Guild Wars 2

I played a different NCSoft game sort of like that, Lineage 2.

You could have guild halls. Some of them you had to fight for every couple of weeks.

You could own a castle, which had to be pvp-sieged. Owners of the castle had access to unique items, control over the economy such as crafting materials, and extracted a tax on all business in their realms.

It was a very different design than guild wars. I’d love to see it implemented in a GW2 type setting (i.e. where gear-level is capped low).

When you’ve played like that, it makes the separated mini-games like GW2’s EB and borderlands seem less meaningful. On the other hand, I can see with GW2 players that there’s a majority that are here because it’s not a real pvp game. It’s a good thing, in the long run.

It’s worth noting that artificer is very reasonable to level to 400.

But as noted above, the mystery tonics are 3 each, guaranteed, in black lion chests.

I think the reason we’ve had free transfers for so long is because the failure to get a functional guesting system.

And they had to limit the free transfers to daily because it was too easy to go world to world getting the rare stuff (like orichalcum nodes). Until they can get that all worked out, the only guesting you can do is in dungeons.

The discussion my party had was that the drops and near constant events must have been ANet’s way of making amends after the Black Lion keys debacle. It seemed fun and profitable, but not crazy out of line.

But somehow they managed to make a kitty-box of it (again).

Put up a guild rally banner! oops….

I think it’s possible to do with your alt. Just partner up with someone. Heck you could even take turns escorting each other’s lowbie alt.

I don’t think the level of the zones is out of line, given the quest reward, and given the backstory.

My g.f.‘s description of the helmet is that it’s an ugly chamber pot on your head. Not just a chamber pot. No. This one is ugly, too.

But the stats and the rune = tasty

Yeah, get help. Or strip naked and make the run!

Got a heavy helmet. Wasn’t sure if should sell it or use it. Still not sure.

It’d be ANet’s style for them to put in an almost-legendary way to craft the pieces.

Seems too often they don’t do their homework until after the fact.

For what it’s worth, I got an exotic after the re-start, but only did one chest-event. I did notice it was a 2-item chest instead of 4 (whereas the world chests are 6-item).

Was unaware of the change to the big chest. Seemed like a lot lot fewer doors were popping, too. /shrug

I think having a magic find set is a good idea for pve players.

Yes, even if it means bagging your real gear. Cuz sometimes you gotta pay the bills.

And, you can get the cheap version of dungeon gear to skin onto your magic-find set. Beautious!

(and piles and piles of loot drop — turning Halloween into Christmas)

My g.f. hunted with me for not quite an hour and got 4 exotics, one of which is a special event skin. I only got 2 and one was a dang trident
jk it’s awesome and I love it very much

I saw a dev post that confirmed they’re not s’posed to work in the recipe.

As usual PvP is completely separated from the rest of the game. :p

PvP glory rank — This would be fine to keep going to infinity, because its only effect is cosmetic and it’s not at all related to level.

Gear stats, I think they have to keep it at 80.

Adding player levels but not changing the gear would freak people out.
Adding player levels while also changing the gear would freak people out.

Adding an expansion without new stats, skills, or levels — think that would freak people out, too.

I don’t think there’s a way to do it without stirring up flames.

The static picture of the chain greatsword looks ok. Watch it in use, it’s simply amazing. I’d say just buy it outright, if you’re one who does stuff like that.

On the other hand, will you still have fun playing the game if you already have the best weapon-skin ever?

I was having troubles in lowbie land today, trying to hit a roadblock. C’mon, it’s literally as wide as a house and my guy was standing right on it…

And the double-whammy is, that big pile of logs is invulnerable to burning.

I played a different NCSoft game (Lineage 2), which was very bot-driven. At one point I discovered I was the only player in my clan that was still using the official client.

The devs and PR folks made talk like they didn’t like bots, but in practice they turned a blind eye to it.

GW2’s pattern thus far is very familiar.

I don’t see a compelling reason to raise the level cap.

In contrast, the game I played most recently was Rift. After a few tiers of raids all at the same level, it is time for a level-cap increase there, because of the content being gated by gear-level. The basic idea of that is you have players who’re locked out of the current content because they don’t have enough of the gear from the preceding tier.

GW2 doesn’t have gating by gear, so there’s no good reason to change the level cap, unless they’re going to keep the lvl 80 gear the same all the way up to 90 or 100 or whatever.

It’ll be interesting to see if they can get the initial release working well enough for long enough that an expansion would be viable. I wonder what’s the timeline…

The hearts are my least favorite pve component, too. But I do ’em for the map completion, and sometimes for the karma vendor. They tend to feel like chores (a lot of them literally are chores).

An interesting idea. There’s been a lot already of ‘gee the world has changed a lot in 250 yrs.’ Maybe Cantha got sunk or fell off the planet to become a moon or…

Personally, I’m not going to worry about whether the devs copy GW1’s progression of expansions. Whatever they do decide to do, I hope it’s good. They could just as well discover an Americas region with Inca/Mayan/Aztec influences. Or heck, make up something new.

