6481

The original Guild Wars solved this problem by making the damage meter into an NPC.

6482

I haven’t played GW2 for a long time, but as I recall, endgame dungeon optimization consisted of three rules:

  • Only bring the best classes (warriors were tops, rangers were the worst)
  • Everyone gears and specs complete glass-cannon. All berserker gear in every slot
  • Skip most of the mobs and rush bosses

I grew to dislike the PvE there enough to stop doing it altogether. The WvWvW was pretty good, though :)

6483

What oghier said. This is what the dungeons came down to without a friendly group – be a Mesmer, Warrior or Guardian. Spec Berserker. Someone here mentioned that thieves and elementalists are now allowed as well. My main classes: Necromancer and Ranger.

6484

I was helping a friend of mine yesterday who bought the game during the sale and just started playing. I have to say that I think they completely fucked up the early game experience for new players. Everything’s gated to a ridiculous extent. At the end of the evening, my friend was, I think, lvl 10 or 11 and wasn’t event allowed to activate Skill Point Challenges yet (despite them being all around the newbie zone).

Combined with the greatly delayed character customization, I’m going to have a really hard time convincing my friends to stay until they’ve gotten passed the early game that’s so incredibly boring now. Honestly, what were they thinking? It’s not like the early game in GW2 was ever super difficult or complicated.

6485

Had a good time running some WvW last night with Charmtrap. Starting to collect some gear pieces.

Also, there are levels in WvW! I gained 6 of them! Wee!

6486

EFlannum posted earlier in this thread that it was done because GW2 was just so gosh darn complicated and confusing for people, so they restricted and gated everything. I don’t doubt that they had data and focus groups to back this up, but that type of shit drives me up the wall. I don’t blame your friends for not wanting to stick it through.

6487

Gonna guess it was more driven by customer complaints, questions, and data modeling collected by CSRs and in-game GMs over the course of the first year and based on tickets.

6488

I agree. In my early morning grumpiness, I just kinda lumped all that into “data”!

I don’t doubt that they had reasons to make the change, but… well, it’s the same situation that all game developers face, I’m sure; you can’t please everyone. One of my pet peeves with a lot of the big industry games is… I’m trying to word this in a way so that I don’t sound like a condescending prick, because that’s not what I’m trying to be… my pet peeve is when game design caters so much to the “lets not confuse people” crowd that it is a huge turn-off to me, where I like to experiment and have a lot of options and things to think about and play with. I know where Shang’s friends are coming from because I’ve been there dozens of times. It can be quite frustrating!

In any case, I’m getting my caffeine infusion now so I’ll likely be less grumpy and a little more coherent going forward. :)

6489

What gets me is that, at least originally, elementalist attunements were gated. (I’m not sure if they still are.) That’s not okay—an elementalist without access to multiple attunements is like a weapon-swap class only getting a main-hand weapon.

That said, some of my friends just started the game, and they don’t seem to have any complaints about the gating, as far as I can tell.

6490

Weapon swaps are gated.

And elementalists start with two attunements (fire and water), the others are gated to roughly the same level as weapon swaps.

6491

I started playing in November after all of the low level stuff was changed. I had no problems with it. There’s so much to see and learn in this game that by the time I even realized something was gated I was already past the gate. Almost all of the complaints I’ve seen about the new system are from veteran players trying to convince me I should have been mad about something that I barely even noticed happening.

Now, even though I’ve only been playing for a few months I already have enough Tomes of Knowledge to blast a new alt right past all of the weapon and skill unlocking. So I’m not sure what the problem is. Especially for the guys who have been around since the beginning. Don’t they give you a couple of boosts to 20 on top of the tomes from daily logins? Plus you could just craft your way past the first 15 levels for a bit of gold.

6492

I’m sorry I don’t have a link at the moment, but just listened to an interview with Colin Johanson where a few things were confirmed (it was news to me anyway). This was on Youtube, Game Breaker TV.

-Each profession will have one specialization (such as Ranger->Druid)
-Specialization can be swapped back with your original class at-will, as long as you’re out of combat, similar to talents.
-Mastery stuff, outside of hang-gliding, is not restricted to the jungle. They want the mastery stuff to be across the whole game, but can’t back-port hang gliding without redesigning all the maps.

