Leger.3724

That MMOs are designed around DPS checks and there's no changing that until you fundamentally change combat in MMOs. Of course that's not the only problem in MMOs but it's a big one.

Yes, 4 skill games have "rotations" and combos. But players quickly move beyond that because it's not hard to remember 4 abilities and the handful of ways you can use them. The games become more about positioning, decision making and coordinating with others. That's why 150 million people play League of Legends each month and 150 play GW2 sPvP. Nobody wants an unintuitive game where you have to practice for hours and hours and hours so you're not absolutely trash on a DPS meter or boon meter. You and others can keep deluding yourself that there's some inherent skill to putting in countless hours learning dozens of different 15-25 step rotations and that is what makes a player skilled... but then there's reality. The reality that none of you matter in a game like League of Legends, none of you matter in the raids scene in World of Warcraft. If you were as good as you think, why couldn't you succeed in these games? Why is your only success in Guild Wars 2? Soccer could add all sorts of stupid rules. You must hop on one foot without the ball, you must tie a hand behind your back. You need to clap 5 times before you take a shot. But they keep it simple. They keep it accessible. And despite being simple, soccer is extremely competitive and I'm nowhere near the level of Messi. Arena Net needs to ask themselves - should we continue to cater to this extremely small group of self-deluding gamers or should we try to make a sustainable game and game modes?

I've stayed on Tarnished Coast since launch. Guild Wars 2 end game and pvp content is trash so I'm not about to pay money to go from one trash can to another. I'm sure I'll get "then why play it", because I like playing with friends and people I know above anything else when I play video games.

Look at an optimal rotation on snow crow. If you want your problem that's it, right there. Nothing is as consequential as maintaining a decent rotation of your abilities. Does anyone deep down honestly believe that's a good game design? That the game is better served with a player remembering a 20 step rotation than making active decisions? The answer to why this game's end game content and pvp has not and will never succeed comes down to this. There is literally nothing rewarding or engaging for a player. Nothing. You memorized the rotation or you did not. It's that simple. The only reason people do these game modes is for gear or because they want to feel like somebody and they failed to be a somebody in the games with bigger communities like pvp mobas or World of Warcraft raids. The combat design in this game was so fundamentally flawed from day 1 and then their first expansion they quadrupled down on every bad decision from launch. The state of the game right now should surprise no one. The only thing people care about is open world pve where combat matters the least. Until this basic reality is addressed (with a Guild Wars 3) expect to be making another post like this in the future.

It's cute people who main this game for their competitive content think there are tradeoffs. That wrongly held belief is probably why they're maining this game and not League of Legends or DOTA 2 or Counterstrike or Valorant or Fornite or any other game with an actual sizeable playerbase that makes the game modes competitive. It's why in MMO terms they're not in World of Warcraft or New World or Final Fantasy 14 either. I desperately hope Guild Wars 3 is coming and they consider reviving the monk profession and taking a long hard look at how little tradeoff there is in this game when you spec into certain things (guardian, thief, mesmer, necro in particular in pvp modes).

I think most of us are aware that it's causing "skill lag" for everyone so it's not something one group can inflict solely on another. But it's like chess, white has an advantage once you reach a high level of play. You go first, you have an advantage. In GW2 if you know what you are about to do you get your stuff out first, trigger the queue. Thankfully I haven't had to make hard choices about avoiding playing with groups on my alliance, nobody seems to be using it from who I have played with but a couple of nights so far in this beta I've seen opposing zerg rosters stacked with a couple specific professions and any time we engaged them we got our skills buffering and not registering. And really the way the engine works just highlights another reason for the need to move on with a new, fresh Guild Wars to make the trilogy.

