Guild Wars 2

So I’ve been playing this game very intensively lately, leveled a char to 80, did roughly 80% of the world completion, did all the big dynamic events, did half the dungeons… it’s time to put together some feedback. For a change, let’s start with positive things

1. Big dynamic events are awesome. It’s just amazing to see that every time The Shatterer or the Claw of Jormag spawns, lots of people turn up to do the event. In fact, usually lots of people turn up 20 minutes in advance, to be sure they don’t miss it

2. Characters look really nice. The armor skins in this game are among the best I’ve seen, and the dye system is definitely the best I’ve ever seen. Every now and then I find myself taking screenshots of awesome looking chars.

3. Dodging is a fun mechanic. It is a skill requiring way to avoid a big attack, escape a fight or engage in a fight.

4. Water content is awesome. I really enjoy the huge, 3 dimensional depths with all kinds of fishes. Quaggans and their villages are really cool too.

And now the negative points:

1. Combat is very, very repetitive. I spend 95% of my time using skill 1, because it kills everything. The “I swung a sword, oh look I swung it again” that we heard so many times from arenanet is definitely not improved.

2. Build variety is very limited. Because there’s only a few heal and elite skills, and weapon skills are all locked, there are only 3 slots (the normal utilities) that really give you some freedom to make builds. This might provide easier balancing for arenanet, but it greatly limits my interest in the game.

3. Dungeons are too hard. I always liked pugging dungeons, because you meet new people, which is part of the MMO experience. In GW2, I found pugging dungeons is a very bad idea, because even in the story mode lvl 30 dungeon I walked out with fully damaged armor while already having repaired once inside the dungeon. And that while I was already lvl 78!. I thought story mode was supposed to be easier, and reasonably completable with pugs…

4. Map travel cost is too high. As it is now, it actually discourages having fun, especially for people with little play time, because the travel cost can be higher than what you gain if you don’t stay for long. The reason I don’t do the dragon events anymore is that if the chest gives me blues/greens, I don’t earn anything because selling those blues/greens doesn’t give me more money than I have to pay for traveling to the dragon area and back to wherever I was.

5. Scaling doesn’t work well. In dynamic events, if there is a lot of people participating, I often see groups of mobs go down in half a second. I really have to try hard to actually get a hit on mobs before they die. In those cases, I always wonder if there is any scaling at all. Arenanet said that other people were in no way bad in GW2, that the events would scale so there was something to do for everyone… this is definitely not true atm.

6. The world is too big for the amount of content / people in it. On my server, I can already clearly see zone populations declining. This is to be expected of course, because the world is so big. But it’s not fun. In those zones, GW2 basically is turning into an regular (offline) RPG. People seem to be flocking to:

- straits of devastation (karma farm, “join the zerg”)
- the other two orr zones (karma farm and gathering orichalcum / orrian sapling)
- sparkfly fen and blazeridge steppes for the dragons
- frostgorge sound for the dragon and endgame resources too

The other zones are already a lot less populated, and at off-peak hours even empty. For the record, when I last checked my server had a “high” population status.

7. Mob density is too high. The only place where I can usually stop moving and take a breath without having 3 mobs on me, is on the water surface. Everywhere on land are mobs, and if you wanna run somewhere you always have to run through mobs. I really wish there would be a bit of a wider mob free zone around outposts sometimes, or that friendly guardian NPCs were stronger so they could keep some areas mob free.

8. Mob respawn rates are too high. Many times I founght through an area, just to turn around and find that to get out I have to kill every mob that I killed in the past 3 minutes again. A good example is a pirate boat with undead lying in the lvl 80 orr zone. I fought inside, to the lower area of the boat (must have taken 2-3 minutes max) and saw a chest. I opened this chest, but it summoned an undead champion captain. I was alone, so turned around to flee, and guess what, everything I killed had respawned. I died and was frustrated.

Let me emphasize that I have no problem with mob difficulty. In fact I think most mobs are too easy, I take down normal mobs in seconds and can avoid all damage if I want to. I also have yet to see a veteran I can’t kill solo. But even the weakest, stupidest mob gets annoying if there’s 1000 of them that respawn in 10 seconds (exaggeration for the sake of argument).

9. The personal story is not so personal, it’s not about your character. Your character is barely even seen as a hero anymore, all the glory goes to Trahearne and the Pact. Also, characters that I had helped in the lvl 1-40 storyline (Trahearne, Carys, Tegwen) didn’t even recognize me in the higher level storyline, they acted as if we first met (again). I found that really lame and immersion breaking.

they should also remove “combat speed”. all the applied buffs in the game go away once you get tagged by accidental aggro. if they apply cripple, fine. poison/bleeding should just do those things, not slow me down -50% normal speed. getting hit by mob axe is okay, but should not lower my speed. In Orr, you are just better off with a full group so you can get everywhere.

I agree with Map travel costs and mob density in the 70-80 zones. Mob density in the earlier zones feels about right.

At first map travel costs fell like they were okay then about level 40 they started feeling like a burden. Couple that with costs of repairs/siege/upgrades in WvW and you can easily lose out on a lot of money vs time spent playing.