voltaicbore.8012

> @"Mogwai.4015" said: >I don't really want to return to pre-Feb balance patch, but it's insulting of ANet to lay the groundwork for an entire shift in philosophy only to then say loljk. I agree 200000% with this. I think I overall had much more fun in the pre-Feb balance, but I still appreciate that lower damage across the board gives more builds the opportunity to compete. That being said, ANet has again just abandoned this project. Abandonment is a huge problem for this studio, and I have no clue why they so consistently do this. I guess we should have seen this coming with what they did with the Canthan district in DR. Instead of reworking it or sticking to their guns... they literally replaced it with a giant hole in the ground. Just kind of letting projects slide out of their hands onto the ground, to lay there untouched forever, seems to be standard fare.

I think the problem is too fundamental to fully address, although I'm a huge fan of ideas like what @"Jekkt.6045" mentioned in terms of baked-in tradeoffs. I'd like to suggest that what we really want is every class to be more viable, which is different than "build diversity" in my opinion. The best example of the difference between "wider viability" vs "build diversity" I can think of is BDO. In that game, you don't have to choose which parts of your kit to take with you into battle - _every single_ passive (the equivalent of GW2's traits) and _every single_ active (the equivalent of weapon skills and heal/utility/elite skills) is available to you at all times in every single fight. All you need to do is get the skill points to train those skills, and it's both possible and fairly commonplace to farm up enough skill points to fully train up everything in your class. In this regard, BDO has absolutely zero build diversity. Ironically, this seems to make it easier for more classes to be viable in small scale pvp. Since the devs know anything they put into a class will be available to every single player running that class, all they need to do is make sure that each class' skill tree gets access to its own flavor of combat essentials (like stability, blocks, protection, cc, and a few big nuke moves). To differentiate classes, the devs do throw in a few tradeoffs; some classes have excellent aoe and stability and high HP, but move slowly, can't close gaps all that well, and are totally unable to touch targets at midrange and beyond. Some classic assassin specs have incredibly high single target burst damage, but depend on landing that burst from stealth, and can be severely punished for messing up due to very low HP and weak active defenses. So while there are differences (and many times these differences need to be tuned to buff garbage classes and nerf OP classes), as a general rule every single class has some way to achieve important combat goals. The BDO devs can (and have!) even gone so far as individually adjusting how much damage each class does against every other class, when re-tuning the tradeoffs isn't enough to balance small scale combat. So the sense of variety in BDO comes not from having a wide range of builds at your disposal, but from the fact that your class (when learned properly) stands a fighting chance in most small-scale pvp situations, and you can use any of your moves in a variety of different ways depending on the situation. So while I do not have any real build options when playing a class, I can be reasonably assured that whatever class I play can participate effectively in most of the game. In other words, no build diversity, but pretty wide class viability. GW2 is much harder to balance, in this regard. Since every class has skills and traits locked to various weapons and specializations, the devs do not have any assurance that every tweak or addition they make to a trait or skill will be reflected in players' builds. Instead they have to distribute enough desirable qualities across enough of the specializations, if they want to make sure each specialization can have some sort of role in pvp. However, achieving true equality of usefulness across every specialization would be kind of stupid, since there's only 12 things they can put into each specialization; if you always make sure to put roughly the same mount of offense, defense, utility, and cc/stability into each one, that's not a lot of space for differentiation. Each specialization would end up looking like just differently named versions of the same thing. They'd have to come up with a unique way to represent those combat essentials (so for instance one trait line might have resistance utilities on shorter cd, while another would give you access to a longer-cd pulsing resistance), and there's only so many ways to do that. What ends up happening is the stale metas we have now. Players figure out, through theory as well as trial and error, which single combination of traits and skills allows each class to fulfill a useful role while also being well-rounded enough to deal with the widest variety of threats. So we essentially end up with one build for each class much like BDO does, but while BDO's single-build system gives your class **everything** at once, your single-build in GW2 only brings a **fraction** of all the cool things available to your class. That fraction-ing is a long-term problem, because some classes have trait lines that are packed with useful things for pvp, while other classes have a more scattered distribution and therefore struggle to patch together 3 traitlines and 15-ish abilities to cover their bases _and_ specialize enough at a particular role. Furthermore, once you've settled on a build and loadout, there's really not too many ways to play it. The apex of combat variety in GW2 is maybe baiting out cleanses and dodges with cover condi and weapon swap skill cancels, or finding stupid kiting spots or no port spots that are less about your class and more about having practiced enough to land non-obvious jumps. So while adding greater complexity as @"JusticeRetroHunter.7684" suggests is indeed the goal, I really don't see it happening due to GW2's fundamental design in forcing player choice. Unless they completely homogenize those choices (making them stupid and meaningless), it appears nearly impossible to me to make sure every trait line across every class has an equivalent share of essential pvp tools. I think the best we can hope for is what we've been getting all along, which is short-term changes to address short-term issues.

