I appreciate your views. And I totally get what you are saying, but I didn’t say the situation was unhealthy, I said that not accepting change was unhealthy.
Why would it be healthy to accept changes for the worse? Of course it’s a matter of opinion in the end. Still …
1. Ascended rings
2. Ascended backpacks
3. Ascended amulets
4. Ascended earrings
5. Ascended weapons
Not sure which one I’ll have to drop once ascended armors are released though.
That’s not how balance works. There are 1000 threads out there with all the things that need tweaks. You don’t leave OP stuff OP because other stuff is OP. Anything overbudgeted and powerful deserves a mention. Yes Thieves need help defensively (outside of evade/stealth spammers), yes other things need fixed, yes other stuff needs nerfed, but that doesn’t make it right.
Actually, yes. I don’t see anything wrong with leaving some OP stuff as long as it’s balanced. Relentlessly hunting every single “op” feature or skill or item in a game always ends up with something bland where every choice feels the same. Take a look at DotA with it’s many many ultra OP heroes in some fashion. Yet if a hero is OP in something, he’s always weak somewhere else. All that creates variety and flavor and is good.
Wonder if making it bypass Protection and Aegis would be OP’d or good. They could always increase the cooldown to compensate.
Giving the thief a tool to bypass defensive stuff could be a solution to the problem that we need to build heavy damage stats to have meaningful effects on tanks leaving us very squishy, AND destroying anything that isn’t a tank itself.
Stuff like armor ignoring attacks like there was in GW1. Assassin signet could work like that : for 5s after activation, physical damage you do ignores Protection and counts the armor stat as for a cloth user with no toughness from stuff or traits or skills.
Yep. The only reason to activate the signet is if you got traits that give you benefits from it.
Yeah, condinuking shouldn’t have any counter. /sarcasm
yeah, stunning someone with basi venom shouldn’t have any counter. /sarcasm
And so what? It’s an elite. It doesn’t need a counter that much really. Anything outside of correct positioning I mean.
Can’t wait for the thief version of “Diamond Body”. Something like : while under stealth, you get no damage at all from any conditions could be fun.
The Good
- Fixing the sigil of paralyzation so that it doesn’t round up
The Bad
- Fixing the sigil of paralyzation so that every single stun doesn’t round up
Nuklear nerfing every single stun in the game that used to round up to a point where they are now all weaker than they were before even while using the Sigil compared to the previous duration without it.
That’s stupid. They said they were adding 1s root to the pistol #2 maybe. As in, the skill would root the target for 1s XD IE, it applies 1s immobilize condition …
Speaking of which, I honestly hope the Dev Team are not planning to add a 1 second root to Body Shot. Hell, MH Pistol needs more maneuverability, not less.
Are you under the impression that they are adding a 1s self root to pistol #2? oO
Thieves have a single source of stability ever, which is a channelled 90 second cooldown elite. If you cancel the channel, you are literally getting 9 ish seconds of stability for our elite slot.
I’m pretty sure every single elite that gives stability during channeling/transform was changed so that you lose the boon if you cancel it early somehow. Including Daggerstorm.
Well, why did I play less? We’ll have to put in perspective how I played W1 the first time SAB was release. I did play it a lot and farm a little everyday to get a couple skins. To get all items and the like. It was fun, there was some speed running element, fiding the good dig spots on the way that didn’t distract too much from the objective and didn’t give so much baubles I’d get too full by the end etc… The baubles per run were plentyful enough that I could enjoy bombing and slingshoting stuff left and right. I even used bombs to break the cage at times to make it faster.
Then comes world 2. By the time it was released, I was kind of over with w1 really so I had no intention of going back. I had no continue coins left because they were worthless to me so I didn’t buy any. What did I find?
- huge nerf on the lives per restart when you don’t use a continue coin I didn’t have. This change made it very very very annoying to play through world 2 because two strikes and your out.
- should I go back to world one to farm continue and lives? But I never HAD to farm to prepare to do a level before. Playing the game was self sufficient. All farming was done for benefit, not to prepare to have fun. Remember how I said I’d get more than enough bauble ammo just from doing it? World two was consuming my ammo more than it was giving back. If I found a dig spot, I couldn’t use it again the same day anyway so if I was thrown out of the map and I had used that money to buy lives at the shop, I couldn’t do it again.
- you get one continue coin per finished zone at the same time as a bauble bubble? Sure, but I had no intention of going to world 1 anyway since I had it done more than enough already so it wasn’t helping at all.
