I went greatsword first because it was cheaper to get going with. axe/mace i slightly ahead though. that said, in certain situations, GS can have higher DPS than an axe/mace.
So I started playing this about 10 odd days back and I'm up to level 60. However its my first MMOPRG and I have literally no idea how to make a somewhat decent build. What should I be aiming for in regards to speccing a warrior? What skills to use, elite, traits, weapons and stats to go for? Currently I just use four banners and whatever weapon I think looks coolest at the time.
Norn warrior, if that makes much of a difference.
Youtube is a pretty fantastic resource for MMOs to check out builds and playstyles. Whenever I consider playing a new character I immediately look for youtube videos. Nine times out of ten they'll post a build, and often gear and sigil ideas.
I think warrior greatsword wins out over axe/mace when Forceful Greatsword and high crit chance get involved.
it still depends on if you can channel a full 100Blades and whirlwind into a wall. with those GS pulls ahead, otherwise they're still pretty much equal
That thing about the burst skills is so true it almost hurts.
Still, it's not like it's necessary to pick the absolute optimal DPS load-out, which I think we should probably remind ourselves. Axe mainhand and greatsword are both good for direct damage, which is almost always what you want while leveling. Condition damage isn't bad either, and it is practically always better if you're in a zone where enemies are 4+ levels above you. You don't really need to do that, though, and mob-murder-sprees are among the least effective ways to level anyways.
Around level 35-45, going to northeast Harathi Hinterlands with a killstreak booster, an exp booster, food, and sharpening stone and doing the event chain which consists of nothing but slaughtering wave after wave of centaurs is probably the fastest non-crafting way of leveling up in the game
Warrior longbow is also severely underrated. It has the only combo field for a warrior and can self fire combo for might stacks.
I see so many warriors using rifles in PvE, where 90% of the time the superior AoE from the longbow is what you want.
Longbow is also really good against the super-squishy thieves in WvW. Immobilize, and it doesn't matter if they stealth because you know where to drop explosive fiery death.
They make an awful lot of assumptions when they say things like "our testers didn't need to pre-scout everything". For example, do the testers know information such as how long it takes for each target to make a loop on their path so they can easily estimate where the target is based upon last reset? Do they know the paths? Etc.
If they want to do this and not make it stupidly difficult without large numbers searching for the targets, they should consider giving some NPCs in the various camps/towns of each zone some ability to give you hints where the NPCs could be or some such.
I guess to be fair, we don't always need to do the T3 bounty either, we could just do T1 or T2 multiple times each week. I just wish they'd think about things from the average player's perspective and not just their own viewpoint.
They likely did it the right way. They failed at first until they figured out a faster method of finding their targets. He talks about how players have assumption that you should be able to finish this content the first time with no issues, but instead they actually expect that you would have to practice, and even fail at times while you learn and get better.
Look at what we do right now. We send about 15ish people out to find every single target...likely one or so per target. Everyone else either isn't on yet or are waiting around until we have all the targets and it starts. Likewise, we can spend 30 minutes to an hour waiting to have fun doing the bounty. Their test team likely took 30 people, split into 6 groups, hit the bounty, and each group picked a target and went looking. When some groups found their target, they most likely took them out and went to go help a harder-to-find target. Except for certain targets, I can almost guarantee that if you had 5+ people looking for each target, you could find them within 10 minutes. Add in people from easier targets joining the search and that number could go down.
The problem is that there are a lot of players that find losing (at any time and under any circumstances) to be anathema and work to remove any and all difficulty from the bounty. This means we record down every location, and spend a lot of time outside of the 15 minute timer doing as much as possible to remove any and all challenge as possible. That's a race to the bottom for developers if they keep that perspective while developing. They actually wanted this to be a challenge in the search, not just the fight itself. Therefore, they designed the new targets where it's much harder to get around. Honestly, I'd rather they keep their own viewpoint instead of gimping the content because a lot of average players don't like losing, even if it means I lose more often.
A fair point, but they also mentioned it means you can just restart the bounty. The only issue I can think of though, is the 12 hours it takes to research the guild bounty, so if we fail, which is fine but not ideal, it also means we can't just try it again right then and there, right?
