Sojourner.4621

lol This is why EAnet made the grind as high inorder to sell them You can only buy the node with volatile magic and gold.

Low APM isn't much of a thing at the higher end, but at least limited array of buttons to press and overly simple rotation is. Other's have said it (while downplaying their rotations below what they are actually capable of) but Staff Daredevil Thief and Axe/Greatsword Reaper Necromancer have the overall easiest rotations to higher-ish DPS. Of the two Reaper probably attacks slower, but Thief you can suck at the rotation more and still output at least a reasonable amount of DPS (can achieve 20k via a majority of auto-attacks only.)

It's true until it isn't, but for now? I also tried ESO, and while it seems like a really solid game, the combat and movement felt very floaty and imprecise to me. I also disliked the resource management mechanic utilizing slow, charged attacks interspersed with bursts of activity. It just made the combat feel really off to me and I couldn't get into it. I tried FFXIV and it seemed absolutely awful. The intro was as generic as it gets! They literally start you off on a ship sailing to "adventure" and when you get there you run errands all over town for an hour before you finally venture out into the countryside to...kill 10 of these, then 10 of those, while searching for Old Man's socks. Barf! Everyone told me it gets a lot better later on, which is fair and can definitely be said about this game as well. But I never made it because of the colossal GCD on skills! I'm afraid that is just a deal-breaker for me. I did BnS. Great combat system! Felt like a fighting game and it's the only one I've tried that would give GW2 combat a run for its money. But otherwise the game seemed like complete garbage. There seemed to be only one story arc that you were forced to play through it on every character and it's as generic a story as FFXIV's intro! WoW, of course. It's a hot mess. I heard they're going to overhaul it, but when I tried it there was no coherence to leveling. No personal story and you level so quickly through the zones that you never learn what's going on anywhere because you're too busy killing 10 of these and then 10 of those and so on. It's just a huge grind to level 120. Worse, the combat feels pretty much exactly the same as it did 15 years ago! Long GCDs, channels, low mobility, no active avoidance, passive, passive, passive. It's just really dated at this point and all it has going for it is the massive amount of content they put out. I need to give BDO a try. I got as far as downloading it and creating a character. Beautiful character models. You could waste a lot of time in their character manager with its impressive array of options. But as of yet I have no feel for the combat or anything else that might be relevant to a comparison. So, yeah, I do find it difficult. This game is far from perfect, but there are a lot of things to love about it, too. I'm sure I could learn to appreciate some of these other games if I were willing to put in the time and overlook their shortcomings the way I do for GW2. But why do that when I could play GW2? To be honest BDO has ultimately the same problem as BnS. The combat is fantastic and the game itself is gorgeous and.... that's it. The story is generic and terrible. The enemies you fight early in the game have essentially no AI at all and just stand there auto-attacking while you hit them, making the great combat meaningless, and the trek to a meaningful level so you can get to the world PvP that is the best part of the game is a slog... and it's very Pay to Win.

Given ep2 launches right at the end of Jan, I'd expect ep3 to hit somewhere after SAB in April anyway. Which about 2.5 months between releases If memory serves, they said Drakkar wont release with the episode, but shortly after. So that would prob be Feb if correct I guess all depends on the quality and quantity of the visions update, im personally a fan of smaller but more frequent updates since anet cant really nail big updades and their replayability but ep1 was too small story wise even for me. Id rather they try and stick to this 2 month schedule tho we'll have to w8 and see. Super bummed about the lack of fractal and raid news honestly, strikes are cool but where is the incentive for ppl to move further. All of all im happy we are seeing the first steps of a roadmap but this q looks relatively weak imo, still it must have taken alot of internal discussion within anet to actual give us deadlines for once. Well any communication is better than none. And this is a lot better than anything else we got, but yes I feel sorry for the instanced players who have nothing to latch onto here. I will take what they serve here though - it is something Ep2 will likely be very short again. I suspect Drakkar is going to be a significant boss which means a lot of resources devoted to it. Which is good - we really need a proper epic scale World Boss. We haven't really had one for a long, long time now. Not since HoT really and Gerent/Dragonstand. But, another miniscule story entry is not something that I will be happy to see. Episode 2 will be the other half of Bjora marches.And Visions of the past? Perhaps its ls1 bought back.It sounds more like the "Bonus Mission" packs from the original Guild Wars... Gwen's Story, Battle of Jahai, etc.

