Guild Wars 2

Hey guys, I played gw1 for five years and would like to comment on what I feel is… lacking and/or there is too much of in gw2, also obviously try to put up creative suggestions in it by comparing this with gw1.

As a baseline, I’d like to say, for the less attentive reader/hater, this is strictly my opinion. If you agree, great, add to it, if you disagree, kitten present logical arguments, and take into consideration the whole post, not just 1/10 of it and sound like an ignorant. Disagreeing and commenting about it is desirable, but in a way that you prove your point, not your incompetence.

Combat: in GW1, boss fights were nothing like they are here in GW2. Let’s take for example the fights in FoW or Urgoz’s Warren, UW, any elite area really. These fights, including the boss encounter, were mostly around specific combos that enemies could pull off, that were in most cases made by exactly the same skills that players had access to. Some haters will say that that’s just boring, no new skills, I’ll simply not answer said haters, because what this was doing, intentionally or not, was teach players new combos that they might never have thought of.

Just by dumping a couple of skills together, the developers of gw1 had managed, through the AI, to create a way of teaching new stuff, open ideas for new builds for players. And the mechanics were much more around grouping them up, so that you, as a team, could take them out faster, while you yourself are spread out. (Now because GW1 was played in teams (heroes or henchies…) I will only look at dungeon runs in gw2, to have a fair(er) comparisson)

In GW2, we don’t see anything of the sort. We see a dull clash of players vs mobs, where players dodge CC y and AoE Z over and over and over and over again until the mob is finally dead. There is no fun in that. Mobs have a way too limited set of skills with hardly any creativity and the only way to make the game hard enough for it to not be any more trivial than it is is through scaling their HP and DMG to points where one auto hit is dealing 5k dmg from a range.

My suggestion: Arenanet, please, find a way for mobs to not simply be about a first encounter, where the mobs all drop their burst and then dont do anything for 20 seconds. Make it so mobs inside a group have different casting times and different abilities, so that it’s not all about surviving the first burst and then slowly killing them. Arah explorable is a great example for this problem, where just engaging a small group of 3 enemies, if not done correctly, leads to a quick AoE wipe. Make it so battles are always hard, throughout the whole battle, and not just at the start. All in all, this can be summed up to: pay more attention to the fights we fight.

Now for Legendaries and Gear.

This is obviously strongly related to the economy of the game, which is completely broken at the moment. I’ll try however not to link them too much and thus try to talk about ideals/concepts, not actual numbers. This creates the need for more attentive reading.

After being fully geared, having ascended stuff yadieyadieyadie, most PvErs want to get a legendary weapon or a couple of extremely expensive exotic skin, or at least have it as their goal as they play along. Because legendaries were meant to be a “quest” for the most determined, I’ll use them as an example.

Legendaries are meant to involve alot of work in all the different fields of the game, which we can see by the name of the gifts: gift of fortune (luck, always a factor), gift of mastery (skill!!!!) and gift of magic and might.

However, the way things are at the moment, we can completely bypass the gift of fortune if we have enough money (c’mon, the karma isn’t hard to get). Adding to the importance of money in getting the legendaries are the precursor weapons, which because of the RNG way they are acquired are, for the majority of the players, only acquirable through the TP(I mean that’s the best option) and also the gift of insert weapon name, which was originally, the way I see it, the ONLY money dump intended in the process of getting a legendary.

And even that money dump was supposed to be in the icy runestones, not the lodestones you need for it.
Basically, what I’m trying to say is that the ammount of sheer money needed for a legendary at the moment is not O.K.

Which is why I want to give kudos to Arenanet for moving forward with the idea of the scavenger hunt for the precursor (assuming it actually is moving forward, haven’t heard any news about it in forever…). It’s one step towards the right way, assuming they don’t somehow end up putting even more RNG in the hunt itself, or make it require more money than buying the precursor, but I digress.

