Quantity over quality
- Sea of Sorrows
D: oh yeah. I guess not. Though it would kinda break the dead mesmer behind the gate exploit too though.
That would work wouldn’t it?
Wow, this topic is still up.
I’d like to add something to my view on waypoints. Waypoints actually frame a particular ‘theatre’ of battle when it is used right. Look at the waypoints that lead up to the lyssa statue at malchor’s leap (not the union one, the other one at the base camp).
When someone exits this waypoint and heads to lyssa, a ‘level’ of sorts is created, you need to get up the ramp, get pass the catapults, fight your way to the center, etc etc.
The more waypoints there are, the smaller these theatre of battles become. Intuitive placement of waypoints can actually help the game a lot by using it alongside the terrain to create a ‘level’ in which a person would be likely to undergo to reach a destination. When these are too frequent, these levels get smaller and end up just feeling like the journey is lost.
And specifically about challenge in DEs:
“In the time since launch ArenaNet’s has been examining its event design and seen how with enough players the challenge level of any particular open world event tends to drop. To maintain an element of difficulty, moving forward some events will be designed with layers, where certain challenges won’t trigger until the number of players nearby hits a specific threshold. This will be the case for a climactic encounter with a guild of NPCs called Modus Sceleris, members of which will pop up throughout Tyria to harass you. You can eventually find them all grouped together in one spot, and by interacting with them can take on challenges.
If you’re alone, initially you’ll fight off waves of their minions before challenging one of the members of the guild directly. Each member will have unique boss-like attack patterns in order to force you to move around and use your skills intelligently. If a lot of players gather around the event’s structure switches. Instead of fighting the guild members one at a time, you’ll fight all four at once, making for a more chaotic and difficult encounter. In other parts of the world, an invading group of enemies might take over a town, and if enough players are around to attempt to repel the attack, an elite monster might spawn right in the middle of the fight to ensure nobody involved gets too comfortable. It’ll be interesting to see how ArenaNet applies this philosophy of event design moving forward as older events are continually swapped around for updated ones."
This is the start of something good!
http://au.ign.com/articles/2012/10/22/whats-next-for-guild-wars-2
“In the time since launch ArenaNet’s has been examining its event design and seen how with enough players the challenge level of any particular open world event tends to drop. To maintain an element of difficulty, moving forward some events will be designed with layers, where certain challenges won’t trigger until the number of players nearby hits a specific threshold. This will be the case for a climactic encounter with a guild of NPCs called Modus Sceleris, members of which will pop up throughout Tyria to harass you. You can eventually find them all grouped together in one spot, and by interacting with them can take on challenges.
If you’re alone, initially you’ll fight off waves of their minions before challenging one of the members of the guild directly. Each member will have unique boss-like attack patterns in order to force you to move around and use your skills intelligently. If a lot of players gather around the event’s structure switches. Instead of fighting the guild members one at a time, you’ll fight all four at once, making for a more chaotic and difficult encounter. In other parts of the world, an invading group of enemies might take over a town, and if enough players are around to attempt to repel the attack, an elite monster might spawn right in the middle of the fight to ensure nobody involved gets too comfortable. It’ll be interesting to see how ArenaNet applies this philosophy of event design moving forward as older events are continually swapped around for updated ones."
OMG!
Erm, except all those skills have different animations. Save Yourself is really distinct too.
Before that update where stats apply to downed state, not stomping is actually a good tactic, now you kinda get smacked around for quite a bit from downed state 1 spam.
Necromancer has some very good concepts for it, but bugs and glitches are happening faster than they are removed from the game. That is the most demoralizing thing about the class.
Trust me, I am equally disappointed. Although that disappointment is almost getting eclipsed by some other stuff…
The newest necromancer bug makes me very excited to play the game.
Yes it should. I’m sure Gaile Gray will come and lock this thread soon too. This is such a hush hush topic for some reason.
Btw, that video OP has kindly posted up shows this is in fact truth.
Wow, I thought this was happening, but shrugged it off as ‘Nah, no way, Arenanet’s programming can’t be THIS bad’.
I think different downed states are good in different situations, which is fair. However, these different situations span over sPvP, and into things like PvE and WvW. It probably should be balanced around sPvP first though.
Fast Healer does not work:
Can someone test this or does anyone have a solution as to why the above results are happening?
I noticed that Fast Healer doesn’t say ‘revive allies’ so what does it actually do? Increase your bandage rate?
Voice Communication.
That’s the advantage some have over others.
Enhancing hot-join will just numb down tournament.
It also enhances play for tournament players of different languages spoken.
Well itself as class mechanics part it sux otherwise, some items stolen are rly crap, i mean sharp tooth, 1 minute bleed low damage, has cast time minimum melee range, hiting it is next to imposible and effect sux if you arent running conditions spec, 10 seconds chill from mage, same cast time + minimum range, hard to set up, rly hard, and effect aint worth it most of time.
