Guild Wars 2

I don’t think its remotely wrong to give up on Gw2. Gameplay is basically solo or zerging, depending on scale, and completely lacks to satisfaction of executing tactics and creative builds that GW1 had with either players or heroes.

The other thing that has continued to really bug me are A) the mishandling of the storyline (bad writing, no hint of continuation of any sort of Personal storyline after Zhaitan, etc) and the way some bugs (Mad King runes summoning hawks instead of crows) and some gameplay issues (mesmers are useless compared to gsword guardians) are NEVER going to be fixed.

I just pass through some time, for old times sake.

The Mad King will return.

The Karka suffered quite badly from a lack of effort in both planning and execution.

Wintersday was fairly limited in scope, compared to Halloween, and will probably repeat.

And 95% of the living story could be done by a basement dwelling dropout, since it’s all just text, scripting extremely simple event spawns, placing static items and npcs, setting npc pathing, and modeling, what, 12 generic and hero character models.
The only part of the “living” story that’s shown any effort were the instances, with voice acting, level design, and suchlike.

So personally I don’t think it’s ‘too much work’, as long as it’s really only the small percentage of Anet working on this stuff that it appears to be. And, as I’ve said, the events that involved effort are reusable at some level.

The irony is theres almost no real support in the game. Other then water staff ele and to some extent staff/wells necro, most classes ability to support others is quite limited.

Most ‘support’ builds are like relying on a Paragon to heal your group instead of a Monk in GW1. Does a little good now and then, but can’t generate large amounts of healing. (Never mind that Paragons look like Monks compared to even the top healing builds in GW2)

Best player is the 3rd to die.

The overly risky die first, the overly conservative die last.

Considering even the Ulgoth (whose chain I farm for supply bags) gives a rare chest even though his chain is a lot easier to do with few people then the Megadestroyer’s looooong chain, its a bit rediculous.

For that matter, the Naegling giant needs looking at, reward wise. Its a long fight with no lootable mob filled followup quest like Kol, in a more difficult environment (buildings force you into stomp range often just to get a firing angle) and can result in multiple deaths. It could use a guaranteed green at least! 1s20c and 150 karma just doesn’t cut it.

It would be nice if the dungeons could scale down by group size. Especially since a lot of them are just not done, especially when its not peak time. I’d like to try all the dungeons in story and exp, but the thought of having to find a group and be judged by elitists who expect everyone to know the route, enemies, and tactics is galling.

The Fire and Frost instances are actually a good example of how dungeons should be – they scale to group size and are quite possible, but not too easy, to solo. Even scaled down, a lot of dungeons will be hard for singles simply due to loss of dynamic combo factors. But this would incentivize creation of self sufficient builds instead of just going “full ‘zerkers’”.

If the devs want us to ‘play our way’, they should be a little more accommodating.

PopeUrban.2578:

You know, I think it’d be nice if grawl turned out to be the only species able to get along with the Karka in a sort of native-american style reverence/use way.

So the Grawl sort of become “stewards” of southsun, helping the karka hatch and hunt, maybe riding around on them, etc.

Like Luxons and giant turtles.

This would, invariably put them at odds with the Consortium, who are trying to push the Karka out and exploit their land… and thus… conflict which could drive the DEs and story arcs of the entire zone in a much more interesting way.

I wish this would be what they do with the grawl, but they’re too busy depicting them as idiot savages. All of the grawl hearts are either killing grawl worshiping the ‘wrong’ false deity, or fooling grawl into worshiping a fake god controlled by the “good” guys.

The grawl are treated as offensively one dimensionally as the ‘evil native american’ centaurs and ‘entire race of psychotic slavers’ krait.

Other then the utterly horrid decision to make Rox’ eyes gigantic, I vastly preferred Rox to Braham. She’s confident, stays on task, and doesn’t give away all her life’s story, unlike Braham. Sure, she’s standard, but she’s a fun standard.

Meanwhile, Braham’s a cliche – by the time we’ve finished his instance, we know where he’s from, who he’s in love with, and what his ambitions are. And he keeps breaking up clustered enemies with his dang shield skill. And his hair piece is like a topee. And WHY is his concept art the wrong ethnicity, incidentally?

At the bottom of it all, the most important issue is the combat dynamics. Rox stays out of the way and helps. Braham breaks up aoe, and has no noticeable DPM. The instances they are in further heighten this problem – in Rox’, they come in in groups of 3, close together and you can wiped them out as they come. In Braham’s, enemies dribble in from far apart spawn points which allow them to disperse in addition to Brahams help in that regard.

TLDR: Rox stays professional and is helpful, Braham whines and is actively a hindrance.

Dragon. And not that poseur, Jormag. The only dragon worth worshiping, Glint.

