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HoT = Dark Souls ? Casual Gamer perspective.


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@maddoctor.2738 said:

@battledrone.8315 said:ANY major mmo simply NEEDS a ton of casuals to pay the bills

Does it? Let's see, after HOT launched NCSoft told us that gem store sales are STABLE, meaning the drop in revenue after HOT wasn't due to the lack of sales on the gem store. According to people like you lots of casuals left the game when HOT launched. If the income from the gem store (from the active players) is confirmed stable after the launch of HOT then the two arguments don't add up. If casuals were paying the bills AND they left the game, then gem store sales would go way down, but they didn't.

This means that either casuals don't pay the bills, or that casuals didn't leave the game when HOT launched. An interesting dilemma.

they had around 3 mio sales at launch, without casuals they would had been at 500k-1 mio2 mio x 50 $...do the math. without casuals , this game wouldnt even EXIST

First I'd like to see your sources about the sales of "casuals" since you have the numbers. Or you pulled them out of your mind? Not a valid argument.Second, I was talking about "paying the bills", meaning the gem store, not game sales. NCSoft told us gem store sales were stable after HOT launched, so before HOT and after HOT gem store revenue was the same, meaning Anet was making the same amount of money before and after HOT from their active players. If casuals were paying the bills AND left the game after HOT, that revenue would go down, but it didn't. You failed to address the actual point and I believe because it goes against your failed argumentation, it doesn't fit your agenda. But you do have to choose between "casuals paying the bills" and "casuals left after HOT"

And please do the math yourself

sure buddy, have fun with that. i have given up waiting for the code to swtor now, i guess the EA support isnt as effective, as one could expectguess its back to wonderverse and co. even when they triple dip on their customers..

So you have absolutely nothing to backup your claims. I expected as much.

it is called common sense, do you think the mobile market would swallow the whole industry if the majority wasnt casual?do you think wow would had turned out this way? look at the number of nerfs they even have made to THIS game too, would they really had done that, if themajority was hardcore players? what do you have to back up YOUR claims?

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@Laila Lightness.8742 said:

@battledrone.8315 said:ANY major mmo simply NEEDS a ton of casuals to pay the bills

Does it? Let's see, after HOT launched NCSoft told us that gem store sales are STABLE, meaning the drop in revenue after HOT wasn't due to the lack of sales on the gem store. According to people like you lots of casuals left the game when HOT launched. If the income from the gem store (from the active players) is confirmed stable after the launch of HOT then the two arguments don't add up. If casuals were paying the bills AND they left the game, then gem store sales would go way down, but they didn't.

This means that either casuals don't pay the bills, or that casuals didn't leave the game when HOT launched. An interesting dilemma.

they had around 3 mio sales at launch, without casuals they would had been at 500k-1 mio2 mio x 50 $...do the math. without casuals , this game wouldnt even EXIST

Strange that casuals has mostly beaten hot core difficulty was its harder to actually lose. But biggest point this is an mmorpg you are meant to play with others. The reason many left wasnt due to difficulty was due to f2p. Alot of ppl left also for how easy game was and it wasnt really. I was casual once thought hot was hard then learned from my mistakes and now hot is easy. But you dont want to improve you want a game wich could be mistake for an afk game. You dont raid or do fractals so you dont need meta gear like zerker or force sigils. You can easly pick cheapest rune like eagle or lyssa and use soldier stats and win. You have a dodge but you dont use it. You got heal but same. Most enemies in hot has skills unlike core. Most of them have obvius animations and tells. Dark souls is harder for it got artificial difficulty and invasions, gw 2 is hard for core game taught you nothing about how to play. So new to the jungle is you have to realise same strats as core wont work unless in a large train wich is up often

yep, hot is practically A DIFFERENT GAME. and that is a BAD thing , if you actually LIKED core.so, its the expansion for players, WHO DIDNT LIKE THE GAME IN THE FIRST PLACE.casuals have fun, until the game practically KICKS them outand the hardcores have to slug through core, to get to the game THEY wantand no, i cant do it. i can raid in other mmos though.

Thats wierd as hot maps are the most active ones and you arent forced to go to hot. You think the hardcores play open world sorry they dont hot is only hard if you ignore every bit of gameplay and mindlessly. Core issue is they could removed every skill but auto and no one would cared for it would been skills they hardly used. But you didnt come here to listen to ppl whose opinion differs from yours. You think you need a raid build group of hard core for hps. You dont at most you need 2 ppl its a mmo not a single player adventure where everything is balanced for soloing. Gw 2 core lost players as nothing felt engaging like how you kill zhaitan by pressign f and 1 it was harder to fail than win. If you want to se real hardcore content go try raids or strikes or t4 fractals. They changed little difficulty wise except the enemies arent walking punching bags anymore

if hot maps indeed were the most "active" ones, then the expansion would had been a huge success, the game would had gained more players,and the layoff prolly wouldnt had happened. and they wouldnt had made pof closer to core either. try again.

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@battledrone.8315 said:

@battledrone.8315 said:ANY major mmo simply NEEDS a ton of casuals to pay the bills

Does it? Let's see, after HOT launched NCSoft told us that gem store sales are STABLE, meaning the drop in revenue after HOT wasn't due to the lack of sales on the gem store. According to people like you lots of casuals left the game when HOT launched. If the income from the gem store (from the active players) is confirmed stable after the launch of HOT then the two arguments don't add up. If casuals were paying the bills AND they left the game, then gem store sales would go way down, but they didn't.

This means that either casuals don't pay the bills, or that casuals didn't leave the game when HOT launched. An interesting dilemma.

they had around 3 mio sales at launch, without casuals they would had been at 500k-1 mio2 mio x 50 $...do the math. without casuals , this game wouldnt even EXIST

Strange that casuals has mostly beaten hot core difficulty was its harder to actually lose. But biggest point this is an mmorpg you are meant to play with others. The reason many left wasnt due to difficulty was due to f2p. Alot of ppl left also for how easy game was and it wasnt really. I was casual once thought hot was hard then learned from my mistakes and now hot is easy. But you dont want to improve you want a game wich could be mistake for an afk game. You dont raid or do fractals so you dont need meta gear like zerker or force sigils. You can easly pick cheapest rune like eagle or lyssa and use soldier stats and win. You have a dodge but you dont use it. You got heal but same. Most enemies in hot has skills unlike core. Most of them have obvius animations and tells. Dark souls is harder for it got artificial difficulty and invasions, gw 2 is hard for core game taught you nothing about how to play. So new to the jungle is you have to realise same strats as core wont work unless in a large train wich is up often

yep, hot is practically A DIFFERENT GAME. and that is a BAD thing , if you actually LIKED core.so, its the expansion for players, WHO DIDNT LIKE THE GAME IN THE FIRST PLACE.casuals have fun, until the game practically KICKS them outand the hardcores have to slug through core, to get to the game THEY wantand no, i cant do it. i can raid in other mmos though.

Thats wierd as hot maps are the most active ones and you arent forced to go to hot. You think the hardcores play open world sorry they dont hot is only hard if you ignore every bit of gameplay and mindlessly. Core issue is they could removed every skill but auto and no one would cared for it would been skills they hardly used. But you didnt come here to listen to ppl whose opinion differs from yours. You think you need a raid build group of hard core for hps. You dont at most you need 2 ppl its a mmo not a single player adventure where everything is balanced for soloing. Gw 2 core lost players as nothing felt engaging like how you kill zhaitan by pressign f and 1 it was harder to fail than win. If you want to se real hardcore content go try raids or strikes or t4 fractals. They changed little difficulty wise except the enemies arent walking punching bags anymore

if hot maps indeed were the most "active" ones, then the expansion would had been a huge success, the game would had gained more players,and the layoff prolly wouldnt had happened. and they wouldnt had made pof closer to core either. try again.

By that logic then PoF, which was created for casuals, was a failure as well.

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@Ayrilana.1396 said:

@battledrone.8315 said:ANY major mmo simply NEEDS a ton of casuals to pay the bills

Does it? Let's see, after HOT launched NCSoft told us that gem store sales are STABLE, meaning the drop in revenue after HOT wasn't due to the lack of sales on the gem store. According to people like you lots of casuals left the game when HOT launched. If the income from the gem store (from the active players) is confirmed stable after the launch of HOT then the two arguments don't add up. If casuals were paying the bills AND they left the game, then gem store sales would go way down, but they didn't.

This means that either casuals don't pay the bills, or that casuals didn't leave the game when HOT launched. An interesting dilemma.

they had around 3 mio sales at launch, without casuals they would had been at 500k-1 mio2 mio x 50 $...do the math. without casuals , this game wouldnt even EXIST

Strange that casuals has mostly beaten hot core difficulty was its harder to actually lose. But biggest point this is an mmorpg you are meant to play with others. The reason many left wasnt due to difficulty was due to f2p. Alot of ppl left also for how easy game was and it wasnt really. I was casual once thought hot was hard then learned from my mistakes and now hot is easy. But you dont want to improve you want a game wich could be mistake for an afk game. You dont raid or do fractals so you dont need meta gear like zerker or force sigils. You can easly pick cheapest rune like eagle or lyssa and use soldier stats and win. You have a dodge but you dont use it. You got heal but same. Most enemies in hot has skills unlike core. Most of them have obvius animations and tells. Dark souls is harder for it got artificial difficulty and invasions, gw 2 is hard for core game taught you nothing about how to play. So new to the jungle is you have to realise same strats as core wont work unless in a large train wich is up often

yep, hot is practically A DIFFERENT GAME. and that is a BAD thing , if you actually LIKED core.so, its the expansion for players, WHO DIDNT LIKE THE GAME IN THE FIRST PLACE.casuals have fun, until the game practically KICKS them outand the hardcores have to slug through core, to get to the game THEY wantand no, i cant do it. i can raid in other mmos though.

