Guild Wars 2

gurugeorge.9857:

I think the fx are beautiful when you’re playing solo – the trouble is, they have the same “impressionistic” feel as all the graphics in the game, which, again, is beautiful in and of itself – it has a painterly look. But that “painterly” look makes the ability fx a bit fuzzy.

The whole of PVE seems to be designed around emotional impressions over gameplay engineering, as if the arts department was allowed to run riot while the engineers were busy getting SPVP working.

Bragdras.9572:

ColinJohanson.2394:

One of the projects we’re working on in preparing the game to release in new regions is trying to make the game easier to learn. While a lot of that work is in the area of better tutorials, better level up messaging guides, and unique tutorials for specific mechanics we’re also evaluating UI complexity (and system complexity) to try and make information easier to see/consume.

Cleaning up the existing UI systems to make them less cluttered, more-stream lined, and better unified is part of this project and absolutely something you’ll see in the west as well, likely around or possibly even before we release the game in our next major world region.

And to get ahead of the next question: No, we have no solid dates! We’re still in beta in China and are testing and developing all of these new systems to make the game is easier to learn. We haven’t announced timelines for development any other major regions other than being in Beta in China at this time.

Something I am legitimately curious about is why the lack of interface customization, isn’t the best way for everyone here is to allow customization of the UI placement / visibility per player, ala Guild Wars 1?

Supposedly they got quite a few support tickets because someone had managed to hide a vital piece of UI in GW1, and thought the game had bugged out on them.

Bread.7516:

custom and resizable UI pls

that huge and unnecessary portrait and enemy hp bar when selected is annoying as hell, it covers up the enemy if large enough or flying

And interferes with ground targeted skills (as do any other opaque UI element).

Makes life hell for any grenade engineer, staff necro or any other build that rely on GT skills.

Bawi.9541:

so much fun to look for animations on wurms when their head is 50m out of your field of view

In particular as their rock barf is not a GT skill, but instead a standard projectile. As such, you need to dodge when the projectile goes flying rather than on windup.

The user inferface for this game is weird when lined up alongside the game mechanics.

Said mechanics scream action game. Skills fire no matter if you have a target or not, constant movement, it is pretty much a third person shooter.

But unlike a third person shooter, it have by default 15+ different keys my may want to hit during a fight. The full numbers row, F1-4, whatever you have set as dodge (unless you double tap to do so, tho i suspect it gets turned off after the first jumping puzzle). Some even play with the inventory window open so they can access various consumables (spiky fruit spam in WVW anyone?).

Contrast this to TERA, where the default is a short skill bar of only 5 slots (tho multiple heights via a modifier key).

Or Neverwinter, where you have only 6 skills up at any one time (and 3 consumables, one of them sitting right next to the big guns keys).

Or to toss in a “shooter”, Firefall. Where you have only 4 combat skills, and a weapon swap (each weapon, two fire modes).

I swear that ANet is trying to use the user interface to artificially ramp up difficulty. One item of evidence is how they soon after general release rearranged guardian hammer skills. This so you no longer could hit the skills in 2-3-4 sequence to gain easy combos. Instead you had to jump 2-4-3 for the same benefit.

And this is why the game is going to the dogs…

Just to add to the insanity, from a PVE POV heal/regen could benefit from being buffed through the roof.

One thing that could be nice tho is for the collapsed items of the right hand sidebar to stay so. Rather than unfold at their own whim (in particular that “personal story” item up top, as i am not going to run the Arah dungeon any time soon!).

I wonder if perhaps they could fold to a 2 line entry rather than a single line entry if they have any kind of progress counter/bar. In the case of the daily/monthly, fold it so that it shows the highest percentage incomplete entry.

Bread.7516:

digiowl.9620:

Bread.7516:

whyme.3281:

Nike Porphyrogenita.8137:

whyme.3281:

It doesnt have to be this way, what if we could choose a “tank” to make our live easier and take a “healer/support” with us but it would take 40% (2 of 5 dealing less damage) longer than running full DPS but it would be easier.
On the other hand, running full DPS (glasscannon) should be more risky than other setups, but with the reward of being faster (5 of 5 dealing full damage).

This… is what the game already is, minus the “tank” because there is no aggro control skills.

