Story mode way way harder than it should be for the intended target: random group of level 30's trying AC story run into the one of the hardest dungeons in the game. This absolutely needs to be easily puggable given the atrociously bad rewards (one ugly helm with terrible stats). The rewards of doing AC story are about equivalent to me soloing two veteran monsters and taking the chests behind them. So the difficulty needs to be in line with that. It's not.
What...? How is it one of the hardest dungeons? What is so hard about AC? I still have no friggen idea what people are talking about. I AM BAD AT VIDEO GAMES. Seriously, I'm not good at them. People talk about playing games on hard because the normal is too easy and I think "I had trouble with normal". My gf plays games on easy. Neither one of us finds AC story difficult. I mentioned to her last night that people think it's hard and she gave this look and said "What? how?".
It is incredibly hard for a first intro into the instance world. Up to that point you have absolutely no reason to even know what a condition remover is because of what the game throws at you is easy world based stuff. You then move into a zone where you either GY zerg or have people change specs to remove conditions, realize that you can (and should) use environment objects on bosses, focus dps, dodge attacks reliably, etc etc. The first time I did the caster boss chic that condition dmgs the hell out of the group was painful with alot of "what is a condition?" from the pugs I was with.
It IS a hard step up from what is presented to the player prior. People familiar with MMOs will have an easier time but it doesnt degrade this fact.
If you didn't understand conditions by the time you are 30 you then haven't been paying attention and failing here would be the point that you learn. That would require you to not be reading the text on your own abilities. Whose fault is that?
With that said... the instance is very easy if you do everything correctly. I have run that instance extremely INCORRECTLY and still got through just fine... so I must assume that some people are so amazingly blind to what's happening around them that if anything was tuned to that level it would ruin the game. They will learn eventually because it does not take lots of skill for these... just learning and paying attention.
I didnt say that I was unaware of them I stated the game does not make you pay attention to them before that point and, if you skip AC, not till much later do the conditions actually make a difference in your playstyle in open world.
In a way, I know you're right, but it's a thing I have a hard time wrapping my head around. How do people play games without caring how all the things work?
Here was me learning about GW2:
What does combo field fire mean? Oh neat, there's combos, oh here's a little chart of what combos with what. Hrm, I can make these fields and use these finishers, hey you're playing a Mesmer, what can you do? Chaos armor is awesome, I'll throw this blast finisher up whenever I can. What the hell is stability? Oh holy crap, that negates knockbacks and pulls, I be that will be handy for something. What are conditions? Dots, got it. Boons are buffs, and OK ready to go.
All I did was read the tooltips and I could pretty much play anything out of the gate. Heck, the support spec I panned out the first time I sat down and looked at Elementalists is apparently *the* support spec, who knew?
I mean, I also enjoy a certain amount of jumping in headfirst and figuring things out, but I don't think familiarizing myself with what's different/unique in basic game mechanics is too much, really.
It's not about knowing what the abilities do, it's about it being so inconsequential that it doesn't matter. Path of least resistance. My abilities could be four pages long each, but if the only thing that mattered was that it did XX damage, because the rest of the text described a situation that was so rare or so inconsequential, then what I'd end up remembering as a matter of course was that it did XX damage.
I think anybody who has ever played an MMO would've figured elementalist and necro mobs in AC were priority 1. If not, you figure it out really fast, followed by rangers. The warriors are completely kiteable and the monks don't heal for enough to matter.
Or with monks you can just poison everything to make the healing they do do even worse.
Honestly I felt that by the end of AC Story, the four of us in our group were better players than when we started. Same thing when I did it with a full group of five later. Everyone seemed to learn a fair bit about their class.
The Great DAMNED STEAM SALES AND WII/U Backlog Just Finished: Borderlands (waste of $7)/Mario Brothers U/The Last Story/Tropico 4 Currently Playing: NS2/ZombiU/PlanetSide 2/Ys/Dota2/Xenoblade Chronicles On Hold: Prince of Persia: Warrior Within/GW2/Scribblenauts Coming Next: Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones/X-Com Classic
Story mode way way harder than it should be for the intended target: random group of level 30's trying AC story run into the one of the hardest dungeons in the game. This absolutely needs to be easily puggable given the atrociously bad rewards (one ugly helm with terrible stats). The rewards of doing AC story are about equivalent to me soloing two veteran monsters and taking the chests behind them. So the difficulty needs to be in line with that. It's not.
What...? How is it one of the hardest dungeons? What is so hard about AC? I still have no friggen idea what people are talking about. I AM BAD AT VIDEO GAMES. Seriously, I'm not good at them. People talk about playing games on hard because the normal is too easy and I think "I had trouble with normal". My gf plays games on easy. Neither one of us finds AC story difficult. I mentioned to her last night that people think it's hard and she gave this look and said "What? how?".
It is incredibly hard for a first intro into the instance world. Up to that point you have absolutely no reason to even know what a condition remover is because of what the game throws at you is easy world based stuff. You then move into a zone where you either GY zerg or have people change specs to remove conditions, realize that you can (and should) use environment objects on bosses, focus dps, dodge attacks reliably, etc etc. The first time I did the caster boss chic that condition dmgs the hell out of the group was painful with alot of "what is a condition?" from the pugs I was with.
It IS a hard step up from what is presented to the player prior. People familiar with MMOs will have an easier time but it doesnt degrade this fact.
If you didn't understand conditions by the time you are 30 you then haven't been paying attention and failing here would be the point that you learn. That would require you to not be reading the text on your own abilities. Whose fault is that?
With that said... the instance is very easy if you do everything correctly. I have run that instance extremely INCORRECTLY and still got through just fine... so I must assume that some people are so amazingly blind to what's happening around them that if anything was tuned to that level it would ruin the game. They will learn eventually because it does not take lots of skill for these... just learning and paying attention.
I didnt say that I was unaware of them I stated the game does not make you pay attention to them before that point and, if you skip AC, not till much later do the conditions actually make a difference in your playstyle in open world.
But how is that bad? That's the point they chose to make you realize they are important but, since it is the first dungeon, they didn't even make it required to do a good job. You can still battle through that fight doing a bad job at taking care of conditions and still win. And which point you are supposed to go "man those status effects were rough! Maybe I should pay more attention to them?"
Let me say I dont disagree with you. I am merely stating that in the regards to the way the dugneons are tuned that AC is, IMHO, overtuned. Even as familiarity improves I still dont see myself doing that dungeon for kicks. It is just a pain in the ass to do.
1 week WvW Matchups started. Got keeps to take, no time to do little heart quests.
Do hearts while waiting on long WvW queue.
Obviously this changes during the time of day.
I'm around 75% now, and already I fucking hate hearts. Some of the activities to get them are fun and entertaining, but overall hearts are boring after a while.
I really like vistas with cool jumping parts before them, I've never actually watched the camera pan around on a vista though. I enjoy completing them in unintended ways with the guardian greatsword leap.
Story mode way way harder than it should be for the intended target: random group of level 30's trying AC story run into the one of the hardest dungeons in the game. This absolutely needs to be easily puggable given the atrociously bad rewards (one ugly helm with terrible stats). The rewards of doing AC story are about equivalent to me soloing two veteran monsters and taking the chests behind them. So the difficulty needs to be in line with that. It's not.
What...? How is it one of the hardest dungeons? What is so hard about AC? I still have no friggen idea what people are talking about. I AM BAD AT VIDEO GAMES. Seriously, I'm not good at them. People talk about playing games on hard because the normal is too easy and I think "I had trouble with normal". My gf plays games on easy. Neither one of us finds AC story difficult. I mentioned to her last night that people think it's hard and she gave this look and said "What? how?".
It is incredibly hard for a first intro into the instance world. Up to that point you have absolutely no reason to even know what a condition remover is because of what the game throws at you is easy world based stuff. You then move into a zone where you either GY zerg or have people change specs to remove conditions, realize that you can (and should) use environment objects on bosses, focus dps, dodge attacks reliably, etc etc. The first time I did the caster boss chic that condition dmgs the hell out of the group was painful with alot of "what is a condition?" from the pugs I was with.
It IS a hard step up from what is presented to the player prior. People familiar with MMOs will have an easier time but it doesnt degrade this fact.
If you didn't understand conditions by the time you are 30 you then haven't been paying attention and failing here would be the point that you learn. That would require you to not be reading the text on your own abilities. Whose fault is that?
With that said... the instance is very easy if you do everything correctly. I have run that instance extremely INCORRECTLY and still got through just fine... so I must assume that some people are so amazingly blind to what's happening around them that if anything was tuned to that level it would ruin the game. They will learn eventually because it does not take lots of skill for these... just learning and paying attention.
I didnt say that I was unaware of them I stated the game does not make you pay attention to them before that point and, if you skip AC, not till much later do the conditions actually make a difference in your playstyle in open world.
Why do you make it sound like having people pay attention in the harder part of the game is a bad thing? If people want to do dungeons, they need to come prepared. That includes knowing game basics. If it takes Ac to make them look at these things, they are 25 levels too late. Dungeons are harder than open world and require you to put in more effort. Sure, there's details that needs tuning, but overall dungeons should require people to put some thought into what they are doing. If they don't, maybe they don't deserve to finish the dungeons?
At least on the hearts there is almost always a kill portion attached to it so you can go through them reasonably quick at max level. The ones that dont tend to complete quick off of the non kill portions of the heart. At this point the most annoying thing about world completion is skill points as I dont need them anymore. The mobs have alot of health and can kill you even if your at max level (stupid underwater SPs with adds). Let alone some of them are in a PVP areas.
The birds aren't a condition. If you want to see it, its the Ranger Warhorn 4 skill. A white damage DoT.
It basically is a flurry attack that you can't get away from.
So it needs to be prevented instead of removed. In that case people could time things that make the boss miss, or trigger aegis on teammates to prevent it
Honestly unless you have experienced it yourself, it is rather condescending to tell people they just need to learn to play better to solve it.
You are making many wrong assumptions about what it is and what it does, which doesn't help your case. As you should know, aegis abilities do jack shit to stop flurry attacks. It blocks the first of the 30 attacks and that's it.
Does the boss spam the thing every 10 seconds? I could see it being harder if he casted it less than every 10 sec, which would then mean two people need to devise a way to prevent it hitting. Or maybe get clever and have a guardian be the only person close enough to recieve it, and then just #4 staff though it with the right traits.
Er, #4 staff is the channeled might buff/small heal one, right? You're going to die before the channel finishes. You die almost instantly unless you immediately execute two back to back dodges. You might die even if you do that, even if you popped hold the line (protection) first.
