Guild Wars 2

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

On the other hand, there are signs we are being heard, and what we say is being listened to. The problem seems to come when what’s asked for is not exactly what we get . . .

I hear traffic, yet it does not inform many of my actions.
Point being, sure, there’s penny if evidence that we’re heard, though only the usual amount common to mmo’s on respect to that anything acted upon is to improve our gaming experience.

Sure, that’s a broad topic given how subjective the notion of improvement is, though would anyone care to tell me who benefits by traits being locked as they now are?

Anet does, by making a long and invoices chore list out of a mechanism that did not prior have any such gating. What benefit does this provide them? Illusion of content, strong encouragement to both play a lot and get a lot of gold to buy traits and accelerate your way toward finally having a toolbox to work with.

Do WE benefit by this? Does this improve the game experience for any of us? Not in any discernible fashion I can intuit. Worse than being no help at all though, or actively angers everyone I’ve ever heard say anything at all about it in game.

With changes like that being given the song and dance like they’re anything other than self-addressed gift baskets from Anet to Anet at our collective expense, I’ll feel warranted in looking to the future of GW2 with absolute dread.

Ever heard the saying ‘with friends like those, who needs enemies’?

As to whether or not they listen though, it’s very easy to put on a good show of listening and caring while only really giving a hoot about what one is going to have for lunch later. The gist of what the rest of your post said, I largely agree with insofar as that I certainly agree that very little can be made well if it’s being designed by committee.

I await the day when an mmo should exist that is genuinely made by anyone that A) plays their own game and has to actually feel the effects of their hamfisted decisions and does more than pay lip service to the concept of caring about the game experience for actual people rather than their contextually asinine metrics.

Whatever mmo devs seem to universally have in their drinking water seems to convince them all that they’re going to succeed where everyone else has failed. They’ll be the ones to figure out the magic numbers that must surely exist to explain phenomenon like WoW, if only they get the metrics right.

I love math, but Anet, if you think you’re ever going to find magic numbers that make everything elegant and beautiful in dealing with people, you’re going to be another punchline in a radically long joke.

My advice to Anet, muttered into the void as it surely is?

So relying so slavishly on impersonal metrics to make QoL decisions, or you too can be coiffured and sad when everything that seems so perfect on paper just make period so mad.

Life must be very mysterious to devs so walled away behind metrics that the concept of players being people might well exist in the same mnemonic territory as myths and rumors, but I promise, it’s true.

I’m sure trait locking looks so beautiful in writing, and provides such an elegant and actionable solution to several frayed ends, and some of you are just wilted with dismay and confusion as to why so many people seem to hate it like it was spit in their faces.

Look past yourselves. Your problems are not ours. Whatever elegance in resolution such a system provides is both invisible and irrelevant to anyone that just plays the game.

Or problems are your problems. We’re very noisy, not typically so stupid as some like to believe and prone to feeling very invested in the things we do in our games.

Imagine, if you will, that your office buildings were suddenly deprived of elevator services. It’s the stairs for all of you, and gosh, look at all the money to be saved by no longer needing to pay for elevator maintenance or liability insurance inclusive of that sort of machinery on premises!

And you’ll all get so much more exercise! Its so elegant and perfect!

You guys getting making traits such a manual slog o unlock them one by one? Comparably as inconveniencing and obnoxious as all of your elevators being forever gone.

Some very few of you might like that some of the time, perhaps more in concept than in actual reality after a few months. I reckon most of you would hate it from day one and it would only get worse from there.

It’s like that. Really.

Bah humbug!

Just kidding: Merry Capitalism Day!

Still kidding (probably): Merry Mithrasmas!

Er, I mean (Wot?): Happy Eve of Kwanzaa Eve?

Well, That’s A Bit Obscure For Some, No? (Maybe): Felicitous Yuletide!

Nobody Actually Knows What Yule Is Though (Lies, some do): Joyeux Noël!

That’s ‘Merry Christmas’ In French, You Hack (I know, jeez): Happy Post-Festivus!

This Isn’t Seinfeld. What Are You Playing At? (You didn’t get anything, did you): MERRY CHRISTMAS!

Ashen.2907:

naiasonod.9265:

Ashen.2907:

naiasonod.9265:

Ashen.2907:

I don’t agree that any of the changes are objectively bad. I do agree that they will be subjectively bad for some people.

For me they are better than the old system because they require me to spend less of my time going out of my way running errands.

You’re asserting that the new trait system requires you to spend less of your time going out of your way to run errands when, in demonstrable fact, it went from being no errands at all to a definitive and lengthy list of errands?

I suspect you might’ve overlooked that elephant in the room in the general reference. Some of their changes certainly didn’t make anything more tedious, but then there’s the trait affair to consider too.

I would be interested in seeing it demonstrated as fact that I didnt face out of my way errands prior to the change.

Perhaps rather than, “demonstrable fact,” you meant, “opinion.”

For me not only did the changes not make anything more tedious, they made things less so.

