Cameron.6450

And what exactly means doing their Job properly and actually playing the game to you?If you mean using the optimal rotations and caring about min-maxing, or knowing every aspect of encounters before seeing them ingame, then those 5% might actually be too high of a number.But that also implies that you consider people, who have fun in their own way, aren't actually playing properly. I have rare met any players in FF14 who weren't playing properly.But then again, playing properly means for me simply that they use more skills than their attack chains. No, i mean that they use their basic rotation and actions you learn from doing the job guests. Like a dragoon who doesn't use blood of the dragon or a monk who doesn't use form shift or black mage who only uses ice magic and never activates enochian. Also not standing in every single AoE as they are too distracted to dodge. Can't enjoy the show when the game inconveniently gets in the way. As in, you simply read the ability description and tested to see how it works in combat. That can't be too much to ask, right? Every day i saw this and at the end of it i was so DONE with it. You don't have to believe me, that won't change facts. I said i have played all classes to max level to simply make sure you know that i know what i'm talking about. There isn't any doubt, it's just the usual MMO "coop" experiance.This is exactly my experience as well.

I agree that unsolicited advice is not always welcome, and while it can absolutely be delivered in a toxic manner, would you consider it toxic behaviour regardless of the manner in which it is conveyed? And when given politely (or what we could expect a reasonable person to consider to be polite) is it still worthy of moderation? I don't think the description that that_shaman is describing is really comparable. There doesn't appear to be any advice, only abuse, pretty clear cut case of toxicity. Also I'm not sure if you're referring to gw2 or ff when you mention stating the use of meters. If you're referring to ff, this isn't really an option in almost all cases. A lot of instanced content is done with a match maker, and so there is no option to label a group at all. The group finder that is more similar to gw2's LFG gives you that option, but due to square's moderation stance, and how some people have weaponised this stance, means that if you put that label on a group advertisement you'd likely get reported and face moderation as well. Unsolicited advice is not toxic, but can be pretty jarring and annoying. Worthy of moderation? Not really, but most of the time it isn't given in a polite way.That_shaman's description is actually really comparable, because many times the one giving "advice", or at least that's what he thinks he's giving, does so in a manner he thinks is polite, when it actually isn't. I doubt you'd face moderation in FF if you put it in a polite manner. But I do wonder why people would still bring up unsolicited DPS advice in FF when clearly told not to do so by the developers.I mean, you're right that often there's a mismatch between how someone intends to communicate and how it is received, and I'm sure you could find tonnes of examples of it, but this one just isn't one. From the brief description, it doesn't sound like the guy was giving any advice, just insults. And I think it's pretty unlikely that the guy thought he was being polite while ranting about carrying people. It's a good example of a toxic dickhead, just not a good example of toxic unsolicited advice. Either way, not super important. As for why people do it? Who knows. Probably mostly the same reasons anyone does anything that goes against ToS. Ignorance? Recklessness? A belief that they won't be actioned because they're making a good faith effort to help someone? Your guess is as good as mine. That being said, given how much of the game takes place in groups of 4, where damage is largely the responsibility of two people, having one very poor dps is far more frustrating than having a poor dps in gw2. There's only so many ice mages a person can take before they eventually lose it.

I agree that unsolicited advice is not always welcome, and while it can absolutely be delivered in a toxic manner, would you consider it toxic behaviour regardless of the manner in which it is conveyed? And when given politely (or what we could expect a reasonable person to consider to be polite) is it still worthy of moderation? I don't think the description that that_shaman is describing is really comparable. There doesn't appear to be any advice, only abuse, pretty clear cut case of toxicity. Also I'm not sure if you're referring to gw2 or ff when you mention stating the use of meters. If you're referring to ff, this isn't really an option in almost all cases. A lot of instanced content is done with a match maker, and so there is no option to label a group at all. The group finder that is more similar to gw2's LFG gives you that option, but due to square's moderation stance, and how some people have weaponised this stance, means that if you put that label on a group advertisement you'd likely get reported and face moderation as well.

