Mistwraithe.3106

It's an interesting point. I think Anet should be looking at ways to add spice and variety which are lower effort than making new maps and stories. Not to replace the new maps and stories I love that stuff and want to keep it. No, I mean alongside them as a way of adding more gameplay and interest for veteran players than can realistically be done with just time intensive new maps and stories. That said. I think balance patches can only be part of the solution. Probably only a small part too because of the investment GW2 players need to make to their characters equipment in order to adjust to new builds (LoL doesn't have that so much, other than buying new heroes which has been a thing for ages, newly released LoL heroes are usuall overpowered). I think Anet need other ideas. Rifts were a decent attempt, they added spice to existing zones without (presumably) requiring a huge amount of development effort. But you need twists on things. Maybe like the fractal instabilities, but more involved? A bit like how games like WWZ have daily and weekly challenges with modifiers which make the game harder, but you also get extra rewards for having completed one of these daily/weekly games. TBH I haven't given it much thought and don't have any particular ideas, but I think there is a lot of potential for some extra spice in the game if someone can come up with some great ideas.

Largely agreed, except the story most definition needs spots in it where you go away and either explore maps or explore new gameplay. This has existed since HoT (learn gliding mastery before you can do the next story step, etc) and I'm fine with it because one of the things Anet do best is open world and it is fun exploring new zones. Anet just need to try to make sure these gaps in the story while you do general exploration/gameplay are aren't too jarring.

Useful to know. But will learning T1 players be able to make use of the boost? I guess we will see.

OK. So that would be 14 minutes at full DPS or 28 minutes at half DPS for a T1 only group. I haven't tried the fractal myself but it sounds like there are quite a few mechanics to avoid (particularly for a T1 group who would probably only do the Fractal once every month or two) so the 28 minutes is by far the more likely time. Sounds excessive to me and the T1 groups will likely just skip it. Note that Silent Surf is the same, I don't do it with this group either because it takes way too long to kill the final boss. BTW, it's quite odd that the T4 boss only has 50% more hit points. There is no way that a T1 group can do 2/3rds the DPS of a T4 group, not even close.

I see conflicting numbers being thrown around here. Does anyone know how many HP the final boss actually has in T1? I think your average T1 only group (not a T4 group doing their T1 rec, I mean a group of people who only occasionally do T1 fractals) probably does 20-30k dps total when able to focus on damage (ie not dodging/running all the time). I speak as someone who plays with friends who have probably done 40-50ish total fractals each, mostly T1 and some T2 (I've done T4 myself but not CM). Someone said Eparch had 31 million HP. If that's correct for the T1 version then that average T1 group would take 20 mins at 25k dps to kill him. If they spend half their time dodging and not doing their full DPS then it goes up to 40 minutes.

I am fine with the bosses having this many hitpoints at T3/T4/CM but the T1 and T2 bosses should have less (particularly T1). T1 are for people dipping their toes into Fractals. This includes friends and family that I introduce to them. The rewards are vastly less than the higher tiers so anyone chasing rewards will rapidly move up. I don't see any reason why Anet doesn't reduce the boss HP on Silent Surf and Lonely Tower in T1.

If you land your burst then more glassy builds can work but it's obviously riskier and if the fight goes longer then clearly you are at a disadvantage unless you have a decent amount of defence and sustain built into your build.

Legendary Runes haven't been a couple of hundred gold for a long time... Get a Runecrafter's Salvage Kit and as others have said build up the ingredients over time is probably the best bet.

I actually thought they would loop back to Meteorlogicus and The Bifrost then wrap it up at that, leaving the starter kits only including the weapons used in the SOTO weapon specialisations. So I regard it as a generous outcome that they are obviously going to continue going through the gen 1 Legendary Weapons. Not even going to respond to OPs post which was frankly ludicrous.

I will add my vote of agreement to those who have already posted that silent surf hit points is too high in tier 1 and tier 2.

There isn't an option which applied to me. If there was it would probably be "Sad to be losing the option to play with the various guilds and groups of people I have played with on my world for the last couple of years and apprehensive about what that means for my future enjoyment of WvW".

It’s clear as mud what you want. My best guess is that you want to gain new abilities or power without the new game content (or any content) requiring you to use the new abilities or content? But what is the point in that? You have defined “progression” as meaning gaining unnecessary things. Yeah, if that is your definition then it’s no surprise that Anet aren’t building their expansions to suit you because most people would regard that as pointless.

I use Shift + # for equipment templates and Ctrl + # for build templates. Still two clicks but fairly easy.

But you don’t. Once I learnt gliding it didn’t just make the HoT maps easier to navigate, it was useful on core maps too. Similarly with mounts (arguably too much with sky scale letting people skip the fun parts of exploration). There are other examples where the masteries are purely gate keepers for the new story and content but tbh as others have said, most players want some sense of progression and achievement. Most GW2 players also don’t want vertical gear grind and the mastery system is a good alternative.

