A big disappointment

First off I would just like to say that the following is my personal opinion and this thread is not meant to offend anyone.

I have played Guild Wars for approx 10 Months now with over 3500 hours under my belt. I have a level 20 character for every profession and all 3 campains.

After reading about the latest update I feel it is time to voice my opinion.

1.- My favorite class used to be the Ritualist untill anet nerfed it by increasing the energy cost and effectiveness of of some of the protection spirits, so I quit playing ritualist. In Nightfall my favorite class was Paragon, I loved the ability to damage as well as support my team. With the latest skill update, the ability to be an effective support for the team was greatly reduced. One of the biggest issues is that the Paragon has a very small energy reserve and very slow energy regen. Anet decided to raise the energy requirements of Incomming and Stand your ground from 5 to 10! In addition to that they also reduced the effectiveness of the skills as well. I fail to see why they thought the Paragon was unbalanced. I guess now I will play my Dervish untill the nerf it too.

2.- As much time as I have put into Guild Wars you would think that I would have received lots of good drops from monsters and drops from chests... Wrong! I have opened hundreds of chests and out of all them I have received 2 good items. Chests are a total waste of money and monsters just don't drop unless you have a good farming build (which most of were nerfed as well). Monsters don't drop good items for me either, I have had perhaps a dozen good drops in over 3000 hours of play! On the so called green drop weekend, I farmed all day long for 3 days and recieved 2 cheap green drops using 4 ppl at a time. Purple items should not even be in chests at all, purple items are all useless. 99.9% of Gold items are worthless as well, occasionally you can get a decent mod if u are lucky but I have only received a hand full of them as well. To get good items in Guild Wars you either have to be a good solo farmer or pay through the nose for an item that someone else has farmed. Most good items are out of reach for the average casual player. I really would like to see Anet totaly revamp the drops and chest system to be more fair. It would really be nice if anet fixed it so that whenever you used an Amulet of the Mist or Book of Secrets the item(s) you received was customized for that character. This way if a person went through the trouble of doing the final mission again he could get a new item that could be used for his/her heros. Heros are great but very expensive to build up with runes and weapons.

3.- Rune prices and availability are insane. My characters all have good runes but getting my heros the runes they need to be effective will take years at the current prices. An idea would be for anet to use a system simular to the hero skill trainers, where runes for heros could be aquired cheaply. Runes that could not be sold or traded like the one given as a reward (minor vigor) in one of the early quests. If you attempt to sell it at a rune trader you get a message saying the merchant refuses to buy this item.
I realize that eventually some rune prices may drop but If you have lots of characters and wish to build up your Heros, the current system will cost you a fortune well beyond the means of most players.

4.- Storage... My biggest complaint of all time about Guild Wars is probably the lack of storage space. While it was nice that anet gave us the space for materials it would be a great help if we had special storage for Dyes, Runes, Collectables and any other items that are stackable. It is very time consuming to shuffle items between characters to make room to bring out one of my less used characters. It is a nightmare to remember where most things are.


Please anet bring some enjoyment back into my game!

Thanks for letting me present my disappointments with the game, I hope I did not offend anyone,

MKC

All classes have had the nerf bat at some point. During the months after release of the first campaign, it was particularly brutal. I remember one in which everyone felt sorry for mesmers, lol.
Builds get broken, favourites become almost useless and people become upset....until they evolve.
However, there are lots of builds that do work and are effective in all manner of situations. Granted some of them may not work as good as the one that got nerfed but believe me, Anet wouldn't change things unless it was important.

Imagine if you had just joined the game, you wouldn't know any different, but, if you had picked up and played on day one, you'd have noticed a hundred and one invincible builds and might have complained about a game imbalance.

Good luck.

1) Its called balance man

2) Chests are totally random, and a gold sink, I wouldn't go there looking to make money from them. Bad luck on the green weekend, prehaps you could buy up some of the farmed greens at deflated prices?

