Has Anet ever released actual numbers of their game? Even during GW1? I don’t think they care about releasing data, they either do not want any press from it (good or bad) or believe the data somehow compromises their evil plans of making we stick to the game FOREVEEEEER.
I believe it would hurt to take away entire segments like the vapor wall parts: in essence they are the little tidbits that make Fractals stand out from Raids and not so linear as to have every single fractal be a boss fractal.
What does work though is changing the segments so that they make more sense: like mentioned above, we should either be made to actually protect the drill (it might overheat everytime a mob hits it and we have to keep it from being hit so it moves faster, and mobs keep spawning inside the tunnel behind us, in addition to the ones during every boulder part), or have no drill at all but a more engaging kind of obstacle such as enemies/stuff we have to dodge. The vapor wall can stay there for the delay it gives: it is already a very small delay and would take some work to change the map layout. That or have it be an obstacle we have to destroy before it drags us in or something.
The boss on the other hand is definitely a snoozefest. It should either be made an actual combat where the Core has much more health but stays available to hit all the time throwing mechanics at us (along with more mobs spawning at all times, maybe they are also resistant to direct damage and we have to CC them into the Core mechanics), or simply a hilarious situation where the Core insta-fails and the Boss comes at us himself with much more elaborate mechanics and a higher health, aka Bloomhunger the Legendary Dredge.
I skimped through the thread and saw no mention of the following; if you guys played the raid or watched WP’s video, you should know the Mursaat’s Bastion was actually managed by the Eye of Janthir itself. It even actively tries to send you to the Mists during the Deimos battle. This alone implies it has some kind of intelligence, or at least a specific purpose which it follows pragmatically and independently of its masters (or should it be “its partners”?).
With this in mind, we could question whether or not Saul even first stumbled upon the “Mursaat city” by accident; maybe the Eye guided him there, or for some reason chose him to carry whatever plan the Mursaat (or perhaps the Eye itself) had at the time. We also see three (apparently living) prisoners during the third boss: Samarog, an ancient Jotun from before their fall, and a human. Out-of-combat fights during the raid also imply the Bastion held Forgotten and other races of Tyria. And those were, at least when we got there, all under the scrutiny of the Eye of Janthir.
So perhaps Saul was spared not by the Mursaat’s own machinations but maybe the Eye had a hand (heh) on it, and for some reason decided to maintain Saul chained to Deimos for all this time. Since Anet has set it to have raids as a third source of storyline (along with LW/Journal and Fractals), I really wish they would touch on the subject of the Eye of Janthir again and finally explain its nature. Specially now that they have raised even more questions about it, which is Anet being Anet as usual.
This is also how I started to raid. I’m also mute which makes starting up and/or leading a raid myself an interesting task to say the least; Nonetheless, it is just a matter of giving the first step just like the OP’s case.
I also urge everyone reading this, that became skeptical of raids because of the word “raid” in itself (which is a loaded term to begin with – this game has nothing like the WoW raids), or became skeptical of raids because they tried pugging VG during release, to try grouping up (even with no voice comm!) to give a shot at Bastion of the Penitent.
Vale Guardian was in my opinion a really bad choice of first encounter for a game mode so loaded with skepticism to begin with. The first boss in W4, on the other hand, is just forgiving enough that you can pop up a “for fun” squad on LFG and still have a concrete shot at acquiring your first LI. If you can pug T4 fractals, even if with some effort, this particular raid might be the perfect introduction for you.
I’m gonna have to agree with both the OP (though I think this is good) and WoodenPotatoes (biggest lore buff on GW since ever) on his last video about the Bastion: Raids are the single best storytelling of the game right now.
They have completely wrecked competition among all playmodes. Fractals are barely tangential Lore and apart from Arkk, we’ve already all grown cold and bored of whatever kind of lore is there behind Swamp, Cliffside, etc. The Living World is getting better and better, but it also feels like they are holding back from concluding anything, and it all feels like some annoying filler before the next episode of a series. Last LW episode was amazing because it had actual closure, and it was extensive enough to make us feel like progressing through it, but it is still not that satisfactory.
The Bastion of the Penitent, on the other hand, completely killed it lorewise. There is even proper blending of story elements with the bosses, and the story actually plays out as the mechanics change during fight. This strictly didn’t happen during the previous wings: you would go into an arena, kill some kitten, and then something else would be triggered to progress the story. This time around things happen as the fight goes on, specially the last fight where you have key elements of lore revealed to you during battle.
Because I can raid myself, I say all of this within a positive view: it is awesome that this content is getting the proper treatment it deserves. I wouldn’t want the founder of the White Mantle to be done with by a silly meta event of sorts, neither by killing some veteran mobs. But I can also identify that it must leave a sour taste on others if the one game mode they [either can’t or] do not want to be associated with, is actually pulling out the most immersion with the lore. It doesn’t matter if the lore presented here is only relevant to the general GW background or if it ties into the main Elder Dragon storyline. What matters is that in raids, it is done the best way possible. Unlike literature, a game is not be experienced second-hand, and Raids definitely nail the RPG part of the GW2 MMORPG.
