Mungrul.9358

> @"hugo.4705" said:

> Possibility to make and craft legendary armor outside of raids (no don't put it in fractals either). Just expensive crafting of armorsmith/leatherwork/tailor 500 as example.

I would really like for this to happen, but I very much doubt ANet will ever implement a way of getting legendary armours outside of raids. For one, they'd face a lot of very vocal opposition from raiders.

To be honest, there's part of me that's still holding out hope for them to return to a more GW1 sort of model, where top level stats (and by extension in GW2, the ability to choose stats at will) are easy to get a hold of, but it's purely cosmetics that the grind is for. But again, they would face very vocal opposition to such a move from the noisy minority.

There's another example of this obnoxious grind culture that's actively preventing me from participating in WvW. I took a break from the game for a very long time, from before mounts and even the wardrobe were a thing.

After returning last year, I finally thought to myself a couple of weeks ago "Yeah, I used to enjoy a bit of WvW, let's give that a go!"

Except I'm immediately at a disadvantage, because everyone has the Warclaw and leaves me in the dust. And the things I need to do to unlock the Warclaw necessitate being part of the blob, but I can't keep up because I don't have a Warclaw...

Way to actively dissuade new or returning players from participating in WvW ANet.

Here's a thought: you've implemented reward tracks in WvW that allow WvW players to unlock PvE content.

How about implementing tracks in PvE that allow PvE players to unlock WvW content?

Edit: Thinking on this further, one way you could allow PvE player to unlock WvW content is excess Mastery Points. I'm not saying make it the only way mind you. And only allow players to spend Mastery Points this way if they've unlocked everything they need to in the related Mastery track. Or hey, go one step further and make Mastery Points repeatable.

Sure, there would be some balance issues to sort out with people then just repeating the easy ones, so maybe only allow people to repeat Mastery Points until they're back to their original excess level.

There's a site I subscribe to that as part of my subscription fee gives me a unique TF2 hat every year, and this hat inevitably sells on the TF2 marketplace for £10. And I don't even play TF2 any more, so it's money in the wallet for me. If you do play TF2 or CS:GO regularly you're likely to get a lot more unique drops, so I could easily see people making enough money through skins in other games to buy stuff in GW2. I'm not saying that EVERYBODY would do it, but I'm sure there's quite a few Steam users who would.

It gets even more interesting when you factor in trading cards, which you get simply for playing games, even without workshop support, and which people are willing to pay for.

But your comment also highlights a reason why I think ANet are nervous about releasing on Steam. ANet at the end of the day are actively invested in dissuading people from playing other games. It's why so many things take such a long time to do. They want as much of their players' free time as possible, to ensure maximum exposure to their monetisation mechanisms.

It's how all "Games as a service" operate, and it's more than a little seedy.

So yeah, ANet are scared that if people are playing on a platform that promotes other games that ask nothing more from their players than the price of entry, people might realise just how scummy the gem store is.

Especially when a lot of games provide Workshop support where equivalent items that would cost lots of money in GW2's gem store cost nothing there.

Has anyone mentioned that another reason the Steam wallet appeals is that you can generate cash in it by playing other games and selling trading cards or things like hats from Team Fortress 2?

That cash can then be spent on anything else on Steam. So effectively, you could sell a hat you got from playing TF2 or a gun skin from CS:GO and spend the resulting funds on gems for GW2.

Personally, the appeal of Steam for me are the tools it provides me with.

Like cloud storage for screenshots, making them easier to share.

Or the Steam Workshop, where the community can make items or mods for games, which can then be subscribed to through the Workshop, keeping them updated with minimal interaction from the user.

Now the items thing would never happen in GW2, but I know there's lots of folk out there using user interface enhancing mods, which can be a pain to keep updated. Steam could do that for you, as long as ArenaNet add Workshop support.

A "Collapse All Categories" button for the crafting list would be great.

And while you're at it, make all craft speeds the same. Having some things take longer than others is completely arbitrary at this point in the game's life and just wastes the player's time. Might as well learn from Diablo 3 here and allow players to craft stacks in one go.

