Guild Wars 2

MithranArkanere.8957:

No. Downscaling is fine. I keep saying it all over the place.

The problem is not downscaling or being able to get in a zerg.

The problem is that repetition works.

So people can kill the same champion oooover, and oooover, and oooover, and oooover, and oooover, and oooover, and oooover, and oooover, and oooover, and oooover, and oooover, and oooover, and oooover, and oooover, and oooover, and oooover, and oooover, and oooover, and oooover, and oooover, and oooover, and oooover, and oooover, and oooover, and oooover, and oooover, and oooover, and oooover, and oooover, and oooover, catches breath and oooover again.

What we need is flags in champions like EVERY OTHER SINGLE THING WITH GUARANTEEED REWARD HAS:

• Nobody can do the same dungeon path and get full daily rewards, they’ll have to do a different path.
• Nobody can do the same fractal range and get full daily rewards, they’ll have to do other level range.
• Nobody can jump the same puzzle again and get full daily rewards, they’ll have to find another puzzle.
• Nobody can fight the same world boss again and get full daily rewards. They’ll have to go to another boss.
• Nobody can try to go and mine he same orichalcum mine and expect it to be reloaded before the next day, they’ll have to find another node.

Why did they change rewards so you could not get them repeatedly from the same thing? Because otherwise people go to the easiest and fastest one, and stick to that, and anyone trying to find people to do other stuff with will have a much harder time to do it.
Have you tried to fight one of the Briban champions lately? Getting anyone to fight Robbary, or the Hylek priestess or the Demagogue takes AGES.
That’s why anything and everything with guaranteed rewards must have flags that prevent repetition within a short time.

But with champions, you can go and kill the same one repeatedly, and they will always drop a bag, and it will often be an exotic bag. And it’ll be the best and fastest source of skill points and exotics, and a really, really good source of gold, not the best, but so easy that becomes the best option for many.

Give them flags with ‘uses’ like a node, and the more you kill a champion, and the greater the difference of level between you and the champion, the more ‘uses’ you consume and the less times you can kill it and get full rewards. So a level 80 killing a level 1-15 champion would be able to get just one bag per day as you’ll use up all uses in one go (even if they are inside a personal story, since those are way weaker and easier o kill, yet they give bags too), but against a level 80 Orrian champion you may be able to fight them up to 5 times before they stop dropping bags, as you consume less uses of its flag each time.

Want more bags? Find more champions. They are all over the place:
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/List_of_champions

See? There’s no shortage of champions! Why do people kill the same 4-5 over and over?

Because they can.

Give champions flags, make it so players can see a Commander emblem across maps, and you will get squads of people traveling all over the world in a squad, and doing different stuff, instead a zerg repeatedly killing 4-5 champions again and again.

which will make inaccessible, because there is no global chat, so how will you know where and when the wandering zerg is? While the idea is good in theory, in reality it would just kill the train for most players, as well as cause other issues, like more complaints about regular people killing champs everywhere etc.

danbuter.2314:

The worst part of this game is 1-10, while you wait for traits. Now that wait will be even longer. I’m making sure any character I want will be at 80 just to avoid this fiasco.

Also, doing quests for traits is dumb. Yes, the first month, everyone will be doing them so they will be easy to get. 6 months from now, new players will have an interesting time getting anyone to help them go out to some out-of-the-way map to get a trait. It’s hard just to get help in Queensdale for the Franklin skill point. Trying to get people to change maps will be even worse.

Reducing number of traits and making them very easy to swap was a great idea. Adding in this unnecessary complication was not.

ease of obtaining doesnt actually improve game desirability. The most popular games are not actually the easiest ones. tetris, pacman, candy crap. chess. magic the gathering.
Its better to make a fullfilling system than an easy one. While you may the idea of getting your skills by pressing a button, its more memorable if you and 2 other people went out hunting the skills, and random people in the map you asked for help come. That builds community, teamwork, and creates a narrative for your charachter progression.

It enriches the world, and gives players reasons to explore, and do things in the world. Its a way better system for an RPG than just clicking a button. I may even make a new charachter just to experience the hunt….

but i probably wont because i have done it on every class once, time for some new professions anet.

Warlord.9074:

ORR is empty becasue ANET made the decsion that they don’t want players farming in ORR. They didn’t want players getting loot in ORR. So no one goes there anymore.

Becasue no way will ANET allow people to play the game to get mats and loot when they can buy gems and convert them to gold.

honestly orr dynamic even farming, though imperfect was a better means of farm than champ trains in terms of rewarding gameplay that fits the game. Farming events had people communicating, choosing where to go, traversing the map, doing a greater variety of things, and scaling combat appropriately. However, it was creating too many raw materials and direct gold for what the economic team wanted, so they destroyed it, and made it worthless. Champ trains give a more controlled amount.

It is not the first time the desire to balance the overall economy creates worse gameplay incentives, and it will not be the last. In fact i think it will occur much more often than not. The fact is what makes a good macro economy tends to make life a lot more boring/grindy

its kind of something that just happened, and continues to happen because now its the norm.
1) Its not because of the champion trains, many maps have similar numbers of champions, probably some have even more.

2)Its not because its easy, champion trains will be easy in every zone due to having a number of people.

3)Its not because the loot is better, it isnt. High level champion trains ALWAYS give exotic bags, and the material drops for other levels are ALWAYS worth more valuable than the level 1-10 counterparts.

So why is it so popular? probably because queensdale was already popular even before champion train, it had a core of people there hanging out. Also champ trains need numbers in order to function, So whats more important than anything else, is that it has a bunch of people there. Even if say, mount maelstrom had more champs, it would still be better to go to queensdale, because maelstrom wouldnt work until you convinced the community to go hunt in another map. There are a finite number of people who enjoy champion trains, so when you make a new map, you are making other trains slower.

Essentially most servers can only support 1-2 trains at a time. For whatever reasons, frostgorge and queensdale are the ones that got popular initially, now, it really doesnt matter any more if they are the best champ trains, they are the best now, because people go there.

Calys Teneb.7015:

Shiren.9532:

LastShot.4762:

Technically none of the npcs should know it’s a dragon(unless scarlet left some hints somewhere), all they can see is a beam shooting out of a giant drill, only players know it’s mordy cause we see where the beam actually lead to at the end.

Maybe they’d know something if Braham and Marjory weren’t so intent on disrupting the only person with any answers?

I’m really starting to resent these characters. I love the idea of a former Ministry Guard (Marjory) taking on the corruption in Divinity’s Reach (and following that story to Brisban if it’s linked to the bandits). I hate the recurring cast of characters with weak to no motivation to be involved in every release, replacing more relevant characters and turning the Epilogue into some kind of mix between a teen Sitcom and a Soap Opera. These “friends” are adding familiarity to the releases but they are not making the story stronger. They are making the story about them and not what’s actually going on (the things I care about).

I don’t care about someone’s sister or “insert joke here”, I want to know what impact the ley line had on Thaumanova, what’s going on in Lion’s Arch, in the refugee camps, in Maguuma, in the three Orders, in the Pact, with the Pale Tree. Tyria is so much bigger than these four characters.

In game, the siege of LA happened in a matter of days. Think of it as Groundhog Day. Yes, to us we replayed the events over and over, but in a very linear ending. One of the Lionguard talk about going in and taking back over during Escape, only to be told to wait until the trade winds carried the miasma out to sea.

For us as players, that was every hour, at least it appeared. However the miasma dispersion for characters didn’t happen until Battle.

In Battle, we killed Scarlet and the drill was blasted with magic. However, it didn’t explode until today. For the characters, that was within a very short period of time, even if it was two weeks for the player.

The point I’m making is that there’s no reason to expect the characters to know anything about Thaumanova. LA has just been reclaimed so nothing’s happening other than it appears. No one’s sure that Maguuma is an option yet. The Pale Tree isn’t under focus because they don’t even know what dragon it is. Yes, as a player you want to know that, but as a character in a video game, you’re asking for a lot of information to come too quickly to be realistic.

Its true that its not been a lot of time, however, they choose at what point to time skip to. Obviously some time has past, people some are back in LA some are still by the vigil, etc. They could have fast fowarded to any point that would most entice for the next arc, they chose to do like a relaxing round table type of scene. Which imo, is a fairly poor teaser overall. The season definately doesnt leave you on you seat and excited for more. The epilog doesnt round out the old story, or draw you in to the next. Its very anti dramatic in general.

Blockhead Magee.3092:

We’ve reached the end. Judgement can now be passed.

LS writing was horrific. The only thing found in abundance was not wonder and excitement, it was the rotten characters and second grade dialog.

Stop the living story experiment and build an expansion with permanent content.

sadly i dont think it would have been any better as an expansion, except maybe more editorializing. I want expansions, but im not to optimistic about any plotlines/charachters based on this last year. I guess its going to come down to the content creation. Maybe they can make compelling gameplay without a solid backdrop from the story.

So yeah, now that its over. First Season story, wasnt very good. the dialogs generally felt poorly executed, the pacing of the story was really poor. The climax wasnt that climatic. Recently been playing shadowrun returns, basically a old isometric rpg, and with just profile pictures some text, told a better story and executed it better. Then i played some user generated content, it was still superior to this entire season story/storytelling/presentation wise. There were some cool events, and some cool moments sprinkled througout, but overall, disjointed, poorly paced, Some what cheesy. Now i guess this isnt constructive, i dunno what to tell you.

I guess the take away for the story guys is, umm back to the drawing board?

yeah i feel bad, somebody worked really hard at this story probably, maybe more than just one, but it just wasnt very good..

proposal:
pet passive dmg boost

essentially this is a sort of comprimise for people who want their dmg back, but still makes the pet a useful mechanic.

essentially the pet gives a status and dmg buff based on the pet when its in passive mode.
HOWEVER
its still out there, and can still be killed, this makes the pet a resource still, that can be countered and still needs to be considered. I would make the pet get the same invulnerability frames while this is active.

