Why is grinding okay now?

I agree it's too steep.

Of course it is optional... just like it is optional to buy FoW armor. However, black dye, FoW armor, crystalline swords and drunkard titles don't give you a skill advantage over another player who chose to spend his time on the defender title. LB and SS seem fine, because they are reasonably obtainable and part of the storyline from the start. May as well link it to the sweet tooth title makes just as much sense to me.

All i read is a whining individual who just wants anet to hand them these skills at maximum level without ever having to lift a finger. Quite frankly its pathetic. And im sorry to say that you are not on your own.

But looking at the discussion from both sides does have merit. Yes there are good points for both sides and i do believe the anet designteam will find a middle ground.

But I seriously doubt that they would be succumbed by whiners and moaners like yourself that would rather detract from other peoples gaming experience ( that have put / will put time into faction farming ) rather than putting in effort themselves, and all under the guise of the 'new players coming into the game' routine.

Yawn

wanting to get rid of the grinding aspect doesn't mean the same thing as wanting it to be just automatically given at level 1. the specific person may or may not want that, but I don't think you really have enough information to make that accusation without looking completely foolish... This "middleground" is actually what most of the people on the side you are opposing actually want... not instantly given without any effort, but given based on deeds that have merit without turning into a grind. sunspear skills do this perfectly. protector title basis would also work just fine.

Pink armor pug ?

You couldn't come up with a better counter example, such as one that might actually happen on a regular basis ?

Also I view completing the game as completing the main storyline, all side quests and all elite missions at least once. So for the players without guild mates willing to help (say a mainly pvp guild) how can they complete DOA without getting the cookie cutter builds ?

Purely cosmetic ?

How exactly are the faction skills purely cosmetic considering they directly effect how well your character performs, regardless of your skill ?

I was just about to say that. Anet missed the ball when they came up with that concept.

What's grinding? And why is factions so bad?

It's the only GW I have at the moment. I think its fun to play. I am planning on getting Prof and Night sometime later (maybe in the winter). But for now I just play the PvE for fun. Am I wasting my time with factions if the skills in this expansion are not as good as the others? I'm a beginner and I don't follow anything going on about grinding or spending time on titles.

Hiya and welcome

The above posters are referring to faction gained skills, not skills only available in the GW chapter called Factions. ie.. they are optional skills that can only be gained by trading 'faction' points.

Factions as a game is great, so dont worry. Yep, a lot of us end up getting all 3 chapters as it does allow a broader and deeper gameplay style if you like (as well as getting 3 times the gameplay.

Grinding is the term used to desribe going out and getting something..experience, gold, items, or in this case 'faction' points. Its called grinding because it is...a grind.. :P ie it can be tedious, long and boring and repetitive.

edit - also, check out GW wiki for lots of really handy info

^^DirtyDirty

Just ignore all that - what they're going on about concerns experienced players who've been playing a long time, not anything people new to the game need to worry about.

You made a good choice. Factions is the shortest of the 3 and the easiest one to get started in. Plus, it's a blast. I say that as someone who completed Proph with 6 chars, taken 5 of those thru Factions (with the 6th about 3/4 finished), plus finished it with 3 new Factions chars with 3 more in various stages of advancement.

Just kick back and enjoy the game.

I didn't tought much about it, since I play mostly Necro and none of the Kurzick/Luxons skills really appeal to me, however one thing that could be done to keep the middle ground between grinding and getting all the skills easily would be to do this, imho :

You need to be level 1 in the title to get the skills, maybe make it so they cost more to buy (like 10k per skill, I don't know), but once you've bought it, it comes with the same power no matter the title level.
People will still have to grind for the title, but it will be more manageable, like the sunspear and lightbringer title.

I don't really see the problem here, unless you pug constantly and all pugs require the top end of these skills,
I'm a title chaser at heart, I dont pug anymore becuase of the bias, time taken to do so, and the unreliablility. Most things i can achieve with my partner or with heroes and hench.
I do mostly PvE, but regularly do PvP. concentrating on Ab at the moment, but I don't have many faction points in either title, 335k in Kurzick and 118k in Luxon, i'm going for both and I will get the skills on all characters, if they become usable i will use them, but I don't think they are necessary to play the game.
If peopel want to max them out then do so if not then play differently, PUG's always find ways to exclude people if its not this then its going to be something else, If you could play the game before there release then I don't see how you can't after

I can't possibly quote this enough for truth.

