Guild Wars 2

mrstealth.6701:

Healers have everything to do with what’s being discussed in this thread. If the Druid is a powerful enough healer that they are required to complete content, and cannot be viably subbed with other classes, then there is a major conflict with the game’s design philosophy.

Healers have nothing to do with the argument that I responded to, which was that ten thieves (or any other group comp using ten of the same profession) ‘must’ be able to complete a raid.

I’m not really sure what point you’re trying to make there. It looks like you’re trying to say that taking two of the same profession automatically means a DPS loss, which makes no sense. If you’re dropping one profession (1 player, or mulitple?) for another profession, your gain/loss in DPS is going to depend on which professions/builds/roles those are. They all have different levels of DPS, support, and survivability.

What I am saying is that every time you exclude a profession from your raid group in favour of a different profession, you should end up losing out on something that you’re really going to miss, and ultimately, that almost invariably has to mean that one way or another, you lose a nice, fat chunk of your practical raid DPS.

Why?

Because the typical raid encounter can be reduced to a pretty simple question:

“Can you successfully deal with these mechanics while maintaining an average of at least x DPS for y time?”

If you can answer ‘yes’ to that question, you win. If you can’t, you wipe and will have to try again.

Everything about any fight that follows this formula ultimately boils down to either increasing your raid’s DPS or avoiding the loss of DPS.

The entire design philosophy of GW2 is for the profession to be balanced with each other so that any party composition is possible. That a certain profession or mix of professions is not required. That 10 of the same profession can complete any content, even if it’s not likely to be the best/fastest/easiest. In fact, that was a specific thing Anet was showing off before launch. Being able to complete dungeons of 5 of the same profession.

Whether you agree with it or not, or whether if fits your idea of what profession balance is, that is the intended design of GW2. Or at least it has been for the last 3 years.

It’s never really been the intended design to that degree — what they’ve promised is that you shouldn’t have to wait around for a member of one specific profession, and all signs point to that continuing to be the case.

But that doesn’t mean that full groups of ten of the same profession can or should be viable in all conceivable PvE content. That’s taking the original idea to an extreme.

It might be different for open-world, dungeons, and even fractals, but I would expect raids to be tuned in such a way that those comps aren’t viable, simply because of the practical DPS losses incurred by excluding all eight of the other professions.

mrstealth.6701:

It means that something is very wrong because being able to do that is the core philosophy of the game. Being able to complete any content with whatever party composition you have. You take who you have, and don’t have to wait around because you lack a healer/etc.

Healers have nothing to do with it. Let’s go back over what I said:

1. Balance requires that dropping one profession in favour of two of a different profession results in a substantial DPS loss.
2. You shouldn’t be able to kitten your raid’s DPS substantially eight times over and still pass a tight DPS check or enrage timer, like the ones that will presumably feature in every single raid.

From those points, it follows that if ten thieves can even come within sight of completing a raid, then either the raid is tuned badly, or the game’s balance is off. Not because of healing or reflects or whatever, but because of DPS.

As for the game’s philosophy being about always being able to succeed with whatever you have to hand, a raid comp comprising ten of the same profession is pretty contrived. If you just grab ten people from your guild and tell all of them to play their favourite specs, you should usually end up with something diverse enough to work.

Of course, if you’re trying to set up a raiding static for OMFG or Favourable Winds, you’re probably going to be in trouble.

Wicked Demiurge.3107:

So, with the announcement of the Druid as what can more or less be called a main healer, and the declaration that “berserker meta is over” and “you can’t dodge everything,” is Guild Wars 2 group content, particularly raids, going to go down the same bad path of all trinity MMO design, where many people aren’t allowed to play content because no one wants to heal and the content mandates X number of healers?

By the “same bad path of all trinity MMO design”, you appear to mean “the same bad path of World of Warcraft trinity MMO design”.

If you look at e.g., FFXIV, healer queues are often little better than DPS queues. Sometimes, they’re worse.

all non-druid PVE healing is a supplement and not meant to be a MMO trinity healer.

The self-heal skills will still be very important, as will all of the shields, reflects, and blurs that other professions provide. You won’t be bringing druid healers to content once you’ve done it enough (but druids will probably still be seen a lot, since they have a lot of uses besides healing).

This goes doubly as the content will be too hard to heal in existing equipment (say, a Ranger’s zerker or condi set), so they will have to farm up and carry around a Healing Power set.