I do know we could run the easier bounties more often to get the same 25 merits per week, so it's not like we absolutely have to complete a T3 each week. It would be nice if the team took into account their average player. As long as folks have fun with the newer content, that is what matters. If they consider the "average" player and base their challenge on that player, it'll help them keep more people around as well I assume.
A fair point, but they also mentioned it means you can just restart the bounty. The only issue I can think of though, is the 12 hours it takes to research the guild bounty, so if we fail, which is fine but not ideal, it also means we can't just try it again right then and there, right?
I do know we could run the easier bounties more often to get the same 25 merits per week, so it's not like we absolutely have to complete a T3 each week. It would be nice if the team took into account their average player. As long as folks have fun with the newer content, that is what matters. If they consider the "average" player and base their challenge on that player, it'll help them keep more people around as well I assume.
That's not accurate, you have to complete a higher tier bounty to get more merits.
They make an awful lot of assumptions when they say things like "our testers didn't need to pre-scout everything". For example, do the testers know information such as how long it takes for each target to make a loop on their path so they can easily estimate where the target is based upon last reset? Do they know the paths? Etc.
If they want to do this and not make it stupidly difficult without large numbers searching for the targets, they should consider giving some NPCs in the various camps/towns of each zone some ability to give you hints where the NPCs could be or some such.
I guess to be fair, we don't always need to do the T3 bounty either, we could just do T1 or T2 multiple times each week. I just wish they'd think about things from the average player's perspective and not just their own viewpoint.
They likely did it the right way. They failed at first until they figured out a faster method of finding their targets. He talks about how players have assumption that you should be able to finish this content the first time with no issues, but instead they actually expect that you would have to practice, and even fail at times while you learn and get better.
Look at what we do right now. We send about 15ish people out to find every single target...likely one or so per target. Everyone else either isn't on yet or are waiting around until we have all the targets and it starts. Likewise, we can spend 30 minutes to an hour waiting to have fun doing the bounty. Their test team likely took 30 people, split into 6 groups, hit the bounty, and each group picked a target and went looking. When some groups found their target, they most likely took them out and went to go help a harder-to-find target. Except for certain targets, I can almost guarantee that if you had 5+ people looking for each target, you could find them within 10 minutes. Add in people from easier targets joining the search and that number could go down.
The problem is that there are a lot of players that find losing (at any time and under any circumstances) to be anathema and work to remove any and all difficulty from the bounty. This means we record down every location, and spend a lot of time outside of the 15 minute timer doing as much as possible to remove any and all challenge as possible. That's a race to the bottom for developers if they keep that perspective while developing. They actually wanted this to be a challenge in the search, not just the fight itself. Therefore, they designed the new targets where it's much harder to get around. Honestly, I'd rather they keep their own viewpoint instead of gimping the content because a lot of average players don't like losing, even if it means I lose more often.
I don't know about anyone else, but I joined on one of the bounties once, on Saturday, and I found standing around clicking on a Skritt for 30 minutes to be the most god awful boring piece of shit I've done in this game. I don't see myself participating in guild bounties again to be honest.
I guess to add to the debate, I can't complain much, since they do offer solutions to the bounties that allow even a guild of 5-10 people to have a good chance at completing. It means it'll take longer to get merits, but you can still make pretty good progress.
It's all about perception and how they want the players to be. If the testers spend a lot of time doing bounties and such, you have to consider that most players don't spend a lot of their time doing bounties, so those testers, who may have started from scratch and all, and much more experienced in doing this. So if these same testers, who are more experienced then a great percentage of the playerbase are able to find the new, more challenging bounty targets in say 3 tries, it could take us 5+.
As much as I'd hate to see everything be for instant gratification for the players since I grew up on Ultima Online and Everquest, they do need to give the players some of that since it helps keep the game alive and money coming in.