So basically, the game put some nerfs on the lives per respawn, combined with nerf on baubles per run and per day made it very very frustrating finishing world two without refarming world one somewhat beforehand. Sure it wasn’t much farming I can see but that’s now how I was about to do it. Using continue coins is cheap, I’d rather finish without. Also preparing to have fun isn’t something I’m happy with.
I don’t suppose you know what an evasion frame is, or that you get them every time you press the dodge roll key.
But you cannot use the dodge move while immobilized. It doesn’t work. It does nothing.
As I’ve said before, when Ascended gear was first introduced, this game had very little “stickiness”. There was no reason for people to play and it was easy to move on to other games. The ascended gear was a stopgap measure (which seems to have worked).
The stickiness now doesn’t actually come from ascended gear. Anet is going to release the rest of it, because it’s in motion, but the stickiness now comes from chasing achievement points.
Is that a good property? There’s no doubt that ANet is in full swing into metrics driven development. You know what are the most stellar examples of games driven by metrics? Farmville.
The problem of metrics are twofold :
- they cannot innovate. Metrics only look into the past, not the future. They can only work on something that was already done and tends to drive future development into more of the same
- any good scientist should know and have remember what he is measuring. What is ANet measuring? Stickiness? As in the ability of the game to glue people on it and keep playing? Well it’s nice but it doesn’t measure what’s important. It tells them how to make a game people come back, it doesn’t tell them how to make a good game.
This is exactly the problem with Farmville and others. They were completely metrics driven and so worked on anything that would keep their numbers high. The problem is, the human beeing is kind of flawed here. Psycologically there is a LOT of ways to keep people playing by giving them crap. Metrics when they measure the stickiness do not measure how to make a good fun game but also how to best polish that hamster wheel to keep us running.
ANet is certainly making changes that work to keep their numbers high, but they do so by doing the same shady ideas than social gaming and the like did. Which for me leads to a bad game I don’t want to play.
Is it fun? This is the question that metrics should be working on, not stickiness.
Well, I got my first ascended weapon today. The part of found the most grindy was leveling my crafting to 500. Beyond that, I didn’t think the grind was particularly bad. In fact, it’s a lot less grindy than I first thought it was.
But leveling three crafts to 500 is unnecessarily punishing to more casual players. Particularly because you’ll need a lot of the same mats for each craft. It’s a lot of farming (and I hate farming).
I don’t know when I’ll get around to leveling my artificer and my huntsman to 500, because I have to recover financially from leveling my weaponsmith up.
It wasn’t cheap.
Indeed. That’s for me the core of the complaint. Draining that much resources from my savings just to level ONE craft to 500 is hardly bridging the gap between exotics and legendaries, it’s making it bigger.
The ascended weapon crafting part once we are 500 is still too expensive in common mats but just that. One reason I wasn’t too bothered by the rings once they were put in is because I could get them while doing other stuff. I could get them while working towards a legendary because all it took was doing Fractal runs which did loot. Same for necklace. The earrings on the other hand it started going downhill fast. Weapons are the worse :/
What if you do a champ tran for 30 mins that at lest one brick one
Bloodstone brick and powder won’t help you get the gold for the more mundane mats required for an Ascended weapon. It still costs like 200g to level a craft from 400 to 500.
The only overspecialization that was going on was Cantrip elem and it was nerfed.
Considering it was a case of having easily 3 utilities that were each both stun breakers and condition removals, on top of whatever the utility was doing was kind of obvious though :p
So what’s the point of Legendary, then?
I don’t know, looks maybe?
Considering Warriors were complaining that their trait that “immobilizes 1s on cripple” was overwriting their long duration immobilize with a crappy one on their sword autoattack, I doubt it.
More likely, any new stack will always make room for itself by removing the oldest stack.
Considering Inmob always stacked up to 1 time (supposedly because of a bug), this would be even a buff… You always got the extra duration because of the time between attacks (and usually I always waited for my shared allies to attack before using mine to keep it up for longer time).
Well yes, I used Immobilize as an example of how the stacks on boon/conditions that stack in duration work. Since the current cap for Immob is 1, it’s a buff. It’s a nerf for the other conditions though.
You cannot have more than 5 stacks on duration stacking conditions now. So if you perfectly share say, Devourer Venom with your group, and all 5 of you hit the same target twice, he’ll only have 5s or immobilize in total (5 stacks of 1s) and you’d have lost half the potential of the venom.
if you go 5 vs 1 in pvp , its just normal that it should not all stack on that 1 person .
