Guild Wars 2

I don’t know about anybody else, but I get almost zero improvement in performance going from maxed to minimum graphic settings. Just for giggles the other day I dropped down to 720p from 2715×1527 and I didn’t quite gain 10 FPS. I’m pretty sure GW2 is pretty much straight up CPU restricted and would benefit the more from a bunch of multi-threading optimization than porting to directx 12. In a perfect world, they’d do both and release a 64 bit client version, but I’d settle for some real serious multi-threading work.

Anymras.5729:

…Wait, what? How’s this happening?

A skill that gives a damage boost based upon a count of a condition applied by a single Guardian is bugged, and incorrectly bases that damage boost on the stack of that condition applied by ALL guardians on a target.

The result is if you pile enough guardians on something running the build, which lots of people are running even if they don’t know about the exploit because it’s a very effective build in it’s own right, then the damage increase just keeps climbing until it destroys everything. Large piles of guardians are currently breaking down gates and walls in WvW without using siege equipment, as an example.

My main concern is that Anet’s idea of “more difficult” seems to be 200% health, which is frankly just a more boring version of what we have now. I could get behind a really good PvE damage balance pass though. Maybe a moderate damage boost, some more use of boons and conditions by the AI, maybe speed up some of those ludicrous telegraphed power moves and increase their damage enough that not paying attention and using dodge has real consequences, especially for epic boss moments in the personal story.

If they got the difficulty right and they finally got downscaling right(ie by pieces of equipment so it doesn’t bugger leveling characters) then I think it would feel like an awesome game with a slightly campy plot. I think the awfulness of the story is really exaggerated by how easy it is.

Just make the bottom most bag in your bag slots an invisible bag and your problems are solved. Nothing placed in an invisible bag gets sorted.

Almost never, I forget about them to be honest.

The REAL downside to the the new downscaling isn’t getting much mention in this thread. I, and some number of others I’m assuming, have always leveled my alts by doing map completion, and I usually do so by clearing all areas of the map in order by level. I really enjoy it, because I flip between the different map sets as I’m leveling, get done with a jungle zone, jump over to one of the mountain zones of the same level, etc. It always worked fine, but now it doesn’t. Or rather, it does, but only if you are constantly buying new gear to match your characters level. The downscaling shows it’s really atrocious nature when you are say, a level 54 character wearing various found and story gear ranging from near your level to 20 or so levels below it. It gets real ugly, real fast when your already underleveled gear is being downscaled by the same ratio as your on level equipment. I’ve died more in the last few days leveling one of my alts than I think I ever have in this game. The only way I’ve found to combat it is to either move on to higher level zones as soon as I hit the level requirements(which is bad, because the higher you go the less different scenery choices), or hit the TP constantly every few levels to replace all of my gear. My level 80s by comparison are at least all wearing decent level 80 gear.

I just think this really needs mentioned, I see lots of complaints about downscaling being off for level 80s, but I don’t think it’s even noticable compared to how bad it is for mid level characters, especially if you want to play one without heavy twinking.

Old daily system was definitely better. I think they changed it just to artificially condense the player base in to a few zones, making population seem higher.

I never got in to dungeons unfortunately, I took a break shortly after release, and by the time I came back nobody seemed to want to do them unless you were “experienced” much less just play it through for the story and watch the cut scenes. So, long story short, I’d never completed the personal story on any of my characters. I think this is great. It takes nothing away from the people doing it in organized groups, and lets those of us who just want to see the story do so without trying to recruit help. I would honestly love to see all of the dungeon story modes playable this way. I think it would also draw more people who don’t do dungeons in to potentially doing them, as they could experience at least the one story path at their own pace and get a general idea of what’s going on with out inconveniencing anyone else.

As someone who has professionally been responsible for keeping thousands of computers running I can tell you if you are having hardware issues, it’s usually the power supply or a hard drive. I would bet you money any day of the week that most pc technicians at large companies and institutions do more hard drive and PSU replacing than anything else, hardware wise.

This will never happen, because it is the total opposite of one of the design pillars of the game. Since the original GW1, they have said absolutely no non-consensual pvp. If you don’t like that, and want open pvp of some form, you are in the wrong game. That’s really what you are talking about after all, an area where you can jump on people who have no interest in fighting you just because they want to experience the content.

