Guild Wars 2

It’s early days yet and some of the combat, events etc. no doubt need a little tweaking. For instance AOE effects probably stack too much, making AOE zerging more effective than it should be. Also currently ranged play styles tend to be lot safer than melee without significant compensations. When you try something new that’s as complex as changing the whole mechanics in MMOs it takes a bit of time to balance it all out. But the signs are good.

BigCisHere.4076:

I’d suggest it is completely situationally dependent. You cannot say that one is ALWAYS better than the other. Personally, I have both a Longbow and a Shortbow equipped on my Ranger as I level. I find that I am using the Shortbow a lot more though. I find that its sustained dps “feels” as though it is slightly superior to the Longbow.

However, for maximum effect, you should switch between them. In boss fights, I often switch between them as soon as it is off cooldown.

In PvE I generally find it is far too difficult to sustain the use of a Longbow, as maintaining enough distance becomes too much of a hassle for me, and to get the most out of it, you need to remain as far away as possible. So if you can do that, Longbow might be the better option, but if you find yourself regularly getting close, Shortbow is definitely worth a go.

Bid sad to have two ranged weapons equipped tho. Have seen other people doing that too, but would be lot more fun if there were more advantages to be had from using a mixed melee/ranged build. Maybe the melee weapons need to be tweaked a bit to make that more of a good option, rather than a short cut to being dead.

Guido.6317:

Still does make quite a bit of sense though. I’ve been wondering as to why I have been dying so much but I don’t think I was spec’d for my play style. Thanks for the advice!

I find at low levels that buffs and traits aren’t all that important, but mostly slap power, toughness and some vitality on my armor. What is more important in GW2 compared to older games is movement:

- Make sure your key bindings (don’t click your skills) allow you to circle strafe and fire off your skills at the same time.
- use the mouse to turn and not the keyboard (a lot of people still do this)
- dodge/roll is your friend, not only to evade, but also as a gap opener – My first five trait points went into Wilderness Survival to get the minor trait Natural Vigor that speeds up the regeneration of endurance (recharges your dodge/roll quicker).

The naming rules are a good thing in that they somewhat lessen the incidence of offensive names. But inevitably there will be collateral damage, in that the algorithms aren’t 100% effective and have false positives – just like spam email filters.

I can’t imagine that Arenanet sat down at a board meeting and banned the name “Lulu” intentionally. But, you lose rather less by not being able to call your cat Lulu than we would all lose if Arenanet were to be more lax with their naming restrictions, I think.

Peter.9406:

They are pretty bad as of now. Not worth taking at all for the reasons listed above by everyone. It’s ridiculous how many post and comments on how bad the spirits are and ANet has done nothing about it.

LOL – Give them a chance, it’s not as if they have nothing else to do. In any case, It’s much better to approach balance issues slowly and carefully than to try and stick a quick bandaid on the problem, as GW1 players will well know. And it’s not as if rangers are lacking other things to do in the mean time.

Generally, its better to be underpowered than OP, then you can expect a nice buff and a new way of playing the class some time in future, rather than to have your build destroyed by a nerf.

Find the short bow is a lot of fun to play if you like a skirmishing/kiting gameplay style. Just can’t find a good 2nd weapon set that is worth switching to – except to fire off those two offhand warhorn skills and quickly switch back to the shortbow.

Having recently started a ranger, I’m a bit bemused by the one handed sword. Without a gap closer or any melee range AOE abilities, it doesn’t appear to have a benefit that makes up for the increased risk of being at melee range.

Using a warhorn offhand does have benefits in that the 5 skill adding swiftness (and fury) is great – almost essential for WvW I would have thought. Warhorn 4 is good as well, though again not an AOE. I reckon its going to be more effective to just fire off 4&5 on the warhorn and then switch to a bow, than try to use the sword from melee range. For that reason axe/warhorn would seem to be a better bet – at least 1&2 on axe are multitarget skills (1 bounces between foes & 2 is a cone) & u don’t have to risk melee range control skills that can get you killed real fast, especially since rangers have far less capable abilities to remove these than a warrior has.

