It’s not going to happen, because transmutation stones, simple as that.
12 year old version: I had a partner to fight with. We killed lots of mobs to the top. We were kinda successful, but she got left behind. Now we tried to rescue her, but we failed, and now she died.
(…)
If you guys aren’t seeing the deeper meanings, then maybe you aren’t looking?
I think you aren’t giving 12 year olds enough credit with that, but maybe I’m too much an optimist. =)
Seriously though, I don’t think the stories have that much more to it. At the end of the day, we are beating a dragon with the power of friendship, the player character has to overcome their biggest fear and trahearne has his little coming of age drama.
I don’t think that should be too much for even a 12 year old to digest.
I feel sorry for anyone who thinks they’re too old or mature for snowball fights. Virtual or otherwise.
this is why so many are asking themselves why is the whole map so fluffy, happy and ready for festivals. Its like there’s nothing serious happening EVER. This game is rated T for teen while there’s tones of games rate E for everyone that are much more serious and not as kiddy. If i had to guess, i’d say this game (by that i mean the quests/story/LS/npcs and not gameplay itself) is aimed at 8-14y olds. Even a 16y old would laugh at quests such as picking up snowballs and throw them at npcs, its mediocre.
It’s a common misconception but age ratings on games have absolutely nothing to do with how serious or grown-up the content is, and almost nothing to do with the intended audience. Just like movie ratings they’re entirely based on how much of the content is considered too violent, scary or sexual for children.
It actually seems to be that games (and movies) at the upper end of the scale are aimed at a relatively small bracket close to that age – for example gory action games with an 18 rating are typically targeted at 18-25 year old males. And then at the other end of the scale you get games rated 3+ which are actually made for 3 year olds and others which are made for adults (like Brain Training on the DS) and would be boring and/or incomprehensible to kids.
It was a nightmare when I worked in a video game shop. On the one hand trying to get parents to understand that just because little Jimmy is in the top set for English and maths does not mean he can handle an 18 rated survival horror game, and on the other hand trying to convince them that yes their adult niece probably did mean she wants this 3+ DS game because a lot of point and click mystery ‘novel’ games are for adults.
Personally, I feel like the all-dark doom and gloom atmosphere some games try to portrait is actually the opposite to being mature. It’s more targetting the 16 year olds then anything, and I don’t see a reason why something can’t be lighthearted or fun and still reasonably mature at the same time.
That being said, gw2s story and dialogue is downright insulting to human intellect for sure. The background for the whole setting seems reasonably well thought out for a fantasy scenario, but the storyline and the way it is presented in the actual game is so abysmally bad that I actually felt personally insulted when I read it at times; it’s like the writers thought their audience was barely literate (if at all), and not able to hold a stream of thought for longer then a goldfish. Practically all characters in the story are completely without depth, and nothing but a caricature for their exactly one dominant personality trait. And seriously, when the epitome of character development in a story is that incomprehensible kitten trahearne, that’s saying something.
I agree that people want goals.
But those goals were supposed to come in the form of new skills and skins. If there is one thing I miss from Guild Wars it’s the skill hunting. Bigger numbers is just a poor substitute for real progression and real progression is what Guild Wars 2 needs. Allow us to unlock more weapon types. Allow us to unlock multiclassing. Allow us to collect skins and give us a wardrobe to store said skins in. Allow us to make use of our personal instance and search the world for things to fill it with.
You want to be different from all the other MMOs thriving on pointless gear grinds? Then give us REAL progression!
Sadly, a dual class system and a real choice of skills and traits is too complicated for this game’s target audience. Obviously, fireworks and pinatas every 2 weeks is much more important when it comes to resource allotment.
(edited by wintermute.4096)
I did say ‘with the exception of […] fractals’
Also, people have and do play WvW naked, or in non-exotics to make the point that if you’re a skilled player, it can be done. And done well. (And if they do kill you, whilest naked, don’t you just feel like crap?) So, even in WvW, it’s not too terribly concerning.
Except that a player of equal skill will probably kill you if he has ground out full ascended.
It is totally real. But don’t worry, you can as well directly pm your account credentials to me so I can personally verify them for you.
Seriouly, those things are never real. Although this one at least looks like something that wasn’t written by google translator alone.
Necros are fine in pvp where condition builds are strong atm, and are actually targeted for the nerf bat currently, so if that’s what you want to do they are fine.