Story mode way way harder than it should be for the intended target: random group of level 30's trying AC story run into the one of the hardest dungeons in the game. This absolutely needs to be easily puggable given the atrociously bad rewards (one ugly helm with terrible stats). The rewards of doing AC story are about equivalent to me soloing two veteran monsters and taking the chests behind them. So the difficulty needs to be in line with that. It's not.
What...? How is it one of the hardest dungeons? What is so hard about AC? I still have no friggen idea what people are talking about. I AM BAD AT VIDEO GAMES. Seriously, I'm not good at them. People talk about playing games on hard because the normal is too easy and I think "I had trouble with normal". My gf plays games on easy. Neither one of us finds AC story difficult. I mentioned to her last night that people think it's hard and she gave this look and said "What? how?".
This has been covered endlessly. The difficulty depends on your group composition, if you had those 3 ranger pulls, and if your team threw boulders at everything or not.
Also, if you did the story at anything past level 30, it doesn't count. And of course, bear in mind that "I didn't think it was that hard" in no way counters "it's the hardest dungeon in the game" unless you have examples of dungeons you think are harder.
So far, nothing has been as harsh an experience as doing AC story mode with level 30's. CM was an absolute cake walk. Honor of the Waves and Citadel of Flame had individual bosses that were obnoxious, but the trash in those dungeons is not an issue - nothing like the rangers in AC.
If you didn't understand conditions by the time you are 30 you then haven't been paying attention and failing here would be the point that you learn.
I don't recall getting a single condition from any monster at all pre 30. If I did get a condition, it was obviously so negligible as to escape my memory. The game does not train you appropriately for condition removal, nor for removing enemy boons, for this dungeon. Nor about the insane spike damage you can get on level 30's on some of the trash pulls. Hell I don't think you even have to dodge pre 30, though I was already good at dodging because I liked to fight the veteran oakhearts.
And thanks again folks, this is very good feedback to have. I think I have indeed been trying to play my thief too much like I play my warrior. Too easy to get into that "I can do it all" mode of thinking.
Just to add to the options, I've been having a lot of fun with a build heavy on condition damage and dagger/dagger, traits heavy in Shadow Arts and Trickery. Mainly in PvE though; I haven't done wuvwuv much yet.
Bleeding stacks in intensity, so I'll run up to a mob and do the Death Blossom (#3 attack) as many times as I can. Then I steal to give myself some more initiative and some Thrill of the Crime buffs and get in one more Death Blossom. Now the enemy is bleeding like crazy and I've been evading repeatedly and taking no damage. At that point I can hit Blinding Powder to go invisible for 4 seconds and twiddle my thumbs while the mob bleeds to death. Right before the invis wears out, join back in with a backstab and some heartseekers and the fight is over.
What's great about this is that since Death Blossom can hit multiple enemies, my approach is equally effective if I'm up against one mob or five. I just stand there while they all fall down from bleeding simultaneously.
i don't know why everyone calls the mobs between bosses 'trash' other then just for using a quick term for them, because they are quite obviously not trash and should not be treated like trash. This seems to be a big area people are struggling with, trash mobs aren't trash in gw2.
also what wonderpug said, this is almost exactly how i play my thief, except i use caltrops and just roll back and laugh as they try to catch me while bleeding to death
Does Thief ever become less shreddable in PvE? I realize there needs to be some differentiation between cloth/leather/plate wearers (or does there?), but the fact that my warrior can wade hip-deep in enemies and walk out nigh-unscathed whereas my thief gets crushed if anything looks at him funny is a bit irritating. There's a huge survivability gulf between those two classes at least and I'd hope there are efforts being made to bring them closer to parity.
From the point of view of a warrior:
1) we have the largest base health pool in the game
No you don't.
Necromancer's have the largest base health pool.
Their profession mechanic DS also gives them a whole other health bar, that can also be replenished much faster than the normal health bar.
And their two elites (Plague and Lich also buff all their stats - including health).
Story mode way way harder than it should be for the intended target: random group of level 30's trying AC story run into the one of the hardest dungeons in the game. This absolutely needs to be easily puggable given the atrociously bad rewards (one ugly helm with terrible stats). The rewards of doing AC story are about equivalent to me soloing two veteran monsters and taking the chests behind them. So the difficulty needs to be in line with that. It's not.
What...? How is it one of the hardest dungeons? What is so hard about AC? I still have no friggen idea what people are talking about. I AM BAD AT VIDEO GAMES. Seriously, I'm not good at them. People talk about playing games on hard because the normal is too easy and I think "I had trouble with normal". My gf plays games on easy. Neither one of us finds AC story difficult. I mentioned to her last night that people think it's hard and she gave this look and said "What? how?".
It is incredibly hard for a first intro into the instance world. Up to that point you have absolutely no reason to even know what a condition remover is because of what the game throws at you is easy world based stuff. You then move into a zone where you either GY zerg or have people change specs to remove conditions, realize that you can (and should) use environment objects on bosses, focus dps, dodge attacks reliably, etc etc. The first time I did the caster boss chic that condition dmgs the hell out of the group was painful with alot of "what is a condition?" from the pugs I was with.
It IS a hard step up from what is presented to the player prior. People familiar with MMOs will have an easier time but it doesnt degrade this fact.
If you didn't understand conditions by the time you are 30 you then haven't been paying attention and failing here would be the point that you learn. That would require you to not be reading the text on your own abilities. Whose fault is that?
With that said... the instance is very easy if you do everything correctly. I have run that instance extremely INCORRECTLY and still got through just fine... so I must assume that some people are so amazingly blind to what's happening around them that if anything was tuned to that level it would ruin the game. They will learn eventually because it does not take lots of skill for these... just learning and paying attention.
I didnt say that I was unaware of them I stated the game does not make you pay attention to them before that point and, if you skip AC, not till much later do the conditions actually make a difference in your playstyle in open world.
Why do you make it sound like having people pay attention in the harder part of the game is a bad thing? If people want to do dungeons, they need to come prepared. That includes knowing game basics. If it takes Ac to make them look at these things, they are 25 levels too late. Dungeons are harder than open world and require you to put in more effort. Sure, there's details that needs tuning, but overall dungeons should require people to put some thought into what they are doing. If they don't, maybe they don't deserve to finish the dungeons?
You, much like several others, are missing the point and reactively replying with "BUT THE GAME SHOULD BE HARD". No one is arguing that. What me and Jubal are saying is that the game itself does not provide adequate preparation. You saying "Poeple should know this, and if they don't, they are 25 levels too late" is silly. The game can have a two hour tutorial about conditions at the start, but if the game itself doesn't reinforce them as an important concept, people will just file the information away as currently useless and move on.
The fact of the matter is, the game fails on two fronts here. Not only is the tutorial information on conditions weak and easy to miss, it's a complete non-issue in the non-dungeon part of the game until the very latest levels. The game gives you a paltry three sentence description of conditions, then completely fails to reinforce in game play how you should even care, then throws the first dungeon in the game at you like "SURPRISE CONDITIONS MATTER". That's bad design and pacing of information.
e: Also what Vorpal just said. Also, I would point out, that several very glowing reviews of GW2 have had this same exact criticism. For as good of a game as GW2 is (and it is), it does a HORRIBLE JOB of explaining itself too you, almost forcing you to go find an external source. This is not a trait that should be lauded.
In a way, I know you're right, but it's a thing I have a hard time wrapping my head around. How do people play games without caring how all the things work?
Here was me learning about GW2:
What does combo field fire mean? Oh neat, there's combos, oh here's a little OUT OF GAME chart of what combos with what.
...
I mean, I also enjoy a certain amount of jumping in headfirst and figuring things out, but I don't think familiarizing myself with what's different/unique in basic game mechanics is too much, really.
I think that right there illustrates the problem. People don't expect to have to go exhaustively research out of game wikis - they expect to be able to learn what they need to learn in game. It's not that they don't care how things work, it's that they expect how things work to be unfolded within the game in a rational and logical manner - and this is a completely reasonable expectation.
i don't know why everyone calls the mobs between bosses 'trash' other then just for using a quick term for them, because they are quite obviously not trash and should not be treated like trash.
They are trash mobs because they give trash rewards. Although almost everything in story mode gives garbage rewards. Honestly the rewards for doing story mode didn't seem that much different than beating a couple veteran/minion combos for chests out in the open world. And, if your group didn't just cheese its way through throwing boulders at everything like mine did, about 1,000 times harder. The risk vs reward for story mode is extremely poor for AC.
I have no issue with them making 'trash mobs' every bit as hard as bosses, but if that is the case, they need to drop loot/rewards similar to bosses. I don't care how hard a trash mob is, it's still a trash mob if it has a trash loot table. Trash mob has nothing to do with the difficulty of the mob so much as what you get from killing it - which was trash, in WOW, and hence where the term came from. You had to wade through useless trash mobs that never dropped anything on your way to and from bosses which dropped the gear needed to upgrade. They were trash because from a perspective of upgrading your gear, they did nothing for you. It had nothing to do really with how tough they were. Some trash was easy some (in AQ especially, bleh) was super hard.
The birds aren't a condition. If you want to see it, its the Ranger Warhorn 4 skill. A white damage DoT.
It basically is a flurry attack that you can't get away from.
So it needs to be prevented instead of removed. In that case people could time things that make the boss miss, or trigger aegis on teammates to prevent it
Honestly unless you have experienced it yourself, it is rather condescending to tell people they just need to learn to play better to solve it.
You are making many wrong assumptions about what it is and what it does, which doesn't help your case. As you should know, aegis abilities do jack shit to stop flurry attacks. It blocks the first of the 30 attacks and that's it.
Does the boss spam the thing every 10 seconds? I could see it being harder if he casted it less than every 10 sec, which would then mean two people need to devise a way to prevent it hitting. Or maybe get clever and have a guardian be the only person close enough to recieve it, and then just #4 staff though it with the right traits.
Er, #4 staff is the channeled might buff/small heal one, right? You're going to die before the channel finishes. You die almost instantly unless you immediately execute two back to back dodges. You might die even if you do that, even if you popped hold the line (protection) first.
Story mode way way harder than it should be for the intended target: random group of level 30's trying AC story run into the one of the hardest dungeons in the game. This absolutely needs to be easily puggable given the atrociously bad rewards (one ugly helm with terrible stats). The rewards of doing AC story are about equivalent to me soloing two veteran monsters and taking the chests behind them. So the difficulty needs to be in line with that. It's not.
