Guild Wars 2

It’s not 7 levels of fractals, just 7 episodes, something that can be done in a single play session.

It’ll take less time to do the fractals than to get the 50 www kills. (Which has been in the monthly every month)

Or buy the gold. It’s a cash-shop game, after all.

You’re talking about hot joins? People drop in and out so much that even if you find a 5v5 game, it’s prob’ly not going to keep 5v5.

Free tourneys are 5v5, of course.

And yes, the system is a discouraging mess to newcomers.

I fear even if the patch comes as soon as Jan 2013 that most of the pvp/esport people gave up awhile ago.

I get the sense that ArenaNet has decided to cull their losses and concentrate on retaining PvE players, since that’s the biggest and closest to complete part of the game.

Really the problem with wvw is it’s not very good because it’s still not yet ready for launch. The whole meta revolves around exploits and weaknesses.

Similarly, for the pvp side of the game, when you look up builds and strats and such, over half of it is from beta. People who were keen on it gave up and left because it’s STILL not ready for launch, even. Leaderboards, spectator mode, balanced classes with working skills…

It’s as if they feel since there’s no sub, there’s no reason to hurry. Well, I’m sorry, but the community watching for eSport possibility gave up already.

WvW, at least there’s no competition. But it is soo far down the worst aspect of the game, it’s a wonder people even bother.

PvE, pretty darn cool!

Maybe a little too patient getting core systems ready for launch yet.

Jasher.6580:

mulch.2586:

I dream of a Tyria where people recognize that about 20% of their stats come from gear. Where people just relax their pretty kittens about gear and put that energy toward trying not to suck at playing instead.

Translation:

“Hey guys, I know I’m contributing less, but it’s only a little less… please stop sucking while I collect my extra loot with my magic find gear.”

That’s not at all what I’m saying. Rude.
I don’t wear MF in party play.

But I do understand the math of GW2, unlike the people who’re fixated on gear.

Raine.1394:

These issues—and more—are why I’ve argued against monthly events.

The counter to this is that they have a huge staff and the teams for the one-off events aren’t the same. /shrug

Given that every single step of the losts shores event was plagued by performance issues and bugs, I think the sloppy code issue permeates all aspects of GW2.

I dream of a Tyria where people recognize that about 20% of their stats come from gear. Where people just relax their pretty kittens about gear and put that energy toward trying not to suck at playing instead.

In terms of button mashing, I think GW2 is better than other games for that.

In Rift, if I was tanking I gather up the mobs and go thru my button sequence. If I was healing, I pushed the same certain buttons in sequence, every 15 sec Radiant Spores… For DPS it was the same sort of thing, press thru your macros and cooldowns, don’t stand in fire and mash your buttons for max dps output.

GW2, it’s much less common to have a fight where you just stand and deliver. It can be intense, but I’m not actually mashing buttons anything like most of the other mmos I played, and have what feels like a lot fewer options of buttons to mash.

Teamwork really makes or breaks it.
I did a PUG for a dungeon yesterday cuz I felt sorry for these people /m LF1M for forever. It was a horrible group, decently nice people but just horrible in terms of gameplay. We even wiped, twice, and this was CM. People weren’t even fighting in the same room. At the end people said “that was a great run!” and stuff like that, but I think we were all thinking “I’m never setting foot outside my guild ever again.” Teammates dodging away from aoe heals, standing to eat the same attack over and over, never using combo fields, hello condition removal?

In a non-teamwork party, GW2 dungeons are miserable. It’s almost as big as the difference between hot-join spvp and a tourny team.

I don’t think this is about cookie-cutter builds. This is about bugs.

This is about trait combinations that say they remove conditions and convert to boons, but in actual game play they never give a boon and only sometimes remove conditions. It’s an expensive rune that says it grants all boons when elite is used, rather than saying “has a chance to apply runes when elite is used.” My sigil says I’m supposed to get a stack of 10 precision (up to 25 stacks) upon defeating a foe. Yet can go dozens of mobs in some dungeons without gaining any stacks.