Its a pretty demonstrable fact that the old trait system was far less procedurally complicated, aka ‘tedious’ or, as most of reasonable mien might be able to broadly grasp, very errand-like, than the new.

That is not opinion. That is absolutely referable, demonstrable fact.

I’m not sure what foot you’re trying to stand on to argue anything contrary. I would probably find any attempt at explaining the thought process arriving at such a bass-ackwards conclusion to be rather entertaining.

I see the disconnect now. I assumed that when you claimed that I was making an assertion about the errand nature of the trait system you had meant to say daily system because my comment was meant to be directed at the daily system.

My apologies for not being more specific.

Ahh, gotcha, gotcha. Disconnect identified; clarification processed! In that light, I can well agree that about the daily system. I’d simply seen your prior statement and thought ‘Wot? Some things are certainly less tedious, but then we’ve got what they did to unlocking traits’.

Its unlocking traits, to be specific, that I was going ‘Err, well, then there’s this too. Did you somehow mean this too? I don’t see how you could mean this too’ about.

Ashen.2907:

naiasonod.9265:

Ashen.2907:

I don’t agree that any of the changes are objectively bad. I do agree that they will be subjectively bad for some people.

For me they are better than the old system because they require me to spend less of my time going out of my way running errands.

You’re asserting that the new trait system requires you to spend less of your time going out of your way to run errands when, in demonstrable fact, it went from being no errands at all to a definitive and lengthy list of errands?

I suspect you might’ve overlooked that elephant in the room in the general reference. Some of their changes certainly didn’t make anything more tedious, but then there’s the trait affair to consider too.

I would be interested in seeing it demonstrated as fact that I didnt face out of my way errands prior to the change.

Perhaps rather than, “demonstrable fact,” you meant, “opinion.”

For me not only did the changes not make anything more tedious, they made things less so.

Its a pretty demonstrable fact that the old trait system was far less procedurally complicated, aka ‘tedious’ or, as most of reasonable mien might be able to broadly grasp, very errand-like, than the new.

That is not opinion. That is absolutely referable, demonstrable fact.

I’m not sure what foot you’re trying to stand on to argue anything contrary. I would probably find any attempt at explaining the thought process arriving at such a bass-ackwards conclusion to be rather entertaining.

The new daily system is neither good nor bad to me – just different. For as strongly as I feel about certain other things, this is one I wasn’t unhappy with for how it was in the beginning, wasn’t unhappy with what they changed it to and now, they’ve changed it again, and it still seems alright to me.

I suppose my least favorite mechanic to do with dailies has always been the laurels though, so I rather prefer the new login reward system insofar as that goes.

Ashen.2907:

I don’t agree that any of the changes are objectively bad. I do agree that they will be subjectively bad for some people.

For me they are better than the old system because they require me to spend less of my time going out of my way running errands.

You’re asserting that the new trait system requires you to spend less of your time going out of your way to run errands when, in demonstrable fact, it went from being no errands at all to a definitive and lengthy list of errands?

I suspect you might’ve overlooked that elephant in the room in the general reference. Some of their changes certainly didn’t make anything more tedious, but then there’s the trait affair to consider too.

Most of Anet’s changes seem to be gift baskets bought and paid for by us, to themselves, with some pageantry they seem to hope will make us think any of it is for us or to our benefit.

I do not believe much of their design philosophy has changed in ways that will benefit us in the future, as I look at things like the new trait unlocking ‘feature’ and I cannot feel that they haven’t done far more damage than they’ve ameliorated in anything else.

I don’t dislike everything they’ve done, but the things I do dislike, I dislike so broadly and intensely that I basically don’t care about the rest. For the social circle I keep, this seems to be a very common way to feel.

Its hard for me to engage in civil discussion on it, in any case. I’ve been playing MMO’s since UO was a new idea. I’ve seen every sort of discussion anybody can ever have about MMO’s, and I’ve seen what they almost invariably amount to – screaming into a digital void.

You can’t reason with the void. The developmental gods like to tell us they value our input and its very important, but I don’t really believe that. I think they ‘listen’ to whatever people are saying that echoes their own voices and do whatever they intended to do anyway.

I do not believe anything we say, unless we say it in ways or places that cause financial disruption, means anything at all, because we, this forum and everything to do with all of it are enormously ignorable. Here’s the hamster wheel, run on it and vent and complain until you’ve exhausted all emotion that might’ve elsewise fueled figuring out something actually damaging (useful or not) to do about it.

Anet is going to do what Anet wants. If you would like to file a complaint, please press one; para español oprima dos. Please be aware that due to high volume, your wait time may be extended, though your opinion is very important to us.

I used to very much enjoy leveling some things up via crafting. That’s pointless now. I enjoyed leveling in EotM and WvW. Pretty much pointless there too.

