naiasonod.9265

*dusts forum account off* No. *Goes back to hibernation*

Just wait until you get the skyscale and discover that its extremely underwhelming most of the time.

I just flopped my guardian back to full-fat DPS gear on an LB/sword+focus virtue-spammy DPS build that's super block and ranged reflect heavy, and won't even try running guardian support in this situation anymore. I gave it the ol' college try. I decided I really just don't enjoy having a 50%+ nerf to my WvW gains. No biggie. Faffing about out there with my necro has been more fun even than the dps guardian anyway, and I really just don't care if depriving my team of buffs is poor contribution. The eternally wise and infallible divines that make these changes must surely have intended for guardian support to be a foolish thing to play now, and who would I be to flout their holy mandates? I'll be fine. Nobody needed guardian support anyway, right?

Bad trade. Do not want.

GW2 is pretty friendly for players with lousy freetime availability. Trickle effort accumulates over time and there is very little to grind for that's on any kind of timer. You can plink away at getting any legendary or mount in whatever tiny little increments you can spare or tolerate, and you'll get it all done eventually if you keep at it like that. That said, most of the grinds aren't my idea of being fun at all. I'm not entertained by the jumping puzzles and I find almost all completions to be exercises in tedium.

Nobody understands just how passionate we nerds get about these sorts of things. Nobody except other passionate nerds, anyway.

What do you all challenge haters pretend of this game? To be a walk in the park? Do you want anet to turn mobs into freaking paintings? Havn't you had enough with core tyria beeing so freaking easy? do you want mobs to become static with no attack or interaction whatsoever? This is the mentality that drove anet to the mess they are in now, with no clear direction and all sort of players leaving, first they lost almost all pvpers, now they are loosing hardcore pvers, soon they will only have open world bots running around playing for a few months and quitting out of boredom, and all of the ones playing fashion wars standing still in the bank... its pretty easy: we liked core, and thats what we want MORE of...not something ENTIRELY DIFFERENTquitting the game AFTER you played it, out of BOREDOM, is still better than quitting BEFORE the endif you made a meal for all you friends, and they all put down the fork after one bite, it prolly wasnt that greatbut if they clear the table in record time, and ask for MORE, then it has the quality, that people wil PAY for Average players love HoT and find core laughably easy. We want more HoT.Unless you've got a mouse in your pocket, you don't speak for a plurality, and the mouse might not agree with you. I, for example, think HoT's maps are great because I personally enjoy exploration, and 3d maps that use the Z axis are usually things I like. What I don't like are tedious mobs, and I draw a ten foot tall wall of concertina wire between what I call tedious and what I call challenging. Something being 'challenging' to tolerate is not the right kind of challenge, and I've been finding too many mobs of HoT's design to be irritations, not fun challenges, since day 1. I want to see mobs with less cheesy supermassive AOE's and knockdown spam and ridiculous multi-hit attacks and more play/counterplay options that actually require tactics rather than negate most builds on most classes by making nothing useful or important to survival except lots of DPS, lots of dodging and as many HP or as much sustain as you can cram in there. HoT mobs are some of the most boring things in the game to me because they're like a badly designed series of hurdles I have to jump every time I want to do something in HoT maps. They're not fun to deal with, and PoF didn't improve on this at all, but that's a different topic. A lot of people will admit that HoT was designed to break the overworld Zerker meta. Low HP, minimal defense 100% glass cannon builds without a single utility slot spared to anything but moar damage was gold standard back in the day because it worked. You could get away with dodging as your only defense in core Tyria and usually be just fine. HoT broke that meta alright...and replaced it with an equally boring but now actually necessary one. From HoT onwards, you need to do as much DPS as you can afford to do without sacrificing your mobility or your hp/sustain. You skimp on any of those and you're going to have a bad time. ...Unless you zerg up. Group up in HoT and you trivialize the entire expansion except for the zone metas, which are the only content that poses even the slightest amount of challenge through requirements of coordination to the players. And the coordination requirements are minimal, but still sufficient to see disorganized AB metas fail on the reg. A whole lot of time clearly went into crafting the mechanics and AI on HoT's mobs, and grouping up in even just a small group deletes the point of that effort completely. Who is actually challenged by HoT mobs? Solo players are, and a solo player that builds for high DPS, high mobility and high HP/sustain will find most HoT mobs to be tedious, not difficult. If your class has good utilities for missile reflect/durable blocks, you can sleep your way through most of HoT and get some of the worst mobs to kill themselves on your missile reflects. But if you don't build for mobility, hp/sustain and as much DPS as you can shove in...you're gonna have a bad time. There's only one correct way to build for soloing around HoT maps, and unlike the problem with vanilla's Zerker meta wherein which you were rewarded for quick kills and maximum mob tagging by sacrificing everthing for more dps and more aoe, HoT rewards no build strategy except what I've been talking about at all. Your reward in HoT for building and gearing for high dps, mobility and hp/sustain is that you turn challenge into tedium. You don't get a positive reward for it. You arguably don't get rewarded at all because building right for HoT trivializes most of it and renders even the cheesed-up challenge to be nothing more than irritation of having to deal with this boring drek on your way to whatever it was you actually wanted to do. Positive rewards are for zergs. Some of the most rewarding content in this entire game are AB and LS4 metas...whiiiiich are done in big zergy lightballs. Zerg to win has been a cornerstone of this game since day 1. I'm not even against it - there's no barrier to entry, even a total doofus can get in on that and contribute something and at the end, everyone gets their inventory full of whacky junk and we all feel chuffed because who doesn't like sorting their loot and making a few more G? HoT requires three zergs to coordinate a little bit. That's challenging for random 'We might as well give it a try since its happening' groups, but no challenge at all for anyone coordinating things. So where exactly is the challenge of HoT that we all supposedly want more of, because I just don't see it. What I do see are annoying mobs that hit too hard with multi-attacks, AoE fields the size of small nations, DoTs that are treated like special effects that you can't cleanse with your cleansing powers and knockdown spam. Conditions you can't cleanse and knockdown spam are especially obnoxious because those specifically target counterplay options and throw them in the dumpster - you can't do anything about them no matter how you gear, build or play. They remove player agency and negate what little purpose there is in building a character for the content, because you're just going to get uncleansable dots and chained knockdowns spammed on you by various mobs anyway, and the only counterplay option you have? Roll around in a zerg. It's all trivialized to the point of virtual non-existence in a zerg. That's supposed to be fun challenge? I don't agree. And I, at least, don't want more of that.

