Morrolan
4721
They were clearly being at best disingenuous on this point given that being able to outfit even in base exotic gear requires grinding.
Cal
4722
I have 1 x friend pass if anyone wants to try GW2? Lets you try friday to monday i think. PM me your email if you want it.
LockerK
4723
Disagree on this point, unless you’re extremely liberal in your definition of what’s considered grinding. I’m excited for the new content, but at the same time disappointed that there’s a new, higher power level of gear available less than 3 months after launch when they said they weren’t going to make a gear grind.
252,000 karma for an Orr temple set is a grind, the number of ectos required for a full exotic set of crafted armor plus exotic jewelry is a grind even with magic find gear and food.
KevinC
4725
No ecto grind is necessary, they’re pretty dang cheap on the trading post. You get money from basically everything you do (dynamic events, WvW, selling loot) so the only way that’s really a “grind” is if you don’t enjoy the game.
Contrai
4726
The update sounds great for the most part. I’m a bit worried like some of the other people here, about them introducing higher level gear. One of the reasons I liked the original GW and why I’m happy with GW2, is that they weren’t going to be going the power creep way of most other mmorpgs. Hopefully, this is just a one-time thing, and they don’t keep introducing new tiers of weapons and gear that are more powerful (stat-wise) than the previous ones.
Phred
4727
Don’t worry though. If you already have a legendary it will get automatically upgraded to match any tier they add down the road.
Maybe it depends on your definition of grinding. I don’t think I’ve been grinding at all in this game (I haven’t done Plinx, for example, except for the first time when I saw it or haven’t ground the dungeons or mobs for mats, haven’t been doing Ori runs or spending hours on TP flipping stuff) and my alt is almost in all exotics. Missing a ring and two earrings. What used to be my main is in half exotics as well but I dumped him about 3 or 4 weeks ago.
I don’t think being able to outfit in exotics requires grinding, you can get them just by playing the game. There are a lot of different ways to get exotics and combined they allow to get a full set pretty fast. Not immediately as you ding 80 but pretty fast and without mind numbling grinding.
Now, if you want some specific set(s), most likely for looks, that’s going to take some grinding.
If they don’t introduce newer and better gear, it hard caps the game’s longevity.
252,000 karma is required only if you want that specific FULL set for looks. If you are concerned with stats only (and that’s where they’ve stated there will be no grind), you could get a couple of pieces for karma, a couple from various dungeons, a couple from crafting, buy some from Vigil (or the faction of your choice, not much stat variety within a faction though), get some pieces for WvW badges, get some pieces from map completion (the ones from the 3 top zones are lvl 78 but the difference with lvl 80 is pretty negligible), etc.
Even if you look at karma gear only. They’ve introduced karma bottles some time in October, when I was in the middle of leveling up my alt. After completing my October monthly and a bunch of dailies (maybe every other day), I have a bit over 20 of them. One can get up to 7500 karma from them with karma buffs but let’s say 5000. So the moment my alt dinged lvl 80, I could get over 100,000 karma from bottles and I had about 70,000 from just leveling. Which allows me to get 4 out of 6 exotic armor pieces without grinding for even a minute. Or even a full set if I used one of the 2 karma boosters I’ve looted while leveling up.
As for ectos, not only they are relatively cheap (they’ve got more expensive lately though, bye bots), not only you could buy rares and break them for ectos (which makes them even cheaper) but you could also simply play the game and loot rares. Do any dungeon, you’ll get 1-3 rare items you can break (and if it was an explorable dungeon, you also get tokens, so you can get your exotics even faster). Or explore the world. If you put together a magic find set (yellow or green will do just fine) and eat some cheap magic find food, you’ll get even more stuff.
No one ever promised to mail you full exotic set as soon as you ding lvl 80. But with a bit of research and by simply playing the game, you can get some exotics right when you ding 80 and then get the rest a few days later by simply playing the game and doing things that you enjoy.
Unless “doing things that you enjoy” is grinding by your definition, for course. :)
A mandatory response would be “GW1 was doing just fine for almost 8 years without gear progression”. I wasn’t playing GW1 that much, so I don’t really know.
IMO gear progression is not required (other than for the die hard Diablo audience but there should be enough customers outside of that group) - a lot of people will gladly play your game for content progression, looks, different stat sets, new skills, runes, sigils, pets, whatever. The question is how many, hehe.
And certainly, it’s much easier and cheaper to introduce gear progression and the associated gear-based content progression, worked for WoW for years. You’ll lose some customers and you will retain/gain some.
It would be interesting to see whether the first way is feasible because we’ve seen the second option taken by gazillion of other MMOs. I hope ANet sticks to their (original) guns but we’ll see.
LockerK
4732
Their current set-up seemed acceptable to me. Keep gear on the same power level, and make the grind completely cosmetic. Introduce new skins over time and you keep the grind alive for those who want it. Play the trading post, convert gold to cash shop currency, and buy the skins/minis/whatever from there.
Guild Wars 1 survived just fine without gear creep, though the argument could be made that the new skills introduced with the expansions are on the same level as new pieces of gear (and this type of growth is still on the table). I do think they gimped an enjoyable aspect of the game by tying half of a character’s skills to the weapon, but I recognize that’s the only way my main class (engineer) can even exist in its current form relying on kits and packs.
Also, you say this like it’s a bad thing. You’re thinking with a subscription-based mindset. There is little to no incentive to keep people playing for the sake of playing if they aren’t using the cash shop. Mini-events every month or three, and an expansion every year or two to get them to spend more money is perfectly fine if there’s no sub fee and more players only means more server costs.