Maybe the bugs are by design, a special treat for necros so they can really get into character, or represent the fickle sleeping gods. Who knows.

Don’t think we need another thread on it.

I think a lot of what ArenaNet has attempted to do with GW2 is very clumsy. Some great stuff that’s fouled by short-sightedness and failure to do the homework.

That we can only advance if we’re on a fractal that’s exactly our highest level is the short-sightedness that makes fractals not nearly as good as they should have been.

As far as I can tell they’ve never reimbursed anyone for anything.

Michael.6849:

By asking for a refund I at least gave them a metric they will maybe use someday

They actually do extensive data collection on players’ activities. If you don’t log in, you are sending a message, just fine. If you don’t do wvw, don’t run fractals, have low fps in Metrica Province… everything you do and don’t do gets counted.

Vote with your feet without forfeiting your account (in case they don’t make you qq forever)

I don’t think it’s much to ask, easiest monthly installment to kick out ever.

If you don’t wanna, it’s totally optional, it’s not like it’s a real achievement.

I think it’s low class to ask for a refund on a small entertainment item you bought months ago.

On the thread title — I would love to get some bank space back from storing dungeon tokens. I can’t bring myself to trash them, just for space, yet they only stack to 250 and they don’t intermingle.

I’d think instead of combining them all together, let’s add “currency” slots. Like we have karma, glory, and gold, let’s store the dungeon currency in a similar manner to gold.

re the trolling rant:
Don’t PUG. Almost everyone at this stage of the game who’s looking for a PUG, it’s cuz they either suck at the game or suck at social skills. gw2lfg.com is as sad as craigslist personals, doncha think?

If you’re interested in a particular dungeon, find others who are, too. Make friends, make plans, make your runs.

I think the policy, while being a little weird, works. It’s the way they (don’t) get the word out that causes disappointment. (a theme of ArenaNet)

3 months in a row we’ve had threads like this.

On the one hand, it’s in the wiki, which is the closest thing to a manual we have, easily accessible in game.

On the other hand, how hard would it be to put in a message of the day yesterday “Please note, monthly quest resets Nov 30 at 4 pm server time”

Genesis.5169:

There are very few fight in game where you stand there wailing away for 3-5mins on end.

Ha, it sure feels that way sometimes!!

Leablo.2651:

Yeah, I don’t really get the point of having open-ended achievement points. Most people as far as I’m aware pursue achievements as a form of 100% completion, giving out points for repeatable actions kind of ruins that.

I don’t think it ruins it at all. I still use my achievement tab to see how far along I’ve come. Not the points, but for example yesterday I saw I’m at exactly half of the diving platforms.

So the list still works as a check list. And even if the points were finite, there’s no scale to tell you that you’re 50% complete or whatever, it’s just a number…

BioFringe.7945:

Thing is that with the current system you can choose to do it twice in one day (but not everyday like that) but your proposed system would have potential to force players not to complete the daily on certain days (as explained above).

Choice is better than force.

Yeah, but…
Ever since they added those big jugs of karma, I feel like it’s a bit unbalancing. Depending what you do during your play time, the daily will likely be the biggest source of karma and a non-trivial source of wealth.

If I log in just to do the daily (and believe me, I have), I can feel just with that one thing I’ve accomplished something — ergo if I don’t get my daily I feel like I missed out. So I may end up skipping some otherwise fun activities to just kick out the daily.

The suggested modification would make it not once per 24 hours, but at least 24 hours between, which would reduce player income of karma, cash, xp, and trivial BLTC items. Which might have a positive effect on our gaming world.

I don’t feel strongly either way.

I think the cheap way to get endless achievement points is to keep applying skins (from HoM) to items.

Perhaps you can salvage and break even in cost, I dunno.

Bullfrog.1324:

So in other words, you should avoid jumping puzzles until 80?

You can always repeat a jumping puzzle. The chests will refresh for you when you return at lvl 80.

You’ll always get loot you can sell (or by some miracle, use), no matter what level, so if it’s fun, if you want the achieve, go for it.