I really don't like the axiomatic agenda of this. It draws what I think is an unnecessary line in the sand between 'Casuals' and...everyone else? What exactly is a casual anyway? Nobody's going to agree on a definition for this term, and the very act of trying to bisect the issue and then declare one arbitrary side to be of greater importance automatically throws the whole discussion - everyone's going to want to think of themselves as a casual because who, precisely, is going to want to identify and categorize themselves as being of lesser importance? And since we're all pretty much free to make up what 'casual' does and doesn't mean, the discussion was over pretty much before it even began. No. I think the better mindset to have is to understand that player experience is the most important thing no matter the individual's colloquially labeled playstyle. The quality of a player's experience with the game will directly impact retention, evangelizing and representation through extraneous mediums such as fan art, guides, content discussion videos, etcetera. It is completely counterintuitive and self-destructive to just draw some line in the sand and say one side is better because of reasons we'll never actually be able to meaningfully define let alone statistically determine. Every player is important because every player is both a potential paying customer, and money is blood in the body of any business, but also because every player is a potential spokesperson representing the game far and wide throughout their own social networks. From a god's-eye view, it seems easy to recognize which players fall into which demographics. Those players that seldom to never raid, do fractals or even dungeons might look definitively casual, and the hardcore raiders that religiously do their fractal dailies and then spend numerous hours a day in WvW or PvP might look definitively hardcore, but those assumptions can be and often are incorrect because they're conclusions drawn from woefully incomplete data. Sme people that seldom to never raid, do fractals or dungeons are hardcore farmers of events and harvesting nodes. They might have spreadsheets and exhaustively explored efficiency routes for farming and 37 alts they'll cycle through on nine different maps. Do you want to be the one to tell a person like that that their effort is objectively less valuable because they're not raiding or fractaling? What about the people that do just about nothing but pvp? They don't even interact with most of the game or most of the players in the game. They might not even contribute hardly anything to the game's economy because they're on no gear treadmills in pvp and there's no essential reason for them to bother with anything else if pvp is all they want to do. Are they casual or not? Who gets to say? What other categories other than 'casual' even are there? How do we define those in sufficiently distinctive contrast to justify their having a category of their own? Everyone that plays the game is important. Every game mode the devs make available at least should be regarded as being of equal importance to all others. And it should always be remembered that words like 'casual' are just shy of being meaningless in too many ways for them to be used as solid reference terms for much of anything.

