There’s so many sounds that I wish we could selectively mute. I do want to hear some of them, like the shouts during battle. And I love in Khylo when the guy yells “Trebuchet!” But some of them really grate.
I really don’t find myself wanting for gold. I just play the game and get my material needs met.
I see gem shop for the fun stuff. That Greatsaw Greatsword was really cool. Not my style, but very impressive. I decided instead to use cultural weapon skins, not as flashy but it works and is “free.”
There is the gem store stuff that’s more quality of life – bags bank and character slots. I grabbed those early on.
I know from other games that I actually enjoy gearing up my characters, and would rather wear something that dropped or I earned in-game than to pick up something from a gem-shop or trading post. Fortunately, GW2 makes it easy to get gear, altho hard to get the fancy stuff.
The requirement to do level 1, then level 2, then level 3, etc should be removed entirely. This is terrible design for an MMO as it fragments communities and creates a painful barrier to entry. The 80 level system is already proving bad enough because although they tried to counter it with scaling/sidekicking, they didn’t tune it enough. Now they are just throwing fuel on the fire without seeming to even care.
I agree here. The fractal level advancement the way they launched it is very bad design. (let’s face it, ToSS is the only part of the Lost Shores patch that wasn’t disasterously executed)
Revamp all of it and then you’d not be so frustrated to want account-wide character advancement.
One axiom in video games — Games based on movies almost always suck
The only more certain proposition concerns Movies based on video games…
Guys, keep this in perspective.
Your character has over 10k relevant stat points. We’re talking about 60 here vs 24 there…
I wear magic find in Orr. But I get what the O.P. is saying. I don’t think it’s the difficulty, per se, but rather that there’s no fun there.
Designed to annoy and frustrate. Make travel take a long time. Be gloomy, make it take a walk of 1000 meters to get to that Orichalcum node that’s right next to you on the map. Crummy zone design, imo.
Again, already happened. When Tera came out, it was 50-70 bucks. When GW2 came out…Tera went down to 30 and is currently $20. And if you think about it, ANet didn’t just pull that number out of a lucky hat. Pretty much every p2p/b2p game is around 50-70 bucks on release. It’s not like GW2 is 65, x2 game is 250 and x3 game is 5. They don’t just pick a number that sounds right, they compare their game to other games and base their price on that. Because that’s what most people would spend on a game.
I tried Tera. It actually was $10 for 2 copies. Make female characters. Even at level 10, they look amazing and scantily clad. XD The game world is beautiful, too. It’s a decent enough game, just there’s parts that make it feel like 2005 instead of almost 2013. That, and there’s over-sexed character models alongside cartoon creatures and little girls (Elin) makes it feel a bit creepy.
On the topic of weapons pricing – I finally finished up my 3rd 80, and was shocked at TP prices. I hadn’t paid much attention for a while, and had assumed there was at least some truth in the “gloom and doom” of gear prices getting ruined by the big chest drops from the events. NOT! Wow prices have doubled and some!
Fortunately I had enough tokens and whatnot banked to get a full set of armor and a couple dungeon weapons. Pity for new players who’re just getting their first 80 now.
Is it a grind if you enjoy doing it though? If fractals were an awesome experience and players loved doing them would people still be so against the items you received for doing them?
I said it above; FotM is horizontal progression. The ascended gear tacked onto it is vertical progression. The response I’ve seen regarding FotM alone is generally positive, outside of the issue with disconnects.
What I’m trying to say is its not what you get for doing them that matters, it should be the choice of what you do and if you enjoy doing it.
How about we flip it and ask, why did they feel a need to give FotM higher tier loot?
The impression I got from all they’ve said about it is they were looking for a place to start bringing in ascended gear, and the Lost Shores update was when it was ready to go. In retrospect, they should have brought it out differently. To me it seems like a good place to make some of ascended available, but it shouldn’t have been the only.
Why they couldn’t make the rings also drop from Garrison’s lord and the back drop from Stonemist’s lord, for example. Wvw is a stupid messy side of the game, but leaving it out of game improvements is only making it worse.
I switched away from D/D elementalist and went with just stand-n-deliver style, rather than dodge-roll and whatnot. It helped a lot to cut down on the invulnerables. I wish the game could handle a more active playstyle.
