Mistwraithe.3106

Everyone is different. Personally, I'm far more interested in GW2 than I would be if it didn't have a story. It's important for me that the story happens in parallel with getting to explore new zones and areas which is a significant part of what I enjoy in the game. Note that I think the core story is mediocre, due to a combination of being over long in placing and the second half of it being largely about Destiny's Edge and Trahearne more than the player. This is a shame as it is the intro for new players. However, it improved from there for me. I only got to play the LWS1 remake but I liked much of what they did and Scarlet added some good humour. Then LWS2 I enjoyed, it helped a lot that the player was now the centre of the story and I really liked how it lead into HoT (which was looking forward to playing). Since then HoT, LWS3, PoF have been really fun for me (despite a bit of disjointedness in LWS3). I've had some laughs, been slightly surprised a few times, and look forward to playing the rest of the story.

This is my pet peeve. I think it's unbelievable that Anet have built the WV (as with the previous dailies, tho it was less of a problem there due to more choice) so that the most logical choice for any new player who enjoys the story is to NOT buy any expansions until they reach that point in the story. It's so backwards. New players who are really enjoying the game are likely keen to throw money at Anet, but they get penalized if they do! So smart new players don't buy expansions beyond HoT/PoF - because obviously that is what Anet wants! I've done what I can to spread the news, including posting in Steam forums, to make sure people don't buy expansions until they need them. My sister, wife and kids all only have HoT/PoF specifically for this reason, otherwise they would have purchased the other expansions in one of the sales. Please tho, for the love of everything that is sane, Anet change it so that WV doesn't give you dailies in expansions/maps which you haven't visited yet! (or any similar fix). Cue all the people saying just do WvW/PvP dailies (many don't like these modes), just jump forward into all the maps (yay story spoilers, I don't read random chapters in a book, why would I do it in GW2?), just skip the dailies/weeklies you can't do (do the numbers, skipping a few has a huge penalty as the bonuses for reaching 3 dailies and 6 weeklies are massive, eg 5 weeklies = 250AA vs 6 weeklies = 750AA+10 laurels+1 tome+1 Celebration Booster) or that it doesn't affect them because they have unlocked everything (good on ya, thread isn't about you).

It's a fair point. I'm guessing Anet wanted to increase the value of tomes and other spirit shard sources a bit. Question is whether they have gone too far?

Legendary Hair! You heard it here first... 🙂

I think you are right that the fear this is just one step down a slippery slope is a big factor in why this thread is so long (and other similar threads). That's fair enough I guess, tho I think when judging people (including Anet) you really need to put more weight on what you know about them, their history and what they are saying currently rather than what they might speculatively do in the future. I've heard people try to argue that Anet is untrustworthy or don't know how to design a good game with horizontal progression etc, but the obvious counter argument to that is that GW2 exists and is the only similar game (that I am aware of) in the world. Saying that a group of people who have successfully done something rare for the last 11 years don't know how to do that thing is tenuous (yes I know teams change, the founders aren't there any more, etc, but still, you have to give them SOME credit!). I also find myself looping back to what I asked in my first post in this thread: what should Anet be doing to provide more goals for veteran players? (as I have a strong hunch this is one reason they are doing the Legend Relic differently). I haven't seen many answers. One answer I did see recently in this thread (tho I doubt they were trying to answer my question or even necessarily aware of it) was more maps/metas like HoT (and I think they mentioned LWS3) as those were still the maps they most enjoyed revisiting. I think that sort of feedback is useful for Anet. It may not be listened to as more difficult and potentially confusing maps are might appeal less to the new players Anet want to attract BUT I think a strong case can be made that Anet makes a lot of money from vets (they presumably have the numbers) so doing something like this could be a winner?

OK, so the problem is that legendary relics break a rule or precedent that Anet created ages ago. You agree that it's not a major rule and that it might have even made sense to not have the rule. So essentially your complaint is that Anet are changing how something works (or more specifically making a new legendary not work exactly the same as the old legendaries, since they aren't changing the rules for the old legendaries). It seems to me that this is entirely encapsulated in Anet's job as developers of the game. It's literally their job to change things to make the game work better in their view and a host of other goals. It's entirely reasonable for players to complain when they disagree with those changes. So fair enough. But given we agree the change is fairly minor and possibly even makes sense, it starts seeming like nit picking rather than a major complaint. It's probably still worth a post or two, but we're 18 pages in now and this is far from the only thread on the topic...

