone getting a Legendary? Your line of thought doesn’t make the slightest bit of sense. It sounds like you didn’t read what I said at all and are just repeating yourself because you can’t think up an appropriate reply to what I actually said.

I’m beginning to think that people honestly have no counter-arguments against the broken status of Legendaries, and so in order to continue defending this bad game design (design that runs contrary to the game’s stated goals), are stuck having to repeat the same two over and over: “changing the system would mean that you’d make it too easy and thus everyone gets a legendary” and “it’s optional so why should you care”.

Except both counter-arguments miss the mark.

We don’t want it to be easier to get Legendaries, we want it to be harder, with a heavy story focus and unique, challenging content.

We don’t care that it’s “optional”, because optional content should still be designed in the most optimal way possible so that people feel encouraged to try (even if they fail) and so that we can hold these things up these examples of amazing content that GW2 does differently when people say things like “Aren’t all MMOs the same? Why should I play GW2?”.

Come up with a new counter-argument, preferably one that actually addresses the things we’re saying, please. We’ve already shown time and time again that no one is actually asking for what you say we are. No one wants an easy button for Legendaries….we just want to actually make them something worth bragging about.

kiba.2768:

-snip-

Seems we’re pretty much in agreement on all counts.

Red Falcon.8257:

There is nothing in this game that kills you inevitably.

Except the Jade Maw, whose only attack will instantly down you if you’re not holding a crystal or are really good at dodging him. And if you get the bad luck of being targeted again while downed (saw it happen to a PUG-mate), you’re killed instantly with no opportunity to dodge.

Oh, and Agony, if you’re lacking in AR at Lvl 20 Fractals or so. At that point, Agony deals 25% per tick and there’s generally about 4 ticks of infliction….that’s a delayed down, not an instant one, but it’s just about inevitable shy of having a dodge at the exact right time.

And then there’s a great number of bosses in events and dungeons with attacks that are either OHKOs or at least very high hitting, and these attacks are also generally very difficult to dodge.

Seems to me like there’s a few too many of these things in the game. And to be frank, anything that can potentially kill you in just one blow isn’t a smart thing to have in this game. Especially if it relies on the dodge mechanic, which is limited. I understand people’s desire to have the game based around “skill”, but OHKOs do not encourage players to learn the adequate “skill”, they encourage players to go play other games. And while some folks in here don’t see a problem with that, if a game is off-putting to new customers when it’s still this young, it gets a bit of a “reputation” and it will never grow into the size-able, meaningful step forward in MMO design that it was supposed to be.

I would much rather see more creative methods of difficulty employed by the development team. OHKOs are lazy, and they’re better than that.

kiba.2768:

find offpeak hours to jump. i get about 30 boh per hour of wvw kills and the 15 from jp daily. just keep at it!

Good lord. You’re getting some darn good drop rates, then.

I’ve been playing WvW more and more lately, and despite a decent kill rate and several hours of commitment, the badges just do not drop very fast for me at all. I hit up WvW today and left several hours later with maybe 10 badges total.

Azure Prower.8701:

I want to be 100% effective in WvW and open world PvE/group PvE.

Why do I have to spend 3s each time to do so or be sub par?

I don’t mind the cost, but I think that we should be allowed to respec at any time so long as we’re not in combat.

You can even keep taking 3s from me every time, I just want to be able to change my traits along with the rest of my build. It makes no sense that everything else is dynamically changeable when traits are not.

This would make it much easier for PUGs to strategize on the fly and change their strategies to suit the situation, which is what the game is supposed to built around.

Siliconhobbit.4361:

-snip-

You’re a bit late to this thread. I’ve already proven statistically that a full set of Ascended gear is not a trivial boost.

Meaning we’re now doing:
1152.5 * (916+197+300+347+222+262) / (916+968) = 1373 damage per strike
[4+((916+300+141+246+158+171)-916)/21] = 52% chance to deal (150+18+10+12+21) = 221% damage.

New Ascended Average: 1373*(1-0.52) + 1373*0.52*2.21 = *2236.9 average damage8

Oh hey, look at that, we’re dealing 23% more damage than the Exotic equipped guy.

mulch.2586:

That math by critickitten is very wrong, just so you know…

I dunno if it really matters. It’s all pretend because it’s based on gear that doesn’t exist.

But ya ought to get the numbers right, even if they’re made up.

News to me, since all of the formulas I used came directly from the GW2 wiki. So presuming that those were the actual stats of real gear, that math should be entirely accurate. Otherwise the GW2 Wiki is incorrect.

And I actually state outright that my math on the Ascended gear is an estimation based on the presumption that Ascended items yet to come will release with only 10% higher stats than their predecessors. However, my math on the Exotic gear is perfectly fine and is based on Exotic-level Berserker gear. But yes, my Ascended gear is “fake”, as I admitted rather directly in the post in question. It’s merely an estimation meant to illustrate how much more powerful a player with full Ascended gear will be than one with full Exotics.

And on that note, I’ll post the stats for an Ascended ring vs an Exotic ring and leave it to you to figure out just how accurate that 10% estimation really was.

Ascended ring: 103 Power, 68 Precision, 8% Critical Damage
Exotic ring: 92 Power, 63 Precision, 6% Critical Damage

That said, I’d certainly love to see your evidence that my math is flawed. Please, post the correct math for all of us to see.

Horrorscope.7632:

Please, who are you? And I don’t even care if you were someone.

Ah yes, attacking the person instead of the argument. Always a good decision, and a great way to establish your argument’s strength and credibility.

I didn’t attack you. I just asked you very nicely to either contribute actual points of discussion or else please stop posting, as all you’re doing right now is insulting the user in question and that’s really not helpful. Especially when he has a valid point, one that has made most of my guild quit the game already.

I just find it hard ro believe, that is all to only be 20% done with multiple 80’s. That said it’s not impossible, just very improbably, no big. If I were calling anyone a liar, I’d just come out and say it, perhaps I’m calling exaggeration.