> @"Fueki.4753" said: > It's nothing but a major disappointment. > > Why did they even bother with the big announcement? > > Making the trailer probably was more expensive than making this shallow content droplet of recycled assets. Exactly. Remember the huge deal they made out of the IBS launch, making it sound like we were really going to see expansion-like content in a LW release schedule. We all know that was absolute kitten at this point, but they had a nonsensically big announcement about it. Turns out the Champions marketing fanfare is more of the same nonsense. I find it hard to blame ANet at this point for how utterly stupid marketing turns out to be. The truth seems to be that their standards for the finale of Champions is the lowest for any GW2 content we've seen thus far, but that's not really something they can come out and say. There'd be just as large an outcry (and many people would likely stop playing) if they straight up told us, "so guys, we don't have the juice to make this any better, it's just one lackluster chapter trickled out over 6 months. Sorry." On the other hand, the result of hyping up something that's clearly not that good is what we're seeing now. The middle ground of a smaller announcement is also nonexistent in this case, I think. If they had told us very little about it, and we got content of this quality, I think we'd be just as pissed that they were hiding the thin-ness of the content from us. **The entire marketing problem starts with the fact that the underlying product being marketed, Champions, is just plain awful.** There's just no way to win the marketing battle there.

> @"anninke.7469" said: > Anyone else getting slightly hopeful that Laranthir's absence may have an actual reason after all? No. After what they did to the Spirits, the norn aspect of the Saga in general, and to my boy Smodur - zero faith in ANet's narrative capabilities. I'd prefer they not ruin Laranthir somehow as well.

OP, bless your heart for still having this level of faith in ANet. I, for one, consider this a futile effort and wasted hope. If there's one thing ANet consistently does, it is abandoning old content to push out half-baked new content (which they in turn abandon as well). As much as I agree that some open-world hearts take much too long compared to others and that we need much better new-player-teaching systems, I don't see any of that happening. Actually, I'd prefer not to see them even _attempt_ some of these fixes. If the Icebrood Saga Champions release is any indication, ANet does not seem capable of putting out good lower-priority content when they have higher-priority content taking most of their attention. Pretty much the only thing I want them to do is fix the latency/server issues.

> @"kharmin.7683" said: > GW2 being so casual-centric it would make no sense to move to exclude those casuals from expansion content. They probably make a large majority of the player base. Making an expansion harder than PoF/HoT would, IMO, cut down on sales. This would be the only reason why I'd tolerate a downgrade in difficulty in EoD mobs. Otherwise, I completely disagree with your assessment, @"Pockethole.5031". You sounded a bit defensive in some other posts, so I just want to make it clear I'm not judging _you_ as a player. I simply do not share your assessment that PoF open world mobs are excessively difficult, and I also do not share your desire for EoD mobs to be easier. While you, @"Pockethole.5031" , pretty clearly state that the mobs are too _difficult_, I suspect that in reality you'd be okay with them being less _annoying_ rather than straight-up _easier_. By "less annoying," I generally mean "more avoidable." There are a number of other elements that can go into what makes any encounter less annoying, but I'll leave it at that for now.

> @"Konig Des Todes.2086" said: > And Braham isn't whining. He's literally saying "hey, you know that trusting the Elder Dragon of persuasion, who's 150 years of history is literally tricking people into wanting to work with it before corrupting them, is a very bad idea, RIGHT!?" And responding to comments of "but my racial history" with "but my racial *and personal* history too!" > > Taimi is the one being childish and unreasonable here. And I suspect that Jormag may have been a bit... _persuasive_ to cause that. The Arcane Council - I can see them agreeing without any need of whispers. But Taimi? She should be smarter than that. Finally, a voice of reason. I understand a lot of us don't like Braham (I don't particularly appreciate him the vast majority of times we see him), but this chapter-ette we see him raising questions nobody else is really willing to address, but he's just getting shouted down. Even if he just shut up during the fights and waited until after the boss was dead to re-raise the issue, the result would probably have been "you're STILL going on about that? Yuck." For the first time ever, I kept wanting to tell the other characters to listen to ~~Sam Riegel~~ Braham for once.

