Guild Wars 2

“Your candy metaphor sounds great but misses the point since we could not clarify what “naughty” actually is other than relativ perspectives.”

Being naughty in a cooperative PvE environment is acting with selfish motives, being greedy to obtain more than your fair share of pie and not cooperating with others to play the content as it is designed… Do you reckon that the mob tagging competitions that take place in Orr events are the height of cooperative gameplay? Surely Not, but that’s the kind of behaviour that the current reward systems are motivating.

Your point about PvP is a complete non sequitur, since MF doesn’t apply in sPvP and the competition in WvW is between servers – you are meant to cooperate with your own side you know.

Your second to last paragraph makes no sense – if you don’t want people to spend some time playing the game to get their gear then just give it to them as a reward for getting to level 80 or something. The intention surely is that you should work towards your max gear by playing the game, not by playing zerg tag and running around resource nodes on a clock timer.

@Bedortiker says: “And you are thinking competitive, otherwise you would not care a single bit about other people getting rewards faster by using MF-gear.”

Absolutely not! This completely misses the point. In fact it’s sort of ironic that people who play the game in this competitive way are actually the ones who are the losers, because they are the very same people who get bored when the progression ends – you can see that theme in the “exit posts” that appear on this forum. And even if you don’t necessarily have a tendency to play this way in the first place, the game motivates it (MF being a part of that) and you need to make a conscious, firm decision to play in a different way (why so many people farming stuff in Orr in the first place?). So in that context it’s pretty crazy to exacerbate the problem by mechanisms such as MF that act to end the progression faster and amplify the yield of farmers.

The people who are going to play Guild Wars 2 long term (I reckon) are the ones who enjoy playing the content, especially together, in the way that GW2 allows people to group up on the fly. That’s not a competition it’s cooperation. And that’s what the reward system should be designed to motivate. MF is totally anti productive for that, for the reasons that I and others have already mentioned. In fact, from a motivational POV, the whole reward system is totally borked at the moment, since it motivates selfish play rather than cooperation, and MF is just a part of that.

And finally: If you want a child to be good, you don’t give them sweeties for being naughty. But if a child is naturally good, despite that, that doesn’t imply that they don’t like sweets too! If Guild Wars 2 was designed as a mincing machine to get people in and out as quickly as possible, then the reward system (and MF) would be totally appropriate, but I for one hope that wasn’t the intention.

Humposaurus.5764:

I haven’t found any magic aswell. I’m an ele with over 150% magic find, but I have to yet encounter a new magic skill for my weapon (I’m still stuck with the stock skills). Does anyone know how to use magic find? Do you need to kill the mob and then you have a chance to obtain it’s magic or what? I’m kinda lost here…

LOL – if only that’s magic find did do.

If, by any chance, you were not having a laugh?! see: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Magic_find

@Bendortiker says: “The supply-demand scheme is of course very simplyfied, but so is your model”

I’m not trying to write an economics text book (tl;dr). However, the principles are uncontroversial when you understand them.

In the subsequent paragraphs you appear to be suggesting that unbalanced increases in supply are good!? They aren’t, they are very bad, in fact ruinous for the economy: Why do you think Arenanet reduced the node respawn rate for resources? Why do you think the Diminishing Returns (DR) system was introduced in the first place? Why do you think everyone complains about bots? The fact is that a game has an optimum pie size and an optimum way of allocating pie to players and that balance is the one that motivates enjoyable gameplay for the greatest number of players. And in fact the game already has a massive oversupply problem for most armor/weapon items, which is why crafting is pointless and most items sell for no more than their trash value, but that’s another story…

These later arguments that because some rewards are cosmetic they should be massively easier to obtain only for people who are prepared to farm/grind the same locations intensively, whilst wearing MF armor, just seems plain idiotic to any rational appreciation – and goes against the stated intention that one form of gameplay should not be so much more rewarding than others (to paraphrase Jon Peters). In the light of that the MF system, which greatly exacerbates this problem is less than optimal, to put it mildly.

