Guild Wars 2

Hi. Just throwing it out there that if you’ve got any spare dev resources in upcoming months, a grouping tutorial (in terms of dungeon grouping) would be great. Even if it’s just a cutscene.

A lot of my guildies come from other MMos, particularly WoW, where they were either semi-casuals or high-end raiders. They understand that Guild Wars grouping doesn’t work like WoW, in that there’s less segregation of roles, but they’re having a hard time getting their head around exactly what the differences are. When they get blocked or stressed they tend to revert back to WoW solutions, which are sometimes valid (attracting ranged enemies by staying out of their line of sight) and sometimes not (looking for their aggro generating abilities to help them tank).

It would be really helpful to have something to point them to which spells out both the philosophy and the specific mechanics of how things like healing, monster aggro, pulling, and boons/conditions work in dungeons. As well, it should explain concepts and commands like combos and group targeting, and give you a little idea of what some of the other classes can do group wise (which classes get abilities useful for pulling mobs, for reviving downed allies, for reflecting projectiles, etc). As far as I’ve seen there’s no really good training for this in any of the overworld PvE play, and it’s presenting a barrier to transitioning over to dungeons. For myself, I only just learned that thieves have a ranged pull yesterday, and apparently all the thieves I’d been dungeoning with previously didn’t know about it either or hadn’t realised that it was valuable or useful.

I mean, obviously my guildies can do what the rest of us did, and learn by playing multiple classes and banging our heads against the dungeons until we get it right, but that’s not the BEST way of presenting that learning experience, is what I’m saying.

On this topic I’d also love more UI options to more clearly display who’s giving you boons and conditions (without having to mouse over the icon, that is), and better show the effects of beneficial AoEs laid down by allies.