Thats an example of a crap one, which is actually still decent (not that you can get Sharp Tooth in sPvP IIRC). But when traiting for steal, it can already do a whole ton of powerful stuff. The 4k damage from Mug is pretty much unavoidable, given the nature of the animation, it teleports as well, gives you a utility skill, along with whatever buffs.
Look at Terror for the necromancer, it adds damage to fear. Whoopdy do. Fear damage is about 1.5 times poison damage. Great. For a total, of 1 second, maximum 4 if you go out of your way to spec into it, AND you are downed.
See the difference?
I wondered about that. I agree that the Dev Tracker should be restricted to only the developers’ commentary. If players have suggestions or commentary, that should be placed in a different location.
Why is the Dev Tracker even available for players to post in?
Well, thats likely a bug… haha.
Now, unless I am mistaken, the current ctrl calling system is really rudimentary. Ctrl clicking in GW1 allowed you to announce your HP, tell your teammates what skill you are using on what target.
This would highly enhance random pub gameplays as well as just gameplay in general.
Seriously, your own Dev Tracker feature is getting trolled by your moderators. No-one wants to see pages and pages of CC moderators closing topics.
Dev tracker is for the Devs, not some random fun police dude.
I’m not sure if there’s a reason Mug does as much damage as it does in the first place.
I agree with everything except downed state, it does need a bit of balancing through
Is this part of the render issue?
You misunderstood me, there is an entire group of people working on balancing the game as I write this…
Wait, and no-one thought quickness was a bad idea? I am dumbfounded.
If you like said item, yes you’ll have to keep it. Possibly transmute it into something better later.
Mr Vaughn, have you played Mass Effect 2? If we only dissect the one aspect of the game that deals with character deaths, I think the same could have been done in GW2, and it’d have been a lot more successful as a storytelling tool.
Your starting companion could be someone who joins the orders with you, your decisions could cause this friendship to strengthen or to fall apart, and somewhere towards the end they’d be put into a mission together (he could replace Tonn pretty much), and dies. We’d end up having a whole heap of story missions to develop a connection to this character, and become emotionally invested in him.
You can never, ever, get that item skin again, is why that question is important.
Or you could’ve done something like this with Tybalt:
Claw Island gets attacked, lots of enemies come. One of them will indefinitely hit Tybalt, PC still has total control of the scene. Its a grievous mortal wound, but Tybalt says he’ll soldier on. As the battle continues he becomes increasingly weakened, and at the finale, he opts to stay behind because he knows he won’t make it. See what that would do? You actually give the player to indulge in Tybalt’s bravery over a period of time, and the question whether ‘he will make it’ will linger in your mind. He can still die 100% afterwards, you won’t need to make extra scenarios.
I’d like to direct you to my favorite gaming moment in which a main character in the story died. This was more emotional than any scene GW2 produced. The character in question was fleshed out well over a period of time, and the PC is never taken away from the action and impending doom of the character until the very end, where nothing more could have been done.
Actually, a more pressing question is: What did you hope to achieve in killing off a heap of characters players don’t really know about. Characters that were killed off were so paper thin, the player has no investment in them, thus, having elaborate cutscenes to show off their deaths is completely trivial.
(edited by kKagari.6804)
I’m not sure if I’m beating a dead horse here, but upon soldiering through the entirety of my human character’s personal story over the course of a few nights, I really began to look back at the somewhat cheesy GW1 stories and realize how much better they were.
I think the main problem in the story lies with the characters. Both your own character and the supporting cast.
Your character:
The problem here is that your player character is completely devoid of emotions. The voice acting isn’t particularly bad, but there are very little times we see any sort of emotive behavior from PC. If we see the PC as the protagonist to the journey we embark on, then we have only a minimal palette of emotions to relate to. I get that our character is supposed to be a resolute hero, but that aspect runs dry very quickly.
For instance, at the beginning, when you aid your companion in the level 1-10 levels, its OK to establish your character as a stoic, resolute character, with the leadership qualities that are deemed useful for the latter half of the story. This however, is exactly what happens, from level 1-80. Our PC ends up having no actual character arc, he/she starts and ends exactly the same way.
A successful protagonist is one in which we can relate to. However, this doesn’t always need to be the case. The protagonist can also serve as a proxy to the viewer/player. This option would appear to be the correct choice here given the nature of the game. GW1 does this very well.
Lets take Nightfall as an example. Put aside the rather wooden vocal performances (though still leaps and bounds better than Trahearne) our PC set off on a journey as our proxy. We discovered the world through the heroes we met, and in turn see them develop an arc in their characterization.
