The game launched with lots of content. If one doesn’t enjoy that content, then no there isn’t anything else to do. I do reckon they need to improve downscaling or introduce some other mechanism to make the content missed during levelling more relevant and challenging. However, as things stand I’m enjoying doing it on alts.
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.
You get these outraged threads about balance in all MMOs. Just have a little perspective: class balance will probably change quite rapidly for a while and then settle down to a more steady pace.
@ “There are screenshots all over the forums of like 30+ naked rangers running around with an army of bears…”
Yes, in those cases I try to report all the bots. That may help to tie the accounts to particular botters, I reckon. It does take a bit of time, but isn’t so hard with the new bot reporting feature – i.e. right click on the bots portrait and select “report bot”. Sometimes the bot trains do subsume players though so you need to be a bit carefull who you click on.
Gaile Gray mentioned yesterday on Guru that they are developing tools to deal with the botting issue. Producing robust code isn’t instant though, so just give them some time and keep reporting bots in the mean time. I expect that repeat reports from different players will help to enable them to eliminate false positives. Also, take a few moments to make sure you are really reporting a bot rather than just a ranger with a bear pet. Mostly it’s pretty obvious, but I can imagine mistaken reporting might be a nuisance.
@ “The problem here is that it is basically our only source of decent movement speed”
That’s what the op is saying, I think. I reckon it’s a general problem with putting swiftness buff on a weapon & having fixed weapon skills in that it unintentionally restricts build diversity:
In guild wars 1 you could equip a speed utility (essential for Alliance Battles for instance) without completely changing your build. Sure if you took a speed buff you couldn’t take some nice extra damage skill, crip or whatever, but in GW2 the fixed weapon skills are all or nothing.
Could be easily fixed by have swiftness utility skill/s, which makes perfect sense for a ranger; there were plenty of them in GW1 and it was one of ranger’s defining features. Rangers are medium armor users, they eschew heavy armor for more sustained speed.
Agree with Drakos. What’s the problem? That you are getting killed by these adds or just that the additional seconds you take to kill them are interrupting your leveling efficiency?
Loot rarity should be balanced around no magic find, the point of magic find is to improve drop percentages, not be necessary just for the chance to get anything.
No that doesn’t work. Magic find increases the prevalence of rare items in the economy and consequently drives down their prices (supply and demand), that means that non MF users will get lower prices for the fewer rare items they actually do find. So whatever way you do it it will cause people who don’t use it to be at a disadvantage compared to a situation where MF was used by noone. That’s basic economics at work: There’s only a finite amount of cake and if you give more of it to some players, the others get less than their share.
Constructive criticism is good, but many of the recent threads and posts aren’t the least bit constructive, not even civil and make unwarranted accusations. Unfortunately, this is something that happens on every MMO forum after a while, so it’s probably best to just filter out the noise.
“What then, if my favorite “build” is my Magic Find “build” and they take it away? Would I “subconsciously gravitate” towards my favorite build, or would I just be pigeon-holed into playing the game the way you think I should?”
The thing is though, your magic find build is your favourite build, because when using it you get a great deal more of the available gold than everyone else does. It’s a bit like a mom giving one of her children a “more cake hat”. Then when it is suggested that the cake be more evenly divided, the child then complains that they aren’t being allowed to wear their favourite hat: “I want more than my share of the cake, cos I have the more cake hat!”
When Jon Peters was discussing why the DR system was in place, one of the things that he mentioned was that they didn’t want one playstyle to be orders of magnitude more rewarding than other playstyles (quite right!). Farming is fine, if that’s what you really like doing, but there is no need for the game to provide potent fertilizer in order to make it even more effective than it already is, since that is exactly another way of pushing players who don’t enjoy farming into feeling that it’s something that they need to do.
And the presence of magic find as an enhancement to farming also has the effect that drop rates need to be reduced for those who don’t use it, which then makes it close to essential for crafters who want to get sufficient drops to support their crafting. If you aren’t sure why that must be the case, I put an explanation in the op.
I’m sure most of us here know that MF is not dungeon breaking, since dungeons aren’t hard enough for it to make such a huge difference. But that just completely misses the point – MF is wrong in principle for grouping for exactly the reasons that Strill points out in the 3rd post in this thread. And further MF detracts from one of the major sources of fun (for many and very popular in GW1) in MMOs which is optimising your builds in the best and/or most fun way for the different challenges that you face.