The way traits are now looks like great game design for a game that was made that way from the start. Moving the goalposts so radically with how restore now have to be unlocked by way of basically going everywhere and doing everything ON EVERY COTTON PICKIN NEW CHARACTER before you can start on doing whatever else you actually wanted to be doing.

It’s great game design for someone that never played e game as it was for most of its lifespan to date – just more busywork and brainless tedium common to every mmo.

I have, sadly, been here since launch, and I liked being able to level by all the means available to me and not be essentially kitten to have so done. I’m guessing that we old fogeys have become disposable, cause, sure, my experience is anecdotal, but I don’t know anybody that likes the new trait unlocking scheme. Nobody. I only know a few hundred people that I speak with in guilds regularly, but I’d any of them like this nonsense, they don’t say so.

Why is that? Sure, my experience isn’t scientifically representative of anything, but why is it that I have never heard even one speck of praise even hinted at about this particular? It makes it very easy to believe that it’s probably widely loathed, but hey, I don’t know that for sure.

What Io know is that now, you level by map completion or you might as will go play in rush hour traffic. You can technically level by other means but, lol, you’ll have zero to maybe about six traits unlocked.

They’ve handed us a giant list of chores made out of things that never used to be chores. Did they expect this to thrill us? I mean, what did they imagine would be thought of that?

Did they envision applause? Praise for making a list if chores out of something that never used to be tedious?

The point squash made leveling feel very dull, for my experience, but not broken. Now, even accessing traits has turned into an epic grind. For every… Single… New… Character.

I’d thought I might make an engineer eventually. Now? Nope! Poof, there went all the money is have spent on town clothes and other gem store goodies for him.

Poof, there went my interest in buying anything for my existing characters purely out of feeling alienated in general by these sweeping changes in pet sure nobody was asking for.

Does that hurt Anet? Probably not. But it’s still true.

They should get out if the habit of making epic chores out of things that never used to be chores. If I have to explain why, there is no possibility that the explanation would be understood.

I’m still pve and wvw focused. I’ll go play LoL if I ever feel like being regularly ridiculed and abused, which my occasional experiences with spvp indicate to me is a majority of what goes on with it. Yeah. I stink at it, but procuring the experience to change that fact isn’t even remotely worth putting up with the people that seem likely to have been banned from lol for being too toxic.

There’s really not a thing Anet could ever do to change that. And as much as I realize not all spvp enthusiasts are like that, more than enough are to make spvp fall right off my list of things to even consider trying to do more than a few times a year, mostly just to remind myself of why we can’t have nice things.

In fine with pretty much everything except the way traits have to be unlocked now. That’s a wrap – I have nothing against playing the game, but you’ve made a long list of chores, Anet.

What do I say to lists of chores? Go kitten yourself, if I wanted a giant laundry list of chores to make a new character even vaguely useful in any circumstances, I’d go back to raiding in WoW.

So, I’ll never be making a new character again. I could certainly do all the things and unlock everything on a new one, but I could also light my head on fire, or slam my head in a car door.

They all sound equally appealing.

adozu.6398:

To be perfectly fair even if necro isn’t the best class for dunegoneering (possibly the worst) you could still run any dungeon with 5 necroes just fine.

Only groups where a necro shouldn’t come are those aiming for record-time speedruns. Regular dungeon farming a necro can fit in just fine, you’ll lose maybe what? 1 minute? 30 sec? over having another one of the “better” classes.

Those people that kick you because you are a necro are those that probably still think warrior is top dps and they need a guardian for reflection. Unless you are using condi gear, of course.

The problem as I see it is not that necro isn’t viable, but rather that it isn’t ideal for anything.

I agree with everything you say here, just not what you seem to expect this should mean. There is no function oriented reason to ever take a necro into a dungeon.

Personal friends might do so happily, and necro can do OK, but on the list of all the classes worth a slot in a dungeon run, necro isn’t just at the bottom. It’s dangling from the bottom by a thin thread of excuses, not reasons.

It’s fine for doing things solo. It’s arguably the best class for mass tagging in zerg farms.

Is it good for anything else? No. Not compared to every single other class. Not most of the others – all of them. Every single other class outshines necro in some valuable way, some in more than one, and that which is supposed to make necro done (pets and conditions) are two of the most pitifully handled and primitively counter-intuitive systems in the entire game.

Most conditions are useless against bosses. The condition stack caps ensure that it’s futile in zergs for more than about three condi necros to ever be on the same farm at one time. Pet AI is pants on head kittened in ways that bewilder the senses, and we have nothing even remotely resembling pet controls. Moreover, even if we did, the most powerful pets can be still leaves them so squishy and feeble that it’s almost comical to try to envision what it would take to make them legitimately useful in pve outside of solo I Do What I Want throw-away builds.

Zip on over to the death shroud mechanic, which offers yet more absolutely nothing to a team and isn’t even that great a mechanic for anything except saving yourself.

What’s it all add up to? If they delete necro from the game, nobody except hardcore zerg event farmers would have any practical reason to miss it. It would probably improve the quality of pug dungeon runs, because nobody would be bringing their random garbage necro builds into them anymore.

