Guild Wars 2

volpenvieh.3201:

It’s only natural that PvP rewards less gold since you spend way less as well. 3g per sigil, 5g per rune, 10g for an amulet and you can use them acount wide whereas PvE and WvW players have to equip every single character (or craft ascended armor to move around) which is way more expensive.

Only a single character is required to run PvE contents, you don’t need to gear them all. You can do the lv40 fractal farm with just ascended trinkets and weapons, which can be acquired with very little gold expense, while offering much more gold income compared to PvP. That without saying that the efforts are way less compared to getting good in PvP.

OriOri.8724:

Lets compare your proposed rewards to other content.

I’m going to double your estimated time to reach those 3k games to 1,000 hours, at which point someone would have earned approx 2250 gold under your proposal.

https://gw2efficiency.com/account/statistics/values.summary.liquidSell

Compare that to the above link, where the top 10% of accounts that have played 500-1000 hours have even 1400 liquid gold (and yes, that 2250 would be mostly liquid gold considering you need to spend almost no gold to unlock all of the runes and sigils you may need). Only 3% of players on GW2Efficiency have 2260 liquid gold or more after playing 500-1000 hours.

How can you defend that as being balanced? Not only would this lead to massive inflation, but its simply not balanced against what the game reflects. If you want to earn lots of gold, then go do SW farm, of ABML. Otherwise suck it up, as a PvP player you don’t even need it.

This comparison makes no sense. The statistics you linked consider only freshly created accounts, which means that of those 500-1000h, lots of them are spent only by leveling the characters and gearing it up, not by farming. I even doubt that those people started farming before the 300h mark.
PvP players needs gold as much as PvE players for the exact same reason: cosmetics.

My overall point is that if you are playing the content you enjoy (PvP) you are actually being less efficient compared to playing other parts of the game, which is kinda unfair considering the overall GW2 philosophy.

If your worries are about the inflation, just give valuable materials instead, like ectos or T6, so the PvP players can make some profit out of them.

Hello everyone.
I don’t know if it has been discussed yet, but I want to attract some attention on the sheer gold rewards given by PvP.

We all know that, once you have been calibrated in the correct skill division, PvP is the hardest game content this game offers due to its intrinsic unpredictability, which no other PvE content can offer.

What bugs me is that it offers way lower gold income compared to other contents, even though the efforts you have to put in is significantly higher.

Right now, running a fractal, which can be completed by experienced teams in about 20 mins max, offers rewards for at least 1g through encryptions and even more if you have spare fractal encryption keys.
Running tarir offers even more gold income, while being even easier compared to fractal, at about 20g per hour. Same with silverwastes.

Now, as a PvP player mainly, I feel I’m missing out by using my time playing PvP, since if I ran fractal or tarir, I would get significantly higher gold income that can make my progress towards a legendary weapon much faster (which is right now my main goal).

In my opinion, ranked PvP matches should give at least 1g per win and 50s per loss to be on par with other contents, while Leagues should give higher gold income too, but I refrain to speak about them right now because I’ve read about a rework of the league system.
This is no way exaggerated if you consider that a seasoned PvP player will have about 3k games played with a 50% winrate. That is about 2250k gold income over 500 hours of sheer playing assuming 10m average per match (so excluding queue times and wait time).

TL:DR;
Increase the gold rewards across the board for ranked play in PvP.
1g per win at least in ranked.

SchmendrickTheMagician.8247:

Don’t get your hopes up, we won’t get any new or changed mechanic, 8 skills on warhorn will be our “mechanic”.

Why? Because if we’d actually get something new our traits would be worded otherwise. Look how necro traits since the patch refer to Death Shroud simply as Shroud in skills because their elite spec gets Knight Shroud or whatever it’s called.

The necro traits have been worded differently after the Necro specialization was announced.
Wording the traits way before announcing the Ele specialization means killing the hype and the anticipation, which isn’t something ANet is looking for.

Gaile Gray.6029:

I agree with you. Suggestions would be wonderful: Practical, reasonably expressed, and clear. Here’s the challenge, and we’ll see if it’s possible and reasonable: Share your opinion about how to improve the end game in (roughly) 100 words or less.

I’ll give two suggestions in this thread that would improve the game so much more to me.

1) PvPvE: basically a PvE mode with enemies being orchestrated or partially made by other players a la dungeon’n’dragons. This will provide the constant and never-ending challenge typical of a PvP mode with the variety of a PvE mode.

2) More solo/duo contents. I’m mostly a solo player and I feel there isn’t challenging and rewarding contents for me if I don’t will to group up with other players.

3) More unique rewards. I like when I finish a challenge and I am rewarded with something special and unique which gives values to my efforts. I’m talking about something similar to the Blazing Light title and the SAB tribulation weapon skins.

That’s it. Hope it helps.

style.6173:

You don’t play enough tournaments.

I play enough tournaments and as far as I know they are pretty much useless.
They usually run berserker, can’t hold a point and they are annihilated by a single thief with ease.

Why are they an issue? Because they stay at 1500 range doing single target damage? Just bring a thief and it will be downstate the whole match.

Ranger are finally useful in hotjoin while still being bad in tournaments.
Better nerf them, folks!

Stopped playing for 3 months because my team quit.

Played 2 TeamQ matches with some PvE guys, which I’ve lost, and a SoloQ match I’ve won because of 4vs5 and skyhammer.

I’m now 160 TeamQ and 19 SoloQ.

How can this be used as a metric of player’s trustworthiness?

Zoose.1640:

You guys care wayyyy too much about that one duelist comment.

Zoose is right.
Let this thread die, please. People are free to believe what they want.

azyume.6321:

You think it is not enough for the process you need go through to craft it. Although if it is small or not, it is a bolster, period. Besides, works more than just WvW, you can use it whenever you want minus PvP.

If you think there is no reason at all to have ascended, it is your personal opinion. Now, let the others come to the conclusion if the 5% booster is enough for them to craft or not.

After playing this game for more than 1 year, at some point will see yourself with plenty of mats to craft something. Not only that, but can also be something to aim for in game. Legendary? Check. Ascended? Check. Dungeon Master? Check and so on.

To conclude, my last post about this matter. I won’t derail the topic with ascended talk. Ascended has been around for about 10 months now, people should be used to it by now.

Read my post.
I’ve said that there is no reason to craft ascended gear if you’re planning to do only WvW, not that there is no reason to craft ascended gear at all.

The only reason you really want to craft ascended gear for is Fractals, for anything else, it is an irrelevant tier of gear you can avoid to craft and live fine without it.

The 5% stat boost does not makes you win fights you were supposed to lose. It doesn’t add anything relevant in terms of damage or survivability in most builds out there, making it to be far from a requirement.

azyume.6321:

If you pay attention, I never stated as a requirement. All I said it is a good call. You can’t deny that and say it is false. For certainly helps if your party will do a 5v7,8 or so fight, the party skills, traits, plus gear are bolsters. Simple as that.

The difference is so small it is absolutely not a good call to make ascended gear and spending so many golds only to do WvW.
You can’t deny that and say it is false.

azyume.6321:

A full ascended set in WvW, which is end content by the way, makes difference. If a person wants a better experience of that game mode without relying on big groups, ascended is a good call.

This is absolutely false. Ascended are nowhere a requirement in WvW in non-zerg settings.
If you feel any differences, it is psychological.

Harper.4173:

Yes ascended gear does’t change much – I know that too – but it also invalidates the initial statement where they said they want “everybody to have the best statistical gear” – even breaking a promise by a little bit still breaks it.

That is because there was still a vocal minority who wanted new gear tier and they listened to the wrong crowd.

Harper.4173:

They’ve said a lot of things about what this game would and would not be and I don’t know how you see it but mainly I feel they’ve lost most if not all of their initial vision.

The game still stands in their initial vision entirely. Some things have changed, of course, over two years of development and player feedback, but the core of game design stays the same.

Harper.4173:

Also these “mistakes” you mention that you use in order to turn a blind eye have happened too often and have been too many for them to be just honest mistakes.

They were not made on purpose and those mistakes were quickly fixed.

