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Guild Wars 2 |OT5| We've got fun and games

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I'm with you guys on the idea of Warrior conjured weapons exotic weapons. Warriors already have the Elite skill War Banner, and that is fun, but it is limited in application.

If it worked like a Engineer tool-kit, and putting a conjured weapon in your utility slot (like Bolars, fist weapons, halbeard, morning star, two-handed axe) it could be really fun.
 

Lunar15

Member
I actually dig the concept and theme around Dragonhunters. Bows do look kinda silly, but I like the way everything connects. I'm for it!
 

Xanathus

Member
It is weird how these minor stories make it on the major gaming sites but not the specilization announcements.

Specialization sounds like a bunch of gibberish for people who don't play the game, hell I don't even really know or care much about it. Generic cheaters getting banned stories are easily understandable and are easy to write.
 

Levyne

Banned
I remember GW1 when Dhuum would randomly come and kill someone sitting in Kamadan, lol.

Hopefully this isn't too obnoxious to post, but I made another shiny. Last one I needed to complete some self defined collection of weapons for the Ranger. Maybe I'll slowly work on a staff, but not going to be as driven as I was for the last handful of them.

screenshot8385_crs75uil.png

When I started playing I never thought I'd make one.
 

Proven

Member
From my earlier list:
I left out all summons. Every class has a summon, and I figured they wouldn't overlap those. Banners, Spirit Weapons, Spirits, Traps (although I suppose they weren't Thief specific), Turrets, Clones/Phantasms, Minions, and Elementals/Conjures.

I also left out Kits, because those are pretty much an profession defining skill set.

Thieves don't have a summon outside of Traps, so there's a good chance they'll get one I guess. Warriors could get some form of Conjures. But I'll speculate later.

The talk around the net about Necromancers needing lots of help is starting to shift to the fact that more people are realizing the Revenant is stepping on the Necromancer's toes. But then that lead me to realize that the classes can be grouped in such a way:

Attrition (naturally very high survivability through mechanics and several weapon skills)
Revenant
Ranger
Necromancer

Bruiser (a mix of offense and defense, has the tools (stats and/or skills) to stay in the middle of the fight)
Warrior
Engineer
Elementalist

High Impact (classes with high burst potential that cannot take a hit to the face without gearing to lose most all offensive potential)
Guardian
Thief
Mesmer

This list is colored by the fact that I'm also looking at sPvP, so it's likely to swap Mesmer and Elementalist.

I'm not entirely sure why I made this list beyond trying to find a reason to be okay with the Revenant's similarities with Necromancers, but of course that's only with a specific part of Revenant and there are more "stances" that haven't been released. The more time passes the more I become sure that Necromancer is getting a major balance pass in the next big patch, along with Warrior to some degree. This also means that I'm wrong and probably going crazy.
 

Moondrop

Banned
Hopefully this isn't too obnoxious to post, but I made another shiny.
We give you too hard a time about your legendary factory, but you've got to put your mats into something. Though you know the ranger collection isn't complete without a staff. :p

I also left out Kits, because those are pretty much an profession defining skill set.
I don't agree that profession-centric skills should be left out. When I made my original list, I included pets (i.e. non-summon, ranger style) and I wouldn't be surprised if warrior or thief got one.

But then that lead me to realize that the classes can be grouped in such a way:
Interesting placement of guardians, those are medi-guardians I assume? I never encountered too many good ones, but I guess I took a break around the time they became hot. Also scepter elementalist deserves to be in the high impact group, but perhaps it's not relevant enough to the metagame (and will apparently be nerfed by the new trait system).
 

Retro

Member
Probably best if everyone except Moondrop skips this monstrosity.
JUWnj.gif


I've calmed down now after being compared to the protagonist of Pi.

This comment here is I waited until morning to respond (edit: Fuck, it's 1pm already). Assuming you weren't joking about being worked up, why did you need to calm down, especially when you later mentioned taking it as a compliment? I feel like this is a nice, relaxed discussion we're having here and it kind of bothers me that you might be getting worked up or taking it personally.

