Guild Wars 2

Vayne.8563:

Kitsune.1902:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

IndigoSundown.5419:

What stops you from playing as you want now?

Actually, the issue is far more complicated than that. Whether we should have hard roles or not isn’t just a matter of player preference, but a business decision. People like having hard roles, and they like having their playstyle reinforced by the game’s design. So, the question is if the game can be more interesting, entertaining, and appealing to the public at large if there were hard roles.

It isn’t a stupid thought. Since beta, one of the biggest legitimate complaints about GW2 is that the PVE combat is samey. From an outside perspective, watching everyone in the team do the exact same stack and smack routine with every encounter ever is both unpleasant to look at and unappealing in general. Hard roles appear to be dynamic and unique, with each player’s singular contribution being noticeable.

From the diversity standpoint no one “loses out” if tanking and healing become requirements. DPS preference players still get to DPS, but now the other two legs get to do their thing, too. The problem is that players who build bulky or healy, or heck even conditiony face not gratitude, but ire from their teammates. Telling these minority preference players to just go and hang out with each other is like telling racial minorities to do the same thing to avoid racism. It isn’t a fix, at all. The hate is still there, you’re just trying to hide yourself away from it.

While it is a community problem, it is also a design problem. So, facing the unreasonable wrath of selfish teenagers on the internet, the only reasonable solution would be to modify the game in such a way that the stat combinations that Anet put into the game are useful in that game.

Personally I think the solution to this problem is just to make the game harder, but in specific ways to encourage more than just corner pulling and bursting. You’ll still get full zerk groups, but hopefully the skill of the average player would mean that running a bunch of unaffiliated full zerkers is no longer completely superior to 4 zerks + 1 zealot.

Well the whole design is apparently leaning away from group content to – on one hand solo, and on other hand ‘world events’. Dungeons are relic of the past, and fractals don’t seem to get a huge amount of attention either. So I don’t know if this is really even very relevant to the game as it is right now.

I suspect we’ll see something happening with fractals in the expansion because there’s a fractal mastery coming. No point in doing that if there’s nothing coming for fractals.

Fractals wouldn’t necessarily need anything new, as mastery is basically just the PvP reward tracks with context appropriate mechanical rewards rather then loot based ones (we think…. it could very well be a loot reward track).

Fractals, as a theme, have map specific mechanics rather then system wide ones. This is the ONLY reason, Fractals were initially popular among the greater PvE population; as it was a huge refreshing burst of novelty that should had been the basis of all standard Dungeons in the game.

The Behemoth fractal is by far my favorite. It forces players to cooperate, but does so by focusing on a single object (The Hammer) which players have to take turns using in order to keep momentum going. One player carries the hammer, and has to get kills with it to gather charges, while the rest of the team both supports the carrier and suppresses the cultists; yet not so much that the Hammer can’t get the tags he needs. EVERYONE is active and conscientious in this scenario, and the environmental hazards do a great job of keeping things in motion. And this isn’t even considering the massive lore potential of a mystical being held captive by a bunch of cultists.

Another good one is Thaumanova Reactor, with its set of mini challenges.

Its because the EU can’t settle on a kitten currency, a set of rules, or even a common mind set. Even excluding VAT from the pricing, every game I’ve seen that used fixed pricing in a region had obvious disparities between places that use pounds vs euros.

I imagine part of this has to do with distribution rights in areas, as many US publishers are either required to, or at least favor using a 3rd party distributor who operates in the region. I don’t think this is the first time this has been an issue with an NCSoft game….. but its much more obvious now that VAT has drawn a lot of attention toward the relative price of games and in-game cash shops.

Map packs are one of the fastest ways to segregate a community, and charging for what should be the not only brings old players back, but new players interested. Match based shooters are starting to catch on to this problem with the advent of season passes (among other nefarious reasons), to make sure match flow doesn’t suddenly break because of a map rotation.

This was a HUGE issue in BF3 due to initial reluctance of players during the “Back to Karkand” release. Enough players felt so jilted by the stock maps, that they refused to pay for a map pack….. this caused problems for servers with mixed map rotation, as they’d lose half their population when a Karkand map came up. Considering how hard it is to get momentum for a full server, most admins had to settle on stock only or karkand only, in order to keep the server populated.

This was only made worse by the fact that the Karkand maps were designed better, flowed better, and had much more usable space that lead all players who had those map packs to play them heavily over the stock ones. The result was a huge community split, particularly among clans, that couldn’t play with each other effectively with the access restrictions.

Thats a major reason the Boarderland redesign is Core game, as population density is critical for WvW to fucntion. This rule doesn’t apply to dungons and most small scale PvE content, as PUG population critical mass is not a factor to keep it running.

Rather then sell map packs, I’d rather see them do LOL style playstyle diversity as a business model. But given this game’s problems with design philosophy about ubiquitous PvP and PvE combat mechanics, there aren’t many options to even sell something exclusive to PvP that isn’t map related.

Vayne.8563:

I think the personal story could have been better. It was hamstrung by the need to keep all the races on the same pace. So that you had installments in chapters of 10. Had it been one continuous story, it would have made for a better story.

Honestly I think the weakness was their using the “rule of 3” in the Personal story branches. Some paths are actually very fun, while others were seriously lacking… but the consistency simply wasn’t there. Its a problem seen in big single player games (where choices ultimately don’t matter), boiled down to 3 mission segments that makes it very noticeable.

What I think would had been a lot more interesting, albeit more complicated to story board, is having crisscrossing branches from a pool of regional stories and uneven pacing. The intent of the personal story is to travel the world anyway, so it would help immensely if story lines between various races and orders intertwined slightly; With each path telling a different part of the same story.

Granted solo stories can be great. But it would had been epic to have a moment like http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Vizunah_Square in GW1 Factions, where the Canthan heros go to meet the newly arrived Tyrian heros, and combine forces to fight off an Afflicted invasion. (Comprised of 2 full parties, each with a different starting point on the map)

Given the Pact’s origins, this would had gone a long way to forming a great story; where their agreements and disagreements could be used to formulate the same mission or story arc from different angles. They played on this lightly during Part 3 (where you side eventually side with an Order), but the “choices” were very unimaginative in their presentation. But ultimately the lack of awareness of what the other sides where doing made the story kind of myopic. At least until Trahearne became Marshall, and the Pact became one unit in the story context.

I find this concept is grossly underutilized in a lot of MMOs, despite having huge story telling value or becoming a real shared experience for 2 groups that otherwise aren’t associated with each other. To have a conversation with someone, and suddenly realize that person was on the opposite side of events, and hearing their story. “So thats why that rock fell!” or “It was your team that sent the golems?”.

Now that I think about it, GW1 did like to separate partys in the high level dungeons to perform different tasks in support of the main group.

I don’t know if its confirmed, but there are 2 major world bugs active right now that causes either death or map warp during lag spikes.

Its suspected that Lion’s Arch is a major factor, as players ejected out of LA (possibly due to map shutdown) have reported being warped to other maps, and I’ve experienced random death in the same time span one of these players appear in my map.