What...? How is it one of the hardest dungeons? What is so hard about AC? I still have no friggen idea what people are talking about. I AM BAD AT VIDEO GAMES. Seriously, I'm not good at them. People talk about playing games on hard because the normal is too easy and I think "I had trouble with normal". My gf plays games on easy. Neither one of us finds AC story difficult. I mentioned to her last night that people think it's hard and she gave this look and said "What? how?".
This has been covered endlessly. The difficulty depends on your group composition, if you had those 3 ranger pulls, and if your team threw boulders at everything or not.
Also, if you did the story at anything past level 30, it doesn't count. And of course, bear in mind that "I didn't think it was that hard" in no way counters "it's the hardest dungeon in the game" unless you have examples of dungeons you think are harder.
So far, nothing has been as harsh an experience as doing AC story mode with level 30's. CM was an absolute cake walk. Honor of the Waves and Citadel of Flame had individual bosses that were obnoxious, but the trash in those dungeons is not an issue - nothing like the rangers in AC.
If you didn't understand conditions by the time you are 30 you then haven't been paying attention and failing here would be the point that you learn.
I don't recall getting a single condition from any monster at all pre 30. If I did get a condition, it was obviously so negligible as to escape my memory. The game does not train you appropriately for condition removal, nor for removing enemy boons, for this dungeon. Nor about the insane spike damage you can get on level 30's on some of the trash pulls. Hell I don't think you even have to dodge pre 30, though I was already good at dodging because I liked to fight the veteran oakhearts.
Dungeons that I found equally as challenging as doing AC at 30:
TA
Dungeons that I found more challenging than doing AC at 30:
CoF, SE, HoW, and whatever the hell the Asura one was called.
All VASTLY more challenging.
And sure it's been covered endlessly and been countered endlessly.
And lastly, you had skills that caused conditions. So you should have known what they did... therefore when they started to kill you you could go HEY, I SHOULD GET RID OF THESE.
i don't know why everyone calls the mobs between bosses 'trash' other then just for using a quick term for them, because they are quite obviously not trash and should not be treated like trash.
They are trash mobs because they give trash rewards. Although almost everything in story mode gives garbage rewards. Honestly the rewards for doing story mode didn't seem that much different than beating a couple veteran/minion combos for chests out in the open world. And, if your group didn't just cheese its way through throwing boulders at everything like mine did, about 1,000 times harder.
They don't give trash rewards though
There are only a couple differences between trash rewards and boss rewards. Explorable mode tokens, and a chest with at least 2 guaranteed blues. That is literally it. I've been through more than one run where "trash" netted me more valuable loot than bosses.
0
SarksusATTACK AND DETHRONE GODRegistered Userregular
edited September 2012
The rewards I get from 'trash' mobs seem about the same as the rewards I get in the overworld, which doesn't seem right to me. In general the rewards system in Guild Wars 2 makes no sense to me. The game gives me stuff I can't use and gear that is usually worse than what I already have. I think the only two good things I got out of my first dungeon run was a hammer someone traded to me and the helmet at the end of the dungeon. Also the silver which offset the repair costs.
It's lucky that the game is fun by itself, because I certainly don't play because of the rewards.
I'm still pretty low level; I have two level 20 characters and that's about it. So, most of the stuff I have to say is dumb and fluffy. Namely...
* Meattoberfest is awesome, why isn't this a real holiday
* it should be a real holiday
* I wish there was some way to put the cooking skill to use in such a way that like... you could open your own little vendor shop in Lion's Arch or something. I know that such a system would be way too easily abused, and the TP is balanced the way it is for a reason, but there's something about having my own pie stand that would be awesome
* I also wish that we had a guild hall, and that in said guild hall I could leave out food items for people to just pick up and chow down on. Even better: use it as the waiting room for wuvwuv, everybody starts with nom buffs
* I am seriously tempted to start a cooking tumblr wherin I make every single thing from the cooking skill in real life. I have the skills and materials to make most of it (not bread, exactly, I'm really bad at dealing with yeasts...) and yes, I am including THIS IS HOW YOU MAKE BUTTERED TOAST. Part of me thinks it'd be a fun and nerdy way to teach people some very basic cooking skills and then work their way up to more complex things. Shame I hate carrots though
Make your own Meatoberfest, visit a Brazilian or Argentinian steakhouse!
Cooking is pretty neat, although I have a hard time anticipating recipes because I want to use ALL the ingredients and the in-game recipes are necessary abstractions. I'm always calling out about it when I'm doing discoveries, though. "Hey, I made onion rings!" Now if only we could put intermediate recipes into Collections...
Yeast isn't so bad! These days I bake bread using my food processor to knead, and that makes a big difference in the amount of effort involved. Quick rise yeast + lukewarm water + food processor kneading = easy bread!
Want to find me on a gaming service? I'm SwashbucklerXX everywhere.
Most bosses in dungeons should eat a 25 to 50% nerf to health, varying, and make for a much less tedious experience. If you're going to give us such boring gimmicks, we don't need to repeat that gimmick eighty times. Ten will do thanks.
They won't because they hate you.
It's going to be like capitalisation all over again, where they delayed the game by an hour each time someone wrongly capitalised races or professions. This time, they add 10k HP to your next dungeon boss encounter each time you ask for a nerf!
If they won't, it won't be because they hate me. It'll be because they're just bad at dungeon design. That would be sad, but understandable. Designing outside the trinity paradigm is more difficult and Arenanet might not be up to the task.
To be more clear, the perfect scenario is that a large hit to dungeon boss health pools (which currently serve no purpose but to drag things out forever, they don't add any kind of challenge) be coupled with more interesting and lethal offensive gimmicks.
Wow, thank goodness you're around, with all of your experience designing MMOs that break the trinity mold! I don't know what we'd ever do without you. I mean, all we have to do is just have ArenaNet put you in charge, right?
I'm sorry that the idea that the future might not be 100% roses feels like an attack on you personally. You should probably re-examine the extent to which you are attached to this game.
Dungeons that I found more challenging than doing AC at 30:
CoF, SE, HoW, and whatever the hell the Asura one was called.
All VASTLY more challenging.
I don't see how you found those more challenging than AC. We plowed through HoW without wiping once first try. Other dungeons we wiped once or twice, but it was overall smooth sailing. I haven't had a story group in any of those that just got massacred and couldn't complete it. I did in AC. Ironically the first group I did AC with just bouldered things and did pretty darn well. Later groups struggled more.
And lastly, you had skills that caused conditions. So you should have known what they did...
We're talking about condition *removal* not condition application. The game does not introduce you to condition removal adequately before level 30. It's as simple as that. If you disagree, you are wrong.
You might try to make rationalizations about how they don't really need to teach you about condition removal before level 30, but you're still wrong. It's bad game design and should not be encouraged.
You can be as condescending as you want and call it all comically simple, but you need to take a step back from the PA crowd of hardened MMO vets who know all about everything 3 months before the game comes out and look at it from the view of someone who hasn't done all this exhaustive pre game/ out of game research and is happily going along relying only on in game resources. They turn level 30, they get a letter advising them to go to Ascalan Catacombs, and off they go. Has the game prepared them adequately for what they find in there? Absolutely not.
Story mode way way harder than it should be for the intended target: random group of level 30's trying AC story run into the one of the hardest dungeons in the game. This absolutely needs to be easily puggable given the atrociously bad rewards (one ugly helm with terrible stats). The rewards of doing AC story are about equivalent to me soloing two veteran monsters and taking the chests behind them. So the difficulty needs to be in line with that. It's not.
What...? How is it one of the hardest dungeons? What is so hard about AC? I still have no friggen idea what people are talking about. I AM BAD AT VIDEO GAMES. Seriously, I'm not good at them. People talk about playing games on hard because the normal is too easy and I think "I had trouble with normal". My gf plays games on easy. Neither one of us finds AC story difficult. I mentioned to her last night that people think it's hard and she gave this look and said "What? how?".
It is incredibly hard for a first intro into the instance world. Up to that point you have absolutely no reason to even know what a condition remover is because of what the game throws at you is easy world based stuff. You then move into a zone where you either GY zerg or have people change specs to remove conditions, realize that you can (and should) use environment objects on bosses, focus dps, dodge attacks reliably, etc etc. The first time I did the caster boss chic that condition dmgs the hell out of the group was painful with alot of "what is a condition?" from the pugs I was with.
It IS a hard step up from what is presented to the player prior. People familiar with MMOs will have an easier time but it doesnt degrade this fact.
If you didn't understand conditions by the time you are 30 you then haven't been paying attention and failing here would be the point that you learn. That would require you to not be reading the text on your own abilities. Whose fault is that?
With that said... the instance is very easy if you do everything correctly. I have run that instance extremely INCORRECTLY and still got through just fine... so I must assume that some people are so amazingly blind to what's happening around them that if anything was tuned to that level it would ruin the game. They will learn eventually because it does not take lots of skill for these... just learning and paying attention.
I didnt say that I was unaware of them I stated the game does not make you pay attention to them before that point and, if you skip AC, not till much later do the conditions actually make a difference in your playstyle in open world.
Why do you make it sound like having people pay attention in the harder part of the game is a bad thing? If people want to do dungeons, they need to come prepared. That includes knowing game basics. If it takes Ac to make them look at these things, they are 25 levels too late. Dungeons are harder than open world and require you to put in more effort. Sure, there's details that needs tuning, but overall dungeons should require people to put some thought into what they are doing. If they don't, maybe they don't deserve to finish the dungeons?
You, much like several others, are missing the point and reactively replying with "BUT THE GAME SHOULD BE HARD". No one is arguing that. What me and Jubal are saying is that the game itself does not provide adequate preparation. You saying "Poeple should know this, and if they don't, they are 25 levels too late" is silly. The game can have a two hour tutorial about conditions at the start, but if the game itself doesn't reinforce them as an important concept, people will just file the information away as currently useless and move on.
The fact of the matter is, the game fails on two fronts here. Not only is the tutorial information on conditions weak and easy to miss, it's a complete non-issue in the non-dungeon part of the game until the very latest levels. The game gives you a paltry three sentence description of conditions, then completely fails to reinforce in game play how you should even care, then throws the first dungeon in the game at you like "SURPRISE CONDITIONS MATTER". That's bad design and pacing of information.
e: Also what Vorpal just said. Also, I would point out, that several very glowing reviews of GW2 have had this same exact criticism. For as good of a game as GW2 is (and it is), it does a HORRIBLE JOB of explaining itself too you, almost forcing you to go find an external source. This is not a trait that should be lauded.