In pve though, conditions are as horribly broken as they were on release day, and necros can’t bring any of the things people like to see in groups (power dps, cleave, utility like reflects, buffs) so they are generally considered the most useless class by most.
Please tell me how
3524 attack, +111% crit damage, 47% crit chance (exotic zerker) w/ avg dam 1801.56
vs.
3538 attack, +102% crit damage, 41% crit chance (ascended clerics) w/ avg dam 1718.32actually makes that big of a difference. Yes, the damage is smaller (in this case, the ascended cleric’s weapon does 95.34% of the damage of the exotic zerker). If you are min maxing that is a noticeable difference, but the way you guys are going off on this (you’d rather have a masterwork zerker instead of an ascended cleric’s) is a bit much. That 83.24 difference in damage will mean every ~20 hits or so for the exotic zerker, the clerics ascended will have to hit ~21 times to do the same amount of damage.
Thanks for doing the math here, but I feel I can’t really understand what you’re saying here. Because essentially, what you’re saying is, “the cleric ascended weapon is a straight downgrade to exotic zerker” (provided I happen to play a build that doesn’t make use of or doesn’t want any of the other stats), and therefore complete junk and a waste of space. And you don’t see why people are complaining?
Personally, I hold my judgment until we can discern the overall droprates for the boxes and their respective stat variant (I expect it to be laughably low, but that’s another matter). After all, what it comes down to, is the amount of boxes you want, drawn out of the pool of all possible drops. For that matter, I’d regard unwanted stat drops as just another vendor trash drop.
But I can see why people get kitten ed off by it. Unwanted stat drops are unneccessarily diluting an already thin loottable, and it creates that unnerving feeling of “Congratulations! You’ve won the lottery!!! … -NOT.”
Omfg no. I could only stand quaggans in the game if they brought playable krait in the same update, with the ability to instantly kill quaggans anywhere, anytime. In a painful manner.
In that case though, yay quaggans.
Believe it or not, someone on their team is totally into unser-unfriendly clunky interface devices like that.
At one point, they got asked why wvw badges don’t go straight to your inventory, because the only difference it makes is that you can (and will) occasionally leave lootbags behind if you don’t constantly press the use button while fighting a zerg, which is just stupid and unneccessary. They actually replied that they think it’s better this way, because they like to have the physical item touch to it.
Gw1 was inspired by mtg, gw2 is inspired by wow. If you loved gw1 for that reason, gw2 is probably not the game for you.
It could have been an awesome game, had it followed in it’s precedessors footsteps, but sadly it has become just another generic themepark mmo with a parade every 2 weeks.
Infinite Continue Coin != pay to win
in Super Adventure Box: Back to School
Posted by: wintermute.4096
P2w, by defintion, doesn’t have to be a button which says “you win, all others lose”, as some people who are whiteknighting anet for whatever reason seem to to imply.
A significant boost that is not achievable by other means is what usually would be classified as p2w, and personally, I’d say that this is the case here.
Infinite Continue Coin != pay to win
in Super Adventure Box: Back to School
Posted by: wintermute.4096
P2w, by defintion, doesn’t have to be a button which says “you win, all others lose”, as some people who are whiteknighting anet for whatever reason seem to to imply.
A significant boost that is not achievable by other means is what usually would be classified as p2w, and personally, I’d say that this is the case here.
You don’t understand, OP.
GW2 will be an “esport” at any cost. Probably even as far as losing their business entirely. Someone at Anet is obsessed with esports, that’s for sure.
Bullkitten. Their pr department is obsessed with it, and they think mentioning it in every interview is good free marketing, and that’s it. Compared to the dev time that went into pve, spvp is a complete afterthought.
Not that it matters much, because pvp has design faults that are deeply rooted in pve: downed state with crappy interrupt/stealth skills, flashy overdone animations and a lack of teamplay dependency because of their “all classes can do anything mantra”.
Those things, which may work well in pve, are anathema to competitive pvp. Yes, people who bought it for the pve play spvp too, hence the user statistics, but the general esports scene doesn’t seem to care about the game anymore, and I don’t see any reason why it should.