Harper.4173:

The " haven’t kept following that route" is false – because vertical progression now exists through ascended infusions on top of ascended gear.

Really? You mean that +5 power on infusion slot?

Harper.4173:

These are great- except they’re not and never will be the rewards people go for or want the most.
I’m talking about skins

Glorious armor and backpieces are skins.
They are experimenting a completely new game format, you can’t expect things will be perfect and well refined after only two years of experimentations.

Harper.4173:

Regarding recurring LS rewards – they did it once – what more do you need as indication that they’ll probably do it again?

If you mean LS reward being bought through laurels, than it is also because of the China release of the game. There is no reason to think they will do it again.

Harper.4173:

Also if you can’t remember Pavilions 2.0 that went on for days and weeks of farming it means you never bothered to look for them. I was part of them – did it a lot for a long time.

I did look at it and I’ve run pavillion several times, but I never bothered to run it again and again just because I thought that the challenge and the fun weren’t worth my time.

Harper.4173:

Regarding content tiers and involvement of casuals vs hardcore.
That’s exactly what I was saying – making content that the hardcore can master easily but only rewards the casuals partially effectively makes the content a grind for the casuals because they have to keep replaying the part they can play in order to get the rewards they want. Since they can’t complete it. So they’re grinding.

Nonono. That is not what I was saying at all.
I was saying making contents that the hardcore can’t master easily and the casuals too.
Casuals access to a specific challenge and eventually goes up in difficulty if they want to get better rewards.
Hardcore will eventually start at an higher difficulty and keep going up at it reaching even “almost impossible” tier difficulty with great rewards.

The example I’ve brought is dungeon gambits.
Complete the dungeon -> casual tier difficulty and rewards.
Complete the dungeon with all gambits -> highest near-impossible challenge with very big rewards.

It’s up to the player when they want to stop difficulty and reward wise.

Harper.4173:

“People will leave also if they end up doing repetitive and grindy contents.” – Yes – but only if you force them to.
If the grind is optional then when they feel they don’t want to anymore they can just stop and do something else.

No.
If people feel that some contents is behind a grind gate, they will get frustrated and ignore that content. You are under the assumption that casuals are the ones who are supposed to grind, while in reality only the hardcore playerbase is more inclined to grind out contents.
If I played GW2 for a couple of hours per day max and I notice that to get the reward I’m supposed to play hundred hours of repetitive contents, I would have gotten frustrated and give up on that content entirely playing something else.

Investing time and resources building contents that just a minority of players will enjoy is a waste.

Harper.4173:

Sadly – the money from the TP goes to NCSoft

NCSoft pays ANet, so it is fine. They are making free contents and they have the resources they need.

Harper.4173:

How is it that an entire company failed to make “Legendary weapons” feel awesome and how is it there’s NOTHING legendary about building one?

Well, that is your opinion.
Holding a virtual weapon on my virtual character that is worth several hundred dollars still feels legendary to me if I’ve spent zero money to make it.

Harper.4173:

First of all let’s get our facts straight – Queen Pavilion 2.0 was designed to be anti-zerg not anti-grind. The content wasn’t touched when it came to grinding.
It was made zerg-proof. There’s a huge difference.

They fixed the main issue of the pavillion first, so that it can’t be done by just zerging mindlessly and made it challenging.

On my records, also, I can’t remember anyone really grinding the hell out of Pavillion 2 like they did with Pavillion 1 and Dunwell farm. The magnitude was nowhere close.

Harper.4173:

People want rewards faster – there’s nothing wrong with that. When you were a kid and it was Christmas time didn’t you want to get your gifts as soon as possible?
Time is limited – the faster you get to do what you want in life, the faster you get the things you want the better it is – at least for most people.

True, nothing to argue against it.

Harper.4173:

People don’t want to grind – true – but you can’t eliminate grind by making the good rewards skill based because guess what? most of your players won’t be able to get them and will become frustrated and leave.

So let’s find another solution.
Maybe tier the difficulty of something and reward people according to the difficulty they have engaged that specific content?
So hardcore players have the challenges they want while casuals can still be rewarded even if they don’t want to get too much involved in difficult contents.

Harper.4173:

Grind is a solution because switching the content from skill-gated to simply time-gated means that everyone can get it as long as they’re willing to work hard for it. And that’s not necessarily good – but it’s better than the game dying because just 10% of people can make legendary items and have cool skins (which I would like but I also realize it would murder the game).

People will leave also if they end up doing repetitive and grindy contents.

Harper.4173:

Regarding legendary weapons – I disagree with you completely.
You would have been right if not for one small detail you can always pop that credit card and buy one straight of the TP no questions asked.

That is really an unconvenient way to buy a legendary and the price is insanely prohibitive for a virtual item.
Even if a minority straight up bought a legendary with real money, I’m fine with it because they have funded ANet to deliver more free contents to me.

Harper.4173:

And some people have fun treating and playing it like a “job”. Some people actually like different things in a game. Some like playing pvp, some just like dressing up their characters. There are very different types of games and people like very different things even in this one.

I particularly happen to know a lot of people who like nothing more than to have more gold and farm it and grind for it if it’s profitable.

Amazing isn’kitten
Not everyone wants to “play” like you do. Not everyone has fun the way you do.

Point is that developers have said several times that this is not that kind of game and people have bought it, me included, following these design standpoint.
If there should be exclusive rewards, they should be tied behind challenging and fun contents, not frustrating, repetitive and time consuming tasks.

Harper.4173:

It gets both boring and repetitive really fast.

It can’t get repetitive when each encounter is different. It can get boring at some point, though, but not because it gets repetitive.

Harper.4173:

This is a “declared” non grindy game. And that “declaration” is just PR talk. It’s fake. The game has plenty of grind in it.

It is not PR talk, it is design directions. Developers have said that they are following this path and if mistakes were made, that does not mean that they have changed it.

Harper.4173:

They also “declared” that players would get the best statistical gear really easy – which ascended is not.

Ascended gear does not make a significant impact to player performance except for fractals. I’ve never made an Ascended armor/weapon piece and I’m doing just fine.

Harper.4173:

They also declared no vertical gear grind -which they added.

And never kept following that route.

Harper.4173:

I want you to give me an example of good rewards tied to non-grindy content in GW2. Please give me that example since in 2 years of playing the game I have not found it.

I’ve pointed out some before.
Glorious Armor skin.
The Blazing Light and The Sunbringer titles.
Any backpiece they introduced in those two years.
Champion Titles.
There are also many other examples that don’t come in my mind right now.

Harper.4173:

True – but you are mistaken if you think the same process can be fun ad infinitum.

But it is developer’s job to make that process fun as long as possible.

Harper.4173:

The Living world is a joke at the moment – mostly because the events are so unrewarding nobody even bothers with them.

That’s because the rewards are bad, not because they are not grindy.

Harper.4173:

I agree with you 100% but they’ll never do this because the casual player base can never live up to this degree of difficulty.
At the same time the same casual player base is very entitled – spamming the forums asking for exclusive Living Story skins that should have been a one time deal. They weren’t playing then – tough luck – no skins.
But instead Anet goes 180 and puts the skins back for them.

You can’t say that.
So far the have taken this direction and they never said that they don’t want to further go that way.
The players spamming the forums is a vocal minority.
The casual portion of GW2 just play the game and don’t give a kitten about what the developers do, they don’t spam the forums for sure.

Harper.4173:

Also while you consider this type of content hard – and while I consider that it would be hard for the majority – my personal feelings is that this sort of content is easy. Hard starts with Liardi and I don’t know where it ends.

I did not said that I consider that kind of content hard. I said that this kind of concept can be a good way to make content hard and time consuming without investing tons of developer resource to please an insignificant portion of the playerbase.

tigirius.9014:

LOL really? someone actually said there was no grind here because you didn’t repeat it? smh

So let’s see we have the “you don’t have to grind for anything you just have to farm gold” crowd the “you don’t have to play the game at all no one is forcing you to” crowd and now the " it’s not a grind because you don’t have to do it a second time" crowd.