Hi, I've run a condition build since level 1. That kinda reinforced how important they are. Any build that uses conditions should pick up how dangerous they are and communicate that to their team, if the team is having trouble. For that matter, wiping on the necromancer should indicate they hey, what are these things that killed me? Maybe I should find out how to get rid of them? And then you spend a little time reading your skills and traits to figure out how to do that.
Yes, the game does a poor job of explaning some things, but conditions and CC are still a basic part of the game. Every class have them. No, the game doesn't hold your hand, but from the sound of it, people aren't even using the information they do have. On my engineer and elementalist, I can find out what every single effect in the game does just by reading my weapon and utility skills. From the sound of it, a lot of people aren't. Dungeons are stated to be harder and prove that they demand more of the player. So Anet should do a better job of explaning the basics. But if you're repeatedly wiping in AC it might be time to try and learn a bit more than what you've picked up. AC seems to be a gate made higher by people not even using the tools at their disposal.
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FairchildRabbit used short words that were easy to understand, like "Hello Pooh, how about Lunch ?"Registered Userregular
I don't have any character higher than Level 30, and so far enemy-induced conditions have mostly been an annoyance rather than something WHICH I MUST REMOVE RIGHT FREAKIN' NOW ! This is what Non-Boss induced poisons quickly became in WOW as the player health pools spiraled out of sight; poison never did much damage so you could safely ignore it. Does this change once I move into 30+ leveling zones ? Do I need to make sure that everyone has a Condition-removing skill cued up ?
i don't know why everyone calls the mobs between bosses 'trash' other then just for using a quick term for them, because they are quite obviously not trash and should not be treated like trash.
They are trash mobs because they give trash rewards. Although almost everything in story mode gives garbage rewards. Honestly the rewards for doing story mode didn't seem that much different than beating a couple veteran/minion combos for chests out in the open world. And, if your group didn't just cheese its way through throwing boulders at everything like mine did, about 1,000 times harder.
They don't give trash rewards though
There are only a couple differences between trash rewards and boss rewards. Explorable mode tokens, and a chest with at least 2 guaranteed blues. That is literally it. I've been through more than one run where "trash" netted me more valuable loot than bosses.
All that really means is that *everything* gives trash rewards in story mode, and everything outside the token chests in explorable mode gives trash rewards.
I don't want blues/greens I'm going to vendor when I run a dungeon. That's where the term 'trash' comes from. It's all vendor trash. I want gear upgrades. I do not recall a single instance of a boss or monster dropping a piece of gear in a dungeon that was an upgrade for me. Maybe I just don't have enough magic find? But I find magic find gear to be a distasteful gimmick.
I would also qualify yellows that you salvage for ectoplasms as 'trash', welcome as they are. If it's not stuff you are going to use, but rather break down / salvage/ vendor, it's all one form or another of vendor trash. Vendor trash is not exciting. I don't bother even keeping track of the items that drop in dungeons because I know they are all useless and are all going to be vendored anyway. I will do a check at the vendor at the end just to make sure and - yep, all vendor trash.
Not caring what drops because it's all garbage, and just going for the 5 tokens you know you get in each chest, saps a lot of the excitement of dungeon running, IMO. Now - this could be a deliberate part of GW2's design at work: you don't need to run the dungeon to get better gear, it's entirely optional. I think that's good. But it does mean that the gear that does drop may as well be replaced entirely by silver and copper, and you're doing it just for cosmetic upgrades. And without the thrill of maybe getting better gear in the dungeon, a lot of the enjoyment of running it over and over just disappears.
Anyway my basic point regarding reward and trash mobs was this; if trash in explorable mode is going to be as difficult as bosses in explorable mode, then they need to give you the same rewards as the bosses in explorable mode - which is the tokens. That's all people care about.
The rewards for story mode are underwhelming across the board, which is why no one sane runs them repeatedly. I did several of them repeatedly before I realized what a waste of time it was - but still did a couple more trying to get some cutscenes I had missed.
Bosses give rewards, trash mobs don't. That's the distinction. The difficulty of the trash mobs is largely irrelevent.
Dungeons that I found more challenging than doing AC at 30:
CoF, SE, HoW, and whatever the hell the Asura one was called.
All VASTLY more challenging.
I don't see how you found those more challenging than AC. We plowed through HoW without wiping once first try. Other dungeons we wiped once or twice, but it was overall smooth sailing. I haven't had a story group in any of those that just got massacred and couldn't complete it. I did in AC. Ironically the first group I did AC with just bouldered things and did pretty darn well. Later groups struggled more.
And lastly, you had skills that caused conditions. So you should have known what they did...
We're talking about condition *removal* not condition application. The game does not introduce you to condition removal adequately before level 30. It's as simple as that. If you disagree, you are wrong.
You might try to make rationalizations about how they don't really need to teach you about condition removal before level 30, but you're still wrong. It's bad game design and should not be encouraged.
The reason I found them more challenging than AC is because I barreled through AC without any trouble multiple times. Those at least posed some interesting and challenging fights.
And I know we are talking about condition removal... but if you understand what a condition does (which you say isn't the problem) and you are getting beat up by conditions... you look at your skills and, assuming you can read, see that you can remove those conditions. What am I missing?
I don't have any character higher than Level 30, and so far enemy-induced conditions have mostly been an annoyance rather than something WHICH I MUST REMOVE RIGHT FREAKIN' NOW ! This is what Non-Boss induced poisons quickly became in WOW as the player health pools spiraled out of sight; poison never did much damage so you could safely ignore it. Does this change once I move into 30+ leveling zones ? Do I need to make sure that everyone has a Condition-removing skill cued up ?
Not really, but you should have something with condition removal available for dungeons and pvp.
i don't know why everyone calls the mobs between bosses 'trash' other then just for using a quick term for them, because they are quite obviously not trash and should not be treated like trash.
They are trash mobs because they give trash rewards. Although almost everything in story mode gives garbage rewards. Honestly the rewards for doing story mode didn't seem that much different than beating a couple veteran/minion combos for chests out in the open world. And, if your group didn't just cheese its way through throwing boulders at everything like mine did, about 1,000 times harder.
They don't give trash rewards though
There are only a couple differences between trash rewards and boss rewards. Explorable mode tokens, and a chest with at least 2 guaranteed blues. That is literally it. I've been through more than one run where "trash" netted me more valuable loot than bosses.
All that really means is that *everything* gives trash rewards in story mode, and everything outside the token chests in explorable mode gives trash rewards.
I don't want blues/greens I'm going to vendor when I run a dungeon. That's where the term 'trash' comes from. It's all vendor trash. I want gear upgrades. I do not recall a single instance of a boss or monster dropping a piece of gear in a dungeon that was an upgrade for me. Maybe I just don't have enough magic find? But I find magic find gear to be a distasteful gimmick.
I would also qualify yellows that you salvage for ectoplasms as 'trash', welcome as they are. If it's not stuff you are going to use, but rather break down / salvage/ vendor, it's all one form or another of vendor trash.
If trash in explorable mode is going to be as difficult as bosses in explorable mode, then they need to give you the same rewards as the bosses in explorable mode - which is the tokens. That's all people care about.
The rewards for story mode are underwhelming across the board, which is why no one sane runs them repeatedly. I did several of them repeatedly before I realized what a waste of time it was - but still did a couple more trying to get some cutscenes I had missed.
Oh, okay I see what you're saying now.
Is your major beef with story mode? Because in explorable mode I would argue that since you dont really get gear upgrades at level 80, etc. etc., stuff that is irrelevant if your issue is that as you're doing story mode dungeons while leveling that the gear is crappy.
In which case, you're right, you don't get much reward for dungeons while leveling, which is very jarring. I would try and justify it and such, but the complaint is legitimate. All I can really say about that is that in GW2, gear is rarely problematic, and near-optimal gear is both cheap and plentiful, so you don't really need to get your gear from dungeons like in most other MMOs.
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MaddocI'm Bobbin Threadbare, are you my mother?Registered Userregular
When he mentioned using staff 4 with the right traits, I can only imagine he meant Altruistic Healing. (Though you need to be level 60 to have access to that)
Maybe I just got lucky, as the doing AC/CM/TA at level (story mode obviously) all netted me 1-3 upgrades from a run.
steejee on
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GnomeTankWhat the what?Portland, OregonRegistered Userregular
Here we go with the "THE GAME ISN'T GONNA HOLD YOUR HAND NEWB" line of commenting. One of these days people will realize the whole world isn't them, and in fact most of the people who bought GW2 aren't them, and just come to grips with the fact that this game does a shitty job of explaining itself. Period.
Hi, I've run a condition build since level 1. That kinda reinforced how important they are. Any build that uses conditions should pick up how dangerous they are and communicate that to their team, if the team is having trouble. For that matter, wiping on the necromancer should indicate they hey, what are these things that killed me? Maybe I should find out how to get rid of them? And then you spend a little time reading your skills and traits to figure out how to do that.
So I picked up the game 2 nights ago and while many of my engineer's skills apply conditions, I have not yet found where the game actually explains what they do. Cripple, stuns, bleeding, and burns are intuitive but stuff like daze, confuse, weaken, or vulnerability are not. I've been playing MUDs and MMOs for about 15 years now and I can appreciate how streamlined GW2 makes a lot of stuff but I'm annoyed at how actual explanations for a lot of mechanics seemed to have gone out the window.
Incidentally, any advice on playing an engineer? I've gotten one up to level 12 or 13 or so as a first character but I'm not sure what kind of stuff I should be focusing on in terms of skills and traits. So far I have points in various turrets, grenades, and the flamethrower. I've been using dual pistols since it feels more involved than the rifle and the blowtorch skill more useful out in the world than the shield skills.
I've found doing dungeons absolutely great, i avoided them til level 70 because of what people were saying in the thread about them, honestly getting 100k+ xp for beating AC SM and then CM SM was worth it to me without any of the gear I picked up even
Here we go with the "THE GAME ISN'T GONNA HOLD YOUR HAND NEWB" line of commenting. One of these days people will realize the whole world isn't them, and in fact most of the people who bought GW2 aren't them, and just come to grips with the fact that this game does a shitty job of explaining itself. Period.
