Guild Wars 2

Dear Anet:

This encounter is great. I thoroughly enjoy it; that tempo, that nail-biting watching of the timer, praying that each platform succeeds. This is exactly what your game is good at; encounters with huge amounts of chaos, using siege weapons to hold back never-ending waves of enemies, getting into small scale fights against elite enemies with abilities that have to be countered as if we were playing an action RPG more then an MMO. This is the most fun encounter I’ve participated in in your game in the approximately 9 months I have had it; the only other ones I liked as much were the twin bosses at the end of the Molten Foundry and the Pirate duo at the end of the Aetherblade Retreat.

So please, please, for the love of god, lay off the giant single monster encounters. Your game’s mechanics aren’t terribly well suited for them. We don’t need four or five huge dragons; every MMO has huge ‘epic’ encounters and, to give them their due, nobody does it as well as that other ridiculously popular MMO that’s been around since 2004.

When you do the next phase of the living story, after Scarlett is dealt with, please focus the encounters on things your game does better then any other MMO I have ever played. I, and I’ll bet quite a few others, want to fight giant battles against literal armies, taking fortifications, holding back counter-attacks, taking out strategic enemy points. You know the fractal where you attack Ascalon with the Charr? That, writ large, should be what your future raid encounters should be like. Because without the holy trinity, the only mechanics you can come up with for large single monsters are going to be things that are too dependent on people not having latency issues, people not showing up in bad gear, and people not showing up not knowing or being willing and able to listen to how to do the things required to win. I am looking at you, Tequatl cannon AFK’ers.

After playing that other game for 9 years I find yours to be great fun, but I look at it with systems in place that aren’t being utilized to make it as remarkable as it could be. My Dragon is more epic then your Dragon is a dumb argument to be getting into; it should be “While your off fighting your dragon we’re leading an army to victory and holding the line against a never ending foe.”