Guild Wars 2

Helcor.9527:

VIVorcha.7853:

It would seem that for you, the wrong “tone” is one of reason and disagreement with your opinion.

Anybody who uses “effing”, “em”, and “bah” in a single post has immediately lost all right to participate meaningfully in the discussion.

Not to mention you’re defending something that goes against the very ideas that Guild Wars 2 is trying to promote in MMOs.

Rangers are not bad, they’re amazing. My new character is a Ranger and after playing him, I feel slow and clunky on my Engineer compared to the mobility and evasion provided by Greatsword, Longbow, Lightning Reflexes, and Signet of the Hunt.

Good point about mobility. I made a build last night and forgot to put my MANDATORY 10 points in Tools for speedy kits. Big mistake in wvw.

Feels like ANet should just give everyone a out of combat swiftness boon and call it a day, at least in WvW.

As for PVE, outside of the overhanging issue of health fat mobs that spam spike damage making anything but DPS a no go, i think our biggest issue is boring ranged options. We have 1 weapon (rifle) and 1 kit (grenades) that reach out the general max range (1200), and the rifle only has that for #1 while grenades will eventually wear out your wrist unless you use something that can hammer the keys for you (sometimes i wonder if ANet even tested this game without hardcore gaming hardware and third party VOIP services).

Ok, there is a third option, mortar, but anyone picking that over the supply drop is insane. I guess a fix there would be if we could pick it up like a warrior banner and bring it along when the battle moves.

All in all ,for a game built with mobility as a focus the engineer is painfully static.

Kits are already nerfed, as their damage stats are somewhere between shield and pistol…

ahuba.6430:

I’m happy for the revamped dragons.
I hated the hype the guy was giving it before the tequatl showcase, about how it was great and took alot of time and effort and how it will be the NEW release for september. I’m speechless that they try to shove this down our throats as new content.
Brb, releasing a game with broken bosses and then re-release them fixed 1 year later and calling it “new content”.

Straight from the Apple school of marketing. Arenanet have been high on hype ever since they first announce the game it seems. And it got cranked to 11 once it shipped.

Lack of effective alternatives to evade and DPS spam in PVE.

CC in most games are about thinning the mob herd (keeping one or more temporarily out of the fight while taking down the rest) as an alternative to the DPS race.

In GW2, CC are the MOBA equivalent of a fighting game combo breaker or air juggling setup.

Without effective PVE CC and aggro management, the game is in essence a DPS race. You either drop the mobs or the mobs drop you.

to make CC effective in PVE, either the effect duration need to be multiplied by 10, or the cooldowns need to be divided by 10. But ANet wants to keep PVE and PVP as similar as possible, as their thinking is that PVE is the warmup session for PVP. Esports is the name of the game, and those of us that only do PVE are simply sucking down bandwidth and costing ANet money…

The most chatter i do is during large events where i can sit at max range and watch the auto-attack go plink plink plink. But even then i need to keep an eye out for AOE spam and be ready to hammer that dodge. In essence, this is not a game you can play on mouse alone for any extended period.

For some kitten backwards reason, ANet thinks that only “tanks” pile on armor. And so they apparently made having a high defense a mob magnet.

But not everyone put on armor for that reason. Some do so because we do not have the connection and reflexes to save ourselves from slip second, out of camera view, dodge or die attacks.

But because more armor means we get more mob attention, putting on more armor is basically futile in this game…

Geekfox.4267:

A regular day at Whitland Flats.

Heh, had a similar experience in southern Frostgorge the other day. Was dealing with a invasion event inside the dredge caves, and all of a sudden the room was stormed by dredge. For some reason the place we were in were also the place for a defensive event between kodan and dredge. As we had enough trouble as it was dealing with a rampaging nightmare, the battle quickly dissolved as everyone ran for easier targets.

The clockwork mobs feel like Southsun in drag.

Horrors = reef drakes. Only now they can consume the remains of others to instantly turn veteran…

Reavers = floaters. But with a mine spam attack that has deceptively small warning circles, and are fully capable of downing anyone if they happen to land in a concentrated manner.

Nightmares = veteran karka. spamming AOE knockdowns with a impossible to read range in between pretending to be walking roto-rooters.

I must have some kind of flagellation fetish, given that i continue to play this game…

There is also the “aggro one, get one or two free” mechanic.

