Guild Wars 2

some PUGs i’ve been a part of either in my guardian main or elementalist have been very unconventional, to say the least.

2 guard, 1 war, 2 mes = ultimate fractals face-rolling
3 rangers + 2 others = managed well
3 thieves + 2 others = managed well
3 eles (2 staff and 1 dagger [me! lol])+ 2 others = managed well
need to try 3+ mesmers, engineers or necros one day

in the end, since everyone can be multi-role, your choice of profession should depend more on your playstyle and the role you like to play. since you tanked and healed in wow i’d say guardian for you, but note that aggro and healing work very differently in gw2, and any class, depending on build, could tank and support at the same time to various degrees of success.

i found ele to be very versatile and fun after maining on guardian for a while.

warrior alt has been relatively boring so far but dishes out the dps.

also depends on what you want to do in dungeons. speed-runs and farming groups almost invariably involve flavour-of-the-month dps warriors and have player-imposed requirements which i find a bit tiresome, but if you’re out for a challenge and just play for fun, then once again, its your preference. casual PUGs generally don’t prefer certain classes except for the occasional EQ-challenged person.

edit: and what Folk said

evo.8640:

I’ve completed four legendaries now. The current method of obtaining precursors is garbage. I would not be angry in the slightest if and when they are made more widely available to players seeking them.

Took me much longer to obtain the karma and other corresponding parts to each one I made than it took me to log in, feed a few of my items into the market everyday. Of course not everyone can control a rare and profitable item on the TP. It has nothing about being smart or crafty in relation to markets but everything to do with when such a person bought out an entire item stock in the games timeline. No one will ever dethrone me from my item unless I quit playing the game. The bigger TP barons wouldn’t waste time kicking me off what I peddle. So newer players will simply never have the ability to have the gold income that I or people who make much more than I do to ever afford the current going rates for precursors when it comes to using the market as income.

If .dat file swapping were possible in this game, I would have done that to see legendary skins on my characters long before I would have worked to actually make one. Let alone four. And all because of the precursor.

off-topic, but here we have someone admitting to “controlling” an item on the TP and being able to afford 4 legendaries. the wonders never cease.

Masterpyro.4310:

Lol reading it again I can see how it makes me sound like an idiot but I’m serious, only a few Asian cultures celebrate it, snip

the chinese, koreans and japanese and a few south east asian nations hardly come up to “a few”, maybe only about 1.5 billion+ people..

but i do see your point about immersion, given that the canthans don’t exist in this version of the game. who knows, maybe if the kodan weren’t busy worrying about their sinking homes and running from this “terror from the north”, given the oriental theme their structures have, they might have put some lanterns and firecrackers up.

just to balance out the anti-thief sentiment in this thread: in my guardian, i was once in a group with 2 thieves, a mesmer and one other person i can’t remember (probably ele or warrior). it was one of the faster runs i did on fractals 10.

sure, people went down every now and again (and i’ve got a level 4 thief, so i’m not terribly familiar with the class yet), but i think as long as thieves stay away from glass-cannon builds and play smart, they can be viable and give a lot of damage mitigation (avoidance?) and conditions in dungeons.

noobs can unfortunately come in any profession, so i think pve thief hate is not justified.

thank goodness this game actually has a pretty good in-game community, as opposed to this “i’m-entitled-to-everything” QQ-mentality that pervades the forum, or i’d have quit long ago.

i was one of those “lucky” ones playing during that 3-hour window between the patch and the daily reset. many players got random disconnects (took me 5 tries to get into LA), progress resets (yes, we’d spend an hour playing and disconnect, then the game didn’t remember what we did) and buggy achievements (it took a party of 5 with 2 staff eles about an hour of killing moas and ghost pirates to get that ridiculous combo killer daily).

i’d think of that 1 (ONE, SINGLE) laurel as compensation for bug-testing for Anet and just drop the issue.

fyi no laurels are given out for this month’s monthly

played level 10 in a pug earlier. 2 guardians, an ele, a warrior (if i remember correctly) and a thief. we managed to pull rabsovich and his veteran to the gate, away from the rest of the mobs who stayed behind near the mining vehicle. i think we pulled everything initially but after we killed the trash mobs, the next “wave” spawned near the vehicle and didn’t come near the gate where we spent some time slowly chipping away at the champ’s hp.

the ice elemental was harder than pre-patch, but we managed with only a few downs. i had 0 ar myself (not sure about the rest of the party) but only went down twice when i kittened up my buttons. me and the ele basically provided constant regen and additional healing on top.