But you weren’t, and we both know you weren’t. Which makes your post ironic now, because you’re lying about calling someone else a liar.

To another, I’m not simply talking map completion, just overall 25% as stated by OP. If it were map completion with several characters adding it all up (unique area’s) I’d also be very surprised it’s not way past 25%.

I wouldn’t be. You can level to Lvl 80 in WvW, remember? Your map completion would be far below 25% if you did that and nothing else.

And I suspect he meant “25%” in relation to how much of the overall content he’s explored, not in terms of map completion. Which is likely true for most of the game’s players, unless you have created enough characters to explore almost every permutation of the personal story. And you’d need to have actively gone out of your way to explore every dungeon area, and scoured every inch of WvW and PvE so as to complete every single event.

As I said, I’m just past the 800 hour mark now and I still run into things I didn’t even know existed. It’s rather easy to miss things when the events are all dynamic.

Finally, I do get some of the complaints but had no where near the troubles the OP has laid out. I personally did not find it that hard at least in the open world, in fact I’m not sure hard is a good word to use in any way describing open world.

I wouldn’t call it difficulty either, because as I previously established, it’s “fake difficulty”. OHKO mechanics are not, and never will be, an example of true difficulty in a video game. And they are a mechanic that GW2 needs to get rid of, in favor of actual challenges and truly interesting content. Fractals does a decent job of this (with the exception of the Jade Maw) and is an example of how to do these sorts of things correctly.

CoRtex.2157:

weapons that when you press F1, you cast Kamehameha attack.

That’s absurd. You can’t use your fighting pride as a weapon.

You can, however, wield something as a weapon….the courage in all of us.

Yeah, I think people are missing his point. It’s not that they’re ripoffs because of the concept, it’s that they actually look an awful lot like a graphically-reduced version of those two swords.

It’s hard to miss the resemblance.

It’s as I said earlier: it can work if you build yourself around it well. That’s one thing I like about GW2, you have a lot of build freedom and you can make your build work if you’re smart about how you do it.

What I was protesting in your post was the perceived notion that you’re going to be equally as good at DPS as a person who specifically specs into DPS….which is clearly false. You may output respectable damage and respectable healing, no one’s arguing otherwise….but it’s not at the same level as someone who stated into those areas specifically. That’s all I’ve been trying to say here.

Horrorscope.7632:

It’s my choice to… I’m not stating he cannot state his as you are doing to me… he’s only seen 20%? I asked a question, no more, stand down.

No. You’re not stating an opinion, you’re blatantly accusing him of lying about how much he’s played.

And I’m asking you rather politely to please refrain from doing so, and to contribute something of value to this discussion.

Very nice, and I am glad it works for you. But, as I’ve said no less than five times, your individual stats are still weaker than a dedicated stat build.

My ranger is still wearing a couple of blues and greens, yet still has significantly more Power than yours, and is very close to an equal amount of Precision. Just as an example.

Kacigarka.5176:

So when I played for 1300+ hours, farmed, doing dungeons, events to gain everything that Legendary require I did in fact nothing?

Man you are really one big jealous person, do you?

There are hundereds of players that worked really hard in order to craft their legendaries.

There is no hard work involved in crafting a Legendary.

I’m sorry that you disagree with me, but I would point out that if someone as unskilled as myself is already well on my way towards a Legendary, then it’s rather obvious that there’s not much skill involved.

And btw, normal people dont hate Kim Kardashian, only those jealous people who cant make more money than life minimum, because they didnt study enought or they think life is unfair.

Are you suggesting that life isn’t fair? Because I have an entire rant prepared for when people try to claim that, and most of it would be off-topic and involve pointing out a lot of seemingly obvious facts about the world at large.

Bottom-line: The world isn’t fair, and actually the amount of hatred for Kim Kardashian is rather significant according to most opinion polls anywhere.

The current system is exactly where it should be. Its normal that some players dont like it, complaining about it. But that will never change no matter what happens. I enjoyed crafting my Legendary A LOT. And I have played every mmorpg for past 10 years and GW 2 is one of the best.

I’m glad that you enjoyed it.

I still think it’s among the worst models I’ve seen for “epic-level” equipment in any MMO I’ve played or seen firsthand, including WoW. I think it’s atrocious that so much of Tyria’s vast and interesting world lore has been tossed aside in favor of items which boil down to a lot of grinding, and not a lot of story or skill.

kiba.2768:

-snip-

You didn’t read it correctly if you think that “dismisses” my argument.

It states that aggro is based on a large number of factors, with those being the major ones. Ergo, it looks to see who is closest, who is dealing the most damage, who has the most armor, etc when deciding who to target.

It did not say that the person with the highest toughness will draw aggro, only that the game checks to see who has the highest toughness when trying to determine who draws aggro.

If aggro in this game works even remotely similar to how it did in GW1 and in many other games, it’s actually looking for a close-range target (so that it can deal melee damage, which is often the strongest attack of most bosses) who has the lowest armor rating when deciding who to attack.

So you’re probably being targeted because you’re right in his face and don’t have great toughness. Which is precisely what I said before.

And I’m glad you admit that your individual stats are not as high as a dedicated player, because this conversation would have been awkward if I had needed to ask for proof and then had to numerically prove your assertion false.

Horrorscope.7632:

Maveric.8369:

Well, after playing several classes and level them up to level 80,

I think I am quitting GW2, not because I did everything in GW2 (I think I did 20-25% at most) but because I am effectively not allowed to access the rest of GW2 content due to the reasons I listed above and similar.

You got several classes to 80, but end with not seeing or doing much of GW’s 2, hmmm….

I still run into quests that I never saw before on many of my characters, and I’ve dumped almost 800 hours into this game now.

