Cl1p

Gorwe, on 27 December 2012 - 07:57 PM, said:

So you really haven't played an MMO before. Let me break it down for you:

Tanks burn out.

Healers burn out.

The entire group is dependent on tanks and healers being on the ball all the time. You can get away with lackluster DPS, but you always need competent tanks and healers, and tanking and healing are largely thankless tasks - both in not being able to see epeen-enlarging big numbers and in having to suffer the rudeness of other players: If DPS dies? Eh, screw that guy. If the tank dies? Everybody dies.

Since tanks are so more important than their compatriots, competent tanking is in very high demand, leading good tanks to end up tanking full-time due to the absolute necessity for having them around in games that revolve around the holy trinity. If they're hybrid classes, now they're not. If this is not their preferred playstyle, they eventually quit. If this is their preferred playstyle, they burn out anyway because everything revolves around them.

This should have been patently obvious for anybody who has ever run a dungeon in any MMO in the last ten years, because you will always fill up the DPS slots nigh-instantaneously, and then end up waiting forever for a tank - longer if you want a competent one.

It's not just PuGs, either. The most important player in the raid guild is the main tank. If  he leaves, you're screwed. You're all screwed. DPS can be replaced at the drop of a hat: Not so for tanks. And since he has to have a perfect attendance rating, guess who's going to burn out first?

Gorwe, on 27 December 2012 - 07:19 PM, said:

Do you honestly not know?

Have you ever played an MMO before?

Here, a lesson in why the trinity sucks, in three lines:

LF1M TANK PLZ
LF1M TANK PLZ
LF1M TANK PLZ

AureliusRex, on 20 December 2012 - 02:08 AM, said:

How is staying in a dead guild casual, and how is being in an active guild hardcore?

And why would you expect content that was added for the hardcore players, to give them content, to be casual?

Dungeons are very casual.. lots of people running them, no real necessity to have gear/skills/titles, only take 30-45 mins for the average path, good way of getting gear and money etc. If you're on a server where there's few runs going; then go to  gw2lfg.com and you'll find plenty of runs (even fractals lvl 6 if you want to do that).

The game is casual because you can jump into the content, play for however long you want to, and jump out at ease. PvP/WvW requires no preparation time/leveling etc, they both level you to 80 for it, dungeons as I said are easy to jump into for the most part, running round the world obviously is easy and always stuff to do (a different issue if there's people there or not).

You could join a guild which has regular players, some which could be casual in that they play after work/schools etc so have more limited time and therefore you can get groups for things easier, and have people to talk to.

However all the above really only works if you're using the definition of casual that implies being casual is more about time available and therefore looking for instant fun/accessibility more than attitude where you'd expect easy content which rewards you with high end items for not really doing anything, or not caring about performance/building a character correctly or usefully.

Lucas Ashrock, on 20 December 2012 - 02:28 AM, said:

Naa if you look at there several key differences between the two.

http://img51.imagesh...tcomparison.jpg

Trei, on 16 December 2012 - 09:36 AM, said:

Make them not destroy your skillbar and we have a deal.

Seriously this is why no-one uses town clothes.

Option?
If it were up to me, I would make all characters automatically change into townclothes in all cities.

No armor allowed in cities!

It's not like you need to resub or anything to pop back in, do you?

I don't ask my friends if I should go back to BF3 either.

I... https://www.google.c...iw=1600&bih=799

I run a full Carrion specced Sword/Torch shatter mesmer with 21.5k hp in WvW. This is for WvW so it may not apply exactly, but the confusion damage will still be significant. I can drop bunker eles and any sort of thief pretty easily, so I'll shed some light from my perspective to see what the best counters are:

My goal is to dump confusion on you. I can pop 12 stacks in 2 seconds and each action you do is going to cause you about 4.5k of damage (2.25k in sPvP). I do not run any condition mitigation because all of my utility slots are critical (decoy, blink, and mirror images). I very, very rarely get conditions flipped on me.

My favorite class to fight is bunker guardians. They think they are invincible, they get 12 stacks, they melt themselves. My least favorite class are condition thieves or bunker D/D eles. Here's how I drop some common builds:

D/D Ele:
Wait for water attunement to go up and avoid the obvious crap along the way (dodgeroll the RTL opener and no I'm not falling for your teleport earthquake the fifth time, quit trying it). As soon as you are on water for about 5 seconds, I drop phantasms and stealth up with the torch 4. As soon as I appear I use mindwrack + mirror images + confusion shatter. Most eles will be in DPS mode and in fire or earth attunement at this point and are easy kills. In long drawn out fights, I keep resetting distance and targetting with blink + decoy, staff 2, and torch 4 for stealth. In fights like this I will typically always have a wall of shatters up and chasing the target, so I have 3 to 6 clones I can run around behind and act like after drop-targetting myself with some form of stealth. Good eles turn this into a battle of attrition and take two element rotations for me to drop -- one to get them to 1/3 health and one to finish you off after the next round of recharges come back.

