Its not lopsided logic. Its exactly the same. The difference is AI in this game doesnt adapt and reposition in all situations. Thats simplistic AI. Not an exploit. PvE is designed so the player should almost always win. So even with more complex AI the encounters are designed so that players can manipulate/take advantage of its attacks. Its like using terrain to protect you from projectile attacks. Or do you want bosses to shoot people through walls?
Its an exploit in the same way bosses wont use ranged attacks on melee players or melee attacks on ranging players. Manipulation of AI. Its impossible to not take advantage of minor AI deficiencies in PvE (this is like the only encounter where you have some choice with how much you manipulate the AI). Thats the whole point of PvE and how bosses are designed.
The 3g price in the past was the stupid price. Especially as it was mostly caused by lupi skippers and underwater heroes. 8g is fair considering legit alphard and how painful brie is these days to solo. Not to mention the overall time to solo P2 and sell. personally I wouldnt sell for any less than 5g for it to be worth my time and effort.
Did you read what we said? Skip to get the end rewards faster. Its as simple as that. You make money faster. And the reason people do it is because the reason for killing trash mobs is often not good enough. So its better to just go faster and get the guaranteed rewards.
Precursors arguement doesnt hold up. Thats purely RNG. Some people get precursors from dungeon chests. And its not like we should go clear every mob in a dungeon just for the 0.000001% chance of a precursor. If we wanted to play the RNG game like that then there are better areas to kill constant trash mobs.
No decent loot. Boring. And in some cases there is greater challenge in skipping assuming you dont use a thief. Plus the faster the dungeon is the more satisfying the run is.
There are a few groups of trash that many speedrunners will kill on casual runs. Such as the risen and destroyer trash in CoE. And thats because killing those groups barely slows you down and you get a load of decentish loot for the time.
AC p1, hodgins doesnt start the burrow event. No idea on the cause. And it seems quite rare.
I’ve noticed this usually happens if he dies on the stairs due to the fire. Even if you revive him there, he wont do anything. It seems that the trigger for the event is somewhere between the door where the waypoint opens after finishing the event and the table.
My workaround for this, usually, is telling the whole party to move into the secluded room where the second burrow spawns, this way Hodgins magically spawns at the table.
We had him bug for no reason. We then killed him on the stairs to try and fix it. He would just follow us around the room not triggering anything.
This was done after the tunnel trigger after scepter pieces didnt activate in our all path in one run. So we decided to do legit P1 to finish. Exploit it and it breaks. Do it legit and it breaks.
Read my post above yours. You lose damage by running and dodging just like you do with berserker builds. You are thinking of DoT damage in other games. It doesnt work the same in GW2.
Just a quick interjection with regards to the pros and cons of hybrid builds (Sinister stats). It’s important to keep in mind one of the strengths of a hybrid build, and that is versatility.
A zerker focused party composition will always do more damage to a low toughness stationary mob, as it should. And a pure condi build will always do more damage to a high toughness, mobile and melee unfriendly (PBAoE) mob since dodges only lower zerker damage, but stacked condis tick regardless.
So when faced with the inevitable (fingers crossed) mixing of highly mobile and or ranged, high toughness mobs and others with low toughness and more stationary, instead of a full zerker party only being half optimal the hybrids can switch on the fly (weapon swap) depending on the strengths and weaknesses of what they face.
My point is you can’t judge the effectiveness of the weapon without weighing it against the strengths and weaknesses of the target. Variation of enemy stats / skills will render the ‘one zerker to rule them all’ calculations inaccurate (again fingers crossed).
The combination of removing the condi cap and Anet creating more varied encounters should in my opinion make hybrid builds more ‘viable’ and (more importantly) versatile as the game goes forward and we see more variation in what we face.
ok that wasn’t so quick…but I’m versatile so whatever
Dodging lowers condi damage aswell. The game is designed so maintaining high condi damage relies on maintaining your auto attack. If you dodge your stacks of condis drop slightly. DoT damage in GW2 is not the same as it is in other games. You cant fire and forget your DoT cooldowns. You have to constantly maintain and reapply them. Any interruption to that will reduce your dps. And due to auto attack dependance and build up time, dodging causes almost the same proportional damage loss as on direct damage.
