Guild Wars 2

I haven’t been logging on much lately, and when I do, it’s usually a disappointment and logoff within a hour or so. I have been trying to put my finger on it. Perhaps I am just burned out on GW2 but I really don’t think so, I feel like aspects of the game have changed that make it less pleasurable for me. Sure there are competing interests (Star Wars expansion, Fallout 4, movies, holidays, etc), but I have been wondering about what my feelings were and what feedback I’d like to offer up, so I am writing here to provide a list of things that have troubled me lately about GW2:

1.) The grind for skills in HoT only able to do in HoT. I like to play this game for WvW and Dungeons most of all, and yet the things I like to do most I can’t use to build my skill bars in HoT. Yeah yeah, I get that you want people to explore those zones, and I have, but I really don’t want to spend all my time there grinding. My suggestion, open expansion XP to all forms of gaining experience, let us play the content we enjoy playing.
2.) Going linkdead sucks, particularly mid-event. It happens often enough that the moment it happens I am done for the night. I don’t want to sit there for an hour waiting for it to cycle around again and then hope for a taxi to a good zone. When someone drops, perhaps a mechanism could get them back to the instance they were in?
3.) The sense of community seems to be fading. Is it just me or do people no longer stop and res fellow players because they want to keep up with an event chain/don’t want to risk death and having to run back from the very few WP there are in the new zones?
4.) Caps on raids. Happens that I really enjoy doing things with my friends in this game. I always have. Dungeons are okay, they have a low cap but they are done quickly. Raids have a higher cap but also can’t be done as often as you want. What that means is there is content that some of the guild doesn’t get to do with their friends, and that sucks. I don’t know what will work for this but it’s for sure something I have seen lately.
5.) WvW is a hot mess. Taking away the old borderlands and adding these new massive zones (which I would really like to use HoT skills in and can’t) changed the WvW so that smaller servers have desolate borderlands that are honestly a lot more boring than fun, and the changes to EB don’t seem like they are working as well as they could.
6.) Roles in raids. Why? It was a foundation thing for GW 2, no trinity. It’s what drew me to this game. It feels like the easy way out for balancing a fight, but also then requires caps. You guys are better than this. There has been some fantastic content that doesn’t require roles and scale very well, make more of that type of content.

It seems that some of the original things I liked about this game, which made it stand out from the rest, have been pushed to the wayside for some reason or other. I hope I am wrong, I hope to see work done to address some of these things because the game I really loved once appears to be turning into just another MMO.

Anyhow, those are my thoughts, thanks for letting me grumble, I just dropped out of octovine to come back to an empty zone… which led to me logging off for the night and coming here to gripe.

1. The initial mastery grind was rather long, but now that I have a lot of the needed ones taken care of, it hasn’t been much of an ordeal. I’m a lazy achievement kitten, so I’m not going to put way too much effort into those niche accomplishments. In saying that, I was able to snag up 110 masteries just from playing through the main game and HoT. Granted, if you’re a relatively new player, I can see trying to get up to that being somewhat of a chore.

2. This does suck. It also sucks trying to jump into a meta taxi and then getting ‘map full’ several times, which then locks you out of joining additional parties. 3 strikes, you’re out. Wait a few hours for the next taxi.

3. It seems to be getting increasingly hostile since the expansion. More whining, angered outbursts and overall negativity in map chat has somewhat diminished my view on the community as a whole. Of course, I started my GW2 days when it was server vs server, so the community on your individual server was a little more ‘intimate’ with the easily angered/trolls.

4. Haven’t even bothered with raids. Maybe if I join a guild that allows it’s newbies to tag along. I think I would be fine, but I never liked the raiding mindset in other MMO’s. Just not my thing.

5. I haven’t even tried on the new map. On one hand, it’s pretty impressive! On the other, if you die, it’s a long hike back. Plus, it hardly seems like anyone is in there like it was back in the ‘good ol days.’ But again, it may have been from the sever vs server mindset.

