Play the game that was advertised when I bought it.
Because it has PvPers in it. If I wanted to be subjected to that behaviour, I’d play CoD on xbox live.
I’m grateful that the game allows me to avoid the children.
Chewie, you’re off on your numbers. By the damage calculation, with the weapon coefficients, it’s impossible to out-damage other classes on the ranger. (This isn’t counting pet damage, since pets are just broken.)
Taken on their own, the way the game is coded, it simply can’t be done. It’s not a matter of skill, it’s a matter of game mechanics. Ranger weapons/attacks are about 30% weaker than all the other class’s weapons.
No offense taken here – just simple fact.
Sword AA is stupidly broken, and would be trivial to fix. Remove the “leap” components from the AA, and the foot animations wouldn’t be all buggered up, and we’d be able to dodge.
Since the entirety of the game comes down to “dodge to avoid damage” people defending the sword AA are, bluntly, wrong.
First off, I’ve played both games from their Betas.
The reason I’m so often “bleh” about gw2 is because everything they need to make it a great game is available, but they haven’t done it.
Things about GW2 that make me go “bleh”.
- Skill hunting. They’ve said they’re adding more skills – why not make a “new” elite, call it signet of capture, and make all the new skills only available through “capture”?
- Replayable interesting content. Simply put, we need new dungeons. Not something hidden away in fractals, but done like the current dungeons. GW1 kept me playing for seven years, there was a LOT of stuff to do. I don’t feel that in GW2.
- Storyline. There’s been lots said about the Living Story, and it’s failures. I’d suggest they start adding content relating to the Orders, and more race based things. We’ve killed the dragon – give us OTHER stuff to do as well. (Please, no more Scarlet).
- Builds. GW1 had a feeling of Magic: The Gathering. GW2 has nothing that compares to that. Adding more build diversity is necessary. The CDI’s have addressed this in depth.
- Balance and classes. There are huge issues with balance in GW2. It’s been covered, repeatedly. Something has to be done to address the balance of classes and what each one brings to the table. Giving everyone the same potential damage, but vastly different health and defense is perhaps the worst balance decision I’ve seen in any game, ever. Then there’s the ranger – a class who’s mechanic is so broken that it’s been acknowledged by the designers, but they also said they have no plans to address it.
- Melee vs. Ranged. Melee is the way to go in GW2, with extraordinarily few exceptions (Shaman and ?). Everyone knows this. The difference in between melee and ranged damage is enormous. Add to this that there are very few ways for ranged users to maintain range (CC’s being too short-lived on far too long a recharge, gap closers being on insanely short cooldowns vs. their potential movement, and the lack of gap-openers meaning the ONLY way to maintain a distance is to kite) and we have an entire playstyle that’s basically invalid. Play your way indeed.
- Grind and BiS gear. I’m one of the ones who bought the game because “Everyone would have BiS gear by the time they were level 80.” Now that BiS gear is only available through prodigious amounts of money and crafting (grind grind grind), and hidden behind time-gating, they’ve completely turned their back on the whole premise of their game, in terms of gear.
Were they to address these, I’d likely list this among the best games I’ve ever played. (GW1, The Zelda franchise, Baldur’s Gate franchise, Dragon Age: Origins, Elder Scrolls series). As it stands, this game has everything it needs to be a true successor to GW, and there’s no reason for them not to make it that.
Anet, guys, I want to love your game!
More than anything, the potential to be what it could is what makes me go “bleh”.
Extremely well written, coherent and cogent. Soa Cirri, I hope you enjoy whatever you do next, and I’ll see you in Tyria when you return.
It’s a perception thing, Scrambles. WoW became unplayable for me, because the constant messaging from people requesting do duel. I’m not talking occasional – I mean constant.
In GW2 terms, this would be endless whispers from raging children. The “Duel me Bruh” isn’t just sarcasm – it’s drawn from real interactions. The way it went in WoW:
Get a request – decline it. The person declined starts spamming “duel me bruh, you scared?” You block, and suddenly their entire clan starts camping your position, and spamming you, because “you’re scared, bro! duel us bro!”. To the point where I stopped playing.
