Guild Wars 2

I have been noticing quite a bit of grief about the supposed “destruction” of playing alternative classes/characters. I wanted to create this topic to understand how everyone is feeling regarding this concern.

I personally don’t believe this game is Alt-Unfriendly as many have stated. I do have a couple of exemptions of the above, however.

• Legendarys: Legendarys are a time consuming process. This takes time, patience, RNG, and wealth to obtain. This Item truly is the holy grail of weapons in GW2. My quarl with Legendarys, is that they are Soulbound. I can handle a soulbound exotic or maybe even an ascended item, but Legendarys being soulbound are obsured. There is only a handful of players who have achieved two or more Legendarys. Mad respects to them, but in order for the player to enjoy his reward, this should be account bound.
  This goes for mapping (which also ties into Legendary Crafting), I can understand uncovering the map again, but gating Legendarys to two unless you do 100 percent map again is alt-unfriendly.

• Dungeons: Another problem I have is the fact that I have to re-do a story on another character if I want to open the explorable. The achievement is account bound, so why isn’t this? I am not someone who overly enjoys re-completing content I did on another character. The exception to the Story Mode of Arah.

• Crafting: I realized how alt-unfriendly this was when I started crafting on an Elementalist, but later created a necro and and had to re-complete all the levels on him. I also realized this when I didn’t know that you have to pay to open a craft if you choose more than two on one character.

The above does not prove to me that Guild Wars 2 as a whole is alt-unfriendly however.

We have the wallet now, which I believe is a huge boost to being alt friendly. I have tons of Karma, and can enjoy the fruits of karma items on any character I want. The same goes for Laurels. I have ascended trinkets on two of my characters and I have 3 80s. I’m the richest man, or OP player, but I have had no real issue picking up another character an rolling with it. Exotic gear is fairly easy to obtain once you have leveled your first level 80. The hardest thing to pick up a second character was getting him spec’ed with gear that matched my build/traits to maximize effiency. (Which on a side note, re-spec’ing a character is a pain, buying new armor, sigilis, weaps, trinkets, runes, etc.)

In conclusion I do want to express that high end items (Ascended, Legendary, etc) would be fantastic if account bound. I’ve never been a supporter of anything thats “bound”, but I can deal with it. At the least, I would like to enjoy some of the high-end items on other characters though. As a human being, I have made costly mistakes of buying different armors, runes, etc, only to find out I didn’t like the playstyle. Now these items collect dust in my bank, with no real use other than possible salvage or skins.

To put it succinctly no.

In some ways it’s alt friendly and in some ways it’s not. So depending on how you play, it may or may not be alt friendly.

It’s alt friendly to me, because I don’t care about WvW, I’m not a major Fractal runner and I don’t care about BIS gear. Those are the ways the game is alt unfriendly.

Everything else seems to be fine.

wasted.6817:

1. The FotM level is not account bound, thus alt-unfriendly.
2. WvW rank is not account bound, thus alt-unfriendly.
3. The whole Ascended gear thingy is extremely alt-unfriendly on so many levels.

Oh yes, I did miss the WvW ranking (I wholeheartedly agree this should be account bound), and I agree on the FotM front as well. I play multiple and understand the frustration of that too.

you do realize that the devs introduce WvW xp jugs which are absolutely accountbound and give great amounts of WXP? They are obviously aware that the current system is alt-unfriendly and fix it.

Furthermore, there aren’t a lot of games out there which have accountbound achievements, e.g. the daily achievements which count for any character.

If they made more things account wide, like crafting, then it would be

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

you do realize that the devs introduce WvW xp jugs which are absolutely accountbound and give great amounts of WXP? They are obviously aware that the current system is alt-unfriendly and fix it.

Furthermore, there aren’t a lot of games out there which have accountbound achievements, e.g. the daily achievements which count for any character.

Making random jugs account bound wont fix the problem, they need to be account bound lol. I havent heard a single good reason why they are character bound…

My warrior has for example 100 ranks, and my main is necro who is lets say rank 400 and I play with him, those 100 ranks are completely wasted.
When I play my warrior he will not have the wvw abilities that are on my necro, my necro has more stuff available so Ill most likely stick to that one character. No jugs will fix that.
Same with fotm ranks and legendary/ascended items.

Very alt-unfriendly.

I can understand why they have Story Mode character bound. It’s so players do story modes too, if it wasn’t like this no “old” player would ever do Story modes again, which is bad for newer players, at least making it character bound gives a reason for players with older accounts to try Story mode too.

Same goes for lower levels in Fotm, it’s already hard to find players to do some range of levels.