the aoe agony is certainly not dodgeable (unless with luck) or blockable, and i cannot comment on what it is like at higher levels, but lots of healing and regen seem to help at level 10 even with 0 ar.

the funny thing is it only started happening after about an hour of the patch. i updated and logged in shortly after 2100 UTC and things were going fine till around 2230. i’d just finished my daily (kittening combo finish achievement) in gendarran fields and walked back to LA. i must have disconnected 3 or 4 times just trying to get into LA. when i finally got in, i managed to make it to the bank before i disconnected again. then i gave up.

these technical problems are starting to get to me. they waste time and effort trying to get around them, and they happen every time (in different forms) there is new content for the game (with the exception of wintersday). i’m seriously doubting the testers Anet uses. so public test server maybe?

it’s something called “culling”. basically servers cannot handle all the data being moved to and from clients (us), so some data is “culled” when there are a lot of players on the screen. unfortunately Anet has decided that cosmetics are more important than our enjoyment of the game, so the data that’s culled happens to be player models. when enough time has passed, the server gets around to passing us the data and finally allowing our PCs to render enemy player models, by which time we’re usually dead because we were standing in the middle of a whole army.

if only they’d give everyone a generic appearance and have generic models for weapons (enough for us to tell what class and weapon configuration we’re fighting), there’d be so much less useless data to transfer. Anet did try a version of culling which worked somewhat, but they decided to revert to the one you see now despite the players telling them not to. as i’ve said many, many times, Anet can have great ideas but that’s all wasted by poor planning and execution.

Sifu.6527:

Actually,

We need a buff! Look at this video. 2 thief couldn’t kill a guardian with 13k hp…

PS- The guardian wtf pwn the two thief and their pet “rock dog”

that was a glass cannon guardian fully-specced into dps and critting (from what i can see) who scored a few aoe crits with smite condition and judge’s intervention then gs skill 2. add blind, burning and vulnerability from the virtue of justice and i think any glass cannon of any profession who walked into melee range of this particular guardian would have suffered the same fate. poor argument for buffing thieves if you ask me.

on another note, more than 2k posts and 40k views. hope Anet realise how big a problem this is and move it up their “list of priorities”. AFTER fixing culling, of course.

from a pve perspective, thieves have to choose either squishy-ness or low dps. would take my guardian or ele anyday.

pvp however, is a different story. in wvw especially, where there’s plenty of space to run around in and not having to be confined to a little circle on the ground. thieves are probably the class taking the least risk when starting a fight:

1) pick target
2) stealth and wait for opportunity e.g. fighting npc or other player
3) shadowstep, stun of choice, unload combo or spam HS
4) if target dies, profit
5) if target puts up a fight, stealth and repeat or run away

everyone else has to pretty much commit when choosing fights. sure, the ranged classes might escape with a slow/knockback and running, the mobility-specced ele can just run forever, mesmers can mesmerise with clones etc. but you can still target them and eventually catch up if you use the correct combination of weapons, skills and traits, and are skilled enough. and then there’re cooldowns.

thieves just vanish, and.. that’s it. if you’re really observant, you can see where homing projectiles/pets/summons are going to give you a clue as to the general direction, but i suppose that’s what you have to expect from “skill-based action MMOs” nowadays, eh?

this sort of reminded me of a multiplayer game called bloodline: champions. now, that’s a skill-based action multiplayer game. stealth was very well-implemented. lots of audio and visual clues e.g. unique sounds (headphones mandatory!), visible projectiles from stealthed opponents. and cooldowns, the lack of which sets thieves apart in gw2.

of course, the design of this top-down-view, team-based arena game is totally different from a chaotic MMO, but maybe there’s something Anet can learn from it design/balance-wise?

edit: just thought of something. make thieves somehow declare (very loudly) that they are going into stealth in the middle of combat and give their enemies a chance to interrupt.

