Guild Wars 2

A fair few jumping puzzles are already located in places where it wouldn’t make much sense to be able to use gliders, such as inside small-ish caves. There are also many jumping puzzles where I’m not convinced that a glider would trivialise things as badly as you suggest (assuming that these are anything like gliders in ArcheAge).

If I recall correctly, improvements to the trait system are coming Very Soon™.

Of course, standard definitions for ‘Soon™’ and ‘Very Soon™’ apply, please refer to whichever World of Warcraft wiki it was for further information.

EDIT: Sorry, looks like information on improvements to the trait system is coming Very Soon™. Improvements to the trait system are coming Soon™

To best show off the new gliders, I think I’d expect to see a handful of massive zones that individually push the game’s seamless world tech to its limit.

The incarnate armour girl at 1:15 – 1:18 appears to be wielding a sword and an off-hand dagger, which isn’t presently legal for any scholar profession.

This most likely means MH swords for eles, although it could also mean MH swords for necros or OH daggers for mesmers.

As I understand it, taking on a specialisation changes your profession mechanic and rewrites whole swathes of your skill list. They’re basically entirely new classes with the ability to borrow certain skills from their baseline professions.

So chronomasticators probably won’t use illusions, for example.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

I think you are right, removed longbow for now. can’t believe I missed that typo not once but twice lol. I was riding along too fast on the hype train.

Honestly, I’ll be kind of disappointed if they don’t introduce ‘lowbongs’ for the expansion now. :P

Although after discovering that my guardian was voiced by Commander Shepard, I’m already disappointed that she doesn’t say “this is my favourite store in the citadel” after finishing dialogue with a vendor in the charr home city.

Tangents aside, assuming that I’m right that the mesmer specialisation will also get a mainhand to complement their shields, I’m guessing that that will be pistol. Or maybe the specialisation will be the “chronomasticator” and their new weapon will be their own teeth.

‘lowbongs’ aside, this implies to me that there’s a new mesmer mainhand as well.

Mesmers already have the fewest skills to use of any profession in the game (not counting Revenants, since they don’t even exist yet), so it’s unlikely that they’d be shafted by getting only two added. Especially when one of the skills on a mesmer would presumably be a phantasm, meaning that that ageing spell is effectively the only skill on the weapon.

Wait… a profession that already makes extensive use of spatial and temporal distortions and getting what I presume is, lore-wise, an ageing field. We get to be chronomancers?

tigirius.9014:

(Snipped)

Prior to making that post, you hadn’t even tried to provide any reasoning as to why you thought that there was a problem in need of fixing. Yet you see fit to label people who provide an equally compelling argument in opposition to yours as enemies of the game? Hypocrisy much?

And even with the post I’ve linked here, would you care to elaborate on literally any of the points you raised so that people can actually debate you instead of this thread turning into some pointless “yuh-uh”, “nuh-uh” crapfest?

Here’s an alternative solution to the “zerker problem”:

1. Gear that does not provide at least moderate power now provides moderate power in PvE only.
2. Gear that does not provide at least moderate precision now provides moderate precision in PvE only.
3. Gear that does not provide at least moderate ferocity now provides moderate ferocity in PvE only.
4. If (1) through (3) add stats to an item that were not previously present, this is counterbalanced by imposing a personal economic debuff on the player in PvE. This could be anything from -60% gold find to having a chance for certain drops such as precursors to autosalvage on pickup, etc.

Effects:

• A player can never ‘hold back their comrades’ or damage their comrades’ enjoyment of content by gearing defensively (although they might still do so due to lack of skill).
• The tradeoff being made is clear — more forgiving content, at the cost of inferior rewards.

Or another, completely non-serious alternative solution:

• Incoming damage receives a multiplier that scales quadratically with the player’s vitality and toughness.

Effects:

• Everyone will wear maximum defence gear at all times.

Flaws:

• It would still be zerker or ’sin gear.

That said, the problem that does exist isn’t people getting kicked from dungeons, it’s the proliferation of prefixes that only have incredibly niche uses in PvE. The ‘true’ solution, which might cause riots, would be to wipe the slate clean and introduce a new, much smaller set of prefixes.