To be clear: I respect your opinion a lot, and I'm glad you regularly share your thoughts in this thread (if anything, you don't post often enough). The last thing I want is for this discussion to turn into a heated debate because I feel like it's discussion worth having. If my language has been incendiary in any way, then I apologize.

I think we have different ways in which we measure success and advancement in games, but there's no reason both views can't exist within the same game or are mutually exclusive. For example, we've run dungeons together where my "what feels right" approach and what I assume is your much more calculated approach were compatible, at least enough to where we were able to complete the content without any trouble.

And we both hate stacking, so there's our common ground.

I've been re-evaluating this paradigm after reading some of the foundational principles for Camelot Unchained (sidenote: I recommend these to anyone interested in WvW-style combat, and it gives me flashbacks to GW2's pre-launch days). Across multiple posts including this one, the author reframes the debate as a "skill-based game" vs. a "class-based game." Taken to its extreme, in an entirely skill-based game there must be no difference between player characters, as only how the user operates them in real time matters. Whereas in a class-based game, each class can perform a different set of actions, and strategy is dictated by how the player's class interacts with that of the enemy; rock-paper-scissors is the epitome of a purely class-based game.

So, I'm not sure what you're getting at with this paragraph; up until this point, we've been discussing skill as "the capacity of the player to do something" but here you're bringing up skill as a game construct, where it's representing a particular character ability. "Skill-based" the way it's being used here describes something like UO, EVE Online or the Elder Scrolls games where your character advancement is free-form and there aren't any restrictions on how you build your character. "Class-based" is how most RPGs work, where you pick a class with pre-determined skills and you generally can't learn anything outside of what the developers intended.

Good design practices have lead to games where character classes are less rigid and you can customize your experience by selecting which character skills you wish to use. I don't think there's ever been a pure "Class-based system" even going back to D&D, the game that defined character classes.

I also don't believe that RPS is class-based OR a skill-based (in the "character ability" sense... ugh, going back to what I said about game design having a crappy vocabulary...) because both of those are methods of character advancement. Just because a system has choices doesn't make it either; as an example "moving to the left" and "moving to the right" wouldn't be considered skills or classes, they're just decisions.

Maybe I'm missing what you're getting at here (again, vocabulary, etc.)

But just as no one plays rock-paper-scissors for fun, I don't believe people actually want to play a pure skill game either (hence the no items/final destination/fox only meme).

Here you've switched to the "capacity of the player" definition of "skill-based", because neither RPS or Smash Brothers have character skills or abilities that the player selects (the water is already very muddy, but we could call each character in Smash Bros. a "Class", but that's not what you're getting at here, as far as I can tell).

I disagree that people don't want to play a game of pure skill; chess, for example, is entirely skill-based because both players have the same number of pieces with the same moves. The only variable of chess that isn't skill-based is that white moves first and thus has an advantage, but chess matches are played in even numbered sets to negate this.

I also disagree that the "No items, Fox Only, Final Destination" thing is inherently 'bad' even if I personally can't imagine playing Smash Bros. that way. The reason people go for that is because it creates a more even playing field in which to determine player skill since Smash Brothers' characters vary wildly in terms of balance and items/stage mechanics introduce chance, the antithesis of skill. It's trying to make Smash Brothers behave more like Chess, i.e. more skill-oriented. The meme is funny because Smash Brothers is an insanely chaotic game and the idea of stripping all of the 'fun' stuff out and being super serious about it is amusing (in the same way we chuckle at RPS tournaments).

In a purely skill-based outcome, all that matters is your reaction time, dexterity, and ability to read your opponent. But when you introduce class into the mix, it adds an entirely new strategic layer involving one's knowledge of game mechanics and how the various classes interact.

I would add "familiarity with the game" to the list of things that matter, as well as "ability to read and predict the state of the game." Small nitpick, I know.

