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Why would you expect that? I wouldn't expect almost anyone to have gotten a good handle on the game over the course of only a weekend. Especially given it's differences from standard MMOs.
If you wanna see what's possible, you need to see people who've been playing for ages. Like the devs. There's a REALLY good Elementalist among the Devs you can see some videos of. He's constant switching attunements and blowing defensive skills making him really hard to pin down or damage.
There is nothing statistically significant about a weekend test because you don't have a very broad sample. You have a large one, but it's HEAVILY skewed towards people who've never played the game before.
I also can't figure out why you'd think there would be a "carry" in an MMO. Carries are usually defined by the fact that they only become super powerful once they've leveled up. It's not the same kind of thing in a game like this.
What the heck were you people doing then? Is this in WvW only or something? This is completely foreign to my entire experience over the weekend.
Playing PvE, weapon unlocks came extremely fast, even for single target weapons.
There was no grinding, I just kept playing the game and killing shit.
God I fucking wish. There are no mmo's on the market that wouldn't immediately be improved 100% by flying mounts and GW2 is no exception.
LoL: failboattootoot
Because flying bases.
Yes, in WvW it can take a long time to unlock weapon skills, especially if you're starting out just running in there with a low level character (IE without decent equipment, utility skills, etc.)
That's how I discovered how skill unlocks work. It takes SO LONG to kill a bat or a moa by yourself in the Eternal Battlegrounds with just auto-attacks.
Give me both. The more shit that flies, the better. The sooner I can own one of those airships they've shown, the better.
LoL: failboattootoot
Edit: I will pay $20 for a flying base.
Edit: I would pay 20 bucks for a flying base and another 10 for an elite skill that summons asura flying gyrocopters to bombard an area and also bring me a gyrocopter to fly around in.
edit 2: and 10 more if we can play beach volleyball after.
edit 3: What I am saying is that I am not good with money.
LoL: failboattootoot
Are you a power gamer? Or do you have experience with power gamers? It doesn't take years for people to start cracking eggs and finding out what is possible. Granted, there may be some really strange way some skills/traits and abilities work together that create a very powerful attack. But some might consider that a bug or exploit of game mechanics. There were thousands of people playing over the weekend actively looking for most powerful builds. Stacking skills, traits, buffs, and gear to see what is possible in each class. What is the max damage my character can do? How much health can I get? How can I build my character to lock people down? How can I kill people the fastest way possible. How can I live forever?
And there are plenty of builds that emerged from that, for each profession. And from what I've seen, still today, some professions are capable of so much more than others in certain areas. Like in my last post how the hardest I've seen an elementist hit for is 6.5k, but I've seen a screenshot of a 20k eviscerate from a warrior. That is a huge gap in damage, and the gap stayed there or got worse when people started to tweak the builds as the elementalist started critting for 2k and the warrior is critting for 12k+.
The other example would be asking you the question "Which professions did you find the hardest to kill?" Most peoples answers were "Necromancer" or "Guardian". For good reason, they were often built to be extremely hard to kill. Warriors also have builds like that I found out with the one I briefly played. But it was severely lacking in other tools that the necro(damage) or guardian(support) wasn't, so they aren't notable.
What is the developers name btw? I'd like to see his videos, got a link to any?
Mostly I worked my way through Staff and Scepter/foci unlocks from levels 1-10, and didn't try to unlock double dagger skills until level 10. Then from level 10-15 I started unlocking the skills for all of the elements on that. I wasn't going out of my way to unlock any of them either, I was doing it as a natural part of playing the game. I figure that's the absolute best way to test it because that's how most new people are going to approach it. As I've said before, they don't need to focus test the ability of players who have been following the game to pick up on the mechanics, they've already studied it from afar for a long time. The real focus testing needs to be "How will someone completely new to GW2 react to the game?". I didn't pick up a second dagger and go "whelp, time to kill 20 rats now", I said "I wonder if these skills are any good" and proceeded to waggle my daggers inside a few hundred ghosts and harpies.
The people who come in brand new to the game aren't going to try to figure it out by killing rats, they're going to look at it as a sort of downgrade for a while until they unlock it normally. It's that carrot/stick thing of "yeah, I could go back and kill some really weak things to get those unlocks, but there's that really awesome place over there I want to check out". Given the option people, who may not even be aware of exactly how the skills unlocked, are probably either going to go off adventuring anyways or just stick to the weapons they have unlocked already.
Hrm, I just thought of something actually.