That’s not me being cynical. Its just plain true, and will likely remain true for the rest of this games life, as they clearly have no big plans of doing anything about it since it likely isn’t costing them anything to ignore it.

Jelzouki.4128:

Arena net, please listen to the cries of the necromancer community. We need help.

I think the only solution we’ll be provided is to play something else if we don’t like necro as it is. They couldn’t be more clearly uncaring about this or anything to do with it.

Lily.1935:

NeXeD.3042:

I think the reason people are so quick to nix 3 is you are just changing to much at once.

The Dervish Change was far more then the number 3 change. So its reasonable to assume that Arena Net could do something like that. They completely reworked the dervish’s primary attribute and changed 90% of there skills! That is far more then This!

Changing it would require care and effort though. I see no particular evidence anywhere suggesting that Anet gives two kittens about this topic though.

I could be wrong, of course, though necromancer hasn’t changed remarkably since launch. Traits that were garbage then are still garbage, we still have no pet controls or even significantly improved AI.

I feel pretty confident, after two years of watching topics like these keep repeating, that it’s not going to be very much different two years from now either.

Necro is never going to be the best for anything in any situation. Anything it can do, some other class can either do better or do well rather than poorly.

After two years, I don’t feel like I’m being cynical to assume that it’d take financial catastrophe, acts of God or civilization destroying asteroids to see much of any of this change.

To all those lamenting the lack of terrible penalties for dying in a video game, leave the house on occasion.

Reality has done amazing things with the most punitive dearth penalties ever. I hear that you can get jobs and have to do everything in real-time, and it even has nudity for those to whom that appeals!

It’s the most hardcore game you’ll ever play, guaranteed.

Viable? Yes. Ideal? No. I wouldn’t want to see one pug, or bring mine purging in mm.

I personally think they’d improve the pet system immensely by giving us some basic pet controls.

Even just attack and stand down buttons to command all pets at once would be great. Add a passive mode toggle and I’d call it OK.

As it is though, it can work, but you’re not going to be making friends bringing an mm necro on pug dungeon runs.

No point, op. You’ll garner no meaningful answers from anyone that has them to give, and just make yourself a kickball for the ‘mmo not for j00 skrub lolbro’ brigade.

My advice is to not play a game hipping it will eventually become what you’re wanting. Chances are, if it wasn’t what you wanted it to be initially, time and development will only exacerbate that, as seems to be the case.

Wish I had something positive to say, but there really isn’t much. I’m not a fan of traits being locked like they are either, incidentally. I like a lot of other changes, but that one is glaringly obvious in its purpose, being to inflate the amount of busywork we have to do without actually having to make more stuff to do.

Behold, the same traits, only now with 35,000% more running around to get them!

So, I’ll probably never make a new character again. I’d be very annoyed to have to literally spend hundreds of hours unlocking the ability to get to the point I’d being able to start being useful.

I keep playing my necro because I like the theme, though compared to my warrior, guardian and mesmer, it’s the mentally damaged runt of the litter.

It’s as complex as mesmer in slightly different ways to squeeze all it’s potential out, but maybe half as rewarding. In terms of straight damage, it’s irrelevant. Condition damage can be great iiiiiif the conditions can persist to do their damage.

My warrior, on the other hand, can do more damage in ten seconds than my necro’s minute plus worth of stacked bleeds and such can or shall ever do.

Part of the problem seems to be this expectation that pets make up for pathetic straight damage. They don’t. They can’t. They’re too feeble, are often instantly dead in Amy real fight and have AI issues. We have no sooty to direct or own pets past activating their special, which really stinks.

But, it’s basically been this way since the game released. It’s never going to be changed. My conclusion?

Don’t play necro if you’re.concerned with being good and desirable for teams. Absolutely shun it if you’re a power build aficionado. If you like pet classes, don’t look to this one to amount to much in that arena either.

Do play necromancer if you like playing for self indulgent challenge of seeing if you’re good enough to make the mediocre shine, and necro does have it’s moments.

Not more though. Just occasional moments of feeling pretty impressive.

The theme and animations are solid, so do play one if you’re concerned with style over substance and like the necro style.

Pvp with one if you like. Just accept that it’s basically electing to hardmode – you will work twice as hard to kill anyone and stay alive. There is no trade off upside if the challenge itself isn’t you’re cup of tea.

Necro can be fun. You just have to accept the realities that aren’t going to change about it and either love it for what it is, and get good at making it shine where possible, or play something else.

I miss the days when I wasn’t 20 years inveterate to driving a car. Back in the day, I had to grip the wheel until my knuckles were white, and it took me two years to get brave enough to drive more than about 40mph at night.

Anet, roll back time and make MMO’s and driving new to me again.

Anet is an NCSoft property. I wouldn’t be surprised if they get shut down out of a clear blue sky one day for nebulous and nonsensical reasons.

pdavis.8031:

naiasonod.9265:

Didn’t you know, op? You’re not qualified to determine what fun is, for yourself is anyone else.

