Guild Wars 2

I just want to mention a few things that I think have been great additions to the game.

The quest for Mawdrey II. I finished this a few days ago and overall I think it was genuinely fun to go through all those mini tasks and recipes. Except for those elusive foxfires, it was nice to find each part, and then all the ingredients for the recipe (but I wouldn’t mind if there were no daily cap crafting). It got reminiscences from the Mad Memories quest, and from the Mini Moa from GW1. I’d love to see more like this, maybe with better rewards at the end, because I didn’t really have much use for the back piece.

Dry Top and Silverwastes. The vertical movement of Dry Top and the new mechanics in both maps have been really nice. I specially love the way Silverwastes forces us to split, and how the events cannot be ruined by just 1 person (Marionette, I’m looking at you). Also with the add of the Labyrinth we got a really nice change of pace between the killing rampage and this pacman like scenario. The rewards in the Silverwastes are pretty awesome, I think I got two exotics in the last two weeks and lots of rares, really nice.

Tangled Paths Achievements. I love that the achievements can be completed in just one run of each mini-story. Some of the previous chapters really got in my nerves, specially repeating the “Party Politics” one for the Nth time. Shame on me, but I decided to use a guide to complete the Party Politics achievements , first time I don’t play something by myself.

Luminescent armor acquisition. I think it is very well balanced between the limit of normal playing vs farming. While I don’t particularly like the design of the new armor, I’m still unlocking it just for the fun of doing it.

The entire Season Two. I’m always looking forward to the next chapter, and to see how the story unveils. I don’t want to spoil the last chapter, but I will say that I was all like “No way, they won’t dare…”, but yeah, you dared!

So, does somebody has something to add here? Anything that you feel has been a great accomplishment from ANet?

I think the boss designs with the new season show a great leap forward with the game, they move around, have abilities that force you to move around, and most of them have interesting mechanics that isn’t just stack and burn like a lot of the original ones.

The mordrem enemies are also well designed with a lot of variation, although personally I’d like something between the original version of the wolves and their current one. Their howl went from close to OP in large groups to meaningless.

I’m loving season two.. I don’t care much for having to wait so long for the next “phase”, but I can see it’s neccessity..

to gaile gray: I still want that little frog mini you got from gw1.. (yes I still play gw1, just because the skill system was so much better)

Dramen Maidria.1034:

The mordrem enemies are also well designed with a lot of variation, although personally I’d like something between the original version of the wolves and their current one. Their howl went from close to OP in large groups to meaningless.

I think combined with teragriff charges it’d be too much to have the heavy retaliation on everything. They still do huge damage while flanking if they manage to sneak in unexpectedly. The frontal immunity was also removed from the thrashers, probably for the same reason.

While I overall agree, I think that a couple of tweaks would make the good updates truly great:

- Once unlocked, the LS story achievements should be completable by ANY character on your account. The current system of forcing you to complete the content on an individual character before you can attempt achievements on them is extremely annoying.

- Dry Top and Silverwastes are well designed maps, but from a long-term perspective I hope the devs have plans to have it scale so its still doable by smaller numbers of players. As an example, it’s almost impossible for a Dry Top map to get past T4 now outside of “raids” by organised guilds; there just isn’t the numbers and interest to make it happen anymore.

- I would like to see a return to the system where the Luminescent armor pieces were given out per character rather than per account. Us altoholics tend to spend far more money and time equipping our characters; having stuff like armor pieces given out per alt felt like a refreshing boost from ANet, one area of the game where our greater efforts are acknowledged and rewarded rather than being overlooked.

Well I like everything ANet’s done so far. I just wish there was even more! But that’s probably a minor complain since more content is just a matter of time (please no more 3-4 months breaks pls :P ).
But yes, armor acquisition was better than relying on random drops or grinding tokens (well the gloves we had to go back to grinding bandit crests, but you get so many of them I’m somewhat hesitant to call it a grind). I prefer Silverwastes over Dry Top, mostly because Dry Top felt like a event grind. Do event X, Y, Z repeat. SIlverwastes is I guess technically similar but it’s less apparent. The goal is not to do events, it’s to defend bases (which are events but aren’t as explicit). I would love to see the Silverwaste be expanded into a new game mode (there’s a lot of potential there guys… although the logistics of it all is iffy since as new content comes along we automatically see people move away from old content to new content and so numbers become an issue). The pac-man was fun (if only because we already have tons of content that involve mindlessly killing things, so the more variety in gameplay is always good).
The only thing that I feel is lacking is new exploration map, and by that I mean more maps like the ones GW2 launched with. Although I do mostly understand why ANet’s not doing that, since it’s a lot of work with moderate engagement (how many map completions can you do before it gets boring). But still a feeling of exploration is somewhat missing in the new meta-focused maps. I’m not saying don’t do meta-maps, but in an ideal world I would have loved to see both.

Season 2 indeed has good points. I just hope they stop doing so many focused solo-player instances. If the mordremoth fight it’s inside one of those, it’ll be as dissapointing as Zhaitan’s fight and will discourage most of the playerbase to keep playing. It must be something as big and huge as marionette or lion’s arch holograms fight, or even permanent like Tequatl.

Please Anet, you got enough time to not screw that one up :P (constructive criticism)

I can’t honestly say that I can think of anything I would consider “great”.

Would you settle for decent?

I also liked most of the living story and most Boss fights were done well (clear telegraphed attacks, charging around the place -like ifrit in ff14-). I didnt like the labyrinth though, too much running around. I only go there now when i got a key for the chest. The map was done well too, but ATM not much incentive to go there since i got the skins now.