And now finally returning to my point: when you frame the debate as, "I am better at gameplay" vs. "I have higher numbers," I feel you're neglecting all of the strategic gameplay resulting from, "He is higher in A, but I'm higher in B, how can I use that to my advantage?" And this component is inherently based on quantifiable differences
aka numbers
between classes.

So, here's basically where we dig in to the heart of this discussion, which seems to be the misinterpretation that the "I want gameplay to matter" folks believe that numbers don't exist (they do) when in fact, the point is that numbers shouldn't matter more than anything else, if at all.

As a very basic example; Mario. There are tons of articles written about how Mario's jump behavior works; the speed, acceleration, gravity, inertia, arc, etc. People have filmed and measured these things down to the pixel and documented the mathematics behind the jump. But the math doesn't define why the jump "feels" so good, or why 30 years on you can pick up a Mario game and it feels right, even if you've spent those 30 years playing games with a thousand variations on "jump."

Knowing the math also does not make you any better at jumping, even though when you break it down it's all numbers. Unless you're some kind of savant who can process these sort of things in real time (in which case, why are you wasting your gifts playing video games), I think most of us pick up the controller, press the buttons and feel our way through what "jump" does. The numbers make the whole thing work, but for the purpose of making Mario jump, they don't matter; Jump is something you feel rather than think about.

The "gameplay first" side of the discussion doesn't deny that the numbers exist, or that the differences between characters are quantifiable. When you say "He is higher in A, but I am higher in B", we're not denying that part of the scenario exists. It's the "how can I use that to my advantage?" part that's problematic, because we feel that on the list of things that should determine victory or defeat in the moment-to-moment gameplay of an action-oriented game like Guild Wars 2, "what are his stats?" or "is he traited for +50 toughness" should be very low, behind things like "who knows how to play their class better," "who has the faster reaction time", "who has more situational awareness", "who has the best strategy", "who knew to bring the right skill and use it at the right time" and so on.

More to the point of why this discussion started, any change that gives the mathematics more impact is a bad change for us (and likewise, any change that reduces the impact is a good one). Not because the numbers shouldn't exist, but because we feel being a better player should be more important than having the better character. When we win or lose, we want to know that it's because one of us was a better player, not because one of us had a bunch of invisible mathematic advantages.

That's why when we talk about "gameplay-oriented" traits, we're talking about things that make a substantial change in how a skill works; to use the jump metaphor, being able double jump, lower the effects of gravity to float in mid-air longer or shake the ground and flip enemies on their back when you land. Yeah, there's totally numbers running how those things work, but the effects, the feel, matters more. Compare the four playable characters' jumps in Mario 2; yes, the numbers under the hood are different but you're not thinking about gravity values, you're thinking "holy shit, Peach can freakin' fly!"

Likewise, when we talk about passive, "math-y" traits being boring, we're talking about things that don't have much impact and small, near-invisible advantages. Getting a bunch of traits that are the equivalent of "you jump 10 pixels higher" isn't as interesting as the examples above, or as noticeable (unless you get a bunch of them at once).

Already running a bit long here, and I'm not sure I even understood your entire post since the second paragraph is talking about something unrelated as near as I can tell. I'm not even sure I have a 'bottom line' to end on because I still feel like we're sorting out what exactly we mean before we actually have a discussion. The one thing I will say though is that no matter how player skill-oriented or action-y the game gets, the math is always going to be there for theorycrafters to tinker with, at least. As you said, numbers are in everything...
 

Shiokazu

Member
may i ask something about the hacker?


is using third party programs considered exploiting? i have a different definition of it and i dont want to stick with it if its wrong.
 

Hawkian

The Cryptarch's Bane
Thanks Hawk, you rawk! I apparently had it on XP SP3 instead of 2 and didn't have admin checked. I have no idea how these settings changed but my bad for not checking before asking you. I only tried it the first night we could get portals and for some reason I thought they only were dropping portals that one night so I was like there's no time! Now I need to look up the controls again and take it for a test run :) How will an extra F key factor in when HoT hits? Will it pose a problem? I guess I'll be able to determine that when I look at what you have the current ones set to.
Yes, yes it will pose a problem, lol.