Then again, they broke that design philosophy and spit all over pve players by requiring wvw areas for map completion, so maybe you’ll get your wish.

Definitely one of the features that I couldn’t believe they left out, after how demanded it was for GW1, and how popular it was once they finally implemented it.

I actually like Tera, and wish Guild Wars 2’s combat was more like it, but the amount of horrific pedophile chat that goes on in that game as a result of the Elin race is disgusting, and has to be experienced for you to understand how bad it can get. So I say no, a thousand times no, no children characters. Between the perverts, and the trolls pretending to be perverts just to gross people out, it’s not ever going to have enough positives to counter all the negatives.

Cerbeius.7129:

No love for Necro :’(

Unfortunately, Necro can’t lay down enough conditions to really compete in PvE. In PvP where they can turn boons into conditions and reflect conditions back on people they are amazing, but PvE enemies don’t use enough boons or conditions to make this very viable.

Necro as a class suffers greatly from the designers attempts to keep things the same between PvP and PvE. It’s already such a powerhouse in PvP that they are terrified of making any buffs for the sake of PvE.

Tirien.1326:

Wait for the next expansion and get this one for free, show us that you truly believe what you say you believe.

I would suggest waiting 10 years for the last expansion so you can get everything before for free, might wanna try that?

You don’t get to put words in my mouth and act like you are making some kind of point. Never, in any of my posts have I asked for anything for free, so stop throwing out strawmen. You apologists keep acting like the money we’ve spent on content we’ve already enjoyed was some kind of blessed gift from ArenaNet rather than exactly what we PAID for. You’re wrong. You also in no way addressed my main concern, which is the volume of playable content in this expansion, and whether it will constitute a large fraction of the volume found in the original game. Since they decided to charge a large fraction of the original game’s price for it. But you go on making yourself feel better, championing a company that doesn’t need your help and acting like those of us who disagree with you don’t have any valid arguments because you said so.

I think that this so called “give away” of the core game is a blatant kick in the teeth of every existing player in the game, but that’s their choice. My main concern is if this expansion will have enough content to justify that price tag. I’m sure not going to pre-order until we know for sure what our money is buying, and if as I suspect, the expansion content is a tiny fraction of the size of the original game, then I’ll wait until it’s selling for a tiny fraction of the original games price before I buy it. I’d rather miss out on the “free” character slot than buy a pig in a poke.

Spirits Unbound for my Ranger. I enjoyed running around the open world with my legion of spirits. I couldn’t care less about using them now that their all rooted and boring.

I love how the intolerant always act like people who disagree with them are THE REAL BIGOTS, and some kind of huge hypocrites for daring to speak out against them. You know what, some things should not be tolerated. I don’t tolerate racists or homophobes any more than I tolerate pedophiles and the Third Reich. As far as I’m concerned, not tolerating some of these viewpoints makes you a good person. I proudly claim my intolerance of the intolerable.

Harper.4173:

But if I’m still short than he’s not objectively wrong. If I’m still short then I’m still short.
My feelings about a topic don’t change what exists and doesn’t in the real world.

What if it’s not short or tall – what if it’s blind and not blind. If I’m blind can I wish sight onto myself because I dislike being blind?
Also the “hide thing” is really odd as well – it depends greatly on how you define hidden. One man’s hide can be another man’s way out in the open.

Does his being objectively correct make him any less cruel or rude? I don’t think so. You aren’t talking about a “wishing” situation here. Obviously the blind man can’t wish sight on himself, but if he has fancy new brain implants that let him “see” using special cameras, and behaves and operates in the world in the same way as someone with natural sight, are you going to go out of your way to call him blind to his face, just because it happens to be objectively true? You have every right to do so, of course, but me and and lots of other people are going to consider you an awful person.

Harper.4173:

Ok I get that but if that’s true then shouldn’t all issues of this matter be treated equally?

If I’m short but it has a very negative emotional impact on me can I then demand that the people around me treat me as if I were tall?

It is a biological trait that I dislike or do not identify with that I want others to perceive as I do rather than how they do.