TheLastNobody.8319:

xbutcherx.3861:

You were all exploiting the bug and now crying because you can’t? live with it until Anet fixes the bug.

They’re saying the other two traits are woefully abysmal compared to the symbol trait. Which honestly they sound like it, one relies on spirit weapons ( ai so you know that’s gonna suck). The other relies on aegis, which I imagine is overwritten by another person aegis, rendering the trait useless. Nice on paper, not so much in real world application.

Which raises another question…. What makes some of these GM traits worthy of being a GM? The philosophy I’ve seen is that of the 3 GMs one is themed toward a weapon property, one toward a utility, and the third thrown in simply to have partial utility if they were only after a T2 trait.

There is a potential burst build with communal defense due to how that trait works… but its essentially 1 chain proc for an Aegis block, and requires you to trait fully into it. Though, this would make an interesting troll build with a group of guardians taking turns starting the proc chain.

I’ve been in the TTS NA runs, and we’ve made a few discoveries that might shed some light on the situation.

1. Teq’s crit spot (anchor or head, I forget which) has more armor then his foot. Attacking the foot nets your more basic damage then you could even crit on the head during the burn phases.

2. Ranged attacks are a waste of time now. With the HP buff, there are just too many problems that can only be solved through double damage spots.

3. The other night we stumbled upon a triple damage spot by his anchor that (from what I remember) works in both the normal and burn phases.

4. Because of the HP total, burn phases are much harder to sustain. I don’t know the exact time of the patch, but the last Teq run I was in couldn’t burn through any of the phases, and usually costed an extra 2-3 min to shave the rest off in a normal phase. (I’m guessing this was post patch due to the abysmal DPS).

I’m pretty sure the triple damage spot is the only option now, as even a fully might stacked zerg had trouble with the burns.

Healing related anything tends to have low coefficients but high base healing. The skills and traits are designed around one of two conflicting ideas. Burst heals (generally one per class), have to be decently effective at 0 Healing power. Healing over time (regen and passives) tend to look at sustained healing, thus have low base and equally poor coefficients.

So the source of the problem is primarily caused by the combat mechanics. In both PvP and PvE, burst damage is king. Even condis, a DoT focused mechanic, only becomes effective if its capable of high enough degen to mimic a burst attack. So its no surprise that burst healing is more popular, as HoT can’t keep pace, nor can it aid as a buffer without a massive HP pool.

If sustained damage was an actual thing for players, healing would actually be good stat to have for passives. But in our world we only experience burst damage… PvP, WvW, and criminally so from PvE. Mechanically, Mordrem actually have a diverse kitten nal of AOE, DoT, and controls that rival that take many hints from Player class builds. But because they use the idiotic HP/Pow only difficulty scaling, what should be multiple examples of diverse builds to combat them is completely undermined by their raw damage, massive AOE and HP oceans.

If mordrem mimicked player builds in how we utilize attack speed, burst combos and mobile defense; they’d not only be more fun to fight, but also Vit/Heal/Tough would have significance.

But if the Boss HP buff is any indication, the player community does far more math then the Devs do with their own internal numbers. And with Teq and TT being narrow windows of attack, it means pre-update those fights were grossly broken in the player’s favor, or they’ve severely miscalculated Condi in the 3 days between update and buff.

Now while I could see Guard symbols skewing this (before anyone realized the bug), but reading any of the battle logs should had made it obvious Guard skills were doing well over double normal. Guards had a tendency to use GS Wrath during burn phases….. that alone would had been enough to make the damage numbers stand out in the logs.

I’m working to update the old Legendary PoV build to work better under the new trait system. Trying to find the best way to mix in the minimal reasonable amount of Healing power (which used to come from the trait line).

The basics are Trooper runes and a gear mixture for 2500+ power (basically all power primary), enough Vit to get around 15k HP, 2500-2600 “Armor”, and the aforementioned healing power via the secondary stats.

Between PoV and the Trooper runes, it has powerful condi cleanse and applies boons that burst heal you . You can easily swap the third utility for anything needed (like Reflection), and synergizes perfectly with Wrath. Mace/Torch & Hammer are currently topping the list for meta potential with the new Symbols trait, but is still perfectly viable with Greatsword. (Though Hammer has the most compound potential for PvE standing fights)

Heres a prototype I’m working on based on this.

http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=-B;4NFk40J3JGV90;9;4nPN;0146256158;45BW0O;1CqNYCqNYo-FII1GH;3kbk6lbl6mbm62o-Gs0V;9;9;9;9;9;9;15-6o

Note that the Zelots armor is a just place holder for the Healing power, until I figure out how much I can safely shave off and put it back into other stats. The 15k health is intended purely as a buffer against Condi damage and mob swarms, letting you soak a bit of damage to better space shouts out.

For fights where condi control won’t be a problem, you can swap for Writ of Persistence to get almost permanent symbol uptime. Combined with Hammer and a small group stack, you can heal faster then you take damage.

The only down side is the loss of some crit damage, but its a small price to pay for being practically unkillable.

Guard traits are incredibly broken at the moment… so the Meta is in flux until its completely fixed and reenabled.

Wanna see how broken?

You don’t even wanna know what they can do to structures.

DarksunG.9537:

After hearing this, i’m not sure how Guardian is “in a good place”. They have an entire set of traits & skills that are useless.

I figured after 3 years they’d make the skill at least worth using.

Its a problem common with all summoned objects. The only reason its not considered a problem on the Mesmer is how they are used as ammo for Shatters. Take away the shatters, and the problems with those skills become painfully obvious.

Below someone suggested making them like banners… but I agree that’s not very exciting at all. If the Reverent isn’t getting Weapon spells, I would suggest making those the Active effect of the summons, and changing the overall mechanics to make them more durable overall.

can we get a summary write up?

You don’t “need” a lot of healing power, as many of the guardian healing skills tend to work off of pulse frequency (Like Writ of Persistence, Shared Virtues and Sig of Courage).

But here is your conundrum (and it finally makes sense now). Toughness only reduces Direct Damage, but not Condi damage. Most classes can self sustain by dodging, or internal healing traits to boost the overall effectiveness of their heal skills.

However, most classes can’t sustain good condi cleansing…. This is of critical importance with the new Condi meta actually being viable, as they now focus on frequency application; But Condi cleanse skills are mostly burst oriented.

This is where it gets extra weird for Guardians. Guards have relatively low base stats across the board, but they more then make up for with their Boon cycles and very, very strong AOE cleansing ability. But that alone can’t save you from a rapid condi stack if you aren’t in a clear spot to purge.

Thats where Vit comes in. Its an HP buffer that lets you soak a few seconds of condi stacks, or keep you alive between some of your cool downs. You really don’t need a lot… but based on several hybrid builds prior to the update, 15k Health is actually enough to absorb bleed over damage from your defenses; and is easily refilled through your healing link traits. Thats about ~350 Vit over your base which you can gain pretty easily with most gear that includes toughness.

If you want to be a good support guard, take a small amount of healing (around 200, don’t really need more then that) and focus on group cleanse (pure of voice) or group buffing (Writs or Virtues). If balanced right, you would only need around 2500 Defense to soften rapid hits while your Prots and Aegis helps with the big ones. You can then dump the rest of the points into offense.