We don’t actually know that’s the case yet, actually. Remember that healing skills in the game currently all start with a huge healing power bonus — for example, the heal amount from a blast finisher in a water field is based on your healing power plus 6600.

Kirschsahne.2081:

These changes are insanely welcome by 99% of the fanbase.

So, you interviewed every single member of the fanbase, did you?

Thought not.

Harper.4173:

The problem is the “you are now forced to take x damage regardless of skill level so the people who like to role play as healers feel wanted”.

1. Making some damage unavoidable doesn’t mean that skill isn’t rewarded or isn’t important. More skilled players, in better groups, with more experience of the content they’re doing will still take less damage, including from ‘unavoidable’ sources.
2. The trinity helps make things accessible by letting less-skilled players group with more-skilled players without anyone feeling like they’re carrying or being carried
3. It also helps provide groups with feedback on whether a fight is going well or poorly, beyond just “is it dead yet, are we dead yet?”
4. Good healers don’t just heal, they use all of the tools at their disposal, including their damage skills, aggro-generating capabilities, and more.

Daniel Handler.4816:

I am not referring to optimal. I am referring to viable. If it is not possible for full thief raids to complete the entire thing, then something has gone wrong…

That doesn’t imply that anything has gone wrong at all.

Raids are meant to be hard — the norm for hardcore raids in other games is that you need to be able to do something like 90% of your theoretically attainable DPS to beat the enrage timer. GW2 should be quite a bit more lenient than that (after all, we will never have genuinely better gear to bring along), but not by that much if they’re to remain credible.

Every time you drop a profession in favour of stacking another profession, balance demands that you’re significantly worse off for doing so. If these are credible raids and the game is balanced, you should not be able to do that eight times over.

Mirta.5029:

in FFXIV without healer’s DPS you won’t clear the current raids.

Well, healer DPS is supposedly not required. It’s only so important now because all of the world first groups running A1S – A4S are effectively undergeared. And your statement isn’t true of the regular A1 – A4.

But cleric stance has always been a very important part of what healers do in FFXIV, and similar things matter in a lot of other MMOs as well. Leech healers are also quite commonplace.

Odin of Ark.4860:

Since there’s no taunt to make an enemy constantly attack you, there is no trinity.

Tanking isn’t defined by the presence of taunt, and certainly not by “taunt to make an enemy constantly attack you”. It’s defined by having unavoidable targeted damage from enemies that, therefore, can only be dealt with proactively by directing it towards whoever is best placed to survive it.

The game already has healers — as a real thing that people use and make a point of using (virtue of courage, retreat, feedback, swirling winds, the guardian hammer chain, wall of reflection etc. are all healing skills as far as the trinity is concerned) — and of course, any game with hitpoints has DPS.

Harper.4173:

Thus began the end of what was once a glorious game.

The trinity isn’t bad. Bad trinity is bad. As long as they handle it properly, this will all be fine. So far, they seem to have made a point of avoiding most of the trinity pitfalls I can think of, so I’m cautiously optimistic for the time being.

It’s disappointing that they’re going with traditional holy trinity instead of coming up with better, but I’m more interested in getting a good game to play than in watching ANet zig where WoW zagged just for the hell of it.

As of the last time I think ANet published relevant figures for determining this (which was on the game’s first anniversary, two years ago), they were claiming to have peaked at 460,000 players (actually logged in and playing at a given moment, that is).

They might have been able to claim about 250,000 active players at that time by a fair definition (which, IMHO, is essentially mean concurrency), and probably something like a million active players by the sort of inflated definition a marketer might use — but note that both of these numbers are essentially guesses based on the two-year old published statistic I just quoted.

Source

You are reminded that you do not automatically have all minor traits upon equipping a specialisation, only those that you have unlocked with hero points.

The appropriate difficulty for mobs is a more complicated problem than I’ve seen anyone in this thread admit yet. It’s absolutely great if there are hard mobs and challenging content in the game — and how many times have I been on the forums specifically to argue in favour of full-fledged raids?

But not every mob needs to be like that, and Verdant Brink is one of the first maps a new player to the expansion sees. If they’re a returning player who hasn’t played in months, then they’re probably seriously out of form. There’s a time and a place for unforgiving content, and the very first map of an expansion might not be it.

Although, to be fair, I’ve played a little more, sticking to the areas that don’t horribly murder my toaster of a machine, and the mobs I’ve encountered don’t seem to be a problem as long as I pick my fights. I haven’t seen the night version of the map yet, though.

The idea that there’s a “rabid anti-trinity crowd” is a myth. The idea that it’s somehow the alternative to zergs is even more laughable.