Let’s imagine you truly suffer from severe dysphoria because of your height. It has led to emotional pain and trauma your entire life, up to and including thoughts of suicide. So you decide to do something about it, and with the help of doctors they agonizingly break and stretch your legs until you now stand at an acceptable average height and no longer feel awful about yourself. Sure it’s not perfect, maybe your proportions are a little off, but you are no longer drowning in emotional pain. Except for your one horrible neighbor who calls you dwarf and shorty every time he sees you, and insists that it’s not an insult or bad, because biologically that’s what you are, even if you’ve resorted to surgery to hide it.

Sounds like a really nice guy, doesn’t he.

No more stats from traits means you can’t trait for tankiness and then use gear to try and do enough damage to make it useful. Basically, adjustments will have to be made to gear choices, you’ll have to gear all out for it if you want to make a bunker build, and you’re going to do a substantial amount less damage than those builds used to. It will take some time for it all to shake out and for the player base to determine if they are really obsolete, although the current consensus seems to be that buffs to condition damage have made toughness useless, resulting in bunker builds being broken.

Harper.4173:

Also on the topic of “he” vs “she” – I understand that these individuals feel a certain way about themselves and do not necessarily identify with their biological identity. That’s fine.

But for me – who perceives them as that biological entity which they are ( regardless of their own inner perceptions) – why is it wrong to call them with the normal pronoun associated with that biological entity? My perception of them is mine. It is subjective.

Is it wrong that I choose to perceive them in my own way instead of the way they themselves want to be perceived?

These are serious questions – and it would be interesting to see how people feel about them and what their answers would be.

Because it has an emotional connotation for them that you are completely ignoring? You are choosing, by ignoring both their wishes and presentation to actively cause them emotional harm for the sake of a word. Basic human decency and politeness would dictate that you, being aware that it hurts them, wouldn’t do it. But some people just aren’t polite or decent I guess.

I love the design, and I’d buy them all in a heartbeat, if they’d shrink them to about half their current size…

Vayne.8563:

The core game has zero cost, which can be different from zero value. Because value and cost have very little to do with each other.

Value is what someone puts on something, cost is what someone pays for it. I’ve gotten stuff for free that has value to me in the past.

If it has value, then part of that value is in fact “costing” you a portion of the price tag of the expansion. They’re just not giving vets the ability to opt out as a way of subsidizing new players purchases. If other MMOs are doing it, then they are doing a bad thing as well. Value and cost have everything to do with each other.

Lambo.1405:

I’m not sure I fully follow you on this. They are not asking you to pay for the core game again. They are charging 50 bucks for HoT and are also bundling the core game for new players to ease the transition into the game. I’m pretty certain that their goals are to remove hurdles and barriers for new folks to step in and play. I think that’s good for everyone! For example, I’ve never played WoW but I did have an interest, but when I browsed the site and saw soooo many expansions I decided not to bother. As a new scrub, I didn’t know what I needed to buy (at the time) to get a good start, so I didn’t bother getting started at all!

I’m all for bringing new players in because ultimately it’s better for everyone. Just my opinion.

The only way this argument makes sense is if you are saying that the core game has zero value. Otherwise, you are paying for that core game. Part of that $50 price tag is based on the valuation of that core game. As a result, any existing players making that purchase are paying some unknown portion of that cost for content they already own.

I understand some people don’t see it that way, especially people who game from terribad monthly fee games and the laughable idea that they are paying AHEAD for future expansion. Those of us who gave five or so years of our lives to the original Guild Wars expect for developers to make expansions and then charge us fairly for the content they have created. None of my money is being paid for pipe dreams.

maddoctor.2738:

You are paying for the years of enjoyment and gameplay until the next expansion hits. The question is simply, is 50$ a good price for the content you get in-between the expansions? If the answer is yes then you got your money’s worth, until the next expansion comes and so on.

If it’s not worth it then you can either not buy the current expansion and wait for the next one to get both at the same price, or simply wait for a discount some months after expansion release.

