Do you really think those people are interested in buying gems and throwing more money at this game? Do you not see that monthly income is down? Because I’m sure Anet sees it.
To clarify a few things. Gem sales are stable, it has been confirmed by NCsoft. You can also check on online retailers that show stats of their product sales to confirm that gem sales are stable for Guild Wars 2. There is no reason not to believe official facts.
This must mean that the amount of players who stopped paying gems because they didn’t like the expansion is countered by the amount of either new players joining (and paying) or older players paying more gems. So for the company it’s not a bad situation.
The monthly revenue of Guild Wars 2 is lower because of the lack of sales, something that was also confirmed by NCsoft financial reports. Players who did not buy the expansion AT ALL, that’s where the problem is. Back before the announcement of Heart of Thorns, the core game (Guild Wars 2 Heroic edition) was selling more than Heart of Thorns does now, and by more I mean a LOT more.
Gem sales are fine and stable. The loss of revenue is because not enough players are converting to the expansion. Since we can all agree that the majority of the population doesn’t read forums or reviews, that’s not the result of an identity loss.
Maybe it’s the result of the core game not being fun enough to force a conversion. If a free 2 play player gets bored by the easy mode of the game, they won’t stay long enough to buy an expansion.
Maybe it’s all those who weren’t satisfied with the expansion that are spreading their negativity on others, hurting the game in the process by sending away potential customers. Players that would’ve bought (and maybe even liked) the game if it weren’t for the negativity.
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Every monster deals too much damage, and takes too little.
Is this about core Tyria in the game called Guild Wars 2? Because in core Tyria (not expansion zones) monsters die in 2-3 hits and deal a negligible amount of damage that you can stand still and completely ignore it. Is your gear exotic (orange)? Did you upgrade your gear when you reached level 80 or you are playing with low level gear? Did you use your traits?
Now we get players with severe memory issues saying that all builds were fine before Raids. Maybe you never touched an instance in the past? Or you only went with your guild and experimented because there is zero difference between pug dungeons and pug Raids.
Hint 1: there was build exclusion long before Raids. Rangers in particular should remember this VERY WELL and any Ranger who ever comes here and says they weren’t excluded from dungeons and fractals is a liar.
Hint 2: Raids have been cleared with multiple types of builds and compositions. There is no one comp working for everyone but there is good variety. Again, moot argument.
snowblind became harder with the rework tho and more skillbased. Sure some hp bars might have gotten smaller but it require bigger awareness and its far less exploitable than what the previous one was.
I disagree.
The first part to lit the brazier was made considerably easier, in the old days the svanir were 1-shotting you, so a very good tactic was to run around and kite them instead of fighting. Also, remember the thief/stealth strat to lit the flame without killing mobs?
The elemental was made really easy because now you cannot get teleported around if you keep at least one fire active. You don’t need all of them, just keep one active and no more teleports, also the aoe attack that causes cripple has a huge cd and no longer hurts as much.
The final boss was made more mechanic heavy because it was really pathetic for a end boss of an instance. You need to kill the effigies and destroy the ice pillars, some more awareness when they spawn, and good focus fire on the adds and there is no problem.
All the reworks lead to easier fractals and the new fractals are also easy. If you want a hard fractal remember Underground at release (stack on the wood)
Everything you said is true. There are less posts about anything but hard core competitive content. That means there are less posts that are personally of value to me, and players like me.
But a lot of the Raid posts are not by the hard core competitive crowd, that means they are of less value to nearly everyone, especially when it’s the same cyclical discussion with the same arguments over and over.
No. It was mentioned directly that the increase in difficulty in the new and reworked fractals was due to them wanting those to serve as stepping stone to raids. It’s a design goal now.
A design goal that doesn’t affect the fractals team at all. What increased difficulty I wonder? All the reworked fractals except for Swamp are easier than their old versions.
Thaumanova is now really easy, it used to be hard (and tedious, good that they changed it)
Snowblind is easier and now actually has some nice mechanics, it used to be just a bunch of mobs with lots of hit points and insane damage.