I’ll start with some QoL stuff I think might be cool (and not including things like build templates that have been requested a squadrillion times over):

1. Selectable LFG descriptors for things like the expected skill level of the group.
2. Dungeon runner profiles, per-character or per-account, with comments, selectable descriptors, and other relevant information.
3. A ‘one-click’ option for the LFG to quickly form a casual ‘clear’ group for a piece of content, or alternatively to match you with people who share your claimed skill level and knowledge of the content you want to run based on your dungeon runner profile.
4. A ‘vetted’ option for the LFG where people joining or merging are placed on probation and can’t actually join an instance with or do anything except talk to the existing party members — and that only on a separate channel to regular party chat — until the group decides to accept or reject them.
5. A raid planning tool for group members and prospective group members to propose builds — including nourishment, traits, gear, weapons, and slot skills — to each other and possibly with some way to confirm that a player proposing to use a certain build can actually do so.

Some changes to levelling and the NPE that I think would be cool except for the riots that would result:

1. Abolition of levels, in favour of obtaining improved gear as the sole form of vertical progression in the game, in a vaguely similar fashion to The Secret World, only more extreme.
2. Equipment decay for lower-tier gear, used as a gating mechanism for higher-tier gear (e.g., equipping an ascended sword might require you to break nine exotic swords first).
3. Use of tutorial quests similar to those found in Bravely Default to encourage players to explore the gameplay options available to them.
4. With levels gone, the initial induction of a player into the game can be via something like a traditional quest. I guess this can be the “main tutorial quest”.

xDudisx.5914:

People talk like if it is hard to lvl up now lol. If you pvp you have stacks of tome of knowledge on your bank. If you run dungeons you can just swap character at the end. If you play wvw you can get lots of lvl in EoTM…

It’s not about how ‘easy’ or ‘hard’ it is to level. It’s about how fun or tedious it is.

Do you think the sort of people who have dungeons on farm still find them enjoyable?

Do you think EotM is fun in more than short bursts of a couple of hours at a time?

As for SPvP, what about all the people who aren’t already semi-pro or pro PvPers, and who therefore don’t have stacks of tomes of knowledge in their banks?

That’s even putting aside the fact that it would completely defeat the point of a level cap increase if existing tomes of knowledge and writs of experience remained valid at level 80+.

I’m honestly more in favour of a level cap decrease. I only have one level 80 that wasn’t due to copious amounts of craft-levelling, and even on that character, I got to 400+ tailoring before reaching level 80.

Or they could remove levels entirely and make the game more like The Secret World. That would be awesome.

Maybe there should be a downed skill to die on the spot?

Although I think PvPers sometimes like to leave people downed off-point since it can keep them out of the equation for longer than finishing them would.

In theory, airship battles can be cool.

In practice, I personally feel that Arah Story is a pretty strong argument against having any more airship battles in the game.

The OP isn’t complaining about rallying in general, the complaint was about the final instance boss for episode 8, where if you go down while soloing, you have essentially no chance of recovering unless you’re a ranger, but the boss can’t finish you, so you have to sit around watching your toon get beaten to a pulp for 30 seconds before you can finally respawn.

It’s an incredibly frustrating experience if you don’t clear that fight first try.

And as I said before, mesmers are actually amazing for the last Shadow of the Dragon fight — if you work at it, your healing throughput can be utterly crazy, possibly higher than any other profession in the game.

The ranger #3 downed skill allows them to revive themselves from downed even if they’re still taking damage. But yes, for the most part, I agree that there should be something about the fight to ensure that it can finish downed players.

Given that the fight doesn’t reset on defeat anyway, they might as well send you straight back to the checkpoint on down.

Could we perhaps have some more ‘easy’ content first, before we start thinking about the ‘hard’ stuff?

The latest living story episode had what was basically a level 40 boss transplanted to a level 80 instance, and while I found it fun, it was somehow ‘too hard’ for players with the benefit of 40 levels’ worth of extra skill development. The same enemy appeared in a previous level 80 instance as what was closer to a level 30 boss, if that. And in level 60 instances, you’ll sometimes see bosses that don’t make the cut for level 10 bosses.

It shouldn’t be easy to get to level 80 without also getting at least somewhere skills-wise. Yet we’re very limited in PvE content — particularly fresh content — that actually provides players with what should be a skills-appropriate challenge.