Risks
might be too OP for ranged dmg. Dont know if it would satisfy guys who just want the pet to cease to exist.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

Katastrofi.5816:

Ummm… What?

It’s not entirely about time. It’s about effort. It’s about work. There is absolutely no deniability in the fact that, for a game centralized around gear in the end-game, if someone bought every piece of gear with real currency while skipping all the necessary steps (which, yes, includes some time factor) to obtain them through the designed means, they paid to win.

Yes, it’s a QoL thing. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t P2W as well.

Wrong again. If two different types of players have the same gear, one paid and one didn’t, it’s not P2W. I’ll explain it one more time to you:

P2W means Paying to Win. That means you pay real money to have exclusive access to statistically better gear than a non-paying player.

Paying $500 to get the same gear that someone got for free is not P2W, but rather Pay for Convenience.

i dont think pay to win has to be exclusive.

It just means you can pay to win. If getting the best gear is winning, and people can buy the gear, they have payed to win. the fact that others can work hard to win doesnt change that.

the fact that others can work hard to achieve the same thing doesnt take away the fact you can win with money, in fact it probably makes it more valuable.

lets take boxing, once one guy can buy the championship through bribery, that essentially becomes pay to win, no matter if others can do it through hard work.

Beldin.5498:

Katastrofi.5816:

There is no ‘true’ meaning of paying to win. You’re not wrong, but neither is my interpretation of the meaning.

But since you’re clearly not willing to accept any other form of argument, g’day.

What you and a lot of people here call P2W is just pay to save maybe a little bit time.
That is also called just Quality of Life (QoL) .. and that is of course a thing that they put in the Shop since those are things that DON’T give you advantage in a fight against other players.

If pay to save time is also P2W, then even buying kitten Drive is P2W because with that SSD you have better chance in the Champ Train to get a hit on the Troll, so you make more money in the same time .. ergo : SSD is P2W.

Or buying a Bankslot or Bagslot .. saves time because you don’t have to clean your invent so often .. so a simple Bagslot is alredy P2W.

pay to win is actually infact related to time investment. Its a classic tactic of pay to win games to have items that take 1000s of hours to get through normal play, or you can get em from the store for 5 bucks.

and keep in mind they slowed down leveling drastically in the chinese version, and they reduced the number of skill point quests, this means, most players will be needing skill points to have access to more skills. In comes VIP with more access to skill points IE more options in battle IE winning.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

No, the true and proper meaning of the term “P2W” is what I posted. Your “interpretation” of P2W is your own, thus is wrong. Sorta like saying salvaging an Exotic Jewel to get more mats back than what you put in isn’t an exploit, yet Anet sees it differently.

I get that over time, a word or term’s true meaning can evolve. But the original and intended meaning of the “P2W” term is “Paying to have an advantage over non-paying customers, thus winning”.

and vip is paying to have an advantage over non paying customers.
first lets look at the concept of VIP, its basically saying you are more important than some one else and get special benefits.

The advantages VIP offers are:
teleport to player
ressurection in battle
more skill points, IE more skills. In china they will have less skill point quests, you will have to be VIP to get access to some.
dont know what the rest means, like
convienent trading?

but yeah, its straight up paying to have an advantage over other players, it cant really be debated, you will have easier times farming, more skill points, special titles.

http://i.imgur.com/qZCwB0m.png

now you could debate whether pay to win is cool or not, thats a different debate though.

The thing i find interesting is how people who play in NA, basically are hoping that GW2 can juice asia for as much money as possible so they can reap the benefits. I mean this is capitalism, so i guess it doesnt matter, but people who would go crazy if this type of stuff was over here, are basically like, go get em anet, and make me some new shoes with that china money.

Wethospu.6437:

Nike.2631:

Spoj The Second.7680:

Thats not the reason they do it though. Noone enjoys do the wisp puzzle. None of the pure invironmental puzzles are fun after doing them once. Puzzles arent replayable or repeatable. And even if you somehow make them randomly generated they will still eventually become boring because theres only so many iterations that can be generated.

How is that different from the jellyfish boss? How are any of the combat encounters in fractals not wildly repetitive the 10th time? or the 50th?

I’m still enjoying guild puzzles. I think they have (a lot) more life than you’re giving them credit for.

The gameplay is designed around combat. Every skill and stat (excluding magic find) is combat oriented. Also combat encounters scale.

Now let’s take a look at the wisp running. Most of your stats, gear or skills won’t matter at all. Also it doesn’t scale.

Which one has more room for innovation and tactics?

gameplay is also designed around movement /position/control. I also find it odd you are against environmental alternate paths, since a fairly large amount of the high level fractals are as much about avoiding bad fights/climbing side walls, etc. If i remember correctly you used such means when practicing your solo lupicus encounters?

Back to the idea presented, i think its a good one. Especially if the content is actually designed for it, this way it can have real difficulties and risks attached to it. It can also swing the other way, they could have combat oriented shortcuts, where you go the long way with low risk, or the short way through a harder encounter.

As far as scaling content, i think environmental challenges can have mechanics that make it harder, like clock tower that spins faster and has water coming to get you. or enemies like harpies shooting you, etc.

crafting might be a hard sell though.

Dempsey.8760:

Chris Whiteside.6102:

haviz.1340:

“Lore people” will play fractals once or twice and move on to roleplay in divinity’s reach while more dedicated players will get bored because it will lack any sort of challenge except bigger numbers.

What should be done is to severely decrease the number of scales, the difference between 1 and 9 is trivial. Introduce complex mechanics for higher tiers (not just numbers) and make those god kitten cinematics skippable. Obligatory reset included.

I am so tempted to be hyper critical on this post but I won’t, as it isn’t this single comment that has been frustrating but instead a culmination of posts in the CDI.

Suffice to say this post emphasizes why this CDI has been pretty good and not great. In my opinion there have been to many posts that have either not been well thought out or the poster has not taken the time to get educated in the discussion before putting pen to paper, and more specifically too insular in terms of goal resolution instead of thinking about the broader audience.

I will leave it at that.

I am still interested in continued discussion around your boss/encounter mechanic ideas, Rewards and ways in which the fractals could be evolved moving forward to provide new types of challenge.

Cheers,

Chris

IIRC, fractals has been the answer to us hard-core PvE dungeons runners as “The toughest content ever!” So I don’t find it unreasonable for those of us that are better at completing these tasks than 90% of the community; to ask for improvements such as better rewards and an actual challenge.

I means seriously you just basically called Haviz uneducated about fractals when hes done dredge at lvl 80 (post reset) and yet Anet devs struggle with aetherblade at lvl 30. I know you guys aren’t good at your own game but come on, at least take the word of someone who does a bit more serious.

you miss his point, and it wasnt totally directed at haviz, he even said that in the post.

Point is, dont say X shouldnt exist, because this content is only made for this subset of players. The content is made for all players. You may like doing fractals at 50, some people like doing them at 10, some have been at 20-30 for months. While its good that fractals give something for the hardcore, it doesnt automatically have to have no appeal to any other player.

and yeah, if you want more development time, you got to hope they find a way to make some part of fractals appeal to more people.

Aggrostemma.1703:

My first problem is that every other profession can be build and be played without the “unique class mechanic”. There are thiefs never entering stealth and necros basically never going death shroud or summoning any minions. You can play an elementalist only attuning to water or a “pirate” thief with P/P and never using stealth. You cannot do this if you play ranger. You are FORCED to have and use your class mechanic!

The second problem is that I doubt that any of the devs ever tried the ranger class (only in sPvP). The new LA fights are just driving me crazy as a ranger. Basically I have no chance to save my pet but keeping it on passive and go longbow. All the AEs hit 900 where the ranger pets are staying. So even if I stay at this range and dodge backwards to avoid the holograms AE the pet stays inside the range and get one-twoshooted. If I dodge sideways out of the “energy beam of death” the pet stays inside! I don’t even mention the melee pets here since they melt before on the loading screen. I know this event can be done only pressing 1 but it’s still very annoying.

The third problem is in WvW. Here I doubt again that any of the devs every gave a zergfight a go. Pets are so useless here that I cannot really describe the feeling of the uselessness of our pets. They just don’t make it! They cannot dodge through, they cannot avoid AE’s, they are useless on walls and under them. I cannot even use the pets after the initial zerg engagement to hunt down separated enemies or support my teammates because 101% that I’ve already lost at least one of my pets in the first few seconds of the fight.

I don’t want to be forced to play something I find frustrating. And the current FORCED pet system is frustrating, annoying, illogical and weak yet we are bound to this system.

Ok the class mechanic of a class is not just whats on the f4 buttons, its the things/mechanics the class has that others dont.

theif = steal/iniative/stealth skills
these things are considered in every facet of theif. you cannot play a thief at all without considering iniative, and no other class has iniative.

mesmer =illusions/shatters
a mesmer couldnt divorce its illusions even if it wanted to, 2 skill on every weapon set AT LEAST have illusion summoning

Sorry that anet is going to sacrifice ranger for marksman, i think the vocal minority is about to screw over 80% of the people who play ranger who play it because they have pets, or who have grown to like the class. I dont really believe the majority of people who play this class dont want a pet. But that seems to be what they are taking away from this.

And yeah your class mechanic is supposed to define your class, id say 3 classes it doesnt very much, and to be honest they suffer for that.

I really hope the make a new class for the people who really wanted a marksman (after they make the martial artist class) instead of trying to warp ranger into something it will never be that good at.

