@mulch
When I look at my warrior, I don’t think tank. I have 30 points into arms for precision and bleeding. That’s pretty much standard for any 5 signet build. I also intitially went full-on glass cannon with 30 points into strength. The last 10 I stuck in defense so I could get that +200 when cc’d trait. This worked pretty well, but left me in the lurch versus condition damage and AoE’s. (snipped some)
I think it’s appropriate not to think “tank” for any character, especially a warrior who’s gonna be weak at condition removal.
My point was that with your set-up, you can take at least 3 times as many hits as a true glass cannon (because of large traited toughness and massive starting health pool), not even counting the regen and +200 healing.
Maybe there’s some misunderstanding here.
No thief can remain permastealthed as the game is designed.
Any attack removes stealth, and applies a cooldown so you can’t stealth again.
An idea to make them transparent and blurry is misguided because we’d have the same problem with even bigger display load (so even more culling).
In a game where most attacks don’t need to be targetted, being able to see but not target is the same as being able to target.
Agree with account bound on acquire
I totally agree, it is suppose to be account bound and not be able to sell.
It is suppose to be something special and not just buy… I hope this doesn’t become one of those PtW games….It’s not pay to win because there’s nothing you can buy that’s better than what you’d get by playing the game.
So, they should just put dungeon armor in the gem shop because I can earn that in the game? Please think about what you just said…
Spending 5 minutes on converting gems—>gold is apparently the same as spending 1000 hours in game to actually earn something
Legendaries, like 99% of everything in this game, have no value because they can be bought with real money
I didn’t say they should put dungeon armor in the gem shop, so shut up about that.
I didn’t say that spending 5 minutes on converting gems to gold is the same as 1000 hrs in game, so shut up about that.
All I said is it’s not pay to win because you can’t buy anything better than what’s easily obtained in game. A legendary weapon is just fancy looking, not in any way better statistically.
The way GW2 is set up, if it’s something that involves the economy, you have several ways to get it, one of which is spend gold. Legendaries are almost all about TP.
200 toughness with double regen and + 200 healing with warrior’s base hp isn’t hardly a glass cannon. Add in “extra armor while over 90%” and 2 other defensive traits…
Compared to my necro who actually can stand toe to toe with champs (well, some champs) it is. Plus, my necro has 3 life bars to play with and lots of life stealing.
The flipside is no DPS. Well, for her anyway. She’s marks/wells so she sets up nonstop combos for teammates.
Don’t compare to a tanky tank necro.
A war with 200 toughness has 70% more hp than an equiv spec/geared elementalist, and is healing for about 5% more than a base warrior.
A war with 200 toughness has 75% more defense than a glass cannon light, even more when above 90% health. That doesn’t help on condition damage, but is directly proportional to regular & crit damage received, so will take 4/7 of the damage.
IMO it’s not the solo-thief who’s a problem in wvw at all. No one ever lost a keep or tower to a solo thief.
The big problem with culling is that we can all be effectively stealthed while attacking, and that so much of the meta surrounding wvw is based on cheesy exploitation of the game’s weaknesses. Much better to go play Planetside 2, and keep GW2 for pve.
Some dyes are coded as having metallic or leather texture. If the armor is also coded as metallic, you’ll get reflection like that.
What’s cool is some light armor has parts that are also metallic and will shiny if you dye it appropriately.
Is there way to see which combos will yield the shiny appearance?
I have used dyes that (according to gw2db) are metallic on obviously metallic gear and have never seen the “shiny” appearance…and I have my settings completely maxed at all times.
In game you click your dyes to sort by material, which will help you narrow it down.
I have to say I’m pretty sure there’s no way to know until you do it and then look at your character, cuz it will NOT usually show in the dye preview for me.
Edit: My discovery for this was via the “white gold” dye. I’d used it as a substitute for white, and many armors it looked either white or like used-to-be-white that’s been thru the washer too many times. Then by chance I found it actually looks like shiny gold, but only on armor that is shiny when it’s not dyed at all.
(edited by mulch.2586)
Some dyes are coded as having metallic or leather texture. If the armor is also coded as metallic, you’ll get reflection like that.
What’s cool is some light armor has parts that are also metallic and will shiny if you dye it appropriately.
I have another image of Sorrow’s Embrace armor which looks so horrible compared to the shiny one. Only the first photo stands out.
The second one is in armor preview, so yes, it looks horrible.
All the toughness and vit in the game doesn’t matter a bit if the player doesn’t understand that GW2 combat is different.
