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Where are you getting information about FF14? The last report I saw (Jan 2015) was Square Enix had less then 1 Million subscribers for all 3 of their MMOs together. Square Enix at one time mentioned 2 Million account for FF14 alone, but now they are down to less then 1 Million for all 3 of their MMOs together. That doesn’t look like great retention rate at all.
I’ll bite, although that’s not really something I’d like to be dragged into.
World of Warcraft has sold something like 60 million copies and currently claims 10 million subscribers — with a pretty broad definition of the word ‘subscriber’. “That doesn’t look like a great retention rate at all.”
A game claiming 500k unique daily logins off of 2 million copies sold — and quite clearly still growing? That’s pretty good (Note: neither subscriber numbers nor unique daily logins are really that great a measure of how populated an MMO is, but a unique daily login is certainly worth far more than what Blizzard thinks a ‘subscriber’ is).
The data for that report is also far older than the publication date — note that the bulk of things listed are “as of March 2014”.
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As we’ve seen by the great example of the sister game Wildstar , I think they learned their lesson on trying to support the 1% in game design.
I’d kind of imagine that being exactly like WoW enough to kitten off all the WoW haters while simultaneously being exactly like GW2 enough to kitten off all of the GW2 haters would be the kiss of death for any MMO, but feel free to pretend that Wildstar’s troubles were caused entirely by focusing on raids.
In the meantime, FFXIV is doing incredibly well, and has a whole suite of endgame offerings, comprising raids, raids, raids, and hardmode dungeons. It’s also posting some pretty good player retention statistics. Interesting, huh?
This actually isn’t quite true. Protection reduces incoming damage by 33%. It doesn’t boost toughness. This makes protection a higher value boon for zerkers as they inherently take more incoming damage. That being said, the rest of your post looks good.
- If you have 9000 hitpoints and are receiving 900 DPS, you will die in ten seconds.
- With Protection, you’d be receiving 600 DPS, which would kill you in fifteen seconds. You get 5 more seconds.
- With 50% more armour, you’d be receiving 600 DPS, which would kill you in fifteen seconds. You’ve bought 5 more seconds.
- With both Protection and 50% more armour, you’d ultimately receive 400 DPS, which would kill you in 22.5 seconds. This means you’ve gotten 12.5 more seconds — you’ve also gained 2.5 seconds more out of protection thanks to your high armour.
If you had a buff that granted +50% to your total armour, in GW2, that buff would be mathematically identical to Protection — it’s even possible that that’s how Protection is really implemented in the code.
There are other weird things surrounding protection — for example, Protection is four times more effective than the Guardian signet that reduces incoming damage by 11%, not just three times. And, ignoring the fact that it only negates a limited amount of actual damage, Illusion of Defence is twice as effective as the Protection boon, not just 50% better.
He’s actually right by the numbers, the problem is as stated in my previous post that the bigger the numbers the effect still diminishes. You just forget to take into account that the effect is quadratic instead of linear.
You’re entirely correct that the more toughness you have, the less “damage reduction” each point of toughness gives you — but you’re actually wrong about what it means.
In Guild Wars 2, if you’re not getting hit by armour-negating damage, and you’re not dodging or otherwise negating hits, then how long you last is directly proportional to your armour.
That means that the benefit from toughness is always the same — when you have 3300 armour, then the time to kill you increases by just as much when you go to 3400 armour as it would if you had 925 armour and went to 1025.
Stacking lots of different percentile damage reduction buffs so that they compound gives better results, but it’s an example of exponentially growing returns — positive feedback. As a result, there’s a limit to how many of these buffs you can get (as there is for the percentile damage increase buffs, for the same reason).
If the percentage damage reduction you got as a result was directly proportional to your armour, you would see an even bigger case of positive feedback. If you start with no damage reduction and gain ten pips of it, that gives you 10% damage reduction and makes you last about 11% longer. If you already have 80% damage reduction and you gain ten more pips? You now take twice as long to kill as you did before.
An interesting curiosity is that +x% damage traits and runes actually have an identical effect to what x% armour pierce runes and traits would do (with slightly different numbers — e.g., a +10% damage buff is roughly the same thing as a 9% armour pierce effect).