Underground difficulty has been nerfed, dredge can be blinded, you get the fixated mechanic at the last boss (which helps immensely)
Chaos is really easy compared to the earlier versions of all the above fractals.
Nightmare is also “easy” by means of having clear and interesting mechanics instead of the bosses there being hp sponges.
If anything the new design of fractals teaches players to learn mechanics to overcome the encounters instead of the old boring design that only taught players to dps (and skip)
Where is this imaginary increase in difficulty?
Now, I don’t know anymore, it just feels like all those things are just there in the background, with GW2 now focusing on raids, and the community shifted massively with this change. That old content is still there ofc, but it’s just that, old content, that…it’s there.
Where is this focus on Raids?
They released more Fractals since LS3 started than during any other time in the history of the game (aside from their release), they also heavily tweaked one fractal so it doesn’t even play like the old one, and tweaked other fractals to make them more fun and engaging.
They introduced more maps with LS3 than at any other point in the game’s history.
They released 2 pvp maps and changed another one, we’ve had 2 pvp seasons (one is underway).
They released multiple new legendary weapons, way more than the zero amount of legendary weapons we got between release and heart of thorns.
Overall in the time frame of LS3 they released more permanent content in the game than at any other point in its history, on nearly all game modes (WvW got a redesign of the Desert Borderlands and that’s it)
So I ask again, where is this “focus on Raids”?
Can you tell me why they must use resources of fractal team to make “stepping stones to raids”, effectively denying fractal players from new content that could be made with these resources, and not using the raid team instead?
The fractals team is making new content for fractals that have nothing to do with Raids. The “stepping stone” phrase means experience in instanced content, and the game in general, nothing more. It doesn’t affect the resources of the fractals team the least bit
The whole idea of treating anything as a stepping stone to raids is a big mistake. It’s only demeaning to that other content, and presenting the idea that raids are somehow more special than the rest of the game (there are no “stepping stones” for wvw or spvp after all, and the only stepping stone for fractals are fractals themselves).
The only content that could possibly do something like that is “easy mode” raids.
By calling Fractals a stepping stone for raids it means players that want to Raid should get some experience in instanced content before entering Raids. A fresh level 80 with rare gear has no place in Raids, while they can do wvw, spvp and fractals without any problems, which is why there is no “stepping stone” needed for those game modes. The alternative would’ve been to hard lock Raids, like what happens with AR in Fractals, but that wouldn’t end well.
off tpic but how are gem sales stable if the quarterly updates show less and less income for anet?
Simple answer:
People aren’t buying many copies of HoT.
I know it’s an answer the anti-Raid crowd don’t want to accept but it’s the only answer that we have data to confirm, anything else is a wild fantasy.
And to give one more piece of data:
Guild Wars 2 gem cards are ranked #3821 on Amazon
In late 2014 it was ranked #3,465 so they are very close
Heart of Thorns is ranked #3,185 on Amazon
Guild Wars 2 Heroic Edition was ranked #1,697 in late 2014 (pre Heart of Thorns announcement)
The reason there is a revenue drop is due to lower than expected conversion rate of old players and free players, gem sales are stable
Now the topic was easy mode for Raids and if you check the OP, about making a spectator mode for Raids. It would be nice if there was discussion on that and not Anet’s financials, nor fractals.
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It’s confirmed that revenue before HoT was at least 33% higher, and there was no fresh HoT boxes to push it up. So, how exactly revenue from HoT sales + gem sales while being so significantly weaker than previous revenue without HoT sales, somehow can be on par?
It’s confirmed that the revenue from gem sales is stable, that’s something you can’t deny because it’s official. Which means your comments about “LOTS of players leaving the game due to Raids” as a cause for the revenue drop is unfounded and without any kind of data to back it up.
What isn’t selling is the expansion itself. It’s not selling as much as the base game did before the expansion was announced, Guild Wars 2, an already old game by 2015, was selling more than Heart of Thorns (before the free 2 play announcement). The reason for the revenue drop is the “low conversion” rate of the expansion, this includes both old players and free 2 play players not converting to the expansion.