Reading lots of forums posts, logic, life experience, extrapolation and guesswork. Note that I pepper my posts with phrases like "I think" and this is "my take". It's "my" conclusion but I don't anywhere near enough evidence to state that I'm correct, it's just a logical guess based on what I do know. A few people rebutted it and said that I was wrong. So maybe I'm wrong. OTOH, two of those rebuttals stated they weren't short of goals which is very much the opposite of what I've seen other veteran players post in this forum and even in this thread. So maybe those two were not representative of the group at large? One thing that gets me in this debate, and it's repeated in several recent posts in this thread, is the assertion about how much grind and effort the scheme used by the legendary relic entails and how it's a betrayal of the legendary model. This seems hyperbole. I've created 10 or so legendaries now (weapons, armour and Conflux) and it never really crossed my mind that getting access to all stats bonuses was a big feature. I was crafting ascended (or stat swapping existing ascended) happily for whatever stats I wanted long before I started crafting Legendary equipment and had gone about unlocking the stats I wanted without thinking twice as part of playing the game. It wasn't a big deal. The big features I wanted from Legendary items were having it across all characters, instant stat swapping, ability to remove/swap runes/sigils/infusions and of course the bling is a nice reward. Unlocking stat combos wasn't something I really thought of. I get that it's part of how Legendaries work but it seems a minor part? Several people have already pointed out that SOTO relics are relatively easy to unlock too.

Ranger is a great choice, the pet helps a lot. Just remember to swap your pet out if it runs out of hit points and retreats back to you. I find Condi builds best too if you want to be relaxed because on most Condi builds you can go full celestial gear and still do pretty good damage (albeit with the ramp up time that condi often has) while having great survivability (vitality/toughness), healing and self boons. Power builds tend to need you to at least go Marauder if you want to do strong damage output.

Agreed. There needs to be at least one more event for Lunar New Year.

I like OPs original suggestion, seems sensible. As to moderators, it's pretty common in a lot of communities to have non-employee community members have some level of moderator powers so the suggestion isn't that unreasonable. Obviously they would only have the power that Anet gave them and I don't think Anet should give them banning powers (certainly not permanent ban), but it would be pretty easy for a system where the moderator investigates and then either marks it as a non offense or tags the account with notes for an Anet employee to review. It's the investigation step which takes time and needs to be done promptly while the offense is going on, I imagine actually applying bans after the fact is relatively fast.

We need everyone complaining about all classes equally. Then there will be balance in the force.

Some interesting points of view. Just quickly here is my take on the game, legendaries and some of the points raised, including Labjax's detailed reply to my post on the last page. Legendaries were a great idea, it's an excellent solution to providing big goals while still embracing horizontal progression. I can see Labjax and other's concern about Anet abandoning the things which make GW2 unique. However, I don't think Legendary Relics (ie having to play some of the expansion content rather than just buy it) are that big a departure from how other Legendaries work and it's a stretch to extrapolate from there to Anet abandoning the game's values (see also my next point). My main caveat here would be PvP and WvW players, if they have to play through a bunch of PvE content to unlock the new relics then that's OK, but not great (we don't know whether they will have options to unlock them using WvW/PvP currency instead, much the same way you can unlock expansion recipes from the WvW vendors, if Anet go that way then this caveat is solved). I actually think an argument can be made that the Legendary Relic approach is how Anet should have implemented Legendaries from the start. Financially they are already covered by making people buy the expansions to unlock new stats for their legendaries, but they also want players to play through and enjoy their content. You might not like it but someone who isn't already upset about it (probably too late for the people complaining in this thread) is probably going to enjoy unlocking the relics in expansion 5 because that's how it works, achieving goals and receiving rewards motivates and provides enjoyment to many people. It's a significant part of why people like playing games. An even stronger argument can be made that this is most important for GW2's 10000+ hour vets. They are the ones most struggling with lack of goals in the game. If Anet had made all Legendaries work this way from the start then I think there would have been little angst at the time (no one would have known any better) and we would be in a much better state overall now. Essentially many of these 10000+ hour vets would be happier in this alternative world. Unfortunately, they didn't go that way and now in trying to move just a tiny part of the game (relics) to this model Anet are getting all this pushback because it's not how the precedent of the other Legendaries work.