Mathematically, the advantage of Ruby is 1% higher crit chance and 2 to 2.5% damage on direct damage. Mathematically the advantage of Divinity is 1% healing, 600 hp, taking about 3% less direct damage, and whatever benefit you do or don’t get from 60 condition damage.
I would give up the 60 power and 24 pre for 60 vit + 60 tuff + 60 heal + 60 cond stats, cuz all 3 of my 80s would get good use of it, and I’d have to run a long time with a regular weapon to statistically detect the difference in offense.
None of it adds up to much when you consider the math of the game (i.e. that gear is under 1/4 of your stats). Given the outrageous high price/popularity of Divinity, I’d save my gold and compromise with a different set. Ruby is not bad, and relatively cheap.
Back when there were top esport people publishing about GuildWars, the Divinity runes were popular, especially if you had 5 of another and wanted a 6th.
But the OP is comparing ruby jewels which aren’t available to pvp players.
Divinity is awesome, an excellent gear choice particularly for characters who don’t have separate sets for different roles. They cost what, 100 times the price of jewels, tho?
People switch on and off all the time, yeah. Red posts have confirmed that it’s accounts listed on the server, not currently playing players. We’ll probably never get the full calculation behind it.
If you did any stochastic processes* coursework, you might think the “fullness” meter would be a weighted value of concurrent users and total accounts based on a server.
*Markov processes, queueing chains, etc.
Right now there’s 10 of the 24 NA servers open.
It does vary by time of day. Early morning last couple weeks there’d only be 8 or so that were “full.”
During the Lost Shores weekend, a lot of people logged in, and the load went up to 90% of max.
GW2 is said to have a plan for a big release every month for as long as they can keep it up.
A lot of players don’t have much they want to do in GW2 except these special event activities.
I’m kind of confused by the top post. Looking for “restricted stance combat” — if you want to stay in fire and wait on your cooldowns, that’s fine. As you pointed out, you don’t particularly feel benefitted from leaving fire. So don’t. Just cuz the game permits you to bounce around, you needn’t feel obliged. Just like there’s engis who use the flamethrower all the time. You can even optimize your traits and utilities not to rely on attunement changes, if you like.
There’s more than one way to play an ele. Personally, I like the swaps. My fiance just goes between fire and water most of the time.
Yes, it’s a different, very moderate approach to progressing your character. There’s a lot lot more than there was in the first Guild Wars. So it’s at least something, and you don’t see people with a full set of 8 80s (yet).
But there’s no gating at all, except for leveling. No keys, no “hell levels,” no exponential increase in xp requirements. In fact, in my experience it speeds up as you get closer to 80.
In other games I played, it was less of a problem that there wasn’t much end-game, cuz it took forever to get to max. (e.g. my first NCSoft game, Lineage 2, would take ~2500-3000 hours of /played to get to max, after which there was sub-class and nobless and …)
There’s a high skill ceiling to this game, and if you are very skilled you can exploit the lvling very easily I guess. In a past game like Everquest, it was also gated in a sense because the mobs took a long time to kill regardless of skill. In GW2, it’s a great thing it has such a high skill ceiling and the ability to reward vastly different levels of skill. However, they might have to find ways to fix this as well because like you said it can be exploited too easily due to the lack of gating.
Gating is something artificial however, and it’s ideal to be able to reward players with above-average skill. With new ideas come new obstacles to tackle.
However, I still believe ideals are the way to develop a game, such as the pure horizontal progression ideal that some players have talked about here in the forums.
PVE in GW2 doesn’t particularly reward skill in any form. It’s extremely easy to play, not many mobs to kill per level, and there’s no competition between players. The biggest difference in leveling speed is simply the rate of gain of xp — other NCSoft games I’ve played it tookittenerally thousands of mobs per level, even in intermediate levels. GW2, where it tracks how many kills per weapon, you realize you’re mostly to 80 before you get your 500th dagger kill, for example.
Moreover, GW2 most of your xp is gifted for other things. You can level up to max level and equip in a matter of hours without leaving town. I think it’s all great, the only downside is so many people got to 80 in the first couple of weeks and then many felt like they were out of things to do in game.
What aspect of GW2 do you find skillful?
