Guild Wars 2

Hi all,
the scope of this post is to do a four hand written review of gw2, what has been, and a lil of what is gonna be from what we know from last blogpost.

Disclaimer:
this is gonna be long, for a reason, and no tl:dr will be made since will make a detailed review pointless.
so get ready for a long read.
Sorry for any grammar or whatever, I’m Italian and already proud of my English level, but far from perfect!

Introducing ourself:
My name is Paolo, and I’m writing this with my gf Sara, I started playing a bit later than day 1, like in October, and Sara started in Gen following my advice on how amazing this game was.
I’m not new to gaming in general, I’m 25 so I was there when diablo1 and baldurs gate were on the top, but I never actually played a real mmo since I always refused to pay a monthly subscription. So no wow for me, I bvarely know the graphics and have really close to no idea of what trinity is and what a true gear treadmill is.
As for sara well she never played a single game beside angrybirds before.. lol!

Marketing strategy :
Well what to say, the first enormous pro we can see is the fact that the game is relatively cheap and free from monthly fees, kudos, I’d never even considered it if it wasn’t and this is even more true for Sara.
That’s a strategy that is highly aimed toward the casual gamer that isn’t sure about the game to buy a pre order or a collector edition.
And it payd off since I’m like 90% sure that 90% of the sales the game had were just right for this
RNG boxes are the drawback, just gonna say I agree on what 90% says on the forum

The beginning:
I’m gonna make a difference on the experience we had, since they are quite different.
For me well, not gonna lie the impact was tough, had close to no support from the guy that introduced me to the game and I had to make up myself into the enormous amount of information and waste a lot of time on try and fails, wasted a lot of money on wrong gears and builds.
As first char I made a Silvary elementalist. Because you know the race must have something to do with the profession, a char cannot be that good as ele right? Lol wrong

follows—>

I suddenly discovered that race is just a matter of cosmetic and beside some racial skills has nothing to do with performance.
Than the experience degraded to almost impossible to play, we all know, ele is not for beginners!
So I started my actual main, a Charr warrior, which I still enjoy enormously.
From here even if it wasn’t easy, It’s been a trilling, relaxing, and surpriseful experience altogether.
Fore Sara was a bit different she jumped into the brave new world of Tirya with strong shoulders to back her up and a full time guidance trough the most technical part of the game (builds) and a companion to hardest story missions.
Gifted her some golds and babysitted trough the leveling process, upgrading gear every 10 lvls.
She started a female norn guardian and always stick to it as main character.
The experience was suddenly great and enjoyable from the char creation panel to lvl80.

Leveling and exploring a brand new world:
Won’t differentiate here since I started my second char as soon as she jumped into the game, a little asura thief, and at 80 we focused on getting map completion.
With each-other’s help we both reached 80 in a week of hard gaming, but I won’t consider that hardcore or powerleveling as was more like “omg is 5 am and I can’t w8 to see that new map!”.
Till 80% of map we enjoyed every single vista we found and she toke a screen of each one as a picture to make an album, like you do for irl travels.
The world is bright and shining, and exploration is awesome the first time you do it, that feeling of a surprise waiting for you just around the next corner was great.
Heart quests were hard to do sometimes, we are no English native speakers so sometime was hard to understand the quest and what we had to do but we managed. On this I have to make my first remark sadly.
These quests tend to be repetitive and boring after a little, but together another appreciation, is the same of other games( ie skyrim), but here we have far more than that DYNAMIC EVENTS.
Anyway our final judgment on the open world is “OMG WOW”, yeah there are some glitches, some stuck events, and so on but is nothing compared to the emotion coming from exploring one of the best digital world ever created, our congrats to the designers!

Dynamic events
GREAT, simply, coming from static games that feels dumb after the first time, this is simply great.
You are exploring the map and suddenly the events pops up and you have to do this quite epic quest and then it finishes into another event, a chain that can drive you away from what you were doing making exploration an experience different every day.

Up to now we experienced most of them at least once, and I’d do 1000’s new if they are introduced.
Is also true that when you are in the game for a while you loose the sense of discovery, and If you know how the chain is gonna end can make the event a bit grindy.
There are also events we didn’t enjoy after the first time at all, I mean nobody enjoys collecting apple in queensdale after the first time.. but I guess that was intentionally designed this way and the rest of big events make up for this.

