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Wandering Mist.2973

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Everything posted by Wandering Mist.2973

  1. Well for me personally I love the Tengu culture and those of us who played gw1 factions have a lot of fond memories of the Tengu henchman.
  2. We know a little more than that. Before the events of gw1 the Tengu originally lived on Shing Jea island in Cantha. When humans started settling on the island too, one of the major Tengu tribes, the Sensali, slaughtered an entire human villiage. At the same time, hatchlings of another major tribe, the Angchu, contracted unfamiliar diseases from the humans, forcing them to kill lots of their own hatchlings. These events caused a 3-war between the Angchu, Sensali and Humans, which lasted nearly 2 centuries. Finally the 3 sides organised a peace summit which Master Togo attended, however the meeting was a trap intended to kill Togo and pin the blame on the Tengu. Togo survived the attack and the Tengu tribes united, forever hating Humans for their betrayal. The Tengu only travelled to Tyria to confront Zaitan, and then made a new home in the Dominion of Winds. They didn't want a repeat of what happened in Cantha so built a wall to keep out any outsiders.
  3. I can't really see undead being an option, as it would be too hard to incorporate them into the lore as a playable race. My choice is definitely Tengu, which would be much easier to put in and you could even introduce Cantha along with it. If the next expansion focused around exploring Cantha and gave as Tengu as a playable race, I would be in heaven.
  4. I think it's safe to say that a lot of people think the fights drag on for too long (based on the comments here). That said, I agree with the people who say the fights should be challenging. You are fighting Gods and Elder dragons, they aren't just going to roll over the moment you appear. Make them too easy and you reduce the impact of the whole story.
  5. I'll be honest, when I saw the thread title my first reaction was "seriously? It's not that hard." But thinking back on that scuffy fight in particular I agree it dragged on for 2 long to the point where I did indeed stop caring about Taimi and just wanted to get the fight over with. I had similar issues with the PoF boss fights. After the first couple of minutes of of doing the same action over and over you get very tired of it. I think lowering the boss health pool would be a good thing, while keeping the difficulty up.
  6. Imagine if they brought back City of Heroes. (We will never forget.) NCSoft put everything behind ArenaNet and GW 2 at the time and while I don't regret their decision to back GW 2, I've missed CoH ever since. I too miss CoH but if they were to bring it back there would need to be some serious changes to it. Still, with all the progress and innovation they put into gw2, i reckon they could make CoH great. As for gw3, I personally don't see the point.
  7. Of course going into Raids with a build someone else told you isn't a very good idea. That's why we have the rest of the game to go train and learn how to use that build properly. Yes except the rest of the game doesn't require the use of those builds or proper use of mechanics. When was the last time you had to break a defiance bar or use a blinding cloud outside of raids and t4 fractals? When do you ever even need to use any cc abilities at all? You don't. You've never been to any Heart of Thorns map then...I went through the heart of thorns storyline on my mesmer with no problems at all. Not sure what the big deal is tbh.
  8. Of course going into Raids with a build someone else told you isn't a very good idea. That's why we have the rest of the game to go train and learn how to use that build properly. Yes except the rest of the game doesn't require the use of those builds or proper use of mechanics. When was the last time you had to break a defiance bar or use a blinding cloud outside of raids and t4 fractals? When do you ever even need to use any cc abilities at all? You don't.
  9. Usually when someone trains people they tell them what builds and equipment to use. Reading a guide also helps in getting the proper build and gear, I don't know how a slowed version could work to teach players their builds and equipment. It's all very well having someone tell you to copy and paste a build and follow a dps rotation, but you won't be able to fully utilize that build just by copying someone else. Players develop a greater understanding when they are given the time to work things out on their own. This deeper knowledge of the build and their class is going to help them a lot more than them just copying a rotation to the letter, as it will allow them to adapt to diffrrent situations on the fly.
  10. Guild Wars 2 Raids are NOT at the same level as WoW mythic Raids. I'm aware of that, but the principle still applies. If you try and cater too much to a minority of your playerbase and exclude the majority, your game will most likely fail.