Greatsword is fun – but doesn’t haven’t any AOE either and you have to sacrifice the warhorn swiftness buff. So I can’t imagine I’d want to use that in PvP. Again you don’t seem to gain much in return for being rather squishy at melee range.

I’d really like to play a skirmishing style with ranger, switching between melee and ranged, but I’m not sure that it can really be made to work well compared to just sticking at range.

Yes, the reward system needs some overhauling, I think. Currently there are so many different ways of getting blues and greens (market, karma, crafting, common drops) that they don’t function as valuable rewards for content. In most cases these items sell for 1c above vendor price on the market and even with gold being a bit tighter in GW2 than other games that’s an insignificant value.

I think they also need to work on the weapon upgrades on green items, especially armor sets. Many of the bonuses are close to useless. For instance even the most dedicated min/maxer isn’t going to carry scads of different weapons with bonuses against different species, such as grawls, ogres etc. So these upgrades (and other limited ones) are essentially valueless.

A little bit of patience is required: Arenanet have to bolt the stable door before the horse gets out; later they may be able ease up some of the restrictions. And there’s plenty to do in Guild Wars 2 right now without frenetically farming for legendaries. And in the end this playstyle is self defeating and a psychological trap that results in people turning fun into grind. You need to enjoy the journey, because the final destination is a game over screen, as it always has been.

It’s totally against the spirit of the game, as anyone who followed it through development will know – and to be fair that is surely what the op’s point is.

I imagine that Arenanet will be trying to fix these things – but players do have a nack of breaking stuff in unforeseeable ways. And the problem is very much tied into the fact that as it stands events fail very infrequently, hiding previous events; that’s surely not intended either.

@ “What gets me is the game was sold on “taking the grind out of MMO’s” then they put in Karma weapons that cost 64k karma, armour sets that cost 212k karma, cultural sets that cost 120 gold and dungeon sets that take 70+ runs to get the badges for, then destroy any ability to farm anything in order to reach these obscene token/karma/gold prices, and expect people not to argue back?”

The point is that they are meant to take some time to get. If you can only get them quickly by farming particular areas, then that encourages people to play the game in a “gamey” way rather than as a virtual world. That would alienate the many of us who really don’t like farming and prefer to experience all the content that Arenanet have designed. That said, in return for nerfing farming, I reckon they do need to make it possible to get the mats and karma over much more of the content.

@melkathi – yes some good ideas.

One thing that occurred to me on this theme is that given a large enough area they might have neighbouring events that overlap in their effect:

If the number of players was small only one of the events might trigger at any particular time. But, if the number of players was larger two or more events would be triggered at the same time, extending the combined event into a larger area; and if anyone of those events failed the players would fail – so any zerg would need to spread out in order to win. i.e. this is scaling by stacking events over an area rather than stacking mobs in a single event in a constricted area.

One advantage of this type of approach is that even when player numbers are lower you can still use the same events, but just not trigger them all together, so that devs wouldn’t need to spend time developing something of limited utility if player numbers start to decline over an area in the future.

Just not sure how this kind of thing would actually go down in practice. Maybe, it would generate complaints “can’t get waypoint X to complete the area” etc. Essentially what you asking for is a sort of WvW where one of the worlds consists of intelligent AI. But, many players just want to continue their inexorable progress to level cap in order that they can farm high level areas for mats & karma and probably wouldn’t care less, except they’d moan when the area was taken over by hostile NPCs inhibiting their progress or ability to get some item or achievement.

melkathi.5203:

Elric of Grans.7684:

I am not sure how difficult/easy this would be to implement, but it sure sounds cool.

It should not be too difficult to implement. The difficulty should be balancing it as more variables are added.

