The generic model thing is the solution to culling. Before the models would just be invisible. Now you have a low polygon generic model as a placeholder until your computer has time to load it up.
Just finished my 5th, about 10% away on my 6th… After that I think I’m done. My last two characters are basically miners now that I only play for a few minutes every day to collect. But I couldn’t stand not having the little star on my other characters that I pay regularly, so…
Don’t feel bad. I think I’ve only had two exotics drop since I started playing the game back a year ago. Never gotten a ticket (and not for lack of trying, I actually farmed for the jade ticket eight hours a day for that and… nothing).
Fortunately I don’t really play for drops, so it only annoys me occasionally. Although the Jade ticket thing frustrated me.
I have no idea why you had such huge expectations for this update… maybe not paying attention to the previews? This was obviously going to be largely focused on the living world story from everything that was released before, there was very little mention about balance changes. Those things, like the progression of new skills and new weapons, were talked about in an article looking forward to the second half of the year, and will most likely roll out over many updates for the next four months or so.
Yeah, OP, maybe you should have logged in for more than a second. The event rotates through the world every hour or so, meaning that all those things you asked for like getting people to different parts of the world to fight unique mobs for special drops are happening right now. I just got done going through two areas, one I hadn’t been back to in months. It was kind of wild seeing hundreds of people roaming through these places.
Now that I think about it, I’m not sure this thread wasn’t started as a joke.
Yeah, I don’t see any real solutions to this. The Living Story generally does a decent job pulling people to areas, but usually only one area at a time. I’ve never seen so many people in Divinity’s Reach, which I think is great because it’s one of my favorite places in game, but that’s going to be at the expense of other areas.
Here’s the thing though. I’ve done world completion five times, I doubt I’ll be bothering with my last three characters. There are some areas of the game that I never want to really return to. On the other hand, I have a few areas that I play through a few hours every day. For the most part they’re beginning areas and level 80 areas. The middle areas are always going to be less populated, and even if the living story does pull us to them temporarily, once the living story is over we’ll either move on to the next chapter or to the few we enjoy.
The only solution I see is player side; to play with a friend or a guild that will help you level up in those areas. Anything else will be temporary at best.
Wow, this change is opening me up to a style of gameplay I didn’t know existed. I had no idea people made their alts keep only the gold they earned and didn’t share with the rest of their account. That’s kind of surprising. I can see why these changes would be disappointing.
But I have to say, I would be really frustrated if they went back to the old way. I have 8 level 80s right now spread all over (although most are in level 80 areas). While two are what would be considered my primaries, I use the others every day to gather materials or play certain events. Previously it was a pain to keep all my alts stocked with money, which between the occasional waypoint cost, costs of buying picks and axes, and the money it cost me to sell things on the trading post, was a slow battle of attrition. It meant I had to keep at last 30 silver on all my characters, but even that would run out in a few weeks. Which meant I would have to haul all eight characters back to a city to replenish. It also meant that at any one time around 2 gold was basically inaccessible for purchases because I had to maintain a pool on all 8 characters. Not having to worry if I can sell something on the trading post because an alt has been out too long is huge for me, and since my computer is something of a dinosaur, traveling to major cities is something I try to avoid. All that being said, if they went back to the way it was, it would be a pretty heavy blow.
I don’t think the actual structure they’re building to replace the hole will be replaced again by the big hole, that would be a strange decision, just that the particular minigame for August will only last a month. I could see them keeping the arena there and then using it for various minigames in the future that would use the same arena, just with different rules.
I have a SB, LB ranger and I am not cannon fodder- I love my Ranger
I have had a SB/LB ranger since game launch.
It used to be my main and fun to play, not anymore …
It has been relegated to doing dailies, harvesting mid-level nodes and easy pve content since I leveled a guardian 6 months ago.
Only reason I have not deleted it is because I have100% world on it ..Currently rangers hopeless and Anet does not have a clue on how to deal with the class. It should be removed from the game and replaced with something completely re-worked, like an archer class without pets.
Ideally I would like to see a proper ranged stealth assassin type class with survival skills. Get rid of the greatsword, axes and warhorn, keep SB LB sword, daggers and torch, add in cross-bows, throwing stars, darts .These become the class ‘mechanic’, range weapons/skills exclusive to the class. Throw out all the nature and pet crap.