I like sPvP, but I’ve never done paid tournaments yet, only the freebie. I’m not a particularly good player, and it’s not my main focus. But I never feel like I’m getting squashed the way you would in other MMOs before you get the gear.

Being all point-capture games makes it not as much fun IMO, and means you can/should build your character around node capturing (witness the bunker-build, roamer builds, treb-repair-mesmer, and fighting mostly in tight areas). I believe it could be better if they added in capture-the-flag, king of the mountain, protect the item (not sure what the PC term is for these, my group called ’em smear the something that rhymes with smear).

They tried to get variety with one map with water, one map with NPC to kill, one map with a lot of vertical, one map with treb… but they’re all versions of the same thing.

Mostly I fear there’s too much left to finish the game that launched. Still need traits and abilities functioning, then balanced, then maybe you could have a legit competition. There’s a lot left for ANet to do.

After that, really it’s up to the players to eSport it. Gotta make it interesting enough to wanna watch, eh.

According to the Wiki, toughness adds equally to armor. There is no diminishing returns. For direct damage, toughness + armor is in the denominator, i.e. inversely proportional.

Double that value, you’ll take half as much damage. Quadruple that value, you’d take 1/4 of the original damage.

It’s a design decision to make builds in GW2 very simple. I think (bugs aside) it works pretty well.

I hate to imagine what balance and the bug-list would be like with a more flexible combat system with more configurable choices.

Some players like systems where they tweak and test and theory-craft builds ad infinitum. A lot of players don’t care for that. This is the game for the 2nd set of players, while giving a few things to fiddle with.

I like (for one of my characters) the pirate skins from Lion’s Arch. My son likes the centaur-vendor skins.

The cool thing is karma doesn’t take up any space, and they increased the karma cap (which was already 1 million+ right?) so I’m cozy with saving it up for when something else comes along.

I was wonder the same thing in-game yesterday, so I tried putting a sigil on a weapon that I wanted to sell (an exotic with grawl slaying, I figured why not use an extra sigil that’s taking up space to make it more desirable).

The game window clearly displayed the warning that it WOULD make it soulbound.

I didn’t go through with it, but believe the warning was true.

I can’t imagine that they’d program in the warning about soulbinding, if it weren’t intended to happen.

It kind of feels like an exploit, not because of the boosters, but because those jugs are amazing payoff for doing nothing out of the ordinary.

I have never died during a dragon fight. They go really pretty quickly, and there’s timers set up on the web to help you time it. There is no easier fight in the game, just equip scepter on my guardian and press 1.

I’ll do Shadow Behemoth if I’m in the area. It takes longer IME than Tequatl or Shatterer, cuz as the top post says, you’ll end up with a small group of characters in the fight.

Never hear of the others, to be honest.

Appearance-changers have been spotted in the game code.

Not race-changers.

Perhaps spend it on gear and chuck it into the M.F. for fun and profit?

It’s more fun in a duo/trio.

The intent of the game design is you can go 1-80 without ever joining a party.

Mesmers had their abilities “toned down” a bit because they remain over-powered 1v1 in spvp and have the best utility in both spvp and wvw. They can stay alive forever and manage with groups of mobs, but it takes a while to kill things.

Bring a warrior to party and mobs will be dead very fast.

Any civilized race would know better than to trust lower creatures from administering a vault. That’s what golems are for. Efficiency minus the attitude!

I don’t see that it would add much to the game if the gear had minor fluctuations in the stats, and if there were major fluctuations, then it’d mess up the foundational principle that everyone can quickly get to the same final gear plateau.

She’s funniest if you’re playing a female non-sylvari. I’ve guested her story quests with others. Sylvari + sylvari, the accent quits being so hilariously out of place.

I wonder who her voice-actor was.

It is what it is. I feel like Cursed Shore is not going to be a lot of fun no matter what you do. It’s the basic design that encourages the zerg-train circuit, the basic design that makes it unfun to play and difficult to navigate, but at the same time essential for farming.

You can’t make a silk purse from a sow’s ear.

50 kills (versus what, 500 salvages, is it?) doesn’t take all that long. Get with a zerg, even a losing zerg, and you’ll get there pretty quick.

If it didn’t bother at least some people, no one would do it.

In a game like this where there’s no death penalty, to me it’s w/e

The loot from kraits is too good. It’s as good as in Cursed Shore, but they have 1/3 the hp and hit like baby moas. Imagine over the course of a week the pile of lvl 400 mats a WvW bot loots.

Autoscaling is a nice feature.

I’m in a guild that does a lot of low-level stuff. I notice for those events I don’t want to come on either of my mains, even tho there is the auto-down-level, cuz it’s not materially rewarding, and there’s the costs of round-trip travel. Even the harvesting tools, somehow soft wood wears out my axe just as fast as ancient. That part of it is a drag.