I also cannot stress this enough, that the new raid is not like the others: it is much more doable to simply pop up an “all welcome, just be patient and bring food” sort of squad in LFG and start learning the first boss face to face. It is in many ways much more forgiving and gives a much higher sense of progression than VG does (VG was, in my opinion, the worst offender when it comes to shunning people way from raids as soon as release).
The deal is that people consider it funnier and more enjoyable if they are doing something optimized. It makes them feel better in general that they are doing something well. This might sound weird at first but, are we not encouraged to do our best at whatever we do?.
That said, this is not a real pressure outside of Fractals/Raids. Marauder, Valkyrie and the like works wonders for survivability as well as damage. You can also wear Celestial to be an all-rounder (change build as you wish without ever worrying about equipment!) and do well at most stuff.
Just remember though, toughness in particular needs a rework. They have severly nerfed it because of a previous PvP bunker meta, and it is basically a junk stat. You need vitality and proper use of protection+vigor much more than you need toughness, as enemies will simply pierce through you in groups. So it might actually be hindering yourself rather than protecting yourself, if you wear toughness equips.
These “small misconducts” will happen because Anet neither supports nor care if you’re just collecting log data. But without Anet’s direct support with their toolkit, we can’t really have a detailed log like WoW’s (e.g in a situation where you lose DPS, the logs would say if it was healing, being idle or taking heavy damage yourself and stopping to dodge or run around mindlessly).
A simple DPS meter says almost nothing, just like being good on the DPS golem is not enough for any boss if you can’t put up the DPS while mechanics are hitting you. So we’re going to see a whole new level of kittens on some cases. Whereas I’m sure there are very good squads around that are going to use it to improve themselves rather than disprove of others, so not all is lost. Yet without Anet’s support I don’t think this tool can ever be actually great.
The new raid doesn’t appear to be so hard, neither did the previous ones take that much training (save for the couple high inquisitors Matt and Xera).
However, and this should be regardless of the veterans’ personal experiences, there is something terribly wrong if the raid released this week and LFG/LFM is not stock full like festival LFG’s or at least T1/2/3/4 when Nightmare was released. This tells us something and it is not that “raids are not for everyone” but rather that “they are almost to no one”.
I strongly disagree that difficulty or LI or build requirements present any kind of entry barrier to players; they can simply pop up their LFM’s and go for it, right? Well if that is the case we would be seeing a lot more “new to raids all welcome” groups than there actually are. Most groups at reset are the static ones, at most filling with experienced players. New players do not raid during reset, where the population is supposed the highest, why would that be? Since I started to fractal I always do it soon as dailies reset as it coincides with my leisure hours. There is no clear separation between “experienced play today then we’ll have training across the week” like there are with raids.
But if it isn’t player fault (they are, after all, playing the optimized comps they have trained so hard to master, with their friends that have also trained, they shouldn’t be carrying others), what is going on then? I can log on during the morning and there are still come T4 fractal groups and even T1 groups looking to start doing their climb. Yet you absolutely need a static group for raiding or rely on training during the week even if you already know what to do pretty well. If the problem is that 10 people is too much to gather, then why have 10-man hardcore content at all? The game is not raid centered but it is not fractal centered either, so why fractals have a good rotation of population and new faces coming and going, while raids are basically the same, rather small group of folks (something I have also experienced during PvP)?
This is a non issue to whoever has a static group right now. We’re all going to get our legendary armors and enjoy the newest challenge motes. But as more and more raids come up and population spreads thin, will these raids bring new people in? My take is, probably not, if Anet doesn’t address the new-players-cant-be- kitten d-to-train-it problem, and before you think inside your head that “Well this is not Anet’s problem”, consider that it doesn’t matter if the problem originates from the playerbase and not from them. If they don’t do anything about it, it’s going to bite them anyway (just like Fractals took so much flak before they started caring for it).
So you correctly pinpointed the Trading Post as the ultimate, idealized rent-seeking institution and still believe that playing it brings fortune to others? Kitten economists! I bet you play a smug Asura that thinks shareholder value being prioritized is the best for everyone.
Back in GW1 one of the most expensive stuff you could get was the Armbrace of Truth, because it took at least 15 perfect runs of one of the hardest elite content (Domain of Anguish). A typical DoA run with more or less competent people could take anywhere from an hour to three. For that reason, getting one (and hence the skins associated to them) was really hard, and they were also used as a currency because we had a low gold limit. Nevertheless, apart from a duping accident, the player price for the Armbrace was more or less fixed for the entirety of the game, it didn’t change overnight or flip around harshly due to someone playing the market, precisely because there was no centralized “market”, it was all peer to peer, local transactions, the most you could do was announce it on the town chat.