I don’t know what to tell you, but I’m baffled that you can’t deal with even higher level PVE. The last Ranger update actually increased the damage rate of the Longbow, so you should be doing better as far as that, and only marginally debuffed pets (most pets only had a reduction to one of their five skills, not a total reduction like some people were claiming). If anything I’m doing a lot more damage now, easily clearing about 3k – 4k per second. Not as much as say my warrior, but still easily holds her own in pretty much every situation I’ve played, especially in PVE.
Shortbow did get a small decrease in range, so…. I guess if you have a build that uses a shortbow, you have to stand a little closer. If that’s destroying your gameplay, I don’t know what to tell you.
I don’t see why anyone would complain. Badges are pretty trivial to get, especially compared to many of the other requirements to make a legendary. Honestly I’ve been working on a legendary for about a month now. I’m barely over twenty in most of my T6 materials, have maybe thirty clovers, but I had 500 badges months and months ago before I even started working on my legendary. And I don’t play WvW all that much, but in the last seven months or so… I’ve accumulated a few. I would have more T6 materials if they hadn’t been so tempting to sell early on in the game… But honestly, while I think its a bit funny to see the stacks of badges in my storage now, I don’t begrudge anyone who had didn’t have to do it the (very slightly) harder way. It really wasn’t that much of an accomplishment to get to 500. If you don’t like them, buy something with them or destroy them. I don’t see how this affects your gameplay at all, it certainly doesn’t affect me.
Well, I’m not sure how “casual” you are. I consider myself pretty casual, in that I play maybe on average two hours a day. Maybe your definition is different than mine. But in the time since the game has come out, I have eight level 80s, and between them in about a half hour I can earn about 2 gold a day just from mining Ori nodes. Then I go and do a couple random boss events, and depending on drops earn as much as 1 gold more.
I’ll probably never get a legendary, but I don’t really care. They’re just vanity items. I’ve easily been able to outfit my characters in exotics, buy most of the weapons I want with the skins I like. All without farming, doing dungeon runs or fractals. Neither do I have a guild. There are plenty of ways to make money in this game, and a lot of helpful people in the game willing to help.
I play two to three hours a day. There are areas I haven’t been back to since I was doing world completion months ago. Mostly 20-70 areas. I do some boss chains, do dailies, and then whatever else tickles my fancy. I’m guessing I’m not unique. It’s a problem you always have in games like this, after people have gone through the content they tend to congregate in areas where they have the highest chances of rewards.
And it’s not just areas I hate. Although I do have a few areas that I loathed as I leveled up like Fireheart Rise or Dredgehaunt Cliffs. On the other hand, I love Kessex Hills, but rarely go. I don’t think it’s a sign that the game is maturing, not necessarily that everyone is leaving. I think it would be great for living story like events to move into some of these areas to give them life, but I don’t see it as a huge problem, and I’m not sure that will be a permanent solution. When I was doing world completion all those months ago, some areas were packed and some were empty.
One thing I think that would help would be getting rid of traveling fees, especially if you got rid of them while traveling between zones. I mean, I’m not poor in game, but I am kinda cheap, which means I don’t hop around very often.
I’m not sure if more grit would increase my enjoyment. Is Divinity’s Reach too clean? Maybe. But there are plenty of areas that are not. Any area with the undead, Krait or Dredge contrast with that. Orr is one huge barren wasteland.
Count me with those who did not like the slums of Cantha. It always felt like such a chore to get through those first handful of missions before you could leave Kaineng and get down to the more beautiful areas of the Kurzick and Luxon.
What’s more, I would argue that the slums of Kaineng were the exception in GW1, not the rule. If we’re going to talk about slums, there weren’t very many in GW1. Lions Arch, Droknar’s Forge, Henge of Denravi, Kamadan, Shing Jea, the Kodash Bazaar all lacked anything I would call slums. Of course many of them lacked things I would call houses too, which I always found odd, but then the scale of those cities were smaller then the major cities of GW2.
I agree this would be a great feature. As much as I love my quiver (and I do), it does stick out like a sore thumb, not matching the general color scheme I’ve set up for my ranger going all the way down to the bow skin.