6. Roles are meh. You bring your A game and try to keep up. But again, raiding.

I do like GW2. I play it all the time. I’m still convinced HoT wasn’t worth the xpac pricing for an already gw2 account. I’m really hoping new content springs forth and by the end of the year, we’ll have similar new areas to play in that equal up to what we got with the original game. Along with that wish, I do hope Anet slows down with the meta maps. Prior to HoT, I really liked Silverwastes and having a few different meta maps are actually nice. But if that’s all we see until the next xpac, that’s going to be a bitter pill to swallow. Sure I can head through a HoT map at my leisure, but I know if it’s a event org’d map, I either have to leave, join up or take a spot that someone else could have. Rather just jump into a map and not have to worry about it, you know?

1. Yes totally. I said in another thread, the thing I loved about GW2 was that I could play low stress, hop on an EOTM train and xp a new character, world boss farm, chest farm SW or wvw (defending or scouting is quite stress free). Most of those things have no real progession in terms of the xpac. I am quite worried about trying raids tbh, I am guessing there would be salt at wipes. Salt stresses me.

2. Literally my biggest hate with this game, is getting a DC (most of the time not your fault) then coming back, even in an anti DC party to not being able to get back in your instance. I am sure adding a 5 minute cooldown on your slot could be implemented, we have screamed for it for years.

3. I have only ever a few times since beta noticed someone actively avoid ressing someone, since HoT I have seen it over and over again. Some how the since of doing things together seems to be lost, maybe because map metas promote selfishness. On the flip side, go to a world boss in tyria and read chat, watch the resses.

4. Not tried raids, fell out of love with dungeons because of wipe salt. Too scared to find a guild to raid in because of this. Could of been the reason to come back too.

5. My saving grace could of also been WvW, imagine when I went in a map during prime time, on a decent pop server, to not only not being active, but those that were there, were simply capping empty structures, took me 15 mins to get to them too. Basically a boring EOTM.

6. Fully agree. ALL classes should have access to these roles if we are going to have roles.

Bish.8627:

6. Fully agree. ALL classes should have access to these roles if we are going to have roles.

As far as I can tell they do in most cases.

jzack.1573:

1.) The grind for skills in HoT only able to do in HoT. I like to play this game for WvW and Dungeons most of all, and yet the things I like to do most I can’t use to build my skill bars in HoT. Yeah yeah, I get that you want people to explore those zones, and I have, but I really don’t want to spend all my time there grinding. My suggestion, open expansion XP to all forms of gaining experience, let us play the content we enjoy playing.

While not technically a bad suggestion, there’s the issue of relative weight here. The issue is trivial in the sense that if you had 0 interest in the content of the expansion, you’re actually very unlikely to buy the expansion in the first place.
In other words, the number of players in your situation is quite probably very low.

Bish.8627:

6. Fully agree. ALL classes should have access to these roles if we are going to have roles.

Though, why have classes in that case?

That’s a serious question. Classes are based on the idea that you specialize into something. Your class excels at something. In return obviously, you don’t excel (but someone else does!) at other things.

If we try to completely remove that aspect, we already effectively removed classes.

Only… we didn’t. See, even in a very balanced state GW2 would still have classes, only you need to look at what effectively constitutes a class, that is, a packaged set of advantages ,disadvantages, reliance-on-others (important in a MMO!) and gameplay parameters.

For example, a Condi Reaper is an effective class. Effective not as in “it’s powerful” but as in “effectively, it constitutes a class, not the overarching Reaper”. This is because many many aspects of them are different from say, a Power Shroud Necro.

More importantly, these can overlap. If given the context X a Power Shroud Necro and a Power Engi do the same thing and play similar (even given the different visuals and noises), then they’re not separate classes, effectively.

As such, the effective classes are quite different from what the game calls “classes”.

And they are very much specialized.

Now what you could argue – and I think that’s the core of the argument – is that each class (in GW2’s sense) should have access to specialization options so that if we want say, 12 effective classes (Burst Power, Burst Condi, Healer, etc etc) then each GW2-class can specialize so that it becomes, say, Burst Power XYZ. Only that the actual GW2-class shouldn’t break this effective-class up into smaller fragments, everyone is balanced in the context and effectively 100% interchangeable?

That could be done. In theory. I doubt it’d survive any attempt at implementation though, MMO balance is way too complex to achieve anything remotely like this.