Well… as I said, its not, running full glascannon is the most effective way, but it is not more risky (in most cases) than running with tankier setups or a support, due to the dodges/blocks and slow attacking enemies.

Running full tank you can soak up around 2x the damage taken.

Not from what i have seen. 25% extra, maybe.

And if it was designed to be a action game i can’t figure why ANet spread the skills over 10 buttons, never mind forcing us to hold down a button the whole time we want to control the camera. The control scheme for this game is straight up old school MMORPG. TERA or Neverwinter on the other had has interface designed for action.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDyKPXjA9eU

yeah tera and neverwinter isnt much of an action game. they’re really not action games. they’re not good examples of an action game. tera is spank n tank game overdone mmo. neverwinter..well..lol.

They can claim it is a action game all they want. But the UI is anything but conductive towards action play. Having a dodge mechanic the player needs to babysit is not enough to make it a action game either.

Both of my examples are games with interfaces much more conductive towards action focused play, as they do not default to having actions spread across half the keyboard. Not do i have to drop a lead weight on the right mouse button.

striker.3704:

They need to give a much larger “cooldown reduction” when you pick it up. Supposedly it’s reduced by 25% when you pick them up, but whenever I time it it is exactly the same.

25% means 5 seconds on rifle, and 12 on rocket. Not much in the grand scheme of things.

Bread.7516:

whyme.3281:

Nike Porphyrogenita.8137:

whyme.3281:

It doesnt have to be this way, what if we could choose a “tank” to make our live easier and take a “healer/support” with us but it would take 40% (2 of 5 dealing less damage) longer than running full DPS but it would be easier.
On the other hand, running full DPS (glasscannon) should be more risky than other setups, but with the reward of being faster (5 of 5 dealing full damage).

This… is what the game already is, minus the “tank” because there is no aggro control skills.

Well… as I said, its not, running full glascannon is the most effective way, but it is not more risky (in most cases) than running with tankier setups or a support, due to the dodges/blocks and slow attacking enemies.

Running full tank you can soak up around 2x the damage taken.

Not from what i have seen. 25% extra, maybe.

And if it was designed to be a action game i can’t figure why ANet spread the skills over 10 buttons, never mind forcing us to hold down a button the whole time we want to control the camera. The control scheme for this game is straight up old school MMORPG. TERA or Neverwinter on the other had has interface designed for action.

DesertRose.2031:

2. The main strength of an Engineer here is that he doesn’t need to kitten his damage by much to heal his allies. E.g. set up a Healing Turret, overcharge it and pick it up/blow it up takes only 1-2 seconds and heals your allies for 2.5k to 3.8k. Switching to Elixir Gun and dropping a Super Elixir takes again only 1-2 seconds and heals for 2k+. Healing Turret’s F skill and Elixir Gun #4 takes again only 1-2 seconds and heals for 1.3k.
A Staff Ele doesn’t deal its maximum damage for 13-15 seconds if he switches to water to heal, or a LH Ele up to 60 seconds if he drops his conjured weapon.

Staff is not where the massive ele heal is, strangely enough. It is off hand dagger and dodging with evasive arcana. Maybe topped off with one more by simply swapping to water while having the right trait. All these are AOE heals with a 1.0 benefit from healing power.

Kozume.9035:

Vayne.8563:

Personally I think you’re at a disadvantage if you’re so worried about being at a disadvantage that you stop having fun because of it.

People want to be forced to have fun, rather than find their own fun.

At least that’s how I see it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analysis_paralysis

Syndrilious.9632:

I would like to think that less Waypoints would lead to player appreciation of the graphics, but then, I remember the casuals. Casuals don’t like spending half their available time online walking. I love it, but I play a minimum of 20 hours a week.

There are two interpretations of “casual”. One is the people that only have a few hours each day/week/month that the can spend on the game, and so like to get things done quickly.

Then there is the other kind. The ones that have heaps of time, but that do not spend it in any goal oriented fashion. Meaning that they may run a dungeon with pugs (even if the gold return on time invested downright stinks), they may spend time around the mystic forge or similar just for the chatter and sights, and any number of similar activities that would raise the heckle in any “hardcore”.