That’s a clue as to where to focus and it’s not Raids, it’s not even the difficulty of meta events or of the expansion in general and it’s obviously outside the topic of this thread.
I have a bachelor’s degree in accounting. If you had any idea what you were talking about you would realize that Anet’s quarterly reports have absolutely nothing to do with whether or not raids have an easy mode.
So when LOTS of people are disappointed and leaving, it have nothing to do with a major switch in endgame philosophy and direction. Allright.
It is confirmed that gem sales are stable so I’m not sure how you get that many people are leaving (without many others joining)
There are two types of dps meters out there. One shows the dps of everyone attacking the same boss, and usually shows bad results for other players.
The other one only shows the dps of other players using it, you can remove yourself from the active list by simply not using it.
I have no issue with the second version. You can join in and remove yourself at any point, you can see only other people who are also using it AND you get accurate results.
The other version is something I dislike. Not only it doesn’t give accurate results (use both you will see) but at the same time it spies on other players without their consent. And the worst part is that those guys using the faulty version can see my dps but I can’t see theirs for example, unless they use both tools which is unlikely.
A simple policy change that they do NOT approve of these kinds of meters should be enough.
- A story mode would not detract from the difficulty of the experience in regular raid modes.
First, we have a developer response on the topic here: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/A-Plea-for-a-Raid-Story-Mode/first
Which says they are discussing it, nothing final, nothing actually being developed, but there is internal discussion about it. I’m sure when they have more to say they will and no amount of asking will make them discuss it faster, especially in threads that ask for an easy mode and stop there. “I want an easier mode” isn’t very constructive, nor useful for the developers. Actual suggestions on how to do it can expedite the process but a simple “I want” isn’t going to do a thing.
Second, the thread topic is about adding an easy mode for story, which means some way for all players to experience the story of Raids, removing Raid specific rewards.
The main issue with a story mode version is that it can become Arah story mode number 2. Worthless to run outside the story, so you run once and forget it even exists, then it gets hard to get people to run it with. I’m sure this is one of the most important problems with a story version, how do you make it not-useless while at the same time allow players of really low skills to complete? It’s a contradiction
There have been multiple suggestions on how to do this without being a waste of time:
Spectator mode
In some HoT instances, when you join another’s story, you fly around as this blue glowing ball since you’re not technically there according to the story.
So maybe similar can be applied here. You can interact with the npcs of the raid but are immune to damage, cant cast anything, and work outside the 10-person limit.
With this one, it will take the minimal amount of work to do (unless it’s hard to port the pvp spectator mode into pve, I don’t know how their coding works) and requires no reward balance at all. Also, some form of training can be achieved here as you watch how other players play in a live environment. This is probably the easiest method but is it worth it compared to watching a video on youtube?
Raid encounters as Fractals
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/Fractal-versions-of-the-Raids/first
Lots of re-work to balance the encounters for 5 players, however no balancing of rewards needed at all, the reward system is there. Aside from the serious tweaking of mechanics, this version that requires 5 players will have minimal, if any, kind of training value for the real Raid, as the mechanics would need to be toned down, or require far less things to do at once.
And this is my own suggestion:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/A-Plea-for-a-Raid-Story-Mode/first
The idea is simple: remove later phases from fights. It won’t work on all bosses, some can be problematic, but for the majority it can work really well. It requires a bit of tweaking to make it work well, mostly hit points and enrage timers, but there is little need to change the mechanics, and very little (if any) reward balancing either. Also, in this mode the story mode can work as training too
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/A-Plea-for-a-Raid-Story-Mode/first
Also has a dev response.
How many you get a week is not in question, it’s why you don’t need crafting for this vendor but you do for the others. The pvp system used to have a limit to the number of ascended shards you could get in a season but they removed that limit when they added the crafting requirements; if they added a crafting requirement for the raid vendors too they could remove the weekly cap for magnetite shards too.