Not sure about that – if it was easy they’d probably have done it already. One gritty problem you are going to run into is: Does the area have enough space to hold not only all the players but the extra mobs? If not a redesign of many battle grounds would probably be required. My gut feeling is that scaling up to large player groups is difficult and coping with huge zergs in a fluid way may not even be feasible for many of the events – there are only so many people you can crowd into one room at the same time.

Suppish.8723:

bump

the entire game is awesome when it’s just you and four buddies in a party. but once you run into a zerg. fun = zero cuz the game doesn’t scale itself properly for everyone on the map to be at the same event

THIS Many of the events along with the mini dungeons in caves are a blast with small parties of 2-4. Single champion/ large boss events though are still fun, but can often be trivialised by circle strafing with a ranged weapon – bosses need to spawn minions more often or have other mechanisms. Also ranged AOE damage from spellcasters is a bit too effective ATM compared to melee and the risk is so much lower – along with fact that the visual spell effects (esp fire) make it impossible for melee players to see what is going on.

DarkWasp.7291:

It would be nice if they implemented a karma boost to counter-act the anti-farm scale.

Something that would give explorers a significant boost and makes the legendary weapon farm more enjoyable.

Something that would notify and reward those who go help with group events which have been all but abandoned in the middle zones.

Something that encourages players to play the game rather than spend 2-4 months of 16 hour days farming the same place.

THIS. I think and hope this may be what is behind some of the recent changes and they’re not finished yet. They surely must discourage everyone just getting to level 80 and staying in the same place in order to farm events for karma to get their max level armor – that would be a crazy game design.

But ATM, if u really want to explore the world on one character you can only do so at the expense of Karma and other high level items. Also its all the wrong way around – the XP gain you get from anything & everything forces you up to level 80 so quickly that you have to explore at least half the map when you are already at max level – and despite the downscaling there is no real challenge, or reward, in doing that: so it just becomes an “achievement” for completionists.

So you should be able to make progress towards your max level armor, however you choose to play the game, not just by farming in high level areas.

Maybe somewhat cynical, but most players don’t really know what they want, because they don’t appreciate what effects their requests are likely to have on the game as a whole. Devs do look at what players say they want, but need to filter it the light of both feasibility and knock on effects. If you are a software analyst you say to your users: “Don’t tell me what you want – tell me what you do” – in a polite manner, of course, but that’s the gist.

Joseph.3860:

That is not what he was saying. Often times, if you try to do the other paths to complete the event, your attacked anyways, whether by the mobs or something happens. I really like the idea of the events and their stories, but it is kind of annoying when you pick a daisy thinking you are ahving a great time then all of the sudden a OMGWTHPWNing Monster comes up…

Think it was what he was saying and you appear to be saying the same thing.

Currently the PvE reward system is set up to reward people for doing things that aren’t fun or if they are fun for some people they certainly aren’t for others. Firstly, Arenanet put in all this great and detailed content that is fun to do, but then in order to get your max gear rewards, you can only really do it by farming Karma & gold & special crafting items off of high level events, dungeons etc.

So the result is that a good % of players ignore almost all the early content in order to get as quickly as possible to the places where they can farm the things they need to get high level rewards.

So where is this: “end game starts at level 1” idea gone? If end game starts at level 1, you should be able to progress towards rewards just as fast there as you can later.

Do we really want a situation where after a few months, everyone is level 80 and farming the high level areas like crazy? Because that’s the direction that the current reward system is encouraging.

Prestige rewards should be about commitment to the game and those who explore and do the content as it is surely designed should not be penalised over those who rush to max level and then farm.

Also see my suggestion Negative XP food, please – which seems to me to be one kind of way in which this problem can be alleviated. But, other things need to be rethought as well, I think.

Food ATM always has +XP bonus on it, which is exactly what you don’t want if you are intent on levelling slowly and say exploring more than one area of the same level requirement (and maybe levelling a craft at the same time).

So why not have negative XP food that makes you gain experience more slowly? Such food would have a compensating bonus to make up for lack of XP gain, the best one I think being +Karma. So you might have food items with:

-20% XP bonus
+20% Karma gain
Maybe some other bonus – +magic find would be great.