No but it's obvious alliances aren't about to lead to any revitalization if this test is any indication. There is primetime NA and then there's "does your server have 5-6x the players in off hour? Congrats, have fun. No? You can't fight anyone 1v1, you can't take a camp without 2-3 people coming to contest you, your only option is going onto EBG and hoping you have enough people to organize so you can sneak SMC or retake some objectives on your third of the map". They should consider having hours and shutting off WvW. Something like 5pm-3am EST. Outside of that, no WvW on NA. You can be a mercenary for EU. Same for EU. Set up a third region where the same is true. And then start balancing regions. If you're a mercenary you don't get a choice of servers. You get filled into one based on need.

It's great and no one will be punished. They just accidentally decided to stack their roster with it. Clearly not intentional.

Yes, do you know what garbage time damage is?

There aren't any easy answers here. I would tend to lean towards this beta being yet another useless to bad experiment. 1) Opened with WvW Rush immediately before it into the actual beta itself. Hopefully the last week of WvW didn't factor into the beta at all when assigning those who didn't pick active wvw guilds 2) Call of War is on which is great if you're trying to farm Gifts of Battle and you main pve. But it doesn't give us an accurate idea of who will be sticking around. I'm not here to blame pvers. But the reality is putting in place call of war messes with player counts and puts more dedicated players into queues. 3) "Play with your friends and guild" is a counterproductive concept when the pvp player pop whether we're talking wvw or spvp is miniscule. Especially when there's no adjustment for size, you just get more magic find if you're outnumbered 3 to 1. All you have to do is look at New World to watch how monopolizing the winning of wars has cratered the pvp population. If they go ahead with implementing these beta alliances into the game permanently you'll have people who decide queueing isn't worth their time. The best guilds will have already consolidated and will bully the other servers. The game dies out. That's what happened with New World. Funnily enough you can look at New World and exploits as well. The past couple of weeks I'm sure anyone participating in a zerg has noticed skill buffering in some of the fights they engaged in. It reminds me of the early ice gauntlet days in New World. It's an interesting window into how the New World game engine is different from the Guild Wars 2 one. Ban exploiters Arena Net. Please. When a guild comps to take advantage and exploit a server/engine limitation and then you see them again and again it gets old fast. We shouldn't have to play the game assuming a certain Guild tag will be exploiting tonight and so we need to use our abilities fast and early and hope they have more people buffering skills than we do.

Lets start with removing SEA IPs from NA WvW so we don't have to worry about balancing the offhours and those timezones completely screwing up the server rankings for the only time zone that should matter - NA primetime. If you want something less offensive - I want them to make Guild Wars 3. Ignore any feedback you got from the end game pve community. Those modes are basically dead outside of T1-T2 fractals where the combat mechanics frankly don't matter much. These end game pvers have no idea how to attract people to a game or game mode... they're just happy being "the guy" and lording it over everyone else. And those are the last types of people you want to be taking advice from. You see all the complaints about Boonball and it highlights the problem the same way end game pvers unintentionally highlight the problem. Combat is bad. Really bad. From the decision to remove monks in the design phase, the size of the skillbar in design phase, to the massive expansion of the skillbar from 2012 to 2014 and continued expansions with PoF and EoD. Boons, reflects, the ranged some specializations get. It's all bad. So the meta is now - memorize your rotation, sit in a giant ball of people or a ball of 10 if we're talking strikes/raids with some minor variation like maybe stack as 5 for certain raid phases/mechanics. Positioning doesn't matter aside from being stacked as close together as possible. Even when we talk solo roamers - things like thieves and mesmers have multiple abilities to escape from their own poor positioning choices. This game's combat doesn't reward skill as much as people want to believe that. This game is much more like attending lectures, memorizing the content for the exam. And if that's how your game is being described it's probably time to look at it and ask yourself: where is the fun? Where is the player decision making that impacts the outcome? The developers need to take a hard look at what makes the pvp games successful, what makes end game pve in other games successful. Players like decision making, intuitive combat design, rotations that don't take time to memorize but rather take time to practice mastering. And they'll find the common themes. Positioning matters. When you use your abilities matter outside of a set rotation you're trying to maintain 100% uptime of. And then of course there are benefits to a new engine, how many players you can have on a map, more technical things than fixing this awful combat system.