Daily achievements help in both these situations, completionists will do both Story modes and lower level fotm (because it’s faster) but is it enough to make players go back so newer players aren’t doomed?

How is crafting alt-unfriendly? The more alts you have, the less you have to pay to switch crafting among them. Just have 2 crafting disciplines on each of your alts and problems solved. Why do you want 2 Weaponsmiths anyway? And in any case, the game allows you to level your alts with crafting, BECAUSE it’s character bound, if it was account bound you wouldn’t be able to level with crafting. Crafted items are either not-bound or account bound (ascended) so I don’t see alt-unfriendliness in the crafting system, if anything it’s the opposite.

I actually prefer have the crafting separate for characters as i can easily level and alt using it.

Dungeons ill agree with, they should be acc bound for opening. kind of irritating when you go to start a dungeon on your alts only to remember that you done story on some1 else.

the map part is annoying bu again its kind of alt-friendly as while getting to 100% your also making gold, exp, karma and sp. and it leaves getting around the map on an alt a whole lot easier.

i have 2 legendary weapons made and am working on 4 more. the only complaint i have at the moment is the huge cut in karma gain we get from daily/monthly completion, making it a bit longer to get enough for all my obsies from balth temple.

I wouldn’t really call it outright alt-unfriendly, but it does make alting incredibly pointless, and it’s much more efficient to focus on a single character.

The reason there so so much grief about alts and GW2 is that the game: started as one of the most alt-friendly on the planet.

The game, as it launched, made it very easy to level up alts and gear them out in BiS gear. They could them be used to play any endgame content at the highest level of skill (dungeons, WvW etc.). For players who love alts, this was a Godsend.

Then Ascendeds hit, and, because of the time-gating, GW2 became immediately an alt-unfriendly game (in terms of endgame). It was a complete 180.

It is especially a problem in WvW where you have simultaneously the impact of Ascendeds and the WXP ranks which are character bound.

If you just run around in PvE land doing care bear stuff it’s not. But once you set one toe outside that it’s very alt unfriendly.

I think you also have to look at the progression of the game. At launch very alt-friendly. Fractal level and ascended gear made is less alt-friendly, but not terrible. Laurels / daily’s made it much less alt friendly. Changes to world boss reward chests – less alt friendly. WvW ranking less alt friends. Ascended weapons —- kitten!

Basically each change they’ve made has made the game less alt-friendly. As a consequence, I strongly recommend not getting invested in an alt. Unless you want to create a level 11 toon as a crafting bot.

If you only want Exotics, it’s fairly alt-friendly.

If you want Ascended, it’s very UN-alt-friendly.

Not at all alt-friendly. The biggest problem is having multiple sets of gear for each character. It’s basically not allowed.

I have 5 fully exo’d out lv 80 alts, seems pretty alt friendly to me:)

No.

Dungeon limitations, gear grind, fractals, wvw ranks = very alt unfriendly

Outside of using them for storage space and being able to gather more wood and ore, I can’t think of any objective “benefit” for having alts in this game.

I’m running out of bank space from gear used by my main character for different builds. I don’t have the room to have different sets of gear for all my characters.

Gear should really become more fluid. Account bound would help, but at least allow us to remove sigils and runes without destroying the item. (without gem store items if possible)

Depends on the player. If you dont care about min maxing every character then its very alt friendly. if you want to have BiS and WvW bonuses then its actually very alt unfriendly.

maddoctor.2738:

Same goes for lower levels in Fotm, it’s already hard to find players to do some range of levels.

Well, this shouldn’t be an issue anymore with working LFG tool, and anyway, the 9 levels long beginners bracket is an overkill, it takes too long, it’s too easy etc., 1-3 would’ve been enough.

Definitely not alt friendly.

its “just” very alt-unfriendly if you intend to lolPvE your whole time
now if you intend to also play WvW, it becomes alt-hostile

rizzo.1079:

I have 5 fully exo’d out lv 80 alts, seems pretty alt friendly to me:)

I have fully exo’d 8 level 80s. That part was ok and the amount of effort was within acceptable range. But then you add ascended trinkets. At one laurel a day, a person with one toon will outfit it far more quickly than a person with alts. Even with guild commendations and WvW badges, mine only have 2 or at most 3 trinkets after a year. A person with a main could be fully outfitted. When you throw in WvW restrictions, fractal restrictions, the time it will take to outfit 8 chars in ascended weapons and armor as opposed to only one, it’s very alt unfriendly,

Konrad Curze.5130:

its “just” very alt-unfriendly if you intend to lolPvE your whole time
now if you intend to also play WvW, it becomes alt-hostile

WvW grasps alts, chews on them and then spits them out. PvE merely swallows them. :P

I honestly cant think of an aspect of the game that is outright alt-friendly save the AP system.

tl;dr — Some systems are a lot more alt-friendly than others. If you have alts, it’s only really practical to have them be second-stringers to your main character. Unless you’re super serious about gear, however, that’s probably a tolerable compromise.

