top for WvW? My vote goes to Trebuchet pilot.
I’m fighting a response of “if you want Skyrim, go play Skyrim”
But it seems akin to complaining that there’s not much action in chess. GW2 is an action game based on dynamic events. WvWvW happens why? Just for the sport of it!
They’re still struggling to get quests to be stable, let alone interesting or engaging. Which is totally ok, cuz it’s really not what GW2 is about.
6 orbs make the equiv of 288 stat points. A character has over 10k equiv stat points.
So, not counting the 6th set benefit, you have to see the stats from runes or orbs aren’t all that big of a deal. Min/maxing the stats while failing to consider the scale you’re min/maxin on can lead to some wacky conclusions.
10% damage from stats is gonna take adding 250+ Power, which you’re not going to find on a single orb.
So maybe people are figuring that the 6th step of the Rune is worth it. Cuz the first 5 steps surely aren’t.
But again, I think the real difference in TP price comes from the rune being an artisan product with rare precious ingredients. Whereas ruby orbs are the equivalent of mass-produced items from an automated Chinese factory.
I really enjoyed doing epic quests in Everquest. They took months, took teamwork, and immersed you in the lore. Something like that would be awesome, either as a way to get a precursor or even to get legendary-quality items.
But let’s face it. ArenaNet is horrible at doing quests (remember the lost shores scavenger? The many storyline quests that were bugged). There’s a record low number of quests in the game compared to MMOs in general. They’re not very good or stable.
To be fair, the vision of the game was to base it around dynamic events instead of quests. So it’s perfectly understandable that they didn’t make a good toolset for implementing quests, and didn’t get any quality of talent for writing them.
I would enjoy a game where a legendary weapon involved legendary achievements. But that’s not what GW2 is about.
Acquisition of items is centered around an organic economy based on a stockmarket-style trading post. Just as in real life, there’s people who work for a living versus people who gather wealth from trading (and/or gold RMT). In this game the heroic achievements are more Warren Buffet than Destiny’s Edge.
The cool thing, though, is that by design those legendary types are not appreciably more powerful than the common man.
Both items prices are based on supply and demand. The price has nothing to do with how powerful of effective they are.
And demand isn’t based off how powerful and effective they are? /facepalm
Why would demand be based on that?
Analogy: consider the food value of peanut butter vs goose liver pate.
The cost in part reflects that Rune of Scholar is more sophisticated and erudite.
And mostly supply-side — that it’s expensive ingredients and only craftable by a minority of characters. Whereas Ruby orbs are farmed by bots.
Don’t look at the offer price for precursors, look at buyer’s bids. It’s more stable and more relevant.
I recently tried a game that has a cinematic along with making you page thru the company credits. It felt really old-fashioned to me.
If I believe what I read, GW2 doesn’t have an endgame yet.
As yet, from a stats point of view there’s no vertical progression. You get full exotics, maybe you also get your ascended ring and back items. None of that requires all that much — about the same as getting “raid ready” in other games. And then you’re done with v-progression, at least until January.
A pvp game should have some recognizable silhouettes. I do recognize GW2 isn’t a real pvp game, but it does/did have aspirations.
One thing that is really cool about GW2 is that stat-wise, the damage mitigation is very similar between steps of armor, only about a 10% difference. Whereas other games, a hit that would hardly damage a tank would one-shot a squishy. To the point that ele and engi are top notch bunkers, despite the clothes they wear.
/em shakes head
There you go again. Don’t break the game and say nothing.
In a game where basically all the progression is about cosmetics… This all should have been done and tested before BWEs.
I remember original Everquest, a dev saying that less than a quarter of the quests were ever completed by anyone, even once. Of course that world was a lot bigger than Tyria, and quests weren’t marked anywhere.
I have the feeling that most spawnable DEs are unsubtle in getting you to spawn them. But that may be an illusion of low-hanging fruit.
My luck works backwards. Exotic dagger drops right after I bought a couple Ascalonian weapons. A staff drops the day after I crafted one for myself.
The loot-gods mock me.
I dunno why we’d talk about 50 games in the year when at least 48 of them aren’t ArenaNet’s.
It’s easier to change your own individual mentality than trying to get a company to change something for you according to what you believe you have the right to want just because you paid for their product. Anybody should know this by now after years of being a gamer. So I don’t even why people even try in forums and expect a result, aside from having just the avenue to express their frustration.