Why can’t they just accept it for what it is. I have a feeling these people sit around and make excuses for the economy like “you don’t HAVE to buy food no one is forcing you to”….

It’s funny how people twist a word definition to the point they think it fits better the thesis they want to prove.
If it is not repetitive, it is not grind. Not that hard to understand.

Also, in the case you have not clear the definition of repetitive: it is a small set of actions (ie: killing a mob or a group of mobs, doing a small amount of quests etc) done over and over with no variation whatsoever.
Repetitive does not mean “you don’t have to do it a second time”. The term you’re referring to is repeatable, not repetitive.

If you think that grinding is something you have to sink a lot of time in, than your definition of grinding is wrong. That is not my definition, that is the definition of various sources that has even been posted here by some people.

On another topic, I can’t really stand on how people here are asking to buff the grind rewards. For god’s sake…

Harper.4173:

The image you’re painting of the devs is really skewed – since there are a lot of things they could have done in order to make this game less grindy and a lot of things they’ve added that have only increased the grind.
So no, I don’t share your view that they’re encouraging a “grind free” environment.

I’m basing my statements on what they said. People make mistakes and you can’t really predict how grindy people will take a content.

Harper.4173:

And while you might like to show some parts of the picture in order to back up your vision let me remind you that the same company made some of the most grind-tastic additions to the game – remember 1st Queen Pavilion? yeah.

Ever since it was changed – requiring people to organize – they made it zerg proof – but not grind proof – and people grinded it for a month ( since they left it on for a month).

They made changes to improve the experience but it was not yet perfect. The fact that they changed it is a proof that they don’t want grindy contents.

Harper.4173:

5)Liadri. Tequatl. When they came out people were asking for nerfs so much.

So? Also many people thanked ANet for how challenging and good were those contents.

Harper.4173:

6)“This is the laziest and most uneffective solution to the problem.” – they did it with everything else – look at time gated crafting.
Look at dailies. Look at monthlies. They broke every bit into little chunks that you have to do every day for it to count.

This is the solution they’ve been using ever since they started addressing the problem.

Still better to let the game drown into the problem.

Harper.4173:

7)Good that you do EOTM that way – but I fear you’re part of a minority of players that do. You see – the majority go there to farm.

How can you say so? Based on your experience?
Because mine says that people that grind are a minority, not the other way around.
Both of experiences are worthless, so let’s move on.

Harper.4173:

Also I’m glad they reworked the system for WvW season 3 – but my point still stands. People want do to stuff and get it out of the way. In order to achieve this they will grind it.

Why have your legendary 3 years from now when you could have it in 4-5 months?

Why wait to get ascended armor in 1 year when you could have it next month?

People are goal-driven. It’s how we’re brought up – it how our society functions. Short, medium and long-term goals are what keep us going.

The things we want are what drive us forward.

The issue is that, if you grind, you get your reward faster, which isn’t supposed to work like that. That is the flaw.

People want the rewards, which is a fair point, and they will eventually find the best and fastest way to get those rewards.
If the fastest way is grind, then it means that something is wrong and should be fixed.

Legendary were not designed to be grindy contents, they just ended up being so because some other contents gave players the ability to farm absurd amount of materials needed to craft the legendary.
They were designed to be a way to show the time you’ve spent playing the game, regardless when you’ve played. That’s why they required stuff from any gamemode and any game zone.

It is simple.

Harper.4173:

1) yes people wanted the loot. And accepted the grind for that loot. It was a choice.

So you admit that grind is not anti-fun, but getting loot is fun. This is not a job, this is a game.

Harper.4173:

2)Yes – killing players in WvW gets repetitive too – you might not think it but it does.

It gets boring, not repetitive.

Harper.4173:

3)GW2 is the game for me – the only thing you don’t seem to see is that we have grind in it even now. People want the better rewards that come with the grind and so do I.
I’d rather grind for better rewards given that I had the option than just play “normally” and have terrible rewards.
I’d love to play “normally” and have good rewards but 2+ years of the game have taught me that’s not going to happen.

Unless you go out of your way to make good loot and money happen in GW2 ..it won’t happen.

Rewards don’t necessarily need to come with grind. You can have better rewards tied to non-grindy content. Is that to hard to understand?

If you think that in a declared non-grindy game didn’t give good rewards to non-grindy contents, what makes you think that they will give good rewards to grindy content?

Harper.4173:

a)For some people getting lots of rewards/gold is more fun than the process itself. In a sense they have fun farming rather than just “Playing”.

This does not imply that the process to get rewards is supposed to be boring and anti-fun.

Harper.4173:

b)The game can’t and won’t stay new forever – so while some experiences might be fun the first 10-20 times around there comes a time when the game becomes a grind for any/every experienced player. Because how many times can you see the same places, do the same things, fight the same bosses ( no matter how well designed or not they are) and go “wow – this never gets old”.
Sooner or later you’ll be repeating content for the rewards only. It might be after your first 5 runs, 10 runs or 100 runs – but there’s always that point in which you stop caring about the content itself and do it strictly for the reward. Or simply don’t do it at all.

That’s why there is the LW, to make the game stay new as long as possible without having to make grindy content. ANY game ever, even the most grindy ones, gets boring once you’ve sinked thousand of hours in them, the point is how good and fun were those hours.

You can’t just put a patch to the problem without fixing it entirely.

Harper.4173:

c)If you think Anet is so anti-grind I’d like to point out Ascended gear. It is and was a grind to make and the worst thing about it is that it is vertical progression grind – the kind of grind that makes you stronger by giving you better stats.

In fact, they never made any further gear tier. A company can make some mistakes.

Harper.4173:

I just want more horizontal progression prestige items – things that make you look cooler but don’t make you stronger – the sort of things that are optional.

It’s fine, but you don’t necessarily have to gate those things behind grind and repetitive contents.
For instance, look at the LW achievements. If done right, they can be potentially a good way to gate rewards behind them, or completing a dungeon without being hit can give a special reward, something along the line of the gauntlet gambits. That is hard and non-grindy content.

Another example is the Glorious Armor which is given only to tournaments winner. If they make some sort of automated tournament system, that is another example of skill-gated non-grindy reward.

continue…

Harper.4173:

7)Nerf the hell out of grind? Wrong. Grind is still in the game – the only thing they’ve nerfed are the rewards which is what the majority of the player base is complaining about now.

Sure it is in the game.
In any game ever you can do the same thing over and over again with no real purpose, the point is that you shouldn’t be rewarded (so encouraged) to do so, which is exactly what they have done.
Nerfing the rewards of grinding, they have nerfed the grind. They can’t nerf the grindy player mentality, they can just take away from him reasons to grind.

Harper.4173:

Also – while they nerfed some “grind spots” they’ve over the past 2 years created plenty others.
Remember champ trains? Those weren’t here at launch.
What about EOTM?
What about Fractals?

This game isn’t perfect but it is striving to reach perfection.
It’s not by pointing out at flaws that you’ll prove that flaws are good.

Harper.4173:

8)I have nothing against tying very good rewards to very challenging content – I’ll try it – learn it – repeat it and get good at it but the majority of the player base won’t. And they’ll cry. And the content will be nerfed or taken out.

When did this ever happen?

Harper.4173:

So in order for them to have a chance too you make it easier but gate it – creating a grind.

This is the laziest and most uneffective solution to the problem.

Harper.4173:

Also the PvP and WvW “challenge” makes me think you’re really out of touch with stuff that goes on there in general.
Do you EOTM? If yes you’ll find out that people there do it for the rewards, easy ranks,karma and badges and very very rarely care about fighting each other.
A successful EOTM commander avoids enemy zergs and leads his zerg into a perpetual farm circle.

So what?
I do EoTM for general roaming. I go around, avoid zergs and do small scale fights, which is exactly how EoTM was supposed to encourage by design and it succeed on a certain degree.

As I’ve said and I’ll say it again, GW2 has still its flaws.
Still, WvW is not the only form of PvP as it is more PvE than PvP.

Harper.4173:

Remember the first season of WvW? […]

That’s why they have reworked this system for WvW season 3.