Especially as ranged attacks that miss, bounce or pierce do not simply stop, they can easily aggro something in the proximity that are not already hostile.

1. Regarding events the issue is not so much complexity as discoverability. The first thing you bump into when walking out of any home city is a scout. Problem is that said scout only points you to hearts, and once they are done clams shut. If they continued to be a source of event locations (ongoing or ready to begin) discovering events would become much easier.

2. on the trinity thing, my opinion is that ANet went too far. They could have implemented a soft trinity where each profession could adapt any of the 3, or some middle ground, but instead they made tanking impossible by stripping the game of any reliable aggro behavior, and made any kind of health related support a dump stat. Hell, healing power, vitality and toughness can in essence all be regarded as dump stats thanks to the dodge mechanic backed by boon duration boosted vigor.

Jared.8497:

2) Events need to be able to take out people who are just auto-attacking and not paying attention. I don’t think we should have to be pros just to play the game, but atm champs/events in general are just exp pinatas. The champs that DO punish people for not paying attention are the ones nobody fights. The broodmother in southern caledon is always up; the cave troll in queensdale is either dead or dying at any given moment, heh.

Like the camp defense events in Southsun? I wonder how many times i was insta-downed because some yahoo aggroed a karka and dodged their attack, that then went on to hitting me from out of camera view. Or some overscaled popper blew up nearby, or that veteran young went on a rampage through the lines.

As long as the fights are undirected brawls, and the camera do not allow us to zoom out to get a clear overview (hello random branch or other overhanging solid object), any kind of “inattention punishment” will just lead to frustration and stressed players.

What is missing from ANet are clear statements, in the news on the front page or similar central source rather than in some long forum thread, about what will be one time only kind of temporary, and what will be seasonally temporary (meaning that you get another shot at the achievements and prizes in a years time).

This would allow people to prioritize the parts that can only be completed once or be forever lost, and work on the rest at a more sedate pace.

I would say that allowing us to pile a crit chance in the high 90s is the real culprit, as it makes crits the new normal hit. This turning into a double whammy when runes, traits and foods have all kinds of “on crit” mechanics. Before they put in the internal timer, a zerker warrior could outperform a vampiric traited necromancer by munching on “heal on crit” foods.

Honestly, this is a massive issue with the game in general. Why are the traits supposedly the defining element of our professions, when gear and foods greatly outperform them? A full stack of armor mods provide 2-3x the amount of stat gain that a trait line does, and various consumables outperform traits that are supposed to define a profession.

I honestly believe that the gear and trait mechanics were balanced solely on SPVP, aiming to produce a MOBA, and that the PVE bits to turn it into a MMO was bolted on because someone at NCSoft raised a stink. Various parts of PVE seems to carry the markings of designers running rampant for arts sake, with no consideration for long term playability.

I suspect part of the problem with WVW is that there is no long term expense for the server when characters die. Real life wars often get decided on pure attrition, who can kill more of the enemy than the enemy can of them. This again leading to terms like Pyrrhic Victory, where the “winner” have lost so many that they may as well be considered the looser.

WVW do not have a solid system for this. And sadly any such system is liable to be griefed (real life would consider it sabotage or terrorism).

The reason we keep seeing roving zergs repeated flipping the same places, is that there is no real way to make any attempt at capturing it more expensive for the attacker than the defender.

matjazmuhic.1649:

Totally brainless zergs autoattacking.

So… Not really fun for me I must admit…

Yep, just sit at the edge and spam your longest range auto-attack.

When you see what certain other companies have done with similar concepts (multiple points to attack, defend, and additional objectives at the same time), this is in essence a loot pinata tsunami.

This even more by how there is no way to control the mobs targeting (aggro) or movement (crowd control), so there is no way to create a organized battlefield.

Btw, i’m starting to wonder if something is badly wrong with how mobs scale to meet multiple attackers. If i go it alone, even the lowly default takes ages to grind down. But if just one other character joins in, it melts in seconds. It is almost as if it starts to take more damage from all of us.

Then i have no idea.

What is the point of having Vorpp being heard by anyone within earshot every time someone complete their achievement?!

Were you close to the final Scarlet battle during the events? That is my best guess, as the achievement talks about being close enough to the portal closing to get readings.

except there is no way to go directly to the list and check your next step. Watch a step, and you’re taken to the watched list on click. Click the living story notice and you end up in the queen’s speech list.