Nonlinear.9823:

Kindread.9481:

I guess I do not understand your issue here …

Critical Hits do an additional .5 damage per point of damage you would normally do. So if you normally hit for 1000 damage, you would crit for 1500 damage without ANY +Crit Damage gear ot traits.

When you add in the passive bonus you get from the trait tree it increases that amount by an additional 30%, bringing your 1000 damage hit up to 1800 damage on crit.

I do agree that 200% +Crit Damage is a good amount to aim for (higher if you can manage it with your build) I am not sure why you feel anything less is a substantial damage loss. Prehaps I am not fulling understanding what you are calling “Long Run Damage”.

It’s about damage scaling and maxing your direct damage, glass cannon or not. You don’t need to be GC to have 50% crit rate and do 15%-20% more damage by not stacking as many poorer scaling stats.

At less than +50% crit damage your precision effectively gets scaled DOWN as it contributes to your DPS over the long term.

As for long term damage it’s simple. When you hit something with an attack, you either crit or you don’t. If you crit you will do:

P * (1.50 + D)

Damage, where P = power and D = crit damage % (as a , 1.5 -> 150)

You will do this X% of the time (i.e. over the long run), where X% is your crit rate, C.

P * (1.50 + D) * C

The other 100% – C or 1.0 – C of the time (i.e. over the long run) you will do a normal hit for basically whatever your power is.

If you assume that you’ll be doing the same dungeons, etc. in either spec then everything else basically factors out (same weapons, same enemies, etc.) and that’s what the difference in stats boils down to.

Simply add them together:

Long Term Damage = Regular hits + Critical Hits
Long Term Damage = P * (1.0 – C) + P * (1.5 + D) * C

Factor…

Long Term Damage = P * (1.0 + C * (0.5 + D))

It should make sense if you think about it. 0% crit and your long term damage is basically a measure of power.

There are some interesting things to note, like how well power scales, the relationship between power, crit and crit damage. The way D makes (0.5 + D) less than or greater than 1.0 if D is 50% (0.5). This is what irks me. That less than 50% and C is scaled DOWN over the long run.

It is not a trivial trade off. I don’t mind that it is a stat but it is a brutal trade off if you are stacking precision and sacrificing power.

To the extent I think I understand your conclusions, I think you’re mistaking the significance.

Formula has (bunches of things omitted for simplicity)
Damage = P + PC(1/2 +D). Noting that C is always less than 1 and D + 1/2 is likely somewhere from .8 to 1.2, the dominating factor is Power.

But of course most of our gear choices have power in them, so power is going to work itself out by ANet’s itemization.

I have a hammer that I like, I think it’s called “Briny Deep” and it looks like a boat anchor.

However, its animation is really messed up. It’s only held in one hand at a time, and when it’s stowed on my back, its handle is at the middle of my shoulder, extending upwards. It’s like it’s supposed to have a long shaft in the animation, but the graphic doesn’t have it.

tl;dr
I think the art team just doesn’t have the chops, or not enough development time to work out the basics of good looking hammers yet.

Images of greatswords are what get them listed on the industry advertising sites.

Crit chance depends on precision. Naked precision is 916 and gets you 4% crit chance. It’s approximately 20 precision for +1% crit chance.

On direct damage you either crit or don’t crit.
On a normal hit your damage is proportional to your power.
On a crit, your damage is proportional to your power times (1.5 + crit %)

So you can build up a damage formula with these as factors and get the gradient to see how changes in your stats affect your damage. But no one likes calculus, so…

In your formula you have power x (crit chance) x (1.5 + crit damage) (and a bunch of other things not relevant to this thread) as the part for critical damage

You also have power x (1-crit chance) for normal direct damage

When you have the product of three variables, this is similar to computing the volume of an object.

If you remember your basic maths, when you calculate the rate of change of volumes and things like that — if you’re going to max the volume (in this case, crit damage) and you have constraints (such as a limited amount of plywood, or in our case a fixed amount of stats that can be added from gear and traits), the inevitable solution is you want equal allotment to the variables. (hold the thought that power is in both parts of the damage equation for now)

In the case of GW2, going all valkyrie (which has power vit and crit) would be a bad idea, even tho you have huge crit bonus damage, you may never get to see it. Similarly, going all precision wouldn’t be good if it taxed your power and crit damage.