There should be a condition equivalent of berserker. I think Cond.dmg/prec/duration would be the perfect stats. But of course it won’t/better not happen before they fix the condition cap. Also they need to increase boss’ armor to bring condition damage in line with direct damage. Then comes the defiant/cleanse problem. All these have to be fixed.
That said, I have no hope anymore they will ever fix condition in pve.
You are right of course, but I think they’d need to do a lot more then that to make condition damage viable. From the top of my head, I’d add at least those issues:
- vulnerability doesn’t do crap for conditions, whereas coordinated groups can easily assume 25 stacks on bosses permanently.
- worse stat synergy, meaning worse scaling on everything, not just weapon damage; one point of power gets more valuable the more precision and crit damage you have, which affects the worth of might stacks, fury, food buffs and scaling to ascended. Condition doesn’t have an equivalent there, because duration is capped and precision does far less then it does for power builds. (this is also why a dedicated condition/precision/duration set wouldn’t do more then free up some rune slots)
- there are no static or conditional +x% bonus damage traits, sigils, or other effects, and nothing to make up for it.
- encounters frequently favor burn phases or have bosses cleanse, change targets, or somehow reset. Condition builds suffer more from having to build up again, power builds don’t care.
Anyway, this and more has been said a thousand times since beta already, anet either don’t give a kitten or are unable to solve those problems which they ineptly created in the first place.
Wonder if devs play wow
wow, aion, jade dynasty and many others, too obvious not to see the similarities.
I know what they don’t play. GW1.
So true, this game is not what it could have been because it was “streamlined” (i.e. stupidified) and is further degrading into just another uninspired generic theme park mmo, only with a parade and fireworks every 2 weeks.
That alone I could live with, but what really nags at me is that they were so close. Gw1 left a great heritage, and gw2 was just on it’s way to follow in its footsteps. Early footage made it look really great, it was going to have the interesting dual class system, more classes, swappable skills and traits that were not locked in tiers at all. Think about the diversity we could have had! But time and again, someone always said “nah, that’s too complicated for our target audience. Make it simpler.”
Of course they couldn’t admit that this is what happened, but I sincerely think that there is someone in charge at Anet, maybe it’s really just one guy, who deserves to get punched in the face for that.
Invest in as many characters as you want. But know that most games, including GW2, they are not designed with people playing multiple alts in mind. And they shouldn’t be. It would be unfair to say the least to the majority that are dedicated to progressing and improving one character
What doesn’t sit well with people is that this is the exact opposite of what they marketed gw2 as, and a huge step back from gw1. Character customization is extremely restricted by limited skillbars due to weapons, limited trait building optiona, condition builds not working in pve etc.; and if you want to play an alt, you have to do the same repetitive grind over and over again until you are ready to play the content you originally wanted to play.
To me, it’s just not worth it anymore and I am disappointed that every update continues to purge the best aspects the franchise originally had going to it, in favor of the same old generic mmo bullkitten.
(edited by wintermute.4096)
so…
Previously -> 0-Max -> 10 levels of XP
Now -> 0 -Max -> 10 levels of XPPrevious Max -> 400
Max atm -> 500… no problem whatsoever!
Previously ~10g for 10 levels, now >200g.
… no problem whatsoever.
My point is that while I might want to play alts in www or dungeons for a change, I don’t enjoy repetitive levelling or gearing them for ages 8 times.
Originally, Anet had that very “you shouldn’t need to prepare to have fun” sentiment covered in their manifesto (or much better yet, in gw1…), but we all know how seriously they took that.
Crafting 0-400 is 7 levels of xp now, instead of 10.
Basically, it’s their way of saying you will play through that utterly moronic story/grind those same boring events again for every alt you want to play and you will like it. Not that there was a reason to, now that you have to grind out best in slot equipment for every character for weeks…
Karma has been a poorly thought conceived system since launch, so I personally appreciate their attempts to fix it, provided they continue this way. Apparently, karma was supposed to be an account bound secondary currency akin to gold, but it’s inflated and unbalanced distribution, along with little to no way to reasonably spend it were what broke it in the first place, so the steps they now took seem reasonable to me.
However, seeing how much they have kittened up since launch I am a bit reluctant to praise them for it yet.
Maybe it’s just me, but at this point, I’d personally prefer some weapons that look like… weapons, for once. I mean just look at what they did to the greatswords post release.