Long winded A: I don't think the assumption you make is generally true across the playerbase as a whole. As far as I am aware, we don't have any stats from anet on how popular different traits and stats are, let alone combinations of traits and stats. I think that information would actually be really interesting, but we simply don't have it available. However you can click through people in open world squads and see a huge variety of trait-specific buffs proc on their bars, as well as see a wide variety of weapons and utilities being used, and those are only the noticeable parts. What you might be seeing instead is the narrowing of builds when players are looking to perform at higher levels. If you look at high level fractal or raid groups, then yeah, you see pretty close to the same set of builds for each class over and over again. But you can't apply that to the game as a whole. BUT. Even if every dh took the exact same traits, and every weaver played with full dps stats, a huge part of a players damage output is due to execution. It doesn't matter that my weaver is fully set up following a snowcrows guide, because I haven't spent enough time playing it, and so I won't be able to do a satisfactory amount of damage with it. That's why the meter matters, even when people run the same builds.

Not trying to pin you down or trap you or anything, but out of curiosity, what would you consider to be toxic intentions when it comes to parsers? I ask because although the usage of meters in gw2 and ff is relatively similar (unsupported third party, not widely used, skews towards high-performance focused players), the moderation in the two games is very different. For example, if I were to politely tell someone in my fractal group that based on my meter their damage was low, and they should try x, y, or z to improve, they might tell me to fuck off, but not much worse would come of that exchange. If a similar thing happened in ff and that person filed a report, there's a reasonable chance that I might be facing a suspension or ban because I explicitly mentioned using a meter, regardless of how politely it is brought up, or the fact that it is part of an attempt to be helpful. For the record I think people who abuse people over dps should be actioned when they have the option to vote kick or leave the group themselves and choose to belittle people instead, but the bar for what constitutes "toxic" can vary greatly.

FF14 and GW2 are two very different games. Thanks, wouldn't have guessed that without your statement.But in this case it's very relevant. Yoshi-P doesn't think an official DPS parser is needed in FFXIV. That does not mean anything about GW2 however. Both DPS disparity and DPS requirements are much, much higher in GW2 than in FFXIV. And FF XIV has a duty finder system that can work due to that game having trinity (and hard-coded roles), and (again) due to a much lower dps disparity and much lower/rarer dps requirements. In short, an average player queuing for a duty in FFXIV is most likely good enough for the content, there's no real need to prefilter. In GW2 for many of the instances it's the opposite. Correction: after a moment of consideration, i decided that you're right after all - GW2 does not really need an official parser, because it's simply not needed in the content most players frequent. An unofficial parser, like ArcDPS, however, is very much needed.Notice, though, that this has nothing to do with Yoshi-P's opinion about FF XIV.Generally agree, however I'd note that after playing FF for the last year-ish, there is a similar dps disparity in that game as there is in gw2. It caught me off guard because I expected the lack of stat/build options, and clearly identified built-in rotations to resolve many of the issues that cause dps disparity here, but it just didn't. You're correct though in that outside of the hardest difficulty instances, the dps requirements are much lower. As long as people do not sit in excessive amounts of avoidable damage, and the tank/healer don't fall asleep at the keyboard, it is very difficult to fail an encounter due to low dps.

I'm curious, could you give me an example of the type of damage that you don't think is recorded by arcdps?

We're talking about stuff added in 2013, before HoT was even released. If you haven't been playing since release, you probably don't even remember that Kessex Hills got a big change for the "Tower of Nightmares" story. Next y'all will be saying the Dredge are too hard so Anet needs to delete the Dredge. All my defensive skills are blinds and I should not be required to use a different build to kill dredge.

You're looking at the wrong section. Everyone is on the achievement leaderboards, which is how I can tell you're on Sea or Sorrows. I wasn't i checked my sever the achievement points don't go as low as mine.. never touched those, and i doubt the average player even know of their existance. neither did i BTWthe names alone are enough to put them at the bottom of my to do list, sound like hardcore stuff IMO You're joking, right? This is a bit? Nope i'm the same didn't know those existed and don't really care that they do..You are definitely there. I added you as a friend and had a look. Your own name shows at the top regardless of filter to show your percentile. This is what I see at the top: https://imgur.com/a/FtRusqa If I've set the filter to friends and I scroll down, I can see you on there, as shown here:https://imgur.com/a/GxqqeTP I'm not sure what you're looking at, but you are definitely included in these leaderboards, just not high enough to get a rank that isn't given as a percentile.