Thats wierd as hot maps are the most active ones and you arent forced to go to hot. You think the hardcores play open world sorry they dont hot is only hard if you ignore every bit of gameplay and mindlessly. Core issue is they could removed every skill but auto and no one would cared for it would been skills they hardly used. But you didnt come here to listen to ppl whose opinion differs from yours. You think you need a raid build group of hard core for hps. You dont at most you need 2 ppl its a mmo not a single player adventure where everything is balanced for soloing. Gw 2 core lost players as nothing felt engaging like how you kill zhaitan by pressign f and 1 it was harder to fail than win. If you want to se real hardcore content go try raids or strikes or t4 fractals. They changed little difficulty wise except the enemies arent walking punching bags anymore

if hot maps indeed were the most "active" ones, then the expansion would had been a huge success, the game would had gained more players,and the layoff prolly wouldnt had happened. and they wouldnt had made pof closer to core either. try again.

By that logic then PoF, which was created for casuals, was a failure as well.

pof isnt for casuals either, it is only a little MORE casual, than hot was, thats iti definately spent more time in pof, and i also liked it more, but it is way too hard to be casuali couldnt even get all classes though the first fight. NOT casual, but very annoying

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@battledrone.8315 said:

@battledrone.8315 said:ANY major mmo simply NEEDS a ton of casuals to pay the bills

Does it? Let's see, after HOT launched NCSoft told us that gem store sales are STABLE, meaning the drop in revenue after HOT wasn't due to the lack of sales on the gem store. According to people like you lots of casuals left the game when HOT launched. If the income from the gem store (from the active players) is confirmed stable after the launch of HOT then the two arguments don't add up. If casuals were paying the bills AND they left the game, then gem store sales would go way down, but they didn't.

This means that either casuals don't pay the bills, or that casuals didn't leave the game when HOT launched. An interesting dilemma.

they had around 3 mio sales at launch, without casuals they would had been at 500k-1 mio2 mio x 50 $...do the math. without casuals , this game wouldnt even EXIST

Strange that casuals has mostly beaten hot core difficulty was its harder to actually lose. But biggest point this is an mmorpg you are meant to play with others. The reason many left wasnt due to difficulty was due to f2p. Alot of ppl left also for how easy game was and it wasnt really. I was casual once thought hot was hard then learned from my mistakes and now hot is easy. But you dont want to improve you want a game wich could be mistake for an afk game. You dont raid or do fractals so you dont need meta gear like zerker or force sigils. You can easly pick cheapest rune like eagle or lyssa and use soldier stats and win. You have a dodge but you dont use it. You got heal but same. Most enemies in hot has skills unlike core. Most of them have obvius animations and tells. Dark souls is harder for it got artificial difficulty and invasions, gw 2 is hard for core game taught you nothing about how to play. So new to the jungle is you have to realise same strats as core wont work unless in a large train wich is up often

yep, hot is practically A DIFFERENT GAME. and that is a BAD thing , if you actually LIKED core.so, its the expansion for players, WHO DIDNT LIKE THE GAME IN THE FIRST PLACE.casuals have fun, until the game practically KICKS them outand the hardcores have to slug through core, to get to the game THEY wantand no, i cant do it. i can raid in other mmos though.

Thats wierd as hot maps are the most active ones and you arent forced to go to hot. You think the hardcores play open world sorry they dont hot is only hard if you ignore every bit of gameplay and mindlessly. Core issue is they could removed every skill but auto and no one would cared for it would been skills they hardly used. But you didnt come here to listen to ppl whose opinion differs from yours. You think you need a raid build group of hard core for hps. You dont at most you need 2 ppl its a mmo not a single player adventure where everything is balanced for soloing. Gw 2 core lost players as nothing felt engaging like how you kill zhaitan by pressign f and 1 it was harder to fail than win. If you want to se real hardcore content go try raids or strikes or t4 fractals. They changed little difficulty wise except the enemies arent walking punching bags anymore

if hot maps indeed were the most "active" ones, then the expansion would had been a huge success, the game would had gained more players,and the layoff prolly wouldnt had happened. and they wouldnt had made pof closer to core either. try again.

By that logic then PoF, which was created for casuals, was a failure as well.

pof isnt for casuals either, it is only a little MORE casual, than hot was, thats iti definately spent more time in pof, and i also liked it more, but it is way too hard to be casuali couldnt even get all classes though the first fight. NOT casual, but very annoying

So what exactly is casual to you?

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@Ayrilana.1396 said:

@battledrone.8315 said:ANY major mmo simply NEEDS a ton of casuals to pay the bills

Does it? Let's see, after HOT launched NCSoft told us that gem store sales are STABLE, meaning the drop in revenue after HOT wasn't due to the lack of sales on the gem store. According to people like you lots of casuals left the game when HOT launched. If the income from the gem store (from the active players) is confirmed stable after the launch of HOT then the two arguments don't add up. If casuals were paying the bills AND they left the game, then gem store sales would go way down, but they didn't.

This means that either casuals don't pay the bills, or that casuals didn't leave the game when HOT launched. An interesting dilemma.

they had around 3 mio sales at launch, without casuals they would had been at 500k-1 mio2 mio x 50 $...do the math. without casuals , this game wouldnt even EXIST

Strange that casuals has mostly beaten hot core difficulty was its harder to actually lose. But biggest point this is an mmorpg you are meant to play with others. The reason many left wasnt due to difficulty was due to f2p. Alot of ppl left also for how easy game was and it wasnt really. I was casual once thought hot was hard then learned from my mistakes and now hot is easy. But you dont want to improve you want a game wich could be mistake for an afk game. You dont raid or do fractals so you dont need meta gear like zerker or force sigils. You can easly pick cheapest rune like eagle or lyssa and use soldier stats and win. You have a dodge but you dont use it. You got heal but same. Most enemies in hot has skills unlike core. Most of them have obvius animations and tells. Dark souls is harder for it got artificial difficulty and invasions, gw 2 is hard for core game taught you nothing about how to play. So new to the jungle is you have to realise same strats as core wont work unless in a large train wich is up often

yep, hot is practically A DIFFERENT GAME. and that is a BAD thing , if you actually LIKED core.so, its the expansion for players, WHO DIDNT LIKE THE GAME IN THE FIRST PLACE.casuals have fun, until the game practically KICKS them outand the hardcores have to slug through core, to get to the game THEY wantand no, i cant do it. i can raid in other mmos though.

Thats wierd as hot maps are the most active ones and you arent forced to go to hot. You think the hardcores play open world sorry they dont hot is only hard if you ignore every bit of gameplay and mindlessly. Core issue is they could removed every skill but auto and no one would cared for it would been skills they hardly used. But you didnt come here to listen to ppl whose opinion differs from yours. You think you need a raid build group of hard core for hps. You dont at most you need 2 ppl its a mmo not a single player adventure where everything is balanced for soloing. Gw 2 core lost players as nothing felt engaging like how you kill zhaitan by pressign f and 1 it was harder to fail than win. If you want to se real hardcore content go try raids or strikes or t4 fractals. They changed little difficulty wise except the enemies arent walking punching bags anymore

if hot maps indeed were the most "active" ones, then the expansion would had been a huge success, the game would had gained more players,and the layoff prolly wouldnt had happened. and they wouldnt had made pof closer to core either. try again.

By that logic then PoF, which was created for casuals, was a failure as well.

pof isnt for casuals either, it is only a little MORE casual, than hot was, thats iti definately spent more time in pof, and i also liked it more, but it is way too hard to be casuali couldnt even get all classes though the first fight. NOT casual, but very annoying

So what exactly is casual to you?

the newbie zones are SUPER casual, as they should be. most of the OW content has a good learning curve until orr.and while orr may be "realistic", it is a huge letdown from the rest of tyria. OW orr is pretty casual now too, but it is still not a place iwant to hang out, like i did in many of the core zones. i just rush through to get it done. IF i even pony up the mojo to play it, that is.story gets hardcore from lvl 10 IMO. some pretty insane difficulty spikes in there

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@"battledrone.8315" said:it is called common sense, do you think the mobile market would swallow the whole industry if the majority wasnt casual?do you think wow would had turned out this way? look at the number of nerfs they even have made to THIS game too, would they really had done that, if the

Common sense tells you:

they had around 3 mio sales at launch, without casuals they would had been at 500k-1 mio2 mio x 50 $...do the math. without casuals , this game wouldnt even EXIST

That's some very specific "common sense", I want to know where you found this specific common sense, because anyone can pull imaginary numbers out of their mind.

majority was hardcore players? what do you have to back up YOUR claims?You said:as for gem sales, it only proves, that all the big whales are in the harcore crowdSo... hardcore players pay the bills and keep the game active? I back up my claim using your own claims.

I didn't make ANY claims, I provided evidence and I will provide it again, NCSoft told us specifically that gem sales were stable during HOT. So I'm gonna repeat this, if casuals were paying the bills and at the same time they left the game due to HOT, then the gem store revenue would go down, but that did not happen. Now use some actual common sense and do the math.

Either casual players aren't paying the bills or casual players didn't leave after HOT, math, logic, evidence, sources and common sense tell us this, you can ignore it all you want but these two arguments cannot possibly work together. Take your pick.

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it's always funny seeing people with thousands hours of playtime in full legendary gear, unlocked elites and masteries and whatever coming to these threads to brag how easy HoT is and that they should buff mobs when average player going into HoT after core story has exotic gear, maybe half of elite spec traits unlocked (if he did 100% hero point completion) and no mounts to skip enemies (unless he decided to play the game not like developers intended and got one from PoF first).

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See, I'm not 10k hours. I am doing my first Legendary, but I have about 1.1k hours here over the last two years. I love HoT. Did my first run without a mount, and OMG I loved every bit of it. I still love it with mounts (Verdant Brink on a Griffon is such fun!)

I have the opposite point - please Buff the Mobs. :# :lol: :lol:

Seriously - please buff mobs depending on Map Pop. It makes Heart of Thorns really the heart of Thorns. I love the fact that it pushes players to work together just because how difficult the game is. Exotics are definitely enough for HoT right now, and several Core builds work like peach. The problem is that Casual players are told to Maximize DPS in Core Game, and they come into HoT with Glass Cannons, and get whacked. So, once a player understands there are builds other than Berserker's, they begin to enjoy it.

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@AliamRationem.5172 said:

@"naiasonod.9265" said:HoT and PoF mobs have a lot of cheesy powers they can use far too often, and they're all HP sponges.

Don't compare this hackneyed farce to Dark Souls. Dark souls requires good timing and figuring out the choreography of a fight, which only the good fights here in GW2 also feature.