Harper.4173:

1)Champion farming was a grind – sure – but you have to understand that the people doing it wanted to do it and it says a lot about the state of the game and general rewards in this game if people were willingly doing that.
That’s no reason to nerf it – just because players wanted to do it. They are still doing it.

People wanted the loot of the champion farming which is way too high, not the champion farming itself.

Do you think that if there were no champion bags and gold income from champion farming people would still do that? Be serious, please.

Harper.4173:

2)WvW is repetitive – even those " unique player actions" become repetitive after a few weeks. Play it and see.

Are you under the assumption that I don’t play the game?
WvW is not repetitive.
The only way you can get it repetitive is if you just stick with the big zerg, not following commander orders through voice communication, spamming yoru AoE skills and getting loot.
But that’s playing WvW not optimally because you are not contributing to your world victory, nor making anything meaningful other than selfish and mindless loot collecting.

Harper.4173:

3)When I got those tokens we didn’t have EOTM – and the puzzles you did daily and they were still a grind. When I got those tokens you had to grind them by killing players – and maybe, just maybe they would drop. it was a grind.

So you are saying that killing players and PvP is repetitive content too?

Harper.4173:

4)Again – those tokens were farmed long before sPVP rewards were introduced.

As I’ve pointed out before, this game didn’t came out perfect, but you’re making it look that the direction they are heading to is wrong, which isn’t.

Harper.4173:

5)I got that gold by farming the now long dead COF P1 repeat farm. Look it up. It was the grind you had to do if you wanted a legendary done back when I made mine. That and the Cursed Shore event chain with Plinx to get the karma.

Yeah, those were grind and they were nerfed to the hell because that is the kind of content and playstyle that GW2, by game design, have decided to not encourage.
If you enjoy grinding, maybe GW2 is not the game for you.

Harper.4173:

6)Right – long term goals – you do realize playing the game at a pace that’s different than “very slow and unproductive” isn’t exploiting or abusing or breaking the game right?
Some people actually have the time and will to farm days on end. Why not let them?

Because farming/grind is bad design.
A game is supposed to provide fun experiences, not providing you goals to go after and encouraging players to do the same thing over and over again.

You might like grinding, but that is your personal opinion.
Many people don’t like it and they have bought GW2 just because the GW franchise has an hystory of not encouraging grinding and it is advertised to provide that kind of experience.

If you like grind, there are several games who encourage and provide you with many ways to grind your way to the ultimate reward. GW2 is not one of these games and the developers have done their best to not let it become one of them.

Continues…

Nokaru.7831:

Have you ever done a Champion farm before? Just because the mobs look different, it doesn’t mean all you’re doing is spamming 1 while reading reddit.

That’s the reality of effortless content. It all congeals together and turns what could otherwise be varied content into a blur of similarity. Farming can become grinding.

That’s why champion farming has been nerfed several times.

The fact that you obtain some materials by doing champion farming does not mean that crafting a legendary is an overall grind, but that champion farming is a grind and should be nerfed.

Harper.4173:

Also you definition as " repetitive content" is too broad – by your logic even WvW is a form of “grind” since you do the same things over and over again and nothing really changes.

WvW is not grind.
The actions you perform in WvW is not repetitive at all as they change according to the situation which is different from time to time.

Harper.4173:

If grinding is the repetition of content for whatever purpose then I’m sorry to say adding more of it to GW2 won’t harm it at all since there’s barely 4-5 months worth of content in this game at all.

That is your opinion. In my point of view and I think in the point of view of many others, adding grindy contents will harm and spoil the game.

Harper.4173:

I’ve been playing it since day 1 ( actually 3 days early release) and by your logic for the last year and a half I’ve been grinding it like a boss.

I’ve been playing for the same time too and I’m sorry to hear that you had such a bad experience with the game.

Harper.4173:

Please tell me that the 500 WvW tokens you needed for the gift back in the day weren’t done by grinding them.

Nope, they are not.
Of course if you play WvW by just following the commander and pressing 1 with a lootstick guardian, you’re going to be grinding, but you can obtain 500 WvW badges by doing achievements, doing Edge of the Mists, roaming, doing jumping puzzles and so on with the same efficiency. It’s up to you to not spoil your game enjoyment for getting a virtual item.

I’ve never grinded at all and I have well over 500 WvW tokens.

Harper.4173:

Please tell me the 500 AC tokens I needed for my legendary weren’t done by doing AC every single day until I had them.

You’ve done 3 different dungeon paths and you can even get the same amount of tokens doing PvP. Is this repetitive in your vocabulary?

Harper.4173:

And let’s not forget the gold – for the precursor and other things – I didn’t have to grind for that at all – I just got it all out of thin air.

How did you get that gold? By farming champion train they have nerfed several times? Yeah, that was a grind and in fact ANet didn’t want that in their game.

Harper.4173:

If people didn’t do this – and just played random content every now and then I seriously doubt most legendary weapon users would have their weapon even 2+ years into the game.

In fact, it was supposed to be a long-time achievement, not something people were able to grind out in a couple of months like they did.
I’m not saying that this game has not flaws, I’m just saying that you are trying to encourage the wrong behavior just because you’ve exploited in the past this game flaws.

Harper.4173:

Let’s face it – people want the grind. It keeps them working towards something.
And even if you consider it bad – I see nothing wrong with “optional grind” – you can choose if it’s for you. If not you can move on to something else.

Again, this is your opinion.
People don’t want grind, but eventually grind if it is the most efficient way to get something.
Solution? Nerf the hell out of grind, which is exactly what ANet has done in 2 years of game updates.
You can make non-grindy contents and they have proved that it is possible to do so.

It is fairly simple: tie the rewards to several hard challenges, rather than repetitive content.
Most of the time it is hard to do so through the AI, which will eventually get understood and exploited by people on the long run, but it is something you can’t do in PvP or WvW, where if you’re matched against evenly skilled people, it will be a challenge regardless.

Nokaru.7831:

sorrow.2364:

Grind is repetitive content done for whatever purpose.

…

Legendary weapons are not a grind because they don’t force you to do repetitive contents to get them.

…

Making a Legendary is a time sink. Your suggestion is grind.

This is the most ridiculous double-talk I’ve ever seen. Legendary Weapons in GW2 are a grind. You’ll be hard pressed to find any forum discussion about them that doesn’t say “grind” or “farm” in it. They are slightly less grindy than they used to be, but this doesn’t change the fact that at their core they are designed to be a ridiculously large item and time sink.

Where do you think all the Lodestones come from? From playing “how you want?”

It’s pretty amusing how people redefine words to suite their purposes. This is the definition of grinding.

Grinding refers to the playing time spent doing repetitive tasks within a game to unlock a particular game item or to build the experience needed to progress smoothly through the game. Grinding most commonly involves killing the same set of opponents over and over in order to gain experience points or gold.

Lodestones drops from any bag really. You can also sell the lodestones you don’t need to buy the ones you need.
How it is repetitive?

Again, time sink is not grind.
Grind implies repetitive content, time sink doesn’t.

VOLTCIEAGE.3029:

So yes it is grind for cosmetic update , it is completly. ok you dont want grind content ? Dont do it , quick and easy go do non-grind content and enjoy it .

This game is a no-grind game. If you want a grindy game because you enjoy it, there are several korean MMO, some of them are also really polished, that wait for you.

VOLTCIEAGE.3029:

I still think rewards shouldn`t be for everyone , when you cant kill this boss , you dont get loot from him it is really easy .

So you want skill-gated rewards or grind?

Harper.4173:

It isn’t.

The way I see it – grind is something you have to do – you have to get that best armor or weapon to progress.

Grind the way I see it is something you are forced to do in order to be able to progress further in the game.

With purely cosmetic rewards there’s no obligation to work for them unless you actually want them.
And why did you assume it’d be a grind?

If you finish a run and get 5 tokens it’ll be relatively easy to get the weapon you want. And if you just want that 1 token it could be made very easy to get.

By your logic legendary weapons are also a grind because you have to work on them for a long time – yet they are in the game.