Yes, it generally is. A skilled player playing casually is going to be far ahead of a casual player playing casually. Some will use casual to solely mean time spent, but you can still be hardcore while only playing an hour a week, and likewise, casual when playing 24/7. Casual/hardcore have multiple definitions based on context, but overall, it is a mindset. A casual player is just playing for fun, doesn't care about learning anything and thus plays poorly with a somewhat random setup while generally relying purely on vertical progression to get past obstacles. They're always going to choose the easiest difficulty when playing games. I think including "playing for fun" as a defining feature of casual players compared to hardcore players is a bit misplaced. I'd argue that just about everyone playing the game is playing for fun, it's just that what people find fun varies hugely across the player base. I don't disagree with the rest of your description, I just think suggesting that casuals are the only ones who play for fun is a bad way to view these kind of categories.

You're simply wrong. Using arcdps gives players their own metric for determining performance. I don't have to wonder whether I performed well or not. I can see the numbers and compare that to my usual performance in the same encounter. I can then change my build and use that same frame of reference for whether or not it's working. How is that not helpful for understanding builds and synergies? You're coming into the use of this tool with a great deal of foreknowledge about how your stats, skills and traitline synergies work however. Where did you acquire that knowledge? You, like the rest of us with a high level of knowledge about such things, have probably spent hundreds of hours out of the game watching videos, reading guides, participating in theorycrafting discussions and trying out countless build arrays, and possibly spending/wasting hundreds of gold on, different gear sets to try to figure out what works, what looks like it should on paper but actually doesn't, what looks like it shouldn't on paper but weirdly does and so on. ARCdps is a valuable tool for the exact purpose I specified: experts refining and polishing builds. Anyone with an expert level of knowledge and understanding of how this game's systems work doesn't need ARCdps for jack diddly squat though. You'll be able to put a build together and feel out whether or not its putting out the DPS it should or if its not quite there a lot of the time through sheer, overwhelming experience with what it SHOULD feel like. Having the data is how you go from 35k to 36.5k and work out how to pick up the improvements you couldn't feel. ARCdps won't help you understand the game better though. ARCdps isn't even a tool the game itself references or provides. You won't even hear about it except from other players, and you have to go to third party sites and download it from third party servers to even get ahold of it. The raiding guild I'm in does a lot of training and teaching. The officers try super hard to reach out to people, to get more people into doing ANYTHING more advanced than 'run around core Tyria spamming 1 and dodging only by accident'. They're great people and we all make great use of ARCdps. It's tough to get new players to even download it about half the time. Most common complaint I've seen thus far is that they don't trust Github for whatever usually not-reasonable reason they have, but why should they HAVE to trust Github to play GW2 better? Why in all creation should ANY player have to go outside of the game to find the tools and resources that will enable them to play the game effectively? Why is the game not providing these tools and resources internally and with all the power and integration only the devs could ever hope to provide? Again, wrong. A new player isn't going to do 40k on a golem benchmark whether they use arcdps or not. But that doesn't mean that arcdps isn't useful to them. They will still be able to observe how changes to their build and strategy impact their performance. Further, the ability to see the breakdown for each skill allows them to easily tell where their damage is coming from. They don't necessarily need to have a deep understanding of the game's mechanics to tell that if 60% of their damage comes from burning, a trait/skill/etc. that improves burn damage would probably be helpful, for instance. I'm not sure if you're deliberately being obtuse because it's too painful to admit that I've got a valid point or if you're legitimately incapable of reading, because you're not only addressing what I'm saying, but you're completely failing to acknowledge that nobody comes into this game knowing what the stats, traits and synergies are, mean or how they work at all. And there's nothing in the game that teaches players these things. You're clearly not new, and it seems to