The potential bad part of vertical progression isn’t the progression part, but rather that “gating” is often associated with it, where a player may be effectively locked out of game content if they haven’t vertically-progressed enough.
I have stopped played WoW many times, for periods of 3 months to a year, and I always can find a group using their Looking for Dungeon Tools. In MMOs is impossible to stay locked out of the progression, because there will be always people at your level, or behind your level, or way ahead of you.
The idea of the entire server population progressing at the same time and leaving people behind is just that, and idea. In reality it doesnt work that way. I have never in all my life playing MMOs being unable to progress because “everyone else is already ahead of me”.
That’s true for WoW, because WoW has always been easy-mode (and even then, you couldn’t enter Serpentshrine without doing a lengthy key quest, even needed key for UBRS and Molten Core).
In EQ, on the other hand, you needed to be flagged, and since there were no instances, guilds would deliberately prevent other guilds from being able to get flagged. Lineage-2 had an explicit lock-out system that was pvp-related, if you’re in the wrong clan you can only feed the enemy.
20-50% higher stats. Yes, we must get them now or get curb stomped in WvWvW. Secondly they are introducing many more items. This is only the beginning.
would like to know where you got those numbers. i have yet to see any official posts of any kind supporting those percentages.
easy. simply compare the items side by side. include the added stats you get from the infusion (most people thing that infusion only helps with agony resist). add up the stats and divide ascended by the base. voila. this excludes the better synergies with ascended pieces too.
The actual math shows it really doesn’t matter. Gear is less than a quarter of the stats that matter for your character. Most comes from traits and levels.
The most common ring you see adds 5 power 5 pre. That’s 1/4 of 1% crit rate and about 1/5 of 1% to your damage.
The improvement only matters if what you’re looking at is stats on items in your paperdoll. It doesn’t matter if you’re looking at in-game performance.
It depends what you put in the denominator. I exclude base stats, and I am looking at item to item stats. Thus, my point stands. I never said over character stats. I specified item stats. It’s your call on how you wish to represent the facts. I am focused on the items. Whether or not it matters is a purely subjective argument. I think these do matter.
Sure that’s fine, cuz you’re into gear-stats progression, like on the paperdoll, whereas I’m talking about in-game playing. And even if I’m just lookin at the paperdoll, what matters to me is the end-numbers, total power, crit rate, etc.
I wonder if the people who buy this ‘wizard hat’ version will be angry that they didn’t get the cute baseball cap or witch hat or devil horns. Cuz I’d totally give them mine, given how little I wear them.
Cept I wouldn’t give em my ballcap cuz it’s not cool to wear another guy’s cap.
Those people decided to buy the game after the release, so they lost the content released during the last few months. Thats what happened to me in GW and I wasnt asking for Tengu Day prizes, since I didnt have the game when it was released. Also didnt complain about the things I didnt get when I wasnt able to attend the events.
So same thing here – if you waited for the sale you could have it. But you decided not to wait. You could have it now if you buy now, just like anyone else.
But it’s just a hat, no actual wizard powers included, no Brittney14 either.
MMOs should just get rid of exclusive/promo and perhaps, rare type items, as it leads to threads like this.
“wheres mine?”
uhg.
I think it’s fine. I don’t think anyone here is actually truly disturbed, just making fusses cuz that’s what forums are for.
High-end fashion and cosmetics use this type of promotion a lot. Luxury items don’t really benefit much from having a sale, and it’s viewed as cheapening the brand if you do it. Customers end up waiting for the next sale. But the companies want to have something to attract attention, so they include bonus items.
Seems like a fine approach here, try to attract attention in the crowded Xmas games market.
In my world of publishing, it’d totally fall into “fair use” of copyright, not even worth asking them about it.
In general, if it looks like fair use and there’s no money involved, the proper approach is to go forward, make sure you attribute to the original source, and it’ll be good.
Do you understand what fair use means? It’s part of the legal code to permit uses like described in the top post.
I wonder if the people who buy this ‘wizard hat’ version will be angry that they didn’t get the cute baseball cap or witch hat or devil horns. Cuz I’d totally give them mine, given how little I wear them.
Cept I wouldn’t give em my ballcap cuz it’s not cool to wear another guy’s cap.
Another draw back to vertical progression is older sections of a game often become obsolete which leads to a growing amount of unused content.