So with this in mind, it’s either you buy the company or change your mentality of playing.
If it still doesn’t work out for you, THEN we gravitate towards what we eventually usually say: Just don’t play the game.
I see some wisdom here in the idea that you accept and play the game with its rules the way it’s intended. In particular, the loot system and how we get gear in GW2 is so easy to get what you need, I really don’t see anything that would benefit from changes. There’s a mostly free-floating economy. The only potentially broken part of the game’s economy, it’s those parts that are not gold-based. Everything else, either play it or don’t. Truly you can do everything in the game that fits under “need” without touching the T.P.
I think this is the weak part of “horizontal” progression. It feels “done” when you have everything you want, but maybe you’re not done having fun yet. Or maybe you’re just done.
I think of it as a bug, cuz if you haven’t been knocked down yet, it should prevent you from being knocked down. Either you’re knocked down or not. The half-way thru being knocked down — that doesn’t make any sense.
Having to go thru the animation to fall down before you can get the benefit of your shout is an awkward bit of ability lag (which there’s a lot in this game).
I’m actually ok with the loot system and chance. It’s an economy, and it works — a lot of people feel like we make really good money and others moan that they don’t. Just like a real economy…
The places where I’m least satisfied, actually, are with the “progressive” – the dungeon tokens are clumsy bank-hoggers.
But I think the O.P. really has it wrong. Most concerns/complaints in the main forum are not about the loot systems, but rather about bugs, about ascended gear, the “trinity,” difficulty finding groups or fun things to do.
To be fair, I don’t go to Orr hardly ever, either.
To solo the same couple static events — really tedious when you’re the only one getting golem parts or karka eggs. Basically the same gather-up quests you’d do in WoW.
I much prefer the setting of Southsun over Orr, but it’s not fun to play there.
Of course you can give it as a gift. When I did it, I set up the account for the recipient.
’tis the season!
Private messages from strangers are sketchy, unless it’s a simple “your outfit looks amazing” or something like that.
Private messages from friends are fantastic.
I find them fun and beneficial, on all 3 of my 80s.
Some weapon sets have more fields than others, same with finishers. So if you’re not built for it and/or don’t play with others who’re built for it, you may be missing that aspect of the game. I think you can still have fun, regardless.
I don’t think the issue is that you can’t do healing. The issue is you don’t need to do healing, and stats-wise the +heal is a weak multiplier.
E.g., for a guardian, instead of specing to do small aoe heals, you could just as well spec to propagate boons of all sorts, keep yourself healed and let the other get along. Consider as a player, would you rather receive 1-2k heals, or receive 1/3 less damage and have a few stacks of might?
The other thing related to this — frequently people confuse healing with being all about healing, like a WoW or Rift healer. Go ahead and be a healer, but you better do more than just heal. If you look at what the characters would be doing — bombs heal allies, but also blow up the bad guys, the warrior shouts but that doesn’t slow them from deploying offensive and control abilities. My guardian gives might on crit, and giving a boon grants a heal, so it’s all 3 “trinity” functions in one ability.
Wizard hat for free.
I did leave, logged out of the game. I hate dieing and to a stupid troll event even more…
It’s completely avoidable. Don’t go near the presents.
They’re even marked on the map so you can avoid getting within visual range of them.
Don’t worry, another couple weeks and they’ll be gone for good.
Thankfully we can skin them.
I wonder what the dev meeting for the art team was about the pearl line. “Ok art team, we need to ensure demand for fine transmute stones…”
Grats GW2 and ArenaNet!
Seriously, I’m a long way from a fanboy, but GW2 beats the pants off the competition. Not a great year for rpgs.
There is a mesmer forum. The thing that struck me, and why my mesmer has stagnated at lvl 27, is that in pve almost every fight lasts less time than it takes for your phantasm to get involved.
PvP at least moves at a slow enough scale that they can do something, even if it’s just absorbing hits.
This is one of the many reasons why I’m quitting this game, it is by no means fun to kill your enemy only to have them downed when your trying to fight 2-3 players. It makes it almost impossible to win a 2v1 or its just down right annoying trying to stomp someone when you have other people beating on you. I really don’t get why downed state is in PvP its just one of the many annoyances in this game. Imho it ruins PvP for me all I think about when I’m about to kill someone in PvP is “OHH can’t wait till they go in downed state so i can get 90% in the stomp animation to have them Blink away or to have them cancel my animation, sooo FUN”
Every other mmo’s PvP is just fine and the players actually die when you “kill” them, but here, nope. Sorry you gotta spend an extra 10-20 seconds to stomp this player after you have already defeated them.
