I'm Squirrel

MazingerZ, on 21 May 2013 - 06:49 PM, said:

Agreed. As much as the new content is nice, at this rate it will take 2 years to get close to an expansion worth of content. The current flow of content is NOT actually impressive if there are no expansions being released. An expansion would be:

• A new continent's worth of open-world content
  
• several new sets of armor & gear drops
  
• Several new dungeons with full sets of armor & gear to acquire
  
• New Races
  
• New Classes
  
• New crafting teirs
  
• Tons of New Achievements
  
• Several New Mechanic/features (guild halls, housing, minigames, etc)
  
• story continuation.

They aren't even close. & they need to stop saying they are.

Please let me preface this with:

If you are still enjoying GW2 and/or happy with ArenaNet, that's fine and I'm happy for you.

---

Some of you may recognize me (mainly for my math posts) if you frequent the same forums/sections as I do.

I used to be quick to defend ArenaNet on many points, but recently I can't help but think of the many things that have continued to aggravate me.

Lack of quality control

• Patch days turn into a patch for the patch for the patch for the patch for the patch ... followed the next day by another patch for the patch for the patch.
  
• The big WvW patch broken WvW ... you'd have thought someone would test that patch to see if it broke the thing it was designed for.
  
• There is quite a bit of evidence that their codebase is horrible
  
  • The patch days mentioned above
    
  • Targeted patches breaking their target (as mentioned above)
    
  • Patches one thing breaking other things completely unrelated to the patch ... like Mesmer spear having no working hitbox after a patch a few months ago ... when there were no patches to it
    
  • Illusionary Leap for Mesmer's being broken/"fixed" on an almost per patch basis (undocumented too).
    
  • Inconsistencies in their code such as Thief basilisk venom having an undocumented immobilize on top of the stun which the state of the game highlighted
    
  • Still haven't fixed (or can't) Mesmer clones' not having offhands
    
  • Still haven't fulfilled (or can't) their promise of allowing 2hand weapons to have 2 sigils so they can be on the same footing as weapon sets that use two 1hand weapons.
    
  • How long it has taken them to actually make NPCs invulnerable in WvW
    
  • Still bad AI plaguing several classes ... two of which AI plays a large part of their class mechanics.
    
  • Groups getting bugged because a player leaves the game without leaving their party
    
  • Ranged attacks that are still randomly obstructed when the attacker and target are both on equal ground with nothing but open field between the two of them

Broken/Unfulfilled Promises

• As previously stated, during BWEs, ArenaNet promised the community that they would make it so that 2hand weapons could have 2 sigils so that those weapon sets could have the same number of sigils as weapon sets using two 1hand weapons ... where is this fix?
  
• The WvW patch was promised to change the WvW meta a bit and give players a reason to still care about WvW when the matchup was an overwhelming win/loss.
  
  • There are no new activities in WvW
    
  • The meta is still Zerg v Zerg
    
  • Most servers (if not all) have been fighting the same other two servers for going on two months now
    
    • For me, personally, this means Ehmry Bay stomping both Borliss Pass and Anvil Rock has gotten very old ... a challenge would be nice ... perhaps a chance to actually lose other than "only if we don't show up"
  • Instead we got WvW XP and levels ... which only affect NPCs and siege
    
    • Siege is largely for taking/defending points ... which matter less when the matchup isn't close.
• There will be "no gear grind" ... except we added in ascended gear which has you grinding fractals and/or guild missions unless you want to be very patient with dailies ... and we were told there would eventually be ascended quality for other gear slots in the future ... "can't wait" to see what additional currency they add to get that ... *sigh*.

Appear to be "bad at math"

• If you read any articles by different game companies or blogs of individual developers, you'll often see that they create a sort of "Average Joe" test dummy to test things on as far as pacing, OP, UP, etc.. It is a standard operating procedure to establish a baseline
  
  • Despite this, ArenaNet has been having to devote time now to changing how classes work because they realized that they allowed people to be killed in 1-2s if a glass cannon hits a non-tanky target.
    
    • This has Thieves in a period of flux where they are having to be changed because "burst or die" isn't good gameplay
      
      • Please note that I'm well aware of very good non-glass tanky Thieves builds ... I'm actually a fan of Sword + Dagger
    • Warriors have been harmed further in PvP by some of these changes
  • If you do the math for the various cooldown changes, you'll notice that some of them give you more or less than the 20% described by the trait.
    
  • Notice we are still getting large sweeping changes to various things' damages? Arrow cart has received two 50% changes recently ... they were that far off, eh?
    
  • Remember when Thief's Dancing Dagger hit for 6k to 8k, was ranged, spammable, didn't require stealth, and hit up to 4 targets? Lol.

Failure w/ Implementation of "No Holy Trinity"

• What is bad about having a holy trinity?
  