Elbegast.6970:

digiowl.9620:

you need to hang around 5 invasion areas for the finish fight with Scarlet, that should provide enough readings for the next stage (that i suspect are gathering parts for his portal machine by fighting a number of champion clockwork horrors).

What are ‘invasion areas’? where?

Each hour, on the hour, the living story notification on your right will inform of a clockwork invasion of some zone. Go there, and hope you get there within 10 minutes so you can get into a overflow instance where it is actually going on…

The main problem is that ANet insist on putting backgrounds on these things.

This makes them much more visually intrusive than they need to be.

I find myself wondering if someone oopsed the scaling code, and the more people pile on the weaker the mobs armor get.

you need to hang around 5 invasion areas for the finish fight with Scarlet, that should provide enough readings for the next stage (that i suspect are gathering parts for his portal machine by fighting a number of champion clockwork horrors).

Beating the stuffing out of loot pinatas.

IMO the aggro mechanic is effectively a RNG. I wonder how many times i have seen big bads ignore multiple people meleeing them as fast as they can to stomp over to little ol’ me sitting out on the edge of my range pewpew-ing with autoattack.

And as long as the aggro is as it is, all fights turn into brawls where you just pick a target at random and drop a ton of hurt on him.

People hidden by a short culling distance have their nametag displayed no matter the setting, to indicate where they are located. Meaning that the server is no longer culling them, and it is up to the player to find the right amount of models, and their complexity, he want to have displayed during play. Once models are drawn, the name tag will vanish if the relevant option is unchecked.

Perhaps ANet should replace the tag with a simple arrow or something?

Aisina.4963:

Yeah its just frustrating in the meantime!

On top of that, Commanders are now trying to pull people away from actually completing the event, saying that if people zerg together, more champions will spawn. They literally said they didn’t care if the event completed or not, they just want money.

This new farming malarky going hand in hand with our living story updates, is really bringing out the worst in people. We really need quick diminishing returns on these invasions to prevent people ruining it for others.

A conceptually simple fix would be to remove all drops from events spawned mobs, and present the players with end of event chests containing an assortment of relevant drops based on their effort within the event.

Infernia.9847:

If only healing power scaled. Make it heal a percentage rather than a set number. But then that would get dangerously close to the trinity role.

I don’t think ANet cares much about trinity at this point. The balancing is done with a fixation on SPVP. And any improvement on passive defenses that would allow people to opt out of the APM race that is PVE, would lead to the “horror” of indestructible bunkers in SPVP.

The world seems like a massive song and dance to bring in the lore fans of GW1 and placate NCSoft’s MMO needs, while the combat mechanics center around building a MOBA to satisfy the ANet executives esport kitten.

Yep, UI interfering with ground targeting is a “classic”.

If you hover over any UI element and double tap a GT skill, the effect will be centered on your character rather than the mouse pointer. Tap such a skill once, drag the mouse over a UI element, tap the skill again, and you get a “out of range error”.

Makes me so wish i could move the target panel (top center) down below my characters back, as i all too often obscures a large mob if i am not up in melee range (the game is massively back row hostile).

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

digiowl.9620:

But discovering that some centaurs are rampaging just beyond the next height is virtually impossible unless one take the time to climb said height.

I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that’s kinda harder if it’s just centaurs because they’re less notable than a giant gaudy airship swooping to park itself over a land feature and start shelling the balloon stands

The good news is there are NPCs in a lot of areas which will run up to players and go “hey, got a moment?” to let them know there’s an event going on not far from there. The bad news is you still don’t often find events without that help or randomly wandering into one.

The NPCs are a bandaid, and usually so close to the event that you may as well wander into it (unless it is at the other end of a escort). What is hilariously sad is that we have all these scouts. But once you have the map portions revealed, and the related hearts done, they clam shut. If we could talk to them and get a highlight of everything going on, it would greatly improve. As this provide a NPC that you can spot and navigate to, rather than the off chance that you wander into something.

Also, any big battle should result in smoke and noise.

Not sure it is worth saying anything now that Vayne has swaggered in, but i suspect ANet honestly thought a larger portion of the player base were explorers. Maybe it was the nature of the last game, maybe it was some designers delusion (the game sometimes seems to have been made on some artsy notions more than the claimed statistics they are supposed to be tracking).