Please refrain from questioning his honesty.

kiba.2768:

don’t think so. official post to prove me wrong?

what i’ve heard is that aggro is dependent upon highest hp. but is also untrue as i’ve pulled aggro from warriors and have had d/d ele’s pull aggro from me.

It’s based on a number of factors, one of which is your stats. Specifically toughness and armor rating.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Aggro

For a neutral (yellow outlined) NPC the player must attack first to gain its attention. The aggro table of a hostile NPC changes dynamically depending on a number of factors, in order of importance :
closest target to them
who is dealing damage
top damage dealers
who is using a shield / has more toughness and overall armor
others (see Tanking tactics below)

my total power, precision, toughness and hp are higher than my respective party members’

It’s statistically impossible for you to spread yourself among Power, Precision, Toughness, Vitality, Healing Power, Condition Damage, and Critical Damage, and still be stronger than a specialized player in every single individual stat. There is no gear in the game that would allow you to do that.

So I’m sorry, but I don’t believe you.

Dogblaster.6713:

Yes but atleast, I dont want current working system changed based on my oppinion

Do you see difference here? You are tryeing to change the system that thousands players like just because YOU dont like it.

No, I’m trying to change a broken system that most players don’t like (as evidenced by the repeated complaints on the subject of legendaries in countless threads, and the many MANY suggestions threads of people asking for adjustments in this area).

Devs never said they dont agree with purchasable Legendary weapons, If they do, can you provide link?

Can’t seem to locate the quote, though the original word out of the support team was:

“If you’ve found any Legendary items for sale on the Trading Post, this is not
functioning as designed and should not be possible. We would need more information
on what you saw, as well as screenshots to investigate this issue further.”

Which Gaile Gray later states was incorrect. So at the moment, evidence suggests the functionality is legitimate.

Which sort of depresses me because it basically kills the entire concept of “Legendaries” nice and dead.

Orr is dead because everyone’s been filtered into the Fractals.

I suggest using gw2lfg.com for finding Fractals groups, you should have a much easier time.

kiba.2768:

actually, removing myself from combat is a bad idea since i draw aggro the easiest in my pugs. i should put up a screen of my stats, but i’m not on my laptop at the moment. my dps is between a full support and a full zerker. however, STATISTICALLY speaking, i live longer than my zerker groupies and longer than my medium/light armored support.

If you’re drawing aggro the easiest, it’s because your stats are lower than everyone else. That’s one of the conditions for aggro.

and it’s a matter of opinion, but your argument stems from having the highest or most dps in a party, which doesn’t win the day every time.

No, that’s not my argument at all. You’re not reading it correctly if that’s what you think I’m saying.

Dogblaster.6713:

First off. Thats only YOUR oppinion.

Just as yours is. See how little this contributes to the discussion here?

Second. RNG is big part of every mmorpg out there, from loot drops, to damage, etc. In many mmorpgs you had only chance to sucesfully craft an item, so be happy you cant fail the Legendary when you have all the materials.

I hate this argument. “Be happy, it could be worse” is not an excuse for bad design. Neither is “it’s optional”. People need to stop accepting bad design on such a flawed basis of thought.

And by the way, who cares that you can buy a Legendary? You act like you bought 10 already

How is it “an indication of everything you’ve been doing and what you’ve accomplished in the game” (in the words of the guy who made Legendaries) if you can just buy it?

The devs already agree that they shouldn’t be purchasable, and it’s likely this function will be patched out of the game in the coming months.

BIS? So what? You act like it takes months to obtain BIS weapon. It takes hour to craft, buy exotic 80 lvl weapon.

So…you clearly didn’t know that Ascended weapons are coming, and will soon outclass your Exotic weapons. Legendaries have been effectively stated as “grind prevention”: grind for them once, and you never have to grind for a BiS item again because they’ll just automatically get stronger when new stuff comes out.

You are just one of these who complains, no matter when, no matter why

Complaining about a game’s flaws does not mean that the person in question just felt like complaining.

kiba.2768:

i was referring to every situation/encounter. changing builds is not an option in the open world since your profession trainer isn’t available 24/7. what i can say is that after every encounter i am able to pick different utilities that capitalize on my stat distribution based on the next encounter and the efficiency of our pug. if our ‘healer’ keeps getting downed, i can definitely pick up his slack, though not as well, but it’s better than not having any support. dps will suffer as i’m removing myself from damaging mobs to heal or support, but given the situation(my personal preference), i would rather sacrifice damage until i can get our healer or support up. pve encounters are static as enemies’ attacks rarely if ever change rotation. it plays to our advantage.

If your healer is getting downed all the time, then he’s not very good at it (skill-wise, not stat-wise). :P

And due to your lower stats in Power and Precision, your DPS likely wasn’t that much to begin with so your PUG wouldn’t suffer all that much in that area if you just stop.

And as I pointed out, anyone can respec their traits (meaning the Major Traits, not the trait points) or utility/elite skills outside of combat to adapt to a situation. I’ve often done this while still running a DPS-heavy build on the ranger. You’re not doing anything that a dedicated player can’t do with a bit of skill and some finesse. All you’re really doing is making yourself able to use a larger variety of skills and traits, but they’re all going to be weaker skills/traits than they would have been if you’d specialized.

Again, you’re not making yourself more useful by spreading your stats thin. You’re just making it so you can switch roles more dynamically. But that doesn’t mean that you’re more useful in any way, shape, or form. In fact, so long as everyone else is doing their job, you’re likely dragging your team down more than you’re helping. Sort of like how those who spec heavily into MF are providing less support to their team, except that their decision is somewhat more selfish.

Pawstruck.9708:

• A “massive” quest/storyline – This would either A) be so massive that it was ridiculous and un-fun, possibly taking up valuable Arenanet resources from developing/polishing the rest of the game, or be short and easy such that everybody could get it. Would you really like everybody to be running around with a Legendary?

This is a false narrative.

Right now there is nothing “Legendary” about them. They’re either grinded out or bought on the TP….neither of which is actually “difficult”. Yet you assert that a massive storyline requiring vast amounts of player skill would somehow be “easier”.