3) Thing is, heroes don't need runes or gear. We played through proph and factions with no runes on hench ^^

I agree with you on storage

No offense meant by this, but have you ever seen a paragon or ritualist in PvP? Ritualists are one thing, comparable to a prot monk who has double spell range. I still think rits are overpowered just because of the spirit range, but they're tolerable because in large groups the spirits die quickly.

Paragons on the other hand were nerfed for three main reasons.
1: They had infinite energy. (leadership)
2: They gave every monk on their team infinite energy. (Energizing finale)
3: They could reduce the overall damage done to your entire team by 75% (incoming, watch yourself, stand your ground)

Infinite resources in a "balanced" game is a no-no.

Instead of responding to each sentence of your post as I usually do, I will just say this:
If you don't like the items that drop for you, stop farming. There are other ways of (insert your economic goal here). You want the best weapons? Buy them. No money? Do an 8 man FoW/UW run. I get around 3k from items I find in fow each time I go there, not including shards.
BTW purple items are the same as gold items, they just don't spawn vamp/zealous mods.
They used to be worse. Don't take the poorly written GW economy system for granted. If you played GW a year ago, sup vigor/absorption were up at 100k, and most other sup runes were at least 1k.
I agree that storage is sparce. I wind up having to clear out my storage or cram everything I own on a character I seldom use, but what solutions are there? You honestly want Anet to add a storage window for every single collectible? I would ball-park guess there are 300 collectible drops in GW. Material storage is almost at its limit, and they omitted some slots (onyx, clay, etc). However, I can see them adding a dye storage, since many people collect dyes (you never know when you wanna change the color of your chaos axe ^^)

the update did little to affect my PVE (Leader/Command) build - my Paragon is still Everbunny for energy

I have 10+ Leadership which give me tons of energy for spamming shouts

On your first issue, it's just that you quit too soon. They nerf 1 skill? OMG HAXORZ, I QUIT PLAYING. Instead, try to search for something else. Is there a way to reduce energy cost? Is there a way to make it more playable? Can I play something else than Shelter spammer? Just try to find something else.

And I do agree that EF was nerfed too harshly.

And the Rune prices and availability are laughable. A year ago, most useful runes were in the range of 30-100k.

Spirit spammer was overpowered even for PvE. There's little to say about that. It gave entire group permanent prot spirit and permanent shielding hands. The build itself was even more boring and mundane to play than bonder, and nobody wants to play a bonder due to its dullness.

Chest are money sink. By design. They are made to lose money. And yes, people only get 1 good item per 100 chests. The rest is sold for mods, sold unided, or sold to merchant. They are not locked piggy banks.

3500 hours over 10 months means over 10 hours of gameplay per day. Guild Wars we never even remotely meant to support this much gameplay. It was actively designed against such hard-core aproach, making sure, that someone who plays that much, will have almost no benefit over those who do not. So playing more is unrewarding by design.

Same goes for storage. Storage is designed to transfer items between characters, not hoard them.

I sort of figured that it was PVP. I never play PVP and have no interest in it at all so yes I do feel short changed by Anet because of it. PVE people should not have to be nerfed because of game imbalances in PVP. I paid good money for my games and and don't think its fair my fun should suffer for a part of the game I will never use.

Years? I think not. If you need cash in a hurry, just run yourself through all the training courses at Shing Jea monastery in Factions. Can do it in less than 90 minutes and nets you a minimum profit of 2.5 platinum (even after paying to open storage and whatever armor upgrades you might need). If you're doing over 10 hours of gameplay per day, that's 17 platinum per day (rounded to 2 significant figures) assuming you take no breaks. It might not be the best cash farm in the whole game world, but it's not half bad all things considered. Buying the more expensive runes becomes no problem if you know where to go to get a strong personal economy running.

Welcome to Guild Wars. Enjoy the rune prices now, as they'll only go up from now. And enjoy the few farm spots left, cause they'll be nerfed when time comes. Oh, and better sell your 15^50 Crystalline right away cause plan is to make all weapons worth absolutely nothing.