The bug has only been around since the big patch, and they are buried in a set of conditionals. With the way code works in most games, you can have something totally unrelated to the feature causing the problem, as state monitoring in games is nothing short of voodoo magic.

As a fact of life, knowing a bug exists, and wanting to fix it, are not the only steps to fixing the code.

Dennis Nedry: "[laughs] I am totally unappreciated in my time. You can run this whole park from this room with minimal staff for up to 3 days. You think that kind of automation is easy? Or cheap? You know anybody who can network 8 connection machines and debug 2 million lines of code for what I bid for this job? Because if he can I’d like to see him try. "

As for E-Sports, the only difference between an exploit and a strategy is if the other team is using it. Its nice to see PvP get a taste of the “we changed this thing, and now your game mode sucks” situation that WvW has suffered for the better part of 3 years.

Except WvW gets to have some fun with the bug for a change.

They need to fix 3 really big problem in order for any of this to actually look and feel right.

1. Fix the kitten animation clipping with the various stances. This occurs on such a fundamental level, thats its been blatantly obvious that the art team only uses standing models in their design process.

2. Implement a better looking cloth physics system. It doesn’t need to be ultra realistic, but the movement animations on some outfits (including armors) is really terrible in motion. The insane clipping of Female monk arm wraps leads me to believe THAT is why we never got capes.

3. Redesign the UI and costume system to layer (ie replace) certain pieces “over” a base outfit. We have the ability to hide gloves, shoulders and helmet; it would be too hard to apply these same concepts to how costumes works.

I would say a rune set that gives passive endurance regen, or vigor duration increase. But the problem is not many classes would even want to use it outside of a very specific build. If anything, this change will only (and probably was intended to) put more focus on the upcoming resistance and other invulnerability effects.

Paulytnz.7619:

I am seeing a lot of engi’s now using trait lines that I used to use before this patch hit who didn’t previously simply because they were not very “zerk friendly”. I am meaning of course the lines that gave toughness or vit.

With the removal of stats from the trait lines this certainly does open up a lot more build options for people. Yet reducing the traits from 6 to 3 per tier and removing the option to use lower tier traits in the higher slots may offset that a bit. So I can certainly understand the people who are saying this is giving less options, it’s a bit of both in my opinion.

So based on what I just said I would assume it would be the same for other classes

I am now fearing that my old build that was unique to me may soon become the or a “Meta” and this does not please me lol. I liked being an individual who played differently to everyone else. Will our individuality or identity soon be based solely on our skins if too many ppl stick with “metas” and follow everyone else?

The overall trait system still needs some improvement, but its been a great start so far. I think a big hitching point is still in the fact that the traits still heavily define certain things by Weapon, when it should be more toward weapon traits or the Skill type. Especially when it comes to cool downs.

This may not work for all classes, but certain ones could benefit by focusing on skill type, which between 2 traits should give cool down across the entire weapon. It allows the skill type to recycle faster, taking advantage of the accompanying trait across one or both of your weapons.

For instance, pre-patch there was a Engie Trait that gave cool down bonus to all “Elixir skills”. This applied to the 4 elixir utilities, but also 2 skills in the Elixir gun kit. A similar idea could be implemented for weapons skills that may, or may not, cross with utility categories. Another example is Guardian Torch skills becoming a pair of consecrations skills. You may even be able to classify them by their Field or Finisher types.

tairneanach.8427:

Purple Miku.7032:

Oh no I think you misunderstand – it’s not selecting each trait in the specialization that bugs me, it’s changing the actual specialization itself. For example changing a warrior’s specialization from Tactics to Arms.

The actual trait changing itself is significantly quicker than previously because you can change them each with a single left-click.

Ah, okay, yes, I agree. Those symbols are definitely a bit hard to read.

I can agree on this. The images all use the background art that all have very low contrast. Increasing the contrast would help, but they really need to highlight and stylize the main icon. The Image style they use on the Signets, or modeling them to be more like notch or carved symbols would go a long way to this.

Current
!http://wiki.guildwars2.com/images/6/62/Specializations_interface.jpg!

Signet examples
!http://wiki.guildwars2.com/images/7/75/Signet_of_Resolve.png!
!http://wiki.guildwars2.com/images/c/c1/Signet_of_Fury.png!
!http://wiki.guildwars2.com/images/b/b0/Signet_of_Fire.png!

Plan on having one of each with the Reverent.

Adjust.6903:

Yeah I’ve noticed that which I quite like. Fire wrecks mobs so you’re saying 30 onwards it gets better still, neat.

I tried to lvl as dd but it wasn’t that exciting. Staff fire just seems to destroy everything with extreme ease. Any tricks to spells I need to know about or is it fairly straight forward? I switch a lot but half the time don’t really understand the point of fire does so well apart from water to heal ofc

There are 2 things going on that are kind of deceptive to new players.

1. Power scales much better at low levels due to sub-standard mob HP/Defense. At higher levels, they HP and damage scale rapidly to the point where burst damage and evasion are the only ways to effectively fight them.

2. Because each element is built around a core stat it tries to amplify……..

Fire- Power
Water- Healing/Vulnerability
Air- Prec/Crit (lots of crit procs)
Earth – Defense/Condi (bleeds and controls)

Fire being power centric has skills with oddly high damage coefficients for AOE capable attacks. More importantly, it offered heavy Might stack potential with all the fire fields, and all related traits are flat damage bonuses. (*more on this below)

Water attacks are all weak by design, and has their base line supported mostly through vulnerability stacking. Water’s big problem is that Fire’s traits are purely additive, while water’s vulnerability stacks are to compensate.

Air centers mostly on crits and hard CCs. But crit’s biggest problem (unless being used to proc other effects) is that it scales off power and ferocity. Without high base power crit damage is unimpressive. But High base power and low ferocity still results in a major damage increase.

Earth focuses on defense, bleeds and hard CCs (like knockdown and immob). Not many Eles run earth builds because it tries to play to the 3 things eles are weak at…. raw defense, damage over time, and slow attacks. The only reason it was ever used in rotations was for the hard CCs, which were flat effects rather then stat scaled.

A good Ele will rotate all 4 elements simply because (even untraited) Fire offers Area denial, Water offers condi cleansing, and Air and Earth offer both hard and soft CCs. A great ele will use a build that lets them spike huge amounts of damage at one or more points in their rotation.

• As for the future…. you might be sad to discover that Staff loses its raw hitting power as levels increase (its designed as support tool, and is incredibly slow), and Dagger and Scepter gain huge amounts of offensive power once you can start rotating attunements. Most Staff eles that tend to run it, only do so to setup (might blast mainly) and clean up, but get most of their damage from Conjures instead.

Pure damage Eles tend to run Scepter/Dagger because of the portable might stacking and opening damage from fire, the huge burst damage and control from Air and Earth, and the burst healing from water.

Before the big nerf, Dagger/Dagger was actually the gold standard for a stand alone Ele, as you could trait for high sustain damage, or run a support build that gave constant buffs on allies, and constant soft CCs on enemy groups. The support version was tough to kill, despite being utterly squishy if hit. But gone are the gold age of D/D builds.