Obligatory I would prefer Anet spent resources on other things 🙂

One obvious improvement would be to make it so that you can see everything in a category without having to select a sub category. So, let the user see all of the LFG for Heart Of Thorns when the click on it. Have the sub category as a column in the list of parties/squads. Let the user still filter further to only see LFG for a particular map if they want to, but usually there aren't so many that you would need to. Also, it needs to remember the category/sub category you last had open, at least within the same play session. This is my biggest frustration with it. Eg, I'm looking for T3 Fractal groups, if I accidentally close the LFG or switch maps then when I open it again it's back to default view so I need to scroll down to fractals, expand it, click on T3 Fractals. Every, single, time.

Hmm. Thanks for the reasoned reply earlier. I think whether the people complaining are 10000+ hour veterans is an important one as the world views are very different. There is clearly a massive difference between doing something for the first few hundred hours and doing it after thousands of hours. Sometimes it doesn't matter and enjoyment can even deepen after a long time, eg many sports are like this, as you get better and more skilled/knowledgeable, this can make your enjoyment richer and usually there are plenty of better players around to keep challenging you. Countering that is that the more you do something the more ho-hum and hence boring it becomes. This is accentuated when enjoyment is coming in part from newness and achieving goals (where the goals are limited in number). In GW2 terms, modes like WvW have an advantage because of the same factors which help sports, a lot of the variety comes from the other players and there is often plenty of challenge available, including a feeling of achievement from overcoming those challenges and winning engagements (cue the complaints about poor world match-ups which fail to deliver that challenge). PvE has a lot of great stuff too, there is a huge amount to do both in terms of exploring the game maps, unlocking new features (eg gliding, mounts, etc), doing the story, teching up your equipment to ascended / legendary. Then there are the difficult challenges, fractals, strikes, raids, which with their CM can scale quite high. There is so much for a new player to do, it's amazing. 2000 hours in (a fair amount in WvW admittedly, but at least half in PvE too) I still have plenty to do and explore, I'm only about 2/3rds through the story because of how I've been going through it and splitting my GW2 play time with WvW, friends/family etc. But for a PvE veteran who has already spent 10000 hours playing the game? They have likely explored all the maps, done all the story, unlocked all of the features and overcome fractals, strikes, raids to the highest level that they are interested in. It is going to be vastly harder for Anet to keep this player entertained with new content. Particularly when they are unable to add any new teching up capabilities (horizontal progression) or have to offer a Legendary option which unlocks everything instantly (keeping in mind these veterans should have enough resources to buy any new single legendary very easily, unless Anet require a lot of a new currency for it in which case they get accused of requiring too much grind). So yeah. As someone said above, you may not be the target audience. In fact, it is likely not possible to build a business model around the most bored veterans. The amount of dev/design time required to keep them amused is probably too high to be economic. Conversely, people like me, who have plenty to explore, learn, unlock and overcome, are very easy to keep happy because for us GW2 is an amazing game. Note that I believe this phenomenon is why you get such divided opinions on these forums. In very broad stereotypes, the newer players (and keep in mind that newer can still mean a few thousand hours playing) tend to be happy and offering praise for how fun the game is and how much there is to do, while the oldest veteran players are more likely to be grumpy and complaining about the lack of content, the lack of fun, etc. Both groups are right but from their own viewpoints. I guess this is why Labjax said a few posts ago that I just don't get it, he has a different worldview. I believe I do get it (as written above, plus I do understand and applaud how GW2's philosophy is different from other MMOs), but I, and many others, aren't at that 10000+ hour point yet. Anet still should take the views of these veterans into account (as they have by giving out the free Legendary Relic, which I don't think they originally expected to have to do) but I don't think they can base their development plans solely on those views.

