Guild Wars 2

Lately Arenanet has been talking a lot about certain parts of the game being too confusing for new players and putting them off, specifically the downed state and the traits system, and that is why they have decided to change them by removing the downed state until level 5 and making trait points unlock at a lot slower rate.

Majority of the people (who are posting on these forums, I’m not speaking for the GW2 community as a whole) seem to disagree with Arenanet and say that these systems are in fact not difficult to understand.

My question is, did anyone ever actually find it difficult? I know for me personally the trait system and the downed state were very easy to understand, to be honest the most confusing thing for me was how crafting worked!

So, how did your first experiences with the trait system and downed state go?

It’s not just the trait system and the downed state though. That’s the thing. People are taking this out of context.

There’s a whole bevy of changes that work together to make the entire experience more friendly. I’ve never found it hard, but I followed everything there was about this game for years.

There are people in my guild who even next to max level didn’t realize the 4 skill in the downed state revived you when there were no enemies around and you hadn’t rallied.

There are people in my guild who really didn’t get how traits worked. But it’s more than just that.

People have complained on these forums about the tutorial system (or lack thereof) for a long time.

I’m guessing you don’t spend a whole lot of time on the player helping players forum, because the questions that get asked there are quite basic sometimes. And for every person who posts a whole bunch simply won’t. At least that’s what seems to be the case historically on most forums.

well some lvl30 elementist is telling me they find the personal story too difficult, and not having traits makes it too difficult for her to complete.

I remember my first elementist, I actually find it somewhat hard. But I think not having traits actually makes it more difficult but not easier.

quite honestly, I think Anet just dont’ know what to put out in their patch, so they keep making this minor and not important update to make it look like they are actually doing some thing.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/September-Stat-Changes-more-dead-levels/first#post4360241

I wouldn’t say it was difficult but it wasn’t what I was used to. It took me a short while to adjust to things but the concepts are pretty simple so it was a very short while. Downed state I’d never seen before and it was confusing the first one or two times. Traits was/is similar to many games so it wasn’t that hard to figure out.

Have to agree with crafting.

I never found it too hard. Confusing, yes, there are new systems and they are never clearly explained in game, but I started in the first open beta without hardly any outside research and figured things out well enough on my own. Pushing Downed State back to level 5 wouldn’t do a kitten ed thing towards making it any easier to understand though, it’ll be just as confusing at level 5 as at level 1, just later. If they want people to understand it better then they need a proper tutorial in its use, where you are forced into the downed state, and then given time to check out the abilities and test them out.

Still though, even when downed state was confusing, it was still one of the most interesting features of the early game. They’ve apparently removed anything remotely interesting about the low level game. There’s no downed state, there’s no weapon swapping, no utility skills, no personal story, apparently even weapon skills will take longer to learn. It’ll just be “press one until the enemies are dead” for about ten levels. Why don’t they go the extra mile and replace all the level 1-10 mobs with pink slimes?

From the sounds of it, if they had launched with the proposed system, I never would have reached level 10 before uninstalling.

Check the achievement leaderboards if you don’t believe them. However you play in the early levels, you should get a few hundred AP pretty quickly. My alt account, on which I levelled (through map completion) an ele to level 16 and have done absolutely nothing else, has 216 AP. It’s ranked in AP at 20% (which actually means 20-30%)… meaning 1 in 5 accounts never even did that much.

Looking at my old guild (with lots of old disused accounts) 30% rankers are 380-420 AP, 40% rankers are 453-538 AP, 50% rankers are 695-859 AP. This could well mean that only about half of all accounts ever reached max level.

It’s a pretty clear way of showing how many people leave the game without playing too much. Anet, ofc, has much better data. I don’t know if the reason is because the game is too confusing; certainly it wasn’t for me. But it’s something they want to fix/improve, and they think this is a good way to do it. They’ve done actual research and stuff, so they might be right.

On some maps yes, I couldn’t figure out where to go for the lower level areas of the map, and sometimes I’d die a lot running into 5+ level mobs.

I did not find any of them difficult to understand at all. Downed state was only completely new system and that I figured out by reading the skill tooltips when I first time got into that state.

I think the problem is that it is getting more and more common that people simply do not read. They do not read the tooltips, quest infos, helps or pretty much anything.

I’ve seen so many times someone asking for something really silly like “How do I use this?” when the only line in the tooltip is “Double-click to open.”

Actually I have a friend who came over from World of Warcraft (he’s played that game for years) and he’s found GW2 to be confusing to get into. Many of the problems he’s mentioned to me (that I hadn’t even noticed myself because I’ve played so long) are being fixed in this patch.