And to address your final point MF isn’t just bad because it creates a disparity in the rates people get their endgame armor, it has a negative effect on the reward system throughout the whole game, (particularly when combined with a levelling system that scales rewards to level):- When you do challenging content you should be rewarded for that, not for how much MF you have on your armor. That’s pretty fundamental, I would have thought and one of the reasons why the limited challenging content currently available in the open world is largely ignored.

@Bedortiker says: “As the poster below you stated correctly you get the basic economic principles wrong here!”

No it’s not Strill that’s getting the basic economic arguments wrong. It would be great if economies worked the way you think, because then we could all be rich! But, what you are forgetting is that if you hold drop rates constant you aren’t increasing the overall supply, what you are doing is tilting the contribution so that those with MF supply more and those without it supply less. Then the limited amount of things you get without MF are also worth dramatically less. Economies work a bit like a see saw, when it’s balanced every one gets there share of the pie, but when you push one end up, by giving one side more pie than the other, the other end must get less pie.

So why don’t they just increase the drop rates (size of the pie)? Ultimately, why don’t games just give everyone everything for no effort? The answer is, of course, that the value of rewards is largely in the motivation that they provide for playing the game. That’s why drops and resource nodes are limited in the first place. But when supply is limited then you are always going to get the see saw effect mentioned above.

Note that you are going to get the see-saw effect anyway to some extent by rewarding farming, more time invested equates to more supply from a particular segment of the players. But, why magic find is so corrosive is because it massively amplifies the see-saw effect and makes a farming playstyle even more effective in achieving rewards quickly that it was previously, at the expense of those players who don’t want to play like that.

Part of the problem is that the more difficult content in the open world isn’t sufficiently rewarding to get players to cooperate in doing it. For instance, I was doing a champion event just now in Metrica Province (near the Thaumatova reactor) on a new alt. Initially two other players were doing it too. But after five minutes or so both of them left, probably because the event was taking “too long” (the 3 of us were only gradually chipping away the mobs health) and they no doubt knew that long more difficult (without zerg) events are no more rewarding than short easy ones.

Actually this area around the reactor has some quite difficult content that you can’t really solo – such as the fire elemental; but if they are going to have harder content then there has to be some way of encouraging people to do it (have had few takers for that particular one). That’s the really tricky problem to solve – particularly since the whole reward system is borked (reward items for events have no value or interest) and is more set up to motivate farming than it is to reward actually playing the game’s content.

If magic find doesn’t do anything then that’s a very good thing! The best thing to do would be to remove it, entirely, for which see here:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Why-Magic-Find-is-a-Poor-Mechanism/first

Think some of the later posters are missing the point again (surprise) – rangers have OK skills in combat for swiftness, such as the weapon swap minor trait and skill 3 on the shortbow….. But if you want to run around the map you only have warhorn & the short buff on the elite RAO. So, the reason you don’t want the 12 seconds swiftness just on the warhorn is not because rangers don’t want that buff, it’s because to get that buff you have to choose warhorn, which restricts your viable builds – you can’t go shortbow/greatsword and have an out of combat speed buff, for instance. And you really need that speed buff, It’s close to essential in WvW, for instance – if you don’t want to be plodding around the map being caught by everyone else. Other classes have more flexible ways to get swiftness that don’t push you into this kind of Hobson’s Choice.

Tynee.9427:

I use warhorn and the armor upgrades (10 sec of speed for group when I cast a heal) use the 20 sec heal and have perma group speed. I sacrifice a lot of dps for speed but like the utility it brings to the group. It just depends on your play style, If you want dps there are better options than the horn and by using 20 sec heal I lose the healing spring. It’s all about trade offs.

