Guild Wars 2

I’ve been playing for a little over a month now, so I should hopefully be able to offer my experiences and views on things as a newer player as useful feedback. I may not get to everything, but I’ve tried to give feedback on everything I can think of. Note that I started around June 23rd, so practically all of my GW2 experience has been from then on.

To make it more organized (and hopefully more interesting), I’ll be splitting my feedback into 3 sections:
The Good (feedback on what GW2 does well)
The Bad (feedback on what GW2 doesn’t do well)
The Ugly (issues I simply can’t believe are in GW2)

The Good

Weapons matter – I absolutely love how weapons completely change what abilities you get and how you play. Mixing and matching weapons, trying out various 2-handed ones, and finding out which weapons work for you is a great joy and very refreshing after coming from other mmo’s (where weapons are usually little more than another way to get stats).
Weapon swap is awesome – Weapons matter, so having the ability to swap them in combat is even more so. Even on classes where there are no weapon swap (Engineer, Elementalist), the ‘mechanic’ is still there, and for good reason – it’s fun and offers great variety.
No having tons of action bars – Having everything on one bar (plus a little one for profession-specific stuff) is pretty sweet, and makes it so I don’t have to worry about using a mouse with 18 buttons on its side.
Classes are unique, or are great takes on ‘standard’ classes – The classes of GW2 are among the best I’ve seen in an mmo, either being unique themselves (like Engineers and Mesmers) or stellar takes on old favorites (like Warriors & Elementalists).
Classes can have many roles – Each class is so versatile, and it’s nice to see so many build options. Support Warrior? Melee Elementalist? There are lots of fun options out there.
Classes can switch out builds, utilities, etc on the fly out of combat – Further making classes versatile is the ability to change things on the fly. The fact that you can do this not only with weapons and utilities, but also your elite and your entire build is impressive and very welcome.
No ‘Tank-Healer-DPS’ Trinity – The lack of the trinity is fantastic, as it makes getting people for dungeons easier and certain classes aren’t discriminated against (or at least, not to the level I’ve seen in other mmo’s). It also makes it so PVP isn’t simply a matter of ‘who has more healers’, which is very, very nice to see.
‘Simplified’ Stats – I love how the stats work in GW2. The best example of this is Power; I love how it increases damage regardless of whether it’s being dealt with blade or spell. In fact, it’s probably this that makes magic/melee classes (like Guardian and Elementalist) viable in GW2…I can’t imagine how bad it’d be trying to get good stats if they were split up physically & magically like a lot of mmo’s do.
Art style / designs are great – Designs for characters, monsters, areas, etc are great and have a lot of variety.
Personal Story – MMO’s aren’t known for their story, so to see one that’s actually interesting – let alone pretty good – is a very nice change, especially since it’s one where your character actually plays a role in.
Trading Post is awesome – I love pretty much everything about the Trading Post – how you can make money in it, how you can get most stuff for relatively cheap, how easy it is to sell items to it, etc.
Inventory goes a long way – Depositing materials directly into your bank & selling stuff anywhere (via trading post) is great, and goes a long way to alleviating the inventory issues you often see in MMO’s. Plus it’s just incredibly convenient, which is always a plus.
No Subscription – I must admit, this is probably the main reason why I risked my money on an MMO I’ve never played before. Subscriptions are pricey and F2P is deceptively so (even when done well), so an MMO that relies on neither model is ideal to me. Aside from this being the reason why I risked my money, this will also be one of the key reasons why I plan on playing for a long time.
Pvp right away – being able to access pvp so early on is amazing for so many reasons – it allows you to see how the class performs in pvp, it allows you to play around with all the builds you want, and it allows you to start having fun in pvp right away. While doing pvp so early on was an intimidating prospect as a newer player, having played some more I can see this was definitely the right decision. (The pvp tutorial, while short, is also nice for easing new players into pvp. I’m glad I wasn’t thrown into a match right away with absolutely no idea what to do.)