I think this is the rockstar solution that would require minimal labor cost to actualize. Five thumbs up. Don't ask where I got the extra thumbs. Nobody's day will be improved for knowing such things.

I think HoT's maps are great and that the mobs are cheesey as all get-out. Too difficult? Only to tolerate the tedium and frequently ridiculous AoE/multi-hit attack varieties. It's very difficult to tolerate.

Sorry, but unrestricted flying mounts would invalidate all other mounts. Why use anything else if you can just fly wherever you want? The skyscale is actually a pretty elegant solution to that problem as it goes about as far as you can without crossing that line. I find I still use most of my other mounts (I admit the springer is pretty neglected since unlocking skyscale). Also, don't judge the skyscale based on that rent-a-scale. I hated that thing and didn't see the point in unlocking the skyscale as a result (dragged my feet for months on that!). But the real deal with cliff jumping is easy to use and lets you do things you simply can't do with any combination of the other mounts. It's a great mount that leaves room to use your other mounts! So...my opinion is invalid and how I feel is somehow wrong, and also invalid. Got it.

They put those black lion statuettes in there on purpose, and it wasn't because they're just that magnanimous. Now they've got the legal defense that you're buying keys to open chests to get black lion statuettes. Everything else is just random rewards they're giving you for free, but what you're actually buying isn't technically gambling at all now. You're buying black lion statuettes. Ain't that slick?

I'm still plinking away at it, but I feel almost zero motivation to get there. It isn't a true flying mount, and I don't need it for anything...at all. It would make life easier when I'm chasing DF pre and meta zergs around, but...not gonna lie; I keep up just fine anyway, and I don't really care otherwise. Skyscale is just another almost-but-not-quite-actually-flying mount. My enthusiasm, and my concern to work hard and focus like I'm crafting another legendary, will be held in reserve for if/when we ever get the chance to get a real flying mount. And if we never do, I'll probably get the skyscale someday. I do pick at it here and there when I go 'meh, lets poke this a little bit' right up until I go 'well this is boring, time to go do something fun'. Worst mistake Anet made on selling me on the skyscale was letting me preview it by flying the borrowed ones. People tell me the one you can get is a bit better, but honestly, I still don't care. It doesn't really fly in anything but the most resource-restricted of fashions, and I don't really care about hovering. I got the griffon. The griffon is all the fake flying mount I had enthusiasm for. I've got none left for the other fake flying mount.

Eh. It's fine. I suspect it's gonna be very useful to have underwater mount speed to get around in Cantha during the next expansion, so I'm definitely not sorry I got it. Did it wow me? No. Thrill me? No. Was I hugely and morbidly entertained by the catastrophe of its launch? Yes. Its fine. I haven't gotten a single bit of real use out of it yet, but again...probably will in the upcoming expansion. Probably a lot of use if the Jade Sea is watery again and we have to run around doing seven hundred collections of waterbug farts so we can unlock the collection for Underwater Basket Weaving that, when completed, will unlock the collection for Standing Around In 20 Places Throughout Tyria For 20 Hours Each that will, when completed, give us strap 1 of 4 for the left stirrup of the Better Dragon mount that will actually fly. You'll really be sorry you don't have underwater skimmering when you're trying to do the collections for stirrup strap 1 of 4!