Every single one of them looks like a giant glowing chunk of different colored plastic. The ascended one is slightly better, but still looks more like an ornamental poking stick then anything else.
You didn’t need full exotics either to complete cof1 either, but we all know how that went…
Also, it unneccessarily kills both alts and build diversity (not like we had any meaningful in the first place).
Yep. Another nail in the coffin of alts in pve. Like their moronic “btc” fractal level wasn’t enough.
Yup. The more people they expect to work together, the more the flawed condition design becomes apparent.
While Zerker builds actually become even better, due to 25 vulnerability stacks pretty much guaranteed, all it takes to completely max out condition damage is 1(!) good engineer. Everybody else running a condition build might as well not be there. But since this has gone unadressed since release, so I wouldn’t hold my breath for it being changed.
So it is highly unlikely that these two teams “schemed” together to design this incarnation of SAB to be particularly centered around the infinite coin in any real respect. More likely that the commerce team saw an opportunity and pitched the idea of this item.
Yeah, there probably isn’t any connection at all between tribulation mode and infinite continue coin.
Sorry to break it to you, but it’s simply not going to happen. People have said this before you did (in fact even before release when change is much more likely) and will afterwards. I agree on most of your points (especially sword #1 and pet dodge being an issue) and would even add some more, but it’s not going to change anything.
Anet don’t read it, or if they do, they don’t give a kitten.
I am just going to chime in here and don’t stone me :P
Any class is a good class because it largely depends on the player playing the class.I suck at guardian and warrior for example- I just cannot keep them alive.
I am good at Engi, Mesmer and Ranger.Some classes just either gell with you or not.
Ranger is what you make it
No.
Just because someone claims to suck comparatively less with a certain class, design flaws don’t just go away.
There are always loopholes they can find to introduce more treadmill elements.
Even if they stick to the statement that legendary is always going to be the highest tier, they can still either introduce elements that bypass that: more slots that need to be filled, more infusions for example. My personal bet though is that they’ll simply raise the level cap and keep our old gear at 80.
I know it sounds like insinuating malicious intent, but at this point I can’t help but think they’ll leap at every chance to further “streamline” (i.e. dumb down), commercialize and destroy every trace of whats left of GW1.
I don’t see why there can even be a discussion about this. The whole gaming industry is almost completely dedicated to casuals (even more so the f2p games), because those people pay the bills.
Convincing the hardcore, highly invested and knowledgeable (in the game’s terms) is a very challenging and expensive endeavour, selling eternal pickaxes for $10 and a collection of plushy backpacks takes basically no effort at all and thus generates that much more income.
The true hardcore scene is always an afterthought; developers tend to think that it is good to have people who consider themselves hardcore around, because it gives the game a better image in press and forums, but it is very clear that they are not the real target audience for the majority of content.
Don’t worry, people who don’t know kitten about game mechanics and can’t be bothered to l2p will still wear it because “it haz more stats!!11”; completely ignoring that most of them are either unneccessary in pve (toughness, vit), don’t work together for the majority of builds (power(condition damage) or scale horribly (healing). Not to mention that stuff like power/precision/crit damage don’t scale linearly together anyway (1 point in power gets more valuable with more precision/crit and vice versa).
You keep the exact same eHP, but you lower HP while raising toughness. Meaning power builds take exactly as long to kill the boss, but now condition builds can keep up as far as %HP damage dealt per period of time, whereas now they don’t.
Simply incentivizing condition builds, even heavily, won’t help alone. Without changing anything else, the problem would be that good condition builds could still completely cap out alone anyway, and some classes can’t even help but put on bleed stacks with their direct damage skills / traits.
So even if it were theoretically beneficial to maybe bring one, just one, condition build, pugs would risk being stuck with 2 condition builds, making one of them completely useless. If anything, it would make matters worse I think.
As an altoholic with 8 characters (and wanting to create new ones when new professions/races appear), I hope you (ANET) think about us when you finally implement this.
I know, this is not GW1 (this is a new game, blah blah blah, I got it) but i miss a lot how easy was to change my build there and to dress up all my characters. Here, everytime some new content appears (as Liadri) I regret that I purchased this armor instead another one (for instance, applying new rune set implies destroying the old one or the armor). If we are so punished equipping and changing our characters with exotics, I can only be terrified of thinking about this same thing with ascended items (more expensive or – please don’t do this – time gated). And, since I have 8 characters, I feel punished x8.