That’s something that needs to be fixed before we start worrying about hard content. And it needs to be fixed at all levels, and under-skilled players need to be encouraged to go back to it. Otherwise, they’d effectively be letting players play around in puddles for 80 hours and then suddenly throwing them into the deep end.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m trying to imagine what a true raid-quality boss fight in GW2 might actually look like and how glorious it would be.

‘Special case’ solutions like PvE/PvP splits for skills are actually far less easy than you might think — or, more accurately, they might be easy for the designer, but they actually make things significantly harder for programmers and QA guys.

Here’s something I might have considered in the same situation:

“Might: Boon. +1.75% outgoing power damage. +1.75% of power to condition damage. +1.75% companion damage. Stacks intensity.”?

In PvP, this directly hits the ‘problem’ builds. At the same time, that would actually be a buff in PvE — anyone who runs with 2000 power gets the original +35 bonus per stack, and players with more power than that get even larger bonuses.

I don’t particularly mind that, because I don’t think that the issues in this game’s PvE come from people being able to pump out too much DPS.

Black Frog.9274:

I don’t consider content that requires trial and error “challenging.” Test my skills, not my patience.

Part of being skilled in this game — or any good MMO — is being able to figure out mechanics and learn fights, and knowing what tools you have available and will work best for the task at hand. That includes picking builds, and it includes the fact that you might not be able to clear every piece of content first time while going in blind.

There is a very big difference between the kind of trial and error gameplay that’s actually a problem, and what’s going on in this fight.

OK, let’s speculate:

I think the massacre of the pact airfleet may have essentially been Mordremoth’s ‘true’ awakening, similar to the event that flooded Lion’s Arch in the backstory, and the same thing that Trahearne was trying to pre-empt.

Given that Mordremoth is the Elder Dragon of the Mind, I think it’s pretty much a given that he will start to corrupt members of the player races besides sylvari, if he hasn’t done so already. We could even imagine situations like Lionguard be ordered to massacre a group of dreamers as minions of Mordremoth, when the officer who gave the order is himself a minion of Mordremoth. Lots of delicious paranoia incoming.

I’d expect the political situation in Kryta to take a horrible turn. Jennah personally ordered thousands of seraph to join the fight against Mordremoth, many of whom were presumably lost in the massacre of the Pact air fleet. It doesn’t help that, as a mesmer, she may even be labelled as an agent of Mordremoth (again, remember that he is the Elder Dragon of the Mind) right off the bat.

The military situation in Kryta is also going to get pretty nasty, given the sheer number of soldiers that were lost to Mordremoth. Centaurs might start to move in, and we might even see them breach DR.

PCs of every race will have to deal with suspicion and see their political stars plummet — you put this new alliance together, yet you weren’t there for the massacre that left Tyria massively weakened. Hmm… that almost reminds me of some dialogue from the personal storyline: “My greatest fear is that I would fail so grievously that I would lose the respect of my comrades. That I’d disappoint my companions and be dishonored.”

Breckmoney.6387:

I actually really like the fight and thought it was a good balance difficulty wise. Some people might need to load one or two different skills, change their traits a bit or put on gear that isn’t just full zerker, but is that really so bad? I mean this is the final boss of S2 and the champion of an elder dragon, surely the fight shouldn’t be just the difficulty of some random terragriff.

Swapping in some pieces from my soldier set was actually one of the first things I tried after the first couple of failures. I don’t think it’s actually helpful at all.

Different people have different perspectives. Earlier in this thread, you’ll find someone mentioning that they had to ‘retrait’, as if shuffling a few trait points was some massive step and not something you consider as a matter of course if content starts giving you trouble.

GW2 is always going to be in a weird situation as far as bosses are concerned — this particular boss was actually simultaneously far too hard and far too easy. It was far easier than the occasion, level, and significance of the fight warranted for a boss, yet it was still far too hard, because this is the game which puts high-level characters up against bosses like the Gatekeeper from “A Light in the Darkness” — and we won’t even talk about the thrilling and epic conclusion to the personal and dungeon storylines.

gvaughn.4163:

RIP mesmers and our crappy stability

I’ve only done this fight twice, both times as a mesmer. And while I don’t think that the fight is as hard as some people make it out to be, mesmers are actually amazing at surviving this particular fight, perhaps to the point that the designers could almost slap an “all worn armour has zero Defence” debuff on you without it becoming too difficult.