Now, I think the Trading Post is very useful for what is, and it is certainly better than announcing WTS XXXXX all day long on LA or LFG, but don’t pretend that it would eventually regulate itself (I’m looking at you John Smith), or that you are getting rich by spreading value to others. You’re right, our 10 gold would be worth more if there was less gold to go around, but then Legendary weapons would be 100 gold and average players would have no means of getting that, as much as they have no means of getting 1000 right now.
What matters for the game is that people feel rewarded, regardless of the value of their gold relative to having no gold. Only the value of it relative to other people’s gold matter, because having someone so much better off than you is what brings unhappiness ( there are some studies about that going around concerning IRL wealth, and I believe it applies to everything else to a lesser extent). So, it doesn’t matter if dailies give 1 lion chest’s key to everyone or 2 gold to everyone, what matters is that there isn’t anyone next to us with materials and skins and gold 1000x more than anyone else around. Which is exactly the 1%.
I don’t know about you, but at least during my active hours, the only thing up on LFG are raids selling and/or guild recruitment to begin with.
Actually, to be fair, the LFM tab is stock full of those. Whereas the LFG is full of people on 1/10 squads demanding [apparently near full parties of] other players to invite them. It’s hard to get a group started because people are looking to fill guild slots rather than pure pugging, and it’s hard to join anyone else for the same reason. So I think the recruitments are not “polluting” the LFG as it is right now, because there is nothing to pollute.
Anet is, very unfortunately, making a point of absolutely blotting underwater content, up to the bare minimum. Think of LS3 for example, even Ember Bay which is a freaking Island chain barely has any underwater stuff.
The Maguuma Jungle, which is ehrm, a kitten jungle (has any developer ever visited the Amazon? The main transportation there is by boat fyi), also barely has any drop of water, most of it being the Lore-jellyfish tunnel under Tangled Depths.
With that in mind, no it is not likely at all that we ever get any mention of underwater raiding. It was already unpopular back on dungeon golden era with Honor of the Waves, and it is even more so now. We’ll be lucky if we even get to see the Deep Sea Dragon.
As a necromancer you enjoy the privilege of being the only Light armor class that can facetank mobs while they hopelessly try to hit you. Whatever stat combination you choose has a suitable build unless you want to Raid/Fractals (then you should probably focus on condition damage), and try not to take toughness at all, as it was severly nerfed due to PvP balance™ purposes. +Pow+Vit+Prec and +Cond+Vit+Prec are very interesting combos for general purpose PvE, as well as Vipers (+Pow+Expertise+Cond+Prec) which is most people’s favorite due to Necros having so many conditions.
Just keep in mind you’re the guy who can go close in when everyone else is backing off, turn on Shroud and awesomely save the team by cleaving enemy damage, and most groups and people in general PvE will love you and send nudes their praise.
You’re right about the semantics but as mentioned above, everything goes down too fast for real DPS to be actually relevant. In lack of a more widespread short term, we adopt that one under the “new meaning” that’s not even what DPS stands for. A strange state of affairs but that’s how language changes over time, eh?
Now, things going down so fast that damage over time is irrelevant are a problem but also a solution: for a long time GW2 has been the go-to game for those without time to spend on MMOs but still wanting to enjoy what this kind of game has to offer. Log-in rewards, dailies and how fast raiding is are prime examples of how this works.
So, since everything is supposed to go by in 2 hours or less (there are even threads around about how you’re doing it wrong if fractals take more than an hour), DPS as an actual measure of damage per second is not as important as the average value of total damage per fix amount of time. Kind of like the difference between actual instantaneous speed (distance per second) and average speed over a certain distance and time interval. With that in mind, DPS can be extrapolated to mean what would actually be average DPS and you can be sure the nukers are champions at that right now (Elem, for example, has the amazing damage you mention and still very low cooldowns to boast, because fights are not supposed to last long and standing still is boring as Mo would probably say).
That’s not to say actual DPS like what condi builds can do is totally irrelevant. It just gets that much outshined by raw damage due to the fast pacing of the game. And this pacing is unlikely to change because it’s a main selling point.
A WvW trebber can easily change the tides on Kylo as long as the team can capitalize on people getting out of their way to get the treb down. Furthermore, the map mechanics are not what allow any “carrying” but rather correctly rotating throughout points.
For example: you’re an Ele playing Foefire and your team just won mid but home is getting zerged by 3 people. So 2 on your team head back home to help the 1 home while the other team member goes far. This results in you being alone against the 2 enemy players. Now if you correctly position yourself and time as best as possible your knockdowns and projectile blocks, as well as judging when to get off point and behind a wall, you can stall for several minutes the progress of the enemy effectively “winning” 2vs1 and giving plenty of time for the team to hold the 2 other points. But should they leave you alone there and go back to zerging far you should be able to judge whether or not it is worth it to try helping the other guy or getting ready to hold mid.