  11. I hope you can read what you quoted, mostly the second paragraph. The game wasn't "casual focused", there were quite a few releases that added challenging content, story parts that had increased difficulty, mobs of a higher difficulty level than both expansions and so on. What happened is that people forgot about all that, because it was temporary content, plus the huge content drought before the release of the expansion caused players to only spend their months in brain dead farms. The game was never "casual focused" in terms of difficulty and challenge, the game was casual focused in a dozen other things, easy to reach level cap, no gear treadmill, no level cap increase with expansions, easy to get higher stat gear, no subscription fee, no competition in the open world (be it for exp, quest objectives, resource nodes or loot), no requirement to form a party to play most of the content and others. That's what made the game "casual friendly" and all of it still applies. The game had since release harder and more challenging fights. "Casual" can mean more than just difficulty. Got some kind of confirmation about this? I'm sure you have some hard facts proving this about Guild Wars 2, some statistical analysis and data directly from Arenanet on what kind of content players like or not. It is the nature of mmorpgs, whether you like it or not. Just take a look at this graph from WoW raiding: http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/1745139-Armory-Stats-Highmaul-and-Blackrock-Foundry-Blue-Tweets-Heroes-Map-Rift-Wardrobe Looking at this graph you can see that for a single wing of a WoW raid, there are multiple difficulties (mythic being the hardest). 70% of the WoW population completed the first wing on any difficulty. That then drops down to less than 10% of the WoW population who completed that same wing on the hardest difficulty. So if you are a games developer, do you think it makes more sense to make content exclusively for the <10% of the population, or 70% of the population? What do you think is going to keep the game running for longer?
  12. The problem with Heart of Thorns is it came after the really easy core game. There was no in-between content for some of the players. On the other hand, those who did play Season 2 when it was released shouldn't have any issues with Heart of Thorns, if anything a lot of the mobs were significantly nerfed with the release of Heart of Thorns. But I guess even the hardest mobs become easy if you hide behind huge blobs of players. But there is also the story of Season 2, how did they get over that and then had issues with Heart of Thorns. More likely the content drought before the expansion caused the players to become terrible at playing the game, no instanced story parts, just follow the tag in huge blobs and auto attack mobs to death for months makes players soft, and dumb. Ever since their first release they upped the challenge level, adding harder mobs, adding harder story instances and so on. They've been increasing the challenge level of the game for 5 years, so I wonder what are these players who don't want to "get good" still doing here. And you can't say that a Molten Brawler, a Twisted Horror, a Mordrem Thrasher (of Season 2, not the nerfed HoT version) are easier than the new Heart of Thorns mobs. Many probably forgot how they were and then called Heart of Thorns hard. Temporary content had this effect on difficulty and challenge, people forgot about it, it's another of the sad drawbacks of temporary content. The game has a wonderful combat system, yet many don't want to use it. If all some players want is a multi-loot farm to get their rewards without even playing the game, then what can I say, they should leave the game as soon as possible. Although Arenanet still creates brain dead farms (some unintentional), they are also creating some exciting encounters too. Easiest way to train people: take away brain dead farms so they have to play the game to get anything. It seems that the focus of the game is changing from how it was before HoT, from a very casual focused game to a more hardcore focused. Unfortunately at the same time Anet are trying to please both the casuals and the hardcore players. Blizzard had a similar problem although in the reverse, where WoW started as a pretty hardcore experience (similar to games like EQ2, etc) and then switched its focus to more casual gameplay. The problem is that in trying to please both parties, you inevitably end up pleasing nobody. And unfortunately despite your wishes for harder content, when it comes down to player populations, there will always be more casuals than hardcore players, meaning if you want to keep a game running you have to cater to the casuals first. If you try and cater only to hardcore players, you will most likely fail, which is exactly what happened to WildStar. Wildstar was designed to be an upgraded version of vanilla WoW when it came to the difficulty of its content, and focused all its effort on catering to hardcore raiders. Their problem? There weren't enough hardcore players to make it work and the game flopped. So whether you like it or not, an mmorpg's success relies on the casuals, as they form the majority of the playerbase. How is this game hardcore focused? 1 raid in 10 month, 2 fractals with OPTIONAL CM? In the meantime 8+ openworld maps , story instances,....and so on.are you kidding? That's just the start. From what you guys are saying the core game was a lot easier, and with each expansion Anet are slowly making the content more challenging. There won't be an instant change of course, but it will gradually happen over time. Open world =/= challenging content. (Zerg everything) Im sorry you feel that way.I'm just going by what you guys are saying. I've only been playing this game for a couple of months, so I don't know if it used to be harder or not.