They can still work around the weapon-based skill limitation by introducing new weapons or new skill sets for existing weapons or all kinds of “weapon modifier” unlocks (similar to engineers but not limited to utility skills), etc. A weapon could, for example, have 5 “infusion” slots, each of them modifying its corresponding skill. Or have 1 slot modifying the entire set. Sky is the limit, still. :)
Also, you say this like it’s a bad thing. You’re thinking with a subscription-based mindset. There is little to no incentive to keep people playing for the sake of playing if they aren’t using the cash shop. Mini-events every month or three, and an expansion every year or two to get them to spend more money is perfectly fine if there’s no sub fee and more players only means more server costs.
I don’t think more players only means more server costs even for a non-sub game. Players are the blood of an MMO, without people to play with, there will be no wvw, no dungeons, no DEs and therefore no cash shop, no audience for expansions or monthly events, no game basically.
Every MMO has to retain its players, they can’t just think “it’s ok we have only 20K people playing our game now, we’ll just sell 2M copies of the new expansion next year and make lots of money” because if the main game is dead there will be no selling 2M expansions.
LockerK
4734
Very true, and I shouldn’t have been so absolute in my wording. Ideally, I think you still want a different type of player than you do in a “traditional” sub-based MMO, and I think that the grind doesn’t need to be as massive or obvious since your main source of revenue isn’t tied to getting another month’s worth of fees.
KevinC
4735
Those are my thoughts as well, adding new weapons or weapon modifiers as well as sets of new Utility/Elite skills would be great content for expansions. I’d also love to see some Minor trait options to unlock as well as additional Major traits for each line. The new levels never excite me in a MMO expansion but the thought of new abilities/spells/talents/whatever does. I didn’t play GW1 but it looks like they kept adding new skills (and classes) and I hope that continues with GW2.
Other than that, the one area of the game I would like to see improved is WvW. The maps are so incredibly small, I don’t think their design works very well at the moment. They feel more like playgrounds than battlegrounds and there’s no true feeling of supply lines, given that you can rush from a tower/keep to the nearest supply camp in 30-60 seconds. The player cap is far, far too high for how tiny the maps are.
Seneca
4736
Looking forward to Anet putting out some detailed information on where they see WvW headed.
Not sure how this new Ascended equipment fits into the WvW framework. Does Anet intend Ascended gear to be PvE only? Will there be some other minor upgrade equipment path via WvW? Some WvW players are willing to chase the progression path through PvE content for a minor stat boost in WvW, while others are calling for the gear to be available via badges.
Bah, they always pick the weekends that I have to work for this try-it-free crap. For anyone not slaving in the salt mines this weekend, it looks like every existing subscriber can invite up to 3 people. Probably plenty of folks in this thread who can provide invites.
“The maps are so incredibly small” is certainly a complaint I don’t see much, I’d say it’s opposite - people usually complain that it takes long time to get somewhere in WvW.
But thinking about it, I would probably agree. Not only the map is too small (remember how much of each of the borderland is sealed off), there is not much to do really, especially for a small-ish sized groups.
Their PvE aspect of WvW seems to have bombed - no one is bothering with the weather stuff and the NPC “recruitment” as they are pretty much irrelevant.
Capping supply camps with a small group is certainly fun but this kind of activity is not in the right place on the reward vs. risk scale, plus there is not that many camps available and some of them will have that stupid invulnerability buff that prevents small groups from capturing them and promotes zerging.
I do wonder what they are planning for WvW. ANet seems to be on top of their game (or at least working on it) in many areas but I don’t hear much about WvW. I hope there will be something in their big Nov 15th patch and more stuff in works for later months.
Well, the Wiki says 8 but whatever.
Burrows event in AC exp 1 would be impossible.
I guess you mean the part where you have to defend an NPC and random burrower nests appear? I was in a group where we killed one nest always before the next appeared. So by damage/hp scaling, this is definitely doable.
Reldan
4740
Zeitgeist, I don’t think anyone is making the argument that what you’re asking for is absolutely impossible (although some elements would need substantial rework and not just a numbers tweak). Just that it’d require more resources to do properly than the benefit most players would get out of it. Also most dungeons assume a team capable of using the Rally system, which is a huge difference in terms of balancing between what’s a feasible challenge for a solo player versus even a team of two. Even the idea that in a worst case scenario a defeated player can graveyard run back as long as the other player(s) keep the encounter from resetting - that works completely differently in a solo design.
It’s like Sonic the Hedgehog. The game throws some rough shit at you but gives you access to those rings and lets you potentially grab rings back if you stay on the ball whenever you get hit. You could make the game more difficult if you decreased the number of rings or increased the number of enemies. But you’d be playing an entirely different game altogether if you completely removed the rings - it would need a substantially different design in how it presented challenges that went beyond some minor tweaks.
That said, on my nice-to-have list I wouldn’t mind if they wanted to reuse the existing dungeon layouts and add in additional explorable modes. And if they at some point wanted to add some 2-man versions I’d consider that a pretty cool thing, but I don’t want to just have that be some dumbed down version of the existing runs - I’d like it to be something designed specifically to challenge two people working in tandem. There’s some cool shit in terms of coordination that you can challenge two people with that would be extremely frustrating mechanically to present to a group of five, and I’d like to see the mode feel like it kept this in mind.