Overworked mobs and dramatic oversaturated Veteran/Elite mobs are just cheese factories that spam overpowered and utterly enormous AOE and Charge and hugely damaging multihits and knockdown and cripple/weakness conditions.

When you look at the design of something, the purpose of that design is often clear based on what the thing in question does.

The purpose of HoT and PoF mobs in terms of their design is clear - they're meant to bypass any and all defenses players have except dodges, blocks and evades, which many classes don't have in abundance and typically don't have in sufficient quantities in any builds that actual players will ever use, because those builds would be utter trash for anything else.

So what's the purpose of this? I phone that the purpose is to feign challenge, and in lieu of being creative, making mobs overpowered damage sponges that can often be counted on to have long and spamable evade/block phases during which time they're essentially invulnerable even if they're also attacking you.

This is the phoned in fake challenge route, and all it does is encourage zerg gameplay for HP's and events, and while there's nothing wrong with zerging up, it's a fairly stupid thing to drive people into doing if you wanted them to do anything else at all ever.

If you're at all concerned about efficiency of time use any time/reward factors, soloing is stupid and you shouldn't bother with it at all. Join an event/bounty train or HP train and get things done quickly and properly, then plink around exploring solo if you like.

HoT and PoF ironically trivialize themselves by making zerg tactics the only tactic worth bothering with if you're actually serious about getting things done. This means that all their pointlessly cheesy mobs get melted in five seconds no matter and they might as well not have bothered giving them ridiculously huge, hard hitting and boringly tedious powers that punish nobody but solo explorers at all.

HoT and PoF mobs are tedious and exasperating. They're not particularly fun and aren't rewarding whatsoever to deal with, and that annoyance factor is the only successful accomplishment achieved by their design.

I can solo low tier fractals more easily than I can sometimes deal with overworld mobs, and the hlarity of why is because fractal fights are structured.

Run around HoT or PoF and you're almost certainly going to have tons of adds wander into your fights, and a considerable number of those adds will be veterans that can frequently kill you in one big crit or spammed multihit roll/channel/shoot you forever powers even if you're kitten around in full Soldier gear.

HoT and PoF completely destroy the use of creative builds and functionally force players into a single playstyle that relies completely on dodging on desperate use of frequently sparing evade/block/distort powers to avoid being utterly annihilated by some tiny little rolling monster that can hit you five times a second for 3k per hit while almost never stopping it's rolling.

You miss one dodge and you're often dead. You miss one block when you're out of stamina and you're often dead. The best defense is often an overwhelming offense, and of you can't kill it before it one shots you, you're going to die a lot, and even if you manage to kill the five things you got the jump on just fine, there'll be a wandering patrol with a stealther and a veteran that will wander in while you're fighting

Fractals are fun because they reward strategy and good gameplay. Dungeons aren't generally fun because they're where the issue of grossly overpowered trash got featured firstly and they reward nothing except killing things asap and figuring out how to skip as much as possible.

Raids reward good gameplay and solid group synergy.

Overworld exploration is just as PITA that rewards asolo explorer with nonstop annoyance and the promise that every fight will be obnoxious and all you'll want to do while you're picking your way through the kitten you can't avoid fighting is never have to fight this stuff ever again, because it's pointless and annoying.

It isn't hard in any sense other than to put up with, and when your 'challenge' is a tolerance check for blinding tedium, you failed at coming up with a challenge worthy of the name.

So zerg up if you want to get things done quickly and efficiently. I promise you, of you had fun the first few times you had to deal with obnoxious mobs, in six years, you'll be so sick of having to deal with them that you'll be putting groups together for everything because there's just no salient point in soloing unless you're a masochist or perhaps not the sharpest spoon in the knife drawer.

I think it's pretty fun to utilize positioning and timing along with dodging and all of my skills to counter enemies that could otherwise be a real threat to me (and usually were, earlier in my GW2 career!).

That just looks cool, doesn't it? Check the part at about 0:44 where I backpedal toward the two pursuing bladedancers and then polaric leap back to the shadowleaper leaving them attacking nothing but air with their stun-and-kill maneuver! Cmon, that was pretty slick, right?

This just doesn't look like the same game you're describing. But I suppose that's a matter of perspective.

Did you seriously just try to counter my point that everything is funneled into dodging...by posting a video of you using mount attacks (didn't exist in HoT), on Weaver (didn't exist in HoT) and dodging a lot while lacing in some mobility attacks (which not all classes have in low CD abundance, now or back in HoT)?

You just did exactly that, didn't you. Cool. I don't think there's anything further to say. You couldn't have proven my point better if you'd deliberately set out to try.

Seriously. You made my whole argument for me. I rest my case; the defense shot itself in the face.

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@"krz.1327" said:it's always funny seeing people with thousands hours of playtime in full legendary gear, unlocked elites and masteries and whatever coming to these threads to brag how easy HoT is and that they should buff mobs when average player going into HoT after core story has exotic gear, maybe half of elite spec traits unlocked (if he did 100% hero point completion) and no mounts to skip enemies (unless he decided to play the game not like developers intended and got one from PoF first).

Gear is not the problem. The difference between ascended and exotic for solo play is negligible. But let's take it one step further. Here's an HoT champion done in level 60-65 blue/green gear purchased for nothing off the TP. Notice the guy who runs in and gets downed at the end because he fails to dodge the boss's charge knockdown and doesn't have a stunbreak to avoid the followup attack. Do you think he was in ascended gear or exotic and did it matter?

Also, we were all new once. We all had to unlock masteries and learn our way around while fighting these enemies. We still have to learn new builds and unlock elite specs for alts, too. It may be impossible for you to believe, but players like me genuinely enjoy HoT and consider it the best this game has to offer in terms of open world play. I'm not calling for it to become any more difficult, but I absolutely like it the way it is!

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@battledrone.8315 said:

@battledrone.8315 said:ANY major mmo simply NEEDS a ton of casuals to pay the bills

Does it? Let's see, after HOT launched NCSoft told us that gem store sales are STABLE, meaning the drop in revenue after HOT wasn't due to the lack of sales on the gem store. According to people like you lots of casuals left the game when HOT launched. If the income from the gem store (from the active players) is confirmed stable after the launch of HOT then the two arguments don't add up. If casuals were paying the bills AND they left the game, then gem store sales would go way down, but they didn't.

This means that either casuals don't pay the bills, or that casuals didn't leave the game when HOT launched. An interesting dilemma.

they had around 3 mio sales at launch, without casuals they would had been at 500k-1 mio2 mio x 50 $...do the math. without casuals , this game wouldnt even EXIST

Strange that casuals has mostly beaten hot core difficulty was its harder to actually lose. But biggest point this is an mmorpg you are meant to play with others. The reason many left wasnt due to difficulty was due to f2p. Alot of ppl left also for how easy game was and it wasnt really. I was casual once thought hot was hard then learned from my mistakes and now hot is easy. But you dont want to improve you want a game wich could be mistake for an afk game. You dont raid or do fractals so you dont need meta gear like zerker or force sigils. You can easly pick cheapest rune like eagle or lyssa and use soldier stats and win. You have a dodge but you dont use it. You got heal but same. Most enemies in hot has skills unlike core. Most of them have obvius animations and tells. Dark souls is harder for it got artificial difficulty and invasions, gw 2 is hard for core game taught you nothing about how to play. So new to the jungle is you have to realise same strats as core wont work unless in a large train wich is up often

yep, hot is practically A DIFFERENT GAME. and that is a BAD thing , if you actually LIKED core.so, its the expansion for players, WHO DIDNT LIKE THE GAME IN THE FIRST PLACE.casuals have fun, until the game practically KICKS them outand the hardcores have to slug through core, to get to the game THEY wantand no, i cant do it. i can raid in other mmos though.

Thats wierd as hot maps are the most active ones and you arent forced to go to hot. You think the hardcores play open world sorry they dont hot is only hard if you ignore every bit of gameplay and mindlessly. Core issue is they could removed every skill but auto and no one would cared for it would been skills they hardly used. But you didnt come here to listen to ppl whose opinion differs from yours. You think you need a raid build group of hard core for hps. You dont at most you need 2 ppl its a mmo not a single player adventure where everything is balanced for soloing. Gw 2 core lost players as nothing felt engaging like how you kill zhaitan by pressign f and 1 it was harder to fail than win. If you want to se real hardcore content go try raids or strikes or t4 fractals. They changed little difficulty wise except the enemies arent walking punching bags anymore

if hot maps indeed were the most "active" ones, then the expansion would had been a huge success, the game would had gained more players,and the layoff prolly wouldnt had happened. and they wouldnt had made pof closer to core either. try again.

By that logic then PoF, which was created for casuals, was a failure as well.

pof isnt for casuals either, it is only a little MORE casual, than hot was, thats iti definately spent more time in pof, and i also liked it more, but it is way too hard to be casuali couldnt even get all classes though the first fight. NOT casual, but very annoying

So what exactly is casual to you?

the newbie zones are SUPER casual, as they should be. most of the OW content has a good learning curve until orr.and while orr may be "realistic", it is a huge letdown from the rest of tyria. OW orr is pretty casual now too, but it is still not a place iwant to hang out, like i did in many of the core zones. i just rush through to get it done. IF i even pony up the mojo to play it, that is.story gets hardcore from lvl 10 IMO. some pretty insane difficulty spikes in there

What I meant was define casual.

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@naiasonod.9265 said:

@naiasonod.9265 said:HoT and PoF mobs have a lot of cheesy powers they can use far too often, and they're all HP sponges.

Don't compare this hackneyed farce to Dark Souls. Dark souls requires good timing and figuring out the choreography of a fight, which only the good fights here in GW2 also feature.

Overworked mobs and dramatic oversaturated Veteran/Elite mobs are just cheese factories that spam overpowered and utterly enormous AOE and Charge and hugely damaging multihits and knockdown and cripple/weakness conditions.

When you look at the design of something, the purpose of that design is often clear based on what the thing in question does.

The purpose of HoT and PoF mobs in terms of their design is clear - they're meant to bypass any and all defenses players have except dodges, blocks and evades, which many classes don't have in abundance and typically don't have in sufficient quantities in any builds that actual players will ever use, because those builds would be utter trash for anything else.