You dont really want a ranger if you want a long range burst dps solo profession, just getting rid of pets isnt going to make long bow into a sniper rifle, or allow you to hit people like people hit backstab. you will in fact be just a warrior clone with archer flavor. They need to build a class from the ground up to give you the type of play you are looking for, with a totally different class mechanic/traits/playstyle.

Romo.3709:

After recent posts from Chris in the CDI I think I understand what Anet’s goal is. Get rid of any hardcore pve’ers. They like pvp though and wvw hardcores. ……

ok some things i agree with some things i don’t

fixing the mild exploits imo is good. It may be cool while it lasted, but we cant really believe that working together and challenge is about things like jumping into geometry and blinking through fences. I think some levels do need a rework, but somethings also need to be fixed. I think the big issue is not that they fixed the exploits, its that they didnt fix the design issues at the same time. Net result longer more annoying instead of fairer overall

rolling is a problem. not the end of the world problem, but its an issue, that will get bigger as they add more fractals. It wasnt as bad before, because you were only picking one fractal, but with the new system the possible draws have funny things happening. Even if you think i’m wrong that doesnt mean my opinion is invalid or shouldnt be voiced. You got to respect other peoples ideas/concerns sometimes.

2nd i dont think anything in the cdi is against hardcore players, its against tunnel vision. not everything in fractals is about level 80 people, or speedclear people, but that also means not everything is about level 10 players or kill everything you see players.

Now as far as the bitterness, i get it, but it really serves no purpose. Im not saying give up trying to get a response, but dont let it infect every interaction you have with people/devs if you can. Keep trying to voice your opinion and reach people, but do not become sad and bitter if thats possible.

you can say some one is wrong without hating them, you can remember the bad things without reliving them/drowning in them everyday.

ok, before the thread is done, let me weigh in on agony.

Agony purpose?
Its not very fun mechanic. I get why its there, Initially it was to serve as a cap on how far you can go, as well as to give a reason for repeating fractals, and a progression withing fractals.

however now that there is a hard cap, that facet of it isnt needed. its main purpose is now to give a good reason for repeating fractals, and a progression within fractals.

People like to get stronger, but agony resistance doesnt give the illusion of strength, you are not really stronger or more durable (most of the time)

Agony stat more interesting
So, make agony about gaining strength. let it increase your dmg, and make you more shiny (while in fractals) perhaps have some agony scaling skills, or make your elite power grow with agony stat. perhaps make hidden rooms or paths that require you to have X agony to pass through(switches to let your no agony buddies through of course). Perhaps foods, or special consumable items that play off your agony resistance stat
Essentially make it a stat you want to get because it increases coolness/fun mechanic, not one that negates attacks, or just kills you outright to progress. Remember, now you have a level limit. Its not as important as a hard gate tool any more

Agony Aquisition problems
is currently a bit backward, make it be more about building upwards, a lot of the current implementation is backwards
for example, if you want a shiny fractal backpack, the most effecient thing to do is not put any agony infusions or verstatile/mighty infusions in it at all till you get the full amount of fractal relics, however, thats a very bad progression, its completely bottom heavy.
rings are also similar, its best to get infused rings before you put in the regular infusion, but this means you are running around with no/small agony resistance till you get infused rings
the new agony infusion thing is the same way, best way is to keep on building and never put it in anything because you lose massive progress.

all of it is too bottom heavy:

Agony Aquisition Solution
make a fractal relic item that can remove infusions from ascended. This increases the value of fractal relics, and lets you actually upgrade as you go, for a nominal fee. Yes its a cost, but its not as prohibitive as trying to replace a versatile infusion or +5 infusion, or change from WvW bonus to fractal bonus, or have you sitting on a +6 infusion because you want to make your backpack shiny first.

you could also put this fractal extractor and agony infusions as a random drop from enemies, so people have slightly more reason to kill regular enemies

timmyf.1490:

dutchiez- I think the justification for artificial caps is this: the devs would like to leave themselves the option of adding new mechanics in the future. Suppose that it just has damage and HP scaling to infinity and a group spends the next 6 months getting to Scale 231, at which point it just becomes impossible.

Well, there’s nothing new or interesting between 50 and 231, so ArenaNet decides to add new instabilities or whatever starting at 50.

Do players at 231 keep their progress, essentially bypassing all the new mechanics? Or do you reset them to 50 and force them to do it again, negating all their hard work and causing them to post on every single forum thread with a red tag (and then some) demanding compensation?

The artificial caps, in my view, exist to give the devs the ability to change things up without having to do another progression reset.

my suggestion for this, is they have two types of progression
difficulty which is just a mechanical slider
and game type/mode
so you do something like

survival: difficulty 20

types of difficulty which are not linked to mechanical stat increases would have their own mode
so you might see
beginner: difficulty 50
this would have high damage/attackspeed/hp scaling but level 1-10 monster spawns and monster skills.

this is a very modular system, and they can add to it without ever having to wipe, or put new content too far away.

some content could have its own bonuses, and progression
say instability would unlock new instabilities for each one you beat, and give you +reward level while playing it.

Instability, Fear the Mossman: difficulty 50
reward level 50+11(if you beat 11 instabilities previously)

they can make the unlock requirements vary based on who the target is/how accessible they want it to be.

many people may be interested in new modes/ maps/enemies/mechanics but not interested in say, difficulty 80 content.

they can even make unlocks come from regular pve, for example unlocking lore mode/content in fractals may require doing some lore stuff in the open world. This could leverage existing content to connect it with fractals. Say finding an old letter in ascalon catacombs unlocks some events/lores in lore focused fractal mode.

it can be ambitious, but that just building possibilities, the important thing is to seperate difficulty/reward scale from varied/new content

hendo.1940:

Chris Whiteside.6102:

haviz.1340:

“Lore people” will play fractals once or twice and move on to roleplay in divinity’s reach while more dedicated players will get bored because it will lack any sort of challenge except bigger numbers.

What should be done is to severely decrease the number of scales, the difference between 1 and 9 is trivial. Introduce complex mechanics for higher tiers (not just numbers) and make those god kitten cinematics skippable. Obligatory reset included.

I am so tempted to be hyper critical on this post but I won’t, as it isn’t this single comment that has been frustrating but instead a culmination of posts in the CDI.

Suffice to say this post emphasizes why this CDI has been pretty good and not great. In my opinion there have been to many posts that have either not been well thought out or the poster has not taken the time to get educated in the discussion before putting pen to paper, and more specifically too insular in terms of goal resolution instead of thinking about the broader audience.

I will leave it at that.

I am still interested in continued discussion around your boss/encounter mechanic ideas, Rewards and ways in which the fractals could be evolved moving forward to provide new types of challenge.

Cheers,

Chris

You anger the Fractal community by resetting their personal reward level, nerf rewards given in fractals, make no effort to fix a particularly obnoxious fractal (dredge) and by introducing fractals with constant time gating (Mai Trin + cannon phases, molten facility + weapons testing area).

You let said fractal community simmer on these problems without even giving them the slightest bit of response to let them know you even give a **** and then when your dedicated fractal community tries to maybe give you a little nudge to ignore the terrible, completely pointless suggestions which aren’t even real problems (re-rolling and lore are two things nobody even cared about until people decided to invent the problem when this thread started and everyone got their frustrations about dredge out the way) you call out their post for being uneducated, insular (and what about those people crying about zerker nerfs? Aren’t those comments insular too?) and not thinking about the broader audience.

Well I tell you what, if you “fix” re-rolling, and for the love of god I hope you don’t fix a non-issue, that won’t be thinking of the broader audience, since people like to roll swamp and you’ll drive more people away from fractals if they have to worry about getting a terrible roll of something like ascalon > cliffside > dredge at level 50.

Though to be honest, this will probably be removed for whatever reason a moderator can come up with or just ignored and swept under the rug, because who even cares about fractals or dungeons, living story for the win. Let’s only fix slaying potions when they become linked to living story, GG ANet, well played.

his point has little to do with other beefs people have, he is just saying people need to stop thinking fractals is for X. If fractals is only for you guys, anet may as well ignore it because its a small minority that cares, getting more players of varying types into fractals means it can justify more development time.

So stop thinking only about what you as an elite fractal runner wants, and start thinking about what everybody wants/doesnt know they want, but they want. Instead of trying to make fractals only for one market, make it good for you and others. While its true that you dont want to have cutscenes which stop the action, there are voluntary cutscenes, and dynamic event type interactions.

Imagine it being possible to tell lore, have a variable challenge and good replayability. Imagine that there was a smooth progression within fractals that keeps you wanting to play it more. Now try to share ideas that will make it be that.

Merus.9475:

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Suffice to say this post emphasizes why this CDI has been pretty good and not great.

I think I agree, to be honest; this was a perfect opportunity to see what kind of people play fractals and what they want out of content like this. Instead there was a lot of repetitive complaining about dredge and about ‘rewards’, with very little insight into whether the problem would be better solved by nerfing champ bags. I don’t think we really came up with any kind of solid design principles for fractals.

Anyway, encounters! I’d very much like to see fractals that take advantage of the existing setup, that these are crystallised echoes of history. I’d enjoy seeing fractals where the fractal starts turning unstable while we’re in it; fractals where two moments in history have mixed together, and fractals that reconfigure themselves while we’re inside.

I’d also like to see a fractal where we spend the majority of the fractal falling, or in the air.

I was a little disappointed when the Jade Sea fractal seemed to take a lot of its inspiration from the jade quarries, because my favourite part of the Jade Sea was the jewelled sea foam. It’s just such a striking image that it’s a shame it didn’t carry over. (And it probably could; there’s a big curved area in the Jade Sea fractal that could easily be turned into a wave.)