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Zerker is glass cannon in some circles it’s called DPS which means it’s very much a role. Please just stop if your only arguments are semantics.
With (usually) one exception, every hitpoint that you bring to a fight is essentially wasted if you don’t lose that hitpoint over the course of the fight (ignoring things like Scholar Runes for now). That’s not a unique thing to GW2 — every MMO follows this principle and it arises from the very definition of hitpoints.
Even if you’re a tank, your sole consideration when gearing is “how does this affect my group’s DPS?”. The DPS of every other member of the group is almost invariably capped at some multiple of your own DPS.
If, as a tank, you’re not as geared for DPS as possible — after accounting for the need to survive throughout the fight — then there are really only three possibilities:
- You simply don’t know what you’re doing.
- You know what you need to be doing, but you’re still working on getting the gold/tokens/whatever necessary to do it.
- You’re hoping that your heals/supports will be more aggressive, and that they will contribute more DPS to the group as a result than you lost with the extra defensive piece.
And of course, note that it’s the height of lameness for an MMO to even permit silly trap approaches like not having enough defence to survive the damage you’re likely to face when doing content. So of course it’s practical to wear zerker gear in GW2 and meet the basic requirement to stay alive. Just as it’s practical in most trinity MMOs to wear the tank’s equivalent to zerker gear.
It’s not necessarily a problem to take point (3) on board and provide more effective ways to translate unnecessary defence into extra damage, of course.
As a fairly boring way to do it, perhaps necromancers could have a GM Blood Magic trait that bolsters the power and ferocity of nearby allies, depending on the amount of overhealing they’ve received via lifesteals recently?
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Were you not referring to the zerker meta in dungeon/fractals? Which is what I’ve been speaking to this whole time.
I’m talking about future content being harder in general, part of which is introducing conflict. Not about making future content harder on zerk players specifically.
Dungeons and fractals are where the existing zerk meta can be found, but this thread is mainly about how the zerk meta will apply to the upcoming raid content.
Not seeing how the part you quoted was a strawman argument, but you’re free to think as you wish. Doesn’t hurt me in the slightest.
You’re attacking a completely fabricated version of my position instead of addressing things that I’ve actually said. That’s the very definition of a strawman argument.
kitten are you talking about? COF p1 farming? That died long ago when they nerfed alts in dungeons. Just for your information, cause I’m a nice guy, I run through the quick paths and then do my fractal reward tiers… But hey, you can assume whatever you want and be wrong if that’s what you want to do… but….
Hmm, that’s interesting,..
…after the 1000th COF p1 run I’m not there for the story or “fun” because I got the “fun” part 100% squeezed out by the 500th run… Now I’m just there for the loots/golds…
Wonder where I got the impression that you were farming CoF p1?
Even more interesting is the question of why it matters specifically what dungeons you farm.
Guess what a lot of what I said just went right over your head. Either you don’t understand the concept of not forcing other players to play a certain way through lobbying the Devs to take action against them through making content specifically more difficult for a gear/build or something… I don’t know.
I’m not talking about forcing anyone to play anything a certain way. And I’m certainly not lobbying the devs to take action against other players whose activities don’t affect me in the slightest.
And I’m not talking about making content hard for certain builds, I’m talking about making content hard in general. Part of that is putting different player goals in opposition to each other.
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Let me put it this way: you are telling the Dev to FORCE ME to run things differently by changing the encounter than I do now because you don’t like that I can do it in zerker gear/build and you can’t.
OK, seriously, what? I couldn’t care less about your dungeon farming, it’s your time, what you do with it is completely up to you. It doesn’t affect me in any way except when you start trying to bring a farming mentality to the design of future content.
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Why? PVE goals have healthbars and because of this the only goal will be to drain that healthbar as fast as possible regardless of what the “challenge” is.
There are plenty of other goals to PvE besides killing things, and even the killing is really itself in service to a goal, rather than being a goal unto itself. It is a flaw of existing content that the goal of killing things quickly never comes into conflict with your other goals, not an inevitability. I’ve already given examples of elements that could be added to fights to create more conflict between different player goals.