Same with dailies – you get 1 laurel each day by doing a few things. Is that grind? Is someone forcing you to do it?
Are you unable to play if you don’t?

Grind is not something you have to do.

Grind is repetitive content done for whatever purpose.

You’re asking to repeat the same contents at least 60 times to get a rewards, so your are pretty much encouraging people to do the same content over and over to get to their goals. This is exactly the vocabulary definition of grinding.

Legendary weapons are not a grind because they don’t force you to do repetitive contents to get them.
The crafting materials are obtained everywhere, skill points are scattered anywhere in the game, globs of ectoplasm can be obtained in multiple ways. Even the dungeon badges can be obtained by either run the dungeon or doing PvP.
You can make a legendary countless ways and they are not at all the same content repeated over and over.

Making a Legendary is a time sink. Your suggestion is grind.

Of course someone can do the champion train or running the same dungeons over and over to craft a legendary, but the game shouldn’t encourage anyone to do so.

Vayne.8563:

They shouldn’t be encouraged to compete in my opinion. People who only play competitive games for the reward will leech just to get the losing reward instead of getting better, ruining the competitive mode. It’s already happening to some degree. People are saying solo queue is the new hot join. It would only get worse if that was what you had to to do get rewards. It would ruin the experience of most PvPers.

I’ve highlighted what is wrong.

Shaduy.5629:

This would look really nice in solo PvE Content, Dungeons/Fractals and really useful in sPvP.

Looking at huge PvE Group Contents and WvW Fights this would be an absolut horror show. Even with options to enable/disable those bars only for allys or enemies maybe with an additional threshold so only bars of players/enemies with 10% HP left will show up is not that easy to implement.

You basically need to regularly check the surroundings of a player for entities that can lose HP, like you already scan those to draw their names on your screen but it would also need additional calls to the server to get their max. HP and current HP and you also need to draw those bars on your screen.

In a game that already cripples a lot of players pc’s (read as very low fps in huge player groups) that would be a total overkill. Sure there are possible performance options to ease the CPU-Usage down but those things take a lot of time and testing.

http://imgur.com/a/VNFwY

You don’t have to apply this effect to any entity, but only on the HP bars that you really want to know the damage done, so the player’s HP bar and the targeted enemy HP bar.

Also, you have to update the HP bars regardless, all you have to do code-wise, at least I think, is to cache client-side the HP of the specific entity before the damage is applied and flag that bar as “damaged” or something and, after x seconds has passed, flushing the HP bar cache and update the visual removing the “ghost” HP bar.

It is basically a couple of client-side instructions for max two entities and a couple of bytes to store the flag and the HP.

Not that hard, nor CPU intensive, nor memory intensive.

Harper.4173:

Ok – so give us unique skins as hardcore content rewards that casuals can get too – but only through a huge time sink.

Example :

1 skin = 300 tokens.
One successful run = 5 tokens.
One attempted run = 1 guaranteed token.

If they work at it long enough they will get it.

This is called grind.

Vayne.8563:

It’s not really that small a difference. If you play random arenas you can only get a certain amount of points. You have to go to team arena to get more per day, which really stretches out how long it takes to get something.

Then you receive more than double the points every time you win a match. I’d say that taking three four times longer to get the same rewards is more than a small difference.

In theory you could grind an entire reward track in a day if you wanted in tournaments. You can’t do that with hot join. Hot join wasn’t really meant to be the competitive mode anyway.

That was not my point.

Of course you get more rewards playing Team Arena and I know that, the point is that the efforts to get those points are not worth the advantage itself so people are not encouraged to compete rather than just abusing Hotjoin.

Vayne.8563:

The thing is, PvE AI IS far more predictable than PvP, because you never really know what a player might do.

The solution is to make something like many games are going recently: mixing PvE and PvP content together to boost the challenge.

Shadow Realm was recently announced which is basically an RPG in which in dungeon the whole enemy AI is guided by a player who can eventually take control of a boss, set traps and make the life overall harder for the dungeon runners.

As it has been pointed out, the AI eventually will become predictable, which is not the case of humans. When you make a boss like Lupicus controlled by a player, then it will be freaking hard to beat and the challange would be 10x harder and, of course, it won’t get easier once the players learn the mechanics as another player can have a different playstyle and tactic entirely.

Sure it requires a lot of back-end work to create a PvPvE dungeon, but in my opinion it would be so much worth it.

Vayne.8563:

Yep and winning is the most efficient reward. You get rewards much faster when winning in PvP.

Yes, but it does not encourage to put efforts into getting better.

People, in fact, don’t wants the max reward but they want want to make the most reward possible with the lowest effort.

To win you are supposed to build up a proper team, train your skill, set up a schedule for team training and so on. That’s an huge amount of efforts to get just a slightly more rewards.

People don’t do that because they can just switch to the winning team in hotjoin and reap the maximum reward possible with little to no efforts or involvement.

I was wondering if the development team can implement the UI damage indication that has been widely used in many other games to give players a better clue on how much damage is dealt on the HP bar.

This indicator is shown as a sort of “ghost” HP bar which represent the portion of the HP bar wiped away by damage which disappear after a specific amount of time has passed without receiving further damage.

To give a better clue on what I’m talking about, as it might look confusing, I’ve attached a screenshot highlighting it.

I wonder if it is possible to add this UI effect in GW2 in both enemy HP bars and your HP bar.

Bambu.4270:

I’m still thinking this would be better. Sure there will be cases where someone has 20+ might but with this change they wouldn’t spec so far in might. If they do spec too much on might well too bad if you can’t handle some bleed stacks. You can’t simply have everything.

Luckily, you’re not the one balancing the game.

nekretaal.6485:

If you out rotate the other team, you don’t have to win any of the team fights. The scoring is built so that you are better off not fighting if you dont have to.

Everybody who has won a game in solo Q against a 5 man Zerg can testify to this.

Plus, if you out rotate the other team, you will win the team fights. Heroic efforts by bunkers notwithstanding, a team up 4-3 has 33% more power, a team fight of 2-1 has 100% more power.

Well, if you are playing for 3 points, then you are susceptible to be out-rotated by the other team if they have more mobility, but playing for 3 points splitting the fights in small scale encounters isn’t the only working tactic in tPvP.

5 man zerg isn’t really a good example as you don’t really need 5 men moving together to create a teamfight.

By the way, today’s ESL weekly cup had a necro in any team, at least for the ones who has been streamed.
Too much for a profession who is claimed to be unviable.

Andele.1306:

Yeah, we totally didnt have a meta which consisted of engies rangers guards warriors and eles keeping points up to 1v3 trough sheer heals and invuls, ignoring any damage in their build to ensure a cap and there totally aint videos of it on youtube *cough just type it spvp 1v2 for results or even a thief 1v2ing phoenix level opponents from 100% like 3 months ago which blu put up on youtube *

Flat out no, sustain on necro got nerfed because of the removal of DS absorb and spectral icds. You are supposed to disengage on professions which have get out of jail cards because they usually have high damage multipliers and are based on poking/bursting enemies in such situations, you are supposed to stick in and fight on guys like necros warriors and guardians.

Seriously please, you are putting even people who dont really go for pvp as their main thing (but just casually watch streams/highlights) to shame with random stupid posts with no historical basis.

Please, keep this civil. I don’t want to get another warning to answer back to people who can’t even argue properly.

Even when the hambow was at its apex of opness, it wasn’t able to hold competent people 2vs1 for extended period of time. And by competent people, I mean a team of player who send 2 dps roamers to kill a bunkerish spec and not a support and a bunker.

If you’re talking about the 2vs1 of Shad, that is a whole different beast because it was a 2vs2 tournament, so Shad was free to disengage and re-engage at will, a tactic that is completely unviable in a proper tPvP match, as you will already lost the point and make the fight useless.
Also, Sizer played horribly because he took most of the damage from cleave trying to ress Ventari. In a proper tPvP match, he would have let Ventari just die for him to respawn and then fighting shad 1vs1.
So yeah, maybe you should get informed better next time.