The only difference between the two types is condi has build up time and is more effective against very high armour. And direct is more bursty and has faster recovery time. It also has much higher maximum output and sustained dps assuming armour isnt completely off the charts. Direct is also slightly more dependant on buffs to be effective.
Which goes back to the original point. Rewards need to be appropriately balanced. Either certain areas need to be buffed or others need to be nerfed. Buffing unrewarding areas to be more inline with current best areas would be the more popular solution. You cant avoid optimisation. So you just need to adapt and balance the game as it is.
Theres nothing wrong with certain areas giving a lot of pure gold. The problem arises when other areas cant compete with those rewards for value and more importantly sustainable value. Account bound unique skins do not have value past the first time you get them.
That and the fact that players continue to play the content long after its release. You will notice that in open world its only the most farmable and newest maps which are heavily played. Old maps and zones are relatively dead by comparison and far less played than dungeons (megaserver alleviates the problem slightly). Dungeons are old but they are still played regularly by a significant amount of players. Thats because the rewards are sustainable. And the social aspect is favourable to many.
I always have to repeat this, I’d love new dungeons, I just have come to the conclusion that they probably won’t happen, and that anet has good, or at least understandable reasons for not doing them.
People come into these threads with a “I like dungeons I want more dungeons so dungeons must be popular and a good idea for arenanet to do.”.
I really dont see why you need to keep repeating this. It adds nothing to the discussion. You have made your opinion clear. Theres no need to try and divert discussion by repeating your expections.
Rewards are the main driving force in all parts of PvE. This is a cosmetic game. Content can be be popular by design alone. But it wont hold true replayability if rewards are poor. And its perfectly reasonable to be rewarded appropriately for whatever content you choose to do. Anet have always said play the game how you want and get rewarded. But when the rewards arent correctly balanced players feel forced to farm certain content so they can get their cosmetic items. Its an important issue and mocking this concept is ridiculous.
Well the class has managed to function with a severe lack of damage avoidance so far. Whats it matter if we lose a bit more.
Honestly i do think one of the more likely ideas for the specialisation is removal of DS as a transform. Make DS skills F key skills and give us some blocks and more defensive utilities. This is a speculation thread. Theres no need to jump down each others throats over disgreeing ideas.
Lets be honest they werent really doing much of anything at the 6 month mark…. All areas of the game had a drop in population. Because the entire population had a drop.
The beauty of instances is you dont have to do the content a certain way. You can do it however you like. That same choice isnt possible in open world. You either zerg it or zerg it.
Thats my biggest problem with Silverwastes and Drytop. Im not a fan of open world due to how its played by the masses. But Silverwastes is a map i can bare. Unfortunately Silverwastes take way too long to progress the map wide objective. And thats what prevents me from going back to those maps. Its also the cause of map hopping. Noone stays on the same map because it takes too long to progress. So they find a map which is halfway done. Shorten the map objective and Silverwastes will probably be a bit more long term friendly.
Drytop i just dislike because its not an open map and the map objective is completely timegated. Its frustrating to get around in that map and thats not even including the aspect crystal jumping. Want to get to the other side of the map? Theres a huge impassable cliff so you have to go round. This is probably the fault of releasing the map in multiple sections. I really hope anet never does that again. It completely ruins the flow of a map.
This in addition to more stuff to spend relics on is actually a really nice idea. It was already discussed that certain new rewards should only be available to purchase at certain levels. But tiered discounts is also nice. Im guessing you mean just like the drytop tiered vendor?
They designed them to be about 20 minutes each (old dev post at release). As long as they dont force timegates experienced players will always find ways to drastically shorten a dungeon. The thing with fractals is they are certainly not designed to be completed in 20 minutes for all 3 shards plus the boss. Thats something only really experienced speedrunners can do with godly map RNG.