My thoughts exactly. It feels almost as if they had taken everyting I loved about Guild Wars 1 and flushed it down the toilet. Then they began writing gw2.
We won’t have a major presence at Gamescom this year no, though a number of senior staff will be flying out to attend the community party that weekend at Gamescom to meet everyone and share a few beers. Make sure to stop by if you’re there for the show!
Somewhat related, if you’re even thinking of being in the Seattle are this year during PAX: you absolutely will not want to miss our ArenaNet PAX event. Not only will it include our PvP championship live on stage, we’ll have some other reveals you’re not going to want to miss…stay tuned! (and no the reveal is not an expansion!)
If it is more quaggan minis I will delete my account, and probably kill a kitten.
Sounds like a crazy, sadistic villain (like the Joker).
I can’t wait!
So, the one who opposes the self absorbed megalomaniac monarch with a knack for bloodsports, who erected a gigantic colosseum over the burnt down homes of canthan refugees is the crazy sadistic villain?
At everyone saying one-shot mechanics are bad:
One-shot mechanics are bad IF AND ONLY IF they offer no counterplay. If you’re getting one-shotted with no means of preventing, avoiding, or negating it, then yes, that is bad. However, that’s not what this is. This is one-shot mechanics with very significant counterplay. You can avoid them.
Seconded. I too don’t really see the problem with oneshots when a fight is so short anyway. Within the constraints of the game mechanics we have, oneshots and the dodge mechanics are a perfect match.
Granted, there are design issues with the whole thing. The camera problems and the environment blending in with red circles are all valid issues, but it still doesn’t make if impossible to get by a long shot. Personally, I get the feeling that it is simply the difficulty, people would blame whatever effect they think killed them no matter what.
Plot Twist: the Watchknights in the Pavillion aren’t actually robots. They have a second mesmer illusion cast on them to hide the fact that they are really the former residents of the Canthan district and the refugees from the war with the centaurs. Jennah saw them as a financial burden on her empire so she set up the whole Pavilion to fool adventurers into culling off all the displaced people, solving her refugee problem while throwing a party in her own honour. The mysterious disappearances in Divinity’s Reach that Marjory was investigating are actually the work of the Shining Blade, gathering up all the displaced people and anyone who discovered Jennah’s sinister secret.
Intriguing. So, what you’re saying is, queen jennah is actually hitler with boobs. And illusion magic. And an endless army of steam robots.
A terrifying combination for sure, I can’t really decide which part scares me the most.
Looks very disappointing so far. Removing Culling is nice I guess, but the birthday presents are a complete letdown. I guess a bta jenna mini for everyone is tyria’s equivalent for socks for christmas…
The speech is an obvious setup for another “surprise” attack, most likely by sky pirates again. All in all, it seems pretty boring.
I’m all for frequent and free diversions like Fractals and mini-games being added to the game. But I’m very much against the Living Story replacing the Personal Story. If you look at the quality of Factions and Nightfall respective to the original Guild Wars there’s no drop-off. If you look at the quality of Queen’s Jubilee or Secrets of Southsun respective to the original Guild Wars 2 they’re not even in the same league. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again…I want quality, not quantity.
Well, I didn’t find the “personal” story very enticing to begin with, but the “living” story definitely is even worse. I’m not particulary against free additional content of course, but I can’t help but think that if they had channeled all the recources that went into creating all those tiny snippets into a single project, we could have a great expansion by now already.
What we got instead was a series of short events that left no mark on the game world whatsoever and seemingly aren’t connected at all, despite some minor hints at a connection between kiel and the sky pirates, which seems more like a complete afterthought in order to tie 2 random theme park fares together somehow.
For what it’s worth, I’ve had the most fun in a while with the gauntlet. I’m pretty disappointed by the living story content as a whole so far, but I did greatly appreciate a good old fashioned arena challenge.
Granted, there are numerous design issues with it, but the concept is great and the fight itself was enough of a challenge to be fun for a change.
You are right about the damage though. However, I think that your perspective is a big misguided. You look at how conditions fare in open world PvE or organized dungeons and conclude that they’re crap. Well, those are extreme circumstances, not the average setting.
So, how exactly are both open world pve and dungeons/fractals “extreme situations”? What exactly would a normal situation look like then?
