flog.3485

Aren’t riftstalkers just reskinned Karkas ? Aren’t branded undead just reskinned undead ? We could go on and on for hours..... Plenty of games have reused skeletons whether we take about assets for designing environments or even profession skills.

Of course it does, easy mode do make raid-centered MMORPGs. In fact, you are contradicting yourself in the first sentence. That is the entire reason why raids force you to go instanced content to get the appropriate gear and justify the need to do so with an easy mode, because not every palyer will agree to do the most difficult content.The majority of the guild wars 2 playerbase will never go into instanced content if they can get the best stats in open world just like the majority of the playerbase will never attempt dungeons at low level if they can get to 80 without doing any form of instanced group content. Remember when any point in the game, some form of progression was locked behind instanced content, how the community reacted ?End of story gated behind Arah ? Please make it solo (and now you even some who demands all the other dungeon story to be made soloable when, in fact, you can already solo it).Mastery progression locked behind raid in the form of acquiring spirit shards ? Instant complain about how some players needed to kill one boss in order to unlock the raid mastery so that thery could gain spirit shards, yet still without needing to fully commit to raids. At this point, the only thing that could make easy mode raiding worth developing, is if the horizontal mastery progression was locked behind raids again. But then it would also need other exclusive rewards that you can't get in open world nor in fractals nor in higher difficulty raids. Good luck finding that. And most importantly, good luck changing the games' general mindset that it has always been possible to play it without needing to go into group instanced content to get the best gear.

Sounds to me that there is a difference in announcing an expansion because the studio knows what the story entails, where it would lead, what kind of content it would have in it and what rewards you would get; as opposed to have it work in doors figuring out everything that the expansion will offer. Based on that premise, expect an expansion announcement during the second half of season 5, if we stay optimistic in saying there will be one another.I mean, we are really not in the same situation as season 3. We sure sure went from season 3 to PoF to season 4 very fast but of course we had two long no content story gaps before and after HoT.

No offense taken, dont worry. Idk. I dont play that much anymore. Most of the time i only log in for raids with my static and even im done with the new map. I´ve probably spend 10 hours on the new map including the story. Im pretty sure that there are people not done with the achievements yet, but i assume that the majority of the people actually playing the content, is. Yes, a fair point you bring up. I mean you could farm the resources of the maps efficiently with lots of alts but then again you already have quite a hardcore mentality behind it no matter how casual the content might be. And I don’t think the general casual player is into that if so much items in the game are account based anyway. But anyway I digress. Let’s get back at topic.The best way to deliver content for Anet imo, would be to alternate raid/fractal for each major release to avoid burn out or make the player base freel like there is only quick content to get through living world.Given the thin resources allowed to fractal/raids, getting easy mode raids outside of the already implemented challenge motes is a bad idea.

Yeah, Ill believe it when i see it.I still remember 6 wings per year. Btw. is there a way to change what i voted for? Yes, sadly there is no way to be sure it is in fact gonna happen. But there is a higher chance it is gonna happen if the teams are not seperate like before.Nah, having the teams not separated just makes it easier to use the formerly "raid devs" for other stuff instead of raids. It is also a clear sign that raids are no longer important enough to have their own dedicated team. It's probably good for fractals, though. We do see more of fractal stuff lately. I understand your position but really I will just never be able to agree with you. Honestly it is just not raids that had problems: it is the basic concept that they always had issues, since the beginning, to develop instanced group content (let’s remember the dungeon team and the lack of instanced content in open world ever since after core game content). I don’t think it is a lack of importance, but rather a lack of resources; obviously they identified that, spreading their resources too thin between two teams working on a really slow pace to deliver content every 10 months, is not the best way to support the release of instanced group content. Its not only instanced content. Right now anet doesnt support a single game mode properly. Not even open world.One new map every 3 or 4 months isnt enough to cut it. After 1 or 2 weeks you are done with the achievements and will probably never go back to the new map again. Why would you? After you have done youre achievements theres nothing to do for you anyway.No offense, but I think you overestimate far too much how fast a casual player might complete these achievements. And the general casual player might not see any value in playing a map only to get the achievements and never return again. I mean personally, I still have stuff to do in Jahai bluffs.

