Guild Wars 2

GW2’s current endgame design is very friendly to solo casual players, because a solo player can easily join any large guild they like for support in endgame activities. Like to SPvP or WvW? No problem: there are plenty of large, organized guilds that focus squarely on that. Like to grind dungeons and push to high levels of FoTM progression? No problem: lots of larger dungeon-centric guilds to join so you can always be taught the ropes and the boss encounters. And even be “carried along” by better, stronger dungeoneers if you’re still learning or even somewhat weak at dungeoneering yourself.

And now the new guild missions have arrived. Unfortunately, only the large guilds with tons of members to generate enough income (in influence) can afford to do the unlocks.

Meanwhile, the smaller, casual “friends and family” style guilds are left totally in the cold at end game. My multi-game guild of many years is effectively dead now here in GW2 because of the current end-game design. Call us bads and jeer all you like, but Hrouda’s idea of dungeon challenge leaves us in the cold. We struggle mightily as a guild to complete even the “easiest” exp paths such as AC2 or COF1, etc. And that was even before the recent AC rework. We struggle at FoTM level 4 and higher, taking nearly 90 minutes to get through even two fractals if we pull the harder ones. And often running out of time for a scheduled guild run and not even being able to complete all 3 fractals.

I’ll point out that this same group of people was able to run all mid-difficulty “elite” dungeons in The Secret World just fine in a reasonable amount of time and with a reasonable learning curve.

So PvP is out unless you are a small group of hardcore PvP elites or you join a large organized guild.

Dungeons are out unless you are a small group of hardcore dungeon elites or you join a large guild.

We were hoping that the much-vaunted “guild missions” would actually give us something to do together at end game, but again, Anet’s very strange ideas about how to provide content for casual players has completely stonewalled us. We’ve been together since launch with as many as 20 people for the first few months and now down to a remaining crew of about 10 people. We’re casual players. At this point we have only 50K influence. That’s after 6 months and buying only some very basic low tiers to get a guild bank, guild armor/weaponsmith, etc. We can’t even buy our way into the first guild mission unlock because that will cost us 66K influence. And even if we manage to eventually unlock that first Guild Bounty mission, we’ll NEVER get past that. We’ll NEVER be able to afford the unlock for any other type of guild mission.

Fail, Anet. Fail. You really need to reconsider your end game content and stop putting up barriers to entry for the casual folks.

Question: Why is PvP out?

As a guild, you could roam, scout, interrupt supply caravans, retake the smaller camps in WvW. In SPvP, teams are matched up on a win / lose basis i.e. The less experienced teams fight each other and the more experience teams fight each other.

Dungeons aren’t all that difficult, unless you’re playing 5 glass cannons, or you’re trying to play as in a traditional MMO with defined roles. Same with Fractals. We aren’t elite players. We fall, dust ourselves off and try again. Maybe change a trait or skill that’ll give us an edge.

Guild missions also aren’t out of the reach of small guilds. Our 11 strong guild of casual players has just queued up AoW level 5. They’ll take longer, sure, but they aren’t impossibly out of reach.

I guess I don’t really understand the issue. If you guys want help on dungeon strategy let me know. I’ll gladly show you through the ones I’ve been through and can help you out on TS3, raidcall, skype, whatever. Having a medium-experience party on voice chat is sometime better than a highly-experienced party typing.

As for guild missions, don’t expect to be doing t6 bounty or anything. Even large guilds have to build alliances, probably, to finish those.

You can still sPvP, just learn your classes and strategy.

You can still farm in Orr

You can still take camps/sentries in WvW, or join a larger zerg.

Make guild alliances

We are a guild of maybe 8 sort of active players…We had unlocked everything before this update. We do a lot of dungeons.

We don’t really feel left out. But we do feel annoy with those waiting time and that absurd requirement of having 50k + influence in order to be able to do guild missions. And then we discovered, after basically wasting our influence, that we cannot do guild treks and we have to do upgrade art of war (luckily we were already at r5, even if we had no use for it). At this point we said “screw this” and everyone gave some gold to buy influence….Can’t wait to do the last type of missions we wanted to do >.>

Anyway, the requirements are annoying but don’t give up ^^
And do events with another guild mate to get more influence. WvW has a lot of events.