Disengage doesn’t always mean “use your teleport”, which you can still do with Flesh Wurm, but also move away from the fight. If you’re getting heavy pressure, you’d better move away from the fight before your HP gets too low to the point that a thief jumping on you will kill you. That is all about how good are you at taking an advantageous positioning to make melee focus harder.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Well, bunkers do. They don’t usually kill anyone, but that’s not their job.

Actually, bunkers don’t hold 2vs1 for that much time. They can hold 2vs1 only if one of the two opponent is a support with low DPS, but I assure you that even the most competent guardian on this planet can’t hold for even 10s against two competent roamers. They even drop like flies in 1vs1 against profession with boon strips (shatter mesmer or necro).

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Necro got survivability buffs in 1v1. Anything more than one opponent and their survivability has actually been nerfed (due to ICD’s) since pre-dhuumfire.

And it’s because necros have so little in the way of active defense that they really can’t hold a point alone. When you have a Necro and the Guardian or Warrior peeling for him sitting on a point…why not dump the necro, use the guardian or warrior to hold the point solo, and get a free spot for someone else?

You are not supposed to hold 2vs1 for extended periods of time.

You have tools to mitigate damage, but if you’re getting several people focusing at you, then you are supposed to either disengage or waiting for a teammate to back you up and to put some pressure on the offenders.

Warriors and Guardians can’t hold a node solo too against multiple people.

djooceboxblast.9876:

How can it not be considered relevant? What you say is completely right, but why would any team suddenly stop playing with a necro? Dhuumfire combined with everything else (terror, bleeds, poison) made necro able to melt basically anything in seconds without even trying hard/being skilled – and that was the only reason why people wanted to bring a necro and that as a trait is not really reliable in tpvp anymore.

Sure, corrupting boons is a nice craft but mesmers do something similar by stripping boons while also bringing more damage, mobility (blink, phase retreat, portal) and tactical possibilities (portal, mass invis, moa).

On top of that we got several other nerfs (terror, mark of blood, grasp of the dead, weakening shroud, putrid mark, corrupt boon) and necro as a whole is “worse” than it was pre dhuumfire. We have gotten some buffs here and there aswell (path of corruption, bigger default marks, longer poison on putrid curse), but nothing that really makes up for our losses and the development of other professions.

For the same reason most team are now stopping playing Ranger, despite the fact that Ranger is not even close to being underpowered.

It is just that now there are more options and people aren’t forced to pick just a single profession to fit that role or just because the metagame shifted.

What you said about mesmer is absolutely right, but there are things that Necromancers can do but mesmer can’t, like holding a node reliably or provide better condition pressure (which bunkers have a much harder time mitigating).

True that Necromancer got several nerfs, but buffs were pretty big too, especially on the survivability side. Necromancer is now much more survivable as it used to be a year or more ago while having slightly less damage.

If anything, Necromancer should have more roles to fit in a teamcomp rather than the boon-corrupter/bunker-melter and I totally agree with that, but I really don’t think that it needs any buff in that aspect.

djooceboxblast.9876:

Black Jack played necro for CM a while back right before dhuumfire got nerfed. So yes, CM played with a necro before hambow got discovered. I played against them, so i should know.

Before Dhuumfire nerf, almost any team ran Necromancer.
I don’t know how it can be considered relevant.

Bhawb.7408:

Team Paradigm was a top team for quite a while (before quitting obv), and they forced Symbolic onto Ranger. In NA you simply got kicked if you were a necro that didn’t reroll.

Who was before forced onto Necromancer from Elementalist.

Blackmoa.3186:

That is nto true. CM played with necromancer, in fact Blackjack mains necro, he just doesnt feel its worthwhile bringing one to teh team atm and therefore plays different classes.
55HP sometimes brought a necro when they where still called [shad] aswell.

I can’t find any match in which CM played with Necromancer. The oldest match I can find is from the first days of November and they were already running the double warrior team comp and, if I’m not wrong, CM formed around october.

Same applies to 55HPM (so [shad]), can’t find any worthwile mach when they were playing with a Necro.

If they ever played a Necro in their team comp, then I would say it was for testing purposes as they never really played with Necro stably.

leman.7682:

I’m still waiting for a viable build from you, that can stand on its own like all the meta builds for other professions.

Path of Corruption Necromancers are extremely solid. You aren’t forced to pick Dhuumfire so you can spend the remaining 8 traitpoints on defensive traitlines.
Now that DS can soak more damage, you can sustain a lot by investing in Soul Reaping and high vitality.

djooceboxblast.9876:

Just because Ventari or Sensotix says something it does not mean that they are right. They won the last esl weekly, and it was deserved, but the only reason for that was a lack of motivation from 55hp monks side (which i can totally understand).

In both of the matches Ventari was put on close doing absolutely nothing because is was the only reasonable thing to do. 55hp monks kept outrotating them so they had to secure close by doing that. 55hp monks played badly and threw it away and that is the only reason boon won. Ventari contributed very little to the win other than standing afk on a point. I am not saying that he is a bad necromancer – he is a very good necromancer, but that does not change the fact that necro lacks potential/viability in several areas compared to other professions.

Of course.
I don’t think that Ventari and Sensotix speak the truth regardless, but they are competent players who managed to play with Necromancer in their team succesfully and are under the opinion that Necro is fine and not a bad profession as anyone thinks here.

55HPM didn’t played bad. They actually made quite good rotations and managed to get several back de-caps. BooN on the other hand really focused on winning teamfights and didn’t even tried to get backcap (Sensotix never split to get a decap on close the whole match) and they actually did.

Ventari wasn’t parked on close, except for half of the first match. In the same time Ventari was parked on close, there was still another 55HPM member parked there too (either Lisey or Shad), so I don’t think it is relevant in any way.

In the second match, Ventari was in all the teamfights and actually gave quite a good contribution to them. They weren’t able to win the midfight at half of the match at first try because of large and forgiving is mid in Legacy, but completely annihilated 55HPM on far and Ventari was there.

KlausKNT.9302:

sorrow.2364- can you understand the simple question?
Answer same as yours- You can watch the pvp leagues fights to know why winning teams don’t take necro.
Just watch carefully, and this will explain You all
easy? isn’t it??
sorrow.2364:
“Playing 2 nodes has always been a valid strategy when you can’t count on heavy mobility and it is not punishing at all if you are sure you can get a solid grasp on them.
True that the meta right now is all about 3 nodes play with heavy mobility, but that does not mean that it is the only option.”

Prove me that playing 2 nodes team with necro its ok vs competitive team with 3 nodes and heavy mobility
Oh i know .. you have no time to prove this or make video, but you still have time to theorycrafting on forum ?
nice troll
On the other hand.
Do You really think that players who took off in leagues dont try all options, dont play pvp from a long time, dont make x tests to finally take the best team comp.?
You really belive this?
I know that Anet try balance all class to be competitive in pvp- and they still have much work to do. The main problem here is that balance on paper don’t compare in practise. The Dev may tell that Necro on paper is attrition class, and when you start fight necro you’re almost no able to escape them, they may tell that ds is a great sustain toll- but on practise this theorycrafting simple DONT WORK.
The last leagues show how good necro is now in pvp- if You still cannot accept this, its Your problem dude- beter stay in your reasonable world

You probably ignored what I’ve said and you’re basing your opinion only on what you see in the finals of tournaments without having a clue on what really happens.
You are just counting the professions and getting to baseless conclusions.
You are under the assumption that the profession carry the players and it isn’t the player who play the profession at its best.

I’ve linked you to the opinion of a well known and competent team about Necromancer and you utterly ignored it keeping spouting your pointless claims.

Keep going, there is no point to argue with you.

Bhawb.7408:

The problem is that in the current meta you can’t guarantee that. 2 nodes isn’t necessarily bad, in fact in general it is what teams tend towards (with one player like a thief/engi/ele/mesmer/warrior/ranger depending on the specific patch going to far), but Necromancer doesn’t even bring a ton to that, except for boon removal. It is certainly nice, its the one thing keeping us alive right now, but it simply isn’t enough. Even if one or two players can just barely manage to make necro work, that doesn’t mean we are good as a class, it means they and their teams are good.