Those of us who have been playing for 2 years are pretty much blind to the problems in the leveling up process at this point.

If you are posting chances are you either have played or are playing and not someone who found it frustrating and left early in the game. Kind of biases the answers you will get.

I found all these things lacking, not hard. There’s a wee bit of difference.

Those of us who have been playing for 2 years are pretty much blind to the problems in the leveling up process at this point.

But all of us who have been playing for two years had the same system starting out and managed it just fine.

The down state was confusing at first, it was the first time I’ve seen such a system and with hit points dropping and not knowing the death penalty in the game it was button mashing.

Traits weren’t confusing as much as mistake prone and tool tip descriptions weren’t all that informative but that’s more of not knowing what skills, abilities, stats, combos do. Things like increasing range/damage/boon/condition time is obvious but my first character was a mesmer.

Lets look at Masterful Reflection. It says “Distortion grants Reflection”. Distortion is a F-key shatter ability that says “Destroy all your clones and phantasms, gaining distortion for each one shattered.” Which doesn’t tell me what distortion does. Looking up distortion it says “Immune to conditions and damage”. Now I have to look up reflection which “Reflects Projectiles”. And this is just one of 5 adept traits in an unlocked trait line. It’s a research project you have to use the wiki for because the in game tool tips simply aren’t informative enough to make a decision. I can understand how it can be overwhelming. By the time I started my 2nd character I had a reasonable grasp of terminology of the game and the tooltips were mostly understandable except for profession specific abilities.

Remember, not all players came from Guild Wars, assuming terms there are similar to terms here.

Ohoni.6057:

Those of us who have been playing for 2 years are pretty much blind to the problems in the leveling up process at this point.

But all of us who have been playing for two years had the same system starting out and managed it just fine.

The changes aren’t aimed at the people who managed ok, they’re aimed at the people who did have problems and therefore left.

Ohoni.6057:

Those of us who have been playing for 2 years are pretty much blind to the problems in the leveling up process at this point.

But all of us who have been playing for two years had the same system starting out and managed it just fine.

I agree with this. And those who tried it, got frustrated, and left the game because it wasn’t what they were used to didn’t.

Anet is trying to increase the update of new players. they’re not trying to make it easier for you. The more new players the better it is for everyone…even if they do nothing but hang out in Queensdale.

Because some of those players will buy something at some point, just funding the game. MMOs are a numbers game. If you can increase the amount of people who start the game and remain in game, you’re better off.

There are a lot of games that have this problem. The experience with leveling up is so annoying, they need to fix it, or they lose people. Even WoW completely redid their starting quests at one point for precisely the same reason.

If you’re still here, it’s less likely you had a problem with this. But a lot of people aren’t still here…and some of those are because they game was just to hard for them…as crazy as that sounds to us.

Wow the downed state is truly terrifying. It took me well over a year before I had the courage to fight those level 7 centaurs in Queensdale. I really just couldn’t handle being downed, and honestly without any of the downed skills explained on screen to help me, I was scarred for life.

Now, 2 years have passed and I’ve finally gotten over my fears of being downed. I just hope they do the same with water skills soon because I’m still terrified of water; maybe they should prevent players from being able to swim until level 5.

I found the downed state to be a bit overwhelming at first. Some things that would have helped me grasp the mechanics of it a lot sooner at level 1 would have been;

1. The downed state was part of the initial character creation story instance. If at one point during the final battle the character was downed and an npc gave some directions verbally on what to do, that would have helped. The recent LS end boss battle where the npcs shout up to you what the boss is going to do at the beginning was helpful. It gave me a little heads up for what was about to happen.

Something similar for a character’s first downed state might be helpful with the downed state skills. It might even be an entertaining experience as well as educational if introduced in this manner. (‘Grab a rock and throw it!’ ‘Even near to death’s door you have that power, to leech the very life force of your enemies… so drain them and heal yourself while I create a diversion, ideally composed of their broken and scattered teeth mixed with blood and regret for having messed with us!’ ‘I can’t reach you but call to your pet, you have a strong bond between you.’

The hints arrow could even point to which skill is being suggested by the npc to help make it very clear what they are talking about. It could even lead the player through a
battle that ‘unlocks’ each downed skill and gives an opportunity to rally by killing an enemy. By the end of that battle the player will have gone through a downed state, tried the various skills and rallied by killing an enemy.