Sorry, I don’t mend to sound rude or elitist or whatever, but there’s no law that says that Anet needs to create content that can be completed by %100 of its player base. There’s plenty of content for you to do; if you’re that casual that you’ve completed all of the content in the game except for FOTM 5+, I suggest trying to improve your game play.

Other games aren’t held to this standard, so why should MMOs? You think in a Madden game, if you can’t beat the PC you’re going to win the Superbowl and see the Superbowl winning cut scenes?

+1 OP, especially the dungeons. Dungeons require no skill, just memorization, like the highest level of Guitar Hero. I know games have been trying to pass memorization off as skill/fun for a long time now, but it’s really starting to grind my gears.

rizzo.1079:

+1 OP, especially the dungeons. Dungeons require no skill, just memorization, like the highest level of Guitar Hero. I know games have been trying to pass memorization off as skill/fun for a long time now, but it’s really starting to grind my gears.

The OP said his group can’t even complete the easiest of dungeons in this game. Your post seems like you’re praising him for calling it easy.

Skill and Memorization are two different things. Just like PvP takes memorization of your own skills and other class abilities. To say that all dungeons take no skill is so silly. Even if you yourself find it extremely easy to do something in a hard dungeon, it’s still a skill.

AC Path 2 final boss for instance, you literally can’t kill him if you don’t have skills in coordination.

You have a valid point about guild missions because the barriers to entry for them are completely arbitrary and have been designed explicitly to exclude small guild participation. This is an absolute failure on ANet’s part and they should rectify it.

However, the problems you’re experiencing with dungeons is another matter. When I hear that you are unable to complete them, my first thought is that you need to learn HOW to do them. Most of them don’t seem to require bucket loads of skill to accomplish, only that you know the mechanics behind them and you are able to cooperate with your group.

For instance, I recently ran the new AC with my guild and gravelings area was giving us all sorts of problems. We must have spent a good hour JUST THERE, trying numerous different strategies, skill combinations and group configurations before we hit on the one that worked for us. Yeah, it took a while, but we accomplished it by persevering and communicating. I can’t see any other group not being able to do the same thing as us. If you just don’t have the patience to figure it out, then that’s something you need to work on for yourselves. It’s not the dungeons that are the problem.

Oh, and I also belong to a small guild.

As for PvP, I can’t help you there. I don’t like and don’t play it. Why not just do what so many others do and just meld with the zerg?

McDili.1549:

rizzo.1079:

+1 OP, especially the dungeons. Dungeons require no skill, just memorization, like the highest level of Guitar Hero. I know games have been trying to pass memorization off as skill/fun for a long time now, but it’s really starting to grind my gears.

The OP said his group can’t even complete the easiest of dungeons in this game. Your post seems like you’re praising him for calling it easy.

Skill and Memorization are two different things. Just like PvP takes memorization of your own skills and other class abilities. To say that all dungeons take no skill is so silly. Even if you yourself find it extremely easy to do something in a hard dungeon, it’s still a skill.

AC Path 2 final boss for instance, you literally can’t kill him if you don’t have skills in coordination.

Dunno, I’ve done two dungeon runs and both of them seemed to be completely dependent on “Ok run past this guy into this corner until he loses aggro, run into this corner and dodge at the exact right time into this corner to avoid his aoe…oh you can’t go forward there you have to stop and do this from here and oh here’s this new mechanic that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the game oh and now you’re dead have fun laying there for 10 minutes”
That’s memorizing exactly where everything is and how to beat it. Not fun, not skill, memorization. Not to mention the rewards are completely cosmetic so there’s really no good reason to do it at all…though I do have to say I came out like 50s ahead the last time I did a dungeon run plus a lodestone of some kind that I’ll probably never use so I have that to sell. Still, making that 2g or whatever is more fun in the overworld.

rizzo.1079:

McDili.1549:

rizzo.1079:

+1 OP, especially the dungeons. Dungeons require no skill, just memorization, like the highest level of Guitar Hero. I know games have been trying to pass memorization off as skill/fun for a long time now, but it’s really starting to grind my gears.