Now I’m just there for the loots/golds… and anything that makes it take longer than it use to or should is bad. Very bad. It’ll certainly put me off of doing that same thing again. Eventually it’ll put me off of playing GW2 altogether. Then there goes my gem purchases and I’m sure Anet doesn’t want that to stop.
I hate to say this, but at that point, you’re almost asking for Progress Quest with pretty graphics. If you’re not enjoying yourself, why play at all?
And this isn’t about your thousandth CoF p1 run, anyway. Maybe that dungeon will get a comprehensive revamp one day, maybe it won’t.
There are actually many fight mechanics in other MMOs that, among other things, work to soft-limit DPS. These include phases (push a phase at the wrong moment and you make the transition harder to handle), tricks like groups of enemies that have to all die at the same time, stunts like adds that have to be killed but do raid-wide damage when you kill them, and so on. Some MMOs even go so far as to tune tank TPS to make it almost impossible to hold aggro against a DPS going all-out.
Many of these techniques should be both effective in GW2 and compatible with the underlying philosophies of the game. It might sound like this is “punishing players for being good”, but in reality, there are a lot of skills that a game can and should be testing. It should never just be about DPS, HPS, and TPS.
Note that none of this is about actually nerfing DPS, and giving a player more mechanics to deal with is not going to make fights easier to deal with than they were before.
Outside of that, in PVE, who gives two flips about what someone else is running because it’s just going to be zerged down anyway?
I cry whenever I see a warrior wielding an axe or a greatsword trying to kill husks in the Silverwastes, so, uh, hi?
It’s especially fun when they’re ignoring a dozen trolls, teragriffs, thrashers, and menders to try and kill a few husks.
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Raids would be a major feature. They claim they have already announced all major features of HoT. Thus, it’s highly unlikely that Raids are coming.
Raids are not a major feature, certainly not something that merits its own bullet point separate from “more content” (which is kind of a given for any expansion). And “challenging group content” — i.e., raid content of some form — expressly was promised.
It was also clarified that the guild halls will have a storyline, which will likely include instances, and will have to involve a large number of players at a time (it makes no sense for a “guild storyline” to only involve four officers and a random, after all).
I don’t see a way to accomplish that without raids, myself. Not when there’s already precedent for non-combat jumping puzzle raids (Turn 3 of the Binding Coil of Bahamut from FFXIV).
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The planned role for condition damage, as has already been seen in the Silverwastes, seems to be as “nutcrackers” who specifically exist to deal with any heavily-armoured high-value targets that might show up.
Otherwise, healing power is actually decent already, as long as you actually want to be really good at surviving in long fights:
- A Mesmer using Ether Feast on cooldown ‘spends’ 5% of her DPS to convert 5% of her healing power rating into hitpoints every second.
- If we accept “the total amount of damage you might deal before dying” as a measure of a character’s value, then losing 5% of your DPS effectively makes each of your hitpoints 5% less valuable.
- Were she completely unarmed and wearing nothing besides the default lingerie, our mesmer could have up to 18,182 hitpoints.
- From this, it follows that our mesmer effectively loses 909.1 hitpoints as an additional ‘cost’ to pursuing a healing strategy beyond the cost of building healing power over vitality.
- With 800 healing power, you create 40 hitpoints per second, and would need to heal a total of 8909.1 extra hp in order to get the same benefit as just taking 800 vitality. That takes 223 seconds.
- Note that I’m pretending that Chaos gives Healing Power and Inspiration gives Boon Duration, because I’m too lazy to account for that not being true.
Remember that if you want to be tanky, you’re probably looking to get into long fights, so this makes healing power look fairly competitive to me. I’m fairly sure every prof has skills that give at least this good a return on healing power for the same or lower DPS loss.
healing up siege carriers in Silverwastes is really fun. And Tequatl is Crit Immune. So I think that Carbine is actually doing a variety of mechanics, but most don’t notice.
TIL: The Mordrem Vinewrath and Tequatl the Sunless are bosses from Wildstar, not GW2. :P
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I can’t wait for the xpack to launch and hear all the trinity lovers cry their hearts out on the forums because of these expectations they’ve been building up since they heard a few familiar words.
