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[GW2]Making a new thread for the BWE. See you guys on Aspenwood soon!
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Alright, yeah, if you're going to approach this from a WoW "Hey lets all stand perfect still and hit each other" perspective then, yes, it's overpowered. However, if you're not going to dodge or do anything to defend yourself except try to shoot them with your wand, you really deserve that 10k crit until someone teaches you to friggin MOVE!
9 out of every 10 players are not going to be anything but a scrub in PvP when they've only had 3 days to play it.
All hail!
Now leak us some info already!
You don't seem to know what a strawman actually is.
And the point is that your supposition about the skills of even an experienced player is wrong. Anyone thrown headfirst into everything about a new class has a steep and nasty learning curve ahead.
A basically universal point of game design is to avoid this.
Weapon unlocks are participation based. As long as you get a hit on the enemy, when it dies you unlock a bit more.
I unlocked my guardians staff in literally like 3 minutes because I was in the middle of a DE with a huge zerg against a zerg of mobs and I just spammed the first skill which is an AoE.
Cause that is what I see these Eviscerate/Greatsword Warrior, Power/Precision Backstab Thief, and Axe&Horn/Greatsword Rangers. They are the carry for your team. They output such ridiculous damage, and your job as their teammate is to make it so they can output that damage. Are they OP? Yea in PUB games, just like in those MOBA games where good players on Carrys could join a random game by themselves and stomp the shit out of the other team. But as part of a team against another team that has their own or knows how to deal with it? I don't know yet, because one of the strategies to deal with a carry hero in LoL is to shut it down early game. In GW2, you can't stop that Eviscerate Warrior from being able to do 20k damage in one hit... he comes equipped with it, so the only strategy left is to CC and focus him down.
I'm trying to get over the fact that some professions can't be the carry on a team. Hopefully there are multiple viable roles for each profession.
Wow, I guess using the autoattack really taught you a lot about skills 2-5. Good thing the game eased you into that.
Some events (like the initial human farm one) have very limited spawns. This means a lot of participation is watering plants, feeding animals, extinguishing bales of hay, etc. I believe that was the intent. Participating in an event should help unlock skills even if you aren't fighting.
My solutions would be: Off-hand / 4&5 receive credit towards their unlock even if 2&3 are still locked. Elementalists get unlocks for all attunements of their current weapon. So if you unlock #2 while using fire, #2 is unlocked if you switch to air, earth, or water.
Edit: Fix'd
XBL GamerTag: Comrade Nexus
Wow, it's like not every system is capable of working perfectly. That's totally a reason to remove all the good things it does because it doesn't quite work as well as it should occasionally!
High level players trying to play another class at high level is not the same as high level players being given access to a medium level character. You are using this superficially similar case to refute my stronger argument. This is a straw man. I was being polite and not calling it a non-fucking-sequitor.
Your last line is complete bullshit. Fight games rarely lock away moves. You are given the full set, and you learn them through trial, error, and gamefaqs. God of War/DMC/Bayonetta let you unlock weapons, but you're usually give almost the complete set of maneuvers to start with. Sure, an FPS makes you wait to unlock a weapon, but they'll almost always let you use secondary fire modes or zoom immediately. Driving games give you a choice between automatic and manual from the get go, or at least I'm pretty sure Pole Position did. Starting weak and gaining power is an RPG element, and can be used to tell a story, but it isn't necessary as a game element. The vast majority of people are not pants on head retarded (until massed in large groups or commenting on a YouTube video).
I'm not saying to throw everyone into open world PVP where mastery of every ability is life and death. I'm saying this mechanic is not necessary to ease a player into the systems - they will do it themselves.
Scrub by what definition? With that logic you could argue that if Starcraft 3 were to come out tomorrow and noone had ever played it before then someone from the SC 2 Bronze league would have an even chance against someone in the SC2 Master league. I wouldn't put money on that Bronze player.
GW2 does not have any crazy new mechanics people have never seen before. You can easily tell the difference between someone just playing for fun, someone actually trying to win, and the really talented people. And many other little classifications in between.