Dunkoro for example was characterized as some super long winded guy who gets his moments of brilliance in the caverns mission before finally revealing his vulnerabilities that lead to his long winded nature in the penultimate chapter of the game.
A more simpler, yet well written character could be found in General Morgan, best described as a well natured fatherly figure to Varesh, torn between his morals and his loyalty. Ultimately he needed to make a choice.
Going though my personal story, the closest character who remotely had an arc was Tybalt. Even then, his character was given so little time to develop. What gives Arenanet? Why did the idea to introduce a plethora of characters ever seem like a good thing.
I think the best way to determine a character is to simply ask someone else to describe them. And not just through appearances. How many descriptors can you provide for said character? So many characters in this game are paper thin and one dimensional.
Theres actually no problem with the PC being presented as a proxy (maybe except for the fact Arenanet vigorously advertised it as a ‘personal story’), but due to the nature of the game, it is also very hard to make the PC a good protagonist to relate to. We never actually get any ‘suspense’ through the character alone, because we know he/she won’t die. Our choices can’t actually affect his/her mood or emotions because that would require an unfeasible amount of vocal recordings.
I feel as though Arenanet would’ve been more successful if they carried more characters through the entirety of the story instead of just being ‘the NPC of the chapter’. There are also so many choices in the story so many of them just end up feeling completely pointless. I was so psyched to redo my personal story again on my alt, but after going through the first ‘chapter’ I realized, none of my decisions actually matter. I can save the orphanage, but there is no payoff for that story itself. I think in further expansions, Arenanet will be better off adopting a GW1 story telling approach, with a small set of decisions to make.
P.S. So after finishing off the Tonn story missions Logan sent me a letter saying ‘I know you’re still agonizing over the deaths blah blah blah’. No Logan, I’m not agonizing over the death of a paper thin character I knew close to nothing about. Its a bigger slap to the face when your PC tells Ceera that Tonn spoke often of her. Twice I believe. Twice.
(edited by kKagari.6804)
Well, we do get an airship.. lol
Gerrard – Human Warrior
Sisay – Most likely a thief, she used to be a pirate and all.
Hanna – Human Engineer
Tahngarth – Probably a tauren, errr…Charr warrior made to look very bull like.
Orim – Human Guardian
Ertai – Human Elementalist
Mirri – Charr warrior
Crovax – Human warrior
Squee – Asuran Engineer
Karn – Squee’s elite skill!
Rofellos and Multani – Sylvari whatevers!
Lets make the weatherlight guild!!!
Did you try lower jaw? That moves it forwards and backwards. Jaw just changes the width of the jaw below the ear which only slightly seems to affect the chin.
Preface: Ok, this might not be the most scientific way of testing but this is how I came about the results:
At first I wanted to see if this is a means of testing whether percentages stack multiplicatively or additively. I’m a warrior, and the 3 different test groups would be:
a)No armor, no traits.
b)6 runes of superior mercy, no traits.
c)6 runes of superior mercy, Fast Healer trait.
My preliminary expectations was that each different group would heal a different amount when rezzing dead soldiers in the pre staging area to HotM, with group C healing the largest amount. I would then compare it to group A’s result to see if this was either 80% of the time taken (additive) or 81% of the time taken (multiplicative). I was in for quite a shock when I found out that the difference between groups A to groups B and C was 1hp. Yes, there was an additional tick of 1 hp.
Ok, so now I thought; maybe the ticks are just more frequent, in which case it is measured with time, rather than HP healed, (at this point I would like to remind you of my preface). I took out my stopwatch and timed groups A and groups C.
I consistently got the same result, over 20 timed sets each, of 8.8 seconds. Now, I might not have the fastest fingers in the world, but I’m fairly certain, even with this rudimentary level of testing, there is close to NO DIFFERENCE, in using rez speed buffs.
As a self proclaimed ‘field medic’ in WvW, I am simply SHATTERED. Is this a bug???
Even the haters can’t pull themselves away from the forums.
IT’S BLACK MAGIC
TBH, I like to hate the game when I’m on the forums too. Possibly because it could’ve been so much more. But in its current state I’d say I’m still thoroughly enjoying it.
Fast Healer has no signs of actually doing anything other than adding an additional tick of 1 hp during reviving
I tested this on downed state NPCs as well last night, the same guys, as soon as they get hit by the imaginary explosion, at half hp. I got 4.5seconds each time, with the same HP rezed per tick as reviving from full death.
Can anyone test this?
When you are invis, you’re still using your health bar. Mist form 75cd. Rampage is an elite. Vengeance is a somewhat very conditional situation.
When you are in Deathshroud, you have another set of hp, you have another set of skills, you can enter this state frequently. It is very different to your examples.
There are A LOT of things other classes get to do that can be considered absurd when compared to necro.. like doing damage… I dont think its much to think necro should be able to finish or revive in DS.