I am not a skilled GW2 player by any stretch of the imagination, but even so, I could easily outheal anything that hit me using Mantra of Recovery with the right traits; and with condi removal covered via Mender’s Purity, I could cram far more anti-CC than the fight actually requires into my utility skill slots.

OK, call me weird, but I actually found that fight to be pretty decent, and together with the subsequent cutscenes, this episode managed to be one of the most satisfying experiences I can remember getting from GW2.

General notes:

• I have played through the instance twice, and died four times on my first playthrough.
• It was nice to see a boss fight with five distinct phases.
• I was able to clear with only two tendril phases on my second playthrough, and was able to use mistfire wolf for both burn phases. That seemed to add up to a nice total length for the fight.
• I’m worried that the fight might take too long for characters who don’t have access to bunker-busters, however. It’s especially problematic because some classes don’t get bunker busters outside of mistfire wolf, which costs gems to acquire.
• I brought quite a bit of stability and stunbreaks into the fight, but I felt that a lot went unused, particularly on my second playthrough. I don’t think that the CC problem is as serious as it’s made out to be.
• I do not have “professional level reflexes” and I’m fairly sure I have weird latency too. I didn’t have too much trouble with the fights.
• Adds that can have phantasms attached to them while invulnerable. I nominate whoever devised that for all of the cookies, even though I just used autoattacks the second time around.

Nokaru.7831:

There’s plenty of “AI Abuse” or unintended ways of playing in Final Fantasy XIV. Either you’re ignorant of them, or you’re hoping others are.

Turn 2 enrage method, anyone?

In any event, the ‘meta’ strategy for FFXIV dungeon runs is… stack lots of mobs up in one place and burn them down with AoE. It turns out that that sort of technique is pretty easy when you have a tank, the bulk of enemies are melee, and level 50 dungeons permit you to massively outgear them.

And ultimately, you will always be wearing max DPS gear as well — every item for your class or job grants bonuses to your main damage stat and to your hp, and the effect of your primary stat dwarfs the potential effect of literally any other stats you might find on your gear.

Honestly, I think even the dailies like Metrica Province events would be mostly fine as long as there was a box somewhere you could tick like “prefer quiet maps” which told the megaserver to sort you into special maps with a lower player cap (essentially the megaserver equivalent of the old option of choosing a lower-pop server to get quieter maps).

klemen.8439:

24 paths, excluding story instance and I did say dungeons. Fractals are great as they are – mechanic wise.

Remember that you’re alleging that your problems come from fundamental flaws with the game’s combat. Even if your central complaint is about how explorables are done, if there is other instanced content that doesn’t suffer from the same problems, that’s evidence that there isn’t a fundamental flaw with the game’s combat.

A far simpler explanation for the problems you’re seeing in dungeons is that too many people have been allowed — and encouraged — to keep them on farm for too long.

I’ll comment on the trinity specifically for now:

In most stock MMOs, in a group that’s essentially competent and knowledgeable about the content they’re facing — i.e., the sort of stock MMO group that you should be comparing GW2’s “zerk meta pugs” to — healers don’t actually do much healing — just tank healing and dealing with the occassional mechanic that was put in place specifically to serve as a “healer check”. The remainder of their time is spent DPSing, or possibly performing silly emotes.

From that, it follows that stock MMO-style healers would only enrich the game significantly with content design that specifically included healer checks, but there’s a whole cornucopia of other forms of support that could be directly checked in a similar way (and this has already been done with projectile absorbs/reflects, such as in the Uncategorised Fractal) — which suggests that GW2’s content already has all the potential for richness that dedicated healers could offer.

As for tanking, most traditional tanking implementations I’ve seen would do a lot to hurt the utility of classes like the mesmer, thief, and engineer — why bother with stealth and swiftness and the like when you can just have a tank do a sac pull?

Moreover, the game already makes successful use of co-ordination and positioning checks — such as Ralena & Vassar from AC and the Dredge Fractal boss — despite not having stock MMO-style tanks.