2. There are lists of weapon skills for each character, particular to their profession, for terrestrial and aquatic weapons. Adding the downed state and its particular skills and what they do to this list would have been helpful for me. I could have read about these abilities in game before a downed state happened and had some idea how to rally.

3. Having the opportunity, either as part of the personal story or elsewhere, to practice rallying from the downed state a few times in a more tutorial (thus forgiving) setting could have helped me get a feel for how the skills worked before embarking upon the regular PvE adventures of not being completely dead, and you might get better!

I don’t think the being downed was a bit overwhelming at level 1 because my pc was level 1, rather it was having little understanding of the skills and being unused to the experience. Some in game information, a bit of tutorialish guidance, and even a way to practice rallying a few times as part of the introductory story for new characters would have gone far in helping me get used to the system a lot faster and I’d have been fairly familiar with it by the time my pc left that first personal story after creation.

I agree with this. And those who tried it, got frustrated, and left the game because it wasn’t what they were used to didn’t.

Anet is trying to increase the update of new players. they’re not trying to make it easier for you. The more new players the better it is for everyone…even if they do nothing but hang out in Queensdale.

But there’s no reason to believe that people will like this new model better. It might work better for no one. It might work better for some but worse for others. Are the people this new system would appeal with the people who ever would stick around with the game? I just feel that if the game had originally launched like this I probably wouldn’t have kept playing, far too slow to get going, far too similar to other games. It seems that they’ve stripped out a lot of the game’s soul in the early levels and pushed almost all character progression back into tens of hours into the game. I’d never make it without moving on to something else.

If they were making changes that were guaranteed to be accepted by more new players than it cost them then ok, I’d put up with it (although ideally it could be something you could disable and revert to the old model if you preferred it), but I really see no reason why this would actually work.

1. The downed state was part of the initial character creation story instance. If at one point during the final battle the character was downed and an npc gave some directions verbally on what to do, that would have helped. The recent LS end boss battle where the npcs shout up to you what the boss is going to do at the beginning was helpful. It gave me a little heads up for what was about to happen.

The first several characters I made, I would ALWAYS die during the boss fights. I didn’t know how to dodge, I didn’t know their telegraphs by heart, I would just get downed at some point and sit there figuring out my moves until someone else killed the boss. It didn’t bother me at all.

Ohoni.6057:

I agree with this. And those who tried it, got frustrated, and left the game because it wasn’t what they were used to didn’t.

Anet is trying to increase the update of new players. they’re not trying to make it easier for you. The more new players the better it is for everyone…even if they do nothing but hang out in Queensdale.

But there’s no reason to believe that people will like this new model better. It might work better for no one. It might work better for some but worse for others. Are the people this new system would appeal with the people who ever would stick around with the game? I just feel that if the game had originally launched like this I probably wouldn’t have kept playing, far too slow to get going, far too similar to other games. It seems that they’ve stripped out a lot of the game’s soul in the early levels and pushed almost all character progression back into tens of hours into the game. I’d never make it without moving on to something else.

If they were making changes that were guaranteed to be accepted by more new players than it cost them then ok, I’d put up with it (although ideally it could be something you could disable and revert to the old model if you preferred it), but I really see no reason why this would actually work.

1. The downed state was part of the initial character creation story instance. If at one point during the final battle the character was downed and an npc gave some directions verbally on what to do, that would have helped. The recent LS end boss battle where the npcs shout up to you what the boss is going to do at the beginning was helpful. It gave me a little heads up for what was about to happen.

The first several characters I made, I would ALWAYS die during the boss fights. I didn’t know how to dodge, I didn’t know their telegraphs by heart, I would just get downed at some point and sit there figuring out my moves until someone else killed the boss. It didn’t bother me at all.

Apparently Anet tested a bunch of things on people who have never played the game and this is the solution that worked the best. Of course it may not work for everyone. NOTHING is going to work for everyone.

That’s why there are tool tips for some people and this for other people and trial and error for other people. It’s called closing the gaps and it’s what you do. You figure out what’s wrong and you make a change to correct it.

The sad thing is there’ll always be something else that needs correcting, no matter how much you do.

Ohoni.6057:

“The first several characters I made, I would ALWAYS die during the boss fights. I didn’t know how to dodge, I didn’t know their telegraphs by heart, I would just get downed at some point and sit there figuring out my moves until someone else killed the boss. It didn’t bother me at all. "

It didn’t bother you, and it didn’t bother me. In a game death is a learning experience, one of many. That being said, I do not see anything wrong with a game giving the occasional hint so that more can enjoy it. I would have appreciated an in game means to read about the downed skills for example. It didn’t bother me that one was lacking but it might help new players to add one in.