In any case, if the events can’t be reached by asura gate they are less likely to be found and done. This simply because waypoints cost money, and so using them for traveling on a lark is a expense.

IMO, the game has a serious issue with discoverability. To locate a event, you have to be sitting virtually on top of it. The new aetherblade events are discoverable, as they announce themselves with sound and a airship way beyond the event range. But discovering that some centaurs are rampaging just beyond the next height is virtually impossible unless one take the time to climb said height.

Take Rift as a comparison. Zone wide events are noted on the world map with a bright red marker. And in the zone, every wandering mass off mobs, every foothold, every rift, is clearly marked as long as that part of the map has been previously uncovered.

Yes, ANet claimed that the map got noisy when they allowed all events to show for a zone. But at least that also tell the players that something is actually going on, without having to run a the map in a repeating search pattern.

Back when i was playing Adventure games, a sign of bad design was that i had to pixel hunt for some item or switch. This meant dragging the points back and forth across the screen to see if it would light up on a interactive element that was hiding in the background art. To me, running back and forth across a zone to look for events is the GW2 equivalent of a pixel hunt.

Nausiation.1469:

does it only make your number 6 ability heal stronger? or does it effect any heal you have like a guardian’s virtue of resolve?

Not all healing skills are made equal. Some get the full amount, some get 50% or lower (as low as 10% sometimes), some get none at all. #6 usually get the full amount.

Thing is though, that defensive stats are additive. Healing power adds to heals, thoughness adds to armor. Power on the other had is multiplied with the rolled weapon damage, so a good roll combined with high power can produce hits in the million range before aromor is taken into account.

Because the modern human being is so high on endorphins, that any drop in the trickle of stimulation is a instant depression.

The core issue is this, each unit in a condition stack has its own timer to track how long that unit lasts.

Additionally there is a timer that applies damage. The number you see flying off the mob is just for show, the real damage is applies once pr second, when the hidden timer triggers, calculates all the different damages (complete with changes to might and whatsnot since the last time) and applies them.

This happens for each mob and character in the entire game that happens to have a condition on them, each second.

A full stack of bleed in GW2 is the equivalent of 25 warlocks in WOW applying one DOT each. And i am not even sure if WOW accounts for buffs and debuffs applies to the warlock after the DOT was placed on the mob.

Stacking DOTs in other games usually just use a single timer to remove the whole stack, with the timer refreshing each time the stack is increased. They do not track individual units within the stack.

From a esthetics point of view, GW2 conditions are a marvel to behold. From a computer engineering standpoint, they are a monstrosity. And this seems to sum up the game in general. As a work of art it is impressive, as anything else it is a house of cards.

Ursan.7846:

digiowl.9620:

This is the polar opposite however, and goes against some of the oldest instincts of the animal kingdom. And it seems to be in the game simply for this ephemeral “skill” that i keep reading about, but that everyone seems to have their own private definition off.

Yes, training yourself to overcome your instinctual urges is a skill. The instant you see something, your instinct is to dodge. But a player who’s experienced the attack pattern over and over will be familiar with the timing of the attack and will know a better dodge timing. It’s something you learn over time and become more proficient at through experience. That is the definition of skill. How is this arbitrary or ephemeral?

Arbitrary in that it seems put into the game simply to promote this “skill”, but (for me at least) badly breaks immersion.

Ursan.7846:

digiowl.9620:

Seems like a arbitrary sort of “skill”.

One of the most important skills drilled into a soldier is the ability to hold your fire until your targets get in range for a higher chance of success: Hence the famous “Don’t shoot until you see the whites of their eye” quote.

Yes, from a positions of concealment so to maximize surprise and chance of hitting.

This is the polar opposite however, and goes against some of the oldest instincts of the animal kingdom. And it seems to be in the game simply for this ephemeral “skill” that i keep reading about, but that everyone seems to have their own private definition off.

anzenketh.3759:

digiowl.9620:

anzenketh.3759:

The trick is to figure out when to dodge when he starts his telegraph. For me I keep doing it too early.

ANet has a wonky sense of dodge timing. If the shield trainer in Queensdale and stone throwing wurms are reliable examples, they want us to dodge at the end of the trigger animation rather than at the start. But every fiber in my body screams that to me that the natural reaction is to dodge the moment i see a incoming attack, not wait until the sword edge is shaving my eyebrows!

