Kalocin.5982

It was fine for me, actually I spent most of my time testing Bladesworn on the drakes there lol

Not sure what caused it but I was fighting a veteran river drake and I used Dragon Slash though it did no damage to it/missed. Looked like it was a weird elevation issue or something for being slightly up higher? I dunno.

From mostly open world perspective, Gunsaber feels really weak and you're way too vulnerable with Dragon Trigger, in PvE the thing needs some immunity or chance to resist knockdown/interrupts. Likewise, flow takes forever to build unless you use frenzy and flow stabilizer. However, even once you get to dragon trigger it takes so long to build up that you take too much damage (against more than one mob). So far it's more effective to just camp in Axe+Pistol since the auto attack does more damage than most of the saber's skills lol Personally, I think Daring Dragon should be changed to instead of re-entering DT again to simply having it charge 2 times the speed. You get those 5 charges pretty quickly at the cost of being able to do bigger damage. Either that or just increase the speed of DT to begin with. Losing your charges AND flow after getting knocked out DT is incredibly bad, there's no other spec that gets punished so heavily for it. You spend all this time trying to go for this big move and boom, all your time and CDs wasted while others only lose a small percentage of DPS by comparison Overall it feels like it could be a fun spec but it's incredibly unbalanced making it awkward to use. It's supposed to feel rewarding to get the big move off but it's instead kinda just tedious. I'd personally take less damage on DT to make it a bit faster and have more damage on the weapon's skills. There's supposed to be this idea of "flow" between the saber, pistol and dragon trigger but so far it's more like use the Axe+Pistol and then hope you don't die using DT. The delay you get to swap weapons after Dragon Trigger is super janky, and goes against the whole fast weapon swapping idea of the whole build imo.

You don't need power or condi stats if the builds are made to be built without them. I'm not saying put random power or condition into the build stats. My point is remove them entirely and bake the stats into the skills and abilities, alongside the traits that affect those abilities. The other guy is telling me there's other MMOs though so I guess I'm supposed to go back to FFXIV after playing GW for 15 years. Sorry for the thread, didn't mean to upset folks.

My point is that builds and balance can be better defined. Stats are not a fun. It's not even a huge change really. Remove the complicated part that causes balance headaches. Why is power and condition stats fun? That's the question. Can it be replaced with other stats? If so, why power and condition then? Does it matter if you're forced to pick gear sets that require those stats anyways?

I could say it's more fun and you could say it's less fun. I said my opinion was controversial, not that it was definitive. My care is more toward devs being able to properly balance the game. Hey what can I say, I miss ele. It's more fun being able to swap builds while not changing gear if you want to be support or DPS focused. Power and condition doesn't add much other than using a stat that an elite spec gets more dps from. Baking it into the traits means you can focus on picking stats you actually care about. Likewise devs can make stats more definitive. Why, you like power scourge?

Ironically it kind of points to my other thing about the struggle to balance specs and stats across the board. They can't just keep putting out new appealing stats and expecting that to balance the game. That's a ridiculous stat result, no other competitive online game requires you to deal with 38 stat combos.

Honestly I'd like to hope random guys on a forum like me aren't in charge with development. The developers definitely decide. Normally I'd struggle to say homogenization is against fun but in this case I think it'd remove less barrier to entry for low players, while also allowing more build diversity for established players. Right now there's really only a few gear stat sets people go with, we all know em. Maybe it might be the same for secondary stats but I do like to think there'd be less restriction

I'm scared to check my notifications tomorrow but I gotta say it. I think Power and condition should be baked into the traits, it'd allow Anet to balance several specs across the board and would also allow gear sets to be reworked with more focus. Likewise, they could fine tune specs more because there's less fragmentization of gear. Sure you do less healing or less crit but focusing on support or DPS wouldn't be so heavy. Power and condition causes a lot of confusion, and some people have terrible build stats while others don't play what they want because they feel they need a perfect stat set. In my opinion, it makes the game more customizable you can play power or condi, and swap based on build and not gear. As a bonus you get a reason to sell those silly build slots

It's fine if you feel you need to defend the company and it's reasoning but it's just a matter of fact you don't get everything immediately. That does matter, I'm currently dealing with it as a beta player. My friends play FFXIV and GW2 is just a steep hill for then to climb to get into. Even the one friend I have got into playing doesn't want to buy the expansions because they're not even sure if they'll hit 80. Anet isn't unreasonable but they've gotta look at the competition and make a change. There's a reason why all the content creators are making videos about FFXIV and not GW2 right now. It's just a shame they're doing it in spite of WoW

Free in a permanent sense. You've got a lot of people joining fresh right now because they heard about the new expansion, or people coming back and trying to get their friends to join. A lot of those people are only getting half those free unlocks. If someone joins today, should the response be "Too bad, you missed out", I don't think so.

I think my point was less on the cost and more on the result. Regardless of how we feel or how fair the price may be, going through the whole story with purchasing the game is impossible. In sub based MMOs you don't have to back pay the sub fee if you join today, you get the whole story to the current expansion's content. For GW2 you so have to back pay a bit to complete the story. While they don't have to unlock them all at once, you can't tell me it's a good experience going from Personal Story to Heart of Thorns and then directly to Path of Fire. There's just a lot lost and it leads into what you call a poor user experience. UX is pretty huge when it comes to games, especially new ones that are going to bring their friends. Most of us forum folk see the benefits and costs of the game but to an outsider it doesn't sell itself. Why buy all this GW2 stuff to play a whole story, especially when you're being told you can play it like a sub based game anyway. Trying to sell to people on the forums here isn't the target. It's the guy who downloads the game only to find out all his bag/bank slots are locked and they have to buy xyz to (at least for a person unaware) fully enjoy the experience. You're not keeping those people.