No, I never found it hard or confusing being a noob. Some parts of the story I found a little challenging, though that’s not a bad thing. The biggest problem was constantly being under-leveled for content, YOUR OWN STORY above all. If you’re brand new you might not know you can travel to other starter zones. But really, why should you have to?

If we’re talking about understanding concepts like traits and downed state? Of course not. I had never experienced a downed state in a game before, but it seemed self explanatory enough. “Oh darn, I died. But wait, I’m still moving, and I have a few buttons I can press. Let’s see what happens”. There, done. Doesn’t take more than the first time going down to figure that out. It also is obvious enough when you have pending skill or trait points to spend. Click on the notification icon, look at what the traits say and spend points as desired. There is absolutely nothing difficult about that.

With world exploration it could sometimes be difficult to find things, but then ..that’s where EXPLORING comes into play is it not? This business about making things even more easy and dumbed down ..ugh. I mean I don’t totally hate the idea. It will be fine I’m sure. But to say this was important and needed, especially more than so many other things? No, ..just, no.

My first character was a female Norn elementalist. I played together with my son from headstart onwards. I found the trait system difficult to understand, and I did not get the underlying dependencies from skills, attunements and traits very well. Nevertheless I liked the system. It was interesting, somewhat challenging and intriguing. Don’t forget, in those days most people did not know what to do.

The down state was very easy for me to grasp. I was downed very often. My greatest problem was to become accustomed to moving while fighting. And it is the fault of Meteor Shower. That is a powerful skill which gives you an awesome feeling of power. And you must stand still while chanelling it, as it was in all my former MMOs. Sadly the monsters did not share that assessment while I stood around waiting for the next Meteor
Shower…

Now I can smile about that because my ele whizzes now through the open world leaping about with her daggers, soloing veterans and most champions there if she fancies it, but that does not mean that the starting experience was terrifying. It is not bad to have to learn. It is interesting and it gives you a feeling of achievement if you master skills you thought way above your skill level.

That is one of the many reasons I think the current iteration of the trait unlocking system is so wrong. It “protects” players from this learning experience by terrifying them away from traits completely.

What I really missed was a true tutorial. There should be an optional instance right after the starting instance which you can skip but not without dire warnings. It should be a bit similar like in pvp. A guided tour through downed states, weapon skills, utility skills, boons and conditions, cleaving and aoe and so on. That would help much more than to push the problem to later levels where it will again stare into the newbie’s face.

I never really found these things too hard.

The only annoying problem i have with different sets of skills are that they are not shown anywhere in the game, until they become available.

You can’t see or read the underwater skills unless you are underwater AND you have them unlocked, same with downed (and i don’t think you can even read what normal weapon skills do until you unlock them).

Same with Necromancers Death Shroud and Lich Form, they give you specific sets of skills that are shown nowhere, and being timed skills, it really hurts to be spending majority of your Lich Form reading what your skills do.

And aside the Downed State starting from lv5, you still need to spend time downed reading your skills (unless ive missed something).

It really can’t be too hard for there to be a tab that shows every skill your character has available, so you know, you can be prepared for when you get to use them.

I guess I’m rather slow. It was probably a year or more before I asked about the Downed state here on the forums and found out exactly how it worked. Still don’t mess with the Trait system, because I find it …confusing.

So, just because it seem simple to most of you, it doesn’t seem intuitive or easy to all. And if the Devs have changed it based on what they have found works best, what does that matter to us? If an experienced player already knows how to use the Downed system, is it going really going to impact their play experience that much to wait 3 levels?

Not too hard, but I did find it extremely BORING.

I hate leveling in any MMO but GW2 was probably one of the most annoying leveling processes I ever experienced. It just takes forever. You want to do your personal story for quick XP, but there are huge gaps so you have to grind XP somewhere else. Crafting cost a load of money. You have to replace your gear every few levels. And then there are 80 levels, urrrghhhhhhh!!!!

To tell you the truth, I reached max level on my first character by exploiting a dynamic event that respawned every few minutes in the early days. I paid the neighbour’s kid 10 bucks to sit there and spam 1 for a day. That made me go from level 20 to around level 50 while I was at work. After that I could do the personal story for another bunch of levels and had some money from the event completion for crafting. Had I not done that I’m sure I would have quit the game my first week, just as I quit Wildstar after 3 hours due to the atrocious leveling experience.