@World as Myth , as I'm too late for the suggestions forum, is there a plan to include a sort of encyclopedia of terms and mechanics in the game? GW1 and a few other games had elements of that, but I didn't see anything that popped out at me as a database of game knowledge when playing beta, I might have just missed it though.
Towards the end when they start PvPing.
And yes, people were desperately trying to find power builds and such, but there's no way they even touched on most of them over the course of only 3 days when most had never played the game before. Even the Devs commented on people not adequately using defensive abilities and skills over the weekend. And then there's the meta-game that hasn't even started, as builds are countered by other builds, which are countered by other builds and so on. The idea that players have gained anything more then a surface understanding of the builds available and their strengths is just not credible.
This might be it then. In PvE, it's a matter of minutes for weapon unlocks. Maybe there's less frequent kills in WvWvW or something. They might need to make weapons skills unlock slightly differently in WvWvW (like make them unlock via X damage against an enemy player, rather then just on kill)
Only time will tell, but I disagree. Unless I am mistaken the match making system was in effect if you hit the "Play Now" button. So all the people that just sPvPed the entire weekend started to face eachother a lot. And since they are super competitive people they were constantly tweaking their builds to beat eachother. So the counter-builds were being built upon. My friends and I were doing it to eachother, and we are nowhere near as competitive as some of these people putting together eSport teams that played all weekend.
What we didn't get to see, which will change the way builds are made, is static teams playing together. I don't know if we will see the ability to play on the same team as your friends 100% of the time.
Yea, this makes a lot of sense, because the weapon unlocks go off a per kill basis. I think the 5th skill goes up 7% each time you kill something? and killing those level 80 wolves/moas/bears did take a long time with level 17 items, hahaha.
Uhhh, it takes months for tactics to get hammered down in a typical MMO. Even esports level players are constantly evolving their strats against other matchups in games years after they come out.
Wut? Flying mounts RUINED World PvP in WoW. Flying was essentially Blizzard's way of putting in a PvP switch without physically putting in a PvP On/Off button on the hotbar.
Did anyone here play Shadowbane? Flying ruined that game too. Entire armies flew over enemy walls in minutes, that took weeks to build, completely trivializing most city defenses. It was stupid.
The last thing GW2 needs is flying.
While I will advocate against flying till I'm blue in the face, I disagree that mounts in general ruin MMOs. Riding horses is kind of a staple in fantasy universes... So I'm somewhat confused how they can ruin immersion.
UO had the best mount implementation. Player tamed, stealable and once dead, they're gone. It made mounts valuable because there was always demand for new ones. It also made it so not everyone rode mounts everywhere, all the time, because they were so easily killed. Sometimes you'd forgo the mount because odds were you were going to lose it on your next adventure.
Mounts are fine if implemented properly. Flying mounts however will ALWAYS break the game in some way.
The world is also, I'm betting, designed like WoW's where adding any sort of flying would require a complete redo since most of the areas aren't designed to be seen from above.
Yeah i think its mostly WvW weapon leveling vs PvE leveling your weapon.
PvE goes super fast. I was 100% weapon unlocked before level 5, except underwater weapons.
@buddies also there is a carry engineer build already:
So they can't start evolving in a 3 day beta weekend?
Why are you guys arguing with me anyway? If you don't care to talk about what classes and builds performed the best over the beta weekend, then don't. That's cool that you think the game will be so different in three months that it isn't worth discussing right now. But I think it is, and plenty of other people may too. It's why people spend so much time on the GW2 Build creator. People may post one of their builds they were thinking about asking for critiques, and we can say "Yea, it looks good" or "Yea, I used it this past weekend and did very well with it. I would make these changes though." or "Nah, I tried that build and it didn't turn out so hot."
I think there is value in that, but you guys make it sound like it's all pointless because it's going to change anyway.
Basically, you can't say "X class can't do heavy damage" just because you may not have figured out how yet.
Not a carry build, that is a support build IMO. It utilizes a lot of blinds and knockdowns. His damage is pitiful compared to these carry builds warrior, thief, ranger. Actually look at the damage he is doing in that engineer video, not his commentary. The highest damage attack is 900.... One of his conditions does some respectable damage, ticking for 629 a second I believe. But thats it. As I pointed out earlier, he didn't 1v4 those people at the start, there was at least 1 Ranger there supporting him. And two of the enemies ran off, and one came back after 2 of his friends were already dead.