me that your problem is that you've known how these things work for so long that you're like a fish in the water; you're not even aware of the water anymore. You've taken it for granted that these things are 'just known' to you. So, I'll ask again; where in the game can I go to learn about Power coefficients as they relate to damage dealt against an armored target? Where IN. THE. GAME. can I go to be taught, by the game, how to build my class more effectively for any of the roles that might be expected of me in advanced content? Until ARCdps can make build suggestions and critique your damage log, its a tool that is most useful to the people that need it the least. The people that need help the most...well, it can't help them very much at all. How, after all, are they supposed to make any kind of informed or useful build choices when nothing in the game tells them anything about...anything, really? I don't know about you, but when I talk to someone that's got their stats all over the place and they really just don't understand why it was a terrible plan for them to try to run around having 2 pieces of Soldier, 2 pieces of Nomad and 2 pieces of Cleric gear with 2 Berserker weapons while running traits in traitlines that don't synergize what so ever with themselves OR the stats/weapons they've got, I don't get angry or frustrated with the player. Why? Because the game doesn't teach anyone anything. Their only 'crime' is that they didn't spend tens or hundreds of hours doing freaking homework like GW2 was supposed to be a job or a college course. They don't understand anything because the game taught them nothing. And so there we are once again, explaining to someone that might've been here for months or even years that no, it isn't actually smart to try to have a little bit of Power and Condition Damage and Healing and Toughness because there is no such thing as 'good at everything, great at nothing' build that isn't utter garbage at everything except perhaps for WvW zerging or attrition weavers, and then you're running Celestial on specific builds which is another discussion entirely. I get mad at Anet because they fail completely, in every way possible, to enable players to excel at their game. It's not that they don't do enough; they don't do -anything-. They leave it all up to Joe Random Playerbase. Well, here we are, eight years deep into exploring that hypothesis. How are you liking all the compelling group content? Liking the new raids? All the new fractals suiting you? Oh. Wait. There's so little demand for that content that the fact we're getting a new fractal for the first time in forever is shocking and almost like the annual glance from Anet to see if demand for that kind of thing has somehow magically appeared in the field they refuse to do anything to tend. Maybe if they taught players how to play, players would be better at playing and, thus, there would be more players ...I dunno, maybe this is crazy...playing? You know, the advanced content? Insane, right? How do I even go from 'Teach players to play' to 'Players will play more content'? It's like I'm on drugs or something probably. ARCdps doesn't teach anyone how to play well. It doesn't teach people how to understand builds and synergies better, or at all. It can be used by those with the knowledge to make use of the data provided to guage the success of a build and rotations to make changes that will improve their performance, but without that knowledge, it's not useful to people that don't understand what the numbers mean or what affects them or how they are derived. It does you no good at all to see that 60% of your damage came from Burning if you don't even know what in your build, gear and rotations can help you do more burning damage, or to understand that your total damage is trash and that 60% of your trash damage being from burning is stupid because everything you picked for traits and utilities is all over the map and you're not actually using the right weapons for a condi build anyway. If you can't figure out that having the information provided by arcdps is useful for improvement to absolutely any player who cares to utilize the information, I don't know what to tell you. Your argument is completely ridiculous all over. Also, what is the premise here? Only experts who already know everything and absolute beginners who have no frame of reference for the information provided by arcdps exist? Nobody inbetween that could use this? What are you even talking about, man? Of course everything I'm saying went whoosh. I should've expected it to. Enjoy your persistent lack of compelling group content and perpetual confusion about why more people don't care about it or want to get into it, I guess. I'm sorry. If your rather extensive thesis ranged beyond the discussion of arcdps, I wasn't paying attention. Having said that, I do agree that group content in