I mean, I don't really support a premium model either... but stating that they shouldn't have one and then telling people to look at a game with a premium subscription as an example isn't really a great way to get this point across. "Hell, just copy ESOs whole model" would literally have them lock our crafting material storage behind a $15 a month fee.

Before you rush to the defense, you should probably do some actual research on this subject. Arenanet could EASILY run gw2 without putting 95% of their content into the cashshop, if you're honestly believing anything different, then i don't think you know how the gaming industry works.Virtually almost all publishers these days, are pushing for Mobile-like monetization in PC gaming, because it allows them to push a new, bland, empty title every year, from any franchise, and make millions off the back of people who blindly support it. ask yourself, did they need all this money from monetization to MAKE guildwars2 ? - no. why?, because their previous game, GuildWars, wich had practically NO monetization, NO subscription fee, made them enough money to: Not have a single day of downtime on the servers, not even on patchdays.make 3 full scale expansions in just 3 years, the Original guildwars came out on April 26, 2005, and the third expansion was released on August 28, 2007.Build all of guild wars 2, and launch it. GW1 definitely didn't make them enough money to make Guild Wars 2. That's not how video games work. What really happened is they were funded by their publisher, NCSoft, to make Guild Wars 2 because they were able to convince them that the second could make enough money to fund its development. Just like Guild Wars 1 was developed not from the funds of a prior game, or the pockets of the developers, but from what essentially amounts to a loan from a publisher in exchange for a continuing cut of the future profits. That's how publishing works, off of investment capital. Meanwhile... I always 100% expected equipment templates to be monetized, if they existed at all... because it is extra storage space, which they have charged for since launch. The trait templates being monetized is annoying, but a minor inconvenience in the long term since you literally can store infinite builds via chat codes + notepad on your home computer. The cap for equipment templates of 6 is by far my biggest irritant, but because I refuse to use ARC I've been manually swapping anyway and will continue to do so.

Why would it be? Because devs who were most likely not working on GW2 left? Okay then, rationality seems to be lost on some Apparently so does math cause 14 is pretty close to 20 now.

It's not buffed in WvW. Its damage at a range is... sorta buffed because it hits more people. However, what made scourge truly bad in WvW was the fact that it was able to support its sub squad with barrier pulses from sand shade at the same time as dealing all of its damage. It did all the DPS with absolutely zero sacrifice in utility. I specifically ran a power burst blood/barrier scourge that did easily 20-30k aoe damage bursts while still applying barrier to my entire havoc. THIS is what made them broken in WvW... HOWEVER... most of that barrier came from sand shade pulses of some kind. By making the necro pulse zero of the sand shade skills on itself once a shade is placed, it forces you to choose between support and damage rather than getting both at once all the time with no effort. At BEST you can place two small shades away and one next to you but it still won't provide near the damage or support that big shade bombs did in WvW previously. And for the condi builds, you have to invest pretty heavily in to condi damage, which means you're not taking the barrier skills. This is a definite step in the right direction.

The scourge changes are actually.. interesting. Current support scourge used big shade to hit at a range while also throwing barrier on all its zergy allies at the same time. Since you no longer pulse with your shade, you no longer can barrier support with big shade. The only option becomes 3-shade and one of them is placed on you for less overall utility. You now have to choose between big damage or big utility, you don't get both at the same time without any extra effort. The tempest changes are fine. Power Tempest was actually already in a decent position damage-wise in PvE (35kish) and this will only make it stronger... Weaver exists for sure, but this might actually put Tempest close to their overall DPS if not their initial burst.