We want more people doing D and E. A, B and C get a lot of attention.

So, now you’ll have to do D and E to get Shiny Thing 1.

There doesn’t need to be any more complicated an explanation than that.

I don’t think thats what the OP was trying to say. After his initial rant, and confusing followups, it turns out that he is basically saying that the rewards from certain content should not be locking a player into a paticular game mode. And that said rewards should either be A) obtainable in other ways/game modes B ) usable for more than one paticular item, and C) at the very least be able to be sold to a vendor, if not the TP.

I can get behind that.

Having now gone through all the follow-ups, yeah, I distill that out of it myself.

The stress and tension of pvp that so many seem to enjoy makes my entire body hurt, and I sometimes have to take a nap to make my headache go away if I’ve gone pvping much at all.

Part of the above – I don’t thrive on conflict at all. Even in RP, I can wind up feeling sick to my stomach if there’s a lot of conflict in it.

I really like the crafting system, even though I tend to be immune to the figurative carrots on most sticks that MMO-type games rely on near ubiquitously. I couldn’t care less about ever having ‘the best’ and no part of my sense of accomplishment hinges on my gear or achievements or what others think about anything much at all.

I’ll probably never have legendaries. I’ll have ascended stuff only because I can plink away at that exactly as much as I find fun on a given day, then ignore it indefinitely again.

I love the fact that GW2 is more skill-based than gear-based in so many ways, for so many things. Most MMOs’ idea of skill doesn’t seem like anything to do with skill at all (dogged persistence, yes. Skill, no).

I tend to avoid guilds that do things on schedules because I strongly resent feeling obligated by anyone else’s decisions as per what I do with my gametime. Its my time off; my let it all hang out and screw off time.

I love rolling around with pugs. It feels like more of an accomplishment to me when five total strangers can come together and make something happen than when the dungeon or whatever’s basically on farm. Similarly, I often wind up only really enjoying a given dungeon or similar the first few times I run it with the same group for this reason.

I really like soloing whenever I can. There’s nobody that has to wait for me when I feel like randomly going AFK, there’s no pressure to do anything other than what I feel like doing, as I feel like doing it. It feels much more like a big, wide world when I’m soloing, because I can do whatever’s there to do at my own whim and leisure.

RNG is a legitimate tool for many things, though it tends not to be particularly engaging. Overglorified slot machines don’t tend to remain invisible in their true natures for very long, to wit.

When the only relevant aspect of player engagement is essentially a convoluted ‘push the slot machine button’ action that has no possible impact on the RNG-bound outcome, there’s a real danger of the activity itself becoming a source of overall ambivalence.

Anecdotally, I have zero interest in the mystic forge for things like precursor attempts. Not in the smallest way to I find it remotely fun, interesting or engaging to just keep throwing rares/exotics into a UI and hitting a button, hoping the blind, uncaring RNG favors me this time.

To me, that sort of RNG dependency feels like a waste of time. Deterministic outcomes give a person something to plan toward, work toward and, if nothing else, be able to feel some sense of incremental attainment upon.

Throwing exotic swords into the mystic forge? Its the worst sort of thing a system in a game can be – forgettably boring.

RNG like that might efficiently solve a developer need for system A to achieve intention 401-B and enable outcomes 100-A through 999-Z, but its really boring and uninteresting.

I wouldn’t feel remiss in speculating that most people that use such systems do so strictly because there’s often nothing else they can do that isn’t even less deterministic in any fashion.

How SHOULD it be done, some would ask? Should things like precursors be guaranteed by any specific activity?

Yes, I believe they should, but that specific activity should be something like ‘Participate in 2000 spvp matches’ or ‘Participate in 200 wvwvw wins’ and so on – things that will obviously take a bit of time, even for those that play 18 hours a day and do nothing but whatever the specific activity might be.

Let there be ways to deterministically circumnavigate the slot machines. Let people do a bunch of stuff they choose to do that will absolutely, eventually, get them to a treasure box that might even let them pick something like the precursor they want as a reward.

Didn’t you know, op? You’re not qualified to determine what fun is, for yourself is anyone else.

We want more people doing D and E. A, B and C get a lot of attention.

So, now you’ll have to do D and E to get Shiny Thing 1.

There doesn’t need to be any more complicated an explanation than that.

Ah, that lovely lie that mmo means group or gtfo.

I’ve got nothing against grouping, but honestly, all ideals of forced grouping are the product of sacred cow thinking.

There is nothing about mmo that means anything less, different or other than that a lot of people can play at the same time. That’s it. Not one thing more or less.

That said, I’m pretty bored with Anet’s idea of making enemies more challenging by giving them insane hp and stupidly op attacks. The 80’s have been on the line for a while now. They want their Nintendo Hard back.