I would hope that the xpac would prove them wrong once and for all about the trinity being necessary, and all we’d hear is silence from them as they try to save face…
Sorry to be super dense here, but what is it exactly that you have to purchase? Just getting back into the game, and have been saving everything while I figure out what I’m doing, and so this would be a great option to have.
You can start a guild from basically anywhere for 1g, then you’d need to visit a Guild Promoter to purchase influence for gold. Then, per the wiki, you need to buy ranks in Architecture. First rank costs 500 influence (1g) and 12 hours, second rank costs 1000 influence (2g) and 36 hours, then you can build the smallest type of guild bank for another 1000 influence and 48 hours. More ranks in architecture will let you upgrade to a 150-slot guild bank and finally a 250-slot guild bank.
You can get cheap 20-slot bags from fractals by exchanging fractal relics, from the Uncanny Canner achievement (for finding jars, most of which come from hearts), and the Bandit Weapons Specialist achievement (for having every bandit weapon skin — they’re the first set of rare weapons you can make, and you can also get them cheaply for karma at your home citadel — and a Bandit Combat Journal, which costs 20s and 150 bandit crests in the Silverwastes).
By the way, if you ever get a personal guild in which you are the sole leader or member, never leave guild. If a guild is left without members it will disappear and the other members must have inviting privileges to get you back. The guild will be leaderless if they can’t promote you.
Standing down from a 1-person guild wouldn’t be a problem, surely?
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The designers do effectively have true tanking in their toolbox for anywhere they want to use it — it would actually feel a lot more natural in some cases than it does in trinity MMOs because of the way healing works here and the way aggro works.
But IMO, it would only ever happen as a specific mechanic for specific fights, not as some across-the-board thing.
Berzerker is one thing but here is another!
in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns
Posted by: evilunderling.9265
What the wiki says is called ‘Forsaken’ gear (Power, Healing, Toughness — basically like cleric’s, but with the power and healing stats reversed) would be nice to see on weapons and armour, and should be effective at Tequatl and possibly a few other world bosses.
It would also save your kitten if you ever find yourself in a fight that’s been tuned to make raider’s fatigue into a potential issue.
Interestingly enough, people that do not put that much emphasis on those numbers do not need DPS meters at all.
The toxic players and ignorant players who would use DPS meters to ruin play sessions for everyone else are out there right now, ruining play sessions for everyone else.
They don’t need DPS meters at all. I still have yet to see any evidence or reasoning to the effect that DPS meters do anything to make them worse. In fact, I see more solid reasoning to the effect that DPS meters make them less of a problem — after all, what do you think happens when a toxic player goes to a DPS meter for ammunition to use against others and finds that there’s none to be had?
As for everyone else, well, of course they don’t need DPS meters. Doesn’t mean that they don’t benefit from having them.
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I agree, the arrogance already displayed in this thread should be a big red flag against it ever being done.
That’s the exact opposite of true. Just because somebody came across as sarcastic or snide about something, doesn’t make them wrong about it.
Sadly, this isn’t something that’s really been studied. There’s this widespread belief that DPS meters somehow turn people into kittens, and all I can say in response is that:
- It simply doesn’t seem to follow.
- It doesn’t match up to my experience.
In Final Fantasy XIV, DPS meters are commonly used (despite being forbidden), and gear inspections are available. I ran far more dungeons there than I ever did here. In all of that, significant examples of toxic play? Not many, and almost never anything to do with DPS meters or gear checks. Anecdotal, admittedly, but still a counterexample to the idea that gear inspections and DPS meters inevitably result in toxic players.
See EQ2 endgame attitudes for a really good example of why log parsers / dps meters are bad. I don’t care how big anyone’s kitten is. Mine included.
It’s not about that. It’s about having a little more information to work with when trying to get better at the game and when trying to work out why things might be going wrong in group content.
As I’ve already said several times, people who are going to play the toxic CYA/blame game are going to play it whether they have a DPS meter for ammunition or not. Just block them, report them, and move on, but please don’t blame the DPS meter for the fact that another player turned out to be an kitten.