All I think we need is very small adjustments, not to our base (as in don’t just go around buffing skills that are already good), but to our options. Buffing options allows you to drop something that isn’t good in the current meta/team comp/whatever, but without just getting a flat power increase. For example if Flesh Wurm was buffed to be a much better teleport (which helps out all three of the big meta builds right now), it still limits Necros to two other utility skills, instead of having a super cheese epi/CB/SoS combo.

Necro is the only profession who can reliably melt any bunker without being insanely squishy, which is far from bad and many teams run it. BooN is one of the famous ones, but also Car Crash always ran a necro (not sure if they quit after ToL tho). It is viable despite what people say here.

What you have to consider is that people when making a choice about a profession to fill a slot in a team usually consider what is the best profession which fills the role I need. That means that if there is a profession which is too powerful, most teams tend to use that one instead of evenly balance the team.
Necromancer is a solid choice in a team comp, but why would I bring it if I can bring a stupid OP 25 mightstack warrior and put a mediocre player behind it?

Sure Necro needs some tweaks as any other profession do and it surely needs more build options but it isn’t overall in a bad state.

Necromancers are supposed to be a non-mobile profession, but it is far to be a death sentence in competitive PvP. There are several non-mobile professions in the meta, first of all the bunker guardian, whose only mobility skill is a swiftness symbol that can’t even guarantee a decent swiftness uptime, that safely hold their spots because of what they bring to the team. If you want to bring more options to Necromancer, I think that mobility isn’t a good choice.
There are several way to bring more options to Necromancers, starting to giving some use to the Blood Magic traitline and Healing Power in general, but mobility and vigor… they won’t happen for sure.

Bhawb.7408:

I’m rank 60 on NA soloQ leaderboard (or was last night probably decayed), Blackmoa is rank 285 on EU teamQ, djooce is 69 on teamQ and 15 on soloQ. Zombify, who hasn’t seen fit to grace us with his presence but completely agrees with us, was on the top NA team for the PAX invitational.

I was specifically talking to Klaus and Abimes. I’m not the guy who ask for credentials when making an argument if the reasoning is solid.

Bhawb.7408:

I’ll agree Necro has some use right now, primarily because every build really wants to run boon stacking and we can remove them. However you are still really punishing your team by forcing them into a 2 node strategy and having someone on the team who needs a devoted peeler.

Playing 2 nodes has always been a valid strategy when you can’t count on heavy mobility and it is not punishing at all if you are sure you can get a solid grasp on them.
True that the meta right now is all about 3 nodes play with heavy mobility, but that does not mean that it is the only option.

You don’t need to see me play Necromancer, nor I want to waste time to make a video you will surely dismiss as you did with any of my reasoning.

You can simply go watch any BooN match that has ALWAYS ran a Necromancer in their team comp.
You can check Ventari’s post history (with a little highlight), which is the Necromancer of BooN, or perhaps take a look at what Sensotix thinks about the profession.

On the other hand, I’m still trying to figure out where you guys got all of this high level tPvP experience to the point that you feel the right to question mine, since I can’t find you on any leaderboard, both EU and NA :/

Roe.3679:

Ok so what I’m seeing is that you’re comparing the staff to combustive shot, which yeah, I agree, the staff is better than that single skill. But you’re implying that longbow skills can be dodged and staff skills cannot. On the contrary: they very much can, and sometimes reaper’s mark and putrid mark are the difference between winning and losing a fight, and they can miss because they are ground targeted.

But I guess it’s cool because we can spend 4 trait points and make the staff more comparable to a longbow’s condi damage. That a warrior can dish out in a power build…

So you’re saying that Staff marks can be dodge as easily and are as reliable as Fan of Fire, Arcing Arrow or Pin Down?

Roe.3679:

Also, MoB only gives regeneration if you’re in the blast radius when it goes off. So a huge majority of the time there is no regen. This really gives me the impression that you don’t play the class.

If you’re not giving Regen to you, you’re giving regen to an ally, unless you are offpoints in a 1vs1 situation, which is rather funny and really gives me the impression that you don’t play PvP.

Roe.3679:

Ok, so you’re saying…. that DS supplements the staff? Again?

Yes, as any weapon set is supplementary to the other.

Roe.3679:

As has been on of the points in this thread, you don’t always have DS, so the staff should be capable of standing on it’s own, yes? Every necro starts an spvp match with 0 life force. So if staff must be supplemented by DS, looks like not only do necros start that match with no mitigation whatsoever, but also only 1 functioning weapon set. And this is by your logic, yes?

First, Necros can start the match with some LF by sacrificing minions. Any competent player knows that.
Second, you probably ignored the fact that you have a secondary weapon set, other than Death Shroud. No weapon set stands for its own, Staff doesn’t as much as S/D.

Roe.3679:

You’re saying sustain and using it interchangeably with mitigation. Necros have mitigation through DS. They do not have sustain as it is almost impossible to maintain life force in a competitive build against reasonable competition. I could use spectral skills you could say. Sure, I could, but those cooldowns are very long. Likely won’t give enough life force to keep me going until the next minute when it is up again, and even by then I’m likely not in a good situation if the fight is still ongoing.

DS isn’t sufficient at sustain. When DS is gone the class has no mobility or previously mentioned mitigation and becomes a sitting duck – and don’t forget no more access to Doom, a strong defensive skill, and other offensive capabilities.

What other class starts a match with no mitigation, hardly any mobility, no access to key skills, and can then lose it if attained? What class when playing defensively doesn’t still have access to heals and utilities? What other class has a CD on that only form of both defense and offense like that? What other class cannot be healed when using their class mechanic, including even their own traits like siphons, or their own skills, like well of blood or signet of vampirism, or their own regeneration boon?

I don’t expect you to have answers to those questions. Nor are answers important. But, do you not at least agree that life force and DS as a mechanic has some inherent weaknesses, given everything posted in this thread? If life force generation were changed, especially on weapon skills and maybe the way it’s generated at all, some cooldowns or utilities in general were tweaked – specifically to spectral skills – it could dramatically improve the situation. But you’re implying that there is no situation which is false.

I’m not implying there is no situation.
I’ve only stood against handing out Vigor and Mobility to Necromancer.
Sustain is through Death Shroud, that is my point.

Kiriakulos.1690:

And I don’t think sorrow bring any productive point to discussion, his Point of View is incredibly narrow and he’s shown how little- not at all- he’s willing to change it when presented with evidence of the contrary.

Evidence of the contrary?
I’m still waiting for people to post some.

Kiriakulos.1690:

Rangers Thieves and Mesmers have much better sustain compared to Necro, every profession does. Any Necro with experience with the other classes will confirm this, it´s bloody undeniable.

Wow.
So much evidence of the contrary.
Since when an empty claim is considered “evidence”?

Kiriakulos.1690:

He keeps saying that LF is as effective as a second life bar for crying out loud, I’ve only ever seen people who’ve never played a Necro make this assumption.

I’ve never said that LF is a second life bar.
I’ve said multiple times that LF is less valuable compared to HP, but I’ve also said that you usually regenerate much more LF as any other profession can with HP. You should read my posts first before claiming I have never played Necro…

leman.7682:

The point stays. Can you propose a build that has the sustainability of a warrior or ele or engie and provides similar level of damage/utility?
If you can’t then provide a build that is more sustainable, which would make up for the lacking damage or utility.
If you still can’t it means necro lacks in comparison.

I can’t for soldier Warrior, because it is bloody OP, but I can easily provide a build with comparable sustainability of eles along with similiar or more damage/utility.
Just try anything with heavy LF generation, soldier amulet, Deathly Perception and some points into Death Magic.

leman.7682:

A full tank wells necro with cleric amulet is not only less tanky than an ele or war, especially under focus fire, but also has a lot less damage. Tested it.

Why Cleric Amulet and Wells Necro? You’ve tried the wrong build.

Roe.3679:

Disclaimer: I don’t care about Warriors and I have no idea why we’re talking about them.

Anyway.