You're simply wrong. Using arcdps gives players their own metric for determining performance. I don't have to wonder whether I performed well or not. I can see the numbers and compare that to my usual performance in the same encounter. I can then change my build and use that same frame of reference for whether or not it's working. How is that not helpful for understanding builds and synergies? You're coming into the use of this tool with a great deal of foreknowledge about how your stats, skills and traitline synergies work however. Where did you acquire that knowledge? You, like the rest of us with a high level of knowledge about such things, have probably spent hundreds of hours out of the game watching videos, reading guides, participating in theorycrafting discussions and trying out countless build arrays, and possibly spending/wasting hundreds of gold on, different gear sets to try to figure out what works, what looks like it should on paper but actually doesn't, what looks like it shouldn't on paper but weirdly does and so on. ARCdps is a valuable tool for the exact purpose I specified: experts refining and polishing builds. Anyone with an expert level of knowledge and understanding of how this game's systems work doesn't need ARCdps for jack diddly squat though. You'll be able to put a build together and feel out whether or not its putting out the DPS it should or if its not quite there a lot of the time through sheer, overwhelming experience with what it SHOULD feel like. Having the data is how you go from 35k to 36.5k and work out how to pick up the improvements you couldn't feel. ARCdps won't help you understand the game better though. ARCdps isn't even a tool the game itself references or provides. You won't even hear about it except from other players, and you have to go to third party sites and download it from third party servers to even get ahold of it. The raiding guild I'm in does a lot of training and teaching. The officers try super hard to reach out to people, to get more people into doing ANYTHING more advanced than 'run around core Tyria spamming 1 and dodging only by accident'. They're great people and we all make great use of ARCdps. It's tough to get new players to even download it about half the time. Most common complaint I've seen thus far is that they don't trust Github for whatever usually not-reasonable reason they have, but why should they HAVE to trust Github to play GW2 better? Why in all creation should ANY player have to go outside of the game to find the tools and resources that will enable them to play the game effectively? Why is the game not providing these tools and resources internally and with all the power and integration only the devs could ever hope to provide? Again, wrong. A new player isn't going to do 40k on a golem benchmark whether they use arcdps or not. But that doesn't mean that arcdps isn't useful to them. They will still be able to observe how changes to their build and strategy impact their performance. Further, the ability to see the breakdown for each skill allows them to easily tell where their damage is coming from. They don't necessarily need to have a deep understanding of the game's mechanics to tell that if 60% of their damage comes from burning, a trait/skill/etc. that improves burn damage would probably be helpful, for instance. I'm not sure if you're deliberately being obtuse because it's too painful to admit that I've got a valid point or if you're legitimately incapable of reading, because you're not only addressing what I'm saying, but you're completely failing to acknowledge that nobody comes into this game knowing what the stats, traits and synergies are, mean or how they work at all. And there's nothing in the game that teaches players these things. You're clearly not new, and it seems to me that your problem is that you've known how these things work for so long that you're like a fish in the water; you're not even aware of the water anymore. You've taken it for granted that these things are 'just known' to you. So, I'll ask again; where in the game can I go to learn about Power coefficients as they relate to damage dealt against an armored target? Where IN. THE. GAME. can I go to be taught, by the game, how to build my class more effectively for any of the roles that might be expected of me in advanced content? Until ARCdps can make build suggestions and critique your damage log, its a tool that is most useful to the people that need it the least. The people that need help the most...well, it can't help them very much at all. How, after all, are they supposed to make any kind of informed or useful build choices when nothing in the game tells them anything about...anything, really? I don't know about you, but when I talk to someone that's got their stats all over the place and they really just don't understand why it was a terrible plan for them to try to run around having 2 pieces of Soldier, 2 pieces of Nomad and 2 pieces of Cleric gear with 2 Berserker weapons while running traits in traitlines that don't synergize what so ever with themselves OR the stats/weapons they've got, I don't get angry or frustrated with the player. Why? Because the game doesn't teach anyone anything. Their only 'crime' is that they didn't spend tens or hundreds of hours doing freaking homework like GW2 was supposed to be a job or a college course. They don't understand anything because the game taught them nothing. And so there we are once again, explaining to someone that might've been here for months or even years that no, it isn't actually smart to try to have a little bit of Power and Condition Damage and Healing and Toughness because there is no such thing as 'good at everything, great at nothing' build that isn't utter garbage at everything except perhaps for WvW zerging or attrition weavers, and then you're running Celestial on specific builds which is another discussion entirely. I get mad at Anet because they fail completely, in every way possible, to enable players to excel at their game. It's not that they don't do enough; they don't do -anything-. They leave it all up to Joe Random Playerbase. Well, here we are, eight years