Or they can be used as backup when telling someone they aren’t pulling their own weight.
I’d be wary of using a DPS meter to call out PUGs like that, myself. Even with evidence to back it up, just telling someone that they suck is never going to help. Instead, you should be helping them to improve and hopefully setting them on the path towards becoming a valued player.
Although I tend to play healers in MMOs, so that might just be my ‘training’ talking. :P
You do realize you’re on the internet?!
Yes. But giving someone something that can be used for, among other things, kittenwaddery will not make them into a kittenwad if they weren’t already a kittenwad, and denying a kittenwad a tool they can use in their kittenwaddery will not keep them from engaging in it.
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i never said materials…..just normal stuff, i never store mats in the storage (with exception of GW2), i rather increase inventory size.
As far as I can tell, Tera doesn’t give you extra storage spaces for anything, so there’s far more pressure on your personal and bank space than you have to put up with in GW2.
You might have more general-purpose bank slots (although, as I already said, it’s fewer than you thought it was), but that doesn’t make your storage situation better.
to be fair, i have played plenty of AAA MMO’s with at least 3X more storage space and they are F2P, tera for instance has about 4 tabs worth of storage in it’s starter tab and you can buy even more space if you want to.
in GW1 i have only bought 2 tabs yet i have 7 tabs of space, more then in GW2.i did buy 1 tab extra in GW2 because it’s just not that much, fair is fair GW2 has among the smallest storage i have seen.
I just went over this. Tera starts you with 72 bank spaces (that’s just a little over two GW2 bank tabs) and lets you buy up to 288 (equal to nine GW2 bank tabs). Guild Wars 2 starts you with 381 bank spaces (including materials storage) and lets you buy up to 2478 (again, including materials storage).
Otherwise, there’s ArcheAge, which starts you with 50 bank spaces and 50 inventory spaces, makes every expansion to either cost someone real money, but eventually lets you supplement that by placing storage chests in a house. Which requires a subscription to do. Rift doesn’t offer a better deal either to my knowledge.
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Other than that, as others have mentioned, DPS Meters are a bad idea and should be avoided like the plague. They discourage friendliness , accessibility, and co-operation, and encourage negative playstyles, limit build creativity and originality, and train players in all the wrong things when it comes to actually learning the game and becoming good at it.
Please, enlighten me as to how DPS meters do any of these things.
Are you telling me that anyone with a DPS meter instantly turns into someone who thinks that other players’s respective worths are defined solely by the holy numberz? Because funnily enough, that’s a load of horse crap.
The point is they’re f2p and they offer that. So… using the past as an example doesn’t change what it is now,.
It very much does. As a subscription game, they didn’t originally have any need to charge players for convenience, and when they went f2p, there were limits on what they could take away from players in order to sell back to them. The situation they’re in simply isn’t comparable to a game that was made to be b2p or f2p from the outset.
More to the point, they’re not offering a better deal on storage anyway — GW2 players start with 349 dedicated bank slots for crafting materials and 32 general-purpose bank slots. That’s 381 bank slots total. Tera players start with 72 general-purpose bank slots and the cap is 288, plus you can apparently buy an inventory pet to reach 360 (for far more than the price of the bank slots).
Note that a single GW2 character can also upgrade as far as 100 inventory spaces without needing to spend single gem, which is about equal to the amount of inventory spaces Tera players will eventually get on individual characters, so I’m not sure where you get the idea that Tera is better about that either.
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Players should be trying to improve their skills, and they should at least have access to DPS meters for that purpose, and there’s a clear benefit to a player’s friends/guildies/mentors being able to look at their DPS as well so that they can provide better advice.
As long as you’re not calling out random PUGs over their parses or discussing parses in /s or map chat, I don’t see how running a DPS meter can make you a worse person or hurt anyone else’s play.
But I don’t work for ANet, and I believe their stance on the matter is a lot less positive than mine.
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Tera sells it for in game gold.
Tera launched with mandatory subscriptions and still has optional subscriptions. It might strictly fit the definition of ‘f2p or b2p’, but it’s still a very different basic idea (and they still want you to subscribe in the end).