  13. The problem with Heart of Thorns is it came after the really easy core game. There was no in-between content for some of the players. On the other hand, those who did play Season 2 when it was released shouldn't have any issues with Heart of Thorns, if anything a lot of the mobs were significantly nerfed with the release of Heart of Thorns. But I guess even the hardest mobs become easy if you hide behind huge blobs of players. But there is also the story of Season 2, how did they get over that and then had issues with Heart of Thorns. More likely the content drought before the expansion caused the players to become terrible at playing the game, no instanced story parts, just follow the tag in huge blobs and auto attack mobs to death for months makes players soft, and dumb. Ever since their first release they upped the challenge level, adding harder mobs, adding harder story instances and so on. They've been increasing the challenge level of the game for 5 years, so I wonder what are these players who don't want to "get good" still doing here. And you can't say that a Molten Brawler, a Twisted Horror, a Mordrem Thrasher (of Season 2, not the nerfed HoT version) are easier than the new Heart of Thorns mobs. Many probably forgot how they were and then called Heart of Thorns hard. Temporary content had this effect on difficulty and challenge, people forgot about it, it's another of the sad drawbacks of temporary content. The game has a wonderful combat system, yet many don't want to use it. If all some players want is a multi-loot farm to get their rewards without even playing the game, then what can I say, they should leave the game as soon as possible. Although Arenanet still creates brain dead farms (some unintentional), they are also creating some exciting encounters too. Easiest way to train people: take away brain dead farms so they have to play the game to get anything. It seems that the focus of the game is changing from how it was before HoT, from a very casual focused game to a more hardcore focused. Unfortunately at the same time Anet are trying to please both the casuals and the hardcore players. Blizzard had a similar problem although in the reverse, where WoW started as a pretty hardcore experience (similar to games like EQ2, etc) and then switched its focus to more casual gameplay. The problem is that in trying to please both parties, you inevitably end up pleasing nobody. And unfortunately despite your wishes for harder content, when it comes down to player populations, there will always be more casuals than hardcore players, meaning if you want to keep a game running you have to cater to the casuals first. If you try and cater only to hardcore players, you will most likely fail, which is exactly what happened to WildStar. Wildstar was designed to be an upgraded version of vanilla WoW when it came to the difficulty of its content, and focused all its effort on catering to hardcore raiders. Their problem? There weren't enough hardcore players to make it work and the game flopped. So whether you like it or not, an mmorpg's success relies on the casuals, as they form the majority of the playerbase. How is this game hardcore focused? 1 raid in 10 month, 2 fractals with OPTIONAL CM? In the meantime 8+ openworld maps , story instances,....and so on.are you kidding?That's just the start. From what you guys are saying the core game was a lot easier, and with each expansion Anet are slowly making the content more challenging. There won't be an instant change of course, but it will gradually happen over time.