Er-hem, well maybe a bit egxaggerated, but yeah, this is what Guild Wars is about. You want something, you find ways of getting it and it gets nerfed, so only few people can get rare stuff. Of course, people will conmplain after that, but instead of giving back the ways of getting the item, the item itself gets nerfed so that nobody wants to go through the trouble of getting it.

I gave up on PvE now, it's just too much the same atm. Tried my luck in the new Domain of Anguish, but I guess I'm not 'leet' enough for that.

PvE vs PvP debates always turn into flame wars and are getting old, so knock it off.

I'd also like to add that telling someone to get a life is silly, considering that you're posting on a fansite.

Use only one major rune on your heroes. Good enough and mega cheap.

I wouldn't bother with inscriptions.Just use those you pick up.

The price of runes atm is good. I haven't seen any over 10k except sup vigor which is normal.

Take advantage of the Runes. With everyone upgrading their heros and new armor sell off any runes now because the prices are inflated. Once everyone is upgraded there will be no longer a need for the runes and the price will come down.

Learn how to play the ecto market. I've been playing since day 1 of GW. I can predict when ecto prices are going to rise and fall. They last time I even tried to get some gold I bought a few stacks of ecto at 3.5k. I held them and resold for 8k.

That took me a few hours to buy and then resell them.

Running is also the best money on the game. The only good farming spot is shiro'ken and that was nerfed. Even at its height it was about 2k per run every 3 minutes. Some runs you can make 5k in 4 minutes.

There is so many ways of making money. Do a search on guru you'll find plenty of threads.

Cheap players use cheap tricks to get stuff, Anet nerfs the tricks they use to get them. And average players get in the crossfire.

So the 'supah eelit gamah mastah' keep finding sploits and ways to get too much cash, while the normal players that are learning to play and have just bought the game suffer for that fight.

I only hope this won't turn into a game with only people that try the game and quits because of it being frustrating and few people that 'enjoy the challenge'.

Do they want that?

But the whole point of Heroes is that you can improve them with runes and awesome weapons. I've been buying keys like mad in the hope that I get a good gold Fire staff or wand for Acolyte Sosuke. Most of the golds I get are janky Assassin or Mesmer weapons. I admit that my Warrior and Monk golds have been good though.

To the OP, I can kinda see where you're coming from. In the nearly 4 months I've been playing I've seen an enormous change in the game. The current AI is the most noticable and annoying change. *lol* At least the Hydras stop chasing me after a minute or so. I think everyone agrees about storage. I wish each character had a personal storage as well as the account wide storage.

You can never have too much cash. Not when A-Net puts stuff like FoW in a game. Don't give me the 'You don't need it' cause thats bs. If you put something in a game, and it gets highly wanted, then you should also give players the chance to get that thing. Sure, it should take some time, but it should not be impossible.

Also, the game is way more fun if you have more cash. The more cash you have to spend, the more you can enjoy of luxury such as better weapons, better armor, chest runs, FoW/UW, try different builds by buying skills, getting titles etc.

Today, an avarage player should have at least 300K in his/her storage or else he/she can't do anything except quests/missions. Well, I don't really care anymore, economy is rather messed up atm, rune prices are higher than they were in the last few months. Why? Cause everyone needs to buy runes not for 8 characters, but for 8 characters and 120 heroes (If 8 characters have all heroes).

That means 120 max damage weapons, 120 x5 = 600 insignia's (when each armor part is upgraded).

And then I haven't even mentioned that alot of people have 2 accounts.

On 3, instead of getting superior runes, get 2 major runes, they work almost just as good, and only cost 100 gold.

Ñaz

all in all i think GW is still doing good my only complaint which i think only conerns me and my teams is that it takes a hell of a long time for me to load into areas

So, all your love and dedicate to the paragon is reduced to only 4 skills?

because only 4 of 75 skills were changed. ... come on.

