Cuks.8241

Ele is definitely versatile and a fun profession. The elite specs are also very diverse and fun and can change your playstyle a lot. Ele is generally a bit harder though. There is also a guardian. Guardians can do everything well and have a place in all content types usually with several iterations (dps; condi or power, boon support, heal).

> @"Ajji.6031" said: > I’m a returning player after taking a break for many years. > > I decided to set Astralaria as my long-term goal. I mostly solo so I got a bit anxious when I saw the fractal requirements. > > Is it true that I can solo the T1 fractals and would that be enough to get the Astralaria collections? You might be able to solo some but definitely not all due to certain mechanics. Just join groups they dont bite. Noone cares about performance in t1.

Anet is doing a great job keeping the economy of this game balanced. One of the best I have seen in mmorpgs. The taxes are just fine.

At the point, you will feel you need it and it's worth it. It is completely optional and depends on your play habits. Thess are a relatively new thing. We played for 7 years without them.

I learned all the mechanics as I played. Never felt pressured because I didn't know something. Often just asking solves everything. Plenty of friendly people that will help, sometimes even with achievements. And if no one knows, have fun learning, it's what games are all about. Also, you were describing Twilight Oasis Fractal. The jump mechanic in there is one of the most complicated to figure out in all of the fractals. The jump is straightforward but if you don't know the city well and where you can get on the rooftops you get lost easily. You seem to have figured it out in one try. That's not much of a learning curve. These mechanics are what makes fractals fun and different. They are generally made really well and add a fun element.

> @"Silvia.9130" said: > Events and bosses indeed upscale depending on the number of people participating, the more people, the tougher. > That's easier to notice on smaller events, like during dailies, when many people are around and mobs that are usually veterans and lower start to appear as elite and champions :) Also, some of the mobs can get stronger, deal more dmgwith scaling. I think elites and lesser can scale up but not champs. So you can get elites that are deadlier than champs. I'm not 100 % on this.

I see legendary bounty trains often (have to check all the Pof maps, sometimes also LW4). Also when there is a daily bounty there are often commanders that are running all the map bounties (EU). The problem lately is that Pof maps are lagging and LW4 maps are nigh unplayable.

There is a middle ground between gw2 style blobs and no blobs. WvW is meant to be large scale war and that is great and why we play it. But I wouldn't mind if there were better strategies than stack as many people as possible at one spot (maybe exaggeration but not by much). I have played mmos that did it better in a way that you had frontlines with heavy plates, backlines with nukers and healers and havoc groups that tried to circumvent frontline to harras backline. And coordination between groups was crucial. One thing that made this possible was player collision. The downside is that the game is much less accessible to an average player and voice comm with several commanders is mandatory. Basically, you are either a hardcore player and part of an organised guild or you are not there at all. I'm not saying this would be better for gw2 but what I noticed from the day I started playing this game is that stacking is too important and powerful in WvW and even more in PVE. Boonshare and aoe cleanse and heal are just too powerful.

Immob druids are the most annoying build right now. Have you tried FA tempest? Can clear immob on every overload on top of the regular cleanse and lots of mobility, superspeed and stability.

Pvp skills have different dmg modifiers compared to pve so numbers on pve dummies do not translate.

Also agony resistance does nothing outside fractals. Literary 0 effect.

Defense trait line, spellbreaker elite and utility skills like defy pain. Add a shield and you can get absurd amount of invul, blocks. You can get away with full zerk gear, no need for vitality toughness. Your base hp is one of the highest anyway. And thats just the icing on the cake. There are healing variants and plenty of condi cleanse if you need it. But this traits have better synergy with power gear. You are probably a berserker with that viper gear which can get quite squishy.

Nerf downstate. It just gets stronger, the larger the group is. I would propose that the speed of ress is irrelevant of how many players ress the downed and limit the number of times you can get downed to once per respawn. If this is applied a full dead ress in combat could be considered but only if it is super slow. Reduce the aoe projectile hate (area for example). It is just too easy to be completely safe from projectiles in a blob. If you are out of position you should be prone to be sniped by roaming projectile heavy classes like ranger and thief. Maybe add some skills that are effective against clumped opponents. Something that requires the group to disperse to make the attack less effective. There are plenty of examples in moba games. An attack that chains between enemies and gets stronger with every jump. I propose next one already a few times but it got a lot of hate. Remove offensive AOE stacking. An area can only have one type of AOE skill active. If ele casts meteor shower on an area and a second ele casts a second shower on the same area only one is active to the enemy players. This would decrease the aoe spam in general, it would require blob to be more coordinated and also promote profession diversity. MIght also help with lag issues.