Finding the exact values will differ for each build, and then is further complicated by consumables, boons, and non-damage but relevant aspects (such as my guardian crits give boons which gives self-heal).

Saying someone needs 200% crit damage is not mathematically responsible unless you also take into context how many stats points were put into power and precision vs how many in toughness and vitality (not to mention condition builds, but that’s irrelevant here cuz conditions never crit anyway).

I think better counsel is that if you’re deciding between Knights and Valkyrie, you should prob’ly take a mixture of them. If you end up with 50% crit and 200% bonus damage, great! But if you’re more defensive or relying on Karma armor or dungeon gear, maybe you end up with 40% crit rate and 190% crit damage, and feel comfortable that way, too.

JaironKalach.4938:

Saldonus Darkholme.5680:

JaironKalach.4938:

You’re saying one thing, but implying another. I find it difficult to believe that even if they said the same things on here as they said on Reddit you would be happy. In fact, you continually refer to it as “political” and “canned.” So what content would make you happy?

OK, how about: “It has been brought to our attention that the last update inadvertently effected drop rates. We are currently addressing the issue and will have a fix for it by next week. Sorry for the inconvenience.” Succinct, to the point.

Perfect. Thank you. Let me try to draw one more insight out of you. If it had read
“It has been brought to our attention that the last update inadvertently effected drop rates. We are currently addressing the issue and will have a fix for it as soon as we can isolate the problem and ensure there are no side effects. Sorry for the inconvenience.”

Would that have still made you happy?

I know you’re not asking me, but here’s the problem I see with it.

The players want to know more. Tell them more and we then want MORE. and MOAR!!!!

Are the drop rates too high or too low? What were the drop rates? What are they now? What are you changing them too? What time next week will you patch it? What’s the drop rate on a completely different item, why didn’t you tell us how you’re adjusting it, or why rangers’ do such low damage? When you said the drop rate was 1%, does that vary by location or level?

The appetite is unending. From what we’ve seen, the developers’ communicative skill varies from not-good to decent, and their capacity obviously is limited.

MethodicMockingbird.6520:

Ayrilana.1396:

MethodicMockingbird.6520:

Saidor.7028:

You cant do it twice daily. You can do it twice on one particular day, but you wont be able to do it again the following day.

Daily means “once per day”. This concept is flawed unless they fix it to reset at midnight for every server individually.

Your concept is flawed because people from different time zones play in all of the servers.

I actually rescind my statement from before, because it wouldn’t solve the problem, but having people that play in different timezones in the same server doesn’t affect this at all. It needs a timer.

Oh I think I get what you mean —
So if I complete my daily today at noon, it starts a timer that gives me 24 hrs before I can earn it again. Something like that?

Mimizu.7340:

krojack.4920:

90% of items right now sell for 1 copper over what you can sell them to a vendor.

i love made up statistics.

oddly, anything i buy from the TP doesnt fall into this “90%”

It’s quite possibly close to true, because 90% of the items on the TP are things no one wants.

see, you can prove the truth of made up statistics using other made up statistics (and get a job as a journalist!!)

My guardian grants might to nearby allies on crit.
Giving boons to allies heals me.
I like crit. But I’m not really built for dealing damage.

The logic in the top post would lead to the conclusion that you really should stack as much power as possible because it’s a multiplier on both crit and regular hits.

MethodicMockingbird.6520:

Saidor.7028:

You cant do it twice daily. You can do it twice on one particular day, but you wont be able to do it again the following day.

Daily means “once per day”. This concept is flawed unless they fix it to reset at midnight for every server individually.

It does reset at midnight, where midnight is GMT. GMT makes sense because the UK is the middle of the world. That’s why it’s right in the middle of a world map.

No matter how they do it, unless you play in the time zone that’s designated as the index, it’ll overlap your real time calendar’s borders.

omica.6548:

i acknowlege your achievement in completing the map. But, depending on the server you play on, your chances of getting 100% completetion varies greatly. How about a one (maybe 2 for time zone issues) day WvWvW exploration day, where there is no combat?