Edit: I should clarify what I mean by "scrub" since I used it first. Someone that doesn't or refuses to learn from mistakes. Ones that rolled into the sPvP over the weekend and didn't change their traits/weapons/skills the entire time. There were these people.. they may have played only a few games. That Warrior video has some decent fights in it against people that showed that they at least had a clue on what they were doing.
It doesn't do anything good. When I started a thief and went straight to the mists, did I first autoattack 5 training trainers, then 10, .... No, I experimented with the weapons and skills, all of them, at my own pace. The fact that every game does this isn't an argument, because Anet keeps advertising that Gw2 cuts out the bullshit that's there because "every other game does this."
No, it's dead on point no matter how much you piss and moan about it.
Drop an experienced player into a max level class he's had no experience with and he will play terribly. Because he doesn't know anything about the class because he hasn't been eased into it by leveling the class up. They will eventually figure it out probably, but they too will take time to acclimate to the new playstyle, learn the new abilities and all that shit. The same stuff unlocking things one at a time does, just in a far less controlled fashion.
The weapon unlock system, like the leveling system itself, is designed to ease you into the game mechanics in a controlled manner so you (hopefully) aren't overwhelmed with things and learn stuff properly. Weapon unlocks are no different then traits not being available till lvl 10 or utility skills unlocking 1 at a time or any of that shit that you see in pretty much any MMO.
If you wanna talk about silly comparisons, lets look at comparing unlocking a new weapon, a process that takes a matter of minutes, to leveling a new character, a process that takes days.
FPS lock away weapons all the time in single-player. God of War games or action games or the like also slowly ramp up your arsenal as the game goes on, as you already touched on. Fighting games tend to lock away specific characeters at the start. Even a Mario game only slowly introduces new powerups over the course of the game, even if "Jump" and "Spin" (in 3D mario) and your various standard moves are available right from the start.
And, more applicably, RPGs are more or less based on slowly introducing the player to newer and greater powers as they go along.
Having a game ease you into increasing complexity as you proceed through it is almost universal. You can say "they will do it themselves" but both experience and the design of most games disagree. You very much want to control the players initial experiences as they learn the various systems of your game.
Steam: Jiggle Billy (Charrbroiled), Guild Wars 2: Tyreh, asura Warrior
This doesn't make any sense.
Also, it would appear A.net don't actually agree with your point since they put weapon unlocking into the game like a year or something ago to deal with the issue of easing players into the game. And are, in fact, according to their forum posts they are looking in to adding even more to the tutorial process.
Teaching your player to play your game in a controlled manner is not bullshit, it's good game design.
You have to autoattack like 3 before you unlock your second skill.
And there's still excitement. Unlocking new things and the excitement that brings is like the core design of RPGs and RPG-like systems in other games.
Personally, I prefer the method of giving you all the abilities from the start and introducing the concepts behind them slowly. Like your Mario example.
We get that unlock satisfaction from skills and traits. I personally don't see why we need it in our basic attacks. You only start out with 1 weapon, so it's not like you have 20 abilities to learn right off the bat.
Over the weekend I dodged my way into the door of an orphanage, crashed into the wall, and leveled from discovery experience. Then I dodged the heck outta there.
Same here. I almost did it too much to the point of it getting me killed in the Ashford jumping puzzle.
It's just so addictive!
And I would be fine with this. But when I'm levels 8/9/10, and I'm finally starting to fight interesting enemies/do interesting events, I don't want to have to say, "Welp, back to the bear shrine so i can ungimp this weapon and see how it works."
Bah, I've been rolling everywhere since like Zelda. Or at least Bastion.
Funnily, I think Bastion is the game GW2 reminds me of most wrt combat.
Apparently even wonderful bugs are still bugs. :cry:
I keep having to stop myself from doing that.
Doing an event or two then buying all your class weapons makes the process much less painful but it's not intuitive at all.