Remove the weekly cap for shards while at the same reduce how many you need to get items? That won’t end well
Also, you get magnetites from doing normal raids, but rewards from recommended low tiers aren’t exactly encouraging, so you’d be doing them only for pages.
It takes 5 minutes to do T1 fractals and most of them are doable in a duo, or even solo. It’s not exactly time consuming to do those low tiers and for the time required the rewards aren’t so bad.
As for the actual comparison in days:
88 Fractal Research Pages require 29 days (3 pages per day are possible)
1300 Magnetite Shards require 9 weeks (63 days) if you can get 150 shards each week. You can get extra shards from the minis and other ascended items you get as drops. That’s about 40 Shards per miniature or 60 per other items, average 50 Shards. You’d need about 4 of those per run for the Raid version to take the same time as the Fractal version, that always assumes you get 150 shards per week, every week, though.
4 miniatures/ascended drops per run, while getting 150 each week, is how Raids break even with Fractals.
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.
Thing is – right now their revenue is lower than one before HoT, so that means that old gem sales was larger than current ones, because now they have gems+paid expansion, and still showing lower results. That means that their customers who were used to buy gems are leaving, and new ones are not compensating it. They are losing their old playerbase, and that means that they did something very wrong and people are disappointed.
You missed the most important part:
The amount of gem sales and item sales versus active players is ok. “ but it is more the issue of the conversion to the paid expansion pack that we have not seen the level (of sales) we have hoped”
There is no problem with gem sales. The problem is with box sales, either old players aren’t converting or free 2 play players aren’t converting. And the majority of players doesn’t visit forums, nor gaming websites, to get their news, in other words they don’t know about the difficulty of the expansion, or the difficulty of Raids. Something that they don’t know about cannot possibly be a reason for the decline in revenue, this means the problem is elsewhere.
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I think the problem with HoT is the sudden spike in difficulty, especially for “new” players who go to HoT as fresh level 80s. Instead of tweaking the difficulty of HoT though, I’d say that tweaking the rest of the game is more important in the long run.
HoT comes with a level 80 boost which most players buying HoT (+ core) as their intro to the game are going to use right off.
Yes that level 80 boost was made so you could TEST level 80 characters in SW and see how the game plays at the highest level. Or to boost an alt. Not to skip the rest of the game and go directly into Heart of Thorns. They should’ve made it so you need at least one proper level 80 character before the boost is usable. It’s not the game’s fault is someone skips the entire game and goes into the expansion.
The entire game without that specific part was making more money before.
Maybe you should look at the root of the problem then. Hint: it’s not Raids
This is rather old:
“To talk about the Guild Wars 2 performance, it is weaker than what we have expected." According to Ncsoft the reason lies in the conversion from play for free to the paid expansion. This conversion rate is not as high as expected/hoped by NCsoft. The amount of gem sales and item sales versus active players is ok. “ but it is more the issue of the conversion to the paid expansion pack that we have not seen the level (of sales) we have hoped”
To address the issue there are two strategies, that Ncsoft is currently trying to look at:
First strategy is to induce more conversions. They try to tdentify what is hindering the people from converting over. They try to address this with events or maybe ingame systems.
The second strategy is a look at the expansion. What was there at launch and what were the expectations of the users? They identified a gap there. They will review the content updtes and their frequency.
Back from Q4 2015
Something that many who post about the quarter reports fail to understand is that with Heart of Thorns the game became free to play which means it lost the game sales. If we believe the NCSoft report which is rather clear, the gem sales are stable, the difference between the revenue now and what it was before is the loss of box SALES.
It has nothing to do with Raids, or how difficult Heart of Thorns is, or how slow the release of new content is. It’s all about failing to convert free players and old players into paying customers, which means the problem is at the EARLY game.
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This would help a lot with crafting and it shouldn’t be hard to implement either, since you can find what you have on the official API which is used by many websites to show exactly how much you have of everything.
