Do you feel like you are progressing?
I earn gold for everything so I get a sense of progression with almost everything I do. Add that on to the daily/fractal/dungeon rewards. Once I buy the look/stats I want I end up saving everything for a while until I get bored and start working towards a different stat set/cosmetic set. I’m a sucker for gem store items so I always have something to spend my money on.
Games with a subscription fee are designed so that you have a series of goals to go through, and eventually reset/add more goals to continue the process indefinitely. This is not progress so much as running on a virtual hamster wheel where you are constantly moving but never get anywhere.
This game was designed to directly oppose that sort of game. Instead of a series of goals you have a selection of activities that you can repeat as often as you want, with one character or several, and leave/return at will without falling significantly behind other players.
TLDR Take a break. It won’t hurt.
Hey Ema,
I’ve been at it as a casual, mostly soloer, since beta & actually feel the opposite, oddly enough. I’ve put in well over 300 hrs (last I dared to check!) & still have so many things I want to do, see & achieve in this game, it’s not funny. But being fairly time limited, it’s difficult to commit to them, sadly.
I only ran my 1st dungeon a couple weeks back & haven’t even touched WvW as yet & I have an 80 necro main, 76 ranger & lvl 20-30 of every other race/class (except guardian). Some suggestions off the top of my head, that may be fun & doable:
- world map completion (I created a new char just for this purpose & having a blast!)
- do all jumping puzzles – a lot of fun, frustration & feeling of accomplishment (using above char, which is a norn warrior for various reasons)
- max out all crafting disciplines & do some high-level ‘entrepreneurial/speculative’ crafting on the TP
- run all the dungeons at least once in story & exploration mode -possibly acquire your favourite set of dungeon armour, though that’s just another type of grind he he (there are many karma & cultural armours that look better imo)
- DEFINITELY make & play some alts – you’d be surprised at how different the game feels with a totally different class/char, especially in zones you may not have done
- complete all 3 faction personal stories
- a lot to do with the living story & the entire story arc at least once
- complete a boatload of dailies + at least the monthly achievement once (just to say you did
- WvW and/or PvP – the world is your oyster here!
- start a guild with a theme/playstyle you’d like to promote & attract like-minded players you actually want to spend time & play with
- become active at mentoring newer players & just offering assists with harder content (you only get back what you put in, as with most things)
- get a real-life friend/GF/spouse interested in the game (even buy them a copy) & duo 2 new chars from scratch – playing in small teams on a regular basis can be very rewarding
I haven’t even listed all those ‘pie-in-the-sky’ accomplishments that are put in the game for the no-lifers he he. Getting your 1st legendary is an awesome feat no doubt, but a hugely daunting goal/task, which is why so many guilds do it as a group. In any case, you can get almost the same stats from exotics if you’re not too anal about the look or special effects the legendaries do (not speaking from direct experience here, so I could be wrong & have known to be on many occasions…at a tiny fraction of the price on the TP.
Anyway, enough rambling, hope that helps. Set some goals for most days or the month & try to achieve them. It’s all virtual anyway, so there’s nothing to take away from the experience at the end of the whole thing, except for fond memories.
(edited by Nostromo.4126)
Nostromo, nice post. Thank you :-)
YMW If you’re ever in-game looking to kill some time, just drop me a PM or an email & I’d be happy to knock about doing whatever. I’m in a funny timezone here at the bottom of the world (Aus, GMT+10), even though it is actually on top, as far as the galactic plane is measured (relativity be kitten
.
If you’re not shy about voice, I have a vent server I can send you the details for in-game if you’d like to chat also (I use it in a lot of games on demand with mates). Most jumping puzzles, for example, are MUCH easier with 2 or more people, especially the ones where you can fall & get downed or where there are lots of mobs to fight.
Btw, have you done all 3 elder dragons in Tyria…? Killin those with dozens-hundreds of peeps can be quite amazing!
I think this game is about a billion times better with a good guild. I mean, this is true of most MMOs, but in newer MMOs, ones that haven’t had the time to make mass amounts of content, it’s much more fun to do this stuff with like minded people.
This game is very limited if you play it like a solo RPG, sure there is lots of things to do but once you crush the content you just come to the forum posting “now what to do ?”.
To more directly answer the OP’s question, I do feel like I’m progressing…but at a pretty slow pace. I’m going for a legendary and I’m slowly building up mats and gold I need. So every time I look at my mats and my gold in the bank, I see progress. Sometimes I buy something and there’s a setback and then I start growing again.