Edit: The guy playing is really good though. I think that build will be a lot better if/when aNet tweaks the engineers damage and kits.
Edit 2: I'll also compare his build vs the ones that I think are much more viable. First off the Warrior. It just does a shit ton more damage, and his defensive mechanic is invulnerability at 25% health vs the Engineers decent heal and condition removal. Warrior Build also has 50% more health.
The Thief sacrifices a LOT of health and survivability to be able to do the damage he does in that video. He uses positioning and is very smart about when to engage and always gets out if he even senses people are going to target him. Has the same squishy 12k health.
The Ranger outputs more DPS faster and has 2 defensive abilities that make him immune to damage for up to 10 seconds. He also has 50% more health
His blinds and stuns are very helpful to his team though, and the professions is better built for that role.
Right. I'll make it simple: mounts, flying mounts, and flying in general, that shit would be freaking awesome. But not in the way MMOs generally do it. I don't want a flying mount because it's a faster way to get from X to Y; we already have a way to do that instantly, and if you're gonna cry because your 400% speed buff would cut your 2 minute commute down to 30 seconds, then cry some more. I want a flying mount because flying around is goddamned awesome. Don't use it to address a design flaw in your world design, freaking build on that shit. Get some aerial combat all up-ins, for starters. Don't let players just pop it up in the middle of nowhere whenever they want, the buildup is just as important. Don't make it readily available everywhere; shit's not necessary, and in some cases would just not make any sense except in a video game. Giving us a button to break immersion at will is not good game design.
DO give us war wagon racing challenges, colossal tank battles, airship pirate fights, and WvWvW aerial raids (with a feasible anti-air counter, of course). Make events out of them. Make encounters out of them. Make a fucking zone out of them, if you want. Just don't make it boring.
I'd say there are three ways I might implement mounts. One is in instanced areas, which is probably where I would test it first. The next would be limited to the area of a dynamic event for whatever purposes (Needs to stay in range of an asuran power crystal, maybe it's a horse race, or something). The last place - and about the only place where it could feasibly make sense to have - is WvW. Mounts would function like modified Siege Golems - they'd cost supply and recipes, and instead of being durable and slow, they would be quick and no more durable than a medium armored player (skill sets would also change, also, land only in WvW).
Just theory-crafting for a game that I'm not developing, though.
Edit: Aerial battle is another complication altogether, although underwater fighting has set pretty decent precedent for what kinds of gameplay ArenaNet is capable of innovating.
XBL GamerTag: Comrade Nexus
[El]: 2 [En]: 2 [G]: 80 [M]: 31 [N]: 80 [R]: 2 [T]: 2 [W]: 34
Minecraft: Ginjinngear | Steam
Go play Mount & Blade, preferably Warband, definitely not Fire & Sword. Mounts are awesome and very medieval / sword & sorcery appropriate. As for MMOs...usually it's a travel time thing, then players ask for mounted combat, and then devs stall for time and sweep it under the rug because "animations." Meanwhile, it's entirely appropriate for an enemy two levels below to swing as you ride by, hit you, and *poof* your mount disappears.
For flying mounts, most people use it to point themselves in the direction of where they want to go, hit auto-run, and then go make food/bathroom break/alt-tab to porn. A few people use it to visit awesome sites in the world or explore without pulling packs of enemies.
XBL GamerTag: Comrade Nexus
Holy gawd, my brain would not be able to take how much more awesome airship pirates would make GW2 (a game already stuffed to the limit with awesome as it is).
...I've been feeling kind of grumpy since the weekend and I just realized it's because of GW2 withdrawals. =/
I've got a thief build that's burning a hole in my browser right now.
That said, if there WERE to be mounts, I like the idea of mounts being race-based, kinda like WoW. Where the Asura can ride golems, the Charr can ride I dunno one of the Siege Devourers or even something like the Armored Saurus from EotN, the Norn ride bears, etc etc.
I enjoy the unlocking system because it means I'm only learning one new skill at a time. By the time I've unlocked the 5th skill, I'm super familiar with the previous 4 and how they potentially gel together, which means I also have a good idea of how the weapon is useful in what situations.
Unless, of course, you did what my guild did, and build walls directly around the world tree and watch as people get stuck in the branches and die by archer fire. Woot. If you designed a good enough counter too it I wouldnt be completely adverse to it. Air dropping into something is always fun.
Flying really trivializes the environments that they have at the moment, and I'd argue it did in WoW, too. Made that world feel less whole.
Not even on the top 10.