I think the point of the failing comment is that it took their testers several tries before they got their strategy down. It sounds like once they had their strategy down, they weren't failing anymore. I think it's misleading to say they "should take the average player into account". They want to encourage the players to get better and learn how to work together, you don't do that by making it doable on the first attempt every time. Players aren't going to get better then, they're just going to get lazier. It's a race to the bottom. We have Tier 1 and 2 for guilds who are smaller or larger guilds who don't want to put in more effort. Does that mean those guilds won't get the max merits per week unless they do the harder challenges? My response to that would be"Yep...your point being?".
I actually have no problem with them making the Tier 3 bounties hard. It's the highest tier, it's supposed to be harder. I always figured it was designed for the larger guilds who could more easily field enough players to find all 6 targets within the time limit, but then I learned players were (IMO) gimping the content by pre-scouting them and suddenly bounties became a lot less interesting. I'm really not surprised they're going this way, since it really sounds like they wanted players to learn to work together and search for the targets, which is honestly a heck of a lot more fun.
I would really love it if we could do a Tier 1 or Tier 2 bounty this way sometimes, where we organize into 2-4 teams and search after the start (faster prep time too). It would give us some good experience if they're going to keep adding more targets that you can't pre-scout as easily, and with only a couple targets we're more likely to get them. Plus I think it'd be a heck of a lot more fun as a guild.
I don't know about anyone else, but I joined on one of the bounties once, on Saturday, and I found standing around clicking on a Skritt for 30 minutes to be the most god awful boring piece of shit I've done in this game. I don't see myself participating in guild bounties again to be honest.
I'll be honest, probably the most fun I've had with a guild event in any game in the past 5-10 years was during a bounty a couple weeks ago when we had gotten 5 and couldn't find the last Skritt with ~5 minutes left (or something like that) and several of us swarmed into Harathi Highlands scouring the map as fast as possible to find him so we could get the bounty.
I think the point of the failing comment is that it took their testers several tries before they got their strategy down. It sounds like once they had their strategy down, they weren't failing anymore. I think it's misleading to say they "should take the average player into account". They want to encourage the players to get better and learn how to work together, you don't do that by making it doable on the first attempt every time. Players aren't going to get better then, they're just going to get lazier. It's a race to the bottom. We have Tier 1 and 2 for guilds who are smaller or larger guilds who don't want to put in more effort. Does that mean those guilds won't get the max merits per week unless they do the harder challenges? My response to that would be"Yep...your point being?".
I actually have no problem with them making the Tier 3 bounties hard. It's the highest tier, it's supposed to be harder. I always figured it was designed for the larger guilds who could more easily field enough players to find all 6 targets within the time limit, but then I learned players were (IMO) gimping the content by pre-scouting them and suddenly bounties became a lot less interesting. I'm really not surprised they're going this way, since it really sounds like they wanted players to learn to work together and search for the targets, which is honestly a heck of a lot more fun.
I would really love it if we could do a Tier 1 or Tier 2 bounty this way sometimes, where we organize into 2-4 teams and search after the start (faster prep time too). It would give us some good experience if they're going to keep adding more targets that you can't pre-scout as easily, and with only a couple targets we're more likely to get them. Plus I think it'd be a heck of a lot more fun as a guild.
I don't know about anyone else, but I joined on one of the bounties once, on Saturday, and I found standing around clicking on a Skritt for 30 minutes to be the most god awful boring piece of shit I've done in this game. I don't see myself participating in guild bounties again to be honest.
I'll be honest, probably the most fun I've had with a guild event in any game in the past 5-10 years was during a bounty a couple weeks ago when we had gotten 5 and couldn't find the last Skritt with ~5 minutes left (or something like that) and several of us swarmed into Harathi Highlands scouring the map as fast as possible to find him so we could get the bounty.
The way they set it up though, this is also a bit of the work smarter not harder theory. That's how folks figured out the pre-scout deal. It's true that it might not be as fun as doing this "correctly" with the timer going, but it depends on the ending.