this game is not particularly compelling, which is why I am mostly a solo open world/PvE player with forays into PvP and WvW roaming. Raids/strikes/fractals have never been a particular focus of mine. If it is your position that the game should have a dps meter built-in then again, I agree in principle. However, like I said, I don't trust ANet after what they did with build templates and I'd rather things stay just the way they are. Also, FWIW, I develop builds that make open world play easier for players to get into. With or without a dps meter, players require time to learn. Time they likely won't have to practice if they're dying so quickly and so frequently that they don't have time to learn anything! You do have to enjoy the gameplay first in order to truly learn and appreciate its depth, after all. I'm not a developer. I do what I can. I agree with everything you just said, where agreement is pertinent. I'm certainly not blaming you for the disturbing disparity of skill level between 'higher-end players' and pretty much everyone else. I'm blaming Anet for that, because they left it in the hands of the playerbase to discover it all, pass it all along and teach others. The problem with their intention, noble as it was, is that I think they dramatically failed to account for how players tend not to trust other players in the MMO space. GW2 has a great community at the higher end of gameplay. It's one of the very few MMO's in which the raid, pvp and wvw communities don't seem (at least to me, others' mileage may vary) to be particularly toxic and mean-spirited. I know quite a few hardcore 'do-everything' people and they're some of the most helpful, friendly and generally chill people I've ever known in any MMO. I see ARCdps as exactly the kind of thing Anet should be providing, and not only that, but a whole lot more. Can't fault you for your mistrust based on what you referenced. The implementation of build templates...yeah, I don't get it either. Maybe its the optimist in me, but I've always assumed they were somehow critically limited by the engine in some way on that. Great case for updating the engine if that's true, but I don't know a thing and maybe it was implemented badly because they just phoned it in, had an intern slap it together and don't really care. People like WoodenPotatoes, Kyosika and Cellofrag that have gone to tremendous lengths to build and support the community have done all they can too, and so have a lot of others. Players can never make up for what the devs don't do in a lot of ways though, and when it comes to getting into the high-end content on here, there are guilds that try really hard to make raid training fun and friendly. I'm in such a guild, and they tie themselves in knots trying to make sure nobody belittles or verbally abuses anyone, whether they're struggling to understand or panicking because too much is going on or not understanding something or just being dense. Its still not enough. ARCdps is great. There's nothing wrong with it, except for that it shouldn't have to exist in this way. Anet should be providing that kind of tool. And a lot of other tools. And training tutorials. And guides for explaining how even basic stat/trait building for the common roles goes. I'm not being critical of ARCdps. Its the best thing it can be, and its creators deserve nothing but praise for doing what they can to support the performance-seeking members of the community. It just shouldn't have to even exist and Anet should be ashamed of itself for making us rely on a data tool and the sporadic good will of other players to perform tolerably, nevermind well, in their game.Dude I understand where you're coming from. I used to feel the same way about how players are let down in how the game is explained to them, and that if anet did a better job with tutorials early on a lot of player skill issues would be resolved. But it's just not true. I've spent most of the last year on a break from gw2 and have been playing ff14. Compared to gw2, that game does a fantastic job of teaching people how to play, and combat systems are much simpler. Skills are drip fed slowly, and gradually build up combos and rotations with only small modifications at any given point. Every class has to complete class-specific quests that in most cases force you to learn how to use skills, there are no stat options on gear (so you can't pick bad stats at all), and the next button to press in your rotation (for many classes) literally lights up after you press the one before it. And in my experience of the two games, roughly the same proportion of people I run into perform terribly. All that extra hand holding in ff amounts to nothing. So while I get what you're suggesting, it's just not the case that anet making better tutorials will fix things. I don't think it will make it worse, but it's not going to make things much better either.