@Branwin “No, that’s just what you all sound like. You know what I do when there is something I don’t like in the game? I focus on the things I DO like and ignore that which I don’t….”
This is a little irritating. The purpose of these forums for many of us is feedback on those features that work well and those that don’t. If I hated the game, I would go and play something else and not bother to comment at all. On the other hand if I thought it was so perfect that it couldn’t be improved, I wouldn’t post here either as that kind of post can get old fast.
completely untrue, the group you party with matters far more. My group has no issue in dungeons only explorable versions really have us in any danger. Many of us who go wear magic find and it has no impact at all on the effectiveness of the group.
Read the thread! Look at Strill’s (very astute) post below my op for an explanation of why MF is such as bad idea for group play that involves any kind of a challenge. And whether the content is or is not challenging is a completely different issue.
Dynamic Events? Really? Such events have already been seen in Warhammer (Open Quests). And I fail to see how GW2 Events or Event bosses like Shatterer are more dynamic that the events in Rift.
I played Warhammer (and Rift) and actually thought it had some pretty good ideas, although unfortunately some major flaws as well. However, neither of those games had chaining scalable dynamic events that remotely approach the complexity of what Guild Wars 2 is trying to achieve. It’s true that currently there are some problems with DEs, but they do have massive potential.
Warhammer is rather a good example, because originally Mythic were intending to be innovative in many different ways – for instance the original design had no levelling, which made much more sense of the integrated PvP. However, Mythic changed horses midstream (that possibly might have had something to do with their relationship with EA), frantically adding mainstream features at the last moment, and that’s now history.
In GW2 weapons are just place holders for sets of skills. Mesmer greatsword could just as easily be a staff, for instance. So, it makes no sense to say rangers need a rifle; rather you need to come up with 5 useful synergistic skills that would make the class more fun to play without making existing ranged options redundant. And why would Arenanet add another ranged skill set when bows already work well, (with a perhaps a few small tweaks only needed).
@ TOR was released in a much more finished state than it, so was Rift.
Neither of those games took significant risks in changing the gameplay, though. It’s a lot easier to do something that has been done before than it is to innovate. There are reasons that no one else has made a dynamic world with scalable events before at least on the kind of scale that GW2 does it! And if it takes a bit of time to get it to work optimally, then its well worth it.
I think you need to look at things in perspective and not just take a totally negative viewpoint, because some things need further work. You have to appreciate that MMOs such as Guild Wars 2 are huge software development projects and that is why many past efforts have been so conservative in not moving away from previously established conventions.
Guild Wars 2 on the other hand is very innovative in many ways and so it’s not surprising that some of the new ideas are going to need further iteration to get right. However, I think, the fundamental ideas underlying the game really can be made to work; and many of us are having a lot of fun with the game already and will continue to do so.
- Cash shop Magic Find (& cash shop karma boosts) encourage static farming and tagging competitions to save time and maximise the use of the buffs before they run out.
- Magic find in general motivates a greedy playstyle that revolves around loot. In PvE at level 80 you might as well just stack magic find on everything, since the PvE isn’t so hard that a small reduction in effectiveness has much impact on your ability to play the game.
- For things to have any value, an economy must be designed to balance supply and demand. That means restricting loot drops (something GW2 does none too well right now for many items). But in the presence of magic find that implies balancing loot drops around the average magic find % a player will have. Consequently, if you build with no magic find you will get much less valuable loot than you would have done in a game where there was no such mechanism.
- if you wear magic find gear in dungeons you are kittening your party for the sake of personal gain.
- Magic find makes botters more productive and consequently fuels gold selling.
I just don’t see that it’s realistic to ask Arenanet to allow petless builds, making the ranger too close to other professions. Really, this is just flogging a dead pet and continued repetition just isn’t going to make it happen.
Good op, that pretty much gets it. Another thing apart from Swoop, which is leap finisher the greatsword doesn’t combo. Instead of making it massively more damaging why not make it do a bit of AOE giving it a different role to the bows that makes it an attractive swap. e.g. Skill 2 Maul might be “Bleed your foes [plural] multiple times with a mauling strike.” and be a whirl finisher. Then you could cross combo or self combo with traps & healing spring. And greatsword really should be an AOE weapon.
The final thing a bow/greatsword build would need is a swiftness utility skill. Then you could use it in WvW with some effectiveness.