It is all about trade offs. But in Guild Wars 1 the trade offs were between single skills, whereas in Guild Wars 2, because weapon skills are fixed, you are forced into adopting a particular weapon just to get the effects of a utility skill that is really a prerequisite for many forms of gameplay. No experienced player of any profession would go into Alliance Battles in GW1 without some form of speed utility buff (and on demand condition removal) and the situation is no different in GW2 WvW, of which alliance battles was a prototypical form, not to mention that in the PvE game, where there are large maps and no mounts, swiftness is more than just a convenience.

The particular lack of flexibility with ranger speed when compared to warrior (which has the simplest mechanics for this) is largely due to the elite “Rampage As One” being on a 120s cooldown and giving only 20s of swiftness, whereas warriors “Signet of Rage” has a 60s cooldown (reducible by 20% with signet mastery) and gives 30s of swiftness. The fact that RAO has balanced stance & affects your pet in no way makes up for this difference.

In general when balancing the ranger Arenanet have IMOP way over estimated the value of the ranger’s pet in most cases. Perhaps that will change if pet’s get improved, but pets are still not a good reason for making rangers so poor at swiftness and condition removal (and yes we all know that brown bears are meant to have condition removal on their F2 skill).

“We oldbies also know all too well what happened anytime the Ranger started being any kind of damage dealer.”

Well Arenanet had a few problems balancing particularly GvG in Guild Wars 1 and one of the early ones was ranger spike teams. Still the standard burning arrow / crip shot builds were very viable and probably still are for balanced PvP teams (and very good in alliance battles too). PvE became a bit problematical for rangers later in the game, since so many mobs were immune to conditions. Still you could usually spec something recently decent.

I haven’t checked this out TBH recently, but personally I’d prefer it if pets didn’t always try to tank – that’s why they die so quickly. That particularly applies to pets such as birds, which expire on the spot – a tanking bird is absurd.

IMOP some more options would be good – pets should be agressive until they get low on health and then try to evade. Currently, as a ranger you have many more ways to evade attacks than your pet does.

ATM, we can set pets to aggressive, but then they are too aggressive, or passive, when they are too passive – something in between say skirmish mode or darting attacks would work a lot better, in most cases, I reckon.

Was it only Asuran rangers that were big headed?

“but that is a lot of info to keep up with server side, considering the worldwide number of rangers x number of ranger pets.”

If there are 1 million rangers and they each have 50 pets with maximum 20 character names (consisting of 20 bytes), we have 50m pets @ 20 bytes each = 1000m bytes or approx 1 gigabyte. i.e. I could fit the database on my mobile phone. Even if storage was a problem names could be cached locally, which would mean that at least they were persistent whilst you remained on the same machine (most of the time for most people).

Poison volley is potentially an interesting skill, since it requires situational awareness and positioning to strike multiple targets.

“As for trait points, look over what all the traits do and simply pick the ones you would like. Don’t necessarily pick trait lines in order to get the extra stat points (such as toughness vitality etc)”

I think that’s good advice you can always adjust the stats you get from traits, by putting different stuff on your jewelry and armor.

The game’s only been out for six weeks and everyone is talking like a battle weary veteran. Lets just see what happens in the coming weeks. After all ranger isn’t the only profession that needs some tweaks and likely Arenanet need to be directing most of their resources to core gameplay issues.

Designers who had the skill to design the weapon skill sets in the first place are not going to suddenly lose their grip when it comes to tweaking them up a bit.

Oddly enough, I haven’t had this problem recently – sometimes the pet names stick and sometimes they don’t, not sure why and haven’t found a pattern.

LOL – when I tried a hyena, the companion it called immediately rushed off in the opposite direction and aggroed more mobs. Aside from that a hyena isn’t really a dog and I was disappointed that (being a spotted hyena) it didn’t laugh or even so much as cackle. So I switched to something else.

All the pets should be viable, as you say – and maybe one day they will be.

Who knows what happened? Probably it started out as an animation fix and then they found that in fact the skill was operating more quick*l*y than intended and so killed two birds with one stone by the 40ms cooldown addition. That seems more reasonable than the absurd idea that it’s some kind of secret conspiracy against rangers, by devs who wish to make their preferred classes op.