So what's the purpose of this? I phone that the purpose is to feign challenge, and in lieu of being creative, making mobs overpowered damage sponges that can often be counted on to have long and spamable evade/block phases during which time they're essentially invulnerable even if they're also attacking you.

This is the phoned in fake challenge route, and all it does is encourage zerg gameplay for HP's and events, and while there's nothing wrong with zerging up, it's a fairly stupid thing to drive people into doing if you wanted them to do anything else at all ever.

If you're at all concerned about efficiency of time use any time/reward factors, soloing is stupid and you shouldn't bother with it at all. Join an event/bounty train or HP train and get things done quickly and properly, then plink around exploring solo if you like.

HoT and PoF ironically trivialize themselves by making zerg tactics the only tactic worth bothering with if you're actually serious about getting things done. This means that all their pointlessly cheesy mobs get melted in five seconds no matter and they might as well not have bothered giving them ridiculously huge, hard hitting and boringly tedious powers that punish nobody but solo explorers at all.

HoT and PoF mobs are tedious and exasperating. They're not particularly fun and aren't rewarding whatsoever to deal with, and that annoyance factor is the only successful accomplishment achieved by their design.

I can solo low tier fractals more easily than I can sometimes deal with overworld mobs, and the hlarity of why is because fractal fights are structured.

Run around HoT or PoF and you're almost certainly going to have tons of adds wander into your fights, and a considerable number of those adds will be veterans that can frequently kill you in one big crit or spammed multihit roll/channel/shoot you forever powers even if you're kitten around in full Soldier gear.

HoT and PoF completely destroy the use of creative builds and functionally force players into a single playstyle that relies completely on dodging on desperate use of frequently sparing evade/block/distort powers to avoid being utterly annihilated by some tiny little rolling monster that can hit you five times a second for 3k per hit while almost never stopping it's rolling.

You miss one dodge and you're often dead. You miss one block when you're out of stamina and you're often dead. The best defense is often an overwhelming offense, and of you can't kill it before it one shots you, you're going to die a lot, and even if you manage to kill the five things you got the jump on just fine, there'll be a wandering patrol with a stealther and a veteran that will wander in while you're fighting

Fractals are fun because they reward strategy and good gameplay. Dungeons aren't generally fun because they're where the issue of grossly overpowered trash got featured firstly and they reward nothing except killing things asap and figuring out how to skip as much as possible.

Raids reward good gameplay and solid group synergy.

Overworld exploration is just as PITA that rewards asolo explorer with nonstop annoyance and the promise that every fight will be obnoxious and all you'll want to do while you're picking your way through the kitten you can't avoid fighting is never have to fight this stuff ever again, because it's pointless and annoying.

It isn't hard in any sense other than to put up with, and when your 'challenge' is a tolerance check for blinding tedium, you failed at coming up with a challenge worthy of the name.

So zerg up if you want to get things done quickly and efficiently. I promise you, of you had fun the first few times you had to deal with obnoxious mobs, in six years, you'll be so sick of having to deal with them that you'll be putting groups together for everything because there's just no salient point in soloing unless you're a masochist or perhaps not the sharpest spoon in the knife drawer.

I think it's pretty fun to utilize positioning and timing along with dodging and all of my skills to counter enemies that could otherwise be a real threat to me (and usually were, earlier in my GW2 career!).

That just looks cool, doesn't it? Check the part at about 0:44 where I backpedal toward the two pursuing bladedancers and then polaric leap back to the shadowleaper leaving them attacking nothing but air with their stun-and-kill maneuver! Cmon, that was pretty slick, right?

This just doesn't look like the same game you're describing. But I suppose that's a matter of perspective.

Did you seriously just try to counter my point that everything is funneled into dodging...by posting a video of you using mount attacks (didn't exist in HoT), on Weaver (didn't exist in HoT) and dodging a lot while lacing in some mobility attacks (which not all classes have in low CD abundance, now or back in HoT)?

You just did exactly that, didn't you. Cool. I don't think there's anything further to say. You couldn't have proven my point better if you'd deliberately set out to try.

Seriously. You made my whole argument for me. I rest my case; the defense shot itself in the face.

I'm sorry. What does this have to do with anything?

Also, please explain your definition of a proper challenge? If not dodging, positioning, timing, etc. then what? You're complaining a lot, but it isn't clear what you think would be better. To me it just sounds like you want everything easier because you don't know what you're doing. Maybe if you did know what you were doing, you'd enjoy the combat more? I sure do!

And LoL@ complaining about weaver's high mobility. FYI sword weaver is hands down the least mobile build you can play! Learn. It helps.

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@AliamRationem.5172 said:

@naiasonod.9265 said:HoT and PoF mobs have a lot of cheesy powers they can use far too often, and they're all HP sponges.

Don't compare this hackneyed farce to Dark Souls. Dark souls requires good timing and figuring out the choreography of a fight, which only the good fights here in GW2 also feature.

Overworked mobs and dramatic oversaturated Veteran/Elite mobs are just cheese factories that spam overpowered and utterly enormous AOE and Charge and hugely damaging multihits and knockdown and cripple/weakness conditions.

When you look at the design of something, the purpose of that design is often clear based on what the thing in question does.

The purpose of HoT and PoF mobs in terms of their design is clear - they're meant to bypass any and all defenses players have except dodges, blocks and evades, which many classes don't have in abundance and typically don't have in sufficient quantities in any builds that actual players will ever use, because those builds would be utter trash for anything else.

So what's the purpose of this? I phone that the purpose is to feign challenge, and in lieu of being creative, making mobs overpowered damage sponges that can often be counted on to have long and spamable evade/block phases during which time they're essentially invulnerable even if they're also attacking you.

This is the phoned in fake challenge route, and all it does is encourage zerg gameplay for HP's and events, and while there's nothing wrong with zerging up, it's a fairly stupid thing to drive people into doing if you wanted them to do anything else at all ever.

If you're at all concerned about efficiency of time use any time/reward factors, soloing is stupid and you shouldn't bother with it at all. Join an event/bounty train or HP train and get things done quickly and properly, then plink around exploring solo if you like.

HoT and PoF ironically trivialize themselves by making zerg tactics the only tactic worth bothering with if you're actually serious about getting things done. This means that all their pointlessly cheesy mobs get melted in five seconds no matter and they might as well not have bothered giving them ridiculously huge, hard hitting and boringly tedious powers that punish nobody but solo explorers at all.

HoT and PoF mobs are tedious and exasperating. They're not particularly fun and aren't rewarding whatsoever to deal with, and that annoyance factor is the only successful accomplishment achieved by their design.

I can solo low tier fractals more easily than I can sometimes deal with overworld mobs, and the hlarity of why is because fractal fights are structured.

Run around HoT or PoF and you're almost certainly going to have tons of adds wander into your fights, and a considerable number of those adds will be veterans that can frequently kill you in one big crit or spammed multihit roll/channel/shoot you forever powers even if you're kitten around in full Soldier gear.

HoT and PoF completely destroy the use of creative builds and functionally force players into a single playstyle that relies completely on dodging on desperate use of frequently sparing evade/block/distort powers to avoid being utterly annihilated by some tiny little rolling monster that can hit you five times a second for 3k per hit while almost never stopping it's rolling.

You miss one dodge and you're often dead. You miss one block when you're out of stamina and you're often dead. The best defense is often an overwhelming offense, and of you can't kill it before it one shots you, you're going to die a lot, and even if you manage to kill the five things you got the jump on just fine, there'll be a wandering patrol with a stealther and a veteran that will wander in while you're fighting

Fractals are fun because they reward strategy and good gameplay. Dungeons aren't generally fun because they're where the issue of grossly overpowered trash got featured firstly and they reward nothing except killing things asap and figuring out how to skip as much as possible.

Raids reward good gameplay and solid group synergy.

Overworld exploration is just as PITA that rewards asolo explorer with nonstop annoyance and the promise that every fight will be obnoxious and all you'll want to do while you're picking your way through the kitten you can't avoid fighting is never have to fight this stuff ever again, because it's pointless and annoying.

It isn't hard in any sense other than to put up with, and when your 'challenge' is a tolerance check for blinding tedium, you failed at coming up with a challenge worthy of the name.

So zerg up if you want to get things done quickly and efficiently. I promise you, of you had fun the first few times you had to deal with obnoxious mobs, in six years, you'll be so sick of having to deal with them that you'll be putting groups together for everything because there's just no salient point in soloing unless you're a masochist or perhaps not the sharpest spoon in the knife drawer.

I think it's pretty fun to utilize positioning and timing along with dodging and all of my skills to counter enemies that could otherwise be a real threat to me (and usually were, earlier in my GW2 career!).

That just looks cool, doesn't it? Check the part at about 0:44 where I backpedal toward the two pursuing bladedancers and then polaric leap back to the shadowleaper leaving them attacking nothing but air with their stun-and-kill maneuver! Cmon, that was pretty slick, right?

This just doesn't look like the same game you're describing. But I suppose that's a matter of perspective.

Did you seriously just try to counter my point that everything is funneled into dodging...by posting a video of you using mount attacks (didn't exist in HoT), on Weaver (didn't exist in HoT) and dodging a lot while lacing in some mobility attacks (which not all classes have in low CD abundance, now or back in HoT)?

You just did exactly that, didn't you. Cool. I don't think there's anything further to say. You couldn't have proven my point better if you'd deliberately set out to try.

Seriously. You made my whole argument for me. I rest my case; the defense shot itself in the face.

I'm sorry. What does this have to do with anything?

Also, please explain your definition of a proper challenge? If not dodging, positioning, timing, etc. then what? You're complaining a lot, but it isn't clear what you think would be better. To me it just sounds like you want everything easier because you don't know what you're doing. Maybe if you did know what you were doing, you'd enjoy the combat more? I sure do!

And LoL@ complaining about weaver's high mobility. FYI sword weaver is hands down the least mobile build you can play! Learn. It helps.

Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't write an entire treatise about game design when I criticized comparing the hackneyed nonsense on here to Dark Souls. It seems that you want an entire library of self-written references to opinions contrary to your own, so you know what ? Here you go. Don't say you didn't ask for it.