  14. The problem with Heart of Thorns is it came after the really easy core game. There was no in-between content for some of the players. On the other hand, those who did play Season 2 when it was released shouldn't have any issues with Heart of Thorns, if anything a lot of the mobs were significantly nerfed with the release of Heart of Thorns. But I guess even the hardest mobs become easy if you hide behind huge blobs of players. But there is also the story of Season 2, how did they get over that and then had issues with Heart of Thorns. More likely the content drought before the expansion caused the players to become terrible at playing the game, no instanced story parts, just follow the tag in huge blobs and auto attack mobs to death for months makes players soft, and dumb. Ever since their first release they upped the challenge level, adding harder mobs, adding harder story instances and so on. They've been increasing the challenge level of the game for 5 years, so I wonder what are these players who don't want to "get good" still doing here. And you can't say that a Molten Brawler, a Twisted Horror, a Mordrem Thrasher (of Season 2, not the nerfed HoT version) are easier than the new Heart of Thorns mobs. Many probably forgot how they were and then called Heart of Thorns hard. Temporary content had this effect on difficulty and challenge, people forgot about it, it's another of the sad drawbacks of temporary content. The game has a wonderful combat system, yet many don't want to use it. If all some players want is a multi-loot farm to get their rewards without even playing the game, then what can I say, they should leave the game as soon as possible. Although Arenanet still creates brain dead farms (some unintentional), they are also creating some exciting encounters too. Easiest way to train people: take away brain dead farms so they have to play the game to get anything. It seems that the focus of the game is changing from how it was before HoT, from a very casual focused game to a more hardcore focused. Unfortunately at the same time Anet are trying to please both the casuals and the hardcore players. Blizzard had a similar problem although in the reverse, where WoW started as a pretty hardcore experience (similar to games like EQ2, etc) and then switched its focus to more casual gameplay. The problem is that in trying to please both parties, you inevitably end up pleasing nobody. And unfortunately despite your wishes for harder content, when it comes down to player populations, there will always be more casuals than hardcore players, meaning if you want to keep a game running you have to cater to the casuals first. If you try and cater only to hardcore players, you will most likely fail, which is exactly what happened to WildStar. Wildstar was designed to be an upgraded version of vanilla WoW when it came to the difficulty of its content, and focused all its effort on catering to hardcore raiders. Their problem? There weren't enough hardcore players to make it work and the game flopped. So whether you like it or not, an mmorpg's success relies on the casuals, as they form the majority of the playerbase.
  15. Very true. "Perfect balance" in a game is actually a bad thing. I'm terrible at explaining this kind of thing, so I'll let these guys do it instead: This video explains everything...And at the end brings you to the main problem of GW2 and why getting rid of traits would hurt balance more than help.The best way to balance the game is offer more choice, and more counters, and traits help with that. The problem with GW2 is that 9 professions, and 27 specializations (core builds+2 elite specs) aren't really enough, especially because the game repeats the same play-styles a lot. There's too much symmetry for the imbalance to work, and too much imbalance for symmetry to work. Because Arena net try to funnel players into the latest thing, core builds are seriously crippled vs elite builds because power creep. And yet sometimes using a core build allows you to get enough traits in to counter a specific elite spec, but because the numbers are seriously lacking, you can't really do that. HoT specs are more useful, but still, in many fields the new elites dominate. HoT are only really good for the extra tanky builds with chrono, tempest and druid shedding damage like crazy (a role that is now being taken over by some spellbreaker builds).And while there's specific identifiable strengths in builds, there's no identifiable counters for a lot of them. Lets analyse the problem with scourge:Scourge is overbearing because it can apply a crap ton of condis onto the enemy, all while doing spellbreaker's thing of denying boons. What would be the best counter? Yeah, another necro build, or marginally a Malix Revenant. So teams end up with two necros because the best counter for a necro is another necro, and playing necro, the duel vs other necro ends up with whoever uses Plague signet first, or has it on CD loses. (I used the word necro a lot...) So we need more traits? Well in that case they should start allowing equipping more than 1 elite specialization in future expansions.We don't necessarily need more traits, but the traits we have need to be rebalanced in such a way that the elite specs aren't just upgraded versions of the core traits. For example, let's look at the Mirage Cloak mechanic, which replaces dodge rolling in the Mirage Mesmer spec. No matter how you look at it, Mirage Cloak is objectively better than normal dodge rolling because it provides invulnerability frames without an animation to slow it down, can be used while casting abilities and can be traited to remove CC and conditions and provide superspeed. The Mirage Cloak is a direct upgrade of the normal dodge roll in every scenario with no weaknesses at all. If you wanted to find balance in this situation, you would need to change it so that using Mirage Cloak roots your character in place for the duration, which would make it weak against aoe abilities. You would then have to choose whether to take the Mirage Cloak and be able to avoid damage while casting spells, or take the normal dodge roll which would interrupt your current action but move you out of range of aoe abilities. Suddenly you have options and would have to decide what to take based on the situation.
