It wouldn’t be the same as Lion’s Arch at all imo. The reason people go to Lion’s Arch to form groups right now is because it’s the only sensible place to go other than the map where the dungeon of interest is. But it doesn’t work the other way around. Many people are in Lion’s Arch for reasons other than looking for groups – crafting, mystic forge, running using it to get somewhere else, etc. Right now, even asking between the dungeon map and Lion’s Arch, it can easily take me more than 30 minutes to get a group together – and that’s assuming I even manage to get a group together in the first place.
Having a specific area for each dungeon that is cross server would be quite different because if you head there, you know that everyone there is there to, well, run the dungeon.
I don’t really think putting in a cross server list of players would be that big a stretch either. Think about what the guild screen does right now – you can see a list of players, their status (online/offline, representing/not representing, away/lfg), their class, their location, their profession levels, etc. This works across servers – it doesn’t even matter if you’re in EU or NA. Compiling a list of players who have their status set to, say, LFG/TA, across all the servers or even just one server, should not be a problem.
Other than the fact that a lot of people don’t know about it, the current LFG tells you absolutely nothing useful and is inconvenient to use. Why are you looking for a group? What if I want to look for a group to do something in another map you’ve completed, while I continue to explore this map? What are you even? The idea that the current LFG tool could have ever been deemed sufficient and useful boggles my mind. It fails in so many different ways, and is something that I assume was rushed out the door.
Quote from Colin Johanson:
“I’ll point out ironically, when we first turned on DoA back in Gw1 the posts you’re seeing in this forum from a few folks about difficulty were the exact same comments everyone had about DoA. It was “impossible, mobs were just tuned to do insane damage and have huge HP, there was no tactics to defeat DoA”, etc. I went back and read through the original DoA launch feedback and it was literally identical to the comments folks on the forums are leaving now.
We made the choice back then to stick with the difficulty, and give people time to learn how to play the dungeon better and overcome it. A few months later, people viewed it as the most fun thing in the game and totally reasonable without us changing anything.We’ll be doing the same with the Gw2 explorable dungeons, our own internal testing teams and alpha test groups learned to beat them using a combination of player skill, synchronous builds, strong use of cross-profession combos, use of cooking/consumable buffs (these make a huge difference!) and well formed player tactics. By comparison, after having months to play the game and the time our alpha was complete, some of our better dungeon groups felt the explorable dungeons were too easy for launch, we decided not to make them any harder given the expected player skill on launch.
We’re actively monitoring every dungeon and working on balancing issues we encounter appropriately. We’ll be keeping an eye on bosses we think don’t have enough varied mechanics to warrant their large health pools and updating them over time to make them more varied/interesting fights. We’ll be monitoring, and continually tweaking/adding to dungeon rewards over time and of course balancing where we see the need. And of course, we’ll be looking at adding more dungeons as well!All of that being said, the game is VERY new for most of our players, and I can absolutely promise with more knowledge of the game and advanced player skill, the explorable dungeons can all be overcome by being skilled groups. We’ve seen many groups do it just fine in our internal alpha test once they had time to learn how to play the game well. Just like Domain of Anguish in Gw1, it takes time and practice to learn how to overcome stuff as hard as our explorable mode dungeons, and that’s exactly the kind of players they are designed for.
If DoA was any indication, a couple months from now, many of you will likely be posting saying most of the dungeons are too easy and you need better challenges.”
That quote means absolutely nothing to me.
To me, dungeons aren’t hard and challenging. They aren’t really fun, either. They’re tedious. They’re made artificially longer and “difficult” by having enormous health pools. Many of the bosses are simple and easy, but take a long time to burn down. Some bosses you can basically AFK on. That shouldn’t be happening.
As someone who can play pretty much only when server population is at it’s lowest, yes please.
It doesn’t have to be automated. At least make a server wide list of people who are looking for dungeons runs, and what dungeon we want to run. Cross server would be even better. Given the fact that we can have guilds that span both NA and EU and across all servers, it should be possible. Granted, I know that NA and EU can’t run dungeons together (I know, and it’s part of why I’m in NA playing on EU servers), but just making a point. I fail to see how this would negatively impact the game.
Forcing your players to stand around and spam in /map chat and get message limited is not exactly a smart system.
I’m pretty sure I spent well over an hour today just getting groups together to run CoE. That’s an hour spent that I could have used to actually do something interesting like explore another map, run a dungeon, bake a cake, or do some DEs.
(edited by omgwtflolbbl.7142)
There’s a difference in what we percieve to be a good degree or type of difficulty as well. If the mechanics are good and challenging, great. If something is “hard” because it has a billion HP, that’s not good.