Merlin Dyfed Avalon.5046:

I Hate: Rangers being able to hit me while stealthed. ANET Fix this! it’s ruining the game!

well, you’re just invisible, not ethereal. maybe Anet should fix this by revealing thieves when they are hit during stealth? realistically (ingame), if i swung my sword and connected with someone’s cranium, i’d know it, wouldn’t i?

and in response to the topic, whatever class you play, you need to survive the initial dps, which usually involves a stun-breaker and dodging or CCing back (might be harder for some classes compared to others).

then you unload your damage on the thief. most are so glassy that they die after a few hits. CC like knockdown to prevent them from restealthing in the meantime.

this is all if everything works as designed. often, in wvw, there are so many character models around that the ridiculous game engine doesn’t render till they’re on top of you or have already killed you, and i’ve seen the permastealth phenomenon.

temple of balthazar. yeah, i know.

problems:
- random mobs AND event mobs spawn continuously, npcs in combat constantly and can’t regen health
- balthazar’s firestorm (which wasn’t implemented a month ago?) is totally wiping the npcs out as we slowly inch up the stairs to the temple
- i’m not very sure of this myself, but the last run i did, some npcs fell behind and just vanished after the first fight, taking half of the morale bar with them before we even got to the steps. to clarify, they were just standing there after a fight, then disappeared. i mean, we’re good, but not that good

and let’s not even talk about the champ at the end. seeing that this is the only way to get obsidian shards outside of spending hours looking for a fractale group at the correct level, please either make this event achieveable or give us another way of getting obsidian shards with karma.

if people are posting on the forum asking which server to transfer to for an open temple, something’s wrong.

let me put my two cents in.

1) it’s still early on in a 3 week event. who knows, Anet might put out a new box in the store or allow us to farm ad nauseum in LA after the daily town visits are finished?

2) compared to halloween and lost shores, this event has so far run without technical glitches for me. that in itself means something.

i suggest that you wait and see. if at the end, Anet does nothing and this event has not come up to your expectations, then you can be “extremely disappointed”, but i think now is a little early. i’m having fun so far.

Ambrosia.2035:

Are the rewards repeatable on character alts?

nope. just tried, but all you get are presents after the first run.

zzled.9125:

Matt Witter.6982:

We feel that everyone should have the ability to contribute no matter what time of the day it is. How we’ve came to this conclusion is that no player’s time is more valuable than another. Everyone has different off peak hours for whatever reason. Players should not be punished or unable to experience and view the same content as everyone else because they play at a different time. They too are paying customers.

The above quote was taken from the WvW forums regarding “Night Capping” by Matt Witter (Game Designer, ANet). Please apply the same logic to World Events, especially if you’re giving out drops like legendary precursors. Please stop the “one-time” events tied to a specific time of day. There are lots of suggestions on this forum about how to get around it. Implement phasing on a character/account basis, let it run repeatedly for a week or a month, etc. The rest of us might not be playing during peak concurrency hours, but we’re paying customers too.

Thank you.

even though i stayed up late and managed to complete the questline and get some valuable (albeit useless to my guardian) loot after 3 hours of slogging, i’ll still sign this as we’re all paying customers. with the kind of execution i’ve been seeing this last month, i won’t be surprised if they do an event at 0300 monday morning, therefore:

/sign

fahd still broken on seafarer’s rest. he’s started the krait patrols event but isn’t moving from his usual spot, so cannot progress.

it seems like poorly executed events will be a mainstay on GW2. the ideas are great but i think the coders and testers should be fired. and surely they should have learnt their lesson from the mad king events that there’ll be LOADS of people on to overload the servers.

to those who complain about us complaining, saying we should be grateful and all: yes, we should be grateful that the devs are trying to make this game fun, but that was in their “manifesto” and most (if not all) of us bought (i.e. paid precious money on) the game on the premise that the game would be fun. lagging with a 30 second delay and buggy NPCs don’t make the game fun. the couple of hours i spent trying to do the questline could have been better used playing dungeons with my guildies or exploring the bits i haven’t explored.

please Anet, be realistic and prepare better for christmas, etc. repeated apologies and quick fixes don’t go far in helping your reputation.

after fighting the gatekeeper, there is a loading screen, then me and trahearne reappear where we last were (on the stairs, where the gatekeeper died). the quest marker says “speak to the pale tree”, but the marker is off to the right of the map and it is impossible to reach.

should have got a screenie but i was so kitten off at wasting an hour looking for a way across that i just quit. was a victim of so many bugs (warping camera, skill point npcs dead, invisible players and weird siren sound in WvW, etc.); i can’t believe i paid £45 for such a buggy game.

i think WvW just needs a bit of time to mature.

having said that, i agree with the couple of mentions of server population and activity being the main factors affecting WvW outcome. (you know the “player activity” graph you see when you log into Steam?) what the devs could do is find a way to watch the WvW server populations AND activity, and match similar servers together.

that way, well-populated servers with lots of “nocturnals” will be playing each other, and the same would go for quieter servers with more day-timers.