The vast majority of time I spend playing the dungeons in the game is with my 5 signet build warrior (ie. constant high damage). I did put 20 points into toughness which is my entire toughness investment. I got that since I’d already gone to 15 to get my second regen (the first being my healing signet).
I’m pretty sure I survive much better than most bunker built necro and guardian players because I learned how to play using my thief. See, no matter how bunker you make a thief, it cannot go toe to toe with anything. You have to dodge, use stealth, etc to get the same kind of survival that warriors and guardians have by default. So, learning to play as a thief is a wonderful way to learn how to survive with just about any build (maybe not a glass cannon engineer because then you’d have no armor to go with your nerfed dps).
And let me tell you…playing a warrior with heavy armor and dual regens ticking while using the same tricks a thief does (minus stealth which is iffy at times with mobs anyway) makes for a very durable glass cannon.
200 toughness with double regen and + 200 healing with warrior’s base hp isn’t hardly a glass cannon. Add in “extra armor while over 90%” and 2 other defensive traits…
(edited by mulch.2586)
Some dyes are coded as having metallic or leather texture. If the armor is also coded as metallic, you’ll get reflection like that.
What’s cool is some light armor has parts that are also metallic and will shiny if you dye it appropriately.
I think GW2 is a very good game for people who don’t care to theory-craft, and like to play very casually.
Based on these forums, I think most of the people who play GW2 have no clue about the math behind their character’s performance. That’s fine, doesn’t stop you from enjoying the game at all.
The big problem with glass cannons in GW2 is the way stats work, there’s not all that big of a payoff in terms of damage.
It’s more like going from tanky-20-gauge to glass-12-gauge.
Whatever your character is holding in its bags — when it’s deleted, all its gear is deleted, too.
If you want to save it, put it in the bank first, including all its coins.
Wow nice necro thread bump. In the 3 months since…
The dropped loot algorithm was adjusted in November. I think zone completion remained the same.
Agree with account bound on acquire
I totally agree, it is suppose to be account bound and not be able to sell.
It is suppose to be something special and not just buy… I hope this doesn’t become one of those PtW games….
It’s not pay to win because there’s nothing you can buy that’s better than what you’d get by playing the game.
I agree, at least these legendary weapons should be tradable/BLTP-able.
The founding principle of this game is you can get top gear a variety of ways (drop/craft/tokens/karma/gold).
One way to get what you want is to buy it. It’s a cash-game, from the ground up. You can paypal your way to 80, too, if you like.
To change the rule about legendary being BLTP-able would be really rude to the people who’ve come this far along, hoping to sell one.
If future gear on the legendary tier were BOAcquire, I think that’d be fine. I would hope that to go along with it, they’d be a lot less BLTP-intensive in acquisition.
You have to accept that from its inception, this game has $ for gold built into it.
Take comfort in the fact that it’s sorta like golf and other hobbies. Wealthy people can buy the top equipment, but that’s never made a weak player into a good one.
But purchased gold is just as legit in this game as gold you looted, or gold you coerced from the TP.
Toughness does not have any sort of diminishing returns. It adds with armor, and is inversely proportional to direct damage received. You can consult the official wiki and see it. Doesn’t do anything about condition damage.
Hopefully while messing around with your gear, you came to realize that almost all your stats are not from gear. An entire exotic set of armor is approx half of what you get from traits, and your character starts with 916 in all the stats for free (so it takes 92 more of a stat to get just a 10% improvement over naked.
So really it all comes down to your build and how you want to play. The biggest influence of traits is how they synergize with your abilities and playstyle.
To me, a balanced approach of gear works out pretty well. If you look at fights you lose, it’s never because you didn’t do enough damage — there’s no war of attrition here the way there is in other pve games that are resource-limited (like running out of mana) or have enrage-timers on encounters. If you fail, it’s because you took too much damage, couldn’t remove conditions, couldn’t manage the fight, something like that. So, come in defensive and you’ll win.
On the other hand, there’s playstyle to consider, and build. My guardian is fairly defensive and support-ish. But when he gets a critical he gives area-effect Might, and giving boons to others procs a heal. So I want him to have decent crit rate (around 50% with consumables).
Piecemeal definitely works with respect to gear, and in the grand scheme of things, gear doesn’t matter all that much. But gear is a place where you can fill in weak spots that are left over from your profession and build. If you don’t have good condition-removal, you darn well better have high vitality, for example.
The puzzling thing is why they decided to remove the previous functionality before the new system is ready for live. And why it was such a big secret to keep out of the patch notes.