Yeah, Ill believe it when i see it.I still remember 6 wings per year. Btw. is there a way to change what i voted for? Yes, sadly there is no way to be sure it is in fact gonna happen. But there is a higher chance it is gonna happen if the teams are not seperate like before.Nah, having the teams not separated just makes it easier to use the formerly "raid devs" for other stuff instead of raids. It is also a clear sign that raids are no longer important enough to have their own dedicated team. It's probably good for fractals, though. We do see more of fractal stuff lately.I understand your position but really I will just never be able to agree with you. Honestly it is just not raids that had problems: it is the basic concept that they always had issues, since the beginning, to develop instanced group content (let’s remember the dungeon team and the lack of instanced content in open world ever since after core game content). I don’t think it is a lack of importance, but rather a lack of resources; obviously they identified that, spreading their resources too thin between two teams working on a really slow pace to deliver content every 10 months, is not the best way to support the release of instanced group content.

Yeah, Ill believe it when i see it.I still remember 6 wings per year. Btw. is there a way to change what i voted for? Yes, sadly there is no way to be sure it is in fact gonna happen. But there is a higher chance it is gonna happen if the teams are not seperate like before.

Well I am pretty sure they wanted to time the release of raids/fractal with each living story update from now on. It was actually the reason why they merged both team. What is so different between a raid encounter and a fractal encounter at this point according to you ? Don’t you think the original fractal designers can also bring their expertise to some raid encounters ? And vice-versa ?

Honestly it doesn't really matter. Whether the team in charge of instanced group content releases fractal or raids, it would be in Anet best interest to make sure that all the players who participate in instanced group content also participate in raids imo, rather than trying to create raid easy mode for open world players. And in that persperctive, it makes perfect sense to have only team in charge of both raids in fractal, which could easily introduce players to raid mechanics through fractal tiers, if necessary.

I would rather say for these reasons personally: for legendary collectionsfor F2P to get some loot and get a hang of the game on a global point of view

If the story was really challenging then the LFG for Living story section would ber filled with lfg group requests.

Why would you play a support build in a solo instance ? You make it sound like guardian can’t play DPS.You don’t even need to play a spec built for raids. You wouldn’t even need to have full try hard ascended armor. And by the way, of course they need to have that sort of health pool, have you seen how generally speaking, we can do a lot more damages due to the elite specs ? Simply because I have duplicate classes with different builds for different modes. Unfortunately my 'main' happens to be the support FB, and I make sure he gets full completion in maps and story. My DPS DH could have done it just as easy as my Condi reaper, but my support scourge would have had a problem as well. Support FB has legend armor, and my DPS DH, Condi Reaper, Support Scourge, Chrono tank, DPS Holosmith are all full ascended. Swapping gear and builds just became a pain so I made multiples of the same classes for different rolesAnd so ? You mean that with your support firebrand with leg armor, you can’t switch the stats to grievers and get yourself some Balthazar runes or any other condis ones to no longer be a full support firebrand ?

Why would you play a support build in a solo instance ? You make it sound like guardian can’t play DPS.You don’t even need to play a spec built for raids. You wouldn’t even need to have full try hard ascended armor. And by the way, of course they need to have that sort of health pool, have you seen how generally speaking, we can do a lot more damages due to the elite specs ?

Story missions = single player Talk to me again after doing it for the 13th time (or twice as often for achievements). :s Can we stop with this nonsense? Story missions will never be truly single player in an mmo, because if it was, then we would be locked out of grouping up. I have already done it many times (5 to be precise and I guess it will go up to 9 times if I decide to play every professions) but I don’t really understand why playing it 13 times with so many stuff being account bound in this game. So agree to disagree ?