As for the assertion that trinities somehow lead to better teamwork, please could you explain your reasoning?

Zenith.6403:

Selling something you don’t own is fraud. How did these sellers get into the position where they are selling the path anyway? Did the seller secure their position by being the instance owner, almost complete the instance with the help of party and then kick them out?

Possibly, but why would you automatically jump to that conclusion? There are people in the game who can legitimately complete a fractal or dungeon with less than a full group.

Yes, it’s direct trade, which means that there’s potential for scams etc. It’s not against the rules, and if people do get kicked out of a run so that the run can then be sold, then it’s up to them to report it.

I do agree to a point with the idea that players being able to get dungeon completion credit without doing a whole dungeon is a problem to a point.

However, as has already been discussed, enforcing that players actually run dungeons in full in order to claim credit would create a worse problem, because it would almost invalidate the work done by people who complete dungeons partially and make it difficult for groups to replenish their numbers part-way through. It would lead to genuinely worse experiences in many cases.

A possible solution might be to have a system something like this in place:

• To claim path completion, you must obtain special tokens that prove completion of each of the significant intermediate objectives in that path.
• If a group completes an objective while understrength, 12 “evidence” tokens for that objective per missing player are generated, and evenly distributed between the players who were present.
• Proof of completion tokens are account bound. Evidence tokens are not.
• 12 evidence tokens for an objective plus an amount of karma/laurels/skillpoints can be converted into a proof of completion token for the same objective.

Azure The Heartless.3261:

Its a shame when a game is developed to break a mold, and the people who express interest in the game for that exact reason expect it to fit the same mold the game was advertised to break.

I can’t care too much either way. Anet has a track record of getting backlash whenever it does anything it all, whether it be sticking to its principles or acquiescing for a large group of like-minded gamers/focus groups.

Do whatever. I know that said opinion doesnt hold any motivation regarding any which way, but I wanted to voice how I came to feel that way, since more than a few players are shaming Anet for appearing to feel similarly.

I want to say its okay for Anet to not go back on its game design just to please some gamers who can’t accept anything that is -not- a WoW clone, but that isnt my place. I dont have metrics.

If I was in the mood for a well-crafted stock MMO at any given time, I have at least two such games installed and ready to go right now, so on that point, I agree.

On the other hand, a game can be different without having to try to zig almost everywhere that another game zagged. Perhaps not so much in the case of expansions, but I do get the impression that ANet’s designers can sometimes be too quick to dismiss mechanics and other elements of other MMOs as ‘harmful’, sometimes missing what the point of those mechanics was.

Knighthonor.4061:

When it comes to new traits in the expansion

Do you all want a new level beyond grandmaster
Or
Do you all want more trait lines added to the lines we have now?

Why would I want either?

Under the current trait acquisition system, adding any new traits by any means at all means bringing along some of the same stock MMO expansion baggage that I don’t want to see.

Assuming that the trait changes are reverted, doing either would probably be acceptable.

Worblehat.8697:

I’ve read something about the old method of unlocking weapon skills on a per-weapon basis by (shockingly) actually using the weapon. That sounds pretty neat to me; more interesting than the current system. Now by the time I actually have access to multiple weapon choices, I just look over the weapon section of my skills panel, work out which one(s) suit me best, and move on from there. Not having weapon choices is of course another facet of the “very early levels are annoyingly limited” complaint.

It wasn’t as great as you might think. It was nice to have an incentive to try to use every weapon, yes.

But here’s the thing: if you’re anything like me, you’ll figure that every skill you can get is meant to be relevant. When I started playing, one of the first things I’d do is grind mobs to get every single weapon skill. That could be over 500 mobs for some professions, with the implication being that not doing this grind will screw you over massively later on.

You actually needed fewer kills to unlock a weapon skill the higher level you were, you weren’t really required to use many skills for most early fights, and by about level 20, I’m fairly sure that a single kill granted enough experience in a weapon to unlock a new skill on the spot. But I didn’t know any of that when I first started playing my elementalist.