I’m just saying, the examples you used aren’t on the same grounds as what you are putting forward.
If you said ‘mesmers can stomp in invis, thieves can’t stomp in invis, thief should be able to stomp in invis, then yes, you have a point’. But we are discussing two different things here. Deathshroud has its own set of strengths and weaknesses.
I’m not attempting to compare the things i listed to DS directly, simply the fact that you CAN defend against Death Shround while you CANNOT defend against invulnerability/stability/invis makes me think it is less deserving of a finish / revive restriction.
But to satisfy your need for an identical comparison. Why can warriors finish or revive inside Rampage but Necros are restricted inside Lich Form? They both grant stability for the duration, they’re both transformations and they both replace every ability on their hotbar.
…I’ve been trying to tell you its pointless to ask why can this do that and why can’t this do that when the two things you are comparing are DIFFERENT.
in WvW
Posted by: kKagari.6804
I want to get 10 female human guardians, stand in a circle facing each other, and use empower at the same time.
It would be the dawn of the synchronized air swimming craze in Tyria.
I’ve actually always wanted to paint the Olympic rings into the ground with hallowed ground ability.
Who’s with me?
Preface: Ok, this might not be the most scientific way of testing but this is how I came about the results:
At first I wanted to see if this is a means of testing whether percentages stack multiplicatively or additively. I’m a warrior, and the 3 different test groups would be:
a)No armor, no traits.
b)6 runes of superior mercy, no traits.
c)6 runes of superior mercy, Fast Healer trait.
My preliminary expectations was that each different group would heal a different amount when rezzing dead soldiers in the pre staging area to HotM, with group C healing the largest amount. I would then compare it to group A’s result to see if this was either 80% of the time taken (additive) or 81% of the time taken (multiplicative). I was in for quite a shock when I found out that the difference between groups A to groups B and C was 1hp. Yes, there was an additional tick of 1 hp.
Ok, so now I thought; maybe the ticks are just more frequent, in which case it is measured with time, rather than HP healed, (at this point I would like to remind you of my preface). I took out my stopwatch and timed groups A and groups C.
I consistently got the same result, over 20 timed sets each, of 8.8 seconds. Now, I might not have the fastest fingers in the world, but I’m fairly certain, even with this rudimentary level of testing, there is close to NO DIFFERENCE, in using rez speed buffs.
As a self proclaimed ‘field medic’ in WvW, I am simply SHATTERED. Is this a bug???
When you are invis, you’re still using your health bar. Mist form 75cd. Rampage is an elite. Vengeance is a somewhat very conditional situation.
When you are in Deathshroud, you have another set of hp, you have another set of skills, you can enter this state frequently. It is very different to your examples.
There are A LOT of things other classes get to do that can be considered absurd when compared to necro.. like doing damage… I dont think its much to think necro should be able to finish or revive in DS.
I’m just saying, the examples you used aren’t on the same grounds as what you are putting forward.
If you said ‘mesmers can stomp in invis, thieves can’t stomp in invis, thief should be able to stomp in invis, then yes, you have a point’. But we are discussing two different things here. Deathshroud has its own set of strengths and weaknesses.
Are the rewards going to negatively affect the game? Other than the blueprints and badges what else do you get? Can you directly turn those into gold?
You get vendor trash items like any other chest.
I think gluttony needs to be fixed before any real talks about shaping other LF gain skills. It might turn out to be so good everyone will spare 5 trait points into SR for it.
I’d rather they make putrid explosion detonate the minion with the lowest HP first. I think they should reverse the formula with life blast at the moment, such that it does more damage when you have less LF. That way, it actually opens avenues for low LF play.
When you are invis, you’re still using your health bar. Mist form 75cd. Rampage is an elite. Vengeance is a somewhat very conditional situation.
When you are in Deathshroud, you have another set of hp, you have another set of skills, you can enter this state frequently. It is very different to your examples.
Flesh golem is a great minion for PvE. Better than lich and plague in most situations. Charge does a lot of damage against structures, which is really good if you are a condtion spec
rift’s system is the bomb, and it’s based on lotro’s system, which i’m sure was based on someone else’s system … in short? it makes us happy. yes, i love having dyes. but in the end, having to transmute and so on just to have a “look,” then do it again when i am bored with that look?
please please please give us wardrobe slots! heck, you had costume slots in gw1! i’m NOT pushing that, i’m asking, think that line, and add to it!
purdy please?
It was based on the wardrobe!
Make people roll a die for it. Like a 1 million sided die, and only once a day.
in WvW
Posted by: kKagari.6804
…and use killshot all at the same time.
Who’s with me?
I got the suggestion too. Promptly went to check if anyone tried to hack in my account.
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