All that said…. All Ele builds have one thing in common. They are ALL built around the concept of rotations. Even fire centric builds will rotate out of it periodically to land CCs, or switch to a Conjure to take advantage of the damage bonus traits.

If the main goal is PvE, you could try a modified Altruistic/Voice build for high utility/survivability without sacrificing too much damage. Its a power build that trades high crit damage (Ferocity) for extra toughness, sustained healing and a crap ton of utility. This build worked for anything thats not a speed run, and recycles extremely quickly; making it my favorite for Dungeon pugs, World boss and PvE wandering.

[If anyone has tweaking suggestions in light of the new game meta, I’m wanting to hear it]

I ran this before the trait changes, and am in the process of retooling it for the new game meta. It has suboptimal DPS compared to the new meta, but you aren’t bound to a weapon set to make it work. The old target was to have ~2500 Power and around 2500 Defense (Armor+Tough), 15k health (which is about +400 vit over your base stats, 130 of which is off trooper runes) and some Healing to boost altruistic and Symbols (if traited), and runs Trooper runes for the shout bonus. Gearing is up to you, but since ascended rings/amulets are cheap you can get off stats (like soldiers or clerics) through them, along with a zerks sets to swap out for more focused builds. That way you can keep a few set of dungeon zerks armor with different rune sets for different builds very cheaply.

The 2 core specs are Valor and Honor (most builds run at least one of the 2 anyway). The third is a choice based on weapon, although Virtues gives a nice burning boost (at least until they nerf it). Solo fighting will be a bit slower, but you can keep the momentum of any group going very easily.

-Traits-
Valor: Any Adept, Strength in Numbers, and Altruistic Healing
Honor: Any Adept, Empowering Might, and Pure of Voice (or Writ of Persistence if you have symbol heavy weapons)

Virtues (my temp setup): Any adept, Supreme Justice, Permeating Wrath (or Battle Presence for world bosses). The goal easy passive burning and group support.
-Or-
Zeal for symbol synergy for direct damage. Radiance isn’t recommended since it needs either virtues or zeal to really make the burning work for you.

For utilities “Hold the line” and “Stand your Ground” are favored for their short cool downs, which aids cleansing. Use Shelter for healing; the blocks are just better then any benefit you could get from “Receive the light”. The elite is your choice. If running virtues, you can use Renewal to burst your virtues and recover them, but Wrath is better if you run zeal to give massive burst damage Great Sword.

Black Box.9312:

To be honest, I feel like not enough current skills and traits were given taunt, resistance, or slow to begin with. It still baffles me that, instead of giving Warrior’s Berserker Stance resistance, they kept it as a complete condition invulnerability with no counterplay at all. I have a feeling this is going to end up leading into a “you need to buy HoT to access these” type of deal, where rather than reworking existing skills that aren’t commonly used, they just limit it to new stuff that ends up creating a balancing issue between those who have HoT and those who do not.

Because they plan to roll them as part of the new specializations. All 3 of those are very powerful given what the Core specs are already capable of. But slow has some major weirdness with Boss mobs and their tendency for long wind up attacks.

Its part of the new WvW blinding meta. Player’s can’t accurately target something they can’t see clearly. :P

I’m more for changing the nature of Ferocity, so it doesn’t insanely scale the way it does, and makes it less interdependent on Prec and Pow to do its basic function.

Xae Isareth.1364:

I guess the problem is that pretty much all the music in the game was made by Jeremy Soule, whom I can’t imagine doing anything but classical.

Some metal or even techno will fit the game well in places though, like when Aetherblades turn up.

Soule is no longer doing the music (not since LS S1 I believe). They have an in-house team now (which did all of Season 2 and most of Season 1), that have done an exceptional job at the game’s new evolving setting. Soule’s issue, I’ve noticed, is that he writes very context sensitive to the visuals of region/map. Without the accompanying visual, a lot of the songs don’t have a lot going on to them. But this new team, while not having made as many as far as I know, have produced very good tracks that not only accompany the ambiance and visual of the areas, but stand up a lot better on their own.

You can check out all the new team’s stuff here.
https://soundcloud.com/arenanet

Lower down the list theres the iconic “Battle on the Breach Make”, “Twisted Marionette”, Bazaar of the 4 Winds, and Sanctum Sprint. SAB is also in there (assuming you can survive the nostalgia bomb).

Composer list by song.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Soundtrack

But back to Soule’s stuff. The new songs added for GW2 are actually scoring higher on average compared to the first game. I’ve been thinking about it for the past 3 years, but the only theory I kind of feel may be the reason is how humans tend to remember single chords the strongest. This is a trait common to good tracks in both the new and old sets, in that no matter how complex the piece is, its relatively easy to follow the main chord progression as series of single notes.

But you’re right… Jeremy Soule has a very distinctive style he has trouble breaking away from. But I think his brother helped compose the GW2 soundtrack; which may explain why it turned out the way it did.

What about a trait that changes the Combo field types from one to another?

I’d argue that the “task oriented” and “point based” unlock systems, by nature, makes the problem worse for new players BECAUSE they can’t effectively experiment with traits. This was the single biggest pitfall of the NPE, because EVERY trait line (under the old system) doesn’t make sense without the others; And under the new system, you’d need at least 2 full trait lines unlocked (along with the utilities) to have enough effects to really start playing around. Thats valuable time during leveling that could be used to experiment, being completely wasted as players fumble with even direct trait/weapon relationships.

This is an example the cognitive dissonance in the NPE that exists, despite the otherwise obvious connections between trait lines, weapons and utility skills. The Answer to this is actually very simple….. Combine the Trait line and Utility unlocks into the same progression screen, highlighting the relationship the 2 lines obviously have, and finding a way to annotate the weapon of choice for a given trait line.

Using Guardians as an example.

Zeal, Scepter/GreatSword, Spirit Weapons
Radiance, Sword/Torch, Signets
Valor, Focus/Shield, Meditation
Honor, Mace/Staff, Shouts
Virtues, Hammer, Consecrations

BrotherBelial.3094:

dragonfighter.4098:

the reason for those whom don’t understand " play your way" its the choices we make while building our toons. We are not moaning we are letting Anet know we are unsatisfied with their choices at the moment. We do this so maybe they understand why a lot of us are leaving the game and actually giving them the option to fix it. players whom have played for a long time really don’t want to give up on them, they just want them to realize that some changes are not wanted nor needed and costing them time , effort and money to fix and that causes loss of many players.

No, “Play your way” means you can get anything in the game by playing how you want. Some ways take longer than others, but you do not “have to do” any thing in game you don’t want to. That is what “Play your way” means. Not what you want it to mean.

Conditions in general was a massive mixed bag of problems. The recent changes addressed the most obvious ones, but many more problems still remain in the basic mechanics behind them.

Probably one of the least obvious improvements was essentially getting rid of passive Condition and Boon duration increase. This leads to a new discussion of HOW to reimplement duration increase for non-stacking boons and conditions, so they don’t balloon the existing (rather insane) DPS potential of the stacking ones. But attached to this discussion is yet another problem…. pulsed effects which are designed to circumvent condi clearing.