Oh, and fix the Choya Logging Tool. The amount of times I have to repeat chopping a tree because the last chop didn't register is massively annoying.

I just want to comment on the state of hammer warrior in open world and story PvE. I know these modes don't get as much attention on the forums, with only raids, dungeons and fractals really being discussed seriously; but hammer warrior in its current state is an embarrassment, and I suspect a lot of people spend a lot more time playing open world PvE than these other modes.

Having returned to the game recently after a seven year hiatus, I loaded up my main and played him through all the seasons prior to The Icecbrood Saga and the full HoT and PoF campaigns as solo hammer warrior. I like to play as hammer partly because it feels good (animations, sound and screenshake all give the warrior's hammer more of a feeling of weight than any other weapon in the game), and partly because the only legendary I have is Juggernaut.

I had to modify my gear somewhat, as I'd left my character with all Soldier's gear when I stopped playing. I first tried running Berserker's, but found survivability to be really bad, so instead made a full set of Celestial. I ended up doing about the same damage as when I was using Berserker's, but with a lot better survivability.

I was running Arms bottom-middle-top, Strength middle-top-bottom and Discipline middle-bottom-bottom.

Skills were "To The Limit!", "For Great Justice!", "Shake It Off!", "On My Mark!" and Signet Of Rage.

Having been a Hambow warrior when I stopped playing seven years ago, I went with that this time as well, and ran a longbow as my other weapon.

And I survived well enough, and was able to tank a lot of fights solo, but it took forever.

With the removal of damage bonuses from CCs and the prevalence of blinds for really basic mobs in PoF, even basic combat were taking a really long time to resolve. Non-veteran mobs that shouldn't prove a challenge became massive speedbumps to my hammer warrior, such as Sand Lions, Scarabs and the dreaded Dust Mite.

On top of which, for a weapon focussed on CCs as much as the warrior's hammer is, it became almost useless against bosses, and didn't reduce the break bar as much as I felt it should given the damage nerf. And while adrenaline build-up was pretty good, with the nerf to CC damage the fun has completely gone out of the Combustive Shot / Earthshaker combo.

Even with all this though, I thought maybe it's as difficult for other professions or weapon combinations and I just had to *sigh* "Git Gud".

This was shattered when I eventually swapped to Berserker geared double axe for The Icebrood Sage. Sudenly, things were dying incredibly quickly, and survivability was less of a problem because things didn't generally stay alive long enough for it to be one.

Blinds became a non-issue due to the sheer quantity of attacks I was pumping out, and I realised just how unimportant CC is for open world PvE when compared to DPS. The amount of scenarios where I needed CC could be counted on the fingers of one hand, where every other scenario benefitted from the increase in DPS offered by running dual axe.

Hell, I suspect even running full Celestial double axe would STILL substantially overshadow hammer.

When I first switched to using dual axes, I also decided to run a rifle as my other weapon. It was good for single-target DPS, but I eventually swapped back to longbow for Combustive Shot, and waddya know? For open world PvE that combos better than Hambow these days too.

At the moment, I would find it really hard to recommend anyone runs through the campaigns and explores the maps as a hammer warrior. About its only benefit is survivability, but you need that considering how much longer fights will take you than with just about any other weapon combination.

So what class IS good with hammer these days? I still want to use my Juggy, but there's not much point on my warrior considering it's in such a sorry state there.

And it really shouldn't be that way.

Hammer warrior needs some *serious* TLC from ANet. It looks like it's never really recovered from the Hambow nerf, and they didn't even consider its slow attack speed when designing later content.

I can only see the game getting massively review bombed on Steam if it launches there in this state. Plus, people there aren't going to like the heavy imlementation of the gem store or loot boxes.

The situation hasn't improved one iota since my last post, no-one's provided a link to any statement by ANet saying how they're going about fixing this. And it's still blatantly obvious to anyone playing that maps for PoF, season 4 and season 5 just fall over as soon as the player level gets to that required to do any sort of meta or other high profile event successfully.