If there weren’t firm consequences for this behaviour in GW2 (perma ban on the first iteration of the “duel be bro” kittentery) then I would 1) quickly discover the limits of the ignore list. 2) quit the game.
There have been multiple suggestions for giving the duelists:
-their own arenas in/near the major cities
-their own instance of a map upon activating a duel (so others don’t have to see it)
-a PvE geared area in the Mists (which is where all pvp belongs, IMO)
-a sign-up list, like the queued arenas.
and, of course, the most common – no dueling in PvE.
If we were to get it, the minimal acceptable measures, to me would be:
-duelists both become invisible to the rest of the map
-they can have absolutely no impact on event scaling or AI aggro
-auto-decline is on by default
-any iteration of “duel me” requests outside of the dueling request interface results in a ban
-it is disabled in major towns
-any request for 1v1 balancing results in a perma-ban of that account
I could live with it.
That said, I still think that most people requesting it would be better served buying mortal kombat.
1) Ranger pet is now optional. Press F1 to toggle attack/return. F2 to trigger its unique skill, F3 to swap pets, F4 to perma-stow and get a 35% damage increase to weapon skills and traps.
2) Ele base HP is increased to match Ranger/Mesmer. Attunement cooldown is reduced to 10s, with an absolute minimum of 7s with 30 in Arcana.
3) Ranger 1H sword has the leaps removed from its auto-attack, so that dodging can actually WORK for the one decent damage weapon the Ranger has.
4) Make the entire UI adjustable the way it was in GW1. Let me move/resize/remove elements as I desire. I want to play the game, not the UI.
5) Remove the AoE cap from offensive skills.
What I miss:
Skill hunting – they really need to introduce a slew of new skills, and have the acquisition be through exploring the open world and capturing them from dead enemies. All they have to do is introduce a new elite “signet of capture” that you can equip in the (otherwise useless) elite slot.
Proper build diversity – I have a suggestion on this forum about separating the gear/stats/traits. That would be a good place to start.
Build templates.
Guild alliances.
Proper armour – not just anime inspired flaming/spikey garbage and trenchcoats – but armour that looks like… armour.
Most of scrambles arguments are actually fairly decent (this comes from a firmly anti-dueling person.)
The one addition I’d want – and it would be unacceptable to introduce dueling without it – instant perma-ban of the inevitable “duel be bro” kittens that (using every other game that has dueling as my evidence) crawl out of the woodwork, and spam the world.
If someone has auto-decline on, and you pester them anyway, you get a permanent invitation to the non-tyrian world. Simple as that.
Dueling is being asked for because griefers want to grief, I get it. What I want as a countermeasure is the first time someone takes is past the auto-decline, and harasses someone, they get an perma-ban, with no appeal.
If I won’t be able to keep it away from me (I’ve suggested about 10 different ways to have dueling implemented that wouldn’t ever impact people not dueling) then have it so the kiddies who will insist you must duel them get removed. Rather darwinian, that.
Just what the title says – our stats shouldn’t be tied to traits or gear.
Gear should, IMO, be all about looks (Horizontal progression) and its damage reduction.
Traits shouldn’t be tied as directly to stats either. The current setup of the trait selection menu is fine, just remove the stat increase from them.
Lastly, we have stats – these should be on a separate menu, and be something that the player has control of themselves.
This would, IMO, open up far more gameplay diversity than we have right now. No more utility skills/weapons that aren’t useable because you can’t get the stats you need while taking the traits to compliment your build.
Anywho, that’s as far as my mind has taken this without coffee – discuss?
(edited by stale.9785)
Same as always for me – they did a complete 180 on their core philosophy regarding gear. That betrayed every single paying customer who bought the game based on 5 years of advertising/interviews/forum talks and blogging. Having another tier of gear is wrong. Making it the grindiest thing possible is wrong. All around, they screwed the pooch.
Since it’s in-game, and not going away, they should at least make it something that is easy to get. Say, 500 of any dungeon token per piece, or 20 laurels. Anything, that’ll put us back on “You WILL have max gear by lvl 80.”