I don’t think it would be. I think it’d be way harder if anything.

And that it would ensure that only the best players are getting their hands on a Legendary.

I also think it’d make Legendaries far superior to similar items in any other MMO. Right now, Legendaries in GW2 are actually inferior to other MMOs in terms of both obtainment and lore. And that’s a shame, because Tyria has tons of great lore that it could use to create an amazing narrative for its Legendary items. Instead, it’s all going to waste.

kiba.2768:

this is all i cared to comment about in your post. adaptability > specificity, especially in groups. granted, it’s worth more in pugs than static groups where everyone knows their ‘role,’ however being flexible is the most important thing in gw2 since there are no defined roles based on profession.

You misunderstand what I mean when I say “adaptability” and that’s partially my own doing. I don’t mean “the ability to adjust to a given situation”, which is possible with ANY build without much alteration at all. I mean “the ability to effectively change your entire build at a whim, even in dungeons”. Which is nice but not practical.

You won’t be able to “tank” as well as a real tank, you’ll be dealing less damage than those specced for DPS, and you’ll be healing less than someone who invested in healing abilities and traits. You’ll be able to change roles a lot more dynamically, but you’ll never perform in any of those roles as well as someone who’s designed for it. That doesn’t make you more desirable, it makes you less desirable. If I need a party member who can provide good support, I’m going to take the guy who specced into a heavy support role, not the guy with slightly higher damage who is only kind of good at it.

just the karka shell alone won’t make a big impact, but the more all stat gear you can equip, the more powerful that concept becomes. of course the more you can utilize those extra stats, the better off you are. if your profession/build benefits from only using 3 stats, then these all stat items are not for you, but i will venture to say that MOST builds rely on more than 3 stats, going so far as to say that it is unavoidable to use more than just 3 core stats.

Not really, it’s easy to design a build around three stats. I’ve got several characters fashioned in this way.

I’m not saying this to stop you from running a six-stat character, I’m simply warning you that your experience will not be the perfect rosy picture that it’s being painted as. You’ll find that your health drops much faster than you expected it to, that your damage isn’t as high as you expected it to be, and that your healing just isn’t enough to counteract all of the incoming damage and conditions. You’ll be efficient if you play it well, but you won’t be as efficient as you would’ve been if you had organized your build more effectively. A guy with 1.4-1.5k to every stat isn’t going to do well against people running 2k+ in one or two stats simply because of the game’s mechanics. Every little bit helps, especially in WvW zergs, but it’ll be left to other more specialized players to provide the extra “oomph” that you lack.

For example, I run a glass cannon ranger in WvW. I deliver death from above, and can pop single targets before they even realize it’s happening in many cases. Yeah, I don’t take hits as well, but I avoid this problem by designing my character to have longer range, more damage (so as to pressure the target to flee rather than engage me), and by evading attacks with traits and skills that help me avoid extra pressure (like Lightning Reflexes). So my weak defenses rarely become a problem.

It’s not a matter of designing your build so that you have average/mediocre stats in several areas. It’s about designing your build so that your weaknesses rarely show themselves, if ever.

I think you’re mistaking two separate groups of people.

There are folks who complain about a piece of content just to complain, and they should be rightly ignored.

Then there are those who are complaining because they enjoy that content, but its current state frustrates them because they know it could be so much more.

People in this forum tend to assume everyone is the former and no one is the latter, and it’s sort of absurd how defensive they get, really. This game isn’t perfect, it has its flaws, and it’s okay to discuss those flaws. In fact it’s a good idea to do so, to make sure they get fixed in a way that makes more players happy with them.

Mackdose.6504:

So after a night of thinking on my posts, it seems you and Raine are both completely missing the point that I’ve been making in favor of arguing some static view of vertical progression as if it’s the concept itself that’s a problem. The problem with arguing from this point of view is you lack context.

All the best stats in the world don’t matter if I’m not gated from content.

I can (and have) tackled Explorables in Greens and Yellows, and succeeded, therefore exotics are negligible. I can beat players at lvl 80 on my 45 ele in WvW. He doesn’t even have a single rare. That stats in WvW largely take a back seat to the strategy.

Please explain to me how vertical progression impedes in any way on my game play experience, because so far, it hasn’t.

No, the one illustrating a lack of understanding here is you.

We’re not talking about “gating content”. We’re talking about the fact that, as power levels continue to increase (and the grind to obtain them similarly increases), this will create problems for in-game content and future content development.

My ranger’s still got less than full Exotics and gets along just fine, too. But that won’t be the case forever, as they raise the level cap and continue to make new items. Why?

It boils down to difficulty. Many players have cried for higher difficulty already. And as player stats go up, the game’s difficulty will decrease unless they increase the power of monsters to compare. This is the definition of power creep.

Eventually those greens and blues won’t cut it (or else you’ll be slowing your entire team down), because the devs will have had to raise the difficulty ceiling to meet the demands of the new gear they’ve unleashed.

It’s a very simple cycle and it’s been demonstrated in many MMOs before GW2. yet somehow GW2 will be different, you assert. To which I say “I’ll believe it when I see it”, because I’ve already seen this game claim that it’ll be “so different” in a lot of areas that they didn’t really deliver in.

Good job revealing your ridiculous bias.

“The options are mandatory grind or mandatory cash shop.”

Give me a break.

Oh, so there’s currently another way to obtain Ascended items besides grinding the Fractals?

Please share, we’d all love to hear it.

And if you’re looking optimistically to the future with their promises to introduce Ascended items in other areas, I think it’s necessary to point out to you how much work it is to get an Ascended item right now, much less an infused version of one. If you believe that they’re going to make other methods of obtaining Ascended items that are significantly easier than all the work you have to do in the Fractals, then you’re mistaken (because really, why would they introduce other ways to get this gear that are WAY easier than the original way of getting them?).

