130 replies to this topic

[Crosius]

But who knows how it'll turn out. They'll need to do some MAJOR rebalancing of traits if this is to work out - because right now I can only try to fathom having 3 grandmaster traits under my belt. I'm hoping that the QA session tomorrow will reveal a bit more behind their intentions.

I'm done slouching over my tiny laptop screen in a dining hall, you guys mull it all over some more while I eat and prepare to go home.

[Slein Jinn]

Silvernis, on 23 April 2015 - 02:45 PM, said:

In a more positive light, I for one am not opposed to thoroughly shaking up the current meta. (Not that I've ever put much stock in meta, but still.)

I enjoy playing GW2.  If I wanted to play a brand new MMO, I'd play a brand new MMO.

[Silvernis]

Slein Jinn, on 23 April 2015 - 03:36 PM, said:

I enjoy playing GW2.  If I wanted to play a brand new MMO, I'd play a brand new MMO.

Fair enough.

[Crosius]

Slein Jinn, on 23 April 2015 - 03:36 PM, said:

I enjoy playing GW2.  If I wanted to play a brand new MMO, I'd play a brand new MMO.

I think that's Anet's principle challenge right now - they're expected to bring about a TON of change by one group of people, and are expected to keep things in control by another. It'll be very hard for them to please the masses with these kinds of changes - they introduce a TON of change with this new system, but they could end up desecrating something that was already beautifully done as is. I'm not saying their PvP and balance is flawless, but right now I feel like they just took everything I knew and put it in a blender.

Next episode: Guild Wars 2 - Will it Blend?


I'm sure that the initial stages of the expansion will feel that way too. It'll be a storming tornado of imbalance, as the new changes all contact the metal blades at once - devs screaming in agony. Then silence.

[Sorrows]

Thanks for posting Jot.


I was at work till now. Take your child to work day today and my division hosts a pinewood derby race for kids/adults. Engineers take it serious. I have not read through everything yet, so I look forward to it.

[thetoothpick]

Crosius, on 23 April 2015 - 03:16 PM, said:

This sounds a little too much like "select from" than actually USE 9 major traits... For the sake of build power creep, much like Slein has already warned us; I hope Anet just  had a poor choice of words.

Sounded pretty clear to me.  If it was the same, they wouldn't have made a point about it being different.

[thetoothpick]

Slein Jinn, on 23 April 2015 - 03:36 PM, said:

I enjoy playing GW2.  If I wanted to play a brand new MMO, I'd play a brand new MMO.

To be fair, it seems like the mechanics and (most of the) skills will be the same, they're just shaking up the balance.  It'll definitely be different, but I wouldn't say it'll be an entirely new game.

[Grav]

I'm OK with everything except this:

Jot, on 23 April 2015 - 09:27 AM, said:

Old skill points in excess of those earned by leveling and skill challenges will be converted into crafting materials for the Mystic Forge (all these scrolls...)

They should give us a selection of things to choose from when converting them.  I'd take some dungeon tokens please, because I want a legendary but fuck dungeons.

[Aduah]

Silvernis, on 23 April 2015 - 02:45 PM, said:

Some of my chars have points spread across more than three lines, and some of them have multiple traits from one tier because reasons.

This.

I run my Engi 6/2/0/4/2, I run 1 Adept trait and 2 master traits in explosives. No grand master trait is worth it to me.  I dont trait for any of the extra stats, but they are nice. I like the extra Vitality, but if they are just increasing the stats on weapons and armour, I'm losing that because none of weapons and armour have extra vitality. If I wanna switch a piece of Armour to compensate, I'm just losing more of something else.

[Khalamity]

thetoothpick, on 23 April 2015 - 06:10 PM, said:

To be fair,

Fair Winds would start his posts off this way


I'll judge the new system when it comes out. If the new balance of the game is still fun to play then it makes no difference to me.

[Silvernis]

Aduah, on 23 April 2015 - 10:06 PM, said:

I like the extra Vitality, but if they are just increasing the stats on weapons and armour, I'm losing that because none of weapons and armour have extra vitality. If I wanna switch a piece of Armour to compensate, I'm just losing more of something else.

Yeah, this is kinda bugging me. The extra stats from traits might not be totally game-changing, but they do make a difference. My normal engie build gets +20% condi duration, +8% crit rate, and +200 vit from trait stats. If they boost gear stats, my rabid set will probably still get me a comparable crit rate, but what about that duration and vit? Again, not totally game-changing, but some extra health and condi pressure are nice to have. Kinda seems like "mixed" builds might be getting slightly screwed over with this, which also kinda makes it seem like we might be losing flexibility and customization rather than increasing them.

