HnRkLnXqZ.1870

Playing alone most of the time, but not really by choice. Whenever there is an event or an option to interact with other players, I give it a try. Even if I am not interested in the event or its loot. Most of my bounty-tours are just for group-gameplay. Once in a while I come across an NPC vendor and realize how many items I can trade, but I do not run bounties with the focus on the loot. I do not even run the Mad King's Labyrinth primarily for the loot. It is just so much fun to fight all the bosses with a group, especially Steve. Same goes for meta-events. The development of communication is a little disappointing. I noticed a trend of players not wanting to talk in open world anymore. Most approaches are ignored. Say chat rarely works. Sometimes I feel like an NPC. Building up a dialogue in map-chat, turned out to be rather difficult nowadays. Also because some people just spam "wiki is your friend" for every question that pops up :S. Questions are still the easiest way to start a conversation. However the bounce/jump communication still works, which is nice. Note: Cannot mention this often enough. BIG THANKS FOR THE Sweet Campfire Treat. It creates wholesome moments, people relax, sit together and even start talking.

Some bossfights are a bit weird. The following things really grind my gears. Mostly when the developers decided to ignore the rules: - They throw you across the field, no matter how many stability stacks you have. Some of them throw you out of bounds. If you are in an instance, joke is on you. - Block unblockable attacks - Reflect melee-damage like they are projectiles. True reflection, not Retaliation :S. Something we are not allowed to have, because it would be overpowered. - We once learned Nuhoch Stealth detection, to see stealthed NPCs, but this mastery is 100 % useless on any other NPCs. Everything enters an leaves stealth as they want. - Some can even block reveal-skills. - The current DRM bosses have a few special tricks on their own. Even if they do a ground-based AoE, it will still oneshot you even when you are 20 m above the ground. - One NPC was able to ignore CC completely, breakbar for visuals only (got fixed by now). - ~~Some~~ Most bosses can land lethal strikes through invincibility. It almost feels like the effect does not exist at all. - Some can even blast through true invincibility, which is extremely annoying. True invincibility means you die, but a trait/rune effect heals you at 0 HP. It can break some of the unblockable lethal strikes, but not all. - Stuns that cannot be broken with a stun-breaker which lasts 5-15 seconds. On the other hand, I do feel sorry for most of the Fractal bosses. The instant a break-bar appears, they can pretty much say bye-bye to all of their cool moves, which would normally be used after that phase. Some of these attacks are very well designed and would require the players to be a lot more than just a rotation-bot. My absolute favorite is the MAMA in the Nightmare Fractal. I totally understand why the farmers want to prevent those attack-patterns at all costs. But it cuts a lot of fun (imo).

Other MMORPGs allow you to level other player's characters with sharing experience while in party. I played a couple of those. It can be an option, if the grind towards endgame is tied to tedious slow exp-gain. We used this method a lot in Lineage II, created parties and pulled trains the size of village-population and watched the levelups rain down on the players. In Gw2, it would inevitably lead to yet another LFG sale-business branch, especially for leveling mastery-tracks. For the Mastery Tracks it would not be a problem, but the Black Lion Instant Level 80 Ticket would face competition from the playerbase. ANet currently allows a lot of questionable things, other competitors would ban on sight. The moment you threaten their income however, the fun is over. They may never implement any mechanic that renders a gemstore-item obsolete (imho). We do not have monthly subscriptions. They only make money with the gemstore and selling the game. Two other things to keep in mind: - Our leveling-curve is one of the flattest in the business. Players notice an increase in the required experience for levelups, but it is significantly lower than usual. - Levelscaling allows you to always gain proper experience, no matter where you play. Staying in a lowlevel section with friends is promoted. This is one of the unique mechanics in GW2. The forums are a place to discuss about the game. People having different opinions about the topics is normal. You cannot prevent people from disagreeing with you, neither can you prohibit them from posting in your thread. If you mark them as spam, there is a high chance you get moderated as well. In the worst case they even delete the topic, which means no one will read about your idea ever again. With suggestion-topics, this should never be the case. Even a bad suggestion can help to improve the game, giving thoughts and ideas about certain mechanics.