The whole point of Ascended gear was that its something you don’t need to do anything in the game, and has a pretty minimal to non-existent impact on WvW, but takes a while to achieve so that progressions don’t get bored whilst the people who don’t want to grind won’t get steamrolled in PvP or kicked out of every party in PvE.
That would completely defeat the purpose of it and they then may as well just get rid of Ascended gear and go back to exotics (which will lead to a ton of complaints that there’s nothing to do).
What you don’t get is that the complainers are the ones who will disappear anyway. They’re game locusts and grinders, who are going to rush to whatever the next big game is – and the more grind it offers, the better.
This game was supposed to be the grind free, horizontal progress haven away from the locusts. NCsoft/Anet caved, in the desire to get the most cash now they could.
I’d be fine if they removed ascended altogether. It should never have been in the first place. If grinding for stats is your thing, there’s literally every-single-other game on the market for you.
Also, you’re delusional if you believe that ascended doesn’t give a large benefit over exotic – it will become the norm for dungeons, and the weapons alone already give large benefit in small scale WvW. This will only get worse as time goes on, and those without have to compete with the grinders.
Same as always for me – they did a complete 180 on their core philosophy regarding gear. That betrayed every single paying customer who bought the game based on 5 years of advertising/interviews/forum talks and blogging. Having another tier of gear is wrong. Making it the grindiest thing possible is wrong. All around, they screwed the pooch.
Since it’s in-game, and not going away, they should at least make it something that is easy to get. Say, 500 of any dungeon token per piece, or 20 laurels. Anything, that’ll put us back on “You WILL have max gear by lvl 80.”
1. Remove AoE cap on offensive abilities. This would permanently end the zerg in WvW.
2. Reduce Ascended stats to be equal to the stats of Exotics but with an infusion slot.
3. Make pets optional for rangers.
4. Remove the connection between stats, traits and armour. Armour should be purely a cosmetic choice, stats should be chosen from their own menu, and traits should simply be to augment abilities.
5. Rebalance all of PvE so that there are mechanics other than 1 hit kills.
6. Undo every single nerf since beta – separate ALL class balancing between PvP and PvE.
7. Stop the “living story” in it’s tracks, and go to an expansion model.
Ah yes entitlement, the fallback position to demonise those who don’t want to grind.
But here’s the catch. You don’t have to grind.
Ah yes, another fallback position, used when there’s no real arguments addressing the problem. Yes, i don’t have to. It doesn’t change the fact that it is alt unfriendly. Extremely alt unfriendly, in fact.
The fact that you bring up non-existent problems pretty much highlight my side of the argument. This game allows you to gear and play all the alts you have.
People want BiS gear, but don’t like the requirements. That’s fine. You can have the tier right below it. Exotics aren’t much different stat wise, and are much cheaper. Very alt friendly.
Yes, yes, i understand your argument well. GW2 is very alt-friendly. Unless i actually want to have alts, and play the game. But hey, i don’t need to, so it’s okay.
That’s not the system that was advertised, nor is it the game that the majority of us purchased. The game that was advertised was “BiS gear at lvl 80, for everyone, including casuals.” The game that the majority of us bought came under that promise.
THAT is the problem.
If they would simply fix the 1H sword rooting issue (remove the leap factor on part 2 of the chain) it would be, hands down, the best ranger weapon for damage.
Until they do that, broken weapon is stupidly broken. Unfortunately, it’s our best DPS weapon.
For the OP – I’d suggest trying the S/WH combo, and if you can live with the constant unable-to-move that results from the broken chain, stick with it – otherwise, LB/SB is probably the best way to rock. With SB, circle strafing is your friend.
I ll explain it way better..
One day “spirit watch” happened….
That is the sole and only reason for rtl nerf.Other things you will read are mostly speculations….
This is it. It’s a pvp thing – which the entirety of the game is about. The ONLY balancing considerations are whether someone could move the orb faster than others, or control two nodes at once. Every other aspect takes a far and distant third place.