  • It creates a higher demand for some classes over others for group play (tanks and healers > dps)
    
  • It can create non-interesting fights where you simply /assist tank + autoattack
• What do we have in Guild Wars 2?
  
  • The status of Guardians, Warriors, and Mesmers as "the top 3" ... due to what they can bring compared to others and how it weighs in relative to current content and what it demands
    
  • Several groups asking specifically for "Guardians" or "Heavies"
    
  • Several groups asking people to not play their Ranger, Engineer, Thief, etc. for dungeons
    
  • Ever seen someone say "we have too many Guardians/Warriors/Mesmers" ? Probably not ... but I bet you have for other classes.
    
  • What do we do in most boss fights? Stand at range and auto-attack supplemented by some other skills
    
    • Occasionally do a dodge roll.

E-Sport Quality Combat ... where?

• As has been stated by "the pros", there is too much use of random numbers in combat
  
  • Crit chance
    
  • on-crit sigils
    
  • on-crit traits
    
  • other procs
    
  • skills with random effects
• Imbalances in classes
  
  • Notice that there are a few classes that are used consistently by the top tier tPvP teams.
    
  • Notice that there are a few classes that are close to never used by the top tier tPvP teams.
• Still balancing the classes with how the Arenas work
  
  • Anyone here think that underwater combat has been balanced? My Mesmer and My Ranger are nightmares for people in the water ... I openly admit they are OP there.
    
  • People running the orbs ... just got a recent fix but there are still those with several more advantages than other classes ... and it isn't something that can be fixed with gear/spec changes.

Combat Being Dumbed Down

• Nerf to confusion ... because avoiding the application of confusion, using condition removal, or moving/dodging without attacking for a few seconds were somehow too hard.
  
  • ​Heavy forbid people have to pay attention to the color change of their screen, effect on their character, condition icon on their screen, and damage numbers popping up with a unique effect each time they mindlessly bash their skills and/or auto-attack.
• Nerf to Caltrop duration ... because people weren't smart enough to not stand in the red circle filled with sharp pointy objects that bled them to death the last 20 times?
  
• AOEs limited to 5 people ... caters to the mindless zerging
  
  • Excuse is "technical limitation" even though older MMOs didn't have this "technical limitation" despite working on older hardware.
    
  • We also have siege ignoring this "technical limitation"
    
  • We also have other effects that ignore this "technical limitation"
• Some skills do "way too much" for a player ... like heartseeker. With skilled players it's just an annoying thief they mock as they kill. At the lower skill-levels, it's a player being successful at turning to face, chasing, closing any gaps, and killing just by pressing one button repeatedly
  
• The current meta is largely "boon heavy builds". These builds have near (if not completely) 100% up-time on select boons and thus influence players to use skills "whenever off cooldown" instead of "in reaction to combat" ... this diminishes skilled play
  
• There are builds that fall completely into paper/scissor/rock ... giving us more "build wars"
  
  • I used to not believe this till I started dueling more, I would watch Alice kick the crud out of everyone (including me), then see Alice lose to Bob, who everyone (including me) kicked the crap out of.
    
    • Bob only beat Alice because Bob's build hard counters Alice's so much that Bob would have to be horribad to lose ... and then it'd be close.

Foods, Oils, and Sharpening Stones

• Part of the draw to having no gear grind is that you don't have to farm/grind/etc. (treat a game like a job) in order to have the same total stat points as someone else.
  
• These consumable items remove that since now you need to be able to afford them constantly.
  
  • Slow day in WvW because everyone is bored? You lose some gold standing around with your bonuses
    
  • Want to spend your gold on something else? Well then I hope you farmed sometime recently or played the trading post because your money is tied up in consumables.
• These also allow stats to get to ridiculous amounts ... which enables for the very quick burst fights that ArenaNet says they are trying to scale back
  
• Ranger pets do not scale with the Ranger's stats, so as more Ascended items enter the game, the relative power of pets to players decreases in PvE and WvW. The consumables exacerbate this problem
  
  • This is part of why Ranger pets are seen as being much stronger in sPvP than they are in PvE and WvW.
• There is also the lemongrass poultry. -40% condition duration. Non-removable.
  
  • Conditions are already largely seen by the community as being "weaker" than direct damage in many parts of the game due to conditions stack caps, abundance of combo fields in WvW, condition removals, not affecting inanimate objects (siege, gates, etc.)
    
  • Now we have a food that lowers your condition duration (and thus damage) by 40% ... and because of the way condition damage works, this rounds up.
• The power of these foods can be see by how the meta changed for some classes when the lifesteal on food was given an internal cooldown on its proc.

ArenaNet's treatment of the community

• ArenaNet is very hush-hush about even their high-level designs for the game.
  
  • They ignore the wonderful things that have come from game companies having very free and open communication with their communities ... both for previous MMOs as well as upcoming ones.
    