  16. Very true. "Perfect balance" in a game is actually a bad thing. I'm terrible at explaining this kind of thing, so I'll let these guys do it instead: That's for PVP games mostly. There is no way to have cycling balance in PVEYes, I realised that and was just amending my last post to explain how to balance PvE (see above).
  17. Very true. "Perfect balance" in a game is actually a bad thing. I'm terrible at explaining this kind of thing, so I'll let these guys do it instead: Now in terms of balancing for GW2, it's important that you can separate PvP and PvE for balancing. PvP balancing can more or less sort itself out as long as every class and build has some form of weakness that other classes and builds can exploit. This will allow the meta to keep shifting as players figure out ways to counter whatever the most popular build is, using the tools they have available to them. Balancing for PvE is a lot harder because it requires the implementation of PvE content that requires certain aspects that force players to change their builds based on the encounter. There are mechanics like this already, but the problem we face right now is that certain classes can provide literally everything needed for all situations. It doesn't matter how many different kinds of bosses or mechanics you create if all of them can be beaten by the exact same team set up, which is where the stale meta comes from. Why take a Guardian tank over a Chrono tank when the Chrono provides more survivability and offensive boons in literally every situation? If you want balance and options you have to make certain classes and builds weaker in some situations, otherwise people will just run the exact same set up for every encounter.
  18. And yet other games I have done raids in have been (In my opinion) more complex than the gw2 raids and yet don't have the same elitist attitudes with them. Now I know that complex doesn't necessarily mean hard, but if the gw2 bosses are less complex, what makes them so hard? I'm reading through the boss abilities and they all seem very simple to me.In GW2 there's no pre-filtering present in game that prevents you from even participating. No attunements, no required "must be this high to participate" gearchecks etc. This usually mean that most of people trying raids in other games already have the "correct" attitude and mindset - and those whose skills are not up to the task are usually also discouraged before this point. Additionally, mechanics of many bosses put different roles on players - some of them are harder, but others can be really easy. On top of that, GW2 is a highly casual game, where the ratio of casuals to hardcores is likely higher than in other game communities All that means that among people trying to raid there may be many that in other games wouldn't even have made it to the entrance. In fact, there are a lot of people like that even among the "pro elitists". Seriously, i have seen quite a number of people in elite armor, with stacks of LI and tons of KPs that didn't know many of the boss mechanics, because they've always been doing the dps only and left everything harder to others. So, even if the complexity of raids is indeed much lower than in some other games, the average skill, commitment and overall experience of average raider is probably lower. It doesn't mean that other games are less elitist. It just means you have less chance of seeing it. When you do see it, though... oh boy, it can be much, much nastier than in GW2. I have seen toxic behaviour in other games that was tolerated (or even considered to be "justified") that would get someone at least suspended here. The big question then becomes, how to "train" the players to be better at the gameThat's a big question indeed. I haven't seen this done well like ever. The only thing all those "attempts to train people" accomplish is to filter less skilled players out. Besides, that's a wrong question to ask. The real question should always be "how to keep players in the game longer". Attempting to trainin them to be better at the game rarely accomplishes that - quite often it does the opposite (by discouraging them). Becoming "better at the game" has no inherent worth. It's just a thing some people like to do.A lot of the time you just need to make people aware of the mechanics. Like I said before I hit level 80 on 2 characters and never even knew that combo skills and breaking bars existed, because during the leveling process I had never had to use those mechanics. FF14 had the right idea when it came to training new players, with their "Hall of the Novice" section. These were training scenarios designed to teach you specific aspects of the game depending on the role you had chosen. So for example if you were a dps player you learned how to avoid aoe attacks and how to quickly switch targets in the middle of a fight. If you were a tank you learned how to maneuver a target into certain positions, and engage new enemies as they approached. Things like this may seem very simple but to a new player they can completely open your eyes to various aspects of group combat.