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In theory, for at least the new bosses, there might be little need for any special CC defence when the boss doesn’t have a break bar up. If using a Deep Freeze on a boss means that you’ll risk missing out on a MoO five seconds later (and let the boss use its nastiest attacks into the bargain), then people are going to use it more carefully.
That said, I am of course very much looking forward to seeing "------- ------- DON’T READ ------- CHAT NO ------- CC OR WE WILL ------- FAIL NICE ------- WORK YOU ------- -------" and the like make a reappearance in map chat.
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There are two more things about the break bar that I’m interested in and hoping to find out more about soon:
- Will there be scenarios where a break bar is up but CC will also have its regular effects? e.g., Illusions that don’t take damage and are destroyed by breaking the caster sounds like lore-appropriate, and very helpful buff to the mesmer in most content, but making mesmers nigh-immune to CC would probably be a problem.
- When there’s nothing to break, the break bar doesn’t look like it gets disabled to me. What does the orange condition icon mean? What do the twelve sections mean?
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So they just changed the visual of the buff, and they will call it a major feature. The more info they give, the more this dlc seems tinier and tinier. It’s the result of 3 years of work, it is so sad.
IIRC, we were told very clearly from the outset that the expansion is intended to be a strictly quality over quantity deal, similar to how Final Fantasy XIV ended up working.
In truth, how worthwhile the expansion will be has nothing to do with crap about how big the heightmaps will be or how many new maps there will be or how many build permutations the Revenant has.
And as has already been said, ANet have already specifically defined this as not a major feature. It wasn’t at the announcement, and the announcement touched on everything they considered important.
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Just a funny side comment here, but I appear to actually do more damage when I’m in a downed state. It’s like a DPS cooldown.
It might be worth just popping into the SPvP hub area and fighting a couple of the sparring NPCs just to get a feel for what you’ll be able to do at higher levels.
For a really “in at the deep end” approach, you could even try levelling exclusively through SPvP. You’ll have access to all of the mesmer’s toys while there, although that route would leave you a little shafted when it comes to traits for PvE and WvW.
Is this something that’s being looked at by ANet, or is it ‘working as intended’? Sure doesn’t sound like good game design to me.
Things don’t sound like good game design when someone’s busy slamming them. :P
That said, I don’t think there’s anyone left who doesn’t think that they dropped the ball with the trait changes, and they have promised to do something about it.
Basically, the situation with mesmers is that they somehow manage to look a lot more effective than they are to anyone who doesn’t play one. This means that there are a lot of complaints every time we receive a buff, even though mesmers are comparatively weak in most game modes (in particular, mesmers suffer from worse versions of most of the ‘crippling’ flaws with rangers).
A particularly horrible example of this is Triumphant Distortion, which certain players reacted to like it triggered every time you crit something.
EDIT: Hyperbole is unbecoming of a mesmer, and you didn’t see what I wrote originally.
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Depends on the profession. Fairly sure Warriors got multiple traits that made it into the meta one way or another, as did Rangers.
Mesmers got a massive kick in the teeth, because almost all of the additions managed to look cool enough to inspire mountains of QQ calling for nerfs despite being of little actual use.
Armor stats let you mitigate the stat effects of your trait choices. The lower the equipment stats we have available the more 1-sided characters will have to be.
Then have weapons and armour provide all stats or all primary stats. Stats from traits would go straight back to having their original level of importance.
You’d need to do that to prevent people feeling like they were losing something massive anyway.
In the GW2 paradigm, it is my belief that gear should be differentiated mainly by what it does, with gear stats depending mainly on the quality of the gear rather than the prefix.
Perhaps a good compromise would be for trinkets to remain as +stats, while armour allows you to build some buff by avoiding damage in combat and weapons allow you to build some buff by inflicting damage in combat.
The problem then becomes figuring out buffs that make sense and making sure that the meta isn’t as drastic as it is currently.
I get the feeling that lots of people here are instantly spitting out “holy trinity holy trinity” whenever someone’s not satisfied with the status quo. The thing is though that this isn’t about holy trinity, it’s about almost every other build but damage, being it via boons, conditions or just pure dps being not viable enough, to a point were skilling that way would be detriment to your team and yourself in every major aspect of the game and it makes you wonder why certain attribute combinations on items are even there when Arena.Net seemingly doesn’t want dedicated “healers” or “tanks” – not even in the classical way, but in the GW2 sense.