Right now pulsed effects are the most effective at application, because they can reapply just as fast as any skill can clear them. But condi cleanse tend to be geared toward single OR burst removal; making the only 2 healing skills that work by pulse (Healing Spring and Ether Renewal) arguably the most powerful outside of highly specialized builds.

Next we have the newly visible problem of weapon traits and utility traits being forcibly paired together. This does infact kill a number of hybrid builds, and intentionally hinders some obvious synergistic builds, because the utility trait you want doesn’t support the weapon traits you want. This is a “unified design” flaw that causes problems with the PvP vs PvE meta; And wouldn’t be difficult to address if they they simply reorganized the “weapon cool down” to be more broad by type (main hand, off hand, 2-hand, or blade, blunt, projectile ), and redistribute the secondary effects into another logically paired trait line based on effect theme (condie, defense, support, control, symbol, ). This should offer more freedom with choice of weapon vs choice of utility skills, making hybrid builds easier to accommodate with the new 3 line limit.

I’d hate to break it to you, but no Aus/Oceanic server I’ve ever seen every stayed populated for more then half a year. Aus doesn’t have enough density of players in any single game (except for maybe WoW) to sustain a server dedicated directly to them. And a Pac Rim server suffers from the same language problems as EU/Asian that potentially compartmentalize them, instead of promoting group interaction.

While I agree that the mega server should open across regions, the reason for the barrier is ping. So unless they lift the region restriction for PVE/PVP, an oceanic region would only compound the existing problems you’re seeing with Coverage.

I was wondering if Sword wave still counts as 3 attacks since the update.

Moredrem, by design, are OP in nature. Stupid amounts of HP, generally high toughness and almost constant control skills from their normal attacks. When fighting them, you want high burst damage and the ability to stable as mobile as possible. Unlike other mobs, you also want a fair amount of armor to suck the 1 or 2 big hits they’ll be able to throw at you, as well as power through the constant AOE they can put out in groups. You don’t want to “Tank” them, ever!!…. but you can’t rely on being a glass cannon with their high attack rates either.

Because Guards are designed to mitigate burst damage (and mordrem are high DPS sustain), you wanna focus on burst damage and reliable cleansing to keep fights as short as possible. With the new trait setup and massive burning power, Virtues is your best friend for any build. For weapons, GS is good for the bursting you need, along with Scepter Immob for dealing with Teragriffs.

Personally I use a hybrid Soldier’s style PoV build, and it can dish out good damage for the short fight, but can survive the longer ones like a champ.

It depends entirely around your core build. Because Guard traits are highly conditional, their utilities tend to integrate more heavily then most classes.

Personally, for a support bend its hard to go wrong with Pure of Voice. With Condi damage and application frequency being what they are now, these guards with a full stack of shouts (especially in light of the new Wrath elite) can single handedly keep a group clear of big damage and movement conditions. These pair perfectly with Hammer and Mace builds, since they don’t have cast times and can be used while disabled. And if timed right, you can mitigate most big attacks during world boss and Dungeon fights.

The only down side is you can’t reach the optimal DPS of the combat focused builds; But if you’re thoughtful of your trait lines, you can still do respectable damage none the less.

Personally I run Altrustic/PureOfVoice (paired with Trooper runes) with SyG, HtL, Ret and FmW, and Shelter as you can get might stacks off the Blocks and can tank your way through cluster AOE. I’m experimenting with the 3rd trait line, but the new OP burning is making Virtues a perfect catch all on weapon choices. This build has served me well in both PVE, casual dungeon runs and WvW, as the basics will work anywhere Max DPS isn’t of primary concern.

anzenketh.3759:

The new one allows for greater build diversity as you can take what effects you want without sacrificing the stats you need.

I also personally find it easier to understand. I am actually paying more attention to traits now as I was not really before.

Except it actually huts build diversity by a proportionate amount, because you can’t readily get the stat combinations you need for non-focused builds. If you run all Zerks, this is about as simple as it gets.

But if you run hybrids, like my medi-guard who used zerks armor, Knights trinkets, and got the bulk of my toughness, healing and Vit off my traits, trying to rebalance that is impossible when the 2 stat types I want are both locked behind deep Achievements and the Living story rewards. I can’t even craft some of them due to discontinued recipes and general lack of materials.

I am all in favor of disconnecting those points from the trait lines; but shifting them directly to equipment (some of which have inaccessible crafting requirements) makes several defensive and hybrid builds nigh beyond difficult to properly replicate.

I’d much rather they had them as free distributed points (in blocks of 50) so we could effectively customize out builds, and get around the fundamental problem locked stat combos because of crafting.

Faux.1937:

We got an increase to armor/stats due to trait points removed.. Why not an increase in Hp?

Just wondering.

Because the increase in equipment bonus stats is intended to off set the missing 700 points you USED to get from trait lines. There is no net gain in the total stats, so theres no reason why we should suddenly get more base HP.

stof.9341:

Well you can still prepurchase only when more info is available. For example, you wait until the last moment before HoT releases, or you wait until after the first few beta events to see the feedback?

Yes prepurchasing blindly isn’t a good thing but there might be a point where enough info is available at all where you’ll feel confident in what you’ll get? Until then, just wait and see.

But pre-purchase relies on marketing hype. You want to start the sale at the peak of interest AFTER you’ve convinced a customer they want in. But there has been a shift in marketing following the Early Access wave, where essentially the peak the interest is BEFORE showing something. This works pre-development or Pre-launch games, but doesn’t work the same way for established games which people have already bought and been playing. The disparity if even greater for AAA games and sequels, as there are a LOT of preconceptions that have to be addressed in order to generate the right hype.

Being a AAA game, you want to hype it up as much as possible, then release the pre-order at the height before game release so it over rides the hype of other games.

Since the game is coming out at the same time Fallout 4 is, my guess is they want to lock in as many sales as possible before that game takes the user base with it. But its the way they are going about it that not only insults the existing customer base, it may drive people away from the Pre-purchase, which in turn reduces the chance that they’ll come back. GW2 is one of those game’s not designed around a reward schedule, but has reward schedules built into it……. the end result is that it keeps a person playing until they inevitably get frustrated with it, and then drops it for several months. Getting players to come back after this is difficult on that merit alone; and the only reason people have been coming back is because the combat mechanics are in fact better then other MMOs out there.

MomentofWeakness.1246:

Well first off, they don’t have the plethora of legendary weapons, ascended gear, and other rare items (dyes, food, etc) that I do. Sure new players get the base game free but they’ve already missed out on 3 years of experiences which is easily worth the $60.00 I paid for this game back when I bought it in 2012, not to mention they have to start from scratch! (level 1 GG).

Also, I was planning on buying gems when HoT came out anyways lol and i’ll equate

Additional Character Slot TIMES 2!
Miniature Revenant Rytlock
Revenant Finisher
Mordremoth’s Bane Guild Hall Decoration
Heart of Thorns Glider Skin

to $20.00 so I’m quite happy about the purchase

Thats a function of time an effort, not money spent. Any new player can invest the time needed to do that, and frankly the only real advantage existing players have is NOT having to power level from scratch just to reach HOT content.