No. Right now everyone can do everything. This perk shoudn’t be such a deal like whole trait line. It should be something that gives personality to your class based on play style you are keen to play.
For example as a ranger
1) you like to be archer and play with the bow
2) you like to play melee
3) you like to support other people
4) etc…One impactful and at the same time negligible bonus based on your personality and what you like.
It can’t be both at the same time, it either has a big impact on a build or it’s not.
And I go back to my example, I chose 1) but then with HoT I will have to make a new character to use 3)
By this logic, amount of content and development time must be proportional to amount of players intended to play this content. And if such numbers are disproportional, then corrections must be made, either by changing amount of said content, or by changing size of the target population.
Why?
So you want something that will make swapping builds more difficult, as if getting new armor, or moving armor between characters, wasn’t enough.
As an example, suppose you had a Ranger before Heart of Thorns and you chose to be some kind of marksman with extra bonuses to your damage (or other abilities) with bows.
Now with the expansion we got the Druid which gives a completely different style of play (healing). In your “system” I’d need to go make a new Ranger, select the more support based abilities and make them a Druid. While with the current system I just swap traits and specializations.
Why complicate things like this? There is already enough trouble with a certain racial skill which makes a certain build much more powerful. It IS a problem and you want to add more of that same problem to the game.
GW2’s lack of any kind of level and/or gear progression ensures that raid content won’t become more accessible over time without another mechanism to do so (e.g., easy modes).
I guess that’s why when we started fighting Vale Guardian we did it with 10 players but now it has been done with as low as 4…
There is no level or gear progression but there is clear player skill progression, the increase and development of raider skill level even took the developers by surprise, they didn’t expect it to happen.
I see what you are saying, but what I mean is this: participation in raiding across MMOs is usually down below five percent of players, full stop. It’s not “some people don’t do this, some of the time”, it’s more like “95 percent of people”.
Got some statistics to prove that 5%?
Do you have statistics on how many players are playing PVP? T4 Fractals? Any Fractal tier? Dungeons? Challenge mote for story achievements?
Let’s remove everything from the game because only a minority (compared to the whole) plays it and keep only Queensdale-difficulty open world that 100% of the players can play.
I thought games were supposed to give content for multiple types of players and not only lazy people.
Do you perhaps remember the times when you could get 25 AP per day from dailies, in addition to monthlies, for doing pretty much the same things you do now, but not limited to specific zone?
That period you are talking about lasted until February 2013, so about 6 months since the game was released, then they changed that system multiple times since then.
With the February 2013 update you had to do more complex things, limited to specific zones just like now, only got 9 AP total per day, it included running fractals and doing wvw achievements as well. And since then it’s been going up in effort and time required to finish the daily.
So you are talking about those awesome days of easy AP from dailies which lasted the first 6 months of the game’s life. Only those who were playing back then have any kind of advantage in terms of AP compared to newer players and it only lasted 6 months.
The group was advertised as in need of condi ranger.
A condi ranger doesn’t use celestial trinkets, it’s a rather specific build, with set gear, traits and weapons.
No, the cap actually favours the veterans, as they no longer need to work hard in order to stay ahead.
…it takes less than 10 minutes to finish the daily now. While it took considerably more time to finish them (and get 10 AP) with any of the old systems. You can’t call spending 10 minutes to earn 10 AP “hard work”
but also because it was much easier to earn them then
To get 10 AP with the previous system to the one we have now it took considerably longer than now.
Current market prices for 20 Grandmaster Marks are, according to the wiki:
2d) 378g 26s 40c for 20 armoursmith marks
2e) 416g 68s 00c for 20 leatherworker marks
2f) 421g 92s 00c for 20 tailor marks
Just to remind you that to get a full set of Ascended armor using the “old” version took 44 days minimum, now it’s 29 days minimum. It also required 354 liquid gold (!!!) plus 117 Integrated Fractal Matrices, that’s another 340 gold extra for a total of 694 gold.