On the other hand the trait system is just horrible; a potentially interesting idea with just about the worst possible implementation. Might not be game-breaking, but definitely alt-killing. I consider my alts to have a de facto level cap around 30 – I might make an exception for my guardian since I’m finding I like that class a lot, but the rest will languish around 30ish until/unless Anet fixes the trait system. Which from what I’ve seen in the huge trait thread seems unlikely after this much time.

I currently have six sub-80 characters, and the one character out of those that I’m actually bothering to level at present was created before the trait changes landed and so gets most of her traits for free.

And under the heading of ‘missed opportunities’, I’m not really sure why the level rewards don’t include free traits to make the trait system more palatable.

Bellizare.5816:

I was just thinking on this. New players can not relate to the changes, as they are new players.

They have no clear idea of how seriously nerfed their gaming experience is. If they did, they would most likely quit in despair.

On the other hand, “vets” know exactly what has been lost in the whole leveling process. Our input here seems to revolve around how to avoid NPE and traits changes, by using our accumulated wealth and privileges. (Which kind of indicates to me that experienced players actually don’t really like the changes).

So, help every new player you find. They really need it.

There are genuine flaws with the NPE and the trait changes, but people are overstating things.

• The level 1 – 20 part of the levelling up process was always intended to be used to learn the game.
• The levelling experience in this game might be pretty cool, but how many characters do you expect to level fully while it’s still fresh, exactly? People were resorting to tomes and edge to level long before the NPE was introduced.
• How many people do you really think want to avoid the NPE specifically for any reason other than the bad press it’s gotten?
• It’s been said before, but a level 20 character under the NPE isn’t missing much that they had before the NPE, and gets there far, far faster than before.

As far as I can tell, the whole NPE was rushed out. Whether because of poor planning, panicky publishers, or whatever else, it’s not something that should have happened, but ultimately, it is what it is. For now, I believe that we should be prepared to give ANet the benefit of the doubt, and assume that the teething issues will be ironed out (as long as people remember to point them out). Among other things:

• Level 9 bandits kicking people’s backsides. Sounds like they weren’t rebalanced to take the new stats into account for some reason.
• People getting noticeably and significantly weaker as they level in Edge: that sounds to me like the level scaling algorithm could be using the old stats as a basis, rather than the new ones. That said, gaining a level in WvW always meant getting weaker.
• Releasing episodes of the personal story out of order: again, I’m going on the assumption that all of this was pushed out of the door in a hurry, and voice actors can’t drop everything and be available at a weeks’ notice.

Good question.

We can probably rule out any sort of box, but there’s an upcoming announcement that might be a prelude to some similar-scale content drops. We have no way of knowing one way or the other for now.

The real thread to NPE complaints here — including the trait changes — might not be so much to do with the changes as to do with what had to be taken away in order to make them.

People might have found it a little weird, but we’d see far fewer complaints about having to dance for cows if that had been present at launch (in fact, there’s a renown heart in Diessa Plateau — an area that avoided many of the NPE changes — where you have to emote for cows).

A worrying thing to note here is that Wildstar’s NPE is very similar to what we have — except that it was in before launch and elements such as avoiding the use of bundles etc. before reaching a certain level of content were far better hidden than they are in GW2. Wildstar didn’t do too well with its new-player retention.

There’s also another point for my NPE nitpick pile:

• Using a bucket of water to extinguish fires is a recurring mechanic in events, yet it works differently in Shaemoor Fields to how it works in Applenook Hamlet. I really don’t see how inconsistencies like this can help ease players into the game. That said, I didn’t figure out that you could extinguish fires the first few times I did the event in Shaemoor Fields.

I’m not aware of any professions in the entire game that don’t have instant cast skills that do at least something to help secure a stomp, so it’s hardly unfair. Warriors and Rangers are the only classes without at least a teleport, and both have access to quickness, damage immunity, and an autobreak (e.g., Last Stand).

And of course, even an invulnerable stomp has potential counterplay, such as bannering the victim.

One of my main general complaints with the NPE is that there are missed opportunities. I still see posts on other forums where people recommend giving the game a miss because combat is “lame and boring” and “has no depth” and “all you do is use your skills when they’re off cooldown” — for many skills, this is almost the exact opposite of how they should be used. Part of the problem is that the game doesn’t really provide much feedback to tell players that they’re doing it wrong, but the NPE could have at least tried to address that myth.