I think you may have missed some posts. Multiple people spoke of rewards as incentives, and not just comparitively. Let me be clear, gold isnt really the complete issue. Its also about what actions are rewarded. Also the issue of fractal relics not having much use after you get a backpiece, which makes one of the main consistent rewards of fractals not as incentivizing. Much about rewards has been discussed, but if chris has a specific question, id love to think on the specific types of things the devs are thinking about

Latinkuro.9420:

Active damage mitigation in gw2 makes it possible to avoid 100% of the damage without investing in any kind of toughness or armor defense whatsoever.

My proposal

Adaptive Active Damage Mitigation

it’s simple really,
make dodge tie into the character’s toughness and armor rating.
Dodging would have a base damage mitigation of say 35-50%
For any higher damage mitigation you’d need to invest in toughness, armor and vitality.
up to say 75-80% damage mitigation via dodging.

What this change would do:

- it would make zerk only parties a lot harder, dare I say impossible since even dodging would not mitigate 100% of the damage and since zerkers do not invest in any kind of defense they would rapidly melt down.
- it would make defensive based play both desired and interesting to play.

My 2 cents.

Discuss.

i think it would be bad on dodge, but might be good if some skills like endure pain/aegis sheild blocks were more effected by toughness or vitality.

xXxOrcaxXx.9328:

I think every content should tell a story. This storytelling could be divided into small parts, a puzzle which you have to put together on your own and epic story which should be satisfying.
I want to talk about this “epic moments” a little bit more since our personal story did it all wrong. 1. The animation didn’t fit into the context. You’ve always used the standart animations which are not convincing to say atleast. The new approach as seen with Kasmeer and Marjory would be the way to go.
2. The current music doesn’t reflect what’s happening. The music has to be as satisfying as the animations have to be.
Speaking of which: This game need new music. New good music. The music has to fulfill two criteria: 1. It has to be matching the content. 2. It has to be “re-listenable”. Play the music one week at work every day. If noone goes crazy, the music is good.

i dont think the stuff we see now in LS would be good for fractals IF it takes too much time, remember fractals replayed alot. I do think its a good idea to have lots of little bits you put together for the whole story (if you choose to hunt it) like scarlets hideout, etc. Or perhaps pieces you can observe in background if you choose. It may also be good to have some hidden areas with some interesting side things happening maybe even hidden chests (like SAB but with lore and loot/events)

and yeah was just talking about the music the other day with a friend, its not bad, just way too random, and very often not related to anything happening. It doesnt serve as a storytelling element that often. Selecting specific music for certain events/places would help the game ALOT imo. But thats probably a totally different issue.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

haviz.1340:

“Lore people” will play fractals once or twice and move on to roleplay in divinity’s reach while more dedicated players will get bored because it will lack any sort of challenge except bigger numbers.

What should be done is to severely decrease the number of scales, the difference between 1 and 9 is trivial. Introduce complex mechanics for higher tiers (not just numbers) and make those god kitten cinematics skippable. Obligatory reset included.

I am so tempted to be hyper critical on this post but I won’t, as it isn’t this single comment that has been frustrating but instead a culmination of posts in the CDI.

Suffice to say this post emphasizes why this CDI has been pretty good and not great. In my opinion there have been to many posts that have either not been well thought out or the poster has not taken the time to get educated in the discussion before putting pen to paper, and more specifically to insular in terms of goal resolution instead of thinking about the broader audience.

I will leave it at that.

I am still interested in continued discussion around your boss/encounter mechanic ideas, Rewards and ways in which the fractals could be evolved moving forward to provide new types of challenge.

Cheers,

Chris

I have always felt fractals were for a broad audience, its the one area where you can kind of select your difficulty. I also think its a good tool to hit a lot of different playstyles/audiences.

I think decentralizing the reward from being just the daily might be good. Perhaps add some more mob drops (of course it need to be something people want), which may balance it so that non speed runners are also incentivized. And levels with more enemies are less frowned on.

i think improving fractal relics trade in value, (towards items fractal players want/hunt) may also help for those who can only do shorter runs/have to leave.

i like the idea some one posted of a fast paced moving fractal. I think it would also to have fractal where you are like gods/totally OP, flashy abilities. Orrr maybe some fractals that show origins/legends related to some of the legendaries, perhaps you can even wield them temporarily. Essentially push the epic factor up a bit. you can do things in fractals that you cant really do in other places.

Substance E.4852:

phys.7689:

but see, the mesmers illusions are not pets, they are manifestations of their skill use. And while you could build a rng like mesmer, it would not be a pet really.

Also the class is built to have the pet and the ranger playing off each other. A big part of the mechanic is supposed to be actively keeping your pet alive. the F1 and F3 skills arent on the Fbar by mistake, its actually supposed to be an important part of keeping the pet alive, telling it who, and what to attack and when to retreat.
(return to me should get retreat functionality in battle aka get away from the target, running behind me because return to me sucks in melee for defending the pet)
this is why ranger gets heals that heal both, access to regeneration, skills like vulnerability, etc.
swap is a defensive measure, this is why the cooldown is long if the pet dies, but not if it is swapped.
a lot of the high level play of ranger is supposed to happen at the pet management level, the problem is some of the tools arent refined, and that a lot of people never learned how to use their pet properly.

a great many rangers dont know you can lock a pet to a target with f1, or make it switch targets with f1, they dont know how the pet acts differently in passive mode. They dont know how to use return to me to avoid dmg.

Ranger IS a pet class, utterly and completely, its defense and offense at a high level is based on mastering control of the pet. I strongly suggest anet make another class for the people who dont want a pet but what long ranged DPS, because that class is completely different than what rng is about. They want long range burst damage preparation/strategy class, soloist, whereas ranger is a skirmishing pressure damage mix up focused team duo (pet and ranger) oriented class.

Essentially they want hawkeye ( http://atomicanxiety.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/hawkeye-widescreen.jpg )from the avengers movie, whereas ranger is beastmaster ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeastMaster_%28TV_series%29 )

there is very little in common with these two archetypes other than the fact they both can use bows.

Except there is no “duo team” with the pet. We have absolutely no advantage that other classes don’t by our use of a pet and allocation of our damage onto it. We used to atleast be able to spread our damage out but then they nerfed the kitten out of our leash range so that is no more. The very fact that we have to melee to get maximum dps makes the pet even more pointless. What advantage is there to have a pet and ranger working at 70/30 in melee, so close that they are clipping into one another, over simply having a single player with 100% of the damage attacking the same target? There isn’t one, certainly not when the pet can’t dodge red rings of death nor function in WvW zergs at all. I don’t even target people with the pet and it still gets instagibed by aoe spam.

As long as we only equal 100% when working with the pet and it can’t body block enemies like pets can in other games, the pet is absolutely superfluous. A good player will always perform better than one of equal skill that has to share a portion of their damage with an unreliable AI.

We’ve had 1.5 years to roleplay Dar the Beastmaster and it has been a headache for anyone that cares about efficiency and respect in pve/wvw. We just want a class that isn’t a joke and works correctly. Flavor ALWAYS takes a backseat to functionality.

its not flavor, its actually the core of the archetype, what you are asking for is for the current ranger to die, and be replaced by another class. Why not just ask for the other archetype? then people can have both.

As far as the rng/pet duo, it can be improved, but theres actually a decent amount of it already.
If they make f2 responsive
have less pet animations root the pet
fix the order of command so they dont constantly self interupt
give some better retreat control

ranger/pets will be pretty beastly. probably get nerfed, but thats another story

Dean Calaway.9718:

phys.7689:

first off
the reset wasnt to level 50, it was to level 30.
Even if you think +50 was exploit, +30 was not.(…)

First off, I never said they reset it to 50.

So when you’re done assuming things you can start wrapping your head around the concept of a big company where people can’t talk without PRs and red tape and made a decision they thought it was best.

What would have been the difference if they reset it back to 50 instead when you said it yourself, people can fairly easy get there?

Nevets Crimsonwing.5271:

You’re wrong, but let me argue this in your terms.

The developers said that at release they only thought people would get up to level 50. You may not have been around at release, but at that time you could only have up to 30 agony resistance.(…)

I bought the game at launch, so I was very much around.

You’re still hanging over this and throwing your tantrum because I mention that fractals were never spouse to go beyond level 50 in the first place, thats really tripping you isn’kitten
Still hanging on “but the devs said unlimited”, they say a lot of things don’t they? Want me to list some of them that never got to be or you wanna start being a grown up about this?

Again, to the POINT of the thread (by the way to who ever may this concern, reporting can back fire if the reported is not actually violating ToS), the reset and the compensation, the whole point of this thread, which is what I was discussing in my first post.

They made it into something “different” and reset the levels, what did you want?
Stay on a level that wouldn’t have been acquired under the new mechanics?
You should consider yourself lucky it wasn’t all the way back to 10 or 1.
And what would the compensation be exactly? Maybe some loot, for people to say “not good enough loot”?
What would be fair?

I wasnt assuming anything, you only talked about post 50 and said it wasnt intended so it was clean up.
but they reset down to 30 which means some people lost 20 levels.

The other factor is the new levels are made to be not different at all and in fact easier by playing level 49 again and again to progress. let me make this clear, level 49 is EXACTLY the same as prepatch except monsters do less dmg, have less hp, and you get agony all the time, which is mitigated by having enough agony resistance(which essentially becomes zero agony)

And the major difference if they hadnt reset it, would be that players would not have had to repeat 20-30 hours of the same content to get back to the same reward levels they had already earned (in fact it turns out to be less rewarding now than before to be 50)

As for the red tape and PR speak stopping the devs. thats the whole point, the thread is essentially saying this is a big mistake PR wise and customer service wise, not to be clear with your customer what they can expect. The thing is the door is now open for any type of charachter progression resets, even when there are no bugs or exploits. Under the same reasoning they could reset everyone to level 60 because they decided to change endgame.

as far as what to give players? it has been recomended they essentially get something to remember/commemorate thier achievement. Titles or special skins or effects covers it. However many recognize this wont happen and more want them to talk about it, and talk about their policy with similar things going forward. In a developing MMO this type of issue will pop up again and again

Yoh.8469:

I understand your point, but I’m not convinced that AI is the actual problem, but rather like most of the problems with Ranger pets, it’s a symptom of the problem.