It’ll probably take me another 2-3 months to get my legendary.
I pretty much done all what you can call a progression a long time ago. Its still fun:-)
Tekkit’s Workshop
i don t care of progression.
I play fotm, i play www, i play guild missions sometimes i go JP with friends….
I am CONCERNED with progression…
If only there weren t this thibg about vertical progression i would gladly “waste” mats and craft a lot of rare exotics skins…
Instead i am stuck in this saving of everything “just in case”…..(and yet i don t have any precursor and do not enjoy farming cof).
At least i can have fotm skins that are free…….
A PvE player is supposed to avoid a 1-2 second 1 shotting aoe.
A WWW player is considered uncapable of avoiding a 5,75 second aoe for half his health.
I absolutely don’t really feel like I’m progressing at all in this game anymore.
The feeling for progression already dies in GW2, once you’ve reached level 80.
I personally don’t count gear grind as progression.
U’ve absolutely no character progression anymore in this game after lvl 80 – only gear grind and thats very SAD, because the only thing left to do after level 80 is getting your character at least an exotic weapon for max stats and exotic armor together with currently ascended accessoires, which are easily farmed together either by playing FotM, or by trading them into via laurels.
I really hope, that GW2 will get improved in future alot in terms of character progression and that by following methods mixed together:
- Increase the Maximum Character Level stepwise per Add On from 80 to 100
- Add alot more Utility Skills and some more Healing Skills to all classes
- Add alot more Elite-Skills to all classes and in generally change all skills to universal usable skills, that are everywhere usable, regardless if on land, or in the water.
- Redesign the Trait System and add a seperate Talent System to it as passive sidekick system to it, so that traits will get divided up between active effects (Traits) and passive effects (Talents)
- Redesign the Racial Skill System and make racial Skills skills, which don’t need to be equipped separately. Racial Skilsl need to be skills, which should be ALWAYS there for the corresponding races. For example. A Norn should be ALWAYS able to transform themself into 1 animal spirit form – that one to which the character is currently connected to the most and by the kinds of actions the player does, will determine, to which animal spirit the character will be connected to the most.
A human character should be always able to pray to their various gods and receive in regard of the class which prays to the god different kinds of class related effects.
A sylvari should be always able to perform various kinds of natural influences that change the environment around them.
A charr should always be able to take advantage over their steampunk based technologies as like an Asura should always be able to take advantage of their technomagical technologies that are based on their beliefs on eternal alchemy.
- Add an Ability System, with that players will be able to actively change and augment skill effects from weapon skills, utility skills and elite skills
- Add to the game’s classes a sub class system making it able to us players to really progress in a characters “career” and to become able to specialize our characters into specific directions making the starter classes just the basic points to begin with, before you try to begin to specialize your characters more and progress with them more into the concrete directions you want to have them in.
If you want to play your thief maybe more as a kind of infiltrator, or more like a saboteur, or more in the end like a rogue, this decision would be all up to the player and would massively help in making classes in GW2 much more individual!
- Add to the game for weapon skills several different kinds of “battle styles” which will be usable as different “weapon skill sets”, so that players will receive more build options and especially strategetic gameplay options while beign in battles.
- Add to all classes more weapons, for example as unlockables via sub classes.
A Thief, that got upgraded to a rogue could be for example be able from that point on to use also in both hands axes and maces as like also dual wield swords.
A thief instead that got upgraded to become an Infiltrator could use from that point on maybe recurve bows, crossbows and claws/katars.
- Improve in general Class Mechanics, by removing obsolete utility skills and redesigning them into fully integrated class features, like for example taking thief poisons and redesign the poisons into a fully integrated secondary F-Button feature.
Turning Stealth into a fully integrated separate F-Button Feature, improve stealing by making stealing a more automatically progress based on chance while attacking enemies in melee range.
All the other classes also have same as much unused wasted potential like these thief examples.
Alot of the things i’ve listed up here are just traditional standard methods that simple belong to MMORPG’s to give players over longer time really the feeling of having a long lasting curve of character progression, that simple doesn’t end, once you’ve just reached only max level.
Gear grind is just a passive background side progression for characters, it should never replace totally character progression in itself, because once character progression fades away too much. EVERY MMORPG will be dead sooner or later.