Speaking of which, being able to dye some weapons like in GW1 would be awesome as well.
I’m not going to comment much on most of the review… agreed with some, not with most. I’m not really sure the point of writing a review anyway. Generally the point of reviews is to give people an idea of what the game is like and whether they would be interested in playing or not. Since everyone here is obviously already playing, with some probably having even more experience, it seems… how do I put it? Born into futility. Perhaps this is just a way to work out your frustration, I’m not sure. Maybe you were looking for a shoulder to cry on. Some soul you could find a common bond of hate with. Whatever the reason, I’m guessing it was ill considered. If your goal was to actually improve the game that would be one thing. It would be better served in smaller suggestions in the appropriate forums and with, you know, solutions rather then an expression of general malaise.
But I was disappointed when you characterized the Guild Wars community in such a negative way. Not only does it generally discredit everything you’re saying, showing you to be rather petty and not as thoughtful as you would like us to believe, but from my experience it’s not even close to the truth. Sure the Forums tend to get negative; that’s what forums are for. Often they’re an outlet of negativity. When someone has a bad experience in game they log off, write an angry post, let themselves cool off and then log back on as if nothing had happened. I’ve been tempted to do it (although thankfully usually my wife talks me out of it). It’s cathartic. And there are those who are just looking for attention. Like someone who writes a twenty page review complaining about a game that has been out for seven months for people who have also been playing the game for at least that long.
But for the most part, in game, I’ve found the Guild Wars community to be friendly, funny, and even on occasion kind. I’ve only had one really bad experience in a PUG since release, which was almost a weekly occurrence back in the first year of GW1. Maybe I’m lucky, but past experience teaches me that I’m not.
Yeah, I’ll be honest I often wonder if people overreact in these situations. I have eight characters, all level 80, but I generally only play one at a time while working on certain goals. I keep the other seven in Frostforge for easy Ori mining which I mine once a day. So if you stand and watch while I’m grabbing nodes, you’ll see all eight of my characters appear right on top of the node (because that’s where I logged them out) within a period of twenty minutes. I’ve never seen the porting/teleport bug that I’ve heard others say bots exploit, but I have played with my wife and seen her character appear and then disappear next to me for no reason whatsoever. Someone who’s feeling a bit overzealous might see these things as suspicious. But I’m not too worried because I assume if an Anet employee did look at my account, it would be easy to see the behavior is entirely legitimate.
actually its known that people looking to power level start in cantha, not nightfall.
Nightfall is one of the longest campaigns to progress through, partly due to the requirement of attaining sunspear general before you can leave the continent.
secondly, thats the reason “Vabbi” runs were popular, which are now pretty much extinct, or absurd prices. you skip to vabbi by being ran because no one wants to do nightfall.
bad advice. only worse advice would be to start in propcies.
pros looking to power level/clear = cantha.
If his objective was to get to level 20 as fast as possible, I would agree with you. It isn’t, it’s about achieving titles. Nightfall has distinct advantages over Factions.
The first; heroes. There are quite a few missions in both factions and prophecies which would be very difficult to complete using only henchmen. With the population being as low as it is, heroes are a must. What’s more, six HOM points are tied up in heroes.
Even if you start in Elona you can still go to Cantha for some of the advantages of Factions. You’re wrong in stating you need to level up to General to leave Ikittenan, you have to be Captain or level 17. Leveling to Captain is fairly trivial, and only marginally slower then leveling in Cantha. Once you unlock the mission to leave Ikittenan to go to Elona you can also unlock the mission to go to Prophecies and Cantha. Once you are level 20 you can unlock Eye of the North. All of the campaigns are going to be needed to successfully go after most of the titles.
Vabbi runs weren’t nearly as popular as some other runs in the game, and the only reason runs through Cantha weren’t more popular is it was nothing but locked gates and running through the content was time/cost prohibitive.
What’s more I would never suggest someone to start with Factions simply because much of the Canthan content would be incredibly difficult to complete without friends helping or heroes, especially if you are new to GW1. Zen Daijun would be the biggest roadblock initially because of tricky mechanics and terrible henchmen available at that point. I would never suggest someone new to the game take on by themselves or with heroes. If you can’t get through that mission you’ll be stuck in the training area without heroes and without the ability to go to Eye of the North.