EDIT: Stop with the posts that say “oh your quiting cause of one thing, how childish” NO I am quitting due to a majority of things. Says right there in the first sentence people.
Stomping is easy if you know what you’re doing… Which you obviously don’t..
I don’t think you needed to add an insult there.
Here’s what’s really cool about it. Yes, depending on yours and their profession, there’s things you can do to get the stomp off or to prevent the stomp.
If I’m stompin a thief or mesmer, I can use a teleport to follow and finish the stomp after they port. Cool, but that’s forced me to use a cooldown to stomp, and to have that utility. Was that a good use of it? Or burn a stability, stealth, or block against a down-state knockback?
If there’s more time, I can just dps them down. Or against an ele, if you dps them down, they’ll just mistform and be back half health again.
So what and how you finish them requires some game sense and strategy. Sometimes takes more thought than you have for the up-state of the game. I think that part is good, and it’s part of why a good team totally curb-stomps nubs, even tho the gear/stats identical.
Well here’s the clever part of downed state.
I was in a tournament game recently, against a good team, I think it was on Khylo. 2v2 on a node turned into 1v2, and they got me down. Instead of finishing me, or dpsing me down, they left me to sit and every time I’d get close to reviving myself, they’d smack me halfway down. As guardian I can throw dirt at them and nothing else with range, so completely helpless and not assisting my team. Good strategy, very frustrating.
Othertimes, instead of reviving a teammate, you can finish an enemy and get him up by rally. It forces you to choose and decide, which adds to strategy.
The hard part is small changes in down-state abilities, just like in up-state, can really change the game. The recent changes to elementalist, coupled with the new rez timers, completely changed the meta, and made ele one of the best bunker-types, whereas before they were one of the weakest professions.
The mandatory 15 sec rez has made reviving teammates too essential, cuz the player is out for at least a half minute and comes back alone. What do you expect when the devs make such drastic changes (essentially doubled rez timer length)?
But clumsy devs doesn’t make a game mechanic bad, just makes spvp not yet ready for esporting…
I think the downed-state mechanic can be part of a good pvp game. Removing it won’t help them get to their stated goals, and would make the game as flat and uninteresting as other MMO pvp.
I’m pretty sure the “alternative clients” let you see foes on the map, too.
The punk-buster approach is a kludge. On the other hand, writing tight code seems to be a challenge for them. Sort of like using Google authenticator, why mess around trying to solve a problem that’s beyond you when you can buy and implement a ready-made solution?
The argument against it is that you have to notice this game has moved toward a pve emphasis. I mean it always had pve as an emphasis, but since launch most of the pvp community gave up and moved on. Game guard/punk buster doesn’t do anything for dungeon runners. And it truly is asking players to deliberately install spy-ware, and to trust a company who’s obviously not good with security.
I think the downed-state is basically the only thing that gives any drama to GW2 pvp.
I can see that it’s frustrating in wvw, especially since it seems most of the people I fight aren’t in a pvp spec there. But sometimes frustration is a good thing.
The way they made the game, it takes soooo long to get back in battle that you don’t want death to be superfast. The game is made for a slow pace sort of thing, especially in wvw. This isn’t Planetside 2 with headshot fatality and 10-sec to be back in the action.
It doesn’t have to look like a swimsuit or exotic-dancer outfit.
But really, take a look at the pix from any red-carpet fashion thing. People do not wear hugely poofed out skirts, or trenchcoats.
And… since we spend most of the time looking from behind, it’d be nice if there were a bit less on the 6 oclock.
Risk/reward is where I notice some weirdness. I don’t think I have ever died to a dragon fight. But they have 6-item chests. A tough veteran or champ and you may come away with nothing, or junk.
My thoughts with GW2 is it really doesn’t matter all that much, because the loot is just loot. It makes you richer. It’ll never make you more powerful, at least not very much.
Competition is good for us all.
On my guardian, I can end up with most or all of the aggro if I try, most of the time. I’m positive I’m not doing as much damage as most of the people I group with, cuz like the OP I have mostly defensive gear on my dungeon-running set. I do have pretty high precision, and pass out a lot of boons.