Another example, you’re a Mes defending the home mine on Forest, and a hardy DH full of traps come in to spam you. Instead of trying to sit on point you get just weak enough for him to try going for the kill, then drag him along the mini JP there burning all his cooldowns. Because the path is narrow he either took all your shatters or is out of blocks by the time you’re back on point, so you can probably finish him even if it’s capped.
EDIT: none of what happens in this game is “hard carrying” on the sense we use it on MOBAS, since relative power among players does not increase with successive kills. But as long as you can stand on your own against 2 or more people, you’re already sort of “carrying” a match. So I guess the answer here is, no you shouldn’t nor you can’t win “alone”, but you can certainly be the main factor for it.
(edited by maxwelgm.4315)
This is a very boring conclusion but it leaves it open ended whether or not Jormag actually does something to whatever female Norn seeking power that can also potentially escape the Sons of Svanir. It could be eventually revealed that we actually find the strongest Icebrood to be female Norn who keep very close or around Jormag itself, hidden and protecting their master.
Jormag is already known for actually having willing followers (e.g they are not enslaved in the absolute sense and only “slaves” to their own perceived power coming from Jormag, if I recall), and I doubt it would simply turn down powerful women who killed several Sons of Svanir on their way to him going against all odds. Then again Anet could just go with “not going to dwell into that” and just leave it as there are no female Icebrood, but the plot mechanism is still there, and would be a fine homage to Eye of the North (it should be a victory for Jormag that he could seduce the “kind” that are somewhat “kin” to Jora and defeated his champion Svanir).
If anything we need more maps like Capricorn and Coliseum and Skyhammer, not less. It already gets boring enough with everyone always picking Forest for the 300030434th time, imagine if it only showed 1/3 of every match? Great increase in diversity and people will actually have to learn different mechanics instead of building solely for a single map (which is the glaring complaint here, that your build full of blinking and jumping does not fit skyhammer…well change it).
Win streak bonus exists in most competitive games but not as giving extra points for a victory. The problem here (which is also the problem with SoloQ guy getting 7 points thread), is that the system always pushes you back to your average rating distribution, no matter what.
For example, say you win 4 matches in a row and the system considers your average rating 1879, but right now you’re sitting at about 1900. Because of that, the system is going to try pushing you back to the average, by giving more points if you are going towards it (i.e losing). In countermeasure, if you lost 4 matches in a row, it would be more rewarding to win because that would be taking you back to your global average.
However, consider how many (potentially hundreds of) games it takes to actually move the global average away from your initial 1879 rating. It would take a win streak of dozens on a row before the game pushed you towards a mere 1887 rating instead.
The very, very easy solution to this is, since your gains are based on average MMR of the whole team and enemy team, a win streak would be putting you instantaneously (a local increase or “boost” of your rating) against higher rated players, and your gains would be proportional because you were supposed to lose that match. It could be done even so that players who get win streaks inside a tier wind up together against higher tier players, a “qualification” match so to say, that would probably give 25+ points for a win.
This would cause silver players on a streak to play against gold players and gold players on a streak to play against plat, etc. with the gains calculated according to their original mean disregarding this “boost”, therefore increasing their gains and rewarding the fact that they are actually winning. The way it is right now, you are never meant to climb, no matter if you’re #1 or if you’re bronze. The system is balanced, but as with everything else in life, true balance is boring.
Does viable mean 1vs1 a point forever and stalling 2vs1 for several minutes? Yes. Does it mean being as good a support as elem and delivering victories by outnumbering yourself then letting your team cap other points? Probably not because elem has much more mobility.
If you’re a necro you should poke at range for a while and pay attention to how many traps the DH has. If he clearly has more than 2 traps on utility you can probably 1vs1 by positioning (learn how to get around the points like the waterfall climb on legacy or behind pillars on forest, and induce him), because he’ll have given up on some utility for the traps. But if he’s actually a burn DH/only has test of faith, then you’ll have to be very careful or simply avoid soloing at all, because if he goes invulnerable/blocking during your condi transfers you’re basically dead.
You could also play his game and spam wells but would that even help with anything else? As a rule of thumb do not build solely to kill DHs, think of picking up the other targets first instead; then you can kite then and range offpoint if necro, or recover your skills for a burst with warrior. Don’t worry about losing the point for a sec, you can more than compensate with the 5 points from killing (people usually forget killing does give points and it’s not negligible if you use it to compensate enemy ticks from kiting).
^Do realize that having a slow climb is not a problem in itself; you might have a win rate that averages to 50% but is slightly higher than that and your climb is going to be at a correct rate of less than 1%. The problem arises when you are always matched to the mean no matter how many successive victories you have. In this case, you will always face people that are behind your “instantaneous” rating, therefore diminishing returns on your victories.
What I suggest is that the system is indeed working as intended, but it should actually be tweaked to generate “instantaneous” higher rating matches as you get more and more wins on a single streak, giving a short burst of qualification matches for you to place yourself wherever you belong in a certain sense. It is, I believe, a good choice for a game with relatively short competitive seasons, whereas in games with year long PvP seasons, they give plenty of time for players to compensate the difficulty in causing a deviation of the mean distribution of their rating.
