ArenaNet: Linsey Murdock unveils High End Ascended Gear (2012-11-13)

[bokiz333]

If wvw was supposed to be balanced then only 80s would be able to enter it. It is a crossover of pve and pvp the one pvp area where anet allows players to use their pve gear against other players. Balanced (ie:fair) pvp is in the spvp areas where I suspect you dont play too often as you like to talk about all the free kills you get on undergeared players.

I'm not answering any more ascended gear/gear progressing questions but this is different enough that I will address it.

I sPvP enough to test builds and to try out different rune sets. I'm only rank 9 but I do more than well there. Not the elite ele's you see on youtube; which are so good due to their superior keyboard/mouse skills; but good enough that people will almost always comment on it in game chat. I just don't do sPvP because its boring, 3 small maps and you just fight players with no rewards. No karma, no gold, no drops, no ex. I don't really see why I would continue playing it so I stopped at 9.

And you can tell who 80's are (if you WvW) and who upscaled players are. If they have the arrow, sure they're a walking badge. But my server (IOJ) is always either T1 or T2...our opponents have organized guilds and this isn't some tier 6 server where most players are sub 80. Majorty are and many have the completion star over their head...and if you have 100% world completion and you WvW, I can't immagine you don't have exotic gear. I'm not sure that's even possible.

As of yesterday I have 8542 WvW kills. Unless you think they were all underleveled no gear players, I'm doing ok.

[Centaur]

You read ad copy, you took every word literally, hung one every word, and when some of those words didn't bear fruit, you scream lie. I'm glad you're not my editor, because that's not the way the world works. There literally are hundreds of combinations of how it could all end up,. probably more, but in the end, there were always going to be a limited number of things for you to experience.

I buy games based on what the company says they are going to do. Everyone does. You did that as well. And then you're surprised that I'm angry when I find whole sections of their advertising campaign that were changed or left out without any notice to us, the customers, before release?
If you, as a writer, say that you're going to write a horror story with hordes of vampires on a boat to London, you advertise this story to the public, and then, when I buy the book, I find out that you decided to leave out the hordes of vampires and replace them with Humpty Dumpty on a boat to London because you ran out of time or because you thought that would sell better, don't you think I would have the right to be angry? Or would you really say, "hey, the story is still about a boat trip to London, as I said it would be, and you can still enjoy it, so what the hell are you complaining about" ?

Some achievements are long term goals. Legendary weapons are long term goals. Getting all the racial armor is a long term goal. I don't know why you say this game has no long term goals. It has pretty much the same long term goals as every MMO in existence. What long term goals do other games have? Skyrim? Dragon Age?

And we're back to the gear grinding. Thanks for confirming my point. So once more: ArenaNet made us believe this game would be better and different, and that the endgame goals wouldn't be about gear grinding. Wrong.

And single-player RPGs don't have long-term goals. You play through them, then quit. MMO's don't want you to quit, they want to give you long term value. To me, right now, GW2 has the value of a single player RPG, not an MMO. I played through it, I enjoyed it, I reached the end, and there's nothing worth doing for me. So I put it down.

[frunk]

Feel free to stop any time you like. There is a clear difference between vertical progression, and gear grinding. Sorry, you cant see that.

Vertical progression and gear grind aren't necessarily the same thing, but they tread in the same waters. The reason for that is that there's no point to vertical progression unless access to each successive level of the progression is gated somehow. Otherwise most players would just zoom right to the top of the progression. Generally this is achieved by:

money: pay to win
effort: collect xp/tokens/karma for levels/rewards
luck: RNG determines when you get the magic sword of BoomWinning
skill: complete this difficult challenge and gain x/y/z

GW2 has a bit of all of these. There really aren't any pure skill/money gates in the game, although both can let you get through the luck/effort gates much quicker. To me a gear grind is when a luck/effort vertical progression forces you to do one or a narrow set of activities repetitively for many hours. Only FotM, Legendary or other cosmetic sets qualify as a grind in GW2, and only FotM is an actual gear grind (for the moment).

edit: Actually let me amend that. Legendaries are a gear grind now as well, since they've been declared to always be best in type.