It’s not a simple formula, no matter what it is. Because I can shed aggro to a glass-cannon type sometimes. In terms of fractals, the end boss for the collossus and the dredge are on me forever. But the jellyfish beast doesn’t seem to notice I’m even there. The eye-beam one seems to be 1/5 chance, regardless.
Honestly, I don’t know how it works. My belief is there’s several different aggro mechanics that bosses and other mobs may follow.
For me, a turning point with my guardian was when I started using my virtues and utilities very actively.
15 trait points into “Radiance,” and you can apply Virtue of Justice to burn and blind every foe (except this trait like a bunch of others doesn’t always work to renew the cooldown). You get to where your favorite position is to be surrounded by normal mobs.
In terms of play, keep moving, dodge-roll or blind or block if there’s a big attack coming.
Have Fun!™
I like guardian in pvp.
Note that “healing” isn’t really about healing other players in GW2, especially in pvp. It’s healing yourself. You may share some regeneration and small heals, but nothing like other mmos.
Guardians do help their teammates by support, giving boons.
I wish there were a way to form a raid group. You know, like there is in basically every other MMO on the market.
There isn’t.
So we have Commander books. They cost gold, so are purchased usually by guilds that take up collections. Yes, it’s the worst, dumbest, most awkward design in MMO history. But it’s GW2. You could go play a game with better tools that you don’t like as much as GW2. Or just deal with GW2. /shrug
Making up some system for wvw-achievement to get you books — that just doesn’t seem like it’ll work at all, and really overestimates what wvw really takes. And is completely irrelevant to a thread that’s about commander books in pve.
I don’t mean to be a dread Cassandra, but…
Last time something like this happened, a bunch of karkas invaded Lion’s Arch.
Ya know, they wouldn’t even have to tell you it was “underflow.” I guess that term just doesn’t sound good to me. The zones could just be listed as “Queensdale 1, Queensdale 2, etc.” The venerable Age of Conan, which was even buggier than GW2, managed multiple instances of zones.
Karma in wvw flows in quickly, especially compared to instance and open world pve. The main thing is to be certain you get your daily, which you can do in wvw zones easily.
The Invader’s set is The WvW gear to attain. I think some more options for karma gear would be good for the game, especially some weapons, but I think it’s important that badges of honor be the defining/pinnacle of wvw because they’re exclusive to wvw.
Of all things, I think the list is missing out on the main things that have hindered wvw from being very good and declining since launch. The big problem with wvw is the entire meta has been about bugs hacks and glitches. 100% of the attention from developers has been about removing exploits.
My conclusion about wvwvw is Planetside 2 is just plain better, largely because I don’t suffer culling there. The reason it’s better is that is all that PS2 is about, whereas GW2 is a pve game with great pvp into which they wedged wvw, which is neither. It’s the forgotten minority side of GW2. If you really like wvw type combat, you should play a game where it’s central to the design/development.
I’m afraid it’s a place where the wvw subsection of the game impacts the other aspects.
While there could be a couple servers based in GMT +10 or thereabouts, how would you manage their battlegroups?
This “I quit” post reads like a suicide note. The anguish, the self-loathing at the travesty of waste. I can hear My Chemical Romance in the background.
Go gently, Togashi Jack.
I’m on SSD. Doesn’t seem to help with GW2. Definitely a quality of life thing elsewhere tho.
They do feel long to me, too. I find it hard to resist alt tabbing to check email or something while we wait…
Not sure what’s being referred to here.
I got an 80 exotic scepter the other day as a drop. It’s account-bound, so can’t TP it. Both my 80s that can use scepters already have one, n the other don’t use ’em. But it was salvagable, got 2 ectos out of it.
Is this what you mean, or are referring to stuff like the tonics that give you a temporary costume, or what?
My third 80 had 3 exotic weapons and a full suit of exotic runed armor (and rare jewels except 1 exotic) before hitting 80.
That’s how you’re helped on new toons for pve/wvw.
The awesome part of PvP is if you crafted a nice set of skins, you can wear them on a diff character, nothing is bound. But since glory doesn’t mean anything, whether you’re low or high rank doesn’t do anything for ya in-game.
I’m amused every time a player spends 100 gold and suddenly thinks they’re a subject matter expert on all things Guild Wars.
wut, as opposed to those of us who spent $59, and now are forums experts?
wvw has a lot of armchair quarterbacks whose guilds didn’t buy them a book, too
The game as a whole would be so much better if they never had portal.