I’m pretty sure you can go with lower levels since they will be boosted to 80.
Yeah, I just remembered that. They’re behind me in Fractal progression but that doesn’t bother me. I’ll do lower level fractals for friends and guildmates no problem. That’s an option too.
As to reporting them…I guess that’s what I need to start doing.
I think it’s childish and chickish to report PUG party members for wanting to do it the fast way. Pre-launch, there were developer comments that pve exploits weren’t something they were concerned about when the content doesn’t get you anything special.
Report the bug/exploit and move along. Play with compatible people in the future.
Reading JV’s comments, he’s thinking about specific creatures respawning, whereas what players are seeing are continual multiple mobs in the same area.
So fine, your monsters are on a 100 second respawn, but when there’s 4 mobs that all spawn in the same place, it’s the equivalent of 25 seconds. Add in some adjacent spawns and wanderers, a slow-kill-speed character, and the player experience is that of instant respawns.
Again, I’d have to say in my opinion this is just a feature to watch. The way the game is now, respawn timers are something we can either adapt to or hunt somewhere else. I include it with things like risen mobs that run faster than you even after you’ve crippled them. A bother, but not necessarily broken, especially in a game where there’s not a lot of pve challenge.
It’s not like losing chests cuz of party bugs, not being able to play with your friends, traits that only sometimes work as advertised, etc.
Diff’rent strokes for diff’rent folks.
If you play with strangers, it’s naive to hope they’ll share your value systems. For every person who’s frustrated that the PUG wants to go faster there’s another who’s frustrated it’s too slow.
It’s precisely this that makes me resist requests for auto-matching dungeon finders, cuz they never match you on the things that matter for having fun.
Please, if gold means something to you, don’t place a buy-it-now bid.
Rather do the smart thing and place buy order at a price you think is good, and work the community. If I had one and knew you wanted it, I’d happily sell for lower and skip the 15% TP commission.
Nice.
I reported a bug where I clicked a key with full inventory and consumed the key, but didn’t get an unlocked chest in its place. I think they did fix that bug – was back when you’d lose stuff if you salvaged with full bags, too..
I didn’t get any compensation. So maybe you got my chest. I hope it has something good.
Fractals killed WvW on many servers because so many players feel compelled to grind for Ascended gear. Huge mistake. This game was the go to for PvP. Now it’s a joke.
The pvp situation was a problem a while ago, because you can start on day 1, but the system still isn’t ready. Since you’re fully ready for pvp at lvl 2, it took players that many fewer hours than pve types to see the endgame wasn’t ready yet.
For WvW, part of the problem with that is competition, such as Planetside 2. There’s strong compelling wvwvw gameplay in a game that’s actually designed for it, doesn’t have culling, much bigger scale with more variety, etc.
This game’s pvp and wvw were weak long before ascended gear (not to mention the tiny stat difference matters the least in wvw and not at all in pvp).
A sense of community, yes it definitely missing.
I see no reason to really be social at all in this game so far. I see another dude, we finish a event, we go our seperate ways, yeah, but beyond that, the game seems very single-playerish.
This rings true to me.
I kept playing some other MMOs long after there was any vertical progression for my character. I quit playing other games when there was plenty of vertical progression within my grasp. Fact is most mmorpgs won’t keep you going on gameplay alone — even single-player RPGs, if you get 100 hrs of gameplay, it’s a winner.
The games I stuck with the longest were ones that pushed me into relationships and regular activities. I’m seeing a guild that was extremely strong and active in a not-great game (Rift) act less community-like in GW2. Too many have given up on wvw, which has a lot of negativity. Used to be, we had dungeons to team up for. Now not even that because we’re at different fractal levels…
I think GW2 is a lot better game than Rift, at least for me, but it doesn’t encourage the social parts that keep you interested in a game when the actual gameplay gets mundane.
I think this is something that we as players can work with. What you end up learning is how to manage your character to avoid, run away from, run thru, or run and pull a bunch of them. With a lot of configurations, you can kill a dozen all at once in about the same amount of time as killing just two as single-targets. So pull the room, and kill them in a stack away from the spawn points. Something like that.
95-120 seconds? Maybe that’s for a specific critter at a specific spawn, but there’s overlapping critters at the same/adjacent spawns in crowded areas that makes it functionally a lot shorter than that.
Again, I think this is something we as players can either deal with or choose not to go there. We’ve seen that the devs collect extensive data on where/how people play GW2. If they see we players consistently avoid regions, maybe they can go back and adjust the risk/reward.
