Guild Wars 2

Many of us, both on the forums and in-game, have lamented the extreme amount of grinding required to gain legendary weapons or ascended gear. For that matter, it feels like the only way to get exotics is grind (either for gold or mats) or luck from drops or the Mystic toilet. It’s a formula that seems to be driving many people, including myself, to get burnt out with Guild Wars 2. But the fact is, Arenanet has no choice. And it’s because of their decisions with Guild Wars 2.

There are essentially three ways to provide gear to players in a game. They are:

1. Random drop
By far the most common method, random drops can very often be frustrating for players, especially if the item has an extremely low drop rate, and is bound to a character upon looting it. Despite this, it remains a staple of the genre, and a major contributing factor to its continued existence is that it can be tailored to challenge levels. Killing a meaningless minion is unlikely to net you much of a reward, but slaying a colossal dragon or <insert generic ancient evil here> gives you a much higher chance of awesome loot.

2. Making it
Usually done by crafting, but sometimes by other means, such as the Mystic Forge. Quite often the rarer or more powerful the item, the rarer and more difficult to obtain the reagents are.

3. Completing a quest
This one is very familiar. Complete a quest, get loot. The harder the quest, the better the loot.

I’m going to use an example here from another game to illustrate these methods and how they apply to GW2. Yes, it’s WoW, and yes, I’m well aware that even mentioning that acronym is enough to provoke waves of anger. But I use it because it is by far the most easily recognisable traditional MMO, and most players in the MMO market have either played it at one time or are familiar with its mechanics. So please don’t take my use of it to infer that I love WoW and can’t wait to dive into it once more. I haven’t played it since 2007 in fact, and it’s the early years of WoW that I draw this example from.

Back in vanilla, there were legendary weapons (there may be ones around today, I don’t know). Sulfuron, and Thunderfury were the only two (again, to my knowledge). There were also some high level epic weapons, Benediction and Rohk’delar, that were extremely rare. All of these weapons used all of the acquisition methods listed above. You needed random drops from bosses in Molten Core, but then had to travel farther afield. To craft Sulfuron, you’d have to be, or obtain the services of, a 300 Blacksmith, then travel to the Black Anvil in Blackrock Depths to craft it. Rohk’delar required slaying Onyxia, Benedicition requires an extremely difficult quest chain in the Plaguelands, and Thunderfury required you to defeat a 40 man raid boss (though admittedly, an extremely easy one, for a guild that had progressed that far in Molten Core).

One very key thing to note is that each item placed you on a quest to obtain them. Some parts you could complete by yourself, but before you could even get the quest, you’d need to take part in a major raid in the highest level dungeon available in the game. This meant that only a tiny fraction of the players on any given server even managed to get their hands on this equipment, and seeing it told you that the player had really accomplished something major.

Now let’s look at GW2. We have legendary weapons here, and whilst they’re currently no more powerful than exotics, we all know that Arenanet will raise their power to at least Ascended level in the future (they’ve directly said this). However, when we look at the acquisition methods for legendries in GW2, we are struck by some immediate differences compared to the WoW legendries. They all require dungeon tokens, but the different dungeons vary wildly in terms of difficulty. By contrast, all the WoW legendries required you to defeat the bosses of Molten Core. The crafting reagents required for the GW2 legendries all drop from regular creatures scattered across the high level zones of Tyria. None of these creatures are particularly challenging to kill. Skill points and gold are not gained through any demonstrated level of skill, but rather, by simply playing for a long period of time. The hardest part of world completion is WvWvW, but whether this constitutes a challenge is entirely dependent on how well your server does, and if you’re desperate to get it done, you can just transfer to a dominant server for free.

The net result of this is that when you see a legendary weapon in GW2, your first thought isn’t “Wow, that player has really accomplished something major!”. It’s “Wow, that player grinded a hell of a lot. Wonder if they bought gold to get it?” You certainly don’t automatically respect that player’s abilities, the way you would be far more likely to if you saw a Paladin sporting Sulfuron, or a Warrior with Thunderfury. At the very least, you would recognise that those players had completed the hardest content in the game, and had been rewarded for it. Yes, they’d gotten lucky, but luck was only part of it. Skill was also a major, major part.