Anyways, i suspect the waypoints came about trying to include a GW1 style travel option in GW2. This while also offering nearby resurrection points.

Knote.2904:

poses.5198:

ninjabiscuit.8052:

To be entirely honest, turrets won’t work in many cases until they can be mobile. Even in tpvp and spvp where there are points to defend turrets are just not viable.

Give them the ability similar to rangers:

Grandmaster Trait XI Spirits Unbound Spirits can move and follow you.

turrets have fanbelts attached to them like the hacked robots of bioshock and move with you. This would be Grandmaster Trait in inventions. They don’t need buffing they just need to move.

^This

No.

Making them mobile will guarantee they stay weak.

What makes turrets appealing is the fact that they’re strong yet immobile to have strong area denial/punish.

They need a really low cooldown on pick up, that will instantly fix the mobility issues.

And nullify the use of tool kit and traits for turret repair. The only way this could work is if ANet stored the state of a picked up turret, so that it has the same health as when it was picked up and so on.

Not much will happen with turrets as they are apparently powerful in SPVP, and SPVP is the focus for balance changes.

Anyways, a core issue is that the turrets when picked up do not save state. Meaning that the next time the turret is deployed it is back at full health. As such, the risk is that some point holding engineer would keep his turrets topped up by constantly picking them up and putting them down again between fights. This then makes the tool kit and the turret auto-repair trait worthless.

Engineers are in a sense a siege profession. Either holding or capturing a location. End result is that when the game mode demands more mobility a large segment of our skill collection is nullified.

In essence the scaling system is a double edged sword.

Yes it allows me to go back and help my recently started friends without one hit killing the zone’s big bads (most of the time, the scaling do however makes starting area champs borderline norms if not for their health fat nature).

But at the same time it makes it pointless to visit most of the zones, because the loot drops are scaled to your actual level (or nearly so). Never mind that before we had loot scaling, everyone was farming Cursed Shore into the ground, with the rest a wasteland (in more than one sense).

Only option i can think of is for the dailies that assign events and group events to stop doing so for specific regions (Tyria, Ascalon and such) and instead assign a specific zone within you characters level range. But this would mean that the achievements would be tailored to each individual character rather than simply everyone en mass.

Nike Porphyrogenita.8137:

Dante.1508:

I agree as of now CC does nothing, Conditions just put another icon on a boss

Sounds like someone who hasn’t done fractals over level 48.

But why the kitten to we have to go all the way beyond F48 before nearly 2/3 of most professions become useful?!

Sounds like it could have been recoded to work like speedy kits. Internal cooldown, 5+ seconds duration. Would allow for it to be removed or converted without being instantly reapplied.

Tobbygnome.6793:

At least let us start with 10%, the minimum amount to enter DS.

With DS now passing overflow damage onto the health orb, i am not sure how valuable that will be.

So you’re saying that the stones and crystals have been moved down in rarity?

They are so rarely talked about in those terms that at first i wondered if the icons themselves had changed color.

My slightly confused setup:

weapon: 123qe
utilties: zxc
heal: r
elite: alt-e
dodge: shift
profession: alt-1234
movement: wasd

Uber.7623:

PvE-Wise, turrets definitely aren’t as lasting as other builds. PvP-Wise, it takes 2-3 folks to take this control point away from me!

And that is what is messing up this game. PVE and PVP plays so very differently. And the cause is more likely to be how mobs are designed than the profession balance.

All the bigger mobs come in two kinds.

1. big bags of health with spiky damage output. Pretty much designed to force us to use what ANet came up with to avoid the “i swing a sword” aspect of MMORPGs that they disparaged in their manifesto.

2. trick bosses that largely nullify profession differences by requiring the use of some environmental object or other.

Both of these badly break turrets, as they can’t dodge/block/evade and are pointless to bring for a trick boss.

Basically turrets are useless as anything but blast finishers outside of SPVP, in large past because of the massive focus the game has on mobility as a defense mechanic.

ANet needs to come up with a easier way for us to bring our turrets with us, but without us turning into a clockwork minion-mancer.

Seems that those that want to keep them use them as disposable blast finishers, while those that want to remove them actually try to use them as turrets.

IMO that indicates that something is badly wrong with the overall turret system.

haviz.1340:

digiowl.9620:

And in the end, that is what keeping you alive. Not being able to take one hit extra.

