Guild Wars 2

Okay, I’ve been slowly moving my Ele up to 80, just got there this week. Yup, Orr is a dangerous and frustrating place for an Ele who doesn’t have (can’t afford) 80 level gear, but I soldier on.

Today, I had the luck of stumbling into several events in Cursed Shore. And they were a blast. Just enough people around to keep an ele like me from being steamrolled, but not so many that it was easy by any stretch. While several events were foregone conclusions, they were still nailbiters. I kited, rezzed, healed, blasted, crippled like a madman in each one. Despite the almost guaranteed win, one slip in concentration would put ya down.

A couple of events were NOT foregone conclusions, retaking a waypoint almost ended in disaster, down to just me and a friendly Asuran necro (thank you whoever you are), retreating just enough and taking on several risen at once (he went down, I was down to 100 hps, but we got him back up, we healed, took out the badguys). Then rezzing NPCs as we fought back to the center, we manage to snatch victory from risen jaws and joined by enough rezzed players and NPCs to take back the waypoint.

Now folks are complaining about the end game… but daaaamnn… I loved doing that event!!! Now, I must admit that after doing about 7 events, I decided I was a bit burnt, and switched to my level 20 Warrior to do some easy exploring and fighting. I don’t want to do it all the time, but in a couple of days, I hope to find Cursed Shore as exciting and fun as today was.

Orr is a nice taste of things to (hopefully) come I think. Outside of the bugs, etc, most of the major meta-events, the shrines especially, but also the attack on the Gates of Arah or the invasion trains in SoD tend to nicely take the zerg mentality and punishes you for it. I sure hope that new content follows this and requires even more coordination and forward thinking to make the events fun.

Some high points that I remember:

The Shrine of Lyssa. The entire place is a huge zerg-punter, due to the requirement to hold the 3 power nodes while a team takes the main boss down.

The Shrine of Balthazaar. Oh hey, you are downed, I will res you in that big red aoe that instakills anything bellow 20k health.

The Shrine of… Uh… I forgot :X. The CS one that spawns the shades. Extra points for people who do know how to kill them, but either do not remove the shade killing buff (which stacks a very nasty debuff on you) or drag the boss right to the NPC that needs to stay alive.

The Gates of Arah, the “2nd” step after the invasion proper starts, swarms of Risen swarming form the top of the stairs! Well, that’s easy! Lets just zerg them before they get to the capture points. Oh wait, we should have left some people across the span of the capture point to guard it form the risen that spawn inside? Oops!

Mind you, most of those can be averted if you zerg is big enough, but I do hope that in upcoming content anet continues this trend of forcing fore thought, splitting up and coordination to complete the huge DE chains. I especially like the idea of a “building” invasion like in SoD, with the pre-events and performance during them give you better odds later on, or change something, but are a challenge to “perfectly” complete on their own. The meta-DE system has some interesting possibilities, even if you assume that most players will just zerg rush. It just really shines through in Orr, where events not only require you to do just a bit more, but also fail if you don’t, forcing a restart.

I’ve found it very hard to drag myself out there the last several days. The zones just aren’t very much fun to be in. Gloomy. Annoying. Just let the risen have those lands, I’d say. Serves them right!

Orr is like going to the dentist – I guess if you are into getting your teeth drilled, you will enjoy Orr.

I have plenty of other things in my life that are annoying, I don’t need my fun time to be annoying, too.

I found Cursed Shore to be one of the best well designed areas when it comes to events too.

You have plinx for karma farming, the “tunnel” for loot farming, and just plain epic dynamic events!

My only complaints are that there is no real incentive to keep Grenth captured (as it’s better to farm the pre-event), too many trash mobs make traveling without WP a pain, and that events like capturing Arah don’t reset enough. We only ever see it after reconnecting from a new build.

Yeah I’d agree, I thought Orr just completely sucked when I first started to go there, but the events are pretty cool once you start getting into groups and doing them. Very interesting how some of them chain.

wish i could agree, but i kind of found orr to be more of a pain in than fun.

some seem to like it which is fine xd but after a while it just drives you mental, it’s relentless and you can’t relax most of the time which is more annoying when all the waypoints are contested you can’t find anywhere to port to that’s nearby so you end up having to port to far away so you can take a break.

it’s a zone that doesn’t allow you to take a break which is fine but is also very annoying.