They specifically stated that the purpose of Ascended items was “to bridge the gap between Exotic and Legendary”. This means that getting Ascended items will be a grind of some sort. After all, they already are. And don’t be surprised when it’s discovered that there are ways to effectively “buy” Ascended gear, because it’ll happen soon enough.

And then the cycle will begin all over again when they raise the level cap and introduce even more new items and new tiers.

You can dismiss our opinions if you wish, slap the “bias” label on it and ignore it. Go right ahead, I don’t mind. I’m reassured in my beliefs and I know what will happen unless this trend is curbed, as do many other gamers on these forums, which is why Ascended items received such massive levels of complaints. Because we’ve seen it before, and we’ve no evidence as of yet that GW2 is going to somehow buck the trend of how vertical progression works in virtually every other MMO out there.

We’re not trying to degrade this game and insult it and ruin it, we’re trying to get its developers to see that they’re going down the same path as many other MMOs out there, and we bought their game because they said they’d be different.

Nike Porphyrogenita.8137:

-snip-

And what I’m trying to illustrate is:

• That you are not a good example of the average player in terms of time commitment or otherwise (which apparently you took as an insult)
• That the current model results primarily in players who bought power rather than earning it

If legendaries are going to be discussed by devs as these wonderful items that only the very top players can achieve, then they should make strides to fix that problem.

Lutharr.1035:

I dunno why everyone wants the legendaries making so much easier to obtain. “When everyone is special. No one is.”

No, I want to make them harder to obtain, not easier.

There’s nothing “challenging” about buying your legendary on the Trading Post.

Evalia.7103:

-snip-

You’re not understanding. The point I made is 100% accurate: dedicated points are worth more than spread points, which is why there needs to be more points on a spread-stat item in order to make the net power gain ~the same. And even then, it still doesn’t make you great at any one thing, your only true advantage is a greater amount of adaptability.

It’s interesting to hear you mention thieves specifically, because thieves are among the most complained about professions in terms of balance in WvW due to their stealth capacity (leading to culling issues) and extreme burst damage that allows them to gank many of the other professions in the game in a few quick blows, often before you’ve had time to react.

A decently “well rounded” build is entirely achievable without speccing specifically into every single stat. This can be done in a variety of ways, anything from speccing a few pieces of armor into different stats, or pumping a few points into an alternative trait tree, and even some traits provide stat boosts based on trees you’re already using. To use your example of the “easy to kill thief”, one trait allows a thief to get 5% of his Precision as as a bonus to Vitality. For a high-crit thief running, say, 2k Precision or higher, that’s 100 free Vitality or more, and is easily supplemented with other things to help keep the thief on his feet.

If you spec into six different areas, the only net result is that your damage is lower, you’re not as “tanky” as a dedicated tank, and you’re not as good of a healer as a dedicated specialist either. Yes, you will be more well rounded, you’ll be “good” at multiple things, but you’re be “great” at nothing.

Lastly, you’re misunderstanding how stats work, which is why you can’t understand the difference between high-damage and high-crit.

Precision does not give power. It doesn’t impact your normal attack damage in any way. It only impacts your critical rate (and not your critical damage, which is a separate stat). That, in turn, improves your average damage, but not your normal damage.

In other words, the difference is that high-damage builds focus on trying to maximize their normal damage output, whereas high-crit builds focus on improving the strength and frequency of their criticals.

To illustrate: A player with default stats who is entirely nude at Lvl 80 has 916 to all four primary stats. Let’s set up two scenarios. In the first, a player specs into armor with high Power, Vitality, and Toughness, and dumps 30 into their Power trait. In the second, the player specs with Precision, Vitality, and Toughness, ditto for their Precision trait. For ammys, accessories, and rings, we’ll assume they both use Power/Precision/Critical Damage.

Thus the Power player has:
916+300+45+34+101+34+67+34+90+112+134+75 = 1942 Power
916+64+40+96+45 = 1161 Precision

And the Precision player has:
916+90+112+134+75 = 1327 Power
916+300+45+34+101+34+67+34+64+40+96+45 = 1776 Precision

Presuming they both attack a target with no Toughness, the Power player deals 1047.5 * (1942) / (916+968) = 1080 damage per strike on average, and a [4+(1161-916)/21] = 15% chance to deal (150+26) = 176% damage. The Precision player will deal 1047.5 * (1327) / (916+968) = 738 damage per strike on average, and a [4+(1776-916)/21] = 44% chance to deal (150+26) = 176% damage.

So they both have the net effect of “higher damage”, but one build is designed to be more reliable damage, whereas the other incurs more risk by relying on criticals, but uses traits to take advantage of those critical hits when they do occur. There is a very, very distinct difference between the two.

Evalia.7103:

Compared to ruby trinket you could get otherwise – ruby gives 96 points of useful power/precision and 3% critical damage. Karka shell gives 100 useful points, not 96(assuming you are getting 25 vitality and 25 toughness that you would get somewhere else instead of power or precision, I mean come on even the hardest DPS needs to survive a bit), and comes with extra benefits on top such as condition damage and healing power(magic find is off the table, but not bad anyways).

Worth pointing out that 96 dedicated points are more valuable than 100 points spread around equally.

Especially since many factors like damage are multiplicative, and thus higher dedicated stats yield significantly better results on the whole.

This is why very few people run “spread stat” builds that utilize all of the stats at once, and tend to dedicate themselves to one pursuit (usually high-damage or high-crit). It gives you a jack-of-all-trades feel, true….but you’re also definitely the master of nothing.

Just to warn you, you’re going to be seeing a lot of “L2P” posts from people who don’t understand that what you’ve expressed is a legitimate problem that will hurt the game long-term.