Improved combat design on here would feature more counterplay options. As it is, there is a high expectation that players might/could/should be using interrupt attacks, yet a great many weapon sets and ideal class builds do not feature interrupt abilities. In order to have a good number of interrupts usable with the common frequency necessary in chained fights that are standard to basic overworld exploration, there should be interrupts available to all classes built into weapon sets that aren't niche.

As it currently stands, you typically have to make the choice between doing 100% of your DPS but having little to no interrupt capability, or severely less DPS while having one or two interrupts you can utilize, whether from utility skills or weapon sets and usually combined. As it stands, many builds on many classes do not work well when you're trying to work interrupts into an attack rotation.

There is nothing inherently wrong about making players make hard choices when it comes to builds, but you have to tune your fights and encounters with the understanding that you, by design, are preventing players from being able to do everything well.

You cannot build for DPS and Survivability and Vigor/Endurance and Mobility and Interrupts all at the same time. Not on pretty much anything. You cannot do this, and if you try to do this, you will be terrible at all of it and will fail because you weren't good enough in any one of those categories in order to function properly anyway.

Right now, to properly deal with overworld mobs in HoT and PoF zones, you need to be able to dodge/block/evade to supplement your dodging, because toughness/armor rating have been completely invalidated by mob design that features huge damage, huge aoe's and things you can't expect to always be able to avoid no matter how good you are, or think you are. You WILL be getting hit. You can only dodge so many times, but layered and spammed AOE's and ground patches and dots will outlast your endurance, will ignore your toughness/armor by design in the case of conditions and so there you sit, with it being an absolute requirement to build for dodging and mobility as much as you can by default.

What will you neglect in order to do this? Damage? Survivability? On some builds of some classes, you don't have to neglect either of these. This is not true on all classes and definitely isn't true for all builds of all classes. To an extent, that's fine; not all builds should somehow work equally well in all situations, or there wouldn't actually be point or functional purpose to there being different builds in the first place.

As it presently stands, there is no point to different builds in overworld content because if you have low HP, you're going to be dead a lot. Unavoidable damage is a significant reality even if you build for dodging, mobility and as much evasion as you can figure out, but you're still going to be getting hit, and you do 0 DPS when you're dead on the ground.

So, you need to be able to take at least one or two hits for those times when you're out of endurance and all your defensive/mobility skills are on CD but you're still getting fumigated and machine-gun shot by half of everything that's aggro'd into your ongoing fight. HoT and PoF maps have extremely high mob densities, lots of roaming mobs and pack patrols of things that will just keep aggroing into your business a fair amount of the time, and if you can't deal with that, you'll be dead on the ground dealing 0 DPS.

Because you cannot do anything about mob densities, wandering patrols and the fact that you will be taking damage no matter how good you are at dodging and staying mobile, you need to kill things before they kill you. So you can't neglect DPS either. You just absolutely cannot do that.

So, on the list of things mob design have dictated that we cannot neglec, we have mobility and DPS. You cannot neglect those. You neglect either of those and you're going to be dead on the ground doing 0 DPS no matter how clever you thought you were with whatever your build was.

But then you need survivability as well. You need HP in order to take that damage you will not avoid all of no matter how good you are. Ignore Toughness in this consideration; it has been completely invalidated as a stat by both high use of Condi damage from many mobs as well as huge amounts of high spike/crit damage from many of them, and Toughness doesn't help you avoid all the knockdown/knockback you will suffer from seemingly most mobs.

High Vitality will give you HP, will is the padding you need to survive stacks of Condi damage and what might keep you alive through a hit or four while you're knocked down or chain KD'd by various charging/tripping mobs. Again, mobility can help you here, but only if you avoid the knockdown attack in the first place, which will not always be possible. Ergo, you need to be able to take some hits sometimes.

Do you need high vitality? Not if you can get lots of damage shield, but rather few classes even have options for that, and since you absolutely cannot build for Healing stat without neglecting something you absolutely cannot neglect, most damage shield offerings will not be as useful as more HP.

So, we have three things you absolutely, positively, 100% of the time must include in your build for dealing effectively with overworld mobs in HoT and PoF, or you're going to be dead on the ground doing 0 DPS way more often than you're going to enjoy.

You need mobility. You need DPS. You need HP.

And that's a wrap. You can't neglect any of those, because overworld fights aren't structured and you have to be ready to deal with the unexpected patrols and respawns and unanticipated extra garbage that will be putting additional pressure on you at random intensities and at random times.

By comparison, raids and fractals are phone-it-in easy because those fights and situations are all structured and never change. You have no unexpected event mobs suddenly showing up and ganging up on you in those. You have no wandering patrols charging in from what sometimes feels like half the world away, with half of them standing 1200 units back and shooting you while you're trying to figure out for a second or two what the heck is killing you this time.

So you can't neglect any of those things because there is nobody else to rely on if you're solo exploring and you do indeed have to somehow figure out how to do it all.

The addition of mounts and utilizing mount attacks as openers is useful for getting an advantage at the start of a fight, but won't help you one bit when you're three chained aggro-adds into an ongoing overworld fight that's been dragging on for several minutes because you're either going to kill everything and then be able to get out of the area you were in or you're going to die trying to hobble away under a 30 second stack of Crippled.

By design, overworld mobs in HoT and PoF are fine...in a vaccuum. But when you have to often deal with random numbers of them in cramped environments wherein which sometimes even your positioning and mobility are negated, nevermind how your armor rating and utilities that block single attacks have already been negated by huge multi-hit attacks and spammable knockdowns that feel like they last for days and every single mob seeming to have stacking condition damage on top of its murderously high direct damage.

You don't get to pretend that build diversity exists for roaming and exploring the overworld, and I say that this is not good game design because it effectively punishes people for having builds that didn't sacrifice everything else for as much mobility, DPS and HP as they could get.

I'm not new to this game. I'm not just some bitter newbie that slapped some nonsense build together and keeps dying because I refuse to dodge, use my toolbox and match my gear to what I'm building for. I'm someone that's been playing this content ever since it was here to be played, and I'm not impressed by it.

The devs have really painted themselves into a corner on this one too, because in order to get to where I think the overworld combat should be, they'd have to rethink and retool pretty much everything about what utilities are available to all the classes to what interrupts/counters are available to all the classes, how toughness works period and so on.

I'm complaining because there's pretty much nothing else I can do about any of it, and I know they're never going to overhaul anything to feature overworld/general PVE fights that reward anything but tricked out mobility, DPS and HP. Toughness is pointless, invalidated by their own design. Its fine to put into a healer or support build running Minstrels or something because it still technically helps a take the edge off of damage, but its not worth building for and you really just don't understand this game if you are trying to build a tanky character with Toughness in it. Anything else is better than Toughness. Even more Heal rating on a non-healer is more useful than Toughness if you have any amount of sustain endemic to your build.

So, if you want to play a solo roamer that doesn't suck, there are some classes you should just avoid altogether because they either don't have the right amount of self-supplied mobility, DPS and HP availability you'll enjoy or they come by it in sub-optimal fashions that are just objectively inferior compared to other classes. This won't make the mobs less tedious to deal with, but you'll be dead on the ground doing 0 DPS a lot less often, and that's always nice.

Running around in a zerg is how all the pro kids get things done effectively and quickly though, and do I really need to somehow prove that? I think even the people not paying attention in the back know that. It's painfully obvious that zerging up and facerolling all the annoying trash mobs is how smart people deal with most of this, because you can get so much more done so much more quickly, and you didn't have to work super hard every single step of the way to do it like you would while trying to solo around on sometimes even builds spec'd out for ideal mobility/DPS/HP.

Game design that rewards you for skipping content and trivializing it through zerg tactics isn't good or engaging design.

May I invite you to take a long and serious look at Dragonfall and Auric Basin farming? Why does all of that happen in zergs, I wonder? Why ever could it possibly be that nobody in their right mind tries to run around solo in those areas doing events?

Because the game's fundamental design punishes you severely for soloing. You won't get much done. Even with an ideal build, you still have to bring the skill level to utilize it properly, and I'd speculate that probably less than 5% of the overall playerbase have the skill required to comfortably solo around HoT even now after its nerfs on their customary builds and deal with pretty much whatever lands on their heads at any given time.

I can do it, and in my expansive social group, I'm one of the relatively few that can. I've discussed this very thing with guildmates in several of the guilds I'm in, and at every turn, what I find is the same talking points.

HoT is great to farm for meta events, but nobody seems to want to solo their way around doing map exploration or getting HP's. Why would they? The mobs are insane and you're just wasting your time when you could put together a map exploration zerg or HP train zerg and waft through it all with ease.

I'm not at all against content that rewards grouping up, mind you. I'm totally fine with the point being to group up and get things done right and proper; it's an easy game to group in and it's just about effortless to find groups to join for lots of things. Not doing so is an issue no amount of game design could help someone with.

But can we really call it good game design when the HoT and PoF mobs are so widely regarded as obnoxious and annoying that just about nobody seems willing to do much outside of groups when they absolutely have to deal with it? How many people get excited when they think "I have to go to Maguuma to get this stuff done for this collection I want to finish"?

Who gets excited at the prospect of soloing the storyline content from HoT onwards? I know this is purely anecdotal, but in the guilds I'm in, all I hear when this comes up is vaguely traumatized relief that 'I did it once and I'll never have to do it again' and 'I'll never go to HoT areas again unless its to farm AB or TD metas' and 'PoF can die in a fire, I got my mounts and I'm never setting foot in that content ever again unless its on a meta train'.

I'm in one raid guild, one farming/TP guild and one WvW guild, and I hear nothing in any of them about how fun it is to play through HoT and PoF content.

This lines up with my own experiences. I hate having to go solo around HoT and PoF areas because it's tedious and obnoxious, not because I can't do it. Some people can't do it, and they've got either skill or build issues to resolve to correct that.

I can do it just fine, but I can also put sand in my oatmeal and eat it just fine. Doesn't mean I'd enjoy it or would find it to be anything short of obnoxious and really bloody tiresome.

TL;DR - Mob design is tedious and tiresome, which is negated pretty much completely if you zerg up and ignore all the mechanics they wasted so much time on anyway. This is not good design all around, and there's probably no way to fix it without restructuring how the mobs are designed and how combat mechanisms/powers are designed a lot, which is never gonna happen.