It would have been nice if they’d added some corresponding fix to balance things out, but I expect we’ll get more buffs & nerfs over the coming weeks. No doubt the direction they will be going in is to make all the weapon sets equally viable options and to make it more advantageous to use all the skills on weapons, rather than just the auto attack.

Vialator.4981:

From the Dev himself-so its official that the nerf stays! -check the Ranger SB nerf:not 40 millisecond post- he has responded in that- official dev response!

Yeah, brave man, bet he traits Barkskin.

I don’t see any reason not to believe that they were fixing an animation issue and I think all this hysteria on the SB nerf thread is incredibly anti productive and shows the community in a very poor light.

Jon Peters point was that spamming the 1 key doesn’t lead to the most nuanced gameplay, which is reasonable I think. It’s just a pity that this alteration wasn’t combined with an offsetting fix and some attention to other issues to sugar the pill a bit.

From my own POV I’m more interested in survivability than damage, since you can’t do a lot of damage if you are dead and rangers have some issues with disabling conditions & speed compared to other classes I play (most of them). The other thing that makes rangers less fun to play than they could be for a skirmishing play style is the lack of a decent melee weapon swap or reason for staying in melee range – since bows are essentially single target weapons, it would seem to make sense to have some better AOE capabilities at melee range.

As to pets – they’re going to take some time to fix, I guess.

Morrigan.2809:

As a staff/gs Mesmer with a condition build and traits to shorten my cooldowns on phantasms/ illusions. I can tell you that I have died more in the last 2 days than in the last 40 lvls.
I worked really hard to get my Mesmer to lvl 80 and to be good with her and I could hold my own unless I got swamped by 5-6 mobs.
Now I feel like I am an escort duty because I can’t walk five steps before being killed by wildlife.
It is sad and it makes me furious because I invested a lot in my character.
I resent having to rethink my build just to survive, because up until now I really enjoyed playing it.
I play mostly in PvE and Mesmer is a tricky class for that.
Why must I suffer because of PvP balance?

This is just the usual balancing whine that will happen every time Arenanet make a change to any class and just shows that what people are really asking for in this thread is PvE easy mode, where their class is allowed to remain OP and unbalanced.

In any case, mesmers are fine, check out the mesmer expertise here and on guru if you don’t know how to play one.

xenoaroe.3894:

Why favor players with multiple characters? If you are trying to increase or decrease the amount of these materials, just increase it or decrease it, don’t give one group an advantage over the other.

People who play alts don’t necessarily do it as an exploit to get more gold. In fact it hadn’t even occurred to me, since I’m rarely in the same area on more than one alt. For that reason, I wouldn’t really object if they did make it account wide. Then they could make karma and exploration account wide too, two things that really aren’t so favourable to alt players.

Stevoli.8795:

@roqoco

IMO, it should be a balancing act. Rather than solely focusing on preventing actual players from making gold, they need to fix some of these long standing bugs, work on removing bots, and fix the stupid forums already, can I get my quote button back?

I’m sure they are doing those things too. I’m just as impatient to see them as you are, but I know it won’t be instant. Yes, the quote button disappearing is very annoying! Worked that time!

@above

If that’s true, it has to be a good thing, since all the things you mentioned are exploits that ruin the economy for those that like to play the content as a game rather than an exercise in maximizing loot.

Spoon.3826:

Mate, I completely agree. But unforunately it doesn’t seem like Anet has any clue what they are doing right now.

I think that’s a bit of a premature conclusion to make. Many of the weapon sets are rather well designed and have interesting synergies, they just need some tweaking in order to be viable. Getting these things right is notoriously hard and there hasn’t been an MMO forum that wasn’t filled with this sort of thing, some of it justified, most not.

@ MrsAngelD: “This is the exact reason they implemented the split in Guild Wars. Us PVE Players complained like mad because our builds were always being changed to oblivion due to the need to balance PVP.”