Since that, I have raised three more characters to 80 (through normal gameplay). The experience of level 1-50 is truly awful, in my opinion. Mainly because it takes too long and because you can’t really customize your character much. In Guild Wars 1, the leveling experience was great. Only 20 levels, and you get nice attribute points and new meaningful skill unlocks all the time. Guild Wars 2 skills and traits are quite ‘meh’, in my opinion.

And I want to be able to reach max level in a day or two.

the first month of this game i didnt know you could use left mouse button to control movement. that was a life changing event for me

What did I find hard, hmm.

- Playing Elementalist. I just can’t get the hang of it properly.

- Playing Necro. Two hours of play and decided ‘no thanks’.

- Soloing champions in Queensdale events before the Train existed. As it would sometimes be necessary to hit map completion.

- Risen Priest of Grenth.

- Doing anywhere near decent in sPvP.

- Mad King’s Clock Tower and Winter Wonderland. (Timed JPs can go to Grenth.)

- Five-man Claw of Jormag.

In the context of being a gamer who is accustomed to a wide variety of games with decades of gaming behind me, I found GW2 very simple to ease into, traits ‘n’ all.

If you’d never played a complex RPG (mmo or otherwise) I can see why you might struggle to get your footing. But then, that would be the same for embarking on any new genre of game. Compared to other games of similar difficulty, GW2 is much more accomodating than most when we look at how it teaches itself to newcomers.

My personal opinion is that these changes are probably the result of China release with ANet re-focusing on launch and new player retention and this is work that isn’t so much being done for its own merit for EU/US/SA/Aus as it is something being rolled out from China to everywhere else and being bundled in as part of a rather barren Feature Patch.

If that isn’t the case, then it’s a shame that the time & resources weren’t better spent on better realising an end-game.

Ameepa.6793:

I did not find any of them difficult to understand at all. Downed state was only completely new system and that I figured out by reading the skill tooltips when I first time got into that state.

I think the problem is that it is getting more and more common that people simply do not read. They do not read the tooltips, quest infos, helps or pretty much anything.

I’ve seen so many times someone asking for something really silly like “How do I use this?” when the only line in the tooltip is “Double-click to open.”

Kartel.2561:

No, I never found it hard or confusing being a noob. Some parts of the story I found a little challenging, though that’s not a bad thing. The biggest problem was constantly being under-leveled for content, YOUR OWN STORY above all. If you’re brand new you might not know you can travel to other starter zones. But really, why should you have to?

If we’re talking about understanding concepts like traits and downed state? Of course not. I had never experienced a downed state in a game before, but it seemed self explanatory enough. “Oh darn, I died. But wait, I’m still moving, and I have a few buttons I can press. Let’s see what happens”. There, done. Doesn’t take more than the first time going down to figure that out. It also is obvious enough when you have pending skill or trait points to spend. Click on the notification icon, look at what the traits say and spend points as desired. There is absolutely nothing difficult about that.

With world exploration it could sometimes be difficult to find things, but then ..that’s where EXPLORING comes into play is it not? This business about making things even more easy and dumbed down ..ugh. I mean I don’t totally hate the idea. It will be fine I’m sure. But to say this was important and needed, especially more than so many other things? No, ..just, no.

^this. Trait system and downed state are already easy enough to understand just by reading tooltips or try and error. I don’t think that this is the biggest problem for someone who is new to the game.

My first character was a Mesmer and I was subsequently missing the offensive capabilities at some point of the PS, however I never thought the game was particualary hard.

Though I have to admit I played several games before.

however I think many of these changes are short sighted, only catering to players who never played an MMO before, or are not able to adapt to new gameplay system, if they come from another game.

Most of these changes are only implemented to have an oldschool progression, to have more “ting” when you level up.
“I got equipment, stats and even a trait? And now I have a down state? WHoohooo”

I don`t really understand the changes in many ways.

An archaic level unlock is not as satisfying as unlocking abilities by using the weapon for example.
if it is too fast, they should change the numbers of enemies you have to kill, before the next skill is unlocked, so you can familiarilize yourself with these new attack abilities.

The downed state is a relative new gameplay mechanic (borderlands ehem…) and essential to the overall experience.
Gating it behind a level and then still not properly introduce it via hands on mechanics does not really help the problem.
Learn and adapt. It`s not that hard and there are several people willing to help you.

They could even put in a forced down state in the tutorial zone and have them explain there how it works.

However the new direction is all streamlining and taking away any uniqueness the game had.
If they continue that way I feel like this game is going backwards, than forward.