WvW – A unique and fun game mode that I haven’t begun to scratch the surface of, despite me playing several matches. I can tell this mode has a ton of depth to be discovered and fun to be had, so I’m definitely glad GW2 has it.
XP for basically everything – I love how you can choose how you want to level up. Want to go exploring? Do it. Want to just kill a bunch of stuff? You can do that too. And the events that pop up are rewarding and interesting as well (at least, the first couple times you do them).
Dungeons – Dungeons are great in GW2. They’ve got great rewards, you get tons of loot, they’re tied to the story, and they’re challenging (when going down paths). Although the last point may fade as I get better at GW2, I feel dungeons will be something I continue to do as I play GW2.
Teleporting / Waypoints – Before GW2, I never realized that MMO’s had accustomed me to such slow travel. Now that I’ve experienced GW2, I’m not sure I can go back. Being able to get nearly anywhere you need to go (or close to it) in seconds, given that you’ve been there before, is huge. It saves time. It lets me spend more time playing the game, rather than watching my character take transportation. I could gush about this for awhile, but I think you guys get the picture already.
Lack of Open-world pvp (also con) – Being able to level up how you want without fear of ganking or spending several hours with some high-level-with-nothing-better-to-do standing over your corpse or killing all your important NPCs is quite nice. It’s also nice how it doesn’t split up the servers into pve/pvp like you normally see in mmo’s. However, there is a downside to this…which I’ll be covering in the next section.

The Bad

Lack of Open-world pvp (also pro) – As nice as a lack of open-world pvp is, it feels as if there’s something missing without it. The excitement of seeing that enemy player, not yet knowing what he’ll do or if you could take him in a fight. The excitement of hunting an enemy player, or the restlessness of not knowing whether or not you’re being hunted. There are exciting times and moments to be had with open-world pvp, and GW2 doesn’t have any.
No Respecs / Variety till high-level – Level 71 is really brutal for having 3 specializations active. In addition to that, the fact that you can’t respec if you’ve gone down a wrong path means that any mistakes you make with a character are permanent until they’re a very high level (where you’ll be swimming in Hero Points). This makes it so you can only really switch roles/playstyles when leveled up, meaning all that variety and fun is locked away until you’re high enough.
Weapon swap is too slow for most classes – Barring the [Discipline] Warrior, Engineer, and Elementalist, weapon swap is just too slow. Swapping between weapons is fun and effective, and putting such a long cooldown on it seems excessive and restrictive. Each time you weapon swap makes it seem more like you’re locking yourself into a set of options, rather than giving yourself more options to use.
….Living Story 2? – Living Story 2 for $20? What is that? And why is GW2 locking away content behind a paywall? I thought the in-game store was for convenience items & services, so I’m not sure what ‘Living Story 2’ is doing there or why it costs so much. The only reason why this point is in The Bad rather than The Ugly is because I feel like there’s some history or information that I’m simply missing here – and unfortunately, GW2 itself doesn’t really do any explaining in that regard. Speaking of which….
Lack of a tutorial & useful descriptions – GW2 doesn’t seem to explain a whole lot. Not in the in-game store, not as you level up, not even in the Personal Story. It seems to expect its players to just….know. While that may be fine for veterans, that’s needlessly intimidating and confusing for newcomers.
Inventory management – Managing your inventory can be a huge pain. While there are a couple bags that try to help you out, they’re either imperfect or irrelevant. Junk and materials bags are useless, since it’s so easy to deposit all materials & sell all junk regardless of where it is in your inventory. Equipment bags seem like they’d be good for equipping different weapons from your inventory, but they only work so long as you don’t pick up other weapons as loot (so they don’t really work well at all). Invisible bags are nice, and do their job, but only having 1 bag type that works well is rather bleak for inventory management. Honestly, I’d like to see something like soul-bound bags (bags where only soul-bound items can go in), but I don’t think there’s a perfect solution no matter what kind of bag is introduced.

No ‘play-your-way’ – Although you get experience for everything, nothing seems to be enough. Pvp doesn’t offer enough to be a true replacement for leveling, and experience you get from any one source doesn’t seem like it’s enough to level up at a good pace. Although you can ‘choose’ how to level up, if you want to level up at any decent rate you’ll need to do several things at once (which sort of defeats the purpose of being able to level up how you want).
No Dungeons till 30 – Dungeons are great for many reasons, as I listed in the pros. So why, then, don’t we unlock them till 30? They’d be great for gearing and leveling up lower-level characters, as well as introducing them to group play much earlier. I’ve seen mmo’s with much earlier dungeons available, so I don’t see why GW2 has to falter in this regard.
Unbalanced – In pvp at least, things do not seem balanced at all. Guardians either pose no threat or are incredibly squishy and Rangers are a joke. Meanwhile, you have Elementalists, which seem to barely take damage and can heal themselves from any damage you do manage to deal them. Other classes seem to vary wildly. I know Balance is an ongoing thing, but for how long GW2 has been out, I really thought this would’ve been a bit better by now.