My suggestion: more steps towards the right way. In my opinion, all materials of a legendary weapon should be farmable, and in quantities that correspond to what you need. Cmon, the way things are atm, no1 will farm 250 of every t6 material. Not a single person. The money dump should be on the icy runestones, thats 100g. The lodestones should be acquirable through other means, namely through farming. However, the drop rate on them is so ridiculously low, that the supply of the whole world at the moment doesn’t reach 250 for charged lodes nor onyx lodes. Increase the supply. That way the economy will balance out as well, the reason why we are experiencing such a huge inflation is because there’s too much demand for the ammount of supply we have. I believe arenanet can figure out a way to make the way towards a legendary feel more “legendary” than it is atm and still make it so it’s exactly as hard. For example, I loved what was done to the jumping puzzle in WvW. It’s a way for non WvWers to get the badges they need for the legendary, but it still takes work from them.

As a last example: I would personally love to be able to farm the onyx lodestones I need for my Twilight legendary. Sadly, it’s so much easier to just make money playing the TP and farming fractals or other dungeons and buying the lodestones than actually farming them. The same thing applies to all T6 materials. It’s just… wrong. The idea of getting a legendary, or even a high end exotic skin, should be that you would explore the world while working for that quest. But yet we are stuck doing the same thing over and over again.

More scavenger hunts, more rewards for personal storyline quests for example. Nerf the drop rate of exotics and rares in fractals but up the drop rates of t6 materials and charged lodestones. Make it so there’s a daily chest that drops 10 of each t6 material or mystic coins if you complete jumping puzzle/champion boss/event Z-Y-Z. There are so many solutions out there, so much to improve in this system. Remove RNg completely from the precursors, make it so they don’t drop at all. You can have other skins drop in return, for people who farm those chests in hopes of getting rly lucky and rich, but precursors should NOT be RNG drops ever! If I got myself Dusk dropped right now, I’d be happy cause I saved 500g, but I’d be kitten off, because I had simply gotten lucky. I had had no effort whatsoever. It’s not part of that “quest”. It just feels like a betrayal to have everything grind-dependent, goes against a Manifesto promise… I’d just be repeating myself if I said that we should be farming in different spots, different content for different components of the same item.

Hope everyone agrees with this, and remembers the baseline I said at the start.

Edit: I had originally also compared this with gw1, but… the post was already waaaaaaay too long

I do agree with you on some points. There’s way too much randomness in acquiring a legendary. I’ve grind those sparks for 2 hours without getting a single charged lodestone. The only reason I have one is because my guild leader gave one to me. I’ve heard one guy grind the same enemies for 8 hours and never got one yet someone else got one on the first kill. I don’t see how Anet thinks this is “fun” or “fair”.

Another sore point is I’ve been playing every single day from the pre-release and, forget exotics, I’ve never gotten a single rare weapon for a chest.

Ever.

At this point I’m about 50% to getting my legendary but everything left is heavily based off of RNGs. I didn’t mind doing the rest because, though frustrating, it was always a slow progress. For instance, I’m not particularly fond of WvW but I’m willing to do the jumping puzzle for my server because there’s little chance of me running into a player from another server. Better still, when I do see one doing my server’s jumping puzzle, we leave each other alone. I personally don’t attack anyone whom made it that far into enemy territory because I know how frustrating that is.

I don’t bother with the jp in eternal battlegrounds because it’s far too long and the risk is way too high for the reward. I did it one for the achievement and that was a hassle even when my server was dominating at the time. Of course things are worse now as it seems I can only do a particular jumping puzzle on one toon instead of all of them.

When I first started working towards Sunrise, I had the intention of doing it all on my own. I stuck with that intention for 3 months, constantly turning down my guildmates’ assistance. now I feel it’s needed to cover the rest of what I need and it just shouldn’t be that way. MY legendary should be based off of MY blood, sweat and tears, not when the RNG finally decides to favor me.