To use your analogy, the 2×4 breaking is a problem, but what if the reason it broke because your doing it wrong or that the material was faulty to begin with?
Replacing that 2×4 doesn’t necessarily mean you won’t encounter the same problem or other new problems down the line, because you haven’t addressed the core underlying problem that caused these problems to begin with.

I believe that the core problem with pets is that they are design to be Always On.

-
For example, pet’s dying because of AOE. Part is there inability to mitigate damage, and their AI not knowing how to avoid said damage, and Players not having the commands to tell them otherwise.

But Mesmer Illusions have the exact same problems (only worse), and they are no less damage potential for the Mesmer as pets are for Rangers as their core mechanic. So why are Mesmers not crying bloody murder?

It’s because Illusions aren’t expected to survive. They are designed around being rapidly created and destroyed. So if they die, often times you can just replace them, maybe not with the Illusions that were destroyed, but others in your kit.
So it’s no big deal if they go down, you can even trait for it and make it an advantage.

-
If you were to go issue by issue, most of the problems can be linked back to the pets requirement to be always on.
Which begs the question, is it worth it?
It causes a whole host of problems, but what possible benefit do you gain from having pets always on vs summoning when you need them?

I think you could summon pets and have them function largely the same for the Ranger as a class mechanic, keeping traits mostly intact, circumvent a lot of these problems while also making pets easier to balance and diversify. (because of now having cooldowns and duration to work with)

I’ll type this up as a formal proposal, but I just want to stress that the underlying reason that causes these problem might not just be faulty AI or questionable design decisions, but rather something more fundamental as to how you went around designing pets in the first place.
And I suspect that if that problem isn’t addressed, it may just continue to create more problems for you down the line.

but see, the mesmers illusions are not pets, they are manifestations of their skill use. And while you could build a rng like mesmer, it would not be a pet really.

Also the class is built to have the pet and the ranger playing off each other. A big part of the mechanic is supposed to be actively keeping your pet alive. the F1 and F3 skills arent on the Fbar by mistake, its actually supposed to be an important part of keeping the pet alive, telling it who, and what to attack and when to retreat.
(return to me should get retreat functionality in battle aka get away from the target, running behind me because return to me sucks in melee for defending the pet)
this is why ranger gets heals that heal both, access to regeneration, skills like vulnerability, etc.
swap is a defensive measure, this is why the cooldown is long if the pet dies, but not if it is swapped.
a lot of the high level play of ranger is supposed to happen at the pet management level, the problem is some of the tools arent refined, and that a lot of people never learned how to use their pet properly.

a great many rangers dont know you can lock a pet to a target with f1, or make it switch targets with f1, they dont know how the pet acts differently in passive mode. They dont know how to use return to me to avoid dmg.

Ranger IS a pet class, utterly and completely, its defense and offense at a high level is based on mastering control of the pet. I strongly suggest anet make another class for the people who dont want a pet but what long ranged DPS, because that class is completely different than what rng is about. They want long range burst damage preparation/strategy class, soloist, whereas ranger is a skirmishing pressure damage mix up focused team duo (pet and ranger) oriented class.

Essentially they want hawkeye ( http://atomicanxiety.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/hawkeye-widescreen.jpg )from the avengers movie, whereas ranger is beastmaster ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeastMaster_%28TV_series%29 )

there is very little in common with these two archetypes other than the fact they both can use bows.

Dean Calaway.9718:

Nevets Crimsonwing.5271:

(…)
Also, people have this tendency to shout “semantics” as if that is a substitute for a good argument. Words have meaning. Please use them properly.

I used the right words, no edits on my posts, you on the other hands are trying desperately to play words to get things your way, and you aren’t even that good at that so I’d suggest you shouldn’t try to win this on a technicality.

My original point stands, you couldn’t go past 50 without serious bending.
And the core of the matter was, the reset.
After the rework they reset because it was something “different”, what propose would it serve having a level you didn’t climb up to under the new system?

A revive orb or a few (and I cannot stress this enough) profession SPECIFIC skills could never be considered a normal intended and ONLY way to beat content.
So either people did it consciously, or like I said, naively.
Frankly, your insistence is just making you look bad, not me, if you seriously thought there was nothing wrong with it, you were naive, which is strange since you’re trying so hard right now to look clever.

Lastly, people weren’t banned over that because it would be plain stupid to do so.
Just like they aren’t banned for so many other things they do in game that eventually gets fixed.
There are plenty of people that never got a ban even after they exploited the karma for gold.
Don’t try to dress that as some sort of evidence on your little case.

first off
the reset wasnt to level 50, it was to level 30.
Even if you think +50 was exploit, +30 was not.

2nd of all(for level 50+), players directly asked if it was an exploit, no one responded. Even when they changed the maw, they didnt hardcap it.

3rd of all, i was infracted by ANET staff for calling it an exploit, this mean ANET doesnt consider it an exploit. I challenged this infraction, a different mod reviewed it, and upheld it.

now, level 50+ aside, you may not have done fractals much so ill let you know, runs from 31-50 tend to take about 1-1.5 hours for a good team. (longer than it takes to get a level) thats about 20-30 hours at best.
level 31-50 was wiped, it was not an exploit.

now you might say, but why should you get access to new levels for what you did in the past? Well turns out fractals 31-50 are not any harder to climb, you can do an agony instability fractal over and over i think its 49. the scaling is actually easier than it used to be, essentially they thought the high dmg/high hp scaling was too hard. regardless if it was or was not it means people who got to 50 before had the proven skills to get to 50 again, so really they just lost time.

So yeah, I think the whole issue was caused by poor communication on ANETS part months ago.
When people asked if it was an exploit, the response should have been. Yes, we didnt intend you to get that high, think of anything past 50 as beta, and you may get your levels reset later

but even that doesnt explain the 31-50 issue.

heres why they reset it.
they thought it would be fun to climb again, and didnt view fractal levels as progress
they felt level 50+ was too hard for average players, and too monotonous to have to go through to get to new content(if it was 51-70 few would ever see it)
they didnt have the time or desire to implement new seperate systems for instabilities.

problem is, none of this is a good reason to actually delete players progress without something. I understand things have to change to evolve the game, but this wasnt really an evolution, all of the problems that popped up now with instabilities and scaling and player leveling were COMPLETELY predicted before the patch even hit.
everything from skipping instabilities
useless leaderboards people reach in 2 days
people who are already level 50 having to re walk an easier road for no reason.

and even if you have a good new evolution, its a bad idea to wipe peoples progress in a progress oriented game mode. build a new system that more accurately represents the functionality and put it alongside the other one.

But most of all regardless what you do COMMUNICATE to your clients, and thats the biggest failure of all. most of the issue is that anet still hasnt said whether wiping peoples progress who dont exploit is something they think they should do. AND they dont communicate on what is and is not unintended behavior, or what they will do when it pops up

haviz.1340:

phys.7689:

i think he just meant they arent using the old cutscene engine anymore. They can just have npcs talking that you can walk past/ignore. Or have people talking while you play like desha during the story fractal for thaumanova. Scarlet button press scene is uneccasry though, its short but annoying

Old cutscenes were skippable, dialogues are not. And if you have to endure the whole dialogues, that’s just painful.

yeah, they dont have to make them impede progress
think like conversations in towns or dynamic events where they are talking but you can run past them.

haviz.1340:

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Lore is an important part of the fractals and will continue to be. Replayability, balance, rewards and challenge in no way exclude the ability to continue to tell exciting and meaningful stories in Fractals.

Chris

Note: Just got back from hospital and going to bed.

If you continue to put unskippable cutscenes/dialogues to justify lore it does exclude a large portion of replayability. And since a guy from cutscenes department told us they would now include all cutscenes in the form of unskippable dialogues it doesn’t look bright. Watching a cutscene 100 times is not exactly a defintion of fun.

i think he just meant they arent using the old cutscene engine anymore. They can just have npcs talking that you can walk past/ignore. Or have people talking while you play like desha during the story fractal for thaumanova. Scarlet button press scene is uneccasry though, its short but annoying

Aridia.3042:

Allie Murdock.8152:

I’m not saying this isn’t possible, but I want you to understand exactly what that suggestion means. It would mean completely rebalancing the Ranger.

The Ranger is designed to have a pet. If the pet was taken away or didn’t do damage, then it wouldn’t be a Ranger anymore. Does that make sense?

The only reason Rangers lose damage is because the AI is not currently what it ought to be. That doesn’t necessarily mean that we should completely redesign the Ranger and get rid of the pet.

Think of it this way: You’re building a house and a 2×4 breaks while you’re trying to screw it in to something. Do you scrap the house and completely rebuild it because that one piece broke, or do you grab a new 2×4 and use that instead? Which do you think would be more efficient?

What I’ve been seeing a lot of is that you guys don’t necessarily dislike pets. What you dislike is how they act and how they are controlled. It seems to me that these are feelings that have been built up over time, and have culminated into “pets have to go” because you guys haven’t seen the improvements that should be made to pets to make them desirable. I certainly don’t blame you for getting to this point, but I do want to know the core of the problem before we start talking about rebalancing an entire class.

Please propose these questions to the Devs:

1. How often should a pet land a hit on a pvp target?

2. Should the number of landed hits be affected by how deeply you spec into BM?

3. How do you propose to have a coherent framework of factoring avg pet damage for this class (and balance the weapon damage accordingly) when some pets hit way harder than another and you can’t predict what pets will be used and how deeply one will spec into BM? (e.g. 30BM Jag vs 0 BM Brown Bear)

I suspect when you get them to answer those questions truthfully, you’ll realize that part of the house never called for a 2×4 but rather really needed some concrete walls.

