Guild Wars 2

What I mean. Basically when you reach lvl 30 you get the last interesting rewards, elite skill. After that lvling becomes meaningless. We always knew that at the end we are supposed to strive to get cosmetic armours and weapons but it really feels like it is not enough. besides that Legendary weapons require such an incredibly amount of time that I bet most players won’t even bother.
Imo the game lacks something in between. Some carrot on a stick which do not require 300h of grinding but at the same time it feels like an achievement when you get it.
Special unique skill when you do a specific event, guild halls and houses are a good reward too. We simply need something like: man only 20 more hours and I will get this cool thing.
Anybody else feels the same?

You can buy Rare sets and weapons for a reasonable price from the TP or craft your own. That’s about it. Then again, the reward is simply playing the game…so they tell us. In part it’s true, just playing has been rewarding since the pace is so fast, buying new skills, ect. By the reward system is fairly unimpressive.

Yeah I see what OP means but I’m not sure how they could introduce something like this without making it feel forced.

Pretty sure every 10 or so levels in my personal story a got a pretty good piece of gear.

A reward system usually works better in a PvE based game so.In a PvP based game the reward is fun…

I agree with the OP. The lack of options is disappointing. I liked in GW1 where different outposts had different looks and two tiers of a look. Really, really miss that.

[Opinion] -

On my thief:

I found the karma vendors to provide ugly, ugly and ugly. Drops that scream “Yarr! I be a pirate!” and so on. That said, there was NO armor look progression for my thief from level 1 to 80. The look changed, yet stayed in something I didn’t like. So I felt almost pushed forward to finally get something I did.

On my mesmer, completely different. I liked the Order Armor and was able to get it easily and early. So from there, I have had a lot more fun kicking back and “enjoying the ride”.

Also finally was able to make a Norn. Not a oversized human, but a Norn. I saved my coppers and picked up the Tier 2 armor for the New Norn Engineer and am finding it a blast (pun intended). Whereas before, the armor was such a distraction I couldn’t enjoy the Norn at all.

There is reward it just doesn’t make you OP crazy one-shotter. Also this is not a PvP game and to think so is absurd. PvP is always an attachment to a PvE game. People need to let the gear treadmill mindset go.

Yeah, the personal story is pretty much what I play for at the moment. There’s usually a quest segment about every two levels.

Unfortunately, it’s so dreadfully boring getting through those 2-3 levels in order to do my story quest. I’m hoping it gets better, but unfortunately I keep hearing that it’s just going to get worse.

Zenith.1234:

There is reward it just doesn’t make you OP crazy one-shotter. Also this is not a PvP game and to think so is absurd. PvP is always an attachment to a PvE game. People need to let the gear treadmill mindset go.

Unless I am mistaken; no one is asking for the Gear Treadmill (ala WoW). It’s a tiered “Look” Progression that is missing; and that comes from lack of diversity in armor design – a complaint that has been around since BWE1.
From level 1 to 80 (on my thief) my character looked almost exactly the same… ugly, broke, poor, a beggar… it was dreadfully dull.

If it is the typical Gear Treadmill of needing Gear X before I can qualify for Area B – then count me out. I am tired of that set up as well.

Meaningless after 30?

Level 40: Master Traits
Level 60: Grandmaster Traits
Level 80: You have all of your trait points.

I got my mesmer to 40 yesterday, finally got clone on dodge. Then when in a fight, I fell in love with this major trait.

Being level 80 makes all the PvE and WvW content a little easier. Plus you can get some elite dungeon gear with far less than 300hrs worth of grinding. I don’t buy the argument that its only a PvP game.

The simple answer to your question OP is – Yes

I think Anet messed up a little bit, they hand out far to many of the ‘goodies’ early on in the Game, ie early in the lvling curve.

This is understandable, Anet want to create a good feeling at the start, get players having fun, get players ‘hooked’, but it leaves the middle ground a little sparse.

I think they should of just spaced things out a little better, save some unlocks for latter in the curve, keeping that ‘reward/unlock’ hit that is quite a big feature for keeping player interest during the lvling curve.

How about giving every class/proff a class specific weapon, have it unlock at lvl 75 ?, gives you 5 lvls to play around with it before you hit 80.

The elite skill is handed out far too early imo, maybe unlock at 50, 60 ?, then just space out unlocks better.

The issue of armor looking ‘bad’ through the whole lvling curve is also another problem, armor should get better (in looks) as you move up the lvling curve, as you progress, it’s part of the reward structure, and again, keeps people playing, keeps people having fun.

The best stuff should always be saved for max lvl, no doubt about that, there has to be a reward for max lvl, but you can still have progression in gear through the curve, and it’s one of the best things for keeping people interested,

People love nice looking armor, and they love ‘building’ chars, they love that sense of creation, taking a lvl 1 whatever, and building it into something, for many people, though by no means all, it’s one of the main reasons they play MMO’s

GW2 kinda gets it all messed up a bit, it needs better spacing, and some better armor skins, all stuff that can be fixed, IF they wanted/want to.

So, yeah, Anet you need to save some ‘goodies’ for the 40-60 zone, and think of some reward or unlock for the 70-80 zone,

I think a weapon unlock that is class specific is my best idea for 70-80,

Ranger gets Crossbow at 75,
Warrior gets Greataxe at 75
Necro gets a ‘kitten’ minion at 75
Guardian gets a Scepter that works at 75, lol

You get the drift,

Tsaritsin thanks this is exactly what I meant but you put it in better words. As you said it is not only armours but also mechanics, abilities etc. When i was lvling up in d&d I was so excited b/c i always knew that next lvl will bring something exciting and new to play with. I think ANet was afraid to go this way b/c of pvp imo.
As you said I also agree that it is fixable and I believe some day they will do it.