My personal favorite chain I definitely the Modnir one. Both for me and Sara. Jumping from a camp to another, the trill of conquer, ending up in a world boss with epic scenario, epic voice acting, and (a bit less) epic fight. Very well done.
Second best is the chain on the pirate island, with the quaggan, lol for sure!
That pice is a kind of little gem of narrative, the correct mix of fight and “silliness” , can really drop a smile from you every time.
Remarks on Des:
The drops. Really, sometimes can be quite frustrating, it was worst before, and I see you are working on that even further. When you go on with the game you may end up wanting to solo an event with a champ or make it with just another player, and the battle are quite epic indeed (sometimes) but the rewards mmm kittens?.
And my first suggestion:

Disclaimer: this is not a blueprint solution to the problem, just a raw idea numbers are casual an likely to be not balanced! Feel free to insult anyway.
as now we know that mf is gonna die as a item stat, and you are rolling out the scaling system on more and more des, well why not scale up mf on an inverse proportion base? And make it party wise ofc, like I start a champ alone, bring him down to 75%, I get 25%mf.
Then a guy comes and I add him to my party so he gets 25%too. We keep killing the guy and we bring him to 50% so we get another 25% but /2 since we are two ppl, so a total of 25+12% and so on. Ow and the champ reward is long due, and a perfect solution to lack of t6 and lodestones.

Dungeons:
Well the first impact is omg! You feel so noob at the beginning and here is an anecdote:
Was roaming around with my charr warrior in Plains of Ashford and I saw a shining portal. Was still so confused and after that ele I was feeling so powerful.
Advised number of player 5.. nah I can do it lol.
Jumped in solo at lvl 15 and got ganked several times by those nasty spike traps! Then vaporized from that lizard another 100 times.

Well frustrated and naked I got back to my standard world exploration and never stepped a foot in those portals till 80 and exo! Lol
This is just to say that imho a dungeons named lvl 35 well is indeed a lvl80 lol and this can be a bit confusing. Now I know that the story can be barely of the level represented while exp mode are hands-up lvl80 instances. No story on this, you can do it with a party of 4×80 and 1 underleveled but you feel the difference.
No way a non veteran group of lvl 35, casually geared ppl is gonna beat Koller, nooo way.
After that is all a matter of training, trials and fails. Build tune up and so on. While is tru that some mechanics are a bit dumb, overall we really enjoyed dungeons, with moments of frustration and crazy joy for our victories.
But again the drop was a problem. I’d gladly spend hours on a hard path trying to improve performance, build amd team work if is worth the effort but it isn’t.
Arah p4= cof p1, that’s the point..
But you are working on that, I saw that and thanks! I really hope a lot in this, makes me really want to cry when I find no one to do a “unfashionable path” .
A cof pro farmer can do 10g in an hour, kitten him, I’m quite sure that if I can get 3g from a coe run, 1 hour worth would be enough to bring lots of ppl from cof farming to other dungeons.
Leave cof as it is, hardcore farmers deserve it, tune up other reward significantly, and imho a lot of farmers will end up spreading trough all the dungeon, generating same if not loess total gold, but with far more fun.
A shame too that some of best dungeons are gone but we’ll live and see, I’m sure they’ll bring them back somehow.
By the way we both had our dungeon master title, and we both agree that dungeon are fine as they are mechanics wise and are for sure the part of the game we enjoyed more by far.
Our favorite dungeon is COE, as a warrior is amazing, being able to melee down a boss with all those nasty aoe, get timing , dodge like crazy and evade with whirlwind, simply great .
To all the warriors, can be a hard time, just disable double tap to evade, use V or whatever, dodge trough the boss, yes you can! fold your trusty rifle, gs is a must here and get an axe+ warhorn.
A war with warhorn can be a life saver sometimes for the group, two can be game changer, due to swiftness and vigor, never underestimate ! this can turn the dungeon from a nightmare to a wonderful experience!
What we’d like to see is more dungeons at least one per map, also outside fractalsn we really wish more standard dungeons in the future.

LFG tool:
Is coming, we all know so I won’t criticize much, was long due, and the lack of up to now is a reason on what im’ gonna say about guilds.

Guilds:
I’m not gonna say many good words her, sadly.
The idea of guild is nice itself, bring ppl together, sensation of belonging to something and “warband” comrades feeling.
All great on papers but the implementation is terrible. Guilds are close to pointless, guild missions apart.
-1 no pve commander and sub commander ranks, no guild limite map tags, no pve commander squad chat and command chain, no possibility to divide the guild into sub groups.. explain itself.
-no guild hall, drops down the sense of union.
-no gvg, I mean this is Guild Wars, nobody cares Is not balanced, it doesn’t have to be valid for leaderboards, It needs to be a fun activity to challenge other guilds and grow the sense of unity.
Not much else to say but for endgame I see nothing more important than guilds, people will make me play this game in years to come more than a new dungeon each month.

Personal story:
Well is fine, I liked it the first time and also the subsequent ones, till lvl60 I guess when all the racial story becomes the same thraherrn kitten.
Well we all know he kittens lol.
Make him die under an asteroid and the celebrations will be bigger than the one for dragon bash.
World bosses:
Good, I like them, some de chain are a bit dumb, they should be all like modnir but they are fine, with the guaranteed rare are ok.
Much room for improving and new ones, but beside culling and lag sometimes is good as it is.
I’d promote some of them to world bosses like megadestroyer and gates of arah but well not up to me.
The API stuff is great, so much you can do with this and really deserves improvements, I can see I bright future on api for many aspects of the game.