Don’t see how ur questions show anything, its essentially the same as whether a player is specced for beserker or some hybrid.

As far as how often should they hit, that should depend on movement speed difference and dodges.

Right now its too easy to dodge a pet for some classes, but they could change that by fixing pets. One problem is players used to be like pets, evwey skill rooted. And thwy had long cast times. They never fixed this. Do any heart where you get transformed into a pet and you’ll see how bad their casting is. if they corrected it for players, they can do it for pets.

Do they want to? I don’t know

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Estriella Faerie.4029:

Spoj The Second.7680:

The regular and loyal fractal players are not in it for one time lore stories and easy dailies and that means they are in it for fun, challenging, rewarding and replayable content.

Quoted for truth ! Lore can be nice, but the most important thing if you want fractals to stay active is replayability, and for this you need balance, rewards, and challenge.

Lore is an important part of the fractals and will continue to be. Replayability, balance, rewards and challenge in no way exclude the ability to continue to tell exciting and meaningful stories in Fractals.

Chris

Note: Just got back from hospital and going to bed.

Got to agree with chris here, lore and reward/challenge are not mutually exclusive. First you have to realize fractals is not just about being 50, its about finding the difficulty you lile. Some people do 10-16 mostly, others stay in the 20s etc.

Now about lore/stories, they could make it a seperate mode, or they have the stories be told without stopping, Npcs who are doing their own thing, narators, the fractal operator, the events that just happen, etc.

As for replayability for lore, the key might be to tie little pieces of lore to events that don’t always happen. (Even things that just happen to npcs on the side) then the replayability is finding all the lore clues and events, all perfectly ignorable by people with other concerns.

Shiren.9532:

New trait: Master: Cleansing Swap: When you swap pets, you lose 2 conditions (ICD of 10 seconds).

Counterplay – when ranger swaps pets, the pet loses boons
Gives Rangers a good option for mobile condi removal.

Why does ranger design and suggestions always treat the pet like a secondary factor even when it’s a suggestion for a trait specifically dealing with said mechanic?

The pet swap mechanic should be about accessing and interacting with your pets. For the pet mechanic to have meaning, it has to be designed so that the ranger is engaging with what the pet does not what the swap does.

I was sad when quickness was removed from pet swap because it was quite powerful and the BM line became completely unappealing for me. Part of me was happy because I hated that the game encouraged me to swap pets for reasons completely unrelated to the pet. If I am going to use a pet swap, why should it be for a reason other than my intention to interact with and utilise the pet?

Removing conditions on pet swap is going to lead to rangers caring less about what the pet does and more about having an on demand condition removal. You might argue it’s an interesting choice – help yourself or potentially swap to a less useful pet but I would argue that it actively designs against the class mechanic, it uses a pet mechanic for a reason that has nothing to do with the pet and the drawback of that design is that the pet might be less desirable than the one you previously had in the fight.

Scenario: I’m pressuring the engineer on home but I’m taking too many conditions. I am using my jaguar for DPS but I have a wolf on swap for its F2 skill. I swap to the wolf so that I can cleanse some conditions and buy myself more time, but now I don’t have jaguar DPS (the wolf also has to get back into range). I don’t need my wolf’s knockdown now (he uses it anyway) and I don’t need his howl. If I get downed or want the fear on swap later on, I can’t access it because I wasted the swap to cleanse a condition.

A trait like this actively designs against the pet as a mechanic (and cynicaly views pet swap as a generic resource and not as it’s true purpose – a pet mechanic). It hinders pet performance by getting you to make pet resource choices for non-pet gameplay. This will just exasperate pet issues and hinder design which tries to best focus on how to utilise the pet and not exploit mechanics tied to the pet for non-pet reasons.

the interaction for quickness was essentially the idea of you and your pet getting hyped when you see them again. I do understand your saying, though. but quickness on swap for both is pretty cool.

I think someone else had a good suggestion saying they should have an on swap skill as soon as you swap them in. This would be a simple means to give more control, and also more combos.

CHIPS.6018:

kokiman.2364:

CHIPS.6018:

So I just tried that “Kill 3 Legendary Clockworks” quest. It is nothing but a DPS test. Can we please stop having quests like these?

These quests are saying:
If you are not using berserker gear, go home.

No these “quest”, they are actually called events, are not a DPS check, they are events that encourage people to play together. The biggest problem right now is, that there are way to many “unique snowflakes” around that keep shouting “I PLAY HOW I WANT AND YOU PLAY HOW YOU WANT” which is something that just doesn’t work in a genre that is all about playing together.

I was in a group that was organized. Nearly everyone there dodged those pull+slam attacks no problem. However we failed due to purely a lack of DPS.

how many stacks of might did yall have on average?

Aidenwolf.5964:

Allie Murdock.8152:

Also, you guys can’t see this due to the limitations of formatting on our forums, but a lot of these points were made by many of you guys. As such, they are much more emphasized in the email threads and discussions we have internally.

First, thank you for your summary. What I think got missed in the pile was the idea that pet damage should be rebalanced so that they no longer draw 30% of our damage from us in the first place. All other classes core mechanics add to base damage where as rangers loose almost a third of our player damage in order to have an AI run around with us. If our pets hit every time and are never dead, we just get to 100% base damage of every other class capping us at 100% a warrior hits 115% with his/her core mechanic.

This does not take into account the loss of gear stats on the pet which is significant.

this is completely false, all classes are balanced with their class mechanics in mind.
A mesmer isnt doing high level dmg competitive with other dps classes without phantasms or conditions without its clones. Necro base power on skills is lower even on its dps skills because they consider condition/minions in their max dps. Elementalists skills are tied to swapping elements, and they specifically place finishers and AOE in different places to promote swapping. Theif inititative totally changes how and what skills get dmg, and its generally balanced around initiative costs. Every classes mechanic is figured into their DPS.

Romo.3709:

Here’s the direct quote from Izzy for referencing purposes:

Fractals: Why did you feel that resetting everybody to fractal level 30 was the best course of action?
“We were changing the relative difficulties of those levels and really wanted to level the playing field and give everyone a fresh start. We know this devalued some of the work people did but we wanted everyone to have a common language as far as the progression in fractals and didn’t want confusion in terminology for example ’I’m a pre change level 50 fractal’. Now if someone says they are level 50 in fractals everyone understand what they did and what that progress means, this becomes very important as we increase the levels in fractals.” ~Isaiah Cartwright

Source

yeah, this is a recurring theme i feel with some of the design choices. They want to try to make things simple and clear, but as an engineer/designer its great to design simple solutions, but you should ask yourself if simple isnt really the right answer if its impeding or blocking the specifications/growth.

for example apple used to have a 1 button mouse because it was “simple” and easy. but it turns out with the many types of things people need to do, having another button is actually the better answer. People had to hold buttons longer, double tap, just to get the same functionality, and the rules keep changing. So one day apple made their mouse have 2 buttons, now the latest mouse is all touch, effectively having many buttons.

I tell you right now i play GW2 with a 20 button mouse, and its the best solution for the job for me. Trying to make GW2 a one button game to serve a one button mouse is not the right answer.

The difficulty scale is uniform, but thats confusing because the actual scaling isnt uniform. being at level 32 isnt much different than being at level 31, but being at level 9 is a huge difference from level 12. Reward scaling gives almost nothing at some differences and a lot at others. Some one who is at difficulty scale 34, may have done 34 level 48 fractals. Some one who did level 47, may have had it easier than someone who did level 39.

point is, the instabilities are differing challenges, they dont even really fit on a regular difficulty scale, saying you are level 48 isnt an objective measure of what type of difficulty you can deal with. Thats fine, but by shoe horning it into a standard number progression you are creating more problems than you solve.

Lilith Ajit.6173:

I’m just mad because I didn’t want anything other than an open conversation about it. Or even just a response that says whether or not they think it will happen again. I have no reason to level fractals. I have no desire to go in and have my progress destroyed in 6 months when they think more people should go into fractals. Because the real truth is, the argument for 30 was that people couldn’t get up to 50. But really, I highly (and I mean highly) doubt that the number of people maxed out at lvl 50 fractals now is much different from those that were before. Casuals still don’t play above level 19. And so next time they decide to “increase the challenges for leaderboards that won’t ever exist because they never had any idea on how in the first place” (hence the several dev comments either saying explicitly that they’re still trying to figure out how to measure fractal awesomeness or simply asking, ‘how to do bros?’ As in the CDI).

that the other thing, if they had totally blown up the difficulty scaling, and created a more accessible system for new content, that gave better scaling for players, it would be one thing, but the linear scale system was the problem and its still there, even if it doesnt fit the content any more.
while level 31-40 is all the same difficulty roughly, with varying conditions, it presents itself as if 40 is harder than the rest, which isnt the case. They want a system where people select the instabilities that are interesting, but the rewards reward the one that is the least interesting

and once again they are going to have to keep placing content behind higher levels as they release more instabilities, which wont be available for most players.

the new system doesnt solve most of their problems, its heading the same way, and when/if they fix it, they will still have to come up with a way not to screw the people that worked hard under this system before its changed.

Thedenofsin.7340:

Dual.8953:

stof.9341:

Fortus.6175:

Bran.7425:

Fortus.6175:

but I can guarantee you that the VAST najority of the players in gw2 would gladly have balance classes over toxic, unbalanced, annoying classes such as thieves currently.

That statement is equal bias as you should only speak for yourself not the vast “najorities”

Please show me a thread where people want classes to remain unbalanced and toxic.

You know, maybe the bias is not in the fact people might want or not the presence of toxic unbalanced classes, but that the thief is toxic and/or unbalanced in the first place.