I'm not sure what to do yet, but I'll figure it out on launch day. I do have some ideas.

I'm thanking god that they're not going nuts by adding in even more, because a couple more F keys and they'd actually be interfering with the script itself, lol

Just add gamepad support already ArenaNets!!!
 

Hawkian

The Cryptarch's Bane
rangers can use daggers? o.o

this post from the forums about the ban
And how is that acceptable professional behaviour? Making a public spectacle of this isn’t doing anything conductive towards an image of being able to professionally and rationally deal with people who have broken the rules, nor does it inspire confidence for a game that is known to produce false positives in regards to things like botting.
How are people supposed to know that they will be dealt with fairly and rationally when the games security lead is partaking in incredibly unprofessional witch-hunt style public shaming of people? Shame on you.

This is straight from your personal linkedin page:
Lead of the team that is responsible for maintaining:
• Fair game-play in Guild Wars 2 by enforcing the User Agreements and Rules of Conduct
• Maintinence and evolution of systems to help reduce instances of payment fraud
• User/Corporate information security
• Improvement of game features to align with the needs of a shifting player base and behavior

Do you sincerely believe that you’re exhibiting a capacity for “Fair game-play in Guild Wars 2 by enforcing the User Agreements and Rules of Conduct” – could you point to the part of the user agreements and rules of conduct that legitimises the video you made? Is it not a compromise of user security for you to post a video logging in to another persons account and posting a video of it? Regardless of what they’ve done, how is that ok? Sure cheating is not ok, but there are wrong and right ways to deal with it. This wasn’t the right way.
you just can't make this shit up.
 

Moondrop

Banned
Maybe I'm missing what you're getting at here (again, vocabulary, etc.)
I didn't mean to create thread drama, my apologies. I was never upset (nor would I have any reason, y'all are all so polite). I was just trying to "yes and" Miktar's "yes and" of my "numbers numbers numbers" joke while changing the topic. I approach posting on the internet differently than most- I don't generally care if I'm misunderstood, or about convincing people, and I think of us all as using personas. I should be more sensitive that others take it more literally and/or personally.

But the math doesn't define why the jump "feels" so good, or why 30 years on you can pick up a Mario game and it feels right, even if you've spent those 30 years playing games with a thousand variations on "jump."
I disagree in this sense: I believe that whoever programmed the jumping in Super Mario Bros. had a better sense of math than those who programmed platforming games where the jumping doesn't feel so good. I don't deny there's an art to programming, but the clay is math.

More to the point of why this discussion started, any change that gives the mathematics more impact is a bad change for us (and likewise, any change that reduces the impact is a good one). Not because the numbers shouldn't exist, but because we feel being a better player should be more important than having the better character. When we win or lose, we want to know that it's because one of us was a better player, not because one of us had a bunch of invisible mathematic advantages.
I will attempt to clarify here because this is the part of the debate I believe needs to be reframed. No one wants to play a PvP-based game where all that matters is acquiring better gear, and obviously that has never been my argument. Thus I brought up the skill vs. class paradigm, in which the issue is not "the degree of impact of mathematics" but " the degree to which characters are similar (skill-based) vs. degree to which characters are distinct (class-based)." Under this paradigm, questions like:
"who knows how to play their class better," "who has the faster reaction time", "who has more situational awareness", "who has the best strategy", "who knew to bring the right skill and use it at the right time"
can be sorted as class,skill,class,class,and class. I know this terminology is still somewhat problematic- isn't "situational awareness" a skill? But there's no situational awareness needed in a mirror match- that's how I think of this skill vs. class paradigm.

(And my Smash reference was another example of me leaving poorly explained statements just hanging there. In fact I was citing that meme derisively, as I am a proponent and practitioner of the true Melee metagame, which permits all characters and only tries to restrict things like rotating stages and randomly falling bombs- hardly unreasonable).