The recent parts of this conversation are ridiculous (speaking with many years experience in dev and dev teams, but what I'm saying is fairly common knowledge). There is no 10+ year old ongoing non-trivial software project in the world that doesn't have legacy code. Good software development teams constantly refactor code where it makes sense which helps keep the entropy at bay but it's a virtual certainty that there will be sections of code which no one wants to touch (unless it becomes absolutely necessary) because they are old, big, complex and fragile (things like SAB which started as side projects and remain side projects are likely to be perfect examples). Given Anet have successfully implemented DX11, replaced their embedded browser, continue to release new content and continue to make changes to old content (eg the bug fixes to dungeons earlier this year) the evidence suggests their code base is in good shape compared to most 10+ year code bases. Particularly given their ability to keep it running 24/7 and do seamless updates without downtime (which is very impressive). So yeah, barking up the wrong tree. You don't survive 10+ years with ongoing stable updates if your code base is that bad.

Yeah. They are all clearly totally incompetent. It's really bizarre that they have created such a good game that we, and presumably you (at least at some point), enjoy playing? Inconceivable!

Getting into the walls without knocking them or the gate down is clearly unintended behaviour and you are not meant to be able to do it. I don't see how anyone could dispute that. Whether it's cheating to do so by just using skills in the game (as opposed to external hacks) really depends on your definition of cheating. You could reasonably argue that it isn't cheating because the "rules", ie the gameplay, allow it. It's definitely an exploit though, because you clearly are not meant to be able to do it, and I believe Anet's terms of usage prohibit taking deliberate advantage of exploits. I would very much like Anet to fix some of these issues. It would be a good response to some of the complaints that Anet don't seem to care that much about WvW.

Fair, and I totally respect that 🙂

Plus buy trophy shipments if you have any spare volatile magic. And if you end up with more T5 trophies than T6 then the Mystic Forge formula to upgrade them to T6 is profitable for a few of the most expensive ones (ie blood and totems, the fast farming website has the details). Pact Supply Mapping Materials are also a reasonable way to convert Karma to Gold by buying out 20 or 40 map rewards (https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Map_bonus_reward/profit). Totally agree with Gehenna tho. Even with all of the above the, T6 trophies are definitely the main bottleneck for me on legendaries (I guess Mystic Clovers will be soon too, I'm slowly running out of the ones I accumulated during the first year of play when I wasn't building legendaries).

I think SAB might be more polarising than some of the other festivals. I for one would prefer it remains just once a year because, while it looks like it could be fun, it’s also massive and I don’t have time to learn the game within the game.

I don't. I'll use real money to buy gems to buy QoL improvements like salvagomatics, permanent gathering tools, a lounge, bags, slots, etc. Some of those will then generate gold (eg volatile gathering tools in particular generate decent gold) and I'm fine with that. But paying real money to buy gems to buy gold for my in game goals (eg legendaries) feels like a slippery slope for me personally. I can see doing it to just get the last few resources to finish a legendary after getting most of the way there (tho personally I haven't done that). However, I personally don't want to approach the point of just spending real money to buy a legendary outright because it feels to me like at that point I would be paying money to avoid playing the game, which means the game itself is no longer interesting me enough and I should stop playing it. Thinking further, this is because crafting legendaries is one of my in game goals. I can see that if someone's only in game goals were to get really good at raids, fractals or WvW, or some other aspirational thing then maybe legendaries (or other gold sinks) would just be an annoying obstacle in the way of their real in game goals in which case spending real money to remove those obstacles would make more sense than it does for me.

You added some qualifiers which weren't in my example. As others have said if the 40 players are more skillful than the 20 organised zerg players then I think even now with the boon meta the zerg will get whittled down or outright destroyed. I guess it depends what you mean by skillful tho. You potentially mean "would win a 1v1" but that's not a fair judgement really. A good zerg player who has been practicing with their guild for months on how to fill a role and keep the zerg going could potentially get smashed in a 1v1 against good roamers but that's because roamers spend most of their time practicing small scale engagements. It doesn't mean the zerg player isn't a skillful zerg player.

The only occasions I can think of recently where 20 players have beaten 40 in WvW are when the 20 were in an organised Zerg and the 40 were not. Potentially this is fine, organised should have an advantage over disorganised. The problem is if the 40 can’t even scratch the 20 even in defence of an important objective and have no realistic way of slowing them down or avoiding just getting farmed if they try.

Great post and a pretty good summary of what many of us are feeling.

Yeah, thread title saying "I DEMAND" is a great way of getting Anet to completely ignore the request. On the surface I can see a point in the person who created the party having special rights. Perhaps you shouldn't be able to vote to boot them so long as they are online? I guess even that has problems if it's a Fractals party and they leave the Fractal instances and the other 4 want to continue but can't because the original creator is still online but not there. Tricky.