Where are your full sets then? I played straight for 2 days and less than 1k shards. Whereas I could have spent a day doing full clears and get ascended piece from raids, or get drops from t4 fracs. Besides, why so afraid of others joining your exclusive club, it is all acc bound and cannot be exploited for gold.
You do have long time to get stuff if you want to work so much, namely the +9+5 stats infusions.
EDIT: the byzantium chest stops giving shards on first repeat according to reddit. Therefore this is even less of an issue, or is 20 gold for like 20 matches a lot too?
(edited by maxwelgm.4315)
@Evan: should MMR work solely how it should work? What I mean is the following: after winning 5 games on a row(half of what was defined as a placement sample) players are getting less points for wins. That means they are close to their own average and going against players that are close in rating.
This is not what happens with most competitive games however, is it? After winning a streak, players are “given” a trial match against higher rated players, therefore actually increasing gains after winning while minimizing losses. Here we are more or less doomed into our first ratings regardless of skill, because moving from any average requires hundreds of deviation samples. Note “more or less”, I know exceptional people can climb, but what about “gold” folks that started on bronze?
Did anyone past Gold tier 2 notice their rating gains drastically drop from a win? Not sure if that’s supossed to happen (actually I believe it is, since I am supposedly fighting against people slightly less rated), but either way it is very frustrating, I’m getting 15 points and losing 30 by now.
This wouldn’t be a problem if this game had a year long season like League of Legends. In there I can amount to thousands of games playing casually (even though the matches are longer in average than they are here) but here we have like a month to climb through. That’s kind of a stalemate, since the best players are already up there with 20/4 kinds of scores and everyone else is kind of stuck with low rating gains. Just to repeat myself, I do know it should get slower, and I wouldn’t normally care, but I wonder if it shouldn’t be a tad faster (both ups and downs) since the season is so short?
DH is not unbalanced, but you’re right about something: it’s the only reasonably easy answer against the madness of invulnerability/blocks that took place after HoT release.
Toughness and health means nothing, all that matters if if you have enough passive/active instant gratification buttons like distortion and endure pain, and whoever uses it at the right time wins a match. Necromancers for example, while being the highest HP class by far, even having what amounts to 2 health bars, can’t stand up for a second without melting down from all the CCs, while not being able to counter at all. Have you ever tried to play condi war against DHs? you can just walk up to them and auto attack while they hopelessly try to go through your immunities.
They could “fix” trap DH and everyone would simply go to whatever next flavor build is crafted specifically to counter all the invulnerabilities/blocks/dodges being spammed. It’s countering spam with spam, which is certainly not fun but works, and people will go with whatever works.
Burn DH’s are the true danger because of survivability. I play with a full trap DH (whole utility bar) and survivability is near 0. If I don’t play smart I can’t even contest a point, whoever is there can kill me before I’m even there. Not to mention if you spam all traps at once you can see a lot of evades, even if you have full recharges your 8-trap can just get dodged twice if you miss a single CC.
Now if you play a burn DH with the improved signet of courage (you can now even secondary a staff for even more sustain!) it might take 2 players to kill you. This is the true bunker build, do not be mistaken.
This is a pet peeve since it’s only 10 matches but kitten …sucks losing a match and counting it towards your placement with someoe dc-ing :/
I love the idea of having the Ele lose the ability to attune to all elements at once while becoming master of a single one, as long as it was a single elite spec trait line (not 4, what about other classes?) and it was something like you can’t switch attunement during combat. I also totally agree it should be the sword, as it would fit the Warlock-ish overall theme of mastering the elements perfectly.
Since the maps are locked in time, I kinda assumed there is some amount of unbound magic everywhere on Tyria, we just see it on LS3 only because it’s the only areas where enough time has passed after Mordremoth’s demise.
This is a case of the journey being more important than the destination. Back in GW1 Rurik’s body was defiled by the Vizier and you had to fight his reanimated corpse towards the end; This was a very big deal back then. Finding his engagement ring on the very same place he was finished off and recovering it, is a very symbolic journey of cleaning up his legacy, even though mechanically you are just walking around wearing his ring and the ashes of his wife as a trophy!
Core guardian virtues were buffed, the DH ones remain the same, with the added bonus that traps do not daze anymore and apply slow instead.
That said, slow is so deadly on this meta that anyone not running diamond skin or mallyx might as well give up on teamfights, the spam is too much to channel anything.
Now you can all stop worrying about the trap DHs and get some ointment for burn trap DHs !!!!!1!!!
Independent of whatever you are changing, it is great that you’re finally doing it in a split manner. I hope PvE balance can be looked at too so that some stuff can be buffed there while preventing PvP powercreep **cough**necro**cough** . With that said, these particular changes are looking promising; I like how you’re slowly introducing a support role into Guardian (as it should have from start) and tuning up Elem damage.