CES – for a while now I’ve felt that the traditional level system is just flawed. It exists as a roadblock for content in GW2 – and in other games. I’d have done it much differently;
Tutorial, which does the standard “press this to move, this to attack, this is how you use skills. don’t lick the computer. this is a lever, use it. don’t lick that either. stop drooling and click something” that we already get.
Out of tutorial, it should just be “These are traits, this is what they do. You’ll have to do X (buy a book, in this case) to use higher level traits.” and “These are skill points – you can learn a skill from a trainer for 1/3/5/10/30 skill points. Trainers live throughout the world. Elite skills can be captured from dead enemies”
Character growth should have been all in skill acquisition and learning your profession/game mechanics. Also, gearing up and world exploration, of course.
The zones could be kept interesting by having continuous DE style things happening. Centaurs that can actually take over the map, or be fought off, then driven across zones, only to return if the players aren’t diligent. Give us the ability to purge the Orrian menace from the later zones (There’d have to be one area still affected, but we should be able to recover most of the south of the map from the zombies, and restore it)
Bleh – too much like this. Anet, if you make a GW3, hire me as an Idea Hamster™ for it.
EDIT: because I don’t see grammar issues till AFTER I submit. Bleh.
(edited by stale.9785)
OP, I hope you realise that, my posts at least (since I cannot speak for anyone else) are as bitter sounding as they are, because there is SO much potential in this game.
Honestly, the changes I agitate for are ones that would move this toward being, for me, the best game ever made.
In no way should this detract from the truth that Arenanet has made a truly great game – it’s just that there’s so much potential, and the direction they seem to be taking instead depresses me.
Anyway, that’s my $0.02 – were this a BAD game, I wouldn’t be waiting for improvements, I’d be gone.
Used to be game, but there’s so much that should be changed I basically stopped playing. Now it’s forums, as I wait to see if they improve anything to the point where I want to play again.
Old approach was probably 100 hours in game for every hour on the forums – now I only log in every second saturday, to see if the guild is up to anything. Check the forums daily though, with (rapidly dwindling) hope.
Harper – I do run with full zerker. There’s literally no reason not to, in dungeons or world boss/general PvE.
Once you’ve done the encounter a time or two, and know what to dodge – that becomes it – your strategy. DPS, dodge when needed. It works, and it works well. It’s incredibly boring though.
I’d LOVE to see an encounter where we NEEDED eles or rangers for snares, plus some condition damage in addition to the DPS race that exists now. It doesn’t exist in-game. Even fractals, so far as I’ve bothered, doesn’t require anything else (could be wrong about this post 20, but I don’t enjoy them, and can’t be bothered running them to get gear to survive agony to be able to do.. fractals.)
The limiting factor isn’t just that going full berserker is faster – it’s only faster because there is absolutely nothing else required. You don’t need massive area control, nor large amounts of poison. The enemies are HP bags with 1-shot mechanics. Attack-attack-attack-dodge-attack-attack-dodge – repeat. Every encounter.
It always drives me nuts, the sheer potential of the combat system, and how very little has been done with it.
1) Remove range restriction from longbow 1.
2) Survivalist. (Elite Skill) You dismiss your pet, and deal 30% more damage for the duration.
Its a long term thing, and the difference is not big enough to make it mandatory to get.
not sure about that.
Difference between exotic jewel and ascended one is big enough to be “mandatory” so now, with ascended weapon + armor……I mean, logicaly ( yes logicaly, because GW2 is became a random gear grinding mmo ) GW is meant to put forward the ability of a player to play smart, and not the “look i have a more powerfull stuff that asked me to farm xxxxx hours” i win.
E.G in WvW if you do a fight against someone in full ascended and if you are full exotic, this personn will still have XX% more chance to win because of a more powerfull stuff.
So the smartest players wont necessary win because his oponent will have a better stuff.whatever if its only 1% boost or 50% that’s against GW “spirit”
Especialy when they ask you to farm XXXXXX hours, and when you DONT have choice.So yeah, its mandatory to keep be equal to everyone.