For instance, I don’t think CoE explorable is hard. In fact, today I ended up running all of everything past the first Subject Alpha fight in a group of 4 (front door path) because someone had a game to go to. We wiped once on the last instance of Subject Alpha, but considering we had one person who’d never run it before, were a random PuG, and were a man short, that’s pretty good. Actually being able to complete CoE explorable is easy, especially if you’ve got a knowledgable group.
The problem is that everything there has a metric kittenton of health, and even if you’ve got the mechanics down it takes a long time. Subject Alpha, for being a boss you have to fight 3 times per path, has way too much health. Evolved Destroyer has dumb mechanics that just make it seem like a giant exercise in patience. Bjarl is incredibly simple and easy and you can pretty much afk while killing him, and again is just an exercise in patience.
Bosses need to have actually challenging mechanics, not just be giant health bars.
Here’s what his issue is with Stealth in PvE (I believe).
It’s not a problem that a monster continues attacking after entering stealth. The problem is that the monster still acts like it can see you perfectly when it comes to channeled skills. For instance, take the Wasp enemies that use long chains of rapid attacks while sitting in place. That chain is one long channeled attack, and you can walk out of range, and walk in a circle around it while it’s still attacking, and it will constantly turn while stabbing to face you. That’s fine and all, but when you go into stealth, it acts in exactly the same way. You can drop a Shadow Refuge on the area for a long stealth, walk around in circles around an attacking Wasp while in stealth, and it will still constantly turn to face you even though it shouldn’t be able to see you. Same thing with stuff like bow Volleys and the like.
Gameplay wise it isn’t that big a deal for me, but it does seem odd. It just feels weird that you go invisible and still be attacked perfectly accurately by some archer’s volley like you didn’t stealth at all. No one is claiming that going into stealth should make you evade everything or immune to damage like a dodge roll or anything, just that going invisible should feel like, you know, going invisible.
I also enjoyed the laser trap a lot. I kind of wish each path had it’s own unique pattern or something, but eh. It’s one of the things in CoE I look forward to.
I can’t stand Alpha. Many pugs are afraid of him, and he really isn’t very varied at all. Add on top the fact that he has a stupid amount of health, and you have to fight him three times in every single path, and it just gets tedious. The first time I fought him, I thought, “Hey, this is kind of amusing! Circles of doom everywhere! But dear lord he has got a ton of HP.” Then we had to fight him again, and he was basically the same plus crystals, which were kind of nifty but sometimes frustrating if he decided he really, really didn’t like you. I didn’t notice anything different the third time I fought him that run.
Then I ran a different path, and had to fight pretty much the same thing another three times. And then again for the last path.
My goal is around 2100 CoE tokens for my weapons sets for my Warrior alone, and I’m not looking forward to fighting Alpha over and over. It just seems tedious to me fighting him three times in one path, and this is what I’m looking forward to least, aside from maybe the Evolved Destroyer.
That fight is an absolute snoozefest. Fire ze cannons, jump down, DPS the boss, run up, fire ze cannons, etc. I’m honestly surprised by the design, and I have no idea what the heck the thought process was behind it. For starters, you’re supposed to be escaping from a collapsing structure. So you ought to be feeling some kind of sense of urgency, right? Then all of a sudden, you get plopped in this boss fight where the boss simply sits in the middle of an island taking a snooze and does absolutely nothing until something actually gets close, and when that actually happens nobody even cares because the boss itself isn’t a threat. A more personal gripe is that visually, the lasers are pretty wimpy and generally unsatisfying to use, but meh.
Bjarl is meh. The fight is really easy. You really don’t have to think much at all, just another health sponge. The fact that he gets stuck a lot doesn’t help, either.
I actually enjoyed the Evolved Husk fight. It felt fairly unique.
While I am all for an improved/useful group finding tool, I just wanted to point out that you can run exploration modes without first doing the story modes. It does require at least one person in your group to have done the story mode first, though. Have that person go in and start the instance under exploration mode, and it’ll invite you in whether or not you’ve done the story mode yet. Technically you could have 4 people who had never run the dungeon in any sort of way before enter exploration mode as long as the 5th has done it once. Heck, I’ve only complete 2 of the story mode dungeons across my 2 characters but I’ve been farming other dungeons in exploration mode.
You can preview all of the armor and weapons by going to Lion’s Arch. In the southern part of the map, near the exit to Bloodtide Coast (I think that’s what it is?), there’s a small fort area with a bunch of Asura gates leading to WvW as well as a ton of vendors just lined up. Those vendors take dungeon tokens that are received by running exploration modes of different dungeons. Each vendor only takes one kind of dungeon token, and the armor/weapons that vendor provides is based on that dungeon. Just right click and preview to see what you might want to work towards.
Also, if you want to preview the armors, go to the second tab to see the level 80 versions of the armor, which actually have their own unique skins. I think the lower level versions use a generic appearance.
I highly doubt there is, but if there is some sort of way to, I’d greatly appreciate it.