This bothers me a bit because the influx of new players won’t be able to enjoy the new content for least a month (roughly how much time it takes to understand enough of the game to move around with purpose), of which none of the Vet players will be around to help them learn the game faster.

There was a reason the old GW games had their core story lines accessible at a relatively early stage of the game…. it was intent on having the imported and new characters (new classes) mingle quickly, so the content can be enjoyed as a group.

What would had helped greatly at several levels of user experience was to produce a starter Zone for HOT, and interlink the existing Story element of the Civilian support (as seen in Silvewastes) as recruitment tool to jump new players into HOT right away. With the current time line, all plot holes could had been avoided by not using Destiny’s Edge as the main characters, and instead using Destiny’s Call (place holder name for Braham’s crew) since they have no attachment to the first personal story.

Vayne.8563:

Why did they take 6 soul crushing days. I don’t know, maybe because when it started half the brass was still at E3 doing like that stuff. And because a HUGE update, possibly the largest in the history of the game is coming tomorrow. And maybe because they wanted to make sure that got it right and, with the community particularly, wanted to make sure they were getting the wording just right.

And maybe people have families and go home on weekends, because waiting six days made no difference to anything, really. Anyone who expected it sooner probably has never run a big business before.

E3 and the events over the past 2 weeks have nothing to do with it…. They’ve been planning this announcement for upwards of a year, and had plenty of time to think this through, to get it right BEFORE the big unveiling. They know exactly what the are doing when they started, and 6 days to respond is very clearly their Marketing and Executive staff having to do enough math to factor in the character slot as an after thought. If they had the “current” plan in mind all along, as they are claiming, it would had taken no more then 2 days for formulate a response via the Mod announcements.

GW2 appeals to a slightly older player base, who scrutinize a lot harder then most fanbases. It seems the marketing folks haven’t quite grasped that, as even a Korean MMO would have structured the offering and pricing so poorly. NCsoft and Anet are fully intent on pushing forward with the original plan, which tells us that they have far too much riding on their pre-purchase sales numbers. More importantly, this also means they are NOT factoring potential gems sales into this equation….. which raises are few other questions about how they view their own gem store.

Vayne.8563:

ZeftheWicked.3076:

The OP’s point is quite valid. Any veteran player that buys and links HoT to his old account should get something.

It’s simple matter of fairness. New players get core game + HoT rolled into one for price of x-pac alone. Old players who do not choose to make new account (taking up server space and other resources), but instead link HoT to their old account, should get something too. Like that extra character slot.

Still at least A-net moved a bit torwards us veterans (and it’s own interest along the way). For me personally now it’s more of an “50$ is ten bucks too much for me”, rather then “I won’t support this sleeze”.

You mean playing the game for as long as you did, got you nothing? You mean you weren’t around to unlock every episode of the Living Story Season 2 for free. Maybe you played none of season 1.

You get something. You get to play the game which you bought. Since we now know that all the prior games will be included in each expansion, I suggest you wait 10 years till the last expansion, but it and get all the expansions free, except for that last one.

The rest of us will be here, playing the game and having a good time.

The entire Living Story was their ORIGINAL “we don’t do continuous yearly expansions, or gear treadmills” promise, and was advertised as their “Ongoing content development”. The Gem shop was, is, and still will be, their main source of income. Especially with the Gem trade (which they’ve purposely obfuscate now, and probably manipulate) to help entice gold players into using Gem store items and eventually buy them; as well as entice gem buyers to sell them in for basically easy profit to NCsoft. Assuming there is still a supply system in the Gem trade, it doesn’t work the same way TP does.

The problem with Living Story in general is that it took to long to get underway, most of the stories were pretty weak, not enough content was released in one go to truly immerse into it (reading 1 chapter of a book every 2 weeks), and cosmetic rewards (while hit and miss) started out as RNGesus, and slowly moved toward grinding for RNGesus.

While I appreciate the lower barrier for “some” of the skins, its still frustrating as the achievement requirements becomes harder as more people complete it, leaving fewer people willing to help with the more difficult ones. But a lot of these armor skins tend to fall flat due to animation and coloring issues that have existed since the start of the game, and continue to be a problem with the newer art assets. Lumi armor can’t display colors correctly, which is why hardly anyone uses it, and the few that do are either blue or green tints. This is shame, because the Carapace design (which lumi is based off of) is actually great with a lot of different colors. Then theres the massive clipping issues in any stance other then idle……

Anet claims they want to set Guildwars apart from other MMOs, by avoiding the common mistakes WoW clones make in their design. They set the bar high. And thats exactly the reason people passionately call them out on mistakes that even WoW wouldn’t make.

But more importantly, the style of the game focuses on Diversity of play. Specifically in the fact that it readily encouraged you to make multiple characters (which many of us did), as each class has unique mechanics that they operate on, and a wide span of build potential within each. But since TP market integration is so critical for high level crafting (which for all intents and purposes is the end game), the game becomes Bipolar in the way it uses character progress but account level player scope. This problem is incredibly clear with Ascended Armor, as there was never supposed to be anything Stat wise higher then Exoitc (which are readily available), is totally optional, but the game throws the material solely used in its production in our faces in ALL areas of the game. I can understand the need for infusion slots to justify the need for the new crafting line….. but the way damage is calculated that +5% stat bonus nags heavily at the player in all aspects of the game; not just the Fractals they were created for.

Ultimately a lot of these counter intuitive elements, no matter how small individually, find a way to compound in other areas of the game. Given the high standard of play the overall game generates, only causes these to stand out even more. Thats why you see this kind of cognitive dissonance effect from Vets….. We LOVE the game, and hold it to the high standards Anet themselves set for it.

Plus there are still the alluded to Mist “colossus”, Fallen gods of Tyria, and the Mist walkers/other god-like entities.

The Mists is basically multi-verse theory at work….. and they have yet to go into the mechanism that governs its operation.

briggah.7910:

Ohh I’m just going to jump right in and believe anything the media says.. If anything the media just brainwashes people or makes things seem worse then they really are.

Culture is designed to brain wash people. Being a free thinker tends to be useless you can get others to agree with your view point.

briggah.7910:

While most living story stuff did take a day or less to complete, you are also forgetting that during those time, most of those had open world events that lasted until the next release. A lot people farmed those events for the entire two weeks to make gold or get items that only dropped during those events.

The farming aspect is considered an unrelated activity, as that could had easily been done (code side) in any other area, with the same amount of effort, simply by adding that material to the drop table. But theres a cup of irony added to the discussion in the way they distribute the Alt currencies, and the rewards tied to them. Since Dry top, there has been a huge move toward event based rewards. This important because its covering up 2 fundamental problems with how the rest of the game works.

1. This is a reward schedule. If you haven’t heard this term by now, it’ll be very important in all upcoming discussions concerning crafting, grinding, and veiled progression. Up until Dailies, and then Fractals, this was almost non-existent in the game’s core activities.