Of course, if a player only do pve, that will not necessary be a issue
Grammar issues aside, I agree with you 100%
The earliest weapon I know of for ascended was a guildy – less than two hours after the patch he had a drop. I assume it’ll roll that way for the armour as well.
If they hadn’t used Defiant on every single threatening creature in the game, and allowed for any form of crowd control to be useful in PvE, there might be some more variety. Had they made encounters that REQUIRE proper crowd control, there would certainly be more variety, and it would likely be more fun as well.
Right now, the entire game is just a DPS race. Unfortunately, in PvE, the “berserker or nothing” people are right. They shouldn’t be, and this is a immense flaw in the game design, but they are.
It’s an advantage over your opponents – most especially if you roll straight damage.
That said, to me, ascended IS pointless, since it’s a gear treadmill for the simple sake of having one – there is NO justification for it at all.
I play guardian. Most balanced class in the game, atm. Most others are either horribly underpowered (ranger, ele come to mind) disturbingly OP in all situations (warrior) or just not to my taste (engineer, necro).
Doesn’t leave a lot of wiggle room. Were they to remove pets, or make them optional, I’d drop the guardian in a heartbeat and bring my ranger back out – I find the class far more fun.
Right now, guardian fills the fun vs. useful role for me the best.
Zero, we get it, you hate, Hate, HATE the idea that the thief is broken, and feel a need to spam the forums with the “thief laughing at people” thread.
The mechanic itself is broken. There should be a risk/reward skew to any venture. With stealth working as it is right now, there is virtually zero risk, for high reward. This is bad design.
Were there things in game that actually countered stealth (torches having a default “revealed” causing radius comes to mind, though that leaves most classes out of luck) it would be a different story. As it stands, there is ONE skill on ONE class that can counter stealth. Otherwise, the response is the same – drop all your AoE at your feet, swing wildly and pray.
There is zero skill involved in playing a mug,cnd,backstab setup. It’s trolling your opponent.
I feel the OP’s pain, to a degree. That said, for me it’s because there’s zero satisfaction in having a character run about with less-than-best gear once I’m at max level.
Probably my biggest beef with Anet (the hideous failure of class balance aside) is that they did a 180 on the BiS gear deal. Effectively, I play one character, and never load up an alt, because there’s no point. Every resource I can earn in game is required just to maintain some build variety on one character.
So, yeah, I don’t save laurels either.
Can’t be bothered finishing up Mr. Salad’s personal story. The beginning was fun, but after the claw island thing – bit ole NOPE.
Seriously, somewhere there’s a tree that shows the personal story branching – it starts out huge, and comes down to “you’re doing exactly the same thing no matter what – deal with it.”
That, plus the personal story ending with a non-scaling dungeon, is a great big fail on story-telling by Anet.
I think that they should have had no levels at all, and thus, no level restrictions. Exit the tutorial with all your trait points available – otherwise leave as is.
You’d still have to unlock weapon skills, and earn skill points for your utility skills, but the only other “development” would have been through gear acquisition. This way, instead of having 90% of the world map empty continually (since it’s not “end-game”) we would maybe see a more even distribution of people.
That said, I’d also have preferred it had Anet kept skill hunting as the main way to acquire skills.
Just my $0.02
Scrambles, I’d like to point out that more than half of the “in favour of dueling” comments are from you. The naysayers are varied, the ones advocating are… you. Yet you persist in claiming you are speaking for everyone.
I’d like you to stop speaking for me, at the very least. The “duel me brah” crowd is a large part of why I left wow. It was, quite literally, a continuous stream of raging freaks bothering me from the moment I logged on till the day I quit. On a very good day, there would only be 4-5 per hour – all declined, all raging about it. On a bad day, it was unplayable, because of it’s prevalence.
I have no wish to see that here.
Lets say we went with my idea – make the base HP the same across the classes.
Next, we adjust armour to work as real damage mitigation. Heavy armour should be a default 33% reduction in direct damage – medium armour 20%, light armour 10%. Adjust toughness gain through stats so that the different levels would top out at:
Heavy: 33% default, 60% max
Medium: 20% default, 33% max
Light: 10% default, 25% max
This could be done through adjusting the toughness return on the different armour stats, and through traits.