If you’re confused as to what I’m talking about, I’m referring to how you can attack a mob, and they’ll…. well, flinch. Sometimes, they’ll flinch in the middle of an attack animation (seemingly without the attack being interrupted), and at times it can make figuring out when to dodge very annoying. Add on top of that a million effects from a bunch of different people as well as lag, and suddenly I’ve got this Ettin who went from flinching to suddenly pulling out the fastest ground pound ever and flooring me. Even more annoying if the target in question is something relatively small (like a human or asuran boss).
So if your grandma/mother/wife/significant other/sibling falls down the stairs and breaks the leg, you’re just gonna ignore them cause you’re in the middle of a dungeon?
My god the things people say
Erm… if a serious emergency happens that requires your immediate attention, chances are that the last thing you should be thinking about is whether you’re going to get your proper rewards for the video game you’re playing.
“My father is having a heart attack? God kitten I’m not going to get my tokens! Freakin’ Anet! I’m quitting this game!”
That said, life will always throw unexpected curve balls and it can something as simple your internet going out in the middle of a dungeon.
Anet changed the rewards system in order to stop people from farming the easy bosses at the start and to force people to actually properly play out their dungeons. That’s fine, except it totally shafts everyone who falls into the above catergory (has to leave) as well as anyone who is unable to complete their runs as a result (depending on when/where you play, getting a replacement party member can be incredibly hard). Add in the fact that people generally seem to have an incredibly difficult time clearing dungeons to begin with, and this just generally makes people unhappy.
Personally, it’d make far more sense to implement a system where you still get parts of your reward at certain intervals throughout the dungeon as you used to, but if you quit out of a dungeon, you are hit with a status that lasts for a set amount of time (say, 1 hour). This status would make it so that if you run through a dungeon and quit without completing it yet again in that 1 hour time frame, you will the rewards you got in that second dungeon as well as reset the 1 hour timer on the status effect. However, if you quit a run after that 1 hour timer is up, then you’ll still retain your rewards from that run (though you will still have a new 1 hour timer put on you).
This would allow for people to still be rewarded for partial runs. However, this would also mean that you cannot constantly milk partial runs for fast and easy rewards because you’d have to wait a full hour each time anyways (and of course, that could be adjusted), and having this status apply globally across all dungeons would mean that you cannot just hop dungeons to milk multiple at the same time. Granted, this could still be abused by simply waiting out that one hour timer, then running the dungeon of choice again, but this would significantly hamper both the speed at which you can farm like this as well as test the patience of any who would actually try to do so. You can also make sure people are much more willing to run things through to the end depending on how you decide to distribute the token rewards per chest in tandem with this, so that while maybe you could still farm the first boss or two of a dungeon, it’d be far slower and far more inefficient to do so.
If you had to leave a run due to some kind of emergency or the random meddling of life, then you’d should be totally fine with this situation because you’d still get rewarded in part for what you had done. If you failed a run and legitimately attempted another and failed yet again, between finding a new party and banging your head in failure in this second dungeon, you’d probably outlast that one hour timer easily enough, and you’d still get something out of your failed attempts so you won’t feel as though you wasted your time.
If that isn’t enough, if people were still subject to the current diminishing returns system across each path and each chest, that’d make this even more difficult to farm up.
For example, if you were supposed to get 4 chests along a certain path for the first run of the day along that path, and they gave you 10+10+10+30 for a total of 60 for a full run, and instead someone decided to farm the first 2 bosses, they’d only get 20 tokens. If they decided to run that path and quit after the second boss again another time that day, they’d only get 6 tokens total for the second run after waiting a full hour for the 1 hour timer to end while if they fully played out that second run, they’d get 3+3+3+10 for a total of 19 (or 3+3+4+10 to keep it even with the current 20).
I’d love a group finder. I have a pretty strange schedule, and I can only really play for decent stretches of time during the earlier hours of the weekday. This is also obviously when server population is not doing too hot, and so it gets to be near impossible to get any dungeons going. In the past week and a half I’ve only managed to successfully get groups to run 3 dungeon instances. Many times there will be 2-3 people willing to run the dungeons I’m looking for, but far more often than not I haven’t been able to get a complete group.
But that’s not the only problem. If I was only able to do the dungeons 2-4 times a week, I’d be okay with it. Sure, it’ll make grinding up the items I want take that much longer, but I’m not in any rush. The real problem is that to get into a group, I have two choices: either spam in Lion’s Arch and hope people are willing to do my dungeon, or waste gold teleporting maps to see if people in that map are willing to do their corresponding dungeons. I shouldn’t have to advertise/check two different areas to see if people are running one dungeon instance. Since I can only play during these relatively low population times, waiting around in map for a group can take well over an hour.
I really don’t want to spend my time “playing” simply sitting there and hoping that a group will come together.