Dead, you say? So are Owl and Wolverine, and they have their adherents. Glint died for all of Tyria, not just for the norn.

Glint embodies dualities – both wisdom and courage. Strength and subtly. An evil and mindless origin, and an individual, heroic fate. Like Glint, we all have the ability to change and become more then we are.

Staff – 30 fire, mainly for the power boost and augments to fire recharge and damage,
A bit in water for the easy to get recharge boost.
~20 in Arcane for faster attunement swapping and the glyph recharge boost

Utilities – the healing glyph, which doubles as a speed boost with air out of combat
glyph of storms, best with earth to blind enemies while you stack up multiple nukes on them
Call worm, if you’re norn, lesser elemental if youre not, to draw fire.
signet of fire, for more crits – swap with others if need be, but I never touch it
Elite – elemental glyph – again it draws fire

Generic engagements involve summoning minions as attacking, using glyph of storms with earth to blind the enemies youve clustered up, then nuking them with earth and fire – spam the water skills too if your health is low. All together, you shouldn’t take too many hits, and the enemy should be dead.

Leet dodging skills not required, simply remember to cast the right skills to protect yourself and draw away fire.

The trinity system wasn’t removed, just severely hampered. You’ll find your groups in a event or dungeon ‘somehow’ doing better if there are people good at tanking, and people speced for healing. The difference between fighting the Modniir Ulgoth with or without a water ele or two in the background for example is substantial!

They just make you have to bend over backwards to actually reach one of the trinity corners that isn’t DPS.

Use Pistols, cond dmg build, elixer B, rocket turret, contextual choice of 3rd utility skill. I’ve traited for pistols and elixers, though you’ll note my bar is low on elixers. The end result is a surprisingly survivable build that can cut through a lot of enemies. You can destroy all 4 sonic emitters in the Rox mission and survive to kill all the enemy spawns.

You get downed repeatedly, you die, taking armor damage and probably having to pay TP charge too.

You get downed against a AoE boss (ie most bosses), everyone who reses you is endangered.

The downing mechanic does not make the game a walk in the park.

According to the wiki page, he has little to do with his warband and killed his way up to Tribune, Klingon-style. Plus he was in Destiny’s Edge. To normal charr, he’s at best a weirdo, so wearing whatever armor he wants isn’t too odd.

.. That depends on the traits you’ve got. But if you don’t have traits that say otherwise, the answer is no.

I ended up committing to P/P with high condition damage (and incidentally, toughness). What conditions I can apply do lots of damage, but due to the nature of engineer skills seem like they don’t last long enough. I’ll have to focus on my traits a bit more, but the build works fairly well, even in Orr. It just doesn’t quite feel super. Incidentally I use a shifting balance of elixers and turrets, depending on the situation.

As everyone is saying, staff + ranged wells is great for support (plus does lots of damage in its own right) – the aoe heal and condition transfer of the marks is super, and laying down 4 wells in sequence can mean theres always a combo field with useful effects up, or you can spike the damaging ones plus marks to wipe out large low hp mobs while staying alive via well of darkness. In short, the best soloing AND group build is staff/wells.

Many classes can stealth if they reeeeally want to, see above. That doesn’t mean they should want to, given IMO the mechanic is just a DPM reducer.

Sure the undead taking over as enemies makes sense, but that doesn’t make it fun, player experience wise, to fight the same thing over and over.

Chaosgyro.6023:

Nothing much to add to this, but I wanted to say that I came to nearly the exact same conclusions as you. I think a similar amount of time in the the future (with a bit of number tweaking on anet’s part) people will feel the same way about the current guild mission uproar.

The only problem is that jewelcrafting is pretty well useless now. That’s rather unfortunate.

Especially since jewelcrafting already requires multiple ectos just to make rares, let alone exotic. Taken along with the snowflake exploit, its pretty clear the devs dont even THINK about jewelcrafting.

We absolutely need culling controls in PvE:

When I’m farming Modniir in the Hinterlands with the other 35 farmers, I don’t need to see the other players, other then the downed ones, and I certainly don’t need to see their projectiles. What I need to see is the enemy, yet the game clearly has this ordering:

Player projectiles and effects>Player models>Enemy projectiles>Enemies, when it should be opposite. And if it would mean less lag in high population boss battles, I’d turn off player models and effects entirely, other then combo field circles.

Get a stack of karma consumables and karma multipliers, and go roll it through orrian boxes in ft trinity. Starting out with 600k karma, after 16 rounds of rolling karma back into boxes I ended up with 18 lodestones, including 2 charged, as well as 7.7g, 66 shards, and 8 risen priest minis. 2.2 million karma used total. Add the ascended trinket karma boost, and it would have been even more. You can sell the lodestones you don’t need for profit, and use that to buy the lodestones you do need.