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@krz.1327 said:it's always funny seeing people with thousands hours of playtime in full legendary gear, unlocked elites and masteries and whatever coming to these threads to brag how easy HoT is and that they should buff mobs when average player going into HoT after core story has exotic gear, maybe half of elite spec traits unlocked (if he did 100% hero point completion) and no mounts to skip enemies (unless he decided to play the game not like developers intended and got one from PoF first).

I wholeheartedly agree. Little known fact: When we started a few years back, all acounts came with unlocked elite specs and masteries, we also got a headstart with a few hundred gold to acquire the best gear possible at the time.

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"TL;DR - Mob design is tedious and tiresome, which is negated pretty much completely if you zerg up and ignore all the mechanics they wasted so much time on anyway. This is not good design all around, and there's probably no way to fix it without restructuring how the mobs are designed and how combat mechanisms/powers are designed a lot, which is never gonna happen."

You're welcome to your opinion, but wherever you come away from the subjective and ambiguous and cross over into stating your opinion as fact you've been proven wrong. Tedious and tiresome? Sure, for you. Not for me. But then you say things like this:

"You don't get to pretend that build diversity exists for roaming and exploring the overworld, and I say that this is not good game design because it effectively punishes people for having builds that didn't sacrifice everything else for as much mobility, DPS and HP as they could get."

I don't? Alright. Take a look at meta battle. Do you see my build on there? Do you see any weaver build recommended for open world? You'll see tempest and core there, but not weaver. Why? Is it because build diversity doesn't exist or because people just assume they know everything just because nobody's shown them another way yet? I did my own thing and it worked out great. What more proof do you need?

You want to say my build can't have its cake and eat it, too? Sorry, but I have literally everything you say you can't have in one build and it's not even on the meta radar! Vigor? Got it. Endurance regen? Got it. CC? Tons of it! Evades? Covered. High sustain and high DPS? Check. Is there anything else you need to believe that you can take the available toolkit and make something work for you?

Not that it matters. Whatever you come up with you'll just say it's tedious. That's fine. You do you. But don't try to tell me there's no build diversity and you can't do this or that. I'm doing everything you're saying can't be done and showing you video proof of it.

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@"naiasonod.9265" said:huge post

You may have a couple of points here (e.g. that high condition dmg from mobs invalidates Toughness), but overall it's not half as bad as you make it out to be. You have to pick your fights with reason of course. You cannot just run guns blazing right into that forged group in Crystal Oasis containing 2 elites, 4 veterans and half a dozen trash mobs close together and expect not to get your ass handed to you. Such encounters were clearly designed to be taken on by a group of players. But on the same map there are also those event patrols goofing around, that anyone with a reasonable build can take out on his very own rather quickly.

I am not a good player, I'm not able to successfully play a melee glass build in the tougher OW areas of the game (and possibly will never be). But having played now every map including Drizzlewood and the whole story content, I can say that I pretty much had zero of the issues you described. With a build that most people would rate as bad (core Guardian in full Soldier's). I get defeated maybe once during 4 hours of play (mostly due to my own stupidity), so I can only conclude that you excessively exaggerate here.

Running around in a zerg is how all the pro kids get things done effectively and quickly though, and do I really need to somehow prove that? I think even the people not paying attention in the back know that. It's painfully obvious that zerging up and facerolling all the annoying trash mobs is how smart people deal with most of this, because you can get so much more done so much more quickly, and you didn't have to work super hard every single step of the way to do it like you would while trying to solo around on sometimes even builds spec'd out for ideal mobility/DPS/HP.

Pro kids? Smart? Everyone joins a zerg at least once in a while of course to get certain things done, but for me it's definitely not the most fun of activities. It's tiring, it drives your framerate into the ground and it turns the screen into a huge clusterfuck of effects. I much prefer to what you call 'roam around solo' or to do stuff in small groups (2 - 5 people).

May I invite you to take a long and serious look at Dragonfall and Auric Basin farming? Why does all of that happen in zergs, I wonder? Why ever could it possibly be that nobody in their right mind tries to run around solo in those areas doing events?

But I do. All the time. In Dragonfall I even have to, since I go there only when it has the LW4 daily. Then I always have to kill 25 native mobs (most of the time all alone) in one of the three parts. Sure, Burning Forest is a bit of a PITA in this regard (because of enemy monks), but I always get it done and the other two areas are a breeze. And I complete events successfully all the time soloing.

In Auric Basin, while waiting for the meta to start, I often run around gathering or doing small (non-group) events. Mounts make all that very easy.

But can we really call it good game design when the HoT and PoF mobs are so widely regarded as obnoxious and annoying that just about nobody seems willing to do much outside of groups when they absolutely have to deal with it? How many people get excited when they think "I have to go to Maguuma to get this stuff done for this collection I want to finish"?

Me, for instance. It always makes me happy if a HoT map or Heart of Maguuma as a whole has any of the dailies. All you need is a Raptor with canyon jump. If you have unlocked Skyscale as well, it gets completely trivial. The two supplement each other perfectly.

I have to admit though that I never played HoT without mounts. So, I don't know if HoT would still be my favourite area of the game (as it is now) if I went there first without a Raptor.

Who gets excited at the prospect of soloing the storyline content from HoT onwards?

Here I have to agree with you. I will never play the storyline from LW2 up to and including LW4 again. But it's mostly because you get hardly any rewards/loot for all that hassle and because OW is just more fun.

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@naiasonod.9265 said:You just did exactly that, didn't you. Cool. I don't think there's anything further to say. You couldn't have proven my point better if you'd deliberately set out to try.

Seriously. You made my whole argument for me. I rest my case; the defense shot itself in the face.

ehh .. I'm kinda just jumping in here without reading up on the context but, errrr .... does Weaver not exist or something? You can't play PoF elite specs in HoT ... ????That's news to me ...

edit: On a serious note ... just play invulnerable Reaper or unkillable Fire Weaver .. or ... you know ... ANYTHING as long as it's a reasonably composed build.

Trust me when I started out in this game I had no idea how to make a good build - for anything.Ask for help from other players instead of assuming it's the game's fault

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@naiasonod.9265 said:

@naiasonod.9265 said:HoT and PoF mobs have a lot of cheesy powers they can use far too often, and they're all HP sponges.

Don't compare this hackneyed farce to Dark Souls. Dark souls requires good timing and figuring out the choreography of a fight, which only the good fights here in GW2 also feature.

Overworked mobs and dramatic oversaturated Veteran/Elite mobs are just cheese factories that spam overpowered and utterly enormous AOE and Charge and hugely damaging multihits and knockdown and cripple/weakness conditions.

When you look at the design of something, the purpose of that design is often clear based on what the thing in question does.

The purpose of HoT and PoF mobs in terms of their design is clear - they're meant to bypass any and all defenses players have except dodges, blocks and evades, which many classes don't have in abundance and typically don't have in sufficient quantities in any builds that actual players will ever use, because those builds would be utter trash for anything else.

So what's the purpose of this? I phone that the purpose is to feign challenge, and in lieu of being creative, making mobs overpowered damage sponges that can often be counted on to have long and spamable evade/block phases during which time they're essentially invulnerable even if they're also attacking you.

This is the phoned in fake challenge route, and all it does is encourage zerg gameplay for HP's and events, and while there's nothing wrong with zerging up, it's a fairly stupid thing to drive people into doing if you wanted them to do anything else at all ever.

If you're at all concerned about efficiency of time use any time/reward factors, soloing is stupid and you shouldn't bother with it at all. Join an event/bounty train or HP train and get things done quickly and properly, then plink around exploring solo if you like.

HoT and PoF ironically trivialize themselves by making zerg tactics the only tactic worth bothering with if you're actually serious about getting things done. This means that all their pointlessly cheesy mobs get melted in five seconds no matter and they might as well not have bothered giving them ridiculously huge, hard hitting and boringly tedious powers that punish nobody but solo explorers at all.

HoT and PoF mobs are tedious and exasperating. They're not particularly fun and aren't rewarding whatsoever to deal with, and that annoyance factor is the only successful accomplishment achieved by their design.

I can solo low tier fractals more easily than I can sometimes deal with overworld mobs, and the hlarity of why is because fractal fights are structured.

Run around HoT or PoF and you're almost certainly going to have tons of adds wander into your fights, and a considerable number of those adds will be veterans that can frequently kill you in one big crit or spammed multihit roll/channel/shoot you forever powers even if you're kitten around in full Soldier gear.

HoT and PoF completely destroy the use of creative builds and functionally force players into a single playstyle that relies completely on dodging on desperate use of frequently sparing evade/block/distort powers to avoid being utterly annihilated by some tiny little rolling monster that can hit you five times a second for 3k per hit while almost never stopping it's rolling.

You miss one dodge and you're often dead. You miss one block when you're out of stamina and you're often dead. The best defense is often an overwhelming offense, and of you can't kill it before it one shots you, you're going to die a lot, and even if you manage to kill the five things you got the jump on just fine, there'll be a wandering patrol with a stealther and a veteran that will wander in while you're fighting

Fractals are fun because they reward strategy and good gameplay. Dungeons aren't generally fun because they're where the issue of grossly overpowered trash got featured firstly and they reward nothing except killing things asap and figuring out how to skip as much as possible.

Raids reward good gameplay and solid group synergy.

Overworld exploration is just as PITA that rewards asolo explorer with nonstop annoyance and the promise that every fight will be obnoxious and all you'll want to do while you're picking your way through the kitten you can't avoid fighting is never have to fight this stuff ever again, because it's pointless and annoying.

It isn't hard in any sense other than to put up with, and when your 'challenge' is a tolerance check for blinding tedium, you failed at coming up with a challenge worthy of the name.

So zerg up if you want to get things done quickly and efficiently. I promise you, of you had fun the first few times you had to deal with obnoxious mobs, in six years, you'll be so sick of having to deal with them that you'll be putting groups together for everything because there's just no salient point in soloing unless you're a masochist or perhaps not the sharpest spoon in the knife drawer.

I think it's pretty fun to utilize positioning and timing along with dodging and all of my skills to counter enemies that could otherwise be a real threat to me (and usually were, earlier in my GW2 career!).

