Recommended Posts

And this is where Anet shows they don't understand their own game.. 

 

"One of the main goals for balance in Guild Wars 2 is to support a wide variety of builds that cater to different play styles. The current implementation of critical damage works against this. Put simply, if critical damage-stacked builds are more effective than other approaches, the build diversity decreases."

 

Berserker is good because the pve side of the game is brain dead easy. AI allows people to get away with going glass cannon. That's not going to change just because they slightly nerf crit damage. It's only going to change when they put in the effort to make a proper fix by changing the behavior of pretty much every single pve enemy in the game, especially bosses in dungeons. And other kinds of build aren't as popular because there is no reason to use to use them, they just aren't as efficient. This change is happening without a doubt to appease whiners on the official forums.

Removing berserker wouldn't fix the problem. People would just move to the next highest dps set. Valkyre or Assassins or whatever. Berserker is a symptom of the real problem. 

 

Here's how anet fixes the "berserker" problem. Make trash enemies attack faster but for less damage. Same with bosses. Then remove all the stupid annoying 1 shot mechanics that bosses all seem to have. Cheap 1 shot mechanics only enforce the idea that killing things faster is better, which means berserker is best. Because if you get hit wearing full defensive set you're downed anyways. Add mechanics that encourage people to use other sets.

 

People have been saying since the betas that toughness and armor were not effective enough, and turns out we were more right than we could have known. Doing the above would increase how effective toughness and armor are.

 

So only after doing all the above will the berserker problem fix itself. Active defense (dodging) is just too good compared to the defense offered by gear and boons. This is the reason why we saw the vigor nerf a while back.

Account bound dyes... seriously? I'm so glad I never bothered making a lot of characters and getting good dyes for them. What a joke. I have several friends who have made a lot of characters and have spent a lot of gold getting good dyes for them. This is going to ###### them off and for good reason, account bound dyes has been a requested feature almost as much as precursor crafting.

 

But anet said, no no, dyes need to be character bound to keep them rare. Again, what a joke. Also during the betas dyes were in fact account bound but they changed it in favor of the how it is now. 

Finally, wardrobe and account wide dyes.  Two things that should have been in the game since launch.

 

Dyes weren't account wide in beta after the first beta test.  They changed that pretty early on.  I only played in the second beta, they were still dye seeds but not account wide.

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/pvp-reward-tracks-and-gear-unification/

 

"New" pvp rewards system. But judging by the pic of the tracks, it's basically the same chest based rng crap as before, just without the glory points now. Which means pvp remains a waste of my time since i STILL wont be able to pick my damn rewards.

I always felt it strange that they went with servers considering how they did things in GW1. The districts worked well in that game and I wondered why they didn't carry over. 

 

Anyways, I'm not sold on the entire mega server thing. It can make it so there are too many people all over the place and that's going to make it hard to do some events because things will explode instantly when they spawn.

  • 9 months later...

Anet announces the first official expansion of Guild Wars 2, called Heart of Thorns:

 

https://heartofthorns.guildwars2.com/en

 

 

  • New heavy armor class Revenant
  • Class specializations, ranger specializes into a druid, can use a staff and more, necro using greatswords, engineers using hammers, changes the way classes play
  • Masteries learned in "the Jungle", level 80 account wide progression system
  • New world vs world borderlands map along with a revamp of how world vs world currently works, new mechanics, actually reward defending instead of ring-around-the-rosie karma trains we mostly see now
  • New pvp game type strong hold, think GvG from GW1
  • Guil Halls
  • New legendary weapons and precursor crafting and/or scavenge hunt of some kind, no specifics yet
  • No new gear tier
  • No level cap increase
  • Raid style content for guilds
  • Maguuma Jungle is the focus of the expansion with the elder dragon Mordramoth, 3 "tiers" of verticality, huge area
  • Glint has a secret for us "in the jungle"

 

And more. No release date and no cost yet.

 

F.A.Q.

 

https://help.guildwars2.com/entries/105801626-Guild-Wars-2-Heart-of-Thorns-FAQ

http://buy.guildwars2.com/store/gw2/en_US/html/pbPage.buyguildwars2

 

On sale for 10 bucks. Worth it? Play a little bit of arch age and i did not like that game at all.

 

Archeage and GW2 are trying to be completely different kinds of games while both still being mmo, so there is that.

 

Its hard to say if you'll like it though. What other kind of games do you like?