The ascended armor rewards are doubly interesting to have on PvP. First it will drag PvE people into it. I know it sounds like a disadvantage, but consider that some % of these will get serious about PvP and actually start to invest on it, therefore raising the queue population. Second, a % of people PvPing are going to think “since I have a full set now I might as well try out some of that PvE stuff” therefore raising the fractal/raids population as well. Having exclusive content promotes migration among the playing modes and should not be shunned. As much as you want to live inside a bubble and never leave HoM or never leave LA, Anet knows better that you could (gasp) have fun outside of your comfort zone.
With time I found it’s actually more effective to play a trapper DH with full traps utilities and elite and play around the “mini jumping puzzles” instead of camping on point. Instead of bursting all your traps, just lay down testament of faith then go off into safety up into a rock or cover around a wall. While your enemy is hopelessly wasting the evades and blocks to avoid testament of faith (even reasonably good players expect you to have teleport and will burst precession of blades early and will pre emptively go in with blocks up), you just chill there throwing arrows. Then right before the point is uncapped you just walk in/drag them with F1/jump in with F2 and run precession of blades.
The idea is that they might actually recover from that if they didn’t despair heal by now, but you still have Dragon’s Maw, heal, your own blocks and an extra trap (Fragments is good but I’ve been using the other one for reveal stealth lately), so they’re mostly done for (especially if they were a necro waiting to boon corrupt you since they either didn’t block any arrows or had to waste CPC). Instead of bow you can also experiment with scepter torch traited for Zealot’s Flame. This is obviously a very vulnerable setup and playstyle, but it’s certainly funnier than sitting on point pressing 7 8 9 0.vaporwave !
Rytlock is the silent-type-not-telling-you-what-you-want trope as much as Taimi is the soft-4th-wall-calling-out-absurdities-players-also-notice trope, so he’ll keep hiding whatever he’s hiding until it’s absolutely necessary for the plot. Or even better (or worse huh), he won’t ever say anything and we’ll just find it out by ourselves to what he’ll just shrug and tell us that he “was going to talk about it sooner or later…”
If a DH wants to bring his invulnerabilities/block spams he has to give up on traps (that have quite some recharge for PvP standards) and you’ll have plenty of time to get away for a few secs then go for a kill even before the point is capped.
A DH that actually uses his/her trap mechanic to the full extent will always have singular traps around the point while you’re on it instead of trying to burst you (specially if you’re a mes, who the hell bursts all their traps there?). That means not taking invulnerability and blocking utilities, neither taking a teleport skill, and investing every slot on traps. Which leaves the DH very vulnerable and you can still outsmart your opponent with careful positioning.
Tl;dr you don’t have any problem with traps and a DH with survivability has no capability of damaging through your two dodges.
Disenfranchising rewards from skill progression is the best thing ever, thank you so much for that! I say this not only for myself, but it brings that much more people into this area of the game, if they are sure to get something out of their effort even if they don’t instantly become top tier. Games like LoL have learned this to keep population up a long time ago and I’m glad you’re pulling it off here. I’m sure this season won’t be as empty as before.
Working for a top stats pip at the expense of winning the match will cost you 9 kitten pips. Do you really think people will try to farm it like this? Consider now that winning a match gives 10 pips and how much they have rescaled it so that we can’t get the chest after a mere couple wins.
People always panic at everything Anet says and this one is specially funny. So instead of playing 5vs5 you believe people are going to play 1vs9 and compete against their own team in order to get 10% of what they could get in a single match? Besides, the top stats are even less certain of getting per match than the victory is, since you can’t really keep your own teammates from overtrolling you and sabotaging your attempt.
This might be a thing for like the couple hours after patch is up but people will soon realize the very first thing Evans must have thought was how to make the winning team actually win more rewards, i.e, what you get for losing are scraps, which are very important so you have motivation to keep trying, but are not farmable at all. (Actually it was probably second thing he thought because programmers usually start stuff with “Wow this is going to take a lot of kitten work to code”).
If you did want to try it, Mesmer is great once you put yourself into it. But if that’s your best class, definitely stick to Rev. Don’t try Ele and beware that Engi is harder to play against more experienced players, that are patient enough to wait out your invulnerabilities before burst.
It’s the Tyrian interpretation that the dragons were immortal beings that is erroneous. Besides, the previous dragonrise also had an uprising, but the Mursaat/Jotun/Seers/Forgotten/Dwarves (and maybe even the Krait to some extent), albeit being very strong, arguably moreso than us concerning magic even if they didn’t have magitech, could not properly join up forces to combat the dragons. Maybe if they all agreed to fight or all agreed to defend and hide either choice would have succeeded better.
So we are not personally that strong, but we (as usual) are the metaphorical glue that holds the whole word together against an almighty enemy. Know what would be a real surprise? If we tried to pit the dragon energies against each other and they actually decided to join forces to prevent this, since we’re going to pull a Deus Ex Machina anyway to kill them (come on, we did it the last 2 times, why not 4 more), we might as well have no other choice, having two or more join and become actually world-ending-powerful.