I call it “cheap shots”. It’s a mechanic that the game’s developers became far too fond of using in late-game content and dungeons especially, whereby they give the player limited-to-no reaction time and hit them with an instant-kill of some sort, whether it be a trap or monster attack. Apparently someone thought that this made their game “harder” and that it would encourage more skillful play with working with teams, when in actuality all it really does is embitter the players and drag out the run of whatever content they’re playing.

Players don’t like to go into a fight knowing they should win, only to get killed by a single blow. And to some degree, it may be “L2P”, sure. But in many cases it’s not, it’s the game actually being designed to have monsters and traps that give you very little reaction time and will instantly down you if you miss that tiny window. This doesn’t make me feel like your content is more challenging, it makes me feel cheated, like you couldn’t throw an appropriate challenge at me and so settled for OHKOs instead.

My hope is that the upcoming patches to the game will cull much of this mechanic from the game, because it’s an ongoing problem that really weakens the game as a whole. And I strongly suspect it’ll scare away a lot of newer players as well if they don’t fix it promptly, because the game’s already got a decent learning curve from the very start and doesn’t need “cheap shots” tacked on to make it even more frustrating.

Dangerkips.6035:

Grouping should always be a choice, not an obligation.

The argument that it encourages grouping doesn’t carry much weight. It doesn’t ‘encourage’ grouping, it forces you to group simply to avoid the painful tedium of not being able to turn around without being faced with the same normal mobs you killed 20 seconds ago. That is not ‘skill’. That is not ‘fun’. It is a p.i.t.a and leaves you with a bunch of disgruntled people united in their misery and rage at an unnecessary game mechanic that could only be put there to compensate for a temporary excess in player presence.

Furthermore:

Invoker.5462:

I think its fine, i enjoy fighting an endless stream of bad guys, makes me feel that much more BA, and in cursed shore it encorages groups.

Strange; it makes me feel like an incompetent idiot that has absolutely zero effect on the world around me.

Pretty much this.

I fell victim to this when trying to take control of an ogre kraal in one of the early zones in the game. My Lvl 40-some necromancer, for some reason despite having a host of powerful minions at my disposal, couldn’t singlehandedly kill the ogres fast enough to take over the kraal because the respawn rates were jacked up so high that even when I was killing them at my fastest rate, this only bought me MAYBE five seconds of actual capture time before multiple new ogres would spawn and ruin my fun. Yet despite this, for a while I was enjoying the challenge of it and was working my butt off trying to outkill their spawns, with limited success and I slowly dragged that capture meter upwards. However, it eventually got very frustrating, and needless to say, I ended up dying despite having invested quite a large portion of time into trying to beat this event and having singlehandedly got the capture meter to around 70%. I got frustrated because I knew that if respawn rates were working properly, I would’ve won that event, bragged to my friends a bit, and then moved on long ago. Instead, the experience frustrated me enough that I haven’t played my necromancer since that day, and reminding myself of it only brings back those feelings of having been cheated out of a win I knew I deserved.

This is something that needs to be fixed. I’m not sure why spawn rates are individually handled by the game, that you would need to check each individual zone and monster type to make sure they’re spawning at the proper rates, but this might be something to make more universal across the game.

Nike Porphyrogenita.8137:

Incorrect. When I was pursuing my legendary, I was easily able to make 50g a day doing dungeons and fractals. Yes it was a lot of hours, but it was at least fun and ‘playing the game.’

50g a day means 6 days of grinding, not 4. And not everyone has the time to commit to that. And there’s nothing “hardcore” about grinding dungeons, either, except perhaps the time commitment itself.

As to the notion that only the “hardcore” obtain legendaries….I’m apparently not hardcore and not among the game’s best players. Okay, fair enough. I know I’m not the best around (and plenty of things can take me down). Yet in WvW, I seem to recall more than one occasion where I killed a person with a legendary in single combat while playing my ranger. Sometimes I’ve even killed multiple people in a group whose leader had a legendary. In fact, in my experience, those with legendaries have tended to be less skillful and less useful in both dungeons and in WvW than other members of my group.

That suggests to me that many of those who have these “hardcore-only” items aren’t really all that good at the game, and really….why are players who suck at the game getting their hands on a legendary? That indicates a massive failure in the way legendaries were supposed to operate. That’s why players have clamored for the scavenger hunt and other skill-based content to be added, so that instead of just having a big wallet to get the BiS items, you can actually earn them.

As I already illustrated, a simple ballpark estimate for Ascended gear (presuming it only raises power by 10% per item) suggests that it is likely to be as much as 23% more powerful than existing Exotic gear. That’s a massive leap forward, one that will definitely affect WvW’s metagame. Those with Ascended gear suddenly have a massive damage output advantage over players who previously dominated the game with their skill or tactics. And that’s bound to lead to one of two things happening:

1. The now-obsolete-but-skillful player will say “Okay, no problem. I’ll just grind for Ascended gear too and then I’ll be back on top.” and will proceed to grind the new content for its gear. This will lead to him getting back to dominance eventually, but in the process he’ll either need to pay real money at some point (as some players already do) or he’ll need to spend a significant portion of his time grinding, which risks him falling way behind in the current metagame.
2. The now-obsolete-but-skillful player will say “Okay, this is frustrating. I was originally a great player, but now the game’s becoming more of a battle of who has the best loot.” and will quit the game. This is often the more common reaction to power creep, and when your game relies heavily on micro-transactions from an ever-decreasing player base, it leads to less people playing and more financial struggles for the game, forcing them to monetize in other ways and get more desperate.

And keep in mind, this is just a single set of gear. We already know, based on previous developer’s notes and posts, that the game’s level cap will be raised and that more tiers of gear are coming. Which means that eventually, Exotic gear will eventually no longer “cut it” for most functions and it certainly won’t be good enough for WvW. And when it no longer does, you’ll be hopping back on the gear treadmill with the rest of us.