So, 2 casts of a skill are about as strong as one cast from another, so it’s cool? That isn’t very logical to me. And then you say, but staff has all these other skills, too! So does the Longbow. So, a warrior in a power build, who can potentially be far more tanky than a necro, can actually deal more condition damage than a condi specced necro assuming it’s longbow vs staff, and more overall DPS by far with more – or at very least, more hands off – survivability. Staff is chosen because there are no other choices that make any sense for a condi build; not because it is a strong choice.

I’ve pointed out several times the differences between LB and Staff and why Staff is in my opinion a better weapon.
LB has Combustive Shot as reliable AoE. Other than that, nothing is left except for some strong skills with huge tells which can be easily dodged by competent players.
Staff has several utility skills which might output less DPS on single target than LB overall, but are way more reliable and provide strong utility.
Putrid Mark is a solid condition management tool. Chilblains offers amazing shutdown capability (especially against Elementalists and bunkers) and MoB provides permanent regeneration other than bleeding. All of these can be traited to be unblockable and have pretty much the same, short animation.

Roe.3679:

Sounds like you’re saying staff is ok because of DS when you literally say DS supplements the staff.

I find many of your points very weak.

You’ve misunderstood what I was trying to say. I’ve said that staff is solid and DS provides extra single target capability that staff may lack when you have your secondary weapon set not available.
Every weapon set has strong features along with weak ones and I’m not trying to deny that Staff has its weaknesses. Point is that you can overcome staff weaknesses either with your secondary weapon set or death shroud (which I think it is complementary to staff somehow) or both.

Roe.3679:

With all the things said in this thread, I think a few tweaks to spectral skills, life force gains on weapons, and overall new weapons that fill roles that the necromancer doesn’t currently fill would help the class more than anything and give it more capable and defined roles. I don’t necessarily think the class is underpowered, nor do I want to see it return to Dhuumfire 1 spam any more than I wanted it the first time. But to argue that necros have sustain is rather flawed. Necros have mitigation through DS, but not sustain, as fights with necros must be ended quickly or the necro loses too much life force and therefore the access to key skills that the class is balanced around, as well as any form of defense.

I see that better sustain through buffing LF regen might be a good choice without spoiling the original profession design. It is quite different from asking for vigor, mobility or invulnerabilities as most people are doing here.

You might argue that Necros need better sustain through better LF regeneration, but arguing that Necros have no sustain is a lost argument from the start.

Roe.3679:

As stated earlier, Guardians have great sustain through blocks, heals, invulns, etc. Multiple sources of mitigation or healing. Necros have a single source that cannot be renewed as fast as it is spent against any competent player (and against multiple foes it does not scale like many other mitigation skills), let alone at high levels of skill.

Guardians have to take specific builds to have that kind of sustain. A burst/DPS guardian has no more sustain compared to a standard condition Necromancer.

Necromancers, when specced for sustain, have plenty of it, so do Guardians and any other professions, but you can’t compare a build not specced for sustain with a build specifically made for it.

If you weren’t looking for a constructive discussion but just wanted people to agree with you and ask for buffs, then you should have said that before.

I would have saved a lot of time and words.

I’m sorry for thinking you guys had a brain and some reasoning capability instead of sustaining an argument by just keeping questioning your interlocutor’s competence with no real basis.

I hope your worthless crusade for buffs will find some success.
Maybe, someday, Necro will come back to be the noob-carrying profession anyone is asking for.

Forsaker.9213:

1. Exacly what i said u have no clue about class u want to discuss. U ask who have more stustain? Every other class , more condi clear? Ele? War? Guardian? Even rangers spec right have ton of condi clear.

3. Read point 1.

4.Where i use them as a argument to get buffs for necro? I said that those rune brought even more power creep and wars/eles/engis got buffed a lot by this.

Show me where i asked for " mobility, Healing Signet or a trait which heals a similiar amount also while in DS, Berserker Stance and Endure Pain"

We want to focus how to change few things (read 1st-2st posts) not how to make necro OP.

1. Every other class have more sustain? Like the infamous Mesmer sustain coming from channeling mantras? What about Thieves? Never seen that much sustain. Rangers, then? Oh yeah, all of that sustain coming from regeneration! All 10x better than a profession mechanic that allows you to gain LF that can be used as the equivalent of HP. Ele has sustain only because they heavily spec into it to be viable. Warr and Guardian are supposed to be sustainable as they are the heavy classes.

What about condi clear? Rangers have decent condi clear only when taking survival skills with Survival of the Fittest. Other than that, it is just a bunch of passive and uncontrollable condi clears and a mediocre condi clear on Healing Spring.
Elementalists and Guardians need a GRANDMASTER (yes, grandmaster) trait into defensive traitlines to have decent condition removal.
Necromancers have by far the best condi clear in the game which allows them to not spec for clearing condis nor bringing utilities for it. Consume Conditions+Putrid Mark+Deathly Swarm all clear conditions and don’t require a single trait or utility to be wasted. Then there are traits and skills like Well of Power, Fetid Consumption or Plague Signet, but you don’t need them anyway since weapon skills and healing skill are already more than enough to cleanse conditions.

You still didn’t answer to why SW is unviable and LF is viable only in power builds.

4. Where? Right here:

In last patch necro was the only class who got nerfed and its not only change to dhumfire but also runes changes/amulet changes witch just buffed eles,engis,wars….
I dont see any such good runes for necro as streanght runes for war/eles or balthazar runes for engi .
And plz stop comparing necro to wars witch are completly over the top with perma 25 stacks of might , high hp , high toughnes and much more.

Tell me what is the point of those statements if not to ask for buffs because of broken runes in the game.

Want to know where people asked for “mobility, Healing Signet or a trait which heals a similiar amount also while in DS, Berserker Stance and Endure Pain”? Read the OP or maybe any other post bringing up Endure Pain and Healing Signet as comparison because “if warrior has them, I want too Q_Q”.
OP asked for more mobility, vigor and buffs to leech. Some people went further and asked for some invulnerability which can mitigate the whole team focus like Endure Pain.

Forsaker.9213:

1. Yes u are right that are buffs , spectral wall not vaible , death magic trait are ok but dont bring to much , VP only for power build witch are not vaible , spectral armor was changed and the inernal cd makes it worse , weaknes change was a buff but at the same time our eaknes duration was hard reduced and weaknes shroud got nerfed , SoS is just cheese , but still this is nothing compered to the nerfs becouse at the same time every other profesions got more sustain , more condi clear etc.

2. Most of this topic is about warrior and his skills idk why but w/e

3. No DS is not sustain , it should be but its not working , full ds can be taken down in 3s , u can be cc in it , u cant get any heals , every class has a “gimme a sec to breathe for a little bit” type of skill necro dont and we should be attriction class?

4. Good thief + mesmer can easy kill u whereever u are and still able to disangade.

5. Nightmare runes and rnd prock , yeas this what necro needs , i dont want runes like strenght or balthazar but at the same time i dont want them to be in game.

And i am done disuss with someone who dont know the game and have no clue about hight tier pvp. Cya.

Shame this topic went on that track.

1. Spectral Wall not viable? Reason? VP only for power build? Why? Any other profession have more sustain? More condi clear? Really? You’re just making wild claims here without any reasoning behind them.

3. Full DS taken down in 3s? Oh, well, if you say so… Mind you to share which team comp/build can wipe 13k+ HP with 2500+ armor in 3s against a competent player?

4. I wouldn’t call 50% trigger chance on hit RNG proc. If you don’t want runes like Strength or Balthazar, why are you using them in an argument to get buffs for Necromancers?

It is funny how you claim I have no clue of high tier PvP while you don’t bring a single real reasoning backing up your wild claims.
I guess it is pointless to argue with someone who clearly don’t want to have a discussion but just want anyone to agree with him.

What do I have to say to make an impression that I know how high tier PvP works to you?
“yes forsaker, you are extremely right and you know everything about this game and competitive PvP. Give Necromancers mobility, Healing Signet or a trait which heals a similiar amount also while in DS, Berserker Stance and Endure Pain, then revert all the nerfs because this is what Necromancer needs in high tier PvP, which no one has a clue on how it works except you!”
Feels better now?