While this might be true, there were two extremely positive things about those dialogue cutscenes that are missing now: Your character's face was actually emoting and the lips were moving to adequately match the words, which is no longer the case during dialogue. You could skip them if you didn't want to listen to the dialogue for the x-th time, something you can no longer do. Well agree to disagree then.The two advantages you bring up are really fluffy imo. We just really needed a good story, not solely a good presentation of story. These two advantages are really only relevant for single player game.You could skip but there wasn't any incentize to so imo, because any optional achievement in story were only made at the start of season 2 of I recall correctly. I really don't mind repeating dialogues if the quality of the story have highly increased overall from the beginning of season 2 and forwards. the incentive was being able to get through them faster and not being forced to listen to things youd heard before, i have 15 characters i dont play very much, having to watch all the cutscenes after the core game is going to be painful. It was painful having to do it on my 3 that i play the most :/ Forced cutscenes are terrible IMO, forced Dialogue that drags on and on is also terrible IMO: theres no need for it and it doesnt add anything other than wasted time if youve listened to it more than once. Well sure. They could always improve the current situation, so that we can skip the story if we need to. I just want point out that, imo, it is much less terrible to be forced to replay a good story with optional achievements than to have the ability to skip a story that was largely being criticized for being sort of weak.

While this might be true, there were two extremely positive things about those dialogue cutscenes that are missing now: Your character's face was actually emoting and the lips were moving to adequately match the words, which is no longer the case during dialogue. You could skip them if you didn't want to listen to the dialogue for the x-th time, something you can no longer do. Well agree to disagree then. The two advantages you bring up are really fluffy imo. We just really needed a good story, not solely a good presentation of story. These two advantages are really only relevant for single player game.You could skip but there wasn't any incentize to so imo, because any optional achievement in story were only made at the start of season 2 of I recall correctly. I really don't mind repeating dialogues if the quality of the story have highly increased overall from the beginning of season 2 and forwards.

Nah it just breaks the immersion and the pace too much imo.Don’t worry the art of Gw2 will forever be relevant through open world content. And frankly from now on, it would be better to stick with what they have created in the cinematic with joko (if possible).

if 90 % of the consumers have trouble with it . that would make it a BAD fight/product Problem is before HoT anet breeded the community of uninspired bots who only care about autoattacking and looting, with 0 awareness of combat mechanics or the ability to read boss animations. It's good they stepped up their game with HoT and so on but many players are too lazy to adapt. It's good Anet works on some tutorials in the background, maybe finally some people will learn how to use their skills. those "uninspired bots" paid for the game, if you think they would had invested this much for a niche population , then you dont know how business workswithout the casuals to fund it, this would had gone the same way as wildstar You give the casual player not enough credit here. You can be casual and still know your class. You can be casual and still adapt to a given situation. I like that GW2 is a very casual friendly game but that doesn't mean there can't be some kinda demanding content every now and then. A casual friendly game does not need to be like candy crush or fruit ninja to be a casual game. Casuals have dem skillz too u know you are missing the point, and you are wrong toowhenever i chose to adapt and get better(if its even possible)..im not a casual anymore, since the game has MOTIVATED me to IMPROVEthat is the exact OPPOSITE of casualHmmm that rather shows that you don’t like what the game has to offer imo. You will always be expected to improve at some point because the game relies on skill rather gear treadmill.

