This’ll be a bit of a long read, and may come of as “complainey” but I assure you I type this up with the fullest intention of helping better this game. Granted the harsh nature of this feedback, I feel I must clarify that in no way to I find “Guild Wars 2” a bad game. I’ve had more enjoyment with this game then I’ve with many others.
I’ve been playing for some weeks now, while trying to figure something out. Something was off-putting. I didn’t quite know what it was. Then suddenly one day I noticed that someone next to me just gathered from the same node I did. I thought about it “Oh, so gathering is individual player instance-based” Not actually a bad thing, It meant fields weren’t devoid of all resources for newer players because of farming. I kind of liked it, in fact!
This is where I started to notice something, though. Dropped gear was instance too! Huh, Okay. That sort of made me draw back and think for a bit. That kind of defeated the purpose of classes using different gear, and working as a team to get eachother gear. The gear grabbing was more “self-serve” This could, however, be forgiven.
Next stop, events! I started doing a bunch of events, as I went I noticed a theme. Nobody really helped anybody else do any objectives, in most cases. No cool team puzzles or the like. Mostly just smash the hell out of a boss, or everyone collect loot individually. Notice the use of the word “Individually” Nobody was “really” working together. It was just a big zerg, you follow it around, you do whatever, you get loot.
I thought surely pvp would be different, right? It has to be! The whole point is teamwork, right? Well yes, and also. . . no. I noticed a theme, and I tried out every role in PvP and PvE to try to clarify this theme and pattern. The pattern is thus; “Do whatever it is you do, and your teammates will get buffs and such as you go.” There are some exceptions, but allow me to make some examples below.
Supporting with my engineer: I build runes around boons and healing, Used all my heals in succession, and kept all conditions off my allies, yet they still died at about the same speed. I have a couple healing abilities, and after using every single one of them, doing a little math, all the healing I did amounts to about 6 smacks from an enemy warrior, or one “2” from a warriors greatsword. Maybe less. This is with 3 monk runes and 3 water runes, and +300 healing from traits, as well as traits specifically to help my healing and buffing. Naturally I did other things to help, too, but the effect of boons can be quite minimal in a lot of cases, and I sacrificed so much of my damage and power to do the garbage amount of healing I was doing, that I wasn’t useful at all.
Why is the above important? Self heals are extremely powerful, and almost every buff you give to allies you also give to yourself. The game is just too self-reliant. I find that regardless of how useful I try to be, the end result is me having to smack the hell out of the enemies to do so. Class not mattering. PvP boils down to whoever gets the jump on the enemies and zergs better. There’s no reason to even try to help your team, everyone helps themselves.
The same is evident in dungeons. Everyone has just about the same job. You hit it until it dies while dodging and healing yourself.
I’m sure I did a bad job of illustrating my point, in at least a few cases. If you’d all kindly do some critical thinking to understand what I mean, I’m sure you’ll all see it. Take off your Guild Wars 1 Nostalgia goggles, turn off your Troll Radar. Sit down, and have a good think.
TL;DR I’m trying to have a serious discussion, here. Come back when you feel like reading.
(edited by Zetoe.1327)