Next, we address survivability. This comes in a few forms. Dodge would be the most basic – it’s 100% damage mitigation. You adjust the different weights of armour to affect endurance differently.
Heavy: Current base endurance return – minimal dodging.
Medium: Current + 100% – you can dodge twice as often as the heavy armour guy – makes sense.
Light: Current + 150% – you can dodge 2.5 times as often as the heavy armour wearer, and half again as often as the medium.
So, we have 3 sets of character – soldier, adventurer, and scholar. All 3 have the same health, same damage output, and different means to stay alive. All that’s left is what each one brings to the table.
Warriors – mostly frontliners, and offensive utility. (Might and vulnerability – Death to the opposition!)
Guardians – mostly frontliners, and defensive utility. (aegis/blind/regen – Stand strong, friends!)
Ranger – skirmisher, front and midline. defensive utility (traps, defense THROUGH offense. spirits for area boons. Disruption to the opposition!)
Thief – skirmisher – front and midline – offensive utility (area stealth, poison/blind fields. Tricky and painful is smarter than forceful!)
Ele – scholar – mid to backline. defense through offense (burning, chill, blind, condition cleanse. Mastery of the elements, Rawr!)
Necro – scholar – mid to backline. defense through deathshroud and offense through abuse – (boon stripping, torment and poison should be stock in trade. Suffer and DIE!)
Mesmer – scholar – mid to backline. defense through clones and offense through being stranger than the next guy. (Confusion to the enemy!)
With the frontline/midline/backline, bear in mind I don’t want a trinity back – every class has ranged/melee options that swap on the fly (except for eles) and that’s good. What I would love is clearer definitions of what each class brings to a party.
TL:DR – give each class the same base HP, but heavy armour should be more tanky than medium, which should be more tanky than light. Light armour folks should be able to dodge more than medium armour types, who are still more agile than heavies.
(edited by stale.9785)
Purely anecdotal, but there are far more of my guildies/friends in GW1 actively than in GW2. This includes a 600 person alliance that came to GW2 with me, which now has exactly 2 representatives in GW2 – myself and another leader. Approximately 300 of them are actively (more than once a week) playing GW1.
The population is nothing like what it was years ago, and personally not having jump/dodge as options drives me nuts, but in terms of execution, I still view it as a far more complete and accomplished product than GW2. (GW1 is magic: the gathering to GW2’s pong.)
STRanger – you should point out that it was 5 years of promises about no grind, easy best-in-slot gear, and that skill would always trump gear/time spent in game. Not one or two comments, but 5 years of drowning anyone paying attention in those themes, and then reversing themselves after 3 months of live release.
Ignoring the “nerf warriors/pls don’t nerf warriors” bits, since it’s a round-and-round argument, the HP difference is the single biggest obstacle in the game in terms of class balance.
The different classes have essentially the same damage potential, but vastly different abilities in terms of survival. For example, glass warrior vs glass ranger or glass ele – they’re going to do roughly the same damage, but the ranger and ele are both going to be free kills.
The classes should have all had the same base HP, with the difference in survival being through armour (armour doesn’t count nearly enough in this game for damage mitigation) and endurance (heavies should have a penalty to endurance regen, mediums should have “base” regen, light armour classes should get extra. For the reasoning here, YOU try doing acrobatics in a bathrobe, then try the same thing wearing an 80lb backpack.) The fact that one single boon counts for more protection than the highest armour stacking available is an absolute fail.
Since there is zero indication that Anet is going to address this, the best we can hope for is some other form of balancing the classes. Unfortunately, the ONLY balance concern that Anet observes involves the 5v5 capture-the-node pvp mode. So long as one class can’t control two nodes, “balancing” will be non-existent.
EDIT: glass ranger will, of course, do less damage – they have the lowest DPS of any class because of a fail mechanic – the basic point still stands though.
I always read these threads, and generally agree with the OP’s. The problem is that GW1 was essentially Magic: The Gathering. GW2 is checkers, or maybe pong. They removed all depth, and replaced it with shiny.