Non-damaging conditions are commonplace in ‘meta’ dungeon runs, as are defensive boons. And people do build specifically to inflict/provide them depending on the content. But gear has little to do with build, as has already been said many times.
As for everyone supposedly being a hybrid DPS + team utility, what the kitten do you think a tank even is? Or a healer, for that matter? DPS is not a role, damage is something that everyone can do. This holds true in nearly every MMO.
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When have they said they’re salting? Legitimate question, have seen no evidence and would really like to believe it for personal piece of mind. I see almost no reason to require a unique password other than they’re not salting.
Not that kind of unique password.
Where did you even get the idea that individual players are forbidden from using the same password as other players? That’s completely absurd and it’s not what either article says. They’re talking about ‘requiring’ (and for obvious reasons, they do little more than ask politely) players not to use passwords for GW2 that they already use elsewhere.
You are not allowed to use passwords that would result in you having log-in credentials that match what ANet have seen tried by a hacker. That is all. And no, it’s not a measure that would be useless with password hashing and salting in place. Where do you get that idea from?
You’ve defeated the Vinewrath with only six people per lane? I’m massively impressed. I’ve had boss attempts wipe with even four times that many.
Well, the bosses themselves scale and all should in theory be doable with only a handful of players, provided that everyone’s on board with the mechanics. Fort defence with about five people is fine, plus a handful of 1-2 man groups who take care of supply and provide backup to any forts that end up struggling. Lane defence seems like it would be the most problematic part.
I wouldn’t personally expect 20 to be enough, but 30 should be. I’m of the opinion that ‘actions’ on the scale of The Silverwastes should have a hard cap of 50.
Gw2 was also marketed as no gear grind. But that’s not the case…
That was very limited, implemented to fulfil an actual, specific need, and didn’t go any further once the devs devised another means to achieve the same end.
No compelling case for a trinity has ever been made.
You’d be happy to know that both “raid” bosses are where soldier gear is usually used.
That’s specifically because the main things you’re trying to kill take damage as structures, which cannot be critically hit or conditioned, making precision, condi damage, and ferocity meaningless. It’s not really a change from the ‘zerk meta’ that certain people like to complain about.
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Holy trinity or not I only know that ranger is a totally broken class.
If they don’ t do something to balance this game and ranger I won’ t buy the expansion.
This isn’t the ranger subforum, and telling someone that X is broken and needs fixing without elaborating on what’s wrong with it is pretty much the worst way to go about getting it fixed.
In other words for those trinity people “roles” means simply not watching mobs but instead red bars moving (party health or threat list)
I think that’s a pretty major misrepresentation of both the people asking for the trinity and trinity games, myself. As has already been said several times, no good MMO would ever force a healer to pass time picking their nose or dancing during a fight.
DPS isn’t really supposed to be a party role in any game, because it’s something that literally everyone should be able to do. The third role after tank and healer is Support, and in context, that refers to characters who bring helpful utility to the table (besides healing, shielding, and positioning/aggro management), as well as ways to supplement whatever else the group might be lacking, be that healing, tanking, or anything else. The guys for whom that means above-average DPS potential aren’t supposed to be the whole story.
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Are current meta is “zerker only”. You must have a meta, but why not have it like… 1 support, 1 control, etc. To get rid of zerker only, you need to make it nearly impossible which is why you make the mobs harder. +50% attack speed, and make it to no one shots, then dps only groups are impossible.
In a ‘meta’ group, members of seven out of the eight professions are expected to provide something in the support role. Thieves provide defensive support via blinds, Mesmers use Feedback and the focus to provide defensive support, Guardians have aegis, blinds, and Wall of Reflection for defensive support, and so on. Warriors and eles help the group to maintain might, Rangers and Engineers often help to provide vulnerability.