Again, Factions is nothing but roadblocks, and most of it can’t be run. Some of the more difficult roadblock missions that pop into mind are Vizunhah Square, Nahpui Quarter, Arborstone and the Eternal Grove. They might seem trivial to you after playing the game for years with fully decked out heroes with access to the thousands of skills and a firm understanding of the mechanics, but these can be prohibitive to someone new.
Nightfall offers advantages over Prophecies and Factions. You’re right that you will level up slightly faster in Factions, but we’re talking about maybe a few hours difference and leveling to 20 is only a small step in filling up your Hall of Monuments. Nightfall is more forgiving of those just starting the game. The missions are less difficult and there are fewer gates to content. You have early and easy access to a wide variety of heroes. And money is much more plentiful early on in Nightfall then both Factions and Prophecies. All of these things are more helpful when filling up the Hall of Monuments then saving a few hours to get to level twenty by starting in Factions.
Personally I think the only thing that should be character bound is armor, but things I would personally like to see:
Dyes – I’m not sure making them account bound would destroy the market; the fact that they are per character discourages people from collecting them; I know I never buy them on TP. If they were account bound I think you would see the handful of expensive dyes lower in price and the other 300+ dyes which don’t sell for much increase in price due to shifts in demand. I haven’t bought dye since the first week of the game because it seem useless as I play multiple alts.
World Completion Emblem – The title is fine but I would rather have one of my GW1 titles up. What I like about the emblem is I can have both. As it is, WvW has become so stagnant I have had 3 characters at 99% for about three months now, and the only reasonable way I can see of finishing those is transferring servers, which I won’t do.
Exotic and Legendary Weapons – In GW1 you got to choose whether to personalize weapons. This allowed you to move weapons around to other characters as you experimented with builds. This has already come up for me and it’s frustrating knowing I have a great exotic on a character not being used but if I want another character to use the same skin, I’ll have to shell out 10g. It’s a bit annoying.
I would like to see more slim realistic sized greatswords as well. Variation is always a good thing. And while some great swords do look great on my big hulking char, they look less great on my little asura female.
Couldn’t agree more with the OP. Blind praise gets you only so far.
@Vayne
It’s not the quantity that matters, it’s the quality. What Guild Wars 1 started with had more structure and soul. The campaign felt more fulfilling to complete than the scattered content you could rush through and ignore in GW2.
Wow, really? I thought the campaign of Prophecies was horrible, absolutely one of the worst I’ve played. So bad that after the first time through all my other characters just caught a run to Lions Arch and then caught a run to Droknar’s. I never played through the entire campaign except for years later to get the title. I didn’t feel it was particularly compelling, in general I thought my characters might be too stupid to live. Constantly manipulated by obvious villains, trusting to a fault, making bad choice after bad choice. And don’t forget, when Guild Wars 1 came out our characters couldn’t even move their mouths and everyone communicated telepathically in cutscenes. That’s the quality you’re talking about?
The stories got marginally better later on (although the voice acting in Factions was so bad I had a hard time telling… seriously embarrassing), but Prophecies never had great storytelling. It had interesting lore, a beautiful world, and a fun skill system, but the storyline was awful, something suffered through rather then enjoyed.
BTW, Ugo nominated Factions for the “Worst Cutscenes in Gaming History.”
I’m stunned that anyone would prefer Spamadan to the Trading Post. I don’t even know what to say to that. After the first year I never even bothered selling my stuff, instead just threw it on one of my mules or gave them to friends. Having a system is infinitely better then no system at all.
I also think it’s funny how much people are lauding the difficulty of GW1. Once heroes were introduced even hard mode was pretty easy. Once you could go seven heroes and they introduced hugely imbalanced PVE skills I don’t think I ever died again in PVE. And yes there were more options for builds, but they weren’t necessarily more complicated then the builds in GW2. There were plenty of builds which required spamming one or two skills while using others as occasional utilities, especially some of the meta ranger builds. And there was a lot of build discrimination if you wanted to join parties for upper level content, so while you had the option for thousands of builds, in reality there were only a handful that were really viable if you wanted to compete in the endgame.
Don’t get me wrong, I loved GW1. But there’s definitely some nostalgia warping memories.