As the old saying goes: "you get what you pay for." LW is free of charge to us playing actively, but for the first time I feel we literally got what we paid for - nothing of value. As OP said, I came into this with very low expectations, and ANet somehow found a way to get even lower. All of that is, however.... oddly okay for me at this stage. While Champions thus far did make me question (for the first time ever) whether or not I'd buy an xpac, just a bit of objective thinking reassured me that EoD will likely be of much higher quality than Saga in general, and Champions in particular. I'll still buy it early, if there is any benefit for doing so. The _one_ thing that would give me long-term concerns about the quality of the game is if we found out that IBS was initially planned with a more coherent story, but due to lack of confidence/staffing changes/whatever began to take all the ridiculous turns it has so far. To me, I would feel much more reassured that IBS was always intended to turn out this way (start with norn, then totally ignore them and go to charr, add in charr family drama, then... Primordus... because Primordus). Even if I think it's garbage, at least it was pre-planned, and it would just be a case of me not happening to like something. If it either (1) wasn't even planned out this far, or (2) turned into this frankenstein mess because ANet couldn't stick to and execute a vision, then I would have serious concerns about ANet's structural ability to deliver story and gameplay.

> @"Hannelore.8153" said: > I went into these missions on my main and it took ~15mins per champion, so they're still HP sponges when soloed The last one especially as it just constantly summons fire tornadoes to throw you around when you're trying to damage it. > > The devs really need to look at the up/downscaling algorithms, they've been broken for a long time now. Agreed. Scaling still seems terrible (perhaps even nonexistent) when soloing these. Doesn't seem worth the time to enter a private instance to solo. Of course, the stock answer is "hurdurr this be an mmo, go play with others." I did! The problem is on day one, people are already afk-ing these. Started with a group of 5, 2 immediately stopped moving in the starter area (just a few things here and there to beat the afk timer, perhaps) and stayed that way the rest of the time. Only one person followed me to boss, and they did no damage and died rapidly/repeatedly. That person eventually stopped respawning, and I was left alone to finish the instance. If scaling were dynamic, that would have made the afkers and leavers a bit less of a problem. I'll have arcdps estimate the boss' HP in various scenarios, and update this thread if I feel it's helpful.

Nevermind, fixed my original issue. Suffice it to say, I still think it was a good idea to delay the Steam release. Too many flaws and inconsistencies right now for a smooth release. In particular, I can see LW chapter access being a dealbreaker, and getting this game ripped to shreds in reviews.

I'm actually okay with the rotating stock and needing to wait for sales. I just think that making a new online store might give ANet the opportunity to unify the store with the actual purchase of the game, so new Steam players (when that finally comes around) might be able to actually buy the LW content at the same time that they buy the xpacs themselves.

> @"LilSpark.4567" said: > Thanks for the reply. A lot of people recommend WoW to me but it's not my kind of game. Guild Wars 2 is different from all the mmorpg I've played. It's the only mmorpg that makes me come back every day and invest a lot of hours. But I started to think he was dead because I don't meet a lot of players.. It all depends on where you are, what you do, when you do it, and what kind(s) of guild(s) you join. Doing fairly popular and rewarding content like the latest meta event (like the newest map, Drizzlewood Coast or the still-running Dragonfall meta, or fractals) will put you with a lot of other players. In fact, for the meta event boss fights, you'll see more people than you'll ever want - the visual effect spam is off the charts in this game. Even officially 'dead' and abandoned content like dungeons, I run them several times per day. Almost every time I either make or join a full group of 5 via LFG. So it's less a matter of "there's nobody in this game", but more a "you have a lot of freedom to choose what you're doing/how you do it". For instance, sometimes I hate having to guide (or just ignore and leave behind) new people in dungeons who don't read chat. I can solo every mechanically soloable dungeon, so sometimes I do just that. A number of fractals can be soloed as well, if you're into that kind of challenge. It just comes down to what kind of content you like, how familiar you are with it, and how good you are at your class. I'm in a handful of guilds, some are quite quiet and less active. Others have very active chats and discords, with activities all the time. Again, it all depends on who you join and for what reason (raid training, general companionship, etc.). Personally, I have no problem with group content, but I like having a choice between playing alone and running with a group on any given play session. Thanks to my irl job, even before the pandemic made it okay for work-related calls to come in at all hours of the day, I liked running solo content because I could drop it and walk away any time if I need to without holding anyone else back.