That just looks cool, doesn't it? Check the part at about 0:44 where I backpedal toward the two pursuing bladedancers and then polaric leap back to the shadowleaper leaving them attacking nothing but air with their stun-and-kill maneuver! Cmon, that was pretty slick, right?

This just doesn't look like the same game you're describing. But I suppose that's a matter of perspective.

Did you seriously just try to counter my point that everything is funneled into dodging...by posting a video of you using mount attacks (didn't exist in HoT), on Weaver (didn't exist in HoT) and dodging a lot while lacing in some mobility attacks (which not all classes have in low CD abundance, now or back in HoT)?

You just did exactly that, didn't you. Cool. I don't think there's anything further to say. You couldn't have proven my point better if you'd deliberately set out to try.

Seriously. You made my whole argument for me. I rest my case; the defense shot itself in the face.

I'm sorry. What does this have to do with anything?

Also, please explain your definition of a proper challenge? If not dodging, positioning, timing, etc. then what? You're complaining a lot, but it isn't clear what you think would be better. To me it just sounds like you want everything easier because you don't know what you're doing. Maybe if you did know what you were doing, you'd enjoy the combat more? I sure do!

And LoL@ complaining about weaver's high mobility. FYI sword weaver is hands down the least mobile build you can play! Learn. It helps.

Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't write an entire treatise about game design when I criticized comparing the hackneyed nonsense on here to Dark Souls. It seems that you want an entire library of self-written references to opinions contrary to your own, so you know what ? Here you go. Don't say you didn't ask for it.

Improved combat design on here would feature more counterplay options. As it is, there is a high expectation that players might/could/should be using interrupt attacks, yet a great many weapon sets and ideal class builds do not feature interrupt abilities. In order to have a good number of interrupts usable with the common frequency necessary in chained fights that are standard to basic overworld exploration, there should be interrupts available to all classes built into weapon sets that aren't niche.

As it currently stands, you typically have to make the choice between doing 100% of your DPS but having little to no interrupt capability, or severely less DPS while having one or two interrupts you can utilize, whether from utility skills or weapon sets and usually combined. As it stands, many builds on many classes do not work well when you're trying to work interrupts into an attack rotation.

There is nothing inherently wrong about making players make hard choices when it comes to builds, but you have to tune your fights and encounters with the understanding that you, by design, are preventing players from being able to do everything well.

You cannot build for DPS and Survivability and Vigor/Endurance and Mobility and Interrupts all at the same time. Not on pretty much anything. You cannot do this, and if you try to do this, you will be terrible at all of it and will fail because you weren't good enough in any one of those categories in order to function properly anyway.

Right now, to properly deal with overworld mobs in HoT and PoF zones, you need to be able to dodge/block/evade to supplement your dodging, because toughness/armor rating have been completely invalidated by mob design that features huge damage, huge aoe's and things you can't expect to always be able to avoid no matter how good you are, or think you are. You WILL be getting hit. You can only dodge so many times, but layered and spammed AOE's and ground patches and dots will outlast your endurance, will ignore your toughness/armor by design in the case of conditions and so there you sit, with it being an absolute requirement to build for dodging and mobility as much as you can by default.

What will you neglect in order to do this? Damage? Survivability? On some builds of some classes, you don't have to neglect either of these. This is not true on all classes and definitely isn't true for all builds of all classes. To an extent, that's fine; not all builds should somehow work equally well in all situations, or there wouldn't actually be point or functional purpose to there being different builds in the first place.

As it presently stands, there is no point to different builds in overworld content because if you have low HP, you're going to be dead a lot. Unavoidable damage is a significant reality even if you build for dodging, mobility and as much evasion as you can figure out, but you're still going to be getting hit, and you do 0 DPS when you're dead on the ground.

So, you need to be able to take at least one or two hits for those times when you're out of endurance and all your defensive/mobility skills are on CD but you're still getting fumigated and machine-gun shot by half of everything that's aggro'd into your ongoing fight. HoT and PoF maps have extremely high mob densities, lots of roaming mobs and pack patrols of things that will just keep aggroing into your business a fair amount of the time, and if you can't deal with that, you'll be dead on the ground dealing 0 DPS.

Because you cannot do anything about mob densities, wandering patrols and the fact that you will be taking damage no matter how good you are at dodging and staying mobile, you need to kill things before they kill you. So you can't neglect DPS either. You just absolutely cannot do that.

So, on the list of things mob design have dictated that we cannot neglec, we have mobility and DPS. You cannot neglect those. You neglect either of those and you're going to be dead on the ground doing 0 DPS no matter how clever you thought you were with whatever your build was.

But then you need survivability as well. You need HP in order to take that damage you will not avoid all of no matter how good you are. Ignore Toughness in this consideration; it has been completely invalidated as a stat by both high use of Condi damage from many mobs as well as huge amounts of high spike/crit damage from many of them, and Toughness doesn't help you avoid all the knockdown/knockback you will suffer from seemingly most mobs.

High Vitality will give you HP, will is the padding you need to survive stacks of Condi damage and what might keep you alive through a hit or four while you're knocked down or chain KD'd by various charging/tripping mobs. Again, mobility can help you here, but only if you avoid the knockdown attack in the first place, which will not always be possible. Ergo, you need to be able to take some hits sometimes.

Do you need high vitality? Not if you can get lots of damage shield, but rather few classes even have options for that, and since you absolutely cannot build for Healing stat without neglecting something you absolutely cannot neglect, most damage shield offerings will not be as useful as more HP.

So, we have three things you absolutely, positively, 100% of the time must include in your build for dealing effectively with overworld mobs in HoT and PoF, or you're going to be dead on the ground doing 0 DPS way more often than you're going to enjoy.

You need mobility. You need DPS. You need HP.

And that's a wrap. You can't neglect any of those, because overworld fights aren't structured and you have to be ready to deal with the unexpected patrols and respawns and unanticipated extra garbage that will be putting additional pressure on you at random intensities and at random times.

By comparison, raids and fractals are phone-it-in easy because those fights and situations are all structured and never change. You have no unexpected event mobs suddenly showing up and ganging up on you in those. You have no wandering patrols charging in from what sometimes feels like half the world away, with half of them standing 1200 units back and shooting you while you're trying to figure out for a second or two what the heck is killing you this time.

So you can't neglect any of those things because there is nobody else to rely on if you're solo exploring and you do indeed have to somehow figure out how to do it all.

The addition of mounts and utilizing mount attacks as openers is useful for getting an advantage at the start of a fight, but won't help you one bit when you're three chained aggro-adds into an ongoing overworld fight that's been dragging on for several minutes because you're either going to kill everything and then be able to get out of the area you were in or you're going to die trying to hobble away under a 30 second stack of Crippled.

By design, overworld mobs in HoT and PoF are fine...in a vaccuum. But when you have to often deal with random numbers of them in cramped environments wherein which sometimes even your positioning and mobility are negated, nevermind how your armor rating and utilities that block single attacks have already been negated by huge multi-hit attacks and spammable knockdowns that feel like they last for days and every single mob seeming to have stacking condition damage on top of its murderously high direct damage.

You don't get to pretend that build diversity exists for roaming and exploring the overworld, and I say that this is not good game design because it effectively punishes people for having builds that didn't sacrifice everything else for as much mobility, DPS and HP as they could get.

I'm not new to this game. I'm not just some bitter newbie that slapped some nonsense build together and keeps dying because I refuse to dodge, use my toolbox and match my gear to what I'm building for. I'm someone that's been playing this content ever since it was here to be played, and I'm not impressed by it.

The devs have really painted themselves into a corner on this one too, because in order to get to where I think the overworld combat should be, they'd have to rethink and retool pretty much everything about what utilities are available to all the classes to what interrupts/counters are available to all the classes, how toughness works period and so on.

I'm complaining because there's pretty much nothing else I can do about any of it, and I know they're never going to overhaul anything to feature overworld/general PVE fights that reward anything but tricked out mobility, DPS and HP. Toughness is pointless, invalidated by their own design. Its fine to put into a healer or support build running Minstrels or something because it still technically helps a take the edge off of damage, but its not worth building for and you really just don't understand this game if you are trying to build a tanky character with Toughness in it. Anything else is better than Toughness. Even more Heal rating on a non-healer is more useful than Toughness if you have any amount of sustain endemic to your build.

So, if you want to play a solo roamer that doesn't suck, there are some classes you should just avoid altogether because they either don't have the right amount of self-supplied mobility, DPS and HP availability you'll enjoy or they come by it in sub-optimal fashions that are just objectively inferior compared to other classes. This won't make the mobs less tedious to deal with, but you'll be dead on the ground doing 0 DPS a lot less often, and that's always nice.

Running around in a zerg is how all the pro kids get things done effectively and quickly though, and do I really need to somehow prove that? I think even the people not paying attention in the back know that. It's painfully obvious that zerging up and facerolling all the annoying trash mobs is how smart people deal with most of this, because you can get so much more done so much more quickly, and you didn't have to work super hard every single step of the way to do it like you would while trying to solo around on sometimes even builds spec'd out for ideal mobility/DPS/HP.

Game design that rewards you for skipping content and trivializing it through zerg tactics isn't good or engaging design.

May I invite you to take a long and serious look at Dragonfall and Auric Basin farming? Why does all of that happen in zergs, I wonder? Why ever could it possibly be that nobody in their right mind tries to run around solo in those areas doing events?

Because the game's fundamental design punishes you severely for soloing. You won't get much done. Even with an ideal build, you still have to bring the skill level to utilize it properly, and I'd speculate that probably less than 5% of the overall playerbase have the skill required to comfortably solo around HoT even now after its nerfs on their customary builds and deal with pretty much whatever lands on their heads at any given time.

I can do it, and in my expansive social group, I'm one of the relatively few that can. I've discussed this very thing with guildmates in several of the guilds I'm in, and at every turn, what I find is the same talking points.

HoT is great to farm for meta events, but nobody seems to want to solo their way around doing map exploration or getting HP's. Why would they? The mobs are insane and you're just wasting your time when you could put together a map exploration zerg or HP train zerg and waft through it all with ease.