You can say all you want about not liking the new system, however, the truth is that the new system is by far cheaper than the previous one. Even if you buy everything from the TP to level to 500, the difference is huge. The “new” price isn’t a problem at all
Also there is a total of 191 Achievement Points that are no longer available AND cannot be added even if LS1 is re-included in the game. The PVP achievements shouldn’t be re-introduced, they were an extra incentive to play during their respective seasons.
So that leaves us with Miniature Collection (120 AP), Hint Completion (10 AP), Skillful (25 AP), Garnet Sanctum (10 AP), Troll’s End (10 AP) for a total of 175 AP.
If I recall, new players start with some amount of AP and not 0, a few of the above are “included” in fresh accounts, but the others need to be made available again. It’s the first (small) step
So there is a possibility but it is unlikely especially with Living World Season 1 content.
Unless they bring back LS1 in the future. It might happen, who knows.
pvp and fractal vendor require you to craft these 500lv craft tokens. That made it way more expensive now.
So why raid vendor dont requite that ?
Its not because its time-gated, as getting fractal pages is also time-gated for example.
Isnt it unfair?
First of all, getting ascended from fractals was made considerably cheaper with the update, it is about 350g-390g (give or take based on weight) while it was above 560g before the patch. Even if you include the cost of leveling your craft to 500 by buying absolutely everything, the new system is way cheaper.
Second, the pvp vendor was changed to be the same cost as the new Fractal vendor. You could get ascended from pvp by paying ~20g which was completely unfair to other methods. Now pvp and fractals have the same cost, fractals is considerably cheaper and pvp is way higher to match the new fractal price.
Third, Raid ascended is more time gated than the fractal vendor. You can get a full set of Ascended from fractals in 29 days but you will need approximately 56-63 days (based on the day of the week you Raid) to get a full set from Raids. These assume that you do all 3 daily fractals (which is really easy and quick) and getting 150 shards per week (which is both slower and much harder)
Fourth, let’s assume that they change the Raid vendor to include crafting, which might happen btw don’t rule it out that it won’t happen in the future. This would mean the cost in shards will drop considerably, then we get the problem of massive hoarding of magnetite shards, they’d need to either limit their supply, or add extra ways of spending that currency in other ways. Right now it’s supposed to be “balanced” with the current supply and demand, reducing the amount you need to buy your gear would have an effect on the currency you might not be able to see.
Fifth, what about unique raid skins? The Raid vendor sells unique skins for Shards and as other unique vendor rewards in the game, they do not need any kind of crafting to get. They are also considerably more expensive, a chest of daggers is 250 magnetite shards and 15g while an Assaulter’s Sparking Dagger costs 600 magnetite shards and 20g. Not to mention the “extra” requirement of killing the appropriate boss before being able to buy these.
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Some customers (however few) leave – Even fewer joins
The thing is, players who paid for HoT, and then leave shortly afterwards, already gave their money to Anet, on the other hand players who start with the free version and then quit never paid anything. As much as you are saying some players are leaving because HoT is hard, I’m wondering how many stop playing GW2 before even reaching higher levels because they find the game really boring.
I think the problem with HoT is the sudden spike in difficulty, especially for “new” players who go to HoT as fresh level 80s. Instead of tweaking the difficulty of HoT though, I’d say that tweaking the rest of the game is more important in the long run. It will keep new players interested with the game so they don’t get bored and leave and at the same time provide a stepping stone for the harder content.
It’s highly unlikely that they will revisit old content any time in the future, they prefer adding new content, which is understandable, but I think the pre-HoT content needs some tweaks and a balance pass.
Dungeons were created by an old team using very old scripting tools. Remember when Aetherpath was added they had to remove one of TA’s paths? That’s because there was a technical limitation that didn’t allow more than 3 paths per dungeon.
Fractals and Raids were created using newer tools that make adding and tweaking them much easier. To “port” dungeons to the new system would be a great amount of work for minimal gain. Most encounter scripts would need to be re-written, basically creating dungeons from scratch.