Lunar Year has always been the smallest of all festivals. For several years, it was just Dragonball and Envelopes (= gold farming). There is nothing bad about that, but the changes were a huge improvement in my opinion. First we got our favorite "Quaggan in need of help" (2018) for a first Luck => Gold conversion, something the community was requesting since the introduction of the luck-system. It was tedious and time consuming. This year we received the Lucky Bags, which work a lot faster. They appear to be bugged somehow. Judging from the feedback I received so far, the bags are considered an improvement and certain players even claim them to be more rewarding than the Quaggan. Celestial Challenge of 2020 was a huge step forward. A bunch of minigames for sure, but most are fun. They added a couple of nice mechanics to make class/build matter less and give everyone a fair chance. Was not perfect. This year the challenges got adjusted, certain mechanics got modified. In my opinion it is a lot better. The bonus loot from the mini-chest is really nice and actually motivates more people in doing the challenge or even grinding it. Last year's skins were a bit of a disappointment. ANet listened to the complaints, reworked them. They were still not great, but better than the original. This year, they caught us off-guard with those amazing flame-glow effects. Some weapons look less impressive than others, but this years skins motivated me to focus on the dailies to unlock as many as possible. The dailies are always easy to do solo in quick time. Some people complain about the bad timing, overlapping LW and Lunar Year. Might be true. But with every LW episode, there is always a group of players that complains the content is way too little. Looking at the Lunar Year Festival 2021, I have nothing to complain. It turned out better than expected, once again.

Vanilla Forums Reputation System TL&DR: The points are some kind of a reputation/karma score. You do something good, the score rises. You do something bad, the score decreases. There are a couple of factors that influence the reputation score directly, for example: - Thumbs up - Helpful - Ranks - Thumbs down (old system) The system should function as a guidance, to see how trustworthy a poster/writer is. In the link, it is also listed that promoted by a moderator adds positive reputation score. There is a 'promoted' score in our profile, but I have not found anyone yet with anything but 0. We do get a warning-level when our posts/threads get moderated. Maybe the warning-level has a negative influence on our reputation score. Just a guess though. Is the reputation-system useful? Sort of. Not every writer with a high score is a nice person. Not every writer with a low score is a bad person. When I want to investigate the nature of a questionable post/thread, I usually have a look on the Helpfuls, Thumbs Up and the total count of Discussions and Posts. I also have a quick look on the discussions page quickly, to check if there are significantly more discussions started than visible. Long story short, there is no 100 % guarantee. Some writers have personal fan-bases which are more likely to give them Thumbs Up or even Helpfuls, even if the comment in question would normally not deserve it (common sense). In addition, there are people on this board who Thumbs Up/Helpful ironic comments to highlight them. ANet disabled the Thumbs Down feature years ago, so there is no feature to mark a bad post. PS: My reputation score is only 1.900.

