Let's Play Guild Wars 2!! - Page 38 - OG Myth-Weavers

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Let's Play Guild Wars 2!!

   
Quote:
Originally Posted by Kaitou Kage View Post
To be honest, I think everyone whining and complaining and upset about this "gear treadmill" is jumping the gun. Every time something is announced that appears to do something the players don't want, the players get all out of whack, well before they see what impact, if any, this has on the game.

So far the only difference this gear will make is with Agony. Everything else can be done without Ascended gear, and we don't even know if the Fractals can be done without Infusions. The stats on Ascended gear are no more than a few points per attribute higher than Exotic gear. All this talk about how it is ruining the game is premature because you are all making assumptions.

If this does make a major difference in the gameplay in EVERY aspect of GW2, then I think it is cause for concern. But as long as you can still do pretty much everything regardless of gear, I think this freaking out about how the game is doomed is just absurd. Plus, exotic gear isn't hard to get. I don't forsee Ascended gear being hard to get either.

Chill out, people. This game is not ruined, it won't be the end of the game, and they are not turning their backs on their design philosophy. Yeesh.
I'm taking a "wait and see" attitude just as much as the next person, but the way it reads sounds as if fractals will require progressive grind for stronger infusions, which is just another form of gear grind.

The issue isn't the gear itself. It's the fact that this gear is essentially going to gate the dungeon's content. "LFG fractal XYZ, infusion ABC only." If you can only progress in content when you have infusions good enough to withstand the damage from the monsters of that tier, then it's exactly like every other gear treadmill, no matter what the actual form of the "gear" takes.

I should note that I don't have anything wrong with gear progression, per se. But this news tells me that Anet is willing to taint its own design philosophy in order to make their job easier. I don't know how this new gear will go over, but Anet's approach to "fixing" its problem makes me quite a bit less excited to log in every day.

I've not really started actually doing any gear hunting. And by this I mean doing dungeons for tokens, so on and so forth. That being said, I don't think I'm going to care much if they do implement a grind for gear. The concept of not having to go on raids to get gear and stuff was a nice idea to me to begin with but as it stands now, I'm a bit bored at the end of the game. Events are still fun to me, but I still have that feeling of the idea that I'm not really "doing" anything. Maybe the idea of hunting for special gear will change that.

It might give me more incentive to do more dungeons too. As it stands I find them pretty pointless. I don't see anything unique or exiting about them, or anything that makes the bosses tricky.

From what I read, you don't get to pick which Fractal you do. You get sent randomly. Agony only gets worse as you do more Fractals within a time period.

Besides, for all we know you can still do Fractals without Infusions. It is just made easier with them. People do Ascalonian Catacombs in level 35 blues and greens, and level 80s in Exotics still have trouble with that dungeon.

EDIT: Aha:

Quote:
Originally Posted by ANet
Players will be able to acquire Ascended Rings in the Fractals of the Mists dungeon
So you CAN do Fractals without Infusions and you get the necessary items as part of doing the Fractals. Seems fair and reasonable to me.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Anet
Once players return to town, future entries into the dungeon will scale to become harder than the last. The amount of enemies players will face will increase as will their health and damage, for example. Of course, you can also expect commensurate rewards for completing harder versions of the dungeon.
http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/g...te.html/page/1

I'm not sure exactly how the mechanic will work, but this quote makes it clear that the content will continue scaling in difficulty (even if it just means bigger number when you get thwacked in the face). Which means people will be asking specifically for top-geared players at some point.

I still think you are jumping the gun and making broad assumptions about something you don't know to be the case. If it turns out to be like you claim, I will be the first to admit it. But nobody has any indication of the scale or the nature of the challenges present in the Fractals. That is why these claims of the game requiring only geared characters, and the gear creep is going to kill the game are absurd. People don't know this yet. They are just assuming that it is going to be exactly like WoW without any real evidence to prove it.

You can clear the first three Fractals without Ascended gear. I am confident this is the case. They have to allow this entrance.

As for the rest, are you really going to spend all your time in the game just trying to do Fractals and nothing else ever? If the answer is no, then what are you even worried about? This doesn't affect you as much as you want to believe.

In any other standard MMO, the first raid always allows you to complete it with baseline dungeon gear. But the next raid requires gear from the previous raid in order to avoid getting 1-shot by the trash mobs.

I'm not saying that GW2 is going to die because of this, but I am saying that the obvious gear treadmill they're instituting goes against the core design philosophy that Anet preached during their development period.

The biggest problem with the game already is there's no incentive to do 90% of the content and no players anymore to do it with. Nevermind it takes 30+ minutes to find a group for TA. When was the last time you saw another player doing a group event in Fireheart Rise? Or in any zone aside from Shaemoor and Cursed Shore?

Now they want to take all of the players away from every other bit of content in the game and funnel them into Fractal by making it the only place you can acquire the phat loots now. While at the same time, it will divide players into those who have the next tier of items and those who don't. This is a new tier of items only 2 months into the game, in a game that was already promised to not have a gear treadmill. By this time next year, they could add 6 new tiers of items for all we know.

Also, this breaks WvWvW. They took out orbs in WvWvW because even the minor stat bonuses they provided proved to be too much of an imbalance, and now they're giving out the bonuses back, but only to certain players who have good luck at the RNG?

Quote:
Originally Posted by dystmesis View Post
The biggest problem with the game already is there's no incentive to do 90% of the content and no players anymore to do it with. Nevermind it takes 30+ minutes to find a group for TA. When was the last time you saw another player doing a group event in Fireheart Rise? Or in any zone aside from Shaemoor and Cursed Shore?
Erm...

I've never found any problems finding groups for dungeons, or doing group events throughout most of the world. It's not the mass rush it was two months ago but people are still out there participating readily.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Kaitou Kage View Post
Erm...

I've never found any problems finding groups for dungeons, or doing group events throughout most of the world. It's not the mass rush it was two months ago but people are still out there participating readily.
I tend to do a lot of alt-hopping, and while some zones still have a handful of people in them, there are some zones that are complete ghost towns. Also, I've had multiple times where I've had to skip over events because there just weren't enough people around to complete them.

Even if this weren't the case, the fact that the only time you see level 80s in non-80 areas is when they're going for world completion speaks volumes to how short Anet fell in their design. The entire game was supposed to be endgame, but there's literally no reason to ever come out of Orr/Lion's Arch.

If I could get equivalent drops in lower level zones that I could get by farming Orr, I sure as hell wouldn't spend most of my time on alts or in Cursed Shore.





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