The mobs with challenging mechanics are fine, but yeah. If your idea of challenge is to just throw a multiplier on stats, you’re not really designing anything.

Frankly, I’ve been finding a lot of living story content pitifully boring due to that alone. Every stupid fight is just a waste of time. Unless you’re crippled in some literal fashion, rather few mobs are actually hard.

They’re TEDIOUS. They’d not more fun because I have to hit the thing 40 times while it does the same thing repeatedly, and I’m dead sick of veterans just being stat bloated blobs I have to waste more time pretending to care.

I’m loving the terrain navigation and exploration aspects. Mobs that are minibosses in virtually every respect?

Final fantasy 1 has a hall of giants in the earth cave. Don’t make everything a hall of giants. It’s really tedious.

I just pretend precursors and legendaries don’t even exist. That way, if I ever do get one, it can be a pleasant surprise.

#mentalgymnastics #deludingmyself

Ashen.2907:

naiasonod.9265:

Yeah yeah yeah. You don’t spend 4-5 hours a week getting to the raids though.

In this case, the grind in GW2 is almost purely elective. Cosmetic-oriented, not function gated.

Nobody has to drive themselves halfway insane in GW2 to get to have very nice gear,

Isnt what you do to get to the raiding in WoW essentially playing the game?

In order to get the nice gear to enjoy playing GW2, ascended (Im looking at needing three full sets plus seven weapons), with the drop rate as it is, I am facing potentially years of grind to finally have my character back to where he was a few months after launch. Half way insane ? Probably not (though my wife might disagree), but still a concern.

I suppose that’s a fair point, though it didn’t feel like it to me. Part of it was the guild I felt stuck with, the rest was just how the system itself works, constantly feeling pressured to go go go. Guild leaders that aren’t crazy likely would’ve made it a very different experience for me in recent times. I know it used to be a lot different in Wrath, though all I was doing back then was pugging ICC and kitten ing around thinking it was the neatest thing I’d ever seen, WC3 fan that I was.

Who knows, maybe its just a case of burnt-out talking. Could be that. WoW’s approach just leaves a sour taste on my tongue anymore. Its like one giant rat race of being antagonized by not being finished yet, and in the end, you’ve had some good times with the good folks you’re with and nothing to show for it except gear I, at least, had become disgusted to even think about anymore and an exhausted feeling that makes the mere thought of doing it again next expac sound like something that’ll get all of my nope.

I’d almost forgotten what it was like to be able to just play, not worry about being productive and indulge childish whims. I waste my time a lot! And kitten, I can do that on GW2 without feeling like I’m screwing up my entire guild!

I like it. I suppose it just doesn’t feel grindy to me because I’ve enjoyed the grindy stuff I’ve done so it didn’t feel particularly grindy (but really, maxing out most of the crafting skills is pretty grindy, innit).

Nevermind me. I’m no expert on anything other than what things feel like and seem like to me. I know what I think very well? I’ll settle for that and hope its good.

Dark Catalyst.1028:

I spend probably 4-5 hours a week raiding. 13 weeks without anything is an anomaly and I have a difficult time believing this claim.

Still, raiding is more entertaining that sitting at a crafting station in GW2 and by far, raiding is not the only end game activity.

Yeah yeah yeah. You don’t spend 4-5 hours a week getting to the raids though. I mean, I only spend a couple hours at work doing my job, but you’ll never get my job without six years of college at the minimum.

My job’s easy. I only spend maybe 3-4 hours a day doing it. Ignore everything that surrounds a cherry picked point and you can make it look pretty much however you care to present it though.

In this case, the grind in GW2 is almost purely elective. Cosmetic-oriented, not function gated.

Nobody has to drive themselves halfway insane in GW2 to get to have very nice gear, ya? I worked up crafting all by myself, and I crafted exotics all by myself. Consequently, I’ve got the second best gear in the game, and I didn’t have to join anyone’s cult to do it.

I’ll eventually have all the ascended armor, and I won’t have to drink anybody’s quirky Kool-Aid to get that here either. I’ll just need to go play the game.

Its a pretty huge difference from what it takes to have second best or BiS in WoW. If you raid, that should be kind’ve obvious.

In any event, I’m not saying GW2 has no grind. I’m saying that its a very different animal, and the grind here doesn’t at all seem to me to be nearly so forced if you want to function.

Also, 13 weeks of no gear for my buddy prior mentioned was due in part to our insane guild leaders, not strictly rng. When RNG isn’t being very nice and crazy guild leaders stick you at the bottom of the list of gear recipients because of reasons, going 13 weeks with nothing isn’t some sort of implausible. The poor guy had to get his locks t16 shoulders and trinket out of LFR because of it.

Maybe your experiences have been different. Honestly, I’d hope so.

The biggest and most vital difference between GW2’s design philosophy and WoW’s design philosophy, when it comes to all things gear related, is that someone running around in full ascended gear with legendary weapon is not monumentally more powerful than someone wearing all 80 greens. More powerful, yes. Dealing 2-3x as much damage, having ~1.5-2x more hp and being considerably more able to do everything in the game? No.