The ‘standard’ model for a PvE combat encounter in nearly any MMO is as follows:

“Deal with mechanics X, Y, and Z without losing too much DPS”

Either there’ll be an actual bar that the group’s DPS has to clear in order to win at all, or you’ll simply want plenty of DPS in order to end the fight quickly.

In nearly every MMO with the holy trinity, it’s normal for healers to contribute to DPS and for tanks to start switching to DPS gear and more aggressive playstyles once they’re confident that they can deal with the damage and other mechanics of the fight. Sometimes, healers are even used specifically to deal with adds — e.g., using healer aggro to pick up the adds and position them or bait them towards the tank; or using their damage skills to take care of certain types of adds so that the regular DPS can concentrate on the boss.

In any event, if you want a smooth, fast run of any dungeon in GW2, you will already use all sorts of support and utility throughout:

• Noncombat utility: stealth, portals, swiftness, teleports
• Mob movement and positioning: pulls, pushes, swiftness, teleports, escapes
• Crowd control and interrupts: stuns, deep freeze, head shots
• Area ‘hard’ damage mitigation and ‘ultimate’ heals: aegis, reflects, blinds
• Area ‘soft’ damage mitigation and pressure healing: protection, vigour
• In-combat utility: cleanses, dispels, corrupts, and poison
• Offensive support: might, vulnerability

Every character will normally bring a whole bunch of these things as part of their overall toolkit. On top of that, you’ve got some personal defensive skills and self-heals, which fulfil the same role in Guild Wars 2 that fairies and hots often do in other MMOs, as well as some damage skills, which really fulfil the same role in Guild Wars 2 that the dots and other offensive skills on healers do in other MMOs.

As long as there’s no particular reason not to heal or tank, people will play healers and tanks. There’s that wonderful thing called an economy going on. Demand exists, and so people try to meet that demand in order to profit.

Good trinity MMOs have fun content and provide ways for healers to make themselves useful when their heals aren’t required (usually DPS or buffing the group’s DPS), which avoids the boredom problem.

The whole “always blame the healer” thing has become a lot less prevalent in games as well — even if people think it actually was the healer’s fault, there’s almost invariably something they could have done better or differently that would have averted the wipe, so they usually don’t pass comment. The bigger problem is tank blame, since any mistake by a tank is incredibly visible.

The non-toxic, non-idiotic majority of players in most trinity games are acutely aware that insulting the tank and healer when things go wrong merely results in fewer tanks and healers queuing for content and longer waits to form pugs. That said, tank blame is still fairly common, since it’s very visible when their health plummets, or a mob switches targets, and it’s normal for players to expect to get away with going all-out.

All of this said, there’s space on the market for something different. So what do we have as support in GW2 — tank skills, healer skills, and other non-damaging utility?

• Positioning and movement of mobs — taunts, pulls, pushes, skills like spectral walk and infiltrator’s strike.
• Using crowd control on enemies to limit incoming damage, prevent them from using important skills, or to keep them vulnerable — deep freeze, head shot, diversion.
• Mitigating incoming damage to the group using area blocks, group evades, group aegis, blinds, etc. — Virtue of Courage, Feedback, Wall of Reflection.
• Helping players to mitigate incoming damage to themselves using group heals, protection, and group buffs such as vigour — Call to Arms, Healing Spring, Chaos Storm, Shadow Refuge.
• Indirect contributions to group DPS, such as might, fury, quickness, and vulnerability.
• Niche utility — poisoning mobs where enemy healers are present, for example.

There’s plenty to do here that’s not damage — you just have to do damage as well. Which is what would be expected of any good tank or healer. And high-end groups already do use all or most of these. As I said before, if you’ve never run as anything but a DPS, you have probably never had a smooth, quick, uncarried run of anything.

In fact, the reason we don’t have literal healers in GW2 is that a lot of groups are advanced enough that they don’t need healing from outside sources — which corresponds pretty neatly to the situation in other MMOs where a healer can keep everyone topped up with nothing more than their hots and pets.

fixit.7189:

Yea in GW2 there really is one role, dps….do or die. If you go tanky/healy roles you are almost always hindering other players rather than helping them; it’s better to be specced as much dps as possible and kill the mobs as quickly as possible rather than be a gimpy no effect support player that just drags things out longer than it has to be.

But in end this is how gw2 is…it’s a bastion for dps players who hate tanks/healers and wants nothing to do with them. lol.