• Continuing with the “one-size-fits-all” complaint from my last post: mesmers now get a sword as a starting weapon. This means that the very first skill they learn after the tutorial is Blurred Frenzy. While that skill might not look complicated, it’s incredibly easy to misuse, and simply knowing what it’s there for requires theoretical knowledge of the game.

I should really be sleeping right now, but here some of the things I’ve personally felt were problematic with the NPE:

• Warriors with healing signet equipped are prompted to activate it when low on health, even though this is unlikely to actually help.
• The conditions tutorial always calls attention to a utility skill as a defence against conditions, even when there are weapon skills or healing skills that might be more useful much of the time.
• I feel like the explanation of rallying given at level 5 needs to be redone.
• Unsalvageable, unvendorable equipment that has to be deleted once it ceases to be useful. This is especially bad since not all such equipment is ever useful, such as on a character using the crafted account-bound exotics at a given level.

Runewolf.8456:

I still would like the option to skip all the tutorial bullkitten on a new character, we need less tutorials IMO not more.

I agree that this sort of thing should be optional — my first instinct on how to do it would be for Commander Siegerazer to mail players on completion of the tutorial instance (or perhaps on next login for existing characters), suggesting that they begin training to join the Mist War and enclosing a portal stone to the new tutorial map.

That said, simply not teaching the game to players is not really an option.

Who hasn’t cried on watching another player save a mob from choppy stabby death by pushing it out of range? Now, sure, that’s not always because the player doesn’t know any better, but when you also see players quit the game and write posts on forums telling people to stay away from the game because “the combat has no depth and all you do is use all your skills on cooldown”?

There’s something deeply wrong when there’s nothing to clue a player in to one of the most fundamental principles of combat.

Putting in another dedicated tutorial might not fix all of this, but it probably wouldn’t hurt.

Adry.7512:

Gele.2048:

expansion on January at pax enjoy all i know we have to wait 23 days from now

link please.

Here you go.

There’s not much to it. Basically, there’s a panel at PAX South where they will be talking about a new paradigm for how an MMO can expand its universe.

So it’s actually an announcement that an expansion is emphatically not imminent.

(lame joke removed)

sorudo.9054:

then let me prove you wrong then, i logged in yesterday with a level 21 character and guess the dailies.
kesseks hills, ORR plants, a boss wurm in lvl 45+ areas and i think a vista.
great scaling there…….

Vayne already explained this. The dailies are determined based on what characters you have on your account, not on what character you actually log in with. Obsessive altoholics and total newbies get easier daily tasks. People logging in with a lowbie alt don’t (presumably to avoid people trying to use lowbie alts as smurfs).

At present, the only PvE dailies I have a problem with are the Zone Event Completer and Daily World Boss achievements, because they attract far too many people to a zone, particularly when the zone in question is a newbie zone. Ultimately, however, this has been discussed repeatedly already, it’s really a megaserver problem, and one way or another, I expect it to be fixed quite soon.

The other problem is when the event zone is Sparkfly Fen. I kind of assumed that this would be a best-case scenario where the achievement hunters would help out with Tequatl, there’d be a whole bunch of successful kills and we’d end up swimming in unique skins and precursors. What actually happened when I ported in close to Tequatl time is that virtually all the achievement hunters were avoiding him like the plague, thus clogging up all of the map slots that could otherwise have been filled with people who wanted to kill Tequatl and making a decent run impossible. On the bright side, that might have been a good opportunity to get the two Tequatl failchievements.

Well, I’ve barely even scratched the surface of what it’s possible to do in fights in this game, but this doesn’t really seem that complicated to me.

Take an x/x/4/6/x warrior in toughness and healing power gear, with Inspiring Battle Standard and other traits chosen to fit playstyle. You’re far from invincible, but even if you do nothing to defend yourself, unskilled players won’t even scratch you, moderately skilled players will take a while to bring you down, and even skilled players will have to put some effort into it (the banner version of this build makes better use of the healing power, but the shout version lets you diversify your defence a bit more).

But now you can’t even start to accomplish anything unless you’re physically standing on a control point. You’re a walking slab of meat that hits like a wet noodle. The simplest way to avoid hitting like a wet noodle is to equip a couple of swords, take condition damage as your third stat, and throw dozens of bleeds at anything that gets near you.

