Guild Wars 2

I would like to thank Anet for one element of the new update – the fact that it lets us feel like real heroes for once.

Recently, for a lot of updates, we’ve been mercenaries, assassins, investigators. All those are good, but the new update also makes me feel like a real hero, standing between raiders and their prey, protecting evacuation routes, helping out… This is where this LS update really hit me.

Even before, one of my favourite things to do was to go to and save centaur slaves. And now, I can save the civilians of an entire city.

I was thinking exactly this earlier.

A lot of the time I like that my character is not exactly the stereotypical hero. She does what she wants just as much as what she should, she doesn’t always follow the rules or do what other people think is right (less so in GW2 where you have relatively few options) and she comes and goes largely as she wants to.

But sometimes it’s nice to simply be the hero, the one who comes in at the last moment to save the day, and this update encompasses all the aspects of that – we fight our way into the city and rally the citizens to save themselves, protect them on their way out and fight off the bad guys.

(Although there’s a fair amount of looting going on too, so maybe it’s not pure heroics. But I’m still doing better than in Elder Scrolls games where I’ll take pretty much anything that isn’t nailed down….and some things that were.)

I have very much enjoyed this update. Rallying citizens and protecting them has been a very rewarding venture (not just talking about bags), and adding to that the ability to kill hundreds of Aetherblades has given me much (prolly too much) joy.

I have to agree the story/lore of the event is well-done and effective at making players feel like heroes, I just don’t care much for the event itself. It has all the charm of trying to move around Orr or Southsun while getting pointlessly spammed by mobs. Each time I tried it the less I wanted to do it again.

At least the storyline has taken a positive turn.

What makes you think you are hero?
You are the enemies of Scarlet’s united freedom fighters.

I actually hate that about it. Rescuing kittens and orphans just seems so out of character for an asura. I should be out there engineering super weapons to combat the threat, not playing fireman.

I enjoyed this LS too and I think the next one will also be good. Reminds me of the last 5 quests in GW1’s Winds of Change. Sneaking into a meeting, defending Kaineng Center when nobody else would answer the call, saving all of the Kaineng citizens from footloose bandits, warning the citizens about the Ministry and lastly defending the place where it all began…Shing Jea Monastery.

It truly felt like heroism.

I think one particular reason LS updates in the past didn’t feel as heroic though is so little was done in a 2-week timeframe. I mean…if you consider it, playing detective and investigator would be your first priority in combating a mysterious threat you know little to nothing about. However, due to the fact that you couldn’t move on to the next step of the investigation and then finally to the heroic conclusion without waiting for periods of time, it lost its mojo.

To use the Winds of Change quests to illustrate the point – imagine you could only do one quest every 2 weeks. By the time you got to defending SJM the heroism you felt saving the citizens would’ve felt a little dry.