For me it's pretty much whatever the artwork is lol

That's looking at things in a smaller scope. You tell someone they've got to spend $100 upfront to play this game and they'll probably look elsewhere, maybe even a new release. It's a reality that the lack of a sub does make the game cheaper in the long run, however, it's also a reality that most people don't want to drop a ton of money upfront. Throw in the bags and bank slot purchases and it's just a huge barrier to entry that most reasonable people wouldn't want to bother with. It creates an anxiety of "what else do I need to buy". Due to the needing content being between expansions to enjoy the story properly, it's not like they can just get those and call it a day

I'm not sure what the solution is but the story is incredibly disjointed and janky for any new players coming in. After doing the personal story they get teleported into the future getting owned by a jungle dragon they had no idea even existed lol. I get profits and stuff but the content is old enough that I'd at least make season 2 free. I'd even go so far as to say make season 3 free as well. Make it so the achievements are locked without purchase or something if the money is still an issue, at least people could go from one expansion to another without it feeling so random. All it does is make new players not care about the story since they can't even understand all of it. Why bother being invested?

They likely don't have dueling in the way of WoW's do it anywhere style to prevent harassment. There's a lot stuff like that, such as not being able to inspect gear of another player. Heck they removed the ability to trade from GW1 lol. They could make a private 1v1 dueling lobby thing that I doubt people would get upset over. If they did that though they'd be unleashing a whole nightmare that's 1v1 game balance lol

Eh, the drops aren't really going to be that great for anyone reading this. They're mostly just incentive to get people to install the game. It'll probably be up in an hour or tomorrow anyway

I think a better thing to ask for in general is to have less loot items that give you more loot items. They literally made a whole unid system to counter this so just remove all the stuff that's only going to give you an unid anyway and drop those instead. Imo they should probably just remove blue/green items in general since they're literally worthless and could be something that actually feels rewarding to get. There's already a ton of currencies in the game so I dunno about if that'd work but I'm sure there's a better idea out there

Everything after weaver will probably feel easier

Make em account based and I won't mind them lol. Joking aside, it'd be cool to see a new system in place instead of hearts

Dang, was hoping for some Ultima online vibes

Just like others have echoed, I think in combination with other things it's another on the list that's having older players lose confidence in the company. Gifts have always been a tradition in GW and GW1 gifts were automated after the game's dev cycle was ended. It's obviously not the case for GW2 with an expansion coming along but us older players don't really feel like investing money into a company/game that might not be around in a couple years. All signs seem to point at EoD being a Hail Mary with how IBS got axed. I dunno man, I probably would have been less salty if the cake had 9 candles. Sounds ridiculous but that lack of care/attention to detail alongside the title duplication shows a real lack of polish Anet used to be known for

Really was expecting at least something kind of cool, pretty much anything that was kind of unique. What bugs me the most is that the cake doesn't even have 9 candles, like c'mon it's low hanging fruit there at least. Anyway, been playing since launch and between Primordus and this I feel pretty shafted. Your oldest vets are the ones who recommend the game on other forums and social media. I'm not going to show off a cake that's missing four candles

Fun random fact, in WoW, the Orc city Orgrimmar has a bridge that connects to two mountain walls with no entrances/exits. Why? It looks cool from the ground I guess. Devs often focus more on efficiency and practicality over realistic design. GW2 actually has a pretty good example of this, at launch a lot of the human stories utilized going in buildings but they were too small for the camera because they were scaled to a realistic size in direct response to other MMOs having oversized buildings. They stopped doing that though because it's incredibly awkward for the camera. There's a reason why most games use large buildings in general

Tons of people play FFXIV for the housing system alone, and it's fantastic for any form of roleplaying. The only thing I personally didn't like is that you lost it after not logging in for a long time. I have a lot of friends who spend most of their time decorating their house. I'm not as active in FFXIV but I really liked my FC house, although I understand Guild Halls kind of feel similar to a degree. I don't think the housing thing would work for GW though due to the way server structures work with it Pvp is pretty subjective but Anet actually focused heavily on GW2 pvp for the first few years of the game. They kept trying to push for esports at the time which didn't work out very well. I imagine it was probably something that got pushed by NCSoft at the time because esports was something every gaming company was trying to be a part of after LoL's success. Toxicity in general stems more from a lack of consequences, lack of bans, and/or lack of community support as opposed to general pvp. There's plenty of pvp centric games out there with great communities. They ended focusing on balancing too hard around audiences iirc and it made people bored of PvP, moving on to other games. Regarding the style of gear, Guild Wars 1 in general was a lot more grounded to reality and was more of a medieval fantasy game compared to the more high almost scifi fantasy we have today. If you look at a lot of older gear you'll see they originally developed sets in mind to be somewhat adhering to what could work in our real world. Eventually though they moved on from that idea, just like trying to make the world literally feel alive by changing zones and what not. There's nothing wrong if people still want that original design choice. We've got dimension-warping dragon's these days though so it's pretty easy to see we moved past realism awhile ago lol Anyway, I'm guessing our fellow here probably wants a proper sequel to Guild Wars 1 as opposed to Guild Wars 2. The games are incredibly different and mostly share the same world building. I understand though, I'm a big fan of the original myself. Imo a better solution would simply be to create a stand-alone single player game with a pvp lobby similar to other console games these days. It's less cannibalistic to Anet's playerbase and could be a decent revenue generator. Doubt it would happen with NCSoft though considering they cancelled the Dune game Anet was making.