As it has been said many times before, GW1 avoided this for many years by sticking with a hard cap of Lvl 20, and by introducing more variety in weapon and armor skins, instead of introducing more powerful weapons and gear. They did it by giving players the ability to customize themselves more and more, rather than funneling them all down certain pipelines to get the best gear and thus leaving the rest of the game abandoned. Yes, I know, GW2 isn’t GW1. But in this case, this is something that they really should have copied GW1 on. Because it was a good model that many players loved and it provided a dedicated player base of fans who were content with its vast PvP content and endgame skins. GW2 seems as though it’s trying to compete with WoW by following in the footsteps of WoW, and this is something that its devs should know better than to do by now. And if they continue down this route, they risk alienating players over time as the goalposts keep getting moved ever backwards, because eventually, everyone has a limit to how much grinding they can stand.

Alice.8694:

-snip-

Zorada.9457:

-snip-

See, I don’t blame either of you for making the posts you did. Posts like these aren’t meant to be malicious, they just come from a fundamental misunderstanding of the concept of vertical progression, and why it’s generally considered a bad thing by many players of this game. So I’ll try to break it down for you.

Vertical progression is a system whereby an already established game continues to add new equipment of increasingly higher power levels, either in expansions or patches. The sole goal of such a thing is to provide new content for max level characters to grind for, to give them a reason to keep playing. And that’s a fine goal, but vertical progression is the wrong means by which to do it.

There’s no problems with power differences between a Lvl 1 and a Lvl 80. This is part of the natural progression of any RPG: your character grows and you grow with it. You gain more traits, more skills, and can wear better gear. And again, this is fine. The problem comes in when you hit max level and suddenly you’re introducing new tiers of gear at that level on a regular basis, or when you start raising the level cap just to introduce new tiers of gear (both of which are confirmed to be happening at some point in the future for GW2).

This introduces a very common problem known as “power creep”, which simply means that the game’s “Best-In-Slot” items keep getting made obsolete by newer gear. This is, in effect, “moving the goalposts” for a player in order to keep them playing, what some people call the “treadmill”. It gives players a reason to keep playing, that much is true, but it also gives players less of a reason to play older content, generally because that older content is more poorly designed and far less rewarding in general.

We can already see this in effect in GW2. Remember how the designers wanted to make the entire game playable at any level so you could go anywhere and do anything? Have you noticed that, despite this, a lot of the older content tends not to get as much attention any more? There’s less people in the low level maps, there’s less people running non-Fractals dungeons, there’s less people running the dragons and the temples, and practically no one plays in the Southsun Cove unless they’re specifically built to farm Karka or are going after the rich Ori node. And this is because of the issue described above. What power creep does is not only raise the bar on what the “BiS” items are, it also makes a lot of existing content obsolete. Fractals is perhaps the best example of this: once it came out, the older dungeons looked positively godawful by comparison, and were less rewarding to boot, so less people started playing them. People don’t want to be funneled into one area of GW2, they want to play everywhere, but right now the devs’ steps towards vertical progression and more grinding for top gear are making that a more difficult thing to achieve.

Now the devs are taking some positive steps. They intend to introduce Ascended gear in more locations of the game, and that’s great. That’ll help keep older content useful in the game without having it all go to waste. But there’s still the core problem of power creep itself rendering a lot of the game’s older gear worthless.

(to be continued in my next post)

han.9042:

They have a lot of work to do these 3 months. They can spend the time to improve the world so everyone benefit from it or spend the time on a making a Scavenger Hunt so only those who cares about legendary benefit from it… hmm which one is a wiser choice, a skin or over all improvement of the world?

Do you actually believe that, if just a few members of the dev team spent just a little time every day on the scavenger hunt, that ANet would have to cancel the Jan/Feb/March patches because they’d just be so completed overstretched?

Because I’m sorry, but I don’t. People do this sort of thing every day at work: chipping away at large, long-term projects by dedicating small fragments of time to them every day or couple of days. This allows them to get their daily obligations finished while still meeting long-term deadlines. And before you protest, yes, it does work with game development and coding as well, I know this from experience.

If they weren’t actively working on the scavenger hunt (and by “actively working” I mean “more than just Lindsey doing work on it all by herself”), they should have kept quiet about it until it was closer to being done. Expecting your players to wait nearly half a year for one badly needed mechanic is not a good way to run your MMO. But then, we’re still on hold for guesting, too….

Agreed.

While some of their posts are rather discouraging and/or make me worry about future content releases, it’s nice to at least see steps being taken towards a little more communication.

We’re not there yet. But this little step is still appreciated.

Rajani Isa.6294:

1 – please show me where they said an expansion’s worth in Jan/Feb – everywhere I’ve seen/recall, it’s always been Jan/Feb/March (based on the fact that a good chunk of December has them on vacation). Simple curiosity here.

http://gamingbolt.com/guild-wars-2-interview-we-talk-to-areanet-about-how-the-mmorpg-has-been-doing-post-launch

We had a huge Halloween update in October, we just had a big one in November, we have a giant Christmas update coming in December, and all of those have gone over really well, and I think in December people are going to be really excited. But January and February are actually are biggest updates to date. They’re even bigger than all the stuff we did in October, November and December. And I think that when people see how much stuff they’re gonna get for no monthly fee in January and February, they’re probably going to be blown away. These two months combined are basically an expansion’s worth of content for free.
~ Colin Johanson

No mention of March. The promise was Jan + Feb = “basically an expansion’s worth of content”

Now the timeline’s been pushed back a month.

2 – I don’t ever recall a time frame for the scavenger hunt being promised to us. They have to both design a system, and the lore for it to fit in.

No timeline was given. But one of the most basic rules of game development is that you don’t pitch an idea to the players unless it’s upcoming in the near future, because players are inherently impatient and are going to start wondering where that release went.

And Colin recently confirmed that it’s not even made it anywhere near coding, it’s still in the concept stages almost three months after it was first stated that it was “definitely being worked on”. Worse, it’s not coming out until at least April, maybe later….that’s 5 months after it was originally pitched to us. And with ANet likely working on an expansion to release some time this year, it’s possible this will continue to take longer as it’s clearly not a priority right now. And it should be.