Living story:
Great idea, we are getting new stuff to do every 2 weeks and is free. Yeah a lot of stuff was dumb/unpolished but I see it is getting better and better. I still don’t get all the temporary content but is getting better.
What really would make this great is the increase of impact that this have on the open world, permanent impacts ofc. And I’d abandon this sort of spin off we had from dragons so wei’ll eventually see orr cleansed and so on but we’ll eventually get there.
We didn’t see much up to now so I haven’t much to say.

Builds and balance:
We’re not experts, never did theorycrafting so we won’t get much deep into details, I can just say that more options are welcome. always.
Build variety is a kind of issue, but mostly is due to the lack of complete division beteween pvp pve and wvw.
Ranger is a clear example of this problem, nerfed again and again to balance pvp just to make it trash in pve.
I have a lvl 15 one and won’t level it soon, Sara sadly has a lvl 80 which is not used since months.
For a pve player the biggest barrier to jump into pvp or wvw is not some build differences, but the human behind enemy ai, I see no reason to keep wvw pvp and pve similar at expenses of some profession in some aspects of the game.
As for new profession my opinion is no, not now, we need to polish what we have then create a new problem from scratch.
Another long due stuff is build templates, I don’t care make me pay the double but I’d like to switch build anywhere out of combat with 1 click. That would make me go wvw far more and put new interest in build discovery.

Legendary, Precursors and the grind.
For a pve player legendary are the goal, plain and simple. While is true that some are not gonna get it nor are after it most do.
When talking about this topic I feel that before talking we should state our current legendary status
We have no legendary, no precursor at all and we don’t have major gifts (sara got gift of mastery).
We have almost the gift of mastery, I’m close to gift of might and half way to magic. Sara is almost the same but lacks a bit of t6 more
Lodestones are still far away I’d say we have 20 each.
Anyway since I guess lodestones will come easyer to get, as t6 I hope with incoming changes, this is no worry to us
The main point is the precursor. Up to now all the gifts are gold/mats sinks and is fine, the game needs some.
But the precursor is the way you guys have to give our legendary the sense of legend.
In the future we’ll have crafting to 500, and is fine, but is time gated. We’ll have new mats but will likely be time gated like quartz crystals.
No problem with that, but then we red that we will likely need tons of them to craft a precursor..OMG.
I can be wrong, I want to be wrong, but would be fine if is a friendly time gating to block 1 day speed runner, like you need the mats, can get 1 per day but you have a long and difficult enough skill based quest to accomplish, so you barely notice the grind, but really really really no one want’s another gift of luck to craft the precursor, no way, to be a solution it needs to be kitten ring than cof 10h a day, and the solution isn’t either to make cof infinitely more boring you know..

SPVP WvW considerations and conclusions:
I guess you understood by now that we are pve players, therefore we can’t get deep into considerations.
For spvp, I must say I quite like it, mostly hot join, you know get in, bash some heads, 3-4 rounds, get daily eventually and out.
Up to now I don’t really see an esport future for this but i can definitely be wrong
WvW is way more fun and I used to play a bit, what hold me back to love it is the lack of command chain as I said in guild section, the zerg based assaults and the need to do long run backl when dead. Mostly the last one tho.
As a conclusion we feel we need to give our kudos to the whole team, we can find the game boring a bit sometimes after almost a year, but we forget how great were the first times
Anet has a god like power on this world and changes cannot be made lightly as with big powe r comes big responsibilities, so the time will say bu as Colin spent time telling us what will be, and we’re quite excited about that, we felt like giving out a comprehensive feedback of what it has been for us, pros and cons.
Well pros are definitely more, and gw2 really helped us in this transitory moment of our lives, filled the excess of free time (due to.. scarce.. employment) actually saved money (Tyria is still cheaper than clubs) and gave us a brand new interest to be shared.

Good job and keep up the hard work

*Saving this spot for comments later when you actually proofread and edit the rough draft of your novel.

Haven’t read it yet, but you might want to edit it a bit to make it a bit more readable. Things like:

Bolding Headings (done by surrounding the heading with *)
Leaving a line between paragraphs.

• Bullet points for lists (done by placing a * and a space before the sentence)

Also, on the last line, you spelt Tyria wrong.

Nice review.

As with all MMO´s you get the most enjoyment out of it, when you find a nice Guild that suits you and your girlfriend. As a good starting point I suggest finding an Italian speaking one. This site should help.
Also teamspeak is very recommended, especially in WvW but generally and in Dungeons/Fractals too.

Also you can be in up to 5 guilds, keep the Guild you made with your girlfriend for the free bank space.

edited tyria lol, i know about format options but i got disapointed when i pasted from word and lost it all lol.
as for guild i’m in a nice international guild, and i’m fine with english, also found an italian 1 on underworld, moreover ofc i have a stash guild named after me (olo).
complaints were after the implementation of the idea of guild, not the ppl in mine !