> International players: What do you think about the story? English is not my native language. Well written, enough plot-twists and changes to keep you busy guessing what is really going on. In most cases, you end up guessing wrong and be surprised about yet another twist in the story. The lose ends keep piling up, while playing a story/season and sometimes clear up way later (e. g. Human Personal Story => Caudecus' notes in LW3). This makes the story interesting and people enjoy discussing it - as I noticed it. Our story-telling is more linear compared to our competitors. We do not have real decision branches, our class and race do rarely matter. This appears to be boring at first, but it offers a couple of advantages: - Instead of spreading their resources on multiple branches, they can focus on one path. Which means the story-instances are usually the best part of a chapter. - No class-specific boss-mechanics. So the encounters have unique mechanics, which are often tied to story-elements (e. g. coordination with NPCs like Aurene). The immersion is better. - Easier difficulty for regular players, challenge motes/hard-mode for skilled players. - Higher attention to detail regarding the mapping in general and key-locations. Very little use of dummy NPCs for the sake of decoration only. - The work intensive periods, where an episode consumes the most resources, are shorter. They can be farther ahead of the current story (e. g. IBS is done, they can work on EoD and just have to focus on balancing/polishing the remaining chapters). - Higher focus on Open World PvE, e. g. meta-events, world-bosses, puzzles, vendors and many more features . We have a couple of amazing maps, which are actively played until today. Although they were only part of a single LW episode. I used to play story together with a french player. Each of us on their own client. Whenever there was an inside joke, pun or ironic/sarcastic dilalogue, we both giggled at the same time. In most cases we told each others what happened and were surprised, how close the translation actually was. They have put a lot of attention to detail to make the story work in the different languages. So I think the "easy" story was mostly a design choice, with the whole process in mind. English is used, because it is learned in many countries around the globe, especially by the young ones. We are Pegi 12 after all. Some of the previously mentioned jokes do use expressions, which are not always the same in every language. If you want to make your stuff easy to understand, you have to remove those stylistic elements and rely on things like Simplified English. The best approach I have seen so far is the Thing Explainer (by Randall Munroe xkcd). It is a book written with only 1,000 words, the most common used words in the English language. It explains stuff like the solar system, nuclear reactor, space-shuttle ... etc. with the most basic writing. I have a bad habit of writing too long texts with too complicated chain-sentences, using expressions and special vocabulary. It does read nicely, but it is quite confusing sometimes, especially when I talk to players with more limited English vocabulary. The book is quite inspiring, in terms of keeping explanations simple. It also shows the limits and what happens if you overdo the task. In some cases, it is better to look up a single word in a dictionary than writing three paragraphs around it.

NO - Why not? That is a very old Warrior request. They keep asking this for years, because they claim Strength and Discipline to be mandatory in every build = cannot experience build diversity. There is something similar going on with the Thieves at the moment and the tunnel-viewed focus on Trickery (Lead Attacks). Giving us the option to select four trait-lines would ultimately boost those classes which already have "mandatory" lines and enhance Elite Specializations even more. Our trait-lines are currently balanced around the fact that you can only select three. Some classes would break through the DPS roof, while others would become indestructible bunkers (e. g. Engineer). OTHER Instead of adding a new Elite Specialization, they could add Transformations. One per class, which you have to level with Hero Points with its unique trait-line and skills. In combat, you can enter it via F6 and have access to unique weapon-, heal-, utility- and elite-skills. The form has an energy-meter mechanic similar to the revenant, that fills with damage dealt/healed and lowers with skills used. When the energy is depleted, you drop out of the form and cannot access it for X minutes. The transformation only uses its own trait-line, no synergy with the others.

The few times I have ever done a raid, I did not want to. The guild was assembling a squad, mostly for training runs and lacked one player. Opposite to the prejudices about raids, I was kindly asked to join with what ever class I felt comfortable with. Knowing how raids actually worked, I still picked one of those builds that perform a little better and rely on external healing to stay alive. I will never forget the first time. Escort. It took us like 8-9 tries to get even past the first fortress. After one wipe, one of our team asked "who the hell is Mine? That thing one-shot me for over 20k!" A moment of silence, then one of the more experienced in our group told them about the mines scattered around the area. I was not hit by one so far, but did not notice them either. So we were more carefully looking at the ground from that on. That is the thrill of not watching countless guides and videos before you do a content. It is risky, you may fail, but it is exciting and sometimes funny. A few times later we messed up at the towers. Jumped off too early = mesmer was killed, glider did not open, varg caught glenna. But after giving it a few more tries, we even made it to McLeod. I got my raid-mastery track unlockded that day and was finally able to outmax my mastery-rank. It was a nice experience, chill atmosphere and the very extreme opposite of what you normally read on these boards. A while ago, I tried to spread some positive atmosphere as well, with a thread about LFG. It worked for a short while, but I am happy to see someone else give it a try. This board still has way too much negative energy. The content is not bad, neither the community is. But when people talk about it, they sadly often talk about bad things that happened. Thank you for this thread and everyone for sharing their experiences.