  • If you want people to continue to invest in you, you could at least respect them enough to tell them what your ideas are ... even at a high-level.
    
  • Heck having test servers would shoot two birds with one stone as they could convey ideas to the community while getting some free-testing ... it could even help make patch days only need 1 patch ... instead of 5 and a few more the next day.
• If you go to any non-ArenaNet-controlled GW2 forum, you'll inevitably run into a post about someone complaining about the moderation on ArenaNet's forums
  
  • These threads often end up with some people replying that they actually take advantage of it to "troll better" as they try to bait people into saying things or simply click on "look at all posts by Bob" and then report all those posts they think they have even a small chance of nailing "Bob" on.
• Some of us (myself included) have tickets that are over a week old. Seeing as how the last time I had a ticket, it was answered in a matter of hours, measuring the current wait time in weeks is a bit ridiculous.
  
  • What's more aggravating for me personally is that I'm encountering the exact same issue two more times, something their community director, Eric "Dalmarus" Campbell, apologized to me for having happened before ... yet now I'm stuck dealing with it because they have yet to so much as acknowledge receiving it ... even though it is on my list of "My Stuff" at support.guildwars2.com.

Gameplay is boring the heck out of me

• PvE
  
  • Dungeons - we run them for skins (or CoF p1 for money) or badges for a legendary. It gets extremely boring running the same dungeon over and over again.
    
    • The content is quite boring. It's often cripple melee opponents, block/reflect projectiles, assist on the called target. Nothing really new there.
      
    • Most people that do dungeons, because they are so boring, constantly look for ways to circumvent as much content as possible ... and are successful
      
    • We still have dungeon content whose difficulty can be circumvented by hiding in a corner ... even with new content like with the Living Story's Molten Facility and the "machine boss" near the beginning.
  • Legendaries are simply "I have lots of money" or "I did the grind". There isn't anything legendary about them. You ran the same dungeon X number of times to get 500 tokens. You gathered/bought a large number of materials. You jumped/fought in WvW for "badges of jumping". Kudos.
    
  • Fractals are the same few fractals every time. The higher levels don't add anything really meaningful. They just make it more punishing to get hit.
    
  • Guild Missions are made stupidly trivial given a large number of people
    
  • If the first person that entered the dungeon leaves group, etc., the entire group is dropped from the dungeon ... why?! ... this allows some people to be jerks and/or troll people and I don't see the benefit.
• WvW
  
  • Arrow Cart ... 1 2 3 1 1 2 3 1 1 2 3 1 1 2 3 1 1 2 3 (feel free to reverse 2 and 3).
    
  • Ballista ... 1 2 3 11 2 3 11 2 3 1 2 3 1 1 2 3 (feel free to reverse 2 and 3)
    
  • Catapult ... 1, hold, release, wait, repeat
    
  • Trebuchet ... 1, hold, release, wait, repeat
    
  • Zerg vs Zerg ... throw random AOE, tab target, and auto-attack random people in a horde of 30+ as a horde of 30+ do the same to your horde.
    
    • There are some zerg-busting groups, but I've found most of those I know of on my server are bored with the game ... so not nearly on as much any more ... so now there's much less zerg busting.
  • You're not on siege and you're not defending the walls? Good luck to you with some classes as you can't hit people on the wall who can hit you because your character only knows how to aim at genitals (or lower) ... we'll ignore that you can see 3/4 of the enemy's body.
    
  • Throw siege around like candy because you can get it from jumping puzzles that you didn't really do because Mesmers are portaling people in large droves to the end ... they also get more "Tokens of Jumping" from this.
• sPvP
  
  • Sadly, these little one-off matches are where the highest level of skill can be leveraged ... however
    
  • Even the "pros" have been complaining about how it quickly gets boring. There are mechanics in each one, but they are largely ignored in favor of simply capping and controlling the points. Lack of any real variation
    
  • Anyone who sPvP'd a large amount already has collected the large amount of skins available.
    
  • Pick-up matches are, again, mindless zergfests because all they have to do is <tab> - auto-attack because numbers is what really matters in most cases
    
  • It is still far from being esport-worthy ... randomness, imbalances, etc. ... claimed to be esport quality combat and here we are over half a year later. Heroes of Newerth, another Moba amongst a sea of Moba games, was picked up quicker than this.

Thanks! And before I forget, here's something else I came up with.





I could only do it in preview because I don't actually have a female human character with light armor to freely experiment with - I had to create an alt for the image above. For the same reason, the dyes aren't the greatest. Dye previewing is limited so I worked with what I had.

Armor used: Stately helm, Magician coat, Acolyte gloves, Student's mantle, Orrian leggings, and (almost) anything for the boots.