I think the reason was more to do with novelty build in PvP. For instance, “Read The Wind” wasn’t overpowered in either PvP or PvE in itself, only when used in particular synergistic builds. So they had to make this compromise.

I particularly would want to avoid a split, because i think it makes the balancers lazy with respect to PvE, where there is lot less dissent when things become OP. Because, a lot of people secretly (or not so scecretly) want to be OP and the mobs don’t complain. You can see that with skills like “Ursan Blessing” in GW1, which made many other builds completely redundant and some of the harder content easy mode. And it took a long time for the balancers to even consider it a problem and address it.

Gray.9650:

Agree, In fact I risk being a broken record on the subject. One problem is that they can’t be more aggressive with downscaling since casual players, who haven’t necessarily learned movement skills too well, need to be overlevel in order to be able to do some of the content.

where would you need movement skills in lower-lvl areas? most mobs hardly do anything special and if you can easily bruteforce your way through with pure damage.

which then leads to decreased rewards due to less “challenge”, which then in turn makes everything but the cursed shore karmatrain unrewarding.

so if you done the 100% with one char there is really no reason to do anything else (thanks to crappy reward/time ratio thanks to pure grind required).

forcing people to do sth else is what the OP is talking about. you need over a million karma for your legendary, which even with CS karmatrain takes a while. telling people “that’s enough, now do something else” will surely help the game in the long run, especially when “something else” is another game.

I do agree with you – but I don’t think the solution is necessarily as straightforward as it may appear. Levelling systems have always had the consequence that they quickly make content irrelevant and to alter that is more than just a quick fix, I think.

I have suggested differential downscaling whereby you can optionally take on additional downscaling in return for increased rewards. That may be one approach that is worth looking at. Certainly making the whole game a loot playground for overpowered level 80s in full exotic gear, within the current down scaling system, doesn’t appear to be an optimal approach.

Caramel Ham.4891:

Fact is….PvE ALWAYS suffers because of PvP. Its never the other way around. Just take a look at the recent “nerfs” that Anet has done. They do absolutely NOTHING for PvE except to frustrate players who already play a “weaker” class in PvE, but might be fine in PvP.

On the contrary balance is just as important in PvE as it is in PvP. Some of the changes are directed towards making the different weapon sets equally viable, that gives more variety in PvE.

If you were going to seriously make this point you would have to argue that PvE is too hard. But, in reality the opposite is true and those people who want an easier time of it can easily overlevel a bit before tackling the content.

@deriver: “I believe it’s because most people are either playing their 80s or leveing alts through crafting… Many of my guild rushed their alts after a certain level just by crafting”

A bit sad to see the lengths players will go to avoid doing the content. A lot of players at level cap can’t have seen more than 30% of the game.

The players I have bumped into have been friendly too and map chat is good compared to others. One thing that is needed I think is more ways to draw players together and perhaps a first step might be to give the group events a somewhat higher yield in terms of karma and rewards compared to other activities. But, perhaps, it’s hard to get the right balance between that and encouraging zerging.

Xericor.9103:

The only problem I have found is revisiting some lower level areas. As a decent kit 80 I feel the downscale isnt strong enough, the pve isnt that much of a threat.

Part of this is down to practice and confidence in skills, knowing the game and attack patterns, being able to dodge etc But I think they could downscale a little more

Agree, In fact I risk being a broken record on the subject. One problem is that they can’t be more aggressive with downscaling since casual players, who haven’t necessarily learned movement skills too well, need to be overlevel in order to be able to do some of the content.

The game works reasonably well whilst you are levelling: The more skilled players can do content a few levels higher than their actual level, whilst less skilled players or those who just prefer an easier time can over level. This all breaks down at level 80 though if you want to go back and explore the map, whilst also having some interesting gameplay.

@Account: “I’m not saying that every zone should have every resource, just that there shouldn’t be such a strong link between zone level, resource type and recipe ingredients.”