That’s the real question isn’kitten I for one, enjoyed almost none of the living story releases, and I also consider them funded by the cash shop, not my initial purchase. So my initial payment was really for the core game and enough slots to have one of every class. I don’t feel I paid for three years of enjoyment, what I did with the game I purchased was my business. I purchased the content. I feel that was money well spent. Now, I’m being asked to spend another $50 for, essentially, the content of the expansion. Unless the living story quality makes huge improvements I’m definitely not paying for that ridiculous mess. So, is there $50 worth of material in HoT alone? A whole new full retail games worth of content? We’ll see. My fear is that the $50 price tag was based on at least a $15 valuation of the core game, as it was available for not too long before this pre-purchase started. If that’s the case, then they think they’ve got about $35 worth of content in the expansion. Sounds reasonable to me, but asking existing players to pay $50 for it if that’s the case strikes me as wrong. So I’ll be keeping an eye on reviews, and if what I’m hearing is that the expansion includes as much content as an A+ retail release I might change my mind. Otherwise, they’re ripping people off, and I’ll wait until it hits a price I don’t feel insulted by.

As I said in another thread, I have no problem with them discounting the core game for new players, or having a starter combo pack that heavily discounts it, but I still feel like including it with the expansion, with no discount for existing players, is asking me to re-purchase a game I already bought. They could sell the core for $1 and the expansion for $49 and as long as I didn’t have to pay that $1 I’d be ok with it. Not overjoyed, but at least they’re paying something for the game I paid $80 for, and I’m not being asked to pay a purchase price that includes the value of that game again. Instead they’re going this route, so I won’t buy it. That’s all I’m saying. If other MMOs are doing it, I wouldn’t make a purchase from them either. I’ll just keep spending my money on expansion episodes for The Secret World, since their pricing methods don’t make me feel devalued as an existing customer.

Just want to make sure I don’t need to log in to each and every one of my characters to ensure I can play these episoded in the future. Is logging in to one character enough to unlock it for the whole account?

I still think we should be able to save and load builds(traits and skill line up) on the go, and the cost should be zero. Getting rid of the tedious mechanics that made changing builds hard was one of the best post release changes Arenanet ever made to Guild Wars. It is a massive tragedy that such a user friendly and logical system didn’t make it in to the sequel, just ahead of them charging money for using way points.

I like the reward ideas, but not the difficulty ideas. As others have mentioned, it would just encourage me to never play a dungeon with any character under level 80, and when playing dungeons to never team with anyone under level 80.

Edit: Your background is from doing very high level organized dungeon runs, and the difficulty idea you propose would benefit players like that enormously. It would just completely destroy pick up groups. Some of us enjoy grabbing a few random people and just slogging through a dungeon. It might take longer, but we know we’ll get it done and get decent rewards at the end. Your difficulty idea is a disincentive to playing with other, random people, and helping new players.

I love my ranger, she was my first level 80 and the first character I made at launch. I do the whole sword/warhorn with feline thing, to be as useful as possible. She’s still not that useful. I’m not going to go on about how I’m a good player and that makes a difference, it does, but I can totally respect why ranger’s aren’t in demand. It doesn’t feel good when people get insulting about it so I see where the dedicated ranger players get frustrated, but I play her occasionally because I enjoy it not because I think she’s a better choice than my other characters. The fact is, as long as the pets “potential” usefulness is factored in to balancing the rangers skills, their actual usefulness is going to be less than any other class. Nothing like watching your pet stand 4 feet away from someone your attacking and completely ignore them because you are on an incline that it can’t path correctly.

Rin.1046:

But like I said, and was promptly ignored by your non-constructive comment, the AI in GW2 is no where near up to scratch to make real use of or challenge the combat system it has. With the exception of a handful of encounters maybe. If the general AI was vastly improved the combat in GW2 (PvE) would feel a whole lot better.

^truth, the bad AI is what has made everything but DPS pointless in PvE. As I’ve said, I would like to see soft trinity as a viable option, and think Arenanet made a mistake in allowing players to be as self sufficient as they are with out more heavily investing in skills and traits, but enemies that acted more like players instead of monstrous hit point sponges with slow telegraphed attacks and immunity to conditions and crowd control would go a long way towards making the current set up feel less stupid.

Leveling guide? Patience. You’ll feel like leveling is a pointless and artificial limit by the time you hit 35 or so. It is, now you get to grind out 45 more levels. You can keep unlocking skills that you won’t use to try and alleviate some of the boredom, and some of the traits are nice, although you have to wait 20 levels between seeing new traits. Crafting is good for spamming through a few levels quickly. If I recall correctly, it’s about seven levels you gain leveling a crafting discipline up to 400. It will cost more gold than you are going to like to do so. I suppose, if you have a ridiculous amount of gold, spamming every crafting discipline to 400 would net you 56 levels or so in a very short amount of time. Unless you enjoy playing the trading post, or find and sell a precursor exotic item(used to craft a legendary) you will not have enough gold to do so.