If someone wants to spend endless hours grinding to get points on a kuzack, luxon or sunspear, etc etc title; then thats their choice.

Let them be!

Yes it means their special skill will be more powerfull, but have you seen all the new special skills? Their not all that amazing!

Granted the elemental one is, but im quite happy just getting 24% more damage on just level 8 of the sunspear title.

I still have one more guardian title to achieve, so Im not going to waste my time grinding until I have absolutely nothing else to do.

But alot of players have nothing else to do, so let them grind. But what MMO/RPG game online doesnt have grind? they all do! get used to it.

I feel the same way. The lightbringer title was just the first step. While you could argue that "they are optional grinds," a 40% damage boost and 8 damage reduction through Nightfalls endgame content goes a long way to separate one level 20 character from another without said title. If you want to even try DoA content, do you think the groups there will take the Brave Lightbringer (what I finished the game at) or the Holy Lightbringer (which is 50 times as much farming).

The addition of these is a bad omen in my book, and I've certianly been playing less lately. Grinding is just an unimaginative way of trying to make a game appear like it has more to do than there really is. There isn't more to do. Its just making people do the same thing far too many times.

I think they should rework the title. Sunspear was pretty good, you should reach rank 7 or 8 by the time you beat the game, which would give you a pretty strong Sunspear skill. However, faction farming will take 10 hours doing FFF (or something like 30 hours for people who don't FFF) just to get the skill at the lowest level. They should at least make the first 6-7 levels be reasonable to get and the final two or three levels be harder for the people who like the grind. I hope they rearrange the cutoffs for the titles so the first few levels are easier to get.

And I don't think the "optional" argument holds. What if the only skills you can unlock are hammer skills, frenzy, and mending until you grind for 100 hours? Sure, you can beat the game with no grind. It just makes the game pathetic. Stuff like 15K armor, FoW armor, black dye, etc are optional because they have no affect on game play, whereas having more skills does.

The lightbringer title already annoyed me a little bit, because on my primary character with level 7 LB, with +35% dam, margonites were a joke. Yesterday I was playing another character and found the mobs to survive significantly longer when I realized that my heroes and I had no LB title (thats 4 characters with +35%, essentially one and a half people). Having that extra invisible nuker changes things alot. But at least it is fairly easy to grind. You can hit rank 4 in under an hour farming in HM.

The Sunspear and Kurz/Lux skills seem to be the only concerning points. Other grinding doesn't make me a better player then others while these do.

I don't seem to have a problem with the other grinds. But the fact that it's the only endgame we get is what sucks.

In theory, title rank discrimination could be an issue for elite areas and HM. In practice, so few are playing that it simply isn't.

I think all this gameplay was added because GW never managed to gain a whole lot of pvpers like they originally wanted. I think this is because:

-The hardcore pvp crowd is loked in Starcraft and Countersrike for all eternity.
-Pure PvP is extremely elitist and that inevitably turns people off.
-Not all players are content to use the current mandatory overpowered build of choise and nothing else. Every single game.

No problem for me. I play games for fun, not to be flamed and kicked out because my build sucks.
The game only improved since i got in.Pve used to be horribly bland before we got heroes and titles.

Bottomline: The pvp-centric gameplay of GW is evolving towards pve because the pvp playerbase is too small.

The next phase of this will be the huge pvp situations in persistend worlds we will get in GW2. Sound juicy sweet i say...

And one more impression: Most pve ers just want to farm. My last guild was all about it,so i got bored with it.

As I see it, you gain Sunspear Rank as part of the game, lets face it, for a NF born character you need 2,500 to get past the Sunspear Sanctuary and are well into the title track. For foreign characters, you accumulate SS rank as well when you run through the NF campaign. So for Sunspear Skills, anyone playing the pve game normally has access to them.

Now lets turn to Kurzick/Luxon Skills, the starting point is 100,000 faction before you can access the new skills. The game content only requires 10,000 to befriend a particular faction. The casual PvE'er stops there, at the 10,000 mark, that’s all they need to progress in the game. Hit the requirement once on one character and you don’t need to do it again across the whole account. With the introduction of faction based skills we are now seeing the introduction of a "requirement" outside the normal PvE game.