It’s broken, has been broken since beta – the fix is obvious, but they REFUSE to do anything to fix it. It’kitten a point where people are claiming it’s a feature.
Stalima, the ranger without a pet is more like a warrior with axe/mace and greatsword. Useful in all situations and not a hindrance to their team.
Pet mechanic is fail. There’s a reason the most requesting thing on the forums is to have the pet be optional.
Putting yourself in melee range increases your risk, so you get more effective in exchange.
okay, now explain why warrior rifle does more damage than engineer rifle then.
Or warrior longbow outperforming both ranger bows. Or any other conceivable weaponset outperforming ele staff?
Besides, with the current stack/boon/11111 gameplay, melee puts you at far LESS risk than ranged in PvE. In any form of PvP, the gap closers are far more numerous and powerful than any ability to maintain distance.
Ranged damage universally gets the short end of the stick in this game.
Ele staff has a lot of beef in it, y’know. Arguably the strongest range weapon in the game in terms of raw of dps.
That’s guardian scepter. Next runner up would be the warrior rifle, then warrior longbow. Ele scepter does more raw damage than the staff does. I think the ele staff out-damages ranger longbow, but I wouldn’t be willing to bet on it.
There’s still the problem that, no matter what ranged weapon you have, you lack the tools to maintain the range. This is most apparent when using the ranger longbow – your damage drops dramatically as opponents close, and every class except for possibly necro can close the gap in 1-2 seconds.
Putting yourself in melee range increases your risk, so you get more effective in exchange.
okay, now explain why warrior rifle does more damage than engineer rifle then.
Or warrior longbow outperforming both ranger bows. Or any other conceivable weaponset outperforming ele staff?
Besides, with the current stack/boon/11111 gameplay, melee puts you at far LESS risk than ranged in PvE. In any form of PvP, the gap closers are far more numerous and powerful than any ability to maintain distance.
Ranged damage universally gets the short end of the stick in this game.
Unlike what some folks in this thread have said, no, the living story is no substitute for an expansion. So far, permanent content changes have been minimal (one dungeon path, and they destroyed on dragon event) and the non-permanent ones have been laughable.
Either they have to cut WAY back on the frequency of the living story updates, and focus on putting out some quality, or they should just give it up altogether, and get one with the expansion.
At this point in the original’s timeline, we had Prophecies, they had added Sorrow’s Furnace, the UW/FoW, all the major PvP types were in game, and we’d just gotten our first expansion. In contrast, GW2 has only just begun to address bugs that have been reported over and over again since beta.
Ive always held that melee should have a higher burst capacity, whereas range should have better sustained damage. So over a span of 30 seconds both do the same damage, the melee is just front loaded.
Edit: That being said, the increased damage to range (mesmers GS and Rangers LB) should be removed.
There’s a huge failing in your understanding here. It’s not increased damage at range, it’s dramatically reduced damage as they lose range. At least, with the ranger LB that’s the case. This is part of the plethora of issues that plague the ranger.
There are quite literally thousands of posts on the forums BEGGING them not to bother with more living story updates, but rather focus on bugfixes and QoL (quality of life) changes. They’d rather just add more of the same, over and over, and pretend the issues don’t exist. Meh.
Ascended weapons.
To get your weaponcrafting skill to level 400, you have to spend 30g.
http://www.gw2crafts.net/weaponcraft_fast.html
After that, to get to 450, you have to spend an extra 40g.
http://www.gw2crafts.net/weaponcraft_450.html
To get that last 50 levels, you have to spend 140g.
http://www.gw2crafts.net/weaponcraft_400.html
Real life money can be converted to gems. Gems can be converted to gold. Gold can be converted to Ascended weapons. Ascended weapons is the advantage over poor players.
Guild Wars 2 is definitely not pay2win.
The point, it’s strong with this one. I hadn’t even considered the ascended weapons, which are a huge advantage in small scale battles. The disparity will only grow with ascended armour.