[frunk]

Imbalance to what? Competitive WvW? Okay. Adding imbalance to a gameplay element that's already unbalanced by design. PvE? Because PvE in this game is so competitive and needs constant balancing for those world first races. sPvP? Because they totally break tournaments right?

This really is ridiculous.

What is the point of making an easy PvE environment even easier? What is the point of making WvWers have to thrash through a PvE dungeon to get an edge? It is ridiculous to make a change that doesn't make anything better.

[Alexanian]

What is the point of making an easy PvE environment even easier? What is the point of making WvWers have to thrash through a PvE dungeon to get an edge? It is ridiculous to make a change that doesn't make anything better.

OK, ill bite.

On this very thread we have players saying they cannot complete challenges in orr and do not want to group to do it.
Does he just never get to complete his personal goals because his skill lacks? How many players are like him, that just need a few extra hp to get it done themselves.

At some point there is dimished return on skill improvement that will need to be compensated with gear increases. Hense vertical progression because everyone cannot be as awesome as bokiz

[frunk]

OK, ill bite.

On this very thread we have players saying they cannot complete challenges in orr and do not want to group to do it.
Does he just never get to complete his personal goals because his skill lacks? How many players are like him, that just need a few extra hp to get it done themselves.

At some point there is dimished return on skill improvement that will need to be compensated with gear increases. Hense vertical progression because everyone cannot be as awesome as bokiz

Except part of the reason for the difficulty in Orr is because of everyone rushing to do FotM instead of Orr. I don't think mayito7777 objects to other people in the zone helping, he just doesn't want to have to organize a party to get through the content.

[Alexanian]

Except part of the reason for the difficulty in Orr is because of everyone rushing to do FotM instead of Orr. I don't think mayito7777 objects to other people in the zone helping, he just doesn't want to have to organize a party to get through the content.

Perhaps, but a lot of people want to be able to solo all the areas (except group events) This game is supposed to be solo friendly, and that is how they interpret it to be. Sometimes the skill alone isnt enough for them. And honestly, even without fotm, certain lvl 80 areas are all but abandoned now that the bots are gone.

[mayito7777]

Perhaps, but a lot of people want to be able to solo all the areas (except group events) This game is supposed to be solo friendly, and that is how they interpret it to be. Sometimes the skill alone isnt enough for them. And honestly, even without fotm, certain lvl 80 areas are all but abandoned now that the bots are gone.

My main issue in Orr is that the area is packed almost every 3-5 feet with several mobs, you barely kill one and you have 2-3 or even 4 right on top of you not giving you time to heal or activate skills. Kind of sucks. Orr has so many mobs that knock, immobilize, stun that is like you are fighting vets from the other areas everywhere, on top of that you have to go to hell and back to be able to reach some of the skill points and Vistas, that is ridiculous.

[Jim Hunter]

My main issue in Orr is that the area is packed almost every 3-5 feet with several mobs, you barely kill one and you have 2-3 or even 4 right on top of you not giving you time to heal or activate skills. Kind of sucks. Orr has so many mobs that knock, immobilize, stun that is like you are fighting vets from the other areas everywhere, on top of that you have to go to hell and back to be able to reach some of the skill points and Vistas, that is ridiculous.

I don't mind the control effects or the amount of mobs, the problem I have is the respawn rate. If there is a big group I usually end up having to kill everyone atleast twice because it was designed for teams to fight instead of a single person.

Champion mobs are the worst though. If I decide to solo one I will spend a minimum of half an hour and I will end up having to kill their adds atleast a dozen times.

I wish instead of making the champions big blobs of hp that occasionally 1 hit you, they kept them closer to lower level veterans and improved their ai. As it is right now all you have to do is learn their pattern so you know when to dodge and hope you don't fall asleep while you spend all day hitting them.

[Sericenthe]

I agree that Orr needs to be more solo friendly. At least the respawn rate for Pete's sake which is ridiculous. In fact it's ridiculous everywhere.

Also, when stealth dumps aggro can we get a timer on the skill point guys and other creatures that they don't heal right away when that happens? I can't use stealth when soloing a skill point and that makes the encounter that much more difficult.