What type of Salvage do you recommend? I’ve been using Basic for everything and I’m wondering when I should advance to the more expensive kits
The normal advice is that only white, yellow, and orange salvage kits are actually useful for salvaging. Use orange kits to retrieve any really valuable upgrades you see, yellow kits on level 65+ rare and exotic gear to yield globs of ectoplasm, and white salvage kits on everything else.
There are often multiple salvage kits with the same colour:
- White: Basic Salvage Kit (vendor), Copper-Fed Salvage-O-Matic (gem store, infinite use, consumes coin on use)
- Yellow: Master Salvage Kit (vendors), Mystic Salvage Kit (combine Mystic Forge Stones with one each of an Apprentice, Journeyman, and Master salvage kit to make a 250-use yellow salvage kit.), Silver-Fed Salvage-O-Matic (gem store, infinite use consumes coin on use)
- Orange: Black Lion Salvage Kit (daily log-in rewards or gem store).
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he GW2 meta is just as toxic, actually it probably is even more toxic.
There is no such thing as a “toxic meta”, only a handful of ‘toxic’ adherents to the meta, and they do get everywhere. Please, provide your evidence or reasoning for it being worse in GW2 than it is in other MMOs.
Note how many MMOs literally bribe players to join pug runs that might include new or unskilled players.
And as an elementalist, I can go pretty darn close to full healer with the right traits. And I can still primarily attack the boss. That’s what I call amazing. Not having to sit around and hope that my team members are bad enough to need me to heal them because they aren’t using their dodges and aren’t moving around appropriately.
To be fair, that’s not all that amazing. If you ever see a healer standing around picking their nose while in a fight inside a dungeon, they’re either a bad player, or playing a bad game.
Strictly speaking, mesmers and guardians act as healers in a lot of content in GW2. It’s always about proactively keeping your team mates alive — in GW2, with things like aegis, projectile reflects, etc. — not about filling bars up.
Ah, this sort of thread is always a classic.
In any event, the holy trinity does not ‘solve’ the problems you or most others arguing for a trinity or against the ‘zerk meta’ describe.
- In trinity MMOs, it’s always about doing as much DPS as possible. The only times it isn’t are due to specific fight mechanics such as phase transitions. Even tanks and healers make every decision about their build with a view towards increasing the group’s overall DPS.
- Trinity MMOs do not permit any added gear or build variety — you’ll always be using some pre-ordained meta build and gear set for your class, and if you aren’t, it will be because you don’t have whatever it is you ‘should’ be using, and are instead using ‘acceptable filler’. Or because you’re so highly-regarded that you’re able to tell everyone else what to wear. You may recognise this as essentially the situation in GW2 today.
- Look at any trinity MMO’s LFG, and you’ll find lots of runs demanding gear that’s seventy levels higher than the content, or threatening kicks at the first mistake. Why is it suddenly bad when someone asks for an all-zerk group?
- I’m not going to go into all of the scenarios in trinity MMOs where players would rather adhere rigidly to their roles than ever actually think.
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For reference, ‘Provoke’ is one of several things MMOs call their force-taunts whenever they don’t want to call them force-taunts. As I already said, the closest thing to a proper term for this class of effect in generic MMO jargon is ‘seduce’.
There’s no reason to assume Taunt is just a stun until proven otherwise.
Taunt is already in the game and is not a condition.
Please note that Taunt isn’t a new thing in GW2. It’s from a champion event in the Brisban Wildlands and you can see it in action there already.
Unless I’m mistaken, this type of effect would ordinarily be called a ‘seduce’ in generic MMO jargon, rather than a taunt. In that sense, it’s probably more thematically appropriate to mesmers, necromancers, and rangers.
Not so sure about “walking waste of healing power”, myself. In theory, mesmers are actually pretty good at turning healing power into healing per second, if not some of the best.
The main issue, as I see it, is that all of the high heal per second per point of healing power options for mesmers are things that would be very hard to use to their full potential in PvP or WvW, and in PvE, there aren’t that many places where a load of healing per second would be appreciated.
You should have options to make use of both power and condi damage at the same time — pistol is an obvious one if you can pull off a decent crit chance, and the staff throws out condis while also providing a nasty power attack.
But I don’t think cele is something I’d go all-in as.