But here is the big problem: numbers of players allowed in a map. If you allow dueling in a map where a major meta event spawns and some players can’t join the instance because their place is taken by players who are dueling and are not contributing, then what do you do ? It just deincentivizes players using the LFG. You also certainly don’t want to recreate the problem of having raid portals only in open world where events of one map were massively scaled because there was a bunch of players afking in front of the portal. In the end here is what would happened: you would have a specified instance where players would go to duel, which is very much what we already have with guild halls or hotjoin 1v1 servers. There's always people in meta maps not contributing whether they're just afking with just enough participation to get rewards or gathering nodes, or doing hero points or whatever. A couple of guys having a duel isn't going to destabilize the meta event system. I personally don’t agree with you because dueling is far more impactful and draws a lot more attention than having a few solo players gathering nodes or whatever. Don’t get me wrong. I am not here to say that dueling is bad. I did have have some duels from time to time in the guild hall, in hotjoin arenas and in WvW. I just think that because it will be impactful, it will be abused and therefore it will need support of not only implementing dueling in open world but also regularly updating it. Do you really think that the devs can do this ? How much time before you see threads pop up saying “dueling is unbalanced, dueling is bugged bla-bla-bla?” Imo they can’t because their teams are already stretched enough. And here is the most important thing: dueling can already happen without any devs further resources used in the process. It is also way too late (after 6 years) to implement such a groundbreaking development when devs have put so much effort into making PvE a full cooperative and supportive-uncompetitive area. What meta events with full maps are struggling to get done now a days? I mean heck there's always 30+ people in every full Auric Basin map AFKing at east. The Domain of Istan and Sandswept Isles metas have huge quantities of AFK turret engineers. These events get done just fine. Dueling isn't going to render open world PvE unplayable. There's already systems for enabling players to attack each other and to switch allegiances and make players hostile to each other on the fly already built into the game, which would be the bulk of the work required to make this system work. The rest adding a "Accept duel" menu, a timer when the duel is accepted, and a system that ends the duel when one player reaches 1 HP. WoW's dueling system is pretty basic and that's really all we'd need and I really don't think it would take a developer more than a day or two's work to implement this. Players upset about 1v1 dueling not being balanced would be barking up the wrong tree and I would have zero sympathy for them. Maybe. But still I don’t want dueling to be implemented in open world. I have provided my feedback and you have provided yours. Let’s see whose feedback they want to listen to.

But here is the big problem: numbers of players allowed in a map. If you allow dueling in a map where a major meta event spawns and some players can’t join the instance because their place is taken by players who are dueling and are not contributing, then what do you do ? It just deincentivizes players using the LFG. You also certainly don’t want to recreate the problem of having raid portals only in open world where events of one map were massively scaled because there was a bunch of players afking in front of the portal. In the end here is what would happened: you would have a specified instance where players would go to duel, which is very much what we already have with guild halls or hotjoin 1v1 servers. There's always people in meta maps not contributing whether they're just afking with just enough participation to get rewards or gathering nodes, or doing hero points or whatever. A couple of guys having a duel isn't going to destabilize the meta event system. I personally don’t agree with you because dueling is far more impactful and draws a lot more attention than having a few solo players gathering nodes or whatever. Don’t get me wrong. I am not here to say that dueling is bad. I did have have some duels from time to time in the guild hall, in hotjoin arenas and in WvW. I just think that because it will be impactful, it will be abused and therefore it will need support of not only implementing dueling in open world but also regularly updating it. Do you really think that the devs can do this ? How much time before you see threads pop up saying “dueling is unbalanced, dueling is bugged bla-bla-bla?” Imo they can’t because their teams are already stretched enough. And here is the most important thing: dueling can already happen without any devs further resources used in the process. It is also way too late (after 6 years) to implement such a groundbreaking development when devs have put so much effort into making PvE a full cooperative and supportive-uncompetitive area.

But here is the big problem: numbers of players allowed in a map. If you allow dueling in a map where a major meta event spawns and some players can’t join the instance because their place is taken by players who are dueling and are not contributing, then what do you do ? It just deincentivizes players using the LFG. You also certainly don’t want to recreate the problem of having raid portals only in open world where events of one map were massively scaled because there was a bunch of players afking in front of the portal. In the end here is what would happened: you would have a specified instance where players would go to duel, which is very much what we already have with guild halls or hotjoin 1v1 servers.