When I stated "take the average player into account", I'm not saying make this doable in the first three tries for any group or guild, I'm saying they should consider the average player in terms of the difficulty in content. If Anet decides to make content only for the best of the best and continue down that path, the average player who isn't nor ever will be due to time constraints or whatever else, will likely drop off the game. That also helps explain (lack of content and such) why we can have 500 people in the guild, but I don't ever see more than maybe 40 on during peak Friday nights or Patch days. If they made more content for the "average player", I think we'd see more folks coming around.
When I stated "take the average player into account", I'm not saying make this doable in the first three tries for any group or guild, I'm saying they should consider the average player in terms of the difficulty in content. If Anet decides to make content only for the best of the best and continue down that path, the average player who isn't nor ever will be due to time constraints or whatever else, will likely drop off the game. That also helps explain (lack of content and such) why we can have 500 people in the guild, but I don't ever see more than maybe 40 on during peak Friday nights or Patch days. If they made more content for the "average player", I think we'd see more folks coming around.
This is true, I feel like I've hit a brick wall with my necro where there are no more challenges I could handle with my current grasp of the game and my available leisure time. If all there is to do for me is stuff I've done before (easier instances, exploring, crafting, jumping) or stuff that requires me to become obsessed with the game (high level fractals, tPvP, grinding for legendaries) then I'd rather spend my time elsewhere and come back when there's some nifty new stuff out for people who love this game on a casual level.
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reVerseAttack and Dethrone GodRegistered Userregular
Call me a purist but I'm not crazy about skills that influence the balance of WvW based on how much you play. Hopefully they're minor enough to not have a major effect on gameplay. Also, fuck yeah no more culling, and fuck yeah no more missing easy shots with the flamethrower.
Taking a break from this game because Bioshock Infinite. I have so little HD space on this borrowed laptop that I had to uninstall GW2 to fit Bioshock on there.
If culls happen, plz do not boot me. I will return once I've conquered the sky.
I'm not a fan of adding ~progression~ to wvw at all. If the abilities gained are actually useful, they widen the gap between new players and players who have put a lot of time into wvw (a gap that ought to be based on skill and coordination); if not, they introduces pointless, uninteresting grind for everyone.
The April Fools for this year should be pretty good...the weapon skins alone make me very interested. (They've already added entries for achievements and possible skins...likely being revealed soon since it's 5 days away).
The April Fools for this year should be pretty good...the weapon skins alone make me very interested. (They've already added entries for achievements and possible skins...likely being revealed soon since it's 5 days away).
MordrothEntrepreNerdNew Republic of AlbertaRegistered Userregular
If the grind is "pointless" then it only introduces a grind for those interested in the "pointless" rewards.... personally I'm not that concerned. I'm sure they are smart enough not to make the rewards gamebreaking.
Can someone who is actually in-game go to the Commendation trader and let me know the names of the new weapons for them? I'm specifically looking for whether they're in a set (like the new Fused weapons) or just random names like the Ascended gear.
I'll be able to get in-game in about 3 hours, so if it takes that long, no worries.
Edit: Nevermind, they're just called "Guild". Berserker stats, 3 gold and 4/5/7 commendations for off/main/2hander. Unique skins though.
If the grind is "pointless" then it only introduces a grind for those interested in the "pointless" rewards.... personally I'm not that concerned. I'm sure they are smart enough not to make the rewards gamebreaking.
If it takes time and people away from actually improving the game, then I am worried about the addition of pointless stuff. The grind itself isn't the problem then, it's the distribution of resources away from areas that have some meaningful impact on the game.
reVerseAttack and Dethrone GodRegistered Userregular
edited March 2013
So, random thoughts:
Maul hits like a ton of bricks now. Not "1000 blades" bricks, but regular any other class bricks.
The reduced cooldowns on other GS skills are nice, but nothing earthshaking.
The quickness change is really fucked. Especially for the beastmastery minor trait that gives quickness on pet change. It was okay, now it sucks ass. Same for the thief major that gives quickness on crits.
Pets feel more fragile. Weird, seeing how there's no supposed overall pet changes.
Death Shroud using the regular UI makes it look ghetto as fuck (four skills on a bar designed for five), but at least you don't lose important info now. Also hopefully the weird skill issues that used to come from switching UIs are gone for good.