2. This acknowledges that they can’t rely on drop tables to simulate a reward schedule.

Why is this important? Because its sole purpose is to meter our progress, while making it look like the system is trying to help us. But mixed into this are Drop-only, high value trade or cosmetics. This is a 2-pronged attack to literally trick us into accepting the effort, despite how badly the odds are stacked against everyone involved. We see some random person get a high value drop, which drives us to attempt it. At the same time, the smaller rewards are stringing us along toward a more “accessible goal” as consolation.

If you boil it down, this is what every arc of Season 2 living story amounted to. Release 1 mini-dungeon, open new map, but only give access to 25-30% of it every 2 weeks, along side a set of1 hour long story chapters, add a new exclusive material, add a new currency type, and 2 sets of skins (one BL, one Unlockable).

Every 2 weeks during arc, unlock one portion of the map, unlock one portion of the crafted items set (via vendor or new events), unlock 1 chapter, maybe reveal a new mob or boss fight. For most of Season 2, also require perfect completion of achievements to unlock cosmetic or crafting item of the chapter. *For the remaining 12 days until the next chapter…… encourage mindless farming. *

Farming doesn’t help the content at all. It proactively distracts us from the fact that there was only 1 hour’s worth story content.

I’d argue that Silverwastes had set the stage for a great set of dynamic event, culminating toward an epic boss battle….. and then instead slapped together multiple standalone events that could be chained endlessly. Had it been planned well enough, they could had easily designed a series of major push-pull events like those found during the initial Southsun release. The battle against the first Karka Queen still stands in my mind as single great event in the history of the game. A lot of those elements leading up to, and including the mechanical style in the actual fight, could had been applied to the battle against the Vine Wrath, with much higher replay value then what we see now.

Ayrilana.1396:

This is great news as it does alleviate a lot of the RNG aspect when it comes to getting ascended outside of crafting.

It doesn’t change anything about that at all. You still need the Insignia, or the method to produce one, in the first place. All it does is lower the cost of generating a new set of armor of particular stat by recycling another set with a stat you no longer want.

Personally I’d rather they had gone route that enables on the fly stat swapping, as this current proposal doesn’t help a player who USES multiple stat sets at all. If I want soliders and zerkers for 2 different builds on the same character (like my mesmer), I still have to make 2 full sets of armor.

Xillllix.3485:

Relax people, if you find it too expensive just don’t buy it.

I find it expensive but not to a point where I would not buy it considering it’s pretty much the only game I play. I have high expectations however for 50$.

This is weak argument when a large chunk of the game’s core mechanics are now bound to whats introduced behind the paywall. For a game whose core philosophies include Unified game play mechanics, organic team play dynamics, and cooperative community dynamics, it makes little sense to actively segregate them on a basic level.

So you can understand the cognitive dissonance created when someone says “just don’t buy/play the new content” when everything in the game’s design pushes you in that direction. It the same dissonance when people say Ascended gear is completely optional, yet the game overwhelms you with the mats used solely for its production on a regular basis.

Xillllix.3485:

Relax people, if you find it too expensive just don’t buy it.

I find it expensive but not to a point where I would not buy it considering it’s pretty much the only game I play. I have high expectations however for 50$.

This is weak argument when a large chunk of the game’s core mechanics are now bound to whats introduced behind the paywall. For a game whose core philosophies include Unified game play mechanics, organic team play dynamics, and cooperative community dynamics, it makes little sense to actively segregate them on a basic level.

So you can understand the cognitive dissonance created when someone says “just don’t buy/play the new content” when everything in the game’s design pushes you that direction. It the same dissonance when people say Ascended gear is completely optional, yet the game overwhelms you with the mats used solely for its production on a regular basis.

Ichigo.3859:

If I buy the standard version could not play with the “Revenant”, because I have not a free slot, this is right?

The character slot augment only applies to people who have been playing the game long enough to have at least five Lvl 80 characters. If you have an unused character slot, you can make your Reverant on that.

kousei.5914:

I still don’t see why people are surprised by this… Anyone that knows GW’s history was not expecting a character slot. EotN, the only true expansion in GW history, did not add a character slot. Even after owning Prophecies, Factions, Nightfall, and EotN, you still had to purchase character slots to have one of every class. This entire thing is being blown up due to player entitlement…

Facts are a harsh mistress. GW1 included 4 slots with the first campaign (with 6 classes). Each additional campaign bound to the account added 2 slots, enough to cover the 2 New classes introduced in later campaigns. You had to buy 2 extra for all 10 classes, but EVERY campaign gave you enough to access the Highlighted content; namely the 2 classes, and the ability to start or import a new character immediately in the areas related to campaign.

EOTN being the only actual expansion is true. It was also cheaper then the campaigns, didn’t highlight a new class, and introduced Class-agnostic skills via title tracks. This required no specialties through the classes, and had no impact on the PvP aspect of the game. Aside from Cracked armor, and a couple condition changes, this was a purely PvE addition to the game, and could be experienced immediately after activating on the account.

So knowing guildwars history, we fully expected a character slot to ensure the new class was accessible, regardless of the preexisting characters, and that the new area would be quickly accessible to new characters, or existing characters via low level hub towns.

DarkOcean.8746:

My biggest problem with this change is that I would have to have multiple ascended pieces to have different outfits. Or I would have to spend a small fortune in transmutation stones.

My other biggest problem with this change (>.>) is that I do not see why this change is necessary in the first place? Can this not wait until Heart of Thorns when the armor is supposedly easier to obtain? This is a bad time to be stirring this boiling cauldron! Can we try to keep the peace for awhile before implementing this? Or are we going for a full out purge right now?

This brings an ancient suggestion that echo’d the changes made to legendarys.

Ascended gears suffers 3 fatal flaws caused by 3 inconsistent rules in how the game uses Stats.

The cause?

1. Builds are a 50/50 split between stats and skill/trait combos to establish it’s effectiveness. Traits contribute to the control aspect, as well as setup for damage. The stats deliver the damage (or mitigate it). Defense is used when Controls are the offense, while Attack uses controls as part of its delivery system for damage. If either of these 2 are lacking, the build fails to perform.

2. Gear makes up a significant amount of those stats, and Traits don’t necessarily have synergy with the stats assigned to the trait line.

3. Because of the way stats are balanced through most of the game, it heavily favors burst damage and damage avoidance. This leads to most builds (prior to the Condi change), centering around high burst output, or being able to survive a burst attack followed by cleansing. In PVE, its heavily skewed toward the offense side, as mobs tend to be slow, heavy hitters (making a tank build kind of pointless).

Which leads us to whats wrong Ascended gear from a user experience stand point.

1. The high cost of producing just one set discourages their use with build diversity. This also makes equipping multiple classes with different armor classes a pain. Add runes to the mix, and you can see how unwieldy the system ends up being.

2. Even if we assume the cost wasn’t that big an issue, the space requirements to store multiple armor sets (with different stats) is inconvenient at best.

The solution? Complicated…… but one thing that would go a long way is adopting the Stat swapping aspect of Legendarys into the Ascended armor’s usability design. You build the base armor set per character (which is the most logical approach), and then use a separate task to unlock the different stats. Once unlocked, you can freely swap between them on your armor set. Extend this to runes, and the “end game equipment” situation becomes far easier to manage.