The OPs point, I think, is that the long swiftness buff on the warhorn is sufficiently desirable that it tends to make builds without a warhorn less viable and that particularly applies to WvW. All classes need a way of getting swiftness out of combat and it would be better if those options didn’t unnecessarily restrict your weapon load outs. For that reason a utility skill would be good. Speed buffs were one of the things that characterized rangers in Guild Wars 1 and made them good for splitting.
I find the ranger to be pretty good, because the bows are so good. But the other options are a bit lack lustre really: There’s no real reason to get into melee range, where you are likely to take more damage. That’s a general thing in GW2 to some extent, but it particularly applies to rangers.
It’s not such a problem for the warrior, because there are other ways of getting the speed buff i.e. signet of rage has half the cooldown of rampage as one and can be shortened further with a trait. Warrior warhorn is probably still best choice for WvW, particularly since charge! removes immobilizing conditions (cripple, immob, chill). Warrior also has better main hand skills on sword (gap closer) and axe (cyclone axe is a whirl finisher), I reckon.
I think ranger melee options need to be reworked – most of the skills are more cosmetic than effective ATM. Ranger is lacking in speed buffs, condition removal and melee AOE.
Rangers don’t need more ranged weapons – a bit of attention to the melee weapons would be good though as currently you don’t really get any compensation for the increased risk of being in melee range.
If you try to name your pet “Dot” you get the same. Probably they’ve got some kind of matching algorithm (something like soundex) and some perfectly reasonable names are just collateral damage. I like the GM theory for Gmork, maybe i’ll test that out next time i’m on my ranger.
Straits is a lot of fun with a small group 2-3, although it’s perfectly possible to solo too, just takes more time. That’s good design I think as it is one of the first areas where you really gain something by playing together for more than just single events (you can then play lots of events back to back and its fast and fun) and it shows that it’s entirely feasible to make open world PvE have a bit more depth. If you don’t like that playstyle, Frostgorge Sound is a 70-80 area that is similar to previous content.
I think both types of content have a place, for different standards of player skill, but maybe Arenanet need some subtle way of directing players into the kind of content they enjoy, since some players don’t seem able to do that for themselves – if you’ve been doing Sparkfly Fen then it’s easy, and seems intended, that you should just go through the gate into straits, whilst Frostgorge Sound is a long way in the opposite direction.
I think the way to go is for measures to be taken that encourage zergs to split up and so that much more small unit action starts to occur – and not only in PvP. That’s something that I think is quite likely to happen in GW2 and appears to be intended (supply etc.). Approaches that allow ganking of low level players by high level ones are, one might put it, not optimal…
So you imagine that Arenanet will implement a system which bypasses the necessity to pay taxes, a very important and useful gold sink (and as a byproduct allow chat to be spammed with trade messages). Do you expect the inland revenue to encourage tax avoidance too perhaps?
This is one feature you are going to have a wait a very long time for, is my guess.
Except, isn’t the mail system specifically designed to let you mail items / gold to other people but not to yourself? I recall having to send gold to a 3rd party who would then send it back to me so I could get the gold on my alt.
You just deposit it in your bank tab and then your alt can withdraw it. That’s been possible since the first BWE at least.
The mail system allows to attach money and items so you can give things to friends. For instance, we used it to send money to a guild officer to expand the guild. Sometimes when in a group we send each other things that might be useful etc. It’s when you start using it for trading, particularly with strangers, that you are subverting a game mechanism – that’s what the TP is for.
“Hello guys i was thinkin about another classes, my idea was like a monk. very cool i think. please Share ure ideas!”
Presumably you meant a combat monk, rather than pure healer. Using a staff martial arts style and having kick boxing type skills such as staff 3 (20s) “fly through the air booting your foe in the face, causing confusion” (3s) … etc.
I won’t quest at level. I habitually solo 3-4 level above my own…and its plenty challenging.
I agree and I ’ve seen a couple of developers suggest the same approach (one being Eric Flannum during beta). What would be nice though is if this was possible throughout the game including at level 80; currently you often have to do zones backwards etc. so you can get the right level band (and leave lots of residual lower level content) and otherwise restrict yourself, i.e. not too much WvW or crafting if you want to see more than a fraction of the content.