I have a feeling that dungeons were created really early in the development of Guild Wars 2, using the oldest tools available to the developers.
fixing forum bugs
You know the best thing for Anet to get more money is to improve the conversion rate of f2p players. I remember it was mentioned on a NCSoft report that the conversion is slow. A better way to convert free players into paying customers is the way to go. But the Core game needs some upgrades for that to work, as the new player experience is really boring and doesn’t “grip” players as it should.
400 gems every 5k AP is a nice reward
Agreed. Of these 3 goals, implementing the first one in the long term is likely a waste of resources.
Yes the goal of “accessing the story” is probably the least useful one in the long term because it leads to the Arah story mode ‘problem’. The only way for a true “story only” mode to work correctly AND stay relevant in the future, is to make it a solo experience. But “Raids” can’t be a solo experience, it won’t be a tweak or a re-balance, but completely new mechanics.
Yet it’s the only goal that we have some developer comment about:
We’re investigating different methods to make the story more accessible.
We already have a developer confirmation that they want Raids to be the hardest content, and I can’t recall them saying at any time that they want to give the Raid rewards through other means. So this leaves us with the more accessible story as the most probable first goal.
why did we have champ trains running around and killing bosses in every zone?
Champ trains were there for people without skill and ability to get rewards by pressing 1 on their keyboard, there was no reason to form a champ train in order to kill the champions, they were perfectly doable with 2 or 3 people, and some even solo.
also on the part of removing world eater that goes against the whole point of the fight that skill makes the fight a dps check if someone goes to easy mode and completes it and the decides he want tomexperience the normal mode he will be treated with a metric kittentone of kitten from ppl because he wont knownhow to dps or what to do in that phase.
It’s when posters have conflicting opinions on what to use an easier version for, that things get complicated. Some want it to experience the story, others to train for the higher difficulty and others to access the rewards without ever trying the higher difficulty.
I think it’s safe to say that a “story mode” for Raids in a way that removes the most important mechanics won’t be used in any kind of training and that’s why it shouldn’t have any kind of reward like achievement kill awards or legendary insights because those can cause confusion on how someone got them.
If we remove training and those specific raid rewards, a story version to experience the story and the lore of the Raid would be both easy to add and provide access to the story to those who don’t want to Raid. And I call it “easy to add” because most Raid bosses already have an easy version, for example, Vale Guardian from 100% to 66% is the easy version. The question is if something like this is worth adding
This has been mentioned quite alot but we never have got an actual answer of this.
Will ANet ever consider and add an Easy mode to Raids for us non-raiders?
We DID get an official answer, take a look:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/A-Plea-for-a-Raid-Story-Mode/first#post6416831
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I wonder if the Gems from AP (and old pvp tournaments) are included in the currency exchange or not
You can also get gems from Achievement Points, it’s 400 gems every 5k AP, that’s 1$ per 1k AP.
Also: https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/2xtjc7/psa_how_gems_work/cp3gd2a/
or do you really want to tell another customer, what they should like?
No, but this is far more complex than liking the taste of cheese.
You should really check this thread: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/How-to-Give-Good-Feedback-1/first#post6372017 and next time try to give constructive feedback. “I don’t like it” is not constructive at all, in fact it’s useless and doesn’t help anyone. If you dislike the expansion say why and be as detailed as possible, that’s the ONLY way the developers can actually make changes. “I don’t like it” isn’t enough information for the developers to work on, nor something that can start and promote a valuable discussion.
i stand corrected, maybe it was because there was no 80 zones before that?
No there was level 80 content at release. Cursed Shore is an entire zone only for level 80s, other zones have parts for level 80 characters. There are dungeon paths for level 80 players too.
we just wanted more like queensdale
I wonder who are these “we” you are talking about here. Queensdale, the zone that has mobs for fresh characters without unlocked their full potential… You can always just stay there and enjoy your time afk killing the mobs while everyone else is having fun in more exciting parts of the game.