In WoW, a fully geared heroic raider is literally like a god compared to someone that’s also max level but only geared in, oh…crafted equipment and quest rewards. There’s not even any viable comparison. Its like comparing the height difference between a midget and a giraffe – we don’t need to break out the measuring tape to get the accurate gist, in short.

Its pretty much a constant problem. Some love it because they think it keeps people motivated and struggling to be top. Others hate it, hate everyone better than them and despise everyone worse off than them. Some just try to have fun puttering around trying to not care too much about gear, but in WoW, if you don’t have at least decent gear, you’re basically crippled from even being able to participate meaningfully in assorted activities, and will absolutely not be welcome to even try in most.

Blizzard makes it very time consuming by dint of lots of RNG to gear up. Here in GW2, things are rather deterministic. Personally, I love that. I don’t mind putting effort in if I know it’ll eventually get me somewhere.

In WoW? I used to raid with a guy that went 13 weeks in the latest raid tier without getting a single piece of gear. We raided two nights a week that he got in on. He wound up having to do LFR in his spare time just to get any tier at all, but that’s the way the cookie crumbled. Our guild was kind’ve screwy when it came to gear.

That’s the other side of raiding – the social politics. The guild I just recently walked away from is led by a husband and wife duo that run the whole show like its their personal cult of personality. You will be bright and bubbly and you will say ‘Grats!’ in guild chat whenever someone gets an achievement and you will do what you’re told in that guild, or ‘there will be consequences’. They like not telling anyone what the consequences will be.

You find out on raid night. ‘Ok, everyone roll for the <Linked Item>. Stickboy wins it! Unfortunately, Stickboy’s been a jerk all week in guild and didn’t bother wishing Lindabear a happy birthday even though he was online when she announced it. Learn your lesson, Stickboy. The <Linked Item> goes to <Person that rolled second highest> instead.’

And people will frequently put up with things like this in WoW to heroic raid, at least where I was at.

Welcome to WoW, eh?

I’m glad to be here on GW2. I feel like I’ve escaped an asylum wherein all the inmates think they’re the only sane ones, and now I can just…be.

its nice out here. So…unbelievably nice.

naiasonod.9265:

Seabreeze.8437:

naiasonod.9265:

Having permanently departed World of Warcraft recently and come back to GW2, I once again find that this really is a ruddy nice game. I’ll have to send Blizzard a thank-you note for finally managing to drive me off with some of their (I think) absurd plans for their next expansion – I forgot how much I loved just -playing- GW2.

Honestly, I’d probably give WoW a try if it wasn’t for the subscription (I really like Taurens, and would love to play them). That, and I’m sure the player base would eat me alive. I’ve heard nothing but bad things about the WoW community in general.

Speaking of which, that’s another thing I love about GW2. Most of the players you meet are actually quite friendly, making the MMO experience all the better!

WoW isn’t so bad if you have, or can find, good people to play with. If you’re going solo and relying on their dungeon finder and raidfinder at endgame though? There’s no shortage of people that deliberately troll those things to ‘punish the scrubs looking for welfare epix’, and the general abuse and mockery rained down by an extremely vocal minority of raiders, wanna-be raiders and other tryhards upon pretty much everything and anyone they deem to be ‘casual and ruining the game’ can be pretty flagrant.

There’s a lot of cruelty and hate between those that wind up identified as ‘casuals’ and those that try to identify themselves as ‘hardcore’. Honestly, most of the decent people are the ones nobody ever really hears from – they’re off playing the game and ignoring pretty much everybody except their guildmates.

Its one of the most horrible games I’ve ever played for the social experience outside of good guilds though. There is no forgiveness for being new and no mercy for those that don’t basically have an inveterate knowledge of how pretty much everything works.

Ask questions at your peril if you ever give WoW a spin. You might go through quite a few people that’ll mock you before you find one that’ll help.

It didn’t used to be that way so much waaaaay back when, but now…I have to say that wow’s ‘community’ has well earned its reputation abroad for being toxic and cruel.

Its hard to find the good sorts if you don’t know any going in. They can be found, but you’d better just have very thick skin and a saint’s tolerance for abuse if you ever decide to take the slog toward finding them.

Having permanently departed World of Warcraft recently and come back to GW2, I once again find that this really is a ruddy nice game. I’ll have to send Blizzard a thank-you note for finally managing to drive me off with some of their (I think) absurd plans for their next expansion – I forgot how much I loved just -playing- GW2.

Having played WoW for entirely too many years, I feel safe in saying that GW2 is one of the least grindy MMOs around. There’s grind if you want certain things, but they’re not necessary for anything at all. Legendaries are quite the long-term investment of grinding away (for most, I’d suspect), but if you don’t have one, what’re you actually out?