Ultimately, I think the problem stems from how raids is implemented into the actual game. And this problem is two-fold imo: they require 10 people as an entry level while no other content in the game requires 10 players.Its content is somewhat assumed (wrongly or not, still up to debate) to be harder than the hardest 5 man content the game has to offer.There is not much to do to change the second problem (and if anything has to be changed, it has already been done with the different encounters providing different difficulties) because players’ expectations, perception and experience will vary too much for anything concrete to do, as far as development goes. However I think something can be done to change the first problem that has not been done so far. I would suggest that the game offers 10 man content that isn’t raids. Guild missions would be perfect for that imo, so that the newcomers that want to tackle raids are somewhat used to group up with 9 other players (and obviously if the guilds are short on players, they could open up the LFG tab).Now what game mode ? Looking back at Guild Wars, there was this cool instance where your would fight swarm of mobs that would get stronger the longer you stay in the instance. I think it would be cool to have this type of content as a guild mission. As for what loot it would offer, I was thinking of mobs dropping a particular currency or materials that can used as a new sink for longterm rewards or as a way to upgrade the guild hall.

That's not the point. I do have guild mates, I can always find someone by LFG as well if I want to. I am saying that story mode should be soloable, because it is 100% part of the campaign's story, not something seperate like fractals or raids, thus should be treated as story missions (hence be soloable). Just chiming in...Honestly that is a weak argument you have here. Dungeon story mode is not part of the story because it doesn’t require to play the dungeons to lvl up and advance your story. It's part of the story because if you just go from "everyone hates each other" in that meeting in LA to "everyone is friends again somehow" in Victory or Death, it doesn't make any sense. Everything between those points plays out in the dungeon story modes.Then they should have made dungeons required to play through and scale its content based on how many players entered the instance. Because, at low lvl, when players have the choice to either play dungeons (with the potential risk of running into toxic players) or casually lvl-up in open world, I think most would choose the path of least resistance (and when you would peruse the LFG back at dungeons hayday, I would also point out that most group requests were LvL 80 only). As for the story aspect, I don't necessarily agree with you. It feels much more like side story to me because the story leads you to kill zhaitan and whatever happens in the dungeons is totally irrevelant to it.

That's not the point. I do have guild mates, I can always find someone by LFG as well if I want to. I am saying that story mode should be soloable, because it is 100% part of the campaign's story, not something seperate like fractals or raids, thus should be treated as story missions (hence be soloable). Just chiming in...Honestly that is a weak argument you have here. Dungeon story mode is not part of the story because it doesn’t require to play the dungeons to lvl up and advance your story.

No the the raids don't need difficulty tiers. The standard MMO design GW2 has evaded for some years now have never advertised raids being a required step for players to get into. That is what makes its uniqueness in comparison to other MMO like FF14 or WoW where you find difficulty tiers because players are forced/pushed into that direction. But the thing is, in these games, players are not really playing raids as they are intented to be that endgame difficult content since they can stick to a dumbed down version of this content. Pushing more resources into raid design is a waste of opportunity that can better be spent elsewhere like open world content and/or fractals imo. I don't see the point of pushing people into easier tiers of raids in a game that allows a player to get the best tier of gear and shiny skins without setting foot in instanced group content. All it will do, if it ever happens, is making the players farm the easy mode and let them complain that is not much reward to go for because the truth is the game as a whole doesn't need much reward to go for to be enjoyed and played as mid tier rewards, except for fractals. And since it would be easy mode, most players will find ways to complete it without a group of 10 people, which would be a waste because the idea of easy mode would be to progress as a group through all difficulty tiers of every encounters. As for story purposes, I tend to feel like story raids are generally seen as amazing only because they feel exclusive. Edit:What the game really needs is new guild group content. Maybe it would be worth looking for guild content that could tell about raid stories through guild upgrades.