For me it was exactly this. I did the personal story when I was still fairly new to the game and got clobbered when I tried to do the last chapter. It was more than a year later before I bothered to go back and finish it and yes, it was significantly easier. Both my game play and my gear were a lot better. Heck, the first time I did the Battle of Claw Island I barely made it through by the skin of my teeth. Now it's easy peasy. :) Same here. After learning how to make a proper build and getting better gear I have had a lot less trouble with content that used to stump me.I have to agree with the general consensus here. Even if we talk about strictly more recent events. I did my first run of PoF within about two weeks of release. I have since run the remaining 21 of my characters through. Each character was easier than the last, and now if I replay episodes on my first it is easier as well. It would potentially be easy to blame this on power creep or differences in the power of individual classes... but the number of characters I have run through means that I have run multiple of every class. The game gets easier as a matter of course not necessarily because something got nerfed or something else got stronger... but because we all know much better how to play what we've been given. Earth djinn now take seconds to kill when before they were sorta 50/50 on whether I even survived an encounter with them. One hydra joining a group of enemies roaming used to be a problem and now I can drop dead in to the center of the cluster of them below Temple of Kormir and take 6-7 at once. HoT really pointed out to a lot of us on its release just how easy all of core tyria was, and just how bad at the game we were.

I've never seen a community in all my life so willing to throw it's developers under the bus. While I largely agree with much of that you said regarding content delivery and feel that something is indeed wrong at Anet, let's not pat our backs as a community for spreading the word of mouth.Our most vocal members have run this game through the mud time and time again. All of what you wrote point at the same thing though. Isn't it weird that a game of GW2's scope, one of the most acclaimed MMOs ever on launch, is struggling with content creator/media exposure? Because it really shouldn't be having any trouble. Not only it does, but we are at a point where well known creators or even Anet partners are expressing dissatisfaction and worry about the state of the game. This is not a common occurrence, usually these types are the first to defend, or as the buzzword is, "shill" a game. Same applies for media outlets like Massively. So how did we get here?Could it be that content creators need a steady stream of "watchable" game content at a known cadence to be able to do what they do?Could it be that media outlets need new big-time features and content packs (like xpacs) to generate clicks, in order to bother with featuring a game?And in the absence of click-worthy content, controversy fills the void.Could it be that a studio was so starved for money that chose to release their new shiny gambleboxes during the peak of hurricane "Battlefront"? Even a 5yo would expect the media reaction that followed. See a pattern here? Cause and effect.I would say it's largely a result of the Guild Wars community that tends to overreact to every perceived sleight to such a massive extent that their manufactured outrage bleeds in to other online gaming communities. Every update ruins everything, is the worst content patch ever and ANet is an awful company that deserves to fail. And then two weeks later the community pats itself on the back and goes back to claiming itself as the friendliest community ever.

Think of it less as questing and more as making them trust you enough to allow you to buy and sell wares with them. You don't gain trust by liberating people who don't realize they are slaves... the first thing you are told on Entering Vabbi is that the nobles don't WANT to be rescued because they don't know any better. Joko is their god, a normal part of the cycle of life and death, and they welcome his rule because they don't know better. Sure at the academy you're trying to disrupt the propaganda machine by catching the kids and re-educating them while they are young... but here, you're dealing with already indoctrinated adults. The goal is different. Instead you're trying to establish diplomatic ties, and when in Rome....

Most third party retailers take 15%-30% of the purchase cost of the game... and some much higher than even that. ANet was likely forwarded next to nothing.

How abot NOT making those previous skins wearable by Koda and Tengu (wouldn't make sense anyway, it would look ridiculous), but instead giving them 6-10 exclusive cultural armor sets? Would be less of a hassle than squeezing and stretching existent sets. Most of those skins are automatically attached to the armor sets that are a part of the base game. So what do you do, make it so they can't equip any armor that has a pre-existing skin on it? The ascended skins? The crafted exotics? Koda can't equip any of the exalted/emblazoned/draconic armors or the temple armors from karma vendors? That would cause an equal riot.

To be honest... I have a hard time being upset about the merchandising fluff. People have been saying for years that ANet does zero marketing and a lot of people outside the game don't even know it exists. There has hardly been any RL Merch released for the game that wasn't specifically organized by the community. The fact that in this past year a whole bunch of merchandising deals have been pushed through is actually kindof a big deal to be honest. It means the marketing department is actually... marketing. Also I wouldn't be surprised if daddy NC made them include it in their segment.