  19. And yet other games I have done raids in have been (In my opinion) more complex than the gw2 raids and yet don't have the same elitist attitudes with them. Now I know that complex doesn't necessarily mean hard, but if the gw2 bosses are less complex, what makes them so hard? I'm reading through the boss abilities and they all seem very simple to me. This I gotta hear, what game have you played where the raiding community was not slathered with elitism? WoW and FF14 are the 2 games where I've raided the most, and neither of them were as elitist as GW2 (in my experience anyway).
  20. Second, and that's possibly more important, it feels like large parts of the GW2 community are atrociously bad. The kind of pugs you regularly encounter in T4 fractals (in theory, the second-hardest PvE content) just makes you cringe if you run Arc and know halfway how to play a class. That isn't that difficult, by the way, since most normal players should get acceptable results (i.e. 70%+ of the benchmark) after practicing an hour or so at the golem unless they're hell-bent on playing a piano class like condi engi. Is spending an hour or so of preparation too much to ask for the most difficult content in the game? Sure, it won't translate directly into perfect gameplay in the real encounter, but too many people lack even these basics. Maybe that's a problem with the leveling process not preparing players for end-game content than the end-game content itself. I hit level 80 on 2 characters and went into my first fractals without even knowing anything about defiance bars and combo abilities, which are 2 of the core mechanics required for completing T4 fractals. I only learned those aspects of gameplay purely from researching them myself outside of the game. I can definitely see how a lot of people would get into T4 fractals not knowing that sort of thing. It might be worth trying to add these sorts of mechanics into the core leveling experience through the personal story to better prepare players for the end-game content. We should also look at the number of people who level characters through PvP and then transition into fractals at level 80. In my opinion this shouldn't be possible because the mechanics and skill requirements for the 2 modes are vastly different. I'd much prefer the system they had in GW1 where you could make a max level PvP only character that was completely separate from any aspect of PvE.
  21. And yet other games I have done raids in have been (In my opinion) more complex than the gw2 raids and yet don't have the same elitist attitudes with them. Now I know that complex doesn't necessarily mean hard, but if the gw2 bosses are less complex, what makes them so hard? I'm reading through the boss abilities and they all seem very simple to me.
  22. What I think we need to figure out is, is the lack of raiders due to difficulty of the content or the attitude and elitism of the current raiders? For example, do you need to have a team with full ascended gear and the perfect set up in order to clear the current raid content? I haven't done any of the raids in this game so far but just looking at the mechanics of the boss fights, none of them are as complex as your average WoW boss, and yet the WoW community isn't nearly as elitist as it Is here. Is the skill ceiling really as high as people make it out to be, or is this just an illusion put on by the raiders so that they don't have to play with "noobs"? If the experienced raiders are expecting entry level raiders to have a full set of ascended gear and the perfect build before even stepping into a raid, is it any wonder hardly anyone new gets In?
  23. I agree that GW2 does underwater combat the best out of any game I've played........but it's still underwater combat. There are so many more issues to deal with when it comes to underwater combat, the chief of which is the added dimensions available. When you are fighting in water you have to think about enemies that are above or below you in the 3 dimensional space, and this can cause a lot of confusion for players who aren't used to it. A lot of the frustration (for me at least) comes from thinking that I am on the same level as my opponent when in fact I'm not. This isn't helped either by the camera that clearly isn't designed with underwater combat in mind. If they were to rework underwater combat that would be the place I would start, so at the very least you could clearly identify your position compared to the mobs you are fighting.
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