Thief caltrop dodge leaving a little UI indicator on the ground is a nice quality of life change. No more guessing where the caltrops may have fallen.
edit Oh an apparently ranger shortbow ate another fairly big stealth nerf thanks to quickness/attack speed fudgery.
Posts
Youtube is a pretty fantastic resource for MMOs to check out builds and playstyles. Whenever I consider playing a new character I immediately look for youtube videos. Nine times out of ten they'll post a build, and often gear and sigil ideas.
it still depends on if you can channel a full 100Blades and whirlwind into a wall. with those GS pulls ahead, otherwise they're still pretty much equal
Steam - Minty D. Vision!
Origin/BF3 - MintyDVision
Still, it's not like it's necessary to pick the absolute optimal DPS load-out, which I think we should probably remind ourselves. Axe mainhand and greatsword are both good for direct damage, which is almost always what you want while leveling. Condition damage isn't bad either, and it is practically always better if you're in a zone where enemies are 4+ levels above you. You don't really need to do that, though, and mob-murder-sprees are among the least effective ways to level anyways.
Around level 35-45, going to northeast Harathi Hinterlands with a killstreak booster, an exp booster, food, and sharpening stone and doing the event chain which consists of nothing but slaughtering wave after wave of centaurs is probably the fastest non-crafting way of leveling up in the game
I see so many warriors using rifles in PvE, where 90% of the time the superior AoE from the longbow is what you want.
Longbow is also really good against the super-squishy thieves in WvW. Immobilize, and it doesn't matter if they stealth because you know where to drop explosive fiery death.
They likely did it the right way. They failed at first until they figured out a faster method of finding their targets. He talks about how players have assumption that you should be able to finish this content the first time with no issues, but instead they actually expect that you would have to practice, and even fail at times while you learn and get better.
Look at what we do right now. We send about 15ish people out to find every single target...likely one or so per target. Everyone else either isn't on yet or are waiting around until we have all the targets and it starts. Likewise, we can spend 30 minutes to an hour waiting to have fun doing the bounty. Their test team likely took 30 people, split into 6 groups, hit the bounty, and each group picked a target and went looking. When some groups found their target, they most likely took them out and went to go help a harder-to-find target. Except for certain targets, I can almost guarantee that if you had 5+ people looking for each target, you could find them within 10 minutes. Add in people from easier targets joining the search and that number could go down.
The problem is that there are a lot of players that find losing (at any time and under any circumstances) to be anathema and work to remove any and all difficulty from the bounty. This means we record down every location, and spend a lot of time outside of the 15 minute timer doing as much as possible to remove any and all challenge as possible. That's a race to the bottom for developers if they keep that perspective while developing. They actually wanted this to be a challenge in the search, not just the fight itself. Therefore, they designed the new targets where it's much harder to get around. Honestly, I'd rather they keep their own viewpoint instead of gimping the content because a lot of average players don't like losing, even if it means I lose more often.
I do know we could run the easier bounties more often to get the same 25 merits per week, so it's not like we absolutely have to complete a T3 each week. It would be nice if the team took into account their average player. As long as folks have fun with the newer content, that is what matters. If they consider the "average" player and base their challenge on that player, it'll help them keep more people around as well I assume.
That's not accurate, you have to complete a higher tier bounty to get more merits.
I don't know about anyone else, but I joined on one of the bounties once, on Saturday, and I found standing around clicking on a Skritt for 30 minutes to be the most god awful boring piece of shit I've done in this game. I don't see myself participating in guild bounties again to be honest.
It's all about perception and how they want the players to be. If the testers spend a lot of time doing bounties and such, you have to consider that most players don't spend a lot of their time doing bounties, so those testers, who may have started from scratch and all, and much more experienced in doing this. So if these same testers, who are more experienced then a great percentage of the playerbase are able to find the new, more challenging bounty targets in say 3 tries, it could take us 5+.
As much as I'd hate to see everything be for instant gratification for the players since I grew up on Ultima Online and Everquest, they do need to give the players some of that since it helps keep the game alive and money coming in.