Harking back to the “short sighted” thingy:
All these changes do not help players who only want to test characters, as well as people who want to level alts.

While the new equipment is rewarding, the whole experienced is now more and more bound to a level up system, instead of a “play how you want” direction.

Hiding the PvP and WvW behind that system is also a big no go for me. I always thought GW2 was play how you want from the start.
Even GW1 allowed you to go PvP from the get go. Even creating a PvP only character was possible.

I found the ‘downed state’ was my cue to go put the kettle on … I drink a lot of coffee.

I only found it confusing when I went into the downed state without even realizing I was in combat. I wasn’t very attentive when I first got the game.

While I found the game quite challenging at the beginning I think I never felt lost or anything in the game. But that mainly comes from the fact that I was really well informed about it since the early development (former GW1 player).
Nevertheless I succeeded in making 5 people around me buy the game and they were really lost by how the game behave. Out of those 5, 3 never reached level 30 and stopped playing.

Among the things that were not clear for them there was the “trinity” issue, the traits in general, the lack of quest and where to go and the game mechanics ( no real rotation of skills and active dodge). On top of that they also didn’t understand the boon system and got really annoyed by the condition limit.
One could say I’m a bad friend not explaining them but I tried to take time to explain but they didn’t like having to ask someone to understand the game and being forced to get outer sources. I would argue that every MMO game needs that ( they all came from WoW mainly and when they talk about how they started the game more than 5 years ago, they need outer sources) but in the meantime going to other not-foundation-breaking games, players tend to understand quite fast new gameplays because they just adapt to small differences. For GW2 you need to rethink the way you launch yourself in a MMO and most people don’t like it if they are not guided.

For that reason, even though the changes won’t change my experience of the game, I think they may be good to keep players attracted to the game. I even thought contacting those 3 people to convince them to give another try.
If Anet decided on those changes for China release and ported them to our version of the game, I’m quite confident that it is due to data they have showing that many account bought at release never reached max level.

Sithaco.4673:

So, how did your first experiences with the trait system and downed state go?

back in the days, when the game first launched, I had zero problems in figuring out how things worked. I never had to “think” about what I was doing, button mashin’ was enough to exp my way to lv80: the content was never challenging, it never required to “figure out a good strategy”, you just sometimes found a boss with extreme high HP and ridicolously op attacks to make up for a real challenge.
The first time I’ve seen the downed state I was surprised, but its meaning was obvious.

note: my first character was an elementalist.

While the downed state was a new concept to me in terms of videogames when I started playing GW2, it wasn’t scary or off-putting in anyway, just needed to do it a few times to get used to it. I have always liked that you get a chance to bounce back from the get go.

Downed state may really be confusing, because you don’t have time to read the
skills when your fighting for your life .. but lvl 5 doesn’t change anything, we need
a tutorial for that better, and maybe a description of the downed skills under the
list of the weapon skills.

Else .. i don’t like it do have more and more useless levels where you get nothing at all
and rather have the old trait system back, and also leave the stat gain how it is.

I wasn’t confused or frightened, but I was pretty aggravated when I realized the personal story rapidly out-leveled my characters. As I have dramatized it previously, “Sorry, Timmy, I can’t get you out of that well just yet, it’s level 50 and I’m only level 40. Just keep treading water! I’ll go kill some centaurs or something.”

I remember my level 5 mesmer fighting level 7 centaur vets along with a herd of other centaurs in a personal story mission and finishing the mission in her undies. And now, thanks to the magic of screenshots, you can, too!

From September 3rd, 2012 (happy anniversary):

Tachenon.5270:

I wasn’t confused or frightened, but I was pretty aggravated when I realized the personal story rapidly out-leveled my characters. As I have dramatized it previously, “Sorry, Timmy, I can’t get you out of that well just yet, it’s level 50 and I’m only level 40. Just keep treading water! I’ll go kill some centaurs or something.”

I remember my level 5 mesmer fighting level 7 centaur vets along with a herd of other centaurs in a personal story mission and finishing the mission in her undies. And now, thanks to the magic of screenshots, you can, too!

From September 3rd, 2012 (happy anniversary):

LOL so true some segments of the personal story are so….. I wanna say badly planned and executed….. I did the same story as you and honestly couldn’t believe it was for the level it said it was. Can’t help but think personal story was originally supposed to have a few more steps in between to make the char to story level ratio flow better so we wouldn’t lose the immersion. But somehow those got cut out.