I think yall are missing the point. A well-built character isn’t one or the other.
My guardian, once per every foe (except that the auto-refresh is often bugged), trigger Virtue of Justice. This gives a big burn on the next hit of all allies. It also inflicts blind on opponents in the area.
So one button press, not even on the global cooldown, and I do all 3 functions (damage, support, control) at the same time.
Engineer bombs that heal — all three functions at once. Etcetera.
If you’re doing it right, you’re doing it all.
Ya, the total makeover/sex change with no name change is unfortunate.
This is one thing that I can definitely see the benefit of releasing it part-way (just the makeovers) before it’s fully ready. And some names work well for either gender, so the sex change isn’t completely unreasonable as is without name-swap.
The harsh realities of gift exchange. Sorry for the frustration. It does kind of feel like slot machines — the whole idea is to keep putting your quarters in until they’re all gone. Only these are ugly clothes you can’t even wear.
The basic party functionality is still rather buggy. It really needs fixing first, because guesting to be in a party that doesn’t work right isn’t a good solution.
Most of the bugs that affect me were reported back in beta, seeing very slow progress. They are very good at pumping out new fluff-n-stuff.
We like your stuff Jeffrey. Just wish the other teams would tighten up their work.
Here’s an example:
My guardian using a hammer.
I put down a field (say the #5 skill). It stops foes from moving (when it works). I do damage. If I crit, I give a boon to nearby allies. Giving the boon to them heals me.
So one button press and I do damage support control as well as tank/heal.
Don’t blame Anet if people want to get those 20 extra points of stats, when already having 1800 to begin with. What you are trying to say is that the players should be protected from themselves. Like children playing with fire. And new content should not be added because, dawwwww, players might get into a (mostly useless) farming binge.
20 extra points in stats!! W00t!
15-30% stat increase across the board would come out to a couple more than 20 out 1800.
It would. But where are you gonna find a 30% stat increase in GW2?
3 ascended items will get you 33 points in a stat, yeah? Which is < 2% change. Perhaps the other ascended slots, when they’re finally added to the game, perhaps they’ll be a lot bigger.
What’s it got to do with the supposed increase in vet & champ drops?
I think the big mistake was in saying you’ll always get loot from a champion. Cuz colored loot drops and especially rare+ are so rare that players really can’t discern changes. But now every vet whose corpse doesn’t sparkle makes you remember this, and makes you feel like you were sold a bill of goods.
I destroyed mine, cuz I wasn’t gonna spend the gold for another bag slot to equip it. When an item is invisible, I don’t have sentimental attachment to it.
1533 Vitality
916 are providence, so you have 617 from traits and gear. Other classes get a big bonus amount, but as a guardian (and thief) I don’t think you do – it’s just 10 hp per vitality. You’re getting about 6% bonus – maybe it’s only 5% – from the server buffs.
The problem with chests is that if they’re buffed, bots will just farm chests…
Not necessarily – they could make ’em a once per 24 hrs to the buffed chests, for example (not to mention get some computer security to require players use the actual client instead of the enhanced ones…)
I don’t see it as a great enhancement to the game that the gold sellers farm fractals instead of DEs. What’s the advantage – out of sight out of mind? /shrug
I can’t see ascended gear coming on a for-gold vendor.
That’d be really jumping the shark.
I heard the ring of truth on all sides.
Very true that ArenaNet masterfully promoted their game. Very true that their vision was good. Also true that we’re waiting still for crucial functionality, had some disillusionment and backward steps…
I keep seeing the suggestion of PvE zones being overflow by default. While it would help the population issues there are some drawbacks to this approach as well. Harvesting nodes are server specific and if loading into a zone pushed you to overflow wouldn’t someone be able to just continue re-entering Orr and Frostgorge until they got fresh Orich nodes to farm?
The harvest-node issue is only an issue because they haven’t fixed it yet. They could just as well make nodes not server specific. Then it’d be fine.
This came up before, was the motivation to limit server transfers to 1 per day so people couldn’t flit from node to node.
As far as dragon timers go, I know that’s a fun part of the game and for heaven’s sake we don’t want to have to hang out in Sparkly Fen. So what can ya do? How about numbering/labeling the zone instances. So the people who want to harvest dragons but not otherwise play in a zone can use a tracker like we do currently, just instead of be Isle of Janthir’s Tequatl timer it’ll be “Sparkly Fen #5.” Should prob’ly put a cooldown on dragon chests while we’re at it.