Yeah it’s fixable, just needs the Devs to go back and look at the lvling process with a critical eye.

You gotta keep giving players reward, to keep the excitement factor going through the lvling curve, keep players ‘wanting’ to hit the next lvl, or the next lvl bracket, instead of players just feeling like it’s a drag through the lvls to the cap.

I think this is more important now than at any other time in MMO’s, as quite a few players seem to be growing tired of the whole lvling aspect of MMO’s, more and more players asking for an ’instant lvl cap button, kinda “let me have max lvl and just get on with it”, and I kinda agree sometimes.

The old reason given for the whole lvling process always used to be – it gives players time to learn and understand the class and the mechanics of the game, ie it’s a learning process, not a lvling process,

But with more and more games getting dumbed down, with less and less skills, less complication, less mechanics, I’m not sure it’s valid anymore.

One things for sure, if you build a good story, and you build that story around the lvling process then you got a good thing going, you got a base to build on, but you still gotta give players that “when I hit next lvl I get this new cool thing” factor.

Check your heart karma vendors after EVERY HEART.

You will find what you are looking for. There are some pretty awesome armors and weps that most people are just passing over -_-

Tsaritsin whats this leveling curve you speak of the game rushes you to 80. The higher level you get the faster leveling gets you can go 1 to 80 in a long weekend. (4 days)

Let’s also not forget that the appeal of cosmetic armour sets are very subjective in themselves. I’m currently struggling to be enthusiastic about obtaining any ‘cosmetic’ gear on my thief simply because so little of the armour available for the adventurer professions appeals to me. I enjoy the class, mind you – but I agree that we need more goals to strive towards. I have faith that such will arrive in content patches, though.

I find that possibly the biggest problem in GW2 is the general lack of progression in everything. All your weapon skills are pretty much unlocked straight away, and they’re presets, so you’re not going to gain or change anything on that front ever in your quest for level 80.
Then you have a handful of utility and healing skills, but you can quickly see which few ones are worth equipping in your very restrictive skillbar and which are not. Sure you can unlock more fancy situational and amusing skills, but the majority just aren’t worth filling up one of your few skill slots, so you never use them anyway.
This is pretty much what happens in the middle ground too, you’ve picked out all the skills you find useful, and while you can still unlock more, you aren’t going to be equipping them, so it feels like a waste and you aren’t gaining anything.

It’s the same in sPvP, only worse. You start out with all the skills, so obviously they aren’t a means of progression. The only thing you can gain for spending hundreds of hours pvping, is cosmetic upgrades.. That’s kinda nice for a few days, but gets meaningless pretty quickly, and the fun factor is lost long before then as well. To me at least.. Gaining nothing at all makes it hard to justify spending so many hours doing it.

As annoying as it is with pvp gear with superior stats, it does give you a strong incentive to progress as a noob, so you can get that gear too one day. PvP doesn’t necessarily always have to be bland 100% fair tournament style all the time. It’s a game, not a sport.

The OP has a point. After you bought all the most interesting skills you will likely still be a long shot away from 80 and earning skill points becomes a lot less exciting then.
Crafting could be a decent middle ground reward, if it was possible to keep crafting level up to date with your character level without excessive farming. On top of that, crafting doesn’t yield much excitement currently, because pretty much everything you can craft until 400 isn’t worth selling.

I would like it, if some skills (maybe new ones in the future?) were explicitly tied to a particular skill challenge. So if you want that new kitten laser beam with piercing effect and aoe blind you gotta do a particular (harder than normal) challenge or maybe even a whole DE chain.
When I first heard about skill challenges before the game was released, I imagined them to be like this and I was a bit disappointed about the current iteration.

Soulwatcher.2604:

Tsaritsin whats this leveling curve you speak of the game rushes you to 80. The higher level you get the faster leveling gets you can go 1 to 80 in a long weekend. (4 days)

The lvling curve is the ‘boredom factor’ which will always kick in when you engage in repetition, which has a bad and nasty habit of slowing down your lvling at higher lvls, regardless of the rate at which you are gaining xp.

Yep, you can lvl fast in GW2, you can lvl fast in pritty much any MMO, if you sit in front of your PC for a very long time and just ignore the ‘Pain Barrier’ imposed by boredom.

But that is not indicative of the average player, lets not forget that GW2 has been out for what, about a month now, and there are still large numbers of players who not even 80 on 1 char, they are taking their time, enjoying the game.

If at any point the game dev’s sat down and said – “ok, you can lvl fast in this game, you can lvl from 1-80 in only a few days, therefore we do not need to maintain the reward and unlock structure through the whole process”, they would be badly wrong.

For me lvling my first char to 80, it was huge fun from 1-40/50ish, and went very fast, but by about lvl 65 I was bored to death of doing Hearts and DE’s over and over again, my lvling slowed down as I started doing other things to combat boredom, and in the end I hit WvWvW, and did 67-80 mostly in that.

Now, don’t get me wrong, the Hearts and DE’s are a bazillion times better than the questing in other such MMO’s (WoW for instance), Anet have done a fantastic job of making questing/xp gain more fun, alot more fun.

But repetition will always bring boredom, sooner or later, and that is why you need unlocks spaced through the lvling process, it adds fun, it helps you overlook any boredom that might be creeping in.