“Wasted content” never troubles me. It’s there if you want to do it, especially in an auto-scale system.
We have a lot of it in GW2, simply because a new 80 will have less than 1/3 of the world covered. Myself, I’d really rather not do Timberline Falls, but it’s there for people to play.
It is a problem in games where content comes out slowly. But if we’re getting a new big chunk every month, it’s all ok here. In EQ1, my guild was generally an expansion behind in progression, and it worked fine for us (and they were still going strong last I checked in with them). Eventually, raid targets turned into single-party targets, so it really depends on the game and how gating works.
Yes, it’s a different, very moderate approach to progressing your character. There’s a lot lot more than there was in the first Guild Wars. So it’s at least something, and you don’t see people with a full set of 8 80s (yet).
But there’s no gating at all, except for leveling. No keys, no “hell levels,” no exponential increase in xp requirements. In fact, in my experience it speeds up as you get closer to 80.
In other games I played, it was less of a problem that there wasn’t much end-game, cuz it took forever to get to max. (e.g. my first NCSoft game, Lineage 2, would take ~2500-3000 hours of /played to get to max, after which there was sub-class and nobless and …)
Get in and try it out. Can be a lot of fun. Of all the RP interactions I’ve had with strangers, most of them took less than 5 minutes of my game time.
Like most social things you do with other people, there’s lots of different ways to approach it, and what seems like good fun to some not appeal to others.
In a game with /g and /p, you really don’t need to worry about people “trolling” you, if you don’t want it. /say means people are being open about it. Fact is, most places in Tyria are empty of people, so you’ll be fine as long as you don’t RP in the Lion’s Arch bank.
Ok, I looked up “put on my robe and wizard hat” — you guys are naughty!!
We have other threads about it.
Most rpgs have some progression to them, either “vertical” of improving your character’s capabilities, or progressing a story. With regard to GW1, it was notable in that there was limited gear progression that was vertical, and very limited time leveling.
Horizontal progression is a term for not having any vertical progression. I guess it’d be like advancing a story-line, except there isn’t really any in GW2.
The potential bad part of vertical progression isn’t the progression part, but rather that “gating” is often associated with it, where a player may be effectively locked out of game content if they haven’t vertically-progressed enough.
I like the 2nd idea. The first idea, basing it on achievement points, won’t fly cuz you can get potentially infinite achievement points for free (just apply a cosmetic skin from HoM to an armor piece over and over).
Is the Wizard’ hat much different from the witch’ hat from Mad King event (that everyone got for doing nothing if you happened to play the game that week)?
I’m surprised how much passion this hat has generated here. 100 posts, but no screenshot. Has anyone seen it in-game?
Y’all should make a post in Suggestions to add it to the gem store. Apparently it’s a really big deal. My server, you basically never see people in town clothes.
(edit cuz you can’t have ’s before hat without breaking obscenity rule)
In other NCSoft games you could see server capacity by using the bot programs.
20-50% higher stats. Yes, we must get them now or get curb stomped in WvWvW. Secondly they are introducing many more items. This is only the beginning.
would like to know where you got those numbers. i have yet to see any official posts of any kind supporting those percentages.
easy. simply compare the items side by side. include the added stats you get from the infusion (most people thing that infusion only helps with agony resist). add up the stats and divide ascended by the base. voila. this excludes the better synergies with ascended pieces too.
The actual math shows it really doesn’t matter. Gear is less than a quarter of the stats that matter for your character. Most comes from traits and levels.
The most common ring you see adds 5 power 5 pre. That’s 1/4 of 1% crit rate and about 1/5 of 1% to your damage.
The improvement only matters if what you’re looking at is stats on items in your paperdoll. It doesn’t matter if you’re looking at in-game performance.
I think there’s more and better-connected events in Human, Charr, and Norn. To me, from a design point of view, Sylvari and Asura feel like “rough drafts” rushed out the door.
Charr suffered from broken skill challenges and DEs, but the story and themes are the most Tyrian.
Ok, calling for server mergers on Nov 9, when almost every server was already full = a dumb thing people say cuz they heard it and thought it was smart in some other game.