[Biff Rangoon]

We'll just have to see how it goes. The value/logic of builds will undoubtedly change because builds are based on things that are a' changin'. In the same way, new builds will be possible that aren't possible now.

The million dollar question really comes down to will the game still be fun?

Anet seems to think it will be, and that what they've cooked up will be a better system that's easier to keep balanced too. They built a pretty decent game in the first place, so I'm personally not too worried that they're going to blow the whole thing up now. And it's not like they can't make tweaks of things that don't work well after the fact.

[Silvernis]

That is true...

[Slein Jinn]

Biff Rangoon, on 24 April 2015 - 09:54 AM, said:

They built a pretty decent game in the first place

And if it ain't broke, don't fix it.  

ANet has really invested a lot of time and money in trying to build the competitive side of GW2, and this kind of change will basically undo most of that work.  Games never have a robust competitive scene right away; they need time to "mature" before they're really competitively viable.  

MMO players bitch a lot about things being "stagnant", but that's mostly because they're fucking retarded.  If a game was ever any good competitively in the first place, then it is extremely unlikely to be genuinely stagnant even with a decade of unaltered mechanics.  There's no need for meddling developers to change a game in order for the meta to continue shifting, especially in a game as complex as GW2.  If the developers stay out of the way and let a game stabilise, then the meta will still evolve, but that evolution will be gradually propelled by an ever rising tide of player skill instead of constantly resetting players' development with changes to the game.  Scrubs like volatile games, because that volatility helps to level the playing field by curtailing the advancement of the players who are better than them.  But a competitive scene can't develop without the emergence of a substantial skill gap, thus that volatility is incompatible with competitiveness.  We can see this in action in the fact that WoW has at once both a staggeringly massive playerbase and a staggeringly pathetic competitive scene.  

Note: When I refer to "competitive play", I'm not only talking about "eSports", although that is certainly a part of it; any game that is worth playing to win is competitive, even if you're not taking part in explicitly sanctioned competitions.  Chess and go are good examples of this.

[Sanji]

What mats are we talking about GRavey?...I got like 10 stacks of 250 skill scrolls...

[Biff Rangoon]

Slein Jinn, on 24 April 2015 - 12:08 PM, said:

And if it ain't broke, don't fix it.  

Maybe so, but it's happening regardless. Worrying that they're gonna blow it is the path to the Dark Side, and there's good reason to think anet is capable and motivated to pull it off anyway.

[Slein Jinn]

Biff Rangoon, on 24 April 2015 - 03:16 PM, said:

Worrying that they're gonna blow it is the path to the Dark Side, and there's good reason to think anet is capable and motivated to pull it off anyway.

It has nothing to do with whether they "blow it".  It doesn't matter if they do an awesome job implementing every single aspect of it.  Whether done well or poorly, they're completely obliterating GW2 and replacing it with something else entirely.  I like GW2.  A lot.  I want to continue playing this awesome game, and I want to continue striving to both improve my own skills and push the meta forward in GW2.  

RIP GW2.  (If there was any remaining doubt, tune into the currently airing ReadyUp.)  Maybe "GW3" will be great, but even if it's somehow even better than GW2--which I feel like we have good reason to doubt, but we can even set that aside for now--I'd probably see it as an overall negative, because it's basically resetting the competitive community back to day one, and three years of maturation will be made irrelevant.  

Maybe they'll allow emulated private servers with vanilla GW2 like certain other MMO's have done.

[Sorrows]

http://www.reddit.co...ivestream_notes

[Gudradain]

I see that everyone is aboard the hype train and spreading the hype all around themselves. That's good

[Wicked]

When they say armor stats will be bumped, I hope they're including trinkets and weapons in that too.  Also, they could bump the stats of ascended infusions as well, but they probably won't take it that far and I'm digressing and getting greedy.  

As for condi duration, you can do quite well with 60% now, and the ranger that I have that on, only has adept traited duration, taking that away would still give me 50% (via food and focusing crystals).  But if it comes down to it, you can also get extra condi duration from weapon sigils.  I do think this is going to throw hybrid builds on their arse though, because if you don't have cele, you can fake it pretty well with a mixture of everything available now, it just takes alot of time and money to experiment, as I'm sure many of us have already done this, but you need everything available now to do it.  So if trinkets and weapons don't get a bump too, hybrid builds are screwed.  Back to the "as many of us have already done" part, many of us have experimented, on more than 1 toon, with varied builds.  We've spent loads of money to find a build that works for us, and if we encounter a situation, we know which toon is perfect for the job.  This is going to force us to rebuild, re-experiment and re-invest in toons we thought were finished and put the other toons that were almost finished or just getting started on hold.