The core game almost everything is soloable and then mastery points are generally behind popular content (world bosses, fractals, etc...) The problem here is on Amnytas a lot of mastery points explicitly or implicitly require multiple people to tackle it. I can understand where they're coming from - locking this kind of content behind groups is kind of lame. Like getting 4 more people for Lyhr event. But on the other hand if you advertise in LFG or in map chat and you do a bit of research I don't think they're too bad to complete.

I don't understand. How? The 2,620 skirmish tickets is the cost of a set of Mistforged Triumphant. But to be able to purchase Mistforged Triumphant you have to buy the corresponding Triumphant set for skirmish tickets. Preview from the Skirmish Supervisor/Skirmish merchant is my recommendation. The Triumphant sets are identical from Ascended to Legendary. The Mistforged Triumphant sets are identical from Ascended to Legendary. Triumphant and Mistforged are nearly identical but Mistforged adds a slight glow that moves, pulses around certain pieces of the armor pieces, the chestpiece adds a big particle effect of 6 beams of light when you are wielding weapons. I really do recommend previewing from the vendor and wielding weapons, the top dye channel is the slight blue hue you'll see on the Mistforged version of the armor and it's pretty easy to overshadow much of the effect with a darker color. You can save up for Mistforged Triumphant legendaries or you can craft the Triumphant and return later to purchase the ascended Mistforged Triumphant and transmute. Again - there is no visual upgrade from the precursor armor pieces for sale from the vendor and the legendary you will be crafting. The Triumphant set you see at the Skirmish supervisor will look exactly the same when crafting to legendary. The Mistforged Triumphant will look exactly the same when crafting to legendary.

The OP can craft Triumphant legendary armor and transmog once they have purchased the ascended version of Mistforged Triumphant. The only difference will be when they look at the armor or ping it in chat... it will say "Transmog" and next line will say "Triumphant Hero's Breastplate" for the heavy chest as an example. That's it. That's the difference. Otherwise Triumphant exotic/ascended/legendary all look the same. Mistforged Triumphant and Sublime Mistforged Triumphant chest piece - look the same regardless of ascended or legendary. So it's up to the OP and anyone interested. Do you care if when you look at your armor pieces or ping them in chat they will say "Transmuted - Triumphant"? Most won't but I'm sure a small section might and will hold out for a full set of Mistforged ascended precursors. Like here is heavy gloves - Mistforged Triumphant ascended on the left, Mistforged Triumphant legendary on the right: https://i.imgur.com/vSguwQq.png And then if you were to transmute the skin you want on it, there's the text letting you know the base legendary: https://i.imgur.com/gQv1gnP.png Except in the OP's case it would say "Triumphant Hero's Gauntlets" in white down below and the purple name up above would be "Mistforged Triumphant" since that is the skin the OP would equip.

The graphics look good to me. Reminds me of Hogwarts Legacy. I think Guild Wars 2 has stood for a long time with its painterly artistic style. But it launched in 2012. I don't think it's some big loss to admit a game developed for a decade that launched in 2023 has better graphics. I would hope 11 years of advances in game engines, hardware has netted some benefit. Having more detail, being able to plug in seasons, rain, sun, clouds. From the looks of that review of Throne and Liberty they have two significant problems beyond being a typical Eastern pay to win MMO: 1) The combat is better but you still feel it's not great. They had a few months to overhaul and it went from really bad to acceptable. The grappling and other stuff is a bit janky and unintuitive. 2) Questing is a bit rough for leveling. They went halfway between traditional MMOs like World of Warcraft and events like Guild Wars 2. And it just makes things unclear and more grindy. I genuinely believe Arena Net should be looking at Guild Wars 3. Huge fanbase. Other MMOs are starting to plug in the "good" parts of Guild Wars 2. Arena Net has a good base in Guild Wars 2's event system and open world in particular but there are flaws, there is bloat and there are opportunities that a new game on a new engine would provide for. No one is saying "abandon GW2 tomorrow" but rather it's time to plan for the future.