Your comment is just so badly wrong on so many levels.

The berserker phenomenon isn’t unique to this game, and it doesn’t mean that everyone is DPS. It is entirely normal for tanks and healers to gear for as much DPS as they can manage without dying in order to clear DPS checks more easily and get things done faster. Every good healer finds ways to boost the group’s damage when they aren’t healing or handling mechanics, and tanks do barely anything but beat the snot out of enemies.

In fact, you cannot play a DPS in GW2 and not be a burden to your group. You’re a support — you contribute to heals, positioning and movement, damage, offensive buffs, or damage mitigation as needed. Cast Black Powder in the middle of a bunch of mobs? Gratz, you’re a healer now. Aggro a group of enemies then spectral recall out of sight so they have to find you? Nice tanking. Pop whirling defence while stacked with a group to negate incoming projectiles? You’re a healer again.

The idea that everyone is a DPS in GW2 is just plain idiotic and absurd.

Yes, I bought it.

Went for the ultimate package, probably in part because of the backlash rather than in spite of it.

How quickly I start playing again after launch depends on how good HW is, however. I’m still paid up for quite a long time in FFXIV at the moment.

Hitman.5829:

So, what you are saying is that selling an item at 2 different prices is not illegal?

There are two items (1 and 2)
Selling item (1+2) to a white guy for $49.99
Selling item 1 to a black guy for $49.99

Please discuss!

That’s not even remotely analogous to what is going on here. Seriously, what the hell?

Biggyboy.7105:

Oh, and for those of you who have “supported” the game for 3 years. You haven’t been supporting them if you haven’t been buying gems regularly…

False.

The entire point of a multiplayer game is that you play with or against other people. Every second you spend playing one is a second you are spending doing unpaid voluntary work to support it.

Especially if you’re organising players, helping to mentor newbies, and otherwise helping to enrich the game experience for all players. Few whales can come even close to doing more to support the game through gem purchases than the best regular players do simply by playing.

ANet are not being greedy or doing anything immoral or shady, and the price they’re proposing to charge should be reasonable by comparison to what other games offer (my estimate is that Heavensward will be about the same size as or smaller than Heart of Thorns).

The problem here is that they don’t have the standing or the track record necessary to be merely reasonable. There are a lot of people who require them to be awesome with this expansion. Maybe those people have a point.

Nidome.1365:

They are charging UK players extra.

Net prices in USD for the different editions, if purchased in the UK using GBP:

• Standard: $45.35 (US: $49.99)
• Deluxe: $77.74 (US: $74.99)
• Ultimate: $103.64 (US: $99.99)

Prices aren’t really that different, but it’s a bit weird that ANet absorbs a bunch of tax on the standard purchase but not the others.

For those wondering if UK players are getting shafted on price, I’m fairly sure that US prices are usually quoted net since the tax rate varies from state to state. The UK prices are gross.

UK players are actually paying the equivalent of $45.90 to ANet for the game, and the equivalent of $9.12 goes to the taxman, for a total cost of $55.02. I’m fairly sure most Americans will ultimately be paying $55 after taxes.

I believe the EU also gets quoted gross prices, and the output tax paid depends on where the point of supply is.

ManBeerVark.9562:

Hi, I bought this game for the first time 5 days ago. I feel very cheated now seeing that the original game will be included in this expansion. I’m a student and can’t afford to fork out cash like this, I have very limited income atm.

Open a support ticket, and make it absolutely clear what your situation is. They’ve already said that players who recently bought the game can get the expansion more cheaply.

Rebound.3409:

What part of the core game wasn’t considered “good” out of curiosity?

Fun question.

If content gets seen as pure padding, players outside of the game will learn about it and take it into account, while players in the game will ignore it and eventually completely forget about it completely.

But wanting a piece of content to be treated as more than just padding doesn’t mean that players will see it as being so.

phys.7689:

FFXIV has a smaller open world, but a fairly expansive amount of instanced content. but yeah, im waiting to see whats actually in the expansion, and when its coming out before i buy it.

It’s a little off-topic, but:

Rebound.3409:

A lot of defenders on these forums (not this thread necessarily) but no one is man enough to make the comparison chart..why? They should be ecstatic to make one and prove the naysayers wrong.

That comparison chart would make the expansion look terrible, as has already been explained.

But in reality, the amount of raw content that’s there on paper means little — what really matters is the amount of refined content. GW2 has enough filler for both itself and the expansion already.