> @"zistenz.1945" said: > I'm basically using [this](https://metabattle.com/wiki/Build:Soulbeast_-_Condition_Skirmisher), with the torch variant and a warthog, and carrion instead of viper's. Well condi builds have dmg ramp up and in general kill stuff slower. There are some exceptions (condi FB for example, builds that are heavy on burning). You have also a tankier setup compared to something like full viper so it will only take longer. So it is more likely you will get mobs to respawn compared to a burstier power build. I don't have first-hand experience with condi SB though and also am not familiar with it's cleave, aoe ability. That is the reason I prefer power builds over condi for open world. While you can get almost invincible with some condi builds in trailblazer or similar they are just to slow for me. I prefer glass power builds and by just adapting some utilities and/or traits you can often kill even the hardest stuff with just using more active defences, movement and knowing your terrain (los).

I would prefer compacted as they can be now with different color background. But its not a big issue for me because I keep my inventory 10 slots wide and last 2 rows are invisible.

WvW has the best community in the game for exactly the reason people pointed out. You have to work together over all the maps. The only time people get touchy is when it comes to pulling activators. But there is no reason for one that just wants to get GoB to be involved in that.

I see more people complaining when there is no aviator box for AB looting then when there is. Vrrrrroooommmm.

In short: there is no other efficient way to get outfits and mount skins besides $$$. Gold to gem will take a lot of farming so lot's of time and it is probably a lot more efficient to just spend some $ (depends on your RL income). Key farming the same. In my opinion that 1-3 key per week and trying your luck is just a big waste of time.

> @"Adonan.8356" said: > I don't know, that sounds a lot like what WoW has, and many attribute the insta-queue to the fall of that game. Although, to be fair, other MMOs have that feature and are doing fine. Yeah it is pretty much like Wow. I would not attribute LFD to the fall of Wow (if we can even say that since that game is really old). It was introduced during the pinnacle of Wow, Woltk and I think was a general success. I'm actually talking specifically about the dungeon tool and not the raid tool, so the casual side of instanced PVE. I barely used raiding tool since I played in statics and didn't play much after woltk. Anyway, maybe I put too much emphasis on the insta teleport from anywhere to instance feature even though I still think it would be a nice convenience, especially if it also returned back to where you were. I think a common interface for instanced PVE with some modern game convenience tools would be in order. LFG is good functionality wise but the interface is just old and lacking. I can see Anet is trying to improve and bring it to a broader audience with strikes and now DRMs but the implementation is often poor and every iteration is different.

> @"Danikat.8537" said: > > @"Cuks.8241" said: > > What this game need is a common interface window that can be accessed at any time and any place in the game and throgh which we can enter the requested instance. A button on the main screen would open a lobby window thought which you could enter either a public instance or join a party (incorporate the existing LFG systems) or a squad and also enter the private instance. > > Most importantly we should be able to enter any instance from anywhere in the world. No need to travel to a certain map or even worse a certain instance of a map. This way I can play in open world, check the lobby if there is a party for a dungeon of my liking and in next moment I am in an instance.And once I am done with an instance I am back to where I was before. > > The LFG tool does all of that except teleport you to and from the instance, and honestly I find it hard to believe that people who spend the majority of their time playing other areas of GW2 are put off doing instanced content because they're not sure how to find the entrance. If you can find story instances or specific maps for meta-events then you can find dungeon entrances. > I don't think they are put off, they just don't play them as much because it is not convenient. I'm basing this on my Wow experience before and after they added looking for dungeon tool. It really revitalised dungeons and I think for exactly the reason that people didn't have to travel to dungeon entrance and wait for others to join and come. There were many complaints and fears before it went live and after it went no one looked back. Wow didn't have waypoints though. With Strikes and now DRM they added public instance. And at least with strikes it only really worked on day 1. After that people just join, see no one is there and leave. I think people would use public instance much more if you could join a queue for it, play whatever you like and the game would teleport you to the instance once it would be full. We will see how it goes with DRMs. It is easy to find a group for popular instances. It can take a long long time for one of the harder dungeon paths or a certain achievement. With an interface, I described I could post a group, play whatever, maybe even with a different squad and when enough interested people would apply I would be straight in the instance. LFG is functionally a good tool. The interface is severely lacking though. Whoever designed it never heard of any basic interface optimisation. And good interface attracts people. There are plenty of suggestions that come up for additional information it could offer but the foremost for me is why the kitten is it a second tab in the Contacts menu. It is the most important tool and feels like they are hiding it. I know this might sound silly to people that are used to it but I have met people that play for years and didn't even know it existed. And I bet there are people that play a long time and don't even know how to enter fractals or strikes. Many people just play the game and don't check any external sources ever. There is nothing in the game that leads you to these instances. Anyway, we had this kind of matchmaking tools, interfaces since the 90's. Either as inherent game functions or external programs like gamespy or all seeing eye or irc bots. There is really no excuse that almost 30 years later a massively multiplayer game has none of it and can't even come up with a coherent system between different modes.