I would like to see:

• New zones -
  
  • Tengu capital city
    
  • Tengu Dynamic Events
• New weapons for each profession -
  
  • two-handed scythes for Necromancers
    
  • two-handed nuncuks for Thieves
    
  • two-handed polearm for Guardians
    
  • offhand whips for Engineer
    
  • two-handed flute for Mesmer
    
  • two-handed axe for Warrior
    
  • two-handed Bo staff for Rangers
    
  • two-handed book of spells for Elementalist
• Personal Story -
  
  • Expand existing Personal Story
    
  • Tengu Personal Story
• Exclusive racial Armor
  
• Expansion themed armor for non-Tengu characters
  
• Expansion themed weapons
  
• Expansion themed pets for the Ranger
  
• Racial elite skills
  
• New emotes
  
• New Mini pets

Jairyn, on 15 May 2013 - 11:02 AM, said:

I think I preferred playing a CRPG over a half-assed MMO or a P2P MMO.

Jairyn, on 15 May 2013 - 11:29 AM, said:

I share your thoughts. This RNG bullshit is just sad. In my opinion WoW, even if i dont like to bring it up, did the RNG stuff actually..awesomely well. It was placed at the right times and right locations. Not always, but most of the time...

In  GW2 you really dont have something to work for. its either farm silly dungeon armor which ownt take long..or grind the shit out of your life to get a..somewhat decent looking weapon. there is no inbetween. these boxes are just promoting more sales with a fake of being able to achieve them in the game....

Because I doubt it's costing them any money, for now.

Trying to think of a way to fix it? I can't, it seems to be too embedded in the game now.

So far in PvE:
DPS is everything
Healing is useless
CC is mostly useless
condition damage is useless
pets/minions pretty useless
hardly any interupts/shutdowns so mesmers are for gimicks and rangers are ultra useless

Good luck with that anet......

It's like farming any other event, not really an exploit. Although it does block people from finishing Lyssa...which leads to the spawns of sparks...which are good to farm for Charged Lodestones lol

Either way, ANet made gold making a bitch in this game. So I don't blame the players.

Ah /sigh...really don't know how long they expect to fill the gaps in the game with these rather meaningless monthly updates.

Interesting idea that is being poorly executed.

The living story would be amazing if it really changed the game and stuck. If players had stories to tell after it was over. If outposts/towns/forts were destroyed by the story and then stayed destroyed or if he landscape was visibly scarred from the effects for good then the world would evolve. Old players would be able to say "Yea, I remember when there was a town here. The dredge came and wiped it off the map with a big drill. Everyone tried to work together to save the town, but we failed." New players would be all "Man that really sounds cool, I can't wait till something happens again so that I can be a part of the world."

I, on 25 April 2013 - 07:28 PM, said:

You can buy mystic coins, you know. And they're much cheaper than ectos.

I am not having the greatest year health wise so far but it has to get better, right? So far this year it has been reactions to medication, flu, sinus infection,  and food poisoning. Oh and I think I have discovered that I am allergic to caffeine (still have to get that verified with a test, but cutting out all forms have vastly improved problems I had before so it is pretty darn likely.)


I do take commissions on a limited basis.  Info can be found on my page at http://koreena.kirins.net/  or http://www.facebook....reenascreations .  For those who have been waiting I just reopened the queue for a limited time starting today.

Trying to keep the butterball shape of the quaggan and giving it decent backpack storage space inside is being a bit tricky.


Oh and for some cuteness from the other month, angel quaggan!!

Most likely never, which makes me really sad considering pvp in every MMO to date is total shit hole except for GW1, and we all know ANet couldn't give 2 shits about that game anymore.

GW2 is dps wars, no depth no strategy just either blowing people up or getting blown up. We need healers or DPS massively toned down.

Any other MMO not even worth mentioning... and GW2 ain't getting any better so I put my faith in Blizzard, hopefully later this year pvp gets better. We're all pretty much screwed though, better off playing LoL. The MMO pvp scene is completely dead and doesn't have a bright future as far as I can tell.

Pvp could never, ever, ever be balanced without a dedicated healer or support class because everything becomes zerg DPS of course, I'm sure ANet knew this unless they truly are retards which means they honestly don't care.

Cereal, on 15 April 2013 - 07:24 PM, said:

Be more dismissive. It doesn't make you seem like a douche at all.

Well, yeah. It'll be great to see more of ESO WvW but it really doesn't take much to beat GW2 WvW. 3 identical maps, 1 small map, zerging being the most effective, defending keeps being almost pointless, etc. WvW is really pretty bad. Lots of people just enjoy the PvP that comes from it.

SPvP won't completely die because of ESO because TeS games never really did have the best combat systems (although some would argue that SPvP is dead as it is anyway). It will take a chunk of PvPers away though. Lots of people including myself just care about the balance notes every update and we are disappointed every single time.