Well collecting rubies is the slowest grind by far if you don’t employ a ton of alts so I think it’s a pretty good tradeoff. Specially with berries that you can get nearly a stack of with 3 or so alts every day. Also for the case of bitterfrost currency, you can buy pretty good food from the heart vendor on the hot springs, it has actually good +stats and magic find to boost.
Guild Wars 1 had the same aspect to its design (even fiercer as you only had to level up to 20) and it worked great and was ahead of its time for this. Horizontal progression is here to stay because people simply don’t have the time to spend on endless powercreep anymore. Just look at the raids we have here, they even forced normalization of completion time through the enrage mechanic, so that a good boss run will take no more than 10 minutes average (even though I hate that), and people already complain how they are dying for 2 hours and they’re wasting time trying to get social and finding a group.
Gear grind is a hugely outdated mechanic, and do not mistake the reason for this with being that people don’t want to make an effort (there are people doing T4 fractals every single day after all in spite of rarely getting any prestige gear out of it, not to mention the silly exotics you get from raiding). The average player has “grown up” in a certain sense (not meant to take young people out of this…we are all on a tighter schedule nowadays) and do not want to spend their time “getting ready for the next thing”, most people just want “the thing” already and be done with it. There might be something wrong with that if you try to apply it to your own life, but it’s certainly not “wrong” inside a MMO environment.
Besides, Anet has already proved from raids and the new fractals that they can lash out a challenge to us without introducing a gear treadmill, and since we’re going to have a good challenge anyways, why not let people feel relatively powerful and fabulous while doing it? When you beat a low level raid in WoW you feel like there’s still so much more to go, but when you beat the Vale Guardian, that’s it, you’re the best kitten around because the same stuff you used can also beat Xera, so it’s all a mindset thing.
It is insane and it is correct. The 9 status infusions are supposed to be the (very) long term goals and gold sink for your fractal adventures. Note that it was already expensive to get the (5 stat +7 AR) ones, but they were not very popular due to low AR for their price.
Alas, no one here is actually asking for Necro to do as much damage as elems. What I have said is very specific: we have a huge health pool and it is worthless because it does not allow you to survive better than others. Let me repeat that, high HP is useless in guild wars 2. As elementalists you have tons of knockbacks, traits like gale song, overloads with stun breaks, and tons of heals if you want survivability. There is no tradeoff for your damage too, as long as your dodge button works and your framerate is alright, you can block/become invulnerable/dodge through anything. People that say necro has higher survivability obviously underestimate the vigor boon.
The triumphant factor for Necro in terms of survivability is the shroud, and let me repeat how the health itself makes no difference in how a Necro or Elem can survive. Now, the shroud locks us away from utility skills and gives us 4 measly skills that are only there so that we don’t stand still while tanking stuff. It also removes most things like bundles and such (unlike elem overloads) and so are more or less not usable with creativity like Mes portals and blinks. Therefore our survival relies on, generally, a huge drop in damage, unless you trait for Soul Reaping (but you wanted to be a greatsword necro and not a dhuumfire auto attacker, didn’t you?).
So, instead of either dropping Necro’s health, dropping elem damage or directly increasing Necro’s damage with no tradeoff, we could simply reshape some skills to cost health while greatly increasing damage or giving support, just like the Shroud skills already costs life force. It would make things interesting in that two different playstyles (glass cannon and blood-spending-thingie) would bring the same overall effect to the table and require the same attention from the rest of the group (e.g druids will have just as much work as before).
Also since this topic is specifically about the place of Power Necro inside raids, this is the primary focus for our balance suggestions here. But this one would also be fine for the rest of PvE (specially fractals where Necros would then lose their “edge” by having to actually have reason to spend their life instead of sitting behind lines and screaming RISE RISE RISE).
Forming a 10-man squad is a problem (that even Anet admits it as a problem) and it’s not going to be fixed anytime soon. I do make my own squads pretty often at all time frames and it does not fill within minutes at all. You see, newbies don’t tend to join pug training themselves (go figure), or leave as soon as they realize it’s going to be an arduous experience, so every 2 or so wipes you have a 15-30 min average interval to get the next players to fill up your group again.
Exp runs while easier to get kills with, also take a lot of time to fill when you start from 1 squad member, and there’s also the amazing phenomenom of having 6 to 7 people on the LFG tab all trying to find a squad for the same boss I’m announcing for half an hour, and they simply refuse to join on me for raid because it’s not a LF1M or LF2M full group already. I call this the “Chak Gerent” effect because it’s the same with TD meta where people in a full or nearly full secundary map are all trying to get into a primary map instead of doing the meta there themselves.