Calling for a decrease in the size of spvp hot join teams down to 6 is completely stupid because there’s limit of 5 already, if you care enough to choose. He doesn’t even know how the game works…
The guy may have some great videos, I just don’t think this one is clever, well-done, nor offering anything new. But I’m sorry to offend, if you’re big fans of his, then go for it, watch it all.
the wiki discussion on this has some feedback.
from what i can unravel, it seems the 30% chance of heal might happen on crits only.
then " Sigil’s chance stacks like 30% + 30% of 70% = 51% chance to trigger the effect."
It seems that the sigils activate only on a crit from a specific weapon – so in a double-weapon setup, first 3 skills can trigger sigil on a main hand weapon, while the second sigil is triggered by 4th and 5th skill.
Observation in my case seems to agree with that – i almost never trigger offhand sigils.
Just a sidenote: I was testing sigils that have effects on the end of weapon swaps on my elementalist, and they do not stack. Both sigils seem to not work.
Out of curiosity, how did you manage to do that? Eles don’t have weapon swap option… (sigils don’t trigger on manual eq change at all, as far as i’m aware)
In-combat attunement change
I didnt think that was very good at all. He sounds like he’s reading.
Ideas are not interesting or innovative. Another armchair quarterback wannabe game-dev.
Your counter ideas are very interesting and innovative, I like how you touched on the points regarding him personally and provided no content to the discussion at all.
Just tryin to save you some time. Trouble with a video is it goes so much slower than reading. Watch it if you want. If the guy wanted an answer here, he’d post it here.
I like theorems. And if you’re one of the few people who watched Stargate Universe, doing theorems for a MMO can get you a job with our nation’s top secret intergalactic exploration agency.
I would say knowledge of whether someone is wearing ascended is relevant because if you cant even tell that the character has it on then how can you assess whether the reason you feel the other player had an advantage is due to gear or your own lack of skill compared to theirs?
You simply assume the former and deny the latter until prove otherwise? How…interesting. Id just like a basic idea of the facts that you follow in order to reach the undeniable conclusion that someone beat you only because they had on 3 pieces of ascended gear.
The other side of that come fm spvp where we all have the exact same gear options. Yet you see experienced players totally curb-stomping scrubs. With the same gear, fights aren’t even close.
Little of GW2 is about gear. That’s how they built it, how they marketted it, and with the basic equations, how it has to be no matter what ascended gear comes.
just wanted to ask.
in wvwvw, how do you tell if your opposing team is rolling with groups of players with full ascended gear? it’s not something you can tell by simply looking at a character.
tbh, it just sounds like a convenient excuse cos someone got roflstomped and had to blame something other than him/herself.
My experience in wvw, gear really doesn’t matter hardly at all. I’ve played fully top-geared 80. I’ve gone with low level, blue-greens. It’s about numbers, it’s about tactics, it’s about siege and upgrades. My staff is some lvl 65 green, but I get more kills with it than my exotics because of range.
I’m sure in some situations it can matter. But in gw2, gear just doesn’t matter anything like it does in other games. Full exotic set is less than a quarter of your stats, anyway.
But the genre, from way back in paper-pencil days, revolves around advancing your character and getting phat lewts. So that idea remains prevalent in GW2 players, regardless of the math behind the system.
And hey, who don’t luv a shiny new bauble? (even if it’s virtual)
I didnt think that was very good at all. He sounds like he’s reading.
Ideas are not interesting or innovative. Another armchair quarterback wannabe game-dev.
I think having precursors that you could obtain in a fixed manner would be fine, as long as it’s comparable in scope.
My belief, however, is that even if you eliminated the cost of a precursor from the equation, we’d not actually see appreciably more legendary weapons in players’ hands. Most of the people fussing over precursors prices haven’t done the various gifts yet.
I’m playing less, but not because of gear or anything like that.
Last night we got on Planetside 2 and had a blast. I don’t like my guild there as much as my GW2/Rift guild, but the game is really good. Blowing things up, advancing my character, huge battles. I wish I liked shooters more, but for big open-world 3-faction combat, it’s unmatched.
After that, came over to pvp the daily and wvw with my guild here. I can empirically demonstrate I’m better at GW2. But wvw, on the same computer with much smaller scale battles, it just doesn’t play as well. We portalled in and took a keep, I’m AoEing invisible opponents who can’t see me either.