6493

I assumed all the mastery stuff would be restricted to Maguuma Jungle because hang-gliding seemed like it would never work outside of that space. Cool to hear that some of it will be useful outside of the new area.

6494

That seems strange to me. If that’s the case, why wouldn’t everyone just move to the specialization? Maybe the specialization will take a lot of work to get to, or it provides a completely different set of abilities (as opposed to a superset, which I originally assumed). I had really expected each class to have two specializations, so you could choose between them.

That makes sense. Blizzard had to do that with Cataclysm, because they couldn’t introduce flying until they revamped all the architecture. A lot of areas were set up like Disneyland, where buildings had facades that looked good from the ground, but were just shells when seen from above.

6495

In the case of Guild Wars 2, making hang-gliding available everywhere would arguably be even trickier, because there are jump puzzles with rewards everywhere (such as vistas, chests, etc). Hang-gliding would arguably make jump puzzles obsolete, and I doubt Anet wants that.

6496

My understanding, which clearly could be very wrong, is that the specialization replaces the abilities of the base class. I don’t think they’re interested in adding more abilities to your hotbar beyond the 10 we have (plus 1-4 based on class mechanics).

6497

What Colin said at the event was:

  • The specialization adds new healing, utility and elite skills (not more buttons beyond 1-10, just new choices of what you can put in slots 6-10)
  • The specialization will change class mechanics (The F keys)

In interviews after the event he did mention that the specialization will still have “a lot of” the abilities that belong to the base class, but not all. So it is not a superset. Also with the class mechanics changing I think there are going to be reasons you want to at least sometimes play as the base class. We also know for sure that one trait line for each class will be replaced with a trait line specific to the specialization (presumably it would be the fifth trait line for each class since that is the one that focuses on the class mechanics).

Specializations seem to be tied to the new weapons, so I’ll be interested to see if you can only use the new weapon with that spec. Does this mean Druids can only use a staff with no weapon swap ability? Or can a Druid use a staff plus one of the other normal Ranger weapons? Does a Druid even have to use a staff at all? Like would Greatsword/Longbow Druid be a possibility?

I’d also like to know the level restriction for specialization. Is it just for level 80s (like most of the expansion content seems to be) or might you pick it up a little earlier? I know they don’t like dumping too much complexity on new players but I could see this reasonably being unlocked by level 60, maybe even level 50.

Specializations can be switched on and off outside of combat, just like traits and skills and equipment. Hopefully this is when they implement a gear/build switching mechanic. Let me save my current state of equpiment/gear/skill/traits/dyes and give it a title and save as many of them as I want. Then make it a UI element so I don’t have to dig through the hero tab every time I want to switch. Oh man, that would be the stuff.

6498

One of the cool things about Guild Wars 2 is that there are levels in everything. Exploration, areas way under your level, crafting, PvP, WvW, dungeons, you name it.

-Tom

6499

While I’m sure that’s their intent, I’m still skeptical. For instance, they were selling the masteries as having a combat aspect that you’ll need to defeat the monsters in the new area, because those new monsters will have new capabilities. But assuming they’re setting up some sort of new elements to combat, how is this going to be useful in the wider world, against monsters that don’t use whatever new capabilities they’re talking about? And this idea of needing to spend mastery points to read lore? How will that relate to the game’s current content? Are they going to sprinkle new lore into old areas?

I’m just skeptical that this new mastery system will be of much value outside the new area. But I’d love to be wrong.

-Tom

6500

So let me get this straight: Guild Wars 2 gives you daily bonuses just for logging in with your character, with those bonuses increasing in value over the course of 28 days; they provide daily quests that give an incentive for people to spend time questing in lower-level areas and do group quests; the daily quests also provide their own rewards which magnify the effects of whatever you’re doing (so for example, you get extra XP from completing events, or extra mining supplies for completing the mining daily); and there is a separate reward for completing all of the daily quests each day.

Does that about cover it? Because to the untrained eye, it sounds like they’re just increasing the chances you’ll play with others, and encouraging you to discover things you might not have seen before. Oh, and they’re throwing items and money and XP at you for doing it. So what’s the catch?