I would say fractals are designed to be about 15 minutes per shard and 10 for the boss. So almost an hour. They actually designed fractals pretty well in that regard because even experienced groups dont get much faster than too often. But casual groups can take hours to do a full fractal. Even on a low fractal level.
And longer dungeons arent necessarily better. Ive seen a lot of praise because dungeons in gw2 are so short compared to other MMO’s. And i agree its a nice time frame for instanced content. Not too long to cause problems for even quite time restricted players. And not too short for the average group. I mean personally i would rather have an action packed 10 minute dungeon than a slow paced 30 minute dungeon. Length and completion time doesnt really matter if the content is good and engaging (assuming its not unreasonably long).
Its not. But i dont always have time or the will to do a full fractal run. Sometimes i want to do a single path of a dungeon. Something which takes 15 minutes maximum. Sometimes i want my challenging content in bitesize slices. A fractal run takes between 20 minutes (extremely good rng and smooth run) and an hour. This is also something many casual players complain about. They cant do fractals because they dont have the time. This is a casual game after all.
Its difficult to accept fractals as the solution with their current implementation and rewards. Most challenging content and the least rewarding. Also the fractured patch didnt exactly give us much faith in fractal improvements.
No matter how much we influence fractals it will never be the perfect alternative for people who just want to jump into a quick instance of their choice for semi decent rewards. I dont ever expect them to change the 3 fractal 1 boss setup.
And being rewarding in pure cash is a factor. Gold never becomes unrewarding. Things like fractal skins and ascended gear become increasingly unrewarding the more you recieve them. There comes a point where you dont need them. And you would rather just have gold to save for the next expensive skin on the TP.
(The following commentary does NOT apply to Fractals and LS S2 replays for Achievements)
What’s the point in adding more dungeons? Levels aren’t going to increase. Gear isn’t getting more tiers. Armor skins can be added to the open world with a casual version and more hardcore version. Extra cosmetics and harder pieces to get (such as Legendaries) already encourage dungeon exploration. With everyone able to reasonably get at least one version of every legendary in HoT, dungeons could see a large influx of players.
But, again, I ask. Why do we need more? I’m not saying that adding more is a bad things. I’m not saying that I wouldn’t like more dungeons (because I would). But what purpose would a new dungeon add? Armor skins and weapon skins? Another currency to use? More shinies to equip?
More encounters that are suited to small groups and cant be zerged down? Some people like to actually feel like they have an impact on the encounter. And they like to play with just their friends. Open world doesnt really let you do that. And you certainly cant reliably solo/small group bosses when any random player can just jump in and invade your play experience. Megaservers killed any chance of that. I miss the days of guesting to Vabbi and solo/duoing temple bosses in orr. Not everyone likes open world zerging.
There should be variety in PvE. Large group encounters and small group encounters. Current dungeons are very old and dont take advantage of the combat system. Having improved new dungeons would be a huge draw for many players.
So this is just a guess. But they may have fixed minipets by making the the ranger runes require companions to have a certain amount of health. Obviously this fixed mini pets but also affected clones and phantasms because they have low health.
GLHF pressing 11111 with your boring living story zombie key mashers
You obviously haven’t done Living Story Season 2 and it’s achievements. Some of the more enjoyable and challenging things I’ve done in gw2 for some time. You’re missing out if challenge is what you seek.
Picking up deals 30% of your maximum health so it doesn’t matter that much who picks it.
Well eles taking it is risky due to how fast they die to cultist attacks.
But,
ele
has
Arcane Shield,
and Sandstorm,
and an effing condition removal in every weapon sets.
Banner kitten has nothing. But banners.
Yeah but on the final seals you arent standing in your sandstorm. You are running out to hit the seal. And you cant use weapon skills while holding the hammer. Plus as someone who always plays eles in fractals i have much experience being singled out by cultists in the stack. Conveniently taking me low inbetween blinds and projectile blocks.
Its not to say an ele cant run the hammer. I do it sometimes. Its just not as favourable as a class with a bit more durability. And eles cant hold the hammer for as many charges most of the time due to condition damage and single hits taking most of your health.