In my experience, the fastest leveling that doesn’t cost you a bunch of gold is to do map completion. Just pick an area and start filling up hearts, completing skill challenges, uncovering points of interest and way points, and viewing vistas. Continue doing so until you finish every one in that area. Then move on to the next one, and then the next one, and then the next one, and then the next one, etc. I usually do them in order. I do all the races starter level 1-15 areas, then all the level 15-25 areas, and so on. I also do my personal story as I hit the level requirements. I have successfully leveled to 80 in three days grinding out areas like this, but that was playing almost non stop.

I’m all for graphic dismemberment and carnage. I think people getting hit with horrendous weapons and dropping bloodlessly to the ground just sanitizes violence in an unhealthy manner. That said, they don’t want to break a T rating, so it’s never going to happen.

They should just bring back districts and let people choose.

GW1 did just fine with only 20 levels, and they sped the early parts up even further with the expansions. I can easily see that extrapolated to a no level system that I would enjoy immensely. All it takes is a developer with some guts to step outside of the expected norm, like the old Arenanet did.

I honestly found the aggro mechanics in GW1 to be great, and a nice way of breaking down the classic trinity with out throwing it away completely. I have no problem with the idea of GW2 making self support completely viable as an OPTION instead of having dedicated support required, but they went too far in that direction in my opinion. The biggest problem with GW2’s current system is that you don’t need to gear or trait for self support, I think being able to do that reliably should require a sacrifice of offensive capability, and a dedicated party support build should be much more efficient. I think if you got the balance right it would be much better than what we have now. I think what I’m describing is actually what they were aiming for, but they erred too far in the direction of solo player empowerment with not enough specialization/sacrifice required to be self sufficient.

Of course, they’d really need to get rid of the stupid trait refund mechanics and give us loadable builds to make something like that truly viable.

When you have to resort to special rules and break the established rules of your game universe in order to artificially prolong an encounter, you’ve already lost the design game. It’s really that simple.

No levels or the much lower guild wars 1 level cap would have been infinitely superior. They fought against the expected, common way things were done when they designed the first game, and then backed down and gave in for the sequel. It was disappointing to see them just give in to the status quo, but the milling mass of WoW indoctrinated brain slaves are comforted by the familiar and they decided it was better to go with the popular decision instead of brilliant design like they did with the previous game. This same thing led them to introduce the ascended tier of items. Dollars holler, after all.

thaooo.5320:

I have 4 world completions. I’m mainly a WvW player. Have 3 legendaries.

The only problem with this system is the people who want to half play the system.

Does it upset you that WvW players have to farm PvE to make legendaries??
Does it upset you that WvW players have to farm PvE to make legendaries??
Does it upset you that WvW players have to farm PvE to make legendaries??

No? Then the original post is completely unjustified, and just selfish and lazy.

Try actually playing WvW, you will probably enjoy it.

Join a WvW guild, use your server teamspeak, immerse yourself in the game mode, and you will actually enjoy WvW, and get your map completion done. Do the above, and you probably stop playing PvE, after realising how boring/easy/clunky the PvE AI is.

Instead of complaining and whingeing, how about you actually play the game you bought. There is a lot more to this game than the dumbed down PvE AI.

@WREAVE, WvW PLAYERS HAVE TO DO PvE TO MAKE LEGENDARIES, YOUR POINT IS FAIL AND MOOT AND WRONG AND CLOSED MINDED

I don’t enjoy it and will never enjoy it because I was coerced in to being there. My hatred for that coercion has permanently poisoned the well as far as WvW is concerned. I’m in a competitive guild, on an active server, and have access to a wealth of player experience and organization, but I don’t have any fun there. I never will. As I hit 100% map completion for each area, I mark it off on the list of places I WILL NEVER GO AGAIN with that character. They forced me to take part in it with their dirty coercive design decisions, but they can’t ever make me go back. I don’t finish one and feel a rush of joy at my accomplishment, I just think “There’s that crap finished for good, now the next one.”