Some of them are pretty, but an ascended weapon’s considerably less of a grind and just as good in almost every possible way. Also pretty good looking. Scads of gorgeous exotics are handily available for a pittance of effort, and they’re not all that hard to get ahold of at all.

And even if kitting out in full exotics seems like more hassle than its worth, you’re still not a third-class citizen if you’re running around in greens karma vendor greens and whatever yellows you’ve haphazardly found and kept. If you’re good at your class, running around in ‘vendor trash’ gear’s not much worse than running around in full exotics.

Fractals are their own deal, I suppose. But if you’re doing fractals, you’ll get fractal-relevant stuff…to do fractals better with. /shrug

Personally, I love GW2’s emphasis on vanity rather than functionality to pieces. I think its exactly, 100% the right thing to motivate people with. Make the carrot functionality like they do in WoW and you wind up with your entire playerbase jealous and spiteful, hateful and selfish. You wind up with a vicious minority of the raid community acting like they’re the holy children and nobody really matters except them, the tryhards that scream at every imaginary benefit anyone but them is getting and increasingly apathetic peasant masses that have little to no hope of ever getting gear that’ll let them experience being powerful in the game.

All while being the unceasing target of mockery for being lazy, worthless, barely-human rejects on ‘welfare’ for doing the raidfinder stuff.

Trust me, if you’ve never been to the depths of a game in which gear was the measure of your worth, you’re fortunate. GW2 feels like I’ve died and gone to heaven, where the air smells like warm rootbeer and the towels are oh so fluffy in comparison.

All the classes have steep reward curves for getting proficient at build tweaking and knowing how to use their toolboxes.

My experience with my necros (of which I have two) is that they’re just plain deficient in a PVP setting, especially sPvP. I love rolling along in dungeons though, where I can focus on being a force multiplier in the form of raining conditions down like scornful laughter from the black depths of my necromanctic soul as well as doing a respectable job of helping offset damage to my party.

Soloing worldmap PvE on a necro feels very mediocre. The pets are braindamaged and evaporate like rice paper in a rainstorm, and if they’re attacking at all, its not usually for very long. Anet’s not very good with pet classes. Those that’ve played games where the devs understood how pet classes can/should work, you know. If you don’t know, feel blessed and simply understand that necro pets are kind’ve confusing.

Someone, somewhere, made them on purpose. Someone else verified that work, and many others nodded at it to get it included as it is. I’m not sure how that happened. It probably seemed like a good idea at the time.

Gluttony’s observations about the trait lines is true; we’re expected and mathematically balanced around having pets. I think our DPS is intrinsically lower because pets are expected to make up the difference, and the way conditions/boons work in this game is something that, coming from any other game, not only takes some getting used to but isn’t quite all its cracked up to be.

Necromancer relies heavily on stacking conditions, and in an sPvP environment, that’s frequently asking too much. PvE mobs don’t use terrain, don’t actively dodge much and don’t comprehend the meta-system of limitations on LoS’ing, counter-strategizing, creatively employing stealth and mobility and so on.

Necro’s toolbox is designed for PvE. A lot of the set-ups required to fully exploit a necro’s output strength are virtually unviable in small group PvP, and are limited to circumstantial viability in WvW. Pets, for example, are of no account in PvP of either flavor; they’re not even speedbumps that will so much as hinder a halfway competent opponent.

And they’re a vital component of the necromancer class’ overall survivability and damage output.

So…/five cents

This is about the most unintuitive and feeble-feeling of classes I’ve played on here. Put in twice the work to get about 3/4 the general performance.

Call it ‘hardmode’ if it helps you feel like you didn’t make a terrible mistake rolling one. There are ways to do it right, and the advice on this thread’s pretty solid, but until they figure out how to make pets not be stupid as a decorative chandelier…meh.

Damage output until well geared at 80 is lackluster, your AoE options are silly and, if you’re wanting something complex that scales well to skill at playing it, roll a mesmer.

Necro…I just can’t recommend it. Someone’s asleep at the wheel on this one, and while it gets less painful to do it right, it doesn’t really stop being painful.

/2cents

The process to get a Legendary weapon…well, it isn’t legendary. Clearly, its one of those things that’s just something somewhat absurd to do in the off-chance you’ve done everything else you cared to do.

That is, in any case, what I see it as. The process itself doesn’t look like anyone even slapped it with the concept of ‘Fun’, so I’d suppooooose the fun is supposed to be more in the having than in the path to the having?

Personally, I don’t see myself bothering anytime soon, maybe ever. If anyone ever does, and I know very well some probably already have, cheers to them, says me.

I’ll be over here, with my merely exotic weapons, doing what I enjoy. If I ever get so bored as that going on the Lolcrawl of grinding up a Legendary weapon starts to look appealing…

…by yimminy, I’ll go outside, or play some other game, ’cause daaaayum that looks like a whole lot of “I hate my life” in one package.

But, that is, of course, just me. Cheers to those that look at it and go “Omaigawd I must do this it will be so AWESOME!”

I ain’t that guy.