I would love to see this kind of food available right out of the starting gate so I can do a couple of starter areas at the level for which they were designed.

And people! such food would be entirely optional – you rushers need not apply!

incisorr.9502:

Me being unlucky is not my imagination but i won’t even continue this discussion.

Whether a fair flip of a coin falls heads or tails is a 50% chance. It isn’t affected in any way by how “lucky” the flipper has been in the past. So any unlucky run you had in the past can in no way affect you future luck: So you’re in the same boat as all of us, and not a special little snow flake in this respect… or maybe ANet have got in for you and are secretly conspiring so that you don’t get lucky clover. Take your pick.

Adzy.8370:

or just buff the sceptre and staff skills so they aren’t completely useless.

There’s something a bit wet about a guardian using a sceptre and the animations don’t help. I don’t play a guardian because I want to ineffectually waive a little stick around.

I think these forums need a section for general PvE, since that’s a major area of the gameplay. This suggestions topic has heavy churn, not to mention people using it for (mostly misguided) complaints about every aspect of the game, that they don’t even pretend to frame as suggestions.

BrettKeane.6805:

I’ve tried all classes. Warrior and engineer seem very weak. Well, I guess we will see what people think and I will add more input providing I’m not dissed for my opinions.

Warrior is a good class and certainly isn’t weak. Remember that you have lots of different build options & weapon choices and u may have chosen bad ones. I haven’t played engineer yet, but others are having a blast (!?) with them.

@ There needs to be significant rewards for experience accumulated without death.

That is a part of the monthly achievements, but currently you don’t seem to be able to check where u have got to in the achievement after it has been reset by a death.

Also this kind of thing isn’t really good since it just encourages people to play conservatively and restrict the things they do: I could probably play through the whole game without dieing quite easily if I didn’t take any risks and played PvE over levelled – or just sat around crafting for that matter.

Agree – Guardian melee is nicely designed, but the ranged weapons (staff and sceptre) are a lot less fun than the warrior’s rifle & bow. I suppose that the problem Arenanet have is in differentiating the ranged play of the guardian from the warrior.

Piktaro.2931:

I agree with the above statements about being able to RPG more within the different “zones” and cities/outposts. I think THIS would make for a more DYNAMIC interaction between players and npc/storyline arc. Also, 1 other thought about DE ..sometimes I just wanna gather and not have to fight everything that comes along, now I don’t mind killing the mobs near the gathering node I’m trying to get to, but I do mind having to be involved in a DE when I don’t want to. Right now the only option is to fight or run, I wish there was a way to turn off DE’s just for my active character at that time, and then turn them back on later. Maybe that’s wishful dreaming.

So you don’t want to play the game, but rather be put in a zone where you can gather stuff without any risk? I take the opposite view – gathering is a bit too simple right now and there are too many easily accessible nodes, which is making the supply outstrip the demand and driving the TP prices down.

or allow players to earn more Karma at the expense of XP!

In Guild Wars 2 the end game starts at level 1…. but it doesn’t since a major part of the endgame involves doing activities to obtain karma in order to get cultural armor etc.

So the problem:

There are several MMO play styles and Arenanet tries to cater for them by adopting a median approach to XP gain: The most extreme are 1) Rushers: Rushing to max level ASAP & 2) Explorers: explore everything completionism.

The problem is that those who verge towards the explorer style (such as myself) tend to over level the content and please note despite the down scaling, this makes the gameplay insufficiently challenging for many experienced players – in fact a better experience for many can be had a couple of levels under the content, I think.

So the Idea:

Explorers take much longer to get to max level than rushers do, so that means they take much longer to get to a place where they can start earning the karma in sufficient quantity to progress obtaining their cultural armor. Consequently, rushers will get their armor a long time before explorers do, even though they have played the game less (and some would argue in a more gamey style).

So to even this out a bit, it would be possible to start earning the karma for max level armor from level one by selecting a play style option that would boost the amount of karma you get from karma rewards at the expense of getting less XP for activities. This would have to be carefully balanced out of course….