3 – While lacking in specifics, it lets us know a few things more. That a (implied less-RNG based) way of getting precursors is coming.

We don’t know that. We’re likely all hoping that it’s not RNG-based, but we don’t have any information on that for sure. It’s no more likely than what I said earlier.

That we have the big blog post coming next week it sounds like.

I kinda figured they’d have to release it next week, as that’s halfway through the month already and they still need time to roll the (apparently much smaller) Jan patch as well.

And they haven’t apparently scrapped the scavenger hunt.

Of course not. They’d be getting flak much, much worse right now if they announced that they were canceling the scavenger hunt concept.

That said, we’ve seen how long it takes to get fixes on things that are not deemed priorities. That alone is enough to concern me. This should be a top focus right now, up there with fixing dungeons and loot tables, and reducing the hefty grind of various things in-game. So it’s naturally quite disappointing to learn that it’s not considered a major step towards “strengthening the core game”. I think most players would say that it should be.

Rajani Isa.6294:

And I don’t see Colin’s post as a promise it will fix the Precursor issue. (Bah, feels like a Jak and Daxter game with all the Precursor talk) Merely that they will address it some. There is a difference.

That was sort of my point actually.

People were leaping to the conclusion that this “new rewards system” would be this great super amazing thing that would fix all of the game’s loot problems and would somehow fix the precursor issue. I don’t read it that way at all, and honestly, I suspect precursors will not be impacted nearly as much as people seem to think. I’d love to be proven wrong, though.

I’d like to see more weapon variety, yes, but I don’t want to see the devs throwing out one of the things that helps diversify the classes.

My thoughts are to either add some limited degree of customization to weapon skill bars. So a player can select from one of two skills in each weapon slot, allowing them to customize their setup a bit more for greater diversity.

And there are a few weapons they can introduce, too. Like claws on a thief, or a scythe on a warrior/necromancer (a real one), or a spear for a warrior/guardian/ranger.

Most of all, though, I’d like to see more tinkering with the existing skills to balance them out better. Some weapon sets are clearly too good, and others are awful.

Draahl.3827:

critickitten.1498:

I’m not actually sure what to think of this thread.

I did find it rather funny that my charr thief has a strip of cloth across her chest, though, considering that charr were designed without breasts. So it’s not actually doing anything, it’s just there. What’s the point of that strip of cloth, exactly? To look more “feminine” from a human perspective? And given how charr feel about humans, would a charr female actually WANT to look more humanly feminine?

Charrs have a minimum requirement of clothing for modesty as well They don’t have breasts but probably teets, and since every other race is doing it I figured they might as well to not make other races think about it too much.

Charr nipples are not visible, they’re buried under the fur according to the art designers.

And cat nipples would be spread out across the chest, so that little cloth bra wouldn’t cover them all. Since we can’t see any of them, I’m led to believe they’re buried well enough that we can’t see them. :p

Leablo.2651:

Tharium.7325:

It’s not realistic and would just make the world a complete joke having all these women running around naked.

Yeah, I said pretty much the same thing to my bipedal cat as we fought an undead dragon on the drive home from work today. He had just finished casting a fireball and replied, “you know what would really be ridiculous, is seeing a naked woman out here.” Then I drank a potion and turned into a tornado.

….

This is the best post in this thread, full stop. It was worth making this thread just to see this post.

Kaizer.7135:

Because my cats lay on their backs when they want me to rub their belly? DUHHHH?

Oh. Your cats are weird then. My cat hates it when I try to rub his tummy, which stinks because his tummy is ultra-soft.

Anyways, my point is: charr nipples aren’t visible, they’re buried in the fur. There’s an easy way to verify this, just look at their chest. If they were visible, the “cloth bra” wouldn’t be large enough to cover them anyways since cat nipples are more spread out than that. :P

This leads me to believe that the cloth bra’s only actual function is to help remind players that their charr is a female. Because there’s no reason a charr would employ a human dress method that it doesn’t actually need. At least not that I can think of. Maybe there’s some other reason? Devs? Please provide some conclusive information on the subject of fem charr chests, please! Inquiring kittens want to know.

(bet they never expected to be asked that)

TheDaiBish.9735:

Could be they’re going to tell us with these blog posts in a few weeks?

Just saying.

Colin has already revealed that the scavenger hunt is not even in coding yet, and it’s not coming out in these upcoming patches in Jan/Feb/March.

So we’ll be waiting until at least April unless something changes.

Ehra.5240:

I’m not really sure what your problem is.

Editing so that I’m being less rude. No point in responding to a rude person with more rudeness, I suppose.

My “problem” is that Colin’s post tells us nothing, and folks like yourself are acting like it tells us so much. It says nothing, and that’s part of the problem here. This isn’t proper communication.

We were originally told to expect an expansion’s worth of content in Jan and Feb. Then Colin basically suggests that it won’t be as big as we expected, and the bulk of it will be delayed to Feb and March. Now we’re being told that it also won’t include a feature promised to us back in November. But it’ll include a “new rewards system”.

Okay, great. What does that mean? You really haven’t given us anything to go on, here, and until I know what to expect, I’m going to be honest and say “yeah, not getting my hopes up again until I know more, sorry”.

I don’t understand why the staff feels like it still needs to sell itself to us. We already bought the game on your promises and hype, and while you’ve delivered a great game, you haven’t lived up to all of them. So it’s time to start talking with us. What features are you adding, and when are you adding them? I’ve honestly never seen a dev team this hush-hush about what it’s doing and when it’s doing it, and that frustrates the heck out of me as a customer because I want to know how their changes will impact the game.

I know that there are people out there with a full list of all the content promised to us “in the future” that we still haven’t seen. And so far, in regards to this patch, we’ve only been told what NOT to expect. It’s really about time the devs started telling us what to expect here.