If you don’t think you have enough information to make a decision about whether or not to pre-purchase the expansion, don’t pre-purchase the expansion. ANet probably aren’t planning to send ninjas to your house if you wait a month or two.

Most MMO connoisseurs consider FFXIV to have far more content than GW2, even though it’s far smaller on paper. Numbers and quantities don’t count for much, because again, it’s the quality that matters, and that’s not something you can judge from “five maps and a new class” or whatever.

Rebound.3409:

@evilunderling so you are basing a price on a fictive, unproven value that might or might not come. So you are basically gambling?

A game purchase can be more or less informed, but it’s always going to be a form of speculation.

Assuming malice with no evidence is just blind hate. And for reference, any law court would require pretty strong evidence of malice as well.

littlemunster.1059:

That was the reason why I bought the base game. Now I felt I’ve been lied to.

You can get a refund within 28 days of the initial purchase by filing a support ticket.

Make it clear that you’re asking for a refund so you can take advantage of the new deal, since otherwise customer services might block you from using the same e-mail and payment method for future purchases.

Acharyn.4738:

They even put it on sale. Before the edit, several times it was on sale after they announced HoT in the making.

Sounds to me like the original plan was to cut the base game to £10 permanently once the expansion became available for purchase, and the sales were just a preview of that.

Again, no evidence of malice.

We don’t have a full list of what the expansion will provide, and it doesn’t matter.

People mentally ‘thresh’ MMO content when they play through it. Nobody cares about the chaff, only the wheat.

If ANet have learned anything from the last three years, this expansion might seem small on paper, but it will be aiming for a much higher wheat-to-chaff ratio.

Not that it matters. The hive mind has spoken, and the expac is doomed whatever ANet do by now.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Think about it this way: Any place you can get to with Spectral Walk can be reached by having a buddy already down there or just popping a Revive orb.

Using a buddy with legitimate access to a gated area to bypass a content gate sounds pretty in line with ANet philosophy to me. Revive Orbs not so much, but those are far more limited than mid-air spectral walks are.

And this assumes that they don’t just implement automatic release for falling deaths, like Aion does already.

Zplus.4217:

Can someone please explain to me how having 1 or 2 sets of account bound ascended gear is enough to share across 8 professions? As in what I can do to get my ele to wear the medium armor set?

Is there a particular reason you don’t want to just settle into one or two main professions? There’s no game where you’re expected to max out your gear on every single class.

And why does it even matter? The number of players who are actually skilled enough to notice the loss of a pip of crit chance and 32 power might not even be in the double digits.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

You mean the new maps where literally everyone will have the ability to fall from any height and take no damage?

So a Necro can do it in a different way. Whoop de doo.

MMOs can’t just not have certain annoyances and inconveniences for players — the best they can do is disguise them. In this case, gliders might be fun, but the main reason they’re being added is to serve as a content gate.

If you can inherently negate fall damage without a glider, it negates part of the point in gliders even existing.

OK, maths time.

At present, ascended trinkets already grant 10% better stats than exotic trinkets, not 5%, and I’m guessing that this change applies only to prefix bonuses, not to things like weapon power and defence.

From this, it follows that only weapons and armour are being altered. If this is correct, then the final increase in your stats attributable to the doubling of ascended attribute bonuses, assuming that every single thing you wear or wield is ascended or legendary, will be something like:

• Primary stat bonus: +32
• Secondary stat bonus: +22
• Celestial stat bonus: +15

This is not a big deal.

GreyWraith.8394:

where is the source of this information on the ascended gear change?

Provisional patchnotes for next week were circulated to a number of GW2 fansites. Most people are going here

Some verified ANet staff have commented on the relevant threads on Reddit, and apparently

Test.8734:

Amazing to see so many people defending ArenaNet by claiming this change isn’t bad… While there’s next to no one saying why it would be good.

Not every single line item in every single set of patch notes needs to be a clear improvement on its own, because the real world simply isn’t that simple.

The world not being all that simple is also why literally any decision ANet makes about GW2 can be easily turned into a stick to beat them with.

Astralporing.1957:

If this one sticks, what will prevent Anet from doubling the difference again (and again, and again) at a later time?

This change is arriving in a patch that also includes alterations to whole swathes of the maths underpinning the game.

There’s no evidence that Anet even can simply add to numbers whenever they feel like it in the way you describe without having to go back and mess around with the scaling algorithms and other fundamental game mechanics.

Arshay Duskbrow.1306:

Surprised this thread hasn’t been locked, like mine was for no good reason and without explanation. I guess there’s too many to silence now.