I dunno. I used the transmutation stones to move a rune I really like (3 runes of the Noble) as I leveled up. I guess I could have bought BL salvage, but it’d have cost a lot more, since we get piles and piles of lowbie transmute stones for free.

I’m used to the stones and like the way they work.

I think they want us to buy the transmutation stones.

It’s listed in the wiki that you can only benefit from one.
Also you get 5-stacks per kill in pvp.

To be honest, it feels like too much now.

It’s a theme with their adjustments.
Something that’s a little too much, they hammer to almost nothing.
And here, it feels like the daily, being 20 times a typical DE, wow! and the montly being x 200!

Cool, but a complete about-face, where initially karma was coveted and conserved, now total gravy train. We’ll all be chuckin karma gear in the forge. (which again, don’t get me wrong, I’m all for it — just has a feeling like poverty to riches all at once)

Oh obligatory on-topic part:
I do kill variety on an alt, cuz the low zones have a lot of different kinds of mobs. I try to finish it on one of my characters that’s in Orr, for the bigger payout.

There’s gonna be a drop-off of players who start the game. Seeing it pretty big in my guild, having lost a couple battleground commander types. My close group of mates haven’t even logged in for a couple weeks now.

It’s hard to put a finger on it, except that it’s often not as fun as you might have hoped. I finished an Orr map and got the zone completion (which was trading-post fodder, as expected) and I realized it really hadn’t been fun at all, cept solving the jumping puzzle. shrug Just before I did the temple of melandru meta, and that last fight had some fun, interesting elements, but was soooo long to the point of tedium, felt unfair and punishing, and of course no reward to mark as being different, so you’re left feeling I’d have been a lot better off if I just followed the bot train…

I know, I know, it’s not about the rewards, in GW2 you do things cuz it’s fun not cuz you’ll get a payoff. But the trouble is the fun part is too often overly elusive.

It’d be kinda cool to get optional skins for the conjured weapons and engi kits.

Consider it this way — if you had stuck with rare instead of exotic gear, you’d have the equivalent of 50-60 gold. Depending on your crafts, you’d have an additional few gold. Prob’ly if you look in your bank, you have 20+ gold of materials. And casual or whatever, you could have instead spent one or so of those hours making money instead of leveling and crafting.

Forced to buy for RL money? No one is holding a gun to your head. Your characters will play just as well with conventional gear.

Myself, I’m finding plenty to do with the event that doesn’t involve spending money, real $ or gold.

Shape-shifting would be fun, but Tyria is awesome, even if there’s no elves and the dwarves are all dead, no Celtic anything (druids or otherwise).

GW2 has a very restricted set of options confined to a subset of the Tyria in GW1.

When they open the southern continents, hopefully we’ll find more variety in flavor.

Ha! I guess you could say the same sort of thing about any of the currencies.

What good is glory? I already have top pvp gear.
What good are dungeon tokens, if I don’t want any of that stuff?
What good are $$ if I dun wanna buy nuthin?

Myself, I’m hoping someday they let us buy cultural armor with karma.

warmonkey.8013:

Draco.2806:

No, no excuses, just plain wrong. It’s a silly thing to ask for from PvE players

But PvE requirements are A-OK to ask from PvP players amirite?

Oh, sorry, didn’t mean to step on your toes — I may have avoided them had your foot not been on my ankle..

The difference is you can do the pve in wvw. Not in pvp, of course, because it’s its own system.

Events – yep
kill 50 players – yep
salvage is the same for everyone
candy-corn mining – yep

Your ankle wasn’t stepped on at all, that was just the way it fit when you put it in your mouth. ;D

We have very limited number of players permitted per map. A bunch of slots are being taken up by PvE characters, often in bot-trains.

The allure is obvious: mobs on WvW maps are super easy compared to regular PvE mobs in lvl 80 areas, yet they drop the same items.

Keep the mobs there, but make them unprofitable for farming. It won’t solve the bot problem, but it’ll get them out of WvW.

I think blaming server transfers is a red-herring.

3 weeks ago my server had an unbalanced battle. No queues, hardly anyone on the map.

2 week ago my server had a great close battle. Queues all week.

Last week, unbalanced battle. No queues, hardly anyone on the map.

This week, close battle. Queues are unmanagably long.

Server transfers have been blamed for our bad weeks. I don’t believe it. I think it’s more that when NA wvw wannabes see a lop-sided score, they give up early, don’t play…

It’s not that we had a bunch of players transfer in on Friday night, transfer out on Monday, then all come back the next Friday only this time to stay on the server all week, ditch the next week. That’s just so convoluted. It’s better explained by noting that NA quit trying when they feel they can’t win the match.

It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I feel like I’ve been participating fully without buying gems.