Now if a proper PVT could take 5+ hits, then it would get interesting. But one extra hit do not really improve the margin for error much.

Tanky guardian can facetank full duration fo necrid trap and still be alive, that’s 5’hits. Glass guardian goes down on the 2nd hit.

edit: this kitten filter filters 5’hits >.<

Champ sadly didn’t specify what he could take two his from with one profession/build, and one hit with another. But i suspect it was not necrid trap and more likely one of the single hit attacks.

Xae Isareth.1364:

2) each class is unique. It brings something to the table that no other class can. A perfect example of not being ‘unique’ is basically how Warriors work at the moment. They can party-support, CC, heal, and DPS, whilst being basically king of all trades, master of all, which breaks the uniqueness of other classes.

That way lies trinity…

Demonstrating how overly balanced the game is around fast paced spiking, something permanent stability counteracts (by nullifying the opening CC). How about a compromise tho, and give permanent protection?

Anymras.5729:

On my Game Bug forum thread, somebody said there were 4 or 5; 1 is what’s supposed to be there, 2 is what’s there for one second after placement (which is unaffected by downleveling and traits alike, and is the version that must be overcharged for the Rifle Turret’s overcharge to function…closer to properly), 3 is Deployable, and 4 is Supply Crate Turrets.

I was going by the thinking that each combination of traits (and perhaps untraited, now that i think about it) would have its own complete entry in the database or code.

Meaning that to change one trait would involve changing every variant where that trait is involved.

My basis for all this is how seemingly any slotted skills touched by a trait change “flips” the moment said trait is chosen. Never mind that for a long time one of the necromancer wells had the wrong icon showing when wells were traited for ground targeted placement.

Meh, sounds like an elixir focused engineer to me. Tho perhaps with a few more “offensive” elixirs (but then there is perhaps the grenade kit for that).

Tiger Ashante.1792:

gumoor.5674:

By the way, if you end a sentence with ‘s’ and then the next word is ‘hit’…it changes the word to kitten. See previous post. LOL!

Haha yea, this forum filter is like a “Lunatic Inquisition” onto itself. I often have to chuckle at the words it picks out to sensor, lot of them just simple words, not even closely resembling a swear word.

It is trying to second guess the creativity of forum trolls. End result is that it not only picks up the words themselves, but also sequences of letters that is split up via various means (spaces, commas, you name it really).

As for the edit issue, yep i have seen it from time to time. I am guessing the server sometimes timeout but there is no error pushed to the ajax running the site.

For the time being i suspect editing should be done via the full editor…

champ.7021:

oh and my internet connection is pretty bad, im just used to lupicus.

And in the end, that is what keeping you alive. Not being able to take one hit extra.

Now if a proper PVT could take 5+ hits, then it would get interesting. But one extra hit do not really improve the margin for error much.

colesy.8490:

Astralporing.1957:

colesy.8490:

No it’s not. The point of berserker gear is risk vs. reward

And the current mechanics make it so the risk is the same for everyone, but the reward is greater for zerkers. Something’s obviously not right.

Zerker guardian gets one-shotted by Lupicus, PVT guardian can take two hits.

And the difference is academic on anything less than a direct LAN connection to the server.

Skan.5301:

Crawford.4135:

I think the new Ascended gear is just horrible. I don’t know what they were thinking when they came up with it. The Ascended weapons are so dull so I expected the gear would be worse. I wasn’t wrong.

You’d think for something you have to actually work hard for would have something creative, but I was wrong there.

It could be like that on purpose.

Here’s the breakdown:

Make kittenty looking weapons and armours that are BiS, meaning people would want them for various reasons. Before and during the release of weapons and armours, put Transmutation Crystals on sale so people will buy them after previewing the sets. +sales

We already saw this happen for the weapons. Watch it happen when the armours come in as well.

Sounds plausible. Also notice how they hand out transmutation stones left and right during leveling, but once you start piling up L80 gear you need to get those crystals. And the most reliable way to get those? The gem store. Almost like they want to get us hooked on frequent transmutations during leveling, only to have us wave that credit card at 80 to maintain the addiction…

Was the render assembled from pieces or found as a single model? If it is the latter, then it was intended for a NPC.