Hmmm… it really would only need to be an hour or so to allow people to go get vistas and jumping puzzles, just leave the gates open… There’s a forum for suggestions, copy this there.

The bags do drop at your feet. For me the bags I miss out on are the ones that appear after I’ve been downed. Cuz it’s just not that hard to press the loot key, you can do it while you run, while you’re using skills….

In a game with no consequences for death (you don’t even pay to waypoint in wvw),…

I want my enemy to sit looking at his corpse and feel the bitter sting of knowing those sparkly bags will never be his.

Cuz I can’t de-level him, I can’t loot his corpse, or nuthin.

In terms of design — there’s a reason we get huge amounts of karma for playing wvw. Go snag the exotic karma gear, there’s some acceptably good assortment of stats, wear it til you earn your Invaders.

There’s also a reason you get coin and mats in wvw… It’s not like it’s pvp where the only tradeable thing you get is dye.

Before speculating who and how and why, it’d be handy to have the character’s player confirm what the gear is.

Both my 80s look like they’re wearing rares. And I do have exotic mf set for one of ‘em. But it’s skinned to look lvl 60 rare.

For what it’s worth, there is a website where you can commission a legendary weapon. But I gotta think if you’re gonna spring for a RMT legendary, you’ll also spring for the costume you want to wear with it.

Gilosean.3805:

I really don’t think there’s anything in gems that’s mandatory. Nice, convenient, good to have, yeah.

Just wait until after Wintersday and the gem ratio will be more reasonable. If you want Wintersday items though, you’re basically going to need to use real money. Anet’s got to pay the server bills somehow.

I don’t think reasonably active players ever need to spend real money on gems. There’s not that much to spend your gold on that could qualify as “mandatory.”

Give it a try, it’s not as tough as it might seem. I got all 4 maps on 2 characters, and one was level 60ish when I finished him. If you go at the right time, you’ll see very little enemy player action.

Whether it should have been included or not, that ship sailed long ago. It would be wrong to change it now.

PUGs are especially bad in GW2, even compared to other MMOs (where they are also frequently bad).

My guild is large and well-organized. We have an in-guild marketplace, have pve, wvw, and pvp scheduled guild events, just like you’d have a scheduled progression raid in other game. It’s also a good source for ad hoc groups or fun activities. We have VOIP, website, and a common code of behavior and values. I wouldn’t play GW2 without my guild.

Guilds are stifled by the weak in-game support for them, but there’s substantially more benefits than a +10% magic find buff.

krojack.4920:

I had about 200,000 karma. Wasn’t going to waste it on the horrible looking legendary bows so I ended up spending it on other bows JUST to get the skin/look. Other then that I found it useless. It might be nice for those that don’t or didn’t level a crafting profession that can make armour or weapons.

I have both my 80s with at least partial sets of exotic karma armor. You don’t get to select the stats the way you do with gold-bought gear, but it’s a good supplement to dungeon gear and can come with expensive runes.

The trouble is you keep earning karma after you’ve fully equipped your characters. Not that it’s a trouble (thankfully it doesn’t take up all your bank space the way tokens do), but there’s only so many harvesting tools you can use. I’d love for an option to get cultural or other attractive skins with karma.

From what I’ve seen, none of it is mandatory.
It’s fluff or “quality of life” things.

Myself, right at launch I got some for quality of life — expanded inventory and character slots.

In my experience, my own in-game wealth has risen substantially faster than the gem exchange rate.

Mostly the fluff is what’s seemed to increase the gems price. Increases come when there’s Mad King chests and the like. Plan ahead for Wintersday.

suppenkasper.5371:

I really hope that u can purchase Ascended gear with Karma in the very near future…starting to piss me off that i still cant run the best equip in WvW without farming lameass dungeons..

What’s wrong with Invader’s gear? It seems pretty good to me.