( dont reward zerg gameplay.)its a good nerf against zergers. Deal with it
5 vs 5 fights you’ll have all those venoms on ALL 5 persons. if your team is smart.
gang up on 1 person with 5 and you should get punished for it.
only downside is the build wont be that good in pve. But then again everything is alot easier in pve then in pvp.
News at six. Smart play in 5v5 is to spread your damage all over the place instead of focusing someone to kill it and turn the fight into 5v4.
Since nearly every weapon somehow causes bleeding with little effort, I can’t wait to see the bloody mess in big zerg in PvE or WvW. Blood all over the place!
The pet needs to flash up like a neon sign saying, “I’m about to ruin your day” so we have a chance to dodge it.
“Sic Em” is an instant cast single target Shout done by the ranger itself.
Though it’d be nice to have some visual feedback that we got caught with some completely unexpected Revealed debuff instead of having to watch the interface.
Who in their right mind is going to sit there and just keep #1 skill on auto-attack without using all of those wonderful other skills we have(all of 4 other SKILLS). The only time I’m spamming #1 is while waiting on the cool-downs from all our other skills activations.
Many thieves, main hand axe warriors have little else to do too.
It’s very hard for ANet to shave anything in LS and not change completely the viability of the skill :p
You don’t need to do any PvP dailies. There are always enough non-PvP ones to get 5 without doing those. You don’t need WvW ones either. I get my dailies (and laurel) every single day without those.
I think he was more referring to the fact that he won’t get the laurel for pve daily, if he’s already finished the pvp daily (and opened that chest? Haven’t ever done a pvp daily, so don’t know if there is a chest as well).
I’m sure you’re correct. You get the chest for 5 dailies, regardless of whether you get the total 5 from PvE, PvP or a mix of both. Of course, you can knock yourself out and play for 2 hours and get every daily, but you are still only getting one chest / one laurel in the 24 hour period.
Something must have changed then. Last time I did both, you get a PvP daily chest and a PvE daily chest, only the first of which comes with a Laurel.
Anyway, the problem with FS/LS is probably the extra evade it provides. If they cut down on non evade functionality and reduce the initiative cost to go with it, it’ll just make the evade spam problem worse :/
I won’t comment on anything but mesmer cuz its not the classes i play but i can assure you that no one will bother with Mantra of Concentration even after patch. Who in their right mind will waste an utility slot for 2sec of stability x 2? Increase stability duration to a minimum of 5sec for this thing to be worth running and even then it’ll be very situational.
That’s two stun breakers too. It’s not bad really and the fine grained 2s of stability could be used as counterplay to block CC you see coming.
So, FS comes back to prebuff state except for the split part? Back to 1 boon for 5 init? XD
At the minimum, if the skill is to remove only one boon it should drop it’s cost to 3 initiative.
I dint see how people think the mats for the best weapon in the game should be easy to get
I mean. Come on, not everyone can have the best.
Also. The mats aren’t all that bad honestly. I get tons of ascended mats just from chain running cof paths.
You do understand that the core of the complaint is mostly from a population group that yes, does believe everyone can have the best (in stats) and that the game would be better that way.
Actually, you’re right WoW did grow. But at the 1 year mark where we are now, it had less sales than Guild Wars 2 does now and it didn’t grow by that point to it’s high point. So how do you know what Guild Wars 2 will do in the same time period. If Guild Wars 2 has two or three years of updates, how do you know it won’t grow?
More to the point, Eve, also considered a successful MMORPG just managed it hit 500,000 subscribers…I think it was last year.
The fact that WoW was mega succesful at a time when there was virtually no competition and made a name for itself means what exactly?
Technically, I know people will hate what I say but, WoW did invent the modern MMO. They had less sales after one year than GW2? Sure but it was because WoW was remaking the MMO market along the way. GW2 had an easier time to get those sales in a short time because it rode the MMO market population that WoW created by attracting many customers to this game genre.
WoW market share was so alien in the MMO landscape at the time, it is clear they get a lot of customers that weren’t MMO customers in the first place. WoW was popular at a time there was no competition? Ah, it’s the opposite really. There was competition, and WoW became so massive you couldn’t qualify the rest as competition anymore after it got some steam.
I think allowing people to have account bound ranks would make it far too easy to specialize their alts in many tasks. You could even go so far as to delete and recreate an alt on demand depending on the situation.