Simply put, just by playing through the Nightfall campaign you will get enough Sunspear points to unlock the SS skills, in factions however you can not get the required level by playing through the quests and missions ordinarily, you have to repeat quests and farm in AB etc etc to be able to access them (let alone use them efficiently).

Every single one of my 11 PvE characters has access to the Sunspear skills on a per character title, simply by following the story line, not one of them can currently access the Faction based skills even though faction is account based (only banked 50,000 Luxon, and I'm now in a Kurzick guild where I've banked 5,000).

While I currently have 10,000 of each in hand to allow easy progression of new characters, that would still leave me woefully short of even being able to "see" the faction based skills without an element of repeat grinding. To unlock them all on one character would require what, another 50K to get to the 100k requirement on Luxon, and a further 30K for the skills themselves. A total of 80K for the first character to be able to get them, and 30K for everyone one after that. On all 11 characters that’s what? A need to farm an additional 380K faction for one side of the divide only? I’d then need another 95K for the Kurzick side to reach 100,000 as well as the 3K per skill per character. Someone tell me this is not going to be pure grind for the sake of grinding.

OK, so I'm a self confessed PvE'er, I've played many characters through each campaign, I have (and no big deal, pardon the pun) People Know Me, from protector, cartographer, LB, SS, and Skill Hunter titles. With all of these titles there was a goal in sight, with Faction titles there was no objective in getting more faction for any particular alliance.

Before people turn round and say well, you grinded you way to max titles on SS and LB, the SS wasn’t intended, it was a consequence of going for the LB title track, to assist my guild mates in the RoT (read: it gives an inherent bonus the higher your rank). There was a purpose to it in the game as released, not forgetting DoA when it came out. Faction, for over 12 months, was only relative to a guild owning a town after you befriended one of the two factions, it had no other inherent benefit.

Even within a guild that purely plays for fun, I can see the way this is going. All of us having spent the time and effort to get together builds for a balanced DoA team within the guild, now face the question, do you have the Kurzick/Luxon skill? If the answer is no, we face the prospect of not being selected for a team within our own guild, all because another player in the guild is better equipped to do so. It doesn’t take much to extrapolate this scenario to that of a general PUG does it?

I already hear the cry in response, "if you are in a guild, just AB the faction". well, it may come as a surprise to you, there are PvE only guilds out there, who don't care to AB it; that want to play the true PvE content for fun, as a group, on an even foot hold.

Oh, and before anyone says I'm just whining, take this on board, I fully appreciate that a-net has introduced PvE only skills. I actually like the majority of the latest update as a whole, but, and there is always a but, whilst I can understand the link of the NF skills to the Sunspear title as part of the journey through the campaign, I fail to see the logic in linking the Factions skills to Luxon/Kurzick faction, other than those are the only campaign specific titles they could use.

Sunspear Title always had a purpose, Sunspear Rebirth Signet anyone? Light bringer had a similar purpose with its own associated skills and inherent bonus against damage in RoT. As part of the game you would reach the required level to obtain these (and the new SS skills). The same is just not true of the Luxon/Kurzick. The only purpose to the majority of PvE'ers (before this week) was to befriend each faction at 10,000, or to get the crafting materials for your 15K armor sets.

Lets look at this from another perspective. You max out SS at 50,000, and say on average for a quest completion you got 100 SS points, along with the points picked up by killing the AI. So lets say 500 points on average per quest. That’s 100 quests before you max the title out. Just how many times do you need to repeat a quest to get to the Faction requirement of 100K to get the skills? After the first 10K, 90,000 is needed at what 400K a throw, that’s 225 times, more than double the grind. Utlimately, if you want these faction based skills, you are now almost forced to AB or repeat the challenge missions. This is simply not true for the SS based skills.

As Skuld said, none of it is required to either play or beat the game. Nor do you need to join a pug that requires you to have a specific skill. If you decide you wish to, the 100k faction to simply get the skill is not an insurmountable hurdle by any stretch. No need to level the skill beyond that point.

You know, i think it's more irritating that you have to infuse every new set of armor you buy in order to play in mursaat areas, then it is to get a few ranks.
If you play the game the way meant to be played (all quests, kill every mob you encounter along the way), every character you make is Sunspear castellan and mighty lightbringer when it beats Abbadon.