I didn't say that was a good thing. But at the moment, it's how it is. The information isn't easily available, but it is there if you look. And since it's there and isn't placed in your hands, is it then unreasonable to expect players who wish to do the harder, more demanding parts of the game to spend five minutes to look up basic mechanics? Sure, you can argue that you shouldn't have to and Anet will probably make the information more visible in due course. But until then, if you want to do the hard parts, you might have to read some on your own.
i don't know why everyone calls the mobs between bosses 'trash' other then just for using a quick term for them, because they are quite obviously not trash and should not be treated like trash.
They are trash mobs because they give trash rewards. Although almost everything in story mode gives garbage rewards. Honestly the rewards for doing story mode didn't seem that much different than beating a couple veteran/minion combos for chests out in the open world. And, if your group didn't just cheese its way through throwing boulders at everything like mine did, about 1,000 times harder.
They don't give trash rewards though
There are only a couple differences between trash rewards and boss rewards. Explorable mode tokens, and a chest with at least 2 guaranteed blues. That is literally it. I've been through more than one run where "trash" netted me more valuable loot than bosses.
All that really means is that *everything* gives trash rewards in story mode, and everything outside the token chests in explorable mode gives trash rewards.
I don't want blues/greens I'm going to vendor when I run a dungeon. That's where the term 'trash' comes from. It's all vendor trash. I want gear upgrades. I do not recall a single instance of a boss or monster dropping a piece of gear in a dungeon that was an upgrade for me. Maybe I just don't have enough magic find? But I find magic find gear to be a distasteful gimmick.
I would also qualify yellows that you salvage for ectoplasms as 'trash', welcome as they are. If it's not stuff you are going to use, but rather break down / salvage/ vendor, it's all one form or another of vendor trash.
If trash in explorable mode is going to be as difficult as bosses in explorable mode, then they need to give you the same rewards as the bosses in explorable mode - which is the tokens. That's all people care about.
The rewards for story mode are underwhelming across the board, which is why no one sane runs them repeatedly. I did several of them repeatedly before I realized what a waste of time it was - but still did a couple more trying to get some cutscenes I had missed.
Oh, okay I see what you're saying now.
Is your major beef with story mode? Because in explorable mode I would argue that since you dont really get gear upgrades at level 80, etc. etc., stuff that is irrelevant if your issue is that as you're doing story mode dungeons while leveling that the gear is crappy.
In which case, you're right, you don't get much reward for dungeons while leveling, which is very jarring. I would try and justify it and such, but the complaint is legitimate. All I can really say about that is that in GW2, gear is rarely problematic, and near-optimal gear is both cheap and plentiful, so you don't really need to get your gear from dungeons like in most other MMOs.
Yes, my main beef is that story mode is completely unrewarding and that explorable mode is extremely tedious.
Like you say, GW2 has made a deliberate choice that you don't need to run dungeons for the best gear. I think this is a good and welcome change. But it means that when you DO run dungeons you're getting the same pile of vendor blues/greens that you could get doing any dynamic event, or the same yellows in chests you could get from opening any veteran guarded chest in the open world...only the dungeon stuff is way way way harder.
This makes story mode dungeons one of the least productive things you could ever do in game: the risk vs reward scale is abominably bad. It's just a hurdle you have to jump over to do explorable mode. Doing the story mode dungeons at the level appropriate never gave me anything good to wear - it was all outclassed by stuff I bought off the trading post for pennies. And yet you've just completed this horrifically difficult (for AC at least, CM and following were pretty darn easy bar one or two bosses) task which at least, story line wise, is SUPPOSED to be difficult so you kind of feel like your character should get some kind of nice reward - but they don't.
Explorable mode, since the gear stats aren't at stake but rather the gear look, has the same problem of 'no gear upgrades drop ever' which is only really a problem in that it makes the run even more boring than it already was, which is a problem when you have to run it a million times. And this was my main point about trash mobs: the only reason I'm here is for the tokens and anything that doesn't drop tokens is annoying obstacle. I'm not here for gear upgrades so saying they drop the same gear as bosses doesn't mean they aren't trash mobs - I'm not here for the gear the bosses drop either.
I think a good solution would be to give out the vanity hat at the completion of story mode. Ramp up the difficulty of the wings, attach one piece of gear to each of those that you get upon completion. Then for the remaining 2-3 pieces and your weapons, you can use the existing token system. That would mean you got something nice out of story mode, you had to do all the wings at least once, and the total number of times you have to run one wing over and over again gets reduced.
Wow this thread has become full of people arguing over trivial stuff.
(person 1) The dungeon was a 9/10 in difficulty!
(person 2) No no sir it was actually more like a 6/10!
(me) AC can be both really hard and really easy. I have beaten it in under 40 minutes with zero wipes. I have also spent like 30s on repairs alone during the lovers fight. All about knowing the route, and the tricks to each encounter.
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DemonStaceyTTODewback's DaughterIn love with the TaySwayRegistered Userregular
i don't know why everyone calls the mobs between bosses 'trash' other then just for using a quick term for them, because they are quite obviously not trash and should not be treated like trash.
They are trash mobs because they give trash rewards. Although almost everything in story mode gives garbage rewards. Honestly the rewards for doing story mode didn't seem that much different than beating a couple veteran/minion combos for chests out in the open world. And, if your group didn't just cheese its way through throwing boulders at everything like mine did, about 1,000 times harder.
They don't give trash rewards though
There are only a couple differences between trash rewards and boss rewards. Explorable mode tokens, and a chest with at least 2 guaranteed blues. That is literally it. I've been through more than one run where "trash" netted me more valuable loot than bosses.
All that really means is that *everything* gives trash rewards in story mode, and everything outside the token chests in explorable mode gives trash rewards.
I don't want blues/greens I'm going to vendor when I run a dungeon. That's where the term 'trash' comes from. It's all vendor trash. I want gear upgrades. I do not recall a single instance of a boss or monster dropping a piece of gear in a dungeon that was an upgrade for me. Maybe I just don't have enough magic find? But I find magic find gear to be a distasteful gimmick.
I would also qualify yellows that you salvage for ectoplasms as 'trash', welcome as they are. If it's not stuff you are going to use, but rather break down / salvage/ vendor, it's all one form or another of vendor trash.
If trash in explorable mode is going to be as difficult as bosses in explorable mode, then they need to give you the same rewards as the bosses in explorable mode - which is the tokens. That's all people care about.
The rewards for story mode are underwhelming across the board, which is why no one sane runs them repeatedly. I did several of them repeatedly before I realized what a waste of time it was - but still did a couple more trying to get some cutscenes I had missed.
Oh, okay I see what you're saying now.
Is your major beef with story mode? Because in explorable mode I would argue that since you dont really get gear upgrades at level 80, etc. etc., stuff that is irrelevant if your issue is that as you're doing story mode dungeons while leveling that the gear is crappy.
In which case, you're right, you don't get much reward for dungeons while leveling, which is very jarring. I would try and justify it and such, but the complaint is legitimate. All I can really say about that is that in GW2, gear is rarely problematic, and near-optimal gear is both cheap and plentiful, so you don't really need to get your gear from dungeons like in most other MMOs.
Yes, my main beef is that story mode is completely unrewarding and that explorable mode is extremely tedious.
Like you say, GW2 has made a deliberate choice that you don't need to run dungeons for the best gear. I think this is a good and welcome change. But it means that when you DO run dungeons you're getting the same pile of vendor blues/greens that you could get doing any dynamic event, or the same yellows in chests you could get from opening any veteran guarded chest in the open world...only the dungeon stuff is way way way harder.
This makes story mode dungeons one of the least productive things you could ever do in game: the risk vs reward scale is abominably bad. It's just a hurdle you have to jump over to do explorable mode. Doing the story mode dungeons at the level appropriate never gave me anything good to wear - it was all outclassed by stuff I bought off the trading post for pennies. And yet you've just completed this horrifically difficult (for AC at least, CM and following were pretty darn easy bar one or two bosses) task which at least, story line wise, is SUPPOSED to be difficult so you kind of feel like your character should get some kind of nice reward - but they don't.
Explorable mode, since the gear stats aren't at stake but rather the gear look, has the same problem of 'no gear upgrades drop ever' which is only really a problem in that it makes the run even more boring than it already was, which is a problem when you have to run it a million times. And this was my main point about trash mobs: the only reason I'm here is for the tokens and anything that doesn't drop tokens is annoying obstacle. I'm not here for gear upgrades so saying they drop the same gear as bosses doesn't mean they aren't trash mobs - I'm not here for the gear the bosses drop either.
I think a good solution would be to give out the vanity hat at the completion of story mode. Ramp up the difficulty of the wings, attach one piece of gear to each of those that you get upon completion. Then for the remaining 2-3 pieces and your weapons, you can use the existing token system. That would mean you got something nice out of story mode, you had to do all the wings at least once, and the total number of times you have to run one wing over and over again gets reduced.
While I disagree with a vast majority of the stuff you write on here... I agree with that last paragraph. While I don't have a big problem with the current system I think more incentive to run through the multiple paths would be good.
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GnomeTankWhat the what?Portland, OregonRegistered Userregular
Here we go with the "THE GAME ISN'T GONNA HOLD YOUR HAND NEWB" line of commenting. One of these days people will realize the whole world isn't them, and in fact most of the people who bought GW2 aren't them, and just come to grips with the fact that this game does a shitty job of explaining itself. Period.
I didn't say that was a good thing. But at the moment, it's how it is. The information isn't easily available, but it is there if you look. And since it's there and isn't placed in your hands, is it then unreasonable to expect players who wish to do the harder, more demanding parts of the game to spend five minutes to look up basic mechanics? Sure, you can argue that you shouldn't have to and Anet will probably make the information more visible in due course. But until then, if you want to do the hard parts, you might have to read some on your own.
*I* personally don't have to do any this, because I am a veracious consumer of information for games I play. On the other hand, I am sentient enough to realize that probably 90% of GW2's players are nothing like me. To expect Joe Player to have to go a) find the wiki, b) look up in the wiki what he needs to look up (even if he may not even know what that is), and c) retain that information when the game does a piss poor job of reinforcing the concepts through game play, is to me unacceptable.
You talk about Engineer, which also happens to be my class (hi5 on that, Engineers rock)...and they are very Condition Damage heavy, most of our pop comes from conditions. You know how much that matters, lets say, pre 50? Almost none at all. You can do 90% of the solo content doing nothing but spamming Grenade kit. The base game simply never reinforces them as important concepts. Sure, as decent engineers, we understand layering conditions, rotating our kits for condition up time and cool down relief, etc....but I bet we learned most of that from reading external sources, not actually playing the game.