Agreed – The problem is that this is baked into the whole levelling/progression system now and maybe very hard to alter without lots of knock on effects. For instance, its intended that final tier materials should be harder to obtain than previous tier materials, so it would require a complete rethink of the whole resource & crafting systems, if the intent isn’t to try and apply a quick bandaid.

The basic problem comes down to the fact that non linear exploration gameplay mixes with an archaic levelling design about as well as oil mixes with water.

Nurvus.2891:

I hope this never gets implemented.

I can’t believe anyone likes splitting PvP and PvE skills or mechanics…
It’s an easy way out that simply shows poor design philosophy.

Stop asking for things that make no sense, please…

Instead of splitting PvP and PvE skills, ANet needs to make PvP and PvE more similar so that it can be balanced under the same mechanics.

Yeah. I always think that this request is a disguised attempt to make PvE easier than it already is so that the PvE game turns into a diablo clone and there are few speed bumps to interrupt the collection of loot.

I’m sure that the PvE/PvP split was necessary in GW1, because the huge number of possible skill combinations made balancing hard. Also some of the mechanics that people were capable of in PvP guild vs guild and HA, such as coordinated spikes were not so relevant in PvE.

Repair and waypoint costs are essential for reasons people have already outlined. However having a hearthstone that allows you to go to your “home” in your home instance looks like a good idea, since you can already zone back to LA anyway for free through PvP.

Does everyone really want to play a game, where the gameplay consists only of running around the same 12 locations every five hours, on the hour? That has to be just about as far away from the RPG part in MMORPG as it is possible to get.

For those who like to play the game as a virtual world, rather than a battery farming simulation a lot more needs to be done to balance resources and rewards across the world and over time. But this is at least a tentative step.

The root problem is putting all the valuables in the game in a few limited places and that’s related to the levelling design, whereby rewards you get in the game are tied to area levels.

Spoon.3826:

Here’s the fun part about the ele bashers: They’ve actually played the class for more then 10 minutes. Saying “Have just started one” invalidates your opinion from the get go. Come back when you’ve leveled one up to level through PvE and did some WvW and PvP in addition to that. Then roll a warrior or a thief.

Hey, down Fido! I did say I sucked at it. You may be right, its hard to tell as many people greatly exaggerate their woes, presumably in order to persuade Arenanet to give them some mega buff.

Aesseus.4596:

What I don’t understand with these Ele whines, is my friend who is an Ele just plainly wrecks on his, and hard.

Yet ele seem to kitten one of the most.

Yeah – I’m not too convinced by this ele bashing either. Have just started one and they have a good collection of skills. Just rather hard to play as it’s necessary to move between attunements to use them properly and that isn’t so easy when you need to make best use of the cooldowns. Honestly, I still suck at that and need more practice, but a guildie I play with makes it work very well. I think all the light armor classes are a bit harder to play than medium/heavy.

@Kwami – I was just answering your questions – not implying that you played like that, but many people do. And give them a chance, I’m pretty sure there is some new stuff in the pipeline, but the game has only been out just over a month and I’m sure the devs aren’t short of things to do right now, just tweaking the initial content and fixing things up.

@Kwami – I think that you have to appreciate that when you have had your fill of the content in a game, that’s really all it has to offer on the PvE side (if you find that sPvP or WvW is more repeatable thats a thing you can do too). Personally, I like Guild Wars 2 sufficiently that I’m happy to play some of the areas multiple times with alts. Some people’s playstyle, OTOH is to rush up to level cap as quickly as possible, ignoring much of the content, and then ask what it is they are meant to do next. There isn’t anything next… at least not yet. How could there be?

Kawami says: "roqoco.4053: GW2 doesn’t contain something you don’t actually like doing purely for some long term objective or reward? Then what the hell are legendary weapons?
Heart quests are no more and no less a grind that quests in any other MMO. Grinding for faction and dungeon gear is no different than any other MMO. But crafting legendary weapons is just about the epitome of grinding."