I'm not at all against content that rewards grouping up, mind you. I'm totally fine with the point being to group up and get things done right and proper; it's an easy game to group in and it's just about effortless to find groups to join for lots of things. Not doing so is an issue no amount of game design could help someone with.

But can we really call it good game design when the HoT and PoF mobs are so widely regarded as obnoxious and annoying that just about nobody seems willing to do much outside of groups when they absolutely have to deal with it? How many people get excited when they think "I have to go to Maguuma to get this stuff done for this collection I want to finish"?

Who gets excited at the prospect of soloing the storyline content from HoT onwards? I know this is purely anecdotal, but in the guilds I'm in, all I hear when this comes up is vaguely traumatized relief that 'I did it once and I'll never have to do it again' and 'I'll never go to HoT areas again unless its to farm AB or TD metas' and 'PoF can die in a fire, I got my mounts and I'm never setting foot in that content ever again unless its on a meta train'.

I'm in one raid guild, one farming/TP guild and one WvW guild, and I hear nothing in any of them about how fun it is to play through HoT and PoF content.

This lines up with my own experiences. I hate having to go solo around HoT and PoF areas because it's tedious and obnoxious, not because I can't do it. Some people can't do it, and they've got either skill or build issues to resolve to correct that.

I can do it just fine, but I can also put sand in my oatmeal and eat it just fine. Doesn't mean I'd enjoy it or would find it to be anything short of obnoxious and really bloody tiresome.

TL;DR - Mob design is tedious and tiresome, which is negated pretty much completely if you zerg up and ignore all the mechanics they wasted so much time on anyway. This is not good design all around, and there's probably no way to fix it without restructuring how the mobs are designed and how combat mechanisms/powers are designed a lot, which is never gonna happen.

Instead of talking in nebulous generalities, how about just stating directly which specializations you think have problems in open world? Make a list.

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Does it? Let's see, after HOT launched NCSoft told us that gem store sales are STABLE, meaning the drop in revenue after HOT wasn't due to the lack of sales on the gem store. According to people like you lots of casuals left the game when HOT launched. If the income from the gem store (from the active players) is confirmed stable after the launch of HOT then the two arguments don't add up. If casuals were paying the bills AND they left the game, then gem store sales would go way down, but they didn't.

This means that either casuals don't pay the bills, or that casuals didn't leave the game when HOT launched. An interesting dilemma.

they had around 3 mio sales at launch, without casuals they would had been at 500k-1 mio2 mio x 50 $...do the math. without casuals , this game wouldnt even EXIST

Strange that casuals has mostly beaten hot core difficulty was its harder to actually lose. But biggest point this is an mmorpg you are meant to play with others. The reason many left wasnt due to difficulty was due to f2p. Alot of ppl left also for how easy game was and it wasnt really. I was casual once thought hot was hard then learned from my mistakes and now hot is easy. But you dont want to improve you want a game wich could be mistake for an afk game. You dont raid or do fractals so you dont need meta gear like zerker or force sigils. You can easly pick cheapest rune like eagle or lyssa and use soldier stats and win. You have a dodge but you dont use it. You got heal but same. Most enemies in hot has skills unlike core. Most of them have obvius animations and tells. Dark souls is harder for it got artificial difficulty and invasions, gw 2 is hard for core game taught you nothing about how to play. So new to the jungle is you have to realise same strats as core wont work unless in a large train wich is up often

yep, hot is practically A DIFFERENT GAME. and that is a BAD thing , if you actually LIKED core.so, its the expansion for players, WHO DIDNT LIKE THE GAME IN THE FIRST PLACE.casuals have fun, until the game practically KICKS them outand the hardcores have to slug through core, to get to the game THEY wantand no, i cant do it. i can raid in other mmos though.

Thats wierd as hot maps are the most active ones and you arent forced to go to hot. You think the hardcores play open world sorry they dont hot is only hard if you ignore every bit of gameplay and mindlessly. Core issue is they could removed every skill but auto and no one would cared for it would been skills they hardly used. But you didnt come here to listen to ppl whose opinion differs from yours. You think you need a raid build group of hard core for hps. You dont at most you need 2 ppl its a mmo not a single player adventure where everything is balanced for soloing. Gw 2 core lost players as nothing felt engaging like how you kill zhaitan by pressign f and 1 it was harder to fail than win. If you want to se real hardcore content go try raids or strikes or t4 fractals. They changed little difficulty wise except the enemies arent walking punching bags anymore

if hot maps indeed were the most "active" ones, then the expansion would had been a huge success, the game would had gained more players,and the layoff prolly wouldnt had happened. and they wouldnt had made pof closer to core either. try again.

By that logic then PoF, which was created for casuals, was a failure as well.

pof isnt for casuals either, it is only a little MORE casual, than hot was, thats iti definately spent more time in pof, and i also liked it more, but it is way too hard to be casuali couldnt even get all classes though the first fight. NOT casual, but very annoying

So what exactly is casual to you?

the newbie zones are SUPER casual, as they should be. most of the OW content has a good learning curve until orr.and while orr may be "realistic", it is a huge letdown from the rest of tyria. OW orr is pretty casual now too, but it is still not a place iwant to hang out, like i did in many of the core zones. i just rush through to get it done. IF i even pony up the mojo to play it, that is.story gets hardcore from lvl 10 IMO. some pretty insane difficulty spikes in there

What I meant was define casual.

its a combination of difficulty and pacing. it gives some leeway for mistakes, it doesnt drive the player forwards like a rolling barrage,and it certainly doesnt fill the screen with enemies and explosions. casual content makes the player feel like a badass, without actually being onethe newbie zones are the epitome of that, it gives the PLAYER total control. unlike the later zones, where im thrown around like a cheap rag doll.

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@maddoctor.2738 said:

@"battledrone.8315" said:it is called common sense, do you think the mobile market would swallow the whole industry if the majority wasnt casual?do you think wow would had turned out this way? look at the number of nerfs they even have made to THIS game too, would they really had done that, if the

Common sense tells you:

they had around 3 mio sales at launch, without casuals they would had been at 500k-1 mio2 mio x 50 $...do the math. without casuals , this game wouldnt even EXIST

That's some very specific "common sense", I want to know where you found this specific common sense, because anyone can pull imaginary numbers out of their mind.

majority was hardcore players? what do you have to back up YOUR claims?You said:as for gem sales, it only proves, that all the big whales are in the harcore crowdSo... hardcore players pay the bills and keep the game active? I back up my claim using your own claims.

I didn't make ANY claims, I provided evidence and I will provide it again, NCSoft told us specifically that gem sales were stable during HOT. So I'm gonna repeat this, if casuals were paying the bills and at the same time they left the game due to HOT, then the gem store revenue would go down, but that did not happen. Now use some actual common sense and do the math.

Either casual players aren't paying the bills or casual players didn't leave after HOT, math, logic, evidence, sources and common sense tell us this, you can ignore it all you want but these two arguments cannot possibly work together. Take your pick.

if they had launched without casuals, they would have had roughly 100 mio less in box salesyes, the hardcores are paying after hot, but without those first 100 mio, this game would had been screwedor at least, in a MUCH worse state, than it is now. and it came back to bite them, no ads can beat the word of mouthif hot had been successful, you would had seen MANY more instances with players in maguma."hot maps are always active" ...sure, but not active ENOUGH for a big title. hot could had worked fine as a hardcore instance,something like a raid. but NOT as an expansion for a normal mmo.

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@battledrone.8315 said:

@battledrone.8315 said:it is called common sense, do you think the mobile market would swallow the whole industry if the majority wasnt casual?do you think wow would had turned out this way? look at the number of nerfs they even have made to THIS game too, would they really had done that, if the

Common sense tells you:

they had around 3 mio sales at launch, without casuals they would had been at 500k-1 mio2 mio x 50 $...do the math. without casuals , this game wouldnt even EXIST

That's some very specific "common sense", I want to know where you found this specific common sense, because anyone can pull imaginary numbers out of their mind.

majority was hardcore players? what do you have to back up YOUR claims?You said:as for gem sales, it only proves, that all the big whales are in the harcore crowdSo... hardcore players pay the bills and keep the game active? I back up my claim using your own claims.

I didn't make ANY claims, I provided evidence and I will provide it again, NCSoft told us specifically that gem sales were stable during HOT. So I'm gonna repeat this, if casuals were paying the bills and at the same time they left the game due to HOT, then the gem store revenue would go down, but that did not happen. Now use some actual common sense and do the math.

Either casual players aren't paying the bills or casual players didn't leave after HOT, math, logic, evidence, sources and common sense tell us this, you can ignore it all you want but these two arguments cannot possibly work together. Take your pick.

if they had launched without casuals, they would have had roughly 100 mio less in box salesyes, the hardcores are paying after hot, but without those first 100 mio, this game would had been screwedor at least, in a MUCH worse state, than it is now. and it came back to bite them, no ads can beat the word of mouthif hot had been successful, you would had seen MANY more instances with players in maguma."hot maps are always active" ...sure, but not active ENOUGH for a big title. hot could had worked fine as a hardcore instance,something like a raid. but NOT as an expansion for a normal mmo.

Core should have been a mini-game. There's too much of it and it's all flat and boring. It's no wonder this game failed so hard out the gate. If only they had released HoT as the original game. Now that would have been something!

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@AliamRationem.5172 said:Core should have been a mini-game. There's too much of it and it's all flat and boring. It's no wonder this game failed so hard out the gate. If only they had released HoT as the original game. Now that would have been something!

It'd just be the same story. The core game was originally at a difficulty similar to HoT, but was severely nerfed during the first beta for obvious reasons. If they hadn't done that, they would have simply ended up here more quickly. If HoT was first however, it would have at least shut down the WoW crowd that constantly attacked the game back then (for not having raids), though most wouldn't have stuck around any longer due to the lack of a treadmill.

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@Healix.5819 said:It'd just be the same story. The core game was originally at a difficulty similar to HoT, but was severely nerfed during the first beta for obvious reasons.

The core game never had any kind of difficulty. Mobs in core are giant HP sponges that rarely attack the player to keep them awake. The only thing they nerfed was the story, as some story mobs had inflated health pools and dealt high damage, so players that had no idea how to avoid those slow attacks got killed and complained.

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