PvP is worse than it was in GW1, and WvW is just a “Who has the most players” battle. There’s very little reward for mastering a profession, because everyone else already knows how that profession works. You’ve got 10 skills, of those 10 about 5 will be used consistently. Unlike in Guild Wars 1 where all 8 skills were mandatory to be considered a decent pvp’er.

Aside from that, the stories are okay. It’s just a very dramatic “heroic story” that gives a bit of entertainment while everyone grinds the boss A.I. that doesn’t move. Voice Acting is a “You either love the character or hate it”. I wanted a Male Norn Warrior. Had to change because I couldn’t keep listening to that kind of V.A.

PvE is the only somewhat decent part of Guild Wars 2 right now. To get 100% World Completionist takes a few weeks of heavy hours, or around a month at most when done casually. So once that is gone and everything that can be experienced a bit is done, then we’re left with pvp, wvw, and dungeons/fractals. Oh and crafting, but everyone just follows a guide and spends ~60g to max the skill anyway, because crafting is a “defined design” type in this game and isn’t rewarding at all.

Wanted to have a decent PvP Esports, Anet? Make the game better by including more solutions to the same problem Professions every pvp event. Wanted a better WvW? Well, there is still the dervish to fix the zerging problem. I doubt you’ll add the Dervish though, because it’s been a consistent miniscule slope of disappointment through the 8~10 years. Dervish could fix a lot of crowding problems very fast. But hey, i’m not the “gentleman” being paid to mess up an entire company.

inb4 post gets removed because lack of “respect”, which has yet to be defined by Anet.

jzack.1573:

I haven’t been logging on much lately, and when I do, it’s usually a disappointment and logoff within a hour or so. I have been trying to put my finger on it. Perhaps I am just burned out on GW2 but I really don’t think so, I feel like aspects of the game have changed that make it less pleasurable for me. Sure there are competing interests (Star Wars expansion, Fallout 4, movies, holidays, etc), but I have been wondering about what my feelings were and what feedback I’d like to offer up, so I am writing here to provide a list of things that have troubled me lately about GW2:

1.) The grind for skills in HoT only able to do in HoT. I like to play this game for WvW and Dungeons most of all, and yet the things I like to do most I can’t use to build my skill bars in HoT. Yeah yeah, I get that you want people to explore those zones, and I have, but I really don’t want to spend all my time there grinding. My suggestion, open expansion XP to all forms of gaining experience, let us play the content we enjoy playing.
2.) Going linkdead sucks, particularly mid-event. It happens often enough that the moment it happens I am done for the night. I don’t want to sit there for an hour waiting for it to cycle around again and then hope for a taxi to a good zone. When someone drops, perhaps a mechanism could get them back to the instance they were in?
3.) The sense of community seems to be fading. Is it just me or do people no longer stop and res fellow players because they want to keep up with an event chain/don’t want to risk death and having to run back from the very few WP there are in the new zones?
4.) Caps on raids. Happens that I really enjoy doing things with my friends in this game. I always have. Dungeons are okay, they have a low cap but they are done quickly. Raids have a higher cap but also can’t be done as often as you want. What that means is there is content that some of the guild doesn’t get to do with their friends, and that sucks. I don’t know what will work for this but it’s for sure something I have seen lately.
5.) WvW is a hot mess. Taking away the old borderlands and adding these new massive zones (which I would really like to use HoT skills in and can’t) changed the WvW so that smaller servers have desolate borderlands that are honestly a lot more boring than fun, and the changes to EB don’t seem like they are working as well as they could.
6.) Roles in raids. Why? It was a foundation thing for GW 2, no trinity. It’s what drew me to this game. It feels like the easy way out for balancing a fight, but also then requires caps. You guys are better than this. There has been some fantastic content that doesn’t require roles and scale very well, make more of that type of content.

It seems that some of the original things I liked about this game, which made it stand out from the rest, have been pushed to the wayside for some reason or other. I hope I am wrong, I hope to see work done to address some of these things because the game I really loved once appears to be turning into just another MMO.

Anyhow, those are my thoughts, thanks for letting me grumble, I just dropped out of octovine to come back to an empty zone… which led to me logging off for the night and coming here to gripe.

Good post.