Something to do with karma, at least.

-Eliminate Trehearne.

-Make the Pact less rich – seriously, how can three NGO’s afford to field a massive army with the most advanced tech there is?

-Make your order mentor come back as an undead leader and make the ending third of the storyline a much more personal kind of Star Wars-esque redemption quest. Remember playing KotOR 1 for the first time? Everyone liked at least one of the mentors a lot more then any other npcs, and harnessing that would have made the storyline gold.

It’s an excuse to take some time before the messenger runs into camp. And to introduce/reintroduce npcs that have been in various peoples personal stories. Both the norn and the sylvari, at least.

Presumably they go on to singlehandedly produce hundreds of airships and choppers, the mech suit from the Priory version of Orr, and all the weapons and armor of the Pact.

They should have introduced the bankers who pay for all this super tech without the means of generating revenue instead.

Yeah, its certainly odd, considering GW1 hyena’s sound nice and hyena-like. (And are more combat-useful! Replace the summon hyena skill that justifies nerfing the hyena’s stats!)

Think of the gold you grind for them equivalent to grinding dungeon tokens or ectos or whatever for other armor appearances.

Columba.9730:

I also find it unethical that they never told us what they changed.

“Working as intended” (Wargaming.net’s unofficial slogan for World of Tanks would work just fine here)

Avatar.1923:

^
yup.

for a random build, game can be much harder!
imagine a guard with spirit weapon

Indeed, I tried that, but wasn’t getting the massive aoe/control/defense that Greatsword gives me. So I switched back.

The lesson here, Anet, is to balance all the professions and weapon skills so that everyone can play up to the level of the few specific “OP” builds (gsword guardian, well necro, etc) BEFORE buffing difficulty levels.

It’s never been play your way. A lot of specific stuff is required if you want anything beyond generic skinned crafting or karma exotics.

Furthermore, if you want to be combat effective to any particular extent, you have to use one of the very small pool of “OP” builds – gsword Guardian, well Necro, etc. This is particularly irksome since it’s due to poor balance of the game.

For example, I used to use mace + torch on my guardian, but dropped it because it was inferior not only in offense but also in defense to the generic gsword build. And other guardian weapons, such as hammer or sword are even worse in this regard, despite my attempts to build for them.

Mesmer – I could manipulate people’s minds without having to learn oratory!

The map needs to be accessable from the rest of the world – swim through a portal at the mouth of LA harbor, and swim east from Sylvari starting area. That would help a lot.

Another problem with the map that others haven’t mentioned is that its a totally linear U shape. You start at the top right and go around the U to the top left. If you fall off, its paying for the wp, or swimming for 500 feet or more to get back up.

The map needs accessibility, it needs the karka to be rebalanced (less strong individually, more of them for higher total drops), and many more events, closer togather, chaining, and involving the right mix of mob battles and boss battles.

The gold standard for creating an area with draw is the north east quarter of Harathi Hinterlands, where you can easily farm THREE quest chains (Kol, Thunder rock, and the Harathi camps) with only a minutes jog. Each of the chains has at least 3 events, with the right mixes of ‘attack an area’ quests, ‘fight a mob’ quests, and ‘kill a boss’ quests. All the maps need stuff like this, especially this one. They could have a karka quest chain, a pirate quest chain, and a… Inquest chain or something.

Conncept.7638:

I think if anything this is proving that the forums are not a good measure of the playerbase at large… :P

Yeah well at least its a good measure of players who use the forums and respond to this sort of thread!

Norn Female Warrior
Norn Female Guardian
Human Female Egnineer
Human Male Ranger
Sylvari Female Necromancer
Charr Female Mesmer
Asura Female Thief

Most games stick a generic “You cannot modify the game in any way whatsoever” in the EULA. I have no doubt this one does too. Some companies ignore mods, others…do not (e.g. Blizzard, killing that great Diablo mod for Starcraft way back in the day).

Add to that the fact that there’s no apparent way to modify any sounds other then (clumsily) parts of the soundtrack.

If you can figure out how to do it, and get Anet to let you, more power to you. But I’d bet it’s 1) Impossible and 2) Not allowed.

Yup.

It’s also odd that other players can hear this (and do, all the bloody time) when they can’t hear cool things like a necromancer saying “I summon you, minion! Rise!”

Melee is ok in PvE… when its got AoE. The thief has neither reliable melee aoe nor the health to survive for long in short range combat. Cloaking does more to reduce your DPS then it does to protect you.

My guardian and warrior are excellent with melee in pve. My thief is so not.

Kill mobs, like in north east harathi, and sell everything profitable on tp.

This system makes no sense, and is not easier to see.

Pressing a button once to trigger a cutscene that kills a boss can be awesome. Pressing a fire button for 10 minutes to kill a target that just bleeds a little on you is lame.