You also completely ignore the good sides of conditions. Since they’re damage over time, there’s tons of scenarios where conditions deal damage where direct damage fails to do so. For example, a condition build is basically guaranteed to keep dealing damage even if they’re CC’ed. Similarly, condition builds allow for much better kiting due to being damage-over-time.
Nope. Over a longer time period it doesn’t really matter whether your pause applying fresh bleed stacks or you pause doing direct damage; the dps loss will be the same. Unless you assume that the direct damage build would deal it’s damage only from auto attacks while the bleed build only builds from high cooldown, short activation utility skills and doesn’t need to do anything inbetween, but that doesn’t really look realistic to me at least.
On the other hand, there are numerous downsides inherent to condition mechanics (no vulnerability, no bonus from crits, no +x% traits/sigils, worse party buffs etc.) even if you ignore the cap for a moment.
Anet have kept quiet about the issue for so long that it’s probably feasible to assume that at some point they probably went through their options to adress the issue, figured it was not worth the effort and decided to sweep it under the rug as good as possible.
On an off topic note my Thief is face-roll in WvW, contrary to what Zacchary said. I know a lot of people will dismiss his claim as ‘oh Thieves are so easy to do well at’ (which is true) but that’s not the question.
What you are describing here would be best called skill floor, but I think it is a bit vague still. For reference:
Skill Floor = The difficulty of achieving at least average performance on a specific class, compared to other people playing the same class.
Skill Ceiling = The difficulty of performing flawlessly in this class, i.e. use it’s abilities to the fullest of their potential in any situation.
Those 2 are not neccessarily related; a class can be easy to pick up and hard to master, or hard to pick up but then have small room for improvement. We should also note that both are not to be confused with a classes’ overall power compared to others. I often see this distinction not being made, but I think it is a neccessary one to explain some of the predicaments of balancing.
A class can be difficult to master and still perform below average compared to other classes. Most would say rangers in pve are such a case; if you skillfully manage your pet, you can perform ok-ish in most encounters, but the class still lacks the tools to do anything special.
(edited by wintermute.4096)
1) Full zerker is bad. Aetherblade Strikers say hi
2) Condition removal = good, especially when getting those 5 stacks of confusion mid WW cast. Time to dust off those soldier runes eh?
3) Shelter = good, no need to elaborate on thisSo please, keep these 3 points in mind the next time you run that dungeon so us “nub non zerker” guardians don’t spend 90% of the time rezzing you, kk?
People who have run any higher level fractals won’t find this any difficult at all. If you need the training wheels that is non zerker gear feel free to use them, but don’t berate people who get by without them, kthxbye.
The skin section maintains the visual and name rarity only. Certain weapons like legendary weapons or high-end exotics retain their name without adopting the equipped sigil suffix. In chat links and player, inventory the equipment rarity appears as the original skin’s rarity. The skin section is nothing but visual flavor.
While you are correct about how things are now, that doesn’t indicate how they will be handled once ascended weapons really come out. Even if the text color is only fluff right now, it means that the weapon’s origin is still kept in the database.
It should be relatively easy to update existing transmuted weapons once asceded are rolled out, and if the dev in question is not a ridiculously detached amateur, this is what they’ll do in one form or another.
Lol. With an attitude like that, I’d kick you too.
dunno what you are talking about, I see no attitude whatsoever.
Asking outright for a ban of a complete party because you got kicked once by random strangers doesn’t tell you anything?
To be clear, I don’t think this type of behavior should be encouraged, but it certainly shouldn’t be a bannable offense like that. Report them and if those reports pile up suspend them temporarily maybe. Most people have a reason for kicking others usually though…
Lol. With an attitude like that, I’d kick you too.
If I had my druthers, I’d change the scepter auto-attack to apply a random condition (burning for 1 second, bleeding or poison for 3 seconds) on chain #2, and chain #3 should spawn a clone that does damage and applies 2 stacks of confusion for 1 second.
I don’t know what they were thinking with scepter really… It’s skills now even more say condition weapon, but it’s #1 is still a split between power based (but with bad scaling) and the gimmicky clone generation that only happens when you don’t dodge or use a skill until the animation is done; it just doesn’t fit.
Hahahahahahaha no.
Stupid question really, who in their right mind would release the source code for a commercial mmo, especially while it’s still running?