The problem is you do still see people complaining that the content is already hard, so Arenanet can’t just make everything harder as then people just learning their skills, those who find kiting tricky and those who prefer easier gameplay would be unhappy. I think the only type of formal solutions that have a chance of working have to split the two play styles as GW1 started to do with hard mode.
caveat emptor – you have to take at least some responsibility for what you do. The fact that a face to face trading system doesn’t exist should tell you that you aren’t meant to trade that way. If you choose to ignore that, then you do so at your own risk and shouldn’t expect someone else to sort it out for you. I am sure that Arenanet support have enough things to do without following you around and recovering any money that you drop on the pavement.
You should be able to waypoint to your home city for free. That provides at least some small incentive to return there now and again. Unless you need the Mystic Forge, you might as well take the free trip. And it would be faster than detouring through the Mists.
It is sad that the capitals become useless once the race part of the personal story is concluded… Divinity’s Reach is truly the most fully realized fantasy city I’ve ever explored in a video game. Making it free to travel to them would be a nice step in giving them some new life. While they are at it, they could get rid of the free LA port from the Mists.
I agree, divinity’s reach is a work of art. Sometimes though it feels a bit like a painting too in that it’s not very interactive. Why are all the vendor NPCs standing around outside in odd places and don’t have their own shops? Why don’t NPCs actually live in DR – for the most part doors are just facades? And Arenanet seem to have been at a loss for giving some of them roles in that many just sell one useless food item and that acts to make it hard to find the right NPC that you need, without running around the whole city clicking on them all and then taking notes.
The mystic forge is a bit of a catch all too (typical c programmer solution) and way over complicated way of doing something they could have done more atmospherically with separate NPCs & shops.
Another thing – when you actually are able to interact with something the game pops up that horrible generic dialogue box – I’d like to be able to read books and inscriptions directly, that would be much better – Skyrim does this rather well (although the sheer quantity of text there is overkill for me).
@Athaulf – I don’t think there is a problem with the OP at all. It’s not uncivil or whiny, just somewhat robustly expressed and that’s fine. And further it has resulted in a discussion and not a flame war, which is positive. You may not agree with the all the op’s points – I don’t. As to whether GW2 will change, it’s more likely to evolve and maybe it can evolve in a better direction as a result of people frankly expressing their views rather than either sucking up or uselessly raging.
Since the first players who reached level cap are by definition rushers/achievers, it may be that things will start to get better there when the slower players start to catch up. Not that there’s anything wrong with goal directed play if its not too extreme etc.
Some of the things you say in the OP have some resonance with me (not the combat and certainly not the shared nodes) and I could add a few more (appalling loot itemisation, archaic inflexible levelling system etc.) However, Guild Wars 2 makes up for all of that and much more for me, by being the best exploring/PvE game I’ve ever seen. The quality and quantity of open world PvE easily exceeds everything else, despite the fact that there are still a lot of glitches. Also I can’t agree about the combat system, but it only really shines when you take on a level of difficulty, which is higher than the default balance (by playing over level say) or come across an event that is in it’s sweetspot with respect to number of players participating (often just two or three).
The above is a playstyle that isn’t suited to everyone, although other people in my guild have found a way to fit the game around their tastes too. But, its probably too much to expect that all MMOs players are going to be happy – and don’t some of the things that aren’t too positive about the game arise from Arenanet trying to please everyone (such as open world PvE & events being too easy etc.) and falling between several stools in many cases?
There was (probably still is) a feature in Rift where players could group up without asking and invitations. All you need to do is click on an individual or existing group and join up. If you aren’t interested in grouping you can just set your private flag. That was something that worked pretty well. Warhammer had public groups too and they worked well. What you don’t want though in PvE is huge zerg groups forming, of course (Warhammer groups were unlimited or at least very large).
Good post op, I’ve been thinking much the same. I don’t think its a lack of trinity thing, since Warhammer Online, for instance, had similar problems. Also combat DR (haven’t heard it called that before) would be one factor in reducing the effectiveness of zergs and make splitting more practical. Plus they could use the same techniques in DEs that are getting AOE spammed.
@Danicco – In RL combat, there’d be no way that 50 people could damage you at once, since most of them would be blocked by others in the way. Some kind of DR would be an approximation of that effect. Obviously a single person would still not be able to take on 50 others at once … but somewhat increased survivability would be both more realistic and result in more hand to hand encounters than happen now.
I don’t know how anyone can go out into the PvE world and say combat is boring. When you get the right combination of factors (no zergs etc.) many of the events and mini dungeons are a blast to play. My main complaint is that the balance right now is way over on the easy side, but you can circumvent that to some extent by playing content 2-5 levels above and then the combat system with dodge/roll and kiting really shines, especially in those events that throw lots of mobs at you at once. Many of GW2’s skills/traits complement a very mobile play style and are a lot of fun to experiment with.