 

But for $10 you probably can't go wrong, considering there is no sub fee.

Wonder if there'll be more than one specialization per class.. either way though glad to see "power creep" isn't going to be an issue, rather annoying in other MMOs. Hopefully they'll do a few more.. still waiting to see what happened with Cantha and Elona too, never mind a few areas they haven't touched yet like Ring of Fire, etc.  

 

On sale for 10 bucks. Worth it? Play a little bit of arch age and i did not like that game at all.

Definitely, as said above there's no monthly fees and the store is totally optional, no "pay to win" here.  Enough content to last you a long while and a decent replay-value with different races/professions as well.  

Wonder if there'll be more than one specialization per class.. either way though glad to see "power creep" isn't going to be an issue, rather annoying in other MMOs. Hopefully they'll do a few more.. still waiting to see what happened with Cantha and Elona too, never mind a few areas they haven't touched yet like Ring of Fire, etc.  

 

Definitely, as said above there's no monthly fees and the store is totally optional, no "pay to win" here.  Enough content to last you a long while and a decent replay-value with different races/professions as well.  

 

I hope there are more than one specialization per class because then it's not really a choice. It's just something everyone of a given class will have which kind of lessens the entire idea of specializing.

 

A few things they didn't mention anything about, and these are kind of big.. they didn't mention anything about new dungeons or a dungeon revamp or fractals either. Which is surprising.

I hope there are more than one specialization per class because then it's not really a choice. It's just something everyone of a given class will have which kind of lessens the entire idea of specializing.

 

A few things they didn't mention anything about, and these are kind of big.. they didn't mention anything about new dungeons or a dungeon revamp or fractals either. Which is surprising.

It's probably a safe assumption there's going to be new dungeons and the like, probably have more of the details revealed as the release gets closer.  And yea I'm thinking the same thing about specialization, it's not like GW1's dual-classing but could come close-ish, for the ranger not only a druid but say a master marksman and one that specializes in blades primarily, give a lot more flexibility/flavor.  That said, going to avoid the revenant for a while.. brings back memories of the Death Knight flood in WoW heh, going to be a gazillion of them.

I'm wondering how they are going to distribute that expansion and how much we will be charged - if it would be released for free then I'm pretty sure this would be mentioned today.

I seriously doubt it'll be free.  Typically it's the core game, buy it once and done.  Free content updates (living story, etc).  And then, at least with GW1, several paid expansions, again once and done, never any monthly fees.  They've been reasonably priced in the past though, plus had an option to buy them all in one shot if you're late to the game.  

I'm wondering how they are going to distribute that expansion and how much we will be charged - if it would be released for free then I'm pretty sure this would be mentioned today.

 

In the FAQ I posted up there it says it will be a paid expansion. My guess is that it will be distributed the same way the original game was. Via their store and box sales.

 

The real question is how much it will be. Wouldn't be surprised at all if it's $50 or more.