This doesn’t mean you’ll be doing particularly good DPS, of course, but it does turn you into something that enemies have to anticipate and take into account. If nobody on the other team has any good defence against bleed spam, you’re going to rip through them, often faster than they can damage you. If everybody on the other team specs to deal with this sort of bleed-spam condi bunker warrior build, then you’ll effectively feed for the whole match, but your team as a whole will still have a concrete advantage over the other team.

One thing conditions do accomplish is to provide some basic offensive capability to things that wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford it and, as such, wouldn’t be viable otherwise. Additionally, they allow for more diversity in offensive strategies, which forces more diversity in defensive strategies and ultimately makes for a deeper game.

Harper.4173:

The problem is – as you’ve nicely put it – you want to have your cake and eat it.

You want to play the gear and build that you like even though it’s not what is best for the encounter but still clear the encounter just as fast or nearly as fast as those who are specifically playing in order to do it as fast as possible.

If you play for the “challenge” then taking longer shouldn’t be considered a “waste of time” since it’s what you like and want.

Ultimately you just proved you want the same rewards speed clear people get with less work while roleplaying your favorite set-up.

There’s no right or wrong way to play the game- it’s the way you enjoy it more.

You can’t really expect the game to change and make what you like to play the meta now can you?

There are a few ways I can think of to at least reduce the zerker meta for raids.

FFXIV has bosses where it’s helpful to slow DPS at times, either to avoid triggering too many add spawns at once, or to avoid pushing into a phase at an inopportune moment. I’m told that there are even some bosses which will enrage if pushed into a certain phase too soon.

Another option would be to require both the enrage timer and the boss’ health to reach zero before the fight ends. When the boss reaches zero health, the group then has to hold off waves of enemies, or the boss might turn invulnerable and gain new attacks. If the boss doesn’t take enough damage in time, then the enrage works as normal for that boss.

With the first suggestion, you’d still have a zerker meta (and FFXIV effectively does: tanks are expected to wear at least some DPS gear, and it’s not unheard of for people to conclude that one healer is better than another not by the healing they do but by their DPS over the course of a run).

I’ve been thinking about this since hearing that instanced raids might become a thing in GW2, so I figured I might as well chip in. There are a fair few things I’d like to comment on, so apologies for the wall of text and not quite following the proposal format. Also, apologies if any of my points were made by ninjas while I was writing.

General:

I think that any instanced raiding options should be not unlike a sort of ‘SPvE’, with characters being functionally true level 80s with all core skills and traits unlocked on stepping inside a raid instance, raid zone, or raid hub. Gear behaves as unprefixed level 80 exotics, and characters create their build using special raid amulets, runes, and sigils (there could, perhaps, be some unique prefixes for raids, and a form of progression from less-aggressive to more-aggressive prefixes).

Accessibility:

I think the best way to control access to the raids proper would be with a series of mini-raids that serve as a vehicle for introducing/reintroducing the core concepts that raiders need to be aware of and have some idea of how to deal with. If a player is skilled enough to raid, and wants a raidlike experience, I don’t see why there should be any barriers to them getting in, even if they only bought the game half an hour beforehand.

This is also a reason I believe an SPvE system would be a good idea — while there is a lot of fun to be had going out into the world to earn skill points and traits, if I’m in the mood for raiding, I don’t want to be forced into doing that.

I also believe that these raids should be accessible to all, not limited to members of a guild.

Tanking:

The game’s ‘organic’ tanking model is somewhat unique compared to other MMOs, and I think raids should make more use of it, with fights frequently requiring that some sort of tanking happens.

We’ve already seen fights that require tanking as part of the twisted marionette — one regulator warden had frontal invulnerability, and another had to be lured over its own mines before it could be damaged.

For larger-scale boss fights, enemies could require multiple players to tank them — a dragon champion might take flight and bombard the group from the air, unless it is constantly harassed with melee attacks from every direction. But closing to melee exposes a player to the boss’ own suite of frequent melee cleaves (which it can launch in any direction), meaning that you can’t stay in that position for long, and groups will constantly have to rotate players between melee and ranged in order to survive.