So what’s my point to be made here? Simple. By removing quests in favour of Dynamic events, and by ditching the Trinity system entirely, Arenanet made it impossible for players gain better loot by any means other than grind. Think about it. Arenanet can’t give you, the player, a personal quest to assemble your Legendary. They can’t put in a drop from say, Lupicus, that then begins a quest that sends you to the depths of the Citadel of Flame to talk to a Flame Legion turncoat who will help you forge the mighty dagger Incinerator. They can’t just add legendries to the drop table of bosses, because that would drastically cheapen them, and furthermore, they can’t design bosses that are truly difficult to take down, because of their choice of combat system. You can argue the benefits and downsides of the Trinity system, but the fact remains that GW2 simply doesn’t have really challenging content. Giganticus Lupicus is widely regarded as one of the most difficult bosses in the game, and he has been soloed. Try soloing your way through Molten Core in 2006.

This wouldn’t matter as much if Arenanet hadn’t decided to put in vertical gear progression. But even if legendries had remained purely cosmetic, they would still lack the impact that legendary gear back in WoW had, because the only pre-requisite for their acquisition would be grind.

That’s why higher level gear will always require grind, and only grind, to obtain. It’s not that Arenanet particularly wants us to mindlessly grind Baracudas or Sparks or toss greatsword after greatsword into the Mystic toilet to get the reagents we require. I truly believe that they want us to be having fun, enjoying ourselves, and working on an epic quest to assemble that legendary item. But the design decisions they made prevent them from giving us that choice. Their only option is to give us grind, because that’s all they have left. They simply have no other option.

“So what’s my point to be made here? Simple. By removing quests in favour of Dynamic events, and by ditching the Trinity system entirely, Arenanet made it impossible for players gain better loot by any means other than grind. Think about it. Arenanet can’t give you, the player, a personal quest to assemble your Legendary. They can’t put in a drop from say, Lupicus, that then begins a quest that sends you to the depths of the Citadel of Flame to talk to a Flame Legion turncoat who will help you forge the mighty dagger Incinerator. They can’t just add legendries to the drop table of bosses, because that would drastically cheapen them, and furthermore, they can’t design bosses that are truly difficult to take down, because of their choice of combat system. You can argue the benefits and downsides of the Trinity system, but the fact remains that GW2 simply doesn’t have really challenging content. Giganticus Lupicus is widely regarded as one of the most difficult bosses in the game, and he has been soloed. Try soloing your way through Molten Core in 2006.
This wouldn’t matter as much if Arenanet hadn’t decided to put in vertical gear progression. But even if legendries had remained purely cosmetic, they would still lack the impact that legendary gear back in WoW had, because the only pre-requisite for their acquisition would be grind.”

- I think this is a very important point and i feel the same way. Because the game is designed to cater to casuals through the content delivery (dynamic events, hearts, shallow combat, shallow systems in general), it will be very hard to do anything outside of this structure. It strangles creative development and that’s most certainly an understatement. You will never see proper quests and engagement in the process of obtaining items simply because the game design does not support it. From the lack of roles making the combat shallow, to the content delivery marginalizing the potential value of content they could design, it just really hits home. What you’re saying just nails it, the game really won’t ever be anything more than a shallow zerg cash grab.

By removing quests in favour of Dynamic events, and by ditching the Trinity system entirely, Arenanet made it impossible for players gain better loot by any means other than grind. Think about it. Arenanet can’t give you, the player, a personal quest to assemble your Legendary. They can’t put in a drop from say, Lupicus, that then begins a quest that sends you to the depths of the Citadel of Flame to talk to a Flame Legion turncoat who will help you forge the mighty dagger Incinerator.
[/quote]Why can’t they? I don’t see why they can’t do any of this, or where you make a case supporting such a claim. Maybe I just missed it in that tower of text.

Galen.9042:

They can’t just add legendries to the drop table of bosses, because that would drastically cheapen them

Cheapen them? They’re expensive as kitten, so a cheaper price is more than welcome. But cheaper in terms of quality of achievement? I think your own words speak loudly enough (bolded for clarity).

Galen.9042:

The net result of this is that when you see a legendary weapon in GW2, your first thought isn’t “Wow, that player has really accomplished something major!”. It’s “Wow, that player grinded a hell of a lot. Wonder if they bought gold to get it?” You certainly don’t automatically respect that player’s abilities, the way you would be far more likely to if you saw a Paladin sporting Sulfuron, or a Warrior with Thunderfury.

I don’t know if you can cheapen it any further than “that guy must be a no-life grinder” or “that guy must have used RMT.”

Galen.9042:

Giganticus Lupicus is widely regarded as one of the most difficult bosses in the game, and he has been soloed. Try soloing your way through Molten Core in 2006.

