Guild Wars 2

Hello all,

You may remember me as the guy who did Vayne’s job before Vayne hit the scene.

Well, I’ve been on a six month GW2 hiatus fighting the good fight in Azeroth, and now I’ve returned to Tyria, where I belong.

These six months have brought me achievement chests, a new wallet, Tequatl beating my kitten into the ground, culling removed in all modes of game play, and tomorrow a skill re-balance pass. Oh, and crafting gets BiS gear as a reward. Snazzy.

That’s a lot of changes to adapt to, undoubtedly.

I’m interested in seeing what changes have made the biggest impact to general game play for my fellow inhabitants.

What have you enjoyed/disliked about these changes, and how have they affected your day to day activities?

I enjoyed Sanctum of the Four Winds. The invasions were sort of OK as a novelty, but have devolved into exercises in farming. Champion loot revamp means when I kill champs solo or in a very small group in off-zones, I get a few silver, a green and yet more Bloodstone Dust, which is better than it once was. Teq seems like an OK initiative to give people who want raid-style planning to do. It seems to be aimed at a few guilds and/or servers, while the rest of the servers rot, so I hope that ANet does not remove more existing content to make another one.

Everything else has been either massive numbers zerg play with headache inducing particle spam, or click this busywork. I’ve gone from having 47 BiS weapons to 0. I recognize that ANet felt they needed to change their game design, but it is a change and I don’t have to like it.

How has this affected my day-to-day activities? Turns out I have more time to play other games, catch up on Person of Interest and spend more time at the gym.

I wasn’t aware Vayne had a job around here. But if you have the same kind of attitude then it’s good to have you (back) on the forum.

As I was just saying to some people I think the thing I’ve enjoyed most is seeing Anet find their footing and get a good pace established for the Living Story. Around August I’d almost burned myself out trying to keep up. Now I’m really enjoying it.

I think they’ve made a really good move with adding permanent content additions to the Living Story. For one thing it means the content is designed in a way that makes it possible to experience it all in a relatively short period of time, but also fun to repeat if you want to. And you’ve got plenty of time to do it so players like me with only a limited amount of time don’t have to worry if we can’t get on much at a particular time.

It depends on how you look at it.

On one hand you get a new TA path and changes to Tequatl permanently, but they make for a rather boring living story patch.

On the other you get stuff like Zephyr Sanctum which give you an entertaining two weeks but don’t change much permanently. (Kite Fortunes were the best living story drops ever.)

If you continue to play the game because you’re looking forward to having stuff to do every two weeks, then you’ll be happy with the Zephyr Sanctum type patches.

If you want to be able to take breaks and come back to new content, Tequatl type patches are more your style. (Unfortunately instead of adding new content they’ve only replaced old content with Teq and TA.)