As said before, ANet need to either pony up for more compute power with Amazon, or lower max player caps on map instances and get rid of the map closing mechanic and its associated nags. A speed boost just isn't enough incentive for me to move to a map where I'm likely to have a much worse experience playing (that doesn't affect my character anyway).

Of course, they could also go back to running their own servers. I'm sure some financial bod sees AWS as being nothing but good, but for the players, it's been nothing but terrible.

I'm in the process of unlocking my Skyscale, and don't have the Warclaw either, so can't comment on those.

But I find each mount has its own particular uses, so I have keybinds for each one. This allows me to quickly swap depending on which mount is best for the current scenario.

With all that said however, Raptor is still probably my most used mount. For regular point A to point B travel, it's just the least hassle, and the jump is just fun.

Also, it's bound to my middle mouse button, so yeah, probably the quickest to summon.

Also-also, the Raptor mini you can grab from the trainer is one of my favourites in the game. It follows you everywhere making that distinctive Raptor clip-clop noise, and when you summon your main ride, it looks like you've made your Raptor mini bigger and jumped on it!

I do absolutely adore my Griffon's animations and noises however. The little chirrups and clucks it makes are just really soothing :3

And the 250 gold for the Griffon?

I've come back recently after a very long absence, and the grind for mastery and mounts is horrible. I've done all but the Warclaw and Skyscale, and I've not even looked in to what I need to do for those.

But no, don't go comparing GW2's grind to BDO; it's well known that Korean MMOs feature some of the worst grinds in gaming, so any other MMO will look favourable in comparison. I prefer to compare the grind in GW2 to say Ubisoft open-world games. Mechanically, they're almost identical, but Ubisoft open world games tend to have a lot more respect for players' time. And that's saying something, seeing as the average gamer is quite often put off of Ubisoft games because they're just too big.

I get it Nubarus, you've put a lot of time in to this game, and it's probably the only one you really play at the moment. But you have to realise that you're the exception and not the rule, and that easing the grind a bit might end up benefitting you long term as more players would be more likely to stick around if they felt the game had more respect for their time.

And more players means more people to play with, more people using the trading post and more people buying things from the gem store, allowing ANet to stay afloat and deliver more meaningful content instead of padding out what should be simple mount acquisition quests with pointless grind.

Got a link to that statement? I would be interested in seeing it. I've come back after a (very) long absence, and while Central Tyria and HoT seemed playable enough, PoF and Season 4 maps are gods-awful.

And the lag definitely corellates with higher player counts.

Okay, I've started ignoring the nags asking me to switch to more populated maps, and generally, the lag is almost non-existent on maps with fewer players.

As soon as the population starts to go up again, lag becomes more and more frequent.

I have a background as a post production engineer, with a focus on shared storage environments. I know that the more clients I have connected to my shared storage servers, the more network and disk bandwidth I will need to support those users, otherwise they will start experiencing frame drops while editing.

This feels very much like that sort of situation, where the "server" (map) doesn't have enough resources to cope with the number of "clients" (players).

I understand that ANet utilise AWS in order to provide server hosting.

May I suggest they either:

1) Pay Amazon for more compute power

or

2) Lower the player limit cap on maps in order to reduce strain on each map instance

OP, you'll never win this argument.

The people who already have them will resent others being able to get them easier, and will make damn sure to make that opinion known.

ANet isn't interested in lowering the material costs, because they know that for players who have less time to play, often the resource grind will drive them to the gem store to bypass it.

And more insidiously, ANet isn't interested in lowering the time it takes, as that may leave the player enough time to step away from GW2 and play something else, which is time they're not exposed to GW2's FOMO (fear of missing out).

Thanks for that!

Although I'm sure I've seen more than the ones shown on that page.

Hey there all;

I've recently started playing GW2 again after an almost 7 year absence, and I was wondering if there's a page detailing all the different icons I'm seeing against people's names.

I know the Map Completion one ('cos I got it!), but there's a bunch of different ones I don't recognise, and there doesn't seem to be a page for this on the wiki, or my search-fu is lacking!

Thanks in advance!