And what happens to me especially is the UI says something along the lines of “meet X NPC in X location” making it sound like a real emergency and I should get there to deal with the situation quick. But oh wait nah sorry dudes expecting me to be a hero I have to fart about and grind out 2 dailys or go to an area in the opposite direction to get some hearts done for xp so I can level up first… real immersion killer that one. XD

Tachenon.5270:

I remember my level 5 mesmer fighting level 7 centaur vets along with a herd of other centaurs in a personal story mission and finishing the mission in her undies. And now, thanks to the magic of screenshots, you can, too!

From September 3rd, 2012 (happy anniversary):

Is that on the Noble path for humans? Because I might know that mission, and my mesmer got her . . . dress really and truly scuffed. I think my ranger could have handled it. Mesmer didn’t work so well.

This wasn’t the first case, either. Elementalist sylvari in almost the same point ran into serious problems with defending This is the part in question . . . and it took a while to finish having trouble with groupings.

It’s fair to say some personal story steps have it easier for some classes and harder for others. (Thief, human, street rat . . . was remarkably easy when you knew what you were in for. And my ranger had a relatively easy time pushing through the story.)

I’ll be quite honest, my husband and I both had our issues when we started the game. Even having played the betas, there were things that he found confusing or didn’t understand. I understood more of it because I hung on every published blog, interview, etc like my life depended on it before launch, but there were still components that I really felt should have more explanation. Downed state was one of them. Oh sure, he and I caught on quickly enough, (I managed quicker than him, but like I’ve said before, I’d read about it, watched the youtube previews of it, etc) but we really did just fly by the seat of our pants for quite some time. It’s been two years and he probably still couldn’t tell you wtf “blasting” is.

LanfearShadowflame.3189:

It’s been two years and he probably still couldn’t tell you wtf “blasting” is.

How about the difference between Launch and Knockback? Took me a while.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

LanfearShadowflame.3189:

It’s been two years and he probably still couldn’t tell you wtf “blasting” is.

How about the difference between Launch and Knockback? Took me a while.

I’m not even sure I know without looking. I’m sure I can probably deduce the answer, but oddly I find it doesn’t matter much (at least to me). I do have enough sense to take note when skills call out that they are a specific type (lightning hammer 3 is a launch, longbow 4 is a knockback for example) and that bosses will usually have those specific immunities called out (where applicable, though not always). That’s about all I pay attention to.

Andrax.4576:

I never really found these things too hard.

The only annoying problem i have with different sets of skills are that they are not shown anywhere in the game, until they become available.

You can’t see or read the underwater skills unless you are underwater AND you have them unlocked, same with downed (and i don’t think you can even read what normal weapon skills do until you unlock them).

Same with Necromancers Death Shroud and Lich Form, they give you specific sets of skills that are shown nowhere, and being timed skills, it really hurts to be spending majority of your Lich Form reading what your skills do.

And aside the Downed State starting from lv5, you still need to spend time downed reading your skills (unless ive missed something).

It really can’t be too hard for there to be a tab that shows every skill your character has available, so you know, you can be prepared for when you get to use them.

I think this right here is the really the underlying problem with downed form (or any other skill that changes your skillbar). The biggest problem is that the skill descriptions are not shown in-game until the skillbar changes. Some skills (like Lich form or ele conjured weapons) can be used out of combat where you can take the time to read what they do. But in the heat of battle, it’s pretty difficult to take a few moments to read and digest what downed skills actually do. Which results in to a new player spamming all their powers without a clear understanding what they do. Some may seek out the information out of game afterwards, but many won’t.

Pushing downed state back to Level 5 isn’t going to fix this problem. The best solution is to add some additional polish to the Hero Panel and incorporate this information into the Skills and Traits section. If the downed skills (and other skills that the character has at their disposal that changes their skillbar) are added to the Skills and Traits section of the Hero Panel, then the player is able to read and digest the information on their own time (not the heat of battle) without having to seek out the information out-of-game (i.e. the wiki).

To answer OP’s question…I personally never found stuff like downed state or the trait system overwhelming or extremely difficult to understand as a new player. At least not to the point that I’d ragequit or demand a complete overhaul of the systems. The only difficulty I experienced when I was a new player was finding good sources of information in-game that thoroughly explained these systems. So I just relied on the wiki.

Never, i found it as userfriendly as possible. It learns itself. I see a disturbing trend in games over the years where everything is toned down and timegated. Its counterchallenging, counterimmersive and counterinteligent.
Remember the time games where actualy challenging and emmersive? I do. The last decade they became more and more casual. People who want to play games but have no desire for challenge, immersion and intelligent gameplay. Only, look at my shinies.
Its not only in online rpgs but also in shooters, RTS, TBS etc. They used to be challenging and fun at the same time.