Don’t do them very often but I occassionally FG if I want gold or to finish up a monthly champ requirement, and I do the Queensdale one if I get a Krytan champion or event daily.

Creeper.9360:

what does it feel like to play a game you don’t enjoy?

I always quit playing those games. So tell me how it feels?

It’s like taking part in a live performance of a tragedy, full of beauty and poignant sorrow. A horrible, dark world enlivened only by shimmering tears and moonlight reflecting on the shards of shattered dreams.

How do you think it feels? A little fun, but not much, lots of nostalgia for the great game that they chopped in to crap to make this sequel, and lots of unfounded hope that they’ll some how pull their heads out and fix it, so I can love it as much as I loved its older, smarter, more talented brother. Hope, unfortunately, takes a long time to completely crush. So arenanet has to keep working hard, month by month, at completely despoiling their intellectual franchise.

I’ve tried doing the train to level alts and actually found it to be much slower than just doing map completion. I kind of see it as slow and steady, with minimal brain power required. In fact I’ve had guild mates tell me that they do champ trains occasionally while watching movies or catching up on their Netflix queue on another screen. Not because it’s very fast, or the drops are good, but because it helps them level alts with almost no attention. Queensdale is a good karma farm, and a quick way to knock out a krytan event or champion daily, but that’s about it. Don’t blame bad players on champ trains, sure bad players are drawn to that form of leveling, but they pay the penalty of it being slow, and having pretty atrocious drops(in Queensdale). If you got rid of Champ Trains bad players would just migrate to something else, and good players would just not play GW2 while watching movies. No point.

Khisanth.2948:

Brutal Arts.6307:

Wow, Warframe dropped quite a bit.

Did it? Maybe just the people who play that and use Raptr(whatever it is) dropped.

No they made some major changes and it’s gone downhill in a big way as far as “fun” is concerned. I was a serious warframe fan, and I haven’t really played at all since then. I doubt I’m the only one.

Teaching children about “skinny privilege” early is a good thing. It’s alive and well in the real world and always will be. I see no reason whatsoever to change the game to make anyone feel artificially better about themselves. If looking at body types in the game makes someone feel bad, it’s just motivation to do something about it.

I’d like to see all soul binding become account binding. I think it’s a terrible mechanic that results in me never using any “good” items I find(as opposed to buying on the TP) while leveling, since after a couple hours of leveling it becomes pure vendor/salvage trash. At end game, soul binding discourages honest testing of new builds if they require re-gearing. If I don’t want to risk wasting my money, I have to use fine equipment that I can sell after, so I don’t see how effective a build might really be if it were geared properly. If you already had an alternate weapon or armor set on another character and you could easily transfer them over to try out new things, it would encourage build diversity.

Nice ideas. I’d also love to see a Lane Counter. Just a simple counter that tells you how many players are in each lane during the warm up, so you could better handle reinforcing weak lanes.

Honestly, either the huge number of people we had still wasn’t enough, or this thing is just stupidly designed and broken. We had a big group, all doing the right thing on amber, and got it down to 50%. I’m not terribly amused. That was with people focusing on getting plague and getting eaten to load the spear gun, and shooting it with the speargun to make the kitten ed thing vulnerable, while moving as an enormous stack so we could ward off all the pointless adds. I think we did a kitten ed good job, and yet 50%. I’m not going to bother again, not until I hear word that it’s going down reliably.

Winecandy.1530:

What if Primordus and his minions come to the surface in the LS. The dwarves have to follow them to fight. And maybe relieves the god all the dwarves from their stone statues when they step on the surface.

Seems like it would be a really convoluted badly written way of getting around lore. Especially since there are plenty of other races that wouldn’t require any of that to make playable.

Keiel.7489:

Casue you can’t guest to other servers to PvE. There is a group roaming around killing Tequatl and other bosses multiple times a day. As for other cotent, what other content? I haven’t seen anyone complain about how hard it is to kill a champ, or it was too hard to spam /m in LA for a dungeon group due to LFG tool. There is only a few reasons to join another server; Friends, Guild and WvW. Guess which one people flock to BG for?

Wouldn’t know, chose BG randomly during preview weekends and haven’t ever had a reason to move. Don’t even know how guesting works. Since I never needed it.