2.

Witch of Doom.5739:

This. We all have a tipping point, a point at which we either will or won’t buy HoT. For me, it’s having an included character slot. I’m OK with $50 for an expansion (if there’s good content) but in a GW case, I have to have an included character slot for the new profession. Perhaps it’s because I got used to that in the first GW and think that’s the way it should be. Simple, ANet, if you want my business.

Exactly. The way GW1 handled it was a quite elegant. In the first game, if you bought the Factions or Nightfall installments (or bought Prophecies after the fact), and merged it to your existing account, the game offered you a few options to help tie everything together. You were given 2 extra characters slots (for the 2 new classes included), and the ability to import your character “freely” into the other story line, allowed you to carry any unlocked skills between the campaigns, and eventually unified some of the core features. You also weren’t required to work through preexisting content just to get to the new release stuff.

A major failing here is that a Reverant WILL need to power level through existing content to take part in the new area….. this creates a very odd split in the activity centers of the game, disconnecting groups of people who may actually want to play together. And with the potential shift of skills being exploration bound, like traits are now, Reverants will the LAST group of players to experience HOT, in light of all the caps and hurdles being placed on Traits, Skill unlocks and power leveling. New players won’t care, since they start from zero anyway… but existing players are being forced into doing world completion if they had originally skipped it in favor of PvP, WvW, or Dungeon content.

Whether new or expanding, players had everything they needed to enjoy the game, without having to give up anything gained in the other campaigns, and had the ability to move between them freely. It just flowed perfectly.

With HOT, stumbling blocks are everywhere for existing players. The way they approached new players is Excellent, as it gets them everything they need to jump right into the game. But with existing players, you have to make a number of assumptions… especially with long time players who probably have several characters, are heavily invested in TP, and probably bought or traded in gems at some point.

Gem and TP prices are hugely important to this argument, as any claims that players “can pick up what they are missing from TP and Gem trade” aren’t taking into account the state of the Gem trade market against the earn rate of Gold for most players. If you go into full farm mode, you can make roughly 10G per day (not counting alt currencies like laurels). But at the current exchange rate, the 800gems to buy a slot is around 150-160gold.

With HOT opening the door for even more crafting, the value of things are going to get majorly shuffled, and gold is going to be stretched thin if you want to take part in it. And since the game goes through a great deal of effort to steer you towards crafting, referring to the gem exchange as a solution to whats very clearly a service design level problem is asinine.

Given how things are now, I would suggest the single most important move to be made is to rethink the vitality/toughness of all PvE mobs. Like its been mentioned countless times, this causes them to behave more like Players in terms of damage mitigation.

For direct damage this eventually has a zero sum impact, since the basic damage formula is still damage\armor. This change doesn’t change the effective HP of mobs for direct damage, but now allows DoT/DPS of conditions to actually mean something.

However, I see a different flaw in the concept of condition damage as a personal stat, and how its the root of stack limit being a problem.

With the Linear stat system, I’m heavily reconsidering the old degen system in GW1 as a way to approach the condition problems in GW2. Refocus them as pressure attacks, and redesign the skills and traits to use conditions as setups for other effects or damage. In short, ditch Condition damage as a stat. This would uniformly solve 2 massive problems..

1. Stack overrides no longer matter since the damage rates are fixed, or instead scaled against the target. Also better leverages toughness as a mob theme.

2. Condition builds won’t be forced to do tall AND wide stacks of conditions to meet a design target DPS.

Condition builds use a wider range of conditions that can synergize off each other, achieving its DPS horizontally while setting up for focused damage builds. It also makes hybrid condition/direct builds more sensible for solo work, and pure condition spam becomes an offensive team support role (easier to design around as well).

Focused damage builds capitalize on specific conditions as a trigger for traits or skills. The idea is a flat conditional for some kind of bonus effect or damage, including the ability to increase intensity for conditions they don’t normally use.

General Support’s role doesn’t change at all.

*To help facilitate this, a very simple rework of conditions stacking would need to be done. *

- 1 Stack, per condition, per source, and applications stack or refresh duration for that source. It may help to have generally short durations, or add a hard cap to a max duration (per stack) for damage focused conditions.

- Multiple sources results in increased intensity. Because of this, kicking stacks doesn’t reduce the effectiveness of the condition, and large targets can reasonably handle more stacks from many sources.

- As an added benefit to the new source/stack setup, you can also set a universal concept of “Deep Wounds” when Bleed reaches its stack cap. This gives small bonus damage to new bleed attacks rather then FIFO the bleed stacks.

- Conditions that stack duration continue to do so, but can use intensity to lead into a hard control. This idea is still fuzzy, but the gist that if enough of a duration condition is piled up on a target, it triggers a control condition. Chilled = Frozen, Immobilized = Stun, Weakness = Dazed, Cripple = Knock down, etc. Its mainly geared toward dealing with defiance stacks, alongside another idea of making defiance more champ specific to expose weakness when striped.

If my brain isn’t fried from it being so early, the net result from this is that most conditions, condition builds, and mob stats can be rebalanced around small group. For large groups and open world, where stack capping will be common, we convert excessive condition stacks into raw damage, and redo defiance so they are specific to each type Champ. It doesn’t disrupt the current flow in direct damage builds, improves small group dynamics, adds viability to the condition builds in PvE, and make champs slightly more interesting with a weak spot.

The only upset would be how sPvP likes to see condition builds. On one hand, condition builds become more hybrid by nature, on the other it also means most builds will be using them effectively.

I would recommend scaling down some settings, especially the ones related to effects (screen shake will pretty much kill any system in a big fight), and lower the Model LOD bias to high or med.

This is what I recommend based on Usefullness/Performance trade offs. Regardless of all else, ALWAYS have a the frame limiter running at 60. This is more of a heat management thing during periods of low activity to help keep the card happy.

- The highest yield, low impact settings are the 3 “Show all names”, as rendering all that text is major bog down on the system.

- Depth Blur off. Not really useful, and arguably good looking.

- Next You can get a lot of FPS by lowering the Character model limit and model quality. Note that the model limit does the most good for PvE, but since you need to see as much as possible in WvW you can lower the limit 1 level and lower the model quality 1 or 2 levels to make up some of the difference.

LOD Distance – Mess with this based on preference. This controls the detail transition thresholds for the terrain. This will help a lot by cutting down rendering cost for scenery.

- Reflections: Terrain and Sky. Off if you don’t care about that. Reflections in general have a high GPU cost, so this may work well with the low end GPU you’re using.

- Best texture filtering off.

- Hi Res character textures off.

- Post processing off for WvW. This setting controls a lot of the ambiance effects, like lighting. I recommend keeping on in PvE for the pretties, but you’ll never notice it in WvW.

- Effect LOD: I haven’t quite figured out how this works, but you can experiment with it.

- Shadows and Shaders to Med or low. This will make the effects less pretty, but helps a lot in zerg storms.

- Render sampling to Sub-sample. This will cause the game to render at half res, but display in full res. It does yield decent performance, but between the upscaling and visual quality loss some people can’t handle it.