The OP said his group can’t even complete the easiest of dungeons in this game. Your post seems like you’re praising him for calling it easy.

Skill and Memorization are two different things. Just like PvP takes memorization of your own skills and other class abilities. To say that all dungeons take no skill is so silly. Even if you yourself find it extremely easy to do something in a hard dungeon, it’s still a skill.

AC Path 2 final boss for instance, you literally can’t kill him if you don’t have skills in coordination.

Dunno, I’ve done two dungeon runs and both of them seemed to be completely dependent on “Ok run past this guy into this corner until he loses aggro, run into this corner and dodge at the exact right time into this corner to avoid his aoe…oh you can’t go forward there you have to stop and do this from here and oh here’s this new mechanic that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the game oh and now you’re dead have fun laying there for 10 minutes”
That’s memorizing exactly where everything is and how to beat it. Not fun, not skill, memorization. Not to mention the rewards are completely cosmetic so there’s really no good reason to do it at all…though I do have to say I came out like 50s ahead the last time I did a dungeon run plus a lodestone of some kind that I’ll probably never use so I have that to sell. Still, making that 2g or whatever is more fun in the overworld.

You’ve done TWO dungeon runs, (I’m going to assume story mode aka easy mode), and somehow you know every dungeon in the game doesn’t take skill?

Lol k.

The problem with dungeons now is that the people who’ve gone through the learning curve and figured them out are now only doing them to farm. The people who haven’t learned them and are now trying to do them are in the learning curve. The “first” explorable, AC, is now harder for this demographic than the old AC. What might help these people is for experienced dungeoneers to teach them. I’ve been in two dungeons lately where I was the one with the most experience. Before those two, I’ve done 6-7 dungeon paths since my old guild faded back in October. I don’t blame experienced players for not wanting to teach. I understand that some experienced players do teach. That still leaves a lot of people trying dungeons and getting stomped. Face it, the learning curve can be quite painful.

And now the new guild missions have arrived. Unfortunately, only the large guilds with tons of members to generate enough income (in influence) can afford to do the unlocks.

Not true at all anymore. The guild missions were tweaked down to 30k influence (from 50k) to make them more accessible to all guilds.

It takes 36k just to unlock Tier 5 anyway so if your guild can’t get to that point, then you would be unlikely to clear the content; especially since some of the content is in the 50+ areas.

And I’m in a small group, only 4 of us generally available for content at the same time (due to time zones/work) and we’re still able to push through to Tier 3 on Poli, Eco and Archi within a reasonable amount of time. We have L1 AoW because guild missions aren’t a priority yet and it’ll be easier, for us, to get everything else to level 5 first.

sorry, if you reference TSW elite dungeons as a measurement of player skill, it is hard to take your estimation of GW2 difficulty very serious. Normally, dungeons are easily completed here even with PUGs.

Algreg.3629:

sorry, if you reference TSW elite dungeons as a measurement of player skill, it is hard to take your estimation of GW2 difficulty very serious. Normally, dungeons are easily completed here even with PUGs.

You realize you’re reinforcing my point, right?

Point being, a casual guild that, on whole, could handle the middle level of difficulty in end game content in other games (such as TSW), by contrast struggles greatly with the learning curve of even the “easiest” exp paths here.

Let’s be clear: I’m not against making really hard dungeon content for the elite players who want and like that. What I’m saying is that Hrouda’s design philosophy leaves casual players who are not leet dungeon crawlers out in the cold if they want to have fun together as a casual “friends and family” guild. And Fractals are indeed easier overall, but to do 3x in a row and the Jaw Maw at the end is a serious time investment for casual players who might need 2 hours or more to grind through all that content in one go. Casual players by definition are primarily those who have very short time windows in which to play. It gets even harder to find a time window where 5x casual players can all play together at the same time for fun.

Sure those same players can individually get into a PUG or another guild group with strong dungeon players who know the encounters very well and be “carried along” just fine. But that’s not the point of many smaller “casual” guilds.

Right now, the only endgame content accessible to smaller casual guilds who aren’t full of people with leet skills is open world events. That’s about it. That’s not a lot of incentive to keep casual players around, except for the ones that don’t mind essentially running solo and guild hopping as needed to gain access to end-game content.