I played a lot of Guild Wars 1. It was a major time sink for me and among other things I have some really fond memories of Alliance Battles. I ended up making sure I had at least 30/50 of the HoM awards because I knew I would end up playing GW2 when it came out.
When I heard ANet say things like, “there will be no dedicated healer class”, and that you’d be able to explore the world by yourself and still be effective in combat, I was overjoyed. Not only did I think it was lame in GW1 that you had to take monks with you everywhere, but as a player I also felt hamstrung in that I needed to take 7 other people/henchies with me practically wherever I went.
So I guess its fair to say that I had a lot of expectations for GW2. And honestly I am a little disappointed. GW2 feels like a very shallow game in comparison to GW1. Once you hit lvl 80, your pve experience pretty much revolves around dungeons and event grinding in Cursed Shore. However, the dungeons are repetitive and un-fun (which I’ll get into below), and that pretty much leaves a major grind-fest so simplistic and repetitive that players have been mistakenly caught in ANet’s anti-bot web.
But I sincerely believe GW2 still has a lot of potential. There’s a dungeon revamp in the works and we’re getting a new zone next week and I guess if one has faith in the ANet devs (and let’s be honest, they HAVE been saying more or less the “right” things when it comes to responding to player criticism), then one should expect these changes to make GW2 a better game to play. And with that in mind I want to point out where things could be better :
*Dungeons
I’ve read a lot of threads on dungeons and why they suck and tbh I think every last one of them has missed the boat. The real shortcoming in dungeons is that the moment the fight starts, players lose pretty much ALL initiative. The entire fight mechanic is built around avoiding damage. Players need to avoid damage at all costs and they get 2 dodge rolls and “utility skills” to achieve this. Considerations like effective DPS and weapon choice come a poor 2nd. Frankly, this is absurd. In every fun MMO I’ve ever played, when it came to dealing with average dungeon mobs, playing well meant robbing the mob of his initiative. Where’s the build which makes you laugh cuz the mobs can barely scratch you? Or the chain-stun build which keep the mobs nicely disabled for your nuker friend so he can blow them to kingdom-come? GW1 had this element, and there were several ways of going about completely destroying trash mobs. Not so in GW2. No matter what, the dungeon mobs are always going to down you in a few shots if you ever get it in your head to attempt to trade blow with them. Until this part of the dungeon experience is changed, no matter what content you design, people are always going to feel like they’re signing up for a particularly masochistic game of dodgeball.
Added to this, dungeons lack a proper loot reward. I’m not saying the armour/weapons is a bad reward. But they’re account bound. You only do the dungeon if you’re actually looking to get a piece from the vendor. This by definition ruins the replayability of the dungeon. Sure, you get a few hardcore dungeon farmers who do it for the other drops, but as far as I can tell its a small subsection of the playerbase that actually does this. The elite dungeons in GW1 dropped currency that players could use to trade for other things they want. The fact that the currencies were desirable because they bought the most prestigious armour/weapons in the game is what gave the dungeons widespread appeal. Dungeons in GW2 need to have a similar kind of payoff in order to draw players into their depths.
*Zones
Where is the zone differentiation? Don’t get me wrong, each of the zones have a different feel to them and the atmospheres can be downright awesome, but… Where’s the unique mob drops? No matter which zone I’m in, the mobs pretty much drop generic level appropriate crafting loot and/or level appropriate random quality weapons. Which, if I were to guess, I would suppose is a direct part of the “all you need at lvl 30 is in a lvl 30 zone” philosophy, but where did it say that all of the rewards had to be solely appropriate to someone who is lvl 30?
There should be rare, level independent (i.e. as desireable to find at lvl 1 as lvl 80), loot that drops from certain mobs in each zone, and no two zones should share the same loot table. By doing this, it would actually matter if someone were in Cursed Shore or Frostgorge Sound or the Hirathi Hinterlands.