Have you ever seen movie “Idiocracy” ??

It was supposed to be comedy movie but actually right now it is documentary movie about current society . People are getting more and more lazy just look at the games which we have right now and games in the past . In the past nobody cares do you understand how to play this game , you had to find tutorials in the internet or games magazines , you had to spend few hours learning game mechanics very often outside the game . And modern games are full of spaming one button,beeing immortal and watching explosions on the screen .

Gw right now has really really casual pve even my gf who plays only sims,lego games and fb games didnt have any problem understanding game mechanics . We should also answear the question does it make sense to spend time/money/resourses to rebuild system for player who bought this game for 40$ and quited after level five cause he didnt understand down-mechanic rly ? of course that anet should place down/transform skills to hero`s page to let us learn some skills without going to transform/downstate and spaming in say chat linked skills , but things like that should be in normal ballance patch in every month !

And now what ?! upset player who left gw2 after lvl5 come back because he heard they changed leveling system and what he got to level 9 and quit cause he didnt understand weapon swamp ? cause in his favourite mmo something like that didnt existed ?!

I also heard that they wanna add arrow which shows direction where to go o_0 rly ?! cause player cant click map and look where is he supposed to go ?! I can bet 100$ that there will be some people crying that arrow showed them go left , but on the left side there was wall ! and they didnt expected to go few meters further to enter through the gate to the city .

I said that many many times that leveling in gw2 was/is really quick and easy when you compare it to other mmos so I really dont get it why they spend their time rebuilding it instead of creating some end-game content I just dont get it .

Nope. Both were simple enough to understand and if I didn’t know something, I am smart enough to know what Google is and how to use it. If you don’t know how to Google up the wiki and find the information you seek…I don’t think a MMO is right for you.

Bolbo Baggins.8594:

Never, i found it as userfriendly as possible. It learns itself. I see a disturbing trend in games over the years where everything is toned down and timegated. Its counterchallenging, counterimmersive and counterinteligent.
Remember the time games where actualy challenging and emmersive? I do. The last decade they became more and more casual. People who want to play games but have no desire for challenge, immersion and intelligent gameplay. Only, look at my shinies.
Its not only in online rpgs but also in shooters, RTS, TBS etc. They used to be challenging and fun at the same time.

I don’t think that it’s so much about people not desiring challenging or intelligent game play. Keep in mind that the people that had hours and hours to play such games a decade ago are now adults with families and jobs. They still enjoy gaming, but the games of a decade ago, the challenges implemented where time consuming. This is something that many responsible adults don’t really have a lot of in their busy, “always connected” lives.

LanfearShadowflame.3189:

I don’t think that it’s so much about people not desiring challenging or intelligent game play. Keep in mind that the people that had hours and hours to play such games a decade ago are now adults with families and jobs. They still enjoy gaming, but the games of a decade ago, the challenges implemented where time consuming. This is something that many responsible adults don’t really have a lot of in their busy, “always connected” lives.

I happen to be of that generation :-) There wasn’t any leveling in that time (no timegating), so you could right jump in the game. A massive TBS/ RTS like Rome Total war was less time consuming then guildwars 2 is now :-) But challenging on Hard mode playing as an underdog faction against the Romans.

So far, I’ve found the changes they made aimed at making it easier on new players have only made it harder/more tedious for fresh characters.

Bolbo Baggins.8594:

LanfearShadowflame.3189:

I don’t think that it’s so much about people not desiring challenging or intelligent game play. Keep in mind that the people that had hours and hours to play such games a decade ago are now adults with families and jobs. They still enjoy gaming, but the games of a decade ago, the challenges implemented where time consuming. This is something that many responsible adults don’t really have a lot of in their busy, “always connected” lives.

I happen to be of that generation :-) There wasn’t any leveling in that time (no timegating), so you could right jump in the game. A massive TBS/ RTS like Rome Total war was less time consuming then guildwars 2 is now :-) But challenging on Hard mode playing as an underdog faction against the Romans.

Guess it depends on the game you were playing, but yes there wasn’t a metric ton of time gating then. You still had ‘leveling up’ in some games, and I don’t really see it being that much different then than now. It was tedious then too. So I guess that hasn’t changed much. But I get your general point somewhat. I never played Rome Total War, so I can’t compare that one. Still, the RTS genre is not quite the same as an RPG.