That one boss was solo killed, but the guy didn’t get there by himself (afaik). Yes, there were similarly ridiculous examples in WoW raiding over the years; the one which most readily comes to mind was a pre-pre-nerf reckoning bomb paladin one-shotting a raid boss, but I know hunters would routinely be asked to kite raid level mobs as part of one encounter, and presumably could solo the mob given enough time.

Actually, I recall seeing a video of a hunter kiting a world boss across half of Kalimdor back to Orgrimmar. I’d put that on par with soloing Lupicus, given that it took longer with about as low a threshold for mistake.

But there are still bosses which cannot be soloed. Are you just jelly that you can’t solo lupicus?

I believe Lupicus or some other soloed bosses weren’t designed for such, and even if they were soloed it truly required some player skill, just think about how the bosses hit you hard in GW2 so that you cannot just stand still (holy trinity is gone, no tanking!).

I hope they surprise me with January/February patches regarding REWARD system though, it needs some serious care.

Why can’t they? I don’t see why they can’t do any of this, or where you make a case supporting such a claim. Maybe I just missed it in that tower of text.

Because the supporting systems aren’t there. You can’t give a player a personal quest in GW2 like you can in WoW. You COULD modify it into the personal story I suppose, but I don’t think that’s very likely. In either case, it wouldn’t work with an item dropping off a boss that starts a quest that only one person could do.

Cheapen them? They’re expensive as kitten, so a cheaper price is more than welcome. But cheaper in terms of quality of achievement? I think your own words speak loudly enough.

Cheapen them in terms of achievement. I fail to see how making a complete legendary drop from, say, the Maw in Fractals would not make legendaries seem like less of an achievement. If you see a player sporting an item that’s purely obtained through luck, you don’t think better of them, or think they’ve accomplished something. The RNG just favoured them.

I don’t know if you can cheapen it any further than “that guy must be a no-life grinder” or “that guy must have used RMT.”

My point is simply that when you see a legendary weapon in GW2, you don’t assume the player wielding it is particularly skilled, because all he or she had to do was grind a hell of a lot to get it.

That one boss was solo killed, but the guy didn’t get there by himself (afaik). Yes, there were similarly ridiculous examples in WoW raiding over the years; the one which most readily comes to mind was a pre-pre-nerf reckoning bomb paladin one-shotting a raid boss, but I know hunters would routinely be asked to kite raid level mobs as part of one encounter, and presumably could solo the mob given enough time.

He exploited part of the map to get there, but that’s beside the point. He still killed a boss solo. The paladin one-shotting a raid boss was hot-fixed by Blizzard within 24 hours of it occuring; it was never intended for players to do that. Contrast that with Robert praising the player who soloed Lupicus, saying this was perfectly intended. With regards to kiting a boss, you’re probably referring to the first boss in Blackwing Lair I believe, where someone had to kite the adds so the boss could be brought down. That’s hardly a soloable encounter; the rest of the raid was required to actually kill the boss.

Actually, I recall seeing a video of a hunter kiting a world boss across half of Kalimdor back to Orgrimmar. I’d put that on par with soloing Lupicus, given that it took longer with about as low a threshold for mistake.

Well, kiting something halfway across the world is very different to actually killing it. You’re most likely referring to someone kiting Thunderan to Orgrimmar, an event I actually witnessed. Regardless, it still took tons of players to bring the boss down once he was there. And world bosses are a little different to dungeon bosses in that there are hard-set limits on how many players can engage them at one time.

But there are still bosses which cannot be soloed. Are you just jelly that you can’t solo lupicus?

Not at all! I’ve personally soloed Butcher path in HoTW (took a while!) and I got a good sense of achievement out of it. I’m sure anyone who’s done something difficult in a game feels the same way, and my hat is off to the individuals who have soloed Lupi. That being said, it’s completely besides the point; none of the bosses required for legendary weapons in WoW could be soloed. Furthermore it merely strengthens my case for GW2 not having sufficiently challenging encounters; if the only way to make it challenging is to solo it, when it’s designed for 5 players, that doesn’t exactly indicate that it’s a difficult encounter.

Valento.9852:

I believe Lupicus or some other soloed bosses weren’t designed for such, and even if they were soloed it truly required some player skill, just think about how the bosses hit you hard in GW2 so that you cannot just stand still (holy trinity is gone, no tanking!).