For what I do, it’s been very alt-friendly. I’m a big fan of the personal story, and taking new paths is a major reason why I have four characters and expect to make more in time. The late-game story runs short on options after the third character, but the early game has way more options than I’ll ever be able to see all of.

Whether gear is alt-friendly depends on how seriously you take your gear. I have a “main” character (The Storyteller) that I’ve decked out with celestial gear and ascended trinkets, and he’s the one I use as my first choice for dungeons, living story, world completion, and basically anything where I care about being at my most powerful. Most of the content, however, I have no problem doing with my alts, who just wear signature armor of their order, which is rare. I could afford to upgrade them to exotics without too much expense, if I were interested. I’m still iffy about whether I’ll do ascended or legendary weapons for any of them, but I probably won’t bother for my alts. That’s not very alt-friendly, but I can’t say I’m torn up about it.

The wallet was a huge deal for me, since it meant that I’d no longer have to split gold and karma between characters. The Essence of Luck magic find update was also an enormous improvement for me.

I’d prefer it if dye were account-bound, but I suppose they’d be more expensive then as well, so I’m not sure that would be realistically much better for me. Most dye doesn’t cost that much, anyway, so it’s really only a big problem if you have particularly expensive tastes.

I don’t play WvW, and I really have no idea how WXP even works. :P

I like that crafting is character-bound. It gives me another way to differentiate my characters, it’s not much of a hassle to switch when I need to craft something, and crafting can be used to power-level if you’re interested.

Only being able to open explorable dungeons after a character has finished story mode is an inconvenience, since I’m probably not very interested in playing a dungeon again that doesn’t give me tokens, but since party members can carry that requirement, it’s only a minor nuisance.

I have mixed feelings on map completion. On one hand, it’s a hassle to have to switch characters because one hasn’t been to the Thaumanova Reactor and I have five minutes before the Fire Elemental goes up. On the other hand, I enjoy exploring, and having fresh maps for each alt makes old areas fresh again for me.

It’s not alt friendly because they want you to be forced into re-grinding everything on a new alt. So much for no grind aye. I guess that’s the only way to keep people playing without adding sufficient content.

Holland.9351:

Not at all alt-friendly. The biggest problem is having multiple sets of gear for each character. It’s basically not allowed.

^
This.

Basically, if I want to run a different build, not only do I have to pay some silver for it every single time, but I also have to wait months now to get the time-gated Ascended items…and spent tons of gold on it. ANet hates W3’ers.

EverythingXen.1835:

I honestly cant think of an aspect of the game that is outright alt-friendly save the AP system.

what about the laurel system? you can buy ascended items with laurels
what about the karma system? exotic endgame gear with karma from Orr vendors
what about the dungeon token system? exotic endgame gear

you guys are complaining about the small bonuses from WvW-xp levels, fractals and the dye-system? O_o

What do you want guys? Gear being accountbound = not having to work for BIS-gear on a character? Seriously? I mean you already can play entirely on your Guardian and equip your Thief BIS by spending karma, laurels and coin. In which other game can you do this?

Even if I wanted to spend my time in front of a crafting station for a few days…. I think about 5% of the population can actually afford 1 full ascended gear [about 60-70 gold per armour piece and weapon]. A total of easily 600+ gold.
And that’s just 1 build for 1 character… bye bye alts? :/

Like others have said, I found the game to be very conducive to alts at launch, and it has gotten less conducive to alts as time has gone on.

I’d say it is. Between everything in the wallet, and the fact that dungeon gear is purchase able by any character through the wallet system, its hard to argue that the game is unfriendly towards alts. What I would like to see however, is more things like the rich ori node in areas where only a 80 level character can get, so that we’d actually be rewarded for having max level alts. That’s what the game is missing in terms of alts IMO. They made strides with chests rewarding empyreal fragments to all 80 characters, which is nice. That way you can get ascended stuff faster. But once you get where you wanna be in terms of ascended, the advantage dissapears because you can’t sell those items. They really need to continue finding ways to reward players for having alts. It helps the people who want to do them, which also provides longevity to their game because alts take a lot of time. Its win/win.