Have you even seen 99.999% of the posts here? If ANet were in the business of censoring negative feedback, they’d have closed down the forums ages ago.

This change is not a good thing, but it’s not a big deal either.

Ascended armour and backpieces will go from providing a trivial stat buff compared with exotic gear to providing a trivial stat buff compared with exotic gear. These are the only pieces that are hard enough to obtain that this sort of change really, really hurts.

Ascended weapons and trinkets aren’t that hard to get.

If there are plans for an ‘armoury’ for account-bound gear, then I don’t think this change is likely to be a problem at all.

Note that in other MMOs, groups demanding excessively high gearscores seem more common than they are because those are the groups that never fill — 90% of the people who meet the requirements figure that 90% of those groups are actually lazy bads who want to be carried.

Hume.2876:

Okay so like Zerker is bad because it feels monotonous to you.. But you can’t explain how your changes would end this monotony, or what your changes would be, or even why having your armor read a certain name causes this dread boredom..

Why do you think that this is a problem with zerker at all? This variety of complaint stems not from any sort of balance problem, but from the fact all gear is boring by default — at least, all gear except for runes and sigils.

MarkoNS.3261:

I am tired of this there is no “zerk” problem if you dont want to be forced to wear zerk then post in lfg that you dont mind other armors, or make ascended armor have selectable stats then modify whatever you want and it wont mater the main issue for me is the price of getting full asc zerk characters and i have 4 of them.

That’s not the issue, that’s a social matter that just boils down to playstyle conflicts and it is completely irrelevant to the discussion because it’s not really about zerker gear.

The issue is that 66% of the gear prefixes in the game have little value to a whole game mode. It’s not the end of the world, but there’s clearly a lot of room for improvement.

Hume.2876:

There TWO proposed ‘fixes’ to the Zerk meta.

1) Add in additional unavoidable damage such that you will not able to wear Zerker gear.

2) Make the other armor sets relatively ‘stronger’.

Or take a third option, because again, those two ideas being crap doesn’t mean that the ‘zerk meta’ is a good thing. I’ve already pointed out one — have fewer stat spreads, and make different prefixes actually do things rather than affecting stats.

It’s a big change that might not be practical right away — and until it’s practical, the status quo is better than any of the easy alternatives (for the simple reason that there’s no easy fix to the problem). But that doesn’t mean that there’s no problem.

Tongku.5326:

So ?

Why should the whole rest of us that can’t stand zerker playstyle be forced to change into zerker builds for optimal performance ? Zerker is a stupid meta and needs to go the way of the proverbial do-do bird.

To be replaced by what? How do you propose to nerf it? If you’re literally telling us that zerker gear should like cause instant death when equipped or something, what the hell do you hope to accomplish with this?

CodeHavoc.7926:

But I thought the amount of content didn’t matter.

It doesn’t. You’re looking at the part of the post that uses a comparison with FFXIV to illustrate why the amount of content doesn’t matter.

Hume.2876:

From a gameplay perspective changes like this do almost nothing. BEST CASE – you have people that will bring different gear to different dungeons. Okay everyone put your soldiers on for this boss. BFD…

So don’t make that sort of change. That should really go without saying by now.

But the fact that that’s a crappy way to change the zerk meta does not mean that the zerk meta is a good thing or that there cannot be better.

Gear could have an economic dimension. Maybe every gear piece could have power, precision, and ferocity; but while soldier’s gear complements that with vitality and toughness, zerker gear might have an economic benefit — perhaps used zerker weapons could be turned in to NPCs for unique rewards, for example, while ‘used’ zerk armour could yield much better salvage (turning certain pieces of used armour in to an NPC would be a bit weird).

Or gear could perform essentially the same and the prefixes could determine something else that it does.

The raw amount of content released doesn’t really matter to players. And it really shouldn’t.

GW2 at launch had more content than FFXIV will have even after Heavensward hits, and GW2’s mix of fortnightly updates and breaks put out more content on average than FFXIV’s quarterly major content drops do — in fact, FFXIV’s “blistering pace of updates” would be regarded as an “inexcusable content drought” by Guild Wars 2 players.

Now look at all the people who’ll tell you that there’s more to do in FFXIV. All the people who react with shock or outright vitriol when someone runs the numbers and they show otherwise.

But look at those responses and you see why people think these things. An event run of the Silverwastes, from the end of Time Out through to the Vinewrath, takes one hour from start to finish. There’s also some more to do there in the form of the jumping puzzle. But that content is “faceroll” and “a joke” and therefore somehow doesn’t count.