I don’t miss how farming dominated the economy in GW1, I don’t miss the title based skills, I don’t miss Spamadan even a little bit, I don’t miss the overly grindy titles or a more restrictive world. And even though I loved my heroes and spent a lot of time and money decking them out, I like that my character now feels more like a powerful hero rather then just one more person in a group of eight who is a pushover if he lost his healer.
When I saw this thread, I at first thought that they were offering Hall of Monument skins as regular items and I was upset. For the opposite reason as the OP actually is. I worked hard to get the achievements and collect everything I needed for the Hall of Monuments. Some of those titles required a huge investment in time and money, and most of the 15k armors I only had pieces of. But when it became clear that the Hall of Monuments would be the way those things would transfer, I put in the extra work so I would have access to those rewards. To me they represent something, and I’m glad there aren’t being made generally available.
They give me no playing advantage, they’re simply skins. I put in the work to get them, you haven’t. If you want that skin then you can do what the rest of us did and go back and play the original Guild Wars. If you’re not willing to do that, you’re out of luck. Just like if you’re unwilling to run dungeons, don’t complain that you can’t get that dungeon exclusive armor.
This happens to me all the time on one of my computers. Oddly the other computer never has this problem. In the past there was a workaround where if I restarted my computer and immediately loaded the trading post after I logged in it would work, but since the last update that hasn’t worked either, so I’ve been forced to use the other computer if I want to sell anything. Very annoying.
I agree. It occurred to me the other day that while the dye system in GW2 is one of my favorites, I couldn’t see myself buying another dye in the foreseeable future.
This is especially true for those of us who prefer to play a wide range of characters. Right now I have eight characters, one for each profession. And while I did buy dyes in the beginning, including a few rare ones, I can’t bring myself to do that anymore. Buying duplicates of blacks or whites or whatever just seems like a waste of money since I’ve already spent money on most of those dyes. And since the dye system seems to be set up with the goal of making it as easy as possible to make our characters unique, account bound dyes do that best.
In addition the dye packs in the gem store are just too expensive for far too little, especially because dyes are not account bound. Again, as much as I’ve been willing to spend money on this game, there’s no way I would spend real money on a handful of random dyes.
And this is coming from someone who is kinda addicted to dyes. I love finding new colors and I love almost everything about the system that’s set up in game. Despite that, I can’t see myself buying another dye while they’re only character bound.
I actually like this idea. Make having your account compromised less traumatic and would reward those who did it less.
I’m sure this has probably been addressed before, but I think it bears repeating as it seems to have become worse recently. I never really understood the reason behind the immunity mechanic that triggers on enemies because they have strayed too far from their spawn area or if they are on a different elevation then me. But for the most part it didn’t interfere with my playing. It was just something to be mindful of.
Increasingly however I’ve had the experience of Immunity triggering for no reason I can see, usually after a long difficult battle with Veterans or Champions. My guess is sometimes the retreat or run mechanic triggers when the enemy has taken a certain amount of damage and that somehow triggers Immunity. Whatever is happening, it’s tremendously frustrating.
There’s nothing like fighting a long protracted battle against a champion, getting it down to about a quarter health and then, for no reason you can see, have it suddenly flash immune and regain its health. It shouldn’t happen at all in my opinion. Just today I saw a champion ogre that me and one other person had taken on do just that. For the life of me I can’t figure out why. It wasn’t out of its spawn area and it had been pretty much motionless for the entire fight trapped by pets and minions. Essentially it turns a difficult battle into an impossible one; after all I don’t get the same immunity and get to recover all my health at the same time. My guess is the immunity trigger is just too sensitive, as it seems to be happening a lot the last week or so. Or maybe I’m just unlucky.
In a related complaint, I have also seen cases where enemies have been positioned in high places and been able to bombard me from above but when I return fire they are immune because they are on a different elevation. In either case its frustrating when that happens. Maybe its an effort to make up for a sometimes simplistic AI, but I think there are better less frustrating ways to do that.
I would like to see this mechanic reduced or even completely eliminated. I’m not sure why it was added to the game in the first place, honestly. It wasn’t a part of Guild Wars 1 and unless I’m missing something it doesn’t achieve anything but frustration.
(edited by funkylovemonkey.3097)