I would really like legendaries to work in the same way achievement point skins do. You would see them more commonly (although any sizable event or walk around Lion’s Arch you will see dozens of legendaries anyway) but I don’t think people would make fewer of them just because they were account bound. I mean, does anyone actually make two of the same legendary so they can have them on more than one character at the same time?

I think it is pretty alt friendly.

Earning dungeon tokens on one character and being able to spend them with another feels extremely alt friendly to me. In fact, I don’t know of any other MMO where I can do this.

I can also transfer a legendary weapon to another character by way of a transmutation splitter. Don’t know of any other games that let me do that.

I don’t agree that having one fully geared 80 should equal having 5 fully geared 80s or 10 fully geared 80s or 100 fully geared 80s. That seems kind of silly.

But I recently leveled an alt and was able to gear her out very quickly by using dungeon tokens, karma, guild commendations, laurels, honor badges and fractal relics and rings earned with my main.

Answer: Depending on what you’re looking at specifically, yes and no.

xephire.8324:

To put it succinctly no.

Definitely not. Just look at the cost for 1 handed weapons. If people have to grind for these things the least they could do is make them easier to make because alot of people use dual handed setups. Can you imagine making those for each of the 8 toons you have?

Astral Projections.7320:

rizzo.1079:

I have 5 fully exo’d out lv 80 alts, seems pretty alt friendly to me:)

I have fully exo’d 8 level 80s. That part was ok and the amount of effort was within acceptable range. But then you add ascended trinkets. At one laurel a day, a person with one toon will outfit it far more quickly than a person with alts. Even with guild commendations and WvW badges, mine only have 2 or at most 3 trinkets after a year. A person with a main could be fully outfitted. When you throw in WvW restrictions, fractal restrictions, the time it will take to outfit 8 chars in ascended weapons and armor as opposed to only one, it’s very alt unfriendly,

Oh well I don’t play WvW and the stat % increase on ascended stuff is in no way a big enough carrot for the time sink they require.

The issue is that it was alright on release.

Story dungeons, dyes or legendaries being char bound wheren’t alt friendly, sure, but it was still on a “Not cool but not big deal anyway”.

Then Fractal level came in, char bound.
With the ascended grind attached.
Then laurels.
The WvW rank.
Time gated rewards.
Time gated gathering (quarts).
Time gated refinements (charged quarts + ascended mats).
Plus all the stuff that came out Char Bound instead of a much better suited Acc Bound (infinite tools, for istance).
Aaaand, cherry on top, nerfin to the ground the token/DG income from multiple characters.

So to me, at least atm, the game is quite alt-unfriendly.

People can try to argue back and forth objectively about the answer to the OP question.

Personally, though, I can report that as a 10 to 15 hour a week player I felt like I could maintain multiple characters up until recently. I have one character of each profession. Four in full exotic/ascended jewelry, two in their sixties, one twenty-something, and one below ten (hello, Ranger). I had every intent to level and gear up all 8.

Recently, I’ve gotten my weaponsmithing to 450, and have confirmed for myself that I now need to decide on one character to play, possibly two. That is all I feel the game affords me with the amount of time I play.

Wish I hadn’t spent gems on that last character slot (sorry, ranger).

Edit: Just to acknowledge something done right for those of us who like to play more than one character, the account wallet was a great addition. Too bad it became fairly meaningless now that I feel the need to stick to one (possibly two) toons.

My overall intentions of this post was to get feedback on whether or not the game welcomes playing alts or not. Specifically pointing out which parts of the game are alt-friendly, and which aren’t. That way Folks at ArenaNet can get an idea of what the players feel is killing their alternative characters.

Thanks

I’ve got 17 chars and definitely don’t feel the game is alt-unfriendly. But, to be fair, I’ve never been one concerned with WvW, fractals, ascended gear, legendaries, etc., so those issues have no impact on my gameplay whatsoever. And I think that’s where the true question lies — what a person’s interested in within the game. For someone who was concerned about WvW, or getting ascended gear for ALL their chars, and things like that, sure, I could see how it would be felt to be an unfriendly environment for alts.

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

EverythingXen.1835:

I honestly cant think of an aspect of the game that is outright alt-friendly save the AP system.

what about the laurel system? you can buy ascended items with laurels
what about the karma system? exotic endgame gear with karma from Orr vendors
what about the dungeon token system? exotic endgame gear

you guys are complaining about the small bonuses from WvW-xp levels, fractals and the dye-system? O_o

What do you want guys? Gear being accountbound = not having to work for BIS-gear on a character? Seriously? I mean you already can play entirely on your Guardian and equip your Thief BIS by spending karma, laurels and coin. In which other game can you do this?

Thank you.