The solution is to make the WvW rank, AND the unlocks account bound.
The attack gained from exotic to ascended was ~55. Depending on your spec, thats 0.5-2%. The major stat gain is 0.5%, the minor stat gain is even less. Of your overall stats.
Since the weapon average damage goes from 1047 to 1100, I don’t understand how you call that only 0.5-2%. It’s nearly exactly a 5% increase.
Unless you’ve fallen down into the trap of the “attack” stat displayed in the game. This stat has no basis in reality and greatly undervalues the effect of the base weapon damage.
Oh my god, the amount of mats needed is ridiculously easy to get.
I’m not sure I’d call all using up all the money and mats I’ve saved from the game release just to level one craft to 500 “ridiculously easy to get”
I like the fact immobilize stacks now. Makes one venom useful.
(edited by stof.9341)
400k concurrent users is 400k users connected at the same time.
That’s because you play the game to enjoy the content, not to get shiny stats.
WoW solved that in part because you’d farm new items to allow you to tackle the next content. Like a linear game really. WoW wasn’t a game were you farmed the best stats but were you farm the power allowing you to visit more content.
What do we farm our ascended items in GW2 for?
So, if ArenaNET made everything easy enough to get with a month of play.. what would you do after that? What motivation would you have to go further?
Of course they want it to take time! It’s an MMO, not a 30-day trial of Pac Man.
Once you take away the unrealistic expectation of being given everything immediately, you will find more enjoyment in the adventure.
Good luck.
We don’t want everything easy to get. We want BiS stats to be easy to get. You can put them on the ugliest ever weapon and armors if you want. They kinda did that for crafted weapons already :p
i think torment should be removed by “hide in shadows” because this healskill removes all dots. but it doesnt, i think they forgot it.
They said it was working as intended unfortunately :/
Well I’d rather have a task saying “go kill Wubwub the Mighty” than “kill 50 nondescript critters in the jungle”
Metrics don’t innovate, they only show you how to make more of the same, but more shiny.
Numerous mobs give too much emphasis on AoE skills. There is already a big imbalance in the game between single target and AoE skills/weapons, no need to make it worse.
Congratulations. That took you ages. Just ages. This endless gear treadmill is tough.
Considering a huge part of the grind to craft an Ascended weapon came from mats and gold you farmed before this patch, yes it takes ages except you are all badly measuring it by just looking at the time since the patch.
So what do you personally want in this game? were you think this is fantastic……….Cause I guarantee, what you like someone else wont be happy. Most players in MMO want the gear and achievements for doing nothing, and thats what i dont understand?
What is there to understand? Weren’t we clear already? I don’t want to play the get to get stats. In fact, I view having to get stats as an obstacle to play and enjoy the game.
So what I want is for sure not more stats but more game to enjoy.
Okay, so a publisher says thousands of things and five of them change. I see you hold people to this high standard of behavior that probably isn’t attainable within a corporation.
That’s not just some 5-6 random points among thousands XD For me, the notion of Horizontal Progression was the core of the game, plain and simple. Changing that isn’t as if the decided to remove some minigame before (or after) the release.
I absolutely loath dailies in any game.
They really need to let you stack up to 7/7 dailies so you can skip some then knock them all out at once, Rift does that with most dailies and it’s fantastic, no pressure of “I NEED TO LOG IN BEFORE 5 PM kitten IT”.
GW1 did that up to 3 days. Obviously since GW1 was an epic fail (that’s what I get from some posters around), they couldn’t copy anything from that or it would taint GW2 :o
The “active combat” in GW2 is definitely better than trinity. When I got bored of GW2 a few months back. I tried Rift again because it is free to play now. I had tried it before when it was in Beta and though it was amazing. Now I couldn’t even get past level 5…..it was that boring. You could say the GW2 combat ruined the traditional combat system for me.
The problem with GW2 combat is the limited skills and the shallow boss mechanics.
Well you could try a game with active combat, AND trinity. And much much more interesting dungeons and boss fights strangely. I’m thinking of Tera here.
Though you might feel bored at level 5 too cause the leveling part isn’t exactly fun :p
They didn’t decide to do it till after they saw the low uptake on legendary weapons. Sometimes it’s not possible to warn someone, because you didn’t know you’d be doing it.
This is going in circles XD
Why then do they pretend it was their intention from the start to have BiS be a big grind?
If someone answers again that “it was their intention from the start, we just badly interpreted what they said” I’ll get angry.