People spend hours just learning how to clear each part of the Binding Coil of Bahamut — each of these is just a fifteen minute instance, but groups spend hours learning them, and that means that they’re providing far more entertainment than the amount of content they actually represent.

Guild Wars 2 doesn’t have high-end progression content. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t have content. The first half of your post is based on making up excuses to inflate the amount of content in FFXIV while making up more excuses to ignore 90% of the content in GW2 as if it somehow doesn’t exist. With an added splash of hyperbole because hell, why not?

Content that’s not to your taste is still content, and time spent on progression for a piece of content doesn’t make it a larger piece of content. If a group that’s just about capable of running something smoothly takes 15 minutes to run an instance, it’s a fifteen-minute instance, end of (hint: this means that a typical group running a fractal takes 15-25 minutes for each individual fractal).

The reality is, Guild Wars 2’s content droughts still feature nearly the same rate of new content that FFXIV provides at its best. From which it follows that the typical rate of new content for GW2 blows FFXIV out of the water.

FFXIV has always been a strictly quality over quantity deal. Appreciate it for what it is, don’t try to make it out to be good at everything it isn’t as well.

Distaste.4801:

Still doesn’t change that the expansion is anemic. Heck the trait re-work shouldn’t be included as part of the expansion since they screwed up the trait system. Let’s not forget that many portions of the game suffered for 3 years, getting relatively little, for the expansion to be…underwhelming.

The trait re-work isn’t considered part of the expansion, it’s being released before. And it’s a comprehensive overhaul that extends to many skills, not a piddly little ‘re-work’. The expansion part of it is the elite specs, which will introduce brand new skills.

Take a look at FFXIV Heavensward. I believe last I saw they are expanding the overall land mass by 150%.

Already pre-ordered it, thanks. Anyway, FFXIV’s open world has tiny maps and not many of them. We’re likely to see significantly more actual landmass added in Heart of Thorns.

HoT looks like a pittance compared to it and FFXIV: ARR has only been out 2 years compared to GW2’s 3. You also can’t discount what gets brought through patches. I’d almost be willing to bet that each major FFXIV patch has brought more to the game than an entire year of GW2’s does.

OK, let’s see. Typical FFXIV patch:

• One new raid — average 50 minutes, not counting time spent on progression.
• One new primal — Two short instances — about 20 minutes.
• Three new dungeons (each about the same size as a GW2 fractal) — about 75 minutes.
• Extension to main storyline — call it about an hour.

This averages to about an hour’s worth of new content per month, not counting PvP. On top of that, you get all sorts of sundry QoL improvements and minor quests and so on.

Well, the last year is widely regarded as basically a content drought, so let’s see what pittance we got then:

• Silverwastes: Call it about an hour.
• LS2: About an hour per episode (total 8 hours).
• Dry Top: We’ll say 1 hour.

Hmm… that’s interesting. GW2’s “content droughts” feature more than 75% as much activity as FFXIV’s “blisteringly fast pace of development”.

Neox.3497:

But it’s like you NEED enough people with zerker (or other types of damage) otherwise you will fail. Which isn’t the “philosophy” by anet about “play the way you want”.

You specifically brought up an anecdote about a group that apparently couldn’t clear content until they swapped to berserker gear. What you can infer from that is that that specific group in that specific situation was failing because they didn’t have enough DPS. It doesn’t follow that that’s a normal situation faced by every group.

Neox.3497:

That reminds me of a guy who did a dungeon and failed at a boss. He and his friend change to zerk and suddenly they were able to kill the boss.

That doesn’t, however, mean much. There are plenty of reasons why someone might fail at something, and if your main problem is not having enough DPS, it’s hard to imagine zerker gear not helping.

Hume.2876:

Let’s be real about this. There are ALOT of gamers who aren’t good – and want to be able to GEAR their way through encounters. This is why they dislike the Zerk meta. Hey if xyz gear combination let me face roll this dungeon I could spend days collecting that combination – and then face roll it! Hooray.

That is not the reason that people complain about the zerk meta. Could you perhaps try not insulting every single person who disagrees with you?

Things like these are closer to the truth about why people complain about the ‘zerk meta’:

1. Conflicts with other players due to differences in playstyle (new players joining high-end farm groups by mistake, that sort of thing).
2. People who don’t like the proliferation of ‘trap’ gear that has little use outside of WvW.
3. People watching videos of zerk/meta groups that make content look easy and coming away with the conclusion that the content is easy due to zerk/meta and not because they were watching skilled players who had done the same thing a hundred times before.