Noone said you can’t grind if that’s what you “enjoy” doing – of course you can. My point is that the content in Guild Wars 2 is (arguably according to personal taste) more fun than in other MMOs and the Forbes article describing that as grind is just a misuse of the word. There are only so many things that you can do with combat and questing in a game, but GW2 does them rather well, I think.

As for legendary weapons, they aren’t a grind in themselves either. Maybe I’ll even get one in a year or two just by playing the game normally with multiple alts. But I’m not that bothered if I don’t. GW2 is a work in progress and hopefully Arenanet will expand the game and maybe make it so that the stuff you need for legendaries isn’t just something that is restricted to a few locations and events, but more something you can progress over the whole game.

Saw that article some time ago. The author doesn’t have much of a clue: The term grind has different meanings to different people and this guys meaning is way out of the normal box. Guild Wars 2 released with a lot of varied content that for many is fun to do, especially the hearts and events – that isn’t “grind”. Grind or at least the most sensible usage of the word is when you do something you don’t actually like doing purely for some long term objective or reward.

@Mephane – but then the MFers are not going to welcome other people turning up to events in which they are participating. One can imagine teams of magic finders making themselves rather more unpleasant than usual. In dungeons – “looking for guardian must have > 100% magic find”.

@AcidicVision – if someone makes a glass cannon build that isn’t optimal for dungeons then that’s an honest mistake in most cases, since people don’t usually choose to kitten their kit all other things being equal. OTOH when you choose MF you are basically saying that you want more loot for yourself even if by doing so you perform less well and you increase your party’s chances of wiping (by whatever small degree – we had that discussion already). i.e. MF encourages selfish behavior, you are no longer playing the game of optimizing your gear for different challenges only of optimizing it for the maximal possible personal gain. That’s directly contrary to what I understood Arenanet’s design goals to be.

@Algreg – Remember that the designers largely control supply by setting the drop rate of items & frequency of resource nodes. Strictly speaking I might have left out the reference to design, but of course it is appropriate for game economies.

There already is a limited way for storing and applying skins – i.e. the hall of monuments, if you played GW1. Would be great to have a similar library for armor you get in game. Presumably you could have an option when using the transmutation dialog of adding a skin to your library.

One idea might to have something similar to HOM in your home instance – you could then go there to apply the skins you already collected. Would be good if you had a hearthstone to take you there too.

Boss fights seem hard to balance, they have to hit quite hard in events, since otherwise you can just run out, heal, rinse and repeat. I think maybe bosses should spawn more dangerous minions than they typically do right now.

That might make sense if PvE was really hard, but it isn’t. If people are struggling in PvE its probably better to work on movement than to have more op skills. PvE is already balanced on the casual side and GW2’s combat system is a lot more fun when you need to use all your skills and combos together.

Also with WvW there’s a somewhat blurred line between PvP & PvE – i.e. you wouldn’t want op classes in WvW either.

Cerise.9045:

roqoco.4053:

Being rich in MMOs is overrated. The only use of gold is to get items that should act as long term goals too quickly, so that you have little else to do in the game. Everything else in the game is quite easily obtainable by just playing the game normally.

Wut? I played GW1 for 7000 hours and had obsidian armor in less than 300. I play the game because the game allows me to do things that I have fun doing. I don’t play just to reach some arbitrary goals, that’s why I never look at the game one day and say “well I guess there’s nothing to do now”. I keep playing the game and keep enjoying it. And if I get cool stuff before everyone else then I enjoy it even more. Being richer than everyone also helps.

I didn’t mean long term exclusive goals. Most of the fun has to be in the day to day gameplay, otherwise you are just grinding really (by which I mean doing things you would prefer not be doing just for the reward). OTOH rewards & achievements are (obviously) a fun part of games, if one can keep one’s perspective, and they can help to direct play. Perhaps my playstyle in MMOs is influenced by those earlier RPGs (Wizardry, Eye Of The Beholder, Ultima etc) since then it was more obvious that trying to eat the whole pie in one gulp would lead to a long wait for the next game.