I know. I have the same problem. That is why I hate Long telegraphs. Because I can not get rid of that innate instinct to dodge and get out of dodge I tend to get one hit too many times.

But this is where the skill comes into play. Learning to stand your ground just a few minutes more.

Seems like a arbitrary sort of “skill”.

Ursan.7846:

Tiger Ashante.1792:

So here’s another one of those smart comments. Sick of hearing this a swell. Doge, dodge, auto attack crap! Just cut it out will you! you guys are making me really annoyed with this crap. I’ve been playing since beta, i got 9x lvl 80.s, my latest one a ranger is reached equivalent to 120 lvls with 0 deaths. So yea, I don’t know what dodge si, as i’m sure most gw2 players don’t, so why don’t you tell us all about it!

Well to be fair, you thought that Necro staff abilities made you stand still.

Tiger Ashante.1792:

I’m a staff necro and every skill is a mark you have to place on the ground and basically stand still to place them

Not quite. I suspect the OP has trouble coordinating a movement direction while putting down the mark with any sense of precision. I have the same issue. If i try to run somewhere while pointing the camera off to the side (never mind backwards) i invariably end up running into a wall or off a cliff.

One reason why i find the slower strafe speeds and lack of a locked aim mode. Yes, there is the third party Combatmod. But i hold the opinion that turning certain actions into toggles (mouse look, show names) would be a simple change yet strongly benefit the game.

For a company that claims to be staffed by serious MMO geeks, the interface is painfully archaic and limiting. Almost to the point that dealing with the UI is a layer of fake difficulty.

Zylonite.5913:

where is this karma vendor?

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Ebon_Vanguard_weapons

Ebonhawk.

Not sure why OP chose to model the tier 1 version tho, as it confuses the point.

The combat mechanics are built around two human opponents facing each other in a limited arena, with moves and counter moves drilled.

LONGA.1652:

A-net want to make this game like Darksoul which is kinda niche.And its not working well when half of your customer playing from other continents.

There is a hilariously ironic line in the wiki about interrupts related to this. It claims that ANet dropped GW1 style interrupts when developing GW2, because it was so sensitive to latency. I say the current evade/block based system is as sensitive, if not more.

Or simply do like every other sane game with a third person camera does it, make the offending piece of terrain vanish (or at least transparent). But i guess that would be offensive to the esthetics of the map design…

anzenketh.3759:

The trick is to figure out when to dodge when he starts his telegraph. For me I keep doing it too early.

ANet has a wonky sense of dodge timing. If the shield trainer in Queensdale and stone throwing wurms are reliable examples, they want us to dodge at the end of the trigger animation rather than at the start. But every fiber in my body screams that to me that the natural reaction is to dodge the moment i see a incoming attack, not wait until the sword edge is shaving my eyebrows!

GW2, the HFT sim.

Meh, too me the lack of any real way to control the fight (pull adds this way, boss that way, keep the back row clear) is what brings out the zerg. You rush in, spam your attacks against anything that moves, and eventually the area clears enough that you can focus on the boss (that is likely crammed into some corner by micro-pushes not blocked by Defiant).

Another thing is that the damage scaling for additional characters is wonky. 1 on 1 a veteran takes time. 2+ and vets simply melt.

The elitism in here can be cut with a quaggan flipper…

ETA for fix, same time next year.

leviathonlx.2437:

Main thing I’d like them adding to combat is a cast timer underneath the mobs health or something. It just feels so arbitrary to make everything about dodging but then giving you no indication as to how far into a cast something is.

Supposedly the mobs have special animations for that, but thanks to how dodge is both a evade mechanic and a movement mechanic the timing becomes iffy between the various mobs.

One example is the ettins in Queensdale. You more often dodge them thanks to the movement part than the evade part (but only the evade part counts for daily “dodger”). Contrast that to the adult wurm, where if you dodge like you “learned” when dodging ettins, you still get hit.

This because apparently ANet wants us to react to the end of the animation, not the opening. And the only place i can think of that “document” this is in the south town in Queensdale, where you can practice blocking. Yet every avoidance instinct i have tells me to get out of the way the moment i notice something, not wait for it to be in my very face.

Sorry for being the sour apple, but this makes me wonder where ANet’s priorities are…