The current LFG function in the contacts list is terrible. Not only do people not know it exists, but it’s simply has poor functionality to begin with. All it does is put you on a list saying you’re looking for a group; it doesn’t give any actual relevant information. Are you looking for a group to just run and complete the map with? Looking for a group to run story mode? Looking for a group to run exploration? It’s woefully inadequate.
I’d be fine if there was no automated dungeon finder, but if you want the LFG thing to be useful I’d at least like to see the list compiled between all maps, with the ability to put WHAT you’re looking for and what class you are (ex. you can filter yourself under LFG – Crucible of Eternity/Story Mode/Thief).
I’ve been looking into making myself a D/D thief that’s based mostly around stacking bleeds with DB, but I’ve found myself wondering about a few things regarding condition damage in general. If I’m getting traits that give me +% damage when I’m not at full endurance or attacking a target with a condition or whatever (ex. Exposed Weakness, First Strikes, Fluid Strikes), or using a Sigil that increases my damage (ex. Sigil of Force), does this affect condition damage such as bleeding or poison?
Also, does Vulnerability have any effect on condition damage, or is that only useful for direct attacks?
This might sound kind of odd, but I’ve put off playing a Guardian solely because I feel like the shield just doesn’t make sense. Not just because of the stats, but because it’s a shield that doesn’t feel like a shield. I’m the kind of guy who’ll play what they want thematically and stick to it, whether or not it’s actually optimal from a min-max perspective. I rolled a Rifle/Longbow Warrior all the way to 80 and am still wearing level 50 armor in 80 zones + dungeons (it’ll get transmuted eventually!) after scrapping my Ranger because I absolutely hated the pewpewpew rapid fire of the Shortbow (both the sound and what I feel like is a totally unnatural and odd rate of fire).
When I tried rolling a Guardian a few days after hitting 80 on my Warrior, I planned from the start to go GS and Sword/Shield, because again, that’s just sort of the setup I like. May not be optimal, but that’s not really what I care about. After a few levels, though, I just simply put the character aside. The shield made absolutely no sense thematically, and it just bugged the crap out of me. With the shield, I could either:
A) Fire a wave of magical energy in front of me, or
B) Create a big magical bubble around me that defended against ranged attacks
Both of these things are something I’d expect from something like the focus, but not from a shield. Shoot out/throw a magical wave of protective energy? Definitely sounds like something right up the focus’s alley. Heck, it already shoots out a beam of light via its #4. And it makes far more sense to me that you’d use some kind of mystical trinket in order to create a gigantic protective magic field that is only good against ranged attacks (discounting the knock back here, as you can simply run inside afterwards, it’s not like it bars entry) rather than a straightforward rustic shield. I mean, if you were on some kind of fantasy magic battlefield and there was a hail of arrows and magical projectiles flying towards your army, and you needed someone to mass defend an area against that barrage solo, would you look to the dude with the big shield that he can probably fit maybe himself behind, or the guy with the weirdly powerful magic wand that does weird magical things?
Probably neither because they both sound shady, so I didn’t prove anything there, most likely. Personally, I’d just try to stack people on top of me and go into fetal position.
And on the other hand, the Focus gets a skill that… summons SHIELDS around you. Literally. Which actually directly block attacks. Sort of like you’d expect a shield to do, except our actual shield doesn’t, for some odd reason. We’re apparently so busy using our shields to create magical bubbles and fire blasts of mystical energy that we need to use our magical trinkets to create shields that actually do what shields do because our regular shields can’t competently do what shields shields do shields.
I mean, I don’t know about you, but that just makes so little sense to me that it throws me off. Not only that, but when you get even more into the theme it starts to make even less sense. I understand that the Guardian is a magical knight kind of character and all and so it does make some sense for him to be doing crazy magical things with his shield, but when you think about it in terms of group vs. solo benefits, shouldn’t the focus probably be the more group oriented item? I mean, I can either hold up this big gigantic cumbersome shield which will probably do a really awesome job of helping me defend myself (or so I’d imagine), but if I want to help out and support those guys over there on the other side of the enemy I’m tanking, I’m probably going to rely on my mystical trinket of +8 defense or whatever because it makes no sense for me to run over to my teammates and plop my shield in the middle of them. Especially if you were holding aggro, because then you’re just telling the enemy to come right up to your teammates. For the guy who mentioned that you should be on the other side of the boss from your teammates so that you can pop your #4 and buff them through the enemy without turning, doesn’t that kind of defeat the purpose of #5 for your team? You’re now positioned on the wrong side to protect your teammates, and if the boss has a relatively quickly cast ranged attack then you probably can’t get to the other side and pop it to act as a wall. If the boss is one of those immune to knock backs, then you literally have a skill you’re doing nothing with. Not to mention the actual range issue itself.