And if thieves get nerfed to the point that they’re no longer “considered” the best roamer? Where will they go after that?

Then thieves will have to compete with Elementalists and Mesmers for the role of roamer on the team.

Then we may see more diverse team compositions. OH THE HORROR!

why should elementalist be a better roamer than theif, when thats the only thing theif can do.
Ele has massive AOE massive blast finishers acess to like 5 different fields(the most useful ones at that), massive support, tanky hard to kill builds that can cap.

Arghore.8340:

Why is it that when you try ‘not’ to think about a certain topic (pets in my case)

because outside of pets, ranger isnt really that off, the biggest problem with ranger is the lack of coolness people get out of their pets.
slow, unresponsive, super long cast times, lackluster controls.

I mean the other stuff is all in the frame of regular balance. The pets is the issue that makes it hard to balance the rest. you cant get much reliable anything from your pet currently, they sometimes are cool, and sometimes completely fail, which makes it hard to figure rng sustain/support or what they should/could be capable of. For example getting your pet too immobilize or fear a target could be very useful for longbow, but the cast times too long and even if you time it right some times the skill doesnt go off, or the pet interupts cast to chase.

got to fix pets, and i do acknowledge they said some of that stuff is coming, but it would be more useful for the devs to say.

Ok heres the problems we are trying to fix with pets, is there any more problems?
or
Ok if we could solve issue X and issue Y, would that make pets work that well?
or
How much AI is good for a pet, do you think they should have more active controls, or less so. If less how do you balance the perception that the pet AI is playing, and not the player?

etc.

spoj.9672:

Estriella Faerie.4029:

spoj.9672:

So they kind of have to sweep it under the rug whether we or they like it or not. Its the safest option for them and thats the way many business’s deal with these things.

I would argue that they’re making customers extremly angry about it, so maybe it’s not the safest option after all. Unless you consider that you can get people so angry that they’ll leave, after which they don’t have to care about them.

Personnaly, I wouldn’t say it’s the safest option. It’s more like the most cowardly one. And telling us they would think about we felt, then 2 months later telling us that this matter was solved back then, seems to imply they just wanted us to shut up about it, thinking we would forget about it after a while. That is not a way to address an issue your community is talking about.

Think of it this way. No matter what they say they wont be able to please us. So bringing up the topic and encouraging the discussion just makes things worse. I think they would rather keep the minority of us annoyed rather than trying to respond, failing to satisfy and making us even more angry and maybe bringing other customers into the arguement. It just doesnt make sense to engage with us in this situation. I know you disagree but thats just because you are letting your bias get in the way and assuming everyone else well be satisfied with a simple apology. Most people arent that reasonable, so no matter what anet do they will get flak.

You cant go wrong or make things worse by not doing anything (sort of). So its definately the safer option. But yes it is cowardly.

not really, if a store tells you no returns, you know where you stand. If they thinking about it we ll get back to you, and you trust them, you are left wondering and waiting.
The biggest problem is that they didnt communicate well in the beginning, and that created the above 50 debate, months later they have to deal with the results. They then didnt communicate on the new content versus old progression debate which i guarantee you will come up in the future. The problem is instead of telling people whats up, they just arent dealing with stuff. People mostly want to know where they stand/what to expect.

Suddenflame.2601:

I am trying to figure out what the issue is here. Fractals were reset to 30 or anyone above rank 30 would be already far above the new content which would make the new leaderboards invalid. They also put a hard cap of rank 50 to prevent people from going higher than that because there is no new challenge or anything different above that. So they need to make content above rank 50.

You are wanting Anet to apologize for reverting you down to rank 30? Like really guys does it seem fair that if you played FOTM prior to the update that you had an easier time getting to rank 50 than new people trying to get to FOTM rank 50?

They also changed the rewards system for FOTM giving better rewards for higher ranks.

The only thing they did wrong is not changing old FOTM weapons into skins (ones without stats) like they currently are.

Going to floor 50 in the previous FOTM was not that hard and less of a challenge compared to the new FOTM. This is also an active MMO meaning you should expect changes to effect competitive areas.

Edit: As well I am not being a fan boy here. This could be the worst possible game in the world but the decision for what they did was not wrong but the right one. It has the most impact on the least amount of people. If they let you keep your ranks it would have negatively effected the leaderboards (that were created in that same patch) and the community as a whole. The majority of players were below lvl30 which is why the choose that number to revert to.

the leaderboards are already invalid, they realized they have nothing with which to currently measure players to begin with.

As far as the above 50 debate, it is primarily caused by anet never saying whether it was intended or not. Even after pages and pages of people asking within the first few weeks of fractals

FOTM is not harder to get to 50 now, its probably slightly easier, perhaps if they used a different system and people had to actually beat all the levels to raise their difficulty, but they dont. Before they scaled it in a semi cheesy way, but is was unquestionable harder and less forgiving. They built a better system(in some ways), but it is in fact easier than before. So really, the people who were at 50 had kind of already proven themselves. the net result really came down to being, get less rewards for 20 levels.

also rewards are not really better, they are actually worse, the biggest difference is they added a low chance of some specific items.

i think you may have made a mistake, they never actually made the leaderboards, and they still havent. Also reseting progress for leaderboards is bad idea. Fractals was never presented as a competitive format, it was supposed to be a dungeon you could work your way through that would get harder and harder as you beat it more, people essentially got the difficulty AND rewards they earned downgraded, to make it into a competitive format, when they havent even figured out a good way to make it competitive yet.

go look for the fractal leaderboards, you wont find any. Most likely once they do exist, they will have little to nothing to do with what difficulty scale you get up to, because that will always be capped, and if its capped everyone will get there eventually if they try

as for resetting people to 30 because thats what people were at, is kind of a slap in the face too, because its saying we dont care about you guys because you are the minority.

Just to be clear, i am not speaking for myself here, i was basically at like 29 when this happened, but it doesnt mean that it was good decisions, or communication on those decisions

Fortus.6175:

danbuter.2314:

No class changes should EVER occur based upon spvp. Maybe, and I mean maybe, 5% of the gamers play this. 95% of the player base should not be penalized to make that 5% happy.

oh is that so? Well then, 40 secs 1200 range RtL would have to like a word with you, healing regen vigor duration for eles would also like to have a word with you. Face it, class balance should be dictated mostly for an enviroment where all classes are on equal footing. But of course, each part should have their own balance, which is why there should be more splits between PvP and PvE.

Besides, any decent game developers knows better than in order to keep a game healthy they must make the changes needed, not the changes that might make a few people happy. In this case your numbers are totally made up and I wont do the same, but I can guarantee you that the VAST najority of the players in gw2 would gladly have balance classes over toxic, unbalanced, annoying classes such as thieves currently.

majority of players dont spvp, and in WvW thief is far from apex predator due to the crazy stuff a bunch of classes can do/become.
Pve wise thief is average.
and even in spvp, thief is not as universally hated as you claim, mostly people who want the thief spot as super 1 v 1 roamer have beef, which is a niche role to begin with. Not only that, but the fact that thief is good with 1v1 roaming makes a lot of sense. It has crappy support, cant cap/defend, and doesnt do that well in a multi man fight. You want more adaptable classes like ele, who can provide large buffs, great area denial, hold points etc, to be better than thief at the one thing it doesnt suck at?

do you also want to be better than guardians at holding points?

Kaiyanwan.8521:

phys.7689:

Kaiyanwan.8521:

ANet tolerated it as long as they had no way to solve the problem itself.

If something gets tolerated it does not mean that it is not an exploit. They had the choice to close down fractals all together till they could fix it, or set a hard reset when they got a fix.

They went for the latter. I think that was fair for both sides.

you are ignoring this part, the people who were 50 who were reset to 30. 50 was completely legitamate and doable without any exploits, hacks, tricks, you could get to 50 by just fighting normally and playing smart.

They reset them down to 30 with that patch. dropping them 20 levels of earned rewards.
Forget the level 80s who may or may not have been unintended, what about the level 50s who were completely intended and encouraged who lost 20 levels?

It doesn’t matter. They have changed fractals and how they work, added stuff past 30 and added new fractals.
30 is as arbitrary as 40 or 50. They changed the difficulty curve. Level numbers have lost their meaning.
Could they have gone with 50? Sure. They have decided to apply changes though and they decided on 30. Nothing wrong with that.

It is a different scale now. They decided that it should be the same for all players, new and old. Sounds fair to me.

except level 50 was harder before than now, they leveled nothing because the people who were at the level basically deserved to be there, they didnt even create a system that made it so each player played through every instability, many people progressed without playing anything but the level 49 that there friend let them into.

So the net result was, an easier climb difficulty wise, but a big time sink and downgrade to reward for 20 runs aka 20-30 hours.

I think instabilities were good, i think the implementation was off, and is still off, and they will have problems with the linear system when it comes to adding content and evolving fractals.

To top it off they alienated the community and still have yet to say anything that you came in and said in 2 minutes.

Like i said, i was initially against it, but the way they responded/havent responded to the community or commincated intent was the initial problem, and its why it came to bite them in the butt later.

They could have said, level 50+ was unintended, and may be reset later, consider it fractal beta test.
They could have gave the level 31-50 people some title since they were getting reset, or some item skin, or even some unique color, since they are completely blameless, and really did nothing at all wrong.

Would you be cool if they reset everyone to charachter level 40, because they added some new level 40-80 zones, and they want everyone to be on an even playing field?

darkace.8925:

Specific Game Mode
PVE

Proposal Overview
Restore Hunter’s Shot to what it was. In PvE, opening a fight with 10 stacks of Vulnerability allows some decent burst damage (when used with pets like Jaguars). In PvE, Stealth is useless on the longbow.