B/S glass thieves:
Pretty much entirely a game of how fast I can hit my distortion shatter.

1) Distortion shatter
2) Mirror images
3) Dodgeroll + Mindwrack
4) Sword 3 + 2 and confusion shatter to finish, or Staff 2 to reset distance depending on my HP

BS thieves that don't get me on the opener are easy game.



Heavy condition thieves:

I don't run into these often enough but they give me massive problems because of no condition mitigation. Typically I have to reset battle as soon as they hit me:

1) Distortion shatter
2) Staff 2 -> Blink -> Decoy (reset battle, LoS on terrain)
3) Hide/heal depending on condition intensity, stealth up with torch 4, and jump the thief


Hopefully this will show you how a confusion shatter mesmer approaches a fight and give you some ideas to counter it.

if you have $15 a month to spare, just spend it on gems or whatever ... ?? no? as for me i won't be spending any more money on the cash shop until further notice. nor would i ever pay monthly subscription to play any online game.

Personally, I'm really not tempted by the cash shop at all.  Furthermore, the gear treadmill isn't in place so, I dont HAVE to spend hours/hours/resources to acquire sufficient gear to enjoy the game.  Gear grind for a an alt, or for new content/PvP season drove me to the brink of insanity with WoW.  I hated running mindless dungeons with derps just to cap out on points/gear so i could access the content I wanted.  While gear makes content easier in GW2, personal skill is a MUCH larger part of the equation.  Anet is new to the whole MMO game, and they dont claim to have struck gold.  However, I find the game is just plain fun.  I enjoy it MUCH more than I do wow and other MMO's.  This game has yet to feel like a chore to me, like other MMO's.  This is inpart because of the lack of necessity to play, if I take a break, i'm not wasting money and I'm not burning through hours and hours only to burn out shortly after catching up.  

That's my story and I'm stickin' to it.

If this was a subscription based game I wouldn't be playing it.

Honestly, what I would like to see in threads like this is more of a suggestion as to ways Anet could improve the economy for more casual players. Yes, at that level, waypoint costs and armor repair is more prohibitive. And by this, I mean looking at the full picture. There has to be gold sinks in the economy, and thats not to keep the cash shop going, thats to give gold any sort of value as a currency. Otherwise, we get huge inflation.

MMORPGs need to make money beyond the box fee, it's a matter of picking your poison. If you prefer the corruption to the integrity of the game caused by a sub fee over the corruption to the integrity of the game caused by the gem shop, that's your call.
But do note you aren't escaping the effects by going to a sub fee game, you're just subjecting yourself to them in different concentrations.

As a simple and well known example, a sub fee means you pay every month, which means the game developers have a vested interest in systems that cause gaming compulsion, forced time sinks, or scheduled necessities in order to make you continue to pay every month. (example: raids with lock outs. Gear gates mean you can't beat the whole thing at once, and lock out periods mean you have to come back every week. Generally this forces you back for a month or two if you want to complete the raid)

Personally I find a system like GW2's to be much less intrusive to the development of the game then most sub fees are (i.e yes it does affect it, just less then many other systems I find). Not to mentioned way cheaper for the player.

For the love of god though, if you are thinking of playing WoW instead, you better do your research a lot better, that game quadruple dips it's player base and has monetization way more intrusive to your game play then the gem store here in GW2 does.
If you're a pay and forget type of person without money worries then fine, but don't pretend WoW's money milking is less intrusive to their development, it's just much more cleverly hidden from years of practice and use of psychological techniques.

And with a subscription based game the game is designed around grind to keep you playing longer.

Pick your poison.

Point being: Whether you play sub games or f2p games, neither have a desirable game design to them.

There is no room for crafting because crafting is easily accessible by everyone. You're expecting to make much profit from crafting when anyone can spend a few gold and level the crafting discipline of their choice from 0-400? No.

And as usual, seems like people don't seem to understand that banning bots is going to make prices go higher. Less supply, same demand (unless you think bots were buying dyes on the market...all the ones I saw were wearing the exact same drab armor sets).

RNG everywhere? GW1 survived 7+ years when the majority of their drops were RNG based.

Your argument on wordwide economy vs. server economy also doesn't make much sense. The only thing this does is eliminate arbitrage (buying ectos on 1 server for cheap, switching servers and selling them at a higher cost). I'd much prefer eliminating that and having higher supply of items to choose from. Having a world economy is not why crafting isn't desireable, see above points.

Regarding dyes being character locked instead of account, I think the current system is probably the best. It's significantly better than GW1 (where you needed a dye for each armor per character). If dyes were account unlocked, it would quickly become a very boring drop. Prices would be insanely huge at the start, and then once everyone has unlocked the dye, it would quickly become worthless. It goes against what Anet originally said, but I think it is the right decision from an in-game economy perspective (and helps their cash shop a bit as well, which isn't an inherently bad thing).

Overall, too much paranoia, not enough understanding of how an in-game economy needs to be managed.