Oh and as a side benefit – it might actually encourage some of those rushers to take a more leisurely route through the game and enjoy all the content that Arenanet have put into it.
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P.S. this suggestion is an elaboration of something that came up in other thread – thanks Kal, I think it was.

Agree – and they somewhat diminish the pleasure in opening a chest in the first place. Also on the subject of useless rewards, please make those golem bankers stack I have bunch in my bank and will probably trash them too.

+1, good idea. Find this confusing and for a long time didn’t even realise that this was what was causing me to lose target lock.

TL;DR (and surely noone else will either), but scanning over it looks like a mixed bunch and little that we don’t know already. What you should appreciate when evaluating GW2 is that its really a huge effort with many daring innovations by Arenanet that haven’t been tried before. Some of those are going to work better than others in practice. As to bugs, I reckon the game has had a pretty good launch and has a been a blast to play for many of us from close to day 1 of pre release, with just a few minor inconveniences. It still amazes me that such complex projects are feasible at all.

Probably you’d get better results if you didn’t frame your suggestion in the manner of a school teacher telling off a naughty student. However, I do think some of the traits could do with better descriptions. for instance nowhere in the wiki or game does it mention a cool down for the trait “last stand”. I believe its 90secs – from trawling forums etc., but that may be wrong or old information.

In the case of sweet revenge, I agree with Leodious that its probably a bug though.

Dungeons might be quite easy for groups who are good at the mechanics, know how to dodge, equip themselves properly, bring symbiotic skills etc. – as Colin Johanson pointed out in an earlier post about dungeon difficulty. But those requirements almost certainly don’t fit the majority of the playerbase, most likely in fact a small minority of dungeon groups will get these factors even half right.

In the light of the above then, making dungeons more punitive would mean that most people would soon give up and the work Arenanet put into dungeons would only be seen by a small minority of gamers.

Part of the problem is that dungeons are just too long, which enhances the possibility of missteps causing wipes. But also when your users have invested hours into an activity only to fail it and have their effort amount to nothing that’s a strong incentive to keep the majority of players out of dungeons permanently, fun as it might be a few.

Also, it’s somewhat hard to know exactly how difficult dungeons are for most people, since difficulty always gets muddled up with ego and everyone claiming they can do them easily with both arms tied behind their backs – which is often far from the truth when you actually encounter one of those players.

Flankenzee.7958:

MMO’s are about lots of players interacting together, and GW2 is severely lacking in that area because everything is so impersonal, people barely use chat at all. TP doesn’t even tell you who you are trading with, crafted items aren’t named with the crafter, you can’t trade with a person standing in front of you.

I agree that currently people aren’t meeting up that much in the game, at least in my experience. But, I don’t think the trading system is the reason for that.

People tend to come together to solve problems that are hard to solve on their own. in GW1 people would just use heroes/henchmen, but in GW2 they just solo everything instead. Not an easy thing for devs to solve, since the solo aspect is pretty essential for casual players. They have tried to intersperse solo events with group content, but maybe that needs to be taken somewhat further.

Pretty much all posts on these forums are suggestions of one sort or another. If you want to get the ear of the devs concerned with professions, it would seem sensible to put your post in the professions section. I can’t imagine that everyone at Arenanet will be trawling the whole forum to find posts such as this.

Further that is where you are likely to find other mesmers who can comment more knowledgeably about your ideas.

miracle.4216:

Really this isn’t going to happen – It would require changing the design of the whole city for starters. And, of course there never would be enough space for everyone. Further when people are offline for extended periods or when they’ve finished playing the game their “house” would just be wasted space. Maybe you might get to rent a flat in an apartment block or something.

I agree that the cities could do with some activities (in addition to vistas etc.). However, non instanced housing would hardly suffice for that, unless the privileged few spent their whole game time sitting on their door steps and entertaining passers by.