I think if you play the game a bit more, you will find that the skill system is very much deeper than it appears to be at first site. If you combine that with possible combinations then there is a lot of variety and many things to learn to play your character to it’s best effectiveness.
That’s not to say everything is perfect right now. Some things are essentially mandatory – I’d never go into WvW (as in GW1 alliance battles) without some sort of speed boost, for instance and that somewhat prohibits the builds I’d actually like to try out there.
@Blacklight: “You should be able to waypoint to your home city for free. That provides at least some small incentive to return there now and again.”
This looks like a good idea. Perhaps you should be able to waypoint directly to your story instance home location; that differs slightly depending on which story line you chose when you created your character.
Not to be over cynical, but communities form in MMOs mostly when people need other people in order to complete content that has high chance of yielding useful loot (how many people met their MMO buddies whilst doing the hogger in Elwynn Forest?). It’s also somewhat ironic that technical & design improvements that have reduced the necessity for queuing have also resulted in people getting together less, since there is less downtime in which to communicate.
I guess the only thing they could do would be to have hard mode servers, but everyone would transfer to those and the others would be empty.
There are several ways that hard mode could be done, there no need for special “servers”:
For instance you could reinstance all the content and adjust it for level 80s – you would just have a a normal instance and a hard mode instance of each map and the latter might be reserved for level 80s who’d completed the content – that’s pretty identical to how GW1 worked.
Secondly, you could have differential downscaling. i.e. when you get to level 80 you can choose a more extreme version of downscaling that would be effective in low level areas … and like GW1 hard mode that would give you better loot.
The second version has the advantage that ist doesn’t split the player base and also the big advantage that players doing that hard mode wouldn’t unbalance low level events in the way full level 80 players do.
I’d like to be able to complete the map on my main character, with the same degree of challenge as when levelling up, possibly a bit more, since when levelling I tend to choose content 2-5 levels over my current level. Not looking for a dungeon level challenge, but something to keep my skills from getting rusty, whilst exploring the rest of the content.
For me the open world PvE content and exploring is so good that I haven’t yet really been tempted by the other options. But it’s less good with a maxed out level 80 character as that’s too easy to be fun.
Had some hopes for downscaling, but it isn’t really intended for this as it doesn’t go far enough. Maybe another optional downscaling option could be added whereby you get increased rewards in return for the increased risk. Would even accept a second life character reset to level 1 (in fact I’d bite Arenanets hand off to get it), if my map didn’t get reset too.
@ “Play the way you want to play… unless it’s not the way we want you to play”
It’s more like: Play the way you want provided it isn’t detrimental to the community. That’s a very worthy aim in my opinion.
You might ask yourself why people don’t farm in single player games such as Skyrim – and the answer is likely that in MMOs farmers are trying to earn a reward that is valued by the community. But, what they don’t seem to appreciate is that they devalue the rewards by the methods they are using to acquire them.
Added catapults and scaling veterans to the bridge repair event in Kessex Hills.
!!!!!!!!! excited!!!!!!!!!!!! THIS IS THE START OF SOMETHING GOOD.
Yeah – you beat me to it. Be interesting to see how it works out. If they were able to add this change so quickly it suggests that the code to alter event scaling in this way was already developed and is quite flexible, so will be interesting to see whether other events are updated in the same general way.
The reward/drop system in the game is borked in general and really needs a thorough overhaul. I don’t see that happening all at once though. I reckon that they felt so liberated from the necessity to eke out rewards in GW1, that they went to the opposite extreme of dropping “rare” items like confetti, with the result that there was nothing special left to put in high level mobs and chests.
The attribute downscaling formula appears to be based on a character wearing a fixed quite low level of armor and I don’t think that it changes at all if you upgrade your armor. So, for instance if you are level 80 your attributes will be downscaled by some factor that depends only on the level you are being downscaled to.
Considering the above, I think that for any hard mode idea they would need to increase the downscaling factor on the assumption that a level 80 will be in max stats exotic armor. That would be a good incentive for maxing out anyway…
I’m not much of a theory crafter so would be interested if anyone has more detailed knowledge about the downscaling formula. However, it works though, a level 80 with even reasonably decent armor (far less max stats) appears to be more powerful than the level they are nominally being levelled down to.
.