While I think it's a cool the floating islands, dream world concept is a bit rough for being an inviting world you want to inhabit and be a part of. I think it sort of hits on the drawback of flying mounts like the skyscale and a world designed based on travelling with them. I think for me in terms of "I want to spend time here": Core Game and End of Dragons are probably the best at it with Path of Fire in third. Core Game is so many zones I'll explain in terms of End of Dragons - the first two maps are filled with allied NPCs everywhere. Seitung has the palace, then a city to top it off but then there are multiple small villages all over the island. Kaineng is one big city. They also have the fishing Leviathan farm. They're places you want to spend time where you'll find other people. I think if they had a bit more event frequency like the core maps they would be amazing. And then Echovald gets a little more sparsely populated like a Path of Fire map. And then you have the massive Dragon's End Meta event. I think that's a good philosophy and it's a similar one they took to the core game. You start with inviting friendly zones like Queensdale and by the end you're in Orr and they're large meta event maps. I wish SOTO was less intense on needing a skyscale and wanting a griffon for fun/speed. I understand it's something people were working towards before SOTO if they didn't have them but I think the maps should always be designed with someone who has no masteries in mind. Auric Basin where you start high and go lower. Kaineng with its staircases.

Celestial is never getting reworked. All you have to do is look at the new player feedback once they hit 80 or boost to 80. You'll see complaints about the game being too hard including Path of Fire. Celestial coming free with the boost is meant to counter this. Is it the ideal, perfect gear? No. But it gives you more stats overall and spreads them out evenly to help that newer player succeed in content or feel more successful. So the options 1) buff all other stats for gear 2) screw over new players and nerf celestial for the benefit of wvw roamers (lol) 3) rework combat and abilities so the difference between a new player and an experienced, knowledgeable player and their DPS isn't 900% more DPS for the experienced player but maybe 25% or 50% more DPS. 4) do nothing And do nothing is by far the easiest and most appealing. 1) and 3) are massive undertakings, 2) appeals to a tiny segment of the playerbase. None are happening.

Thief mains seem to think we're impressed, that they're skilled or that we think they're OP. LMAO. They truly do main Velcro shoes IRL. There is a difference between "this is not fun to play against" and "this is overpowered".

You're trying to explain risk/reward to people who play a class that 99% of the time has no concept of risk and reward because they run away at the first sign they might have to risk anything.

I think longterm MMO is the future, people are social. What comes to mind to me is Minecraft. Not an MMO but the idea of people working together cooperatively and building. You look at League of Legends, Fortnite, Apex Legends, Call of Duty - large pvp games that have some persistence in the form of skins you can buy or earn, that add account levels in that don't impact the fairness of the gameplay but allow you to show off something persistent and permanent outside of the individual game rounds. The biggest games are still multiplayer even if they aren't true MMOs or they don't have the RPG element. And this is what developers need to grapple with. Would anyone here without a World of Warcraft account consider that game? You're going to have to spend large amounts of money and then for the privilege of spending all that money.... you're 15 years behind other people, you're thousands of hours behind people. Same problem with Guild Wars 2 even with 'horizontal' progression. You pay a large amount of money for the privilege of having to grind significant hours to catchup to other people. And then you look back at the games I listed at the start. You play them for the sake of playing them. You play them because you find them fun and engaging. Not because you're going to get 5% extra stats on a gear piece drop, not because you're going to get a mastery point so you can get more loot from Kryptis rifts. You play because it's fun. People are searching for gameplay that's fun and engaging where there isn't a grind put in front of them whether it's something less significant like the GW2 mastery system or whether it's a level and gear progression system like FF14 or WoW. Maybe this is a place AI could be leveraged. I think the open world in Guild Wars 2 is a really good concept. But AI could be leveraged here to create an even more dynamic world with events taking place across it. As hardware improves the worlds can get bigger. NPC AI can help bring it alive - both allied and enemy NPCs. The two core questions for MMOs when a new player is looking at them (outside of "does this have a playerbase"): 1) is it inviting? Do you want to be in the world? 2) Is it approachable in terms of combat and other core systems? You look at your typical MMO and the answers is no to both. I think Guild Wars 2 is a yes on 1 but a no on 2 after 11 years of systems being added, augmented. It is what it is. The MMO genre needs that first daring, successful launch just like how Ultimate Online created a bunch of spinoffs and then World of Warcraft spawned a bunch of spinoffs. We're waiting for that next generation game that can attract an audience and then keep gameplay fun without adding bloat in the form of grinds so that 5 years after launch it's an attractive option for someone who has never played and is considering hopping in.