The Ugly

No mounts / slow speed – Out of all the things wrong with GW2, there is only one thing that has ever made me go “Really? Are you kittening kidding me?”; that is this point. Who on earth thought that having a large world to explore and then not giving any good means to explore it was a good idea? Instead of a standard solution to this – mounts, which would go incredibly well with the in-game store (mount customization and the like) – we get all these strange work-arounds that inconvenience everyone. You can eat up one of your utilities for a signet that makes you run faster, alter your build to accommodate a trait that increases your speed, use up one of your weapon choices so you can supply yourself with swiftness, or be a Guardian running around yelling “Retreat!” all the time (which, even worse, is pretty much their only option). It’s ridiculous, and with such a standard solution in place that so many other mmo’s have had for years, it’s simply inexcusable. The fact that things are like this in GW2 is just incomprehensible to me.
Armor does nothing vs conditions – The potential downfall of having simplified stats is that you might miss something. In GW2, this is defense vs conditions. To be blunt, it’s completely black & white: either you have the means to cleanse the conditions put on you, or they eat you alive with you having no idea what happened. Toughness – the stat that’s supposed to mitigate damage – does nothing. You can build the mightiest tank, but all that health and armor means nothing because there’s a kind of damage you simply can’t mitigate – and that just doesn’t seem right.
Guardian’s Shield is horrible – I was glad to see the Warrior’s shield to be as effective as it is, and both surprised and pleased to see the shield options (plural) for Engineers. So Guardians – the defensive class, the class that poses with a shield – should have mastered the shield and have the best abilities with it, right? It seems so obvious. Well, I guess it wasn’t too obvious. The Guardian’s shield isn’t just the most underwhelming, ineffective, annoying, and non-fun shield in the entire game, it’s also probably the worst off-hand in the entire game. As someone who was actually looking forward to playing a Guardian with a shield, you can only imagine my complete and utter disappointment.
(Future) Weapons from Elite Specializations are 80-only – Perhaps this one is unfair to comment on now, as Heart of Thorns isn’t out yet, but as a new player who heard about this I thought I should speak up. This is terrible for new players. If I want to play a Reaper – a melee death-bringer – I don’t want to play 79 levels of caster before I can swing around a greatsword. If I want to play a Dragonhunter, I don’t want to wave around a scepter or twirl around a staff for 79 levels before I can use a bow. You learn things about your character, your build, and so on as you level up; I’ve no idea why you’d want to take that learning experience away from players as they level up their class (not to mention all the fun you have of leveling up). For an mmo that seems to prize itself on giving players choice and freedom, being locked out of something rather integral – something that completely changes the way you play the class – for 79 levels seems absurd.

A few comments -

WvW is the closest available equivalent to Open-world PvP

Weapon swap cooldown is by design to make you make choices. Anyway, it’s not so much the swap that’s delayed, but the swap back again.

Living story is free if you logged on while it was running. You didn’t even have to play it, just log on.

Requiring skills or traits for speed boosts is again a design decision to further differentiate classes. There are 2 mounts available in the store (broom and carpet) but they don’t give speed boosts.

Armour and toughness aren’t supposed to be for condition mitigation. That’s what vitality is for as well as condition clears. It’s all part of build making.

Enjoy the game for what it is, don’t be so down on it for what it is not.

A couple of comments:

• Living Story Season 1 was temporary content, which came and went. When players offered their opinions that temporary content was Bad, ANet revised their approach and made LS S2 instanced, and repeatable. It was unlocked free if you logged on during each episode’s release period. As far as new players go, I guess you could think of it as DLC or a (very) mini story expansion that is entirely optional. Fwiw, TSW, another Buy to Play game, sells story episodes also.

• Conditions versus Direct Damage: Toughness and active defense are the counters versus Direct (Power-based) damage. The stat counters for condition damage are (primary) Vitality and (very secondary) Healing Power coupled with a sustain build. Active defenses like dodge and block can be less effective v. conditions because basic attacks often apply them. However, you can still use them to counter some skills – assuming you can recognize them. Then there’s cleansing, which obviously has to be built for. The two types of damage, and the way they interact with defense provides some variety in play. This also means there are opportunity costs with regard to build choices, which is a good thing for the long-term health of any MMO.

Otherwise, thanks for your review, and good luck in the game. No game is perfect, and GW2 is a game. There may be some players who like all aspects of it, but I’d say most would be able to list good/bad/indifferent features. Of course, different players good/bad lists will contain different — sometimes the opposite — things, so no game is likely to contain no bad for a given player. For instance, your “bad” list would mostly be on my “indifferent” list, with the exceptions being an inventory management complaint about the lack of a click-all option for stacks of bags/chests and no open world PvP being solely on my good list.