And the loot was underwhelming. Shouldn’t we get a rare, or maybe an ascended for killing one of the 6 !@#$ing elder dragons?

Even the Abaddon fight required that we at least move around. And dying was quite possible.

Do you guys read the fluff at all?

Cantha is clearly going to be some expansion or another where we go overthrow the evil Empire that purged the bird people and crushed our favorite suburban civil war.

Bubbles will probably show up there, if not Mordremoth (probably not the latter since it seems linked to Nightmare, which is a sylvari problem).

Frankly and logically, there should be. If people can fall in love with ugly people because the person is a great person, personality wise, then why not a 10 foot tall hulking charr with 4 inch claws, or a sylvari? Obviously its easier for norn/humans/sylvari, since theyre all humanoid…

But seriously, if Mass Effect can make it work out, GW2 should too.

ReginaBuenaobra.6953:

As our artists have also said in interviews that one of the purposes of concept art is that it is a way to convey mood to a viewer and to serve as inspiration for designers. Concept art is not necessarily a blueprint to follow by rote. There is stuff in the game that looks like the concept art, but just because something is depicted in the concept art doesn’t necessarily follow that it will make it into the game.

Please take your tinfoil hats off and be reasonable.

I am reasonable. I assumed it was reeeeeally ill advised concept art. The ‘no mounts’ nature of Tyria is well known, afterall. I just find it foolish that the devs decided to send the wrong signals with what specific image they chose to represent this event.

Necros are among the easiest profession to solo – death shroud effectively doubles your health, plus a well necro can do massive aoe and crowd control while healing and protecting themselves. Alternatively, you can hide behind minions.

The Goat.1940:

the whole idea of area of effect is to effect an area…. when limiting the effect to a certain number of players/npc in the AoE the skill is no longer a true AoE. with the damage nerf to AoE such skills are highly unattractive. I suggest making AoE in gw2 “real” AoE.

It’s all about ‘balancing’ pvp. It’s always been that way. Remember all the soul-crushing nerfs that happened to GW1 so that pvp could be ‘balanced’?

Dead npc’s are easy to find. And combos are removed. And the one I hate, dodging, can be done quickly if you focus on it.

I just wish they implemented the 4 out of 6 way of doing dailies that they’d referred to before.

They’re a great way to get rid of karma, and with only 6 I got a charged lodestone (worth what, 4g?). Plus even in the worse case scenario, you get some coin for your useless karma, and some karma in a format that lets you send it to a character that actually needs it.

Trying to play CM story with a 4 thief 1 ele pug has highlighted for me just how WEAK the thief is in PvE. I’m sure some people can make it work, but for me its the hardest profession to play, worse then mesmer, which is pretty simple once you get down the spamming and destroying clones and creating combo fields.

Thieves lack in both DPM and survivability, leaving what? Warriors with just about any weapons have similar or superior DPM, and defensive skills. Guardians regenerate health. Both have heavy armor. As for ranged combat, pistols damage is low, and shortbow is boring – spam normal attack plus combo fields + explosion finisher.

Stealth’s power is overrated in combat. Its a great utility for breaking aggro and running off, but when you have to stand and fight and contribute to the group DPM, like in a dungeon, stealth is only useful for resing people.

Sometimes evading and stealthing just isn’t an option. The thief needs more usable defense skills.

Ari Kagura.9182:

Gate of Madness!

RNG could determine if you fight the Undead Lich or Shiro Tagachi in the end (but you could fight both of them at the same time on higher difficulty levels).

Best idea. Better still, we’d be doing it without Kormir following us around!

ProphetSword.5427:

Onshidesigns.1069:

How could you or anyone disagree with this post? Do you like wasting your time killing every enemy for 5 min without a drop?

I disagree with it for a lot of reasons.

• It would fill up your bags too fast.
• It would require you to stop to collect it all.
• It would hurt the economy.
• It wouldn’t add anything to the game, overall.

No, I think it’s okay the way it is.

What this guy said. We don’t all have 20 slot bags and merchant consumables.

The Seperatist issue bugged me too. Sure they may be misguided terrorists who engage in the only mission that actually gets an emotional reaction from me (trying to attack an innocent charr and his fireworks), but going into Ebonhawke, the coolest place in all of Tyria, to do a ‘Night and Fog’ imitation door to door does bug me.

In addition, the “Fallen Angels” (what a great name for a ‘heroic’ organization) come across more as bored occupiers then as some sort of protectors. We wouldn’t have to do all the actual fighting otherwise.

What makes it egregious is none of the other race’s “rebel” groups are treated like this – we don’t drag the Inquest from their beds or murder the Sons of Svanir in that cave in Hoelbrak.