Goal of Proposal
I’m sure PvP and WvW rangers love the Stealth provided by Hunter’s Shot, but it’s nothing but a dead space on the weapon skill bar of a PvE Ranger. With a longbow, we’ve got long range, a pet, a knockback, and utility snares/roots to keep my enemies away. By changing Hunter’s Shot, you not only lowered my dps, you also gave me a skill that I have will never use in PvE.

Associated Risks
WvW and PvP Rangers would lose the Stealth, but as far as I know you guys still intend to add new skills to the game. Perhaps adding a Utility Skill that provides the Stealth would be the better way to handle it. They’d get their Stealth, and PvE players wouldn’t be saddled with a useless weapon skill.

its pretty good with the opening strikes buffs, essentially gives you a guaranteed crit and 5 stacks of vulnerability during fights, heck, id rng ever gets a smoke field, or works with a thief/engy/mes, could be downright hax

Kaiyanwan.8521:

ANet tolerated it as long as they had no way to solve the problem itself.

If something gets tolerated it does not mean that it is not an exploit. They had the choice to close down fractals all together till they could fix it, or set a hard reset when they got a fix.

They went for the latter. I think that was fair for both sides.

you are ignoring this part, the people who were 50 who were reset to 30. 50 was completely legitamate and doable without any exploits, hacks, tricks, you could get to 50 by just fighting normally and playing smart.

They reset them down to 30 with that patch. dropping them 20 levels of earned rewards.
Forget the level 80s who may or may not have been unintended, what about the level 50s who were completely intended and encouraged who lost 20 levels?

Healix.5819:

Would you have preferred it if they simply nerfed 1-50 and added 20 more levels featuring the new mechanics? They could have done that instead, making it slightly more of a grind for players to catch up. In the end, it would have been the same thing. I wouldn’t expect compensation.

they should have just made instabilities a seperate track/mode. they havent really gained much by not doing that. I perfectly understand them not wanting to place instabilities at 50 or 80, and wanting people to go through the content, but there were other solutions, and they will continue to have the same problems as fractals continue. Even the next set of instabilities, will not be available until people hit 50, the ones after that? 70

and what about players who want to have the new instabilities without the increase in HP/DMG etc? If they dont make it increase that way, then why put difficulty scale numbers on it? They didnt come up with a better solution, they streamlined a bad one, and its still going to be a problem later.

Kaiyanwan.8521:

Zelyhn.8069:

My point is that the Fractured patch showed one thing: Anet does not care.

They did, they fixed the content for you. They updated it and gave you new toys to play with.

With the reset (I’d call it a rollback because of MMO rule #2: Exploit early exploit often), they leveled the playfield for everyone. This sounds like caring to me.
They would REWARD exploiting if they gave something for everyone.

Don’t blame ANet (wow, that’s hard for me to say) blame the people who exploited the system.

your entire theory is offbase for one simple reason

they reset to level 30, not to level 50.
30-50 was completely legitamate, not even questionable.

then even on your level 80 is an exploit thing,
Im sorry, according to anet it was not exploit. I was infracted for saying it was. Anet never really made it clear whether it was or was not. People directly asked them.

The problem here is, and has been a lack of communication.
If it was an exploit, why didnt they tell players
If it was unintended clean up, why have they still not said so

and non of that explains why the 100% legitamate progress from 30-50 was reset.

I can infer the reason was because placing instabilities at 50 would be way too high, but they should have made instabilities a seperate track with special rewards.

Kaiyanwan.8521:

The whole system was more or less abused to get to higher levels anyway.

People want to be rewarded for that? You have made it, you got the loot (even though loot in this game fails) and the memories. Good enough I say.

people lost progress to 80.
Honestly i think its more the non responses than anything. I mean i was initially on the just take it on the chin side. But anet should explain that its a take it on the chin situation.

If they were like:

going past 50 was an unintended occurence, we did a quick patch till we could figure out what to do, at some point we realized we couldnt support the consequences of the bug so we had to clean it up.
as far as those who earned up to 50, we ll give you rewards for levels at the level you were until you catch up.
Or we dont have time to do anything now, but we will compensate you later

Or, that was a big mistake not to consider it ahead of time, we wont do that in the future, but we had to do it then once we were commited

but they never said anything really one way or the other, or said what their intent is for the future.

Izzy says yeah we thought it would be a good change, but nothing about the results or intents, or what to expect in the future. We shouldnt have to assume, or figure out anets intent when it comes to these things. Its the type of thing the company should either say, yes i will accept returns, or no we dont accept returns. dont say we are considering your case and never really respond. To this day no one knows what anets stance on the issue even is.

They havent even said if 50+ was fair game or not

Lilith Ajit.6173:

Stooperdale.3560:

They didn’t post up any response to the all the moans about the reset since they are not in the business of arguing with players on forums. That’s all that would have happened. A big argument on the forums between players and developers that would inevitably get deleted again.

Assuming there is no recompense for the reset, do people really want a big argument between devs and players? Would that make anyone happier? Don’t say “but I want a reset” because a big forum argument is not going to create a reset.

It isn’t even about that anymore, it’s that he said he would give us his thoughts, then lied and acted like he was never going to, when proven wrong, he deletes any post on the subject and says they are off topic. Swept under the rug is the big cat problem here.

yea the primary issue is that anet isnt really saying anything. They should have before, and still should make it clear what type of loss of progress players can expect as the game evolves, and what type of things they might do should they have to reset progress. And if its just a take it on the chin type thing, let people know that too.
when you ask a store if they accept returns, and they dont they just tell you, not gonna happen.

Conski Deshan.2057:

I would work on the basis they want recognition for what they achieved.
That to me means something that visually identify s them as those who completed it.
The easiest way to do so is a unique title.

@kyle, anyone would consider the amount you suggested insulting, it amounts to about 5 mins of work if even.
@timmy, but they did’nt do it so they don’t get it, woulda shoulda coulda.
I’d suggest compensating anyone who rose above level 50, and as with fractals compensate by tier.

people lost 30-50 as well, and post 50 was semi patched out, so ehhhh

xXxOrcaxXx.9328:

Flytrap.8075:

xXxOrcaxXx.9328:

Flytrap.8075:

I feel that other professions pull this way better than Ranger currently does.

A lot of the weapon sets available to Ranger are either awkward/clunky or don’t have a clearly established niche.

I don’t even think that weapons have to fill a niche, they just have to serve a clear purpose. If the LB was designed to deal high, long-range damage, I would say yes, the LB is capable of doing so but he is highly unreliable since his damage falls of if the target comes closer. At the same time the LB has no real countermeasures to prevent an enemy to come closer. Furthermore the arrows are a hit-n-miss gamble at long range.

“Fitting a niche” and “serving a clear purpose” are the same thing in my eyes.

The problem with “Fitting a niche” vs. “serving a clear purpose” is that the niche implies that the gameplay feels totally different from other weapons, beeing unique. I don’t have a problem with the MH axe serving the same purpose as the SB does, just both weapons have to excel at one point. SB as example should be the always kiting, persistent damage dealing weapon while the MH axe could be somewhat more bursty but less kiting.

SB is mostly a single target weapon that focuses on kiting/flanking, MH axe is multitarget weapon with decent non kiting defensive options. MHA is more bursty dps in aoe with a shorter recast on splitblade and a bouncing AA, its more customizable because you can choose your 4 and 5 abilities as well.

urdriel.8496:

misterdevious.6482:

When people simply say “the pet,” I wonder how much was invested in that pet.

The default pets have 0 traits, 0 bonus stats, 0 condition damage, 0 movement speed buff, 0 regen, 0 pet utility skills, and 0 support from the ranger or the ranger’s gear.

The most powerful pets benefit from most of the ranger’s traits, up to 4100 bonus stats (Beastmastery 300×4, Master’s Bond 200×4, Might 875×2, Trait 350×1), up to 1225 condition damage, +50% condition duration, 25-40% movement speed buff, massive regen, 3 pet-related utility skills, and full support from the ranger, and the ranger’s healing, precision, and boon duration gear. (Giving the pet 25 stacks of might can be done with a single key using the right build.)

I can keep pets alive in 30v30 zerg fights (map-blob vs map-blob is another story), but it requires building specifically for that purpose (a bit different from the most lethal pet) and making a compromise with my own safety. With the upcoming change to F2 activation, I may play this way more often.

• Should there be less difference between the min and max pets?
• Should it be easier to spec for a good pet?
• Should pets have more utility by default that isn’t heavily dependent on their stats?

Thieves and mesmer will laugh hard at your pet , all other classes will kite it until the end of the fight

phys.7689:

urdriel.8496:

Aioros.4862:

Now we are skirmishers, not archers. I think it’s a “Go melee or get out” thingy.

Yes, common sense, we will give you Shortbow and Longbow but you must go melee…….

they also gave you daggers swords greatswords and axes.

this game isnt designed where one of a professions weaponsets is supposed to better than others, each set is supposed to serve different needs.
ranger is meant to be able to go in and out of range, and have good options from any range. They actually did that fairly decently, my main beef is LB/SB is boring. I wouldnt mind aimed shots and charged attacks, but i dont know if thats what yall want

Oh yes, without traits, max LB range 1200 SB 900, gap closers have 600-1200 range, you hit 1 time and in 1 second your enemy is at melee distance, it is really stupid, on the other side a warrior can hit like a truck and run like the roadrunner ( WITH HEAVY ARMOR…)

LB/SB are boring because the best dps is always the AutoAttack, this is a DESIGN FLAW.

SB is supposed to be a condition weapon.

And LB is supposed to be a Power weapon, but DOESNT HAVE a real burst skill.

i think it would be bad if rangers could fight people who cant ever hit them. that said, if the 1 skill was a charge skill(increase dmg on release) that alone could make rng more entertaining, and make LB more interesting