I don't think it is nearly as bad as you are making it out to be. While they haven't officially announced it I think they fixed some of the glaring AI issues, at least I haven't encountered them again, and that tickles me. I have yet to spend one dime on any of my heros and they are still effective. If you think rune prices are insane now you must not remember when Superior Absorb and Superior Vigor were selling for over 50K each. Anet has made it easy to fix some of the energy problems on Paragons with the attunement runes, and people laughed at me when I suggested energy runes in Sardelac. I think you need to look beyond the four skills that got nerfed and find new skills you like even better. Look past the lack of drops for you and try to find other avenues of income, crafting materials are still viable if a little slower than weapons. Not all drops are bad though you just need to hit that lucky drop. As for Storage well, I don't know what to tell you on that except make a dedicated mule

The only Paragon skill that hurt me at all was Stand Your Ground and 10 energy compared to 5 didn't effect me that much. Incoming has no place in PvE so I"m ok there. I really wouldn't call this a nerf at all, just a minor adjustment.

Yeah but you know that the gold drops are screwy when you're paying 100 times more for the exact same item in a gold, when the green is insanely cheaper. I suppose it's all about the skin for some people. I think any key that costs you 1.5k to purchase should automatically be a gold chest. Period.

It's totally fair, you paid good money for Guild Wars, a hybrid PvE and PvP game. If you don't want peanut butter in your chocolate don't buy a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup.

Even if it wasn't, if something is imbalanced in PvP, there's a good chance it's just as easy to trivialize PvE with it.

offtopic but worth mentioning

you can get an easy 20/20 Fire Staff from the Collector at the Marketplace
http://gw.gamewikis.org/wiki/Attendant_Nashu
5 Putrid Cysts (common afflicted drop)

I fixed it for you.

QFT.

This is one of the best posts I've read in months! Made my day....

Yes i agree storage should have been added when you merge campains, I think and extra 4 slots would have sufficed per camapain. Material storage a great thing :-) Now maybe rune or dye storage.

Personally i like collector weapons, I have a few golds,purples loots that were worth keeping , But for my ele , I still use the fire staffs from the collector right outside of ice caves of sorrow mission,max dmge and 20%& 20 %, for a few imp hearts. Yeah its blue but way better than most of the stuff that drops.
Even some of the crafted ones are pretty good , bit pricy 5p but could be cheaper than buying some looted thing with crappy mods for the same or higher price. Just because its green,gold or purple doesnt automaticly make it better.

What? O.o People are STILL complaining about the runes - the vast majority of which are 100gold?! Ok, fine, you want radiants on your people: I've gotten 7 radiant insignias from drops _from playing the game normally on one character_.

Storage has gotten better with extra character slots + heroes to store like 120 weapons (for me), but I agree - a better storage is needed.

As for the rest, sigh, tired of the nerf rant, rune rant, me me me, now now now rants.

PVP kills more games. Why? PVE mobs have no lobby, so they cannot whine about spells etc. But PVP has so many lobbyists it's not funny. Everytime someone loses they come to the boards, and complain until all profs eventually get ruined.

Me personally, I wish I could find a game like GW without PVP or at least 2 separate systems that do not effect each other (in other words a balance change in pvp does not make it's pve counterpart useless.)

I am not so much trying to increase my income as I am to locate max damage weapons with good mods for all my heros. Yea, I suppose I am spoiled and only want the best for my heros, my goal is to give all my heros Superior runes for their main skill, a major vigor rune for health, and a few minor runes along with a great weapon nicely modded. I also want to "pimp out" all of my heros with good looking armor, very good weapons etc, its just very difficult to do if the weapon and rune drops I get are very poor. Until now it didnt bother me too much because all of my characters have great weapons, runes, armor etc, but my heros need to be spoiled too. :-)


Unfortunatly the build I liked best used those skills. I was actually quite proud of the build and even talked about it alot with friends.