I'm not sure if it would help, but there aren't a lot of raids that have critical audio cues, so turning the game volume to zero might help to remove some audio stimuli? You could also turn the graphics down very low. The game won't look as good, but it might strip back some of the flashy animations of other players that are unnecessary, and adding to the visual noise. Best of luck to you.

Doesn't really affect what I'm saying. Casual players don't want to do research online to figure out everything like this. They had this experience because this is the experience being offered and a casual will experience this way. There are enough upvotes to that post to make it a pretty common reaction. You don't need to do research online for strike missions. They're simple enough that you can learn what to do after a few tries. Also, upvotes on Reddit don't really mean anything. Don't kid yourself. Upvotes on reddit mean something. It means people are experiencing what I'm experiencing. I only had a modest number of likes on this post, but I find fewer people using hte like button on forums over all even if they agree with you and said so. Reddit is another story altogther. What it doesn't show are those that disagree with you. Reddit also has a very bipolar hive-mind mentality. What could get upvotes one day can just as well get downvotes the next. Even posts that state complete facts can receive downvotes into the negatives. While I agree with some of what you say, it's easy to see the % of people who upvoted a post. This post is 83% upvoted. If you don't think that's an issue it's certainly okay. I think it means something. We'll have to agree to disagree. I should also mention this is pretty much against the harder core hive mind of reddit. The full thread title is "Played Strike Missions for the first time and people are dying all the time in random groups ... it's even worse than in Tier 1 Fractals. what is happening?". That's basically a "why people so bad lol" title, and the title is not expanded on by the OP until further down in the comments. It is highly unlikely that those upvotes are mostly from people who are "experiencing what you're experiencing". I'm reading comments. I'm definitely not alone here. Edit: In fact if he's saying everyone is bad, it intensifies everything I'm saying about strike missions. Why would I want to play with people like that?I didn't see any comments that mention strike missions being part of the meta achievement. There's a bunch of complaints about it being too difficult, but I'm pretty sure I remember you (and others) saying that it wasn't that strikes were too hard, but rather that they were instanced content in the first place. And I don't think the OP was intending to make a "why people so bad lol" thread, but it's very easy to interpret their title in that way. I got the impression from the op's comments further down that it was genuine confusion as to why so many people were dying, but it's not clear. It could be possible that they are a regular raider who stepped into it and was making a comment on how people suck, but I doubt it. But even if he were being disparaging, if getting the strike done was such a big deal for so many people in your guild, I'm not really sure why you'd be doing it with random pugs instead of your guild members, since presumably none of them would act in that way.

Doesn't really affect what I'm saying. Casual players don't want to do research online to figure out everything like this. They had this experience because this is the experience being offered and a casual will experience this way. There are enough upvotes to that post to make it a pretty common reaction. You don't need to do research online for strike missions. They're simple enough that you can learn what to do after a few tries. Also, upvotes on Reddit don't really mean anything. Don't kid yourself. Upvotes on reddit mean something. It means people are experiencing what I'm experiencing. I only had a modest number of likes on this post, but I find fewer people using hte like button on forums over all even if they agree with you and said so. Reddit is another story altogther. What it doesn't show are those that disagree with you. Reddit also has a very bipolar hive-mind mentality. What could get upvotes one day can just as well get downvotes the next. Even posts that state complete facts can receive downvotes into the negatives. While I agree with some of what you say, it's easy to see the % of people who upvoted a post. This post is 83% upvoted. If you don't think that's an issue it's certainly okay. I think it means something. We'll have to agree to disagree. I should also mention this is pretty much against the harder core hive mind of reddit.The full thread title is "Played Strike Missions for the first time and people are dying all the time in random groups ... it's even worse than in Tier 1 Fractals. what is happening?". That's basically a "why people so bad lol" title, and the title is not expanded on by the OP until further down in the comments. It is highly unlikely that those upvotes are mostly from people who are "experiencing what you're experiencing".