Compare the four playable characters' jumps in Mario 2; yes, the numbers under the hood are different but you're not thinking about gravity values, you're thinking "holy shit, Peach can freakin' fly!"
Another good example of how we look at things differently. When Mario 2 came out I only played Peach- floating was amazing. But looking back at it, wasn't Toad really the most mechanically interesting character? He speeds up when he's holding items. And he has a clear drawback in his basic jump height. Playing Toad was a much different, more challenging experience than floating through levels.

I understand when you request traits that actively change abilities. But I personally don't always see such clear delineations between "A occurs during condition B" (Peach), "X*1.5 during condition Y" (Toad), and M*2, N*0.5 (Luigi).
 
Hey Ash, what do you think of my tweaking the build you posted to this?

Build

I felt Zeal made more sense for a burning build and just wasn't impressed with Valor's major traits. What sucks about it is that I don't get as much toughness bonus but the condition duration is real nice and a boost to power as well. I actually was able to get my toughness near yours anyway by going with Rabid over Celestial on accessories. The main stat I seem to be missing out on is health, I have a lower health pool by not going with Celestial and I'm wondering if I'd regret that but I get a nice boost to condition damage.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on my changes and if any of them were shortsighted. Also, if having a bit lower health was going to really set me back for survivability even with toughness that high.
 

Cathcart

Member
A dead man shows up.

I'm not dead I'm just resting my eyes.

Was on a pretty long vacation and kinda forgot to play PC games for a couple weeks. Now I can't put Theatrhythm: Curtain Call down. And I might play some Bloodborne. And the Witcher. And Batman. Uhhh....

This weekend kinda busy with the mom's day stuff but at the very least I do wanna hop on for some guild missions soon.
 

Morokh

Member
Kinda liked how they set their idea of the specialization to be 'Dragon Hunter' more in the spirit of 'Witch Hunter'

But I don't know, after seeing the skills and what they do i'm still not sold on the whole thing.
 

SourBear

Banned
Looking forward to the inevitable post on the Necromancer forums about how Guardian is now better at vuln then Necro is. LOL. Seriously hope Necro gets a rebalance overhaul cause it looks less relevant for each new elite spec that comes out.
 

Proven

Member
1200 range longbow. I wonder if, since they got rid of the Warrior trait for 1200 range, they'll add it in as baseline.



Dragon's Maw gives Slow. Neat.

Eh, I think they confirmed that Warrior is going to stay at 900 range. The other effects we're getting are pretty worth it to me.

Ready Up actually incorporated some criticsm from last week's stream, and gave more info. I probably could make a Longbow build now... But I want to stay stubborn.

Looking forward to the inevitable post on the Necromancer forums about how Guardian is now better at vuln then Necro is. LOL. Seriously hope Necro gets a rebalance overhaul cause it looks less relevant for each new elite spec that comes out.

Oh jeez, I was thinking about Engi at the time, but this is a good point too. Lmao.
 
Eh, I think they confirmed that Warrior is going to stay at 900 range. The other effects we're getting are pretty worth it to me.

Warrior Longbow is 1000 range. The trait we have now is +20% range, and it was no where to be seen in the core specialization preview. No reason to not let us keep it.
 

Ashodin

Member
Kinda liked how they set their idea of the specialization to be 'Dragon Hunter' more in the spirit of 'Witch Hunter'

But I don't know, after seeing the skills and what they do i'm still not sold on the whole thing.

It's "Dragonhunter" not "Dragon Hunter". :)

It's pretty awesome spec, imo. Totally changes the feel of the profession.
 

Proven

Member
Warrior Longbow is 1000 range. The trait we have now is +20% range, and it was no where to be seen in the core specialization preview. No reason to not let us keep it.
I guess I should check when I get home, but I'm pretty sure it's 900 range and the trait Stronger Bowstrings doesn't actually say what it does beyond a vague statement. As for the range being lost, it's just me remembering from watching the original stream live. When I have free time tomorrow I can go through the VOD to double check.

Also, changes to Guardian Tomes incoming: http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/35bjf3/dragonhunter_ready_up_livestream_notes/cr2uzj7
And I'm not wholly against them either.
 
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