Check out Robert’s replies to the boss soloing threads over in the dungeon forum. Arenanet certainly doesn’t mind players soloing bosses. Now I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that mentality; the combat system Anet chose for GW2 supports that sort of thing happening, and it’s a great example of player skill. I agree wholeheartedly with Robert when he says that it takes a great deal of skill to solo a boss like Lupicus.

But that is not to say that bosses in WoW back when I played were not challenging. It took ages for even the best guilds to finally clear Molten Core, and for many guilds, it was simply out of their league. Trinity style combat is a whole other kettle of seafood, and it has it’s challenges. Does it provide developers with the opportunity to create more challenging content than the GW2 system? I believe so, based somewhat around the speed at which players have been able to defeat new content. WoW released on November 23 2004, and it wasn’t until April 25 2005 that Ragnaros went down for the first time to the guild Ascent. Players started clearing the highest available content in GW2 in the first month of its release. Anet’s decision to include a mechanic that needed extremely specific gear to counter it (Agony) and including a boss where it was impossible to avoid Agony through skill (Maw) indicates that they had reached the thresh-hold of challenge that their combat system could provide, and so they had to incorporate something entirely new to raise the difficulty, in this case, a gear check. We can debate the merits of that decision as much as we like, but the fact remains that in order to make a new dungeon sufficiently challenging, Anet had to introduce something new. That more than anything seems to be an indication that there’s a hard-ceiling difficulty cap on the GW2 combat system, and they have already hit it.

By the way, with regards to the scavenger hunt for precursors, I’ve honestly been scratching my head as to what that’s going to entail. To be honest, I can’t help but suspect that it’s simply going to be “Collect these drops from Orr, Frostgorge and Southsun and toss them into the Mystic Forge, along with a scroll or two”. I mean, they can’t give players a quest to get them. They could toss out some special harvesting nodes that you have to collect, but that’s no different to grinding really.

Galen.9042:

The net result of this is that when you see a legendary weapon in GW2, your first thought isn’t “Wow, that player has really accomplished something major!”. It’s “Wow, that player grinded a hell of a lot. Wonder if they bought gold to get it?”

Pretty much my thoughts when I see a legendary… everything else I disagree with though.

There is no reason why Anet can’t add in a few more personalized quest lines into the mix for special items and other stuff (maybe some sort of personal character development too; like actually letting players do something more with the Order they chose, etc. and obtain “faction” points when they do these quests for their order).

Also, it is more than possible to have difficult boss fights in game with the current combat system. The thing that keeps it from being so, is Anet keeps turning things into either fluffy kitten rainbow pillow fights (in order to keep it “open” for all players to do), or they are just seemingly not thought through well enough and end up becoming “corpse rush zerg fest.”

Personally, I have a philosophy that games should be based around personal player skill in whatever you decide to devote your time to in game whether it be crafting, combat, etc. Games shouldn’t be heavily reliant on a trinity, but should allow for players to adapt and overcome new conditions and circumstances as they develop throughout play (if your “healer/tank” dies, it shouldn’t mean “oops guess we have to wipe” but should just mean that the group must adopt a new strategy to win and then revive their dead player or whatever…). Group play in certain areas of the game should definitely still be necessary, but not in some rigid and linear format.

As for legendary weapons? I think they should have been based more around achievement and soulbound items (account bound at least) obtained through dailies and unique quest lines.

Galen.9042:

He exploited part of the map to get there, but that’s beside the point. He still killed a boss solo.
—

Yep, I could have also soloed path 2 but path 3 with that exploit was easier.

Galen.9042:

Trinity style combat is a whole other kettle of seafood, and it has it’s challenges. Does it provide developers with the opportunity to create more challenging content than the GW2 system? I believe so, based somewhat around the speed at which players have been able to defeat new content.

That is just downright untrue; Gw2 style of combat is perfectly fine for providing a platform for challenging content that takes players a long time to figure out a strategy to beat. The reason why it isn’t so is because Anet has this obsession with creating purely content that is kitten easy, so that “everyone has access to it.” They haven’t pushed player skill in the slightest yet.

Galen.9042:

By the way, with regards to the scavenger hunt for precursors… I mean, they can’t give players a quest to get them….

Uh… yes, they can. I have no idea why you think things are so limited; this isn’t a single player game from the 90’s where it would have been difficult to add in new content. They could even run with a modified version of the achievement tab if they felt they really lacked the resources…

Foor all the talk of how much more skill is required in WoW, it still seems that everyone I know falls into one of two categories. The guild leader and a maybe a couple other people who look up how to do something on YouTube, and a bunch of people who do what they’re told.