Then rerolled an Asura thief, who looks just like my Asura Mesmer and Asura Engineer.
I think I have a sickness.
But thief is kind of cool.
*sigh* Stupid game.
I actually have no problem with them making the Tier 3 bounties hard. It's the highest tier, it's supposed to be harder. I always figured it was designed for the larger guilds who could more easily field enough players to find all 6 targets within the time limit, but then I learned players were (IMO) gimping the content by pre-scouting them and suddenly bounties became a lot less interesting. I'm really not surprised they're going this way, since it really sounds like they wanted players to learn to work together and search for the targets, which is honestly a heck of a lot more fun.
I would really love it if we could do a Tier 1 or Tier 2 bounty this way sometimes, where we organize into 2-4 teams and search after the start (faster prep time too). It would give us some good experience if they're going to keep adding more targets that you can't pre-scout as easily, and with only a couple targets we're more likely to get them. Plus I think it'd be a heck of a lot more fun as a guild.
I'll be honest, probably the most fun I've had with a guild event in any game in the past 5-10 years was during a bounty a couple weeks ago when we had gotten 5 and couldn't find the last Skritt with ~5 minutes left (or something like that) and several of us swarmed into Harathi Highlands scouring the map as fast as possible to find him so we could get the bounty.
Haha, I'm assuming this has to do with me getting Spark?
The way they set it up though, this is also a bit of the work smarter not harder theory. That's how folks figured out the pre-scout deal. It's true that it might not be as fun as doing this "correctly" with the timer going, but it depends on the ending.
When I stated "take the average player into account", I'm not saying make this doable in the first three tries for any group or guild, I'm saying they should consider the average player in terms of the difficulty in content. If Anet decides to make content only for the best of the best and continue down that path, the average player who isn't nor ever will be due to time constraints or whatever else, will likely drop off the game. That also helps explain (lack of content and such) why we can have 500 people in the guild, but I don't ever see more than maybe 40 on during peak Friday nights or Patch days. If they made more content for the "average player", I think we'd see more folks coming around.
https://forum-en.guildwars2.com/forum/info/news/Game-Update-Notes-March-26-2013/
I'm really wondering what the hell word was tripped in their filter for that.
It's "Elixir U skill".
Apparently it's a slur.
PSN: ShogunGunshow
Origin: ShogunGunshow
If culls happen, plz do not boot me. I will return once I've conquered the sky.
https://podcast.tidalwavegames.com/
Possible spoilers if you want to be surprised.
http://imgur.com/a/E0sAb
Then there are the hints from the Achievements
http://imgur.com/FJfMlbo,wrnMIyq,Ay6mblW
It's possible that this is related to Josh Foreman's "Mother Of All Jumping Puzzles".
Mother of god
Someone put that thing out of its misery
I'll be able to get in-game in about 3 hours, so if it takes that long, no worries.
Edit: Nevermind, they're just called "Guild". Berserker stats, 3 gold and 4/5/7 commendations for off/main/2hander. Unique skins though.
If it takes time and people away from actually improving the game, then I am worried about the addition of pointless stuff. The grind itself isn't the problem then, it's the distribution of resources away from areas that have some meaningful impact on the game.
BUT
april 1
https://podcast.tidalwavegames.com/
Maul hits like a ton of bricks now. Not "1000 blades" bricks, but regular any other class bricks.
The reduced cooldowns on other GS skills are nice, but nothing earthshaking.
The quickness change is really fucked. Especially for the beastmastery minor trait that gives quickness on pet change. It was okay, now it sucks ass. Same for the thief major that gives quickness on crits.
Pets feel more fragile. Weird, seeing how there's no supposed overall pet changes.
Death Shroud using the regular UI makes it look ghetto as fuck (four skills on a bar designed for five), but at least you don't lose important info now. Also hopefully the weird skill issues that used to come from switching UIs are gone for good.
Thief caltrop dodge leaving a little UI indicator on the ground is a nice quality of life change. No more guessing where the caltrops may have fallen.
edit Oh an apparently ranger shortbow ate another fairly big stealth nerf thanks to quickness/attack speed fudgery.