Wow. Ok. So 25 years in software development at all levels, including previously working in game development, plus 2000 hours in GW2 including playing it from the start in 2012 (I had a multi-year hiatus in the middle), doesn’t make me anywhere near as qualified to comment as you. Right. Can I assume you are one of the jaded 10000+ hour players I mentioned then? Regardless, I did post a pointed question which you didn’t answer. What would YOU do to provide goals for veteran players?

For those people complaining, what would you do to provide goals for veteran players? Creating relics seems like a pretty sensible move to me. The old system with the 6th Rune containing the special bonus was significantly more limited in how easily they could add new special bonuses because unless the stats for the first 5 runes are exactly right for a build people aren't going to use that rune set. Separating the special bonus out into relics objectively gives them a lot more flexibility to provide new special bonuses which will actually be used by players. So the change tidied up how it worked, added build flexibility and gave Anet something they could expand upon in future expansion. It's a solid change, I run a software team (not games) and I think if I was in their position I would have gone for it. A lot of the complaints in this forum seem to be short sighted or even contradictory. "I'm 10k hours in and bored cause I have done everything, give me more things to do and new goals, but don't actually add anything new for me to aim for because horizontal progression prohibits that, also if you do add anything I need everything unlocked and available without playing any of the game.". How does anyone develop a game for people who have reached that mindset?

Hmmm. Thanks for explaining, I suppose you are right as I have mainly noticed it on EBG. Pretty sad...

I think there is room for something in this space, probably short events. Anet are clearly working on more regular events such as their "Rush" weeks, there are many possible weekly themes they could come up with here. I don't think people would burn out from one week where there were extra rewards for playing WvW with a particular focus, eg rewarding PPT play or killing enemies more, there could be small bonus rewards at the end of each skirmish up to a maximum of 20 skirmishes (per player) during the week.

I don't understand what the point is of the wall runners. Maybe they have a macro or similar clicking move buttons to stop them from timing out BUT if that is all they are doing it doesn't take long at all before your participation is below three and you aren't getting pips towards either the skirmish reward track or the wvw reward track. So, what is the point? They will end up with no rewards unless they go capture a camp every 10 mins or so. And if they are capturing a camp every 10 mins then there is no point in leaving themselves running, they can just leave their character standing still for 8 mins at a time and it works fine (I've done this a bit to get skirmish claim tickets, only when there aren't queues tho).

We ran into a group doing this too a few weeks ago, seems limited defences against it if the group they are merging with has enough players to instakick in the combined group. It's going to need an Anet fix (ideally find the culprits and ban them too!).

Wow, so much debate about something which seems pretty simple. Obviously CC output is a factor which should be accounted for when comparing builds. Equally obviously if two classes have equal max dps builds but one of them has lots of cc available but the other doesn’t then the first build/class is better when evaluating for max dps builds. Thus it should be taking into account when balancing. So should survivability, boon production, etc. They all contribute to the overall evaluation of a build (and by extension class when comparing max dps builds).

Totally agreed with OP. I think a rebalance pass would be a great idea, hopefully they learnt from the starter rebalancing (which wasn’t bad, it perhaps just went slightly too far). I also agree that Dragonstand should be gliders only.

Thanks for the tip, I will have to try that out. I maintain it's still a poor UI for usability tho 🙂 Re the bonus events, I've enjoyed the PvP rush event, I'm still Deer level after playing it a little a year ago. It was nice to give it another go and the rush event meant there were more less experienced PvP players around too, meaning the average skill level was more in keeping with my level. Some very good rewards too!

I bought Runecrafter almost a year and do the same as Vayne (which I believe is what fast farming recommend), blue with copper, green with runecrafter and gold/orange with silver (if I don't sell on TP). I'm currently also salvaging gold armour which contains a skill based rune with Runecraft just to maximise my chance of getting a few more Charms of Skill. Over the last year I've accumulated enough charms and symbols that I would have enough to craft a Legendary Rune if I hadn't used 12 Charms of Skill on Trapper Runes. As it is I'm close. So it seems to me that Runecrafter is a long term thing, it gradually adds charms/symbols to your material storage but takes thousands of salvages to get significant amounts. As others said here it probably takes a long time to provide a positive return on investment tho if you used gold to gem conversion to buy it.