Hi, I've run a condition build since level 1. That kinda reinforced how important they are. Any build that uses conditions should pick up how dangerous they are and communicate that to their team, if the team is having trouble. For that matter, wiping on the necromancer should indicate they hey, what are these things that killed me? Maybe I should find out how to get rid of them? And then you spend a little time reading your skills and traits to figure out how to do that.
So I picked up the game 2 nights ago and while many of my engineer's skills apply conditions, I have not yet found where the game actually explains what they do. Cripple, stuns, bleeding, and burns are intuitive but stuff like daze, confuse, weaken, or vulnerability are not. I've been playing MUDs and MMOs for about 15 years now and I can appreciate how streamlined GW2 makes a lot of stuff but I'm annoyed at how actual explanations for a lot of mechanics seemed to have gone out the window.
Incidentally, any advice on playing an engineer? I've gotten one up to level 12 or 13 or so as a first character but I'm not sure what kind of stuff I should be focusing on in terms of skills and traits. So far I have points in various turrets, grenades, and the flamethrower. I've been using dual pistols since it feels more involved than the rifle and the blowtorch skill more useful out in the world than the shield skills.
Pistol + Shield is the most optimal config, but at Level 13 I wouldn't sweat that much, your level is low enough that you are fine going with whichever weapons are strongest. Turrets are most definitely NOT going to be your main source of damage but are instead more useful for distracting mobs while you shoot them from a distance. I found certain skills like the Thumper Turret and Battering Ram to be absolutely useless; I'm not sure if they are even working at all.
GnomeTankWhat the what?Portland, OregonRegistered Userregular
There is some love for turrets here on PA, but I think most of us are pistol/shield + kit engineers. The kits vary, I know I am grenade and flame thrower, someone else where swears by bomb + flame thrower, etc.
Here we go with the "THE GAME ISN'T GONNA HOLD YOUR HAND NEWB" line of commenting. One of these days people will realize the whole world isn't them, and in fact most of the people who bought GW2 aren't them, and just come to grips with the fact that this game does a shitty job of explaining itself. Period.
I didn't say that was a good thing. But at the moment, it's how it is. The information isn't easily available, but it is there if you look. And since it's there and isn't placed in your hands, is it then unreasonable to expect players who wish to do the harder, more demanding parts of the game to spend five minutes to look up basic mechanics? Sure, you can argue that you shouldn't have to and Anet will probably make the information more visible in due course. But until then, if you want to do the hard parts, you might have to read some on your own.
*I* personally don't have to do any this, because I am a veracious consumer of information for games I play. On the other hand, I am sentient enough to realize that probably 90% of GW2's players are nothing like me. To expect Joe Player to have to go a) find the wiki, b) look up in the wiki what he needs to look up (even if he may not even know what that is), and c) retain that information when the game does a piss poor job of reinforcing the concepts through game play, is to me unacceptable.
You talk about Engineer, which also happens to be my class (hi5 on that, Engineers rock)...and they are very Condition Damage heavy, most of our pop comes from conditions. You know how much that matters, lets say, pre 50? Almost none at all. You can do 90% of the solo content doing nothing but spamming Grenade kit. The base game simply never reinforces them as important concepts. Sure, as decent engineers, we understand layering conditions, rotating our kits for condition up time and cool down relief, etc....but I bet we learned most of that from reading external sources, not actually playing the game.
While it may not be GOOD I think saying "that's the way it is" applies to many games. Many games continue to be successful by doing things this way. Motivation to do it better is required. Piles of compalints must come in before they actually decide to change something. Now I'm not comparing games just comparing this idea accross gaming. Look at League of Legends. That game is absurdly popular and you won't know a majority of how it works without looking that stuff up. A majority of players DO NOT look stuff up and continue to play (extremely poorly) and continue to not understand stuff. But they keep playing.
And I know we are talking about condition removal... but if you understand what a condition does (which you say isn't the problem) and you are getting beat up by conditions...
Actually the game does a remarkably poor job of telling you both what your own conditions are doing, AND what enemy conditions are doing to you.
When conditions are mixed in with direct damage the game does not tell them apart.
On my guardian, for example, I put up retaliation, apply a damage over time, a burn, and use my greatsword whirl move. White numbers are flying all over the place - but I have no idea which of those is from my burn, the only 'condition' in the mix.
If a monster is immune to burning, he seems to take only a slightly longer time to die (granted I'm mostly precision/power and not condition damage) which tends to reinforce the idea that conditions are no big deal. Likewise, any conditions I got (I *think* maybe a centaur gives you a tiny duration bleed? just rolled right off and didn't seem to be important.
Likewise, you get the idea that boons are no big deal. When I ran into my very first monster with a condition, the skales that regenerate, I thought 'Oh cool! The game is introducing you to boon removal already! This monster will just keep regenerating until you remove his boon or slash his healing some how. What a nice idea to introduce players quickly to the importance of condition/boon removal! Let me look at my skills and see what I ha- oh. The monster is already dead and I was just auto attacking. OK, I guess boons are no big deal"
Because I rely heavily on out of game / pre game experiences I know this is not true, but those are the impressions that are conveyed.
This is added to the general absurdity of spell effects everywhere in dungeons (a lavish spectacle of glee when solo, a confusing mess of particles when grouped) and any tells the enemy might do are generally lost. If you just keel over dead, it's not apparent if you died because of direct damage or conditions. The combat log doesn't specify which type is which either. You don't know if you should DODGED to live (direct damage) or gotten rid of a condition to live.
Hard games are great. One of my favorite games is dark souls. But hard games can succeed only if they tell they player that they are failing, and why they failed, and point them in the direction of what to do to improve, and teach them the things they need to to do improve. Dark souls does all this - I haven't had to look crap up on line.
For example: you get hit with conditions pretty early on in dark souls (in the first zone in fact):the rats in the undead burg poison: they don't do much damage, but they last FOREVER and slowly drain your health. You will sit up, take notice, and figure out either how to not get hit with those conditions in the first place, or find ways to mitigate the damage, or ways to cure it.
Then, later on, the game introduces more and more dangerous conditions: the toxic poison that ticks much faster and is hard to get rid of, then the curse bar that can kill you incredibly fast. In all these cases, what killed you is pretty obvious as there's a big bar on the screen and you are only ever affected by one condition.
There are only a few conditions, you're only ever impacted by one, it is obvious when you are impacted, and it is a big deal, always.
Contrast that to the GW2 model: there are a million conditions, they don't seem to harm you at all, they don't last very long, until suddenly there is a dungeon where they are super important.
Imagine if dark souls just dropped you straight into cursing monsters without leading you through any of the other guys first. Dark souls is an incredible example of slowly leading the player through gradually harder and harder encounters against enemies with more and more abilities - but I don't think anyone would qualify it as holding the players hand. Instead, the players knowledge and experience builds upon itself: what he needs for a certain encounter has been taught by degrees in the previous encounters.
In GW2, that smooth arc of progression is not present. It's incredibly spotty in difficulty.
Hi, I've run a condition build since level 1. That kinda reinforced how important they are. Any build that uses conditions should pick up how dangerous they are and communicate that to their team, if the team is having trouble. For that matter, wiping on the necromancer should indicate they hey, what are these things that killed me? Maybe I should find out how to get rid of them? And then you spend a little time reading your skills and traits to figure out how to do that.
So I picked up the game 2 nights ago and while many of my engineer's skills apply conditions, I have not yet found where the game actually explains what they do. Cripple, stuns, bleeding, and burns are intuitive but stuff like daze, confuse, weaken, or vulnerability are not. I've been playing MUDs and MMOs for about 15 years now and I can appreciate how streamlined GW2 makes a lot of stuff but I'm annoyed at how actual explanations for a lot of mechanics seemed to have gone out the window.
Incidentally, any advice on playing an engineer? I've gotten one up to level 12 or 13 or so as a first character but I'm not sure what kind of stuff I should be focusing on in terms of skills and traits. So far I have points in various turrets, grenades, and the flamethrower. I've been using dual pistols since it feels more involved than the rifle and the blowtorch skill more useful out in the world than the shield skills.
If you mouse over an ability that confers the condition, it will state right next to it exactly what it does.
For the longest time I played dual pistol, if you think that's interesting I recommend looking for gear that gives precision and/or condition damage. When you get traits you gain access to burns and vulnerability on crit, which is quite useful. Utilities are entirely up to you, really. Elixir B is worth looking at, as it is a very strong buff. The rocket turret is also quite useful, as it will tank for you and knock people down. I recommend trying some different things and see what you feels fits with how you play. Personal Battering Ram never stops being funny, though, and is very useful for both getting mobs off you and for kiting, since its tool-belt skill is a ranged cripple.
Speaking of, don't neglect your toolbelt. Some utilities are pretty much worth taking for their tool-belt. For example, Utility Goggles are useful, but they are really good because they will let you instantly put 10 vulnerability stacks on someone, so instantly 10% more damage on someone with one button-press.
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GnomeTankWhat the what?Portland, OregonRegistered Userregular
edited September 2012
Uhh, I disagree mightily on the LoL front. It has a pretty decent tutorial that goes through last hitting, creep pushing, staying alive, how towers work, what barracks are, what super minions are, etc. It then gives you the bot matches to actually go learn how to play, and playing the game inherently reinforces the game play concepts.
So back to GW2, nothing about the pre-AC game play says 'conditions matter', not a single thing. Even playing a condition heavy class like Engineer, does very little to reinforce, through game play, how important the concept is.
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It's not about knowing what the abilities do, it's about it being so inconsequential that it doesn't matter. Path of least resistance. My abilities could be four pages long each, but if the only thing that mattered was that it did XX damage, because the rest of the text described a situation that was so rare or so inconsequential, then what I'd end up remembering as a matter of course was that it did XX damage.
Or with monks you can just poison everything to make the healing they do do even worse.
Honestly I felt that by the end of AC Story, the four of us in our group were better players than when we started. Same thing when I did it with a full group of five later. Everyone seemed to learn a fair bit about their class.
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Let me say I dont disagree with you. I am merely stating that in the regards to the way the dugneons are tuned that AC is, IMHO, overtuned. Even as familiarity improves I still dont see myself doing that dungeon for kicks. It is just a pain in the ass to do.
Do hearts while waiting on long WvW queue.
Obviously this changes during the time of day.
I'm around 75% now, and already I fucking hate hearts. Some of the activities to get them are fun and entertaining, but overall hearts are boring after a while.