End game is such a broad descriptive that has a different definition for each and every player. In GW2 WvW is my end game, on a scale of 1-10 I would rate it as the most important thing in the game for me at 10. However I am only giving an example within the confines of what the game has offered to me that I find appealing or not. That’s not to say I don’t like PvE Raiding or other forms of end game, but I honestly don’t think it would appeal to me like WvW or RvR does any more. I totally despise vertical gear progression such as World of Warcraft or Rift.
In all honesty, I don’t dislike PvE dungeons, raids, or anything else they have to offer, but I look at levels 1-70 as forgotten content after my first character reaches level cap. I would really love to see (and in hindsight would have loved to have seen in this game) level cap at level 20 or 30 and every single map thereafter being of equal level, but of varied challenge. I really dislike how modern MMO’s are trivialising massive persistent game worlds by focusing content into a handful of end zones.
What I would find appealing in a PvE game, would be for it to have a fast level cap (20 or 30), but a massive world past that point, filled with a huge variety of mini-dungeons, group content, raid content and open world events with persistent changes (I really dislike Living world’s fire and forget content). I’d even buy into a game that had no levels at all, where every player had a standard base of attributes, with a horizontal progression system extending from that.
I find that most modern MMO’s have just turned into Lobby games of late. Where players stand around a trading post selling their loot and waiting for dungeon/fotm groups to pop. The large worlds are teeming with dust and tumble-weeds. They don’t feel like Massive Multiplayer Online games any more, but more like an old game of Diablo.
MMO’s should be about a virtual world in which every time you log on, you take part in and improve that world as your character or one of your alternate characters. It is this kind of feature that players are labelling as “Sandbox”, yet it should not be labelled as sandbox, it should just be MMO. Star Wars Galaxies was like this once upon a time, it truly should have been used as an example of an interactive gaming world. Yet here we are in the eve of 2013, over ten years have passed and we are still being fed the junkfood of MMOs (Standing in a city hub, getting a group and doing instanced content).
End game should not exist in MMO’s, that word belongs in Single Player/Multiplayer games where a game is destined to have an ending.
You, sir, have won all of my internets. Massive respect for a well thought out post. I want to play what you want to play.
Conncept – based on the last time I bothered doing the champ run (been weeks now, though I’m familiar with the 7G an hour thread, and I hope the guy has healed up) you get 10-15 times the value in materials as you do straight money. This is especially true now, since they nerfed the monetary reward on champs.
1 champ box used to give you about 10 silver, and 2-3 weapons + materials. Now, if you’re me, you salvaged the weapons, and sold the resulting materials for 5s-1g, depending. Expand the sample size, and the material value (quantity multiplied by cost) far eclipses any potential profit from the silver alone.
I’ll admit, my assumption is that the majority is farming frostgorge, and thus are getting 1-3 ecto from every other bag. (I know that assuming everyone has the same results as me is a huge bias, but for the bags, I’m the only example I can check.) It’s possible the majority of farmers are selling everything they get directly to the merchants, but that would be stupid. It not only lowers your potential (though not guaranteed) profit, but it WILL cause inflation. I like to believe people aren’t quite that stupid.
Also, the last statement, about checking history, is drawn from real life examples. Every nation that ever added money to it’s economy without the materiel to back it has suffered massive inflation.
They really need to address this – and it is a huge issue. The ranged weapons do pitiful damage, and have virtually no tools to maintain range. Conversely, the melee weapons are devastating, and (afaik) every class can close the 1200 range gap in 1-2 seconds, rendering your attempt at ranged combat moot.
A large part of this is the weakness of the CC skills. Ranged CC should be long lasting, and it’s not. 1-2s of chilled, 1s immobilized, 2s cripple, and mostly on 30-60 second recharge. There’s nothing at all keeping the axe wielding warrior from strolling up and embedding his axe in your frontal lobe.
Guardians have lots of condition removal – this isn’t news. Warriors are in a good position too. Ele’s can be, if they build for it. Rangers get boned for it, unless you want to blow your heal or kill your pet. (Passive condition removal is a total fail mechanic, btw. SoR desperately needs a remake.)
It depends on your class, and your build. Overall, I’d say the ability to apply conditions is far too powerful at the moment, not condition cleansing.