Ah, you still evade my points, and now you verge on ad hominem, which is where you went in our last disagreement. I do not deny that a high level player will have degraded skills in another high level class at first. However, I wasn't wanting them in a high level class. I want a high level player to be able to skip the lowest levels of content, which are designed to teach a completely inexperienced player. Perhaps 20-30 in WoW terms - most core skills and a mount. (How many people rolled a Death Knight and had their mind blown by the sheer overwhelming number of skills available? I never met them. And most DK players were seriously average.)
FPS games don't lock away the rocket launcher because the player is too dumb to handle it. They lock them away because it's a reward for playing further. You play through the game and get them. And that's the only weak example I gave - unlocking fight game characters is a long step from "weak punch 10 times to unlock strong punch". GW2's weapon unlocks (in every case I've observed, which is 2) take the player out of the game and make them do something else (grind) until they have full use of the weapon.
You're right, some games introduce concepts as the game go on. In this case, the concept being introduced is not that complicated. People are NOT as dumb as this mechanic implies that they are. If it's a reward, it's a crappy reward - I feel punished that getting a shiny new toy means 10-15 minutes (over an hour for wizards) killing rats to fully use it. If it's to educate me in using it, it fails, because I completely ignore anything but autoattack until all skills are unlocked and I can see how they interact. If it's to stretch out content, it fails because there's no subscription - the only way they make more money from me is keep me having fun so that I tell my friends to buy it and buy the expansions.
We might want to avoid each others posts, man.... you're a white knight, I'm a black knight. You have a game you feel passionate about, and you want to defend it, rabidly so. I see a game I'm passionate about, and I want everything to be perfect, so I call out what I perceive as wrong, no matter how many people tell me "dude, it'll all be okay". Tilt at me all you want, it's cool - I like debates, and if I can't back up my position then how do I know I'm right? But let's not shit on the thread while we do it - we're both getting close.
noooooooooo
Gonna miss being able to do that.
It's not a bug if you intentionally re-add it.
They are only a large annoyance right now because what all of us are doing during the limited time we get to play is starting characters and trying new things., both of which involve wrestling with the noob hotbar unlock system.
Once that tendency falls away, everyone will forget that it's an issue (because it isn't one level 10+)
One thing they could do is put a 100 gem item in the gem store that auto unlocks all 1-5 abilities for all weapons for that character. That would give altitis afflicted or experienced, impatient players an alternative.
Playing a guardian, this actually works because you are immune to damage during the roll and you need to get into melee range most of the time anyway. I could see it not being so hot for other classes though.. wasting a dodge is not smart!
/mourn LoL dance skating
I just do it because I want a chance to be a part of the fight at all. Some mobs go down pretty quick.
I can't say for sure, but I believe that suggestion would upset people, though I think it has some merit. We're sensitive to giving people unfair advantages through gem purchases. I'm not a game designer, but my hunch says that allowing someone to pay for that ability would tip the balance somewhere.
I wouldn't mention it if gems weren't purchasable via in-game gold. Higher level players will have access to more gold, hence the ability to purchase gems. 100 is a small amount, and they wont mind spending gold on a lower level character to make the early game more enjoyable.
And really.. it's superfluous. The mechanic is in place to introduce players to the game. A tutorial, essentially. When a player no longer needs a tutorial, it instead becomes an obstacle.. an annoyance, as you have seen individuals in this thread claim. I don't believe the devs would place an option in the options menu to disable it completely, but obviously that would be the better option if they would be worried about ruffling feathers.
To be clear, I am only referring to the core 1-5 skills. unlocking utility skills etc with time and points is a-ok with me.
First weapon - Normal
Second weapon - skills unlock 25% faster
Third - 50% faster
Fourth and beyond - 75% faster
We can assume that by the time a person is unlocking a third, fourth or even fifth weapon for a class, they pretty much "got it", right?
Weapon switching should be immediately available and covered in a tutorial, and all classes should start with two full weapon sets equipped (that means an offhand for the thief, what was that about >.>).
E: Beat'd by ironzerg