Strikes are supposed to prepare players for Raids in the sense that they require teamwork, team composition and player skill (to deal with mechanics). It's a good thing that we have Fractals and Dungeons as group content to prepare you for the other group content. If you want to gear up, Fractals is the best choice, but Dungeons, crafting and the living world are also valid options, why expect Strike Missions to reward you the gear? Strike Missions teach players some fundamentals of group content mechanics, you will gear up elsewhere though, that's what the rest of the game is about. I've done no less than 25 fractals, have not received a single selectable stat anything. If that's the preparation loop on top of strikes that's just broken, the more recent strikes take plenty of time between getting a group and coordinating again when there's a failure. Other games have natural gear progression where doing X that prepares you for Y actually gives you the gear to do Y. I'm not the only one with this idea but geez there's a lot of contrarians in this forum. You can swap the stats of gear using the mystic forge. If Strikes indeed prepare you for Raids, Fractals/dungeons prepare you for Strikes, so follow your own advice and do the natural progression. Strikes take too little time and effort, if they gave you the gear to Raid, then it would make the rest of the game pointless. When they finally add proper Strikes with enough challenge maybe they could add good gear rewards to them too. By the way, I believe Strikes are not a good preparation for Raids as they are lacking mechanics (Boneskinner maybe excluded) to be proper content that bridges that gap, and the Grothmar Strike is easier than all dungeons or fractals in the game. Follow the normal progression, Strikes are preparing you for Raids, but you clearly missed the preparation for Strikes. Didn't get any ascended gear either. IIRC, exotics can't have their stats swapped (nor can ascended trinkets cia mystic forge. There are special ones like the bloodstone fen ones). Fractals are starting to feel dead. When i try to do them, the groups are taking longer to fill, and from what i hear it gets really bad in the tier 2-3 range. Your doing level 1-25 fractals and expect loads of ascended drops?From what I remember you can get rings from those only.You can use the recommended fractal journal pages ( turned into book ofcourse) to buy ascended gear tho. If you're expecting people to have characters geared in t4 fractal gear before stepping into strikes that's overkill and an overdone gear preparation loop.Thing is, no one is expecting that. As people have said from basically the very start of this thread, exotic is perfectly fine for doing strikes.

That's really more of an indictment on the people complaining than it is an indicator of difficulty in that content. Lol i just completed the jump puzzle chalice of tears and immediately thought of this thread. Maybe complete that in your first try then we talk. Certainly tougher than pressing skills at a big target Read your own comment again. How many "OW bosses and living story bosses" are there in chalice of tears? If you want to talk about non-combat difficulty, we can do that. But when you clearly mention bosses and meta events, and then pull up an example that isn't even a fight, it doesn't really give you that "gotcha" moment you seem to be looking for. For what it's worth, I actually enjoy the difficult jumping puzzles, and would say that chalice of tears is reasonably difficult without a guide (probably not worth throwing out a "do this then we talk", but to each their own) . And while there are a few other jumping puzzles (along with SAB trib mode) that I would also consider somewhat challenging, OW is talked about as being braindead because of the parts of it see the most activity. If an open world set of legendary armor featured tasks on the level of finishing those puzzles without a mesmer to port you through it, then maybe something could work. But then again, if raids just boil down to "pressing skills at a big target", then I'm not really sure why there needs to be an OW set. OW is just pressing skills at even bigger targets, so it should be pretty easy to breeze through and pick up that armor right? Why do I have to list everything in my first post which I posted while walking somewhere with my mobile phone and by not doing so, my later points are considered contradicting If raids and OW are the same because of PVE category, pvp and wvw are the same because PVP category. 1 mode is vs AI and another mode vs players, so simple right 1v1 me in fortnite I mean, I never said it's contradictory, because it's not, and that's not the problem. But okay. If you really think that saying OW and LS bosses are hard is backed up by saying a jumping puzzle is hard, then you are welcome to die on that hill.

That's really more of an indictment on the people complaining than it is an indicator of difficulty in that content. Lol i just completed the jump puzzle chalice of tears and immediately thought of this thread. Maybe complete that in your first try then we talk. Certainly tougher than pressing skills at a big targetRead your own comment again. How many "OW bosses and living story bosses" are there in chalice of tears? If you want to talk about non-combat difficulty, we can do that. But when you clearly mention bosses and meta events, and then pull up an example that isn't even a fight, it doesn't really give you that "gotcha" moment you seem to be looking for. For what it's worth, I actually enjoy the difficult jumping puzzles, and would say that chalice of tears is reasonably difficult without a guide (probably not worth throwing out a "do this then we talk", but to each their own) . And while there are a few other jumping puzzles (along with SAB trib mode) that I would also consider somewhat challenging, OW is talked about as being braindead because of the parts of it see the most activity. If an open world set of legendary armor featured tasks on the level of finishing those puzzles without a mesmer to port you through it, then maybe something could work. But then again, if raids just boil down to "pressing skills at a big target", then I'm not really sure why there needs to be an OW set. OW is just pressing skills at even bigger targets, so it should be pretty easy to breeze through and pick up that armor right?