It is only the aggro range in the open field. I'm ok that everyone inside an enemy fort wants to kill me and I like harder enemies but when I travel across land and all the fauna and half of the flora in sight wants to murder me it's a bit exaggerated.

With the latest expansion we got new instanced PVE content with again slightly different format. They are not that much different to what we already have in forms of dungeons, fractals and strikes and could just as well be one of these. Instanced PVE doesn't seem as popular in this game as with other mmorpgs. Maybe I'm wrong on this one but Anet is constantly trying to invent a new format that would get more players to play this type of content but I am not sure it is working. In my opinion fractals have the best format but still have some problems that I will ge into below. They also added a public instance with strikes which I think is a great idea but just got deserted after a few days and I think not much will change with DRMs. What I think is the biggest problem is the accessibility in the game, the interface that is holding all these content back. It is not the difficulty, not the required player amount for a full instance and not the toxicity which is really low in this game compared to games that have much more popular instanced pve. What this game need is a common interface window that can be accessed at any time and any place in the game and throgh which we can enter the requested instance. A button on the main screen would open a lobby window thought which you could enter either a public instance or join a party (incorporate the existing LFG systems) or a squad and also enter the private instance. Most importantly we should be able to enter any instance from anywhere in the world. No need to travel to a certain map or even worse a certain instance of a map. This way I can play in open world, check the lobby if there is a party for a dungeon of my liking and in next moment I am in an instance.And once I am done with an instance I am back to where I was before. I excluded raids from this post since those are harder and need more organisation. Anything else can be tackled by any average player without much organisation.

Mmorpgs and Mobas are always dying according to their forums. It's a tough life being a multiplayer game.

What do you even need gold for with your playstyle (very casual, haven't seen all the game in 8 years)? If you are playing for 8 years you can just sell some stuff like mystic coins from your material storage and you should have plenty of gold for anything that your playstyle requires.

> @"Astralporing.1957" said: > > @"Cuks.8241" said: > > > @"Astralporing.1957" said: > > > In the end, the price keeps rising because we _still_ have a situation where supply is lower than demand (and by demand i don't mean a consumption rate, but _demand_) > > How is that a problem? > You might want to see the whole subdiscussion this was part of, you would understand what i was saying and why. > > I was following this thread before I posted and I was somewhat following the other thread about the latest manipulations of MCoin prices. I haven't seen a straightforward reason why the current price of MCoins is bad or wrong. On the contrary, I see people that are MCoin consumers, that make a lot of legendaries saying its fine. And from my experience I agree with them. I see MCoins and clovers as the limiting factor for the number of legendaries that can be introduced to the game over time and I think Anet implemented them like that. You just can't farm them like other mats. So naturally, if other mats drop in prices MCoins will go up. They are a balancing tool. I only judge this by Gen1 supply and price on TP. Supply is stable, prices are even slowly dropping so I think the MCoin price is exactly where it needs to be and will even increase over time which is actually exactly how it is supposed to be unless we see a big shift in overall mat supply. I don't see any reason why Anet would need to adjust this balance unless they want more legys in the game.