The point I’m trying to make is don’t confuse solvable technical issues with reasons to stick with strategies other MMOs tried (incidentally, I don’t think server mergers ever worked to save a game).
I have a bunch of the black lion trader things from dailies. I never use ’em. :o
Traits are more important than gear. I like this.
A lot of traits are boring. That’s actually ok with me as long as there are some good choices.
The biggest problem is so many traits don’t work reliably. They need to get the system working well before they consider revamping the traits to be more interesting.
I’ve been hit by that several times. Only once in Tixx so far, but in other dungeons, too.
It’s been an honest mistake and I know the people feel bad about screwing their guildies from loot. Each time it happens, that person learns that it’s a risk. It is preventable, if you all are careful to let everyone loot before you go.
But the game shouldn’t do that, no matter what.
Servers aren’t dead. Game is 3 months old. All the casual players finally got their level 80 toons now, so it seems that no one is in the low level areas any more. Nearly the same amount (maybe a little less or a little more) are playing still, you just don’t realize it because many people have gotten their toons to 80 now.
Yeaaaah, that must be why every temple in Orr on every server is contested and there’s hardly anyone there at all.
Haha, well all 3 of my 80s are geared up and I only hated Orr as long as I could stand it when I still felt like there was a reason to farm.
It’s just not enough fun to motivate me to go out.
I think it’s cool. It’s only once per hour, and even then it so often happens after the event is done rather than during combat. A special treat, even after levels don’t mean anything.
Pattern Two —
People’s perception of the occurrence of rare events is naturally misguided.The number of rare items in a period of farming should follow a Poisson process. The math behind it ensures that you will see clusters, that some people will be much richer than others.
It’s natural to be superstitious. The brain creates patterns when there are none, cuz that’s what brains do.
If indeed the number of rares over time follows a poisson distribution with an extremely low lambda, doesn’t that constitute of an easy-to-compute DR mechanism? If so, is there a possibility that the lambda was much higher before november 15th?
They wouldn’t be adjusting the Poisson parameter, because drops happen on individual events — drawing from an urn, so to speak.
Did they change the contents of the urn? Lots more “no-prize” and “porous bone” events in there? Seems like. And it does seem like as you hunt they keep tossing in more “no-prize” chips into the urn.
But regardless of how the parameters may have changed, under any system you’re going to see what look like clusters and non-randomness, even if the underlying process is independent random.
Although you can go for ascended items if you really, really really want to have a few extra stats and do hardcore PVE — it’s only a couple of slots and overall it definitely will not make you overpowered compared to someone in full exotics.
Yea, the full set will only be a 15-30% increase in stats across the board. Nothing major.
So far it’s looking to be much smaller than that. 3 slots will get your character just a percent or two improvement. And we only have 13 or 14 slots.
Pattern Two —
People’s perception of the occurrence of rare events is naturally misguided.
The number of rare items in a period of farming should follow a Poisson process. The math behind it ensures that you will see clusters, that some people will be much richer than others.
It’s natural to be superstitious. The brain creates patterns when there are none, cuz that’s what brains do.
I’d think if they ever did merge servers, the thing to do would be to take whichever guildbank was bigger/biggest and keep it. And surely give warning for people to pull stuff out of it.
I think instead of mergers, they should:
1) get guesting in place as it’s been too long promised, yet to be delivered
2) make transferring to the server of your choice possible and easy
3) implement shared common zones, so if you go to Lornor’s Pass, it’s not restricted to only players from your homeworld.
The world designation is only there to give teams for wvw. GW just had one set of cities, not even really a world, from which we left to our private instances. We have global, not server-based, economies. Play with your friends anywhere. There’s no reason to separate pve zones by server.
Coming in with an opposite perspective, I think there is a huge amount of lore and story to the game. Using a human character as an example:
I understand that there is a story, and I did all 3 orders. (I also sat with progress blocked for weeks, and re-ran many steps trying to get them not to hang). My contention is that it’s not what the game devs put their vision into. The lore is there, but the things we do, the design of the game isn’t to advance the story, or even to consistently respect it. It’s cosmetic, just like race and sex, to support an action-based game.
Most shooters, RTS, and action/console games have stories, too. Even good pr0n.
The story is there, but it’s not what it’s for.
They’re bind on equip.
After they’re equipped, you can unsoul bind it with a fine transmutation stone.
I feel like what’s being asked for is basically already in-game.
I guess conceptually/philosophically, to me a legendary is the one thing that absolutely should be soul-bound after equipping it. Legends aren’t about Captain America loaning his shield to Thor.