I really like vistas with cool jumping parts before them, I've never actually watched the camera pan around on a vista though. I enjoy completing them in unintended ways with the guardian greatsword leap.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Why do you make it sound like having people pay attention in the harder part of the game is a bad thing? If people want to do dungeons, they need to come prepared. That includes knowing game basics. If it takes Ac to make them look at these things, they are 25 levels too late. Dungeons are harder than open world and require you to put in more effort. Sure, there's details that needs tuning, but overall dungeons should require people to put some thought into what they are doing. If they don't, maybe they don't deserve to finish the dungeons?
Honestly unless you have experienced it yourself, it is rather condescending to tell people they just need to learn to play better to solve it.
You are making many wrong assumptions about what it is and what it does, which doesn't help your case. As you should know, aegis abilities do jack shit to stop flurry attacks. It blocks the first of the 30 attacks and that's it.
Er, #4 staff is the channeled might buff/small heal one, right? You're going to die before the channel finishes. You die almost instantly unless you immediately execute two back to back dodges. You might die even if you do that, even if you popped hold the line (protection) first.
This has been covered endlessly. The difficulty depends on your group composition, if you had those 3 ranger pulls, and if your team threw boulders at everything or not.
Also, if you did the story at anything past level 30, it doesn't count. And of course, bear in mind that "I didn't think it was that hard" in no way counters "it's the hardest dungeon in the game" unless you have examples of dungeons you think are harder.
So far, nothing has been as harsh an experience as doing AC story mode with level 30's. CM was an absolute cake walk. Honor of the Waves and Citadel of Flame had individual bosses that were obnoxious, but the trash in those dungeons is not an issue - nothing like the rangers in AC.
I don't recall getting a single condition from any monster at all pre 30. If I did get a condition, it was obviously so negligible as to escape my memory. The game does not train you appropriately for condition removal, nor for removing enemy boons, for this dungeon. Nor about the insane spike damage you can get on level 30's on some of the trash pulls. Hell I don't think you even have to dodge pre 30, though I was already good at dodging because I liked to fight the veteran oakhearts.
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Just to add to the options, I've been having a lot of fun with a build heavy on condition damage and dagger/dagger, traits heavy in Shadow Arts and Trickery. Mainly in PvE though; I haven't done wuvwuv much yet.
Bleeding stacks in intensity, so I'll run up to a mob and do the Death Blossom (#3 attack) as many times as I can. Then I steal to give myself some more initiative and some Thrill of the Crime buffs and get in one more Death Blossom. Now the enemy is bleeding like crazy and I've been evading repeatedly and taking no damage. At that point I can hit Blinding Powder to go invisible for 4 seconds and twiddle my thumbs while the mob bleeds to death. Right before the invis wears out, join back in with a backstab and some heartseekers and the fight is over.
What's great about this is that since Death Blossom can hit multiple enemies, my approach is equally effective if I'm up against one mob or five. I just stand there while they all fall down from bleeding simultaneously.
also what wonderpug said, this is almost exactly how i play my thief, except i use caltrops and just roll back and laugh as they try to catch me while bleeding to death
No you don't.
Necromancer's have the largest base health pool.
Their profession mechanic DS also gives them a whole other health bar, that can also be replenished much faster than the normal health bar.
And their two elites (Plague and Lich also buff all their stats - including health).
They also get all the ladies.
You, much like several others, are missing the point and reactively replying with "BUT THE GAME SHOULD BE HARD". No one is arguing that. What me and Jubal are saying is that the game itself does not provide adequate preparation. You saying "Poeple should know this, and if they don't, they are 25 levels too late" is silly. The game can have a two hour tutorial about conditions at the start, but if the game itself doesn't reinforce them as an important concept, people will just file the information away as currently useless and move on.
The fact of the matter is, the game fails on two fronts here. Not only is the tutorial information on conditions weak and easy to miss, it's a complete non-issue in the non-dungeon part of the game until the very latest levels. The game gives you a paltry three sentence description of conditions, then completely fails to reinforce in game play how you should even care, then throws the first dungeon in the game at you like "SURPRISE CONDITIONS MATTER". That's bad design and pacing of information.
e: Also what Vorpal just said. Also, I would point out, that several very glowing reviews of GW2 have had this same exact criticism. For as good of a game as GW2 is (and it is), it does a HORRIBLE JOB of explaining itself too you, almost forcing you to go find an external source. This is not a trait that should be lauded.
I think that right there illustrates the problem. People don't expect to have to go exhaustively research out of game wikis - they expect to be able to learn what they need to learn in game. It's not that they don't care how things work, it's that they expect how things work to be unfolded within the game in a rational and logical manner - and this is a completely reasonable expectation.
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They are trash mobs because they give trash rewards. Although almost everything in story mode gives garbage rewards. Honestly the rewards for doing story mode didn't seem that much different than beating a couple veteran/minion combos for chests out in the open world. And, if your group didn't just cheese its way through throwing boulders at everything like mine did, about 1,000 times harder. The risk vs reward for story mode is extremely poor for AC.
I have no issue with them making 'trash mobs' every bit as hard as bosses, but if that is the case, they need to drop loot/rewards similar to bosses. I don't care how hard a trash mob is, it's still a trash mob if it has a trash loot table. Trash mob has nothing to do with the difficulty of the mob so much as what you get from killing it - which was trash, in WOW, and hence where the term came from. You had to wade through useless trash mobs that never dropped anything on your way to and from bosses which dropped the gear needed to upgrade. They were trash because from a perspective of upgrading your gear, they did nothing for you. It had nothing to do really with how tough they were. Some trash was easy some (in AQ especially, bleh) was super hard.
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Dungeons that I found equally as challenging as doing AC at 30:
TA
Dungeons that I found more challenging than doing AC at 30:
CoF, SE, HoW, and whatever the hell the Asura one was called.
All VASTLY more challenging.
And sure it's been covered endlessly and been countered endlessly.
And lastly, you had skills that caused conditions. So you should have known what they did... therefore when they started to kill you you could go HEY, I SHOULD GET RID OF THESE.
This is like... comically simple stuff here....
They don't give trash rewards though
There are only a couple differences between trash rewards and boss rewards. Explorable mode tokens, and a chest with at least 2 guaranteed blues. That is literally it. I've been through more than one run where "trash" netted me more valuable loot than bosses.
It's lucky that the game is fun by itself, because I certainly don't play because of the rewards.
Make your own Meatoberfest, visit a Brazilian or Argentinian steakhouse!
Cooking is pretty neat, although I have a hard time anticipating recipes because I want to use ALL the ingredients and the in-game recipes are necessary abstractions. I'm always calling out about it when I'm doing discoveries, though. "Hey, I made onion rings!" Now if only we could put intermediate recipes into Collections...
Yeast isn't so bad! These days I bake bread using my food processor to knead, and that makes a big difference in the amount of effort involved. Quick rise yeast + lukewarm water + food processor kneading = easy bread!
I'm sorry that the idea that the future might not be 100% roses feels like an attack on you personally. You should probably re-examine the extent to which you are attached to this game.
If you have an actual argument, I'm all ears.
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I don't see how you found those more challenging than AC. We plowed through HoW without wiping once first try. Other dungeons we wiped once or twice, but it was overall smooth sailing. I haven't had a story group in any of those that just got massacred and couldn't complete it. I did in AC. Ironically the first group I did AC with just bouldered things and did pretty darn well. Later groups struggled more.
We're talking about condition *removal* not condition application. The game does not introduce you to condition removal adequately before level 30. It's as simple as that. If you disagree, you are wrong.
You might try to make rationalizations about how they don't really need to teach you about condition removal before level 30, but you're still wrong. It's bad game design and should not be encouraged.
You can be as condescending as you want and call it all comically simple, but you need to take a step back from the PA crowd of hardened MMO vets who know all about everything 3 months before the game comes out and look at it from the view of someone who hasn't done all this exhaustive pre game/ out of game research and is happily going along relying only on in game resources. They turn level 30, they get a letter advising them to go to Ascalan Catacombs, and off they go. Has the game prepared them adequately for what they find in there? Absolutely not.
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Hi, I've run a condition build since level 1. That kinda reinforced how important they are. Any build that uses conditions should pick up how dangerous they are and communicate that to their team, if the team is having trouble. For that matter, wiping on the necromancer should indicate they hey, what are these things that killed me? Maybe I should find out how to get rid of them? And then you spend a little time reading your skills and traits to figure out how to do that.
Yes, the game does a poor job of explaning some things, but conditions and CC are still a basic part of the game. Every class have them. No, the game doesn't hold your hand, but from the sound of it, people aren't even using the information they do have. On my engineer and elementalist, I can find out what every single effect in the game does just by reading my weapon and utility skills. From the sound of it, a lot of people aren't. Dungeons are stated to be harder and prove that they demand more of the player. So Anet should do a better job of explaning the basics. But if you're repeatedly wiping in AC it might be time to try and learn a bit more than what you've picked up. AC seems to be a gate made higher by people not even using the tools at their disposal.
All that really means is that *everything* gives trash rewards in story mode, and everything outside the token chests in explorable mode gives trash rewards.
I don't want blues/greens I'm going to vendor when I run a dungeon. That's where the term 'trash' comes from. It's all vendor trash. I want gear upgrades. I do not recall a single instance of a boss or monster dropping a piece of gear in a dungeon that was an upgrade for me. Maybe I just don't have enough magic find? But I find magic find gear to be a distasteful gimmick.
I would also qualify yellows that you salvage for ectoplasms as 'trash', welcome as they are. If it's not stuff you are going to use, but rather break down / salvage/ vendor, it's all one form or another of vendor trash. Vendor trash is not exciting. I don't bother even keeping track of the items that drop in dungeons because I know they are all useless and are all going to be vendored anyway. I will do a check at the vendor at the end just to make sure and - yep, all vendor trash.
Not caring what drops because it's all garbage, and just going for the 5 tokens you know you get in each chest, saps a lot of the excitement of dungeon running, IMO. Now - this could be a deliberate part of GW2's design at work: you don't need to run the dungeon to get better gear, it's entirely optional. I think that's good. But it does mean that the gear that does drop may as well be replaced entirely by silver and copper, and you're doing it just for cosmetic upgrades. And without the thrill of maybe getting better gear in the dungeon, a lot of the enjoyment of running it over and over just disappears.
Anyway my basic point regarding reward and trash mobs was this; if trash in explorable mode is going to be as difficult as bosses in explorable mode, then they need to give you the same rewards as the bosses in explorable mode - which is the tokens. That's all people care about.