Would be better to just use staff marks out of combat and then swap weapon. Because in an extended fight you arent going to want to get stuck with staff for 10 seconds. It only works as an opener.
OP is just showing that there are people who support dungeons but arent vocal. I can attest to that. My guild currently holds about 30 members. I am the only regularly vocal member of the guild. We are a speedrun and dungeon/fractal solo guild. Also on EU there are atleast 4 other big speedrun guilds with even more members than us. And they have a maximum of a couple vocal members per guild on the forums aswell. Same goes for NA speedrun guilds. There are less of those but they have far larger numbers in each guild.
Also i have lost count at the amount of people that have asked me for dungeon help and thanked me for info in game. And these are people who never post on the forums. Compare this to the fact that i can recall almost everyone who posts regularly on the dungeon subforum (including people that no longer play/post). Also there is never a shortage of dungeon groups on the LFG. So even if the community is a minority. Its not as small as people make it out to be and its only a minority because of the lack of support weve had since release. As someone thats very involved in the dungeon community its never felt like a small minority to me.
Also i was going to test elemental powder on the dummies in silverwates. But i realised i dont have any armour sets with ranger runes on any character anymore. Easy way to test is to use locust swarm on necro and summon the elemental half way through the duration.
You dont want staff even in an organised group. Even if you dont use battle sigil camping scepter dagger is superior. And path of midnight is a must have.
Clones – dont work
Phantasms – dont work
Turrets – dont work
Banners – dont work
Minions – work
Spirit weapons – work
Glyph elementals – work
Ranger pets – work
Minipets – dont work
You want to run scepter and dagger in both weapon sets and use a battle sigil. And you want to drop staff mastery and take path of midnight. Dark path and tainted shackles are good skills for condi. And tainted shackles is good for power aswell. Also if people dont stack might you want signet mastery and aristocracy runes.
You will see a TON more condi players if it sticks. Condi will overrule zerkers in big boss fights. Maybe not still in speed runs, but big fights. If you can continue to stack condies, the continuous damage output would be far superior to zerkers.
This is simply false. The maximum potential damage of a condi build is far lower than a berserker build. The stack limit has never been the main reason for condi builds being unpopular. Its their ramp up time and their low maximum damage. Condi builds are good in solos because they dont need as many buffs to be moderately to highly effective. But in any group content direct damage should still be far superior.
All this change means is that condi players dont get their damage completely destroyed by competing condis. And as a result condi builds arent quite as bad for open world anymore. But they will still be frowned upon (although more accepting) in any encounters that require the entire group to contribute as much as possible. Basically timer boss fights like Triple Trouble and Tequatl (dps checks).
Yeah i agree. The main issue is simply the devalueing the type of CC people use. And there are plenty of ways to fix this. It can be through CC vulnerability once the break bar is destroyed. Or it can be different predetermined effects based on the type of CC’s used in majority to break the bar. In fairness these could both be implemented. The former for old stuff as the base break bar system. And the latter for new encounters.
Valid points but realistically they’re not gonna spend precious resources to change the combat system now. It’s something they should have done from the beginning they didn’t, so we get this middle ground solution. Might be interesting, we’ll know more after we see it in action a bit more.
And let us not forget the clusterkitten that follows combat overhowls… folks still remember the revamp in sw galaxies… i don’t think they’re gonna risk it.
Oh yes, the Star Wars Galaxies revamp was quite a mess. Which just shows why it is important to get the groundwork of a robust combat system right from the start. Once you start building the game, and discover the foundation is broken, it is quite difficult to fix it without collapsing the building on top.
I don’t think the situation is as hopeless however as it was with SW Galaxies. I believe Anet can add incremental changes to the combat systems to fix these glaring issues. First and fore most, I think they should look at the rock-paper-scissors idea of their main combat mechanics.
Break bar is a good first step to be honest. Its the implementation on old bosses that will most likely be the problem. And for new stuff it will be encounter design. But the break bar itself is a nice idea if you ignore the predetermined effect at the end.