Running around like a headless chicken to rotate the turrets back to full health do not sound like easy to me. Unless you stack them in one place. But then one good AOE can wipe them out, unless they get much more health then they currently have.

TexZero.7910:

Until they make control / conditions worth using this topic is at best a pipe dream, as far as PvE goes.

One option for PVE control could be to introduce a second effect stage on non-defiant mobs. In most other MMOs, CC effects have a long duration but can be broken by doing damage to the CCed mob. ANet could have something similar for hard controls in PVE on top of the existing unbreakable durations.

Just today i tried using necro warhorn #4 on some skritt while doing my daily. I barely had time to register that they were dazed, and start attacking one of them, before they all woke up again.

IMO that makes GW2 control skills useless as PVE CC, and once again reinforce DPS as the way to go (in particular AOE DPS when facing down multiple mobs).

Control skills in GW2 are, IMO, designed more as SPVP combo breakers (to borrow from fighting games). Something you slam in a attackers face to stop him from pulling off a damage chain.

IndigoSundown.5419:

chemiclord.3978:

IndigoSundown.5419:

You haven’t been paying attention, then. This suggestion has been made many times, some of them in this thread, by suggesting that mobs behave more like players.

While I personally would LOVE to see mobs have an AI that plays more like a player would… Arena.net had better, more complex AI in place during the betas. The general consensus was that players despised it, and made combat too frustrating.

Bringing it back to that earlier level now would kitten off more people than it pleased, of that I am certain. So the solution is to find alternate ways for enemies to deal damage while keeping the enemy dumb.

You might be right. However, one of the ways in which players behave differently than mobs is that their auto-attacks are faster, and do more damage.

More often, yes. More damage, dunno. One example of how much slower mobs attack in general can be found in the confusion condition. In PVE it hits twice as hard as in SPVP, because mobs perform actions less frequently. This also makes confusion spewing mobs (reef drakes, clockwork horrors, wintersday dolls) much more dangerous than perhaps ANet intends.

By increasing the action frequency of mobs to be more in line with characters, said damage can be brought in line with SPVP. And at the same time it would make retaliation that much more effective against mobs.

chemiclord.3978:

IndigoSundown.5419:

You haven’t been paying attention, then. This suggestion has been made many times, some of them in this thread, by suggesting that mobs behave more like players.

While I personally would LOVE to see mobs have an AI that plays more like a player would… Arena.net had better, more complex AI in place during the betas. The general consensus was that players despised it, and made combat too frustrating.

Bringing it back to that earlier level now would kitten off more people than it pleased, of that I am certain. So the solution is to find alternate ways for enemies to deal damage while keeping the enemy dumb.

Not so much that the AI is more complex, particularly in terms of movement. But that it makes more use of boons rather than simply being health fat for survival. Right now mob boon usage is so rare that i easily forget that i even have anything specific to counter it while running around.

And a sizable portion of all processions skill set is dedicated to dealing with enemy boons in some way or other.

SaintSnow.6593:

If this effect was only for utility turrets then yes maybe that could help the sad state they are already in. But if it effected the healing turret we would have a constant heal+condi cleanse at all times with no cool-down. I mean I’m not against this as I would love to be extremely overpowered but I don’t think it would fly with the rest of the community.

Internal cooldown?

Anymras.5729:

Rocket Turret’s also being affected by an issue that causes a version of Rocket Turret that did not receive the direct damage buff, but did lose Burning, to be used when Rifled Turret Barrels is active, so it’s impossible to really tell how effective it is at its new apparent purpose of ‘massive direct damage.’

Ugh, sounds like either spaghetti code or a bloated database.

meaning that rather than applying trait related changes in some mathematical way, each combination of traits have their very own related turrets. Meaning that for every turret that is changed you have to go over the whole code, or database, and find every variant of said turret for every possible trait combo there is.

Unless i am totally off the wall here, there is potentially 25 different variants for each turret. Or 175 different turrets in total.

Cyanide.7952:

Maskaganda.2043:

it takes 1-2 seconds to hit at melee range, coupled with an immobilize and a jumpshot I think it could have some decent burst potential. I’ll experiment some.