2. nerf it
They didn’t nerf the difficulty of Heart of Thorns mobs at any point in time. They nerfed how the meta events work, making them require no participation before the final events started. The actual difficulty of the encounters is the same as at release.
That’s why this whole discussion on difficulty is pointless if you don’t provide context on what exactly you find difficult
Also, the level cap was 80 at release and was never raised, not even once.
I don’t think it’s fair to say that a game can’t evolve to the point where old builds won’t work as well. I think it is fair for new zones to present new challenges, even as they present new opportunities.
Exactly. Otherwise the game will get stale and boring. Then there are two types of players, those who will change their playstyle and/or build and adapt to the new challenge and those who won’t and complain that it is difficult. Change the player, not the content.
It would also help immensely if anyone who is having trouble with the expansion actually took the time to say with what. If you are having trouble in a specific area or against specific mobs, there are many ways someone can help out. A vague “the expansion is too hard” offers no basis for a discussion at all, other than the inevitable response of “no it’s not”.
Yeah, there are no skins on the armor, but especially now that all other methods of getting ascended gear require crafting the costs are especially reasonable. 400 shards + 15g is great for a chest piece, IMO. The only things I never buy from the Magnetite Shard vendor are non-skin 2H weapons. Those are a little overpriced at 500 shards + 30g.
A Ghostly infusion goes for 250 gold on the TP. You can buy one for 1000 shards and 20 gold, that leads us to a “value” of 23 silver per Shard. A full set of Ascended armor from Glenna costs:
1300 Magnetite Shards and 47g 50s, 1300 Magnetite Shards have a value of 299 gold. So basically you get a full Ascended armor set with the equivalent of 346 gold and 50 silver.
For the Fractal vendor, you need 20 Marks, 14 gold, 3000 fractal relics and 88 fractal research pages.
Light armor set: 18g 39s per mark, 367g 80s, for a total of 381g 80s
Medium armor set: 17g 73s per mark, 354g 60s, for a total of 368g 60s
Heavy armor set: 17g 13s per mark, 342g 60s, for a total of 356g 60s
88 Fractal Research Pages require 29 days (3 pages per day are possible)
1300 Magnetite Shards require 9 weeks (63 days) if you can get 150 shards each week. You can get extra shards from the minis and other ascended items you get as drops. That’s about 40 Shards per miniature or 60 per other items, average 50 Shards. You’d need about 4 of those per run for the Raid version to take the same time as the Fractal version, that always assumes you get 150 shards per week, every week, though.
+1 Agony Infusions cost 2silver on the TP, you need 25 Fractal Relic to buy one of those. That’s an extra 2g 40silver cost for the Fractal Vendor ascended set.
(edited by maddoctor.2738)
I think in the future aquiring legendary armor from diff modes would be a really cool idea and great insentive to do more of the content the game has. Imho fractals could benefit greatly from having in the future their own fractal themed legendary armor. Now i understand this would take time to materialise but again theres no real issue as fractals are easily accesible end game and ppl play it for the good rewards regardless. Adding a long term prestigious reward like that would be amazing. As for the li problems this could be easily be bipassed by having the items for it be farmable through challenge motes only like the existing ones (100 cm) so ppl are not gated from doimg their normal t4 clears. We saw this with the backpiece as well since ppl didnt ask for anything like that when pugging mai trin or w/e back when it was first released.
Adding legendary armor to other types of content would be really nice indeed, in a very similar way when the first Ascended items were added to the game (rings) they were exclusives to Fractals and now they are spread around a lot. I wonder what they have in store for Fractals in the future.
We’re almost at a year and a half since the release of Spirit Vale and still no legendary armor, if they tried to make a separate set for fractals and pvp it would take 6 years.
First, a new Legendary Armor skin for any other game mode won’t start development until after the raid armor is ready. And if they go that route and select, let’s say Fractals, the pvp legendary armor will be developed after the Fractal version is complete. It only makes sense to do them in order so one does not hinder progress on the other.
Second, how long it will take is irrelevant. Once they decide to make new legendary armor skins, they might assign more resources to it.