In the end, it all boils down to the low amount of people actually raiding. Of course, no statistics are available directly to us but it’s clearly harder to find a group than it is for fractals, and not only because of the 10-player requirement I believe. Consider for example that players with 40+LI’s only become a majority among those with 4000+ hours of playing the game, according to gw2economy (which is not the most reliable tool as well, but players with the most playtime do often put their API’s there…). Furthermore, you can look at the raiding tournament hosted by players themselves this weekend: https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/5f7uiv/all_elitists_are_toxic/ . It didn’t have much participation at all (one of the starting brackets didn’t even fill if I recall, it was something like 7 guilds on a 10-guild bracket), unlike PvP where (in spite of being quite unpopular) the bracket was quite large. If these brackets amount to any sample of the actual population actively playing these modes raids are actually an elite thing (in the sense that a low % partake in it).
In sum, and in spite of what one’s guild activity/static groups make it look like, there are not enough people raiding, which is not unhealthy at all for the game itself, but very unhealthy to the raiding environment, as everyone is locked into the “social” aspect of finding a fixed group instead of a plug&play challenging activity like PvP or WvW are. That is detrimental to new players (social barriers being harder than ability barriers is a huge thing on group behavior research), and leads experienced players down the road of stagnation.
All that said, I enjoy running with the 2 raiding guilds I’m part of, both training and exp runs are both fun and profitable, but I do miss the aspect of simply log on and go get a raid done that some other games have. Here it is log on, ask about on the guild, then go sit on your kitten for up to a whole hour until a group of people join your LFG, who will leave after 3 wipes.
The OP has probably not read the other topics here because this post was originally on the general forums and moved here soon after. I don’t believe they should move everything back here, it just fuels the echo chamber we already have. Specially the topics regarding balance and rewards, I think they are too general to wound up here for the usual people to keep putting in the same usual posts.
Training groups are not easy to fill from PuGs at all if you’re starting from scratch, so you’re better off trying to find a guild (also hard for some reason even though I get asked about raids a lot during T4 fractals).
I guess people in GW2 simply don’t use the LFG system correctly: sometimes I see 10 different people looking for the same boss at LFG tab, while a single one is looking for 7 more on the LFM chat, and they never join or find each other! It’s really skewed towards static guild groups right now, and I don’t believe it’s the difficulty, but rather the population numbers, causing this.
The argument that necro has more HP is not so good, because the flat damage rates make it so we die with 2 hits instead of a single one, not much improvement if you ask me. Specially because other classes employ many active defenses (the amount of vigor, dodges and extra blocks/invulns on other classes compared to necro is amazing).
So, while we do have the highest HP pool by playing necro (both flat HP and the Shroud bar) it does nothing to actually help us achieve survivability, and it’s only so good during fractals because we can mitigate small damage that would otherwise build over time (something other classes can do with blocks and vigor).
Furthermore, we aren’t even the masters of condition play, because our signets and traits can easily be replaced by support druid and tempest. What amount of conditions we can actually transfer doesn’t add much to our personal damage at all.
A big HP pool should not translate into small damage; hell, there are so many games where the Necromancer/Blood Mage/Dark Arts caster has high HP because his spells actually cost health to use, hence being a fine tradeoff, and it would fit GW2 really well. What we have now is a travesty of a Necro: we’re not doing damage, we’re not being masters of cursing everyone, and we’re not even actually putting our true life force (our HP) to use.
For open world content I’d wager elementalist. The ideal, however, would be if you could afford at least 2 sets of armor (I don’t see why not, you can pretty easily build 2 full exotic sets, and even ascended might take some time but you’ll be enjoying content on your exotics while doing it). Thing is, you might want to go full blown glass cannon at times for bosses and such, and other times when you’re just going around (specially with HoT content), you want to be a bit tankier so you’d need a support set to properly do it. Even then, if you want to stick to a single set of armor, I suggest valkyrie or commander’s since you specified open world content, zerker is the most damage but you do take a beating easily. You also have a lot of diversity on your playstyle by switching weapons, not to mention the attunements midfights.
But all that is assuming you meant diversity of playstyles and not only diversity of content. If what you actually want is to wear a single piece of armor and wreck havoc on anything without ever looking back to your inventory or build panel, I’d go with the Necromancer. It is certainly behind most classes in damage but it’s far beyond anything else in survivability. You can simply drag a mob train to yourself and watch them drop as they helplessly try to kill your high HP kitten .
Also, if you want a true wildcard just go engineer. You’ll have quite some diversity in what to pick and the kits add a lot to changing your playstyle at all times. It is, however, not the most popular class for anything, so if you want to eventually partake in lfg stuff you might get some looks on you (not a trouble at all outside of raids, even fractals are fine if you want to play engi).
EDIT: Mesmer deserves an honorable mention in that, while not being diverse, it is very fun to play because the utility you bring is unparalleled. Open world content is seldom done by yourself, there’s always someone coming along to help you kill stuff/doing hearts, etc. and Mes is the ultimate harbinger of good buffs and fun times.
(edited by maxwelgm.4315)