If you stand inside the target it hits instantly.

So, can be use this to recreate the banzai grenade barrage?

Here is my thinking:

Track turret stats internally at all times.

When a turret is picked up, do not destroy in game engine terms, but instead store its state somewhere. At the same time, put a icon alongside the boons.

Said icon is a indicator that you are now carrying a turret. A turret that can instantly be deployed again by hitting the relevant skill button. The turret such deployed have the state of the turret picked up, with all cooldowns continuing from where they left off.

While carrying turrets, their detonate toolbelt skills should remain active. And if pressed, will destroy the turrets and cause a blast centered on the engineer.

Optionally, introduce a trait that allow carried turrets to cause relevant effects based on trigger conditions (periodic, attack, crit, affected by CC and so on).

The problem is that they apparently made for good point defense in SPVP when spread out so that AOE can’t take them all. They then end up with the enemy either having to go for the engineer and hope he can survive the turret damage, or go for the turrets and allow the engineer to slap them around.

One thought i had elsewhere was that rather than have the pickup just be a cooldown reduction, how about the turrets become a kind of charge (like say the mesmer mantras). While the engineer holds such a charge he can instantly deploy the turret again, or use the toolbelt detonate to create a blast at his location.

Perhaps there could even be a chance of some effect happening, perhaps with the right trait selected, given certain conditions and depending on the turrets carried.

This would allow a engineer to grab a turret and go, and gain a choice between holding the turret or dropping it again when arriving somewhere else.

Right now, at least in PVE, you are better of just blowing the turret up as the reduced cooldown do not cover the extra hassle of actually going over and grabbing the turret in the first place (unless you’re standing right next to it, but then that just expose it to AOEs).

Seems like what quite a few have been asking (tho mistakenly labeling it trinity), have meaningful non-dps builds. That is, stat lines that actually make a noticeable difference when not boosting damage output.

There are two reasons for why we do not have that today, SPVP balance and mob design.

The first is that boosting non-damage will result in a stagnant SPVP play style, where people use builds that enable them to sit on points all day with the other team going all out on them.

the second is that mobs outperform characters in both health and damage output. This makes non-damage builds futile as they just increase how long the players need to concentrate on the fight rather than reduce the players workload.

Given that, what is needed to change is not the PVE build options but the mob design. They need to attack more often, but do less damage pr hit. And they need to have less health and instead make more use of boons and heals.

This put them more in line with SPVP builds, allowing players to use more of their profession’s toolbox of skills against the mobs (boon strippers/converters, interrupts, and so on).

Btw, at least two of the big bads in the labyrinth are prime examples of bad design. The big elemental is basically a overly long trick fight (stand in randomly located puddles, but do not stand too long, to defend against massive andy corn barrages). And the Lich can simply be dogpiled.

Mojo.7986:

I’ve been kicked from dungeon groups now due to the color of my sword. If it ain’t red, it ain’t making things dead.

Groan…

did a labyrinth zerg run today with my pistol engineer, and the new damage popups really showed how little impact my bleeds had.

I was seeing maybe 1-2 ticks, then nothing for a long while, then 1-2 again. This while if i run solo it can reach 10+ stack size just by letting the autofire do its thing.

And i suspect the new pr second damage popups are simply showing how the damage has always been done internally. The spray of numbers style bleed was simply eyecandy done client side.

Meh, strip the upgrade slots from the items, and instead put them into the hero panel next to the affected items. The current system is needlessly convoluted, perhaps to prod us towards buying transmutation crystals.

Meh, the GW2 trinity is runner, bunker, bunker-buster.

Zackie.8923:

first step to revitalize tequatl would be to get rid of the timer.

all the timer does is say “you better do this this this and this way or else you will fail and get nothing”

Indeed. All the timer does it reinforce the “DPS! DPS! DPS!” mantra.

It should fail because the players fail to stop Tequatl from obtaining some goal, not because “oh, look at the time! Take 5 everyone!”.

Karizee.8076:

As of yesterday the Tequatl Terror Squad alone is over 200 kills on overflow servers:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/guilds/recruitment/TTS-Update-From-the-Flight-Captain/

In effect turning the whole thing into a instanced raid by manipulating the overflow mechanics. Nice going ANet…