> @"Hesione.9412" said: > Surely the leeching could be easily stopped. They have a metric that they use to identify the top contributing player each round - and they have to measure the metric on each player. Is implementing a system such as "must have contributed at least half the level of the winning player" as the anti-leeching measure? Connection issues, like rubber-banding. Or the situation ran into a few times yesterday: The instance had a few high-dps builds, most mobs died before I managed to reach them, let alone touch them. Especially in the challenges that require NPC slaying, your suggestion would turn into a nightmare for certain players. The festivals are free for everyone, no matter of skill level, build, experience or even connection. We have mount-rentals, generous time limits and very low participation requirements, so everyone can join the festivals and have a good time. Why not continue with the most recent development: Split Celestial Challenge into Private and Public instances.

It takes as long as it takes. We decided to make the best of the situation and grill a snowman (EU)  powered by Sweet Campfire Treat, by far the most useful item you have added in years. EDIT: The moment I pressed SEND, I got kicked out of GW2. Client frozen, revenge of the snowman probably. And login-sever seems to be down :S.

1.: We could solve this with representing. Just tell our members "If you represent the guild, we assume you are interested in doing stuff with the guild and its members." In that case we could just use the guild-roster. Representing does not have no purpose at all. There are a couple of features which only work that way (e. g. waypoint discounts and claiming objects in WvW). An alternative option would be that board you suggest, as a guild-only LFG tool. You can mark yourself as "willing to participate with others." People who are in the guildhall and check the board can easily see those people and decide if they want to join their activities or PM them. A good reason for a guild-only LFG is the situation with Raids, Strike-Missions and DRM right now. New players and non-meta-focused players are recommended to use guilds instead of the LFG anyway. I suggested the opposite strategy for a long time, but I do not mind going the extra mile myself. 2.&3.: With the current EoTN design, this is a serious request. The old excuse, this kind of feature would ruin the convenience-lounges is obsolete. EoTN makes most convenience lounges redundant. 6.: a.) I use the SAB chests and link it with a grave-marker monument. I put a special password in the monument-text, so people have to pm me or post the code on discord to get the reward. It is clunky, it is complicated, but the SAB chests even have opening music ^^. b.) The major problem behind this is: No guild would treat its members so unfair and lock the daily farm-rewards behind custom JPs. All of them would place the chests right next to the gathering nodes. c.) The only option I see as a possibility is a safe-box we can load with own items. And even then, certain individuals would abuse this for off-TP trading :S. Our community sadly is like that. Every mechanic that relies on common sense and good will gets abused, exploited and milked until it gets fixed/removed. /shrug The other suggestions are fine.

Ranger is in a good spot at the moment. Soulbeast is useful enough to be meta at the moment. Soulbeast works great for soloing PvE content and even in PvP. In Fractals you can also play Druid (healer). Engineer has seen worse days. Scrapper is nice for soloing content, especially Story and Open World. High sustain, even on full-dps gear. There exists the Heal Scrapper for group support, which is also used in Fractals. The Holosmith does very good DPS and is rather easy to learn and use. It mostly depends on your resources, your goals and your interests. We can make suggestions, but we cannot decide for you. You started the thread asking "which class is always meta." Especially Engineer was not always meta. Guardian had a very difficult stand in its early years, Ranger was considered a solo class until HoT. If you like to play Engineer, go for it. If you enjoy Ranger, go for that. Both currently have options for Fractals and perform well in solo-content. Will they always be part of the meta? We cannot say.

Warrior. Bannerslave for instanced content. Afaik this never changed in all the years. It also performs well in Open World.

I am afraid there is no picture :scream: What do you mean with moving exactly? - like a pet (follows us) - like a gyro (moves with us) - like a robot (moves on a pre-defined line/circle) Turrets are a bit too fragile to sustain any real damage, so giving them the ability to move could actually improve the situation. They definitely need a rework sooner or later, so every suggestion regarding this topic is helpful. Could you give some more details?

Most of the discussion in the Professions and its sub-forums are completely about PvP and WvW. The few PvE related discussions usually have a [PvE] tag in the title and even then, there is a high chance the discussion derails into yet another balancing-topic. If at all, that sub-section would only have an entertainment value for the staff.