I hate having to troll the community to get responses that Anet can actually use.

GW2 alt friendly? No, no way, they did a bait and switch. So yes, the first year it was alt friendly enough beyond ascended trinkets, but now with weapons and armor coming, it’s just a single character grind fest. All I do now is work on trying to re-gear my wvw character which I don’t even play as much as other characters in pve. And for my pve characters, it’ll be six months to a year before I’ll probably be able to work on their gear (I have 2 chars for wvw). Heck, the stupid crafting timers will probably take 5 years to take care of my 8-80’s.

So they baited us to make alts, then they switched the system to be a gear grind for a single character to keep up. I figure it’s to keep people around grinding gear for all those alts people made, for years to come. Grind gear so you can enjoy content, grinding gear isn’t content. Guess no need for them to develop more content any longer, just temp stuff to help you grind armor and skins. New players, I recommend to them now that they stick to one or two characters, otherwise they are just leveling characters to camp at JP chests to get mats to make ascended gear for one or two characters.

I don’t think the game as a whole is alt unfriendly. But I do feel the Living World thing is a bit alt unfriendly. I feel the need to do every Living World event. Because they show up every couple of weeks I find I don’t have time to raise in level an alt because as a working person I don’t have the time and what time I do have is used in Living World and some minor things like dailies. Since I don’t like that feeling of dissonance I just reconcile myself to not doing many Living Worlds. I am not doing the current Living World event at all with my one and only lvl 80 character and instead am enjoying leveling my alt guardian. But that is a choice I had to make.

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

EverythingXen.1835:

I honestly cant think of an aspect of the game that is outright alt-friendly save the AP system.

what about the laurel system? you can buy ascended items with laurels
what about the karma system? exotic endgame gear with karma from Orr vendors
what about the dungeon token system? exotic endgame gear

you guys are complaining about the small bonuses from WvW-xp levels, fractals and the dye-system? O_o

What do you want guys? Gear being accountbound = not having to work for BIS-gear on a character? Seriously? I mean you already can play entirely on your Guardian and equip your Thief BIS by spending karma, laurels and coin. In which other game can you do this?

First, I don’t give a kitten about another game or a comparison of games, I’m talking about this one. Just because other games are also not alt-friendly doesn’t mean anything here.

Second, I took the question to be whether or not I would recommend someone create an alt. I would absolutely answer no. Under no circumstances would I ever create an ALT. If I knew then what I know now, well, I probably would not buy the game. But if I had already bought the game I would play each class to level 20 and pick one, deleting all others.

If you asked a reason I would say. 1-15) Ascended gear grind 16) WvW ranks, etc…

Third, the problem isn’t “working” for BIS gear (we can talk later about the pathology that makes people think working in a game is ok), but instead, that the amount of work is such that I absolutely don’t want to do it twice.

Forth, Laurels, you earn 1 laurel per day per account, you are better off having 1 toon here. No alt-friendly. Karma → yes, alt friendly as we have said you can easily get soon-to-be-not-BIS gear more alt friendly than it was at launch because of the wallet, Dungeon tokens → yes alt friendly BUT less alt friendly than it was at launch (when you could get daily tokens on each toon / path)

Gibson.4036:

People can try to argue back and forth objectively about the answer to the OP question.

Personally, though, I can report that as a 10 to 15 hour a week player I felt like I could maintain multiple characters up until recently. I have one character of each profession. Four in full exotic/ascended jewelry, two in their sixties, one twenty-something, and one below ten (hello, Ranger). I had every intent to level and gear up all 8.

Recently, I’ve gotten my weaponsmithing to 450, and have confirmed for myself that I now need to decide on one character to play, possibly two. That is all I feel the game affords me with the amount of time I play.

Wish I hadn’t spent gems on that last character slot (sorry, ranger).

Edit: Just to acknowledge something done right for those of us who like to play more than one character, the account wallet was a great addition. Too bad it became fairly meaningless now that I feel the need to stick to one (possibly two) toons.

My limit has always been three because I play as much as you do but ascended is out of the question for me entirely because of the massive amount of time it would take to get maxed on the 3 types of weaponry I use and on top of it all the fact that all three of these toons use not just 1 but multiple weapons per set. I use 3 on my thief, 5 on my guardian and 2 on my engineer, just feel the pain of the grind in that sentence alone, can only imagine what the armor crafting will be like when that hits.

I will say alt unfriendly. You will be hard pressed to get one whole set of ascended items for just one character.

Is Guild Wars 2 Alt Friendly or Not?

No.

Its one of most alt unfriendly games I have ever played.

Any roadblock they can put in your way to having alts they do.