As for framing things as a deliberate choice to solve a problem, I’m fairly certain that preventing players from outlevelling and outgearing content was handled via level adjustments and by being very careful not to introduce too many new gear tiers with better stats than what was available before. Not by making zerker gear the most valuable gear for dungeons.

cocowoushi.7150:

I never played WoW. Is the Shiva fight in Hard Mode from FF14 Realm Reborn considered a raid? Because I liked that.

In FFXIV, the following are considered raids:

• The Binding Coil of Bahamut — Turns 1 through 5 taken together.
• The Second Coil of Bahamut — Turns 6 through 9 taken together.
• The Final Coil of Bahamut — Turns 10 through 13 taken together.

• Labyrinth of the Ancients — this is an example of a ‘casual’ raid.
• Syrcus Tower — again, this is a ‘casual’ raid.
• The World of Darkness — again, this is a ‘casual’ raid.

Self-contained fights like Shiva HM and the Steps of Faith are considered too short to be raids, but they are the same basic idea. Back when ANet did the guild raiding CDI, one of the first pages mentioned Ultima HM as an example.

The ‘zerk DPS meta’ problem that gets complained about boils down to the fact that some players take content they’re familiar with and run it with a farming mentality. There’s nothing wrong with what they’re doing, but sometimes there are conflicts between them and players who want to take a different approach to content. In reality, these things happen in every MMO. As a player, you just have to be sensible and mature and not join groups whose playstyle conflicts with your own.

There is also a mechanical problem at work, but that’s more complicated than it’s made out to be. Ultimately, you will not fix the problem of one set of gear being ‘forced’ upon people who care about efficiency by forcing a different set of gear.

One solution would be to just remove every stat spread except celestial from the game, but I imagine that that would be unpalatable to many. None of the better solutions I can think of are practical, though.

NikeEU.7690:

Just because you can’t figure out how to design challenging content with a lot of mechanics in an active combat doesn’t mean its impossible. Don’t be small-minded.

Pretty much this. There are an impressive number of raid designs in other MMOs for which few or none of the mechanics would be a problem in GW2.

I bring Turn 5 up a lot in these threads, but it’s a good example of this:

While not strictly a raid, you could also do something pretty similar to FFXIV’s Steps of Faith quite easily in GW2.

Jerus.4350:

While personally I want as much challenging content as possible I think it should be the Grilled Onions and seasoning on your Steak. At the heart the meat of the content would be your typical “open to everyone” stuff, but with that extra flavor for us to bang our heads on when we want it. Big chunk of meat with no flavor isn’t as good as a well seasoned steak, but you don’t just eat a pile of onions and seasoning either (well most don’t… I think I could, <3 onions).

I absolutely agree. There needs to be a range of different difficulties to content. I quite like the Silverwastes and I think that similar ‘actions’ do have a place in the game.

I do, however, think that there’s also a need for moderate-difficulty content for small and medium-sized groups, as well as hard and ultra-hard content.

Vayne.8563:

I agree some of what you said. But I think there are ways to deal with the zerg mentality without actually making raids. In some ways, it’s already been done in parts of the game.

To a point, it is something you can avoid with content design, yes. But if your content designer also has to also work around a whole bunch of extra problems because the content in question isn’t instanced, that is itself is going to affect the quality of the content they design.

Vayne.8563:

It amazes me how people only see things from one point of view and seem incapable of seeing how others can for a different one, even though this view is shared by so many. So maybe, just maybe, there’s a reason for it.

Many people holding a view does not make that view correct. And not everything is a matter of perspective.

Any piece of content attempted with more than a certain critical mass of players will degrade into something that players cannot engage with or appreciate. The sheer mass of players will make meaningful participation difficult thanks to things like culling, framerate drops, skill lag, and things being obscured by players, numbers, and particle effects. At the same time, the sheer mass of players also eliminates both the social and gameplay pressures that would require those players to actually try.

So something has to stop such a critical mass of players from attempting any piece of content worthy of appreciation. And from this, it follows that true instanced raids really are critical. Nobody to date has found a way to do this, without violating the spirit of GW2 with mechanics like friendly fire, kill-stealing, and competition for loot.

As for rewards, engaging with content has to be more rewarding than not engaging with content, otherwise people won’t engage with the content, in which case it might as well not exist. That’s why instanced PvE content is a good idea in the first place.