deep into exploring that hypothesis. How are you liking all the compelling group content? Liking the new raids? All the new fractals suiting you? Oh. Wait. There's so little demand for that content that the fact we're getting a new fractal for the first time in forever is shocking and almost like the annual glance from Anet to see if demand for that kind of thing has somehow magically appeared in the field they refuse to do anything to tend. Maybe if they taught players how to play, players would be better at playing and, thus, there would be more players ...I dunno, maybe this is crazy...playing? You know, the advanced content? Insane, right? How do I even go from 'Teach players to play' to 'Players will play more content'? It's like I'm on drugs or something probably. ARCdps doesn't teach anyone how to play well. It doesn't teach people how to understand builds and synergies better, or at all. It can be used by those with the knowledge to make use of the data provided to guage the success of a build and rotations to make changes that will improve their performance, but without that knowledge, it's not useful to people that don't understand what the numbers mean or what affects them or how they are derived. It does you no good at all to see that 60% of your damage came from Burning if you don't even know what in your build, gear and rotations can help you do more burning damage, or to understand that your total damage is trash and that 60% of your trash damage being from burning is stupid because everything you picked for traits and utilities is all over the map and you're not actually using the right weapons for a condi build anyway. If you can't figure out that having the information provided by arcdps is useful for improvement to absolutely any player who cares to utilize the information, I don't know what to tell you. Your argument is completely ridiculous all over. Also, what is the premise here? Only experts who already know everything and absolute beginners who have no frame of reference for the information provided by arcdps exist? Nobody inbetween that could use this? What are you even talking about, man? Of course everything I'm saying went whoosh. I should've expected it to. Enjoy your persistent lack of compelling group content and perpetual confusion about why more people don't care about it or want to get into it, I guess. I'm sorry. If your rather extensive thesis ranged beyond the discussion of arcdps, I wasn't paying attention. Having said that, I do agree that group content in this game is not particularly compelling, which is why I am mostly a solo open world/PvE player with forays into PvP and WvW roaming. Raids/strikes/fractals have never been a particular focus of mine. If it is your position that the game should have a dps meter built-in then again, I agree in principle. However, like I said, I don't trust ANet after what they did with build templates and I'd rather things stay just the way they are. Also, FWIW, I develop builds that make open world play easier for players to get into. With or without a dps meter, players require time to learn. Time they likely won't have to practice if they're dying so quickly and so frequently that they don't have time to learn anything! You do have to enjoy the gameplay first in order to truly learn and appreciate its depth, after all. I'm not a developer. I do what I can.I agree with everything you just said, where agreement is pertinent. I'm certainly not blaming you for the disturbing disparity of skill level between 'higher-end players' and pretty much everyone else. I'm blaming Anet for that, because they left it in the hands of the playerbase to discover it all, pass it all along and teach others. The problem with their intention, noble as it was, is that I think they dramatically failed to account for how players tend not to trust other players in the MMO space. GW2 has a great community at the higher end of gameplay. It's one of the very few MMO's in which the raid, pvp and wvw communities don't seem (at least to me, others' mileage may vary) to be particularly toxic and mean-spirited. I know quite a few hardcore 'do-everything' people and they're some of the most helpful, friendly and generally chill people I've ever known in any MMO. I see ARCdps as exactly the kind of thing Anet should be providing, and not only that, but a whole lot more. Can't fault you for your mistrust based on what you referenced. The implementation of build templates...yeah, I don't get it either. Maybe its the optimist in me, but I've always assumed they were somehow critically limited by the engine in some way on that. Great case for updating the engine if that's true, but I don't know a thing and maybe it was implemented badly because they just phoned it in, had an intern slap it together and don't really care. People like WoodenPotatoes, Kyosika and Cellofrag that have gone to tremendous lengths to build and support the community have done all they can too, and so have a lot of others. Players can never make up for what the devs don't do in a lot of ways though, and when it comes to getting into the high-end content on here, there are guilds that try really hard to make raid training fun and friendly. I'm in such a guild, and they tie themselves in knots trying to make sure nobody belittles or verbally abuses anyone, whether they're struggling to understand or panicking because too much is going on or not understanding something or just being dense. Its still not enough. ARCdps is great. There's nothing wrong with it, except for that it shouldn't have to exist in this way. Anet should be providing that kind of tool. And a lot of other tools. And training tutorials. And guides for explaining how even basic stat/trait building for the common roles goes. I'm not being critical of ARCdps. Its the best thing it can be, and its creators deserve nothing but praise for doing what they can to support the performance-seeking members of the community. It just shouldn't have to even exist and Anet should be ashamed of itself for making us rely on a data tool and the sporadic good will of other players to perform tolerably, nevermind well, in their game.