There are 3 ways to get tickets, the first 2 are significant, the last one is not. 1. Maintain participation by capturing, defending, killing players - that would be the series of chests you see on the second tab of WvW. If you click All Rewards it will show you Wood to Diamond. If you have them all checked off (4 chests each for Wood-Bronze, 5 chests each for Silver-Gold-Platinum, 6 chests each for Mithril-Diamond) that means you have earned the 365 reward skirmish tickets for the week resetting Friday night. 365 total. 2. "Weekly World vs. World" tasks, same tasks every week, you can find them in the World vs World achievements. Capture 5 ruins, capture Stonemist Castle, capture 3 keeps, defend 3 keeps, capture 8 towers, defend 8 towers, capture 15 supply camps, kill 15 dolyaks and kill 50 players. That is 9 total achievements. Each rewards you with 10 tickets. Resets Sunday overnight into Monday. 90 total. That's how you get 455 tickets. Some things are harder than others. Defending 8 towers, spending time in Eternal Battlegrounds to cap Stone Mist Castle. But some are super easy, capping 5 ruins for 10 tickets is easy. 15 camps, 15 dolyaks over a week also easy. 3. If you attack or defend a significant objective you can gain +1 ticket - example, a T3 tower - I got bronze participation, I get +1 Skirmish ticket for taking that objective. Obviously the less significant or upgraded the objective the higher your participation to get the +1 ticket. Gold on a Tier 1 Keep should give you a ticket for example. And 4th option if you have not done it yet - you can do the Warclaw reward track if you purchase it, I believe it gives 200 or 250 skirmish tickets. One time only.

Some people like manual transmission cars. Others prefer automatic. Skyscale is the automatic. You're not getting the same level of performance but you're not putting in anywhere near the same effort.

Stealth is unfun and it was so unfun they had to develop a consumable item purchasable for currency to counter it in a game mode. Look at the approach serious games took (League of Legends - Evelynn, stealth wards since inception of the game) and then look at games like this. I guess they just figured thief mains are bigger whiners so they couldn't actually nerf it to make gameplay somewhat fun. Imagine stealth and teleportation not being completely braindead crutches for people who main velcro shoes IRL.

MMOs are losing players. World of Warcraft is looking around to try and figure out what it can do and right now all it can do is copy. This time they're copying the only currently successful MMO (in terms of bringing in and retaining players) in Oldschool Runescape which has bridged the gap with Leagues and Deadman Mode into an 'esport' of sorts. Whenever people talk about Old School hitting a new player high - it's always at the start of one of these events. Everyone's account starts fresh on a set of temporary servers and they battle it out to see who can get the most points or if it's Deadman (pvp) the last man standing. So I guess the better question is - why should Arena Net continue down the path they know is in longterm trouble? The genre needs innovation. The only one really providing it right now is Jagex and Old School Runescape with their Leagues and Deadman modes. But how long will that last?

Is character progression the new euphemism for grind to make it sound better? I think customizability is a good thing to have as an option but professions are already way too complex, I'm not sure adding more would help attract anyone. Sure, Season of Discovery might be getting great reviews from active players. But how many are logging back on World of Warcraft and playing regularly now because of it? I doubt it's many beyond your typical expansion pack bump and then slow decline.