This topic is now closed to further replies.
  • Posts

    • Actually, I think even Microsoft doesn't know how to control it
    • OpenAI is making Codex more useful in Chrome and the cloud by Pradeep Viswanathan OpenAI's Codex now has more than 5 million users, up nearly 4x from earlier this year. To further accelerate Codex's growth among developers, OpenAI today announced that it has agreed to acquire Ona, a company that builds secure cloud execution and orchestration technology for developers. Ona will enable developers to run Codex with persistent and controlled cloud infrastructure for long-running agentic workflows. Right now, most Codex execution happens locally on developers' laptops and PCs, and the agents work continuously for hours. Through Ona, OpenAI aims to make Codex agents keep working for days without being tied to a user’s local machine or an active session. This will be an important capability for enterprises that want to deploy AI agents in production while maintaining control over infrastructure, data, security boundaries, credential scope, logging, and review workflows. Like any acquisition, the deal is still subject to customary closing conditions, including regulatory approvals. Until the deal closes, OpenAI and Ona will continue to operate as separate companies. After closing, Ona’s team will join the Codex team to improve developer workflows. Alongside the Ona acquisition announcement, OpenAI today introduced a few Codex updates. Developers can now save Codex rate limit resets and use them later instead of losing them when they are not needed immediately. OpenAI is also adding a referral option where users can invite a friend to Codex and get a saved rate limit reset. OpenAI today also announced a developer mode for browser use in Chrome and the Codex in-app browser. With this mode, Codex can use the Chrome DevTools Protocol to debug web apps, inspect pages, and work more directly with browser-based development workflows. Developers can use this when they want Codex to profile JavaScript, inspect console output and network traffic, examine web page states including the DOM and applied styles, and more.
    • Camtasia 2026.1.3 by Razvan Serea TechSmith Camtasia is the complete professional solution for high-quality screen recording, video editing and sharing. Camtasia 2026 makes editing your videos easier, and faster than ever. The new editor is packed with enhanced video processing, all-new production technology, an innovative library, and stock videos and other creative assets to help you create more polished, professional videos. No video experience needed. Anyone can create informative, engaging videos. Create professional, eye-catching videos: Add special video effects - Apply Behaviors that are perfectly designed to animate your text, images, or icons. Get a crisp, polished look without being a professional video editor. Drag-and-drop your edits - What you see is what you get. Every effect and element in your video can be dropped and edited directly in the preview window. And you can edit at resolutions up to beautiful 4K, for clear video at any size. Get exceptional performance - Camtasia takes full advantage of your computer’s processor with 64-bit performance. You’ll get fast rendering times and enhanced stability—even on your most complex projects. Camtasia 2026.1.3 changelog: Feature Updates Improved keyboard navigability in tool panels. Improved screen reader accessibility of headings in Preferences. Tool panels can now be resized using a keyboard-navigable control. Updated color of folder icon in User Library tab for better visibility. Grouped media now render a composite waveform considering all audio media within that group. Added Long Path Aware to the manifest of Editor and Recorder. Performance Improvements Improved performance for editing groups on the timeline. Improved the project loading performance when timeline has lots of trec media with cursor data. Updates for IT Administrators Updated cpp-httplib from 0.38.0 to 0.43.3. Updated expat from 2.7.4 to 2.8.0. Updated freetype from 2.13.3 to 2.14.3. Updated harfbuzz from 13.0.1 to 14.2.0. Updated libpng16 from 1.6.55 to 1.6.58. Updated pango from 1.57.0 to 1.57.1. Updated girepository from 2.86.3 to 2.88.0. Updated pcre2-posix from 10.47.0 to 12.0.2. Added new harfbuzz-gpu.dll. Updated FFmpeg from 7.1.1 to 7.1.2. Updated aom from 3.11.0 to 3.13.1. Updated dav1d from 1.5.0 to 1.5.1. Updated ogg from 1.3.5 to 1.3.6. Updated SDL2 from 2.32.4 to 2.32.10. Updated zlib from 1.3.1 to 1.3.2. Updated Nalpeiron binaries to version 4.4.69.3. Bug Fixes Fixed an issue which prevented some user submitted crash reports from being sent. Fixed a potential memory leak when decoding HEVC or VP9 video. Fixed a potential crash when trying to delete a range selection on a magnetic track. Fixed a bug with the Properties Panel showing stale properties when only a caption is selected on the timeline. Fixed an issue that could prevent the Opacity and Blur properties from being changed in the Background Removal effect. Fixed an issue where larger Camtasia online projects may fail to open in Camtasia Editor. Table of contents thumbnails are no longer created for Smart Player exports with no table of contents. Fix resetting skew revert to revert just skew and not scale as well. Fixed editing in Snagit with snagX file with Unicode characters. Fixed a bug where grouped visual media could be cropped in some cases. Fixed importing SnagX files with Unicode characters. Localization fixes. Download: Camtasia 2026.1.3 | 309.0 MB (Shareware) View: Camtasia Homepage | Tutorials | Screenshot Get alerted to all of our Software updates on Twitter at @NeowinSoftware
    • yeah it seems to be Edge only. The dialog buttons work as expected in Chrome and Firefox. The phone is using Android 16 (OneUI 8.5) and Edge version  149.0.4022.53
  • Recent Achievements

    • One Month Later
      Jamswaz earned a badge
      One Month Later
    • Week One Done
      Jamswaz earned a badge
      Week One Done
    • Rookie
      Marzoid went up a rank
      Rookie
    • Community Regular
      coch went up a rank
      Community Regular
    • One Year In
      slackerzz earned a badge
      One Year In
  • Popular Contributors

    1. 1
      +primortal
      512
    2. 2
      PsYcHoKiLLa
      188
    3. 3
      +Edouard
      157
    4. 4
      Steven P.
      83
    5. 5
      ATLien_0
      75
  • Tell a friend

    Love Neowin? Tell a friend!