SHM.7628:

This has been brought up a million times From the fist beta and on. I agree with you you 100%. It is the number one issue in the game that needs attention. I don’t understand why Anet hasn’t even commented on it. (unless I missed something.)

They have commented on it – see Baxuz’s post above, which gives a link to his very well put together thread, which disects all these issues.

You’ll find lots of other engineers in the engineer forum, in the professions section.

You know there is section in the forums for mesmer, right? If not, you’ll find it under professions.

The main problem with the high waypoint costs is that they penalize short gaming sessions and moving around the map – something I think that should be encouraged rather than the opposite. If the devs are concerned that reducing waypoint costs would inflate the gold supply all they need to do is to reduce reward amounts by the correct % to compensate.

The queues are long, because the game has just launched. After a while they will die down and in fact have done to some extent already on my world. Also, Arenanet have mentioned that they working on increasing the capacity. So there probably isn’t any real need for further “solutions”.

Flankenzee.7958:

I am more than used to the TP already, and I do plenty of trading on it. But when I’m out in the field and want to trade with a specific person, I want to be able to trade directly with them, whether they are on my friends list, or someone I am teaming up with for a short while.

Wots wrong with using mail for that? The only thing that mail lacks is the security aspect. But, if u just want to give something to someone it works fine. If u want to flog that black dye or sword of uber slaying then its best to just put it on the TP.

There’s no convincing case here for F2F trading and certainly not one that even begins to make up for the disadvantages. This is one of those things like (censored) that people will continue to moan about.

You can’t see the names of opposing players in WvW. I’m pretty sure that the devs would take a similar view on inspect, so I very much doubt this will be in the game and am thankful for it – no doubt the next feature people will be requesting would be some kind of gear score.

miracle.4216:

I just wrote a thread about this. I’d LOVE to see non-instanced housing in Divinity’s Reach.

Really this isn’t going to happen – It would require changing the design of the whole city for starters. And, of course there never would be enough space for everyone. Further when people are offline for extended periods or when they’ve finished playing the game their “house” would just be wasted space. Maybe you might get to rent a flat in an apartment block or something.

Hardly the “main reason this game is lacking though” is it? Those are relatively minor things that some people might appreciate and may be added later unless the devs have some compelling reason for not doing so. Also hopefully, they’ll add a spectator mode for sPvP.

Flankenzee.7958:

Not being able to walk up to someone in front of you and trade with them is just silly. The current system doesn’t solve any problems – and I never had a problem in other games that I could trade with other players.

One can only repeat that the market is a far better place to trade with strangers. When u get used to it I’m sure you will come round to it.

@ “As a low leveled character, you don’t get to enjoy high events and dungeons that maxed characters are able to reach. I would think that low leveled characters are the limited ones in comparison.”

Yes you do, but after you’ve experienced the early content at a level for which it is appropriate. Endgame begins at level 1 in GW2 – that was no idle boast, GW2 is a blast to play from the start and it’s a pity to outlevel the content before you have finished it, because then you can do everything in those zones by standing still and spamming your 1 key.

As to the guy who said “don’t use food”, well I don’t. I’ll probably just use the magic find food at level 80 (my first toon is nearly there unfortunately), where the additional XP doesn’t make you level quicker, but just results in extra skill points.

Phy.2913:

Onshidesigns.1069:

lethlora.1320:

There’s too many level 80s now and I don’t feel special anymore!!!

Leveling isn’t that important in this game.

Some of us are taking our time to enjoy the game. You miss to much by rushing through it.

You’re implying we can’t enjoy the game at level cap, or go back to area’s we missed before.

you can, but it won’t be very challenging – downscaling is a really nice idea, but its a not a complete solution to making early content a viable option, at least if u want to do something other than roll your face on the keyboard.

Rotten title – if you want to complain about PvP make a thread in the PvP section, this is the suggestions section and its hard to fathom just what your suggestion is.

Well, there are some invisible walls, but they’ve done a pretty good job in that area and I don’t see it as something that needs urgent developer attention right now.