First and foremost, I have been gaming online since 1997 with Diablo and Ultima Online (UO). UO still stands as the game I had the most fun in. it was a true sandbox, and it provided a in challenge in many areas of the game, I would probably still be playing it if it was still populated and a Pre-T2A ruleset. I have played nearly every game to have come out, substantially time invested in UO, EQ, SB, DAoC, WoW, and now GW2, which are games I feel were a success.
I will dive into the game mechanics first, The condition and boon system is great, its simple to understand, and I feel that I don’t need to memorize class’s abilities to know what to do next. The class system is also great, I feel that everything is pretty well balanced besides maybe Mesmer abilities, and thief’s burst damage. But for the most part everything is scaled very well. After playing the beta’s I really could not choose what I wanted to play, I was literally going to put the classes into a hat and draw out of it. I went onto level a Mesmer to 80 at release and acquired my exotic set of armor; I am now working on a Ranger which will be 80 pretty soon. Leveling in this game is great, It is the most enjoyable leveling experience I have had, in any MMO, besides UO, but that was a skill system. You get XP from everything which is great and the story itself isn’t bad at all. The only thing I would have liked to see Is more quests that broke off from the story, nothing major but maybe a few more quests down the road that delved into something different than the dragons.
I enjoy the multiple ways of acquiring gear, whether it be from farming mats to have the items crafted, through dungeon running, or through PVP. The only gripe that I can say is that the gear other than the crafted set seems to be focused around toughness and vitality which I don’t feel is good because they fit a low amount of builds. I’d like to see this revised in the future. But overall the acquiring of gear is enjoyable and challenging in its own ways.
PVE endgame is somewhat lack luster as there is no epic feeling, to them. I want to do more than 5man’s. I want to play with a large number of my guildies at once in a epic PVE setting. Yes there are a few world events in Orr and Jormag(sp?) the dragon which is awesome, yet yields nothing of importance for the most part. I hate to say it but I want some raiding to the quality of at least EQ. even DAoC had some epic raids that yielded great rewards.
WvW at its current time, 2-3 weeks after release is fun, and enjoyable. I love taking over keeps and such as we did in DAoC. Yet I feel looking to the future that at its current state it will become lackluster due to no real rewards. Yes you get tokens for gear and server buffs. But in all seriousness a few months down the road what’s the point. I enjoy PVP, I feel I classify myself as a PVP’er at heart. But server wide boons just aren’t appetizing to me, and I feel the majority of players would agree. I would love to see realm ranks to unlock more utility abilities related to PVP. I also would like to see something like Darkness fall’s, like in DAoC, where in GW2 you would have to control your servers map as well as 50+% of the eternal. Or something like that, which had a slightly better chance to drop materials and such.
I am not hear to rag on the game, as it is now I feel the want and need to level every class, and participate in a lot of sPVP and WvW. I just feel that the game as it is down the road will leave many wanting more. The game needs to be appetizing to those who enjoy mainly PVP, or PVE. PVE’ers need to be drawn to participate in WvW, the best way to do this is systems like Darkness falls as in DAoC, or even go a step more and add a live non instance dungeon where the 3 servers are constantly fighting to keep control of it. The opposite is also true, you have to draw PvP’ers to PVE. There are little features that are absent from the game which I consider to be mandatory in any game. Below I will list my suggestion in which I feel would make this game an even greater success.
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