Amen!

When they do, Guild Wars will be removed from my hard drive and I will be playing the new one, thats for sure! I like Guild Wars alot still but changes made because of the PVP side is quickly spoiling the fun for me. It does not seem that Anet notices this, or perhaps they do and simply favor and gear the game for the PVP players.

Imagine Guild Wars without nerfs or buffs from the start. I can picture quite a bit less profession and build diversity compared to what it is now. And I'm betting the rune prices of all the overpowered professions/builds would be a lot more to complain about than the current rune market.

As for PvP affecting PvE - It is often the reverse that occurs as well. Do you truly believe that pure PvE, online games never have nerfs or changes?

No offence, but it seems like you are looking for a game that never changes, where the enemies die by the aura of your presence and godly artifacts drop at whim.

An increase in storage size, I do agree, needs to be implemented.

Mad King Corn, Game companies like PVP because it is low maintenence. Why? No storyline, no content, just nice scenery and game mechanics. Best of all lower RND costs. I'm willing to bet most gaming companies wish pve would die completely. They would really rake in the profit then. (talk to fight promoters, they have lil or no overhead. All they need is a venue and seats really. If they could get people to stand in a vacant lot and pay to see boxing matches they'd do it in a heart beat.) Same follows with PVP if everyone was happy with one arena style they'd only have one.

- So, you seem to have an eye for overpowered builds that make the game really boring, that's your bad, not Anet's.

- You get crap items but you don't have enough storage? Ironic.

- 3500 hours and apperantly only PvE, go play some HA or GvG and you'll see why the skillchanges have been inserted.

Greens are meant to be cheap, an accessable way for ppl to get perfect items :-/ Golds are as they say, rares,

you may like Everquest or EverQuest2
- little PVP and theres rarely, if ever, been a game update that made changes due to PvP

other MMORPGs that have both PVP and PVE
Dark Age of Camelot and World of warcraft
-- nerf class skills worse than GW because of PVP balance issues

I agree with what Skuld had to say here especially on no 3 you don't need runes on Heros as they are just to implement a void spot on your party.This is what I said in my thread Heros aren't replacement for human players and beating the game 3 times I can see that by now.I would never buy runes for my Heros that is why all the runes have gone up in price ppl are buying Runes for thier Heros.I only use one if it is a drop.I would suggest trying this out with your chars and as well no runes in presearinng you have no access to runes.I do agree with storage though.

Well SOE will not get another dime from me so no go on everquest.. LOL But thanks for the info/suggestions..

Regarding Rune prices: Don't know if this will help or not - You can use a Superior Salvage Kit on Heroe's Armor. You will always get your Rune back and they keep their armor. So if each of your warrior hero have the same general build when it comes to rune set up. You can easilly take Runes off Hero 1 for character 1, and give to hero 2 for Character 2.

Take Care..

Don't remind me back in the day of my good old mesmer. When Energy Drain was a great skill, and Fragility was leet. Oh how I miss old drok arenas.

I can give an example of that. Not a perfect example, but an example nonetheless.

When the Broken World expansion for Dungeon Siege 2 came out, a lot of things got nerfed. Armor ratings dropped right across the board (the combat mage that I had with over 600 armor suddenly dropped to just over 150 armor, despite staying in the same custom enchanted gear). The best boss-killing power in the game had its bite removed (my dual-wielding warrior still hasn't forgiven GPG for that), and the equivalent AoE power was pumped up (to my delight as it gave my throwing ranger a huge offensive advantage). Not to mention the number of skills they nerfed across the trees (some by as much as a 60% decrease in effectiveness). We're still playing though.

Nerfs happen. But we adapt. Other professions and build styles get their turn in the spotlight that way, and this helps keep things interesting. If nothing ever changed (in both PvE and PvP), then every game would get extremely boring after a while (and we'd probably all still be playing Pong on top of that).