That's really more of an indictment on the people complaining than it is an indicator of difficulty in that content.

Oh nothing was lost on me. I was trying to give you the benefit of doubt in the hope that you were basing your statements on something more substantial. If you think that the skill animations and names were developed before the devs had an idea of what they were building, I don't really know what else to say to you. You keep saying that you think the initial concept of druid was dps, and yet you're using the skill names that were launched with a support spec. Your only information to go on is the final release. If it swapped from dps to support early in development, you'd need to have some information before the release version to support this. For example, we can say that revenants in their initial conception only used one weaponset. Why? Because in a beta weekend of HoT, that's how revenants worked. Given that you don't have anything to work with on the druid as dps side, I'd suggest that rather than stubbornly sticking to this line "because it's your opinion", maybe rethink the validity of that opinion. As a side note, just because something is your opinion, does not make it some untouchable statement that no one can disagree with you, or point out that there is nothing substantial to base that opinion on.

What do you mean by initial concept? Because if you mean the initial concept of druid in gw2 then you are just simply wrong. It wasn't a support from the release of hot, it was a support from its conception. If you disagree, would you mind pointing out what information suggests druids were initially damage dealers? If by initial concept you mean druids as a general fantasy concept are damage dealers, then yeah i agree with you, but that's based on interpretations from outside the game. In gw2, druids have only ever been support.

Druid was purpose built to be a support, it was never damage oriented. You might have it mixed up with the interpretation of druids in other fantasy settings.

I get why people say this, because of the valuable stuff you can get from the HoT meta-events. However, I've always felt that HoT was tiny because it takes up so little space on the map, and I almost never go back there now that I've completed all the achievements. I've found Elona to offer much more to an exploration-oriented player by comparison, and I find myself going back there all the time. Different kinds of players enjoy different kinds of content, and I can understand that some people like gold and they'll go where you get more of it. It doesn't really interest me though; I get bored of farming really quickly, so I need to wander around. People don't say HoT felt like more because of rewards (which weren't necessarily there at first). That might be the case for comparison of specific metas, but you're not really giving HoT the credit it deserves if you only look at the maps it launched with, or just consider it as a way to make gold from the metas. Like the post you quoted listed, HoT introduced a number of systems that completely changed how the game worked, PoF mostly just added in new aspects to the existing systems that were put in place in HoT. Not that those additions were lacklustre at all, it's just that the first set of elite specs will always be more exciting and feel like a greater change than the second set, or the third set (fingers crossed) etc.

Ess and lnhb are rewards from the challenge mode version of fractal 100. Ess refers to cosmic essences that people will ask others to ping for them as evidence of experience in that fractal. Lnhb is the title "leaves no Heroes behind" which you get for doing the entire fractal without anyone in your party dying. P+f just means pots and food, so the group expects you to use consumable buffs.

Although this idea sounds fine on paper, what would prevent the raiding teams from creating alt accounts to get those extra rewards? Meaning in the end, less non-raiders get into teams because the spots will be filled by those alts. You can't prevent that. But given that you can't raid on an account that hasn't purchased any expansions, it's not something that's able to be abused with f2p. Also given that raids give such a small amount of liquid gold, even doubling the reward from 2g to 4g with a new player, I highly doubt that anything like this would effect the economy anywhere near the scale of something like istan or dragonfall farms when they were released.

Well what I meant was that you don't learn much if you lie on your back but the kill happens anyway. That's what I meant by that. Like if you die, then the rest of the squad still kills the boss, you don't actually get to try that same mechanic again. It's off to the next boss, and a completely new set, which makes it a bad way to learn. Dying as a part of learning is of course going to happen though, just need to make sure it's in a situation where you can get back up afterwards and try to not die the same way next pull.