I think you can tighten the list

1) WvW Culling — I’d put this in its own spot because it’s completely changed one of the signature offerings of GW2 to the point that all WvW is about is exploiting this defect (used to be about hacking the orbs, too, til they were removed). Everything else GW2 offers is common in the market, but 3 faction large scale combat could have been a selling point. As a corollary, I’d add in wvw queues that are long and not first-come first-served, require requeue if you get DCd…

2) Bugs. Basic class-defining abilities and traits don’t work reliably. I can’t hit the ground I’m standing on. My pet obstructs my shots. I’ve gotten to the end of the dungeon and no final reward. My son’s story quest was stalled for 6 weeks cuz of bugged content. The first month post launch, the tp didn’t work, guilds didn’t work, mail didn’t work, parties didn’t work… it was bad.

3) Missin social content. Guild interface remains an industry-worst. Party still doesn’t work very well — get DCed and screw your dungeon group from loot, can’t always join story quests, getting to same overflow. Can’t preview trading post, I can’t sPvP with my friends unless we’re entering tournaments, almost nothing in game to encourage friends.

4) Basic game philosophy seems like it needs some evolution still. Balance classes. Do something to make big fights interesting or challenging rather than just long. (e.g., did the Dredge fractal and tried but lost count of how many complete revolutions of the room it takes… The long repetitive fights at the start of explore modes, it’s routine but takes 5 minutes of tedium, Spider Queen and Lt Kholer, snore). It’s nice we’re getting ascended and fractals and new/special content, but would trade half of it to get good new content that actually works.

cesmode.4257:

Arenanets big mistake was allowing free transfers for too long.

What I would have done:
“You will have 10 days of free server transfers, with one day cooldown. After this time, server transfers will cost X amount of gems, resulting in a one week cooldown”.

If I wnated to transfer servers in WoW, its 25 bucks(back in the day at least). A deterrant not to, but the option is there if I wanted to…

Server pops were never a huge problem there, and they have 100-200 servers.

The servers here hold a lot more people than in WoW or other games. GW2 sold over 2 million accounts, yet only has 52 servers worldwide, so about 40,000 per server.

It doesn’t seem like its feasible to do mergers here the way it is in other games. I remember it seemed like in some games (warhammer) you got a new merger everytime I logged in after a bit. But here it’d mess things up with the wvw ladder (which I recognize is a small part of the game, but it’s important to some players).

underflow, or even just finally putting “guesting” (one of the heavily advertised features of GW2) would help pvers

If gold were sinking, why wouldn’t we be seeing deflation instead of inflation?

That’s only one example. I think they were made to have different recipes on purpose. None are easy, but some are more difficult than others. That’s what makes ’em special!

Seems like there’s an order of magnitude difference in the TP value of precursors, too.

Mimizu.7340:

people who are “playing the market” aren’t.

they are ripping off other players to line their pockets.

“flipping” is not a mini-game.

if everyone who was spending all day and night cuddling the TP merchant would actually go out and play the actual game,
there would be plenty of cheap mats in the TP.

Anet needs to restrict market manipulation, otherwise everything will just get more and more expensive – flip after flip after flip…

Actually the real problem with that system is there’s no way to short-sell, no put options, so there’s no way that traders can exert negative pressure on prices.

I think Anet wants the market to be part of the game. It’s just not particularly deep.

You have to take the lesson from real life — look at the wealthy folks. They don’t work to get wealthy, they trade to get wealthy.

But if you can be content with a modest middle-class level of wealth, I find no matter what I do, if I play the game anywhere that’s not sPvP or a crafting table, at the end of playing I have more gold and mats than I started with. Relax, have fun, good things will happen.

HoD still shows as in the very middle of the pack (12th of NA servers) for population. So strange.

Karizee.8076:

ANet has steadily expanded server capacity since launch.

The queue times for WvW are biggest reason not to increase server caps any more than they already are. As you may be aware, only 2,000 players from each server may participate in WvW at any given time and some servers have very long queues, especially after WvW resets on Friday evening.

It’s 2000 players from all 3 servers, just 500 total per map.

And they sold over 2 million accounts for 52 servers, so there’s an average 40,000 accounts per server.

I actually really like it. It almost always works fairly well, too.