The Trinity just makes the instructions for the people doing what they’re told easier to convey. It gives the few people giving orders nicely categorized game pieces to play with. I don’t want to be telling other people where to stand and what to do to get things done, and I don’t want to stand where I’m told and do what someone else says either. There is a line where things move past teamwork into being a cog in a machine, and the trinity and all that goes with it crosses it.

Being a cog isn’t fun for a lot of people. And assembling and maintaining a bunch of cogs isn’t fun for a lot of people either. Making people do those things when they don’t enjoy them to get the best items in a game is still a grind.

That is just downright untrue; Gw2 style of combat is perfectly fine for providing a platform for challenging content that takes players a long time to figure out a strategy to beat. The reason why it isn’t so is because Anet has this obsession with creating purely content that is kitten easy, so that “everyone has access to it.” They haven’t pushed player skill in the slightest yet.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/Do-NOT-nerf-please/first#post126835

Have Arenanet just made easy-mode content? That’s an interesting question. On the one hand, Arenanet said prior to launch that explorables were meant to be very hard, and Colin above says that:

it takes time and practice to learn how to overcome stuff as hard as our explorable mode dungeons, and that’s exactly the kind of players they are designed for.

Which would certainly seem to indicate that Arenanet considers them a challenge. On the other hand, in the same post, Colin states that:

a couple months from now, many of you will likely be posting saying most of the dungeons are too easy and you need better challenges

Which points towards Arenanet recognizing that the current crop of explorables are easy.

Since release of course we’ve had the Fractals update, which brought in the infamous ascended gear. From the original blog post it seems clear that Arenanet sees Fractals as a definite end-game activity, and therefore difficult. However the Fractal dungeons have been easily cleared and the only barrier for many players is the lack of rings dropping, something that Arenanet rectified (with, I might add, yet another grinding system).

Which leaves us with the question: is the GW2 combat system truly capable of more challenging combat, and Arenanet has just been holding back, or are they throwing the best they can at us and we’re rolling over it easily. Given that Fractals and Ascended gear were implemented at least in part to provide more of an “end-game”, it would stand to reason that Anet would make the Fractals as difficult as possible, to keep players stalled for as long as possible. But I’m not Arenanet, so I don’t know their thought processes. All I do know is that they haven’t managed to give us truly challenging content yet. We can both draw our own conclusions as to why that is.

Uh… yes, they can. I have no idea why you think things are so limited; this isn’t a single player game from the 90’s where it would have been difficult to add in new content. They could even run with a modified version of the achievement tab if they felt they really lacked the resources…

You perhaps misunderstand me. Of course they have the capacity to code it in; they could give everyone a Legendary weapon tomorrow if they wanted to. However that’s the key: if they wanted to. Arenanet so far has shown no inclination towards including traditional quests in GW2, and I don’t expect that to change with a so-called scavenger hunt. Time will tell on that front though; I’m just not expecting much more than what I mentioned above.

The Trinity just makes the instructions for the people doing what they’re told easier to convey. It gives the few people giving orders nicely categorized game pieces to play with. I don’t want to be telling other people where to stand and what to do to get things done, and I don’t want to stand where I’m told and do what someone else says either. There is a line where things move past teamwork into being a cog in a machine, and the trinity and all that goes with it crosses it.

Being a cog isn’t fun for a lot of people. And assembling and maintaining a bunch of cogs isn’t fun for a lot of people either. Making people do those things when they don’t enjoy them to get the best items in a game is still a grind.

Absolutely! But that “cog” mentality is still very much present in GW2. If my Fractals group is doing the Harpy fractal, and we get to the poison golem, we organize ourselves so that the crystals are moved, ready to be inserted, and have people ready on all three platforms to activate them when needed. In the Swamp we co-ordinate in the extreme, something which is made exponentially easier with a Mesmer on the team. We move like machines against the Dredge boss, or against Lupicus, or the Butcher, or Rumbellous. We’re just as much cogs as we would be downing Ragnaros.

In almost every boss fight in GW2 there are places to stand and not stand, things to do and not do. The combat system doesn’t negate those things.

And whilst the gear in WoW required grind, so does the gear in GW2. If I want Ascended, I have to grind a hell of a lot of fractals and collect a massive amount of Tier 6 materials (and ectos!), which either requires gold or more grinding mobs. If we can say that doing Molten Core for the twentieth time wasn’t fun, then I can certainly say that fighting your way through 200 fractals isn’t fun either.