I wish there were something like PS2 that’s set in more of a GW type setting. Hopefully someday.
GW2 was advertised, and you still hear Colin Johanson saying similar things, that you can play with your friends anywhere, just like in GW1. At launch, you couldn’t guest, but if servers weren’t full, you could hop around. It’s only gone downhill since then. First took away the ability to jump over and back the same day. Now it’s a full week cooldown with its own assortment of bugs. The only slight relief is that a lot fewer servers are “Full” lately.
So many parts of the game aren’t yet ready for launch….
My first 80 was a ranger. I still have him of course, but he often falls off the login-screen. My first 50-win achievement on a character was a thief who’s now relegated to storage.
I’m spending my play time on my guardian (2nd 80) and ele (who’ll hit 80 this weekend, unless we get distracted by pvp).
Questions like this often are best answered by going to the mists and equipping. you can test ‘em out for free. There’s golems that don’t strike back and targets that do to choose from, aoe and single.
Other things to ascertain — does it only work on abilites using that particular weapon, or also the other-hand? (there’s examples of each n the sigil world) Does it proc from utility?
I haven’t personally tested that one. Never trust a tooltip.
It’s not all that hard to get your weapons, such a small thing in your life as a GW2 player.
It’s not gonna be “fair,” because each profession has to deal with their own abilities and tradeoffs.
The only place where the game developers set the price is with currency-bought weapons, and they DID make 2H cost more. Not double, but 130%. Seems fair enough to me.
How about Engi and Ele? Shouldn’t they have to pay double what everyone else does because they don’t weapon-swap?
soulesswanderer,
Simple solution. Simple script. Send everyone a chest (if you want to be picky, send the chest just to the ones who did not got it from the mail today).
Have a look. Simple script crashes server and bungles the distribution. Simple script is not their forte.
Why not giving a chest to whomever did not got 1 today by mail?
Any sense of the history of this fiasco would lead to the prediction — they could spend weeks on it, execute it, and not only would it crash the servers, but it’ll distribute to all the wrong people all over again.
I think them fixating on the chest/loot isn’t helping assuage the disappointment.
Better to apologize and move ahead.
I took an indefinite break from the game due to the Lost Shores Event. However, I did received my Karka Chest in the mail and I think that Anet resolved this issue sufficiently enough that I will return to the game at the Winter event. While I will not be spending money in the gem store for a few months (since I spent that money on other games when I did not think I was returning to GW2), I will be supporting GW2 again sometime next year if all goes well.
Teep
P.S. No more one-date/time events.
Welcome back.
I hope ArenaNet is learning. Big one-date/time events is just not in their wheelhouse.
The cool thing is a player can quit and come back easily, see if it’s regained its lost luster. I really like that GW2 isn’t a commitment the way other MMOs often are.
What I think is quite unfair is that this event, whether you liked it or not, was absolutely free, provided great rewards (if you got them), and was bundled with a ton of OTHER new FREE content.
NOBODY playing the game lost out on anything. You know what I think? I think Arenanet should have never rewarded anyone with anything because none of you guys appreciate their efforts. And every time they try to make things right, you piddle all over them (and yourself in the process).
I’m just saying that everyone is being a weeeeeeee bit melodramatic and overly sensitive.
They’re adding new ways to get precursors, precursors were not even close to a guaranteed get from the chests, none of the items are anything better than what you could craft on your own (relatively cheaply), and none of the game’s content even makes you feel like you need a full set of exotics to survive to begin with. Especially if you play with any other people.
I’m sure they know how you guys feel. How could you not by looking at the topics alone? Calm down, send a ticket, if they deny you appeal their decision with proof if you really really think you MUST have a karka chest, or drop the game and go play something that you don’t care so much about.
Because in the end, if you didn’t LOVE the game, why are you so mad?
I agree. It is getting a little out of hand in my personal opinion. But like they say, you give people an inch and they will walk aaaaalll over you. Its like giving into the spoiled child, one day you will have to put your foot down.
Using your foot on a child… good emotion there.
I get the sentiment, but I think it’s off base to think of patches and content releases in a paid-for MMO as “free.” These updates are free only in the sense that the car-wash I get at my garage is ‘free’ or the breakfast that comes with a motel room is ‘free.’ I have a receipt that shows it was purchased…