The rewards for story mode are underwhelming across the board, which is why no one sane runs them repeatedly. I did several of them repeatedly before I realized what a waste of time it was - but still did a couple more trying to get some cutscenes I had missed.
Bosses give rewards, trash mobs don't. That's the distinction. The difficulty of the trash mobs is largely irrelevent.
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The reason I found them more challenging than AC is because I barreled through AC without any trouble multiple times. Those at least posed some interesting and challenging fights.
And I know we are talking about condition removal... but if you understand what a condition does (which you say isn't the problem) and you are getting beat up by conditions... you look at your skills and, assuming you can read, see that you can remove those conditions. What am I missing?
Not really, but you should have something with condition removal available for dungeons and pvp.
Oh, okay I see what you're saying now.
Is your major beef with story mode? Because in explorable mode I would argue that since you dont really get gear upgrades at level 80, etc. etc., stuff that is irrelevant if your issue is that as you're doing story mode dungeons while leveling that the gear is crappy.
In which case, you're right, you don't get much reward for dungeons while leveling, which is very jarring. I would try and justify it and such, but the complaint is legitimate. All I can really say about that is that in GW2, gear is rarely problematic, and near-optimal gear is both cheap and plentiful, so you don't really need to get your gear from dungeons like in most other MMOs.
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So I picked up the game 2 nights ago and while many of my engineer's skills apply conditions, I have not yet found where the game actually explains what they do. Cripple, stuns, bleeding, and burns are intuitive but stuff like daze, confuse, weaken, or vulnerability are not. I've been playing MUDs and MMOs for about 15 years now and I can appreciate how streamlined GW2 makes a lot of stuff but I'm annoyed at how actual explanations for a lot of mechanics seemed to have gone out the window.
Incidentally, any advice on playing an engineer? I've gotten one up to level 12 or 13 or so as a first character but I'm not sure what kind of stuff I should be focusing on in terms of skills and traits. So far I have points in various turrets, grenades, and the flamethrower. I've been using dual pistols since it feels more involved than the rifle and the blowtorch skill more useful out in the world than the shield skills.
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I didn't say that was a good thing. But at the moment, it's how it is. The information isn't easily available, but it is there if you look. And since it's there and isn't placed in your hands, is it then unreasonable to expect players who wish to do the harder, more demanding parts of the game to spend five minutes to look up basic mechanics? Sure, you can argue that you shouldn't have to and Anet will probably make the information more visible in due course. But until then, if you want to do the hard parts, you might have to read some on your own.
Yes, my main beef is that story mode is completely unrewarding and that explorable mode is extremely tedious.
Like you say, GW2 has made a deliberate choice that you don't need to run dungeons for the best gear. I think this is a good and welcome change. But it means that when you DO run dungeons you're getting the same pile of vendor blues/greens that you could get doing any dynamic event, or the same yellows in chests you could get from opening any veteran guarded chest in the open world...only the dungeon stuff is way way way harder.
This makes story mode dungeons one of the least productive things you could ever do in game: the risk vs reward scale is abominably bad. It's just a hurdle you have to jump over to do explorable mode. Doing the story mode dungeons at the level appropriate never gave me anything good to wear - it was all outclassed by stuff I bought off the trading post for pennies. And yet you've just completed this horrifically difficult (for AC at least, CM and following were pretty darn easy bar one or two bosses) task which at least, story line wise, is SUPPOSED to be difficult so you kind of feel like your character should get some kind of nice reward - but they don't.
Explorable mode, since the gear stats aren't at stake but rather the gear look, has the same problem of 'no gear upgrades drop ever' which is only really a problem in that it makes the run even more boring than it already was, which is a problem when you have to run it a million times. And this was my main point about trash mobs: the only reason I'm here is for the tokens and anything that doesn't drop tokens is annoying obstacle. I'm not here for gear upgrades so saying they drop the same gear as bosses doesn't mean they aren't trash mobs - I'm not here for the gear the bosses drop either.
I think a good solution would be to give out the vanity hat at the completion of story mode. Ramp up the difficulty of the wings, attach one piece of gear to each of those that you get upon completion. Then for the remaining 2-3 pieces and your weapons, you can use the existing token system. That would mean you got something nice out of story mode, you had to do all the wings at least once, and the total number of times you have to run one wing over and over again gets reduced.
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(person 1) The dungeon was a 9/10 in difficulty!
(person 2) No no sir it was actually more like a 6/10!
(me) AC can be both really hard and really easy. I have beaten it in under 40 minutes with zero wipes. I have also spent like 30s on repairs alone during the lovers fight. All about knowing the route, and the tricks to each encounter.
While I disagree with a vast majority of the stuff you write on here... I agree with that last paragraph. While I don't have a big problem with the current system I think more incentive to run through the multiple paths would be good.
*I* personally don't have to do any this, because I am a veracious consumer of information for games I play. On the other hand, I am sentient enough to realize that probably 90% of GW2's players are nothing like me. To expect Joe Player to have to go a) find the wiki, b) look up in the wiki what he needs to look up (even if he may not even know what that is), and c) retain that information when the game does a piss poor job of reinforcing the concepts through game play, is to me unacceptable.
You talk about Engineer, which also happens to be my class (hi5 on that, Engineers rock)...and they are very Condition Damage heavy, most of our pop comes from conditions. You know how much that matters, lets say, pre 50? Almost none at all. You can do 90% of the solo content doing nothing but spamming Grenade kit. The base game simply never reinforces them as important concepts. Sure, as decent engineers, we understand layering conditions, rotating our kits for condition up time and cool down relief, etc....but I bet we learned most of that from reading external sources, not actually playing the game.
Pistol + Shield is the most optimal config, but at Level 13 I wouldn't sweat that much, your level is low enough that you are fine going with whichever weapons are strongest. Turrets are most definitely NOT going to be your main source of damage but are instead more useful for distracting mobs while you shoot them from a distance. I found certain skills like the Thumper Turret and Battering Ram to be absolutely useless; I'm not sure if they are even working at all.
While it may not be GOOD I think saying "that's the way it is" applies to many games. Many games continue to be successful by doing things this way. Motivation to do it better is required. Piles of compalints must come in before they actually decide to change something. Now I'm not comparing games just comparing this idea accross gaming. Look at League of Legends. That game is absurdly popular and you won't know a majority of how it works without looking that stuff up. A majority of players DO NOT look stuff up and continue to play (extremely poorly) and continue to not understand stuff. But they keep playing.
Actually the game does a remarkably poor job of telling you both what your own conditions are doing, AND what enemy conditions are doing to you.
When conditions are mixed in with direct damage the game does not tell them apart.
On my guardian, for example, I put up retaliation, apply a damage over time, a burn, and use my greatsword whirl move. White numbers are flying all over the place - but I have no idea which of those is from my burn, the only 'condition' in the mix.
If a monster is immune to burning, he seems to take only a slightly longer time to die (granted I'm mostly precision/power and not condition damage) which tends to reinforce the idea that conditions are no big deal. Likewise, any conditions I got (I *think* maybe a centaur gives you a tiny duration bleed? just rolled right off and didn't seem to be important.
Likewise, you get the idea that boons are no big deal. When I ran into my very first monster with a condition, the skales that regenerate, I thought 'Oh cool! The game is introducing you to boon removal already! This monster will just keep regenerating until you remove his boon or slash his healing some how. What a nice idea to introduce players quickly to the importance of condition/boon removal! Let me look at my skills and see what I ha- oh. The monster is already dead and I was just auto attacking. OK, I guess boons are no big deal"
Because I rely heavily on out of game / pre game experiences I know this is not true, but those are the impressions that are conveyed.
This is added to the general absurdity of spell effects everywhere in dungeons (a lavish spectacle of glee when solo, a confusing mess of particles when grouped) and any tells the enemy might do are generally lost. If you just keel over dead, it's not apparent if you died because of direct damage or conditions. The combat log doesn't specify which type is which either. You don't know if you should DODGED to live (direct damage) or gotten rid of a condition to live.
Hard games are great. One of my favorite games is dark souls. But hard games can succeed only if they tell they player that they are failing, and why they failed, and point them in the direction of what to do to improve, and teach them the things they need to to do improve. Dark souls does all this - I haven't had to look crap up on line.
For example: you get hit with conditions pretty early on in dark souls (in the first zone in fact):the rats in the undead burg poison: they don't do much damage, but they last FOREVER and slowly drain your health. You will sit up, take notice, and figure out either how to not get hit with those conditions in the first place, or find ways to mitigate the damage, or ways to cure it.
Then, later on, the game introduces more and more dangerous conditions: the toxic poison that ticks much faster and is hard to get rid of, then the curse bar that can kill you incredibly fast. In all these cases, what killed you is pretty obvious as there's a big bar on the screen and you are only ever affected by one condition.
There are only a few conditions, you're only ever impacted by one, it is obvious when you are impacted, and it is a big deal, always.
Contrast that to the GW2 model: there are a million conditions, they don't seem to harm you at all, they don't last very long, until suddenly there is a dungeon where they are super important.
Imagine if dark souls just dropped you straight into cursing monsters without leading you through any of the other guys first. Dark souls is an incredible example of slowly leading the player through gradually harder and harder encounters against enemies with more and more abilities - but I don't think anyone would qualify it as holding the players hand. Instead, the players knowledge and experience builds upon itself: what he needs for a certain encounter has been taught by degrees in the previous encounters.
In GW2, that smooth arc of progression is not present. It's incredibly spotty in difficulty.
PSN: Vorpallion Twitch: Vorpallion
If you mouse over an ability that confers the condition, it will state right next to it exactly what it does.
For the longest time I played dual pistol, if you think that's interesting I recommend looking for gear that gives precision and/or condition damage. When you get traits you gain access to burns and vulnerability on crit, which is quite useful. Utilities are entirely up to you, really. Elixir B is worth looking at, as it is a very strong buff. The rocket turret is also quite useful, as it will tank for you and knock people down. I recommend trying some different things and see what you feels fits with how you play. Personal Battering Ram never stops being funny, though, and is very useful for both getting mobs off you and for kiting, since its tool-belt skill is a ranged cripple.
Speaking of, don't neglect your toolbelt. Some utilities are pretty much worth taking for their tool-belt. For example, Utility Goggles are useful, but they are really good because they will let you instantly put 10 vulnerability stacks on someone, so instantly 10% more damage on someone with one button-press.
So back to GW2, nothing about the pre-AC game play says 'conditions matter', not a single thing. Even playing a condition heavy class like Engineer, does very little to reinforce, through game play, how important the concept is.